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I thought this as well until I heard a counter-point [0] which was very convincing. The reason Amazon is successful is not because you can shop online (from a

I thought this as well until I heard a counter-point [0] which was very convincing. The reason Amazon is successful is not because you can shop online (from a catalog) and receive items in the mail. The reason Amazon is successful is because you can do those things and receive your items within two days. Before Prime existed, Amazon had very quick fulfillment, and after Prime two-day it became even better. The Sears catalog ended in 1993 but the Sears Wish Book continued to exist after that. In 1999 I remember ordering something from the Wish Book required 3 weeks to receive the item. If they didn't have the desire to improve that, then they would never have become Amazon. > If anything, Sears was the worst positioned to become Amazon. What they had was just completely wrong and more of a burden than a benefit. Had they tried to retool with their massive catalog it likely would have been a disaster. Amazon had a real benefit starting small with just books which let them learn the ropes on the cheap. [0] I think this is especially relevant here on HN because it shows how startups are required to solve problems. For many problems, a behemoth company has no reason to improve, and a lean startup can rush to a solution faster in many cases. [0] https://np.reddit.com/r/news/comments/a6nwj7/sears_bankruptcy_court_oks_25_million_in_bonuses/ebwphf4/ https://np.reddit.com/r/news/comments/a6nwj7/sears_bankruptc...

