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.
A version of this focussed on a gift economy/trading platform (e.g. like freecycle, or the buy nothing groups on facebook) would also be cool.
Also person-to-person buying/selling, rather than business-to-person would be nice to have, like craigslist, reverb.com, gumtree, or used items on ebay.
If this was focused on a craigslist/gumtree style of selling, where most of the actual trade is done off-site/in-person with cash or bank transfers, it would completely side-step the payment processor problem.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
Do you have numbers for this? I tried to find some, and couldn’t.
Yeah, so 18% of the stuff is shipped by someone else. IDK if you want to call that “a lot”, but I definitely wouldn’t call it “very few.” Anyway glad we got to the answer, however to characterize it.
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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.
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?
“Can someone try and poke holes in this idea?”
you are still proposing a federate ad network. payments are left to crypto (not fedi), credit cards (not fedi) or paypal (not fedi). the shipping is done by shops themselves (not fedi) (also amazon handles ~80% of their deliveries, check in this thread for sources). What’s a “main shop”? doesn’t sound very decentralized. you suggest leaving contestation again to the shops to handle (not fedi).
what exactly are you fediversing here? the proposition to users would basically be a single view with all shops, but then just delegating to them? there can be value in this, i see it mostly as an ad network leveraging AP and I’m really not a fan. it isn’t really amazon
being angered by being shown issues in your idea doesn’t help your idea. go visit your local hackerspace and start building if you think we’re just naysayers
Bittorrent is federated streaming video before it was cool.
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.
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I agree on the need for legilature. I strongly disagree on the scam. You dont have massive csam on peertube either because it has manual federation. Everyone who runs a business knows that its much more important to not get sued than to sell stuff. Big difference between small businesses and large ones btw.
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amazons true strength is ultimately in their logistics. Amazon itself isn’t a bad idea in theory but the execution is poor because of cutthroat capitalism exploiting workers and privatization. Ultimately the idea of sellers being able to ship their goods to communal warehouses for fulfillment should be a service that is nationalized. The marketplace can be federated, sure
Another point here, Amazon has really thin profit margins on their core business (not counting AWS, etc. Just the online shopping). If it weren’t absolutely gargantuan, it would fail. It’s only profitable because of the logistical efficiency it has achieved, exploitation (of workers, cheap goods from China, etc.), and absolutely massive economies of scale. Similar to Walmart.
Recommended reading: People’s Republic of Walmart. All for nationalizing - would be better for everyone.
Collective buying and building of such a project means that there is not universal standard or regulation and the project falls apart when there is disagreement. Given the scale this is inevitable
Look at lemmy for example: most servers play nicely but occasionally you get the server like exploding heads that cause the overwhelming majority to defederate
Amazon has 300 warehouses across the US and another 175 worldwide according to a quick web search. That’s a lot of sites that have to play nice with each other. If even one of them starts having poor practices, doing something offensive, something disruptive, etc. it may cause a lot of the others to not want to work with them. If you have one that is especially shit stirring then it may cause a huge portion of the network to cut ties.
But unlike lemmy now it’s not just some social media where you jump to a new server. Now companies have their products held hostage. Now people in that region potentially have services significantly disrupted. Now your whole system is undermined and a bezos type can swoop in to prove his is much better and more trustworthy.
A state controlling it (which would inherently happen with collective ownership if done correctly, a pseudo state would be created given the scale) would introduce regulation and enforcement to ensure consistency in operation. It is then the responsibility of the constituents to hold representatives accountable to ensure regulations and enforcement are meaningful
Thats a very good point. Thank you. I dont disagree on any of it but I think there could be alternatives to some parts.
There are physical syndicate-owned places that store collective things in them. Also, we are talking businesses here. A collective warehouse of say 100 sellers around a small city or bit town would not be easily being held hostage.
But these are details, although very interesting. Its very good long term for making such a project more resiliant and competitive.
Ideas are cheap. This is the third post like this I’ve seen in two weeks. Build it.
I really like the idea of a grassroots Amazon competitor. That said,
You need to have a high level of trust. A federated network of shady scams that just take your money and send you nothing half the time is not going to fly. Is there a vetting process, who controls that process, how’s all that work. If its ‘good seller’ reviews, how are those stats protected from manipulation.
You need to have extreme ease of use. UI barriers that seem trivial to developers can sink a platform.
