Hacker News Reader

Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

We canceled Prime about 3 months ago. It's been quite tough (relatively speaking) having to re-train ourselves. You realize exactly how dominant Amazon is. Every other retailer either takes 5-7 business days or charges you the earth. Home Depot messes up your order about 10% of the time. Things come in 3-4 days from Amazon instead of two days now. Not too bad.

We got a free ShopRunner subscription through Amex and I was excited about that but they seem to be mostly for clothing.

But the biggest annoyance is that we no longer go straight to Amazon to buy something, we actually have to shop around, google for things, etc. And Google Shopping isn't as useful as it used to be. A good shopping aggregator would go a long way in helping.

Edit: We were frequent users of the shipping, by the way, and never used streaming. Unlike others that use mostly streaming and not shipping.

View on HN

My biggest frustration is how many orders I make get email replies telling me the item is not in stock. I think a lot of retailers just aren't very good at syncing their inventory to their storefronts. You would think everything would operate off a centralized inventory database, but there pretty clearly are multiple systems that don't check in with each other nearly often enough given how often this happens.

Yup basically if we're talking about building a distributed sort-of vendor-neutral fulfillment system and storefront, that's basically what Amazon is. :)

So there's pretty much nobody that can catch up to this level of dominance, not even the second place players. Which is a clear sign that Amazon should be broken up by the government.

This happens even with WalMart, BestBuy, and Target though. So it doesn't even need to be vendor neutral. Even within a single vendor they're screwing it up.

Yeah because they are all traditional retailers and have that brick and mortar mentality. They have to pay the "but we have all these properties already" strategy tax every time.

The other companies can compete with Amazon, they’re just too incompetent to do so.

Depending on the store, it's not as simple as the systems not talking to each other. It's more likely that the system for the store front is either out of sync or incorrect. The systems that multi-tenant warehouses use were made for a time before e-commerce and has had more modern updates shoe-stringed on.

Even if the software is well implemented, there's still issues of items being damaged during the pick/pack step, items being labeled incorrectly, put into the wrong bin, misplaced, or even stolen. These are things that smaller shared-warehouse store fronts don't have the capacity (in space or money) to cope with it.

I'm pretty sure some 'on back order' emails are a deliberate attempt to get you to call so that you can be upsold.

> A good shopping aggregator would go a long way in helping.

For some European countries there's PriceSpy that scrapes prices and shipping costs (I suppose it scrapes as I would guess e-commerce entities would not publically expose API to query their products). It works OK most of the times, but sometimes it reports old or not updates prices, so I would say it's not foolproof.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com