encorekt 8y ago
Yeah, I think you're completely on point. Sears has been on verge of folding for at least a decade, and they've done little to nothing to implement any innovation that would give them another swing. It left plenty of opportunity for smaller startups to swoop in and stay ahead of the market Sears lost out on.
mceldeen 8y ago
So what I'm hearing is "so big they had to fail".
- artursapek 8y ago
  I wonder if Amazon will ever get to that point. It's hard to imagine.
  - ForHackernews 8y ago
    As it grows larger, the "Amazon marketplace" is getting more and more filled with garbage knockoff products and fake reviews. There may eventually come a tipping point where they lose user trust.
    - nvusuvu 8y ago
      I'm almost there now.
    - willismichael 8y ago
      My hope is that smaller, more focused online retailers and marketplaces emerge that can compete in specific verticals. For example, I already go to non-amazon sites where I prefer to buy music gear and computer hardware.
      - SneakerXZ 8y ago
        This is more popular in EU. In many countries Amazon even does not operate, and even in Germany people try to prefer different place if they can.
    - RhodesianHunter 8y ago
      Most people in my circle already won't buy anything they put in their bodies from Amazon, because the risk of Chinese counterfeits is just too great.
    - gregknicholson 8y ago
      If that happens, I don't think the problem will be perceived as "Amazon" — people will say "online shopping" is untrustworthy, like how "social media" is responsible for the world's ills, not "Facebook".
    - lostlogin 8y ago
      Unmentioned here as far as I can see is their attitude to worker’s rights. That’s massively off-putting for me.
icelancer 8y ago
> I think this is especially relevant here on HN because it shows how startups are required to solve problems. For many problems, a behemoth company has no reason to improve, and a lean startup can rush to a solution faster in many cases. Pretty much. Jurvetson calls it the luxury of being a new entrant. It's very hard to steer the Titanic away from an iceberg.
- amyjess 8y ago
  Yes, first movers in general have a disadvantage. For example, this is part of the reason why Sega's hardware business died. Admittedly, that was only part of it: there was some mismanagement behind Sega's decline too. Actually, you could say the same thing about Sears: the final nail in their coffin wasn't Amazon learning from Sears's lessons but rather Eddie Lampert's deliberately and systematically looting the company over a period of several years. If not for Lampert, Sears would just be another Macy's.
  - icelancer 8y ago
    No question that they operated poorly on top of just being in an eventually bad position for the future. Sears could have innovated or had a separate department like Xerox PARC and others did that kept them alive a long time, but unfortunately fast movers and disruptors will always have that advantage no matter what you do. Hence why FB and others just buy out all the small companies.
gibolt 8y ago
While this is generally true, imagine if Sears had honestly realized their competitors potential and tried to compete. They had the country covered in stores and could have easily cut shipping times down by shipping from the nearest one. Their stores were also a hodgepodge of junk all randomly mixed, and they never made their store a desirable place to stroll.
- hrktb 8y ago
  We could say the same for other big box retailers. I don’t know any that even comes close to te amazon experience, short of Yodobashi.con in Japan. I think it requires something very special for an organization to accept to canibalize itself. Apple is the only exemple that I would see at a behemoth scale.
  - _dark_matter_ 8y ago
    What is "The Amazon experience"? Ads being served as the first few rows of results? A review system that cannot be trusted? The same item listed multiple times by different sellers? Extreme price variance when choosing different colors and sizes?
    - bluGill 8y ago
      The experience today is not what made them great in the past. 10 years ago the negatives you list didn't exist.
      - Apocryphon 8y ago
        Perhaps all of these too big to be good utility services- Amazon, Google, Facebook, even Apple should just offer “classic” slimmed down versions of their previous offerings, for a paid subscription in the case of the online services.
        glenneroo 8y ago
        How would this help eliminate any of the current issues? Why would giving them money and/or building a slimmed-down version reduce fake reviews, fake articles, ads as search results, et al?
dv_dt 8y ago
Hmm, I could be misremembering, but I think there was almost a decade between the point when Sears had all the legos but didn't know how to assemble them, and when Amazon really started using fast shipping as a differentiator. And I think the "Prime" account branding came still later into the picture. Before shopping at Amazon ramping up, right around 2000, I remember Sears logistics starting to break down with kafkaesque calls into Sears service and parts departments. I guess the point is, I think the decline of Sears mostly had to do with internal complexity and breakdown of effective management than anything directly to do with Amazon.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  HN user xigency is right, Amazon has always been light years faster than Sears. Personal anecdote: My mother, back in the late-nineties came to me one day and told me how she had figured out how to get stuff from the jcpenny and sears "even faster". Because she could just search Amazon, "and they actually deliver it to me by the end of the week!" "I bet you thought they only sold books right? It's something new they have!" yada yada yada blah blah blah. She was pretty proud of herself to be telling me about the new stuff on the web, but I digress. Point is, she was like a kid in a brand new candy store. Only a candy store that sold toys and video games too, and opened up across the street from the kid's house.
ghaff 8y ago
TBH, I think there's a much better case to be made for Sears doubling down on some of its core assets and creating Home Depot before Home Depot did. Its store footprints weren't right, which is no small thing. But they were already a significant home improvement and major appliance store. They probably had a window when it was clear that discount retailers (and some high-end stores) were the future of "department stores" and if they couldn't go there--which they probably couldn't--their future lay in focusing.
- Vivtek 8y ago
  They literally had the best tools in the world - my dad swore by Craftsman, told me never to bother buying any other brand. Then they threw it away on a demonstration of Randian philosophy.
