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?

        • niisyth@lemmy.caEnglish
          8·
          1 year ago

          Considering the size of the country, and the margins it works with, it works quite well. Well enough that Amazon itself uses USPS for deliveries. Plus there’s a lot of additional work that USPS does. Like shipping to places that just don’t make any fiscal sense but are essential for that remote community. Shipping live chicks under a certain amount of age.

          And no private company would do this coz it won’t give the most profits but the service greatly benefits the populace as a whole. (Which preaching to the choir since you’re on Lemmy vs Reddit when the Reddit experience is a lot smoother for the layman right now but also fully profit oriented.)

          • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
            1·
            1 year ago

            Yes exactly. But Amazon uses their own EV delivery trucks and sorting wearhouses for city deliveries. So for a national solution to take over, it’d need to be better or compatible in those areas too, not just the edge cases.