Comment by cepth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cepth | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> SFP rates are equal to Amazon MF rates, which are better than public rates but certainly aren't Amazon's own rates being passed through.

Refer to your original comment: "This is false. You do not get Amazon rates for shipping using SFP."

I took this mean that you do not get any discounted rate from Amazon for shipping using SFP. If you're now amending your claim to say that a SFP seller has access to "Buy Shipping" rates, then yes we agree. And if you're conceding that "Buy Shipping" rates are cheaper than those available to other businesses, then we agree again.

At no point did I claim that an individual merchant is getting the exact same quote to ship a package as Amazon would. UPS/FedEx wouldn't allow this, since pickup points are different, etc. But, it is certainly because of Amazon's volume that merchants who want to sell with a Prime badge can now get deeply discounted shipping rates. This is what I meant by "negotiated rates for UPS/FedEx/USPS that Amazon has access to".

> I'm not even the only one replying to you that disagrees with your claim

At the time of your comment, who else is disagreeing? This comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18695969) is saying that Amazon's negotiated rates "aren't better". Better than what? Even you agree that buying through Amazon's "Buy Shipping" services are better than the baseline rate tables from UPS/FedEx. What I'm saying is that these rates are better than even the ones available to a merchant doing significant volume.

You made your original post in a very misleading way, then.

When you say "ship at the negotiated rates" that Amazon has access to, it's really hard to interpret that as anything but the amazon warehouse rate.

Backing down to "some negotiated rate that Amazon has, but not even close to the best one", is a very different beast.

> "When you say "ship at the negotiated rates" that Amazon has access to, it's really hard to interpret that as anything but the amazon warehouse rate."

Who negotiates the rates that are available on "Buy Shipping"? I could've been clearer, and added the "Buy Shipping" name specifically, so sorry for any confusion.

My point is simply that an Amazon merchant who wants to sell with a Prime badge previously had no such access to shipping discounts. Now they do.

> Backing down to "some negotiated rate that Amazon has, but not even close to the best one", is a very different beast.

At no point did I say this. UPS has gross margins of ~8%, FedEx of ~20%. Any discount off sticker price is going to affect those gross margins significantly, so the discounts that SFP merchants have access to are very meaningful ones.

Assuming that you accept my premise that "Buy Shipping" rates are up to 20% better than the rates available to even a volume shipper, a SFP merchant now has rates that are much closer to Amazon's own shipping costs than their previous rate.

So no, SFP merchants do get rates that are much closer "to the best one". Amazon's own rate < SFP rates < "sticker/market" rates, and the delta between SFP and market is much larger than between Amazon's own rate and SFP.

I took from your original comment an assertion that buy shipping rates on SFP orders were better than rates on non-SFP orders. If that wasn't the implication then there's no specific incentive for SFP over MF as far as shipping rates go.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com