You are trying to solve a real-world problem experienced by a lot of profitable companies, so there is already a market of paying customers waiting for this. One of my clients is actively trying to reduce their dependence on Amazon and instead integrate with other marketplaces.

I see it's just Shopify-to-Shopify for now - bravo for starting with probably one of the most costly integrations. I'm working with a client right now who had to build these integrations using a low-code drag-n-drop platform which allows a quick MVP but has slow job processing, so isn't great for high order volume.

The "amazon" comparison is good for marketing - sure you're not doing all their marketing, or having their reach but you are connecting suppliers, buyers and fulfilment which is a genuine problem.

The companies who would use this often have developers on board already, so providing open source, accepting contributions and turning this into a useful dev-friendly service will almost certainly find paying customers.

Following :)

Can I ask, out of curiosity, what was the low-code solution they ran with? I've tried a few and been only marginally happy with most.

I’ve been using n8n and I love it. Easy to build almost any ETL workflow I can imagine.

you can zorp.one for building operations workflow.

Thank you

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 reasons" to make you competitive to the niche.

  If, for some reason, the seller is removed from the marketplace, their software stays with them and they can continue accepting orders directly.

Apart from the software systems, there's a whole bunch of basic business processes that Amazon takes care of, which are less portable. Using FBA? Leaving means learning how to run a warehouse, shipping logistics, pricing, staffing, etc. Not using FBA? How's your Marketing department doing? Hopefully you didn't let it get too anemic or too fitted to "people who are good at gaming Amazon's algorithm."

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!

i think the branding "open source Amazon" is just way too ambitious/big. invites a lot of confusion/criticism if Amazon is different things to different people.

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.

Either that we actively (doubtful) ignore non-click-bait, more that we are programmed (in some sense) to only pay attention to click-bait.

It is genuinely difficult to ignore things which sound alarming but usually either nonsense or much less alarming, than it is to actively investigate everything, whether it seems alarming or not.

The later is much more difficult but also a lot more fruitful - it is why Google News was so good, a simple collation of all news instead of only click-bait-y news, and why it is genuinely terrible now (mostly dominated by click-bait-y news again).

And again, an illustration of active versus passive - actively filtering google news feeds was fruitful, passively filtering led to algorithmic optimizations which ultimately favored high click counts and therefore more click-bait-y news...and ultimately at this point to being "click-bait highlights of the day", akin to some nonsense like yahoo or msn news.

An open source order management system is interesting to a certain number of people, but probably doesn't affect me personally. It sounds like another open web storefront builder if i had to guess based on the title.

An open source Amazon is a big deal, it implies that it aims to do what Amazon does, not just a repo you can clone and build an online store, and I might be placing orders there someday.

A distributed open source Amazon. Storing goods in people's rooms. Creating a distributed worldwide warehouse, kinda like P2P. With a fleet of uber-like delivery persons. Each participant gets a share of the profits.

Sometime I feel like submitting to blackhole when not receiving any comments, but I've adjusted the expectation over time

I think we get excited by big ideas, and things that sound like big ideas. That makes us a great sounding board. On another forums it'd be 'i like amazon, down vote' or 'i don't need that, ignore'.

At least here, we move on perceived merit, however superficial

"Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon in Rust" would be even better

I think it’s good marketing.

Amazon’s primary source of revenue is as a market-maker/logisticics provider, so why not position yourself as a competitor if it gets contributors interested?

I had thought until now that Amazon primary revenue stream is running a good chunk of the internet. Quick research tells me, you are right.

Revenue for Amazon is in the retail business. The margin however is a lot better in the AWS side. Warehouses and logistics cost real money to operate.

Amazon to most is primarily a website where you get everything mostly reliable and mostly with a consumer focussed service (I for one never had any issues when returning things, any problem was like "yeah ok, send it back, we send you a new one or do you want a refund?" ... For sellers they play a different game with their market power, discounts or they won't offer your things or rank competitors higher)

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.

Constant hassle with payment processors deciding to ban smut once you get too big, though.

> Constant hassle with payment processors deciding to ban smut once you get too big, though.

Not doing something because you might get too big is not sound reasoning.

When you get too big, that's the time to worry about it.

The payment processors will shut you down even for your first payment if it's for porn. More likely - you'll never get to a first payment anyways, they won't sign the contract.

> The payment processors will shut you down even for your first payment if it's for porn. More likely - you'll never get to a first payment anyways, they won't sign the contract.

If that was even occasionally true, the tons of paid porn sites wouldn't exist. The fact that they both exist and take popular cards tells me that that cannot possibly be true.

There are special payment processors catering to porn/etc, but the problem is that they require extremely large collateral and have other unusual requirements that are untenable to new businesses. Most probably they won't even talk to a startup (I tried, didn't get a reply). There's a reason why startups like OnlyFans used normal payment processors and tried to convince them they're not porn instead of beginning with these specialized ones.

Edit: BTW, a large portion of seemingly independent porn sites are actually run by only few companies. Especially the Xvideos corporation.

So we should pivot to building an open source payment processor for porn?

A payment processor is an entity that handles bureaucracy. It's not a piece of software you can run and forget about. It is many people working around the clock taking phone calls.

I should have been clearer and said "software to aid in running a payment processor" but I used "payment processor" as a shorthand. Just as "open-source Amazon" is shorthand for "software to aid in running an entity like Amazon."

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

Many have already done open source Google and MS. We have those solutions already, and they are great though not yet pervasive. We need open source market place and logistics, and that is where they should stay focused.

Maybe practice creating an open source Microsoft before quitting your day job?

Harsh, but true

literal LOL

For some blissful seconds I thought this post would be related to reforestation efforts.

Probably for this crowd anyway. My first thought at seeing the title was AWS, not the store front.

Also very difficult to compete with Amazon. Amazon makes their operating profits from cloud computing and subsidizes their retail market with it. That is how they keep prices so low.

The result is a form of predatory pricing which should be illegal.

Instead a company should subsidize their product with VC funding like every single company on YC does..

I would be down for an open source AWS services. Shouldn't be to hard to make web front end to the fire cracker instance, but make everything in the backend open source, so any one can run the community edition.

Any thoughts on that?

Yeah, and then you run your "open source AWS" on AWS xD. I believe what you mean it's called Open shift, kind of.

More of your storefront being portable is a big plus for any business that fears lock-in or unwanted removal from Amazon.

