Buying from an alternative ecommerce site usually sucks: you have to register for every website, enter your address, payment information and other information, they may leak data or store it improperly, you may not know the reputation of the website or business, you can’t easily compare products with other vendors and more. Amazon and ebay offer a centralized good experience and you know you can trust them with your purchase. They benefit the consumer by aggregating many businesses so it fosters competition lowering prices but they have so much power and they have done some anti consumer moves. Their fees could also be a problem. The same way mastodon offers a viable alternative to the deadbird platform and slice power to small instances while getting a better user experience. (And lemmy to Reddit.) A fediverse version of ecommerce could perhaps be viable: federated ecommerce that aggregates small business shops, handle the user details and let the business access it when you hit buy. Activity pub to communicate the listings and purchase orders. I am not a programmer and don’t know the technical implementations of it. So what do you think?
ActivityPub (the protocol used by the fediverse) has recently had a proposal to expand it incorporate marketplace exchanges of information. See the proposal, and a discussion thread
Looks good. While it looks more oriented towards a second-hand marketplace, its concepts can be extended to include business-to-consumer interactions as well. A mix of these systems could enhance the marketplace ecosystem’s versatility and usefulness. Thanks for sharing the proposal
Well it’s a new proposal and open to suggestions and further extensions of course.
This is very interesting to me and I’ve played with this kinda idea a few weeks ago, the Activity Pub proposal you linked seems very sensible for communicating between actors but doesn’t really offer much of a path to create a platform. In my view creating a platforms is the reason this should exist, because current platforms (Amazon,Ebay,Uber, AirBnB,DoorDash,Lieferheld) are mostly just engaging in rent seeking from buyers/sellers on their platforms. Rentier Capitalism
I don’t believe a protocol can sufficiently challenge the current players without an underpinning organizational structure that ensures fairness and transparency to both sellers and buyers, when it comes to moderation, indexing, and categorization. Especially moderation but also hosting will have costs, and the consequences for bad moderation are likely much larger with commerce than with social media. So I would like a Coop with significant control from both sellers and buyers to provide the public facing platform which then federates with the Stores which can be self hosted by sellers (potentially as an extension to existing eCommerce Software).
Or alternatively two Coops if it’s not reasonable for the sellers to host their own Stores e.g.: Uber and AirBnB, here the sellers should outright own the one providing the Stores, and own the minority in the one providing the Coop. Obviously middle grounds could also exist where e.g.: a Platform for Delivery food federates with seller servers that are hosted on a local level by Coops comprising of restaurants of a region.
I very deeply believe something like this could make our commerce much better and fairer, and while getting it of the ground might be hard, I think because the sellers make money on these Platforms it should give real incentive to develop both the tech and the legal orgs as well as advertise for them, and for the sellers to invest real money into it, or maybe agree to kick 1-2% of a purchase back to the coop.
Thanks for the reply! What you say makes a lot of sense to me. In general, co-ops are probably in greater need across the fediverse, and I can definitely see a timeline ahead of us where many of the organisations running major instances or services on the fediverse are co-ops of some sort.
Beyond that, I suspect you are onto something generally true in your comment about the need for institutions beyond the protocol. I suspect that this could be a trend in the growth of the fediverse also (see related thread here).
Otherwise, this isn’t my proposal, I’d encourage you to go share your thoughts in the discussion thread I linked to!
Decentralized marketplace will just look like Craigslist and Facebook and other classified marketplaces; chock full of spam and scams.
Adding some element of democracy (like voting on posts) could maybe improve both those marketplace sites.
I think it would improve any site really. Imagine how much better Instagram or Facebook would be if one could downvote stupid shit and the posters would see what people actually thought about their posts/comments. But that might lead to sads, and therefore less active users, so they won’t allow it.
Democracy is pretty cool though imo.
This is kind of like what happens internally on platforms for 3rd party sellers like eBay, Amazon, and AliExpress. Even decades later they’re still working the kinks out obviously. Amazon and AliExpress particularly have lots of scammers, so they clearly haven’t figured out the secret sauce yet. They’re not under-resourced, so either they’re under-motivated to weed it out or it’s actually pretty tricky to do.
My guess is it’s both, but more that it’s just tricky to implement a reliable system of reputation and trust. EBay and Amazon got around it early on by being cheap and establishing policies that heavily favored buyers in disputes, which made the prospect of using the service less risky to the public, improving their market shares. They probably also have non-trasparent systems for tracking buyer reputations as well to avoid abuse.
It seems to be the norm to keep these systems obscure to avoid abuse, but to make a truly functional open platform you would need to have public systems, so I’d hope that the norm of obfuscation is out of convenience or laziness and isn’t required to make the system function.
When money is on the line, I promise you it will be gamed.
