[theunspoken]

A marketplace maker can't have its own shop, a marketplace maker can't have its own delivery service, a marketplace maker can't have its own payment processor.

To me the biggest problem with these kinds of platform is information asymmetry. Amazon literally knows about every credit card number and every shipment and every product ever sold, while the customer can't even trust if the numbers on a seller's page are legit or just the result of scams, or if the price didn't change 5 seconds before they clicked on the product page. The only stategy to rebalance the market is to REQUIRE every company to be as CLUELESS as possible about what happens on their platform, so basically enforce PRIVACY.

Amazon should only know which sellers are on the platform and their catalog of products. It shouldn't know my address or my purchase history. The sellers should only know which of their products are selling. They shouldn't know my address. The shipment company should only know my address and what the package broadly is about. It shouldn't know exactly what I have bought or that the purchase was done through Amazon.

All of this could be achieved with a well made public key cryptography architecture and open APIs for being a customer, seller, payment processor and shipment company. Let's take an example: a seller wants to sell on Amazon. 1 - they create a key pair 2 - they tell Amazon their public key 3 - when I click on the seller's page I receive the public key and now the traffic is encrypted between us, Amazon can see nothing 4 - the seller has chosen the shipment company(s) and payment processor(s) and gives me their public key at the moment of purchase 5 - the customer encrypts the credit card info with the payment processor pubkey, encrypts the shipping info with the shipping company's pubkey and encrypts everything with the seller's pubkey 6 - the seller now delivers the information to the payment processor and shipment company 7 - the shipment company tells the seller how much the package is going to cost and the payment processor tells the seller if the payment has been concluded successfully 8 - the seller prints the tracking paper's encrypted QR code and the shipment company proceeds to deliver it to the customer

So what would be Amazon's role in all of this? They should provide a website and/or app that just works across all platforms imaginable and is fast and stable and good looking. They should manage the identities of sellers so customers know they are buying from real people, but nothing more. Lastly they should collect a fee for every transaction. E-commerce should be reliable and automated, not a privacy horror fest filled with ads, bogous suggestions and shady practices and policies