281–290 of 309 posts
"Had an idea I’ve been stewing on for a few days now… a decentralized (not tied to any one company) Amazon Prime. As a user, you would pay a yearly fee and get free shipping from all the participating eComs. As a partnering eCom, you get more repeat customers."
I can see this being a product (or a feature) you can offer down the road.
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I’m pretty happy to live in world where it’s difficult to build a business where you move trucks around cities to deliver a single tube of toothpaste to someone who ordered it the day before. Yes, it’s hard to do this as fast as Amazon does. But should we really go that way, anyway?
>But should we really go that way, anyway? Yes. It is more efficient from an energy, carbon, land usage, and labor perspective. The bluish-grey van that delivered my toothpaste had several hundred other deliveries on it, and the warehouse it came from stocks the products of hundreds of stores (if not more). How do you think a tube of toothpaste gets to "Ye Olde Mum and Pop's Auntie Emma's Down Home Crunchy Granola Au…
It would be if they saved up all orders from a week, and then send it all to you at the end of the week in a single delivery.
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Also very difficult to compete with Amazon. Amazon makes their operating profits from cloud computing and subsidizes their retail market with it. That is how they keep prices so low.
The result is a form of predatory pricing which should be illegal.
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18 hours is a pretty stupid selling point IMO. You either need something immediately or you can wait. Rarely do I need anything 18 hours from now. I think many sellers would love to not be locked into Amazon and at least use something like this as an additional alternative. I'm on the other side of the table where I avoid buying from Amazon as much as possible.
Imo it’s less about the speed than the predictability. I routinely pick the “next Monday and we’ll give you two bucks digital credit or whatever” option because I assume it’ll make the shipping a little more efficient or make some factory grunt’s life easier, and I’ll still pick Amazon over other vendors because when they say Monday, they mean Monday . I’m always able to track the shipment, it’s always predictable, I…
No. At best it will reduce the number of factory grunts working. Amazon has whole departments dedicates to making factory grunts life as hard as possible. "Ease" == less profit.
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Amazon.com is likely the most a/b tested piece of software on the planet. It is ugly and clunky because that's what _works_ - same with Alibaba and Yahoo JP.
"It is ugly and clunky because that's what _works_" It's a legacy code nightmare, but customers are used to it and this is #1 reason why it will not be changed anytime soon.
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> FWIW, every company I've ever worked at bans AGPL products / code. Is every company you've ever worked for a software vendor? Because those are the only companies that would be impacted at all by using AGPL products/code.
Any business that uses AGOL software needs to be able to provide the source code of that AGPL software to people who use their services That is… just not something most online stores are interested in adding to their compliance burden. And of course they will have changes. It’s a business software platform, the only way to accomplish some things is going to be through adding or modifying code.
Step 1: add GitHub link to footer on website
...that's it, you have achieved compliance.
This "wah the AGPL is too viral" argument is the same FUDdy duddy nonsense Microsoft was whining about back in the early 2000's about the original GPL - and it's even less of a valid argument now than it was then, thanks to the existence of umpteen bajillion Git repo hosts that will gladly handle distributing said source code (and therefore making you compliant with the terms of said code's license) at zero cost to you.
Outstanding! I worked for a number of years at one of the larger used book resellers in the USA, top 1-3 of Amazon's used listings consistently, it had a fairly surprising amount of volume to me when I first started. The fact that Amazon was 98%+ of our sales source was considered an existential threat to the company everyday but the ability for us to mitigate that was almost impossible. Even after multiple temporary…
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> The payment processors will shut you down even for your first payment if it's for porn. More likely - you'll never get to a first payment anyways, they won't sign the contract. If that was even occasionally true, the tons of paid porn sites wouldn't exist. The fact that they both exist and take popular cards tells me that that cannot possibly be true.
There are special payment processors catering to porn/etc, but the problem is that they require extremely large collateral and have other unusual requirements that are untenable to new businesses. Most probably they won't even talk to a startup (I tried, didn't get a reply). There's a reason why startups like OnlyFans used normal payment processors and tried to convince them they're not porn instead of beginning with…