I keep telling myself I'm going to do this, but it becomes a huge pain in the ass. First I half to find a half dozen vendors to buy stuff from, because I like multifaceted projects, but no one else stocks all the pieces I need. Then I have to manage accounts across 6 different vendors, and put my credit card info in 6 different places.

Then once I've ordered, I have to track 6 different packages. If anything goes wrong, I have to track down which vendor, and how to contact them, and hope that they have a good policy of fixing things like this.

What we need is a replacement for Amazon. Federation could solve a lot of my pain points. Just give me an interface like Amazon that is connecting to hundreds or thousands of stores, where the orders are just dispatched to the store you ordered from. It doesn't fix shipping speeds, but it does give me:

a) a sane way to order from multiple stores

b) an easy means of tracking what I've ordered from all the stores

c) an easy way of tracking the shipping for packages I've ordered

d) a single point of entry when I know I want to buy something

Amazon cornered the market, not on prices, but on convenience. If we want them to stop being so dominant, that's where you want to kick them.