Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea!

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/

Decentralized sales platforms would just suck to use, in general. The Amazon problem is likely something that can only be solved by the legislative processes of the countries it operates in.
Imagine Ebay but with even less scam prevention.
- I agree on the need for legilature. I strongly disagree on the scam. You dont have massive csam on peertube either because it has manual federation. Everyone who runs a business knows that its much more important to not get sued than to sell stuff. Big difference between small businesses and large ones btw.

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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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.
- 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.

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 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 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.
  
  Accepting payments isn't some kind of wild adventure that will inevitably doom your operation. People do it all the time, you can set up a Stripe account in a few minutes. You could, if you wanted (and you would probably want to go this route at least initially), require people to have a Stripe account or something and get paid directly from the buyer without you being involved. And then just charge a flat fee to the merchants or something, if you wanted to make the whole thing sustainable.
  Stripe is well-equipped to deal with issues of taxes, fraud, refunds, and so on for micro-level businesses. Once you get into accepting payments and re-disbursing them to people, you've opened up a whole can of worms which probably means you should be spending a couple thousand dollars on lawyers and accountants to make sure it's all on the up-and-up, but even then, it's not unsolvable. It's kind of a pain in the ass, that's all. Jim Bob's Towing with his 2 pillhead employees manages to do it every day. It's how Jim Bob financed his boat. It's fine.
- 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.

No, federated model is chosen over distributed model or centralized model to allow feuds, putting it simply.
That may work for a Reddit alternative, but doesn't work for markets. Helps moderation (some idea of it, I don't think that idea is good), but definitely hurts a single space to sell and buy stuff.
Which is why cryptobros and such types make either centralized or distributed systems.
So much for using computer networks for this.
Now about Amazon specifically - your post omits the whole warehouses and logistics part. Which is most of Amazon's core business.
Computer people today somehow started forgetting that real life is very hard and complex. When I was a kid (born 1996, so not old man), computers had a promise of making that real life easier, and from time to time delivered on it, but at some point bullshit like glossy buttons and Web 2.0 and social media became a thing in itself, and everyone started behaving as if it's done, we now can look down like olympic gods to those mortals messing around in dirt, and sometimes easily solve their problems. We can't.
Getting back to logistics - one has to design a system of shared warehouses, transportation, mailing and delivery tasks, tracking, reporting on outcomes of every event, and all that should be even more abuse-resilient than the processes inside actual Amazon. You'll have Byzantine problems in every interaction.
The "distributed king of all social media, solving once and for all the problem of centralized platforms" that I'm often dreaming about is realistic compared to that.
- Your comment brings no ounce of new ideas or criticisms to the table, overlooks all the pros and cons already mentioned and assumes you know a lot more thane for example. I run businesses for 15 years, do ethical business since 10 yrs and am thinking from a position of experience.
  The reason I dont present myself in a way that screams competence is because this is lemmy and we dont need this stuff. I like spitballing ideas and push new projects for the benefit of the people.
  But feel free to suggest constructive things.
  
  I feel like this is far too dismissive for a comment that was in my eyes fairly constructive. He correctly pointed out that one of Amazon's main selling points is their whole logistics division. A federated website doesn't have that. So either:
  You somehow also start doing logistics, or
  You provide a good reason why shops don't actually care about Amazon's logistics all that much, and how they could to it themselves instead.
  Maybe you could actually address the core of his criticism instead of outright dismissing it.
  
  Sorry if my tone will be less gentle than needed.
  Your comment brings no ounce of new ideas or criticisms to the table,
  I don't think so.
  overlooks all the pros and cons already mentioned
  It makes sense that others look at different parts of the problem than you do.
  I run businesses for 15 years, do ethical business since 10 yrs and am thinking from a position of experience.
  Most people have (or recently enough had and will have) a job, and most people know a person or two with 10-15 years of experience in management positions who think they are thinking from a position of experience.
  Different professions and job responsibilities exist for a reason.
  The reason I dont present myself in a way that screams competence is because this is lemmy and we dont need this stuff.
  You did it here instead of continuing a pretty normal thread or leaving it be.
  I like spitballing ideas and push new projects for the benefit of the people.
  That is important, but almost everyone has been spitballing ideas and pushing new projects since they learned to speak.
  But feel free to suggest constructive things.
  Quoting myself:
  Getting back to logistics - one has to design a system of shared warehouses, transportation, mailing and delivery tasks, tracking, reporting on outcomes of every event, and all that should be even more abuse-resilient than the processes inside actual Amazon. You’ll have Byzantine problems in every interaction.
  "Shared" is the important part. Even without that one can fail logistics - see USSR, the biggest corporation to fail in history.