I haven't looked into the specifics of this offering, but if you were able to use your own custom domain for your storefront, minimise the platform's insights into your actual sales (i.e. to prevent a similar case to Amazon launching products in your niche), etc and mainly leveraging a centralised platform for the audience, then that's the best of both worlds.

It's the word "simply" that usually raises all the red flags :-)

"just" is another red flag word

My first reaction to the idea a few hours ago was along those same lines.

Coming back to the ShowHN just now, I thought “China.”

By which I guess I mean manufacturing, and not drop shippers, middlemen, importers, etc.

To me, it seems like this matches the way manufacturers multi-channel their sales, and fits the IT priorities a manufacturer is likely to have…bills of materials, inventories, forecasting, design, etc. and not a big emphasis on the web, saas, and building websites.

YMMV.

>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 reasons" to make you competitive to the niche.<

The bigger stores with IT staff and budgets would be first to join and contribute. Some of us consultants could help the smaller shops and possibly combine energies into communities or coops using shared resources.

re " how big the niche "technically literate to run their own e-commerce business, but selling on Amazon for other reasons" is,

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.

You can always do what bookshop.org did and appeal to social justice and hipster oppression. Talk about supporting "small business" and pretend that everyone's not just dropshipping from asia.

I don't think you know too much about how the book retail industry works. If people are dropshipping from anywhere, they're dropshipping from Ingram, which is in the US. Some of the stuff they carry might be printed in Asia, but it's not shipping directly from there to individual US customers. If I had to guess, this is how I'd expect bookshop.org to be fulfilling orders that they fulfill themselves. I can't remember if bookshop.org kicks any fulfillment to its indie bookstore partners, but if they do, those stores are almost certainly using Ingram dropshipping or fulfilling from the store's in-store inventory.

That said, it's still not nearly as good for indie bookstores as just buying directly from the indie bookstore, but it's pretty far from your characterization.

I was referring to OP's product. The non-book part of Amazon sources the majority of their products from asia. Bookshop was just a point of comparison. Their schtick is to complain on media (said media is conveniently on an anti-big tech crusade right now) about small indie book stores being oppressed by Amazon while ignoring the fact that most publishing is centralized upstream.

I see your point, though it wasn't as clear from your first post.

To be fair, publishers being consolidated is much smaller problem for bookstores than Amazon is. While publisher consolidation is real (Penguin Random House is quite a beast!), it is not total; many publishers exist that have not been absorbed by the major publishers. And there are multiple major publishers a tier below the aforementioned PRH. Whereas when it comes to sales, the main competitor for _all_ bookstores is pretty definitively Amazon. So there is some merit to what Bookshop is doing, and it's not quite as hypocritical as you seem to make it out to be.

Love open source projects in the eCommerce domain, especially ones that are JavaScript instead of PHP! Two pieces of feedback:

- 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.

> - 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.

What makes the AGPL unattractive? I thought it was basically just the GPL with a limitation on using the software to provide a SaaS product. You don't even have to contribute unpublished changes, right?

Before reading your comment I actually checked the licensing in the repo because I was thinking the exact opposite; using MIT would be a mistake because it's too easy to undermine the turnkey offering by selling a competing service without the cost of development.

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 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.

> Because Google's core products are services that users interact with over a remote network interface (Search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube), the consequences of an engineer accidentally depending on AGPL for one of these services are so great that we maintain an aggressively-broad ban on all AGPL software to doubly-ensure that AGPL could never be incorporated in these services in any manner.

FWIW, every company I've ever worked at bans AGPL products / code.

> 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.

the toxic combination is (a) virality and (b) remote end user access triggering the GPL rights.

You could have one but not the other. We really need "LAGPL" to parallel LGPL, to make it clear that there is a clear and well defined way to stop the "remote access" part of AGPL from propagating accidentally into proprietary code.

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.

I always cackle a bit when someone points out that GPL-family licenses are incompatible with large-scale enterprise heavily relying on proprietary technology for value extracting. Obviously GPL is incompatible and that's a feature and not a bug.

If Google truly had to be competitive, they surely could figure out ways to make AGPL work. But they don't have to because for now they're just taking everyone's data practically for free.

that really give one a sad state on the reality of business.

the fact that google is against AGPL, makes it even more important to use it! Whatever is good for google, it is not good for humanity, and whatever google doesn't like is beneficial for humanity. Support AGPL!

> FWIW, every company I've ever worked at bans AGPL products / code.

Is every company you've ever worked for a software vendor? Because those are the only companies that would be impacted at all by using AGPL products/code.

Any business that uses AGOL software needs to be able to provide the source code of that AGPL software to people who use their services

That is… just not something most online stores are interested in adding to their compliance burden.

And of course they will have changes. It’s a business software platform, the only way to accomplish some things is going to be through adding or modifying code.

> Any business that uses AGOL software needs to be able to provide the source code of that AGPL software to people who use their services

Step 1: add GitHub link to footer on website

...that's it, you have achieved compliance.

This "wah the AGPL is too viral" argument is the same FUDdy duddy nonsense Microsoft was whining about back in the early 2000's about the original GPL - and it's even less of a valid argument now than it was then, thanks to the existence of umpteen bajillion Git repo hosts that will gladly handle distributing said source code (and therefore making you compliant with the terms of said code's license) at zero cost to you.

Step 2: take responsibility for all the content of that GitHub link being free of copyright infingements, patent violations, etc.

And you missed step 0: convince the boss there’s a good reason why your e-commerce storefront needs to have a link to a GitHub page on it.

> Step 2: take responsibility for all the content of that GitHub link being free of copyright infingements, patent violations, etc.

You already do this when using any open-source software (because your legal right to use it depends on upstream's legal right to distribute it to you), so if any other FOSS license is okay then so is AGPL by this metric.

> And you missed step 0: convince the boss there’s a good reason why your e-commerce storefront needs to have a link to a GitHub page on it.

You already do this for license text / copyright info when using software under nearly any other FOSS license (unless you thought those attribution requirements in the MIT/ISC/BSD/etc. licenses were mere suggestions?).

> The primary risk presented by AGPL is that any product or service that depends on AGPL-licensed code ... _may be_ subject to the virality of the AGPL license.

This is aggressive scare tactics. It's very straightforward when this is triggered.

