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Wal-Mart in Talks to Buy Web Retailer Jet.com for $3B

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Re: Wal-Mart in Talks to Buy Web Retailer Jet.com for $3B

#181
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That'd be a killer position for Microsoft to be in. What do you mean by this? I don't deal with things of that scale, but I would imagine it would put Wal-Mart in a very good position to negotiate down near at-cost. It could be good for Microsoft on the PR front against Amazon, but bad for profit margins (on this one account).

Depends. Netflix doesn't get any kind of sweetheart deal with AWS. As far as I'm aware the prices they pay are exactly the same as what any other high volume customer would pay.

AWS is the big boy in the room. They don't have to prove anything to anyone.

Re: Wal-Mart in Talks to Buy Web Retailer Jet.com for $3B

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If jet is at 4 million+ loyal customers I doubt many of them are loyal. Most ordered from Jet due to huge discount codes, making them the cheapest. I'd love to see how many people place a second order, one with no discount code.

What is it with people on hacker news? You all love Amazon or something? Chances are a lot of them are coming back because their system, at jet, is guaranteed to be cheaper if you buy multiple things. It is why they have double the order size when compared to Amazon, at least according to the news articles. Amazon is about to close down every Walmart in America. They are going to shut down the number one employer in…

What is to stop Amazon from duplicating this modal if it gets traction? What is their moat?

Amazon released Prime Now about 9 months after Google Express and will copy any other successful e commerce trend and do it way better than another startup.

Re: Wal-Mart in Talks to Buy Web Retailer Jet.com for $3B

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What surprises me is that in many European countries, you can now order ALL of your groceries delivered. You place an order, and someone physically walks around a local supermarket, picks up stuff, they put on a van, and it is delivered to your home. It is actually very inexpensive (and free if you spend enough). Yet nobody in the US does that (well nobody outside of big cities). Walmart right now today has a HUGE ad…

> What surprises me is that in many European countries, you can now order ALL of your groceries delivered. You can do it in much of the US, too; a number of brick-and-mortar grocery chains offer online ordering home-delivery services, even before considering third-party or online-only grocers.

I've lived in multiple states in the past 5-ish years. Nowhere I've lived has had this.

Re: Wal-Mart in Talks to Buy Web Retailer Jet.com for $3B

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What surprises me is that in many European countries, you can now order ALL of your groceries delivered. You place an order, and someone physically walks around a local supermarket, picks up stuff, they put on a van, and it is delivered to your home. It is actually very inexpensive (and free if you spend enough). Yet nobody in the US does that (well nobody outside of big cities). Walmart right now today has a HUGE ad…

This is fairly common in the US as well.

Man, I must seriously have been unlucky in the places I've lived so far. Seriously never even heard of this being a thing until reading articles about Instacart and then Amazon Fresh, and thought "wow, wonder why nobody has done this before". Until this thread I still thought those were practically the only ones, and then only in like one or two cities.

Re: Wal-Mart in Talks to Buy Web Retailer Jet.com for $3B

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This super smart team didn't even know how to configure Cloudflare. Non-US access got blocked with a captcha. This same company disabled downloading their app if you weren't in the US. And then the site would plaster big scary banners telling you a ZIP code was mandatory and if you weren't in the US, beware! Who comes up with this stuff? Somehow, with all that money raised, they failed to realise there'd be some cust…

I'm not sure I understand, or rather I don't think you understand their business model... I think they set up their CloudFlare 100% correctly. Jet does not sell outside the U.S., they have no plans to ever sell outside they U.S. Most of the cyber attacks against them are from outside the U.S. Their entire business plan is cutting cost out of the supply chain inside the U.S. By bundling items together in the same box…

Just to clarify, given the highly defensive yet also authoritative sounding posts this account has made since being created apparently specifically to respond here: do you _work_ for Jet, fowlerpower?

