6 ms·

I think Amazon should split it's company between AWS and the Amazon store. AWS is great and is a very important part of the internet these days, it would be a

by dm2 12y ago

I think Amazon should split it's company between AWS and the Amazon store. AWS is great and is a very important part of the internet these days, it would be a shame to have their quality decrease if the Amazon store ever starts losing money. The Amazon store has too many flaws. There is a huge opportunity for a competitor to come in. It would be easy for "Walmart Online" to be a significant competitor to Amazon in a very short time, I don't think they're trying too hard for some reason though (fear of cannibalism of current walmart customers maybe). I would pay 10 cent per item to be able to pick out items online and have them boxed at the customer service desk at Walmart, that sounds reasonable and profitable for both parties, doesn't it? 1+ years ago I was a huge Amazon.com supporter, these days I will avoid them if possible. Their prices and shipping changed, plus they won't allow people to always filter out all of the "not sold or shipped by Amazon" products which I absolutely do not want to have constantly clutter my search results. I've ordered several products from Amazon which they did not have in stock (but did not say they didn't), this resulted in long shipping times and in a few cases they automatically ordered the "not sold by Amazon" product and had it shipped to me, that product was very near expired (as is the case with many of them) and I have no clue where it came from, for all I know they found found it in a hot warehouse that was sold. Then there are the "not sold by Amazon" sellers who charge huge Amounts for products just hoping that people accidentally order them. The reviews will be from people who ordered the Amazon.com version and automatically promote the seller just trying to trick people. Huge flaws in your system Amazon, get it fixed please. Don't even get me started on the "we've passed your package off to your local carrier, there's no telling when it'll get delivered and you'll probably have to drive somewhere to pick it up", that they refuse to fix. I canceled my Prime account out of protest and now they delay shipping my product for at least 7 days then they 2 day or overnight ship my items, wtf Amazon.