There is a guy who interviewed me for a freelance gig, who generates new dropship e-commerce sites a day, for the past few years. He has over 2000 sites. He wanted help creating bots to have conversations and pump his sites on social media.
He was going to pay me well. But the skillset required was out of my expertise.
The Federation would provide a great tool of figuring out the best way to build trust. A reputable server will only let people join if they are in some way reputable. Servers that let scammers flourish will become defederated. If course servers have to be comparable in size. If there’s one server with 90% of users it doesn’t work that well.
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they may leak data or store it improperlyAnd you would rather trust Joe Random who’s hosting part of a marketplace website from their home?
It’s crypto all over again,
blockchaindecentralize everything even when it doesn’t make sense!There’s a world where it can make sense, due to advancing technology and education. We don’t live in it.
Ok, you don’t think that decentralizing is the solution. If you consider Amazon and eBay to be a problem what do you think might be a potential solution?
There’s a difference between companies having their own store (like is the case for many things at the moment, I don’t buy car or bike parts from Amazon for example) and having a decentralized Amazon through a fediverse type thing.
Okay, so what is the solution you are advocating for?
Alternatives exist, the clients need to give themselves the trouble to shop around.
The only things I buy from Amazon are things I just can’t find elsewhere or only find on a similar website (shopping n Alibaba/Aliexpress vs Amazon is pretty much the same thing so might as well buy from Amazon), if everyone started doing that it would greatly improve things…
Yeah, maybe there could be a website that helps people find these alternative sites so they don’t need to rely on Amazon as much.
Search engines? 😛
Yeah, I just realized I was trying to reinvent the wheel. Whoops.
Not OP, but: enforcing antitrust laws. We’re not gonna “consumer choice” our way out of monopolies.
I can’t enforce those laws myself, and my government is basically three corporations in a trenchcoat pretending to be a democracy. So direct action - even if an uphill battle - is my only real option.
Think you just described crypto markets, and it’d be overrun with scams, fraud, legal issues, and zero accountability. Also my payment info and shipping address is the very last thing I want given to random decentralized instances ran by unknown people. No thanks.
At least when Amazon sends something shitty, they’ll fight back against the seller and you’re actually receiving something. Also big tech is significantly less likely to ever expose your personal information (addresses, payment info, etc) then some random instance owner.
So this is absolutely a terrible idea in a digital environment.
I’ve worked on payment systems. It is very hard to federate unless something like Stripe is used for actual payment.
Credit card companies simply won’t interface with you unless you prove their data is safe. It isn’t a process that scales well.
Brick and mortar companies get around this by having payment terminals which are insanely locked down. (Which is also why those terminals mostly suck)
Payment terminal aren’t as locked down as you think.
They are shitty because manufacturers do the bare minimum and always ask for exceptions (and they often are granted).
Processors only want as much terminal as possible out there to make more money.
My personal pipe dream is we swing back to a world where people buy in brick and mortar. Online shopping has stolen the soul from the buying experience.
More choice is not necessarily better. Buy local. See your money back in your community. Even shopping at “The Gap” at least part of your purchase is going to local employees that then go out and put the money into your community.
Saying this as someone who loves the convenience of Amazon… Fuck Amazon.
I’m curious when a challenger emerges and how.
You can shop online and still buy local. I’m not sure why you’re convinced this is an either/or scenario.
Personally I don’t have the time for a ton of brick-and-mortar shopping and my work requires specialized materials that aren’t made locally but often do require a bit of “shopping around.”
Shipping was sabotaged and it just doesn’t make sense to buy local. The item is more expensive and there’s a 30 to 60 dollar shipping fee tagged on. It’s usually the same made in china quality.
For work related stuff, I bypass both and get straight from China.
I don’t like it but the gov didn’t step in and basically handed half our economy to Amazon. At the height of it, they decided to sell our national shipping service so prices went up (I’m in Canada btw).
In a perfect world, amazon would get the boot and we would have a government owned drop shipping infrastructure. Until that happens, I’m not ready to pay 3x the price for simple items just to keep a dead dream alive. Local got snuffed when it comes to consumer goods.
Using Stripe or equivalent must be used for such a platform. The sellers would just get a check or bank transfer, they’d never need to handle a credit transaction.
For me what drives me to Amazon is their logistics (1-2 days delivery, free delivery), their no-bullshit assurance and the gigantic inventory. 3rd can certainly be reached with a decentralised alternative. 2nd maybe even though rogue actors could hop instances and trust building is I guess challenging with an open model and 1st isn’t going to happen.
I hate the marketplace thing, and the harder it became to filter out third parties the more I ordered outside of amazon.
I came to amazon back then because it was one seller offering most I cared about, and a single contact for everything. More and more stuff is now only available via 3rd parties - and with that I can just order stuff bypassing amazon.
