7 ms·

Those efforts look impressive but no service will be a version (open source or otherwise) of Amazon until it can place a single tube of toothpaste in my garage

Those efforts look impressive but no service will be a version (open source or otherwise) of Amazon until it can place a single tube of toothpaste in my garage 18 hours after I ordered it, which it just did thirty minutes ago. Amazon’s “tech” stack, both consumer- and seller-facing is horrible and borderline irrelevant. Their fleet of trucks and aircraft is not.

throwayyy479087 4y ago
Amazon.com is likely the most a/b tested piece of software on the planet. It is ugly and clunky because that's what _works_ - same with Alibaba and Yahoo JP.
- ikrenji 4y ago
  i read somewhere that bezos personally controls the look and feel of amazon and thats why it looks like that. some amazon UX/UI director even quit over it
  - thomasjudge 4y ago
    Probably not so much anymore..
- abvdj2 4y ago
  That is not true, some parts might be clunky because that works, but there's also many parts that are clunky simply because it's hard to make a change without breaking anything. But amazon doesn't care due to their strong position in the market and because AWS is their cash-cow anyways.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  It's ugly and clunky because a) Jeff used to guard it fiercely, b) because a/b testing is not guaranteed to get the best results, and c) you might just be on the "ugly" a/b test.
- okyanusoz 4y ago
  They could make the UI better if they wanted to, but they don't, because of reliability. For most enterprises, if it works, don't touch it.
- the_cat_kittles 4y ago
  its not what works, its whats good enough, or not bad enough to cause an obvious problem. well maybe thats what you mean by "works" i dunno
- hk__2 4y ago
  > Amazon.com is likely the most a/b tested piece of software on the planet. It is ugly and clunky because that's what _works_ - same with Alibaba and Yahoo JP. This was on the HN frontpage yesterday: "Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32651763 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.
- franczesko 4y ago
  "It is ugly and clunky because that's what _works_" 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.
  - lupire 4y ago
    It's been ugly forever, and there have been several wholesale rewrites (C++ -> Perl -> Java, and JavaScript and whatever is in native apps)
- avgDev 4y ago
  Amazon ios app is pretty trash. I keep getting blank white screens, it has been this way for months. https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/tto68z/anyone_else_getting_a_blank_white_screen_on_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/tto68z/anyone_else_get...
kayson 4y ago
A lot (most?) of that is contractor based now, though. At least the last mile. And from the sounds of it, most of the contractors aren't huge fans of Amazon anyways. Seems like it would not be insurmountable to leverage that market for similar delivery times.
- xwdv 4y ago
  Most contractors also don’t care.
marban 4y ago
18 hours — Or ~ 4 hours if you're in Japan.
- presentation 4y ago
  It’s sweet, definitely helps that most people live near one of a handful of cities.
betwixthewires 4y ago
You're right, amazon is a logistics company first and foremost. But if you can replace the website with something like this and then let all the other logistics providers (ups, USPS, FedEx, dhl unfortunately) handle the logistics you can re-enable competition in this space.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
18 hours is a pretty stupid selling point IMO. You either need something immediately or you can wait. Rarely do I need anything 18 hours from now. 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.
- rocket_surgeron 4y ago
  18 hours is overnight. 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.
  - bamboozled 4y ago
    - thiht 4y ago
      If he’s the one who gets pizzas delivered at the party, then yeah!
  - ryanisnan 4y ago
    You have an interesting (and I find pitiable) perspective here. I live in a small town, and brick and mortar stores are how many folks survive here. 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?
the_cat_kittles 4y ago
getting stuff that fast is very stupid 98% of the time. people may like it and want it and sing its praises, but its mostly stupid. and i think stupid things generally tend to die out. that is all to say that maybe that edge that amazon has is not that important.
- desiarnezjr 4y ago
  It's not stupid. 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.
  - hk__2 4y ago
    > 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. 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.
    - desiarnezjr 4y ago
      Agreed. Every logistics partner I ever dealt with was another layer that you did not have full control of, and each had their problems. 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.
XCSme 4y ago
https://bol.com https://bol.com in the Netherlands has delivery within a few hours (by bicycle) for some cities and select products. I got in this way an inflatable mattress (old one was punctured, so I needed one by the evening for my guests) and a few other electronic devices or household items.
- graderjs 4y ago
  Well the mattress would have to be inflatable to be delivered by bicycle
  - XCSme 4y ago
    The bikes are stronk here [0]! [0]: https://rollingspoke.com/how-to-move-things-on-a-bike/ https://rollingspoke.com/how-to-move-things-on-a-bike/
  - TotempaaltJ 4y ago
    Delivery is done with cargo bikes
- kristov 4y ago
  Bol.com gives me hope that Amazon competitors can survive by excelling in their local market.
hk__2 4y ago
I’m pretty happy to live in world where it’s difficult to build a business where you move trucks around cities to deliver a single tube of toothpaste to someone who ordered it the day before. Yes, it’s hard to do this as fast as Amazon does. But should we really go that way, anyway?
- rocket_surgeron 4y ago
  >But should we really go that way, anyway? 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.
  - hk__2 4y ago
    > 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. 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).
  - naasking 4y ago
    > It is more efficient from an energy, carbon, land usage, and labor perspective 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.
UncleEntity 4y ago
> Their fleet of trucks and aircraft is not. 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…

throwayyy479087 4y ago

Amazon.com is likely the most a/b tested piece of software on the planet. It is ugly and clunky because that's what _works_ - same with Alibaba and Yahoo JP.

