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?
Shipping and logistics would be a royal pain. Efficiency there is why Amazon can be cheap.
Another reason is that they can subsidize their retail business with their web hosting business.
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.
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
Personally, I am more for voluntary association than increasing government power but I agree that important systems should be under public control.
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.)
Yes exactly. But Amazon uses their own EV delivery trucks and sorting wearhouses for city deliveries. So for a national solution to take over, it'd need to be better or compatible in those areas too, not just the edge cases.
Not always, they like to mix it up in my experience
Yeah, not all EVs yet, but their ergonomic and effectively optimisation is crazy for their facilities and vehicles.
I mean they will deliver using other companies like USPS or FedEx
It might work for a Facebook marketplace or eBay alternative where you drive locally to pick things up. But then you'd need a robust reporting and reputation system to avoid robbery. Decentralizing a system like Amazon that benefits immensely from centralized is going to be an up hill battle.
Okay, so your potential solution is to build a robust and effective reputation/reporting system. I like the idea. There are a few different projects that have to deal with the same problems so maybe we can learn from them. As for logistics I am trying to think about if there is a way to make that system better in a decentralized system.
Okay, so your potential contribution is to phrase your questions and responses in the most patronizing possible way, as though we're in a boardroom with you at the head of the mahogany table, and pretend that much smarter people aren't already working on this and coming to more complex, detailed obstacles and solutions. I don't like the idea. As for logistics, I am trying to think about if there is a way to solve a complex issue that has vexed generations and touches nearly every global industry, in a lemmy thread based on a showerthought.
I like being direct. I don't have all the answers (no one does) but I think asking people to think about solutions when they offer criticism helps move the conversation forward.
You gotta read the room and understand the context. Someone brings up a thought/question casually on lemmy, it's gonna make you sound super self-impressed and generally naive to respond as though you're the one who (or anyone at all) is going to get that thread to a global solution for an incredibly difficult issue that people are already working on. Everyone is just spitballing for fun and curious if any novel thoughts will get tossed around in a thread, so when you reapond to someone highlighting an issue by saying "okay, so what's the solution" as though people aren't already thinking of that or wouldn't have included it in the comment if there was one, it isn't productive, it ignores the intention of the comment, and it makes you sound like the crappy boss in a bad movie. What is expected? Someone to say, "The solution? I hadn't thought about that! The whole thing is cracked! Invaluable contribution!" In the end, there's just a huge difference between saying something like "That's interesting, I wonder what the biggest obstacles are" and "Okay, I approve of your thoughts, and I know thats important to everyone, but they are incomplete, which you likely didn't notice. Let me help you with the next step by asking, what's the next step, which, beside offering great insight, is surely the type of conversation you were looking for in this thread."
You know what I agree with you. I should work on my tone more and try to contribute at the same time. Thanks for the feedback.
That's super open minded and uncommonly positive, and makes me think I didn't necessarily come to this thread with the most constructive tone myself. I'll think more about how I voice feedback as well online for this.