Comment on Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea!
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 2 weeks agoI think the biggest issue is that if you already need to separate payments, returns, shipping, etc… you’re left with a shop that also advertises products for other shops, possibly competitors. Then the question becomes… why bother federating at all?
I think it’d be better to set up a FOSS shopping platform, eg something that competes with WooCommerce or the likes. That’s significantly easier from a financial and legal perspective, and I think it’s an easier sell to actual merchants (why pay a license for that shit, use this one for freeee). Then once you have that running, you could think about optional federation as an addition to an already well-functioning platform.
haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 2 weeks ago
I used woocommerce in the past. Its not that complicated. Woocommerce is open source from what I read: www.forbes.com/advisor/…/woocommerce-review/ i would have to check the source but implementing federation would be quite trivial i guess.
Why bother federating:
You advertise for your partners, not competitors. This is done already but manually by reselling. This would just expedite the process. The only part that is not yet clear to me is if the shop advertises something from another shop and clearly says, only sale processing through website, not fulfillment, if that would also make it that the legal warranty is done by the downstream vendor. Processing returns also is trivial from a technical perspective. Its just the legal one that keeps me guessing atm.