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)
- how to process payments? how to ship goods? how to handle refunds? how to handle contestations?
  The problems are solvable, but the solutions taken together are couple times as complex as Amazon itself. This translates to cost. Which is naturally the reason Amazon came to existence earlier than that solution.
  I think that layers of storage\messages and actual logic should be firmly separated, an instance going down when someone wants a refund for an operation that involved it seems not good enough. If the operation is a cryptographic contract with an escrow, and "instances" are just servers providing message storage probably privileged for some users (might be members of a community, might pay for that storage, that's lower layer anyway), this is less of a problem. But that's not a federation.
  By the way, however I dislike OP's attitude, if you suggest this idea like a federated ads and reviews platform, it becomes useful.
- 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
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  Considering your answer to payments solution was "This is trivial.' it sounds like a) You've never run a business and b) you're more interested in fantasizing than a realistic conversation.
- 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
  
  A lot of the terrifying aspects of slinging money around that people are talking about in this thread actually do become terrifying, once Bitcoin and friends are your platform. Fraud? Refunds? Someone hacked your server and stole your wallet? All that stuff is now 100% your problem, there is absolutely no way to "undo" if something wrong happens, and no infrastructure in place to handle any of it or any professionals with already a simple system in place for it. Or, if there is an infrastructure, it is based on a shady company which is orders of magnitude more sketchy and predatory than the (already pretty sketchy and predatory) banking system.
  I actually think 3% is roughly a fair fee for the processor to charge you, in exchange for agreeing to worry about all of that nonsense on your behalf so you can just collect the money. For in-person transactions, it's mostly just a predatory rent payment, but for online transactions where the possibility for malfeasance is amplified, it makes sense to me.

It's much more than that. Amazon's strength is also in its proximity warehouses and contacts with delivery companies.
Otherwise you just have a federated Ebay.
- I order stuff from ebay. Got a phone on the way from china right now. Ebay work-alike might not be a bad place to start.
  
  Exactly. The idea is to not make a perfect copy but a viable alternative without the constant breaks in design and trust when scouring the web for items. All those funny labels on websites for example like trustedshops are just for this. If one could make a web of trust, that would eliminate fakes and take power from for profit companies who make these labels and control trust.
- Amazon has a lot of different aspects, same as facebook and xitter. I aim to think of alternatives, not perfect copies. My only hard target is that it is free from single entity control. Thats why not ebay or one of the others. Flohmarkt is kind of promising but i'll check it out deeper and host an instance. That way I can judge its potential.
- I buy stuff from Ebay and Etsy plenty often.

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
- communal warehouses for fulfillment should be a service that is nationalized.
  Domestic terrorism vibes here

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?
- 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.
- like pc-partpicker
- 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.
  
  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
  https://www.ecommerceceo.com/open-source-ecommerce/

I like the idea and it could work very well for smaller communities. In fact, theyre already doing something similar called "Werbering" (advertising ring) in germany. It takes the idea and elevates it into the digital space.
- Thats an interesting bit of information. Thanks! :)

This is surprisingly one of the few actual useful uses of blockchain. Business tried to shove it in everywhere and it didn't make sense because blockchain is a way to audit federated separate instances - which businesses are not. They're a single monolithic structure, and they don't need the trust - they already have it. They're themselves, they just have to trust their own internal teams.
We, on the otherhand, are the perfect use for it. A way to say X person paid Y person for this product on this day at this time, X person now has the authority to rate Y person for how they did. Immutable, impossible to fake.
- Exactly xmr has been doing this for the markets on the dark web for years now. Escrow reviews ratings seller trust etc.
  I fear the idea of crypto has been so poisoned by scammers and bullshit that the average person had forgotten it actually has value
- You don't need a blockchain.
- I'm definitely intrigued. I have HUGE prejudices when it comes to blockchain, one being climate impact. The other being privacy of all things. But I can see it as an option.
  
  Not crypto, blockchain. When done correctly and you don't have every user trying to calculate the next hash for some pennies it works pretty well. Computing the hash when an action happens like a purchase is fairly trivial compared to mining.
  Crypto started the concept of the blockchain, at the end though it's just a distributed immutable audit log. The hash is required, but if done correctly, it's trivial.
  