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    Even while our dads were swearing by Craftsman, better tools existed. You're right that Craftsman was good enough for most people's needs. Craftsman is still an OK brand for hand tools (not power tools). It was just easier to get Craftsman, because they sold it at a store that wasn't too far away. Back in the day you could only get Snap-On etc. if you were affiliated with e.g. a mechanic's shop that was on a Snap-On truck route. Now thanks to Amazon, Home Depot, etc. there are more ways to get quality tools.
    - greedo 8y ago
      Sear's return policy for Craftsman pro tools was exceptional; lifetime warranty. If it broke, bring it in to exchange for a replacement.
      - Broken_Hippo 8y ago
        I was just going to mention this! The warranty is the real reason my father had quite a few craftsman tools. Well, at least the ones he used the most, anyway.
    - 8y ago
rubicon33 8y ago
Where's the startup that is solving the pile of Amazon boxes in my backyard that I am too lazy to breakdown?
CoolGuySteve 8y ago
Not to be snarky, but there needs to be a name for selective amnesia when an idea that seems obvious in retrospect is ignored later on. In this case, the thing that made Amazon so great, before Prime existed, was that it had the "Things you might also like" section. AFAIK it was one of the first online stores that used machine learning to recommend new and related items you didn't realize you wanted and to have user ratings for each item. It was especially powerful for books/movies/music just due to the sheer volume of different titles that makes it hard to find new content you might like. There are a lot of retailers that had the logistics and infrastructure for online sales, but the kind of marketing that Amazon did for up-selling was wholly new and something that could only be done online. So even if Sears could do it, it wasn't obvious back then to anyone that they should do it or how to do it. Even now, the Walmart and Target web stores recommendations are just ok compared to Amazon. Even eBay seems less comprehensive in its recommendations.
- bpicolo 8y ago
  Is that really a primary growth factor? I've never once acted on an Amazon recommendation, and it's always felt almost entirely useless - "you just bought a vacuum, here's 15 more vacuums just in case you're a vacuum-obsessed lunatic"
  - squirrelicus 8y ago
    I would sacrifice so much karma for more upvotes for this
    - squirrelicus 8y ago
      Worth it
  - CoolGuySteve 8y ago
    True, I think like most market incumbents, Amazon has become lazier lately. The vacuum-obsession problem, the proliferation of counterfeit goods, and subpar third party sellers are all more recent problems. But if you just bought 1984 for example, there's a good chance you'd also want to buy WE, Brave New World, Erewhon, etc. The algorithm made sense for the book store, but it makes less sense for the "Everything Store".
growlist 8y ago
For me it's the speed of Prime, plus the fact I don't have to bother entering my card or PayPal details. It's almost annoying when I can't find what I want on Amazon and have to go elsewhere.
- airstrike 8y ago
  Removing friction is tremendously valuable. Same reason people use Uber even in cities like New York: not having to pay at the end of the ride.
mancerayder 8y ago
And Amazon's return policy. I remember specifically buying clothes from an online retailer a few years ago and when things didn't fit, I got charged a 10% restocking fee. I'd mostly bought from Amazon but decided to go outside the box. Sure enough, I went back to Amazon. When I lived in the UK, I discovered retail shop hours at 9 to 5, except Thursday and Saturday when you have to fight crowds. Also, things were more expensive. So Amazon won again. All the monopoly complaints aside, the rest of the retail world doesn't compete very well.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  Hell sometimes Amazon doesn't even require a return. They will just say keep it and send out the one you actually wanted.
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    I've had this happen on a Wal-Mart order as well.
acdha 8y ago
There was a significant gap between Amazon launch and having two-day shipping — it took years of behind the scenes development before orders started arriving notably faster than other retails. Sears' numbers include regular postal delivery in both directions so switching to online ordering would have cut them in half with no other changes (and don't forget the efficiency wins from orders arriving as validated electronic data rather than handwritten order forms). The reason why Amazon was successful early on was selection and pricing. They had _everything_ rather than the generally limited selection most people had from local stores and the pricing, especially for things like technical books or genre publications, was often very favorable. Yes, some people lived in major cities with awesome bookstores but for most of us in suburbia the selection was what the local supermarket / drugstore carried or a non-trivial drive.
- filmgirlcw 8y ago
  The pricing benefit really cannot be understated. Amazon was 40% less than list for books -- which was a massive amount, even if you lived in Barnes & Noble markets (and B&N wasn't as pervasive in 1996/1997 as your average mall bookstore was), where there were similar markdowns. And of course, you could get any book you wanted from Amazon. And then Amazon very quickly moved into media like CDs and DVDs. I used to order DVDs from various online retailers in the late 1990s and although Amazon wasn't my go-to in 1999/2000 (there were plenty of startups that sold at ridiculous losses and coupons that 16 year old me took advantage of), I appreciated their selection -- not to mention the gift certificates. I think a lot of us forget that Amazon wasn't the only big e-tailer in the late 90s, it's just the one that survived. There were lots and lots of bigger and smaller places that straight up went out of business after the .com crash, but Amazon, despite taking a massive beating, survived. Price was a huge reason for its success -- but I agree with others who point out that Sears and other incumbents had a chance to take them on, if not on price, than on selection and speed, way earlier than they did. Instead, many businesses chose to partner with Amazon (Borders, Toys R Us) for a time, to their ultimate detriment.
  - stinky613 8y ago
    Very good points. I'd like to add that Amazon began in a time when the typical person didn't trust ANY online shopping options. To my recollection, Amazon and eBay were the two biggest players that found ways to give people confidence that they could safely shop online.
PaulHoule 8y ago
