How's Amazon's own delivery service going over there? In the UK it's pretty common to have amazon deliever via Amazon Logistics for my area (it's not nationwide yet).
As the side states it seems to be about selling in your local area so doesn't seem that much of a leap from what Amazon are currently offering. (I.e. Your sold item isn't going cross country. To the nearest depot and back out again after packing)
Note: This is just an observation on that Amazon already have a collection / delivery network in place with plans to expand. Not a comment on the quality of said service. I've had many miss deliveries (my items delivered to other addresses, other people's items delivered to me, a knock on the door then driving off. My home office is less then 30 secs from the front door but still had drivers climbing back in their vans saying no one was home during that time.) but I guess that's what you get when drivers are paid per delivery instead of per hour.
I ordered a bunch of stuff from amazon.in when I was visiting India. All the deliveries are via courier like DTDC. But I was in a smaller town. I am not sure if the Amazon delivery network is in action in the bigger cities.
Most Amazon.in orders are delivered by them in Bangalore for me (for Amazon fulfilled orders). Even for my friends. Both Amazon and Flipkart have a strong delivery network in big cities.
Aptdeco does pickup in the US (furniture and other design objects). Can confirm that it's expensive. But it's so much nicer than dealing with the super flaky people of Craigslist. The people who pick up are professional movers who bring packing material.
Another thing Aptdeco does is verify the condition of the item. They require the seller to post photos that show every angle of the item, including close-ups of defects.
For small things that anyone can carry on a messenger bike, I don't know if it would be cost-prohibitive. It seems to work well for food.
Amazon pick up the item from you, pack it and deliever it to the purchaser. Craigslist invokes meeting up with people either at your home or at a public place. Now if you were selling say 3 items a day (random number plucked out of the air) you would only need the single pick up of items.
This is neat. My biggest complaint with Amazon these days is there's just so much noise on the site. For any given search I expect like half the results not to be serious ones. Even when you filter for just prime, there are tons of edge cases like the mini version of a thing will be prime but the regular version is not, or only one color is prime, or sometimes the item is clearly more expensive than in a store so you're paying the full consumer cost of 2-day shipping even though it's prime, sometimes the item has changed slightly but still includes the old reviews which are now misleading, etc. In some ways these are nitpicks, but Amazon have set the bar so high that now I expect the magical experience that I get with Amazon-fulfilled items for everything on the site.
Anyway I feel like amazon would be even better if these low quality listings were moved off to a separate site which was explicitly 3rd-party (whether from businesses or individuals) similar to Ebay. And then the main site would have "official" stuff where amazon does more quality assurance on the listings and it's all fulfilled by them and Prime. (I also think that better curation like this is necessary for purchasing through Echo to really catch on at least for me, there are way too many gotchas in Amazon listings that I still feel like I need to actually focus and look carefully through the listing before I buy anything).
My idea is obviously very different than this Bangalore-only product but there's a glimmer of a separate 3rd-party only site here and I hope Amazon evolves in that direction.
Agreed. I also think such a spinoff would do well against ebay. I tried using paypal/ebay yesterday and gave up after 3 hours of trying to get a payment to go through. It was like going back in time to the 90s
Amazon actually tried doing this with junglee.com. The challenge of course is generating traffic for a separate entity, plus it is more costly. So now it has sort of integrated Junglee with Amazon where, junglee powers the used & refurbished business.
P.S: In India, all Amazon listing are third party, since legally foreign investment is not permitted in ecommerce, so Amazon.in actually just functions as a marketplace not a retailer.
Yeah, there used to be a clearer deliniation between Amazon marketplace and the "official" Amazon store... But now the Amazon store is polluted with sellers gouging on otherwise out-of-stock products and bad high-shipping-cost deals.
I realize this has basically allowed Amazon to crush eBay, but they've left the door open for another seller to come along and offer properly curated products.
This is about 15x more frustrating here in EU - most of the result hits here now say "Will not deliver to your country", since small German mom-and-pop electronics stores mostly refuse to ship outside the country. Before that, Amazon was my primary go-to for shopping, now it's a cesspool of duplicated entries I can't even order.
Of course they don't have a filter to show me only things that are shippable to me. Even if they can say it when I click on an item.
The pickup and delivery costs don't make sense given the high cost of labor. In India it's significantly cheaper so good to prove the concept out there - at least until drones arrive.
I was genuinely curious. Was excited about p-2-p selling and wanted in on the action but was disappointed. Also, Uber, Lyft etc first started in the SF.
