Startup idea for you: Modern e-commerce isn't enough | Hacker News Reader

Startup idea for you: Modern e-commerce isn't enough

tibbon.com

73 pointstibbon55 comments

We tried to do exactly that a couple of years ago. I've no doubt lots of others have tried, it's not an original idea. The problems associated with it are legion though. The vast majority of small or independent stores have no electronic inventory system. Lots of store owners we spoke to didn't even know what they had in stock, or have a list (electronic or paper) of what they had in stock. And it's these smaller stores which actually make such a service truly valuable. And don't forget - there are thousands, 100s of 1000s of them. getting them all on board is nigh-on impossible.

Many the small stores we visited had thousands of items for sale. The job of itemising them is, for a small business, just too expensive and/or time consuming. Additionally most of these owners were absolutely hopeless with technology - they couldn't even upload a csv (what's a csv file?) with a simple web form. Many of them didn't have, nor want a website. It's out of their realm of knowledge or understanding, and they have no desire, in fact often an aggressive rejection of, adopting new technologies.

Couple that with the costs involved, they are simply not interested, whatever the business case.

This isn't going to happen by virtue of an active sales drive. This is only going to happen passively over the next 10 - 20 years as more stores get unified cash register/inventory systems - and then only if such systems provide a common or standard api for web or mobile platforms to hook into. And this in itself is a huge problem - there is no dominent player in the cash register/inventory business - just hundreds of little guys with no common standards.

It's a nice idea and would be wonderful. But it's just too big a project to make a reality.

Even that big players can't track there own stock. Recently I wanted a toy at toys-r-us, but found out the only way to get it was to call every local store once a day until someone had it in stock. I paid the scalper fee and bought it on ebay. Similarly I wanted to rent a specific (more expensive) car with Avis. The only way to do it was to click on each office, put in my dates and see what they had, one by one. There was absolutely no way to search for a car to find out where it was or would be. I ended up just renting the cheapo car. You would think tracking your inventory would be a solved problem in this day in age for a company of either of these sizes.

You'd be gobsmacked how many big companies totally missed the boat on core, defining technologies, due to failure of vision, switching costs, or just belief that it did not matter for them. Hopefully they will be made into lunchmeat by their competitors, but that is not a law of nature.

There are banks that still require humans to make credit decisions with $2,000 of maximum risk to the bank. There are airlines where rebooking a ticket requires getting three humans together on a telephone call. There are retailers who do not know how much of their bestselling product is on the shelves. There are retailers who do not know what their bestselling product is right now, but who can give you a pretty good guess two weeks from now. There are e-commerce companies who do not do A/B testing yet. There are newspapers who do not SEO. There are publishers who think that paper is the future of their industry. The list goes on and and and on.

Additionally, there are still businesses that use 3-column ledger paper for their books, write all receipts manually, accept cash only, have no web presence at all (of their own), and use mechanical cash registers. Unfortunately, the presence of technology does not always mean adoption of technology even if the benefits seem crystal clear to most others.

This seems to me to be ("simply") a failure of marketing. If you can demonstrate value, then you would generally be a deployed solution. But you have to get that message out there, and if your target market is stuck in the stone age SEO isn't really going to be quite as helpful.

The mid-sized (but nationwide) courier company we use in Canada for our web based business does not have a web service interface for us to add new customers to our customer database on their site. So when we get an order from a new customer, we have to log in to the website and enter all this information manually. This seems to be considered reasonable, according to several people I talked to on the phone.

They have much lower rates and we have low volumes for now, otherwise we would have switched to one of the big names long ago. If these guys are still in business, it makes me think the big, efficient couriers must be hugely profitable.

Starbucks, Chipotle, Nike, Apple, Victoria's Secret, Whole Foods, and Google all seem to me like examples of x done right for some x. But for each of example like those there are probably ten more xs that haven't been done right.

Talking about being lunchmeat. I did notice that Target lets you put in an item and it will tell you which store in your local area has it in stock. Since than I have made purchases at Target, but not toysrus.

Wasn't RFID supposed to fix this by now?

That and the Semantic Web.

