21–30 of 61 posts
Amazon has had, what, five years to expand its Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service? The fact that they have chosen not to implies that they haven't managed to make it cost effective. I think this speaks volumes about the feasibility of grocery delivery.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I agree that Amazon not having much success in this market is not a great sign, it seems like there are probably a number of other reasons they haven't been expanding the service. Amazon is trying to be the one spot you buy all physical goods, but it's been proven time and time again that getting to generalized, or trying to be all things, means you can't do all of them (or sometimes any of them) well. I think…
Personally, I wish Amazon had stuck with books. IMO, their diversification has made their site organization suffer -- especially when they allowed 3rd-party sellers to create product listings (which led to maddening duplicates). I pray that Newegg's diversification from computer hardware won't have the same adverse effect, but it's probably a law of retail that it will.
If those are the actual operations, it appears like it would be very difficult to turn a profit. However, it does seem like there are plenty of good ways to make the operations more efficient once demand is high enough while still remaining light on assets like warehouses, trucks, etc.
If your order twice a week for 50 weeks than customer gets 100 deliveries for $99. So net/net Instacart would have gap of 40 deliveries = $33. So in essence they would eat up $33 per customer as loss which you can simply be viewed as customer acquisition/retention cost.
I think this is brilliant model. $99 for 3 hour deliveries would be very attractive to upper middle class. It also illustrates class of powerful business models which are simply based on swapping time for money and leveraging the exchange rate between time and money to be minimum wage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I agree that Amazon not having much success in this market is not a great sign, it seems like there are probably a number of other reasons they haven't been expanding the service. Amazon is trying to be the one spot you buy all physical goods, but it's been proven time and time again that getting to generalized, or trying to be all things, means you can't do all of them (or sometimes any of them) well. I think…
Personally, I wish Amazon had stuck with books. IMO, their diversification has made their site organization suffer -- especially when they allowed 3rd-party sellers to create product listings (which led to maddening duplicates). I pray that Newegg's diversification from computer hardware won't have the same adverse effect, but it's probably a law of retail that it will.
It seems that I only have good results when I search for a specific $productname, and even then I get results for products with user comments reading something like "its not $productname but..." or "get a $productname instead". More frustrating is that these seem to be ahead of what I'm actually searching fairly often.
Isn't Amazon Fresh the Amazon Prime for Groceries?
Back of the envelop calculations: A typical delivery would cost 1 hour of someone's time. At minimum wage this would cost ~$5. So $99 buys you 20 deliveries. If you batch up 3 customers every hour than $99 can pay for 60 deliveries. If your order twice a week for 50 weeks than customer gets 100 deliveries for $99. So net/net Instacart would have gap of 40 deliveries = $33. So in essence they would eat up $33 per cust…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I wish Amazon had stuck with books. IMO, their diversification has made their site organization suffer -- especially when they allowed 3rd-party sellers to create product listings (which led to maddening duplicates). I pray that Newegg's diversification from computer hardware won't have the same adverse effect, but it's probably a law of retail that it will.
I don't think the problem is so much that they're too diversified, its that their search functionality has done a very poor job of keeping up with and supporting that diversification. It seems that I only have good results when I search for a specific $productname, and even then I get results for products with user comments reading something like "its not $productname but..." or "get a $productname instead". More fru…
Don't even get me started the self-published ebook spam -- is Amazon just ignoring it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I wish Amazon had stuck with books. IMO, their diversification has made their site organization suffer -- especially when they allowed 3rd-party sellers to create product listings (which led to maddening duplicates). I pray that Newegg's diversification from computer hardware won't have the same adverse effect, but it's probably a law of retail that it will.
I think the problem Amazon has dug for itself is by operating at razor thin profit margins, the volume has to be massive. That of course means crossing into more and more markets, and spreading itself more thin