23 ms·

The Ecommerce Surge

73 points by prostoalex 6y ago

sdenton4 6y ago
Thanks to lockdown, I tried both grocery delivery and food delivery for the first time, and hated both of them. Food delivery I think we've now seen fail in just about every conceivable way (wrong order, missed items, order cancelled by the restaurant after 20 minutes, 404 restaurant no longer exists). And groceries were such a poor experience that we just never tried it a second time (inexplicably tiny selection of things, subject to completely random substitutions (if you allow substitutions) or just missing a bunch of essentials if not). Dry retail goods are fine for ecommerce, though, just as they've always been...
- peterwoerner 6y ago
  I tried grocery delivery. Its mostly work pretty well. It has changed the way I meal plan, which is buy a bunch of staples and figure out what goes together afterwards. Yes, you have to be careful about what substitutions you allow, but I have been happy with it. Also, as time has passed it has gotten a lot better now that supply chains have shifted to the change in demand (or demand has shifted back to the supply chains).
  - swiley 6y ago
    > buy a bunch of staples and figure out what goes together afterwards. This is unusual?
    - kasey_junk 6y ago
      Lots of us just in time buy from a local grocer (read one you can walk to in 5 minutes or less). I didn’t realize how much of a quality of life aspect this was for me until the lockdowns. I miss being able to pop over to the shop, see what looks good and make a meal.
    - peterwoerner 6y ago
      I used to pick seven meals I wanted to make for the week and buy the ingredients for just those meals.
- an_opabinia 6y ago
  The substitutions were so obviously to increase the merchant’s margins or to get you to cancel low margin orders. The economics simply made absolutely no sense. Demand wildly outstripped delivery and picking supply, ie logistics. Even Whole Foods probably substituted at least 1 of every 5 items ordered.
- hayksaakian 6y ago
  if you value not having to spend time driving to pick things up then a lot of those fails are tolerable IMO even a 20% failure rate could be tolerable for people who really value the delivery aspect.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    Erm, no they are not; you enter into an agreement or contract with a delivering party, you PAY them to deliver things to your house. If they flunk out or do subpar products they won't get repeat trades. I don't understand why you think a half-assed service is acceptable. I don't believe I'm being unreasonable. 20% failure rate is unreasonable.
    - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > 20% failure rate is unreasonable If I didn’t get my food 20% of the time, that would be a problem. But if a dish is missing, the food isn’t piping hot, it’s less than an hour late or the packaging is a disaster twenty percent of the time, that’s fine. I still saved time.
      - jkinudsjknds 6y ago
        > But if a dish is missing, or the food isn’t piping hot, or they say 8 and it was 8:45, or the packaging is a disaster, that’s fine. Maybe this is just me but those sound like pretty serious detriments.
- jwblackwell 6y ago
  Are you in the US? Ocado here in the U.K. is great.
  - youngtaff 6y ago
    We find Ocado a bit mixed… We shop for a week but often find there are multiple items that have short dates i.e. less than a week, their soft fruits don't seem to last, and need to remember to remove all the other fruit and veg from it's packaging otherwise it gets covered in condensation when it comes out of the cold van. Also way too much non-recyclable packaging. Other than that their pretty good, cheaper than Sainsburys, and the advantage of shopping one line is you can see what the final bill is as you go
    - te_chris 6y ago
      We used to do a mix of Ocado and our local grocer - Ocado for dry and frozen goods and cleaning. Have switched cleaning to Splosh though, as much lower waste https://www.splosh.com/ https://www.splosh.com/.
  - sbmthakur 6y ago
    Swiggy in India has worked out nicely for me.
  - string 6y ago