When you're using code unmodified as a library (whether source or binary) it's not triggered at all.

When you _do_ make upstream modifications, it's triggered. That is the specific risk, and it is easily satisfied by open-sourcing the full modified version.

The whole "if a remote user uses it" argument is FUD. It closes a loophole in GPL where remote use != distribution.

Google is hostile to copyleft full stop. So are other bigcos and cargo-culting smallcos/startups. That doesn't make it right.

There is no such thing as virality, you always retain your own copyright over the code if you don't publish it under the AGPL. If you use AGPL code in a non AGPL codebase you are merely violating copyright and must remove the AGPL code from your codebase.

In this case, there is nothing at all wrong with a GPL license. Everyone is answering from the perspective of a software company. That isn't who this product seems to be targeting. It's targeting businesses that sell physical goods and need a virtual storefront to do that. They aren't looking to fork this and repackage it as a different product. The purpose of it being open source at all is so they can more easily self-host it. If you self-host an application you don't fork and modify, there is nothing for you to publish. The source was already published by the person you got the code from in the first place.

Thank you for adding practical sanity to this thread.

This ignores the fact that AGPL has no strict definition of “forking/modifying”.

So, adding text/marketing copy (see user comment on a restaurant app use case) can be seen as a modification.

For an app like this, that would typically be configuration in the database. (Think WordPress; are you writing your marketing copy in plugin source code or are you writing it using the page editing functionality?) The AGPL doesn’t require you to publish your database.

There's a lot of FUD out there about GPL licenses and they've become pretty unpopular over the last decade. There are trade-offs, but there's nothing wrong with using the AGPL if that aligns with your own goals and values.

> What makes the AGPL unattractive? I thought it was basically just the GPL with a limitation on using the software to provide a SaaS product. You don't even have to contribute unpublished changes, right?

The things AGPL adds to GPL don't just affect people trying to do a SaaS offering of the program. If you modify it and users interact with it over a computer network you have to make source for your modified version available to them.

For example suppose it was software to add online ordering to restaurants. A restaurant modifies its copy so that it can be given the recipes of the items they sell and the modified software uses that information to allow customers to easily exclude items they might be allergic to or that violate their religious or ethical eating rules.

If that restaurant wants to use that as a competitive advantage over other restaurants they aren't going to want to have to give away their modifications, so aren't going to want to use AGPL software. They'd probably be fine with GPL software.

The kind of arguments you raise here have always, to me, basically looked like:

"I want something for nothing"

Or in more detail:

"I want to take something you created and agreed to share with me (on the proviso I like-wise share any changes as an exchange of value). I deem your software valuable to me but I won't be paying you money for it. I'll add something else to it so it fits my use-case. But, I refuse/object to sharing my changes because they're valuable."

> If that restaurant wants to use that as a competitive advantage over other restaurants they aren't going to want to have to give away their modifications, so aren't going to want to use AGPL software.

That's exactly the kinds of scenario the AGPL was written to avoid, right? The free software movement doesn't see software as a competitive advantage worth protecting; software is information that should be free.

To put it another way, if somebody releases software under a license that says "You may use and modify this for free, but you must contribute your changes back to the world," then your scenario seems perfectly fair.

As someone working on a product that uses open source, GPL makes development more complex.

With a permissive license, I can make a decision, with my manager, to use a technology based on its merit.

Office bureaucrats get weird when you talk about the GPL. When using it, I have to involve lawyers in the company, they don’t understand why the technology is important, but they have a bunch of questions, and to answer them it takes up time from my team. Upper management is involved and wants to know if we can use anything else, or they’ll phrase it as a question like: why can’t you use anything else? You have to deal with a lot more office politics when you use GPL instead of doing development work. So I’d say that’s the biggest downside for developers is that it wastes their time.

AGPL is banned from every corporation I have ever seen.

Because it's viral even when it is used internally, you might end up having to release things you never expected and that are very sensitive.

It would be insane to allow anyone to use AGPL code in any corporate environment.

MongoDB is effectively licensed under the AGPL and seems to have no problem being used by corporations of all sizes.

MongoDB is licenses as SSPL which is non Open Source license all together

BUT this is only if you are not paying for MongoDB. If you do chances are you're using MongoDB Enterprise which is licensed under commercial license or MongoDB Atlas all together

SSPL is a nearly verbatim copy of AGPL, except one section. It is more restrictive than the AGPL, in a way that many feel is anti-competitive, which is why it's not considered Open Source by many, but also in a way which doesn't really change the argument here IMO.

In fact, here's a diff of AGPL and SSPL, provided by MongoDB: https://webassets.mongodb.com/_com_assets/legal/SSPL-compare...

They took AGPL and modified it a bit to arrive at SSPL (See Section 13).

MongoDB - the application is. MongoDB - the service isn't.

You can use an Oracle database (however ugly its licensing is) without having an oracle license on every piece of data you expose. The same is true of Mongo license and the data it exposes as a service.

The AGPL in this case is "you use MongoDB - someone wants to know about it, the source for MongoDB is over there." MongoDB AGPL doesn't 'infect' the application it is part of.

Now, if you were to fork MongoDB and do something with that fork (FongoDB), and that deployed FongoDB would need to make it's source code available if it was accessible - not the entire application that it is part of or components that use the data that it provides.

Yes, that's the entire purpose of the AGPL. If that's the outcome this person wants for their project, they should consider the AGPL.

I'm attempting to counter the narrative that no corporation would touch any AGPL software, because it's clear that how you are using the software is an important part of the equation.

MongoDB no longer uses the AGPL licence.

Looking at https://webassets.mongodb.com/_com_assets/legal/SSPL-compare... and in particular section 13, this is an attempt to squash a cloud service from packaging MongoDB and their own custom backup and UI software without offering the backup and UI software also under the license.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/16/mongodb-switches-up-its-op...

> MongoDB is a bit miffed that some cloud providers — especially in Asia — are taking its open-source code and offering a hosted commercial version of its database to their users without playing by the open-source rules.

> So while the SSPL isn’t all that different from the GNU GPLv3, with all the usual freedoms to use, modify and redistribute the code (and virtually the same language), the SSPL explicitly states that anybody who wants to offer MongoDB as a service — or really any other software that uses this license — needs to either get a commercial license or open source the service to give back the community.

If I was to write blog software that is backed by MongoDB, that blog software doesn't have to be released under the SSPL.

