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?
Providing just a searchable marketplace that then dispatches you to buy from the store where you have to enter your payment information for them? Sure. And I’d use it. But then, that’s what the ‘shopping’ item on Google is.
If you then say “but I’ve got to enter my payment and shipping info with the store again” - is that as much of a problem as you make it out to be? Because they do need it to do the payment processing and shipping. Fortunately my browser knows who I am and so it auto fills much of that information.
The payment processing is a major hurdle. You’re dealing with each company and each company has its relationship with the payment processor. They have different rates depending on how trustworthy they are and how much business they do. The less trust in the system, the more it costs. The smaller the volume, the more it costs again.
The companies that leak credit card data? They’re gonna pay with increased payment processor costs. You may not see it, but behind the scenes you’ve got https://www.commerce.uwo.ca/pdf/PCI-DSS-v4_0.pdf (that’s a 350 page checklist for the standards for handling payment cards).
Assume that we’ve handled payment… logistics. Amazon has their enormous warehouses and automation that they’ve invested in (the robots are originally from Kiva - https://www.fromscratchradio.org/show/mick-mountz ). Having everything in one place and then dispatching works well and saves money. If I buy something from Best Buy and something else from Pottery Barn and something else from Williams Sonoma – they don’t share a warehouse and so they’re each doing their own shipping with whoever they’ve contracted to do shipping.
Amazon again got big enough that they’ve got their own last mile shipping (and since they’ve got coverage with distribution centers it makes it even more efficient). Shipping from DC to DC is cheap - it’s the last mile that has the expenses.
So, its cheaper (and more carbon / energy efficient) for someone to buy from Amazon and get one package from a marketplace where Amazon manages the payment, inventory, and logistics for delivery than it is to have it be managed from multiple vendors each with their own payment, inventory, and logistics.
Presenting the marketplace is the ‘easy’ part of this. Payment, inventory, and logistics are hard and aren’t solved by federation but rather made more complex and worse from the standpoint of the consumer.