Amazon can already ship to 72% of US population in a day, map shows
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Has anyone had any luck with cloning this technology yet? I suppose the devil's in the details (and the hardware) with this one.
Amazon is a luxury brand, and amazon doesn't seem to know this. I mean... it really is a pretty great luxury brand? There's a lot of crap I don't have to own if I know I can order it the day before, and I'm willing to pay extra for that convenience.
I mean, there's three tiers of amazon stuff.
1. "Shipped from and sold by Amazon.com" amazon amazon
2. "Sold by X, fulfilled by Amazon" - like ebay, but with fast shipping and reliable returns
and
3. "Shipped and sold by X" - like ebay, except you use the amazon interface.
I mean, really, for me, someone who buys everything on amazon, these markings are clear enough for situations where it's a common item that I don't need to read reviews. If I had ownership of amazon, though, I'd be pissed, 'cause they are pissing on their own brand by not making it super clear when they are actually selling the thing and when they are just acting as ebay for some maybe super shady third party.
(I mean, it may seem like the prime check solves the problem, but this is what I mean by it being a luxury brand. I don't want to have to deal with shiping something back when it wasn't quite exactly the right item or whatever; shipping stuff back is a pain
But amazon has a massive problem of mixing reviews for products in those three categories, and quite often, you end up with reviews for product X which are actually reviews for product Y or product Z that users got when trying to buy product X from a seller that was not amazon, because the reviews are mixed.
It makes amazon a lot less useful for stuff where I need reviews; things like generic brand stuff. There's just no way to reliably line up the review to the version of the product being sold.
I mean, right now? when amazon is willing to do all this shit for near cost? It doesn't really matter, 'cause they are naturally going to be better than most of the competition that has to keep their P/E below 20; It's easy to run a business if you don't have to make money.
But at some point, investors will demand returns.
There are many around and they are all to be steered clear of unless you desperately can't find the item you want somewhere else
They’ve come a long way since I bought them at < $300 a share. I don’t understand what’s next. Personally, I’m shopping less and less at Amazon.
In the US, I never thought of them as a luxury brand, but I did think of them as someone who understands that if you do the right thing for your customer and are insanely loyal to your customer, your customer will reciprocate. As of late, they don’t seem to care much about the customer.
(I personally don't really relate luxury to good customer service... Luxury, to me, is about convenience and comfort. If you have to deal with customer service at all, they've blown it. But then, I guess I don't really understand the concept of loyalty, either, at least when it comes to corporations, so we might just be talking past oneanother.)
Yeah, that's exactly what I was complaining about. The "shipped and sold by amazon.com" experience is super luxury. For consumer goods, and a whole lot of industrial parts? I have next-day access to a giant warehouse of stuff. I'd pay a lot extra for that. They cheapen that by adding in the shitty aggregator capabilities. (though, like I said, the biggest problem is mixing reviews, and making it hard to limit your search to just 'shipped and sold by amazon' - when looking at a listing, an experienced user can easily see if it's amazon or a shady third party)
A lot of my friends have big storage units full of stuff for projects, books they found that they want to read at some point, etc, etc... things we have bought before we needed them because we didn't know that those things would be available when we needed them.
As amazon gets better, there are more and more classes of things I don't need to own until the day before I need them. For those of us who live in areas where storage or living space costs way more than "stuff" - this is huge.
Think about a world where we don't have to go shopping. Especially where we don't have to go exploratory shopping, where you don't have to buy the things you will need ahead of time.
(actually, I mean, this is a very silicon valley perspective; I visit family members elsewhere in the USA, and it is so weird to me that one day shipping isn't available if I forgot to pack a thing I needed. At that point, it becomes a lot less luxury.)
Now its a mire of junk and finding something solid is hard. And even if you find it, you get to wonder if you got a counterfeit or not.
I imagine in other countries Amazon largely skipped the build up phase where they bought and sold everything themselves. Now they're just an ebay without the auction.
The majority of merchandise transactions on Amazon is conducted by 3rd party sellers. The 3rd party sellers on Amazon ARE the 3rd party sellers on eBay. To them Amazon and eBay are simply 2 of the many channels they use to reach buyers. There's no difference. So of course you'll get the same experience from them.
With regards to the article.
First I am amazed it was cost effective to buy such a huge fleet of vehicles and train the delivery people than use existing providers. Just on observation with my nearly thirty mile commute I can see quite a few of their trucks running about. Oddly I still can get items from Amazon delivered by both them and UPS even on the same day though that frequency has dropped. Wal Mart was not much better, having a shipment split and both arrive separately on the same day, one Fed Ex Home and the other regular Fed Ex.
Second, one day delivery only works if the product isn't excluded some how. There have been more that a few items marked "Prime" that have disclaimers on ship time.