If there are problems solvable by centralization, maybe that could be done as a cooperative organization which devs and vendors can join and run democratically.
I wonder if you can ‘outsource’ trust by relying on payment systems? If a seller uses stripe and scams some users, stripe would freeze their account right?
Correct. Someone orders something, it doesn’t arrive, they dispute the charge with their CC company, their CC company and Stripe talk to one another and get the merchant’s side of the story, and basically unless there is some pretty massive indication that the buyer is lying or has a consistent pattern of this or something, the buyer gets their money back. If that happens a bunch, the seller loses their Stripe account.
The system is heavily biased in favor of the buyer, which for the most part works out, because most of the fraud exists on the seller end. And on the whole the fact that 99% of people on both sides are not cockheads trying to abuse the system, is what makes it all work reasonably well.
Thank you for participating in this discussion. Happy to hear someone thought about this.
The high level of trust is important, yes. My idea is to either plain use or build something similar to the fediseer. I’m an instance admin and I use fediseer for trust management. This means that instances can trust other instances (manually!) and are responsible if these instances turn out bad. That means if you have a friend you know personally and trust, you would recommend them to the fediseer. this friend in turn would recommend another friend and so on. that is a chain of trust. so far this works wonderful.
Some things could also be solved by building communities or unions like normal companies do. But of course this should be limited to federating companies.
Thanks for asking questions. It helps me think.
Another issue might be, how do you deal with people selling illegal items/services? How do you avoid “Silk Road” style liability? Would there be a blacklist that someone running an instance could use so they don’t have to vet everyone they are federated with?
I don’t see why we can’t just buy directly from shops. Maybe an aggregator of links for products, so there is an rss-like feed of products, prices etc?
like pc-partpicker
I think we will see this continue, but with federated product search, soon.
Small business vendors cannot afford to continue to leave their search results to Google and Amazon to control.
Because this does not work in reality. You have many mechanics that are hidden to the casual user but play a significant role from a vendor standpoint.
You have ui change which means you slow down the users purchase due to them finding buttons and informarion, leading to similar websites which is bad for variety and gives corporare unified marketplaces an edge
Then you have trust. Leaving a website you have learned to trust means you have to check if the next website is trustworthy which isnt feasible.
Unified order overview and checkout so you know what you bought and when its coming. Especially for a complex multi stage order.
Unified payment of course as well as claims, returns, etc.
I think the way to beat amazon is to specialize in one tiny area. Carve them up into such small slices that they cant fight back.
So like, instead of trying to do just their books business, do just horror books. Horror that mixes with all genres, every possible crossover, but always horror books.
Having a genuine specialty is what can take amazon down, bit by bit. Something genuinely cool, something genuinely fun. Another big-ass store is nothing special.
Open Bazaar
It’s much more than that. Amazon’s strength is also in its proximity warehouses and contacts with delivery companies.
Otherwise you just have a federated Ebay.
I order stuff from ebay. Got a phone on the way from china right now. Ebay work-alike might not be a bad place to start.
Exactly. The idea is to not make a perfect copy but a viable alternative without the constant breaks in design and trust when scouring the web for items. All those funny labels on websites for example like trustedshops are just for this. If one could make a web of trust, that would eliminate fakes and take power from for profit companies who make these labels and control trust.
Amazon has a lot of different aspects, same as facebook and xitter. I aim to think of alternatives, not perfect copies. My only hard target is that it is free from single entity control. Thats why not ebay or one of the others. Flohmarkt is kind of promising but i’ll check it out deeper and host an instance. That way I can judge its potential.
I buy stuff from Ebay and Etsy plenty often.
This is surprisingly one of the few actual useful uses of blockchain. Business tried to shove it in everywhere and it didn’t make sense because blockchain is a way to audit federated separate instances - which businesses are not. They’re a single monolithic structure, and they don’t need the trust - they already have it. They’re themselves, they just have to trust their own internal teams.
We, on the otherhand, are the perfect use for it. A way to say X person paid Y person for this product on this day at this time, X person now has the authority to rate Y person for how they did. Immutable, impossible to fake.
Exactly xmr has been doing this for the markets on the dark web for years now. Escrow reviews ratings seller trust etc.