That said, the license and its application to patches on older versions would raise some eyebrows in legal with (likely valid) concerns that an upgrade of a point release may change the license on them as it was done before. In the interest of minimizing risk for the organization, the license and the company that changes its license so easily would be ones that would get extra scrutiny and developers using it would likely be advised to ask permission rather than forgiveness when dealing with it (rather than the other way around) as the risk to the org is greater than accidentally incorporating some GPL code in a service.

Wouldn’t those corporations just purchase the commercial license MongoDB offers, though?

Maybe? The commercial version has some extra features, but if you don't need them then there's probably no need to. I imagine there is more value in paying for a support contract.

My 2 cents :

In an ecosystem like this you may want to have businesses build extensions or plugins that they'd sell. GPL has this reputation of spreading to everything it touches, and as such would scare them away.

like wordpress plugin marketplace?

I wish

Exposing the API/Web pages is considered distribution.

>What makes the AGPL unattractive?

My two cents: it juts isn't in business culture to contribute to public good.

>Using a copyleft license like AGPL makes this an automatic non-starter for most businesses, no matter how impressive your tech might be.

Maybe some (but certainly not most!) tech businesses, but what makes you think that vendors of real-world products give a shit about AGPL?

https://drewdevault.com/2020/07/27/Anti-AGPL-propaganda.html

> Using a copyleft license like AGPL makes this an automatic non-starter

Completely disagree. It protects the end user, and if another license is absolutely necessary, they can negotiate for it or create a different service tier.

AGPL with paid alternative licensing is strictly superior to MIT for start-ups.

js has come a long way but i'm skeptical that it's maturing fast enough for this to be the right medium- to long-term language/platform choice for something that's meant to be more infrastructure than just web app. and while php[0] is long past the hype cycle, it's more proven in this role than js, but even that is usually superceded, or at least augmented, by more "industrial" languages when approaching amazon's scale. for instance even mid-market WMS systems are often written in compiled languages like C# because of the need for speed and robustness.

[0]: nowadays i prefer ruby/rails, which can also get you pretty far before needing extra help.

Isn't this project mostly about interfaces for businesses to connect their guts? The language used to implement services behind common interfaces shouldn't matter all that much. It's just the reference implementation in js, no?

i didn't examine deeply but it seemed to me the backend is running on node, and that it was meant to be the implementation, not just a reference.

Akin to saying: "You should not ask businesses for money for your work, because they do not like it."

Greedy businesses not wanting to contribute back can buy another license and have their way, at least paying the maker(s) of this project.

AGPL by default with a paid, non-copyleft license would be a good business model.

> especially ones that are JavaScript instead of PHP why?

Those efforts look impressive but no service will be a version (open source or otherwise) of Amazon until it can place a single tube of toothpaste in my garage 18 hours after I ordered it, which it just did thirty minutes ago.

Amazon’s “tech” stack, both consumer- and seller-facing is horrible and borderline irrelevant.

Their fleet of trucks and aircraft is not.

18 hours is a pretty stupid selling point IMO. You either need something immediately or you can wait. Rarely do I need anything 18 hours from now.

I think many sellers would love to not be locked into Amazon and at least use something like this as an additional alternative. I'm on the other side of the table where I avoid buying from Amazon as much as possible.

18 hours is overnight.

Last night "Hmm. Toothpaste almost gone. Let me check the linen closet. Nope. Excuse me while I whip this out. (gasp) Swipe, tap, tap, t-o-o-t-h (autocomplete), scroll, tap, tap, tap. Done."

Used the last this morning, new toothpaste delivered at noon.

I shop online exclusively because one of my first jobs was in retail and it is my solemn duty to do everything I can to annihilate the brick and mortar store, to erase it from existence to the point that it remembered only as a distant cultural echo by future generations.

This is all I can do, and it is enough.

I even get booze delivered so I don't have to stand in line as some tweaker tries to buy lottery tickets with handfuls of quarters at the liquor store.

Despite what the internet might have you think, fulfillment centers for every single distributor or retailer are run the same so I choose amazon because they can get many things here in 4-6 hours, most of the rest the overnight, and weird stuff in two days.

You have an interesting (and I find pitiable) perspective here. I live in a small town, and brick and mortar stores are how many folks survive here.

I, and many other townfolk go out of our way to expressly shop in town. This helps create an interesting, culturally vibrant downtown, filled with shops and restaurants.

My saturday mornings usually involve me walking the town, poking my head into shops, saying hi to folks I might know along the way, and supporting a local business here or there.

I can't imagine wanting to get rid of all of this, possibly even irreversibly so, for the sake of efficiency.

Who hurt you?

You obviously live in a much nicer place. Sounds like the GP lives in a rougher neighborhood in a larger city, which if you’ve never experienced, can definitely leave you wanting to avoid having to shop in public.

It is crazy how things are different around the world. I can't imagine buying something online what I can just walk 6 mins and buy in a shop.

My local brick and mortar store is less than five minutes away. Why the hell do I have to replace it with an even more expensive alternative store that increases the waiting time by a factor of 216?

It's almost never 5 minutes though, is it? You have to get there, park if you are using a car, possibly pay for parking, depending on the location, go look for the things that you want all over the store, possibly not find some of them, wait in line which could be quite long, get to the car, drive back. All this time will add up.

Instead, I can do some of that shopping on my computer or phone, then quickly reference it again or even set up auto deliveries. A lot of times it'll be cheaper too because I can comparison shop.

For me, it's about convenience and saving time and money. It won't be the same for everyone, of course. The location where you live will dictate whether this shopping experience is similar to yours or not.

A next day thing can save a trip to the shops, and more importantly one less thing on the todo list. You don’t need to remember to buy it.

2+ days is a world away from tomorrow. If it is that it needs to wait until the next shopping trip.

For “now” I would just have to go to the shops. Although Uber could deliver it from a petrol station for three times the price if desperate and lazy.

I have got embarrassing small orders on uber before :)

Imo it’s less about the speed than the predictability.

I routinely pick the “next Monday and we’ll give you two bucks digital credit or whatever” option because I assume it’ll make the shipping a little more efficient or make some factory grunt’s life easier, and I’ll still pick Amazon over other vendors because when they say Monday, they mean Monday.

I’m always able to track the shipment, it’s always predictable, I never have to wonder. It’s a less tangible feature but far more valuable.

