FedEx launches new e-commerce platform
theverge.com
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If FedEx's platform can't promise 1 or 2-day delivery, it will never take off.
On the other end of the spectrum, Amazon promises 1-2 day delivery but has been falling through more often than first seen and can become a 2-4 day delivery. Amazon does seem to absolutely bleed their workforce to keep up, but also push more absolute junk through their platform now.
Costco is in kind of a prime position to offer quality-tested products with 1-2 day delivery... but they just do not care to offer this "Prime" type of service. Costco is still quick, just not as quick, and their website / app is trash to use compared to Amazon.
One honest competitor I see rising up - Home Depot. They are making incredible moves in this space (in terms of web/app UI/UX and expedited deliverable date).
I’ve seen this claimed a few times lately here on HN but it hasn’t been my experience at all. Is there any data out there to support this claim?
They'll often promise me today or tomorrow and deliver 4-20 days later in some extreme cases.
I quit Amazon years ago but my wife still uses it, seems like most things take 2-3 days.
Walmart has next day, and most 1st party e-stores are 2-3 days, so it really just seems like an Amazon problem. (Montana)
During Covid in Bozeman, I spent too much time tracking inbound packages. With I-90 going through town, most quick-shipping packages either came in via truck from Billings (after the air freight to get it there) or direct on the morning Fedex feeder flight arriving to the airport at 8:15am.
At one point, outbound through USPS in Billings was a delay of 2-3 weeks, during COVID.
What are you imagining?
The people reporting falsified shipping times on HN are the data you're asking for. I can personally confirm - Amazon "guarantees" two-day shipping for Prime orders, but it will not actually provide two-day shipping, and if you complain their only response is "Well, it got there eventually. What's wrong?"
After enough time where they systematically refused to honor their own purported benefits, I canceled my Prime membership.
At best they’re an extremely biased sample. More realistically, they’re just anecdotes.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/12/16/business/costco-gold-bars...
https://www.costco.com/1-oz-gold-bar-pamp-suisse-lady-fortun...
This doesn't make any sense. The market for gold bars is tiny. At some point, there's nothing you can do to sell more of them.
Costco has the manpower to do more than sell gold bars.
Products from Amazon can no longer be trusted, So I only order things from Amazon for a few reasons...
1. I can't find it locally, or purchase it from a trusted online seller. 2. It is something I might need to return (Amazon's returns are easy). 3. I want something cheap because I'm only going to use the product once.
So I would not be surprised if prime delivery is back to 1-2 days now.
But, I still have no desire to purchase prime again. All it did was encourage me to buy things I really didn't need. Simply being able to buy almost anything at any time is not healthy for me.
When it's 11pm and I suddenly have a desire to start a new hobby and buy a bunch of products to support it, I can no longer fill my Amazon shopping cart and click buy. The added friction of having to wait until stores open the next day means I completely forget about it before I waste my money.
Unfortunately, Home Depot probably wouldn't be interested. They're doing their thing, have their own extremely efficient behind-the-scenes logistics system, and largely specialize in markets that Amazon isn't interested in. (Some consumer overlap, but Home Depot's bread and butter is non-consumer stuff)
Costco... what would be in it for them? Do they want to move more items / have more members? I guess so? Not sure if they're volume constrained and what their logistics flows look like.
But store-picked + shipper-delivered seems interesting. Costco assembles orders overnight, then truck stops by in morning on way to deliveries and loads. Customers get next day delivery within range of a Costco.
Whereas Amazon has a huge warehouse / fulfillment footprint, Home Depot uses stores + a few (2?) online-specific fulfilment warehouses.
The benefit of that system has been really efficient storage costs. The limitation has been multi-item (especially rarer) pulling from multiple stores (because each only has a few pieces).
At a high level, Home Depot's logistics goal is zero warehoused inventory. Either something is (a) on a ship, (b) in transit to a store, or (c) in a store.
Home Depot has been around since 1978.
Retooling a brick and mortar logistics system into a flow-through, multi-channel one isn't simple, cheap, or easy. But they've been working on it since ~2010(?).
Suffice to say... looking at retail is like looking at the tip of an iceberg. Most of the company (the logistics), you never see.
Ok, I see a bunch of HomeKit compatible light switches with that search phrase. What's the issue?
Try the slightly more terse "HomeKit light switch": https://www.homedepot.com/b/Electrical-Wiring-Devices-Light-...
