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Who knew that Best Buy's USP was simply shipping the product you actually bought?
by miles 6y ago
Who knew that Best Buy's USP was simply shipping the product you actually bought?
- rectang 6y ago(For those like me who don't know the jargon: USP in this context seems to stand for "unique selling point".)
- aspenmayer 6y agoThank you. I’ve seen that for years and thought it was related to the USP used in vitamin labeling, and knew that wasn’t right, but assumed it was a kind of UL type thing. Wrong context entirely.
- mlthoughts2018 6y agoThis feels tongue in cheek but it’s legit. As you scale the operation of being low latency (2 day Prime shipping) globally distributed (Amazon distribution network) CDN (stuff in warehouses) to the size of Amazon, it becomes a legit hard problem to match the per product validation that smaller retailers can achieve by drastically reducing and centralizing their distribution method (chain stores, focus on only one niche category of products like consumer electronics or specific clothing brand).
- dhosek 6y agoI think Amazon has reached the too big to succeed stage of its growth. Putting aside counterfeiting issues, just finding a product on Amazon can be a nightmare.
- mlthoughts2018 6y agoYou have to have great machine learning and information organization solutions to function at that scale and I think it’s where the seams really show on Amazon’s two pizza team approach and deeply fractured dogfooding approaches to rely on internal versions of their external ML consumer services.
- erik_seaberg 6y agoThe problem is that Amazon scaled by accepting sketchy merchandise from pseudonymous dropshippers who obviously aren't legit manufacturers. Retail customers shouldn't have to wonder where a product came from, that was the whole point of branding them.
- mlthoughts2018 6y agoNo, they got sketchy sellers after scaling (mostly as a bookseller).
- paulmd 6y agobest buy has real problems with fraud too, on r/datahoarder you can read on an almost daily basis about people finding drives that have had the original (expensive) drive removed, replaced with some crappy 500GB drive, and repackaged.