
Flexe finds spare warehouse space for e-commerce merchants - bilifuduo
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-11/this-startup-is-the-airbnb-of-warehouses-and-has-amazon-in-its-sights?cmpid=socialflow-facebook-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social
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Dwolb
Great problem they're tackling. Some issues:

Splitting inventory is an expensive activity. Often times you need to purchase
more overall inventory and incur more warehouse receiving cost when you try
and divvy up your stock around the country to decrease average shipping times.

They don't own their warehouses. This can be an issue if something _goes
wrong_ (eg they lose track of a large portion of inventory). Often warehouses
hire temporary and low-trained workers. Things can go wrong if the warehouse
doesn't have proper operational controls and can stay wrong for days (months
even!) if a warehouse doesn't have a proper support team. Since they don't own
the warehouses these issues are difficult to control for.

There's some competition in the space like Shipwire owned by Ingram Micro (who
also lease space to Amazon). Also I believe you can use Fulfillment By Amazon
(FBA) to fulfill customer orders even if an item isn't listed on Amazon.

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desdiv
>Flexe did it without spending a nickel on facilities and already has 25
million square feet of storage, about 25 percent of Amazon’s capacity...

This comparison is extremely misleading. Amazon either leases or outright owns
their warehouse space and thus has total control over it. But Flexe's 25
million square feet are just listings; the property owner, not Flexe, has
control over it, and if a better marketplace comes along they might choose to
leave Flexe and list somewhere else.

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petra
The big opportunity here isn't serving the US, a place already well served,
with though competition from Amazon, but creating a platform to serve smaller
countries, without fulfillment infrastructure services or with a weak one, ,
earning margins closer to an e-tailer margins than a warehouse supplier, and
with the possibility, since the country is small with fewer competitors -
maybe manage to carve out a long terms table position.

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WaxProlix
So - do they get bought or crushed? I feel like it's a 50-50, but that's more
on my gut than out of any particular insight.

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ThrustVectoring
It's hard for me to see what their moat is. Having negotiated enough warehouse
partners that retailers can expect to find space and warehousers can expect to
get free space filled? That can get imitated with a lot of straightforward
work in local geographic areas, and if customers are spending enough money to
make it worthwhile, they can make the physical back-end interchangeable.

There's also many buyers that make sense for the company, too. From "make it
easier to build a business" things (like Stripe), to "we have a bunch of
warehouses and could synergize with usage & market data".

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thefalcon
This is exactly what smaller e-tailers need in order to begin to be able to
compete with Amazon -- most of them eventually learn that they have no chance
if they try to actually rely on Amazon as their primary platform, but it's so
hard to compete with that infrastructure without a service like this.

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elvirs
Darkstore is another startup thats claiming to provide
warehousing/delivery/fulfillment services utilizing unused spaces at malls,
etc.

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thefalcon
Looks like Darkstore is offering full 3PL