k__ 12y ago
I'm with you with the splitting, I don't think these to fields belong together and they can work much more independently with a split. But they probably will only split if one half goes down :\ But I like the Amazon store quite much, don't know any other company that offers a similar service (in Europe/Germany).
nkozyra 12y ago
Should there ever appear a seemingly real fault line in Amazon's long game, I think at some point they'd be forced to sell the infrastructure / hosting platform to keep investors happy.
mattmcknight 12y ago
I disagree with most of your points, but agree somewhat with the non-sold by Amazon nonsense, and the generally poor quality of 3rd party sellers. You have to be very watchful with this. Not using Prime isolates you from this pretty well, as you can easily filter by items available under Prime shipping terms, and 3rd party sellers that put their stuff in the Amazon warehouses to make them Prime eligible avoid the slow shipping problems and are generally not an issue. However, the third party sellers on there are giving them a bad reputation, because people are not distinguishing them from Amazon proper. I seriously doubt there is any personal retaliation going on. I don't think they should split the business, as one of the things that makes AWS good is that it has to keep Amazon running. The initial concept of AWS as something that Amazon can use to meet demand peaks, while selling excess capacity makes a lot of sense.
- Turing_Machine 12y ago
  In my (limited) experience, Amazon boots third-party sellers off pretty fast if they get complaints.
- russell 12y ago
  I have had excellent experience with Amazon. In reading the reviews of a couple of high end monitors that I am considering, I see that Amazon will give a refund even when the seller will not. I imagine Amazon hammers them back into line. My only complaint is when they ship by FedEx. In my town FedEx hands packages off to the Post Office, where two day delivery becomes three or four.
- justincormack 12y ago
  AWS was never really something to sell excess capacity, thats a myth. And anyway now, it is vastly bigger than Amazon's compute needs. The stockmarket would like it to be sold off, but not sure it will be.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    It would be terrifying if AWS was just Amazon's excess capacity, as then one might want to ask what would happen when Amazon suddenly needed the capacity... Apart from for spot instances, a lot of people have never seemed to get that Amazon needs to over-provision massively because of how the product works, and that their customers still need to cover the cost of all that over capacity.
cookiecaper 12y ago
If anything, AWS is overrated. It already has some decent competitors and more will grow up soon, though they're massively underutilized. The idea that Amazon itself is critical to internet infrastructure is very disturbing, yet in many cases, it's true these days. We really need to get other cloud providers in the mix. Amazon as a retail store has been consistently great for me in all major aspects. Any issues I've had with orders have been promptly resolved and Amazon has gone to bat for me several times. I agree that Wal-mart or another major department store could give Amazon a run for its money if they played their cards right, but like you, I don't think they're in that headspace.
- dm2 12y ago
  SES is really the only AWS service that has not been done by anyone else as far as I know. Some of the SES features (spam reporting for instance) requires cooperation between email service providers and Amazon, something that many other companies would have difficulty arranging.
  - rgbrenner 12y ago
    SES is really the only AWS service that has not been done by anyone else as far as I know. sendgrid is like 5 years old: http://sendgrid.com/ http://sendgrid.com/ mailchimp's version: http://mandrill.com/ http://mandrill.com/ rackspace: http://www.mailgun.com/ http://www.mailgun.com/ also: https://postmarkapp.com/ https://postmarkapp.com/
    - dm2 12y ago
      I had never explored Mandrill, thanks. SES is still the cheapest (especially when scaling up) and extremely fast from my experience with it. Here is a good article I found about SES and competitors such as Mandrill: http://www.ventureharbour.com/transactional-email-service-best-mandrill-vs-sendgrid-vs-mailjet/ http://www.ventureharbour.com/transactional-email-service-be...
      - wavefunction 12y ago
cwyers 12y ago
AWS is far more vulnerable to online competition right now than Amazon the retailer is. There's several companies that have the available infrastructure to compete with Amazon in the cloud... Google and Microsoft are already out there, and Amazon is finding themselves cutting prices to compete. Nobody really has Amazon's physical goods delivery infrastructure. You can look at Wal-Mart and Target, but they have infrastructure designed to solve a very different problem, getting large amounts of the same goods to certain physical stores. They rely on semi-truck drivers to deliver palettes of goods to stores. What they don't have, for example, is Amazon's very close relationships to UPS and USPS. Could they develop it? Maybe. At great expense. Would they be able to peel off more existing Amazon customers than they'd be cannibalizing their own current sales? Who knows.
- dm2 12y ago
