Those efforts look impressive but no service will be a version (open source or otherwise) of Amazon until it can place a single tube of toothpaste in my garage 18 hours after I ordered it, which it just did thirty minutes ago.
Amazon’s “tech” stack, both consumer- and seller-facing is horrible and borderline irrelevant.
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.
Last night "Hmm. Toothpaste almost gone. Let me check the linen closet. Nope. Excuse me while I whip this out. (gasp) Swipe, tap, tap, t-o-o-t-h (autocomplete), scroll, tap, tap, tap. Done."
Used the last this morning, new toothpaste delivered at noon.
I shop online exclusively because one of my first jobs was in retail and it is my solemn duty to do everything I can to annihilate the brick and mortar store, to erase it from existence to the point that it remembered only as a distant cultural echo by future generations.
This is all I can do, and it is enough.
I even get booze delivered so I don't have to stand in line as some tweaker tries to buy lottery tickets with handfuls of quarters at the liquor store.
Despite what the internet might have you think, fulfillment centers for every single distributor or retailer are run the same so I choose amazon because they can get many things here in 4-6 hours, most of the rest the overnight, and weird stuff in two days.
You have an interesting (and I find pitiable) perspective here. I live in a small town, and brick and mortar stores are how many folks survive here.
I, and many other townfolk go out of our way to expressly shop in town. This helps create an interesting, culturally vibrant downtown, filled with shops and restaurants.
My saturday mornings usually involve me walking the town, poking my head into shops, saying hi to folks I might know along the way, and supporting a local business here or there.
I can't imagine wanting to get rid of all of this, possibly even irreversibly so, for the sake of efficiency.
You obviously live in a much nicer place. Sounds like the GP lives in a rougher neighborhood in a larger city, which if you’ve never experienced, can definitely leave you wanting to avoid having to shop in public.
My local brick and mortar store is less than five minutes away. Why the hell do I have to replace it with an even more expensive alternative store that increases the waiting time by a factor of 216?
It's almost never 5 minutes though, is it? You have to get there, park if you are using a car, possibly pay for parking, depending on the location, go look for the things that you want all over the store, possibly not find some of them, wait in line which could be quite long, get to the car, drive back. All this time will add up.
Instead, I can do some of that shopping on my computer or phone, then quickly reference it again or even set up auto deliveries. A lot of times it'll be cheaper too because I can comparison shop.
For me, it's about convenience and saving time and money. It won't be the same for everyone, of course. The location where you live will dictate whether this shopping experience is similar to yours or not.
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 never have to wonder. It’s a less tangible feature but far more valuable.
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.
18 hours is a fantastic selling point for me. I am willing to wait a couple of days for something that I bought. Beyond that, I'd rather just go out and buy it.
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?
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 Authentic and Real Indie Small Business"? Trucks.
> It is more efficient from an energy, carbon, land usage, and labor perspective
That's very doubtful. Normally you'd get toothpaste along with a bunch of other items. The convenience of delivery means you no longer purchase in batches. Batches is more efficient in every sense.
Maybe the mom and pop's supply chain could be shorter and more efficient, but the OP was talking about whether we should be going down the path of immediate delivery of small orders.
> How do you think a tube of toothpaste gets to "Ye Olde Mum and Pop's Auntie Emma's Down Home Crunchy Granola Authentic and Real Indie Small Business"? Trucks.
With one truck every two weeks that deliver toothpastes as boxes of 1000s. That’s one truck for all the customers that will go in that shop over two weeks.
Compare that to 2-3 trucks to directly deliver all these people one package per toothpaste. The only way to lower the delivery times is to increase the number of trucks.
Think of a tree where leaves are customers and the root is the producer. Each other node is an intermediary. In the worst case, if all customers go by foot in one shop that gets direct deliveries from the producer, you use only one truck (producer->shop). If all N customers are delivered by the producer, in the worst case, you use N trucks (producer->customer).
You're right, amazon is a logistics company first and foremost. But if you can replace the website with something like this and then let all the other logistics providers (ups, USPS, FedEx, dhl unfortunately) handle the logistics you can re-enable competition in this space.
