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A comment on Amazon sellers are moving to alternative ecommerce platforms during Covid-19. Parent comment

Re:Amazon sellers are moving to alternative ecommerce platfo... by ObsoleteNerd on Friday May 08, 2020 @03:46AM (#23112386)
They're individual websites run by the stores themselves, so you need to find them the old fashioned way by finding the store that sells what you want. I definitely think there's space for "local" directories (eg by country or state maybe) for online stores. Google Shopping and all the big sites that attempt it are an absolute joke, full of SEO gaming and manipulation. An old school Yahoo-list style index of local stores that's searchable would be killer right now.

Source: consumer who buys lots online, almost daily, and would absolutely love to support local (national) stores.

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Re:Amazon sellers are moving to alternative ecommerce platfo... by hardwaresofton on Friday May 08, 2020 @04:39AM (#23112706)
Solving this seems like a lay up for Shopify. Some sort of "shopify universe" product that takes products & categorization information and brings it all together would be a huge move forward.

Amazon's interface, without the centralization.

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Re:Amazon sellers are moving to alternative ecommerce platfo... by ckdarby on Friday May 08, 2020 @08:25AM (#23114011)
It also lets them start going into Etsy's space of marketplace
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Re:Amazon sellers are moving to alternative ecommerce platfo... by vizzah on Friday May 08, 2020 @07:53AM (#23113713)
They've just launched an app for that. Shop.app. An aggregator of all Shopify merchants searchable and proximity-aware. Haven't tried it yet though, if it's any good.
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Re:Amazon sellers are moving to alternative ecommerce platfo... by WhyNotHugo on Friday May 08, 2020 @09:40AM (#23114747)
Seems to be US-only, and mobile only.

I can use a 34" for Amazon, I'm not gonna switch to comparing products on my phone. Especially given that I'm locked so my computer is always nearby.

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Re:Amazon sellers are moving to alternative ecommerce platfo... by tjbiddle on Friday May 08, 2020 @08:47AM (#23114221)
Took a very quick glance at this. I expect that it's limited to those that are running Shopify POS, rather than all Shopify stores.
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Re:Amazon sellers are moving to alternative ecommerce platfo... by Rafert on Saturday May 09, 2020 @11:02AM (#23125221)
It's not limited to POS - it has a way to pay during online checkout and tracks package deliveries.
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Re:Amazon sellers are moving to alternative ecommerce platfo... by eru on Friday May 08, 2020 @04:28AM (#23112635)
If you have any alternative that gets popular, it'll probably be full of SEO gaming, too?

(Though, of course, the team behind the alternative might be better at resisting the gaming? Google, the company, isn't magic.)

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Re:Amazon sellers are moving to alternative ecommerce platfo... by dmix on Friday May 08, 2020 @04:41AM (#23112714)
You mean Shopify would need proper search/listing capabilities which handle gaming and spam if they were to do their own index pages?
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Re:Amazon sellers are moving to alternative ecommerce platfo... by eru on Friday May 08, 2020 @04:44AM (#23112724)
At some point, yes. Amazon needs them, too.
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Re:Amazon sellers are moving to alternative ecommerce platfo... by ObsoleteNerd on Friday May 08, 2020 @05:44AM (#23112990)
I think the main problem is both Amazon and Google (and all the similar ecosystems) have a vested interest in rigging the results towards personal profits.

I see this more like an open index of local online stores, curated and not using scrapers/bots to index but by stores submitting their URL and search endpoint for meta-search across all their products. Let the user sort the results by price, location, etc.

Obviously there's always going to be people trying to game the system but it would still be better than what we have now, which is us consumers needing to use Google/DDG/etc to scrape through the 99:1 noise:signal ratio of search results these days just to try fluke upon a local online store that has what we want.

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