Idea: fediverse of ecommerce. Time to dethrone amazon and ebay. What do you think?
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
@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:
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 …
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Code is still there, which is a nice thing about opensource, but they definitely should be looked at for lessons on the idea of trying to build a decentralized marketplace.
Sounds good, but with how the Fediverse operates, you'd be sharing all your information with everyone. It would need to be a lot more secure and reliable than it is.
The hard part is confidential shipping addresses. The decentralized anonymous payment stuff has already been solved, solved again, and then over-solved for good measure.
I had the same idea but there's a lot of actual tangible assets that have to be dealt with.
The first part is picking a pilot country which is probably where the developer lives. The second is either investing in or partnering with Fast ship locations - you need a service or partner that you can use like Amazon prime to store inventory across a country, and last is shipping and delivery maybe it's baked in. I bet there's a company that does this that has an API or partnership program.
In other words you have to establish partnerships or literally incentivize real people to invest in order to create the same value as Amazon. The magic of amazon isn't really that's it's like eBay and buying things online, it's that I can get it so soon.
I think this is a bad idea. Not to be a downer but commercialism is what is rotting the web. Bringing that cancer to the Fediverse would be asking for the same.
There are better ideas to do the same, such as GNU Taler, that could be incorporated into existing Internet infractructure, work locally and be more environment friendly.
That makes a lot of sense -- when I'm buying something online I like the excitement of not knowing whether a product will cost 20 or 20,000 "dollars" based on how the scam market is doing that day lol