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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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think of it this way. Launching a marketplace today is very difficult, but what if we made the backend of a marketplace open-source and used that as leverage. One that could be your backend for all operations. You can choose to enable the integrated marketplace or not, but the system is yours. It’s about bringing power back to the sellers. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change t…
> It’s about bringing power back to the sellers. But let's be honest here. What sellers really want are buyers. That's why sellers list on Apple, Amazon, Ebay etc. despite the fees. They are paying for the virtual equivalent of a shop-front in the premium mall. They get the payment handling. They get the anti-fraud technologies. And with Amazon they get the forward and reverse logistics. Its about SO much more than h…
Wrong. I own a small shop in Vermont and I love recompiling my shop software every morning to get customers. I tweak a couple of things - - yesterday I lowered tcp_orphan_retries - - and, boom, more customers!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Its all very well having a vision, but executing it is a different question. This also relates to the clickbait-y "I'm building an open-source Amazon" positioning, which I don't think serves you well. You're building (I think) an e-commerce platform upon which someone can build online shops ("nano-Amazons"?). Where the "open-source Amazon" pitch is difficult to take seriously, I think there probably is space for ne…
This is just one piece of the puzzle. I explained it in another comment: > I think of it this way. Launching a marketplace today is very difficult, but what if we made the backend of a marketplace open-source and used that as leverage. One that could be your backend for all operations. You can choose to enable the integrated marketplace or not, but the system is yours. It’s about bringing power back to the sellers.
Yes! That is the point, which is why over-selling this as an "open-source Amazon" will backfire spectacularly with anyone who understands what they're talking about.
It's important to know what you're building (from the POV of potential customers) and who your competitors are. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/software/best-ecomme...
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 r…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think of it this way. Launching a marketplace today is very difficult, but what if we made the backend of a marketplace open-source and used that as leverage. One that could be your backend for all operations. You can choose to enable the integrated marketplace or not, but the system is yours. It’s about bringing power back to the sellers. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change t…
> It’s about bringing power back to the sellers. But let's be honest here. What sellers really want are buyers. That's why sellers list on Apple, Amazon, Ebay etc. despite the fees. They are paying for the virtual equivalent of a shop-front in the premium mall. They get the payment handling. They get the anti-fraud technologies. And with Amazon they get the forward and reverse logistics. Its about SO much more than h…
I would say 85% of sellers on eBay and Amazon have their own storefront now to be in more control. They also funnel these orders into an OMS.
- 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.