
Amazon peer-to-peer selling - jaxondu
https://www.amazon.in/p2p
======
dcosson
This is neat. My biggest complaint with Amazon these days is there's just so
much noise on the site. For any given search I expect like half the results
not to be serious ones. Even when you filter for just prime, there are tons of
edge cases like the mini version of a thing will be prime but the regular
version is not, or only one color is prime, or sometimes the item is clearly
more expensive than in a store so you're paying the full consumer cost of
2-day shipping even though it's prime, sometimes the item has changed slightly
but still includes the old reviews which are now misleading, etc. In some ways
these are nitpicks, but Amazon have set the bar so high that now I expect the
magical experience that I get with Amazon-fulfilled items for everything on
the site.

Anyway I feel like amazon would be even better if these low quality listings
were moved off to a separate site which was explicitly 3rd-party (whether from
businesses or individuals) similar to Ebay. And then the main site would have
"official" stuff where amazon does more quality assurance on the listings and
it's all fulfilled by them and Prime. (I also think that better curation like
this is necessary for purchasing through Echo to really catch on at least for
me, there are way too many gotchas in Amazon listings that I still feel like I
need to actually focus and look carefully through the listing before I buy
anything).

My idea is obviously very different than this Bangalore-only product but
there's a glimmer of a separate 3rd-party only site here and I hope Amazon
evolves in that direction.

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salmonet
Agreed. I also think such a spinoff would do well against ebay. I tried using
paypal/ebay yesterday and gave up after 3 hours of trying to get a payment to
go through. It was like going back in time to the 90s

~~~
nocoder
Amazon actually tried doing this with junglee.com. The challenge of course is
generating traffic for a separate entity, plus it is more costly. So now it
has sort of integrated Junglee with Amazon where, junglee powers the used &
refurbished business.

P.S: In India, all Amazon listing are third party, since legally foreign
investment is not permitted in ecommerce, so Amazon.in actually just functions
as a marketplace not a retailer.

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chipperyman573
In USD:

14 cent fee for anything less than $14.72

73 cent fee for anything $14.72 - $73.58

$1.47 fee for anything more than $73.58

This service reminds me a lot of craigslist but with a fee. Does India not
have a similar service?

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Crosseye_Jack
Amazon pick up the item from you, pack it and deliever it to the purchaser.
Craigslist invokes meeting up with people either at your home or at a public
place. Now if you were selling say 3 items a day (random number plucked out of
the air) you would only need the single pick up of items.

That is value in the fees from what I see of it.

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brianwawok
Bangladore only.

Cool way to get into the market. Pickup cost would make it harder to work in
the US.

~~~
Crosseye_Jack
How's Amazon's own delivery service going over there? In the UK it's pretty
common to have amazon deliever via Amazon Logistics for my area (it's not
nationwide yet).

As the side states it seems to be about selling in your local area so doesn't
seem that much of a leap from what Amazon are currently offering. (I.e. Your
sold item isn't going cross country. To the nearest depot and back out again
after packing)

Note: This is just an observation on that Amazon already have a collection /
delivery network in place with plans to expand. Not a comment on the quality
of said service. I've had many miss deliveries (my items delivered to other
addresses, other people's items delivered to me, a knock on the door then
driving off. My home office is less then 30 secs from the front door but still
had drivers climbing back in their vans saying no one was home during that
time.) but I guess that's what you get when drivers are paid per delivery
instead of per hour.

~~~
baseh
I ordered a bunch of stuff from amazon.in when I was visiting India. All the
deliveries are via courier like DTDC. But I was in a smaller town. I am not
sure if the Amazon delivery network is in action in the bigger cities.

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ComputerGuru
This is tangential, but I presumed a launch page like this for an Amazon
product would be copy-edited by a native English speaker, even if for India,
no?

("Sell as Individual" should definitely be "Sell as an individual", a very
common mistake with non-native English speakers.)

~~~
jdietrich
Articles are frequently dropped in Indian English; as I understand it, Hindi
does not have articles. It might be an error, or it might be localisation.

~~~
witty_username
No, this is wrong in Indian English too.

It's true that Hindi doesn't have articles; instead one, this, and that are
used (translating).

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shimon_e
Wonder how this will be profitable with Bangalore's traffic. 2km can take 1
hour in peak hour.

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sarreph
Is there a reason why all of the content on the page are images? (one image
per section)

~~~
mandarlimaye
Probably to make sure the Rupee symbol renders properly:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3598085/displaying-the-
in...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3598085/displaying-the-indian-
currency-symbol-on-a-website)

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dangoldin
Man - I'm so impressed by Amazon pushing this stuff out and constantly
leveraging their existing infrastructure.

This looks to be affiliated with Junglee
([http://www.junglee.com](http://www.junglee.com)) so might mean Amazon is
repositioning it as P2P.

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Waterluvian
If framed properly (ie. this isn't Amazon quality, buyer beware!) this would
be the single most exciting advance in commerce for myself.

99% of the friction of me selling used stuff I don't want or new stuff I
produce is the shipping and money handling logistics.

I can't do Craigslist/Kijiji. I'm socially awkward and would rather throw away
item X than risk the possibility of an awkward situation where someone's
messing with me or trying to barter the price down, etc.

~~~
jon-wood
I've had pretty good success signing up as an Amazon seller to get rid of a
few things I don't need anymore. My only annoyance is them massively under
quoting on shipping costs, meaning you really have to do those calculations
yourself and then price it in. This bit really irritates me as they'll sell
you shipping from their seller portal, and even there it's massively more
expensive than the price their quoting the customer for shipping.

~~~
matt4077
Part of that is the dramatically lower shipping rates you get if you do it in
volume. The other reason is that people hate shipping costs, so its usually a
good move to subsidise shipping with the product price.

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yalogin
It's getting difficult to keep track of all the services Amazon is offering
these days. If it's products then the feature will be integrated into the
search results so it should not be a problem. But it feels like they are
announcing something new every other week these days.

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dewiz
Is there a similar service in US?

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ktta
Not really. You definitely can get close with eBay/Craigslist + Shyp[1]

[1]:[http://www.shyp.com](http://www.shyp.com)

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imaginenore
Wow, this is way better than eBay. And the fees are so small, it's hard to
believe.

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Animats
Does Amazon do the deliveries with Amazon employees, or is this an "Uber for
packages" thing?

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ausjke
craiglist on amazon? amazon is getting bigger and bigger and is making ebay
obsolete I feel.

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redmaverick
Why is this not there in the US? Why not start in SF?

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jonny_eh
Why should it start in SF? You wouldn't happen to live there would you?

~~~
biesnecker
But ... but ... but ... doesn't the Earth revolve around SF?! :-P