After a confusing "new in..." section mixing relevant and irrelevant results, the top three results are all non-smart switches, with only the first sponsored result actually matching the query. The next four results are all non-smart switches, with a mix of relevant and irrelevant results after that, with more HomeKit-compatible products buried multiple pages deep.
"[] Google Assistant, [] Alexa, [] Apple HomeKit, ..."
Really? I feel like Amazon is always trying to trick me into a) signing up for prime, b) buying sponsored products, c) buying cheap Chinese junk or d) buying stuff in the wrong currency and getting hit with unfavourable foreign exchange rates.
Whereas the Costco website just works.
The Home Depot website is also a pile of junk. Just yesterday I probably spent 5x longer on the Home Depot site than on a competitor’s (Canadian Tire) website because of the jankiness of filtering for an extension cord. If you search for something with a lot of results (e.g. light fixtures) the result set is basically unusable because of poor filtering functionality. A few months ago the entire search functionality broke because of some ad domain that I was blocking. They harvest emails that you punch in for email receipts at checkout for marketing purposes. etc. etc.
Really? I've been using a unique email (i.e. homedepot@my.domain) at checkout for the last 2 years and haven't received any emails at that inbox except for my receipts.
Someone needs to build a front end that drills down through the ad cruft to reach the products you want.
Or offer a prime plus that doesn’t have search ads.
It is an awful experience.
I'd like to add Walmart, too.
EDIT: oh yeah the filtering is horrendous as pointed out in other comments here. Its not walmart level bad but its close.
Here, even in a remote village, normally it's 1 day, and if you live in the big cities you can even have the "same day" delivery.
Also a side note, but I have been reading a lot of people complaining about fake stuff on Amazon, and I feel that it's also a problem that we don't experience here, at least, not at that level to be noticeable.
Im talking about Amazon Spain of course.
... if you live in a big city.
I'm pretty rural, there's a city of about 6000 nearby, two cities in the 20-50k population range within an hour, and Amazon Prime takes 5-7 days to deliver here.
(Without Prime, Amazon seems to retaliate by switching from UPS to USPS, which means that on top of a 1-week delay I typically need to go to the post office to pick up the package.)
Other sellers using seem able to do 2-day shipping here when they want to, so it sure sounds like cost savings at Amazon.
It is seemingly all run by bots. They delisted my product and none of the humans knew why. It is a bot that decided that and no one could answer what the reason was.
I welcome any competition that is more friendly to sellers.
I think it's not just sellers who would welcome some competition in this space.
For something more serious either buy directly from the brand, or from Costco, Target, Walmart, HomeDepot, BedBath&Beyond, BestBuy, Macy's, publisher's website, some specialized hardware, electronics or hobby shops. There is still a limited number of things where Amazon beats others, but their quality went down, and hassle free return is not hassle free anymore.
On top of that, they exhibit highly unethical behavior when it comes to counterfeit books. Here is a good thread by François Chollet about his book: https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/1550930876183166976. The main takeaway is this:
Q: What is Amazon doing about it?
A: Nothing. We've notified them multiple times, nothing happened. The fraudulent sellers have been in activity for years. The issue affects ~100% of Amazon sales of the book since March or April. That's because, amazingly, since fraudsters are claiming to have inventory, Amazon has stopped carrying its own inventory for the book (i.e. it has stopped ordering new copies from the publisher).
I have some bad news for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bed_Bath_&_Beyond#Bankruptcy_a...
TBH I had forgotten Overstock existed until the acquisition was announced.
Yes, yes, quite odd. It’s almost as if these capitalist notions of self- correcting market forces that large businesses are so keen to sell us on are based on decrepit bullshit ideas peddled by the ones who stand to profit the most, with the goal of keeping themselves unregulated for as long as possible so they can squeeze every drop of value at the expense of everyone else. Who could have predicted that a system that not only allows but incentivises a handful of individuals to amass and control the world’s money, thus allowing them to effectively make the rules, would have negative repercussions for society?
As I finish writing this, I notice on the front page yet another article about rising income inequality. Because of course there is, because it’s only getting worse.
https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2024/jan/15/worlds-fi...
Things take time in the real world, emotional blithering about capitalism notwithtanding.
Precisely. It depends on a number of factors, including the strength of the tree and of the infection. In other words, these companies are getting stronger and more ingrained all the time, and the longer that goes on the harder it will be to do anything about it.
> Things take time in the real world
Yes, let’s all keep waiting a few more decades without doing anything or criticising the system. That’ll teach them and fix the problem, it’s been working really well so far. All that self-correcting is coming any day now, I can already feel the billionaires shaking in their gold-plated astronaut boots. Maybe the Invisible Hand of the markets will steal the olive from their cocktail.
