Idea: fediverse of ecommerce. Time to dethrone amazon and ebay. 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

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

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!

Think you just described crypto markets, and it'd be overrun with scams, fraud, legal issues, and zero accountability. Also my payment info and shipping address is the very last thing I want given to random decentralized instances ran by unknown people. No thanks.

At least when Amazon sends something shitty, they'll fight back against the seller and you're actually receiving something. Also big tech is significantly less likely to ever expose your personal information (addresses, payment info, etc) then some random instance owner.

So this is absolutely a terrible idea in a digital environment.

I’ve worked on payment systems. It is very hard to federate unless something like Stripe is used for actual payment.

Credit card companies simply won’t interface with you unless you prove their data is safe. It isn’t a process that scales well.

Brick and mortar companies get around this by having payment terminals which are insanely locked down. (Which is also why those terminals mostly suck)

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.

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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.

The India Govt established an Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) which is a federated e-commerce system.

Details at ONDC YouTube

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

India has actually developed such an open platform: the open network for digital commerce.
https://ondc.org/learn-about-ondc/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Network_for_Digital_Commerce

So the software is there. You only need to adapt it to Europe and get people to use it.

Shipping and logistics would be a royal pain. Efficiency there is why Amazon can be cheap.

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!

💀

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.

don't see mention of magpie market yet https://codeberg.org/MagpieMarket

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.

Pitty I see that Openbazaar was discontinued...

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.

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.

Ah yes, finally a place to sell high end custom made fur suits with for crypto.

Oh, so Shopify + Stripe but decentralized. It sounds... It might have some security issues, and of course banks might offer some resistance.

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.

I wouldn't say amazon provides a good experience. Their UI has always been crap and often I can't even filter my search with obvious values.

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I made a post about this too, I fully support it

I posted this exact idea a week ago. Good that it finally gets discussed. :)

Cryptocurrencies need to be the main payment method, such as Monero, Bitcoin, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash.