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?
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.