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Comment by reacharavindh | Hacker News Reader

I'm still waiting for a time when UPS or Fedex will come up with a Prime option where I pay $99 a year for 2-day shipping through them, and all these companies like Anker would ship through major carriers directly. Buying third-party stuff from Amazon is always a hit and miss experience..

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Amazon 2-day shipping is just regular ground shipping. The trick is they've strategically located products in various warehouses throughout the country and then spent a bunch of effort optimizing the lead time so pickers can get them out as soon as possible.

That's basically what https://www.shoprunner.com/ is trying to be, I think?

It's not as integrated as it could be, but it accomplishes the same thing.

The problem with shoprunner is that not every store supports it,but all stores can ship with ups "prime".

What's to stop someone from sharing their UPS Prime membership with everyone they know?

Verified address(es) sound like the only answer, and that brings up another set of problems to solve.

Beyond that, just because UPS offers a membership doesn't mean that retailers will have it integrated into their checkout flow/logic. In a lot of cases that would be a re-work and could take a long time before it was practically usable.

Maybe it's strictly associated with the address: every time UPS ships something to your address, it gets flagged for express treatment. Seller doesn't have to know about it at all.

This would actually be significantly harder than you would think - definitely much more difficult than a 'flag' on your address.

Below constitutes my (limited) experience working as an engineer at a company with a big logistics component (not Amazon).

When you run an operation the size of Amazon (or even muuuuch smaller) and are putting out a lot of freight for UPS/FedEx, you batch up your outgoing material based on ship method and 'next hop'. In order to speed up the delivery from a 3-5 day window to a 2 day window, you would have to explicitly purchase the '2 day' shipping option for that customer, or it would get batched in with all of the other 3-5 day goods, which could get sent to a totally different distribution center than the 2 day.

We're talking huge numbers trucks all going to "Indianapolis 2 day" versus "Lexington Ground" or whatever - once it gets on that ground shipping truck, I don't think it matters a ton what your address is flagged, as it's going to go that shipping method.

It would still be hard to implement. The shipper still has to make an additional request to UPS to make sure they get paid for the label.

The first and largest complaint people will make is that they can't use UPS Prime while on vacation or to ship gifts.

As andrewflnr said, it would be tied to your name and address, or maybe two addresses (home and vacation/business) and four names (family) the same way USPS offers Informed Delivery[0] based on name and address. It offers the carriers a double dipping (charge shipper standard rate and then charge you subscription fee) but there's definitely a market for it.

[0]https://informeddelivery.usps.com/box/pages/intro/start.acti...

ShopRunner is also free if you have an American Express card.

ShopRunner is also free, forever, if you ever sign up for one of their free trials - I think they tend to happen around Black Friday.

I signed up for a free 1 year trial 5+ years ago, and it's still active. I don't know if they're desperate to goose their user numbers or what, but I've never heard of anyone's trial expiring.

I use Shoprunner where it's supported, because I get it for free with Amex. My experience is that it's not as good as Prime. Prime is supposed to give you free delivery in 2 days. Shoprunner is supposed to give you free 2-day shipping. These are very different things. Yes, the Shoprunner package is shipped via a 2-day shipping method, but the merchant often takes several days before they ship it. I've had Shoprunner orders take a week or more to arrive. Every once in a while Prime misses its promise date, but it's pretty rare, and usually only by a day. I don't think I've EVER had a Shoprunner order arrive in 2 days. Unless the merchants are all prepared to start passing orders off to the carriers more quickly, a carrier program will have a hard time matching the Prime experience.

This is pretty typical for most not-amazon (or amazon-competitor) stores, I've found. It's why I am so reluctant to use third party sites, even though I know it's for the better if I do.

Newegg I've found to fulfill the Shoprunner "two day" shipping promise pretty reliably. I actually get a lot of stuff the next day due to being relatively close to their Indiana drop-ship partner/warehouse/whatever.

The Prime service only works because Amazon is able to negotiate shipping prices due to their volume of pickup. Maybe if you were getting a high volume of delivery everyday, then shipping companies would consider it.

Also because they basically have warehouses and distribution centers in one. Instead of shipping your box to a distribution center and from there to your home, they just put it in the truck that delivers it to your door. At least that's what I've seen in Europe, but wouldn't be surprized that that is what they do in the US, too. I think they have direct 'peering' arrangements with DHL and others, in that the truck actually starts at Amazon or goes there the first thing in the morning.

