
Amazon vs. Jet.com - magda_wang
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2015-01-07/amazon-vs-dot-jet-dot-com-marc-lore-aims-to-beat-bezos
======
jbob2000
They'll still lose. Amazon has Prime. They have the fastest shipping in the
world. Fuck, they practically invented Just-In-Time warehouses. Amazon is
diverse too; they have one of the largest clouds in the world. People _know_
about Amazon. Amazon has tons of reviews on products too, so I know if a
product is shitty or not.

I order online like 3 or 4 times a year, I'm not going to pay $50 to shave a
few percentage points off my total bill.

~~~
MediaSquirrel
Do you have kids? Are you a middle-class homeowner?

Because I think that's where the real money is and who these guys are really
targeting.

Costco launched in 1980, 30+ years after Wal Mart, and won by offering less
selection and lower prices. I believe there's a real opportunity here.

~~~
larrys
"Costco launched in 1980, 30+ years after Wal Mart, and won by offering less
selection and lower prices. I believe there's a real opportunity here."

A website, such as jet.com is out of "sight out of mind". Unless it becomes a
habit (like Amazon has for many people including me).

Costco has several advantages over a jet.com. And the Devil is in the details
in terms of what made Costco a success.

1) It's not out of site in any way. You can't miss Costco if there is one in
your neighborhood. You can easily miss jet.com or not think about it unless it
becomes a habit.

2) Costco succeeds also by doing what Walmart does in part. Once you are in
the store they get you to buy things that you didn't think that you needed.
And more of it then you thought you needed. This was the concept behind Makro
Self Service Wholesale in the 80's (the place that Tom Stemberg of Staples
interviewed at and got the idea for Staples for. [1] (Ntim, I was at that
store when it opened..)

3) Employee culture. Can be done (Zappos) online but I would say more of a
benefit in a physical store (my weakest point I will agree). [2]

[1] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2012/07/05/tom-
stemb...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2012/07/05/tom-stembergs-
advice-to-young-entrepreneurs/)

[2] [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-06/costco-
ceo-c...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-06/costco-ceo-craig-
jelinek-leads-the-cheapest-happiest-company-in-the-world)

~~~
DaveMebs
#2 and #3 are explicitly points being addressed by jet.com.

Re #2: The entire Jet model is the more you buy the more you save. Taking the
baseball example, it's pretty easy to infer when they see you are buying
cleats and a glove that they will up-sell you with a bat as well and call out
the bundle discount you will receive.

Re #3: The article explicitly discusses that the founder is trying to create
an "anti-Amazon" culture that values people and relationships. You can agree
or disagree with this approach, but you can;t deny they are actively trying to
promote a great culture to work in (no performance reviews, for example).

This is not to say that Jet.com is going to nail it, but you can't dismiss
Jet.com's efforts here out of hand either.

------
freshhawk
Once I sign up, some of the resources return 403 (IP is blocked by geoblocker
...). Went through a US proxy and can see what it's supposed to look like. The
funny part is that first message that is supposed to say "Thanks! You're Jet
Insider No. XXX,XXXX Share to move up the ranks" instead says:

Thanks!

You're Jet Insider

No."

I could not figure out what the hell that was supposed to mean.

I guess this is just some launch last minute scrambling or something? Might
not have been the best choice, anyone outside the US or wherever is being
blocked has the first impression "Ah, they are going to take on Amazon and
can't get a signup flow to work ... right".

~~~
oh_sigh
There is a number that comes after "No." which shows your spot in line. It
took a few seconds after the page was rendered to show up. Also, that entire
circle is in flash. That may explain why you had that kind of experience

~~~
jamesn
There's no flash on there except for some thing for copying the referral URI
to the clipboard.

------
shittyanalogy
Jet sounds pretty disingenuous to me.

 _" We're basically not making a dime on any of the transactions."_ \- If
that's how you really feel then take the word basically out. You are making
money off transactions but you would very much like to give the impression you
aren't.

Their example of "How Jet Works" involves supposedly wholesale prices that
somehow get magically discounted and a shipping arrangement that somehow
magically works that, if you pay with a debit card, saves you $6 off your
contrived amazon order...

Then it goes into a story about the guy who's starting jet and how he is and
always has been a money hungry, cut-throat business man looking to make
millions and then sell. Nothing about his "bio" sounds very consumer focused.

Exerpt from the site: "Refer friends to boost your Insider rank. The more
friends you refer, the more perks you unlock."

Yeah, no thanks. Costco is consumer focused, amazon is consumer focused, this
is money focused and the businessweek piece is a complete puff job.

