191–200 of 333 posts
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This should be Walmart's lane: no third-party sellers, just the best place to buy branded, verified products.
There has to be _someone_ who wants to be the high-quality seller. Even Newegg went down the eBay path. I understand it's profitable, but surely being a very successful #2 is OK too?
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Well, hundreds of millions Americans do. It's one of the strongest brands in the world.
Millions (billions?) trust Facebook too. Yet, Facebook kept the Instagram brand and it paid off.
It seems plausible that as walmart.com becomes better known as a good alternative to amazon for straightforward items, it might actually make people trust the walmart brand more - and put more shoppers in stores.
Story time! When Jet.com launched they had some promos going on so I wanted to check out what it was all about and ordered a bunch of stuff. I think at that point they had 2 day shipping over 25 without a membership. Their signature purple package arrives on time, in a larger than expected box. I open it, and there's a smaller Amazon box inside. I open THAT and it has all my items. I got two receipts, one from jet.co…
This reminds me of when I sent a friend a case of Topo Chico from Jet. He'd never had it. The package (of heavy bottles of water) shipped next day and each bottle was meticulously wrapped in mesh paper. You could have stuffed a mattress with all the wrapping. All for $1.99/bottle and free overnight shipping....
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This is indeed poetic. It’s actually an excellent metaphor for how AWS works. Fun fact: Startups spend almost 40 cents of every VC dollar on Google, Facebook, and Amazon. [1] [1] https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/socialcapital-annual-lett...
No doubt this is not an original thought, just tickled me to have an urban dictionary style definition. STARTUP (n.): An invention to funnel investor money from venture capital (VC) to Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Exhaust products are hype, blog posts, and waste heat.
FTFY.
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Because you cannot rely on non-employees to do the job correctly.
It's already non-employees (there's little to no entry barrier for DoorDash, Postmates, etc). They just don't want to have to deal with delivery logistics, easier and cheaper to outsource it to the existing companies.
There's still the entry barrier of having a background check, verifying insurance, etc., so it'd likely be more effort than it's worth for neighborhood Joe to sign up for it unless he wanted this as a full-fledged side hustle. If people want to do a "community delivery"-style thing, they can just sign-up for DoorDash/Postmates/IC/etc.
Walmart's ecommerce platform is fundamentally the same thing it was when they bought jet.com. People around here don't know what they're talking about.
Marc wanted to close down all the in-house data centers and move everything into Azure. Walmart inked a big deal with Azure with sweetheart pricing. I'm sure they're paying through the nose now because Marc Lorey only knows how to spend other people's money, not make it.
Walmart execs bought hard core into the SV culture as the means to success online. As soon as his 5 year lock up is done, he's out of the company.
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Techcrunch also breaks the back button, so you have to mash it to get back to HN
In many browsers you can click-hold the back button to get a pop up menu of previous pages. That can usually get you back easier than mashing. Some sites break the back button in such a way that they only appear once in the pop up, so with them it is just click-hold and select one entry and you are done. Others end up with many entries in the pop up so the one you want is farther down, but the one you want is still t…
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huhuhu, what happens when I tell Walmart I've completed the deliveries, but I haven't? what happens when I make the delivery, but someone gets injured in the process? DoorDash has insurance for this most likely.
How much would you bet against DoorDash's "insurance" being the small print on page 78 of the T&Cs when you sign up to be Dasher including something along the lines of "You, as and independent contractor partner, certify that you carry all appropriate insurance and accept responsibility for any claims arising from your delivery operations."???
Shipt supposedly covers it–their contractor agreement states that you need to have the state required auto insurance and they have a policy that takes effect while working that will increase your coverage to commercial-level insurance. I have also asked their insurance department about this directly and this has been confirmed.
I now trust Walmart [jet.com] and Bestbuy more than Amazon. Walmart / Jet have made great strides in their online experience and I trust them more than Amazon now. I don't really care about the branding Jet or Walmart is fine. And for my rant/last straw with Amazon: My most recent Amazon frustration: I ordered a Ryzen processor "shipped and sold by Amazon" and got an opened and obviously installed processor. Pins wer…
This is particularly ironic given that Jet's original premise was to be _entirely_ a marketplace which did not complete with the merchants on it. That plan was soon abandoned however and the warehouse network and first-party products introduced.
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The book "The United States of Walmart" goes into how Walmart pressures manufacturers to lower price points, margins, outsource, etc to meet the price Walmart wants to sell their products at. They have done significant damage to once reputable brands like Levis and Huffy in the interest of having that premium brand in their stores. For much of the 90s and early 2000s offshoring of manufacturing in the US was primaril…
Maybe this is a result of what you describe but I never remember Levis or Huffy being premium brands. Before Walmart "came to our town" those brands were featured in other big-box stores.
The pattern seems to happen many brands over time that sell out or fail. You see it across markets with brands like Packard Bell, Kodak, Polaroid, Martha Stewart, Kate Spade, RCA, etc.
50 years ago if you had a Zenith or RCA TV it was a sign of quality, 10 years ago you'd be mocked. Before the turn of the century Philips was known for consumer electronics and even made videogame consoles, now they make lightbulbs.