    Ocado are the reason I stopped buying food online. Their customer service is absolutely atrocious. One example: An order I needed to make dinner for some friends that were coming over just didn't turn up one day. I called close to ten times, each time a different excuse including: "I can see it's just around the corner", "I promise it will be there within 15 minutes", "we can't get hold of the driver", "there was a problem at the warehouse", "the driver was in an accident", etc. At about 11:30pm they finally admitted the driver was just behind schedule, the order wasn't coming and it would be delivered the next day. When it came the next day (~4 hours late) it contained no fresh or frozen items as "Ocado don't re-deliver fresh or frozen items". I guess they don't think it's important to inform customers of that fact. So I ended up with a load of cleaning products and some tinned tomatoes. This was just one of a long list of terrible experiences. I honestly think it's company policy to encourage their staff to lie to customers. Hands down consistently the worst customer service I've ever experienced from any company. If they're the best we have I think that industry has some space for improvement.
- foota 6y ago
  I use Uber eats multiple times a week, I'm generally pretty happy with it, and the cost has gone down recently as well.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    > and the cost has gone down recently as well. At whose expense though?
    - foota 6y ago
      My feeling, though I could be wrong, is that they've restructured fees to rebalance who pays the most. But it's also possible they're taking less profit or paying couriers less.
- trengorilla 6y ago
  What do you mean by food delivery, surely not traditional takeaways? I probably have over 100/year with virtually no issues.
  - readarticle 6y ago
    Food delivery = gig workers picking up takeaway for you.
- rimliu 6y ago
  We have had groceries delivery service available for a few years already, so it worked very well, except the beginning of the lockdown when they were under capacity. It also forced other players to join faster.
- impendia 6y ago
  Have you been dealing with middlemen? I've had great experiences so far with food delivery and with grocery curbside pickup. For food delivery, I've either called the restaurant or used the restaurant's website directly to order. This has worked for chain restaurants, but most of my orders have gone to a local establishment which I've just called. For groceries, I've been buying from a small non-chain establishment: in the morning I send them a Word document with my order on it; they call me to discuss substitutions if necessary and to arrange payment; I pick up my food in the afternoon. I find it all to be wonderfully pleasant. And my money is going to those who are providing me with food.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    Same here. I just show up at (get your pearls ready) Walmart <gasp>, check in on my phone, wait a few minutes and they put stuff in the trunk. The only problem I had was when they substituted (at no cost) many small burger rolls for a package of fewer big ones. I did accept the substitution though so it's on me. I wound up making sliders. It's basically a more streamlined version of picking up orders in a B2B context. There's just no forklifts trucks or flirting with the gatehouse lady (if you're driving a box truck you may as well act the part).
- eloisant 6y ago
  In my experience (in France) because restaurants could only do delivery, a lot of restaurants rushed to Uber Eat or Delivery to get some revenue. I was already using those services pre-quarantine. So we got much more diversity (yay!) but a lot of them were not up-to-speed, or selling food that wasn't really meant for delivery (and arrived in pieces).
- stronglikedan 6y ago
  > if you allow substitutions My parents get substitutions even when they explicitly don't allow it, but they put up with it out of safety/convenience, and because it's almost impossible to resolve it with these companies after the fact. I just make a weekly trip to the store for them to get the few things they actually wanted, and they write off the rest.
kqr 6y ago
I am very fortunare to work in this space at this time. We are developing a truly personally relevant (probably the only one in the world right now) search and navigation engine for e-commerce businesses. It's very exciting and also nice to be very safely employed these times. If you don't mind the self-promotion, we have two positions open: - Backend Developer: https://careers.loop54.com/jobs/927090-back-end-developer https://careers.loop54.com/jobs/927090-back-end-developer - Frontend/fullstack developer: https://careers.loop54.com/jobs/799962-front-end-or-full-stack-developer-with-ui-focus https://careers.loop54.com/jobs/799962-front-end-or-full-sta... We have rather high demands on our co-workers technically, but feel free to give it a shot if you're not feeling secure in your current position.
- pottertheotter 6y ago
