7 ms·

Amazon vs. Jet.com

98 points by magda_wang 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
forgotten 12y ago
Lore and Baharara are quite a team. When they were Diapers.com they went down kicking and biting against Amazon. I hope a book gets written about these guys, they are incredibly inspiring.
latkin 12y ago
Also notable is that Jet.com is using F# as the core language for their backend
- melling 12y ago
  It'd be great if they could blog about how F# performs and the benefits of using it. e.g. Fewer bugs, less code... How are things working in practice.
  - jamesn 12y ago
    Hey, I'm Jet's VP Engineering. We'll definitely be blogging about F# and some of the other tech behind Jet in the very near future!
    - NicoJuicy 12y ago
      I'm also very interested in the F# side of things, i haven't seen much articles blog posts about it.
kin 12y ago
At first it sounded like a better version of online Costco, which sounds awesome since Costco's selection is limited. But after reading how it really works I'm not so sure this will be that competitive vs. Amazon. There's a dependency on other merchants it sounds like?
- dsugarman 12y ago
  over 40% of Amazon sales are from their 3rd party marketplace which relies on third party merchants. If those merchants were allowed to sell without paying Amazon 15% commissions and without competing directly with Amazon's first party sales, you would imagine they could become even more competitive on price. there is no reason Jet will not be consistently lower than Amazon on price especially since they take on no infrastructure costs.
  - kin 12y ago
    I see. As a prime member my perspective only shows me how I use Amazon. I always use the Prime filter and try to buy things that are Shipped from and Sold from Amazon. For 3rd party merchants than this definitely sounds impactful. I wonder if there's any room for Jet to satisfy those who seek impulse buys, convenience, and speed.
    - jplahn 12y ago
      From the article, it seems like you still can, you'll just pay a higher price. If you want next day shipping on one item, you can do that; you just won't reap the benefits of their bundling idea.
alacritythief 12y ago
I found out you can get a free 6-month membership if you sign up to their site here: https://jet.com/#/ji/cjswd https://jet.com/#/ji/cjswd
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
freshhawk 12y ago
Once I sign up, some of the resources return 403 (IP is blocked by geoblocker ...). Went through a US proxy and can see what it's supposed to look like. The funny part is that first message that is supposed to say "Thanks! You're Jet Insider No. XXX,XXXX Share to move up the ranks" instead says: Thanks! You're Jet Insider No." I could not figure out what the hell that was supposed to mean. I guess this is just some launch last minute scrambling or something? Might not have been the best choice, anyone outside the US or wherever is being blocked has the first impression "Ah, they are going to take on Amazon and can't get a signup flow to work ... right".
- rada 12y ago
  The whole sentence reads You're Jet Insider No. 100,000 (or whatever your number is). The number probably loads from a separate service, there is a noticeable delay before it renders.
- oh_sigh 12y ago
  There is a number that comes after "No." which shows your spot in line. It took a few seconds after the page was rendered to show up. Also, that entire circle is in flash. That may explain why you had that kind of experience
  - jamesn 12y ago
    There's no flash on there except for some thing for copying the referral URI to the clipboard.
- libraryatnight 12y ago
  There was a delay before it served me my number, so I saw the same for a bit. I was rather confused myself.
rbcgerard 12y ago
slightly off topic, but what still amazes me is the variability in price over time on amazon... www.camelcamelcamel.com is mind blowing
- rtkwe 12y ago
  There's quite a bit of algorithmic pricing going on @ Amazon by all parties. Sometimes it leads to hilarious results. http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358 http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358
jbob2000 12y ago
They'll still lose. Amazon has Prime. They have the fastest shipping in the world. Fuck, they practically invented Just-In-Time warehouses. Amazon is diverse too; they have one of the largest clouds in the world. People know about Amazon. Amazon has tons of reviews on products too, so I know if a product is shitty or not. I order online like 3 or 4 times a year, I'm not going to pay $50 to shave a few percentage points off my total bill.
- joelthelion 12y ago
  I hope some other people who understand the value of competition will be more willing than you to give the new entrant a chance...
- MediaSquirrel 12y ago
  Do you have kids? Are you a middle-class homeowner? Because I think that's where the real money is and who these guys are really targeting. Costco launched in 1980, 30+ years after Wal Mart, and won by offering less selection and lower prices. I believe there's a real opportunity here.
  - tokenadult 12y ago
    You wrote: Do you have kids? Are you a middle-class homeowner? Because I think that's where the real money is and who these guys are really targeting. Costco did not launch thirty-plus years after WalMart. "THE HISTORY OF COSTCO "The company's first location, opened in 1976 under the Price Club name, was in a converted airplane hangar on Morena Boulevard in San Diego. Originally serving only small businesses, the company found it could achieve far greater buying clout by also serving a selected audience of non-business members. With that change, the growth of the warehouse club industry was off and running. In 1983, the first Costco warehouse location was opened in Seattle. Costco became the first company ever to grow from zero to $3 billion in sales in less than six years. When Costco and Price Club merged in 1993, the combined company, operating under the name PriceCostco, had 206 locations generating $16 billion in annual sales." http://www.costco.com/about.html http://www.costco.com/about.html "1962 "On July 2, 1962, Sam Walton opened the first Walmart store in Rogers, Ark." http://corporate.walmart.com/our-story/history/history-timeline http://corporate.walmart.com/our-story/history/history-timel... I have four children (three still living at home in my care, one grown up) and am solidly part of the United States middle-income category. We don't own a house however, but rent a townhouse. I have lived longer at this address than at any other I have lived at in my whole lifetime. I am a member of Amazon Prime, of Costco, and of Sam's Club. I buy different things at different stores. (I buy a lot more at Sam's Club than at Costco mostly because our local Sam's Club is much more on my way to and from other destinations than the local Costco is.) I don't see anything about the new Jet business venture that appeals to me, but I'll listen to my Facebook friends, other middle-aged parents like me, and see what they think about it. I often talk about deals I've found on Amazon to my friends on Facebook. I hardly ever talk up Costco or Sam's Club.
umsm 12y ago
The signup process reminds me of a ponzi-style scheme. After entering your email, you can "unlock" features or free service by referring people.
