Who delivers? Is this a P2P marketplace (like Taskrabbit, etc?)?
Instacart (YC S12) wants to be Amazon with 1 hour delivery
101–106 of 106 posts
Re: Instacart (YC S12) wants to be Amazon with 1 hour delivery
#102I'd love to have this service at home, so I'm (selfishly) hoping Instacart becomes hugely successful! That said, I can't help but wonder whether the company will find a business model with sustainable economics. A lot of really smart people have tried and failed to accomplish this sort of thing before. For example, Amazon invested $60 million in Kozmo.com back in the late 90's, and they couldn't make it work. (Kozmo.…
I'm hoping service succeeds also - its an awesome value proposition for consumers. However, I've built a few real-time delivery businesses, and I'm pessimistic. Real-time operations are costly to manage even though the software has become easier to build. Not being Amazon and not being able to control inventory, and access to that inventory, hurts. However, probably a bigger issue is establishing consumer habit - tri…
I think the main problem is sourcing. If sourcing can be done locally, then delivery costs will automatically plummet. Take vegetables for example. The actual cost of growing the vegetables is negligible compared to the transportation costs of delivering and storing to the end consumer. There is also the added cost of storing. Companies are doing a lot to address the transportation and storage but not doing much to address the sourcing issue. I think one startup in NYC is doing some sort of urban warehouse farming to tackle the sourcing issue.
Re: Instacart (YC S12) wants to be Amazon with 1 hour delivery
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon already has "Amazon lockers" scattered across Manhattan where you can go pick up your packages from a kiosk inside a grocery store / drug store. You enter a pick-up code on the touchscreen, and a specified locker opens up with your goods inside it. It's easy to see how similar tech could be adapted for use inside a robovan.
Any particular location you have seen this in NYC? Haven't seen it yet
I've personally only used the one at the Gristedes in Sheridan Square, but based on their locator (http://www.amazon.com/gp/css/account/address/view.html/ref=l...) it looks like they have a good 15-16 in Manhattan and 3-4 in Queens/Brooklyn.
Re: Instacart (YC S12) wants to be Amazon with 1 hour delivery
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think to solve this problem, Amazon needs to bridge the gap between their value and local retailers' stock. It'd work something like this: You go online. You want to buy a new A/V receiver You find the one you want on Amazon at 9 am Amazon then asks you where you live Amazon taps into a database of willing stores that might carry the product. Most big-box stores have web-based inventory checks, so syncing their inv…
The bottleneck is the delivery: unless there are sufficient deliveries to be made in your neighbourhood, sending a van to just your house then back to depot is very expensive. For hundred-dollar-and-up items this works, but not for the kind of consumer goods that people want within an hour (food, namely). And for $9.99 for one-hour delivery, who is not getting paid very well here?
I think food already has its systems in place (think eat24.com). The only leftover gap is the retail items. That said, many retail items aren't that expensive, but utilizing GPS and logistics tech is the key here. You don't have to make one-off stops if you coordinate. Hell, can you imagine how much UPS or FedEx would like something like this? Their overhead would go down to almost nothing, and they could replace fleets of big air freight with many electric powered local trucks.
Re: Instacart (YC S12) wants to be Amazon with 1 hour delivery
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Robotically offering me a box seems significantly easier than robotically driving a freaking van.
Right, now we're talking about stuff that's a hundred years away (yeah I know Google car ...)
What is still left to be done? Google has extremely detailed mapping and the self driving car works well in real traffic. (One advantage a car has over planes is that if things go horribly wrong it can just stop.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car
There aren't any technical unknowns left. Obviously the algorithms will continue to be tweaked and improved. Importantly it can operate in the existing environment - there is no need for every car to switch to driverless at once.
Re: Instacart (YC S12) wants to be Amazon with 1 hour delivery
#106Better than Peapod and Kozmo, the time for such a service is definitely now in the mobile driven world.