Two day is more than fine for me. Plus knowing that everything arrives on two days lets me be prepared. If something randomly arrives one day and the rest on the second it is a bother. Another site I use (nuts.com) can get me any order in two days from New Jersey to Atlanta so I don't see Amazon as all that special. Just have an efficient warehouse with good arrangements with your shipper.
Anytime I find something I want to buy but it is sold by a third-party, I have to go through the list of other sellers and look for Amazon. A switch would save me time.
I cancelled my prime subscription immediately. I don't think I'll be giving them any of my business anymore. I used to work there so I still own a lot of shares, though.
Amazon is attempting to shift everything to being 3rd party. That way they're a middleman who gets a cut of everything sold, but without any risk. The risk is all on the sellers, who are can be at Amazon's whims, and on the buyers who get garbage from scammers. But sellers can come and go and the customer can't keep track of which sellers are actually trustworthy.
We can already see this gradual slide with how counterfeits work on Amazon. You can't tell if or when you'll get a counterfeit. Even Sold By Amazon is no guarantee since Amazon will mix 3rd party seller goods into the same bin.
This is pure MBA thinking. They remove risk to the business and the need to have buyers of bulk goods to list them. They don't have to keep their own stock anymore. Sure they run a warehouse business too, but the risk of holding good too long is someone else's problem: The 3rd party sellers. And still they keep getting a cut of everything sold.
It has been explained repeatedly here, but since Amazon commingles all products of the same SKU, regardless if they are genuine or fake, you can easily receive bad products from trustworthy sellers.
Given a chance, brick and mortars will fuck everything up. Guaranteed.
Let's not pretend Amazon are innocent of fuck ups like this. I'm a semi regular shopper with Amazon (uk) and in the last 12 months I've had: - used products sold as new - products sent by Amazon's own courier service for "next day delivery" show up after 3 days - flat out wrong items sent - previews for books sent in place of actual books - received knock off cables when ordering manufacturer cables.
That's not to consider the mess of trying to order goods from Amazon and figuring out when they'll arrive. Searching for "prime" or sold by Amazon doesn't actually guarantee next day delivery on rh item, nor does it guarantee the item will be correct.
Their only saving grace is that every time I have a problem, I can resolve it with live chat, they send a replacement and a courier picks up the old item from my office (if they even bother asking for it back)
With Home Depot their phone support was 100% useless and I had to physically go to the store the item shipped from. I made sure the new product was on the shelf and tried to do a simple exchange. Unfortunately the duplicate SKU was a problem and the price had increased since I paid for the order so the drone wanted me to pay the difference. That wasn't going to happen so my time had to be further wasted arguing with them over their mistake.
My latest issue was a clearly used item being sold as new, and it was damaged. The price had increased since I ordered it, and with one live chat they couriered me a replacement, and picked up the old one, at no cost to me.
The industry average for a brick and mortar is just about 10%.
They don’t do much online revenue because they don’t invest in growing it. They don’t invest in growing it because it’s too small a portion of their business to warrant investment.
Online first companies are eating brick and mortar alive because of this.
I had to do a chargeback as Home Depot refused to refund me, they seemed confused as to where the shipment was. I don't think HD or any company run in the HD mold will ever be competitive if these are the outcomes.
They aren't any better, and their customer "service" is pretty much limited to "throw the customer another month of Prime (it's worthless anyway) and hope they go away".
EDIT: Looks like the population ranking has swapped! My apologies!
Managing an enormous seller marketplace is almost as fraught as shopping on one. I can understand why Amazon wants to act as the broker in every aspect of the retail transaction. As a third-party broker you’re shielded from much of the liability while reaping much of the benefit.
Unfortunately, third-party brokers are limited in the kinds of interventions that first-parties can bring to bear during a service failure. Walmart, Target, et al., can fix a wayward transaction much more quickly and cheaply than Amazon can by virtue of maintaining many well-staffed warehouses, i.e., stores.
Also, physical stores clearly have some value for Amazon themselves to be opening them, and at that point they're going to have a much tougher time competing - cool tech notwithstanding.
But Etsy also has some of the problems that Amazon has: They've not done a great job at enforcing their "handmade" standard, and you'll find resellers of off-the-shelf mass.produced stuff there too.
What they need to fix is the crazy estimates and deliveries that may turn up from anytime from early morning to "up to 9PM".
It's a way more transparent notification system than I've gotten with the other "Big Three".
There's having to get on AliWangWang and chat up sellers to make sure they actually have stock of the items they're listing for sale. If you optimistically order without spending ten minutes going back and forth with them beforehand, your purchases may not ship because one of the items is out of stock or no longer available in that size/color (despite it being listed w/claimed inventory of 9898998 pieces in stock) and when you do get on WangWang, you've got to waste more time haggling over individual item cancellations, substitutions, etc.
