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 46 points 1 day ago (6 children)

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)

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

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

The problems are solvable, but the solutions taken together are couple times as complex as Amazon itself. This translates to cost. Which is naturally the reason Amazon came to existence earlier than that solution.

I think that layers of storage\messages and actual logic should be firmly separated, an instance going down when someone wants a refund for an operation that involved it seems not good enough. If the operation is a cryptographic contract with an escrow, and "instances" are just servers providing message storage probably privileged for some users (might be members of a community, might pay for that storage, that's lower layer anyway), this is less of a problem. But that's not a federation.

By the way, however I dislike OP's attitude, if you suggest this idea like a federated ads and reviews platform, it becomes useful.

[–] Suoko@feddit.it 1 points 10 hours ago

the idea is not bad. Think you create your ecommerce site, list your products, and they are automatically listed in a huge marketplace. The same could apply for bed and breakfast booking websites

[–] PriorityMotif@lemmy.world 1 points 17 hours ago

Bittorrent is federated streaming video before it was cool.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 6 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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.

[–] ericjmorey@discuss.online 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Amazon doesn’t handle shipping for a lot of the things they sell.

This is false. Very few products sold via Amazon are shipped independently from Amazon's logistics services.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 points 3 hours ago

Do you have numbers for this? I tried to find some, and couldn't.

[–] Randomgal@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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.

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

a) You’ve never run a business

They might have run a small business or been present in a bigger one in management position, doing their own job well enough to avoid painful understanding they don't get it as a whole. Arrogance is not always cured by experience, actually I doubt it's ever cured in humans and we all have it.

b) you’re more interested in fantasizing than a realistic conversation.

That much was clear from the very beginning, I tend to have such ideas too, but I have BAD and thus mania periods.

[–] kat@orbi.camp 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Pretty much what they're doing all over this thread.

Like some people can only see the glass half full. Few have the guys to look at both the fullness and the emptyness equally.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat -4 points 1 day ago

I have run several businesses, some of them on this micro-scale. That's how I know that part is trivial.

You can literally set it up for yourself for free, if you want to see: https://stripe.com/

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com -4 points 1 day 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?

[–] Mubelotix@jlai.lu -5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

God, if only someone had invented an internet-native form of money in 2008

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 3 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

A lot of the terrifying aspects of slinging money around that people are talking about in this thread actually do become terrifying, once Bitcoin and friends are your platform. Fraud? Refunds? Someone hacked your server and stole your wallet? All that stuff is now 100% your problem, there is absolutely no way to "undo" if something wrong happens, and no infrastructure in place to handle any of it or any professionals with already a simple system in place for it. Or, if there is an infrastructure, it is based on a shady company which is orders of magnitude more sketchy and predatory than the (already pretty sketchy and predatory) banking system.

I actually think 3% is roughly a fair fee for the processor to charge you, in exchange for agreeing to worry about all of that nonsense on your behalf so you can just collect the money. For in-person transactions, it's mostly just a predatory rent payment, but for online transactions where the possibility for malfeasance is amplified, it makes sense to me.