  I was not suggesting that Walmart compete in home delivery, I was thinking that they should ship things to their store (which as you mentioned they already have that system in place) where it would be boxed up and ready for pickup by customers (because everyone has a walmart fairly close to them, and that's a huge advantage). The cost to them would be minimal and the customers they would gain that have been using online shopping with shipping to their homes could be significant. Even for a small surcharge it would be worth it to me.
  - cwyers 12y ago
    They already offer that. http://www.walmart.com/cp/Site-to-Store/538452 http://www.walmart.com/cp/Site-to-Store/538452
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - eclipxe 12y ago
    >The cost to them would be minimal and the customers they would gain that have been using online shopping with shipping to their homes could be significant. This does not compute. They already have ship-to-store, and have had for quite a while. It hasn't made a significant impact on their online power. Customers don't want to drive to a Walmart to pickup their online order. That's an extra step for no reason.
eclipxe 12y ago
This makes no sense. Walmart Online to dominate Amazon? Walmart has been trying hard in the online space for ages! What indicates they aren't trying hard? I'm sure they're trying as hard as possible. A major problem for Walmart is engineering talent. Top engineers don't want to work for Walmart. The brand has negative value for an engineer. Innovation and the ability to leap frog will be hindered by this brand problem. And as far as "pick out items online and have them boxed at the customer service desk". Yes, it does sound reasonable - in fact they've been doing this almost since day one (Site-to-store). It's obvious and it doesn't solve any real problem. I don't want to have to get in my car, deal with traffic, park in a huge parking lot, wade through crowds and Walmart, wait for a disinterested customer service rep to find my online order (let's hope they didn't forget anything), ring me up, then haul everything back to my car, drive home, etc. I want to click a button for what I want, then open my door that same day and see my items sitting there waiting for me. That is human progress and innovation that Walmart isn't going to be able to match.
- dm2 12y ago
  Site-to-Store actually isn't available for most items. http://www.walmart.com/search/search-ng.do?search_query=ensure http://www.walmart.com/search/search-ng.do?search_query=ensu... http://www.walmart.com/search/search-ng.do?search_query=centrum http://www.walmart.com/search/search-ng.do?search_query=cent... If it is then I can't figure out how to use it. Those were just the two items I would like to purchase and typed in first. Regarding the "click a button for what I want, then open my door that same day and see my items sitting there waiting for me", that's not true for many places. I live in a tech-focused capital city and shipping is at least 2 days for Prime but I've had it take much longer (yes, for items sold by Amazon). I regularly see Amazon do the "our shipping carrier handed your item to USPS and we are no longer responsible for how long it takes" routine and it is completely unacceptable. Once they get the site-to-store thing right (in it's current state you are correct, it has flaws) then they should offer some kind of large promotion to encourage people to register and use their service one time. Right now I'm hesitant to register and start shopping with Walmart, I don't have a logical reason for this though. Real innovation will be when I can order and pay online, then send out my autonomous vehicle to walmart, then one of their employees will put the items in my car and the car will drive home and text or email me when it arrives. That's probably 10 years away but it will happen.
paletoy 12y ago
The right way to implement "ship to store" is using something like "amazon locker". Assuming that's the correct route, amazon will win, because it can choose better locations than a walmart store . And in retail location is everything. But the fact that amazon has tried some lockers but it doesn't seem the common way to buy stuff, and there's no huge scaling effort from amazon, seems to indicate that people prefer to recieve packages at home. And bezos understands that in this game, if you want to make profits, you need for customers to love using your services.Having that ability at low enough costs could earn you a monopoly. And than might be the time to play with "amazon lockers" and other cost cutting measures.
- dm2 12y ago
  The Amazon Lockers seem to only benefit Amazon because the shipping is much cheaper for them. If they offered a discount or credit for using the lockers then it could potentially be a useful service. What is the benefit of using an Amazon Locker rather than shipping to your home? Maybe in neighborhoods that have a high stealing packages percentage. The term lockers also imply (incorrectly) that they are supposed to be purchased by people for packages to be shipped to (like a PO box), the name might be hurting their success. I can't find anywhere on any of the Amazon Locker pages where it lists a single benefit of using the lockers, http://www.amazon.com/b/?node=6442600011&ref=locker_fd_brws http://www.amazon.com/b/?node=6442600011&ref=locker_fd_brws
  - paletoy 12y ago
    I think that shipping fees for amazon are much lower than prices offered for people at say ups. Offering half of that, wouldn't be attractive and will probably hurt the amazon brand.
    - dm2 12y ago
      They already offer (or use to) a credit if you choose standard shipping while being a prime member. The Subscribe & Save does something similar.

