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?
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?
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.
Okay, so what is the solution you are advocating for?
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…
Yeah, maybe there could be a website that helps people find these alternative sites so they don’t need to rely on Amazon as much.
Search engines? 😛
Yeah, I just realized I was trying to reinvent the wheel. Whoops.
Not OP, but: enforcing antitrust laws. We’re not gonna “consumer choice” our way out of monopolies.
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.