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Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon (openship.org)

50 points by theturtletalks ↗ HN
I'm building an open source Amazon.

In other words, an open source decentralized marketplace. But like Carl Sagan said, to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

So first I had to make open source management systems for every vertical. I'm launching the first one today, Openfront e-commerce, an open source Shopify alternative. Next will be Openfront restaurant, Openfront grocery, and Openfront gym.

And all of these Openfronts will connect to our decentralized marketplace, "the/marketplace", seamlessly. Once we launch other Openfronts, you'll be able to do everything from booking hotels to ordering groceries right from one place with no middle men. The marketplace simply connects to the Openfront just like its built-in storefront does.

Together, we can use open source to disrupt marketplaces and make sure sellers, in every vertical, are never beholden to them.

Marketplace: https://marketplace.openship.org

Openfront platforms: https://openship.org/openfront-ecommerce

Source code: https://github.com/openshiporg/openfront

Demo - Openfront: https://youtu.be/jz0ZZmtBHgo

Demo - Marketplace: https://youtu.be/LM6hRjZIDcs

Part 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32690410

12 comments

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Hackbraten
The landing page scrolls with 2 fps on my phone, making it completely unusable.

I wish there was a browser setting to disable CPU-heavy CSS filters in Firefox to fix pages like this one.

simianparrot
Don’t use Firefox. It’s practically no longer a maintained browser engine because Mozilla has other priorities. Not a problem in Safari or Chromium.
ranger_danger
I clicked on the openfront repo, and...

Having a .claude folder, which also contains full publicly-accessible postgres credentials, does not instill confidence I'm afraid.

joshribakoff
This is a very low quality submission. Its a vibe coded app that gives me a chat ui. When i ask for soup it shows me t shirts.
RobotToaster
> Openfronts will connect to our decentralized marketplac

How exactly does (or will?) this decentralisation work?

onion2k
I'm building an open source Amazon.

No you're not. Amazon is not the software that runs the website. 'Amazon' is the millions of relationships that Amazon has with suppliers and customers. It's the strong brand, the trust that people have that they can shop there safely, the sheer scale of the operation meaning that products are about as cheap as possible and will arrive when Amazon say they will. It's the ease of using an invisible, massively optimized chain of systems from a pretty basic app.

You can't build a new (and hopefully better) Amazon by copying the software. You need to work out how to get sellers and buyers to come to your site before they go Amazon, then build that thing so they do. How good the software is and whether it's open source of not probably doesn't matter. Better software is never going to be enough of a reason for people to switch away from Amazon.

the_real_cher
The one thing that keeps me coming back to Amazon is how it tracks all my orders.

I could go to the individual product website.

But having everything I've ever ordered in one place is massive value.

samtheDamned
While i respect the vision (the decentralization scheme is really enticing), the last thing I want to see when opening up a storefront is an AI "ask me anything" prompt. I want to see what the storefront offers. When I open amazon on a private tab right now I see the wide range of products they sell from mobile devices to toys to beauty supplied. If I open Etsy I see blankets, artwork, and dalls. If I open Wootings store page I see the different keyboards they sell. As a first impression a blank page with "ask me anything" (even with a couple suggested prompts) makes me uncertain about the whole situation I walked into.
alazoral
It’s not clear to me how this idea, a decentralised place where you can access a lot of different stores, isn’t just the web. There’s a lot of mature alternatives for running web based ecommerce storefronts.

The value of Amazon and other marketplace systems, what I think many would say is their distinguishing factor, is capital L Logistics. It’s the warehouses, the return systems, quality control, customer support, international shipping and importing, inter-warehouse trucking and a network of last mile delivery, all tuned to minimise costs. An open source platform that handles all of that somehow would actually be revolutionary, but even the design of the system would require actual years of user research and mastery of systems that are truly arcane.