Hi folks! I'm here with another idea. Let's make an amazon alternative. I know! I know! That was asked for a couple times already but lets discuss some details.

Amazon is basically glorified dropshipping by now. What if we just made federated (not sure if over activitypub would work) ads and sales, powered by fediseer (the "trust" network of the fediverse).

Example 1: So you buy at toms groceries, you trust them. they have experience with tina's hardware store and they trust them. so you can buy both toms and tinas wares on both sites.

Example 2: So for example, I run a small business that sells computers. You run a small business that sells mice and keyboards. I have worked with you before so I mark you as trusted in my local website, which federates with yours, showing your products in my shop. If a customer buys my computer and buys your keyboard on top, my site sends you a buy order with customer address and payment. I get a small fee for my electricity of say 1%.

Can someone try and poke holes in this idea? It feels like this could work!

Have a nice weekend.

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[–] aramis87@fedia.io 11 points 2 days ago (3 children)

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?

[–] PriorityMotif@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

If you have a network of paricipating stores, then they can agree to take each others physical returns and inspect them.

[–] Suoko@feddit.it 1 points 2 days ago

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...

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com -1 points 2 days ago

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.