Why Amazon is eating the world (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Why Amazon is eating the world (2017)

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49 pointsmooreds58 comments

Great Bezos quote: “I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. … [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,’ [or] ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’

How about, "Jeff, I used to love Amazon, but since you started fronting a bunch of knockoff products I can no longer confidently choose the lowest priced options--I wish your selection was less vast and more select, and I'd even be willing to pay slightly higher prices to ensure that the quality remained consistent even amongst the lowest priced products."

That actually describes the strategy of some other brands like REI which have higher prices but consistently higher quality products

This is why you only buy items that are both "shipped from" and "sold by" Amazon. They are very good about accepting returns.

Comingled means those can be counterfeit

Amazon has been shipping counterfeit products when you buy "directly" from them for more than five years, now.

They don't care at all. The market is failing to punish them. We need a government to step in and fuck them up.

"Accepting returns" means that I have to deal with a counterfeit product. Requesting the return, shipping it off, and ordering a new one (aka real one) are a series of pains that I'd rather skip.

Product QA, tracking inventory provenance, and punishing bad actors would be a major improvement.

An additional problem with that is that Amazon will not guarantee that the replacement will be a genuine product.

Totally agree. I buy a lot from Amazon. But not when, for example, my survival might depend on it. Then I buy from REI.

Rei also has better support. I often buy stuff from bed bath and beyond over Amazon due to it's return policy and no knock offs

Well, I just wish they'd stop trying to convince people to let them into their houses and cars to allow for faster delivery.

It's the means I usually have a problem with,not the ends.

You're not forced to agree to that option. I think it's a good choice to have.

Didn't say I was.

As a customer i still don't like it,even if other customers do. Much like how I don't like fastfood restaurants serving unhealthy food,even though customers like it.

What harm do you see in Amazon delivering to customers' houses or cars? Surely it's more secure than leaving it out on the porch.

Why do you think people lock their home and car doors?

To restrict access to those trusted to hold a key.

Now it's ok for them to not only record your voice in your home but to get into it. The home is the last privacy frontier.

What is an option today becomes mandatory tomorrow. It might not be much of an option once every market place does this and you can't practically use brick and mortar stores to buy what you need.

Honestly, I'm not sure I'd mind delivery "a little more slowly". Lately, I've been ordering something on Amazon in the morning and it shows up on my doorstep that afternoon. This just creeps me out.

Sometimes you don't need or want something ASAP. If you're buying a birthday gift you don't need it a week before the birthday.

There are slower shipping options available, often with a small credit incentive.

Be careful of depending upon this, though.

I was going to be out of town for a few days. But the item I wanted had a good sale price. I ordered it and selected the slowest shipping option; the page said it would ship the Friday before my return -- perfect.

The next day, it had already shipped. I had to scramble a bit to make sure it wouldn't be returned as abandoned, before I returned (shipped to a shipping address that only holds packages for so many days).

I find myself using Amazon so rarely now that it probably makes sense to drop Prime. It used to be the first and only place to look for something - I knew they would have it and it would be cheaper than anywhere else. Then it used to be that it might not always be cheapest, but it would be close, and at least it would be easy to find and delivered quickly. Now it seems like there is so much crap to sort through, half the time what I'm looking for isn't there, and if it is, it's probably overpriced or a counterfeit. Maybe I'm just an outlier.

Of late the delivery hasn't been on time either due to staff strikes. I look on Amazon a lot but I do find myself buying elsewhere for price and availability in specialist stores more and more. The biggest mistake Amazon is making is making it necessary to look elsewhere, after training me it was basically the best place to look first now it is training me to not bother.

And their Two Day Delivery Gaurantee is increasingly neither two days nor a guarantee.

To Amazon's credit, they do try to make up for a missed delivery target. [1]

1. http://time.com/money/3955429/amazon-prime-late-deliveries/

Unfortunately they no longer offer a free month of Prime for a late delivery - I believe too many people were taking advantage of that perk.

The last few times I've bothered to complain I've been offered a $5 credit instead.

Im in the UK where Prime free delivery option is next day. And they 3/4 of the time to deliver the next day. the 1/4 rolls over to a 2 days delivery.

I live too far outside London to use Prime Same Day and Prime Now options. (I.e same day and 2 hours delivery). I would be interested in how often they meet those much tighter delivery times?

I’ve had a similar experience. The most frustrating part has been the fraud in the ratings system, and I’ve been shocked that Amazon hasn’t done more to stop fake reviews. The always-5-star-reviews that were given a product for free are nearly as bad as the purely fake ones.

I don't even bother to read 5 star reviews anymore (on any site, not just Amazon). I skip straight to the 1 & 2 star reviews to see if they mention anything of real consequence or are just people complaining about a bad customer service experience. If there are no immediate red flags, I'll look at the 3 & 4 star reviews for a more balanced assessment of the product.

1-2 star reviews can also be fake (paid for by competition)

What is the relevance of this comment? The article isn't about Amazon's retail operations; it's about everything in Amazon's operations except that.

> Amazon had to build their own technology infrastructure. The financial genius of turning this infrastructure into an external product (AWS) has been well-covered

Wasn't the story about AWS wildly discredited? As in AWS was built not from sractch as a product and was NOT using any infrastructure that was used to run Amazon, and only later adopted by Amazon itself.

Why people still keep repeating that story?

