21 ms·

Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon

1335 points by theturtletalks 4y ago

A couple of years ago, I had an interesting idea. What if there was a marketplace where all the underlying tech was open-source? The order management system, the storefront, customer support, etc. The marketplace would simply connect to the seller’s infra instead of locking them in. If, for some reason, the seller is removed from the marketplace, their software stays with them and they can continue accepting orders directly. This model can be used to disrupt any marketplace from AirBNB to UberEats: building tech for home renters and restaurants and later, leveraging that to build a competing marketplace. In 2019, I started building the first piece, Openship, an order management system that lets you source orders and fulfill them from anywhere. Now that that’s in stable release, next up is Openfront (an e-commerce platform for storefronts) and Opensupport (ticketing software for customer support). Together, they provide the staples for any modern business: sales, fulfillment, support. Let me know what you guys think of the idea and if you see any potential pitfalls.

webinvest 4y ago
How do I buy stuff from the OpenShip marketplace?
mak4you 4y ago
May the universe of good energy be bestowed on you. all the best. I am so excited just to read this.
mtmail 4y ago
Quick note, the third submission was automatically blocked by the HN algorithms. Posting the same three times in 24h is too much. > Show HN: I'm building an open-source order management system and marketplace API > Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon > Using open-source to disrupt marketplaces
- theturtletalks 4y ago
  Yes I saw that. The last one was a blog post I made in 2019 describing the vision in detail.
  - traceroute66 4y ago
    > a blog post I made in 2019 describing the vision Hence I think you have, regrettably, answered your own question. Its all very well having a vision, but executing it is a different question. The sort of thing you propose requires a lot of time and a lot of money to develop. Let alone maintain. Let alone market and sell. Look, its like all those "Bloomberg killers" that come out of the woodwork as often as the seasons in the financial world. There is a reason why only Bloomberg and Reuters are at the top tier, why the second tier is so narrow and why everything else is junk. To replicate Bloomberg would take years in time and billions in cash. I admire your ambition, but perhaps rein it in a little ?
    - trinsic2 4y ago
      Execution starts with vision. I don't see a problem with thinking big, it inspires others that want to help become part of something great.
      - traceroute66 4y ago
        > Execution starts with vision. Yes I agree. But the OP had the vision in 2019. We are now at the tail-end of 2022. I still see a vision and not much execution. Meanwhile, the Amazon that the OP is pitching themselves against has continued to move onwards and upwards.... As I said. The vision is fine. But the OP needs to realise that executing it will require a lot of time and a LOT more money !
        trinsic2 4y ago
        I think if you start with vision, and you have passion for something the logistics around making it happen will manifest, or it won't if its not ready/needed. It depends on where your idea takes you and sometimes ideas need to be iterated to figure out where you are going. IMHO is too early to be focusing on the negatives of what may or may not happen. That comes later and it should be made in a positive direction, "Where are we going to get the money to make this happen", rather than, "Yea man, that's going to cost you a lot money". When comming up with ideas, the latter doesn't really help, for me.
trinsic2 4y ago
I don't do any selling on Amazon, mostly purchase, but the interface and the tools for what I understand is to aggregate products for selling into one place is spot on.
sanroot99 4y ago
Best of luck
craniumslows 4y ago
I think this is a good solution for businesses that are starting to outgrow their home garages. Here's my feedback: When I read this post and looked at the site I thought you were offering a turnkey drop shipping solution service. I also had the impression that you offered warehousing and other logistical services. I know this is not the case, but it took me several minutes to figure out what exactly was happening.
- jollyllama 4y ago
  Wouldn't this be more of an open source Ebay then, if the logistic components, which make up much of Amazon's value, are not there?
tailspin2019 4y ago
I instinctively like this idea a lot, and the website does a really good job of explaining the concept. Good luck with it!
toofy 4y ago
i haven’t visited your site yet, but i’ve long thought something in this vein has been missing. imagine if taxi companies could make use of it, or a group of friends could start their own GNUber. or a group of high school kids who want to deliver groceries/items to the elderly as volunteer work. or a bunch of middle school friends wanted to do a lawn mowing service. or… of course, anyone in the industry knows how many unpredictable pitfalls reality will throw at it, but we also know very well these kinds of ideas, if followed through can be remarkable and truly can change the world. it’s been like tiny little pinpricks at me for years that apps like Uber, Lyft, door-dash, etc… don’t have a scaled down open-source alternative — a decent Configure, Describe Services Offered, Spin-Up-An Instance and Go. i’ll take a look later today when my schedule loosens up. edit: just reread your post and looked at the comments, i misread what you were doing, sorry bout that. still sounds interesting tho, good luck!
- swalsh 4y ago
  People are going to hate on me, but web3 makes this absolutely trivial to build. If you try to build this as another centralized service, you just end up in the same place but a new dominant owner. Don't get me wrong, there IS a wrong way to build this in web3 where it's just a web2 service on-chain. But designed correctly, it can avoid the pitfall.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    > web3 makes this absolutely trivial to build So good to hear. Put differently: are you insane? ps. I built the original Amazon. On top of that, I have a brother who builds web-stuff related to decentralized coordinated activities and has done for many years. I didn't check in with him, but I'm pretty sure that we both think that you're insane.
    - swalsh 4y ago
      lol, do you end every technical argument with "I'm Paul Davis, don't even try to debate me!"
imwillofficial 4y ago
You gotta take out that fade out effect. It’s terrible for usability. Otherwise great work!
bmismyname 4y ago
Good luck and I hope you succeed, but the (unfortunate) reality check I'll give you is that money rules everything, and if you get even the slightest bit of traction, there is more than a trillion dollars in market cap behind ensuring you (and nobody else) will ever succeed. The only way to get ahead these days is to either 1) flout the laws or 2) have enough capital and political influence to force your way to success, such as with regulatory capture.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  That is a very pessimistic way of looking at things. While it is true that there are entrenched interests that do what they can to prevent any new entrants from disrupting their dominance, I feel obligated to point out that this has always been the case. Just to point to how bad things in US have been at one point, I would like to point out the oft-discussed robber barons and the origin of antitrust laws. Edit: I forgot to add a conclusion somehow. And yet, somehow we ended up with Googles, FBs, Amazons, Teslas and multiple other in tech sector alone over the past few decades. Neither of those started even close to existing dominant forces in the market.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    I don't understand your objection. The country was run by robber barons and started to move toward some sort of revolution (however you would describe FDR getting four terms), then antitrust laws ended it. Then we stopped enforcing antitrust laws, and got Google, Amazon, Disney, etc.. > That is a very pessimistic way of looking at things. This isn't a real criticism. It's either an accurate way of looking at things or not. And I think the obvious odds that Amazon wouldn't just buy it and shut it down if it made it up the difficult road of getting any significant traction are 1. That's how business works now, that's actually success. Tech companies are making this exact argument during antitrust hearings - that not allowing them to buy businesses up and shut them down would destroy the startup scene. edit: it would have a lot better chance if somebody would paint Amazon as either being intolerably liberal, intolerably conservative, or both at the same time. Open the angry Boomer spigot.
tobinfekkes 4y ago
This is a fantastic idea, and you're off to a great start. I've spent 6 years building a similar thing for local business in my area, just not quite this polished and expansive. I will be keeping an eye on this for sure, love it!
jiggywiggy 4y ago
I really like the look of the site. And seems like wonderful work. I see no base for your claim however: "This model can be used to disrupt any marketplace from AirBNB to UberEats". A tech stack is hardly what makes platforms, it's the consumer side of things that disrupts. So just to make it more fair to the suppliers of the marketplace would not really lead to a disruption imo. Not saying it's not worth it.
jpatt 4y ago
A few points I'm skeptical of: simply connect to the seller’s infra instead of locking them in. One of the value-adds of Amazon is there's a whole bunch of tech sellers don't need to know how to write, run, and maintain. You'd need to understand how big the niche "technically literate to run their own e-commerce business, but selling on Amazon for other reasons" is, then how your operation would answer those "other reasons" to make you competitive to the niche. If, for some reason, the seller is removed from the marketplace, their software stays with them and they can continue accepting orders directly. Apart from the software systems, there's a whole bunch of basic business processes that Amazon takes care of, which are less portable. Using FBA? Leaving means learning how to run a warehouse, shipping logistics, pricing, staffing, etc. Not using FBA? How's your Marketing department doing? Hopefully you didn't let it get too anemic or too fitted to "people who are good at gaming Amazon's algorithm." In short, if your value add is: "Amazon, but you get to take the tech home with you if you leave the platform," then that feels like a small niche of highly competent businesses, then you're stuck with "well if they could do all this on their own anyway, why are they choosing Amazon?" Hope that helps and wasn't just me blabbering. Good luck!
- kaiusbrantlee 4y ago
  re " how big the niche "technically literate to run their own e-commerce business, but selling on Amazon for other reasons" is, As the platform matured, the level of technical literacy could decrease over time. e.g. the more technical aspects get abstracted away from the users. Furthermore, users who are motivated enough would begin to extend their technical reach by means of self education, and/or collaboration with more technical party/(ies). This is a common arc in technology.
- swyx 4y ago
  i think the branding "open source Amazon" is just way too ambitious/big. invites a lot of confusion/criticism if Amazon is different things to different people.
  - pushedx 4y ago
    I think it’s good marketing. Amazon’s primary source of revenue is as a market-maker/logisticics provider, so why not position yourself as a competitor if it gets contributors interested?
nprateem 4y ago
Particl.io does this on the blockchain. It's fully anonymous
eastbayjake 4y ago
Love open source projects in the eCommerce domain, especially ones that are JavaScript instead of PHP! Two pieces of feedback: - Using a copyleft license like AGPL makes this an automatic non-starter for most businesses, no matter how impressive your tech might be. You'll have a lot more luck with mid-size and enterprise adoption with an MIT license. - You've really built an Order Management System for marketplace use cases, which is in industry typically a distinct domain from a Warehouse Management System (WMS) or a Transportation Management System (TMS) which at large-scale tend to handle how orders actually get fulfilled and shipped to customers. Your naming is a bit misleading - at the very least I'd emphasize somewhere on your landing page that this is an open source Order Management System if you want eCommerce domain folks to grok quickly what you've built and how it plugs into a broader architecture.
- ryan29 4y ago