I would love to see "independent" fulfilment centers. E.g. I order at my favorite company a few cities away, and my local fulfilment center (the former huge amazon warehose) processes it, and I get it next day. I could imagine a shipping flat, for all packages that go through "my" center. Note, I am not thinking "mom and pop" centers, I am imagining local joint ventures beween logistics/delivery companies and these huge warehouses/goods transportation centers. But still a few orders of magnitude smaller than Amazon. (For the Germans: all my Amazon packages go through Bad Hersfeld. Imagine that logistics center would be it's own company, maybe backed by DHL / Schenker / Trans-o-flex / ... I believe it has a critical size to be viable.)

Unfortunately, the free market is not going to bring me that...

This is kind of the idea of Fullfilment by Amazon (FBA). You send your stuff to Amazon in bulk, they keep it in their warehouse, and when you sell an item, tell them where to deliver it to. You can use it even if you don't sell on Amazon.

Prime works because not everyone makes frequent purchases and they get a flat $99 a year. People with prime are going to shop at amazon first because of the sunk cost of prime.

Prime from a customer standpoint is indeed about the shipping. But Prime from a seller standpoint (usually) means Fulfillment By Amazon. That means Amazon stores the product until there's a sale, then they pack and ship the product, and they handle most of the customer service. Those things are quite a ways outside the wheelhouse of UPS or Fedex, I think. You need a proper fulfillment center for those things. There are a number companies providing these services, so theoretically, Anker could use them instead of Amazon already. But alas, Amazon being Amazon is probably too large of a marketplace to ignore.

FYI UPS has a Supply Chain division that will do warehousing and fulfillment for other companies:

https://www.ups-scs.com/logistics/warehousing.html

First I heard of this is when I found out that some "mail order" companies let UPS handle their returns. (I think it was Lands' End.)

Oh, wow. They seriously haven't redesigned that site since I helped build it at Studio Archetype in 1998. I swear some of that is still my (very, very dated) HTML, especially all the IMG SRC="1.gif" WIDTH=123 stuff. Yikes!

I agree with you.

While it is true Amazon does negotiate very good deals for themselves, they have been moving more and more into UPS/FedEx's business of shipping logistics and delivery. If these shipping companies want to survive they need to find a way to support Amazon's competitors.

Amazon isn't moving in on UPS/Fedex really, yet. Their "in house" Amazon Logistics is mostly third party vendors who are doing a terrible job at it too. So much so that I've had to call Amazon enough that they've explicitly flagged my account to never use it as an option for shipping me anything.

One of their drivers called me at 9am telling me to meet them outside on the corner because they couldn't find the apartment building entrance. There are only four sides to the building, not that hard...

Glad I'm not the only one. Every shipment I've had using Amazon Logistics has showed "out for delivery", then an hour later "back at carrier facility". The next day, same thing. They can't find my address, even though it comes right up on Google Maps, as well as Mapquest, Bing, and TomTom.

Currently Amazon "owns" the customer, plus it owns very large fullfilment network - i.e. a caching for the physical world - making it's cost per packet the lowest. This is a powerful combination.

Furthermore, if Fedex/UPS will start to find sucsess in this "prime" project, Amazon could instantly change it's software to add a box "only from branded manufacturer's store", or some other software change, and solve this hit and miss experience you speak of.

Isn't retail margin usually 50%? Doesn't Amazon use some of their savings from not having a retail store front to subsidize shipping? I assume the Prime fee doesn't actually cover the cost, it simply is a mechanism to lock people into ordering.

We sell a product through Amazon on their vendor program. After all the deductions we come up with about 50% more cash per product than through the one traditional retailer we have. We only make few more percent through our own website as Amazon's own margins are so thin. They offer a much better deal than the rest of retail.

I feel like I have a hard time justifying Prime because I never need anything that fast. I'm happy to wait until I have 25, 35, or 50 $ (or whatever value) of purchases in my cart and wait a week to get my stuff.

I dunno about the US, but in the UK Anker sells direct through Amazon. I do agree with your overall idea though, but then there's like 3 or 4 major delivery services..

Hrm, so a premium, tiered access for the "last mile" to your house?

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