The high value of Sears real estate holdings alone distorts the valuation of the company and doesn't help in making good decisions for running the store.
amyjess 8y ago
Honestly, I think both of those perspectives don't quite explain why Sears died. Sears died because Eddie Lampert spent years systematically looting the company. If not for Lampert's dismanagement [0], Sears would be in roughly the same position as other department stores like Macy's or JCPenney. Yeah, sure, they're not doing super great, and Amazon is kicking their asses, but they're still keeping their heads above water. [0] Sic. I'm trying to coin a neologism here. Dismanagement is to mismanagement as disinformation is to misinformation. Mismanagement and misinformation come from incompetence; dismanagement and disinformation come from malice.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > I'm trying to coin a neologism here. Dismanagement is to mismanagement as disinformation is to misinformation. Mismanagement and misinformation come from incompetence; dismanagement and disinformation come from malice. I've seen “malmanagement” used the way you seem to be trying to set up “dismanagement”, by analogy to the distinction between misfeasance and malfeasance. (Dictionaries seem to view it as a simple synonym of “mismanagement”, though.)
nilkn 8y ago
Looking over the comments and replies here, it seems everyone has their own version of "the real reason Amazon was successful was X..." My own conclusion reading this is that Amazon was just highly competent across the board. They were online in the mid-90s. They were quick with shipping (eventually, if not right at launch). They were competitive on pricing. They quickly had a huge inventory. They had the "you might also like..." algorithm that's impossible to get from a print magazine. They had online reviews. They offered Prime in 2005.
anovikov 8y ago
I think they even had no way to improve rather than (or in addition to), no reason. Their existing operations never allowed for going from 3-week delivery to 2-day delivery.
jiveturkey 8y ago
Obviously (to me), Sears could have easily re-tooled to make Amazon stillborn. But, like Kodak, they were a bit too protective of their own business model to want to compete against themselves. That's why disruption even works. Google may have a strong position driven by search, but disruption will come for them, too.
blairanderson 8y ago
Amazon's business model commands a continuously increasing selection and best-in-class customer experience. Cannot succeed without both.
gumby 8y ago
> [For many problems, a behemoth company has no reason to improve, and a lean startup can rush to a solution faster in many cases. This is 50% of the thesis of The Innovator's Dilemma, the book that introduced MBAs to the the word "disruption". The other half if why this happens to behemoth companies, which is that they are listening to their customers. In this case, the customers are those who are OK with waiting 3 weeks and would just like a wider selection or lower prices. People who would but if delivery were faster by definition aren't customers. Startups have to address the non-customers because otherwise they'd have to pry them away from their existing supplier -- generally a much tougher task.
Semaphor 8y ago
Here in Germany Amazon had books and later other products. Fast shipping came way later. And even now their shipping is not really that impressive. 2 days most of the time with prime. 2-3 days is normal for most stores
- morsch 8y ago
  It's normal now, it wasn't normal 20 years ago when Amazon started here. They also had free shipping from the start, also very rare back then.
dkrich 8y ago
This is true. Sears is easy to pick on, but the truth is that Amazon is seemingly the only company that was early to understand ecommerce and how to effectively gain market share by continually innovating and creating customer-centric practices like free shipping on all orders over $25, which was unheard of before that. Just having a lot of money and knowing the internet would be big was table stakes to start an ecommerce site, but certainly not sufficient to guarantee success. If it were Amazon wouldn't be what it is today.
kazinator 8y ago
Ordering something on Amazon, while it can be fast, can take two months or more to arrive from China, and everything in between. Amazon started as purely a book store in 1994 and stayed that way for a good while; it was not immediately obvious to sell every damn thing imaginable. Bezos was cautious about what to try selling online. In 1998 they announced they would move beyond books, but without specific. Amazon did not turn a profit until 2001; they really took it on the nose in the beginning, and had to weather the dot com bust. Before Amazon expanded into things other than books, the site most known for that was eBay. In popular culture, every meme and joke about anyone buying or selling anything online was about eBay for the longest time.
- joncrane 8y ago
  ...and eBay didn't have to solve any logistics or shipping problems because they crowdsourced it.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dkarl 8y ago
Big companies have an extraordinary ability to overlook what small competitors are good at. Instead of thinking, "This company is setting a new competitive standard that we don't know how to meet," they attribute it to immaturity and lack of scale. I worked for a company that got acquired by a Fortune 10 company, and the people from the "mothership" were downright smug and condescending when they heard how fast we expected to do things, because clearly we were not doing things right if we thought we could them done that fast. I bet when Amazon's fulfillment speed was brought up as a competitive advantage, the Sears execs looked at some spreadsheets, did some calculations, and said, "This is stupid. They're losing a ton of money shipping stuff so fast. They won't get far before some adults take over and force them to smarten up."
chrisgd 8y ago
The reason Amazon is successful is AWS. They can buy stickiness in retail by offering lower prices subsidized by being the biggest cloud provider.
marktangotango 8y ago
Lol I paid for next day before the holidays and got my stuff 7 days late. Demanded and got refunded shipping.
nikofeyn 8y ago
> I think this is especially relevant here on HN because it shows how startups are required to solve problems. that's quite a leap. and i don't see how that follows from what you've said.
sjg007 8y ago
And the reason Amazon will die is because "Prime" is no longer 2 day and most "Prime" returns aren't actually free. In fact there is a whole category of "Primes".. If Target or Walmart successfully execute on local delivery + free returns they could really give Amazon a run for its money.

