
Why Amazon is eating the world (2017) - mooreds
https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/14/why-amazon-is-eating-the-world/
======
dade_
Great Bezos quote: “I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to
change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a
very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change
in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is
actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business
strategy around the things that are stable in time. … [I]n our retail
business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to
be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection.
It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes
up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little
higher,’ [or] ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’

~~~
bribroder
How about, "Jeff, I used to love Amazon, but since you started fronting a
bunch of knockoff products I can no longer confidently choose the lowest
priced options--I wish your selection was less vast and more select, and I'd
even be willing to pay slightly higher prices to ensure that the quality
remained consistent even amongst the lowest priced products."

That actually describes the strategy of some other brands like REI which have
higher prices but consistently higher quality products

~~~
arbie
This is why you only buy items that are both "shipped from" and "sold by"
Amazon. They are very good about accepting returns.

~~~
caseysoftware
"Accepting returns" means that I have to deal with a counterfeit product.
Requesting the return, shipping it off, and ordering a new one (aka real one)
are a series of pains that I'd rather skip.

Product QA, tracking inventory provenance, and punishing bad actors would be a
major improvement.

~~~
exco
An additional problem with that is that Amazon will not guarantee that the
replacement will be a genuine product.

------
cleetus
I find myself using Amazon so rarely now that it probably makes sense to drop
Prime. It used to be the first and only place to look for something - I knew
they would have it and it would be cheaper than anywhere else. Then it used to
be that it might not always be cheapest, but it would be close, and at least
it would be easy to find and delivered quickly. Now it seems like there is so
much crap to sort through, half the time what I'm looking for isn't there, and
if it is, it's probably overpriced or a counterfeit. Maybe I'm just an
outlier.

~~~
arkades
And their Two Day Delivery Gaurantee is increasingly neither two days nor a
guarantee.

~~~
Fjolsvith
To Amazon's credit, they do try to make up for a missed delivery target. [1]

1\. [http://time.com/money/3955429/amazon-prime-late-
deliveries/](http://time.com/money/3955429/amazon-prime-late-deliveries/)

~~~
swhitt
Unfortunately they no longer offer a free month of Prime for a late delivery -
I believe too many people were taking advantage of that perk.

The last few times I've bothered to complain I've been offered a $5 credit
instead.

------
golergka
> Amazon had to build their own technology infrastructure. The financial
> genius of turning this infrastructure into an external product (AWS) has
> been well-covered

Wasn't the story about AWS wildly discredited? As in AWS was built not from
sractch as a product and was NOT using any infrastructure that was used to run
Amazon, and only later adopted by Amazon itself.

Why people still keep repeating that story?

~~~
scarface74
Yes that’s been discredited repeatedly by Amazon executives. Stories pop up
all of the time from Amazon where they talk about moving part of thier
infrastructure to AWS - including the migration from Oracle to AWS native
solutions.

~~~
mrep
Yes, Amazon is trying to move off of Oracle but they still use a lot of them
[0]. Also, most of their retail stack runs outside of AWS which is why they
could not scale up during prime day because they completely depended on their
non-AWS nosql database sable [1].

[0]: [https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-salesforce-would-
love-t...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-salesforce-would-love-to-move-
from-oracle-databases-muzzle-ellison-but-can-they-succeed/)

[1]: [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/19/amazon-internal-documents-
wh...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/19/amazon-internal-documents-what-caused-
prime-day-crash-company-scramble.html)

------
Syzygies
I see a rising consciousness that "sold by Amazon" products are often likely
to be stale-dated or counterfeit. Read the reviews. Read manufacturer
responses to complaints. This is broad-spectrum: Fake SDXC cards. Adulterated
Moroccan argan oil. Travel underwear that falls apart because it sat six years
in a hot storeroom before the merchant went under.

I find myself evaluating each Amazon purchase for provenance, as if I found it
in the woods. I never buy from those rural Pennsylvania bargain stores that
have stale-dated corn flakes for a dollar; why do we give Amazon a pass on
this? As more people make this association, their sales will peak and fall.

~~~
Fjolsvith
The nice thing about "sold by Amazon" is you can return it at no cost to
yourself.

~~~
amykyta
That introduces enough friction that I don’t want to bother buying there. I’ll
just pay more and wait longer for a product I know is genuine.

Oh, they’ve been banning customers for too many returns!
[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/zm8mde/amazon-
ban...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/zm8mde/amazon-banning-
customers-for-returns)

------
cs702
Amazon will soon be operating at a scale that no other company in history has
reached. There is a good chance they will run into operational challenges that
no one else has faced before. Think: challenges on which there is zero
academic research because no one has studied them in the past. Think:
challenges for which there are no known solutions. Simply chanting that
"software is scalable" and "software has zero incremental cost" doesn't solve
those kinds of challenges.

Multiple geographic groups, business units, physical locations, data centers,
software systems, managers, and employees, by their very physical nature, are
able to communicate and coordinate with each other only in statistically noisy
ways that are ultimately constrained by the Laws of Thermodynamics. These
laws, to put it mildly, impose hard limits of what any company can do with
information and energy.

I wonder when and whether Amazon will start running into these limits.

~~~
beamatronic
The final state is when every human on Earth is an Amazon employee, going
through life with the computer strapped to their arm, telling them what to do
next, awarding points for compliance, and electrical jolts when you don’t.

------
amelius
What I don't get is why postal services like USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc. don't
start an Amazon competitor.

For them it could be the difference between being in a race to the bottom
versus being in a race to the top.

~~~
mooreds
I think part of it is that they don't have expertise in retail. It also would
pit them against all their competition, not just Amazon.

~~~
deltron3030
They'd need some digital infrastructure and open online marketplace, map or
index, and use local shops as repositories for goods. For this to work they
need some kind of automated delivery, like drones, or eTaxi/Uber passengers
who take on delivery jobs.

Let's say you take an Uber from your friends house to your home, or you
shedule your electronic car to "accept packages", and some shop owner drops
you a package along the way that you deliver to a neighbor of yours.

You need a good system to make this work, so that shop owners (real world
repository maintainers) and traffic participants are on the same map. Of couse
would you take a a package if the friction is low enough, or you're stopped by
a traffic light anyway and/or get some compensation for it.

Cars as investment (putting the car to work), instead of a constant cost
factor for private ownership would be a game changer for private consumers.
This might be possible soon with more automation in the infrastructure in
place.

~~~
iamgopal
So, are we sensing a startup idea of "start your own amazon" but for shipping
company.

~~~
deltron3030
Just ecommerce 3.0, all the benfits of Amazon but decentralized, supporting
your local environment. This could be an open source project, a public good.

------
amykyta
The described strategy starts to fall apart when by offering FBA they lose
control over quality of products being sold and credibility in their retail
operations. The fact that I have to use things like FakeSpot puts me off from
shopping on Amazon while I did so without thinking twice in the past. I wonder
what portion of AliExpress and Amazon is cross listed.

~~~
astura
>I wonder what portion of AliExpress and Amazon is cross listed.

It wouldn't surprise me if it were close to 90%.

------
diego_moita
By Techcrunch, from Silicon Valley.

Meanwhile, the world is a different place. In China Amazon is almost nothing,
in rest of Asia they're still far from dominance and Europe is running scared
of the hegemony of American IT companies.

Disclaimer: I buy mostly from AliExpress and BangGood.

