My goal is to cut out the middleman and allow vendors to wrestle back control from services like Amazon. I work in the film industry where we watched our suggestions to studio heads get ignored.

To give you an idea of how I tend to think, years ago, my idea was this to solve the fragmentation/walled garden problem in video streaming:

• every company submits video content to a central store
• users can watch anything they want. They just have to pay a monthly fee
• that fee gets divvyed up to the companies that produced the media watched. Money only goes to companies that had content that was viewed and is a direct percentage of the monthly revenue of each user.

• Ideally you’ll need a stable identifier for each specific product. Most small online stores I use have product names riddled with typos, so a way to tackle that would be nice.

Ideally, I'd start in a budding industry, slowly building and iterating upon an industry stylebook for their retail items that can be iterated upon by all users who are able to submit merchandise. I’m thinking of a whole separate place where the structure of each industry’s API can be tuned and made polymorphic with related but different item types.

• What’s the data model? Would each store be an ActivityPub Actor? Like each one would have a username and publish inventory updates?

That's the current vision, though I could also see an ecosystem of incentivized crowd-sourcing of out-of-reach inventories. That's another idea I have concerning decentralized oracles but, if crypto tied into this retail thing eventually, a lot of the cool new technologies that crypto offers (digital identity, oracles, SPO's that operate alongside instances, and so, so much more) could certainly come along for the ride.

• Where do these updates go (maybe something akin to a Lemmy “community”)?

A lot like a Lemmy community but reformatted to work with inventories. Think of any web store. It could be identical to that but the data could be coming from multiple sources at once. I think there could be so many different possibilities for how this data could be mapped onto a front end that that I'd hate to pigeonhole this based on my preconceived notions....the flexibility might even be part of the beauty of this idea.

• If you’re just relying on stores’ self-reported stock levels, where’s the benefit of using a federated model? Could you just build an open source app that scrapes retailers’ websites and collates that information?

I was actually attempting to do that but then quickly came up with this idea instead because it felt like I wold be further contributing to enshittification in an entirely enshittified dystopian hellscape if I just did the same thing as everyone else again. So many other sites contain warchests of scraped metadata. Very few are truly egalitarian like the fediverse can be, IMO.

• Is the eventual goal that this competes with Amazon et al? I.e. it becomes an actual marketplace, perhaps with a “buy” and “sell” Action, and where vendors’ instances are effectively web stores?

Buying and selling features will be essential to draw people away from Amazon. Problem is, that’s one of the hardest probems to tackle in an elegant, dependable way. I can see similarities to OpenBazaar using a atomic wallets that accept any kind of crypto and convert it to any other....but I intend to spin this tech up with existing technologies to start.