  Climate impact of monero is significantly less per transaction than any fiat. Their are no physical banks with employees and buildings and travel and transport and minting etc etc etc. Monero is the only truly private currencies all others have every transaction tracked.
- as long as it's between instances and not exposed to end-users, yeah i think that was the original use case.

Ideas are cheap. This is the third post like this I've seen in two weeks. Build it.

The problem they (should/did) solve was scamming, and payments. So you'd need to have some banking system with locked money, disputes etc. IMO that is the complicated part, the rest is just more or less a searchable database.
- Its possible that this is pretty sttaightforward. My thought on payment is stripe and paypal atm since they're already established. They also handle this.
  
  So not decentralised then 😅
- That's a solved issue. Monero escrow services have been doing exactly this for the dark web for years now
  
  Yeah but that doesn't solve anything for the average Joe. Nor lost packages or scamming tactics etc.

How do you handle returns, defective merchandise, warranties? If I buy something from you and something goes wrong with it, I'm not going to like being fobbed off with "hey, go talk to Tina". If they return-ship something to you instead of Tina, who pays to ship it back to Tina?
- If you have a network of paricipating stores, then they can agree to take each others physical returns and inspect them.
- With Amazon you pay that service if you consider that its prices are often higher than standard ecommerce sites. You can say it's a very comfortable service, but try to think how many times you returned products that you considered really necessary...
- The same way it is done today. If I have a shop for cell phones i dont manufacture them. If they are defective, you come to me and I go to apple, google or whatever.
  One could argue that if you made it clear that this shop is being federated to give you a streamlined experience. That way one could contact the shop in question through the same means (federation) and ask for refund, repair whatever.

I really like the idea of a grassroots Amazon competitor. That said,
You need to have a high level of trust. A federated network of shady scams that just take your money and send you nothing half the time is not going to fly. Is there a vetting process, who controls that process, how's all that work. If its 'good seller' reviews, how are those stats protected from manipulation.
You need to have extreme ease of use. UI barriers that seem trivial to developers can sink a platform.
If there are problems solvable by centralization, maybe that could be done as a cooperative organization which devs and vendors can join and run democratically.
- Another issue might be, how do you deal with people selling illegal items/services? How do you avoid "Silk Road" style liability? Would there be a blacklist that someone running an instance could use so they don't have to vet everyone they are federated with?
- I wonder if you can 'outsource' trust by relying on payment systems? If a seller uses stripe and scams some users, stripe would freeze their account right?
  
  Correct. Someone orders something, it doesn't arrive, they dispute the charge with their CC company, their CC company and Stripe talk to one another and get the merchant's side of the story, and basically unless there is some pretty massive indication that the buyer is lying or has a consistent pattern of this or something, the buyer gets their money back. If that happens a bunch, the seller loses their Stripe account.
  The system is heavily biased in favor of the buyer, which for the most part works out, because most of the fraud exists on the seller end. And on the whole the fact that 99% of people on both sides are not cockheads trying to abuse the system, is what makes it all work reasonably well.
- Thank you for participating in this discussion. Happy to hear someone thought about this.
  The high level of trust is important, yes. My idea is to either plain use or build something similar to the fediseer. I'm an instance admin and I use fediseer for trust management. This means that instances can trust other instances (manually!) and are responsible if these instances turn out bad. That means if you have a friend you know personally and trust, you would recommend them to the fediseer. this friend in turn would recommend another friend and so on. that is a chain of trust. so far this works wonderful.
  Some things could also be solved by building communities or unions like normal companies do. But of course this should be limited to federating companies.
  Thanks for asking questions. It helps me think.

Open Bazaar
- whats that? do you have a link?
  edit:
  sad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBazaar

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.

So online farmers/flea market?
- flea market
  !flohmarkt@lemmy.ca
- that is online farmers and flea market? feel free to post a link

ITT: OP has an "idea" and no money. Please do all the work.
We are not your thinktank bro
- I think op sees us as exactly that. His thinktank. Isn't that kinda the whole point of a social network?
- Why do you hate fun
- wow. you're a real piece of work, aren't ya? byee
  
  So I'm not wrong then, got it. Thanks for confirming it.
  
  To me at least, this contribution makes you seem like an even worse asshole than them. Just some anecdotal feedback.