encorekt 8y ago

Yeah, I think you're completely on point. Sears has been on verge of folding for at least a decade, and they've done little to nothing to implement any innovation that would give them another swing. It left plenty of opportunity for smaller startups to swoop in and stay ahead of the market Sears lost out on.

mceldeen 8y ago

So what I'm hearing is "so big they had to fail".

artursapek 8y ago
I wonder if Amazon will ever get to that point. It's hard to imagine.
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  As it grows larger, the "Amazon marketplace" is getting more and more filled with garbage knockoff products and fake reviews. There may eventually come a tipping point where they lose user trust.
  - nvusuvu 8y ago
    I'm almost there now.
  - willismichael 8y ago
    My hope is that smaller, more focused online retailers and marketplaces emerge that can compete in specific verticals. For example, I already go to non-amazon sites where I prefer to buy music gear and computer hardware.
    - SneakerXZ 8y ago
      This is more popular in EU. In many countries Amazon even does not operate, and even in Germany people try to prefer different place if they can.
  - RhodesianHunter 8y ago
    Most people in my circle already won't buy anything they put in their bodies from Amazon, because the risk of Chinese counterfeits is just too great.
  - gregknicholson 8y ago
    If that happens, I don't think the problem will be perceived as "Amazon" — people will say "online shopping" is untrustworthy, like how "social media" is responsible for the world's ills, not "Facebook".
  - lostlogin 8y ago
    Unmentioned here as far as I can see is their attitude to worker’s rights. That’s massively off-putting for me.

icelancer 8y ago

> I think this is especially relevant here on HN because it shows how startups are required to solve problems. For many problems, a behemoth company has no reason to improve, and a lean startup can rush to a solution faster in many cases. Pretty much. Jurvetson calls it the luxury of being a new entrant. It's very hard to steer the Titanic away from an iceberg.

amyjess 8y ago
Yes, first movers in general have a disadvantage. For example, this is part of the reason why Sega's hardware business died. Admittedly, that was only part of it: there was some mismanagement behind Sega's decline too. Actually, you could say the same thing about Sears: the final nail in their coffin wasn't Amazon learning from Sears's lessons but rather Eddie Lampert's deliberately and systematically looting the company over a period of several years. If not for Lampert, Sears would just be another Macy's.
- icelancer 8y ago
  No question that they operated poorly on top of just being in an eventually bad position for the future. Sears could have innovated or had a separate department like Xerox PARC and others did that kept them alive a long time, but unfortunately fast movers and disruptors will always have that advantage no matter what you do. Hence why FB and others just buy out all the small companies.

gibolt 8y ago

While this is generally true, imagine if Sears had honestly realized their competitors potential and tried to compete. They had the country covered in stores and could have easily cut shipping times down by shipping from the nearest one. Their stores were also a hodgepodge of junk all randomly mixed, and they never made their store a desirable place to stroll.

hrktb 8y ago
We could say the same for other big box retailers. I don’t know any that even comes close to te amazon experience, short of Yodobashi.con in Japan. I think it requires something very special for an organization to accept to canibalize itself. Apple is the only exemple that I would see at a behemoth scale.
- _dark_matter_ 8y ago
  What is "The Amazon experience"? Ads being served as the first few rows of results? A review system that cannot be trusted? The same item listed multiple times by different sellers? Extreme price variance when choosing different colors and sizes?
  - bluGill 8y ago
    The experience today is not what made them great in the past. 10 years ago the negatives you list didn't exist.
    - Apocryphon 8y ago
      Perhaps all of these too big to be good utility services- Amazon, Google, Facebook, even Apple should just offer “classic” slimmed down versions of their previous offerings, for a paid subscription in the case of the online services.
      - glenneroo 8y ago
        How would this help eliminate any of the current issues? Why would giving them money and/or building a slimmed-down version reduce fake reviews, fake articles, ads as search results, et al?