Not to mention the ridiculous markup on everything. The last few times I’ve looked on there the prices for generic chinese garbage was higher than name brand stuff directly from the manufacturers website. These days I’ll stop literally anywhere besides amazon.
That has happened to me. Amazon on itself was reliable and good, all the issues I had were marketplace related but so bad I look for alternatives for every purchase now.
Amazon has gone downhill massively in the last few years (in the UK anyway). Free delivery is only for orders over £20 now if you don’t have Prime, and they make it really difficult for you to pay for delivery as an option. Prime is no longer next day delivery, or even guaranteed delivery by a specific date.
My last 2 orders were marked as delivered but haven’t arrived. It was so difficult to get a refund for the first one (you have to go through a chat bot now which wasn’t easy to find on their app) and I haven’t been able to get a refund for the second one yet as it was a 3rd party seller and they haven’t responded to my message.
I’m trying to use other sellers as much as possible now. It’s also often cheaper to go direct I’m finding lately.
Yeah I’m not saying there isn’t a good dose of enshittyfication but a lot / most of the smaller players are shitty altogether. Exception being Coolblue here in Belgium which has yet to fail me smaller shops are either price gouging or taking 2 damn weeks to process an order.
With Amazon at the very least I can watch Prime when I’m angry at their failures …
Yeah I agree, there isn’t a better option and it’s frustrating.
I do missing watching Prime since cancelling my subscription 😆 But it’s not worth the price imo.
I’m angry at them for cancelling The Expense but even that wasn’t enough to make me cancel prime 😅
2-day delivery is pretty much standard here in sweden lol, no matter where you buy things (so long as they’re domestic)
Sweden is also 22x smaller then the USA by landmass :p
Well yeah, but then why doesn’t the US just do things on a state-by-state basis and accomplish the same things? This is a very strange argument to me.
Like yeah sure sweden is smaller but that… doesn’t matter? In the end all this argument ends up saying is that america is incompetent, which i don’t feel like that’s what you want to say.
Case in point: the northeast corridor (washington DC through NYC to boston) has FIVE TIMES THE POPULATION OF SWEDEN, twice the population of all the nordic countries combined! And yet two day shipping is some impressive feat for amazon to pull off? It should be utterly trivial with that many people living ontop of each other!
E-commerce isn’t as much of a monopoly as “reddit-style social media”.
Technically anyone has the ability to open an eshop and sell whatever they want (provided they follow the appropriate sales/tax laws etc).
It’s just that people don’t like to buy from no-name shops online, as reputations give a level of accountability.
I imagine a lot of people got their credit card details stolen when the first eshops appeared.
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The India Govt established an Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) which is a federated e-commerce system.
Details at ONDC YouTube
Super interesting
This is a bad idea, Mr random hoster could literally just scam people, and there would be no way to remove him
Plus the illegal items being sold. Who would monitor those.
Piracy communities have been defederated just because worlds wants to preempt legal trouble, just in case the moderation there slips up.
What more for physical items, such as illegal drugs and our services. The fediverse might quickly find itself to be a clear net version of the silk road, or a real hotbed of counterfeit items.
Lemmy is being moderated like crazy… Maybe even worst than reddit…
How would you improve the idea?
India has actually developed such an open platform: the open network for digital commerce.
https://ondc.org/learn-about-ondc/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Network_for_Digital_CommerceSo the software is there. You only need to adapt it to Europe and get people to use it.
Shipping and logistics would be a royal pain. Efficiency there is why Amazon can be cheap.
Another reason is that they can subsidize their retail business with their web hosting business.
Retail isn’t unprofitable though is it? But if they were trying to crush a competitor, they could be even more attractive by subsiding more for a bit.
Ok, then what do you think could be a potential solution?
Nationalize them 😳
No seriously I think companies that provide such basic logistics services should be under public control. Amazon’s statistics/planning department is basically our (better) version of the Soviet gosplan agency. Yes the investors would be sad, yes they are also the ruling class but a man can dream
Personally, I am more for voluntary association than increasing government power but I agree that important systems should be under public control.
Isn’t FedEx the nationalized version? You’d need to make it way better to mach Amazon efficiency.
FedEx is a private company. USPS is the public one.
Oh okay. Anyway, efficiency would need to be better.
Considering the size of the country, and the margins it works with, it works quite well. Well enough that Amazon itself uses USPS for deliveries. Plus there’s a lot of additional work that USPS does. Like shipping to places that just don’t make any fiscal sense but are essential for that remote community. Shipping live chicks under a certain amount of age.
And no private company would do this coz it won’t give the most profits but the service greatly benefits the populace as a whole. (Which preaching to the choir since you’re on Lemmy vs Reddit when the Reddit experience is a lot smoother for the layman right now but also fully profit oriented.)
Yes exactly. But Amazon uses their own EV delivery trucks and sorting wearhouses for city deliveries. So for a national solution to take over, it’d need to be better or compatible in those areas too, not just the edge cases.
