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21 days agoNot a bad idea for small businesses - having a central place to purchase direct from retailers is a nice idea, I think where it may struggle is:
Verifying seller authenticity / avoiding scam products
- In a fully open marketplace its hard to enforce accountability. Amazon has teams of people removing fraud items (and they still have rampant fraud).
- Amazon functions as an insurer on sales - if you receive a fraudulent item, amazon eats the cost (and tries to cover it from the seller)
Part of Amazon’s market dominance and convenience is owning the logistics
- Amazon operates massive warehouses and has tons of money invested in logistics, so orders can be consolidated
- All of the savings of not paying the “Amazon tax” will just become the FedEx/UPS tax
This is not to say it can’t be done but Amazon has billions of dollars of infrastructure that’s hard to replace with volunteer programming
Pretty sure the last one was a bootleg copy of the original Taken movie - a friend had a digital copy and easiest way to play it on the TV was with a DVD
Woulda been while it was still in theaters, circa 2008.