Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon (openship.org)
The marketplace would simply connect to the seller’s infra instead of locking them in. If, for some reason, the seller is removed from the marketplace, their software stays with them and they can continue accepting orders directly.
This model can be used to disrupt any marketplace from AirBNB to UberEats: building tech for home renters and restaurants and later, leveraging that to build a competing marketplace.
In 2019, I started building the first piece, Openship, an order management system that lets you source orders and fulfill them from anywhere. Now that that’s in stable release, next up is Openfront (an e-commerce platform for storefronts) and Opensupport (ticketing software for customer support). Together, they provide the staples for any modern business: sales, fulfillment, support.
Let me know what you guys think of the idea and if you see any potential pitfalls.
308 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] thread> Show HN: I'm building an open-source order management system and marketplace API
> Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon
> Using open-source to disrupt marketplaces
Hence I think you have, regrettably, answered your own question.
Its all very well having a vision, but executing it is a different question.
The sort of thing you propose requires a lot of time and a lot of money to develop. Let alone maintain. Let alone market and sell.
Look, its like all those "Bloomberg killers" that come out of the woodwork as often as the seasons in the financial world. There is a reason why only Bloomberg and Reuters are at the top tier, why the second tier is so narrow and why everything else is junk. To replicate Bloomberg would take years in time and billions in cash.
I admire your ambition, but perhaps rein it in a little ?
Yes I agree.
But the OP had the vision in 2019.
We are now at the tail-end of 2022.
I still see a vision and not much execution.
Meanwhile, the Amazon that the OP is pitching themselves against has continued to move onwards and upwards....
As I said. The vision is fine. But the OP needs to realise that executing it will require a lot of time and a LOT more money !
As much as people may say they hate salesmen, we still want to be sold something. As a consumer, it's your job to be skeptical. It's their job to sell.
Engineers have this self regarding view of every other side of the tech business. That actually -- "Only the tech matters" while being incredulous as to why certain tech succeeds while others fail. It's because vision and sales and business acumen really matter.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead
But let's be honest here. What sellers really want are buyers.
That's why sellers list on Apple, Amazon, Ebay etc. despite the fees.
They are paying for the virtual equivalent of a shop-front in the premium mall. They get the payment handling. They get the anti-fraud technologies. And with Amazon they get the forward and reverse logistics.
Its about SO much more than how open the backend software is.
Wrong. I own a small shop in Vermont and I love recompiling my shop software every morning to get customers. I tweak a couple of things - - yesterday I lowered tcp_orphan_retries - - and, boom, more customers!
I would say 85% of sellers on eBay and Amazon have their own storefront now to be in more control. They also funnel these orders into an OMS.
I stopped putting stuff on Ebay due to ridiculous fee schedule ( listing is free, but then you get hit with tons of seemingly random invoice, which is automatically deducted without a real way to challenge it ) and I was regularly thinking of putting a store up myself, but I don't sell often enough to justify it. I once played with an idea of a weird garage sale app that basically let your address list what you have available for sale, but it seemed like a lot more work than I was willing to put forth.
This.. could work. I will admit I am tempted to try the self-hosted version.
edit: changed sellers to buyers
This also relates to the clickbait-y "I'm building an open-source Amazon" positioning, which I don't think serves you well.
You're building (I think) an e-commerce platform upon which someone can build online shops ("nano-Amazons"?). Where the "open-source Amazon" pitch is difficult to take seriously, I think there probably is space for new e-commerce platforms.
> I think of it this way. Launching a marketplace today is very difficult, but what if we made the backend of a marketplace open-source and used that as leverage. One that could be your backend for all operations. You can choose to enable the integrated marketplace or not, but the system is yours. It’s about bringing power back to the sellers.
Yes! That is the point, which is why over-selling this as an "open-source Amazon" will backfire spectacularly with anyone who understands what they're talking about.
It's important to know what you're building (from the POV of potential customers) and who your competitors are. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/software/best-ecomme...
You rein it in a little.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yeah, how dare they have ambition.
I bet they haven't even applied for their Ambition Licence or submitted their "permission to try and make something cool" (PTTAMSC) paperwork.
/s
Maaaan if we were in the same room. Don't belittle someone who's trying to accomplish something (and following through with it).
I'm not belittling. I'm just saying set realistic goals. "Build an open-source Amazon" without the budget or the manpower ? Its simply not realistic unless you have very deep pockets and a team of hundreds of full-time staff.
