> Jeff Wilke revolutionized the fulfillment centers
After 7 years in Amazon Fulfillment, I'll say this: we're doing a mediocre job- fortunately no one else is doing much better. But still, we've got 25 years of legacy software and processes to carry with us wherever we go.
There's a lot of potential for a new entrant to radically and rapidly innovate and compete inside the warehouse. Shopify's business model is different enough to make the fulfillment problem different in a few fundamental ways that might let them undercut further. Lots of potential.
There's also a great big Shopify office opening not too far from Amazon Toronto. And wouldn't you know it, there's a big chunk of Amazon Fulfillment right here in this office. I'm expecting to see poaching begin soon, just like when Uber opened here and hired a lot of Amazon Flex talent. (Non-competes sure are hard to enforce in Ontario).
I really hope they can prove themselves a viable competitor.
> After 7 years in Amazon Fulfillment, I'll say this: we're doing a mediocre job- fortunately no one else is doing much better. But still, we've got 25 years of legacy software and processes to carry with us wherever we go.
Mind expanding more on the specific kinds of baggage holding back fulfillment at Amazon?
To avoid any NDA troubles, I'll keep it pretty generic: a facility designed and built in 2009 is going to be very hard to modify such that it's operating any differently than it did it 2009. Physical things are harder to upgrade than software. Built a new robotic system? That's great for new facilities, but what happens to the ones that predate it? Amazon has hundreds of facilities.
And on a software front, those older facilities are using different physical processes which need different software than the new tech. How do you architect the whole thing such that the increasing complexity of this ecosystem doesn't create exponential work as it needs to all integrate together and be maintained?
Shopify, by contrast, isn't carrying that legacy on their back. They're potentially on the same exponential curve, but they are much farther on the left and maybe they can find a way to make it a smaller exponent. Maybe. We'll see how it goes.
After 7 years in Amazon Fulfillment, I'll say this: we're doing a mediocre job- fortunately no one else is doing much better. But still, we've got 25 years of legacy software and processes to carry with us wherever we go.
There's a lot of potential for a new entrant to radically and rapidly innovate and compete inside the warehouse. Shopify's business model is different enough to make the fulfillment problem different in a few fundamental ways that might let them undercut further. Lots of potential.
There's also a great big Shopify office opening not too far from Amazon Toronto. And wouldn't you know it, there's a big chunk of Amazon Fulfillment right here in this office. I'm expecting to see poaching begin soon, just like when Uber opened here and hired a lot of Amazon Flex talent. (Non-competes sure are hard to enforce in Ontario).
I really hope they can prove themselves a viable competitor.