Comment by jpatt
4 years 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!
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.
They previously submitted the same link with a different title and got... 3 upvotes.
The Amazon comparison clearly helped to get on the HN front page.
> Show HN: I'm building an open-source order management system and marketplace API
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=openship.org
Just goes to show that for all of HN's hyper ad awareness, we still fall for basic click bait in our own territory.
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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?
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.
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Amazon to most is primarily a website where you get everything mostly reliable and mostly with a consumer focussed service (I for one never had any issues when returning things, any problem was like "yeah ok, send it back, we send you a new one or do you want a refund?" ... For sellers they play a different game with their market power, discounts or they won't offer your things or rank competitors higher)
should start small, like an open source Google, then work your way up to an open source Amazon.
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.
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Many have already done open source Google and MS. We have those solutions already, and they are great though not yet pervasive. We need open source market place and logistics, and that is where they should stay focused.
Maybe practice creating an open source Microsoft before quitting your day job?
Harsh, but true
literal LOL
For some blissful seconds I thought this post would be related to reforestation efforts.
Probably for this crowd anyway. My first thought at seeing the title was AWS, not the store front.
Also very difficult to compete with Amazon. Amazon makes their operating profits from cloud computing and subsidizes their retail market with it. That is how they keep prices so low.
The result is a form of predatory pricing which should be illegal.
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I would be down for an open source AWS services. Shouldn't be to hard to make web front end to the fire cracker instance, but make everything in the backend open source, so any one can run the community edition.
Any thoughts on that?
Yeah, and then you run your "open source AWS" on AWS xD. I believe what you mean it's called Open shift, kind of.
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.
It's the word "simply" that usually raises all the red flags :-)
"just" is another red flag word
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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