If you think I'm being unduly harsh, what sort of grilling do you think the OP will be subjected to when they rock up at a bank or VC fund looking for a few hundred million ?
I might agree that the characterization is a little bombastic, but:
1) It is oddly good marketing if mildly misleading ( as discussed in other posts it is not exactly a 'replacement for Amazon store for seller' as I would have initially thought from the initial presentation )
2) Here we are discussing its merits or lack thereof
In short, I agree with your general point, when compared to today's Amazon, but I think it was more of a rhetorical device rather than a 'factual statement'.
> what sort of grilling do you think the OP will be subjected to when they rock up at a bank or VC fund looking for a few hundred million ?
Appropriate grilling (financial prospects, executive potential, etc), not being told to "lower your ambitions."
I still smirk at the chucklehead who dismissed Drew Houston when he "Show HN: Dropbox"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29178442
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28293146
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24366316
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275
Short version, he was genuinely trying to be helpful and that thread has been taken out of context over the years.
As for condescension: that's in the eye of the beholder. When the OP said "Let me know what you guys think of the idea and if you see any potential pitfalls" do you think that was a mistake to ask for feedback? Should they have only asked for affirmation?
That "bank of VC fund" you speak probably looks at a startup like this very differently after they've been through YC, not just because of YC's reputation but also because YC can do a lot to help a startup like this after funding it.
What does that part mean exactly? Sounds a bit threatening.
I hope whatever happened to you to make you think like this is resolved, because it saddens me to see people tell others to pipe their ambitions, goals and visions down because THEY don't see it as a reality.
If everyone believed this, we'd have never advanced at all as a society because nobody would push the boundaries.
When I read this post and looked at the site I thought you were offering a turnkey drop shipping solution service. I also had the impression that you offered warehousing and other logistical services.
I know this is not the case, but it took me several minutes to figure out what exactly was happening.
Good luck with it!
imagine if taxi companies could make use of it, or a group of friends could start their own GNUber.
or a group of high school kids who want to deliver groceries/items to the elderly as volunteer work.
or a bunch of middle school friends wanted to do a lawn mowing service.
or…
of course, anyone in the industry knows how many unpredictable pitfalls reality will throw at it, but we also know very well these kinds of ideas, if followed through can be remarkable and truly can change the world.
it’s been like tiny little pinpricks at me for years that apps like Uber, Lyft, door-dash, etc… don’t have a scaled down open-source alternative — a decent Configure, Describe Services Offered, Spin-Up-An Instance and Go.
i’ll take a look later today when my schedule loosens up.
edit: just reread your post and looked at the comments, i misread what you were doing, sorry bout that. still sounds interesting tho, good luck!
Don't get me wrong, there IS a wrong way to build this in web3 where it's just a web2 service on-chain. But designed correctly, it can avoid the pitfall.
So good to hear. Put differently: are you insane?
ps. I built the original Amazon. On top of that, I have a brother who builds web-stuff related to decentralized coordinated activities and has done for many years. I didn't check in with him, but I'm pretty sure that we both think that you're insane.
That to me, feels quite in line with Web3's capabilities. The hard problems to me don't seem to be technical in nature. I think the bigger hurdles will be business related. But this is a tech conversation, so here is my thoughts.
The way I see it, Uber enables 3 primary capabilities, for which it takes a major cut, and commands total control over drivers:
1. Driver Ratings
2. Payments
3. Match Making
I think web3 can solve 1 and 2 on-chain using smart contracts relatively simply. and if you use a chain like Avalanche, it can be done with low fees (cents) and with fast transaction finality (seconds).
The match making capability should not be on chain. For that i'd design a simple rest API using traditional technologies that consumes configuration from the chain. This service can be deployed on Akash, and paid for by taking a small cut off each transaction or devaluing a utility token... i'd build a DAO to govern the whole thing, and i'd distributes votes based on activity in the drivers pool.
Are there probably problems here? yeah, this is 3 minutes of thought. But i'm sure if I cared to, I could design a functional system in a weekend.
Otherwise great work!
The only way to get ahead these days is to either 1) flout the laws or 2) have enough capital and political influence to force your way to success, such as with regulatory capture.
Edit: I forgot to add a conclusion somehow.
