
Amazon and Google are on a collision course - Brajeshwar
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/05/08/godzilla-vs-mothra-the-sequel/
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peteretep
If I can't buy it via Amazon, I probably won't buy it. I trust the reviews,
and I trust them to play fair if they've sent the wrong thing, to such a
degree that any other avenue feels like a big waste of my time.

~~~
dewitt
> _If I can't buy it via Amazon, I probably won't buy it._

This was 100% true of me as well for a decade or more. But getting into the
Google Shopping Express beta changed everything. Same day delivery (i.e., even
faster than Prime), competitive prices, up-to-the-minute order and delivery
tracking, and sharply dressed and exceptionally polite and courteous couriers,
means that for a large portion of "just use Amazon" products I'm now going
with Google instead. See <http://google.com/shopping/express/about/>.

Selection and availability are of course the caveats of the early Google tests
(limited to just San Francisco and parts of the Bay Area for now), and I was
skeptical at first, but boy is this a game changer if we can pull it off. I've
averaged almost an order a day since we started.

Granted, Amazon's use of OnTrac in San Francisco for Prime is also a factor. I
may not renew my Prime membership for the first time since it launched as a
result of OnTrac's poor service here.

(Ob. disclosure: I've worked at both companies.)

~~~
bitops
_> I may not renew my Prime membership for the first time since it launched as
a result of OnTrac's poor service here._

I've resorted to having stuff delivered to a location where I know that OnTrac
is less likely to be used. They do such a shoddy job of delivering on time and
seem cheerfully incapable of reading delivery instructions.

~~~
dewitt
OnTrac recently "lost" a 75 llb package of mine while on the truck out for
delivery, and took several days to admit it was missing, and only then after
about a dozen calls and emails. There's not a doubt in my mind it was either
stolen (most likely) or the delivery person simply didn't want to lift the box
and kicked it out the back of the truck. Amazon had to eat the cost of
replacing it, and I subsequently required that they use FedEx or UPS (which
they did).

OnTrac will sink Amazon Prime.

~~~
mitchty
As someone from an area without OnTrac, how could this company even have
gotten a contract with Amazon? They sound worse than "play football with your
packages" FedEx and UPS. And I have to admit that is an impressive feat.

~~~
bcoates
IIRC OnTrac uses contractors, mostly of the "some guy with a truck" variety,
of wildly varying quality, and is very cheap. When they're good there's
nothing wrong with them but the bad ones do things you would never see a UPS
or FedEx guy doing.

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mjmahone17
Interesting. Initially, I was thinking "But Amazon could only ever eat into a
small-ish percentage of Google's total revenue, because Lowe's and restaurants
and such will still want to advertise on Google so long as anyone is using it
for search." However, I think there's a clear avenue around that: allow Amazon
to index and ship Lowes' products. This would allow stores to stop supporting
their massively expensive e-commerce operations (or significantly reduce
them), especially if Amazon allowed the store to have significant individual
branding when you're viewing a product they list. They could even index movie
tickets and restaurants, which would mean you could Amazon your "night out,"
reserving tickets and dinner online, in one place.

~~~
ereckers
"allow Amazon to index and ship Lowes' products. This would allow stores to
stop supporting their massively expensive e-commerce operations (or
significantly reduce them)"

Sounds like the "online malls" of yesteryear, maybe even a little AOLish. I
can see Amazon continuing to be used as a sales channel, but I think we've
already gone through that line of thinking and a place like Lowes still finds
big value in running their own store.

~~~
MBCook
This is what Borders used to do. For some insane reason their online shopping
site _was run by Amazon_ , their biggest competitor.

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riggins
So this is a bit of a tangent, but I'm a bit of a fan of economist Hyman
Minsky (fascinating, accessible writing on economics btw). One of the really
interesting things that Minsky repeatedly points out is that advertising isn't
technologically necessary.

It's kinda mind-boggling to step back and think that the main service
(advertising) that one of the most valuable companies in world charges for is
entirely unnecessary (I put it that way because I think google provides a lot
of valuable services they don't charge for). Its always fun to noodle a bit
about a world without advertising. I'm sure we'd get along just fine. We'd
still figure out what food, clothes, cars, household goods to buy.

