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?

  • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    they may leak data or store it improperly

    And you would rather trust Joe Random who’s hosting part of a marketplace website from their home?

    It’s crypto all over again, blockchain decentralize everything even when it doesn’t make sense!

    • Danterious@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      Ok, you don’t think that decentralizing is the solution. If you consider Amazon and eBay to be a problem what do you think might be a potential solution?

      • kibiz0r@midwest.social
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        1 year ago

        Not OP, but: enforcing antitrust laws. We’re not gonna “consumer choice” our way out of monopolies.

        • explodicle@local106.com
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          1 year ago

          I can’t enforce those laws myself, and my government is basically three corporations in a trenchcoat pretending to be a democracy. So direct action - even if an uphill battle - is my only real option.

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        There’s a difference between companies having their own store (like is the case for many things at the moment, I don’t buy car or bike parts from Amazon for example) and having a decentralized Amazon through a fediverse type thing.

          • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            Alternatives exist, the clients need to give themselves the trouble to shop around.

            The only things I buy from Amazon are things I just can’t find elsewhere or only find on a similar website (shopping n Alibaba/Aliexpress vs Amazon is pretty much the same thing so might as well buy from Amazon), if everyone started doing that it would greatly improve things…