And yet, somehow we ended up with Googles, FBs, Amazons, Teslas and multiple other in tech sector alone over the past few decades. Neither of those started even close to existing dominant forces in the market.
> That is a very pessimistic way of looking at things.
This isn't a real criticism. It's either an accurate way of looking at things or not. And I think the obvious odds that Amazon wouldn't just buy it and shut it down if it made it up the difficult road of getting any significant traction are 1. That's how business works now, that's actually success. Tech companies are making this exact argument during antitrust hearings - that not allowing them to buy businesses up and shut them down would destroy the startup scene.
edit: it would have a lot better chance if somebody would paint Amazon as either being intolerably liberal, intolerably conservative, or both at the same time. Open the angry Boomer spigot.
Tesla exists. Cars are an existing and crowded market. And yet, despite that, Tesla managed to not only enter, but survive. If that is possible, parent's claim that:
"The only way to get ahead these days is to either 1) flout the laws or 2) have enough capital and political influence to force your way to success, such as with regulatory capture."
is simply not accurate.
<< It's either an accurate way of looking at things or not.
Based on example of Tesla, it is not accurate.
I've spent 6 years building a similar thing for local business in my area, just not quite this polished and expansive.
I will be keeping an eye on this for sure, love it!
I see no base for your claim however: "This model can be used to disrupt any marketplace from AirBNB to UberEats".
A tech stack is hardly what makes platforms, it's the consumer side of things that disrupts.
So just to make it more fair to the suppliers of the marketplace would not really lead to a disruption imo. Not saying it's not worth it.
In short, if your value add is: "Amazon, but you get to take the tech home with you if you leave the platform," then that feels like a small niche of highly competent businesses, then you're stuck with "well if they could do all this on their own anyway, why are they choosing Amazon?"
Hope that helps and wasn't just me blabbering. Good luck!
As the platform matured, the level of technical literacy could decrease over time. e.g. the more technical aspects get abstracted away from the users.
Furthermore, users who are motivated enough would begin to extend their technical reach by means of self education, and/or collaboration with more technical party/(ies).
This is a common arc in technology.
Amazon’s primary source of revenue is as a market-maker/logisticics provider, so why not position yourself as a competitor if it gets contributors interested?
Not doing something because you might get too big is not sound reasoning.
When you get too big, that's the time to worry about it.
If that was even occasionally true, the tons of paid porn sites wouldn't exist. The fact that they both exist and take popular cards tells me that that cannot possibly be true.
Edit: BTW, a large portion of seemingly independent porn sites are actually run by only few companies. Especially the Xvideos corporation.
The Amazon comparison clearly helped to get on the HN front page.
> Show HN: I'm building an open-source order management system and marketplace API
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=openship.org
Maybe it isn't that we "fall for" click bait, it's that we very loudly ignore stuff that isn't.
It is genuinely difficult to ignore things which sound alarming but usually either nonsense or much less alarming, than it is to actively investigate everything, whether it seems alarming or not.
The later is much more difficult but also a lot more fruitful - it is why Google News was so good, a simple collation of all news instead of only click-bait-y news, and why it is genuinely terrible now (mostly dominated by click-bait-y news again).
And again, an illustration of active versus passive - actively filtering google news feeds was fruitful, passively filtering led to algorithmic optimizations which ultimately favored high click counts and therefore more click-bait-y news...and ultimately at this point to being "click-bait highlights of the day", akin to some nonsense like yahoo or msn news.
An open source Amazon is a big deal, it implies that it aims to do what Amazon does, not just a repo you can clone and build an online store, and I might be placing orders there someday.
At least here, we move on perceived merit, however superficial
Any thoughts on that?
I haven't looked into the specifics of this offering, but if you were able to use your own custom domain for your storefront, minimise the platform's insights into your actual sales (i.e. to prevent a similar case to Amazon launching products in your niche), etc and mainly leveraging a centralised platform for the audience, then that's the best of both worlds.
That said, it's still not nearly as good for indie bookstores as just buying directly from the indie bookstore, but it's pretty far from your characterization.
To be fair, publishers being consolidated is much smaller problem for bookstores than Amazon is. While publisher consolidation is real (Penguin Random House is quite a beast!), it is not total; many publishers exist that have not been absorbed by the major publishers. And there are multiple major publishers a tier below the aforementioned PRH. Whereas when it comes to sales, the main competitor for _all_ bookstores is pretty definitively Amazon. So there is some merit to what Bookshop is doing, and it's not quite as hypocritical as you seem to make it out to be.
