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Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon

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Re: Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon

#201
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another way to frame it (from the opposite direction) is a collective failure on "our" part (if there is such a thing as "us") to explore and promote genuinely interesting things just because they lack the sparkle of click bait on the outer surface.

Maybe it isn't that we "fall for" click bait, it's that we very loudly ignore stuff that isn't.

Re: Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon

#202
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not stupid. Unnecessary most of the time but it becomes an expected processing and delivery standard, which makes the experience much more predictable for consumers. Very few can really compete effectively with Amazon on this front. Source: Used to run an e-commerce company that shipped up to 2 million packages annually. Once we optimised shipping and processing, customer service inquiries and complaints dropped…

> Source: Used to run an e-commerce company that shipped up to 2 million packages annually. Once we optimised shipping and processing, customer service inquiries and complaints dropped dramatically, and customer trust / sentiment skyrocketed. I used to work at company that shipped ~30k packages a day. I’d say 90% of customer complaints were about the delivery delays, and only 10% about the rest. It was really hard to…

Agreed. Every logistics partner I ever dealt with was another layer that you did not have full control of, and each had their problems.

Amazon's in-house logistics gets cheaper with scale. Waiting for the day Amazon launches their offerings to C2C and B2C delivery to directly compete with UPS and Fedex.

Amazon's in-house logistics, plus their ability to co-mingle this entire layer will be hard beat.

Re: Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon

#203
Outstanding! I worked for a number of years at one of the larger used book resellers in the USA, top 1-3 of Amazon's used listings consistently, it had a fairly surprising amount of volume to me when I first started. The fact that Amazon was 98%+ of our sales source was considered an existential threat to the company everyday but the ability for us to mitigate that was almost impossible. Even after multiple temporary pauses on our Seller Central account (because of bogus customer complaints sent from our competitors/buyers who were buying our used inventory, then re-listing it on Amazon as "new" at a higher price point, and who then repeatedly gamed Amazon's refund policy to pay nothing for it and then "return" the items, even though we'd stamped them and knew it was bogus and hadn't come from us...) the owner never dedicated the resources it would have required for us to truly become multi-channel. The volume from Amazon, especially for books, is ludicrously profitable compared to any of the other e-marketplaces but terrifying from a risk and sustainability POV. This is a major pain point for so many small businesses out there and I wish I had this while I was still there, I will be forwarding it along to those who still are. Now that I'm thinking about it, the hardest part for us with Amazon was that we historically were treating our Amazon listings as our inventory counts, and let's just say Amazon doesn't do a great job with handling items that are clicked to buy but cancelled afterwards. There's absolutely no way that the company I worked for is the only one that does or did track its inventory by coupling itself to the sales channel, so you've probably saved a lot of people from future headaches already.

One thing I think you've got very right here is the relatively spare use of fields in your schema models. I can't emphasize enough how much that will help a seller that uses this, since so many small business owners and employees out there don't know what they don't know and are making it up on the fly and tend to focus on the wrong things. Not a lot of headspace for the "nothing missing, but nothing unnecessary" approach when you're trying to juggle every hat because you're understaffed, and doubly so when you've never even heard the term many-to-one. Of course, because this is open-source, if users want they can extend these schemas (and even extend the views to use them! etc.), but they'll have to go out of their way to do that, not start with a tangled mess of concepts and pare them down. Really, it seems like no big deal, but humble schemas are so so important. At my current job I'm having the fun time of maintaining true spaghetti software with hundreds of fields in tables, a lot of which are null (or empty string! but which is it?), and all of which have no field names beyond a number...to power a POS/inventory system. But don't worry, none of the data is normalized and it pre-aggregates your transactions to compress itself, and then writes those compressed records into an always existing "temp" table and then reads them every time you want a report, and look at that, it takes 5 minutes to generate a COGS report for last week that is a sub 5 ms SQL query. Ugh.

I guess where I'm going with this is that there is so much crapware out in the world, absolute trash that needlessly overcomplicates the problem it addresses, that continues to get its license renewed every year because the clients its sold to now believe its a truly hard problem, but if you look under the hood it's actually just some WSYWIG editor generated garbage that is trying to be everything and so instead is nothing usable, and their sales staff will tell you "just upgrade to our new microservices design to solve those legacy issues!" Every project like yours that takes what is a fairly traditional, well-trod problem and brings it into the open-source realm in a readable and straightforward way is a big win for small-time entrepreneurs. Please keep going with this.

I think you have something here, but the hardest part will be marketing it if you're trying to do this for a living. There are absolutely an absurd number of small businesses out there living or dying by their ecommerce sales who are either struggling to actually use the tools and workflows they currently have or are paying far more than they need to for sub-optimal solutions to this problem. They will not come to you first over the internet because they are not looking for open-source sales software, because they don't know what open-source is, but some honest shoe-leather work pounding the pavement and identifying the larger businesses around you physically or trawling through the business formation records in your county might pay real dividends, even if it's just an HN "lifestyle" business for you with recurring revenue comparable to the average salary.