RFID will only contribute when all the stuff in Mom and Pop stores ends up having RFID tags. Then other people will start building systems that use them. But who takes the leap of faith and pays for putting RFID tags in everything they make, with little or no chance of a return?

Chicken and egg.

This is a kind of obvious problem to approach, but as people here have mentioned, it would be extremely difficult (milo are trying, as have others). An idea I had once upon a time was that you could essentially solve it by building a kick ass point-of-sale and inventory management software system that customers are able to use for free, provided that they're happy to have their goods indexed on a location aware product search engine. Needless to say, that is still an extremely difficult challenge. I've got a feeling these guys might attempt it at some point: www.vendhq.com

Agreed, it is a difficult challenge. I know because I'm working on it right now with my company, Cashier Live. We've thought about doing something like this in addition to working with options out there like Milo or Google's local product search, but it leads to the same problem they have now. Comprehensive search. If I (or VendHQ) did something like that, we'd only have independent stores and not the large chains.

That being said, I think Milo knows their weakness is in independent retail and it looks like they're taking steps to solve that.

Exactly what I was thinking. One feature you'd have to include though is a way to back out transactions at end of day. A lot of small, independent family run retailers (especially coffee shops, corner stores) have software mods to their cash registers for reversing sales at end of day so they can remove them to avoid paying taxes.

If I was doing this, I would be very leery of accepting an advanced, internet connected POS device into my store rather than my trusty old, hackable offline cash register. It would take a huge increase of sales to overcome the money saved by not paying taxes on a portion of sales.

Or decouple the POS and inventory/catalog systems and have a restricted interface between them. Only the inventory system needs to be indexed for search.

Something which wasn't mentioned here is that many retailers don't want you to know - they want you to come in to the store. If all of the retailers have you come in to the store, there's an effective block on this sort of thing working.

Also, many retailers have "we'll honor competing prices on things but only if they're in stock" policies. This would make it too easy for people to play retailer X off retailer Y.

I noticed on milo.com that most of the items I looked for "might" be in stock. Well, of course they might be - I still need to call/drive.

A different approach would be a push - let me push out what I'm looking for, and have competing retailers contact me with replies. Have the service cost a bit for retailers to use - not a lot, but something to prevent rampant spamming. Build in location, so retailers are only getting requests from people in the area, and have retailers use the system on a regular basis. Just like someone should check voicemail every few minutes (30?) someone could check serviceX, and reply if they have the item in stock with the price, terms, etc. "Click here to hold the item from company Y for 2 days" etc.

Wow, excellent idea!

" Just like someone should check voicemail every few minutes (30?) someone could check serviceX, and reply if they have the item in stock with the price, terms, etc"

This could presumably be (sometimes) handled automatically with an interface to common inventory/POS systems - and the retailer could handle exactly which items to be exposed in this way, price differential, etc.

Sounds like reverse auctions. Rather than people competing to buy an item on sale, sellers would be bidding to sell a wanted item. Does anyone do this? Would it actually work?

yeah, and this idea has been tried for more than a decade in various forms. To make it work, having a twitter-like approach, with location included, and having stores actually using it, that would take off (potentially). The diff now from 1999 is tech is cheaper, more pervasive, and mobile.

The main challenge would be to convince business owners to publish data about their stock to the web. The rest should be easy.

Convincing them of this could be difficult.

The absolute only idea that I had which might work is to provide businesses with 100% free automatic (rfid or whatever based) inventory systems of whatever size they need. Yes, that is a large expense.

However, in exchange for the free inventory system, you get access to their data and the ability to post it online. You give people the ability (but don't force them to) buy the item from their mobile phone/computer quickly and easily, so when they show up they have a zero balance and are ready to go. Then you take a 2-5% cut of that (just a hair more than credit card transactions) for the online business referral.

TL;DR- Give business owners something expensive and massively valuable in return for their data, and the ability to let consumers buy their items through your referral system online.

I agree. Putting your entire stock online can take a lot of manpower, depending on who you are. (Best Buy? Probably fairly trivial. Grandma's and Grandpa's Little Shop of Flowers? Gotta hire more grandkids.)

Unless the time and money spent on the effort is going to pay off, and pay off quick, a store isn't going to bother.

I've done db work for mom&pop stores, small-town hardware shop, etc. You would be surprised how much of inventory is digitized even at a small place.