The bigger stores with IT staff and budgets would be first to join and contribute. Some of us consultants could help the smaller shops and possibly combine energies into communities or coops using shared resources.
Coming back to the ShowHN just now, I thought “China.”
By which I guess I mean manufacturing, and not drop shippers, middlemen, importers, etc.
To me, it seems like this matches the way manufacturers multi-channel their sales, and fits the IT priorities a manufacturer is likely to have…bills of materials, inventories, forecasting, design, etc. and not a big emphasis on the web, saas, and building websites.
YMMV.
- Using a copyleft license like AGPL makes this an automatic non-starter for most businesses, no matter how impressive your tech might be. You'll have a lot more luck with mid-size and enterprise adoption with an MIT license.
- You've really built an Order Management System for marketplace use cases, which is in industry typically a distinct domain from a Warehouse Management System (WMS) or a Transportation Management System (TMS) which at large-scale tend to handle how orders actually get fulfilled and shipped to customers. Your naming is a bit misleading - at the very least I'd emphasize somewhere on your landing page that this is an open source Order Management System if you want eCommerce domain folks to grok quickly what you've built and how it plugs into a broader architecture.
What makes the AGPL unattractive? I thought it was basically just the GPL with a limitation on using the software to provide a SaaS product. You don't even have to contribute unpublished changes, right?
Before reading your comment I actually checked the licensing in the repo because I was thinking the exact opposite; using MIT would be a mistake because it's too easy to undermine the turnkey offering by selling a competing service without the cost of development.
In an ecosystem like this you may want to have businesses build extensions or plugins that they'd sell. GPL has this reputation of spreading to everything it touches, and as such would scare them away.
Because it's viral even when it is used internally, you might end up having to release things you never expected and that are very sensitive.
It would be insane to allow anyone to use AGPL code in any corporate environment.
BUT this is only if you are not paying for MongoDB. If you do chances are you're using MongoDB Enterprise which is licensed under commercial license or MongoDB Atlas all together
They took AGPL and modified it a bit to arrive at SSPL (See Section 13).
You can use an Oracle database (however ugly its licensing is) without having an oracle license on every piece of data you expose. The same is true of Mongo license and the data it exposes as a service.
The AGPL in this case is "you use MongoDB - someone wants to know about it, the source for MongoDB is over there." MongoDB AGPL doesn't 'infect' the application it is part of.
Now, if you were to fork MongoDB and do something with that fork (FongoDB), and that deployed FongoDB would need to make it's source code available if it was accessible - not the entire application that it is part of or components that use the data that it provides.
I'm attempting to counter the narrative that no corporation would touch any AGPL software, because it's clear that how you are using the software is an important part of the equation.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/16/mongodb-switches-up-its-op...
> MongoDB is a bit miffed that some cloud providers — especially in Asia — are taking its open-source code and offering a hosted commercial version of its database to their users without playing by the open-source rules.
> So while the SSPL isn’t all that different from the GNU GPLv3, with all the usual freedoms to use, modify and redistribute the code (and virtually the same language), the SSPL explicitly states that anybody who wants to offer MongoDB as a service — or really any other software that uses this license — needs to either get a commercial license or open source the service to give back the community.
If I was to write blog software that is backed by MongoDB, that blog software doesn't have to be released under the SSPL.
That said, the license and its application to patches on older versions would raise some eyebrows in legal with (likely valid) concerns that an upgrade of a point release may change the license on them as it was done before. In the interest of minimizing risk for the organization, the license and the company that changes its license so easily would be ones that would get extra scrutiny and developers using it would likely be advised to ask permission rather than forgiveness when dealing with it (rather than the other way around) as the risk to the org is greater than accidentally incorporating some GPL code in a service.
> The primary risk presented by AGPL is that any product or service that depends on AGPL-licensed code, or includes anything copied or derived from AGPL-licensed code, may be subject to the virality of the AGPL license.
> This viral effect requires that the complete corresponding source code of the product or service be released to the world under the AGPL license. This is triggered if the product or service can be accessed over a remote network interface, so it does not even require that the product or service is actually distributed.
> Because Google's core products are services that users interact with over a remote network interface (Search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube), the consequences of an engineer accidentally depending on AGPL for one of these services are so great that we maintain an aggressively-broad ban on all AGPL software to doubly-ensure that AGPL could never be incorporated in these services in any manner.
