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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[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 5 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I feel like this is far too dismissive for a comment that was in my eyes fairly constructive. He correctly pointed out that one of Amazon's main selling points is their whole logistics division. A federated website doesn't have that. So either:

You somehow also start doing logistics, or
You provide a good reason why shops don't actually care about Amazon's logistics all that much, and how they could to it themselves instead.

Maybe you could actually address the core of his criticism instead of outright dismissing it.

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 0 points 5 hours ago

You're missing that these points have already been adressed in a lot of other comments and have been stated way more constructively.

Of course having a whole logistics setup in place will be far superior to only doing dropshipping. But this is a whole different (additional) project. It absolutely has it is place. What I'm dismissing is the claim that the idea is dependent on somehow cloning the arguably much more expensive and complex parts of amazons business.

Again, i do agree that amazon has a huge machinery in place. But I also wish to discuss things without being treated dismissively myself.