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?

  • sunbytes@lemmy.world
    22·
    1 year ago

    E-commerce isn’t as much of a monopoly as “reddit-style social media”.

    Technically anyone has the ability to open an eshop and sell whatever they want (provided they follow the appropriate sales/tax laws etc).

    It’s just that people don’t like to buy from no-name shops online, as reputations give a level of accountability.

    I imagine a lot of people got their credit card details stolen when the first eshops appeared.

    • Wisely@lemm.eeEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      Funny enough that’s how I first heard of Amazon. Had AOL dialup. Searched for some shops to buy things on Alta Vista. My card was stolen from buying something on one of those e shops. They bought about $400 worth of stuff from Amazon among other places.

      I had no idea what Amazon was and looked it up to find out it was a book store. Told the bank I did not spend $400 on books online lol. It was hard to check your balance back then so by the time I received notices in the mail that my account was overdrawn by thousands of dollars in fees. Always hated Amazon since then even though it wasn’t their fault.