Are there any instances of this? It looks promising

Amazon is local independt shops too, and better shipping, I just wouldnt do that to myself when amazon exists and ik I can get returns + fast shipping, you need buyers, more than a few altruistic ppl

Like the other comments said, it's prob on it's way to becoming it's own amazon like figure there, thats how they start out

I think this is a good idea

In the near-term, a better idea might be to establish an alternative under a co-op model, like Subvert is trying to do for music as a Bandcamp successor. Vendors are part-owners of the entity and have input into its governance. Any code should be open source, too. Federation would be great to later help turn it into a truly resilient global platform.

There are actually 2. One is being more blatant about this and enshittifying in its attempt to be more like Amazon and hide the sellers. The other one is trying ads/subscription. I use the second.

The main reason for a store to sign up on a website would be:

• Advertising
• Centralised shipping
• Centralised handling of payments (and note, this one is especially hard due to laws surrounding KYC and complexities in handling different payment methods)

The Fediverse, being decentralised, has a hard time implementing the latter two. The first is basically not much different than being discoverable on Google.

So fun as it sounds, it won't be easy to implement. You'd likely have to have independent "shippers" and PSPs sign up to this, and somehow have webshops choose which to use. And that's a very awkward structure for a Fediverse-minded solution.

Here is a partial list.

Try shopping on Discogs or EBay. They both can handle a single cart with multiple vendor items shipping from different places.

This is kind of how it works in countries that haven’t been infected by Amazon Prime. In Sweden for example most e-commerce is done directly from individual stores. There are aggregation sites like prisjakt which lists prices of all different stores so you can find the best deal.

It’s not perfect and maybe not as convenient as Amazon Prime, but I don’t see how a fediverse alternative could do it better.

Sounds like Rakuten actually...