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.
Instead of Amazon. Id do fediverse equivalent of Craigslist and Facebook marketplace. Which technically exists in. Europe it just needs to be imported to the US
As you said, it exists. You can just clone it from codeberg and run it. Here’s an article about it https://wedistribute.org/2024/08/flohmarkt-federated-market/
Wasn’t a federated Amazon just a mall, in a way?
A mall is a private real estate instrument built by speculators to extract rent from businesses and it’s actually rather predatory. This is fundamentally not real estate and fundamentally does not exist to extract rent, so it’s more like “what if you took a mall and removed all the mall-ness from it”.
If malls were collectively owned by the stores that comprise them and pieces of the mall could appear and disappear at will of whoever’s participating… Is it actually even still a mall really???
Good point!
The mall was still centralized and most shops didnt have their own place and a stall ij the mall but I can totally see where you’re coming from.
It might be a good idea to keep this in mind if this ever becomes reality and we need marketing ideas. :)
You don’t seem to understand the retail operations of Amazon. They provide logistics and marketing services to retailers, they also directly compete against those retailers because those retailers can’t do better at logistics and marketing without using Amazon’s services.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
You obviously didnt get the point. These stores already exist and they’re not big.
I do get the specialization idea and I think its valid. i just dont see how to make that federated and why only for books as I’m not talking about a service, really. Its a network.
What about the online food ordering market. I reckon that might be an easier first step than consumer products. Here in the Netherlands JustEatTakeaway has a market share of around 90% and requires restaurants to give them a 14% provision. Restaurants don’t have much of a choice, if they’re not on there they miss out on a huge part of the market, it’s like they don’t exist. Why don’t restaurants unite and develop a FOSS protocol that let’s them federate, so the consumer has a central place to browse the food delivery market, but simultaneously makes the providers independant because they can run their own instance if they please. Have these types of ideas been pitched to branche organizations? Restaurants have a clear interest to develop this to free themselves from the platforms with a monopolistic venture-capital-driven strategy.
I fully agree that this would be a valid application. The reason any company doesnt adopt such strategies is the cost of pioneering it. Most companies who spearhead such an idea want it to pay off -> proprietary. Also most people are specialized in their industry. Developing an app is not native to food industry for example.
I know that Federation is exciting, but all these ideas for federated services are really missing the reason why the Fediverse’s current bits are successful - because they have low moral hazard.
When you get into economics and meatspace relationships, moral hazard skyrockets.
Accepting payments and creating “contracts” over the Fediverse is no bueno at the current time. I think it would require some kind of 3rd party, almost PayPal-esque (PayPal has its own controversy) service that would create the obligation and associated penalties that come with an online transaction. Could be the instance itself but as you said that’s a risk most instance owners wouldn’t take.
What is “meatspace”
Real life. The offline world. Grassville.
That is a very good point! Thank you! I figured someone would find a constructive way to argue why something might be better than something else and you are that person. This would kind of speak to the idea of crypto which I dont really like on first sight but it would at least give the ability to audit, right?
Crypto doesn’t really solve any of the problems that a payment processor wouldn’t also solve, unfortunately.
yeah, thats right as well. and at least to my knowledge it would not be better to the environment either. one thing at a time. federated payment is for next week. :)
I would probably just use stripe and charge the customer and spread the money to the company in question. this is what you do as a normal business as well btw. You probably need to make your terms and the shop so that customer and the law knows that you are just a storefront for others as well as your own product. but aside from that I dont see a huge issue there.
I would love a federated Amazon that works directly with producers to sell everything at cost without a middleman or fees to the sellers.
There you go. Glad you like it.
Correct me if I’m wrong. But you examples are bot cutting off the middle man.
The person with the small computer store is still a middle man.
And being smaller usually means that their cut needs to be bigger to maintain themselves.
I wont correct you since I’m not the authority. I think your point is valid.
