

Amazon, in Threat to UPS, Tries Its Own Deliveries - itry
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304788404579521522792859890/

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ajb
This is being told as a story about ambitious new services, but right now I
bet it's mostly amazon's traditional squeezing of suppliers. Amazon don't need
a comprehensive service for them to be worthwhile: they can selectively cut
out areas which deliverers currently make the most profit on, and leave the
difficult ones.

It will be interesting to see if this affects relative prices. It could well
mean that generalists have to put up their prices in rural areas.

~~~
martinald
I agree.

Also, I'm not really sure this makes sense, if it is only for delivering
Amazon packages. Surely FedEx/UPS have better economies of scale as they can
deliver everyone's packages?

It's been a very long time since you've seen a company do total vertical
integration well.

At least in the UK the delivery/logistics market has razor-thin margins with
relatively high capital costs. Is this really the best use of Amazon's capital
vs spending it on developers or content for their other services?

~~~
jonknee
> Also, I'm not really sure this makes sense, if it is only for delivering
> Amazon packages. Surely FedEx/UPS have better economies of scale as they can
> deliver everyone's packages?

They also have profit margins that could be taken by Amazon. Amazon has been
putting warehouses near where it sells the most product which means average
delivery length has been dropping. I could easily see Amazon beating UPS at
local delivery. Especially so with grocery delivery in the mix--they're
already stopping by your building to deliver food, why not drop the morning's
packages as well?

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nutjob2
There's also less handling: Amazon would be loading its own trucks that go
directly to the customer in cities with warehouses nearby, compared to UPS who
have at least one sort step.

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nrao123
Mike Moritz saw this coming:

[http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130805231302-25...](http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130805231302-25760-stop-
the-presses-a-new-press-lord-appears)

In Los Angeles customers who pay $220 up front for Amazon Fresh, the company’s
home delivery grocery service, get ‘free’ shipping on orders above $35. It
might be ‘free’ but Amazon has their cash. Customers and vendors have helped
Amazon build its 90 fulfillment centers, which now enclose about 65 million
square feet. That should be enough to make the managements of FedEx and UPS
tremble.

\-----

So did Simon Sarris:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6591112](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6591112)

It's important to note that if any other company spent until their EPS was
negative, investors would flip. Amazon is playing with razor thin margins
while trying to scale up a platform to end all platforms that we might someday
use for everything without thinking about it. If successful, on that
day/year/eon dollar bills might as well be printed with Jeff Bezos' face on
them. Amazon won't be using UPS and Fedex trucks on that day. They'll be using
Amazon trucks. You'll know that era when you see it, I think.

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gregd
If they could deliver me a quad venti latte in 12.5 minutes, then I'd be
impressed.

But in all seriousness, generally the _only_ thing that has ever been
disappointing about ordering from Amazon, is the shipping times. Any time I've
ever had to call Amazon because of an issue, I've been impressed with their
general attitude toward me and their willingness to _fix_ or go beyond what my
original issue was.

Having said that, they seem to have some smart people working on logistics for
them
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcXoj_UBXv8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcXoj_UBXv8)

So it only makes sense for them to move toward the "last mile"

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yangyang
They've been doing this for quite a while ("Amazon Logistics") in London, UK.
They have a depot in Croydon. Since late 2013, at least.

~~~
cjrp
Is it a "proper" service though? The delivery guy always turns up in a rented
van, makes me think they're just outsourcing it to a man in a van or
something.

~~~
yangyang
Yes it often looks like casual labour, occasionally we see someone from the
depot though. They made a few mistakes at first, delivering to wrong address
and leaving parcels in inappropriate places. They seem pretty much fine now.

They don't have the fancy tracking that some of the larger couriers have now
(30-minute delivery windows etc) but they seem better than some of the super-
cheap couriers (e.g. HDNL).

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itry
Will this become as successful as their cloud computing business? Most parcels
I get are from Amazon anyhow. I guess its that way for many people. They will
have an insane headstart going into this business.

Personally, I welcome our new delivery overlords. I would like to order stuff
and have it at my door 1 hour later.

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thix0tr0pic
see previous discussion here -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7641861](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7641861)

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dayone
Own delivery network is already happening in India by Amazon where the
delivery partners are not that reliable/costly. Surprising to see e-commerce
players take solutions from developing markets to developed markets, rather
than the other way round.

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itry
When i look at the streets and all that stuff that moves around there, i
think: its somehow possible to turn this into a internet of things where stuff
moves around like tcp packets in a network.

Without competition, UPS will probably never get there.

