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Target is plotting a big move away from AWS as Amazon takes over retail

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Re: Target is plotting a big move away from AWS as Amazon takes over retail

#51
post #2

Who remembers when Target's website was hosted by Amazon.com (not AWS)? Probably 6 or 7 years ago now. IIRC Toys'R'Us was also but left earlier.

https://www.geekwire.com/2011/target-finally-parts-ways-amaz...

I remember when the new Target website launched, and they had a 'Credits' page on the website (or a press release?) that listed over 50 partners that made the launch possible, kinda crazy and not surprising that the website failed on launch day.

Additionally, Target partnered with a popular designer to launch their product line on the same day to celebrate the new website, adding insult to injury with a huge traffic spike.

Their inexperience in operating a retail website was painfully obvious. For example, the search results were accurate when really you want to optimize for the customer experience and not accuracy - the first couple pages of search results for an item were all the right items but also all out of stock, so it looked like a very empty store as you clicked through page after page of unavailable items. The search results should have sorted in-stock items to the top by default.

Re: Target is plotting a big move away from AWS as Amazon takes over retail

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is a company that cares about credibility above all else, plus word travels fast in software engineering circles. Seems unlikely they would risk snooping

Before AWS or their open marketplace model, Amazon provided e-commerce services for established brick-and-mortar retailers (basically, Amazon-run online shops under the established retailers’ names.) They quite aggressively mined this for data that was used competitively for Amazon's own online retail operations. I'm not surprised that this combined with Amazon making a big move into brick and mortar retail would wor…

Citation required

Re: Target is plotting a big move away from AWS as Amazon takes over retail

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and lose any credibility? Lets throw away our entire cloud revenue to look at the raw data rather then scraping the public site? Please. This is tin foil hat crazy

The public site doesn't give you the sales numbers.

Just ask your suppliers for those. It’s not overly secretive

Re: Target is plotting a big move away from AWS as Amazon takes over retail

#54
post #11
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we know Amazon's policy on "peeking" into people's AWS data? I feel like they would have something against that in their ToS/Privacy Policy.

That absolutely will not look at your data under any circumstance, even if you specifically ask them to. Multiple times I was trying to troubleshoot an issue and asked them to "just log into the database" and they said they have very strict policies against that. There is no way they have any of Target's data.

This is naive - they don't need to look at your data to draw inferences from it, they can just monitor and analyze network traffic.
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