  > - Using a copyleft license like AGPL makes this an automatic non-starter for most businesses, no matter how impressive your tech might be. You'll have a lot more luck with mid-size and enterprise adoption with an MIT license. What makes the AGPL unattractive? I thought it was basically just the GPL with a limitation on using the software to provide a SaaS product. You don't even have to contribute unpublished changes, right? Before reading your comment I actually checked the licensing in the repo because I was thinking the exact opposite; using MIT would be a mistake because it's too easy to undermine the turnkey offering by selling a competing service without the cost of development.
  - bsaul 4y ago
    My 2 cents : In an ecosystem like this you may want to have businesses build extensions or plugins that they'd sell. GPL has this reputation of spreading to everything it touches, and as such would scare them away.
    - homarp 4y ago
      like wordpress plugin marketplace?
jahewson 4y ago
This is really high quality work, great job! > Let me know what you guys think of the idea and if you see any potential pitfalls. Yes, so I don't agree with this: > This model can be used to disrupt any marketplace from AirBNB to UberEats: building tech for home renters and restaurants and later, leveraging that to build a competing marketplace. Because the value in a marketplace is the people, not the tech. Here's a thought experiment: if Amazon were to open-source their entire marketplace tomorrow, what would change? My answer is: close to nothing. What makes marketplaces so hard is that you need people - on both the demand and supply sides. You seem to have a good handle on the tech and the way that businesses use it, so keep talking to people and I'm confident that you'll find a valuable niche! People will find the quality of your work very compelling.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
Saying that you're building an open source Amazon to complete with Amazon is like saying that you're working on an audio player skin to compete with Winamp. Amazon isn't a web site. It's the one of the most sophisticated supply chain systems on the planet. The website is what people interface with, but it's also one of the most inconsequential parts of the system with regards for why people use it.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  What's the first?
ivoras 4y ago
One of these day someone will do OpenBazaar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBazaar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBazaar) right. They were on to something, and just possibly, all this infrastructure built around web3 might not be completely useless for that kind of a distributed marketplace.
0x9b 4y ago
The change in your past HN posts from "open source order management system" to "open-source Amazon" is a great case of vision selling better than the product itself.
- criddell 4y ago
  When I read the title, I assumed they were taking on AWS, not setting themselves up to sit between a business and their customers.
rocket_surgeron 4y ago
Those efforts look impressive but no service will be a version (open source or otherwise) of Amazon until it can place a single tube of toothpaste in my garage 18 hours after I ordered it, which it just did thirty minutes ago. Amazon’s “tech” stack, both consumer- and seller-facing is horrible and borderline irrelevant. Their fleet of trucks and aircraft is not.
- throwayyy479087 4y ago
  Amazon.com is likely the most a/b tested piece of software on the planet. It is ugly and clunky because that's what _works_ - same with Alibaba and Yahoo JP.
  - ikrenji 4y ago
    i read somewhere that bezos personally controls the look and feel of amazon and thats why it looks like that. some amazon UX/UI director even quit over it
    - thomasjudge 4y ago
      Probably not so much anymore..
  - abvdj2 4y ago
    That is not true, some parts might be clunky because that works, but there's also many parts that are clunky simply because it's hard to make a change without breaking anything. But amazon doesn't care due to their strong position in the market and because AWS is their cash-cow anyways.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    It's ugly and clunky because a) Jeff used to guard it fiercely, b) because a/b testing is not guaranteed to get the best results, and c) you might just be on the "ugly" a/b test.
  - okyanusoz 4y ago
    They could make the UI better if they wanted to, but they don't, because of reliability. For most enterprises, if it works, don't touch it.
throwayyy479087 4y ago
The website is ... not the hard part.
WesleyJohnson 4y ago
This seems like a reseller's dream. If you're lucky enough to find an untapped resource on Etsy, Shopify, eBay, etc and you think you can market it better and flip it for a profit - create your own stores, route the orders through OpenShip and have the lesser-known seller fulfill them for you. I didn't dig in, but in that above scenario, does the "supplier" dropship directly to my buyer or does it come to me and I reship it?
- theturtletalks 4y ago
  It goes directly to your buyer. Once you start getting a lot of orders, you can private label, order in bulk, and ship it yourself by just changing the channel. You can become the supplier people dropship from.
qabqabaca 4y ago
On your deployment page[0], it says you can deploy the entire thing to Vercel or Netlify and pass in the postgres connection string to the frontend directly. Am I understanding this correctly? Is the connection string for the database readable from the front end? [0]https://docs.openship.org/deployment https://docs.openship.org/deployment
- theturtletalks 4y ago
  It uses Next.js API routes as the backend which is all server-side.
turtlebits 4y ago
I don’t think you should compare it to Amazon. What makes Amazon so popular isn’t the that their store front / reseller portal / interface is great. What makes people buy from Amazon is the speed in which you get your product and their customer service.
electric_mayhem 4y ago
Openbazaar is a thing. https://openbazaar.org/ https://openbazaar.org/
- Ndymium 4y ago
  Is it, really? The domain name doesn't resolve and Wikipedia talks about the project in past tense. Is it being developed?
- WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
  Was a thing... OpenBazaar Co-Founder Explains Why Web 3’s Answer to eBay Folded Its Tents https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/07/15/openbazaar-co-founder-explains-why-web-3s-answer-to-ebay-folded-its-tents/ https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/07/15/openbazaar-co-f...
xwdv 4y ago
Since this is an open source Amazon I’m curious to know how you are building out your product recommendations and suggestions for users?
- mdaniel 4y ago
  My experience is that Amazon.com has never once recommended or suggested anything sane to me, beyond that it loves to "recommend" the items that I just bought. It's worse than the YT recommendation algo, in that way. If flushing the Amazon browse history wasn't such a monster PITA, I'd do it daily
kburman 4y ago
You’re solving the wrong problem, For building Amazon you need capital not tech so much.
sandeepeecs 4y ago
in india they are doing some thing called ONDC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Network_for_Digital_Commerce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Network_for_Digital_Comme... ONDC is not an application, an intermediary, or software, but a set of specifications designed to foster open interchange and connections between shoppers, technology platforms, and retailers.[3] Technological self reliance, demand for level playing field mainly from small retailers, lower the barrier of entry and discovery online, adoption of open digital ecosystem across key sectors and fixing the non-competitive behavior of big ecommerce firms like Amazon and Flipkart to capture the US$810 billion domestic retail market led to its creation.[4] Designed to keep check on Big Tech companies from violating Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) (Amendment) Rules, 2021 due to concentration of market power by integrating them into an open-source decentralised network where data portability will break data silos while data interoperability will allow innovation.
adavid17 4y ago
So this is really a open-source Shopify replacement, right? An OMS that lets you sell on multiple channels (website, Amazon, Instagram, Etsy…) and manage/fulfill those orders in one location? I was confused at first by your title (open source Amazon) which seemed like it was going to be a e-commerce marketplace like Amazon.com - but it seems like that’s the 2nd step. Why does a new e-commerce marketplace also require a new open-source OMS? OMS’s have a lot of seller lock-in, but it seems like way less lift to have OpenSourceAmazon.com be a channel sellers using Shopify’s OMS can sell on with a few simple steps on Shopify.
- judge2020 4y ago
  For reference, Shopify already has https://shop.app/ https://shop.app/ which does some browsing and recommendations based on your product purchase history, so while it's still "you must use shopify as your storefront", I don't see it as much different from this guy's product. Perhaps the selling point is "nobody can deplatform you", but chances are not many places have that problem (shopify is against doing it for political content[0]), and if that's the case, all this does for you is force you to hire a team to handle scaling the systems once you need to support tens of thousands of concurrent users. 0: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/shopify-faces-increased-pressure-over-refusal-to-drop-breitbart-webstore/article33973253/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/shopify-f...
hosh 4y ago
I think this is a great idea. I am for moving closer to local-first infrastructure. For this to work, businesses would have to hire IT personnel or a consultant to implement and maintain it. There is also how much this can synergize with self-hosting. One of the things I'm looking at doing are distributed software forges and "community supported software" (that uses open-source and free software as its base). Also, there was an article posted here about the semantic web and a mention of something called the "data mesh". I think being able to interchange data will be important. Without that, then you're still locked into the software and possibly the vendor customized things for you.
cush 4y ago
Do companies want or need an open source Amazon? To me, Shopify fills this role. Buyers just want cheap and fast, and sellers just want more profits. Amazon isn't a software company - it's a logistics company that specializes in distribution of anything, anywhere, at the absolute minimum price to maintain profits. Most of what Amazon does software-wise Shopify covers - the storefront, sales, marketing, analytics, and even some of the distribution logistics. What Shopify doesn't do is analyze your businesses sales, create competing products and drive you out of business.
HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
How many licenses have you sold?
marcodiego 4y ago
Make it not only open-source, but decentralized too. Also, maybe it is possible to use federation, so a system of reputation may work and buyers can know what they are really buying. This may prevent it from being taken over or becoming flooded with scams.
zameericle 4y ago
Looking at the code, I’m not seeing how you’re managaging the workflows/processes needed to manage ATS and ATP, along with reservations, within openship, the OMS.
MetaWhirledPeas 4y ago
You'll definitely need inventory (if it's not already a part of your other packages). Seems like great fun! My advice would be to actually integrate with Amazon as much as possible. I'm not sure what's involved there, if Amazon provides a bunch of proprietary tools or what. But you don't want people to make the hard choice between your project and Amazon. Help them do both!
5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 4y ago
Mobile layout is a bit cramped with half of the screen seemingly being cut off the way it's done. The bottom part looks like a banner
ledgerdev 4y ago
I've been thinking about a clone of amazon marketplace that can be run/operated by small cities/towns to support local commerce. Anyone have any thoughts on this or seen any other similar projects?
loquisgon 4y ago
Are you building it in AWS?
motoxpro 4y ago
Seems like there are two ideas here. 1. A way to keep your data/parts of your business after you've been kicked off a platform. I say parts because amazon is much more than just OMS, CMS, support platform. 2. Tools to build a marketplace. Which, besides being open source, how is this idea different than https://www.sharetribe.com/ https://www.sharetribe.com/?
Something1234 4y ago
Wouldn't it be more interesting if there was a federated way to take orders and see deals? Something like RSS for but for stores. I think the bigger issue is just how much work it is to deal with the spam on any marketplace.