FWIW, every company I've ever worked at bans AGPL products / code.
This is the entire point. The goal is to stop the SAAS loophole.
You could have one but not the other. We really need "LAGPL" to parallel LGPL, to make it clear that there is a clear and well defined way to stop the "remote access" part of AGPL from propagating accidentally into proprietary code.
Is every company you've ever worked for a software vendor? Because those are the only companies that would be impacted at all by using AGPL products/code.
That is… just not something most online stores are interested in adding to their compliance burden.
And of course they will have changes. It’s a business software platform, the only way to accomplish some things is going to be through adding or modifying code.
Step 1: add GitHub link to footer on website
...that's it, you have achieved compliance.
This "wah the AGPL is too viral" argument is the same FUDdy duddy nonsense Microsoft was whining about back in the early 2000's about the original GPL - and it's even less of a valid argument now than it was then, thanks to the existence of umpteen bajillion Git repo hosts that will gladly handle distributing said source code (and therefore making you compliant with the terms of said code's license) at zero cost to you.
And you missed step 0: convince the boss there’s a good reason why your e-commerce storefront needs to have a link to a GitHub page on it.
You already do this when using any open-source software (because your legal right to use it depends on upstream's legal right to distribute it to you), so if any other FOSS license is okay then so is AGPL by this metric.
> And you missed step 0: convince the boss there’s a good reason why your e-commerce storefront needs to have a link to a GitHub page on it.
You already do this for license text / copyright info when using software under nearly any other FOSS license (unless you thought those attribution requirements in the MIT/ISC/BSD/etc. licenses were mere suggestions?).
the fact that google is against AGPL, makes it even more important to use it! Whatever is good for google, it is not good for humanity, and whatever google doesn't like is beneficial for humanity. Support AGPL!
If Google truly had to be competitive, they surely could figure out ways to make AGPL work. But they don't have to because for now they're just taking everyone's data practically for free.
This is aggressive scare tactics. It's very straightforward when this is triggered.
When you're using code unmodified as a library (whether source or binary) it's not triggered at all.
When you _do_ make upstream modifications, it's triggered. That is the specific risk, and it is easily satisfied by open-sourcing the full modified version.
The whole "if a remote user uses it" argument is FUD. It closes a loophole in GPL where remote use != distribution.
Google is hostile to copyleft full stop. So are other bigcos and cargo-culting smallcos/startups. That doesn't make it right.
So, adding text/marketing copy (see user comment on a restaurant app use case) can be seen as a modification.
The things AGPL adds to GPL don't just affect people trying to do a SaaS offering of the program. If you modify it and users interact with it over a computer network you have to make source for your modified version available to them.
For example suppose it was software to add online ordering to restaurants. A restaurant modifies its copy so that it can be given the recipes of the items they sell and the modified software uses that information to allow customers to easily exclude items they might be allergic to or that violate their religious or ethical eating rules.
If that restaurant wants to use that as a competitive advantage over other restaurants they aren't going to want to have to give away their modifications, so aren't going to want to use AGPL software. They'd probably be fine with GPL software.
That's exactly the kinds of scenario the AGPL was written to avoid, right? The free software movement doesn't see software as a competitive advantage worth protecting; software is information that should be free.
To put it another way, if somebody releases software under a license that says "You may use and modify this for free, but you must contribute your changes back to the world," then your scenario seems perfectly fair.
"I want something for nothing"
Or in more detail:
"I want to take something you created and agreed to share with me (on the proviso I like-wise share any changes as an exchange of value). I deem your software valuable to me but I won't be paying you money for it. I'll add something else to it so it fits my use-case. But, I refuse/object to sharing my changes because they're valuable."
With a permissive license, I can make a decision, with my manager, to use a technology based on its merit.
Office bureaucrats get weird when you talk about the GPL. When using it, I have to involve lawyers in the company, they don’t understand why the technology is important, but they have a bunch of questions, and to answer them it takes up time from my team. Upper management is involved and wants to know if we can use anything else, or they’ll phrase it as a question like: why can’t you use anything else? You have to deal with a lot more office politics when you use GPL instead of doing development work. So I’d say that’s the biggest downside for developers is that it wastes their time.