ikrenji 4y ago
i read somewhere that bezos personally controls the look and feel of amazon and thats why it looks like that. some amazon UX/UI director even quit over it
- thomasjudge 4y ago
  Probably not so much anymore..
abvdj2 4y ago
That is not true, some parts might be clunky because that works, but there's also many parts that are clunky simply because it's hard to make a change without breaking anything. But amazon doesn't care due to their strong position in the market and because AWS is their cash-cow anyways.
robertlagrant 4y ago
It's ugly and clunky because a) Jeff used to guard it fiercely, b) because a/b testing is not guaranteed to get the best results, and c) you might just be on the "ugly" a/b test.
okyanusoz 4y ago
They could make the UI better if they wanted to, but they don't, because of reliability. For most enterprises, if it works, don't touch it.
the_cat_kittles 4y ago
its not what works, its whats good enough, or not bad enough to cause an obvious problem. well maybe thats what you mean by "works" i dunno
hk__2 4y ago
> Amazon.com is likely the most a/b tested piece of software on the planet. It is ugly and clunky because that's what _works_ - same with Alibaba and Yahoo JP. This was on the HN frontpage yesterday: "Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32651763 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.
franczesko 4y ago
"It is ugly and clunky because that's what _works_" 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.
- lupire 4y ago
  It's been ugly forever, and there have been several wholesale rewrites (C++ -> Perl -> Java, and JavaScript and whatever is in native apps)
avgDev 4y ago
Amazon ios app is pretty trash. I keep getting blank white screens, it has been this way for months. https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/tto68z/anyone_else_getting_a_blank_white_screen_on_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/tto68z/anyone_else_get...

kayson 4y ago

A lot (most?) of that is contractor based now, though. At least the last mile. And from the sounds of it, most of the contractors aren't huge fans of Amazon anyways. Seems like it would not be insurmountable to leverage that market for similar delivery times.

xwdv 4y ago
Most contractors also don’t care.

marban 4y ago

18 hours — Or ~ 4 hours if you're in Japan.

presentation 4y ago
It’s sweet, definitely helps that most people live near one of a handful of cities.

betwixthewires 4y ago

You're right, amazon is a logistics company first and foremost. But if you can replace the website with something like this and then let all the other logistics providers (ups, USPS, FedEx, dhl unfortunately) handle the logistics you can re-enable competition in this space.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

18 hours is a pretty stupid selling point IMO. You either need something immediately or you can wait. Rarely do I need anything 18 hours from now. 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.

rocket_surgeron 4y ago
18 hours is overnight. 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.
- bamboozled 4y ago
  - thiht 4y ago
    If he’s the one who gets pizzas delivered at the party, then yeah!
- ryanisnan 4y ago
  You have an interesting (and I find pitiable) perspective here. I live in a small town, and brick and mortar stores are how many folks survive here. 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?

the_cat_kittles 4y ago

getting stuff that fast is very stupid 98% of the time. people may like it and want it and sing its praises, but its mostly stupid. and i think stupid things generally tend to die out. that is all to say that maybe that edge that amazon has is not that important.

desiarnezjr 4y ago
It's not stupid. 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.
- hk__2 4y ago
  > 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. 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.
  - desiarnezjr 4y ago
    Agreed. Every logistics partner I ever dealt with was another layer that you did not have full control of, and each had their problems. 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.

XCSme 4y ago

https://bol.com https://bol.com in the Netherlands has delivery within a few hours (by bicycle) for some cities and select products. I got in this way an inflatable mattress (old one was punctured, so I needed one by the evening for my guests) and a few other electronic devices or household items.

graderjs 4y ago
Well the mattress would have to be inflatable to be delivered by bicycle
- XCSme 4y ago
  The bikes are stronk here [0]! [0]: https://rollingspoke.com/how-to-move-things-on-a-bike/ https://rollingspoke.com/how-to-move-things-on-a-bike/
- TotempaaltJ 4y ago
  Delivery is done with cargo bikes
kristov 4y ago
Bol.com gives me hope that Amazon competitors can survive by excelling in their local market.

hk__2 4y ago

I’m pretty happy to live in world where it’s difficult to build a business where you move trucks around cities to deliver a single tube of toothpaste to someone who ordered it the day before. Yes, it’s hard to do this as fast as Amazon does. But should we really go that way, anyway?

rocket_surgeron 4y ago
>But should we really go that way, anyway? 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.
- hk__2 4y ago
  > 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. 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).
- naasking 4y ago
  > It is more efficient from an energy, carbon, land usage, and labor perspective 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.

UncleEntity 4y ago

> Their fleet of trucks and aircraft is not. 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…