231–240 of 419 posts
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Using Amazon for reviews seems ironic to me. Product reviews highlight Amazon's single biggest weakness: trust. You can't trust any Amazon review. Many of Amazon's other failings also center around trust.
I don't disagree. But for some products it's sometimes hard to find reviews outside of Amazon. I also learned how to spot products that have fake reviews.
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I’m not sure what’s going on with Amazon recently, but they’ve on multiple occasions told me that an item won’t ship or arrive until well into May, only for it to turn up next day. (edit: this is over the last 3 weeks for context) I wonder how much of their slow delivery is them under promising and how much is them actually not being able to get things out in a day or two. None of the other vendors I’ve worked with,…
There was a giant banner at the top of their site that explained there was global health crisis and shipments of non-essentials could be delayed. They'd been asked (told in some cases) by governments and others to prioritize eseential product shipments, so they did. They also told suppliers to stop sending non-essentials for FBA. If they had capacity (and items on hand) they've been delivering non-essentials (I've go…
Also, when FBA stock depletes, sellers have the individual option of whether to direct ship or not. Some are, and some are using expedited shipping, but others are either not shipping at all or are using the cheapest freight possible.
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…
1. The problem for me is that for any given product category, I don’t know who the online retailers are . For electronics there is microcenter.com, frys.com, tigerdirect.com, circuitcity.com, and many many more. 2. I think this is something that is burned into people’s heads but not actually true. Most retailers do offer pretty fast shipping. Even with prime you’re paying for fast shipping (in the membership fee).
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I agree with your points, but I've also found another one that is far more common: They sell products at a loss to gain income in other places. For example, if you are a content producer you are competing with a company that sells "ad-free" video (Prime Video) attached to a low-cost service (Prime) so that they can sell more goods online. Amazon is killing content producers by running a negative margin content busine…
>That is a strategy only available to... monopolies. Wait. And this is 100% not meant to be snide, it's a real question. Isn't that the actual strategy for tech startups? Work with investor capital long enough to get established and own the market by selling at negative margins, then increase the price once you own the market?
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…
Local bookstores are much better about this.
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 can also order groceries online from Safeway and either get it delivered or do curb-side pickup from my local store.
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Your home built video compression software does _not_ achieve the compression ratios of commercial software. Differences can be between 20-50% pretty easily. It also does _not_ have the reliability. x264 is good but not the benchmark. x265 is simply mediocre. That aside, as others have pointed out, there is the whole "in the cloud" thing which has to do with global TCO. Also the pricing you can get of the AWS site do…
I didn’t say I could do it cheaper. I’m not an expert, I’m sure that BAMTech could. Also, “the others” that pointed out TCO - was me.
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 is unusable for product search. It's too heavily gamed and optimized not to show you things you want to buy, but things Google is paid to show you. It makes it too difficult to get the information you want to make the purchases you want. Try shopping for a car or hotel room sometime on Google. None of the information is reliable, and none if it is for what you want to see or ordered in a reasonable way to navi…
>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.
This is entry level domain material for anyone involved in sales: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4PE2hSqVnk