If framed properly (ie. this isn't Amazon quality, buyer beware!) this would be the single most exciting advance in commerce for myself.
99% of the friction of me selling used stuff I don't want or new stuff I produce is the shipping and money handling logistics.
I can't do Craigslist/Kijiji. I'm socially awkward and would rather throw away item X than risk the possibility of an awkward situation where someone's messing with me or trying to barter the price down, etc.
I've had pretty good success signing up as an Amazon seller to get rid of a few things I don't need anymore. My only annoyance is them massively under quoting on shipping costs, meaning you really have to do those calculations yourself and then price it in. This bit really irritates me as they'll sell you shipping from their seller portal, and even there it's massively more expensive than the price their quoting the customer for shipping.
Part of that is the dramatically lower shipping rates you get if you do it in volume. The other reason is that people hate shipping costs, so its usually a good move to subsidise shipping with the product price.
This is tangential, but I presumed a launch page like this for an Amazon product would be copy-edited by a native English speaker, even if for India, no?
("Sell as Individual" should definitely be "Sell as an individual", a very common mistake with non-native English speakers.)
Articles are frequently dropped in Indian English; as I understand it, Hindi does not have articles. It might be an error, or it might be localisation.
It's getting difficult to keep track of all the services Amazon is offering these days. If it's products then the feature will be integrated into the search results so it should not be a problem. But it feels like they are announcing something new every other week these days.
46 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadCool way to get into the market. Pickup cost would make it harder to work in the US.
As the side states it seems to be about selling in your local area so doesn't seem that much of a leap from what Amazon are currently offering. (I.e. Your sold item isn't going cross country. To the nearest depot and back out again after packing)
Note: This is just an observation on that Amazon already have a collection / delivery network in place with plans to expand. Not a comment on the quality of said service. I've had many miss deliveries (my items delivered to other addresses, other people's items delivered to me, a knock on the door then driving off. My home office is less then 30 secs from the front door but still had drivers climbing back in their vans saying no one was home during that time.) but I guess that's what you get when drivers are paid per delivery instead of per hour.
Another thing Aptdeco does is verify the condition of the item. They require the seller to post photos that show every angle of the item, including close-ups of defects.
For small things that anyone can carry on a messenger bike, I don't know if it would be cost-prohibitive. It seems to work well for food.
Did you mix up Bangladesh and Bangalore?
14 cent fee for anything less than $14.72
73 cent fee for anything $14.72 - $73.58
$1.47 fee for anything more than $73.58
This service reminds me a lot of craigslist but with a fee. Does India not have a similar service?
>Buyers order your products online
>You schedule a doorstep pickup
>Amazon picks, packs and ships for you
>You receive money in 3-5 days
Except Craigslist didn't come to your house and handle the delivery.
That is value in the fees from what I see of it.
Yes They are mobile first services. Quickr & OLX are the popular services in India.
[1]:http://www.shyp.com
This looks to be affiliated with Junglee (http://www.junglee.com) so might mean Amazon is repositioning it as P2P.
Anyway I feel like amazon would be even better if these low quality listings were moved off to a separate site which was explicitly 3rd-party (whether from businesses or individuals) similar to Ebay. And then the main site would have "official" stuff where amazon does more quality assurance on the listings and it's all fulfilled by them and Prime. (I also think that better curation like this is necessary for purchasing through Echo to really catch on at least for me, there are way too many gotchas in Amazon listings that I still feel like I need to actually focus and look carefully through the listing before I buy anything).
My idea is obviously very different than this Bangalore-only product but there's a glimmer of a separate 3rd-party only site here and I hope Amazon evolves in that direction.
P.S: In India, all Amazon listing are third party, since legally foreign investment is not permitted in ecommerce, so Amazon.in actually just functions as a marketplace not a retailer.
I didn't even bother with the Amazon end of year sale, too much noise.
I realize this has basically allowed Amazon to crush eBay, but they've left the door open for another seller to come along and offer properly curated products.
Of course they don't have a filter to show me only things that are shippable to me. Even if they can say it when I click on an item.
99% of the friction of me selling used stuff I don't want or new stuff I produce is the shipping and money handling logistics.
I can't do Craigslist/Kijiji. I'm socially awkward and would rather throw away item X than risk the possibility of an awkward situation where someone's messing with me or trying to barter the price down, etc.
("Sell as Individual" should definitely be "Sell as an individual", a very common mistake with non-native English speakers.)
It's true that Hindi doesn't have articles; instead one, this, and that are used (translating).