Could this be an app realized based on the mycelial web - amazon uses huge AI models to predict their customer's behaviour and do the logistics ... (not sure myself, but it probably won't work solely on ActivityPub)
- The goal is not to ensnare the user but to free them. AI is absolutely not part of this idea. I havent read of the mycelial web yet though. Is it a thing or just an AI pipedream?
  
  I made a first prototype here: https://github.com/bluebbberry/MyceliumWebServer. Its recommends songs to the users. You can see it here: https://techhub.social/@myceliumweb and try it out by posting to #babyfungus on Mastodon.
  You can do AI in an ethical way by making it more decentralized. The idea behind the mycelial web is to realize it based on volunteer computing, meaning that everybody can contribute computing power. And then I can say, for example: use my models, which was trained with all these other models, on this Amazon alternative to recommend me stuff. And the AI model was trained on my PC and runs on my PC (just wasn't trained solely with my computing power or my data alone).

I think there's some misunderstanding here. Amazon is a massive logistics system. The retail storefront is a tiny part of what Amazon is today.
AWS exists because Amazon needed to solve an internal data handling problem in order to solve their logistics problems so that they could scale up. After building that system, they started selling it as a product to other businesses. The point being, Amazon's real success is based on providing business-to-business services. The retail website is the tiny public-facing bit, but it depends on the rest of the organization structure in order to operate properly.
What you're proposing is more like an eBay alternative, where the system is basically just the storefront, and the sellers listing products are responsible for their own logistics. eBay still provides dispute resolution for buyers though, and that's hard to achieve without some centralized control.
There's also the legal problems. At some point someone will use such a system as a silk road - probably sooner rather than later. Whoever is administrating and hosting it will be liable for criminal activity in the countries where the crime occurs. It will not end well.
- Thats entirely possible. Thanks for pointing it out.
  But the rest about amazon is (interesting?) noise in my opinion. The thing keeping people locked in amazon is amazon, nothing else. Sellers need to sell there to survive and customers cant find alternatives, especially not for a competitive price.
  
  I don't see how you think its noise. Many items from amazon come from an amazone warehouse and delivered by amazon. they don't exclusively do it this way but this is how they have the same day and few day shipping. I remember when amazon went from mostly being a book site to selling everything and people were gaga about 2 day shipping and when same day shipping came to some metros it was talked about a lot. I think the main thing is the other guy mentioned logistics and aws but forgot to mention the warehouse and shipping part of the logistics.
  
  Sellers need to sell there to survive
  Amazon is a service provider. Sellers sell there because Amazon provides product advertising (every product page is essentially an ad), order processing, payment processing, warehousing, order fulfillment (via the warehouse staff), shipping, dispute resolution, return processing (which is its own logistics nightmare), and even resale of returned/refurbished products in some cases, and all of it is coordinated through their data systems.
  It is extremely convenient to sell a product on Amazon because they handle all of the customer-facing parts of selling, all you have to do is describe what you're selling, and arrange for Amazon to get the product somehow. It's the convenience that keeps sellers on their platform. It's the convenience that makes it worth the cost of doing business with Amazon.
  Now yes, each individual service could be replaced, but splitting them out is going to cause coordination problems. It's going to slow down the order fulfillment, and it's basically shunting the operation cost (both time and money) back onto the seller. That's going to mean fewer sellers interested in using the alternative, because now they have to do for themselves what they could simply pay Amazon a percentage of their sale price to do. And because this alternative is slower and can't provide the same kind of return guarantees that Amazon can, fewer customers are going to want to use it.
  The thing keeping people locked in amazon is amazon, nothing else.
  So yes, you're right, but I don't think you're giving enough weight to what Amazon is as an organization. Amazon is a lot more than just the retail website. Having all of those services under one roof makes the operating costs lower, which is a big part of why the prices are so competitive. If the seller has to take on those costs then they have to raise the price of their products.

Or you can just buy from other online retailers.
- except you cant. not in most real life situations. I personally made it a habbit to not shop at amazon and the time and money I "waste" for shopping elsewhere is insane. If you come with "you're just bad at searching then" I will block you without comment.
  
  It is hard to shop at other places. I just always give other places a chance to win my business. It keeps some money from Amazon.

Example 1: So you buy at toms groceries, you trust them.
[citation needed]
- I mean, if their content was signed you could verify the authenticity of the certificate. Usually the business name appears in the cert.
  
