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Honestly, I don't know if I buy it. Even today, when I buy online from a small business, it's normal to wait 3-5 business days for the order to be processed an

Honestly, I don't know if I buy it. Even today, when I buy online from a small business, it's normal to wait 3-5 business days for the order to be processed and a shipping label to be created, 1-2 days for the product to enter shipping system, and 3-5 more days for delivery. I routinely wait 2-3 weeks for popular stuff from decently big websites that are clearly 10000000X smaller than Amazon. Meanwhile, Amazon hits same day and next day shipping all the time zero issue. Amazon wasn't the right thing at the right time. It imagined a different type of delivery that no one else today gets anywhere near. Amazon is to delivery what Apple is to hardware. It's different and not repeatable no matter who tries. I try to support smaller shops all the time, but it's definitely frustrating to wait 2-3 weeks on a delivery that know Amazon will next day to me. Shout out to local pet foodstore hollywood feed which puts a branded car at each location and does physical deliveries. Y'all beat Amazon with a 30 minute delivery. Can't argue with results.

jabbany 4y ago
The example of same/next day delivery doesn't suggest anything special about Amazon though. It's really just an argument of economies of scale. A small business usually only addresses a very specialized part of the market so they don't really ship that much stuff and thus can't hire that many people to deal with shipping without a huge overhead. However, if you stack thousands of businesses onto a marketplace, and then handle logistics for all of them, now there's much less overhead: the same shipment can combine many different specialized things. Also fwiw Amazon is by far not a pioneer of fast delivery. Same day delivery has been around in densely poplated places (like in China) years before Amazon even started trialing the service.
- AussieWog93 4y ago
  Sorry mate, but I'm going to call bullshit on this. I've grown a home-based eCommerce business from nothing to 400k sales a year with 5000+ active SKUs. Once you've hit around 5-10 sales per day, there is absolutely nothing physically stopping anyone from doing same-day delivery apart from poor inventory management or a simple unwillingness to do so (which is valid; some people can't work every day due to family commitments).
  - jabbany 4y ago
    > 5000+ active SKUs. You have provided evidence for the exact same point I'm making, economies of scale. You have a large ecommerce business with a variety of things to sell so you benefit from economies of scale in shipping. Most small individual sellers have maybe like 50 SKUs which makes it prohibitively expensive to do same day delivery.
    - AussieWog93 4y ago
      No, I think you've missed the point. 5000+ SKUs make the logistics _harder_, not easier. Back when we only had a couple of dozen SKUs, it was much easier to get everything out same day. Package them all in the same envelope, stick in a red post box. Done.
      - jabbany 4y ago
        It doesn't make logistics easier, but it makes it worth investing resources into. Economies of scale means you get more value for the resources you do invest into logistics. Anecdotally, almost all small online businesses I've seen the back end of do not have a dedicated logistics person. When there's only a handful of different kinds of stuff to ship, shipping becomes an extra low-skill task usually given to whoever is free. They also usually do not have a sophisticated inventory management system (because it is not worth it to purchase one), and instead use spreadsheets that are manually managed. Secondly, sending out stuff same-day is not even close to same-day _delivery_. For that you need to control all aspects of the logistics chain, which only makes sense at Amazon scales. I've encountered many times where I've ordered things, had a label created the same day but then with no progress for a week. After contacting the seller, it turned out the courier only picks up packages from their warehouse once every 3 days, and then takes another couple of days to "ingest" it and do the origin scan.
nwienert 4y ago
Zappos and others have done it (Zappos did it better, even), but most were sucked up or forced out by Amazon as it had all the momentum. That's exactly being in the right place at the right time.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
> Amazon is to delivery what Apple is to hardware That's a key point. Amazon isn't an ecomm company. It's a logistics / fulfillment company. It markets, sells and delivers commodities. It's magic is execution. Which is a lesson for all of us. That is, average idea...world beating execution.

jabbany 4y ago

The example of same/next day delivery doesn't suggest anything special about Amazon though. It's really just an argument of economies of scale. A small business usually only addresses a very specialized part of the market so they don't really ship that much stuff and thus can't hire that many people to deal with shipping without a huge overhead. However, if you stack thousands of businesses onto a marketplace, and then handle logistics for all of them, now there's much less overhead: the same shipment can combine many different specialized things. Also fwiw Amazon is by far not a pioneer of fast delivery. Same day delivery has been around in densely poplated places (like in China) years before Amazon even started trialing the service.

AussieWog93 4y ago
Sorry mate, but I'm going to call bullshit on this. I've grown a home-based eCommerce business from nothing to 400k sales a year with 5000+ active SKUs. Once you've hit around 5-10 sales per day, there is absolutely nothing physically stopping anyone from doing same-day delivery apart from poor inventory management or a simple unwillingness to do so (which is valid; some people can't work every day due to family commitments).
- jabbany 4y ago
  > 5000+ active SKUs. You have provided evidence for the exact same point I'm making, economies of scale. You have a large ecommerce business with a variety of things to sell so you benefit from economies of scale in shipping. Most small individual sellers have maybe like 50 SKUs which makes it prohibitively expensive to do same day delivery.
  - AussieWog93 4y ago
    No, I think you've missed the point. 5000+ SKUs make the logistics _harder_, not easier. Back when we only had a couple of dozen SKUs, it was much easier to get everything out same day. Package them all in the same envelope, stick in a red post box. Done.
    - jabbany 4y ago
      It doesn't make logistics easier, but it makes it worth investing resources into. Economies of scale means you get more value for the resources you do invest into logistics. Anecdotally, almost all small online businesses I've seen the back end of do not have a dedicated logistics person. When there's only a handful of different kinds of stuff to ship, shipping becomes an extra low-skill task usually given to whoever is free. They also usually do not have a sophisticated inventory management system (because it is not worth it to purchase one), and instead use spreadsheets that are manually managed. Secondly, sending out stuff same-day is not even close to same-day _delivery_. For that you need to control all aspects of the logistics chain, which only makes sense at Amazon scales. I've encountered many times where I've ordered things, had a label created the same day but then with no progress for a week. After contacting the seller, it turned out the courier only picks up packages from their warehouse once every 3 days, and then takes another couple of days to "ingest" it and do the origin scan.

nwienert 4y ago

Zappos and others have done it (Zappos did it better, even), but most were sucked up or forced out by Amazon as it had all the momentum. That's exactly being in the right place at the right time.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

> Amazon is to delivery what Apple is to hardware That's a key point. Amazon isn't an ecomm company. It's a logistics / fulfillment company. It markets, sells and delivers commodities. It's magic is execution. Which is a lesson for all of us. That is, average idea...world beating execution.