themagician 4y ago
I also work with basically every Amazon selling platform globally: Vendor Central (Direct PO) in the US and EU and Seller Central in the US, CA, MX, UK, DE, FR, IT, ES, TR, PL, NL, JP, AU, and SG. The software is (generally) not the issue. The software is great. The service is great. FBA can be a game changer in many regions. The real problem with the Amazon, from a seller/brand/manufacture perspective is support. If you get banned—if there is a hiccup, or if there is a problem of any kind—it is a nightmare (or straight up impossible) to resolve. I don't really want to own the software. I want to talk to a human when something goes wrong. I want to talk to someone who will ban a seller infringing on my trademarks. I want to talk to someone who will give me control of my listings when someone else hijacks them. Amazon is, for better or worse, where the customers are. I have a good product and I don't have to pay for advertising. I don't want to have to pay for advertising to get people to go somewhere else. I just want to be able to talk to a human on occasion to resolve issues. I do millions of dollars of business every year with Amazon and reaching a human—let alone a human who can actually do something—is the most frustrating part of Amazon.
betwixthewires 4y ago
I think it's fantastic. Growth will be slow. This is something like xmpp or mastodon, people will use it for sure, it will grow over time, but you're not going to see an explosion of use like amazon did. Keep at it, your work is much needed and this system you're building is wonderful. Don't concern yourself with monetization too much. I know you need to eat, HN is populated largely by people in startups (because it's run by a sv startup accelerator) and you'll have a lot of replies asking you how you'll monetize and giving you advice on that. Don't do anything too hasty, don't break what you're building by being short sighted. You can run storefronts as a service to people who don't want to, that's in your back pocket (or front pocket, I don't know your plans), so changing the open dynamic of this thing is not necessary and it would end the whole value proposition of what you're building. I don't know if you are familiar with OpenBazaar, if you aren't take a look at it and see if you can get any ideas from it, or even if you think what you're building could improve on it. I think it's cool but lacking and I think what you're putting together could actually be widely useable.
samsquire 4y ago
You might find odoo interesting, it's an Enterprise Resource Planning system and open source in Python. It has its own ORM. You can also build websites with it.
johnorourke 4y ago
You are trying to solve a real-world problem experienced by a lot of profitable companies, so there is already a market of paying customers waiting for this. One of my clients is actively trying to reduce their dependence on Amazon and instead integrate with other marketplaces. I see it's just Shopify-to-Shopify for now - bravo for starting with probably one of the most costly integrations. I'm working with a client right now who had to build these integrations using a low-code drag-n-drop platform which allows a quick MVP but has slow job processing, so isn't great for high order volume. The "amazon" comparison is good for marketing - sure you're not doing all their marketing, or having their reach but you are connecting suppliers, buyers and fulfilment which is a genuine problem. The companies who would use this often have developers on board already, so providing open source, accepting contributions and turning this into a useful dev-friendly service will almost certainly find paying customers. Following :)
- anakaine 4y ago
  Can I ask, out of curiosity, what was the low-code solution they ran with? I've tried a few and been only marginally happy with most.
  - djangelic 4y ago
    I’ve been using n8n and I love it. Easy to build almost any ETL workflow I can imagine.
    - tarunmuvvala 4y ago
      you can zorp.one for building operations workflow.
    - anakaine 4y ago
      Thank you
aaroninsf 4y ago
The consumer experience is that unregulated "open" markets fall prey quickly to abuse of many kinds which bewilder, mislead, and defraud. Consider the now-standard criticism of Amazon wrt cookie-cutter phantom brands with identical products; false reviews; etc etc. or one of the "amusing(?) stories of the week" about the fraudulent 30TB SSD on Walmart (another open market). If you don't build protections for the customer in at the ground level, well...
samstave 4y ago
UHM.... you need to buy ImportYeti....
cbreynoldson 4y ago
Cheering you on!
itisit 4y ago
What's your USP compared to others in this crowded iPaaS+EDI space (ex. Celigo, Boomi, SPS, etc.)? Maintaining reliable integrations requires a lot of money, especially at scale and even more so when traversing borders. And EDI 850 is pretty well-entrenched. I guess I'm mostly asking who is this for, like specifically what size and type of customer?
ganeshkrishnan 4y ago
We already do this via hypernile.com although we are not open source. The biggest challenge for you will be shipping from the 3pl. Amazon warehouses all talk to each other and it helps them keep the shipping costs bare minimum. We use machine learning at scale to replicate it and we have made good progress however we haven't been able to distribute inventory between warehouses. Amazon can do it because they have their own distribution trucks while we are surviving on eating ramen for dinner The hardest part is convincing warehouses to connect into our network
luc_ 4y ago
Thank you.
randyrand 4y ago
Your pitch is really compelling. Haven’t read the comments yet, but I just want to say that personally your pitch got me excited. Good job writing it.
ryanobjc 4y ago
I used to work in Amazon Supply Chain Systems Software, many years ago. Yes a key component of what amazon does is software, but... that is not all what supply chain systems are. They are human processes, and physical things. There exists many systems that lets you take orders online and put them in the mail. There are not many systems that lets you cheaply ship things to users in like 1-2 days. Best of luck!
trollied 4y ago
I have flagged this because the title is clickbait
activatedgeek 4y ago
Very ambitious! Good luck! A small bug in the call-to-action at the bottom of the page - If I upvote only "Stripe" in the "Connect your Shops" section, the call-to-action reads: > Want to know when Stripe, Stripe, and more integrations are ready? Voting for greater than one shop resolves this repetition error.
what-imright 4y ago
Openship is wrong name.
jollybean 4y ago
This looks really nice but it's really hard to tell 'what it is' from your website. I can't make heads or tails of it. You have: A powerful new standard for fulfillment Multi-channel fulfillment at scale And then kind of a complicated diagram. "Get Started!" <- with what? Who is this for? What problem does it solve? 'What is it' and roughly how does it work? Mid way through your landing page you have this UX experience where 1,2,3 etc fade in and out with some kind of relative diagram at the bottom - this is also confusing and counter-intuitive. I see why you'd want to do that, but don't. Just find a way to express the concept without that oddity. "Let me know what you guys think of the idea " 80% of makers fail to express their idea in digestible terms. It's shocking and uncanny but the reality is 1/2 of ideas fail because they are never communicated properly. I think from the comments here on HN this looks pretty neat - congrats - please work on communicating it.
awill 4y ago
your pricing doesn't make sense. $500/mo for unlimited everything? What happens if a company scales to the size of the amazon.com ?
kristov 4y ago
I think it would be really cool if all your sellers had to do was maintain their inventory in a google sheet, and "share" access to your marketplace thing. Maybe you require columns to be named a certain way etc, but much lower barrier to entry.
- danskeren 4y ago
  Love the idea! If somebody wants to build SaaS products together (starting with this one) then hit me up :)
avereveard 4y ago
Everyone wants to be on Amazon not because of the software but because of the eyeballs that are on it searching for things to buy Anyway how does this compare to openerp + an open storefront?
jbaczuk 4y ago
What is your motivation for doing this?
levkk 4y ago
Great idea and powered by Postgres on top of it, love it! If you're interested in integrated ML, check us out at https://postgresml.org https://postgresml.org Cheers!
awillen 4y ago
I own an ecommerce company, I've used 3PLs, and I just can't see how you could have a meaningful market for this (and to be clear I mean the current product at openship.org, not everything that you're describing). It's basically a many-to-many connector of storefronts to 3PLs. The problem is very few people have multiple of either, let alone both. Nobody's on Shopify + WooCommerce + Wix and fulfilling from Shippo and Vistaprint. Unless you have someone with multiple options at both ends, this isn't needed - there are 3PLs that can integrate with multiple storefronts and storefronts that can integrate with multiple 3PLs. No need to pay for a third party connector to do that. If there is a company out there with some complex need for multiple of everything, it's probably big enough to have a dev team to integrate all their services anyway. The bigger picture that you describe is interesting in theory, but it misses the point of Amazon's value. Amazon has infrastructure, sure, but what really matters is they have customers. I sell from my website, but I'm also on Amazon because all I had to do was list my products there and people started buying them. On my own site, I have to acquire those customers.
WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
Very nice but keep this in mind, the tech is the easy part. Getting a whole community who contributes to it in the long term is the hard part. The genius of Linus Torvalds wasn't that he started an OS. Although, that was smart on it's own. The genius was that he was able to motivate a bunch of people to contribute to the project for decades. Learn how he did that and you can have a solution that can change the world. The best part is that there are a bunch of people that are willing to help. You just need to create a project where people can contribute to move it forward. Good job and good luck.
- mentos 4y ago
  You recommend any reading on how Linus achieved that?
  - WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
    I don't but I would start by understanding how the contribution process for Linux works now. You can at least understand what works now. Also, making a plan and making it public will help a lot. You should make it easy to communicate and gather like minded people. It's a long term project. Remember that what Amazon is was created over 2+ decades. The advantage you have is that you can duplicate what Amazon is without having to try stuff that never worked out.
shaburn 4y ago
Who goes to amazon / Shopify for technology? The go for distro on both the buy and sell side. The fact they have software is an after thought.
dougabug 4y ago
So would this be something like OCP, but at the level of an entire eCommerce marketplace? If so, that sounds pretty awesome. Main pitfall would seem to be free riders cloning the system, stealing what works, creating closed source improved versions and killing the upstream.
bbatchelder 4y ago
I happen to be building this exact same product, but closed source, and somewhat attached at the hip to my company's 3PL WMS product. One thing I did not see in your demo, is inventory synchronization. I'm guessing thats because your first use-case is drop shipping. I'd also disagree that you're open-source Amazon. You're more like open-source DropStream or maybe Boomi. If I were you, I'd do this: 1) Pick an open-source WMS and write a channel for it. 2) Make it dead easy to write ad-hoc channels. 3) Quickly implement shop connectors for BigCommerce, Magento, and WooCommerce. Good luck!
derefr 4y ago
> What if there was a marketplace where all the underlying tech was open-source? What about the actual "marketplace" part? E.g. the channel-partner product listing management; the product recommendation engine that combines global factors (user reviews) with personalized interest; the shopping cart that packing-problem's your order on checkout into separate orders according to logistics-provider constraints, etc. When you say "open-source Amazon", this is the part I envision. As far as I know, many pieces of the technology stack required to be an individual FBA seller already mostly exist as FOSS; but what does not exist as FOSS, is the technology to build your own two-sided-marketplace on which others can list products for sale. Even more starkly, the software and systems to run an "Amazon-style" warehouse to back that marketplace — one where the sellers on your marketplace can send you SKUs of merchandise to hold such that you can then centrally fulfill orders for a bunch of sellers, and the whole ecosystem of backend support to allow them to remotely manage that held inventory — are nowhere to be found outside of Amazon itself, for love or money.
