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I wish there was a browser setting to disable CPU-heavy CSS filters in Firefox to fix pages like this one.
Also, that chat is just one part of it. Those stores are running on Openfront, our Shopify alternative. Please check our ethos to get the full vision.
Also, I was working on this before AI. Openfront and the/marketplace are part of an ecosystem. We built Openship, an e-commerce order management system, years ago.
How exactly does (or will?) this decentralisation work?
There’s no central database or shared backend. The marketplace is simply a discovery layer that sits on top of fully independent stores.
No you're not. Amazon is not the software that runs the website. 'Amazon' is the millions of relationships that Amazon has with suppliers and customers. It's the strong brand, the trust that people have that they can shop there safely, the sheer scale of the operation meaning that products are about as cheap as possible and will arrive when Amazon say they will. It's the ease of using an invisible, massively optimized chain of systems from a pretty basic app.
You can't build a new (and hopefully better) Amazon by copying the software. You need to work out how to get sellers and buyers to come to your site before they go Amazon, then build that thing so they do. How good the software is and whether it's open source of not probably doesn't matter. Better software is never going to be enough of a reason for people to switch away from Amazon.
I'm not building better software to compete directly with Amazon. I'm building infrastructure that sellers can truly own, so lock-in stops being such a powerful moat.
Traditional marketplaces charge 15-30% because they provide checkout, payments, and the customer database. But if stores already own that infrastructure, the only thing you really need is discovery. And discovery doesn't have to cost anything.
Our marketplace is essentially just a directory. Stores keep their own checkout and process their own payments. We query their API and render the results conversationally. And because the code is open source, if we ever became like Amazon, anyone could fork it and launch a competing directory.
to blunt the hit of that (0).
On top of that, many of them provide additional assurances, like vendor screening and easy dispute resolution on fraudulent operations.
The catalog and the checkout are the easy part.
Unfortunately OP has to play the HN game where the only response to a "too clever by half" comment is flattering the commenter.
The value of Amazon and other marketplace systems, what I think many would say is their distinguishing factor, is capital L Logistics. It’s the warehouses, the return systems, quality control, customer support, international shipping and importing, inter-warehouse trucking and a network of last mile delivery, all tuned to minimise costs. An open source platform that handles all of that somehow would actually be revolutionary, but even the design of the system would require actual years of user research and mastery of systems that are truly arcane.
I could go to the individual product website.
But having everything I've ever ordered in one place is massive value.
Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32690410 - Sept 2022 (301 comments)
(Reposts are fine after a year or so; to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)
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