Requires a fully funded and staffed public postal service in a county that's dismantling, privatizing, and outsourcing core components of public sector package shipping

Not quite what you want but Flohmarkt (flea market in German) is federated. https://codeberg.org/flohmarkt/flohmarkt

The biggest problem I see is that retailers generally don't want to increase visibility for their competition. Competition usually lowers prices, good for consumers, but business is not a fan. Even in non competing markets, consumers only have a limited amount of money. That $50 you spent on clothes is $50 not spent on power tools. The main reason some sell on markets like eBay/amazon/etc is because they're so large and centralized that you can't really avoid them.

Amazon is more “warehousing and fulfillment” than it is “storefront”.

This would be hard to replicate without immense capital.

We had this in Greece and it was great. Then you could order through the aggregator itself. Then it got its own delivery service that shops could use (still better than all other delivery companies). Then shops were added that don't have their own site nor a physical shop. Now it's trying to expand to other countries and there is a subscription that gives you lower delivery fees. It's still good and most people buy stuff from there but it's clear it's trying to become Amazon and I'm afraid most similar centralized services will go this way sooner or later.

I mean, I buy stuff off eBay a lot, and it's often from small mom-and-pop shops. I needed new ribbon for my typewriter recently and ended up getting it from a store that just sells ink ribbons. They have an off-eBay presence too.

A Search and streamlined payment program would be neat, but customer support and other things would have to be the responsibility of each store, so at minimum you'd have to gather stuff like contact info and return policies in a standardized way to show users

I love this idea!

This is kinda the same process amazon itself went through back in the day

A major benefit of Amazon is just being able to add 20 things to your cart and get them all in like 1-2 boxes.

If this has worked for you in the last 5 years, your Amazon experience has been very different than mine.

It was wonderful, when they did that.

I had a horrible Amazon experience 3 or 4 years ago and haven't shopped there since, so I'm probably remembering the time when it did work.

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.