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’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 was sabotaged and it just doesn't make sense to buy local. The item is more expensive and there's a 30 to 60 dollar shipping fee tagged on. It's usually the same made in china quality.
For work related stuff, I bypass both and get straight from China.
I don't like it but the gov didn't step in and basically handed half our economy to Amazon. At the height of it, they decided to sell our national shipping service so prices went up (I'm in Canada btw).
In a perfect world, amazon would get the boot and we would have a government owned drop shipping infrastructure. Until that happens, I'm not ready to pay 3x the price for simple items just to keep a dead dream alive. Local got snuffed when it comes to consumer goods.
Using Stripe or equivalent must be used for such a platform. The sellers would just get a check or bank transfer, they'd never need to handle a credit transaction.