fercircularbuf 4y ago
Demo > Try it > password creation fails for me
Iv 4y ago
I need something like that for my open manufacturing project. Openship sounds like one of the missing piece I was looking for! Thanks!
an_taeus 4y ago
Outstanding! I worked for a number of years at one of the larger used book resellers in the USA, top 1-3 of Amazon's used listings consistently, it had a fairly surprising amount of volume to me when I first started. The fact that Amazon was 98%+ of our sales source was considered an existential threat to the company everyday but the ability for us to mitigate that was almost impossible. Even after multiple temporary pauses on our Seller Central account (because of bogus customer complaints sent from our competitors/buyers who were buying our used inventory, then re-listing it on Amazon as "new" at a higher price point, and who then repeatedly gamed Amazon's refund policy to pay nothing for it and then "return" the items, even though we'd stamped them and knew it was bogus and hadn't come from us...) the owner never dedicated the resources it would have required for us to truly become multi-channel. The volume from Amazon, especially for books, is ludicrously profitable compared to any of the other e-marketplaces but terrifying from a risk and sustainability POV. This is a major pain point for so many small businesses out there and I wish I had this while I was still there, I will be forwarding it along to those who still are. Now that I'm thinking about it, the hardest part for us with Amazon was that we historically were treating our Amazon listings as our inventory counts, and let's just say Amazon doesn't do a great job with handling items that are clicked to buy but cancelled afterwards. There's absolutely no way that the company I worked for is the only one that does or did track its inventory by coupling itself to the sales channel, so you've probably saved a lot of people from future headaches already. One thing I think you've got very right here is the relatively spare use of fields in your schema models. I can't emphasize enough how much that will help a seller that uses this, since so many small business owners and employees out there don't know what they don't know and are making it up on the fly and tend to focus on the wrong things. Not a lot of headspace for the "nothing missing, but nothing unnecessary" approach when you're trying to juggle every hat because you're understaffed, and doubly so when you've never even heard the term many-to-one. Of course, because this is open-source, if users want they can extend these schemas (and even extend the views to use them! etc.), but they'll have to go out of their way to do that, not start with a tangled mess of concepts and pare them down. Really, it seems like no big deal, but humble schemas are so so important. At my current job I'm having the fun time of maintaining true spaghetti software with hundreds of fields in tables, a lot of which are null (or empty string! but which is it?), and all of which have no field names beyond a number...to power a POS/inventory system. But don't worry, none of the data is normalized and it pre-aggregates your transactions to compress itself, and then writes those compressed records into an always existing "temp" table and then reads them every time you want a report, and look at that, it takes 5 minutes to generate a COGS report for last week that is a sub 5 ms SQL query. Ugh. I guess where I'm going with this is that there is so much crapware out in the world, absolute trash that needlessly overcomplicates the problem it addresses, that continues to get its license renewed every year because the clients its sold to now believe its a truly hard problem, but if you look under the hood it's actually just some WSYWIG editor generated garbage that is trying to be everything and so instead is nothing usable, and their sales staff will tell you "just upgrade to our new microservices design to solve those legacy issues!" Every project like yours that takes what is a fairly traditional, well-trod problem and brings it into the open-source realm in a readable and straightforward way is a big win for small-time entrepreneurs. Please keep going with this. I think you have something here, but the hardest part will be marketing it if you're trying to do this for a living. There are absolutely an absurd number of small businesses out there living or dying by their ecommerce sales who are either struggling to actually use the tools and workflows they currently have or are paying far more than they need to for sub-optimal solutions to this problem. They will not come to you first over the internet because they are not looking for open-source sales software, because they don't know what open-source is, but some honest shoe-leather work pounding the pavement and identifying the larger businesses around you physically or trawling through the business formation records in your county might pay real dividends, even if it's just an HN "lifestyle" business for you with recurring revenue comparable to the average salary. As a final thought, when you do get to integrating Seller Central, you should look at bringing the different API services out there into your project for dashboards and the like. Maybe you don't want to deal with all that, but being able to flip through market metrics from all the different sales channels and even integrate them together would be a killer feature. In particular I'm thinking of https://keepa.com/# https://keepa.com/#!, but I know other people use https://www.rainforestapi.com/ https://www.rainforestapi.com/ too. Don't know about the other e-commerce marketplaces out there but I'm sure they have them too. Congrats on a getting a ten year long lurker to actually post.
atherton33 4y ago
When I want to buy something, like cat litter or dish soap or notepads, I open a browser and type "amazon.com" and search for what I need. What should I type instead if I want to support your open source approach? It wasn't clear to me from your writeup.
lisper 4y ago
What would be an Amazon-killer for me as a consumer -- and just about the only thing that I can imagine that would be -- is something like Amazon that connected me to the inventory of local merchants where I could buy things for same-day or next-day delivery via something like Doordash. There is a ton of inventory within a 30-60 minute drive of my house (in the Bay Area) but no centralized service to connect me to it, so if I want some glassware and some shower cleaner (my actual current use-case) I have to visit two different merchants, place two different orders, set up two accounts, take twice the risk with my credit card number, etc. A centralized order dispatcher that was connected to local inventory and delivery which would let me order everything I needed all in one place and know that fulfillment would come from local merchants that I can trust to vet their suppliers would kick some serious tushy.
- mathgorges 4y ago
  I drive for Amazon flex and they’re beginning to trial orders similar to what you describe. I don’t have a clue what the interface for ordering is like, but I know there’s a new offer type where I’m expected to pick up orders from one-or-several brick and mortar stores in a single shopping plaza before delivering
  - lisper 4y ago
    Yeah, this doesn't surprise me. Amazon certainly could do this. The problem is one of branding. Amazon is ridiculously convenient but they now have a well-deserved reputation that the quality of the products you get from them is a total crap shoot every time. If there was something like Amazon that I could rely on to deliver quality, I would happily pay extra for that. I think there's a window of opportunity for someone else to step in and become the "Amazon for reliable local quality" in the same way that e.g. NextDoor has become the "Facebook for local interactions". And I hope someone does because Amazon really needs some serious competition.
yrgulation 4y ago
No. Build an open source aws and you’ll be better off. It’s easy. Particularly since entire generations dont know that an “object” is a file and that a “lambda” function is just code executed inside a container. As long as you dont charge for … “cold starts” you’ll win at least one client. Thanks ignorance you’ll make a killing! Remember to charge extra for “permissions” (aka iams) to do anything. Easy. Bootcamp programmers will think this is the best thing since sliced bread.
margarina72 4y ago
Great idea. Add federation to it (ala mastodon and the like) so that multiple marketplace can communicate (useful for search). Think about the recommendation/comment system to avoid/minimize spam/fake reviews and scam (orders that never arrive) maybe have integration with an escrow payment system.
tegansnyder 4y ago
Couple things to look into if you are thinking of running a marketplace: 1. Tax gets complicated in marketplace model. Marketplace facilitator tax laws in US and some European countries require the entity running the marketplace to collect and remit tax. 2. If your channels have multi-warehouses and ship from different US states its important to remember there are 11 origin-based states in the US.
sylware 4y ago
That would allow to have noscript/basic (x)html portals for many market places. amazon was still noscript/basic (x)html compliant (with wallet codes) 2 years ago... now it's gone.
butterfly771 4y ago
I found that the technology stack used in this project is exactly the same as my recent project, next prisma mantine swr.... That's great!
blobbers 4y ago
How much transaction volume does this system currently operate on?
tonguetrainer 4y ago
What will it look like from a shopping perspective? Will it be an storefront akin to Amazon?
sar009 4y ago
loved the idea. One suggestion around pricing, Please make it usage based pricing. IMO, Seat based pricing does not justify value of a product.
pabs3 4y ago
Sounds like your business model is managed hosting of the open source project. Is that subject to change? Are you planning on additional revenue streams (like open core)? Are you aware of the incentives with the managed hosting model? If not, it is that you're incentivised to make it harder to install, so people choose your hosting and to make it harder to move to self-hosted, so people can't leave. How do you plan to mitigate those issues? Are you planning on adding something like whitelabeling, which would allow other companies to also sell Openship hosting, competing with your hosting? Would you prevent someone from contributing that to the main codebase?
eternityforest 4y ago
Obligatory disclaimer: I'm just a dev, I don't have any clue about business. But as a dev working for small groups, my big concern is usually avoiding too much in house tech. Will this be usable by sellers without any IT staff? As I understand it Amazon does a lot for sellers. Also, will digital asset sales be a focus? That seems more accessible. I've had several project ideas(Never seriously focused on, I really don't want my own business) where it would be helpful to have an easy way to sell license keys, or an basic subscriptions API to query whether someone was a paid subscriber.
snickmy 4y ago
I'm a complete newbie in the ecommerce space, would anyone be able to explain this as I was a 5 years old ?
EpicEng 4y ago
Consumers don't care about open source software and Amazon's competitive advantage is not their software.
captn3m0 4y ago
You should look into https://becknprotocol.io/ https://becknprotocol.io/
Scootwilli90 4y ago
[flagged]
amelius 4y ago
It would be great if postal services could install your software and become part of the logistics solution (instead of being in a race to the bottom led by Amazon).
ph0rque 4y ago
What a coincidence! Last week, I wrote the following: "Had an idea I’ve been stewing on for a few days now… a decentralized (not tied to any one company) Amazon Prime. As a user, you would pay a yearly fee and get free shipping from all the participating eComs. As a partnering eCom, you get more repeat customers." I can see this being a product (or a feature) you can offer down the road.
_8j50 4y ago
The main problem is quality anf branding. If you can associate the brand with good user experience and keep it that way this is a good idea. As a customer I only care about the quality of my experience not about the software used to deliver it.
hammyhavoc 4y ago
Title should be "Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon marketplace" Amazon offers a lot of stuff, including AWS.
adultSwim 4y ago
What I want is infrastructure with open governance, in the style of Debian.

