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

30•theturtletalks•1d ago

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

Hackbraten•12h 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.

grekowalski•10h ago

What is your mobile phone and browser?

XCSme•2h ago

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

llbbdd•2h 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.

dang•2h 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)

ranger_danger•2h 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.

abigail95•2h ago

I feel safer always running him in dangerous mode now.

joshribakoff•2h 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.

ranger_danger•2h ago

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

theturtletalks•2h ago

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

pxx•2h ago

It's still there. Check the pg_dump command.

joshribakoff•2h 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.

theturtletalks•2h 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.

orbeliani•2h 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

happytoexplain•1h 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.

RobotToaster•2h ago

> Openfronts will connect to our decentralized marketplac

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

theturtletalks•1h 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.

onion2k•2h 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.

theturtletalks•1h 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.

mbirth•2h ago

How does this compare to flohmarkt?

https://codeberg.org/flohmarkt/flohmarkt

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