  No I mean, I don't "trust" a groceries store. I only use them to trade for groceries, and only use cash when doing so.
  Just because I use someone doesn't mean I trust them. Even more: just becaue I trust Alice, that doesn't mean I trust Bob by transitivity.

I know 20 years ago Walmart was the face of corporate evil but hear me out. They have had 1 company MO and have never wavered from it, providing affordable goods at the lowest possible price to the consumer without any bells or whistles. No coupons, no buy 3 get 1 free, no sketchy pricing based on bullwhip procurement.
My message here is to encourage anyone like myself who is fed the fuck up with Amazon, Google and Microsoft shitting on every product they put out all rhe while cutting all operating costs from any semblance of customer support. I call Walmart every year to check how much .22 ammo they have around deer season to get my tags and the winters supply of varmint ammo in one trip. Every year I speak to a real person even if it rings for a hot minute.
For about the same price as Amazon prime, I have Walmart "prime" that comes with free delivery of not just market place shit but also same day grocery delivery. They dont spread themselves too thin like literally every single corporate giant out there. They were better equipped than Amazon to get into the market place industry and they are killing it. While every other shit head company is dumping billions into AI (Walmart might be too idk so take this with a grain of salt) Walmart invested billions into developing their drone delivery project.
Tldr: I encourage everyone who likes simple affordable products from a straight forward without any bullshit to give the Walmart equivalent of Amazon prime a shot.
Edit: One other perk point for uncle Wally is it isn't a snake payment deal like 9.99/month of never ending monthly payment, maybe they do offer that now but when I signed up it was a single flat payment for 1 year and I get 2 emails letting me know it's coming due for next year and the second being the invoice. They dont spam you, force apps on you, value your data more than you or the product you're buying. Fuck i could keep going with how pleased I've been with Walmart.
- no sketchy pricing based on bullwhip procurement.
  Walmart's procurement has been abusive to their suppliers (who often go out of business because of their relationship with Walmart) for decades. I think you may need to reassess your perception of their procurement strategy.
  
  Lol that's called business. It's why nothing came from any of the investigations accusing them of not doing enough to protect workers employed by other companies they purchased from. It also happened around 2015ish and all the articles I found from 2020 praise their supply chain managment.
  https://courses.ie.bilkent.edu.tr/ie479/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2024/11/Optimizing-Walmarts-Supply-Chain-from-Strategy-to-Execution.pdf
  https://www.marketingscoop.com/consumer/walmart-supply-chain-strategy/
  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375551491_Retail_Supply_Chain_Systems_Analysis_A_Case_of_Walmart
  I mean they were called out for not being attentive enough and they responded in a way you would hope a company would respond. Albeit an article written by walmart but still they owned up and addressed it.
  https://corporate.walmart.com/askwalmart/what-is-walmart-doing-to-promote-responsible-labor-practices-in-the-supply-chain
  Haven't found a single source that supports your claim that the issue went on for decades either so feel free to provide some sources and I'll be happy to read them and adjust my opinion accordingly.
- Glad you found something that works for you mate. Still, this corpo-soft-lock-in-shit isn't cool man. I get it, you want it easy and reliable. But this aint it. The stuff I'm talking about here is kind of the middle inbetween local seller and wholesale chain store. Thats why I like the idea.

So in simple terms, you propose to build a mom-and-pop shop and have it act like a global player like Amazon?
Congrats, it does not happen very often I sit in a chair and stare at the screen in disbelief!
- Whatever your idea of a mom and pop shop and acting like a global player is, I'm not thinking of anything like this. As I mentioned. This already exists. The idea is to automate and streamline some parts, basically.

@hauilemmy I had a mostly similar idea a few weeks ago but I'm a mess ( sleep issues ) so no coding for me. 😂
But yes, as I mentioned somewhere extending activitypub could be a start.
- You dont need to code. Help can have many forms. Ideas, counsel, testing, building, planning, etc. Feel free to dm me if you're interested in building something. The most promising start so far was flohmarkt. It already kind of does something remotely like this but its very young. I'll check it out and report back.
  
  @hauilemmy Flomarket is more like a separate shops, you need a protocol, and gui's that are easy to embed via EU made web frameworks like drupal. ( React to be avoided as it's from meta ) That way you see the shop on the individual site but also can create aggregators that look like ebay or ammazon but are federated.

I think the closest you can come is open source an entire business, from business plans, architecture, systems, payment processing, etc.