1335 points by theturtletalks 4y ago

webinvest 4y ago

How do I buy stuff from the OpenShip marketplace?

mak4you 4y ago

May the universe of good energy be bestowed on you. all the best. I am so excited just to read this.

mtmail 4y ago

Quick note, the third submission was automatically blocked by the HN algorithms. Posting the same three times in 24h is too much. > Show HN: I'm building an open-source order management system and marketplace API > Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon > Using open-source to disrupt marketplaces

theturtletalks 4y ago
Yes I saw that. The last one was a blog post I made in 2019 describing the vision in detail.
- traceroute66 4y ago
  > a blog post I made in 2019 describing the vision Hence I think you have, regrettably, answered your own question. Its all very well having a vision, but executing it is a different question. The sort of thing you propose requires a lot of time and a lot of money to develop. Let alone maintain. Let alone market and sell. Look, its like all those "Bloomberg killers" that come out of the woodwork as often as the seasons in the financial world. There is a reason why only Bloomberg and Reuters are at the top tier, why the second tier is so narrow and why everything else is junk. To replicate Bloomberg would take years in time and billions in cash. I admire your ambition, but perhaps rein it in a little ?
  - trinsic2 4y ago
    Execution starts with vision. I don't see a problem with thinking big, it inspires others that want to help become part of something great.
    - traceroute66 4y ago
      > Execution starts with vision. Yes I agree. But the OP had the vision in 2019. We are now at the tail-end of 2022. I still see a vision and not much execution. Meanwhile, the Amazon that the OP is pitching themselves against has continued to move onwards and upwards.... As I said. The vision is fine. But the OP needs to realise that executing it will require a lot of time and a LOT more money !
      - trinsic2 4y ago
        I think if you start with vision, and you have passion for something the logistics around making it happen will manifest, or it won't if its not ready/needed. It depends on where your idea takes you and sometimes ideas need to be iterated to figure out where you are going. IMHO is too early to be focusing on the negatives of what may or may not happen. That comes later and it should be made in a positive direction, "Where are we going to get the money to make this happen", rather than, "Yea man, that's going to cost you a lot money". When comming up with ideas, the latter doesn't really help, for me.

trinsic2 4y ago

I don't do any selling on Amazon, mostly purchase, but the interface and the tools for what I understand is to aggregate products for selling into one place is spot on.

sanroot99 4y ago

Best of luck

craniumslows 4y ago

I think this is a good solution for businesses that are starting to outgrow their home garages. Here's my feedback: When I read this post and looked at the site I thought you were offering a turnkey drop shipping solution service. I also had the impression that you offered warehousing and other logistical services. I know this is not the case, but it took me several minutes to figure out what exactly was happening.

jollyllama 4y ago
Wouldn't this be more of an open source Ebay then, if the logistic components, which make up much of Amazon's value, are not there?

tailspin2019 4y ago

I instinctively like this idea a lot, and the website does a really good job of explaining the concept. Good luck with it!

toofy 4y ago

i haven’t visited your site yet, but i’ve long thought something in this vein has been missing. imagine if taxi companies could make use of it, or a group of friends could start their own GNUber. or a group of high school kids who want to deliver groceries/items to the elderly as volunteer work. or a bunch of middle school friends wanted to do a lawn mowing service. or… of course, anyone in the industry knows how many unpredictable pitfalls reality will throw at it, but we also know very well these kinds of ideas, if followed through can be remarkable and truly can change the world. it’s been like tiny little pinpricks at me for years that apps like Uber, Lyft, door-dash, etc… don’t have a scaled down open-source alternative — a decent Configure, Describe Services Offered, Spin-Up-An Instance and Go. i’ll take a look later today when my schedule loosens up. edit: just reread your post and looked at the comments, i misread what you were doing, sorry bout that. still sounds interesting tho, good luck!

swalsh 4y ago
People are going to hate on me, but web3 makes this absolutely trivial to build. If you try to build this as another centralized service, you just end up in the same place but a new dominant owner. Don't get me wrong, there IS a wrong way to build this in web3 where it's just a web2 service on-chain. But designed correctly, it can avoid the pitfall.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  > web3 makes this absolutely trivial to build So good to hear. Put differently: are you insane? ps. I built the original Amazon. On top of that, I have a brother who builds web-stuff related to decentralized coordinated activities and has done for many years. I didn't check in with him, but I'm pretty sure that we both think that you're insane.
  - swalsh 4y ago
    lol, do you end every technical argument with "I'm Paul Davis, don't even try to debate me!"

imwillofficial 4y ago

You gotta take out that fade out effect. It’s terrible for usability. Otherwise great work!

bmismyname 4y ago

Good luck and I hope you succeed, but the (unfortunate) reality check I'll give you is that money rules everything, and if you get even the slightest bit of traction, there is more than a trillion dollars in market cap behind ensuring you (and nobody else) will ever succeed. The only way to get ahead these days is to either 1) flout the laws or 2) have enough capital and political influence to force your way to success, such as with regulatory capture.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
That is a very pessimistic way of looking at things. While it is true that there are entrenched interests that do what they can to prevent any new entrants from disrupting their dominance, I feel obligated to point out that this has always been the case. Just to point to how bad things in US have been at one point, I would like to point out the oft-discussed robber barons and the origin of antitrust laws. Edit: I forgot to add a conclusion somehow. And yet, somehow we ended up with Googles, FBs, Amazons, Teslas and multiple other in tech sector alone over the past few decades. Neither of those started even close to existing dominant forces in the market.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  I don't understand your objection. The country was run by robber barons and started to move toward some sort of revolution (however you would describe FDR getting four terms), then antitrust laws ended it. Then we stopped enforcing antitrust laws, and got Google, Amazon, Disney, etc.. > That is a very pessimistic way of looking at things. This isn't a real criticism. It's either an accurate way of looking at things or not. And I think the obvious odds that Amazon wouldn't just buy it and shut it down if it made it up the difficult road of getting any significant traction are 1. That's how business works now, that's actually success. Tech companies are making this exact argument during antitrust hearings - that not allowing them to buy businesses up and shut them down would destroy the startup scene. edit: it would have a lot better chance if somebody would paint Amazon as either being intolerably liberal, intolerably conservative, or both at the same time. Open the angry Boomer spigot.

tobinfekkes 4y ago

This is a fantastic idea, and you're off to a great start. I've spent 6 years building a similar thing for local business in my area, just not quite this polished and expansive. I will be keeping an eye on this for sure, love it!

jiggywiggy 4y ago

I really like the look of the site. And seems like wonderful work. I see no base for your claim however: "This model can be used to disrupt any marketplace from AirBNB to UberEats". A tech stack is hardly what makes platforms, it's the consumer side of things that disrupts. So just to make it more fair to the suppliers of the marketplace would not really lead to a disruption imo. Not saying it's not worth it.

jpatt 4y ago

A few points I'm skeptical of: simply connect to the seller’s infra instead of locking them in. One of the value-adds of Amazon is there's a whole bunch of tech sellers don't need to know how to write, run, and maintain. You'd need to understand how big the niche "technically literate to run their own e-commerce business, but selling on Amazon for other reasons" is, then how your operation would answer those "other reasons" to make you competitive to the niche. If, for some reason, the seller is removed from the marketplace, their software stays with them and they can continue accepting orders directly. Apart from the software systems, there's a whole bunch of basic business processes that Amazon takes care of, which are less portable. Using FBA? Leaving means learning how to run a warehouse, shipping logistics, pricing, staffing, etc. Not using FBA? How's your Marketing department doing? Hopefully you didn't let it get too anemic or too fitted to "people who are good at gaming Amazon's algorithm." In short, if your value add is: "Amazon, but you get to take the tech home with you if you leave the platform," then that feels like a small niche of highly competent businesses, then you're stuck with "well if they could do all this on their own anyway, why are they choosing Amazon?" Hope that helps and wasn't just me blabbering. Good luck!

kaiusbrantlee 4y ago
re " how big the niche "technically literate to run their own e-commerce business, but selling on Amazon for other reasons" is, As the platform matured, the level of technical literacy could decrease over time. e.g. the more technical aspects get abstracted away from the users. Furthermore, users who are motivated enough would begin to extend their technical reach by means of self education, and/or collaboration with more technical party/(ies). This is a common arc in technology.
swyx 4y ago
i think the branding "open source Amazon" is just way too ambitious/big. invites a lot of confusion/criticism if Amazon is different things to different people.
- pushedx 4y ago
  I think it’s good marketing. Amazon’s primary source of revenue is as a market-maker/logisticics provider, so why not position yourself as a competitor if it gets contributors interested?

nprateem 4y ago

Particl.io does this on the blockchain. It's fully anonymous

eastbayjake 4y ago

Love open source projects in the eCommerce domain, especially ones that are JavaScript instead of PHP! Two pieces of feedback: - Using a copyleft license like AGPL makes this an automatic non-starter for most businesses, no matter how impressive your tech might be. You'll have a lot more luck with mid-size and enterprise adoption with an MIT license. - You've really built an Order Management System for marketplace use cases, which is in industry typically a distinct domain from a Warehouse Management System (WMS) or a Transportation Management System (TMS) which at large-scale tend to handle how orders actually get fulfilled and shipped to customers. Your naming is a bit misleading - at the very least I'd emphasize somewhere on your landing page that this is an open source Order Management System if you want eCommerce domain folks to grok quickly what you've built and how it plugs into a broader architecture.

