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?

    • Swedneck
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      1 year ago

      Well yeah, but then why doesn’t the US just do things on a state-by-state basis and accomplish the same things? This is a very strange argument to me.

      Like yeah sure sweden is smaller but that… doesn’t matter? In the end all this argument ends up saying is that america is incompetent, which i don’t feel like that’s what you want to say.

      Case in point: the northeast corridor (washington DC through NYC to boston) has FIVE TIMES THE POPULATION OF SWEDEN, twice the population of all the nordic countries combined! And yet two day shipping is some impressive feat for amazon to pull off? It should be utterly trivial with that many people living ontop of each other!