As a final thought, when you do get to integrating Seller Central, you should look at bringing the different API services out there into your project for dashboards and the like. Maybe you don't want to deal with all that, but being able to flip through market metrics from all the different sales channels and even integrate them together would be a killer feature. In particular I'm thinking of https://keepa.com/#!, but I know other people use https://www.rainforestapi.com/ too. Don't know about the other e-commerce marketplaces out there but I'm sure they have them too.

Congrats on a getting a ten year long lurker to actually post.

Re: Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If someone got it to be popular enough, MindGeek would buy it and you'd be back at square one.

Re: Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not stupid. Unnecessary most of the time but it becomes an expected processing and delivery standard, which makes the experience much more predictable for consumers. Very few can really compete effectively with Amazon on this front. Source: Used to run an e-commerce company that shipped up to 2 million packages annually. Once we optimised shipping and processing, customer service inquiries and complaints dropped…

The advantage of a great logistics network is predictability. If I order from Etsy, I will drop $100 on a product and shipping. But when will I get it? I don’t know. Will it even arrive? Who knows? With Amazon I know what I order is coming this week. That’s why I buy from them and no one else. It doesn’t matter that half their website is styled like it’s 2003 and I’m probably getting a counterfeit product.

Bingo. Predictability and consistency is actually hard to execute and scale.

I can order an iPad from Best Buy or Apple, but most of the time I'm never quite sure when it might arrive. Amazon, I know it should arrive tonight or tomorrow.

I tend to avoid buying many brands on Amazon because of supply chain integrity risks, but their execution is consistent and predictable. I can't say that about many retailers.

Re: Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon

#207
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a blog post I made in 2019 describing the vision Hence I think you have, regrettably, answered your own question. Its all very well having a vision, but executing it is a different question. The sort of thing you propose requires a lot of time and a lot of money to develop. Let alone maintain. Let alone market and sell. Look, its like all those "Bloomberg killers" that come out of the woodwork as often as the seaso…

Cunt it was 2019. You rein it in a little.

Yikes, please don't respond to a bad comment by doing this! That makes everything worse, and we eventually have to ban such accounts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon

#208

I think it would be really cool if all your sellers had to do was maintain their inventory in a google sheet, and "share" access to your marketplace thing. Maybe you require columns to be named a certain way etc, but much lower barrier to entry.

Love the idea! If somebody wants to build SaaS products together (starting with this one) then hit me up :)

Re: Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon

#209
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's Google's stance on why they ban AGPL software: https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl... > The primary risk presented by AGPL is that any product or service that depends on AGPL-licensed code, or includes anything copied or derived from AGPL-licensed code, may be subject to the virality of the AGPL license. > This viral effect requires that the complete corresponding source code of the pr…

> This viral effect requires that the complete corresponding source code of the product or service be released to the world under the AGPL license. This is triggered if the product or service can be accessed over a remote network interface, so it does not even require that the product or service is actually distributed.. This is the entire point. The goal is to stop the SAAS loophole.

In other words, to stop the process of people no longer owning their software and data and being subjected to someone else's decisions about whether a feature or service is important or should be deprecated.

Re: Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon

#210

Good luck and I hope you succeed, but the (unfortunate) reality check I'll give you is that money rules everything, and if you get even the slightest bit of traction, there is more than a trillion dollars in market cap behind ensuring you (and nobody else) will ever succeed. 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 succe…

That is a very pessimistic way of looking at things. While it is true that there are entrenched interests that do what they can to prevent any new entrants from disrupting their dominance, I feel obligated to point out that this has always been the case. Just to point to how bad things in US have been at one point, I would like to point out the oft-discussed robber barons and the origin of antitrust laws. Edit: I for…

I don't understand your objection. The country was run by robber barons and started to move toward some sort of revolution (however you would describe FDR getting four terms), then antitrust laws ended it. Then we stopped enforcing antitrust laws, and got Google, Amazon, Disney, etc..

> That is a very pessimistic way of looking at things.

This isn't a real criticism. It's either an accurate way of looking at things or not. And I think the obvious odds that Amazon wouldn't just buy it and shut it down if it made it up the difficult road of getting any significant traction are 1. That's how business works now, that's actually success. Tech companies are making this exact argument during antitrust hearings - that not allowing them to buy businesses up and shut them down would destroy the startup scene.

edit: it would have a lot better chance if somebody would paint Amazon as either being intolerably liberal, intolerably conservative, or both at the same time. Open the angry Boomer spigot.

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