I fear the idea of crypto has been so poisoned by scammers and bullshit that the average person had forgotten it actually has value
Not crypto, blockchain. When done correctly and you don’t have every user trying to calculate the next hash for some pennies it works pretty well. Computing the hash when an action happens like a purchase is fairly trivial compared to mining.
Crypto started the concept of the blockchain, at the end though it’s just a distributed immutable audit log. The hash is required, but if done correctly, it’s trivial.
Climate impact of monero is significantly less per transaction than any fiat. Their are no physical banks with employees and buildings and travel and transport and minting etc etc etc. Monero is the only truly private currencies all others have every transaction tracked.
I’ll have to look into it at some point. The crypto bros could have also been hired by banks at this point to burn crypto as comoetition. I would not touch it with a 10 foot pole before extensive personally conducted research. which is unrealistic even for myself but especially for everyone else.
That’s quite a popular theory that the banks and even perhaps the us government itself played a part in promoting the crypto scams and nft bullshit simply to poison the idea of crypto for the masses.
Please do look into it if u got any questions dont be afraid to ask !monero@monero.town
I work in the IT department for a fairly large payment service provider. I can tell you now that you seem to be vastly underestimating both the financial aspect of this as well as several legal aspects.
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Federation would almost certainly have to be opt-in rather than opt-out. I don’t think you’re going to pass KYC checks for any PSP if it’s opt-out, the risk of someone (ever so briefly) selling illegal goods through your website is too great otherwise. Stripe would just shut down your account (if they even let you open it), PayPal probably won’t let you open it at all.
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Selling goods from other sites through your own, makes you liable for any returns, warranty claims etc… Simply “passing these on” isn’t going to cut it. If the other site disagrees with the customer claim, you are on the hook for it, because it was sold through your website.
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The financial logistics aspect here is really complex. If you’re going to process payments on behalf of another site, you have to deal with reconciliation. After reconciliation you have to the send the money to the other shop, incurring additional (sometimes surprisingly sizeable) fees. And coming from someone who deals with (automated) reconciliation on a daily basis, every payment method does it differently and they all find extremely creative ways to mess up your systems. And that includes unannounced changes, mistakes, random unexplained fees, failure to deliver settlement files, etc…
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How do you deal with the risk of scam instances? E.g. instance A tells instance B that a product was sold and the payment was processed. B sends it out, but it turns out the customer was the owner of A, and there was no payment at all. B just lost a product with very little chance of getting it back.
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Then there’s practical aspects. How do you deduplicate products in search? Or will you have dozens of listings for the exact same product?
The only remotely viable way I see this working is if only search is actually federated. Once you are on a product page, you can only pay using the payment page of the instance that has the product. You won’t be able to pay for products of multiple instances at once, and you might lose some unified styling. But at least that approach has a chance of passing KYC and deals with all the legal issues regarding returns/warranties etc…, and it reduces the scam risk because you’re in charge of your own payments. But at that point, you’ve only federated product search and nothing else, and then as a consumer you might as well just Google it instead.
I appreciate you have experience in running a business, but running a marketplace, especially a very complicated one, is really not like running a usual business.
This is incredibly valuable advice! Thank you so much!
My current stance on federation is of course opt in and requires the main seller to trust the downstream vendors.
The main point is that this already happens for a large portion of thing you can buy. I sell computers and adjacent services, classical system integration if you will. Of course I have to buy the systems from vendors and resell them to my customers.
Many system integrators have shops where some of them rely on custom integration of vendor apis. Take minecraft server sites for example that have an automated integration with a hosting company’s api (eg hetzner). you as a customer just order a server, their automation makes the order processing with hetzner and provisions the server for you.
Now make this over a non custom but standardized api, eg activity pub.
I might still be overlooking stuff but from a technical standpoint this should be doable. The legal aspect is interesting, although I think this could be done similar to already existing resellers.
Feel free to point out flaws obvious to you. I appreciate your feedback massively.
I think the biggest issue is that if you already need to separate payments, returns, shipping, etc… you’re left with a shop that also advertises products for other shops, possibly competitors. Then the question becomes… why bother federating at all?
I think it’d be better to set up a FOSS shopping platform, eg something that competes with WooCommerce or the likes. That’s significantly easier from a financial and legal perspective, and I think it’s an easier sell to actual merchants (why pay a license for that shit, use this one for freeee). Then once you have that running, you could think about optional federation as an addition to an already well-functioning platform.