~~~
xur17
I think the point is that they want to make all of their money off the $50
yearly charge.

------
thethrows
I went to the website. Signed up for the insider thing. It said "Share <link>
with your friends to be top 100,000 to get access". BYE!

Really? Their strategy to starting a business is making a pyramid scheme?

~~~
sp332
Sign up for Jet Insider: Earn a free 6-month membership

Be in our Top 100,000: Earn early access to our site

Be in our Top 10,000: Earn a free 1-year membership

Be in our Top 1,000: Earn a free 5-year membership

Be in our Top 100: Earn a free lifetime membership

Be in our Top 10: Earn 10,000 shares of Jet stock

Be the No. 1 Insider: Earn 100,000 shares of Jet stock

------
latkin
Also notable is that Jet.com is using F# as the core language for their
backend

~~~
melling
It'd be great if they could blog about how F# performs and the benefits of
using it. e.g. Fewer bugs, less code... How are things working in practice.

~~~
jamesn
Hey, I'm Jet's VP Engineering. We'll definitely be blogging about F# and some
of the other tech behind Jet in the very near future!

~~~
NicoJuicy
I'm also very interested in the F# side of things, i haven't seen much
articles blog posts about it.

------
swingbridge
Amazon will kick their ass on logistics. Amazon already does most of the
bundling, dynamic pricing, discounts for slower shipping and other tricks that
jet.com mentions. Amazon will also kick their ass in pricing (that's what they
did to diapers.com).

They only real viable option is to have products that Amazon doesn't have, but
citing Sears as a key early partner doesn't really bode much hope in that
dept.

They'll also need to burn insane amounts of cash on marketing and customer
acquisition to get people to pay for subscriptions (which they say is their
only source of revenue). This at a time when VCs appetite for startups burning
cash like crazy is starting to come back to reality...

If there are investors are willing to set piles of cash on fire poke Amazon in
the side then I'm happy to watch such a blood sport, but the business plan and
concept at this point seems rather weak.

------
chrischen
How is a bunch of disparate geographically disjointed retailers going to out-
price one massive local Amazon warehouse doing a large volume of local
deliveries? Plus I'm already paying prime, which is > $50 membership fee Jet
is charging.

------
forgotten
Lore and Baharara are quite a team. When they were Diapers.com they went down
kicking and biting against Amazon. I hope a book gets written about these
guys, they are incredibly inspiring.

------
ChrisNorstrom
Finally! If Jet.com doesn't charge amazon style fees this means I can mark my
products down by 25-50% ! and still make the same profit as I do on Amazon.
Amazon fees are massive even without the penny pricing snag. Here's mine:
[http://i3.minus.com/i0tJucuLy5zPB.jpg](http://i3.minus.com/i0tJucuLy5zPB.jpg)

When Jet opens up to small sellers I'll be the first in line. Hopefully
consumers will notice the big price differences and buy a membership.

~~~
pavel
You can! [https://partner.jet.com/](https://partner.jet.com/)

------
kin
At first it sounded like a better version of online Costco, which sounds
awesome since Costco's selection is limited. But after reading how it really
works I'm not so sure this will be that competitive vs. Amazon. There's a
dependency on other merchants it sounds like?

~~~
dsugarman
over 40% of Amazon sales are from their 3rd party marketplace which relies on
third party merchants. If those merchants were allowed to sell without paying
Amazon 15% commissions and without competing directly with Amazon's first
party sales, you would imagine they could become even more competitive on
price. there is no reason Jet will not be consistently lower than Amazon on
price especially since they take on no infrastructure costs.

~~~
kin
I see. As a prime member my perspective only shows me how I use Amazon. I
always use the Prime filter and try to buy things that are Shipped from and
Sold from Amazon. For 3rd party merchants than this definitely sounds
impactful.

I wonder if there's any room for Jet to satisfy those who seek impulse buys,
convenience, and speed.