Otherwise other retailers tend to price regular items much better and you’re unlikely to get used stuff sold as new.
When the Temu version arrives, return the Amazon version.
Now you have it quick, and cheap.
[0]: https://github.com/amzn/selling-partner-api-docs/discussions...
As a seller going through multiple channels if you are selling books for example - Amazon basically pays - many bookstores slow pay, even distributors can get way behind and require lots of phone time. The trade is that it’s all on amazons terms. Same thing with fulfillment- many sellers complaining have never actually run a warehouse and done pick / ship. I don’t doubt complaints by sellers are valid, I just wish Amazon dialed down the marketplace side because it’s too full of junk for me
Diving into one I think is detrimental to both sellers and customers, Ads. If you are not a huge brand this is a ~mandatory additional cost on top of FBA (or you won't show in results). As a customer it sucks because many of the top results are trash. Why bother having a decent product if you can just buy a ranking and some fake reviews? Amazon is pushing this so hard right now as it is a quickly growing revenue stream for them :(
Maybe, Shopify should buy FedEx.
Seriously, I don’t understand how so many major players are so bad at it. Search that doesn’t work (heck, Home Depot can’t consistently get their search bar to display if an ad blocker is running) or can’t find the item you’re searching for even if it’s there. Item displays that are absolutely awful (the item I’m currently looking at and probably want to buy is far below the fold). Delivery that is “FREE” but mysteriously is not free in the cart. The list goes on. Shipping address verification that wants to “correct” your address to something wrong in an infinite loop.
Sometimes I feel like Amazon’s competitive advantage is that its website is so-so in a field where everyone else’s is truly awful.
Places like Target and Home Depot do not have an unlimited number of suppliers for the same object. So each object has one page and not a varying number of pages for the same product for different vendors.
Beyond a certain scale (when you're becoming more of a logistics company and less of a store front) there are a whole heap of rather tricky problems sitting there waiting to bite you in the arse. Preventing exponential cache growth is my favourite, especially for b2b. Search is also highly non-trivial, again especially b2b.
For a company like Home Depot or Target, there is an actual finite inventory of sellable objects in the physical possession of the retailer, and this inventory is small by computer standards. Any remotely reasonable full-text-searchable database should be able to search it accurately and efficiently.
That leaves items in the supplier’s inventory (or made to order) and third-party listings, I suppose. To the extent that items in the supplier’s inventory are curated, they should still be finite and in a database. Made to order is more complex, since the actual number of distinct orderable items may well be effectively infinite, but the number of item listings is still finite.
Third-party is a mess, and this is where I think many large retailers mess up. A large part of the value proposition of a store like Home Depot or Target or the in-store part of Walmart, etc is curation and first-party responsibility: if I buy electronic stuff at Home Depot, I expect it to have appropriate safety listings and generally not be utter crap. If I buy housewares at Target, I expect them not to be made out lead. By allowing third-party crap into their sites, these companies dilute the very thing that makes them better than Amazon. (And they apparently mess up their websites, too.)
At the very least, search should be entirely reliable for first-party listings.
From my experience in this space b2c is kind of a subset of b2b where you can treat the c as a single customer (see - users and customers are related but not the same) in the rest of the b2b mess. But totally for the simple case - a retailer who sells a particular kind of thing - the basic solution is pretty trivial. Search is tricky once you start moving from single product category into general catalogue. Then you're going to want things like rules to feed back search results from customer behaviour (one example of a few curly ones). Algolia seems to have solved that kind of problem adequately for now given the assumption of a certain level of quality of data in the licence holder's back end systems and aggregation code. Then there's things like variants (e.g. same product different colour / size) where it's tempting to make a naive implementation that won't scale and will be a maintenance nightmare, or where your data modeling fits the arbitrary case instead ...
Their next biggest competitor is Wal-Mart with 6%.
Logistics isn’t trivial but Amazon literally built their business overnight while FedEx literally has tons of global competitors.
FedEx needs to capture more of the upstream revenue.
New Idea!
Shopify buys FedEx then merges with TikTok :)
I trust random street thug much more than Shopify.
I would consider those rather normal complaints. Is there something else?
Of course Fedex figured out logistics decades ago. But their consumer IT experience I've seen thus far is ridiculously bad, and has a vibe that they really don't care. (Contrast with Amazon's vibe: Bezos once cared, and that will take a long time for the company to completely unlearn, although lately they can coast and cash out on legacy goodwill and entrenchment.)