dv_dt 8y ago

Hmm, I could be misremembering, but I think there was almost a decade between the point when Sears had all the legos but didn't know how to assemble them, and when Amazon really started using fast shipping as a differentiator. And I think the "Prime" account branding came still later into the picture. Before shopping at Amazon ramping up, right around 2000, I remember Sears logistics starting to break down with kafkaesque calls into Sears service and parts departments. I guess the point is, I think the decline of Sears mostly had to do with internal complexity and breakdown of effective management than anything directly to do with Amazon.

bilbo0s 8y ago
HN user xigency is right, Amazon has always been light years faster than Sears. Personal anecdote: My mother, back in the late-nineties came to me one day and told me how she had figured out how to get stuff from the jcpenny and sears "even faster". Because she could just search Amazon, "and they actually deliver it to me by the end of the week!" "I bet you thought they only sold books right? It's something new they have!" yada yada yada blah blah blah. She was pretty proud of herself to be telling me about the new stuff on the web, but I digress. Point is, she was like a kid in a brand new candy store. Only a candy store that sold toys and video games too, and opened up across the street from the kid's house.

ghaff 8y ago

TBH, I think there's a much better case to be made for Sears doubling down on some of its core assets and creating Home Depot before Home Depot did. Its store footprints weren't right, which is no small thing. But they were already a significant home improvement and major appliance store. They probably had a window when it was clear that discount retailers (and some high-end stores) were the future of "department stores" and if they couldn't go there--which they probably couldn't--their future lay in focusing.

Vivtek 8y ago
They literally had the best tools in the world - my dad swore by Craftsman, told me never to bother buying any other brand. Then they threw it away on a demonstration of Randian philosophy.
- jessaustin 8y ago
  Even while our dads were swearing by Craftsman, better tools existed. You're right that Craftsman was good enough for most people's needs. Craftsman is still an OK brand for hand tools (not power tools). It was just easier to get Craftsman, because they sold it at a store that wasn't too far away. Back in the day you could only get Snap-On etc. if you were affiliated with e.g. a mechanic's shop that was on a Snap-On truck route. Now thanks to Amazon, Home Depot, etc. there are more ways to get quality tools.
  - greedo 8y ago
    Sear's return policy for Craftsman pro tools was exceptional; lifetime warranty. If it broke, bring it in to exchange for a replacement.
    - Broken_Hippo 8y ago
      I was just going to mention this! The warranty is the real reason my father had quite a few craftsman tools. Well, at least the ones he used the most, anyway.
  - 8y ago

rubicon33 8y ago

Where's the startup that is solving the pile of Amazon boxes in my backyard that I am too lazy to breakdown?

CoolGuySteve 8y ago

Not to be snarky, but there needs to be a name for selective amnesia when an idea that seems obvious in retrospect is ignored later on. In this case, the thing that made Amazon so great, before Prime existed, was that it had the "Things you might also like" section. AFAIK it was one of the first online stores that used machine learning to recommend new and related items you didn't realize you wanted and to have user ratings for each item. It was especially powerful for books/movies/music just due to the sheer volume of different titles that makes it hard to find new content you might like. There are a lot of retailers that had the logistics and infrastructure for online sales, but the kind of marketing that Amazon did for up-selling was wholly new and something that could only be done online. So even if Sears could do it, it wasn't obvious back then to anyone that they should do it or how to do it. Even now, the Walmart and Target web stores recommendations are just ok compared to Amazon. Even eBay seems less comprehensive in its recommendations.

bpicolo 8y ago
Is that really a primary growth factor? I've never once acted on an Amazon recommendation, and it's always felt almost entirely useless - "you just bought a vacuum, here's 15 more vacuums just in case you're a vacuum-obsessed lunatic"
- squirrelicus 8y ago
  I would sacrifice so much karma for more upvotes for this
  - squirrelicus 8y ago
    Worth it
- CoolGuySteve 8y ago
  True, I think like most market incumbents, Amazon has become lazier lately. The vacuum-obsession problem, the proliferation of counterfeit goods, and subpar third party sellers are all more recent problems. But if you just bought 1984 for example, there's a good chance you'd also want to buy WE, Brave New World, Erewhon, etc. The algorithm made sense for the book store, but it makes less sense for the "Everything Store".