Yes that’s been discredited repeatedly by Amazon executives. Stories pop up all of the time from Amazon where they talk about moving part of thier infrastructure to AWS - including the migration from Oracle to AWS native solutions.

I don’t know the origin story, but that doesn’t discredit anything. Lots of Amazon teams predate AWS, and so does some of their technology. You wouldn’t make a new service and then drop absolutely everything across a huge company to force migration to it. Teams at Amazon have a lot of flexibility in how they build.

Yes, Amazon is trying to move off of Oracle but they still use a lot of them [0]. Also, most of their retail stack runs outside of AWS which is why they could not scale up during prime day because they completely depended on their non-AWS nosql database sable [1].

[0]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-salesforce-would-love-t...

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/19/amazon-internal-documents-wh...

I have no idea what the actual story was, but I would imagine it can be both true and not true in the way you’re imagining.

Say you really need new simple scalable storage because X part of your stack has bottlenecks. You spin up a team to work on it, and that team immediately has ambitions of making it big and sharing their service with the entire world. Now... which narrative is true? Yes, it was spun up to help Amazon. Yes, it was built from scratch as a product. Those don’t sound exclusive to me.

I see a rising consciousness that "sold by Amazon" products are often likely to be stale-dated or counterfeit. Read the reviews. Read manufacturer responses to complaints. This is broad-spectrum: Fake SDXC cards. Adulterated Moroccan argan oil. Travel underwear that falls apart because it sat six years in a hot storeroom before the merchant went under.

I find myself evaluating each Amazon purchase for provenance, as if I found it in the woods. I never buy from those rural Pennsylvania bargain stores that have stale-dated corn flakes for a dollar; why do we give Amazon a pass on this? As more people make this association, their sales will peak and fall.

The nice thing about "sold by Amazon" is you can return it at no cost to yourself.

That introduces enough friction that I don’t want to bother buying there. I’ll just pay more and wait longer for a product I know is genuine.

Oh, they’ve been banning customers for too many returns! https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/zm8mde/amazon-ban...

All prime is like that

At no cost only considers the monetary value of the actual shipping. That does not consider the time (and usually gas) of me taking a trip to ship it back.

Provenance is a frequently cited use case for blockchain. I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon is working on some kind of “Amazon verified authentic” blockchain service that will lead to widespread adoption across retail manufacturers.

Travel underwear?

Amazon will soon be operating at a scale that no other company in history has reached. There is a good chance they will run into operational challenges that no one else has faced before. Think: challenges on which there is zero academic research because no one has studied them in the past. Think: challenges for which there are no known solutions. Simply chanting that "software is scalable" and "software has zero incremental cost" doesn't solve those kinds of challenges.

Multiple geographic groups, business units, physical locations, data centers, software systems, managers, and employees, by their very physical nature, are able to communicate and coordinate with each other only in statistically noisy ways that are ultimately constrained by the Laws of Thermodynamics. These laws, to put it mildly, impose hard limits of what any company can do with information and energy.

I wonder when and whether Amazon will start running into these limits.

The final state is when every human on Earth is an Amazon employee, going through life with the computer strapped to their arm, telling them what to do next, awarding points for compliance, and electrical jolts when you don’t.

Does Amazon really operate on a larger scale than Walmart?

What I don't get is why postal services like USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc. don't start an Amazon competitor.

For them it could be the difference between being in a race to the bottom versus being in a race to the top.

I think part of it is that they don't have expertise in retail. It also would pit them against all their competition, not just Amazon.

But they could do the equivalent of the amazon market place given their expertise in logistics.

They just need to do fulfillment as a service. It would be a huge business.

They'd need some digital infrastructure and open online marketplace, map or index, and use local shops as repositories for goods. For this to work they need some kind of automated delivery, like drones, or eTaxi/Uber passengers who take on delivery jobs.

Let's say you take an Uber from your friends house to your home, or you shedule your electronic car to "accept packages", and some shop owner drops you a package along the way that you deliver to a neighbor of yours.

You need a good system to make this work, so that shop owners (real world repository maintainers) and traffic participants are on the same map. Of couse would you take a a package if the friction is low enough, or you're stopped by a traffic light anyway and/or get some compensation for it.

Cars as investment (putting the car to work), instead of a constant cost factor for private ownership would be a game changer for private consumers. This might be possible soon with more automation in the infrastructure in place.

So, are we sensing a startup idea of "start your own amazon" but for shipping company.

Just ecommerce 3.0, all the benfits of Amazon but decentralized, supporting your local environment. This could be an open source project, a public good.

Hoho, that made me laugh. The United States Postal Service offering 2 day delivery.

Priority Mail is usually two days for me.

DHL tried something like this with allyouneed.com... it came to my attention recently when they announced they were shuttering the site:

https://ecommercenews.eu/dhl-ends-online-marketplace-allyoun...

The described strategy starts to fall apart when by offering FBA they lose control over quality of products being sold and credibility in their retail operations. The fact that I have to use things like FakeSpot puts me off from shopping on Amazon while I did so without thinking twice in the past. I wonder what portion of AliExpress and Amazon is cross listed.

>I wonder what portion of AliExpress and Amazon is cross listed.

It wouldn't surprise me if it were close to 90%.

By Techcrunch, from Silicon Valley.

Meanwhile, the world is a different place. In China Amazon is almost nothing, in rest of Asia they're still far from dominance and Europe is running scared of the hegemony of American IT companies.

Disclaimer: I buy mostly from AliExpress and BangGood.

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