Are businesses going to let Fedex operate any consumer-facing facet other than the package showing up on doorstep?
I have found that they've got a great selection of electronics, kitchen supplies, and of course office goods, and they are not a marketplace: they do not permit 3rd-party sellers. They have house brands and name brands, and they sell all through their own stores and warehouses.
The shopping experience both online and in-person is a breeze. Their logistics are great; when I went shopping for my Christmas gifts in the evening of 12/25, I scored free next-day delivery. I picked up a cable modem, some plasticware, and an executive office chair. They were all delivered via Uber next-day to my doorstep. Some originated from my local store, and some from across town.
As a bonus, their CopyMAX location allows me to securely shred documents for a song. They contract that out with Iron Mountain. I've got a membership; I earn points and valuable coupons every time I shop. It's basically worry-free, and the staff at my store is friendly, and they seem to be respected and supported by management, even though the storefront is a veritable ghost town by now.
I've been able to avoid any entanglements with Newegg and Target and Best Buy, where I've had some bad experiences. Office Depot/MAX is my go-to, first choice now for just about anything.
Sold! Thank you for sharing. It seems the marketplace nonsense and its fake vendors who have their products comingled with legit vendors have ruined almost every online store.
Perhaps this is most companies that age and size but I simply would bet against any of their new technical endeavors without radical change in their organizational structures. I'd love to be proven wrong though. Healthy competition is a good thing.
As someone who builds ecommerce sites and has seen Amazon become dominant I've thought about how to solve this problem many times - it requires deep pockets and most importantly good logistics. I've often thought if a logistics company expanded their shopping cart plugins to also (optionally) feed back data to a central ordering system and included their own payment solution to allow direct from customer ordering with centralised ordering, payment and logistics - perhaps at a loss until a prime type offering could be built there would be a potential for a strong business. Amazon take a huge amount of fees a chunk of which go to putting the wrong product in front of the customer!
You know when you shop there that what you order will arrive quickly, no convoluted delivery charges, and a returns policy that shook the industry up completely
In other news, people in different areas share wildly different experiences with the quality of their local McDonalds service. The jury is out, is McDonalds service entirely and objectively good or entirely and objectively bad? We investigate at 11.
Also, I'll mention that Amazon FBA isn't even competing for my money or time. I can't use them, since I don't sell anything through Amazon nor pay for Amazon Prime if I buy something from Amazon.
Meanwhile, FedEx and UPS are almost always available anywhere, and USPS also remains an option everywhere if the shipment is something they handle.
I now know that "neighbor" and get greeted with a laugh every time I swing by to drop off their packages.
I would also have accepted if they'd leave the EXIF data in their "delivery proof" images, so I can do my own GPS navigation, because the picture of some piece of grass with my box sitting on it, shockingly, is not a good way to track down lost parcels
If I could snap my fingers and end FedEx as a company I would do it without any hesitation. Hell, in a more constructive vein: if I could pay to ensure that no one ever used FedEx to ship something to me, I'd do that, too (even as I write that I'm cognizant that's perverse incentives for FedEx improving, but it would be a more likely fix than just praying for FedEx to go out of business anytime soon; it'd be like shipping insurance but in the other direction)
My family has a running joke that if it’s FedEx the delivery date is like the pirate code… “more like a guideline”
If Amazon offered such a postal service I'd use that in a heartbeat with full confidence.
Sounds cool though. Good luck to FedEx.
The real problems seem much deeper to me. Amazon's warehouses, their online store, their ability to handle disputes: that much deeper integration feels like the challenge FedEx faces.
Well, if FedEx Prime Video didn't insert ads in my videos, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
Walmart always makes me think similar but not in the same way. Ultimately, the in-person retail experience still offers its own conveniences so that's a good feature.
tl;dr: good luck.
Because it’s likely not going to be successful but would be, like Apple to Microsoft in the 90s, the small slice competitor that keeps government action from happening.
What happened to independent e-commerce solutions that you can stand up in your own server room? Does no one run their own store anymore?
It’ll be a new era when FedEx can give accurate delivery estimates. Last time I recall paying for next day delivery and wondering how my package will traverse all of Canada in that time. I then watched the delivery estimate update to “tomorrow” every day for a week until it finally delivered.
For a company that should have all of the data necessary for training a system to do a better job, their systems are a farce. I would love to hear the FedEx engineers defend this status quo.