ryan29 4y ago
> - Using a copyleft license like AGPL makes this an automatic non-starter for most businesses, no matter how impressive your tech might be. You'll have a lot more luck with mid-size and enterprise adoption with an MIT license. What makes the AGPL unattractive? I thought it was basically just the GPL with a limitation on using the software to provide a SaaS product. You don't even have to contribute unpublished changes, right? Before reading your comment I actually checked the licensing in the repo because I was thinking the exact opposite; using MIT would be a mistake because it's too easy to undermine the turnkey offering by selling a competing service without the cost of development.
- bsaul 4y ago
  My 2 cents : In an ecosystem like this you may want to have businesses build extensions or plugins that they'd sell. GPL has this reputation of spreading to everything it touches, and as such would scare them away.
  - homarp 4y ago
    like wordpress plugin marketplace?

jahewson 4y ago

This is really high quality work, great job! > Let me know what you guys think of the idea and if you see any potential pitfalls. Yes, so I don't agree with this: > This model can be used to disrupt any marketplace from AirBNB to UberEats: building tech for home renters and restaurants and later, leveraging that to build a competing marketplace. Because the value in a marketplace is the people, not the tech. Here's a thought experiment: if Amazon were to open-source their entire marketplace tomorrow, what would change? My answer is: close to nothing. What makes marketplaces so hard is that you need people - on both the demand and supply sides. You seem to have a good handle on the tech and the way that businesses use it, so keep talking to people and I'm confident that you'll find a valuable niche! People will find the quality of your work very compelling.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

Saying that you're building an open source Amazon to complete with Amazon is like saying that you're working on an audio player skin to compete with Winamp. Amazon isn't a web site. It's the one of the most sophisticated supply chain systems on the planet. The website is what people interface with, but it's also one of the most inconsequential parts of the system with regards for why people use it.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
What's the first?

ivoras 4y ago

One of these day someone will do OpenBazaar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBazaar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBazaar) right. They were on to something, and just possibly, all this infrastructure built around web3 might not be completely useless for that kind of a distributed marketplace.

0x9b 4y ago

The change in your past HN posts from "open source order management system" to "open-source Amazon" is a great case of vision selling better than the product itself.

criddell 4y ago
When I read the title, I assumed they were taking on AWS, not setting themselves up to sit between a business and their customers.

rocket_surgeron 4y ago

Those efforts look impressive but no service will be a version (open source or otherwise) of Amazon until it can place a single tube of toothpaste in my garage 18 hours after I ordered it, which it just did thirty minutes ago. Amazon’s “tech” stack, both consumer- and seller-facing is horrible and borderline irrelevant. Their fleet of trucks and aircraft is not.

throwayyy479087 4y ago
Amazon.com is likely the most a/b tested piece of software on the planet. It is ugly and clunky because that's what _works_ - same with Alibaba and Yahoo JP.
- ikrenji 4y ago
  i read somewhere that bezos personally controls the look and feel of amazon and thats why it looks like that. some amazon UX/UI director even quit over it
  - thomasjudge 4y ago
    Probably not so much anymore..
- abvdj2 4y ago
  That is not true, some parts might be clunky because that works, but there's also many parts that are clunky simply because it's hard to make a change without breaking anything. But amazon doesn't care due to their strong position in the market and because AWS is their cash-cow anyways.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  It's ugly and clunky because a) Jeff used to guard it fiercely, b) because a/b testing is not guaranteed to get the best results, and c) you might just be on the "ugly" a/b test.
- okyanusoz 4y ago
  They could make the UI better if they wanted to, but they don't, because of reliability. For most enterprises, if it works, don't touch it.

throwayyy479087 4y ago

The website is ... not the hard part.

WesleyJohnson 4y ago

This seems like a reseller's dream. If you're lucky enough to find an untapped resource on Etsy, Shopify, eBay, etc and you think you can market it better and flip it for a profit - create your own stores, route the orders through OpenShip and have the lesser-known seller fulfill them for you. I didn't dig in, but in that above scenario, does the "supplier" dropship directly to my buyer or does it come to me and I reship it?

theturtletalks 4y ago
It goes directly to your buyer. Once you start getting a lot of orders, you can private label, order in bulk, and ship it yourself by just changing the channel. You can become the supplier people dropship from.

qabqabaca 4y ago

On your deployment page[0], it says you can deploy the entire thing to Vercel or Netlify and pass in the postgres connection string to the frontend directly. Am I understanding this correctly? Is the connection string for the database readable from the front end? [0]https://docs.openship.org/deployment https://docs.openship.org/deployment

theturtletalks 4y ago
It uses Next.js API routes as the backend which is all server-side.

turtlebits 4y ago

I don’t think you should compare it to Amazon. What makes Amazon so popular isn’t the that their store front / reseller portal / interface is great. What makes people buy from Amazon is the speed in which you get your product and their customer service.

electric_mayhem 4y ago

Openbazaar is a thing. https://openbazaar.org/ https://openbazaar.org/

Ndymium 4y ago
Is it, really? The domain name doesn't resolve and Wikipedia talks about the project in past tense. Is it being developed?
WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
Was a thing... OpenBazaar Co-Founder Explains Why Web 3’s Answer to eBay Folded Its Tents https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/07/15/openbazaar-co-founder-explains-why-web-3s-answer-to-ebay-folded-its-tents/ https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/07/15/openbazaar-co-f...

xwdv 4y ago

Since this is an open source Amazon I’m curious to know how you are building out your product recommendations and suggestions for users?

mdaniel 4y ago
My experience is that Amazon.com has never once recommended or suggested anything sane to me, beyond that it loves to "recommend" the items that I just bought. It's worse than the YT recommendation algo, in that way. If flushing the Amazon browse history wasn't such a monster PITA, I'd do it daily

kburman 4y ago

You’re solving the wrong problem, For building Amazon you need capital not tech so much.

sandeepeecs 4y ago

in india they are doing some thing called ONDC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Network_for_Digital_Commerce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Network_for_Digital_Comme... ONDC is not an application, an intermediary, or software, but a set of specifications designed to foster open interchange and connections between shoppers, technology platforms, and retailers.[3] Technological self reliance, demand for level playing field mainly from small retailers, lower the barrier of entry and discovery online, adoption of open digital ecosystem across key sectors and fixing the non-competitive behavior of big ecommerce firms like Amazon and Flipkart to capture the US$810 billion domestic retail market led to its creation.[4] Designed to keep check on Big Tech companies from violating Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) (Amendment) Rules, 2021 due to concentration of market power by integrating them into an open-source decentralised network where data portability will break data silos while data interoperability will allow innovation.

adavid17 4y ago

So this is really a open-source Shopify replacement, right? An OMS that lets you sell on multiple channels (website, Amazon, Instagram, Etsy…) and manage/fulfill those orders in one location? I was confused at first by your title (open source Amazon) which seemed like it was going to be a e-commerce marketplace like Amazon.com - but it seems like that’s the 2nd step. Why does a new e-commerce marketplace also require a new open-source OMS? OMS’s have a lot of seller lock-in, but it seems like way less lift to have OpenSourceAmazon.com be a channel sellers using Shopify’s OMS can sell on with a few simple steps on Shopify.

judge2020 4y ago
For reference, Shopify already has https://shop.app/ https://shop.app/ which does some browsing and recommendations based on your product purchase history, so while it's still "you must use shopify as your storefront", I don't see it as much different from this guy's product. Perhaps the selling point is "nobody can deplatform you", but chances are not many places have that problem (shopify is against doing it for political content[0]), and if that's the case, all this does for you is force you to hire a team to handle scaling the systems once you need to support tens of thousands of concurrent users. 0: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/shopify-faces-increased-pressure-over-refusal-to-drop-breitbart-webstore/article33973253/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/shopify-f...

hosh 4y ago

I think this is a great idea. I am for moving closer to local-first infrastructure. For this to work, businesses would have to hire IT personnel or a consultant to implement and maintain it. There is also how much this can synergize with self-hosting. One of the things I'm looking at doing are distributed software forges and "community supported software" (that uses open-source and free software as its base). Also, there was an article posted here about the semantic web and a mention of something called the "data mesh". I think being able to interchange data will be important. Without that, then you're still locked into the software and possibly the vendor customized things for you.

cush 4y ago

Do companies want or need an open source Amazon? To me, Shopify fills this role. Buyers just want cheap and fast, and sellers just want more profits. Amazon isn't a software company - it's a logistics company that specializes in distribution of anything, anywhere, at the absolute minimum price to maintain profits. Most of what Amazon does software-wise Shopify covers - the storefront, sales, marketing, analytics, and even some of the distribution logistics. What Shopify doesn't do is analyze your businesses sales, create competing products and drive you out of business.

HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago

How many licenses have you sold?

marcodiego 4y ago

Make it not only open-source, but decentralized too. Also, maybe it is possible to use federation, so a system of reputation may work and buyers can know what they are really buying. This may prevent it from being taken over or becoming flooded with scams.

zameericle 4y ago

Looking at the code, I’m not seeing how you’re managaging the workflows/processes needed to manage ATS and ATP, along with reservations, within openship, the OMS.

MetaWhirledPeas 4y ago

You'll definitely need inventory (if it's not already a part of your other packages). Seems like great fun! My advice would be to actually integrate with Amazon as much as possible. I'm not sure what's involved there, if Amazon provides a bunch of proprietary tools or what. But you don't want people to make the hard choice between your project and Amazon. Help them do both!

5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 4y ago

Mobile layout is a bit cramped with half of the screen seemingly being cut off the way it's done. The bottom part looks like a banner

ledgerdev 4y ago

I've been thinking about a clone of amazon marketplace that can be run/operated by small cities/towns to support local commerce. Anyone have any thoughts on this or seen any other similar projects?

loquisgon 4y ago

Are you building it in AWS?

motoxpro 4y ago

Seems like there are two ideas here. 1. A way to keep your data/parts of your business after you've been kicked off a platform. I say parts because amazon is much more than just OMS, CMS, support platform. 2. Tools to build a marketplace. Which, besides being open source, how is this idea different than https://www.sharetribe.com/ https://www.sharetribe.com/?