Re: Wal-Mart in Talks to Buy Web Retailer Jet.com for $3B

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If jet is at 4 million+ loyal customers I doubt many of them are loyal. Most ordered from Jet due to huge discount codes, making them the cheapest. I'd love to see how many people place a second order, one with no discount code.

What is it with people on hacker news? You all love Amazon or something? Chances are a lot of them are coming back because their system, at jet, is guaranteed to be cheaper if you buy multiple things. It is why they have double the order size when compared to Amazon, at least according to the news articles. Amazon is about to close down every Walmart in America. They are going to shut down the number one employer in…

I never said anything about Amazon. I'm not sure what that came from.

Real, sustainable competition is what makes capitalism great. Jet spending $800mm+ in a year and taking a loss on every sale is not sustainable.

Re: Wal-Mart in Talks to Buy Web Retailer Jet.com for $3B

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it with people on hacker news? You all love Amazon or something? Chances are a lot of them are coming back because their system, at jet, is guaranteed to be cheaper if you buy multiple things. It is why they have double the order size when compared to Amazon, at least according to the news articles. Amazon is about to close down every Walmart in America. They are going to shut down the number one employer in…

I never said anything about Amazon. I'm not sure what that came from. Real, sustainable competition is what makes capitalism great. Jet spending $800mm+ in a year and taking a loss on every sale is not sustainable.

> Real, sustainable competition is what makes capitalism great. Jet spending $800mm+ in a year and taking a loss on every sale is not sustainable.

OTOH, spending and taking losses like that is often the cost of breaking into a business with established competition, even if you have a fundamentally better model -- a bit part of what every business wants to do is establish the kind of "moat" that makes that kind of thing necessary for any would-be new competitor.

Re: Wal-Mart in Talks to Buy Web Retailer Jet.com for $3B

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do sell to people that are outside of the US. They just sell via freight forwarders. In Central America (and probably all over) there are many businesses that exist entirely to service customers. The biggest bank in the country I'm in now (Guatemala) gives people credit cards and a Miami address specifically marketed to buy stuff off Amazon. You'd think with all that money spent, they'd have recognized this. FWI…

The captchas serve to stop bot nets and DDoS attackers who are all over the world. It is why many sites throw those up. It is not a miss configuration. It is a smart move.

It is 100% the wrong thing to do. On a static page like Trump's website, it is absolutely unacceptable that it ever shows a captcha to obtain readonly information. They are already handling the TCP connection, they are sending back the static assets (custom error page). They just don't send the main content.

Unless it's under a current attack, and even then it should go by IP or something. Visiting from an IP never used before should now throw up a captcha. Nor should it continue to do so on repeated visits.

It's broken, full stop.

Edit: I mention Trump's site because it's a reasonably high profile, static, site that I've seen CF blocking on. Also, FWIW, after I sent several emails to Jet, they seemed to reverse course and their app and site are available. Seems like an oversight/not knowing to me. CF's defaults are not very good so they probably didn't change them. CF should review their customers and suggest better defaults, at least to high end clients.

Re: Wal-Mart in Talks to Buy Web Retailer Jet.com for $3B

#189
post #120

Whoa whoa whoa stop the clock ;) Before everyone gets up in a big frenzy on the price, read the article (closely): "It isn’t clear how much Wal-Mart would pay, but a person familiar with the matter said Jet could be valued at up to $3 billion in private markets." That is nowhere near a statement that $3B is number from Wal-Mart. That means "someone" thinks they COULD be valued at UP TO $3B in "private markets". That…

Thoughts after today?

Re: Wal-Mart in Talks to Buy Web Retailer Jet.com for $3B

#190
post #120

Whoa whoa whoa stop the clock ;) Before everyone gets up in a big frenzy on the price, read the article (closely): "It isn’t clear how much Wal-Mart would pay, but a person familiar with the matter said Jet could be valued at up to $3 billion in private markets." That is nowhere near a statement that $3B is number from Wal-Mart. That means "someone" thinks they COULD be valued at UP TO $3B in "private markets". That…

Spot on!
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