~~~
mtrimpe
What I find even more mind-bending is that since premium brands often come
from the same production line as cheaper brands, you're actually paying a
company a premium to to convince you they're worth the premium for convincing
you even more they're worth ... you get my point.

~~~
jlgreco
Obviously the importance of it depends on the product, and some things don't
do it at all, but there _is_ the consideration that although two products came
from the same line, they were branded according to how well they passed QA.

Sometimes they keep the same overall brand (see: Intel and AMD disabling
defective cores) and sometimes nobody even pretends that the product you are
buying is not the result of failed QA for another product (bags of broken
pretzel bits), but between those you get a fuzzier line. I have heard that
consumer batteries do this for example: the weird-brand batteries that come in
your remote control from the factory are probably rebranded batteries from a
company you have heard of.

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mcintyre1994
Are companies being so hugely stretched over multiple billion dollar markets a
by-product of the web, or is there some precedent? I mean, of course they're
all on a collision course because once they get large enough they seem to find
their way into every market.

Another example is Facebook, which obviously competes with G+ but also things
like Youtube with a pretty serious video player - a more social take on that
seems to have caught everybody off guard. They also seem to be positioning
themselves for eCommerce too with recent(?) gift voucher presents etc.

Even looking at younger companies like Dropbox and a push into Email, Twitter
and Vine.. collision seems inevitable when the rules seem to, at some point,
become do everything you can remotely link to your core product.

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johnrob
5 years ago, someone at google told me this: our biggest weakness is amazon,
because we make a lot of money from google searches that end up with an amazon
ad getting clicked on. If people take those searches to amazon (where the
purchase ends up anyways), google gets cut out of the transaction.

Google is vulnerable in this case because they are acting as a middle man.

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ipsin
A quote from wikipedia: "in May 2012, Google announced that the service (which
was also immediately renamed Google Shopping) would shift in late-2012 to a
paid model where merchants would have to pay the company in order to list
their products on the service."

This pretty much ended my use of Google for shopping queries. I still tried it
a few times after that, but the quality of the search results is so sparse and
poor that I end up using Yahoo! Shopping (yes, really) before giving up and
going to Amazon.

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zmmmmm
Funny to say they are on a collision course at this point. Did they not notice
Amazon forking Android? Selling a directly competing tablet? Did they not
notice Google setting up Play Books, Movies, etc. all directly in Amazon core
business?

These companies aren't on a collision course - they collided a long time ago.

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rfriedman
Another overlap in search I've noticed recently is 'People Search'. 9 times
out of 10 this leads me straight to LinkedIn. I imagine the overlap in this
area will also have a negative effect on Google's market share.

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danmaz74
Personally, I use Amazon when I have a clear idea of what I want, but I use
Google when I have to make up my mind before that. I don't see Amazon easily
fill that need.

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e3pi
Crane lofting of final pod for completed anonymous intercontinental missle
stack:

[] Tor p2p anonymity

[] Bitcoin: wallet blockchain verification and QR codes/smartphone for street
trade

[] Prepaid anonymous debit cards

and...

[]:

"...through Google BufferBox, Google has plans to place secure boxes in
convenient locations throughout a city to which you can have parcels shipped
to for easy pickup. They just launched their first location in San Francisco,
with many more likely to come."

Elon can't be happy about this.

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freefrancisco
Amazon supported the Internet tax. It would be poetic justice if Google
provided a free to use tax and shipment calculation to all merchants if/when
that becomes law. Then Google would be able to help users find what they want
and sort it by final price, including shipping and taxes. That might be the
missing piece that gets all merchants giving Google the information it needs
to allow users to do that.

~~~
jaynos
I think Amazon will still be able to compete in this scenario. They can (and
will have to) calculate sales tax. Plus, the tax will be based on the state
that I reside in, not the state that the merchant resides in, so there won't
be any "gaming the system" to find the lowest price.

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jfoutz
Weird. I thought amazon made more from cloud services than they did through
retail. I wouldn't doubt a collision course, but in search? seems unlikely.

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bjhoops1
I might add to this that I very frequently finding myself using Amazon just
for the reviews. You can learn a lot about a product by reading reviews,
especially the 1 star ones. If a product has no Amazon reviews, I don't really
trust it. I can't remember the last time I googled "Product X reviews."

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fimoreth
> "Shopping on Amazon is a superior user experience and it runs the table on
> the magical retailer formula of selection, price and convenience"

Clearly has never used Amazon Canada.

But in all seriousness, a great article. It's interesting to see how the
different web markets overlap so easily.

~~~
MrDOS
> Clearly has never used Amazon Canada.

Funny, I came here to say something more serious to this extent. The degree of
American-centricity in this thread is astonishing (or perhaps I'm just used to
Reddit). Outside of the US – to my understanding, _anywhere_ outside of the
US, not just Canada – Amazon is next to useless. The product selection is
abysmal and shipping options are terrible. Maybe the article has some points
with regards to the American marketplace, but on an international level,
Amazon has a long way to go.

(Yes, I realize some Amazon.com retailers do ship to Canada. To those who are
about to suggest this to me, I ask: have you ever _tried_ it? In most cases,
the shipping costs more than the item in question, and depending on how it
ships – something I don't seem to have any control over, although maybe that's
just a case of me not knowing how to use Amazon – it either ships UPS and I
get dinged with insane “duty” fees, or it ships USPS and I don't see the item
for a month.)

~~~
SatvikBeri
Amazon Japan works well and is quite popular there, at least in Tokyo.

~~~
MrDOS
That's true. I've heard of people in North America ordering things like
mechanical keyboards on Amazon.co.jp and using a forwarding service like Tenso
to ship it.

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adventured
I had to check to make sure that article wasn't written ten years ago.

"E-commerce is clearly the future of retail and there is a growing battle
brewing for dominance in this new world"

Where's the 1998 time stamp?

~~~
3825
Perhaps they are talking about a shift[1] in focus in how Google makes money
from just presenting ads to actually delivering end-to-end
shopping/procurement/vending.

I know it is already possible with cost per lead and cost per action but
"fulfilled by Amazon" is definitely a threat for Google if it gets too big.

[1] the same thing as Robert Scoble did when he was talking about Google
glasses a few weeks ago

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orangethirty
One of my biggest fears as a search guy is that Amazon starts dabbing in
general search.

~~~
taeric
Isn't that what this is? <http://www.a9.com/>

~~~
adventured
*That's what that was

A9 failed to compete in general search, so Amazon turned it completely inward
as a product search engine.

~~~
taeric
Yeah, I clicked around some after I posted and realized it was not as general
purpose as I remembered it. I am not a search person, though, so wasn't how
far removed from general it was. In particular, the visual search stuff seems
even more impressive, honestly. Assuming it works. (I would guess that is a
huge assumption.)