Something1234 4y ago

Wouldn't it be more interesting if there was a federated way to take orders and see deals? Something like RSS for but for stores. I think the bigger issue is just how much work it is to deal with the spam on any marketplace.

themagician 4y ago

I also work with basically every Amazon selling platform globally: Vendor Central (Direct PO) in the US and EU and Seller Central in the US, CA, MX, UK, DE, FR, IT, ES, TR, PL, NL, JP, AU, and SG. The software is (generally) not the issue. The software is great. The service is great. FBA can be a game changer in many regions. The real problem with the Amazon, from a seller/brand/manufacture perspective is support. If you get banned—if there is a hiccup, or if there is a problem of any kind—it is a nightmare (or straight up impossible) to resolve. I don't really want to own the software. I want to talk to a human when something goes wrong. I want to talk to someone who will ban a seller infringing on my trademarks. I want to talk to someone who will give me control of my listings when someone else hijacks them. Amazon is, for better or worse, where the customers are. I have a good product and I don't have to pay for advertising. I don't want to have to pay for advertising to get people to go somewhere else. I just want to be able to talk to a human on occasion to resolve issues. I do millions of dollars of business every year with Amazon and reaching a human—let alone a human who can actually do something—is the most frustrating part of Amazon.

betwixthewires 4y ago

I think it's fantastic. Growth will be slow. This is something like xmpp or mastodon, people will use it for sure, it will grow over time, but you're not going to see an explosion of use like amazon did. Keep at it, your work is much needed and this system you're building is wonderful. Don't concern yourself with monetization too much. I know you need to eat, HN is populated largely by people in startups (because it's run by a sv startup accelerator) and you'll have a lot of replies asking you how you'll monetize and giving you advice on that. Don't do anything too hasty, don't break what you're building by being short sighted. You can run storefronts as a service to people who don't want to, that's in your back pocket (or front pocket, I don't know your plans), so changing the open dynamic of this thing is not necessary and it would end the whole value proposition of what you're building. I don't know if you are familiar with OpenBazaar, if you aren't take a look at it and see if you can get any ideas from it, or even if you think what you're building could improve on it. I think it's cool but lacking and I think what you're putting together could actually be widely useable.

samsquire 4y ago

You might find odoo interesting, it's an Enterprise Resource Planning system and open source in Python. It has its own ORM. You can also build websites with it.

johnorourke 4y ago

You are trying to solve a real-world problem experienced by a lot of profitable companies, so there is already a market of paying customers waiting for this. One of my clients is actively trying to reduce their dependence on Amazon and instead integrate with other marketplaces. I see it's just Shopify-to-Shopify for now - bravo for starting with probably one of the most costly integrations. I'm working with a client right now who had to build these integrations using a low-code drag-n-drop platform which allows a quick MVP but has slow job processing, so isn't great for high order volume. The "amazon" comparison is good for marketing - sure you're not doing all their marketing, or having their reach but you are connecting suppliers, buyers and fulfilment which is a genuine problem. The companies who would use this often have developers on board already, so providing open source, accepting contributions and turning this into a useful dev-friendly service will almost certainly find paying customers. Following :)

anakaine 4y ago
Can I ask, out of curiosity, what was the low-code solution they ran with? I've tried a few and been only marginally happy with most.
- djangelic 4y ago
  I’ve been using n8n and I love it. Easy to build almost any ETL workflow I can imagine.
  - tarunmuvvala 4y ago
    you can zorp.one for building operations workflow.
  - anakaine 4y ago
    Thank you

aaroninsf 4y ago

The consumer experience is that unregulated "open" markets fall prey quickly to abuse of many kinds which bewilder, mislead, and defraud. Consider the now-standard criticism of Amazon wrt cookie-cutter phantom brands with identical products; false reviews; etc etc. or one of the "amusing(?) stories of the week" about the fraudulent 30TB SSD on Walmart (another open market). If you don't build protections for the customer in at the ground level, well...

samstave 4y ago

UHM.... you need to buy ImportYeti....

cbreynoldson 4y ago

Cheering you on!

itisit 4y ago

What's your USP compared to others in this crowded iPaaS+EDI space (ex. Celigo, Boomi, SPS, etc.)? Maintaining reliable integrations requires a lot of money, especially at scale and even more so when traversing borders. And EDI 850 is pretty well-entrenched. I guess I'm mostly asking who is this for, like specifically what size and type of customer?

ganeshkrishnan 4y ago

We already do this via hypernile.com although we are not open source. The biggest challenge for you will be shipping from the 3pl. Amazon warehouses all talk to each other and it helps them keep the shipping costs bare minimum. We use machine learning at scale to replicate it and we have made good progress however we haven't been able to distribute inventory between warehouses. Amazon can do it because they have their own distribution trucks while we are surviving on eating ramen for dinner The hardest part is convincing warehouses to connect into our network

luc_ 4y ago

Thank you.

randyrand 4y ago

Your pitch is really compelling. Haven’t read the comments yet, but I just want to say that personally your pitch got me excited. Good job writing it.

ryanobjc 4y ago

I used to work in Amazon Supply Chain Systems Software, many years ago. Yes a key component of what amazon does is software, but... that is not all what supply chain systems are. They are human processes, and physical things. There exists many systems that lets you take orders online and put them in the mail. There are not many systems that lets you cheaply ship things to users in like 1-2 days. Best of luck!

trollied 4y ago

I have flagged this because the title is clickbait

activatedgeek 4y ago

Very ambitious! Good luck! A small bug in the call-to-action at the bottom of the page - If I upvote only "Stripe" in the "Connect your Shops" section, the call-to-action reads: > Want to know when Stripe, Stripe, and more integrations are ready? Voting for greater than one shop resolves this repetition error.

what-imright 4y ago

Openship is wrong name.

jollybean 4y ago

This looks really nice but it's really hard to tell 'what it is' from your website. I can't make heads or tails of it. You have: A powerful new standard for fulfillment Multi-channel fulfillment at scale And then kind of a complicated diagram. "Get Started!" <- with what? Who is this for? What problem does it solve? 'What is it' and roughly how does it work? Mid way through your landing page you have this UX experience where 1,2,3 etc fade in and out with some kind of relative diagram at the bottom - this is also confusing and counter-intuitive. I see why you'd want to do that, but don't. Just find a way to express the concept without that oddity. "Let me know what you guys think of the idea " 80% of makers fail to express their idea in digestible terms. It's shocking and uncanny but the reality is 1/2 of ideas fail because they are never communicated properly. I think from the comments here on HN this looks pretty neat - congrats - please work on communicating it.

awill 4y ago

your pricing doesn't make sense. $500/mo for unlimited everything? What happens if a company scales to the size of the amazon.com ?

kristov 4y ago

I think it would be really cool if all your sellers had to do was maintain their inventory in a google sheet, and "share" access to your marketplace thing. Maybe you require columns to be named a certain way etc, but much lower barrier to entry.

danskeren 4y ago
Love the idea! If somebody wants to build SaaS products together (starting with this one) then hit me up :)

avereveard 4y ago

Everyone wants to be on Amazon not because of the software but because of the eyeballs that are on it searching for things to buy Anyway how does this compare to openerp + an open storefront?

jbaczuk 4y ago

What is your motivation for doing this?

levkk 4y ago

Great idea and powered by Postgres on top of it, love it! If you're interested in integrated ML, check us out at https://postgresml.org https://postgresml.org Cheers!

awillen 4y ago

I own an ecommerce company, I've used 3PLs, and I just can't see how you could have a meaningful market for this (and to be clear I mean the current product at openship.org, not everything that you're describing). It's basically a many-to-many connector of storefronts to 3PLs. The problem is very few people have multiple of either, let alone both. Nobody's on Shopify + WooCommerce + Wix and fulfilling from Shippo and Vistaprint. Unless you have someone with multiple options at both ends, this isn't needed - there are 3PLs that can integrate with multiple storefronts and storefronts that can integrate with multiple 3PLs. No need to pay for a third party connector to do that. If there is a company out there with some complex need for multiple of everything, it's probably big enough to have a dev team to integrate all their services anyway. The bigger picture that you describe is interesting in theory, but it misses the point of Amazon's value. Amazon has infrastructure, sure, but what really matters is they have customers. I sell from my website, but I'm also on Amazon because all I had to do was list my products there and people started buying them. On my own site, I have to acquire those customers.

WheelsAtLarge 4y ago

Very nice but keep this in mind, the tech is the easy part. Getting a whole community who contributes to it in the long term is the hard part. The genius of Linus Torvalds wasn't that he started an OS. Although, that was smart on it's own. The genius was that he was able to motivate a bunch of people to contribute to the project for decades. Learn how he did that and you can have a solution that can change the world. The best part is that there are a bunch of people that are willing to help. You just need to create a project where people can contribute to move it forward. Good job and good luck.

mentos 4y ago
You recommend any reading on how Linus achieved that?
- WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
  I don't but I would start by understanding how the contribution process for Linux works now. You can at least understand what works now. Also, making a plan and making it public will help a lot. You should make it easy to communicate and gather like minded people. It's a long term project. Remember that what Amazon is was created over 2+ decades. The advantage you have is that you can duplicate what Amazon is without having to try stuff that never worked out.

shaburn 4y ago

Who goes to amazon / Shopify for technology? The go for distro on both the buy and sell side. The fact they have software is an after thought.

dougabug 4y ago

So would this be something like OCP, but at the level of an entire eCommerce marketplace? If so, that sounds pretty awesome. Main pitfall would seem to be free riders cloning the system, stealing what works, creating closed source improved versions and killing the upstream.

bbatchelder 4y ago

I happen to be building this exact same product, but closed source, and somewhat attached at the hip to my company's 3PL WMS product. One thing I did not see in your demo, is inventory synchronization. I'm guessing thats because your first use-case is drop shipping. I'd also disagree that you're open-source Amazon. You're more like open-source DropStream or maybe Boomi. If I were you, I'd do this: 1) Pick an open-source WMS and write a channel for it. 2) Make it dead easy to write ad-hoc channels. 3) Quickly implement shop connectors for BigCommerce, Magento, and WooCommerce. Good luck!

derefr 4y ago

> What if there was a marketplace where all the underlying tech was open-source? What about the actual "marketplace" part? E.g. the channel-partner product listing management; the product recommendation engine that combines global factors (user reviews) with personalized interest; the shopping cart that packing-problem's your order on checkout into separate orders according to logistics-provider constraints, etc. When you say "open-source Amazon", this is the part I envision. As far as I know, many pieces of the technology stack required to be an individual FBA seller already mostly exist as FOSS; but what does not exist as FOSS, is the technology to build your own two-sided-marketplace on which others can list products for sale. Even more starkly, the software and systems to run an "Amazon-style" warehouse to back that marketplace — one where the sellers on your marketplace can send you SKUs of merchandise to hold such that you can then centrally fulfill orders for a bunch of sellers, and the whole ecosystem of backend support to allow them to remotely manage that held inventory — are nowhere to be found outside of Amazon itself, for love or money.

