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Comment by vsskanth | Hacker News Reader

Story time!

When Jet.com launched they had some promos going on so I wanted to check out what it was all about and ordered a bunch of stuff. I think at that point they had 2 day shipping over 25 without a membership.

Their signature purple package arrives on time, in a larger than expected box. I open it, and there's a smaller Amazon box inside. I open THAT and it has all my items. I got two receipts, one from jet.com and one inside the Amazon box with the actual cost of my stuff without the promo codes.

I don't know but something about this was poetic and funny about the world of venture funded startups.

Even now when I ship something from Walmart to my address it says Jet.com. hopefully it's not an Amazon prime wrapper anymore.

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This reminds me of the Silicon Valley episode where the start up 'Sliceline' sells repackaged Domino's pizzas.

Don't recall if they explicitly stated 'they'll make it up in volume.'

Real life version:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/18/21262316/doordash-pizza-p...

Did they sell slices for more than the pizza? Because then it might have been a decent enough way to test the market, without having to put an insane amount of money in it.

This is literally the business model of DoorDash, brought to you by the same genius investment firm who brought you Uber and WeWork.

This is indeed poetic. It’s actually an excellent metaphor for how AWS works.

Fun fact: Startups spend almost 40 cents of every VC dollar on Google, Facebook, and Amazon. [1]

[1] https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/socialcapital-annual-lett...

I love how your source is hosted on AWS too.

No doubt this is not an original thought, just tickled me to have an urban dictionary style definition. STARTUP (n.): An invention to funnel investor money from venture capital (VC) to Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Exhaust products are hype, blog posts, and waste heat.

> Exhaust products are hype, Medium posts, and waste heat.

FTFY.

Unless you're a hardware startup, your money goes to payroll, Amazon et al., and rent. The rest should be noise. Depending on if that money is going to marketing or servers, a higher number could even be better because it means the startup has more scale with fewer employees.

This reminds me of when I sent a friend a case of Topo Chico from Jet. He'd never had it.

The package (of heavy bottles of water) shipped next day and each bottle was meticulously wrapped in mesh paper. You could have stuffed a mattress with all the wrapping.

All for $1.99/bottle and free overnight shipping....

It reminded me of when I ordered a 38 cents lemon juice bottle and they sent it to me in a way to big box as an expedited parcel with free shipping in 2016. (Canada) https://imgur.com/a/QpEHAea

Those who do not remember webvan.com are condemned to repeat it.

It has happened twice now that I order something off Amazon and it arrives packaged from Walmart.com. How the turn tables!

I figure that some people have identified arbitrage opportunities in pricing differences between the two sites and are making easy money receiving orders on one site and fulfilling from the other.

I recently had the reverse experience. I ordered something from Amazon and there was a Walmart box inside the Amazon box. I was not expecting that!

WalMart actually directly lists some items on Amazon, then ships through their normal fulfillment. Confusingly, I've found that they twice listed items on Amazon that are present in their stores but not on their own website. Probably just a temporary situation but still amusing.

I can see how this would happen. When working in inventory and fulfillment we'd often see our competitors price their goods below our wholesale. Sometimes it was because of the manufacturer incentives, other times because the product was a loss leader and was used as a promo. Either way, it seems that Jet.com was able to leverage this and use the Amazon pricing to keep their client happy. Fair play to all involved.

A lot of services weight unit velocity highly in determining product search ranking and other ranking methods that involve pay per click advertising. This creates some incentives to under-price for extended periods of time.

An inception of shops, shippers and packages.

I was also an early Jet customer. I believe they did this for things they didn't have in stock.

I recall the Jet price sometimes even being cheaper than the Amazon price which was intersting.

> poetic and funny

We have very different ways of seeing it. I would have found it absurd and infuriating.

Drop shipping at its finest! :)

Reminds a bit of Theranos too.

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