I used woocommerce in the past. Its not that complicated. Woocommerce is open source from what I read: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/software/woocommerce-review/ i would have to check the source but implementing federation would be quite trivial i guess.
Why bother federating:
You advertise for your partners, not competitors. This is done already but manually by reselling. This would just expedite the process. The only part that is not yet clear to me is if the shop advertises something from another shop and clearly says, only sale processing through website, not fulfillment, if that would also make it that the legal warranty is done by the downstream vendor. Processing returns also is trivial from a technical perspective. Its just the legal one that keeps me guessing atm.
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I really don’t see the appeal of activity-pub for this.
It’s a protocol used for social media and interactions. You describe just sort of a “metastore”.
Maybe a review store site could work better with activity pub.
I think it makes sense. It would allow a decentralized unified search across all stores. With Lemmy I can search posts as long as the instance is federated. With this I could find products.
In this example instances are stores, stores are users in instances? How stores are protected to be defederated by competitors (we are talking about money and making a living here).
What it adds to just a simple centralized service that any store can join. If you don’t want it to be another amazon, make that service a coop. or some kinds of non-profit that it’s paid by the stores that want to become part of that.
I think here we are in the classic conundrum of “a solution in search of a problem”.
Fediverse and ActivityPub is cool, but it’s a social media thing. And decentralization is cool when needed, for instance social media. But it doesn’t have to make sense for every use case.
For what’s being proposed there’s zero actual need for decentralization or ActivityPub.
Instances are stores (think Amazon or Etsy). Products are posts. Sellers are users.
Stores aren’t protected from being defederated. You can still search Google or whatever, still visit the site and buy stuff. It just will not be a unified search, just like how anything else works with ActivityPub.
The good stores would be run by admins who don’t have an incentive to defederate from others. Stores don’t make money or take a cut from sellers anyway. The sellers aren’t in charge of the instance, just like an Etsy seller can’t do anything about the fact that they have competitors on Etsy.
The need for decentralization is that the store / Amazon / Etsy is broken up but the search and interactions, reviews, etc. are unified.
Those admins are unpaid?
Managing a store it’s a LOT of work. And you are doing to provide profit for other people. Who is going to do it for free?
It’s not like social media where people may volunteer to admin and mod, and users may donate because it’s a common goal of share information, opinions, knowledge, funny stuff etc.
Here we are talking about bussiness that do what they do because they want money. I would not volunteer to admin a store so shop owners could earn money, that’s for sure.
And I still not see the advantage of doing within the ActivityPub instead of just being a normal service where all interested shops could join.
Reading the post, I found what I really want right now: a federated review platform. Too many times I want to look for a product, and has to look into a reddit thread to see a recommendation. There should be one, right? Where is it?
If it involves money, it has the incentive to game the system. So each instance would be dealing with multiple attempts from actors adding fake reviews, sabotaging competitors, endless spam etc. If it can be easily automated, the service would be 24/7 filled with AI spam and drive away all users, defeating the purpose entirely.
The only trustworthy reviews are from people who actually bought the product in the website, because then it has a negative incentive to spend that much money for one fake review.
Argh, that connects it to the shopping platform. I wish there is a way around amazon…
Reading the post, I found what I really want right now: a federated review platform.
!neodb@lemmy.zip is a general review site. It currently covers media but, if you can get the data in (SKUs?) I can’t see a reason it couldn’t cover other products.
Thanks a lot! Bummer that it is primarily for media. I wish it had more publicity/popularity, is there any way I can help?
It’s not a bunker per se, it is just that, if you are a review platform, the easiest initial targets would be Goodreads, IMDb, etc. Other types of stuff to review may take a little longer. However, if you can get access to a source of unique IDs, it may be possible to import the information. As it is written in Python there will be knowledgeable folks around who can better advise on this. I’d suggest post about it here: !neodb@lemmy.zip. See what other people think about it.
If you have a network of paricipating stores, then they can agree to take each others physical returns and inspect them.
The same way it is done today. If I have a shop for cell phones i dont manufacture them. If they are defective, you come to me and I go to apple, google or whatever.
One could argue that if you made it clear that this shop is being federated to give you a streamlined experience. That way one could contact the shop in question through the same means (federation) and ask for refund, repair whatever.