In my idea, the shop you visit - lets call them computer store - will sell you a range of computers, some of their own assembly, with normal margin, like its done today. What changes is that they partner with another shop (or many) that sell adjacent products. That could be a desk for the computer, software or other products. Those products are manually federated, ie the partners have been vetted by computer store. If you buy the computer, the seller makes their typical margin. If you buy the desk, no matter if additionally or exclusively, they will only manage the order process and payment. The rest will be done over classical dropshipping. Meaning the original desk seller will handle everything after the sale has taken place. Same as amzon does with many of their products, same as aliexpress and ebay but better than ebay because the computer store owner keeps control of the vendors they partner with. They receive a small fee only which would not be enough on its own but they arguably dont have any work besides processing the order.
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)
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
Bittorrent is federated streaming video before it was cool.
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?
God, if only someone had invented an internet-native form of money in 2008
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.
That is a very constructive idea! Thanks. The warehouses can also be collectively bought/built imho but I’m not totally opposed to state owned. Everything is better than techno feudalist owned.
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.
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
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 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.
Thats actually a very long interesting point. Thanks for mentioning it
The best idea I can come up with is a federated marketplace. Each vendor has their own instance. Buyers can browse the marketplace and have a unified checkout experience. Vendors would have unified product posts so whichever vendor has the best price or fastest shipping (user preference) would get the sale. USPS for example has shipping zones which determine the price for shipping depending on distance.
The best example I can come up with is rockauto. They are a central marketplace of different auto parts suppliers. You can find parts that are in the same location in order to combine shipping.
If you put a part in your cart it will then show parts that are in the same warehouse.
Thats pretty straightfoward. I like it. Combined shipping can make sense. Thanks for participating.
Closest we’ve got right now is Flohmarkt, right? If they haven’t already been working on some kinda trust system, they’re probably taking code contributions. I saw somewhere else somebody suggested Loops integration for it, so they could have something like the tiktok shop. I mean capitalism is garbage, but unfortunately we do currently gotta buy stuff occasionally, and it would be nice if that experience sucked less.
Flohmarkt is nice if a little small atm but of course it is very new. I’ll check if it would work to implement their api in a normal website/shop. because my point also is to make people independent from each other so that no single entity can control them. in this case I mean if flohmarkt got “outlawed” for example because lobbyists and such, websites would prevail, i hope.
Thanks for participating.
Flohmarkt is nice if a little small atm but of course it is very new.
Philosophically, the classified ad model (a bit like Etsy or eBay without auctions, where you are just an introduction service) seems more in keeping with the Fediverse and has a lot less hassles than trying to replicate Amazon with all it’s storage and shipping.
I’ll check if it would work to implement their api in a normal website/shop.
What I’d like to see is more seamless integration of !flohmarkt@lemmy.ca into other Fediverse services.
So someone has a blog for their writing on WordPress or Ghost but can run a sidebar or footer with links to Flohmarkt where people can buy a signed copy or special edition directly. Or you have it working with !neodb@lemmy.zip where users can read a review of a film and click through to see if anyone has a copy of the Blu-ray on Flohmarkt.
Equally, !friendica@lemmy.ca is a kind of Facebook replacement and Flohmarkt could slot in there as a Marketplace replacement.
In general we probably need more plug-ins in Fediverse services to help integrate things more tightly and Flohmarkt seems the kind of thing that would work well when slotted into a lot of other existing services.
if flohmarkt got “outlawed” for example because lobbyists and such
That would be very difficult to do with a decentralised service.
I agree on all points except the last. It is no problem to outlaw something and disrupting fediverse instances is no problem either. With websites that is a whole different ballgame because they are manifold.
Instances are websites.
No, they are not.
Instances have websites but the bulk of the fediverse is done on a completely different layer, even a different port.
Fediverse instances are clusters of microservices. They usually include a database, a frontend and a backend. The backend is where the api is and where federation requests come in and go out. Thats where the magic happens.
If you want to test this, just disable the webserver (frontend) and watch the instance still working. You can also see this working when you look at the different frontends of some bigger lemmy instances for example.
We coiod think of an integration with all main ecommerce platforms like:
WooCommerce X Cart PrestaShop OpenCart osCommerce Joomla Zen Cart VirtueMart (Joomla) Drupal Commerce (Drupal) KonaKart PimCore
That would probably jumpstart the adoption. Good point.
So… Postmates/Instacart but using activitypub for… Some reason?
Again, how about a non condescending way to deliver your feedback? Its valid and I’ll check it. Just take the win.
