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:
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.
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_CommerceSo the software is there. You only need to adapt it to Europe and get people to use it.
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.
💀
Decentralized marketplace will just look like Craigslist and Facebook and other classified marketplaces; chock full of spam and scams.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.”
Shipping and logistics would be a royal pain. Efficiency there is why Amazon can be cheap.
Ok, then what do you think could be a potential solution?
Nationalize them 😳
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
Isn’t FedEx the nationalized version? You’d need to make it way better to mach Amazon efficiency.
FedEx is a private company. USPS is the public one.
Oh okay. Anyway, efficiency would need to be better.
Considering the size of the country, and the margins it works with, it works quite well. Well enough that Amazon itself uses USPS for deliveries. Plus there’s a lot of additional work that USPS does. Like shipping to places that just don’t make any fiscal sense but are essential for that remote community. Shipping live chicks under a certain amount of age.
And no private company would do this coz it won’t give the most profits but the service greatly benefits the populace as a whole. (Which preaching to the choir since you’re on Lemmy vs Reddit when the Reddit experience is a lot smoother for the layman right now but also fully profit oriented.)
