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> E-commerce has been optimized to the last decimal point for the last 30 years Sort of, but there's a ton of middlemen between "resources in the ground" and "
by xnx 7mo ago
> E-commerce has been optimized to the last decimal point for the last 30 years
Sort of, but there's a ton of middlemen between "resources in the ground" and "product in my hand". For example, how much utility is there in a "store" to thee consumer at this point? Let me buy from the manufacturer.
- sethhochberg 7mo agoManufacturers themselves generally don't want to sell directly to consumers: consumers are fickle and need support and have questions and sometimes want refunds or returns and if you sell directly to them, you need to have the staff and policies to deal with all of that. They're also located all over the world, and you might not want to deal with figuring out taxes and duties etc for shipping your product around and figuring out your warranty obligations everywhere you want to sell. Much easier if you can sell wholesale (sometimes via distributors) to a retailer or network of retailers, and the retailer is responsible for owning the customer relationship, dealing with their part of import/export, local regulations, etc. Retailers are businesses who will buy hundreds of your product at a time, can accept it as palletized freight, and pay you via bank EFTs instead of credit cards. There are notable exceptions to this model like Amazon's FBA system, but they're the outliers. I'm sure we can all point to inefficiencies in legacy product distribution networks but they solve some real problems.
- xnx 7mo agoDefinitely historically true, but I think the equation might be changing if I have an AI as a concierge shopper to do the grunt-work of browsing through a bunch of stores to extract useful product info and prices.