7 ms·

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

• 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?
    • AndyPa32 4y ago
      I had thought until now that Amazon primary revenue stream is running a good chunk of the internet. Quick research tells me, you are right.
      • johannes1234321 4y ago
        Revenue for Amazon is in the retail business. The margin however is a lot better in the AWS side. Warehouses and logistics cost real money to operate.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • dudeinjapan 4y ago
    should start small, like an open source Google, then work your way up to an open source Amazon.
    • cush 4y ago
      Harsh, but true
    • ReedJessen 4y ago
      literal LOL
    • zxcvbn4038 4y ago
      Nobody ever wants to open source Pornhub. Wide consumer interest, no physical products to worry about, lots of advertising potential - and your not competing with Amazon, Wal-Mart, Google, Apple, or Target. Sounds like a better deal to me.
• ajvs 4y ago
  More of your storefront being portable is a big plus for any business that fears lock-in or unwanted removal from Amazon. I haven't looked into the specifics of this offering, but if you were able to use your own custom domain for your storefront, minimise the platform's insights into your actual sales (i.e. to prevent a similar case to Amazon launching products in your niche), etc and mainly leveraging a centralised platform for the audience, then that's the best of both worlds.
• melony 4y ago
  You can always do what bookshop.org did and appeal to social justice and hipster oppression. Talk about supporting "small business" and pretend that everyone's not just dropshipping from asia.
  • joemi 4y ago
    I don't think you know too much about how the book retail industry works. If people are dropshipping from anywhere, they're dropshipping from Ingram, which is in the US. Some of the stuff they carry might be printed in Asia, but it's not shipping directly from there to individual US customers. If I had to guess, this is how I'd expect bookshop.org to be fulfilling orders that they fulfill themselves. I can't remember if bookshop.org kicks any fulfillment to its indie bookstore partners, but if they do, those stores are almost certainly using Ingram dropshipping or fulfilling from the store's in-store inventory. That said, it's still not nearly as good for indie bookstores as just buying directly from the indie bookstore, but it's pretty far from your characterization.
    • melony 4y ago
      I was referring to OP's product. The non-book part of Amazon sources the majority of their products from asia. Bookshop was just a point of comparison. Their schtick is to complain on media (said media is conveniently on an anti-big tech crusade right now) about small indie book stores being oppressed by Amazon while ignoring the fact that most publishing is centralized upstream.
      • joemi 4y ago
        I see your point, though it wasn't as clear from your first post. To be fair, publishers being consolidated is much smaller problem for bookstores than Amazon is. While publisher consolidation is real (Penguin Random House is quite a beast!), it is not total; many publishers exist that have not been absorbed by the major publishers. And there are multiple major publishers a tier below the aforementioned PRH. Whereas when it comes to sales, the main competitor for _all_ bookstores is pretty definitively Amazon. So there is some merit to what Bookshop is doing, and it's not quite as hypocritical as you seem to make it out to be.
• HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
  It's the word "simply" that usually raises all the red flags :-)
  • bookofjoe 4y ago
    "just" is another red flag word
• kornhole 4y ago
  >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.< The bigger stores with IT staff and budgets would be first to join and contribute. Some of us consultants could help the smaller shops and possibly combine energies into communities or coops using shared resources.
• brudgers 4y ago
  My first reaction to the idea a few hours ago was along those same lines. Coming back to the ShowHN just now, I thought “China.” By which I guess I mean manufacturing, and not drop shippers, middlemen, importers, etc. To me, it seems like this matches the way manufacturers multi-channel their sales, and fits the IT priorities a manufacturer is likely to have…bills of materials, inventories, forecasting, design, etc. and not a big emphasis on the web, saas, and building websites. YMMV.