>18 hours is a pretty stupid selling point IMO. You either need something immediately or you can wait. Rarely do I need anything 18 hours from now.

Stupid or not, hard to argue with Amazon's income sheet. Obviously most people disagree. I don't disagree fwiw.

18 hours is a fantastic selling point for me. I am willing to wait a couple of days for something that I bought. Beyond that, I'd rather just go out and buy it.

Lol Amazon would disagree and are laughing their way to the bank.

Amazon's retail branch is supported by AWS' profit, so no.

I’m pretty happy to live in world where it’s difficult to build a business where you move trucks around cities to deliver a single tube of toothpaste to someone who ordered it the day before. Yes, it’s hard to do this as fast as Amazon does. But should we really go that way, anyway?

>But should we really go that way, anyway?

Yes.

It is more efficient from an energy, carbon, land usage, and labor perspective.

The bluish-grey van that delivered my toothpaste had several hundred other deliveries on it, and the warehouse it came from stocks the products of hundreds of stores (if not more).

How do you think a tube of toothpaste gets to "Ye Olde Mum and Pop's Auntie Emma's Down Home Crunchy Granola Authentic and Real Indie Small Business"? Trucks.

> It is more efficient from an energy, carbon, land usage, and labor perspective

That's very doubtful. Normally you'd get toothpaste along with a bunch of other items. The convenience of delivery means you no longer purchase in batches. Batches is more efficient in every sense.

Maybe the mom and pop's supply chain could be shorter and more efficient, but the OP was talking about whether we should be going down the path of immediate delivery of small orders.

Not to mention the endless packaging these deliveries arrive in.

> How do you think a tube of toothpaste gets to "Ye Olde Mum and Pop's Auntie Emma's Down Home Crunchy Granola Authentic and Real Indie Small Business"? Trucks.

With one truck every two weeks that deliver toothpastes as boxes of 1000s. That’s one truck for all the customers that will go in that shop over two weeks.

Compare that to 2-3 trucks to directly deliver all these people one package per toothpaste. The only way to lower the delivery times is to increase the number of trucks.

Think of a tree where leaves are customers and the root is the producer. Each other node is an intermediary. In the worst case, if all customers go by foot in one shop that gets direct deliveries from the producer, you use only one truck (producer->shop). If all N customers are delivered by the producer, in the worst case, you use N trucks (producer->customer).

> It is more efficient from an energy, carbon, land usage, and labor perspective.

It would be if they saved up all orders from a week, and then send it all to you at the end of the week in a single delivery.

You're right, amazon is a logistics company first and foremost. But if you can replace the website with something like this and then let all the other logistics providers (ups, USPS, FedEx, dhl unfortunately) handle the logistics you can re-enable competition in this space.

A lot (most?) of that is contractor based now, though. At least the last mile. And from the sounds of it, most of the contractors aren't huge fans of Amazon anyways. Seems like it would not be insurmountable to leverage that market for similar delivery times.

Most contractors also don’t care.

https://bol.com in the Netherlands has delivery within a few hours (by bicycle) for some cities and select products. I got in this way an inflatable mattress (old one was punctured, so I needed one by the evening for my guests) and a few other electronic devices or household items.

Bol.com gives me hope that Amazon competitors can survive by excelling in their local market.

Well the mattress would have to be inflatable to be delivered by bicycle

The bikes are stronk here [0]!

[0]: https://rollingspoke.com/how-to-move-things-on-a-bike/

Delivery is done with cargo bikes

> Their fleet of trucks and aircraft is not.

A little while ago I drove past a giant blue pyramid dedicated to the grand and wise Jeff Bezos where I can only imagine The Great God of Online Commerce conducts his human sacrifice rituals on unwitting union organizers. Pretty sure they are currently keeping the management indoctrination ceremonies low key being Labor Day weekend and all that.

And people thought the Long Beach shipping container height restrictions were lifted over practical concerns…

Amazon.com is likely the most a/b tested piece of software on the planet. It is ugly and clunky because that's what _works_ - same with Alibaba and Yahoo JP.

It's ugly and clunky because a) Jeff used to guard it fiercely, b) because a/b testing is not guaranteed to get the best results, and c) you might just be on the "ugly" a/b test.

They could make the UI better if they wanted to, but they don't, because of reliability.

For most enterprises, if it works, don't touch it.

> Amazon.com is likely the most a/b tested piece of software on the planet. It is ugly and clunky because that's what _works_ - same with Alibaba and Yahoo JP.

This was on the HN frontpage yesterday: "Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32651763

I’ve seen countless bad decisions being taken because the A/B test was badly done. You can’t assume that some decision was good JUST because they A/B-tested it.

"It is ugly and clunky because that's what _works_"

It's a legacy code nightmare, but customers are used to it and this is #1 reason why it will not be changed anytime soon.

It's been ugly forever, and there have been several wholesale rewrites (C++ -> Perl -> Java, and JavaScript and whatever is in native apps)

Amazon ios app is pretty trash. I keep getting blank white screens, it has been this way for months.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/tto68z/anyone_else_get...

That is not true, some parts might be clunky because that works, but there's also many parts that are clunky simply because it's hard to make a change without breaking anything. But amazon doesn't care due to their strong position in the market and because AWS is their cash-cow anyways.

i read somewhere that bezos personally controls the look and feel of amazon and thats why it looks like that. some amazon UX/UI director even quit over it

Probably not so much anymore..

its not what works, its whats good enough, or not bad enough to cause an obvious problem. well maybe thats what you mean by "works" i dunno

getting stuff that fast is very stupid 98% of the time. people may like it and want it and sing its praises, but its mostly stupid. and i think stupid things generally tend to die out. that is all to say that maybe that edge that amazon has is not that important.

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 dramatically, and customer trust / sentiment skyrocketed.

My understanding is that in certain regions Amazon offers the option to consolidate orders to be delivered on a specific day. This is actually impressive as it's much harder to do at scale than you'd imagine.

> 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 optimize because we had 1M products and were using just-in-time logistics with very little inventory. This is a specific market that Amazon hasn’t really entered yet, but when they’ll do they’ll crush everyone.

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.

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.

how is it not kind of stupid to prioritize getting something asap over being genuine?

The growth potential and the customer satisfaction.