~~~
jplahn
From the article, it seems like you still can, you'll just pay a higher price.
If you want next day shipping on one item, you can do that; you just won't
reap the benefits of their bundling idea.

------
gsands
They lose right off for me because the back button doesn't work on jet.com to
even exit back to the previous site you were on.

------
christiangenco
These "share your link to move up in line" things are a fun mechanic, and seem
to work well for virality, but the way they're currently being implemented is
embarrassingly easy to gamify.

In a line of curl and about ten minutes, I went from ~130,000 to #2 (proof:
[https://twitter.com/cgenco/status/553651179779940352](https://twitter.com/cgenco/status/553651179779940352)).
Anyone with an elementary knowledge of the Chrome web inspector and bash could
do the same.

This could be halfway patched by only counting _verified_ accounts. ie: send a
verification email to everyone who signs up, and only count them if they click
the link. It could still be "hacked," but it would be more tedious and require
sufficiently more resources. If you're thinking about doing something like
this for your startup launch, _please_ at least verify email addresses.

A full solution would have to depend on something that could verify that an
account has one-and-only-one real person behind it. Perhaps linking a credit
card, making a purchase, or shipping to a unique address.

I'm really interested in jet as a service, and very excited for the launch,
but I'd be incredibly disappointed if my ~5k fake entries aren't discovered
before the end of this competition.

As an aside: this website has really confusing UX:

1\. Why does practically everything on the page flip over if I hover for
~1000ms? Things should either flip over _immediately_ on mouse hover (which
still isn't fantastic - what do you do on mobile?), or after a button press.

2\. "Click to copy your unique link" doesn't work (Retina MBP OS X 10.10
Chrome 39.0.2171.95 64-bit), and only shows a pointer cursor the first time
you hover over it.

3\. "Click here to check your Jet Insider rank" in the welcome email doesn't
have an href attribute, so the link doesn't work.

~~~
asusmenu
like you say, email verification can be hacked just as easily. best answer is
to use some authenticated id like facebook/twitter. regardless, why would
someone bother....their terms have all sorts of stuff about securits laws,
signing consulting agreements with jet etc...they must be auditing anyone in
the running for stock.

agree about the ui thought....flash? 1990's much?

~~~
christiangenco
I'd bet that's only there to verify granting of stock options: manually going
through the top ten isn't that labor intensive. There's still an advantage to
getting free service for a year.

Re flash: unfortunately that's the state of the art for cross platform copying
to the clipboard. Their implementation just seems broken.

------
umsm
The signup process reminds me of a ponzi-style scheme.

After entering your email, you can "unlock" features or free service by
referring people.

~~~
efuquen
Other than having more tiers how is this any different then sign up incentives
any number of other sites offer? When Uber gives you free rides for signing up
other users is that a ponzi-style scheme as well?

------
rbcgerard
slightly off topic, but what still amazes me is the variability in price over
time on amazon... www.camelcamelcamel.com is mind blowing

~~~
rtkwe
There's quite a bit of algorithmic pricing going on @ Amazon by all parties.
Sometimes it leads to hilarious results.

[http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358](http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358)

------
ChikkaChiChi
Saying that Amazon is an e-commerce provider is like saying Microsoft is a
hardware company because it sells (good) keyboards. Amazon is positioned to
become the biggest distributor of computing power to leverage you to sell a
good that Amazon's army of distribution centers and local courier agreements
can get to you in as little as a few hours.

Yet-Another-Hyperbole-Filled-Buying-Club is not something I believe Bezos
would be scared of. If anyone should be scared, it should be UPS, FedEx, and
the USPS. Amazon is much more likely to be coming for them.

------
libraryatnight
This sounds gimmicky, but I fed them an e-mail address. I found the weirdo
smiley face logo to be off-putting. It's jarring somehow.