A lot (most?) of that is contractor based now, though. At least the last mile. And from the sounds of it, most of the contractors aren't huge fans of Amazon anyways. Seems like it would not be insurmountable to leverage that market for similar delivery times.
https://bol.com in the Netherlands has delivery within a few hours (by bicycle) for some cities and select products. I got in this way an inflatable mattress (old one was punctured, so I needed one by the evening for my guests) and a few other electronic devices or household items.
A little while ago I drove past a giant blue pyramid dedicated to the grand and wise Jeff Bezos where I can only imagine The Great God of Online Commerce conducts his human sacrifice rituals on unwitting union organizers. Pretty sure they are currently keeping the management indoctrination ceremonies low key being Labor Day weekend and all that.
And people thought the Long Beach shipping container height restrictions were lifted over practical concerns…
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's ugly and clunky because a) Jeff used to guard it fiercely, b) because a/b testing is not guaranteed to get the best results, and c) you might just be on the "ugly" a/b test.
> 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.
I’ve seen countless bad decisions being taken because the A/B test was badly done. You can’t assume that some decision was good JUST because they A/B-tested it.
That is not true, some parts might be clunky because that works, but there's also many parts that are clunky simply because it's hard to make a change without breaking anything. But amazon doesn't care due to their strong position in the market and because AWS is their cash-cow anyways.
i read somewhere that bezos personally controls the look and feel of amazon and thats why it looks like that. some amazon UX/UI director even quit over it
getting stuff that fast is very stupid 98% of the time. people may like it and want it and sing its praises, but its mostly stupid. and i think stupid things generally tend to die out. that is all to say that maybe that edge that amazon has is not that important.
Unnecessary most of the time but it becomes an expected processing and delivery standard, which makes the experience much more predictable for consumers.
Very few can really compete effectively with Amazon on this front.
Source: Used to run an e-commerce company that shipped up to 2 million packages annually. Once we optimised shipping and processing, customer service inquiries and complaints dropped dramatically, and customer trust / sentiment skyrocketed.
My understanding is that in certain regions Amazon offers the option to consolidate orders to be delivered on a specific day. This is actually impressive as it's much harder to do at scale than you'd imagine.
> Source: Used to run an e-commerce company that shipped up to 2 million packages annually. Once we optimised shipping and processing, customer service inquiries and complaints dropped dramatically, and customer trust / sentiment skyrocketed.
I used to work at company that shipped ~30k packages a day. I’d say 90% of customer complaints were about the delivery delays, and only 10% about the rest. It was really hard to optimize because we had 1M products and were using just-in-time logistics with very little inventory. This is a specific market that Amazon hasn’t really entered yet, but when they’ll do they’ll crush everyone.
Agreed. Every logistics partner I ever dealt with was another layer that you did not have full control of, and each had their problems.
Amazon's in-house logistics gets cheaper with scale. Waiting for the day Amazon launches their offerings to C2C and B2C delivery to directly compete with UPS and Fedex.
Amazon's in-house logistics, plus their ability to co-mingle this entire layer will be hard beat.
The advantage of a great logistics network is predictability.
If I order from Etsy, I will drop $100 on a product and shipping. But when will I get it? I don’t know. Will it even arrive? Who knows?
With Amazon I know what I order is coming this week. That’s why I buy from them and no one else. It doesn’t matter that half their website is styled like it’s 2003 and I’m probably getting a counterfeit product.
Bingo. Predictability and consistency is actually hard to execute and scale.
I can order an iPad from Best Buy or Apple, but most of the time I'm never quite sure when it might arrive. Amazon, I know it should arrive tonight or tomorrow.
I tend to avoid buying many brands on Amazon because of supply chain integrity risks, but their execution is consistent and predictable. I can't say that about many retailers.
The growth potential and the customer satisfaction.
The sad reality is that a large majority of people don't actually use products they buy. They want the satisfaction of getting a new "quality" product and imagine it gives them status.
Amazon’s “tech” stack, both consumer- and seller-facing is horrible and borderline irrelevant.
Their fleet of trucks and aircraft is not.