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?

  • HughJanus@lemmy.ml
    522·
    2 years ago

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

    • Rediphile@lemmy.ca
      9·
      2 years 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
        4·
        2 years 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·
        2 years 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
      61·
      2 years 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.

    • Ferminho@lemmy.mlOP
      101·
      2 years 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

  • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
    468·
    2 years 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!

  • persolb@lemmy.mlEnglish
    22·
    2 years 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·
      2 years 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.

    • WetBeardHairs@lemmy.ml
      1·
      2 years 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.

    • whoisearth@lemmy.ca
      54·
      2 years 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.

  • a4ng3l@lemmy.worldEnglish
    20·
    2 years 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.

    • Lazylazycat@lemmy.world
      7·
      2 years 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·
        2 years 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·
          2 years 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·
            2 years 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·
      2 years 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·
          2 years 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
    15·
    2 years 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
    131·
    2 years 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·
      2 years ago

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

      • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        2 years 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.

      • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        2 years ago

        Really interestingly would be to see it restart up but with ONDC support so that sellers/vendors can be automatically added from that network.

  • cnnrduncan@beehaw.orgEnglish
    7·
    2 years 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!

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
      2·
      2 years 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·
      2 years 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.

      • triplenadir@lemmygrad.ml
        3·
        2 years ago

        Maybe there was a glitch on Codeberg? it’s working for me currently anyway

        Magpie Market aims to be a federated alternative to Etsy, allowing sellers to leverage the fediverse to sell their goods and services.

    • FlickOfTheBean@lemmy.world
      4·
      2 years 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·
        2 years 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.

  • smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.de
    6·
    2 years ago

    I think having your own store you control, like with WooCommerce, is enough.

    What we need is more freedom respecting payment system and the closest thing I saw someone is working on is GNU Taler.