Amazon compiles reviews, presents product information, processes orders, facilitates and produces delivery, and facilitates and produces returns.
Amazon is the dominating first mover in web shopping. Thanks to Amazon’s favorable pricing, its overall product is hard to outcompete as either a physical retailer or a similar second mover.
Amazon’s practical, functioning solution provides highly-valuable intel, showing what similar, effective functionality to deliver using an open solution.
An open solution will provide added benefits to customers and to producers—including reviewers, manufacturers, and shippers.
Empowering Customers
Customers seek products that do things they value. Customers benefit from shopping information, good pricing, delivery by the time products are needed, and returns when needed.
Shopping information from all sources could be improved.
External product reviews are currently summarized by Amazon. In the future, these reviews could get rated for usefulness and linked to.
Customer reviews currently get centrally controlled by Amazon. In the future, these reviews could get aggregated from multiple sources, rated, and displayed.
Manufacturers’ product data currently gets entered by sellers and gets listed in comparison tables by Amazon. In the future this could continue. But also, product data could be tiled for side-by-side comparisons that also let sellers quickly inform customers about the features that make their products add more value or that make their products provide comparable value for lower prices.
Pricing is a total that currently gets stabilized somewhat by Amazon. In the future, pricing could be an emergent property that flows from instantaneously-bid prices for a product, packaging, and shipping.
Delivery currently gets offered as a few discrete options by Amazon. In the future, delivery could reflect customers’ needs, entered as constraints. If a customer is reordering but still has some inventory on hand, or if a customer for some other reason doesn’t plan to use a product until after some date, he could just enter a need date and let that constraint be met optimally by the manufacturer and shipper or shippers, working together. Pricing could vary depending on the applicable shippers’ capacity utilization and offering prices at the exact time when a customer orders.
Returns are currently shipped using a small number of producers. In the future, returns could be shipped using many more producers, and manufacturers could process returns themselves.
Decentralizing Production
Amazon’s solution coordinates substantial work done by various producers, including reviewers, manufacturers, and shippers.
A review can be an excerpt or a full review. It can be a product comparison, findings after initial use, or findings after substantial use. In each case, all of the review content that’s currently displayed on Amazon is produced by reviewers, but all of this displayed content currently gets subsumed into Amazon and owned by Amazon.
In the future, customer reviewers could retain ownership for a copyright period of, say, 3 years—long enough to provide property rights during the initial, most-valuable period, but short enough to disrupt progress much less than current copyrights do.
Most reviewers would likely still provide content for free. But reviewers who provide content that customers find particularly helpful could in exchange earn donated tips or royalties—which could be a nice thought, and which could even add up to a meaningful bonus. Educated shopping is a valuable skill. Incentivizing the most-skilled people to spend a little time writing or recording reviews that pass along their best insights could surface far-better information.
Manufacturers currently ship most of their products to Amazon warehouses. Amazon receives, stores, picks, packages, and delivers.
In the future, manufacturers could package their products themselves for shipping. They still could deliver retail packaging, or they still could provide frustration-free packaging that doesn’t need to be suitable to display for sale and that doesn’t need to limit shoplifting. Customers could opt-in for frustration-free packaging wherever it’s available. Manufacturers could then migrate to frustration-free packaging that’s already also suitable to get directly shipped as-is.
Shippers could be given complete flexibility to route products directly from the manufacturer to the customer. In time, shipping could get decentralized into pickup, intercity loading, intercity trucking, delivery loading, and delivery.
Programmers can build an open-source solution that transforms all of these component tasks to make each of them open to competition. Customers, reviewers, manufacturers, and competitive shippers each have strong interests in bringing this solution into being and helping it succeed.
Together, they can build a future open shopping system that cuts out even the current-best middlemen to deliver overall pricing and value that can’t be beat.
James Anthony is an experienced chemical engineer who applies process design, dynamics, and control to government processes. He is the author of The Constitution Needs a Good Party and rConstitution Papers, the publisher of rConstitution.us, and an author in Western Journal, Daily Caller, The Federalist, American Thinker, Lew Rockwell, American Greatness, Mises Institute, Foundation for Economic Education, and Free the People. For more information, see his about, media, and overview pages.
Copyright © James Anthony
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