Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea! (lemmy.giftedmc.com)

submitted 2 months ago by haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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Hi folks! I'm here with another idea. Let's make an amazon alternative. I know! I know! That was asked for a couple times already but lets discuss some details.

Amazon is basically glorified dropshipping by now. What if we just made federated (not sure if over activitypub would work) ads and sales, powered by fediseer (the "trust" network of the fediverse).

Example 1: So you buy at toms groceries, you trust them. they have experience with tina's hardware store and they trust them. so you can buy both toms and tinas wares on both sites.

Example 2: So for example, I run a small business that sells computers. You run a small business that sells mice and keyboards. I have worked with you before so I mark you as trusted in my local website, which federates with yours, showing your products in my shop. If a customer buys my computer and buys your keyboard on top, my site sends you a buy order with customer address and payment. I get a small fee for my electricity of say 1%.

Can someone try and poke holes in this idea? It feels like this could work!

Have a nice weekend.

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[-] iltg@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 months ago

you are not proposing a federated amazon, this is just federated ads and/or reviews.

how to process payments? how to ship goods? how to handle refunds? how to handle contestations?

please you can't just make anything federated. this protocol is built for social media and struggles to take over that sphere, we should focus on one thing rather than throwing random stuff at the wall hoping it sticks (cough federated tik tok cough)

[-] PriorityMotif@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Bittorrent is federated streaming video before it was cool.

[-] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 0 points 2 months ago

how to ship goods?

Part of their point was that Amazon doesn't handle shipping for a lot of the things they sell. If you want to, they can store everything within their massively-optimized operation and ship it for you for a small-enough-to-be-compelling fee, but you don't have to. You can also just list your stuff there and ship it to customers when they order it.

how to process payments?

This is trivial. The modern financial internet makes it extremely easy.

how to handle refunds? how to handle contestations?

This is a fair point, probably the biggest issue that could be a stumbling block. One fair counterpoint is that Amazon's handling of these situations is often pure uncaring dogshit, so if you're doing a bad job at it, you're still no different than Amazon (and potentially better than, since it is hard to see how someone could be any worse.)

It's not totally simple, and you have to do some real actual work to solve it, but it's also not like going to the moon. It's solvable.

[-] Randomgal@lemmy.ca 0 points 2 months ago

Considering your answer to payments solution was "This is trivial.' it sounds like a) You've never run a business and b) you're more interested in fantasizing than a realistic conversation.

[-] balder1991@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

All of this talk is actually ignoring the very fundamental aspect of this sort of transaction: trust.

When you buy from a place, you do it because you trust the store or the service to handle problems [1]. I remember one saying that a purchase is actually a very intimate relationship, and if you have any reason to think that person or service would screw up over, you’d never engage in any monetary transactions with them.

A marketplace where anyone can sell only works because despite your diligence to look for reputable sellers, the platform usually offers some assurance that you’ll be refunded for any type of scam, which means they take on the burden of doing some quality control on approving sellers. At least that’s how it works in Brazil, I suppose that a country with a high societal trust might have less of this problem, but the incentives are the heart of any system.

[1] Sure, sometimes it doesn’t go the way you wanted it and you can end up being screwed by the service, but the expectation was there.

[-] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com -1 points 2 months ago

Wow. Took a while to get a naysayer in here.

Sorry mate, I can do whatever I like. You should visit a hackspace at some point. You would be shocked how many people there give a crap about what you think they can do.

But on a more productive note:

I have not thought out the whole process yet. Otherwise I would not ask here but show a product. There are ways to work payments for open source already. Payments are limited to credit cards, bank transfer, crypto, paypal, stripe, etc as far as I know. So I would suggest the "main shop", that the customer orders in, would be the one booking and sending the other funds to the other shops the customer ordered in. The delivery would be standard dropshipping (the buy order goes to the other shop and they are responsible for delivery, same as amazon does for many shops now). Contestations is a good point. They would also need to be delivered to the dropshipped company and the payment contested as well. From my current pov this sounds entirely doable.

So if you just drop that condescending tone you can see we actually can be productive here. Do you have any more points we can work through?