alt Hacker NewsYeah, 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.
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The service could capture a proof of a new seller’s Amazon rating,
to blunt the hit of that (0).
Traditional marketplaces provide a range of services, from unified delivery to complete logistics management. They also provide all the kyc filtering and fraud screening that quite lowers the merchant risk.
On top of that, many of them provide additional assurances, like vendor screening and easy dispute resolution on fraudulent operations.
The catalog and the checkout are the easy part.