Day Two to One Day • Hacker News Board

Re: Day Two to One Day

#51

Post by petra » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 5:02 PM UTC

the_watcher wrote: post #44

petra wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> All in all I am pretty bearish on them. Who will "kill" them ? What will the e-commerce market look like in 10 years - and could that be without Amazon as a major competitor ?

I'm not bearish on Amazon, but it seems realistic that someone could build an aggregator of Shopify (or other owner-operated storefronts) sites. For example, a Shopify aggregator/product search engine that had any kind of meaningful traction could try to build a checkout integration with merchants using Shopify payments and take a cut of revenue, or just sell ads the same way Amazon does. Maybe this already exists to…

// product quality, counterfeiting, and producer control

Those all come from a single reason: commingling - mixing the same product but from different sellers, when fulling an order.

I could see shopify setting up a system of letting sellers buy a certain original product from a manufacturer - and sending it to some warehouse and selling it on their aggregated store.

Let's say this solves co-mingling.

Than it would a be a great time for Amazon to copy that.

And it would e quite easy for them.

Re: Day Two to One Day

#52

Post by conception » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 5:20 PM UTC

vimota wrote: post #43

aresant wrote: post #4

Anazon is better than ever for brand name, known buys. Eg I recently ordered a UHD bluray movie, took about 15 seconds end to end and arrived in a day. They are terrible for everything else. Eg I bought a reading light. Which was a 10 minute sorting excersise trying to figure out which of a dozen nearly identical products was the least likely to burn down my house. Then trying to uncover which had real reviews and no…

I totally agree - we built https://indieshops.co/ in order to solve for the "quality first" alternative you mentioned. We found that the majority of online shopping today consisted of 1) buying basics (read: cheap mass products) on Amazon or 2) getting advertised brands to you on Instagram/Fb/Google and hoping the one you like finds you. We hope that Indieshops provides an alternative where you can discover high qual…

Just shared this with my group looking for Amazon alternatives as well. Awesome.

Re: Day Two to One Day

#53

Post by the_watcher » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 5:24 PM UTC

petra wrote: post #51

the_watcher wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not bearish on Amazon, but it seems realistic that someone could build an aggregator of Shopify (or other owner-operated storefronts) sites. For example, a Shopify aggregator/product search engine that had any kind of meaningful traction could try to build a checkout integration with merchants using Shopify payments and take a cut of revenue, or just sell ads the same way Amazon does. Maybe this already exists to…

// product quality, counterfeiting, and producer control Those all come from a single reason: commingling - mixing the same product but from different sellers, when fulling an order. I could see shopify setting up a system of letting sellers buy a certain original product from a manufacturer - and sending it to some warehouse and selling it on their aggregated store. Let's say this solves co-mingling. Than it would a…

> I could see shopify setting up a system of letting sellers buy a certain original product from a manufacturer - and sending it to some warehouse and selling it on their aggregated store.

Isn't this just dropshipping (already an extremely popular behavior on Shopify). The aggregator I'm describing is one where the aggregator is just solving product discovery, but limited to non-Amazon storefronts, ideally limited to the product's owner, even if white labeled (doesn't entirely solve the quality issue, but would help with explicit counterfeiting at least). A core part of the value prop would be that it gives you direct access to the seller (some of whom may explicitly not list on Amazon) without Amazon as an intermediary.

Google kind of does this, but one of the reasons people go to Amazon is they know the entire SERP will be products, so if they're ready to buy, it's often the fastest way to get to place where they can click "Buy". The aggregator I'm thinking of is really a more aggressively curated, non-Amazon version of this.

Re: Day Two to One Day

#54

Post by tootie » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 5:31 PM UTC

madamelic wrote: post #25

My wonder is how large a company can get before the founder can no longer force strong culture. The decision to favor their own products over others seems like a short-sighted goal to help an exec get a bonus rather than help their customers I am wondering how they can handle short-sighted, highly-motivated individuals self-dealing rather than looking out for the company and its stated culture.

Keynes said it best. In the long run, we're all dead. Jobs died and his culture is already ebbing.

Re: Day Two to One Day

#55

Post by frogpelt » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 6:05 PM UTC

whamlastxmas wrote: post #34

frogpelt wrote: post #29

Jeff Bezos does not have integrity. We know this because of the way he treated Mackenzie Bezos. Now, we just have to see how far his lack of integrity will go in his business operation.

Tell us more about the in-depth and personal knowledge you have about the former Bezos marriage. Were you present for their marriage counseling? Their intimate disagreements? Tell us about how they interacted on a personal level and what their dynamic was together. Marriages are complicated. What we see in public is very limited and far from the truth. Being the richest dude in the world means everything goes through…

That's fair. I don't know what happened. But I assume he cheated on his wife. I consider that not having integrity.

If I'm wrong and he didn't cheat on his wife, then I stand corrected.

I disagree with your last statement. The problems with the world are because fewer people have integrity than because more people are believing tabloids.