  This is interesting but I feel like this isn't even the foundational problem for most websites these days. Speaking as a consumer, one of my problems almost every day is that there seem to be a lot of missing data about products. So filtering only somewhat works. Also, just get categories for products down well. Don't personalize it for me. Just make sure products are properly categorized, and make a logical, easy to use category menu. Lastly, make search work. As in, if I type in a product name and it doesn't show up in the search but I can find it on the website, fix that. And if I search for x today, I don't want my search results to change tomorrow or a week from now because it's "personalized". I wish you success, but I wish the basic things would get some focus first.
- r0b05 6y ago
  I like the idea. Are you perhaps hiring remotely or does one have to be based in Sweden?
- the-dude 6y ago
  I do mind. Downvoted for being offtopic.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Pandabob 6y ago
Slightly off-topic, but any personal experiences on how to get involved in the ecom space? Or if you can point me to any online forums, that would also be appreciated. I'm aware of ecom-reddit. I'd love to hear stories on running a online store, consulting in the space or building software around the platforms (like Shopify).
- treyfitty 6y ago
  I own a small e-commerce brand for men’s skincare. Getting the store up and running from a design, legal, inventory, and finance perspective is pretty straightforward. It’s the marketing that’s very tough. It’s not unusual for “small brands” to spend $10k per month just on Ads. Depending on your market, there are different “critical thresholds” to pass in order to make it worthwhile.
- grwthckrmstr 6y ago
  Hey! I've written extensively about my experience building a Shopify app. Check it out, hope it helps :) https://www.preetamnath.com/blog/building-your-first-micro-saas-app-on-shopify https://www.preetamnath.com/blog/building-your-first-micro-s...
- Ologn 6y ago
  I posted about this a few days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24246341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24246341 I would stress the end part. Think now of what success is. "Success" means you are still making small margins, but your volume is increasing and you have outgrown your closet or garage, and probably need to sublease a space and hire someone part-time to accept deliveries from wholesalers and to ship items out. The leap to space rental and wages will probably flatten any margin you have to zero initially. The business is low margin, high volume, and niches where the margins are wide are usually narrowed over time, I know people doing this and it has happened in many fields. So consider what the likely course is now. It will mean years of growth but low margins and grinding.
xoxoy 6y ago
the biggest unknown right now is future of shipping costs - there’s big upward pressure from FedEx and UPS to drive prices up now that they have more leverage and had been inundated with shipments during the height of the lockdown - both have already said they would raise rates for large and bulky shippers for holidays. it’s pretty apparent that a lot of retailers just hide the cost of shipping in jacked up prices and still claim free shipping. unclear how long that can last before more consumers catch on - I certainly feel like online shopping outside of thing sold and shipped directly from large retailers are highly inflated because of this.
- hellweaver666 6y ago
  As a consumer I can't decide if I would rather see cheaper product prices but have to see shipping separate or pay a little more and not have to think about the cost of shipping. It doesn't help that a lot of people that do separate shipping also bump up their shipping costs too, making a little profit on that as well.
- conjectures 6y ago
  > unclear how long that can last before more consumers catch on I'd rather have it that way round than get to the checkout and find 'O yea and there's £5.99 delivery charge as well'.
  - xoxoy 6y ago
    you’d rather buy something for $100 with free shipping vs $80 and $10 shipping? that’s my point - it’s a psychological game that retailers exploit. it’s the same thing as listing something as $150 and having it on “sale” for $100 because it psychologically feels like you’re getting a great deal even if the retail price was always just $100.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  Shipping costs are a cost. It's not underhanded to include shipping in the cost of a product. Shelf space, refrigeration, etc are also a cost. They're included in the prices of regular stores. IMO it's mostly a UI thing. Free or flat rate shipping is easier to communicate to users at the operative time. The alternatives are too complicated.

