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Comment by tanilama | Hacker News Reader

If Amazon has shipping delay in US, then it is unlikely other smaller shops can fare it better.

This isn't really accurate – independent retailers have quite the advantage right now because they aren't constrained by centralized fulfillment. The reason Amazon has shipping delays is because:

1) Amazon has observed a massive influx of orders and fulfilling centralized orders requires a large amount of workers in fulfillment centers – Amazon is hiring more than 100,000 workers for this reason[1] – and getting those orders in and out of those warehouses takes a good chunk of logistics planning and time. Independent retailers don't need to deal with this, particularly if they're shipping direct or use their own facilities.

2) They use their own delivery networks for a majority of deliveries in cities these days to bypass sending via the normal postage system. The platform, Amazon Flex[2], saves them money on postage but likely needs to ramp up scale–Flex usually actually means deliveries are faster, but as order volume scales up, it'll slow down deliveries.

Amazon is bottlenecked on both fronts: a massive influx of orders means needing to get those products into its warehouses, then actually having workers fulfill them, and it needs to manage the shipping side, due to its reliance on Amazon Flex in city areas. Independent retailers just aren't bottlenecked like this – they have their own set of inventory that isn't super broad, and they ship with normal delivery networks, which are generally delivering on time in North America right now.

[1] https://blog.aboutamazon.com/operations/amazon-opening-10000...

[2] https://flex.amazon.com/

At the beginning of the pandemic, Amazon was overwhelmed by people panic buying or preparing for shelter in place. The problem was not primarily the shipping industry, it was within Amazon. They've since hired large numbers of people and deprioritized [items deemed] non-essential so that people can get their essential needs in a timely manner.

How does amazon know what is essential?

Edit: I thought you said "determine" rather than "know", answered accordingly below. Of course they don't "know", that's not a helpful question.

The same way everyone does when trying to solve this problem systemically (vs individually), by making imperfect decisions and leaning on categories.

My UVC lamp was delayed. I think that's more important than someone else's "third month" bunker food, but what are you going to do.

A guess: it’s probably just heuristics based on things being panic-bought, high demand, suddenly high number of searches, etc. Obviously they don’t “know” some subset of essential items, that would be difficult, error-prone, and they would inevitably miss certain things which would lead to complaints and bad press.

At a high level, at least, anything in categories like "Groceries", "Health Care", "Personal Hygiene".

Ebay seems to be doing fine. I make about five orders a week through them (this week it's mostly hardware and electronics supplies). Having the platform truly just be a transaction facilitator means the hard, linearly scaling, work of actually shipping merchandise is distributed among tens of thousands of sellers instead of hundreds of warehouses.

Ebay is generally cheaper and arriving on time.

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