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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[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 8 points 1 day ago (9 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 4 points 20 hours ago (3 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 0 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] ericjmorey@discuss.online 4 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

From Amazon:

In 2023, FBA had been the preferred choice of 82% of Amazon sellers to deliver their products.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 points 13 hours ago

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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