
The Ecommerce Surge - prostoalex
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/8/18/the-ecommerce-surge
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sdenton4
Thanks to lockdown, I tried both grocery delivery and food delivery for the
first time, and hated both of them. Food delivery I think we've now seen fail
in just about every conceivable way (wrong order, missed items, order
cancelled by the restaurant after 20 minutes, 404 restaurant no longer
exists). And groceries were such a poor experience that we just never tried it
a second time (inexplicably tiny selection of things, subject to completely
random substitutions (if you allow substitutions) or just missing a bunch of
essentials if not).

Dry retail goods are fine for ecommerce, though, just as they've always
been...

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jwblackwell
Are you in the US? Ocado here in the U.K. is great.

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youngtaff
We find Ocado a bit mixed…

We shop for a week but often find there are multiple items that have short
dates i.e. less than a week, their soft fruits don't seem to last, and need to
remember to remove all the other fruit and veg from it's packaging otherwise
it gets covered in condensation when it comes out of the cold van.

Also way too much non-recyclable packaging.

Other than that their pretty good, cheaper than Sainsburys, and the advantage
of shopping one line is you can see what the final bill is as you go

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te_chris
We used to do a mix of Ocado and our local grocer - Ocado for dry and frozen
goods and cleaning. Have switched cleaning to Splosh though, as much lower
waste [https://www.splosh.com/](https://www.splosh.com/).

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xoxoy
the biggest unknown right now is future of shipping costs - there’s big upward
pressure from FedEx and UPS to drive prices up now that they have more
leverage and had been inundated with shipments during the height of the
lockdown - both have already said they would raise rates for large and bulky
shippers for holidays.

it’s pretty apparent that a lot of retailers just hide the cost of shipping in
jacked up prices and still claim free shipping. unclear how long that can last
before more consumers catch on - I certainly feel like online shopping outside
of thing sold and shipped directly from large retailers are highly inflated
because of this.

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dalbasal
Shipping costs are a cost. It's not underhanded to include shipping in the
cost of a product. Shelf space, refrigeration, etc are also a cost. They're
included in the prices of regular stores.

IMO it's mostly a UI thing. Free or flat rate shipping is easier to
communicate to users at the operative time. The alternatives are too
complicated.

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stevewodil
Additionally shipping is a separate service. If the product price includes
margin for shipping, that's great for me when I return the item and get the
full price refunded.

Otherwise once you pay separately for shipping and the item is delivered it's
uncommon to refund any shipping costs if you return the item

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Pandabob
Slightly off-topic, but any personal experiences on how to get involved in the
ecom space? Or if you can point me to any online forums, that would also be
appreciated. I'm aware of ecom-reddit.

I'd love to hear stories on running a online store, consulting in the space or
building software around the platforms (like Shopify).

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treyfitty
I own a small e-commerce brand for men’s skincare. Getting the store up and
running from a design, legal, inventory, and finance perspective is pretty
straightforward. It’s the marketing that’s very tough. It’s not unusual for
“small brands” to spend $10k per month just on Ads. Depending on your market,
there are different “critical thresholds” to pass in order to make it
worthwhile.

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kqr
I am very fortunare to work in this space at this time. We are developing a
truly personally relevant (probably the only one in the world right now)
search and navigation engine for e-commerce businesses. It's very exciting and
also nice to be very safely employed these times.

If you don't mind the self-promotion, we have two positions open:

\- Backend Developer: [https://careers.loop54.com/jobs/927090-back-end-
developer](https://careers.loop54.com/jobs/927090-back-end-developer)

\- Frontend/fullstack developer:
[https://careers.loop54.com/jobs/799962-front-end-or-full-
sta...](https://careers.loop54.com/jobs/799962-front-end-or-full-stack-
developer-with-ui-focus)

We have rather high demands on our co-workers technically, but feel free to
give it a shot if you're not feeling secure in your current position.

~~~
pottertheotter
This is interesting but I feel like this isn't even the foundational problem
for most websites these days. Speaking as a consumer, one of my problems
almost every day is that there seem to be a lot of missing data about
products. So filtering only somewhat works.

Also, just get categories for products down well. Don't personalize it for me.
Just make sure products are properly categorized, and make a logical, easy to
use category menu.

Lastly, make search work. As in, if I type in a product name and it doesn't
show up in the search but I can find it on the website, fix that.

And if I search for x today, I don't want my search results to change tomorrow
or a week from now because it's "personalized".

I wish you success, but I wish the basic things would get some focus first.