And even if everything you want is in stock, you're lucky enough to be ordering when the seller isn't away from their phone/computer because they're asleep/eating/whatever and so is available to confirm this, they're as likely as not to wait until a bit later to confirm your shipping address. If you're not on WangWang to respond to the shipping address confirmation query, then your order sits around unshipped until you do (and until they read your confirmation).
When you do receive your purchases, you can expect them to be cellophane-envelope wrapped or rolled up in clingfilm, which is usually sheathed in a layer of Mainland grit and grime (hence the cellophane/clingfilm) and this in turn is often packed in crumpled Chinese newspapers or scores of the foam webbing collars one sees used around individual apples, pears, etc. in supermarkets here.
If you live in China or HK/Macao, then you'll probably use Taobao much more than Amazon, but only because of the shipping costs. Actually enjoying using Taobao after having used Amazon, though, would require a strong masochistic streak.
For 99% of the time, you go straight to click-n-buy which should get your order delivered on time, and for the 1% you prefer to talk to the seller the option is a blessing, not a curse.
I used to work for Alibaba.
If you haven't encountered these issues, then I'm happy for you. For my wife and I, phantom inventory is a regular problem. Usually, we can catch the problem over WangWang, but it's not unusual for us to place the order and, just before paying, give the order number to the seller and have them confirm they've got it before paying, then pay and a few days later when the order hasn't shipped, message them again and get an apology and a sad story about one of the items being out of stock or only available in a different version.
Shopping on Amazon is like buying in Target and shopping on Taobao or Tmall (a slightly better experience w/re to seller flakiness) is akin to buying from a shabby flea market. If the nearest Target is a few hours' drive away and the flea market is ten minutes' drive from your house, you'll shop at the flea market but it's not really an enjoyable experience.
That said, the shipping times definitely aren't as consistent as Amazon (although I've only used Amazon in Seattle). I'm not in a Tier 1, but I am in a provincial capital. I'd estimate about 50% of my orders take 3 days, 30% take 2 days, 10% take 1 day, and 10% greater than 3 days.
With Amazon it was like 80% 2 days, 20% 1 day, and hardly ever more than 2 days using prime.
This isn't a totally fair comparison, I guess. I don't pay a yearly fee to Taobao and I rarely get express shipping, I just use the default. But really Taobao is fine. It's not as amazing as some people on here say, but it's not crap either.
What's aggravating are the delays in shipping (the time that passes after you pay and before the seller hands off the order to a logistics service provider) and the excuse-making.
Usually, after a couple of days have passed (depending on that seller's "ships within [time]" promise), and I get on WangWang and ask them what's holding things up, it's due to nonexistent inventory. China's many long festivals and holidays can be an issue because enough people stop working earlier pre-holiday and resume working later post-holiday than promised to cause delays.
Buying stuff, having to hop onto WangWang to tell the sellers that, yes, the address they got from Taobao is the address they're to ship to and then having to keep an eye on it and periodically load AliWangWang to see if a seller has sent me some emoji-laden sob story to explain lack of inventory, and then deal with that. It's not fun.
On Amazon, we buy, pay through the nose for shipping, and then don't have to give the order a second thought. Amazon for us just works, painlessly.
Here are two recent examples of my having to interact w/sellers on WangWang. Top half of screencap: have to confirm address or they won't ship. Bottom half of screencap: other seller waits two days to tell me that the stuff I bought was out of stock and I should apply for a refund (the items are still for sale on that shop btw).
And don't buy items from Taobao with zero sales per month.
I'm talking about Taobao. We also often purchase from Tmall, but Tmall sellers are usually better organized or less shady.
Sales numbers and reviews aren't 100% trustworthy. If someone buys X but X is out of stock and the buyer asks the seller to send some Y of roughly equivalent value instead, Taobao won't show the next buyer any new sales of Y but will show the (nonexistent) sale of X.
And if you leave unfavorable reviews, sellers will wheedle you endlessly on WangWang, begging you to get rid of the negative feedback and offering partial refunds or free stuff in a future order.
The way I use it is with the app, click to sort by number of sales, and usually buy from one of the top sellers. I don't usually talk to the sellers unless I have questions about the stuff I'm about to buy, and I turn off the notification for the app so 80% of the time I just never reply the seller. They might still send the message asking me to confirm the address, but they'll still send the package even if I don't reply.
As for the delivery time it depends on where you live and where the seller is in. When I lived in Shanghai most of the packages arrive in at most 2 days as I usually choose the sellers from Zhejiang, Jiangsu or Shanghai
Here are two recent examples of my having to interact w/sellers on WangWang. Top half of screencap: have to confirm address or they won't ship. Bottom half of screencap: other seller waits two days to tell me that the stuff I bought was out of stock and I should apply for a refund (the items are still for sale on that shop btw).