The major work wouldn't be in manpower, but in hooking up the db to something that can index it.

Why just not parse/index all the products from stores websites and verify in-stock real-time when making a search via script or something (given that in-stock availability is indicated). Using this approach you can collect product/location data from more than a million stores I would guess. No?

Real-time inventory tracking for as large a company as Best Buy is "fairly trivial"?

For large companies, it is a multi-million dollar investment to build a warehouse management system capable of showing near real-time levels of inventory. Besides the capital costs, companies can have very specific workflows for managing inventory levels. Also things like drop-ship vendors and sourcing items from multiple sources can make it extremely difficult to calculate or predict inventory levels prior to a sale.

No, the main challenge is calling every mom & pop store and getting them indexed. You are also unlikely to convince a mom & pop store to do any extra work, especially if it involves something they don't understand (computers).

There's a reason Milo is starting with big-box and national retailers.

I feel like that's basically what I said.

I thought you were saying that business owners would be reluctant to share their data,e.g., for privacy or competitive reasons, versus:

1. The difficulty and expense associated with calling and converting smaller retailers

2. The amount of effort required by smaller retailers to integrate with your system coupled with the fact that smaller retailers are technologically lazy and don't readily understand the benefits of integrating

The "easiest" way might be to replace their inventory systems yourself, for example. This is more-or-less what OpenTable did.

No, I meant for all of those reasons, not any one. I'm sure there would be a wide variety of reasons a business wouldn't want to publish data. You're right to draw them out into separate worries.

The company I work for is trying to come up with a solution of it's own...

We're working on tagging our products with RFID. That way, we can show the inventory of the products online for consumers to see. Not only that, we can help our retail partners keep our product in stock.

It's at no cost to the retailer and relatively simple.

Walmart has been trying to get a similar system implemented for years (they're currently testing their latest iteration on denim - all denim is tagged supposedly).

We do not sell to Walmart, we're in a very different channel.

A partial solution would be to have something like Google street view for the insides of stores. At least then you could check to see if the store had what you wanted. Some objects could probably be automatically recognized.

I thought about trying to do this for something like groceries, but grocery stores don't list all their prices in an accessible manner.

I don't think they want to, either. Every grocery store, I'm sure, calculates how much they can discount some items to draw you into the store so you pay exorbitant prices for others. In the end, they profit. If all prices were accessible online, it would be possible to write an application to minimize consumer spending, but this would cause the whole system to collapse. If all consumers could get all the deals everywhere--throughout their whole shopping list--the grocery stores wouldn't profit.

The Australian Government tried this and it was a disaster. http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/how-grocery-choice-was-ushered...

But is this really how people use grocery stores these days? I just can't picture people running around to different stores, trying to get the best deal on broccoli.

If there is one big grocery store significantly closer to my home than any other, that's the one I will go to when I'm out of food, no matter what. If it's late, I'll go to the one that's open late. If I have options, I'll go to the "cheap" grocery store, which tends to have better selection and slightly lower prices, on average.

Never, ever have I done prior research on where to go or what I was buying, except to check their hours. Most of the time I don't even know what I'm going to buy.

So, they can't lure me in with sales. But what they could do is keep track of which flavor of yogurt is ten times more popular than every other flavor and stock the shelves proportionately, so that I have a fighting chance of actually being able to buy most of the things I want on any given trip, and so they don't have to throw tons of unpopular food in the trash.

They could also lay off the guys that awkwardly try to pack food in my backpack for me since I can do a much better job of that myself. They might as well lay off the cashiers too and replace each one with two or three of those lovely self-checkout machines (I have tremendous sympathy for young people who find themselves unemployable, but doing work that doesn't need doing is no solution to that).

Because of the location thing, the grocery stores aren't really competing with each other for my business. But they are competing with restaurants and starvation, both popular alternatives to the hassles of buying groceries.

If e.g. Google launched a grocery store chain, with all the expected technological and common sense enhancements, they would steal most of my business and create a lot of value that was never there before.

@tibbon: this is exactly the pain-point I wanted to solve when we applied to Y Combinator (but we pivoted after being accepted into the summer batch and built AdGrok). Antonio blogged about it: http://adgrok.com/plan-a

Pretty sure Milo.com already does this.

