I'm surprised at how few retail websites have implemented Apple Pay for checkout. It's a pleasure to use a site that implements this and when they do I'm happy to buy directly from them instead of through Amazon. Sites that make you manually enter all your shipping and credit card information while navigating thru last minute check out popups is a big reason why it's so much more convenient to buy the same thing thru amazon.
There are a lot of things we can do to improve the web and make it more resilient to big tech. Optimizing web sites for rapid checkout with modern Apple and Google pay mechanics is one of them.
Edit: Some of you correctly point out that this is actually just trading reliance on one big tech entity for another. I agree and would love to see a better approach for convenient online payments but that future seems very far off. Ironically, Apple and Google Pay can help smaller merchants level the playing field with Amazon today while we await a better payment future.
I'm really referring to Amazon's dominance of all online commerce here. While Apple and Google pay certainly are from big tech, these payment capabilities enable small merchants to do more effective online commerce which is critical to decentralizing commerce on the web again.
@uriel Buying everything through amazon's website centralizes the web. It's important for small merchants to be able to sell directly to customers on their own web sites. You're right though that either way big tech is involved.
@uriel
Yes, discovery of all those smaller merchant sites is a whole other issue that needs to be solved. I think Mastodon and the fediverse could help a lot with this. I just hope these smaller sites can survive in the meantime.
I'm not familiar with open bazaar. Will check it out.
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