fercircularbuf 4y ago

Demo > Try it > password creation fails for me

Iv 4y ago

I need something like that for my open manufacturing project. Openship sounds like one of the missing piece I was looking for! Thanks!

an_taeus 4y ago

Outstanding! I worked for a number of years at one of the larger used book resellers in the USA, top 1-3 of Amazon's used listings consistently, it had a fairly surprising amount of volume to me when I first started. The fact that Amazon was 98%+ of our sales source was considered an existential threat to the company everyday but the ability for us to mitigate that was almost impossible. Even after multiple temporary pauses on our Seller Central account (because of bogus customer complaints sent from our competitors/buyers who were buying our used inventory, then re-listing it on Amazon as "new" at a higher price point, and who then repeatedly gamed Amazon's refund policy to pay nothing for it and then "return" the items, even though we'd stamped them and knew it was bogus and hadn't come from us...) the owner never dedicated the resources it would have required for us to truly become multi-channel. The volume from Amazon, especially for books, is ludicrously profitable compared to any of the other e-marketplaces but terrifying from a risk and sustainability POV. This is a major pain point for so many small businesses out there and I wish I had this while I was still there, I will be forwarding it along to those who still are. Now that I'm thinking about it, the hardest part for us with Amazon was that we historically were treating our Amazon listings as our inventory counts, and let's just say Amazon doesn't do a great job with handling items that are clicked to buy but cancelled afterwards. There's absolutely no way that the company I worked for is the only one that does or did track its inventory by coupling itself to the sales channel, so you've probably saved a lot of people from future headaches already. One thing I think you've got very right here is the relatively spare use of fields in your schema models. I can't emphasize enough how much that will help a seller that uses this, since so many small business owners and employees out there don't know what they don't know and are making it up on the fly and tend to focus on the wrong things. Not a lot of headspace for the "nothing missing, but nothing unnecessary" approach when you're trying to juggle every hat because you're understaffed, and doubly so when you've never even heard the term many-to-one. Of course, because this is open-source, if users want they can extend these schemas (and even extend the views to use them! etc.), but they'll have to go out of their way to do that, not start with a tangled mess of concepts and pare them down. Really, it seems like no big deal, but humble schemas are so so important. At my current job I'm having the fun time of maintaining true spaghetti software with hundreds of fields in tables, a lot of which are null (or empty string! but which is it?), and all of which have no field names beyond a number...to power a POS/inventory system. But don't worry, none of the data is normalized and it pre-aggregates your transactions to compress itself, and then writes those compressed records into an always existing "temp" table and then reads them every time you want a report, and look at that, it takes 5 minutes to generate a COGS report for last week that is a sub 5 ms SQL query. Ugh. I guess where I'm going with this is that there is so much crapware out in the world, absolute trash that needlessly overcomplicates the problem it addresses, that continues to get its license renewed every year because the clients its sold to now believe its a truly hard problem, but if you look under the hood it's actually just some WSYWIG editor generated garbage that is trying to be everything and so instead is nothing usable, and their sales staff will tell you "just upgrade to our new microservices design to solve those legacy issues!" Every project like yours that takes what is a fairly traditional, well-trod problem and brings it into the open-source realm in a readable and straightforward way is a big win for small-time entrepreneurs. Please keep going with this. I think you have something here, but the hardest part will be marketing it if you're trying to do this for a living. There are absolutely an absurd number of small businesses out there living or dying by their ecommerce sales who are either struggling to actually use the tools and workflows they currently have or are paying far more than they need to for sub-optimal solutions to this problem. They will not come to you first over the internet because they are not looking for open-source sales software, because they don't know what open-source is, but some honest shoe-leather work pounding the pavement and identifying the larger businesses around you physically or trawling through the business formation records in your county might pay real dividends, even if it's just an HN "lifestyle" business for you with recurring revenue comparable to the average salary. As a final thought, when you do get to integrating Seller Central, you should look at bringing the different API services out there into your project for dashboards and the like. Maybe you don't want to deal with all that, but being able to flip through market metrics from all the different sales channels and even integrate them together would be a killer feature. In particular I'm thinking of https://keepa.com/# https://keepa.com/#!, but I know other people use https://www.rainforestapi.com/ https://www.rainforestapi.com/ too. Don't know about the other e-commerce marketplaces out there but I'm sure they have them too. Congrats on a getting a ten year long lurker to actually post.

atherton33 4y ago

When I want to buy something, like cat litter or dish soap or notepads, I open a browser and type "amazon.com" and search for what I need. What should I type instead if I want to support your open source approach? It wasn't clear to me from your writeup.

lisper 4y ago

What would be an Amazon-killer for me as a consumer -- and just about the only thing that I can imagine that would be -- is something like Amazon that connected me to the inventory of local merchants where I could buy things for same-day or next-day delivery via something like Doordash. There is a ton of inventory within a 30-60 minute drive of my house (in the Bay Area) but no centralized service to connect me to it, so if I want some glassware and some shower cleaner (my actual current use-case) I have to visit two different merchants, place two different orders, set up two accounts, take twice the risk with my credit card number, etc. A centralized order dispatcher that was connected to local inventory and delivery which would let me order everything I needed all in one place and know that fulfillment would come from local merchants that I can trust to vet their suppliers would kick some serious tushy.

mathgorges 4y ago
I drive for Amazon flex and they’re beginning to trial orders similar to what you describe. I don’t have a clue what the interface for ordering is like, but I know there’s a new offer type where I’m expected to pick up orders from one-or-several brick and mortar stores in a single shopping plaza before delivering
- lisper 4y ago
  Yeah, this doesn't surprise me. Amazon certainly could do this. The problem is one of branding. Amazon is ridiculously convenient but they now have a well-deserved reputation that the quality of the products you get from them is a total crap shoot every time. If there was something like Amazon that I could rely on to deliver quality, I would happily pay extra for that. I think there's a window of opportunity for someone else to step in and become the "Amazon for reliable local quality" in the same way that e.g. NextDoor has become the "Facebook for local interactions". And I hope someone does because Amazon really needs some serious competition.

yrgulation 4y ago

No. Build an open source aws and you’ll be better off. It’s easy. Particularly since entire generations dont know that an “object” is a file and that a “lambda” function is just code executed inside a container. As long as you dont charge for … “cold starts” you’ll win at least one client. Thanks ignorance you’ll make a killing! Remember to charge extra for “permissions” (aka iams) to do anything. Easy. Bootcamp programmers will think this is the best thing since sliced bread.

margarina72 4y ago

Great idea. Add federation to it (ala mastodon and the like) so that multiple marketplace can communicate (useful for search). Think about the recommendation/comment system to avoid/minimize spam/fake reviews and scam (orders that never arrive) maybe have integration with an escrow payment system.

tegansnyder 4y ago

Couple things to look into if you are thinking of running a marketplace: 1. Tax gets complicated in marketplace model. Marketplace facilitator tax laws in US and some European countries require the entity running the marketplace to collect and remit tax. 2. If your channels have multi-warehouses and ship from different US states its important to remember there are 11 origin-based states in the US.

sylware 4y ago

That would allow to have noscript/basic (x)html portals for many market places. amazon was still noscript/basic (x)html compliant (with wallet codes) 2 years ago... now it's gone.

butterfly771 4y ago

I found that the technology stack used in this project is exactly the same as my recent project, next prisma mantine swr.... That's great!

blobbers 4y ago

How much transaction volume does this system currently operate on?

tonguetrainer 4y ago

What will it look like from a shopping perspective? Will it be an storefront akin to Amazon?

sar009 4y ago

loved the idea. One suggestion around pricing, Please make it usage based pricing. IMO, Seat based pricing does not justify value of a product.

pabs3 4y ago

Sounds like your business model is managed hosting of the open source project. Is that subject to change? Are you planning on additional revenue streams (like open core)? Are you aware of the incentives with the managed hosting model? If not, it is that you're incentivised to make it harder to install, so people choose your hosting and to make it harder to move to self-hosted, so people can't leave. How do you plan to mitigate those issues? Are you planning on adding something like whitelabeling, which would allow other companies to also sell Openship hosting, competing with your hosting? Would you prevent someone from contributing that to the main codebase?

eternityforest 4y ago

Obligatory disclaimer: I'm just a dev, I don't have any clue about business. But as a dev working for small groups, my big concern is usually avoiding too much in house tech. Will this be usable by sellers without any IT staff? As I understand it Amazon does a lot for sellers. Also, will digital asset sales be a focus? That seems more accessible. I've had several project ideas(Never seriously focused on, I really don't want my own business) where it would be helpful to have an easy way to sell license keys, or an basic subscriptions API to query whether someone was a paid subscriber.

snickmy 4y ago

I'm a complete newbie in the ecommerce space, would anyone be able to explain this as I was a 5 years old ?

EpicEng 4y ago

Consumers don't care about open source software and Amazon's competitive advantage is not their software.

captn3m0 4y ago

You should look into https://becknprotocol.io/ https://becknprotocol.io/

Scootwilli90 4y ago

[flagged]

amelius 4y ago

It would be great if postal services could install your software and become part of the logistics solution (instead of being in a race to the bottom led by Amazon).

ph0rque 4y ago

What a coincidence! Last week, I wrote the following: "Had an idea I’ve been stewing on for a few days now… a decentralized (not tied to any one company) Amazon Prime. As a user, you would pay a yearly fee and get free shipping from all the participating eComs. As a partnering eCom, you get more repeat customers." I can see this being a product (or a feature) you can offer down the road.

_8j50 4y ago

The main problem is quality anf branding. If you can associate the brand with good user experience and keep it that way this is a good idea. As a customer I only care about the quality of my experience not about the software used to deliver it.

hammyhavoc 4y ago

Title should be "Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon marketplace" Amazon offers a lot of stuff, including AWS.

adultSwim 4y ago

What I want is infrastructure with open governance, in the style of Debian.