growlist 8y ago

For me it's the speed of Prime, plus the fact I don't have to bother entering my card or PayPal details. It's almost annoying when I can't find what I want on Amazon and have to go elsewhere.

airstrike 8y ago
Removing friction is tremendously valuable. Same reason people use Uber even in cities like New York: not having to pay at the end of the ride.

mancerayder 8y ago

And Amazon's return policy. I remember specifically buying clothes from an online retailer a few years ago and when things didn't fit, I got charged a 10% restocking fee. I'd mostly bought from Amazon but decided to go outside the box. Sure enough, I went back to Amazon. When I lived in the UK, I discovered retail shop hours at 9 to 5, except Thursday and Saturday when you have to fight crowds. Also, things were more expensive. So Amazon won again. All the monopoly complaints aside, the rest of the retail world doesn't compete very well.

paulie_a 8y ago
Hell sometimes Amazon doesn't even require a return. They will just say keep it and send out the one you actually wanted.
- jessaustin 8y ago
  I've had this happen on a Wal-Mart order as well.

acdha 8y ago

There was a significant gap between Amazon launch and having two-day shipping — it took years of behind the scenes development before orders started arriving notably faster than other retails. Sears' numbers include regular postal delivery in both directions so switching to online ordering would have cut them in half with no other changes (and don't forget the efficiency wins from orders arriving as validated electronic data rather than handwritten order forms). The reason why Amazon was successful early on was selection and pricing. They had _everything_ rather than the generally limited selection most people had from local stores and the pricing, especially for things like technical books or genre publications, was often very favorable. Yes, some people lived in major cities with awesome bookstores but for most of us in suburbia the selection was what the local supermarket / drugstore carried or a non-trivial drive.

filmgirlcw 8y ago
The pricing benefit really cannot be understated. Amazon was 40% less than list for books -- which was a massive amount, even if you lived in Barnes & Noble markets (and B&N wasn't as pervasive in 1996/1997 as your average mall bookstore was), where there were similar markdowns. And of course, you could get any book you wanted from Amazon. And then Amazon very quickly moved into media like CDs and DVDs. I used to order DVDs from various online retailers in the late 1990s and although Amazon wasn't my go-to in 1999/2000 (there were plenty of startups that sold at ridiculous losses and coupons that 16 year old me took advantage of), I appreciated their selection -- not to mention the gift certificates. I think a lot of us forget that Amazon wasn't the only big e-tailer in the late 90s, it's just the one that survived. There were lots and lots of bigger and smaller places that straight up went out of business after the .com crash, but Amazon, despite taking a massive beating, survived. Price was a huge reason for its success -- but I agree with others who point out that Sears and other incumbents had a chance to take them on, if not on price, than on selection and speed, way earlier than they did. Instead, many businesses chose to partner with Amazon (Borders, Toys R Us) for a time, to their ultimate detriment.
- stinky613 8y ago
  Very good points. I'd like to add that Amazon began in a time when the typical person didn't trust ANY online shopping options. To my recollection, Amazon and eBay were the two biggest players that found ways to give people confidence that they could safely shop online.

PaulHoule 8y ago

The high value of Sears real estate holdings alone distorts the valuation of the company and doesn't help in making good decisions for running the store.

amyjess 8y ago

Honestly, I think both of those perspectives don't quite explain why Sears died. Sears died because Eddie Lampert spent years systematically looting the company. If not for Lampert's dismanagement [0], Sears would be in roughly the same position as other department stores like Macy's or JCPenney. Yeah, sure, they're not doing super great, and Amazon is kicking their asses, but they're still keeping their heads above water. [0] Sic. I'm trying to coin a neologism here. Dismanagement is to mismanagement as disinformation is to misinformation. Mismanagement and misinformation come from incompetence; dismanagement and disinformation come from malice.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> I'm trying to coin a neologism here. Dismanagement is to mismanagement as disinformation is to misinformation. Mismanagement and misinformation come from incompetence; dismanagement and disinformation come from malice. I've seen “malmanagement” used the way you seem to be trying to set up “dismanagement”, by analogy to the distinction between misfeasance and malfeasance. (Dictionaries seem to view it as a simple synonym of “mismanagement”, though.)

