Lot18 raises $30M series C led by Accel, 3rd round this year | Hacker News Reader

Lot18 raises $30M series C led by Accel, 3rd round this year

allthingsd.com

How is sales tax calculated? The sales tax quoted at checkout is based on the shipping address you provide. The amount includes both state and local taxes, when applicable.

Looks like Lot18 solved a problem amazon claims it cannot.

Looks like Lot18 solved a problem amazon claims it cannot.

1) Amazon has never claimed this. Amazon wants to be taxed the same as other e-commerce competitors.

2) It is far easier to calculate sales taxes in the 500 or so jurisdictions if you only sell one type of product.

A message seeking comment was left Thursday on a media telephone line at Seattle-based Amazon.com. Amazon spokeswoman Mary Osako said last month the company believed "the sales tax issue needs to be solved at the federal level."

And that was just today. Amazon does not want to pay local taxes at all. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_INTERNET_SALES_IND...

On a related note, we are hiring: http://www.lot18.com/careers

I would be very interested in knowing the open rate for these type of emails as well as the unsubscribe rate. I mean, are there really people interested in buying wine each and every single day? Seems like something you buy for a special occasion or once in awhile... If you buy once, you probably won't buy for a long time.. and if you get a lot of emails and don't buy, chances are you'll lose interest and unsubscribe

A lot of people cook at home and drink wine with their food. It's not reserved for special occasions for many people.

I'm a member, but unfortunately I am in Canada.

However, if their deals were opened up to us, I would definitely buy a bottle every so often. They have awesome deals and wine isn't just for special occasions!

The numbers from the site said 600,000 members who have purchased 500,000 bottles of wine. That's not bad, but I would assume it's a smaller chunk of the 600,000 members who buy multiple bottles of wine.

Just a hunch.

I'm subscribed to a bunch of these, and it's just a case of me being too lazy to unsubscribe. In fact, I even end up opening a bunch of them by mistake when trying to open a different email.

Tricia spends a couple grafs on the shipping costs. I'd be interested to see a pricing curve for mail related operating expenses for lot18. Reminds me a bit of Reed Hastings' Quora reply on how much NFLX spends on shipping ($500m to $600m http://www.quora.com/Netflix/How-much-does-Netflix-spend-on-...)

Nice job Philip & company. lot18 has grown so much, its crazy.

Flagged. Why is a wine store on the front page of "Hacker News" ?

It's not any wine store - it's a daily deals wine store that just raised a massive round. I have ordered from them before and got some amazing wines for dirt cheap. I highly recommend them.

Oh wow they have coupons on the internet. There is no technology or hacking going here other than the fact that they take orders from the internet. Whoopty-do.

Its a VC funded startup which uses technology as its primary business model and has several interesting problems to solve?

Seems like normal "Hacker News" fare...

You mean they use amazing high technology like a website, like 99% of businesses in the world now do?

You have to be kidding me. Not every company that has a website is a technology comapny. This is a wine company. They sell wine. They did not invent any technology or hack abnything. This isn't Techcrunch. We know the difference between Venture Capitalism and technology.

Actually our technology stack is quite impressive and we are solving problems that are not quite apparent when simply viewing it as an ecommerce site. Your arguments would go against Gilt Groupe, BuyWithMe (when they were around) and Groupon.

There is always more than meets the eye - I would hope that someone working in the technology sector would realize that.

That's nice. But that's not what the article was about. It was about how a wine company got an investment from an venture caplitalist. It's nice you got funding and are doing well, but please don't parade around like you're solving humanity's problems by selling alcohol from a website.

Just making sure, you flagged the groupon IPO threads right? Since those have nothing more to do with "hacker news" then this.

Yes. I often flag articles that I think don't fit in with content of this site. That's what it's for. The quality of the content on HN is decreasing because literally any article about venture capitalism is somehow interpreted as being about technology.

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