You are completely misunderstanding what Amazon actually does, and why it's successful, despite being a shitty company. It's first and foremost a logistics company. People can order "stuff" in many places, but if they order it on Amazon, they'll get it by tomorrow if they order it before midnight. They got warehouse everywhere. They do (some) of their own final deliveries for anyone close to those, use the big logistics players for the rest (ups, DHL, ...) while having massive volume and the power to dictate price that comes with that. The number of workers in the warehouses is actually minuscule for their size, it's all automated. Huge up front cost, very low cost once it's actually running.
Consumers go there because they can get literally anything. Again: warehouses. It's also a market place but that only works (these days) because it's THE place the people go. The reviews are also a massive point, and would be inherently untrustworthy in a federated version.
How would you ever get anyone to go to your federated version for shopping that sells like "some" things? Even if you manage to combine all those shops, you'd need a way to agree on what an item is called (or how to assign id numbers) so the same item from multiple sellers is grouped in the same offer, and many similar small things you take for granted it didn't even ever see/notice on Amazon.
- The reviews are also a massive point, and would be inherently untrustworthy in a federated version.
  The reviews on Amazon are so often very obviously bots, that they aren't really trustworthy at all. What the hell is inherently untrustworthy about federation? 🤨
  
  But you're saying yourself that those are "obviously bots". It's easy to ignore those. And just to be clear, I really did mean the reviews, and not the score (where the skew is less transparent).
  Everyone leaving a review has to have an account somewhere in the federated network. This includes seeing up an instance just to use it for review bots, or fake votes on something. Obviously there's is defederation and other mechanisms, and I'm sure there are ways to improve the situation. But the whole base setup is just inherently much harder to get into a trustworthy position. Even the common centralized sites (not just Amazon) have trouble getting it under control when they can "see" will the related data, for finding outliers and such. I'm just saying it's an even harder proposition.
- I'd really appreciate your points, were they not shrouded in condescension. I understand very well what amazon does.
  If you feel like helping, think of constructive things to say. Otherwise dont waste your energy.
  
  Condescension was not the intention at all. The fact that you mention logistics only as a foot note is what lead me to believe you really didn't understand, and it was just meant as an explanation. Amazon is just scale, in every aspect, and I don't think that can be achieved with a federated approach in the physical retail world.
  As for being constructive, you can be constructive by talking someone out of an idea. I really don't believe there's any viability in the idea, no matter how much I wish there was. I personally value my time, so I assume others do as well. I consider saving someones time incredibly constructive, but that only applies if you intend to pursue the idea to actually get somewhere "real" with it, let's say reaching "profit" or improving participants existing profits.
  You might enjoy spending your time figuring out solutions here, maybe you see it as an economic experiment or hobby project, so it's fun no matter the outcome. I'm that case my comment really isn't constructive in your situation, and I'm sorry.
  Rest assured I didn't comment out of malice.

Let's call it Frontpage

Lol

I love the idea of federate Amazon. The obvious choice would be to implement Monero as the "reserve currency" integrate with decentralise xmr exchanges and escrow services. U would do some sort of seller raring from consumers giving reviews tied to a purchase transaction on the blockchain.
Also imagine the possibilities if for services could federate (most likely only with eachother). If this gets built it will be the final form of the free market. No borders no laws no restrictions no censorship no taxes. It would be chaos. The end of wall street as we know it, and from its ashes shall rise a libertarian phoenix.
- Shilling your bags as usual. Crypto-scammers are all so predictable.
  Why in god's name do you need monero to buy groceries or even computer parts?
  
  They're also transphobic and where whinging on one post about being censored
  Apparently consequences for being a bigot is censorship for them
  
  Monero does a couple things that no other currency can do.
  It cannot be manipulated like fiat as its decentralised
  It cannot be frozen owning means u own it
  Ur payments are anonymous so ur purchases are not being mined by privacy invasive data brokers and insurance agencies
  Transaction fees are a fraction of a all existing currency cos free market
  No other crypto or fiat can do this. It is objectively the best currency by all metrics. I challenge you to find one metric by which it is not objectively better (except its not widely used by normies).
- OK Crypto Scammer
  Also, FUCK TRANSPHOBES
- This is some Azula-level irony.
- I like your enthusiasm. Not too sure if I would go so far but I can see how one would think about it this way. No disagreeing from my side. I'll keep monero and other things like gnu taler in mind for a payment system. Thanks for participating.

[citation needed]