alt Hacker NewsI'm building an open source Amazon.
No you're not. Amazon is not the software that runs the website. 'Amazon' is the millions of relationships that Amazon has with suppliers and customers. It's the strong brand, the trust that people have that they can shop there safely, the sheer scale of the operation meaning that products are about as cheap as possible and will arrive when Amazon say they will. It's the ease of using an invisible, massively optimized chain of systems from a pretty basic app.
You can't build a new (and hopefully better) Amazon by copying the software. You need to work out how to get sellers and buyers to come to your site before they go Amazon, then build that thing so they do. How good the software is and whether it's open source of not probably doesn't matter. Better software is never going to be enough of a reason for people to switch away from Amazon.
Replies
[flagged]
Yeah, you're right. Amazon isn't really about the software at this point. It's the lock-in. Sellers can't leave without losing all their reviews, rankings, and years of optimization. That's the moat.
I'm not building better software to compete directly with Amazon. I'm building infrastructure that sellers can truly own, so lock-in stops being such a powerful moat.
Traditional marketplaces charge 15-30% because they provide checkout, payments, and the customer database. But if stores already own that infrastructure, the only thing you really need is discovery. And discovery doesn't have to cost anything.
Our marketplace is essentially just a directory. Stores keep their own checkout and process their own payments. We query their API and render the results conversationally. And because the code is open source, if we ever became like Amazon, anyone could fork it and launch a competing directory.