Yes, I’ve seen many variants tried. It’s so funny, because whenever I talk to brick and mortar SMB they tell me they want it _so_ bad with regularity. Perhaps there’s just not enough hunger on the consumer side?
How would you prevent the Mom-and-Pop business from, eventually, becoming essentially a franchisee of the Not-Amazon system?
If you list everyone's inventory with one-click ordering (assuming that order fulfillment is solved somehow), it is going to be an immediate race to the bottom on pricing, perhaps accelerated by arbitrageurs. Consumers will initially be happy, until service suffers, but vendors will be hit hard on margins.
One niche where I could see such an app succeeding: less-urban areas. In the past year or so, Amazon has neglected my parents' market in the college town of Blacksburg VA. My Dad broke his computer mouse over the weekend; while I could get one in hours via Amazon here in Seattle, the earliest delivery Amazon offered via Prime on Monday was Friday, with no option to pay more for faster delivery. I guarantee that there are hundreds of computer mice in existing store inventory within an hour's drive.
I don’t think the app would do fulfillment in a traditional sense. Consumers would go to the brick and mortar and pay for / collect their item. Maybe there’s a DoorDash type deal where drivers can collect the item from the store and deliver to the consumer. Doordash for consumer goods?
Interesting point on rural areas- I’m also in the same boat. Amazon only delivers USPS, and any package that won’t fit in my mailbox has to be collected at the post office 10+ miles away. It always adds a day of transit and a drive. There are times where I would pay for same day delivery. There are times where I wouldn’t mind driving to shop X in town and picking it up myself.
I think Amazon and covid (semi and full lockdowns, local shops closing etc) have exposed an idea that you touch on, decoupling the last mile shipping from amazon/doordash/etc; a market/depots/etc for peered-powered distributed shipping/delivery. I would guess the bulk cost of shipping is the fist and last few miles.
An analog would be doordash & restaurants, with the added difficulty being brick and mortar retail often don't have great inventory and cataloging. Most restaurants were already doing take out, so hooking that up to a logistics machine (doordash), was easy. Here you need to go in and get stores to take photos of inventory and track said inventory, THEN hook them up to a logistics machine. doable for sure.
This race-to-the-bottom rhetoric seems like a pessimistic view blocking actual opportunity; as we've seen with any marketplace (e.g., amazon, doordash, walmart, shopify) it's a balance...
I had 2 ideas to try and overcome the poor inventory system problem::
- at first, SMB would manually input their inventory into the app, kind of like an eBay listing. Eventually, we’d build integrations to common POS.
- alternatively, you could allow consumers to select a category+text box entry of what they’re looking for. When submitted, businesses listed in that category would get pinged. If they have what the customer wants they could click to let them know. Perhaps with 2 way messaging.
Second option looks the more scalable solution. Solves the 'why should I bother inputting all my inventory into this new website' and allows you to handle the problem of not having any inventory to show for a real time search or even any shop partners yet.
Have seen this done successfully (including acquired companies) for quotes for services markets.
I can't speak for everyone, but as someone who tries to buy local, I wish that existed. There's a few stores that have reasonable web stores, but most have a single web page that was updated in 2017.
Also helpful would be a browser plugin (or something) that would allow me to find the product on Amazon and see if it's available locally. I do this with books all the time (find on Amazon, find the ISBN number, and the go put it into the local bookstore website). The local bookstore also does local deliveries.
I also enjoy supporting my local shops, but detest browsing 5 websites in an attempt to see if they have what I’m looking for. Usually their website site is awful and I have to call. That’s usually when I give up and buy on Amazon.
I like the idea of doing it as a browser extension, definitely useful to nudge people out of their naughty Amazon habit ;).
