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Comment by brianbreslin | Hacker News Reader

Walmart has already spent close to $12B funding walmart.com/labs and not made a dent in catching Amazon.

Jet has a super smart team looking at ways to gain margins in areas amazon is ignoring. short term their investors won't appreciate this buy.

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> Jet has a super smart team

They might be smart but they haven't been successful. They almost immediately abandoned their original value proposition-- make money on the subscriptions like Costco and break even on sales.

If pivoting means you're not smart, HN would be the stupidest place on the internet.

I think the point was the lack of success, not smarts.

And the response was clearly questioning the argument put in favor of that point, thus making the point itself questionable.

It's a strange world when a startup that was just founded 2 years ago and is steadily growing [0][1][2], is considered a failure because they haven't already wiped out a 22-year-old goliath that has had a long history of struggling to break even, and operates in several other markets (AWS, Streaming Video, Devices, etc) that aren't this startup's main focus.

[0] https://www.snapagency.com/blog/jet-com-vs-amazon-mean-ecomm...

[1] https://www.internetretailer.com/2016/04/15/jetcom-predicts-...

[2] http://time.com/money/4337044/jet-com-lowest-prices-amazon-w...

My question, though, is whether Jet is "losing money on every sale but making it up in volume." That is, your articles mention how jet aims to be about 5% cheaper than Amazon, but they say nothing about the long term cost structure that would let them sell at these cheaper prices and still be profitable.

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 customers using freight forwarders.

When I went to purchase, the site stopped working, just providing some sort of generic error page. I called them up. A lady told me they were "performing maintenance" (middle of day). The website provided zero indication; just appeared broken.

Shipping took a while.

I'm certain they have smart people. But my anecdotal experience was that things were a bit clueless and not even remotely close to the level of taking on Amazon in any way.

You seem to forget its a startup and not a well oiled industry giant that has been around for ~20 years.

Maintenance to fix a security critical bug in the middle of the day to remain in compliance for credit card processing could have been a reason for this nuisance. Lots of factors and variables.

>Non-US access got blocked with a captcha

Walmart.com blocks the VPN I use with a generic 403 Forbidden.

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 and saving the consumer in the U.S. Money.

The entire point is to reduce the risk footprint, when most startups are being hacked left and right jet is being very smart by throwing captchas and saying to everyone outside the U.S. we don't want your scammy business.

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. FWIW, they eventually fixed it, a week or two (or so) after several poorly-written emails I sent them. So I think it is more likely to be the result of bad thinking, or just being unaware of the situation.

Furthermore, if their anti-hacking defense relies on a captcha or not being able to easily download their app, they're beyond screwed. I don't think they are that incompetent, it might have been, at best, oversight.

Probably the fault is at least partially on Cloudflare, though. Trump's read-only campaign website throws up a captcha at least to Guatemala. And GT isn't known as a centre of any hackers, to say the least. So if they have high profile sites like that which are misconfigured, perhaps they don't do enough review or customer education.

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.

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?

> Jet has a super smart team looking at ways to gain margins in areas amazon is ignoring

So does Walmart Labs, though. What makes Jet a better buy? Even if they've proven successful as their own company I'm super-skeptical of any startup merging with a larger organisation and retaining anywhere near 100% efficiency.

One of the way forward I see is that, Walmart will let Jet be Jet but will the major source of the products etc. Mostly growing from the back-end of it. Enabling things like same day delivery in certain instances. I would actually let Walmart groom Jet as a separate brand.

12B sounds like an incredible number for labs. Is there a source?

I think it's 12Bn of investment in eCommerce, which includes but isn't solely Labs.

The may be smart, but the business model seems to be failing. Not clear how this helps WalMart much.

Where did you get the 12bn number for Walmart Labs from? It seems quite high.

my guess is that the IT department for the whole organization for x years totals $12B. Some IT manager probably mentioned to someone near the c-suite that they were working on some cool internet commerce stuff. And then after the story has been passed on and on it gets reduced down to "$12B spent on labs"

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