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?

    • Ferminho@lemmy.mlOP
      151·
      1 year ago

      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

      • silverpill@mitra.social
        3·
        1 year ago

        @Ferminho @maegul This proposal describes a very simple marketplace, and some things were intentionally left out. However, it is based on Valueflows system which can be used to describe many different economic processes, including planning, production and transportation:

        https://www.valueflo.ws/introduction/core/

        So developers may use object types and properties defined there if they want to build something more complicated. And social interactions can be represented as standard ActivityPub activities. I think Valueflows and ActivityPub nicely complement each other.

    • kugel7c@feddit.de
      10·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        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!

  • HughJanus@lemmy.ml
    612·
    1 year ago

    Decentralized marketplace will just look like Craigslist and Facebook and other classified marketplaces; chock full of spam and scams.

    • Rediphile@lemmy.ca
      12·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • deathbird@mander.xyz
        6·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • exocortex@discuss.tchncs.de
      101·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
    589·
    1 year ago

    they may leak data or store it improperly

    And you would rather trust Joe Random who’s hosting part of a marketplace website from their home?

    It’s crypto all over again, blockchain decentralize everything even when it doesn’t make sense!

  • regalia@literature.cafe
    362·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • persolb@lemmy.mlEnglish
    27·
    1 year ago

    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)

    • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
      6·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • whoisearth@lemmy.ca
      74·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • some_guy@kbin.social
        17·
        1 year ago

        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.”

    • WetBeardHairs@lemmy.ml
      2·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • a4ng3l@lemmy.worldEnglish
    26·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • aard@kyu.de
      111·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • applebusch@lemmy.world
        51·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • VanillaGorilla@kbin.social
        3·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • Lazylazycat@lemmy.world
      91·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • a4ng3l@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        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 …

        • Lazylazycat@lemmy.world
          3·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • a4ng3l@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            I’m angry at them for cancelling The Expense but even that wasn’t enough to make me cancel prime 😅

    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
      3·
      1 year ago

      2-day delivery is pretty much standard here in sweden lol, no matter where you buy things (so long as they’re domestic)

        • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
          1·
          1 year ago

          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!

  • sunbytes@lemmy.world
    20·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Furball@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    192·
    1 year ago

    This is a bad idea, Mr random hoster could literally just scam people, and there would be no way to remove him

    • andruid@lemmy.ml
      2·
      1 year ago

      Another reason is that they can subsidize their retail business with their web hosting business.

      • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • cnnrduncan@beehaw.orgEnglish
    131·
    1 year ago

    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!

    • bleistift2@feddit.deEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
      5·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
      2·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • FlickOfTheBean@lemmy.world
      4·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Franzia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        3·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • sab@kbin.social
    11·
    1 year ago

    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.