So it does! Of course the trick is expanding to more retailers and getting this to be ubiquitous for all purchases- no doubt a goal of theirs. Right now it seems to be big box stores only, but knowing about this now does make me happy.

Sadly, my search for Founders at Work showed that the closest copy is at a Target outside of Cincinnati, which is rather far from Columbus.

My search for an Aquafina water (1 liter), said that it might be at Target (duh), but that I'd have to call them. I'm sure I can find the water closer.

However, it did find me a white dress shirt for under $30 nearby (Macy's), but still didn't know about the stock status and asked that I call.

A great start, and I'm glad you brought this up. I hope that in 5 years (or far less) that it gets better and better.

tibbon, check this out: http://bit.ly/ciKymu

thefind.com is also tackling this

For example, last Christmas, I learned that a local crafts store carried Thomas & Friends wooden railway. All of the local toy stores had been sold out, but A.C. Moore had a few in stock.

Here is an idea: an eBay like site to link buyers and sellers in real-time.

One simple way to implement: Twitter hashtag #buyitnow

Every single item of data can be considered 'original content' (unless you plagiarized it from someone else). All those listings (or objects) represent the informational abstract of the actual item you have to sell.

This 'original content' is the life blood of Google (and all the other search engines). Google, and Bing to a smaller degree, are trying to organize these bits of 'original content'. The problem that arises is when a big boy (like Amazon, eBay, et al) wants to hijack your search (via paid advertising).

The key to making all this work, is to find a business model where every seller (not counting the drop shippers) has an equal footing to sell the wares they have for sale (physical or electronic).

Amazon is not an equal opportunity listing agent. They play one seller against another in order to generate as much revenue as possible.

Part of the equal footing in my mind is location. I want things locally, and it isn't just big box stores near me. The closest stores in fact are tiny, and that is likely the case for most people that don't live directly beside a Target or Walmart. You are correct in that Amazon breaks things a bit.

Any ways to get this data indexed without contact with the shops? For example, maybe you could write a kick-ass smartphone app that can track your grocery spending by taking pictures of receipts and OCRing them. As a side-effect it would produce a database of locations and items.

Similar problem: Online ordering for takeout (like opentable for takeout). Getting all the large restaurant chains is one project. Getting the hoards of small, mom & pop, owner-operated restaurants is another project. It's a big challenge. Selling them. Supporting them. In many cases, for example, there's no fancy POS machine. Just a piece of paper. A "dumb" cash register.

I was under the impression that this problem had been solved, when I lived in Boston. Foodler and a few others seemed to make this possible with almost every place that had carry out. I put in (roughly) that I want pizza, that delivers near me, at 1am... and it found it.

When I moved to Columbus, Ohio I found that the penetration of these things really hasn't hit as strong nationally. There are some, but not every place does it.

There are a dozen websites providing this service already. Since they have to sign up each individual restaurant, they cater to specific cities. My favorite is campusfood.com, which provides online ordering for thousands of restaurants in the cities surrounding over 300 college campuses. They had over 100 restaurants in the Philadelphia area when I lived there. The restaurants don't need any special software or even a computer; orders are placed through the website, optionally paid through the website, and the restaurant gets the order by e-mail or fax.

Fits.me is one company that's been working on the problem of buying clothes online that fit well, using a robot mannequin: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20018094-1.html

Not that this wouldn't be a cool idea, but why would a large company expose their real-time inventory data via a public API? At the present I don't see how any ROI could be achieved from the expense of making this inventory information public.

I liked the article's heading and thought it had been done using image replacement.

Turns out it is a font imported from Google's font directory called "IM Fell DW Pica".

Nice font especially for headings.

Aggregating the inventory from brick-and-mortar - Goodzer's site and iPhone app is coming in November. http://bit.ly/ciKymu

picksie.com is trying to do something similar for things to do around you. Its coming out in closed beta and more data points soon.

milo?

Milo got he interface right? Paaaalease....

yeah, I'm working on it

Finding directions (parking or public transportation from your current location) to events is another good application.

Also, I wish sites had a link to google maps from their directions page.

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