We need a decentralized Amazon.
Amazon has increasingly moved to abusing sellers with advertising costs. I spent a year and a half trying to cater to the algorithm and build a brand. I kept my costs down by importing raw materials direct, building packaging and labeling the product myself. I have trademarks and have done everything right. Reviewing my year it’s costing me $1 in ad spend to generate $1.20 in gross sales. In addition they charge 15% commission, storage fees, FBA fees based on item weight size and category and the seller is responsible for returns and damaged/lost products.
My material costs are 25% of the sales price. Add it all up and I’m selling at a significant loss. I would have stopped earlier but I built significant inventory to support the additional volume and there was no other sales channel for me to move the volume. It would have been cheaper to throw it all away, but I reasoned that with time and reviews it might start to improve. I have over 50 5 ⭐️ reviews and haven’t seen any boost. I answer every customer question and follow best practices on the platform.
Amazon is designed to extract money from entrepreneurs. If we build a decentralized version we can pass the savings to customers and improve the customer experience. Vendors would flock to it but it would be difficult to compete at scale without a “hook”. Ideas?
Replies (6)
I feel your pain. We sold on amazon for a while, the commission in itself was pretty crippling, but as we are a very small manufacturer, and items are handmade to order, our lead time was 2 weeks. We made the lead time clear at the order stage, but kept getting marked down for delivery time. Amazon started withholding funds, and eventually booted us off. Amazon also won't let you charge any extra for delivery to northern Scotland which costs us 4 times the delivery cost so would be a significant loss.
If what you are selling is hand made, there's artisans.coop which is not corporate owned. It's just a bunch of small arts and crafts makers who are pooling resources to build a marketplace that isn't there to exploit the sellers (or the buyers for that matter).
There's Tindie for small electronics projects.
Neither currently accept BTC, but that would be a lot easier to change with the coop than with Tindie, since the coop is democratically run.
There was OpenBazaar that was a true p2p marketplace that focused on cryptocurrency, but that died and the attemp to revive it has not seemed to have been going well.
I'm not sure what other options are out there in this space, but I'm always interested in hearing about more good options!
I'd highly recommend artisans.coop for you. Check 'em out and if you want to join, I'd be happy to be put down as the referrer!
This looks really interesting - thank you so much. 💜🫂
I just want to say , for what its worth , that I stopped buying anything on Amazon a few years ago. Since then I have still not found a replacement. As a consequence I just accept not buying stuff. However, my point is that if there was the type of alternative you describe, I would gladly use it!
The problem is bootstrapping scale. Without getting huge sellers like P&G and Nike onto a new platform, people will always need to buy some stuff from Amazon and then the new platform gets stuck in the “Etsy layer”. I wonder if there’s a way to provide a search of independent sellers “booths” that can be accessed in a decentralized way but also return Amazon results in the same search so customers can seamlessly choose between the different options. All from one interface? Would Amazon allow that? Could they prevent it?