73 points by prostoalex 6y ago

Thanks to lockdown, I tried both grocery delivery and food delivery for the first time, and hated both of them. Food delivery I think we've now seen fail in just about every conceivable way (wrong order, missed items, order cancelled by the restaurant after 20 minutes, 404 restaurant no longer exists). And groceries were such a poor experience that we just never tried it a second time (inexplicably tiny selection of things, subject to completely random substitutions (if you allow substitutions) or just missing a bunch of essentials if not). Dry retail goods are fine for ecommerce, though, just as they've always been...

peterwoerner 6y ago
I tried grocery delivery. Its mostly work pretty well. It has changed the way I meal plan, which is buy a bunch of staples and figure out what goes together afterwards. Yes, you have to be careful about what substitutions you allow, but I have been happy with it. Also, as time has passed it has gotten a lot better now that supply chains have shifted to the change in demand (or demand has shifted back to the supply chains).
- swiley 6y ago
  > buy a bunch of staples and figure out what goes together afterwards. This is unusual?
  - kasey_junk 6y ago
    Lots of us just in time buy from a local grocer (read one you can walk to in 5 minutes or less). I didn’t realize how much of a quality of life aspect this was for me until the lockdowns. I miss being able to pop over to the shop, see what looks good and make a meal.
  - peterwoerner 6y ago
    I used to pick seven meals I wanted to make for the week and buy the ingredients for just those meals.
an_opabinia 6y ago
The substitutions were so obviously to increase the merchant’s margins or to get you to cancel low margin orders. The economics simply made absolutely no sense. Demand wildly outstripped delivery and picking supply, ie logistics. Even Whole Foods probably substituted at least 1 of every 5 items ordered.
hayksaakian 6y ago
if you value not having to spend time driving to pick things up then a lot of those fails are tolerable IMO even a 20% failure rate could be tolerable for people who really value the delivery aspect.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Erm, no they are not; you enter into an agreement or contract with a delivering party, you PAY them to deliver things to your house. If they flunk out or do subpar products they won't get repeat trades. I don't understand why you think a half-assed service is acceptable. I don't believe I'm being unreasonable. 20% failure rate is unreasonable.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > 20% failure rate is unreasonable If I didn’t get my food 20% of the time, that would be a problem. But if a dish is missing, the food isn’t piping hot, it’s less than an hour late or the packaging is a disaster twenty percent of the time, that’s fine. I still saved time.
    - jkinudsjknds 6y ago
      > But if a dish is missing, or the food isn’t piping hot, or they say 8 and it was 8:45, or the packaging is a disaster, that’s fine. Maybe this is just me but those sound like pretty serious detriments.
jwblackwell 6y ago
Are you in the US? Ocado here in the U.K. is great.
- youngtaff 6y ago
  We find Ocado a bit mixed… We shop for a week but often find there are multiple items that have short dates i.e. less than a week, their soft fruits don't seem to last, and need to remember to remove all the other fruit and veg from it's packaging otherwise it gets covered in condensation when it comes out of the cold van. Also way too much non-recyclable packaging. Other than that their pretty good, cheaper than Sainsburys, and the advantage of shopping one line is you can see what the final bill is as you go
  - te_chris 6y ago
    We used to do a mix of Ocado and our local grocer - Ocado for dry and frozen goods and cleaning. Have switched cleaning to Splosh though, as much lower waste https://www.splosh.com/ https://www.splosh.com/.
- sbmthakur 6y ago
  Swiggy in India has worked out nicely for me.
- string 6y ago
  Ocado are the reason I stopped buying food online. Their customer service is absolutely atrocious. One example: An order I needed to make dinner for some friends that were coming over just didn't turn up one day. I called close to ten times, each time a different excuse including: "I can see it's just around the corner", "I promise it will be there within 15 minutes", "we can't get hold of the driver", "there was a problem at the warehouse", "the driver was in an accident", etc. At about 11:30pm they finally admitted the driver was just behind schedule, the order wasn't coming and it would be delivered the next day. When it came the next day (~4 hours late) it contained no fresh or frozen items as "Ocado don't re-deliver fresh or frozen items". I guess they don't think it's important to inform customers of that fact. So I ended up with a load of cleaning products and some tinned tomatoes. This was just one of a long list of terrible experiences. I honestly think it's company policy to encourage their staff to lie to customers. Hands down consistently the worst customer service I've ever experienced from any company. If they're the best we have I think that industry has some space for improvement.
foota 6y ago
I use Uber eats multiple times a week, I'm generally pretty happy with it, and the cost has gone down recently as well.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  > and the cost has gone down recently as well. At whose expense though?
  - foota 6y ago
    My feeling, though I could be wrong, is that they've restructured fees to rebalance who pays the most. But it's also possible they're taking less profit or paying couriers less.
trengorilla 6y ago
What do you mean by food delivery, surely not traditional takeaways? I probably have over 100/year with virtually no issues.
- readarticle 6y ago
  Food delivery = gig workers picking up takeaway for you.
rimliu 6y ago
We have had groceries delivery service available for a few years already, so it worked very well, except the beginning of the lockdown when they were under capacity. It also forced other players to join faster.
impendia 6y ago
Have you been dealing with middlemen? I've had great experiences so far with food delivery and with grocery curbside pickup. For food delivery, I've either called the restaurant or used the restaurant's website directly to order. This has worked for chain restaurants, but most of my orders have gone to a local establishment which I've just called. For groceries, I've been buying from a small non-chain establishment: in the morning I send them a Word document with my order on it; they call me to discuss substitutions if necessary and to arrange payment; I pick up my food in the afternoon. I find it all to be wonderfully pleasant. And my money is going to those who are providing me with food.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  Same here. I just show up at (get your pearls ready) Walmart <gasp>, check in on my phone, wait a few minutes and they put stuff in the trunk. The only problem I had was when they substituted (at no cost) many small burger rolls for a package of fewer big ones. I did accept the substitution though so it's on me. I wound up making sliders. It's basically a more streamlined version of picking up orders in a B2B context. There's just no forklifts trucks or flirting with the gatehouse lady (if you're driving a box truck you may as well act the part).
eloisant 6y ago
In my experience (in France) because restaurants could only do delivery, a lot of restaurants rushed to Uber Eat or Delivery to get some revenue. I was already using those services pre-quarantine. So we got much more diversity (yay!) but a lot of them were not up-to-speed, or selling food that wasn't really meant for delivery (and arrived in pieces).
stronglikedan 6y ago
> if you allow substitutions My parents get substitutions even when they explicitly don't allow it, but they put up with it out of safety/convenience, and because it's almost impossible to resolve it with these companies after the fact. I just make a weekly trip to the store for them to get the few things they actually wanted, and they write off the rest.

