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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

It would be cool if there were some open format and standard URL structure (or a meta link) that points to it so that any online shop can publish a full table of what they have for sale, so aggregators can slurp up all of the data from all known webshops.

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Wouldn't that turn everything into a race to the bottom, which is precisely what happens in Amazon?

You can choose who you aggregate from. You could also as a customer choose between aggregators based on how a good a job they do.

The fact that there is not some global “hey i have x for sale” machine readable message bus is sort of crazy to me.

There somewhat is - many retailers offer data feeds. The formats and quality vary widely though. Google shopping has a feed format that many retailers implement.

Amazon has far worse problems then declining quality.

Eg: review fraud, selling stolen items, counterfeits, inventory comingling, inconsistent return policy, warehouse worker/driver treatment, terrible search/discovery, bad ux, etc.

I'd worry about that problem when it's a reality not before.

I agree with you, but my point is: other than their internal problems, wouldn't a aggregator suffer the same faith?

The subscription fee should be enough to hire enough staff to design fraud resistant systems and police the rest of the network with bounties for whistle blowers and PoCs. The server cost for essentially a forum, even with trillions of page views a month, is nothing compared to tens of millions of paying subscribers and the requisite army of business moderators.

I think this was a joke reference to current sitemaps?

No; I mean a specific metadata format for online stores to publish machine readable (so json probably) lists of what they have for sale, and prices, and product page links, sort of like rss but for shopping.

That reminds me of the PAD files used for shareware

But they seem to have died out

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