Amazon’s “tech” stack, both consumer- and seller-facing is horrible and borderline irrelevant.
Their fleet of trucks and aircraft is not.
I think many sellers would love to not be locked into Amazon and at least use something like this as an additional alternative. I'm on the other side of the table where I avoid buying from Amazon as much as possible.
Last night "Hmm. Toothpaste almost gone. Let me check the linen closet. Nope. Excuse me while I whip this out. (gasp) Swipe, tap, tap, t-o-o-t-h (autocomplete), scroll, tap, tap, tap. Done."
Used the last this morning, new toothpaste delivered at noon.
I shop online exclusively because one of my first jobs was in retail and it is my solemn duty to do everything I can to annihilate the brick and mortar store, to erase it from existence to the point that it remembered only as a distant cultural echo by future generations.
This is all I can do, and it is enough.
I even get booze delivered so I don't have to stand in line as some tweaker tries to buy lottery tickets with handfuls of quarters at the liquor store.
Despite what the internet might have you think, fulfillment centers for every single distributor or retailer are run the same so I choose amazon because they can get many things here in 4-6 hours, most of the rest the overnight, and weird stuff in two days.
I, and many other townfolk go out of our way to expressly shop in town. This helps create an interesting, culturally vibrant downtown, filled with shops and restaurants.
My saturday mornings usually involve me walking the town, poking my head into shops, saying hi to folks I might know along the way, and supporting a local business here or there.
I can't imagine wanting to get rid of all of this, possibly even irreversibly so, for the sake of efficiency.
Who hurt you?
Instead, I can do some of that shopping on my computer or phone, then quickly reference it again or even set up auto deliveries. A lot of times it'll be cheaper too because I can comparison shop.
For me, it's about convenience and saving time and money. It won't be the same for everyone, of course. The location where you live will dictate whether this shopping experience is similar to yours or not.
2+ days is a world away from tomorrow. If it is that it needs to wait until the next shopping trip.
For “now” I would just have to go to the shops. Although Uber could deliver it from a petrol station for three times the price if desperate and lazy.
I have got embarrassing small orders on uber before :)
I routinely pick the “next Monday and we’ll give you two bucks digital credit or whatever” option because I assume it’ll make the shipping a little more efficient or make some factory grunt’s life easier, and I’ll still pick Amazon over other vendors because when they say Monday, they mean Monday.
I’m always able to track the shipment, it’s always predictable, I never have to wonder. It’s a less tangible feature but far more valuable.
No. At best it will reduce the number of factory grunts working. Amazon has whole departments dedicates to making factory grunts life as hard as possible. "Ease" == less profit.
Stupid or not, hard to argue with Amazon's income sheet. Obviously most people disagree. I don't disagree fwiw.
Yes.
It is more efficient from an energy, carbon, land usage, and labor perspective.
The bluish-grey van that delivered my toothpaste had several hundred other deliveries on it, and the warehouse it came from stocks the products of hundreds of stores (if not more).
How do you think a tube of toothpaste gets to "Ye Olde Mum and Pop's Auntie Emma's Down Home Crunchy Granola Authentic and Real Indie Small Business"? Trucks.
That's very doubtful. Normally you'd get toothpaste along with a bunch of other items. The convenience of delivery means you no longer purchase in batches. Batches is more efficient in every sense.
Maybe the mom and pop's supply chain could be shorter and more efficient, but the OP was talking about whether we should be going down the path of immediate delivery of small orders.
With one truck every two weeks that deliver toothpastes as boxes of 1000s. That’s one truck for all the customers that will go in that shop over two weeks.
Compare that to 2-3 trucks to directly deliver all these people one package per toothpaste. The only way to lower the delivery times is to increase the number of trucks.
Think of a tree where leaves are customers and the root is the producer. Each other node is an intermediary. In the worst case, if all customers go by foot in one shop that gets direct deliveries from the producer, you use only one truck (producer->shop). If all N customers are delivered by the producer, in the worst case, you use N trucks (producer->customer).
It would be if they saved up all orders from a week, and then send it all to you at the end of the week in a single delivery.
A little while ago I drove past a giant blue pyramid dedicated to the grand and wise Jeff Bezos where I can only imagine The Great God of Online Commerce conducts his human sacrifice rituals on unwitting union organizers. Pretty sure they are currently keeping the management indoctrination ceremonies low key being Labor Day weekend and all that.
And people thought the Long Beach shipping container height restrictions were lifted over practical concerns…
For most enterprises, if it works, don't touch it.
This was on the HN frontpage yesterday: "Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32651763
I’ve seen countless bad decisions being taken because the A/B test was badly done. You can’t assume that some decision was good JUST because they A/B-tested it.
It's a legacy code nightmare, but customers are used to it and this is #1 reason why it will not be changed anytime soon.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/tto68z/anyone_else_get...
Unnecessary most of the time but it becomes an expected processing and delivery standard, which makes the experience much more predictable for consumers.
Very few can really compete effectively with Amazon on this front.
Source: Used to run an e-commerce company that shipped up to 2 million packages annually. Once we optimised shipping and processing, customer service inquiries and complaints dropped dramatically, and customer trust / sentiment skyrocketed.
My understanding is that in certain regions Amazon offers the option to consolidate orders to be delivered on a specific day. This is actually impressive as it's much harder to do at scale than you'd imagine.
I used to work at company that shipped ~30k packages a day. I’d say 90% of customer complaints were about the delivery delays, and only 10% about the rest. It was really hard to optimize because we had 1M products and were using just-in-time logistics with very little inventory. This is a specific market that Amazon hasn’t really entered yet, but when they’ll do they’ll crush everyone.
Amazon's in-house logistics gets cheaper with scale. Waiting for the day Amazon launches their offerings to C2C and B2C delivery to directly compete with UPS and Fedex.
Amazon's in-house logistics, plus their ability to co-mingle this entire layer will be hard beat.
If I order from Etsy, I will drop $100 on a product and shipping. But when will I get it? I don’t know. Will it even arrive? Who knows?
With Amazon I know what I order is coming this week. That’s why I buy from them and no one else. It doesn’t matter that half their website is styled like it’s 2003 and I’m probably getting a counterfeit product.
I can order an iPad from Best Buy or Apple, but most of the time I'm never quite sure when it might arrive. Amazon, I know it should arrive tonight or tomorrow.
I tend to avoid buying many brands on Amazon because of supply chain integrity risks, but their execution is consistent and predictable. I can't say that about many retailers.
The sad reality is that a large majority of people don't actually use products they buy. They want the satisfaction of getting a new "quality" product and imagine it gives them status.