by dm2 12y ago

k__ 12y ago

I'm with you with the splitting, I don't think these to fields belong together and they can work much more independently with a split. But they probably will only split if one half goes down :\ But I like the Amazon store quite much, don't know any other company that offers a similar service (in Europe/Germany).

nkozyra 12y ago

Should there ever appear a seemingly real fault line in Amazon's long game, I think at some point they'd be forced to sell the infrastructure / hosting platform to keep investors happy.

mattmcknight 12y ago

I disagree with most of your points, but agree somewhat with the non-sold by Amazon nonsense, and the generally poor quality of 3rd party sellers. You have to be very watchful with this. Not using Prime isolates you from this pretty well, as you can easily filter by items available under Prime shipping terms, and 3rd party sellers that put their stuff in the Amazon warehouses to make them Prime eligible avoid the slow shipping problems and are generally not an issue. However, the third party sellers on there are giving them a bad reputation, because people are not distinguishing them from Amazon proper. I seriously doubt there is any personal retaliation going on. I don't think they should split the business, as one of the things that makes AWS good is that it has to keep Amazon running. The initial concept of AWS as something that Amazon can use to meet demand peaks, while selling excess capacity makes a lot of sense.

Turing_Machine 12y ago
In my (limited) experience, Amazon boots third-party sellers off pretty fast if they get complaints.
russell 12y ago
I have had excellent experience with Amazon. In reading the reviews of a couple of high end monitors that I am considering, I see that Amazon will give a refund even when the seller will not. I imagine Amazon hammers them back into line. My only complaint is when they ship by FedEx. In my town FedEx hands packages off to the Post Office, where two day delivery becomes three or four.
justincormack 12y ago
AWS was never really something to sell excess capacity, thats a myth. And anyway now, it is vastly bigger than Amazon's compute needs. The stockmarket would like it to be sold off, but not sure it will be.
- vidarh 12y ago
  It would be terrifying if AWS was just Amazon's excess capacity, as then one might want to ask what would happen when Amazon suddenly needed the capacity... Apart from for spot instances, a lot of people have never seemed to get that Amazon needs to over-provision massively because of how the product works, and that their customers still need to cover the cost of all that over capacity.

cookiecaper 12y ago

If anything, AWS is overrated. It already has some decent competitors and more will grow up soon, though they're massively underutilized. The idea that Amazon itself is critical to internet infrastructure is very disturbing, yet in many cases, it's true these days. We really need to get other cloud providers in the mix. Amazon as a retail store has been consistently great for me in all major aspects. Any issues I've had with orders have been promptly resolved and Amazon has gone to bat for me several times. I agree that Wal-mart or another major department store could give Amazon a run for its money if they played their cards right, but like you, I don't think they're in that headspace.

dm2 12y ago
SES is really the only AWS service that has not been done by anyone else as far as I know. Some of the SES features (spam reporting for instance) requires cooperation between email service providers and Amazon, something that many other companies would have difficulty arranging.
- rgbrenner 12y ago
  SES is really the only AWS service that has not been done by anyone else as far as I know. sendgrid is like 5 years old: http://sendgrid.com/ http://sendgrid.com/ mailchimp's version: http://mandrill.com/ http://mandrill.com/ rackspace: http://www.mailgun.com/ http://www.mailgun.com/ also: https://postmarkapp.com/ https://postmarkapp.com/
  - dm2 12y ago
    I had never explored Mandrill, thanks. SES is still the cheapest (especially when scaling up) and extremely fast from my experience with it. Here is a good article I found about SES and competitors such as Mandrill: http://www.ventureharbour.com/transactional-email-service-best-mandrill-vs-sendgrid-vs-mailjet/ http://www.ventureharbour.com/transactional-email-service-be...
    - wavefunction 12y ago

cwyers 12y ago

AWS is far more vulnerable to online competition right now than Amazon the retailer is. There's several companies that have the available infrastructure to compete with Amazon in the cloud... Google and Microsoft are already out there, and Amazon is finding themselves cutting prices to compete. Nobody really has Amazon's physical goods delivery infrastructure. You can look at Wal-Mart and Target, but they have infrastructure designed to solve a very different problem, getting large amounts of the same goods to certain physical stores. They rely on semi-truck drivers to deliver palettes of goods to stores. What they don't have, for example, is Amazon's very close relationships to UPS and USPS. Could they develop it? Maybe. At great expense. Would they be able to peel off more existing Amazon customers than they'd be cannibalizing their own current sales? Who knows.

dm2 12y ago
I was not suggesting that Walmart compete in home delivery, I was thinking that they should ship things to their store (which as you mentioned they already have that system in place) where it would be boxed up and ready for pickup by customers (because everyone has a walmart fairly close to them, and that's a huge advantage). The cost to them would be minimal and the customers they would gain that have been using online shopping with shipping to their homes could be significant. Even for a small surcharge it would be worth it to me.
- cwyers 12y ago
  They already offer that. http://www.walmart.com/cp/Site-to-Store/538452 http://www.walmart.com/cp/Site-to-Store/538452
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- eclipxe 12y ago
  >The cost to them would be minimal and the customers they would gain that have been using online shopping with shipping to their homes could be significant. This does not compute. They already have ship-to-store, and have had for quite a while. It hasn't made a significant impact on their online power. Customers don't want to drive to a Walmart to pickup their online order. That's an extra step for no reason.