kqr 6y ago

I am very fortunare to work in this space at this time. We are developing a truly personally relevant (probably the only one in the world right now) search and navigation engine for e-commerce businesses. It's very exciting and also nice to be very safely employed these times. If you don't mind the self-promotion, we have two positions open: - Backend Developer: https://careers.loop54.com/jobs/927090-back-end-developer https://careers.loop54.com/jobs/927090-back-end-developer - Frontend/fullstack developer: https://careers.loop54.com/jobs/799962-front-end-or-full-stack-developer-with-ui-focus https://careers.loop54.com/jobs/799962-front-end-or-full-sta... We have rather high demands on our co-workers technically, but feel free to give it a shot if you're not feeling secure in your current position.

pottertheotter 6y ago
This is interesting but I feel like this isn't even the foundational problem for most websites these days. Speaking as a consumer, one of my problems almost every day is that there seem to be a lot of missing data about products. So filtering only somewhat works. Also, just get categories for products down well. Don't personalize it for me. Just make sure products are properly categorized, and make a logical, easy to use category menu. Lastly, make search work. As in, if I type in a product name and it doesn't show up in the search but I can find it on the website, fix that. And if I search for x today, I don't want my search results to change tomorrow or a week from now because it's "personalized". I wish you success, but I wish the basic things would get some focus first.
r0b05 6y ago
I like the idea. Are you perhaps hiring remotely or does one have to be based in Sweden?
the-dude 6y ago
I do mind. Downvoted for being offtopic.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Pandabob 6y ago

Slightly off-topic, but any personal experiences on how to get involved in the ecom space? Or if you can point me to any online forums, that would also be appreciated. I'm aware of ecom-reddit. I'd love to hear stories on running a online store, consulting in the space or building software around the platforms (like Shopify).

treyfitty 6y ago
I own a small e-commerce brand for men’s skincare. Getting the store up and running from a design, legal, inventory, and finance perspective is pretty straightforward. It’s the marketing that’s very tough. It’s not unusual for “small brands” to spend $10k per month just on Ads. Depending on your market, there are different “critical thresholds” to pass in order to make it worthwhile.
grwthckrmstr 6y ago
Hey! I've written extensively about my experience building a Shopify app. Check it out, hope it helps :) https://www.preetamnath.com/blog/building-your-first-micro-saas-app-on-shopify https://www.preetamnath.com/blog/building-your-first-micro-s...
Ologn 6y ago
I posted about this a few days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24246341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24246341 I would stress the end part. Think now of what success is. "Success" means you are still making small margins, but your volume is increasing and you have outgrown your closet or garage, and probably need to sublease a space and hire someone part-time to accept deliveries from wholesalers and to ship items out. The leap to space rental and wages will probably flatten any margin you have to zero initially. The business is low margin, high volume, and niches where the margins are wide are usually narrowed over time, I know people doing this and it has happened in many fields. So consider what the likely course is now. It will mean years of growth but low margins and grinding.

xoxoy 6y ago

the biggest unknown right now is future of shipping costs - there’s big upward pressure from FedEx and UPS to drive prices up now that they have more leverage and had been inundated with shipments during the height of the lockdown - both have already said they would raise rates for large and bulky shippers for holidays. it’s pretty apparent that a lot of retailers just hide the cost of shipping in jacked up prices and still claim free shipping. unclear how long that can last before more consumers catch on - I certainly feel like online shopping outside of thing sold and shipped directly from large retailers are highly inflated because of this.

hellweaver666 6y ago
As a consumer I can't decide if I would rather see cheaper product prices but have to see shipping separate or pay a little more and not have to think about the cost of shipping. It doesn't help that a lot of people that do separate shipping also bump up their shipping costs too, making a little profit on that as well.
conjectures 6y ago
> unclear how long that can last before more consumers catch on I'd rather have it that way round than get to the checkout and find 'O yea and there's £5.99 delivery charge as well'.
- xoxoy 6y ago
  you’d rather buy something for $100 with free shipping vs $80 and $10 shipping? that’s my point - it’s a psychological game that retailers exploit. it’s the same thing as listing something as $150 and having it on “sale” for $100 because it psychologically feels like you’re getting a great deal even if the retail price was always just $100.
dalbasal 6y ago
Shipping costs are a cost. It's not underhanded to include shipping in the cost of a product. Shelf space, refrigeration, etc are also a cost. They're included in the prices of regular stores. IMO it's mostly a UI thing. Free or flat rate shipping is easier to communicate to users at the operative time. The alternatives are too complicated.