Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon

Posted by theturtletalks 3 days ago

Counter49Comment29OpenOriginal

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

Comments

Comment by onion2k 2 days ago

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.

Comment by theturtletalks 2 days ago

Yeah, you're right. Amazon isn't really about the software at this point. It's the lock-in. Sellers can't leave without losing all their reviews, rankings, and years of optimization. That's the moat.

I'm not building better software to compete directly with Amazon. I'm building infrastructure that sellers can truly own, so lock-in stops being such a powerful moat.

Traditional marketplaces charge 15-30% because they provide checkout, payments, and the customer database. But if stores already own that infrastructure, the only thing you really need is discovery. And discovery doesn't have to cost anything.

Our marketplace is essentially just a directory. Stores keep their own checkout and process their own payments. We query their API and render the results conversationally. And because the code is open source, if we ever became like Amazon, anyone could fork it and launch a competing directory.

Comment by aforwardslash 1 day ago

Traditional marketplaces provide a range of services, from unified delivery to complete logistics management. They also provide all the kyc filtering and fraud screening that quite lowers the merchant risk.

On top of that, many of them provide additional assurances, like vendor screening and easy dispute resolution on fraudulent operations.

The catalog and the checkout are the easy part.

Comment by DANmode 1 day ago

The service could capture a proof of a new seller’s Amazon rating,

to blunt the hit of that (0).

Comment by ekjhgkejhgk 2 days ago

[flagged]

Comment by joshribakoff 2 days ago

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.

Comment by theturtletalks 2 days ago

It’s using AISDK and MCP-UI, which is standard for chats. If you check the cart in the input, there’s only 2 stores added for now.

Also, that chat is just one part of it. Those stores are running on Openfront, our Shopify alternative. Please check our ethos to get the full vision.

Also, I was working on this before AI. Openfront and the/marketplace are part of an ecosystem. We built Openship, an e-commerce order management system, years ago.

Comment by orbeliani 2 days ago

Don’t confuse vibe coding with a low effort build, vibe coding can lead to the high-quality, amazing products. I’m just here to protect the vibe coding phenomenon :D

Comment by happytoexplain 2 days ago

It's just a semantic disagreement. In my experience, "vibe coding" means "software made with genAI, casually iterated until it passes tests and appears to work, without exhaustive or experienced review of the output, and is therefore often bad." It doesn't have to mean that, but in practice that seems to be the dominant definition currently.

Comment by tempsaasexample 1 day ago

I watched YouTube howtos, and read 1000 stackoverflow results around 2016 and made my own saas for the construction industry in PHP/jQuery. Was a car salesman before that. I have 34 companies using it today. I promise you, a vibe coded app would be an improvement. So what's the problem really?

Comment by dang 2 days ago

A previous thread:

Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32690410 - Sept 2022 (301 comments)

(Reposts are fine after a year or so; to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)

Comment by Hackbraten 2 days ago

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.

Comment by llbbdd 2 days ago

I couldn't believe this but I see other threads on the Internet from over a year ago complaining that Firefox can't handle the backdrop blur filter performantly at all. Chrome has no issue; I had to squint to even figure out what heavy work might have been weighing Firefox down. This design element has been everywhere for years, I didn't know it had gotten this bad at Mozilla.

Comment by grekowalski 2 days ago

What is your mobile phone and browser?

Comment by XCSme 2 days ago

It's also laggy for me, with a 5900x + 3090...

Comment by simianparrot 1 day ago

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.

Comment by llbbdd 23 hours ago

You're downvoted but you're right. I give it less than 10 years before Firefox is relegated to a SourceForge download. Firefox has almost the same usage stats as "Samsung Internet", which is just the default browser on Samsung phones. Firefox has the same install rate as a browser that is just available by default on every phone bought from Samsung. I love Firefox, I loved firebug; it's 2025, Google Chrome is the Internet.

Comment by alazoral 1 day ago

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.

Comment by samtheDamned 1 day ago

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.

Comment by ranger_danger 2 days ago

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.

Comment by joshribakoff 2 days ago

10 minutes after your comment I checked and I don’t see any pgsql credentials, but I do see that they have committed their local settings instead, including their local file paths now.

Comment by ranger_danger 2 days ago

https://github.com/openshiporg/openfront/blob/master/.claude...

Comment by theturtletalks 2 days ago

That is an old database used for development, I will remove and add .claude to gitignore

Comment by pxx 2 days ago

It's still there. Check the pg_dump command.

Comment by abigail95 2 days ago

I feel safer always running him in dangerous mode now.

Comment by mbirth 2 days ago

How does this compare to flohmarkt?

https://codeberg.org/flohmarkt/flohmarkt

Comment by RobotToaster 2 days ago

> Openfronts will connect to our decentralized marketplac

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

Comment by theturtletalks 2 days ago

Each store has its own Openfront setup, with its own database, checkout, and payment (Stripe & Paypal) account. The marketplace just connects to the store’s API in real time, fetching products, adding items to the cart, and handing off to checkout. When a customer pays, the funds go directly to the store’s Stripe account.

There’s no central database or shared backend. The marketplace is simply a discovery layer that sits on top of fully independent stores.

Comment by onion2k 1 day ago

If I have 5 items in my marketplace basket that means my payment details need to go from the marketplace to five separate stores and then on to Stripe, and that means Stripe is going to see five transactions at about the same time using my card details. They'll flag that as fraud and decline them.

Comment by the_real_cher 1 day ago

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.

Comment by catlover76 2 days ago

[dead]