I won't pretend to be a lawyer, but I do know that when we were acquired we had to list ever piece of software we used and which licence it was under. They were very concerned about copy left. We didn't have any, so I don't know how that would have changed things. MIT was what they were hoping to see.
My two cents: it juts isn't in business culture to contribute to public good.
[0]: nowadays i prefer ruby/rails, which can also get you pretty far before needing extra help.
Maybe some (but certainly not most!) tech businesses, but what makes you think that vendors of real-world products give a shit about AGPL?
https://drewdevault.com/2020/07/27/Anti-AGPL-propaganda.html
Completely disagree. It protects the end user, and if another license is absolutely necessary, they can negotiate for it or create a different service tier.
AGPL with paid alternative licensing is strictly superior to MIT for start-ups.
Greedy businesses not wanting to contribute back can buy another license and have their way, at least paying the maker(s) of this project.
> Let me know what you guys think of the idea and if you see any potential pitfalls.
Yes, so I don't agree with this:
> This model can be used to disrupt any marketplace from AirBNB to UberEats: building tech for home renters and restaurants and later, leveraging that to build a competing marketplace.
Because the value in a marketplace is the people, not the tech. Here's a thought experiment: if Amazon were to open-source their entire marketplace tomorrow, what would change? My answer is: close to nothing.
What makes marketplaces so hard is that you need people - on both the demand and supply sides.
You seem to have a good handle on the tech and the way that businesses use it, so keep talking to people and I'm confident that you'll find a valuable niche! People will find the quality of your work very compelling.
Amazon isn't a web site. It's the one of the most sophisticated supply chain systems on the planet. The website is what people interface with, but it's also one of the most inconsequential parts of the system with regards for why people use it.
Amazon’s “tech” stack, both consumer- and seller-facing is horrible and borderline irrelevant.
Their fleet of trucks and aircraft is not.
For most enterprises, if it works, don't touch it.
This was on the HN frontpage yesterday: "Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32651763
I’ve seen countless bad decisions being taken because the A/B test was badly done. You can’t assume that some decision was good JUST because they A/B-tested it.
It's a legacy code nightmare, but customers are used to it and this is #1 reason why it will not be changed anytime soon.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/tto68z/anyone_else_get...
I think many sellers would love to not be locked into Amazon and at least use something like this as an additional alternative. I'm on the other side of the table where I avoid buying from Amazon as much as possible.
Last night "Hmm. Toothpaste almost gone. Let me check the linen closet. Nope. Excuse me while I whip this out. (gasp) Swipe, tap, tap, t-o-o-t-h (autocomplete), scroll, tap, tap, tap. Done."
Used the last this morning, new toothpaste delivered at noon.
I shop online exclusively because one of my first jobs was in retail and it is my solemn duty to do everything I can to annihilate the brick and mortar store, to erase it from existence to the point that it remembered only as a distant cultural echo by future generations.
This is all I can do, and it is enough.
I even get booze delivered so I don't have to stand in line as some tweaker tries to buy lottery tickets with handfuls of quarters at the liquor store.
Despite what the internet might have you think, fulfillment centers for every single distributor or retailer are run the same so I choose amazon because they can get many things here in 4-6 hours, most of the rest the overnight, and weird stuff in two days.
I, and many other townfolk go out of our way to expressly shop in town. This helps create an interesting, culturally vibrant downtown, filled with shops and restaurants.
My saturday mornings usually involve me walking the town, poking my head into shops, saying hi to folks I might know along the way, and supporting a local business here or there.
I can't imagine wanting to get rid of all of this, possibly even irreversibly so, for the sake of efficiency.
Who hurt you?
Instead, I can do some of that shopping on my computer or phone, then quickly reference it again or even set up auto deliveries. A lot of times it'll be cheaper too because I can comparison shop.
For me, it's about convenience and saving time and money. It won't be the same for everyone, of course. The location where you live will dictate whether this shopping experience is similar to yours or not.
Stupid or not, hard to argue with Amazon's income sheet. Obviously most people disagree. I don't disagree fwiw.
I routinely pick the “next Monday and we’ll give you two bucks digital credit or whatever” option because I assume it’ll make the shipping a little more efficient or make some factory grunt’s life easier, and I’ll still pick Amazon over other vendors because when they say Monday, they mean Monday.
I’m always able to track the shipment, it’s always predictable, I never have to wonder. It’s a less tangible feature but far more valuable.