The sad reality is that a large majority of people don't actually use products they buy. They want the satisfaction of getting a new "quality" product and imagine it gives them status.

that is stupid, which is what im saying

Even if it’s stupid, the sad reality is that most people want things as fast as possible and will always gravitate towards it.

18 hours — Or ~ 4 hours if you're in Japan.

It’s sweet, definitely helps that most people live near one of a handful of cities.

I think it's fantastic.

Growth will be slow. This is something like xmpp or mastodon, people will use it for sure, it will grow over time, but you're not going to see an explosion of use like amazon did. Keep at it, your work is much needed and this system you're building is wonderful.

Don't concern yourself with monetization too much. I know you need to eat, HN is populated largely by people in startups (because it's run by a sv startup accelerator) and you'll have a lot of replies asking you how you'll monetize and giving you advice on that. Don't do anything too hasty, don't break what you're building by being short sighted. You can run storefronts as a service to people who don't want to, that's in your back pocket (or front pocket, I don't know your plans), so changing the open dynamic of this thing is not necessary and it would end the whole value proposition of what you're building.

I don't know if you are familiar with OpenBazaar, if you aren't take a look at it and see if you can get any ideas from it, or even if you think what you're building could improve on it. I think it's cool but lacking and I think what you're putting together could actually be widely useable.

So this is really a open-source Shopify replacement, right? An OMS that lets you sell on multiple channels (website, Amazon, Instagram, Etsy…) and manage/fulfill those orders in one location?

I was confused at first by your title (open source Amazon) which seemed like it was going to be a e-commerce marketplace like Amazon.com - but it seems like that’s the 2nd step.

Why does a new e-commerce marketplace also require a new open-source OMS? OMS’s have a lot of seller lock-in, but it seems like way less lift to have OpenSourceAmazon.com be a channel sellers using Shopify’s OMS can sell on with a few simple steps on Shopify.

For reference, Shopify already has https://shop.app/ which does some browsing and recommendations based on your product purchase history, so while it's still "you must use shopify as your storefront", I don't see it as much different from this guy's product.

Perhaps the selling point is "nobody can deplatform you", but chances are not many places have that problem (shopify is against doing it for political content[0]), and if that's the case, all this does for you is force you to hire a team to handle scaling the systems once you need to support tens of thousands of concurrent users.

0: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/shopify-f...

I think this is a good solution for businesses that are starting to outgrow their home garages. Here's my feedback:

When I read this post and looked at the site I thought you were offering a turnkey drop shipping solution service. I also had the impression that you offered warehousing and other logistical services.

I know this is not the case, but it took me several minutes to figure out what exactly was happening.

Wouldn't this be more of an open source Ebay then, if the logistic components, which make up much of Amazon's value, are not there?

Quick note, the third submission was automatically blocked by the HN algorithms. Posting the same three times in 24h is too much.

> Show HN: I'm building an open-source order management system and marketplace API

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

> Using open-source to disrupt marketplaces

Yes I saw that. The last one was a blog post I made in 2019 describing the vision in detail.

Nothing wrong with wanting to showcase what you're working on but don't spam HN when you're not pleased with the amount of eyeballs on it (At least not multiple times within 24 hours with varying titles like you're trying to AB test)

Even if you say that, it totally worked, so they have little incentive to take your advise.

in india they are doing some thing called ONDC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Network_for_Digital_Comme...

ONDC is not an application, an intermediary, or software, but a set of specifications designed to foster open interchange and connections between shoppers, technology platforms, and retailers.[3] Technological self reliance, demand for level playing field mainly from small retailers, lower the barrier of entry and discovery online, adoption of open digital ecosystem across key sectors and fixing the non-competitive behavior of big ecommerce firms like Amazon and Flipkart to capture the US$810 billion domestic retail market led to its creation.[4] Designed to keep check on Big Tech companies from violating Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) (Amendment) Rules, 2021 due to concentration of market power by integrating them into an open-source decentralised network where data portability will break data silos while data interoperability will allow innovation.

What would be an Amazon-killer for me as a consumer -- and just about the only thing that I can imagine that would be -- is something like Amazon that connected me to the inventory of local merchants where I could buy things for same-day or next-day delivery via something like Doordash. There is a ton of inventory within a 30-60 minute drive of my house (in the Bay Area) but no centralized service to connect me to it, so if I want some glassware and some shower cleaner (my actual current use-case) I have to visit two different merchants, place two different orders, set up two accounts, take twice the risk with my credit card number, etc. A centralized order dispatcher that was connected to local inventory and delivery which would let me order everything I needed all in one place and know that fulfillment would come from local merchants that I can trust to vet their suppliers would kick some serious tushy.

I drive for Amazon flex and they’re beginning to trial orders similar to what you describe.

I don’t have a clue what the interface for ordering is like, but I know there’s a new offer type where I’m expected to pick up orders from one-or-several brick and mortar stores in a single shopping plaza before delivering

Yeah, this doesn't surprise me. Amazon certainly could do this. The problem is one of branding. Amazon is ridiculously convenient but they now have a well-deserved reputation that the quality of the products you get from them is a total crap shoot every time. If there was something like Amazon that I could rely on to deliver quality, I would happily pay extra for that. I think there's a window of opportunity for someone else to step in and become the "Amazon for reliable local quality" in the same way that e.g. NextDoor has become the "Facebook for local interactions". And I hope someone does because Amazon really needs some serious competition.

This is really high quality work, great job!

> Let me know what you guys think of the idea and if you see any potential pitfalls.

Yes, so I don't agree with this:

> This model can be used to disrupt any marketplace from AirBNB to UberEats: building tech for home renters and restaurants and later, leveraging that to build a competing marketplace.

Because the value in a marketplace is the people, not the tech. Here's a thought experiment: if Amazon were to open-source their entire marketplace tomorrow, what would change? My answer is: close to nothing.

What makes marketplaces so hard is that you need people - on both the demand and supply sides.

You seem to have a good handle on the tech and the way that businesses use it, so keep talking to people and I'm confident that you'll find a valuable niche! People will find the quality of your work very compelling.

One of these day someone will do OpenBazaar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBazaar) right. They were on to something, and just possibly, all this infrastructure built around web3 might not be completely useless for that kind of a distributed marketplace.

This is a fantastic idea, and you're off to a great start.

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 happen to be building this exact same product, but closed source, and somewhat attached at the hip to my company's 3PL WMS product.