eclipxe 12y ago

This makes no sense. Walmart Online to dominate Amazon? Walmart has been trying hard in the online space for ages! What indicates they aren't trying hard? I'm sure they're trying as hard as possible. A major problem for Walmart is engineering talent. Top engineers don't want to work for Walmart. The brand has negative value for an engineer. Innovation and the ability to leap frog will be hindered by this brand problem. And as far as "pick out items online and have them boxed at the customer service desk". Yes, it does sound reasonable - in fact they've been doing this almost since day one (Site-to-store). It's obvious and it doesn't solve any real problem. I don't want to have to get in my car, deal with traffic, park in a huge parking lot, wade through crowds and Walmart, wait for a disinterested customer service rep to find my online order (let's hope they didn't forget anything), ring me up, then haul everything back to my car, drive home, etc. I want to click a button for what I want, then open my door that same day and see my items sitting there waiting for me. That is human progress and innovation that Walmart isn't going to be able to match.

dm2 12y ago
Site-to-Store actually isn't available for most items. http://www.walmart.com/search/search-ng.do?search_query=ensure http://www.walmart.com/search/search-ng.do?search_query=ensu... http://www.walmart.com/search/search-ng.do?search_query=centrum http://www.walmart.com/search/search-ng.do?search_query=cent... If it is then I can't figure out how to use it. Those were just the two items I would like to purchase and typed in first. Regarding the "click a button for what I want, then open my door that same day and see my items sitting there waiting for me", that's not true for many places. I live in a tech-focused capital city and shipping is at least 2 days for Prime but I've had it take much longer (yes, for items sold by Amazon). I regularly see Amazon do the "our shipping carrier handed your item to USPS and we are no longer responsible for how long it takes" routine and it is completely unacceptable. Once they get the site-to-store thing right (in it's current state you are correct, it has flaws) then they should offer some kind of large promotion to encourage people to register and use their service one time. Right now I'm hesitant to register and start shopping with Walmart, I don't have a logical reason for this though. Real innovation will be when I can order and pay online, then send out my autonomous vehicle to walmart, then one of their employees will put the items in my car and the car will drive home and text or email me when it arrives. That's probably 10 years away but it will happen.

paletoy 12y ago

The right way to implement "ship to store" is using something like "amazon locker". Assuming that's the correct route, amazon will win, because it can choose better locations than a walmart store . And in retail location is everything. But the fact that amazon has tried some lockers but it doesn't seem the common way to buy stuff, and there's no huge scaling effort from amazon, seems to indicate that people prefer to recieve packages at home. And bezos understands that in this game, if you want to make profits, you need for customers to love using your services.Having that ability at low enough costs could earn you a monopoly. And than might be the time to play with "amazon lockers" and other cost cutting measures.

dm2 12y ago
The Amazon Lockers seem to only benefit Amazon because the shipping is much cheaper for them. If they offered a discount or credit for using the lockers then it could potentially be a useful service. What is the benefit of using an Amazon Locker rather than shipping to your home? Maybe in neighborhoods that have a high stealing packages percentage. The term lockers also imply (incorrectly) that they are supposed to be purchased by people for packages to be shipped to (like a PO box), the name might be hurting their success. I can't find anywhere on any of the Amazon Locker pages where it lists a single benefit of using the lockers, http://www.amazon.com/b/?node=6442600011&ref=locker_fd_brws http://www.amazon.com/b/?node=6442600011&ref=locker_fd_brws
- paletoy 12y ago
  I think that shipping fees for amazon are much lower than prices offered for people at say ups. Offering half of that, wouldn't be attractive and will probably hurt the amazon brand.
  - dm2 12y ago
    They already offer (or use to) a credit if you choose standard shipping while being a prime member. The Subscribe & Save does something similar.