The Anti-Amazon Alliance • Hacker News Board

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#211

Post by autokad » Tue, Apr 28, 2020, 7:01 PM UTC

tinyhouse wrote: post #3

Good article. There are a few unknowns still. 1. Is Google really all in on product search? Their product search is pretty bad at the moment and it's a very challenging search space, esp when you work with tens of thousands of retailers. Going directly to retailer/niche-platform sites usually works better for me. For example, for music related I go to reverb.com, for outdoor to rei.com, etc. I then to Google and Amaz…

Google was all in on cloud, and they have already had some layoffs in cloud, froze hiring, and are reducing spending on data center.

Either Google never goes all in, or they do not know what all in means

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#212

Post by SuoDuanDao » Tue, Apr 28, 2020, 7:02 PM UTC

softwaredoug wrote: post #4

As a consultant, I see companies struggling to compete with Amazon (or Amazon-like companies). Most companies struggle for a couple of reasons - They are ego driven, with legacy execs & others relentlessly protecting their status - whereas Amazon is relentlessly data-driven - They have poor incentive structures and are feature factories. They value velocity over outcomes. Amazon, by being more data driven, is focused…

What do you mean by 'value velocity'? I'm not familiar with the term.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#213

Post by oblio » Tue, Apr 28, 2020, 7:02 PM UTC

poxrud wrote: post #135

joefourier wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often hear this repeated with Amazon, that it's pointless to try to compete with them because they can just undercut you on price, but I have seldom seen any evidence for it. AWS is one of the most expensive cloud/hosting services for compute, data, bandwidth, etc., the products sold on Amazon are almost always more expensive than buying them from alternate sites or directly from the source. The only cheap thing th…

The prices for AWS products only tell a small part of the story. The real costs are in outgoing bandwidth. Take the encoding example above, you might pay a competitive price for the compute time required to encode, but you'll be paying some of the highest bandwidth fees in the industry if you were to stream out your encoded video to multiple viewers.

You'd use a CDN.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#214

Post by MattGaiser » Tue, Apr 28, 2020, 7:04 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #176

ozkan wrote: post #114

Most companies are not customer obsessed , that's why they fail. Let me give you an example; I've bought a sofa set from Coleman, and supposedly I needed to measure the door, if the sofa can fix or not. Because of the shape of the hallway and entrance, the sleeper did not fix from door. And carrier guys did not want to push further. Luckily, my patio's door was large enough to fit. I've called Coleman and explained t…

Amazon lost me as a customer completely. They're not at all customer focused. Their shipping care/quality is horrendous (stuff is damaged all the time). Any non-trivial issues (anything that can't be resolved by refunding money, re-sending the item) have no path to resolution. Amazon.com itself is like a flea market: tons of untrustworthy/counterfeit merchandise, fake reviews everywhere. Apple is customer obsessed. A…

>Any non-trivial issues

What product issue is not solved by a refund or replacement?

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#215

Post by jimktrains2 » Tue, Apr 28, 2020, 7:06 PM UTC

schnevets wrote: post #133

MattGaiser wrote: post #93

Most non-Amazon businesses are mediocre. Most grocery stores still don't have online ordering. Years, and years, and years, after Amazon entered the field, the other grocers have just decided to lie down and die. Still waiting for Chapters (a bookstore in Canada) to start sending me reading good reading recommendations. Still waiting on VISA to make generalized gift cards which are not miserable to use. I'm trying to…

My thoughts on declining industries have changed a lot since listening to the Spectacular Failures podcast episode about Toys R Us and learning more about the vampiric practice of Private Equity, where firms like Bain acquire struggling businesses and win regardless of the output. Here's a similar story from The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/toys-r-... I'm tired of people lamenting th…

Sears just confuses the heck out of me. They had everything they needed to basically be what Amazon is now, before Amazon even existed. Heck they were basically Amazon before the web existed.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#216

Post by noizejoy » Tue, Apr 28, 2020, 7:10 PM UTC

schnevets wrote: post #133

MattGaiser wrote: post #93

Most non-Amazon businesses are mediocre. Most grocery stores still don't have online ordering. Years, and years, and years, after Amazon entered the field, the other grocers have just decided to lie down and die. Still waiting for Chapters (a bookstore in Canada) to start sending me reading good reading recommendations. Still waiting on VISA to make generalized gift cards which are not miserable to use. I'm trying to…

My thoughts on declining industries have changed a lot since listening to the Spectacular Failures podcast episode about Toys R Us and learning more about the vampiric practice of Private Equity, where firms like Bain acquire struggling businesses and win regardless of the output. Here's a similar story from The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/toys-r-... I'm tired of people lamenting th…

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#217

Post by spaced-out » Tue, Apr 28, 2020, 7:10 PM UTC

uoaei wrote: post #166

scarface74 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I checked, Amazon doesn’t have a monopoly on servers, payment systems and shipping...

And what qualifies as a "monopoly" to you?

Would you consider a company that controls 1/3rd of the market share a monopoly? Because that's how much of the cloud market AWS controls.

https://www.statista.com/chart/18819/worldwide-market-share-...

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#218

Post by nano81 » Tue, Apr 28, 2020, 7:10 PM UTC

koboll wrote: post #14

>as John Gruber put it on Daring Fireball, “Amazon isn’t hurting for revenue (especially now), but they are hurting for trust.” This is empirically false. Amazon is the second most-trusted brand in America . https://morningconsult.com/most-trusted-brands/ It's wild how easily SV types will tweet things like "No one trusts Amazon!" when the reality outside the Bay Area is so radically and demonstrably opposite.

The context of that quote is talking about the trust of merchants which sell products on Amazon, not the trust of consumers (which is what your link is). Consumers of course don't care if Amazon rips off merchants.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#219

Post by hinkley » Tue, Apr 28, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #93

Most non-Amazon businesses are mediocre. Most grocery stores still don't have online ordering. Years, and years, and years, after Amazon entered the field, the other grocers have just decided to lie down and die. Still waiting for Chapters (a bookstore in Canada) to start sending me reading good reading recommendations. Still waiting on VISA to make generalized gift cards which are not miserable to use. I'm trying to…

I learned last year, possibly here, that the reason you can make withdrawals from your credit union at virtually any other credit union’s ATM isn’t because of some cabal of credit unions so much as the fact they nearly all use the same vendor.

I don’t know if there’s a lesson here for grocers, or maybe Organic Valley (a farmer cooperative) is a closer model.

If you are not clear on what your secret sauce is, or what your competitors think theirs is, it’s hard to be open about commodifying things that aren’t critical to you but are to your customers. Shared logistics systems? Probably trade secrets there. Other things? Maybe not so much.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#220

Post by dalai » Tue, Apr 28, 2020, 7:12 PM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #190

alkonaut wrote: post #187

These days when Sweden is often touted as “the experiment”, you can actually go there to see what e-commerce looks like in 2020 without Amazon. It might sound crazy but there is... no Amazon. If I go to amazon.se I end up at amazon.de There is no same day delivery of household products (like toilet paper). If I want a book I need to go to an online bookstore. Why this is I’m not sure. But it’s interesting.

Same in the Netherlands, it was recently announced that Amazon will open a Dutch store (not sure when) but it was quite a shock for me when moving to Germany that people here have no clue how to order things other than by going to Amazon. Too much effort to use google and try different web shops if all the web shops can come to a monopolizing marketplace instead I guess? Too bad that the marketplace also competes wit…

In Germany there are a lot of price comparison sites, geizhals and idealo being just two examples. If I am looking for electronics the filtering capabilities of geizhals are way better than Amazon and it is often the case that I can get a better price in one of the many other web shops.