One thing I did not see in your demo, is inventory synchronization. I'm guessing thats because your first use-case is drop shipping.

I'd also disagree that you're open-source Amazon. You're more like open-source DropStream or maybe Boomi.

If I were you, I'd do this:

1) Pick an open-source WMS and write a channel for it. 2) Make it dead easy to write ad-hoc channels. 3) Quickly implement shop connectors for BigCommerce, Magento, and WooCommerce.

Good luck!

This seems like a reseller's dream. If you're lucky enough to find an untapped resource on Etsy, Shopify, eBay, etc and you think you can market it better and flip it for a profit - create your own stores, route the orders through OpenShip and have the lesser-known seller fulfill them for you.

I didn't dig in, but in that above scenario, does the "supplier" dropship directly to my buyer or does it come to me and I reship it?

It goes directly to your buyer. Once you start getting a lot of orders, you can private label, order in bulk, and ship it yourself by just changing the channel. You can become the supplier people dropship from.

Saying that you're building an open source Amazon to complete with Amazon is like saying that you're working on an audio player skin to compete with Winamp.

Amazon isn't a web site. It's the one of the most sophisticated supply chain systems on the planet. The website is what people interface with, but it's also one of the most inconsequential parts of the system with regards for why people use it.

On your deployment page[0], it says you can deploy the entire thing to Vercel or Netlify and pass in the postgres connection string to the frontend directly. Am I understanding this correctly? Is the connection string for the database readable from the front end?

[0]https://docs.openship.org/deployment

It uses Next.js API routes as the backend which is all server-side.

I really like the look of the site. And seems like wonderful work.

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.

This looks really nice but it's really hard to tell 'what it is' from your website.

I can't make heads or tails of it.

You have:

A powerful new standard for fulfillment Multi-channel fulfillment at scale

And then kind of a complicated diagram.

"Get Started!" <- with what?

Who is this for? What problem does it solve? 'What is it' and roughly how does it work?

Mid way through your landing page you have this UX experience where 1,2,3 etc fade in and out with some kind of relative diagram at the bottom - this is also confusing and counter-intuitive. I see why you'd want to do that, but don't. Just find a way to express the concept without that oddity.

"Let me know what you guys think of the idea "

80% of makers fail to express their idea in digestible terms. It's shocking and uncanny but the reality is 1/2 of ideas fail because they are never communicated properly.

I think from the comments here on HN this looks pretty neat - congrats - please work on communicating it.

I don’t think you should compare it to Amazon. What makes Amazon so popular isn’t the that their store front / reseller portal / interface is great.

What makes people buy from Amazon is the speed in which you get your product and their customer service.

Do companies want or need an open source Amazon? To me, Shopify fills this role. Buyers just want cheap and fast, and sellers just want more profits.

Amazon isn't a software company - it's a logistics company that specializes in distribution of anything, anywhere, at the absolute minimum price to maintain profits.

Most of what Amazon does software-wise Shopify covers - the storefront, sales, marketing, analytics, and even some of the distribution logistics.

What Shopify doesn't do is analyze your businesses sales, create competing products and drive you out of business.

We already do this via hypernile.com although we are not open source.

The biggest challenge for you will be shipping from the 3pl. Amazon warehouses all talk to each other and it helps them keep the shipping costs bare minimum.

We use machine learning at scale to replicate it and we have made good progress however we haven't been able to distribute inventory between warehouses. Amazon can do it because they have their own distribution trucks while we are surviving on eating ramen for dinner

The hardest part is convincing warehouses to connect into our network

I also work with basically every Amazon selling platform globally: Vendor Central (Direct PO) in the US and EU and Seller Central in the US, CA, MX, UK, DE, FR, IT, ES, TR, PL, NL, JP, AU, and SG.

The software is (generally) not the issue. The software is great. The service is great. FBA can be a game changer in many regions.

The real problem with the Amazon, from a seller/brand/manufacture perspective is support. If you get banned—if there is a hiccup, or if there is a problem of any kind—it is a nightmare (or straight up impossible) to resolve.

I don't really want to own the software. I want to talk to a human when something goes wrong. I want to talk to someone who will ban a seller infringing on my trademarks. I want to talk to someone who will give me control of my listings when someone else hijacks them.

Amazon is, for better or worse, where the customers are. I have a good product and I don't have to pay for advertising. I don't want to have to pay for advertising to get people to go somewhere else. I just want to be able to talk to a human on occasion to resolve issues. I do millions of dollars of business every year with Amazon and reaching a human—let alone a human who can actually do something—is the most frustrating part of Amazon.

I own an ecommerce company, I've used 3PLs, and I just can't see how you could have a meaningful market for this (and to be clear I mean the current product at openship.org, not everything that you're describing).

It's basically a many-to-many connector of storefronts to 3PLs. The problem is very few people have multiple of either, let alone both. Nobody's on Shopify + WooCommerce + Wix and fulfilling from Shippo and Vistaprint.

Unless you have someone with multiple options at both ends, this isn't needed - there are 3PLs that can integrate with multiple storefronts and storefronts that can integrate with multiple 3PLs. No need to pay for a third party connector to do that.

If there is a company out there with some complex need for multiple of everything, it's probably big enough to have a dev team to integrate all their services anyway.

The bigger picture that you describe is interesting in theory, but it misses the point of Amazon's value. Amazon has infrastructure, sure, but what really matters is they have customers. I sell from my website, but I'm also on Amazon because all I had to do was list my products there and people started buying them. On my own site, I have to acquire those customers.

> What if there was a marketplace where all the underlying tech was open-source?

What about the actual "marketplace" part? E.g. the channel-partner product listing management; the product recommendation engine that combines global factors (user reviews) with personalized interest; the shopping cart that packing-problem's your order on checkout into separate orders according to logistics-provider constraints, etc. When you say "open-source Amazon", this is the part I envision.

As far as I know, many pieces of the technology stack required to be an individual FBA seller already mostly exist as FOSS; but what does not exist as FOSS, is the technology to build your own two-sided-marketplace on which others can list products for sale.

Even more starkly, the software and systems to run an "Amazon-style" warehouse to back that marketplace — one where the sellers on your marketplace can send you SKUs of merchandise to hold such that you can then centrally fulfill orders for a bunch of sellers, and the whole ecosystem of backend support to allow them to remotely manage that held inventory — are nowhere to be found outside of Amazon itself, for love or money.