nilkn 8y ago

Looking over the comments and replies here, it seems everyone has their own version of "the real reason Amazon was successful was X..." My own conclusion reading this is that Amazon was just highly competent across the board. They were online in the mid-90s. They were quick with shipping (eventually, if not right at launch). They were competitive on pricing. They quickly had a huge inventory. They had the "you might also like..." algorithm that's impossible to get from a print magazine. They had online reviews. They offered Prime in 2005.

anovikov 8y ago

I think they even had no way to improve rather than (or in addition to), no reason. Their existing operations never allowed for going from 3-week delivery to 2-day delivery.

jiveturkey 8y ago

Obviously (to me), Sears could have easily re-tooled to make Amazon stillborn. But, like Kodak, they were a bit too protective of their own business model to want to compete against themselves. That's why disruption even works. Google may have a strong position driven by search, but disruption will come for them, too.

blairanderson 8y ago

Amazon's business model commands a continuously increasing selection and best-in-class customer experience. Cannot succeed without both.

gumby 8y ago

> [For many problems, a behemoth company has no reason to improve, and a lean startup can rush to a solution faster in many cases. This is 50% of the thesis of The Innovator's Dilemma, the book that introduced MBAs to the the word "disruption". The other half if why this happens to behemoth companies, which is that they are listening to their customers. In this case, the customers are those who are OK with waiting 3 weeks and would just like a wider selection or lower prices. People who would but if delivery were faster by definition aren't customers. Startups have to address the non-customers because otherwise they'd have to pry them away from their existing supplier -- generally a much tougher task.

Semaphor 8y ago

Here in Germany Amazon had books and later other products. Fast shipping came way later. And even now their shipping is not really that impressive. 2 days most of the time with prime. 2-3 days is normal for most stores

morsch 8y ago
It's normal now, it wasn't normal 20 years ago when Amazon started here. They also had free shipping from the start, also very rare back then.

dkrich 8y ago

This is true. Sears is easy to pick on, but the truth is that Amazon is seemingly the only company that was early to understand ecommerce and how to effectively gain market share by continually innovating and creating customer-centric practices like free shipping on all orders over $25, which was unheard of before that. Just having a lot of money and knowing the internet would be big was table stakes to start an ecommerce site, but certainly not sufficient to guarantee success. If it were Amazon wouldn't be what it is today.

kazinator 8y ago

Ordering something on Amazon, while it can be fast, can take two months or more to arrive from China, and everything in between. Amazon started as purely a book store in 1994 and stayed that way for a good while; it was not immediately obvious to sell every damn thing imaginable. Bezos was cautious about what to try selling online. In 1998 they announced they would move beyond books, but without specific. Amazon did not turn a profit until 2001; they really took it on the nose in the beginning, and had to weather the dot com bust. Before Amazon expanded into things other than books, the site most known for that was eBay. In popular culture, every meme and joke about anyone buying or selling anything online was about eBay for the longest time.

joncrane 8y ago
...and eBay didn't have to solve any logistics or shipping problems because they crowdsourced it.

deleted 8y ago

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dkarl 8y ago

Big companies have an extraordinary ability to overlook what small competitors are good at. Instead of thinking, "This company is setting a new competitive standard that we don't know how to meet," they attribute it to immaturity and lack of scale. I worked for a company that got acquired by a Fortune 10 company, and the people from the "mothership" were downright smug and condescending when they heard how fast we expected to do things, because clearly we were not doing things right if we thought we could them done that fast. I bet when Amazon's fulfillment speed was brought up as a competitive advantage, the Sears execs looked at some spreadsheets, did some calculations, and said, "This is stupid. They're losing a ton of money shipping stuff so fast. They won't get far before some adults take over and force them to smarten up."

chrisgd 8y ago

The reason Amazon is successful is AWS. They can buy stickiness in retail by offering lower prices subsidized by being the biggest cloud provider.

marktangotango 8y ago

Lol I paid for next day before the holidays and got my stuff 7 days late. Demanded and got refunded shipping.

nikofeyn 8y ago

> I think this is especially relevant here on HN because it shows how startups are required to solve problems. that's quite a leap. and i don't see how that follows from what you've said.

sjg007 8y ago

And the reason Amazon will die is because "Prime" is no longer 2 day and most "Prime" returns aren't actually free. In fact there is a whole category of "Primes".. If Target or Walmart successfully execute on local delivery + free returns they could really give Amazon a run for its money.