Re: Day Two to One Day

#56

Post by amsilprotag » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 6:23 PM UTC

aresant wrote: post #4

Anazon is better than ever for brand name, known buys. Eg I recently ordered a UHD bluray movie, took about 15 seconds end to end and arrived in a day. They are terrible for everything else. Eg I bought a reading light. Which was a 10 minute sorting excersise trying to figure out which of a dozen nearly identical products was the least likely to burn down my house. Then trying to uncover which had real reviews and no…

I recently finished Brad Stone's The Everything Store, written in 2013. In the last chapter, brands complained about Amazon pricing below the their Minimum Advertised Price (MAP), to the detriment of physical sellers. Stone used the German knife company Wüsthof as an example. Wüsthof at one point around 2010 stopped supplying Amazon, but its products were still sold by third parties. Looking at Amazon now, there are at least 100 in-house Wüsthof products being sold by Amazon at prices that seem lower than the mid-hundred dollar price ranges cited in The Everything Store.

Does anyone know what happened generally to Amazon's relationship with brands over the past six years? Presumably over this time, Amazon has only gained in bargaining power over brands at the expense of physical locations, in accordance with Ben Thompson's Aggregation Theory. As an outsider, it seemed like Amazon and brand buyers have done well at the expense of brands and retail stores.

Re: Day Two to One Day

#57

Post by OJFord » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 7:53 PM UTC

aresant wrote: post #4

Anazon is better than ever for brand name, known buys. Eg I recently ordered a UHD bluray movie, took about 15 seconds end to end and arrived in a day. They are terrible for everything else. Eg I bought a reading light. Which was a 10 minute sorting excersise trying to figure out which of a dozen nearly identical products was the least likely to burn down my house. Then trying to uncover which had real reviews and no…

> And amazon is obviously jam packed with smart people, so what am I missing

How many of them work on the (loss-making) shop app though?

I'm honestly curious, because presumably it's supposed to eventually come out insanely profitable and awesome, but the UX sucks, has done for years, and rarely changes.

I assume (but may well be completely wrong) that most engineers at Amazon work on keeping AWS's managed offerings up with the hype train (only one needs to be lasting mega usage to make it all worthwhile), and a whole load of SRE and performance work (I wouldn't like to guess how small a fractional optimisation to EC2 would result in an $X saving across the whole fleet!).

Re: Day Two to One Day

#58

Post by OJFord » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 7:56 PM UTC

vimota wrote: post #43

aresant wrote: post #4

Anazon is better than ever for brand name, known buys. Eg I recently ordered a UHD bluray movie, took about 15 seconds end to end and arrived in a day. They are terrible for everything else. Eg I bought a reading light. Which was a 10 minute sorting excersise trying to figure out which of a dozen nearly identical products was the least likely to burn down my house. Then trying to uncover which had real reviews and no…

I totally agree - we built https://indieshops.co/ in order to solve for the "quality first" alternative you mentioned. We found that the majority of online shopping today consisted of 1) buying basics (read: cheap mass products) on Amazon or 2) getting advertised brands to you on Instagram/Fb/Google and hoping the one you like finds you. We hope that Indieshops provides an alternative where you can discover high qual…

Nice! Any plans for other markets (and filtering for them)? I gather it's all 'made with love in the USA' currently.

And how big is too big to be called 'indie'? If you take it quite literally it disallows having two shop fronts, but then to disallow that and allow online-only international-shipping... Just curious how you draw a line.

Re: Day Two to One Day

#59

Post by powvans » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 7:58 PM UTC

gjm11 wrote: post #33

groby_b wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fwiw: Many of us dinosaurs remember when you ordered things on Amazon, and it took a week and cost shipping. Prime, and 2-day shipping, felt like a luxury you don't need. (And many of us thought long and hard if we should spend, and then it turned out to be really convenient...) And those of us from the Triassic period even remember the days before Amazon, where you went to a bookstore, and you hoped they had a book…

"Whaddya mean 'we', paleface?" I'm a happy non-Prime Amazon customer. I buy plenty of things from them, and I basically never need anything faster than their free shipping (which I'm pretty sure they deliberately slow down, holding back dispatching in order to incentivize customers to get Prime). I could easily afford a Prime subscription, but I don't see how it's more worth the money than a hundred other things I co…

I dropped Prime a few years ago for all the reasons that have been hashed over many times. I've reduced my Amazon purchases drastically and not having Prime helps.

As far as the deliberate slow down is concerned, I'm positive that they are doing that because they tell me. About half my orders from them come 1 or 2 day shipping after a 5 day delay from the time I submit the order. I get an email telling me that the item has shipped and will arrive tomorrow or the next day. Then the transaction hits my credit card. It's super annoying and I'm sure they want it that way.

Re: Day Two to One Day

#60

Post by sixstringtheory » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 8:06 PM UTC

madamelic wrote: post #25

My wonder is how large a company can get before the founder can no longer force strong culture. The decision to favor their own products over others seems like a short-sighted goal to help an exec get a bonus rather than help their customers I am wondering how they can handle short-sighted, highly-motivated individuals self-dealing rather than looking out for the company and its stated culture.

Probably something around Dunbar's number ("proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150") [0]. I imagine it's not simply the size of the company but how quickly it grew to that size, too.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number