What a coincidence! Last week, I wrote the following:

"Had an idea I’ve been stewing on for a few days now… a decentralized (not tied to any one company) Amazon Prime. As a user, you would pay a yearly fee and get free shipping from all the participating eComs. As a partnering eCom, you get more repeat customers."

I can see this being a product (or a feature) you can offer down the road.

I used to work in Amazon Supply Chain Systems Software, many years ago. Yes a key component of what amazon does is software, but... that is not all what supply chain systems are. They are human processes, and physical things.

There exists many systems that lets you take orders online and put them in the mail. There are not many systems that lets you cheaply ship things to users in like 1-2 days.

Best of luck!

What's your USP compared to others in this crowded iPaaS+EDI space (ex. Celigo, Boomi, SPS, etc.)? Maintaining reliable integrations requires a lot of money, especially at scale and even more so when traversing borders. And EDI 850 is pretty well-entrenched. I guess I'm mostly asking who is this for, like specifically what size and type of customer?

I instinctively like this idea a lot, and the website does a really good job of explaining the concept.

Good luck with it!

When I want to buy something, like cat litter or dish soap or notepads, I open a browser and type "amazon.com" and search for what I need. What should I type instead if I want to support your open source approach? It wasn't clear to me from your writeup.

May the universe of good energy be bestowed on you. all the best. I am so excited just to read this.

Make it not only open-source, but decentralized too. Also, maybe it is possible to use federation, so a system of reputation may work and buyers can know what they are really buying. This may prevent it from being taken over or becoming flooded with scams.

I think this is a great idea. I am for moving closer to local-first infrastructure.

For this to work, businesses would have to hire IT personnel or a consultant to implement and maintain it. There is also how much this can synergize with self-hosting.

One of the things I'm looking at doing are distributed software forges and "community supported software" (that uses open-source and free software as its base).

Also, there was an article posted here about the semantic web and a mention of something called the "data mesh". I think being able to interchange data will be important. Without that, then you're still locked into the software and possibly the vendor customized things for you.

Sounds like your business model is managed hosting of the open source project.

Is that subject to change?

Are you planning on additional revenue streams (like open core)?

Are you aware of the incentives with the managed hosting model? If not, it is that you're incentivised to make it harder to install, so people choose your hosting and to make it harder to move to self-hosted, so people can't leave. How do you plan to mitigate those issues?

Are you planning on adding something like whitelabeling, which would allow other companies to also sell Openship hosting, competing with your hosting? Would you prevent someone from contributing that to the main codebase?

I've been thinking about a clone of amazon marketplace that can be run/operated by small cities/towns to support local commerce. Anyone have any thoughts on this or seen any other similar projects?

Very nice but keep this in mind, the tech is the easy part. Getting a whole community who contributes to it in the long term is the hard part.

The genius of Linus Torvalds wasn't that he started an OS. Although, that was smart on it's own. The genius was that he was able to motivate a bunch of people to contribute to the project for decades. Learn how he did that and you can have a solution that can change the world.

The best part is that there are a bunch of people that are willing to help. You just need to create a project where people can contribute to move it forward.

Good job and good luck.

You recommend any reading on how Linus achieved that?

I don't but I would start by understanding how the contribution process for Linux works now. You can at least understand what works now. Also, making a plan and making it public will help a lot. You should make it easy to communicate and gather like minded people.

It's a long term project. Remember that what Amazon is was created over 2+ decades. The advantage you have is that you can duplicate what Amazon is without having to try stuff that never worked out.

The change in your past HN posts from "open source order management system" to "open-source Amazon" is a great case of vision selling better than the product itself.

When I read the title, I assumed they were taking on AWS, not setting themselves up to sit between a business and their customers.

That would allow to have noscript/basic (x)html portals for many market places.

amazon was still noscript/basic (x)html compliant (with wallet codes) 2 years ago... now it's gone.

I don't do any selling on Amazon, mostly purchase, but the interface and the tools for what I understand is to aggregate products for selling into one place is spot on.

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 success, such as with regulatory capture.

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 forgot to add a conclusion somehow.

And yet, somehow we ended up with Googles, FBs, Amazons, Teslas and multiple other in tech sector alone over the past few decades. Neither of those started even close to existing dominant forces in the market.

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.

<< I don't understand your objection.

Tesla exists. Cars are an existing and crowded market. And yet, despite that, Tesla managed to not only enter, but survive. If that is possible, parent's claim that:

"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."

is simply not accurate.

<< It's either an accurate way of looking at things or not.

Based on example of Tesla, it is not accurate.

The consumer experience is that unregulated "open" markets fall prey quickly to abuse of many kinds which bewilder, mislead, and defraud.

Consider the now-standard criticism of Amazon wrt cookie-cutter phantom brands with identical products; false reviews; etc etc.

or one of the "amusing(?) stories of the week" about the fraudulent 30TB SSD on Walmart (another open market).

If you don't build protections for the customer in at the ground level, well...

Seems like there are two ideas here.

1. A way to keep your data/parts of your business after you've been kicked off a platform. I say parts because amazon is much more than just OMS, CMS, support platform. 2. Tools to build a marketplace. Which, besides being open source, how is this idea different than https://www.sharetribe.com/?

Title should be "Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon marketplace"

Amazon offers a lot of stuff, including AWS.

You might find odoo interesting, it's an Enterprise Resource Planning system and open source in Python. It has its own ORM.

You can also build websites with it.

You'll definitely need inventory (if it's not already a part of your other packages). Seems like great fun!

My advice would be to actually integrate with Amazon as much as possible. I'm not sure what's involved there, if Amazon provides a bunch of proprietary tools or what. But you don't want people to make the hard choice between your project and Amazon. Help them do both!

You should look into https://becknprotocol.io/

Couple things to look into if you are thinking of running a marketplace:

1. Tax gets complicated in marketplace model. Marketplace facilitator tax laws in US and some European countries require the entity running the marketplace to collect and remit tax.

2. If your channels have multi-warehouses and ship from different US states its important to remember there are 11 origin-based states in the US.

I need something like that for my open manufacturing project. Openship sounds like one of the missing piece I was looking for! Thanks!

Your pitch is really compelling.

Haven’t read the comments yet, but I just want to say that personally your pitch got me excited. Good job writing it.