No. At best it will reduce the number of factory grunts working. Amazon has whole departments dedicates to making factory grunts life as hard as possible. "Ease" == less profit.
2+ days is a world away from tomorrow. If it is that it needs to wait until the next shopping trip.
For “now” I would just have to go to the shops. Although Uber could deliver it from a petrol station for three times the price if desperate and lazy.
I have got embarrassing small orders on uber before :)
Unnecessary most of the time but it becomes an expected processing and delivery standard, which makes the experience much more predictable for consumers.
Very few can really compete effectively with Amazon on this front.
Source: Used to run an e-commerce company that shipped up to 2 million packages annually. Once we optimised shipping and processing, customer service inquiries and complaints dropped dramatically, and customer trust / sentiment skyrocketed.
My understanding is that in certain regions Amazon offers the option to consolidate orders to be delivered on a specific day. This is actually impressive as it's much harder to do at scale than you'd imagine.
I used to work at company that shipped ~30k packages a day. I’d say 90% of customer complaints were about the delivery delays, and only 10% about the rest. It was really hard to optimize because we had 1M products and were using just-in-time logistics with very little inventory. This is a specific market that Amazon hasn’t really entered yet, but when they’ll do they’ll crush everyone.
Amazon's in-house logistics gets cheaper with scale. Waiting for the day Amazon launches their offerings to C2C and B2C delivery to directly compete with UPS and Fedex.
Amazon's in-house logistics, plus their ability to co-mingle this entire layer will be hard beat.
If I order from Etsy, I will drop $100 on a product and shipping. But when will I get it? I don’t know. Will it even arrive? Who knows?
With Amazon I know what I order is coming this week. That’s why I buy from them and no one else. It doesn’t matter that half their website is styled like it’s 2003 and I’m probably getting a counterfeit product.
I can order an iPad from Best Buy or Apple, but most of the time I'm never quite sure when it might arrive. Amazon, I know it should arrive tonight or tomorrow.
I tend to avoid buying many brands on Amazon because of supply chain integrity risks, but their execution is consistent and predictable. I can't say that about many retailers.
The sad reality is that a large majority of people don't actually use products they buy. They want the satisfaction of getting a new "quality" product and imagine it gives them status.
[0]: https://rollingspoke.com/how-to-move-things-on-a-bike/
Yes.
It is more efficient from an energy, carbon, land usage, and labor perspective.
The bluish-grey van that delivered my toothpaste had several hundred other deliveries on it, and the warehouse it came from stocks the products of hundreds of stores (if not more).
How do you think a tube of toothpaste gets to "Ye Olde Mum and Pop's Auntie Emma's Down Home Crunchy Granola Authentic and Real Indie Small Business"? Trucks.
That's very doubtful. Normally you'd get toothpaste along with a bunch of other items. The convenience of delivery means you no longer purchase in batches. Batches is more efficient in every sense.
Maybe the mom and pop's supply chain could be shorter and more efficient, but the OP was talking about whether we should be going down the path of immediate delivery of small orders.
It would be if they saved up all orders from a week, and then send it all to you at the end of the week in a single delivery.
With one truck every two weeks that deliver toothpastes as boxes of 1000s. That’s one truck for all the customers that will go in that shop over two weeks.
Compare that to 2-3 trucks to directly deliver all these people one package per toothpaste. The only way to lower the delivery times is to increase the number of trucks.
Think of a tree where leaves are customers and the root is the producer. Each other node is an intermediary. In the worst case, if all customers go by foot in one shop that gets direct deliveries from the producer, you use only one truck (producer->shop). If all N customers are delivered by the producer, in the worst case, you use N trucks (producer->customer).
A little while ago I drove past a giant blue pyramid dedicated to the grand and wise Jeff Bezos where I can only imagine The Great God of Online Commerce conducts his human sacrifice rituals on unwitting union organizers. Pretty sure they are currently keeping the management indoctrination ceremonies low key being Labor Day weekend and all that.
And people thought the Long Beach shipping container height restrictions were lifted over practical concerns…
I didn't dig in, but in that above scenario, does the "supplier" dropship directly to my buyer or does it come to me and I reship it?
[0]https://docs.openship.org/deployment
What makes people buy from Amazon is the speed in which you get your product and their customer service.
https://openbazaar.org/
OpenBazaar Co-Founder Explains Why Web 3’s Answer to eBay Folded Its Tents
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/07/15/openbazaar-co-f...