It might work for a Facebook marketplace or eBay alternative where you drive locally to pick things up. But then you’d need a robust reporting and reputation system to avoid robbery. Decentralizing a system like Amazon that benefits immensely from centralized is going to be an up hill battle.
Okay, so your potential solution is to build a robust and effective reputation/reporting system. I like the idea. There are a few different projects that have to deal with the same problems so maybe we can learn from them. As for logistics I am trying to think about if there is a way to make that system better in a decentralized system.
Okay, so your potential contribution is to phrase your questions and responses in the most patronizing possible way, as though we’re in a boardroom with you at the head of the mahogany table, and pretend that much smarter people aren’t already working on this and coming to more complex, detailed obstacles and solutions. I don’t like the idea. As for logistics, I am trying to think about if there is a way to solve a complex issue that has vexed generations and touches nearly every global industry, in a lemmy thread based on a showerthought.
I like being direct. I don’t have all the answers (no one does) but I think asking people to think about solutions when they offer criticism helps move the conversation forward.
You gotta read the room and understand the context. Someone brings up a thought/question casually on lemmy, it’s gonna make you sound super self-impressed and generally naive to respond as though you’re the one who (or anyone at all) is going to get that thread to a global solution for an incredibly difficult issue that people are already working on. Everyone is just spitballing for fun and curious if any novel thoughts will get tossed around in a thread, so when you reapond to someone highlighting an issue by saying “okay, so what’s the solution” as though people aren’t already thinking of that or wouldn’t have included it in the comment if there was one, it isn’t productive, it ignores the intention of the comment, and it makes you sound like the crappy boss in a bad movie. What is expected? Someone to say, “The solution? I hadn’t thought about that! The whole thing is cracked! Invaluable contribution!” In the end, there’s just a huge difference between saying something like “That’s interesting, I wonder what the biggest obstacles are” and “Okay, I approve of your thoughts, and I know thats important to everyone, but they are incomplete, which you likely didn’t notice. Let me help you with the next step by asking, what’s the next step, which, beside offering great insight, is surely the type of conversation you were looking for in this thread.”
You know what I agree with you. I should work on my tone more and try to contribute at the same time. Thanks for the feedback.
Is the whole Amazon obsession just a North American thing? I’ve bought like 4 things from them in my life and nothing since about 2016 and I haven’t felt at all inconvenienced. From my perspective it’s not too hard to either buy from local companies, directly from foreign manufacturers, or from aliexpress if all else fails; that may just be because I’m not American though!
The reason why I choose Amazon is buying from many different stores without creating an account for each and every one. Nevermind that paying is easy.
Also returning stuff is very easy and uncomplicated when buying stuff from Amazon.
They have a huge market share in Europe too. And it’s very hard to compete with them, because in online retail the advantages given by economy of scale are brutal.
In the Netherlands there are plenty of online retailers like Coolblue who are doing well by competing on quality and customer service, despite prices being a bit higher (ironically). Next working day delivery is standard, so that isn’t an issue.
Bol.com is also really successful and much like Amazon, including its problems.
I assume this is because of a first mover advantage; for a long time, Amazon was only available in the UK, Germany and France*, so that created a major disadvantage. I’m guessing this might apply to a lot of smaller European countries.
*maybe other countries too, but at any rate not in the Benelux.
To those unfamiliar with the acronym: Be – Belgium • ne – The Netherlands • lux – Luxembourg
It’s definitely not a thing in sweden, they came here a few years back and everyone just laughed and carried on business as usual.
Then they tried to automatically translate all listings and that’s probably the best advertisement they could have made because people laughed themselves insensate over how mind-bendingly bad the translations were, and then a week later people promptly forgot that amazon exists again.
💀
Defederated FB marketplace, eh? Community centric geoservers might not actually be a bad idea… But the moderation and security of users is still a massive road lock for a system like that. I wouldn’t trust it at first, personally… Not sure how to get around that.
I am desperate for location-based internet. My local government can’t be bothered to supply any information online beyond what they are required to. Craigslist and facebook marketplace provide at least commerce, sorta. And of course universities nowadays have official discord servers. See how our need to localize has ended up supporting the most evil corporations rather than self-hosting? I was very interested in Youtube Location-based videos, but it’s a mystery how it works and hidden behind The Algorithm, rather than a local videos page.
Yessss I miss the old Craigslist
There is the very promising @Interledger Foundation, which aims to produce a defederated “open and inclusive payments network that puts humanity first”. It could eventually prove useful for money flow on federated platforms.
I’m intuitively critical of all online financial services like this one, but then you realize it was not only funded by the Mozilla Foundation and Creative Commons, but it’s actively support by the w3 consortium. Furthermore, it doesn’t use blockchain.