- efuquen 12y ago
  Other than having more tiers how is this any different then sign up incentives any number of other sites offer? When Uber gives you free rides for signing up other users is that a ponzi-style scheme as well?
gsands 12y ago
They lose right off for me because the back button doesn't work on jet.com to even exit back to the previous site you were on.
chrischen 12y ago
How is a bunch of disparate geographically disjointed retailers going to out-price one massive local Amazon warehouse doing a large volume of local deliveries? Plus I'm already paying prime, which is > $50 membership fee Jet is charging.
shittyanalogy 12y ago
Jet sounds pretty disingenuous to me. "We're basically not making a dime on any of the transactions." - If that's how you really feel then take the word basically out. You are making money off transactions but you would very much like to give the impression you aren't. Their example of "How Jet Works" involves supposedly wholesale prices that somehow get magically discounted and a shipping arrangement that somehow magically works that, if you pay with a debit card, saves you $6 off your contrived amazon order... Then it goes into a story about the guy who's starting jet and how he is and always has been a money hungry, cut-throat business man looking to make millions and then sell. Nothing about his "bio" sounds very consumer focused. Exerpt from the site: "Refer friends to boost your Insider rank. The more friends you refer, the more perks you unlock." Yeah, no thanks. Costco is consumer focused, amazon is consumer focused, this is money focused and the businessweek piece is a complete puff job.
- xur17 12y ago
  I think the point is that they want to make all of their money off the $50 yearly charge.
ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
Saying that Amazon is an e-commerce provider is like saying Microsoft is a hardware company because it sells (good) keyboards. Amazon is positioned to become the biggest distributor of computing power to leverage you to sell a good that Amazon's army of distribution centers and local courier agreements can get to you in as little as a few hours. Yet-Another-Hyperbole-Filled-Buying-Club is not something I believe Bezos would be scared of. If anyone should be scared, it should be UPS, FedEx, and the USPS. Amazon is much more likely to be coming for them.
thethrows 12y ago
I went to the website. Signed up for the insider thing. It said "Share <link> with your friends to be top 100,000 to get access". BYE! Really? Their strategy to starting a business is making a pyramid scheme?
- sp332 12y ago
  Sign up for Jet Insider: Earn a free 6-month membership Be in our Top 100,000: Earn early access to our site Be in our Top 10,000: Earn a free 1-year membership Be in our Top 1,000: Earn a free 5-year membership Be in our Top 100: Earn a free lifetime membership Be in our Top 10: Earn 10,000 shares of Jet stock Be the No. 1 Insider: Earn 100,000 shares of Jet stock
- perishabledave 12y ago
  Isn't this just the same as, "share with your friends to get a better place in our waiting list" that others have employed. I remember Robinhood doing this and wondered if it really moved my place or was simply a growth hack lie.
swingbridge 12y ago
Amazon will kick their ass on logistics. Amazon already does most of the bundling, dynamic pricing, discounts for slower shipping and other tricks that jet.com mentions. Amazon will also kick their ass in pricing (that's what they did to diapers.com). They only real viable option is to have products that Amazon doesn't have, but citing Sears as a key early partner doesn't really bode much hope in that dept. They'll also need to burn insane amounts of cash on marketing and customer acquisition to get people to pay for subscriptions (which they say is their only source of revenue). This at a time when VCs appetite for startups burning cash like crazy is starting to come back to reality... If there are investors are willing to set piles of cash on fire poke Amazon in the side then I'm happy to watch such a blood sport, but the business plan and concept at this point seems rather weak.
ChrisNorstrom 12y ago
Finally! If Jet.com doesn't charge amazon style fees this means I can mark my products down by 25-50% ! and still make the same profit as I do on Amazon. Amazon fees are massive even without the penny pricing snag. Here's mine: http://i3.minus.com/i0tJucuLy5zPB.jpg http://i3.minus.com/i0tJucuLy5zPB.jpg When Jet opens up to small sellers I'll be the first in line. Hopefully consumers will notice the big price differences and buy a membership.
- pavel 12y ago
  You can! https://partner.jet.com/ https://partner.jet.com/
libraryatnight 12y ago
This sounds gimmicky, but I fed them an e-mail address. I found the weirdo smiley face logo to be off-putting. It's jarring somehow.
christiangenco 12y ago
These "share your link to move up in line" things are a fun mechanic, and seem to work well for virality, but the way they're currently being implemented is embarrassingly easy to gamify. In a line of curl and about ten minutes, I went from ~130,000 to #2 (proof: https://twitter.com/cgenco/status/553651179779940352 https://twitter.com/cgenco/status/553651179779940352). Anyone with an elementary knowledge of the Chrome web inspector and bash could do the same. This could be halfway patched by only counting verified accounts. ie: send a verification email to everyone who signs up, and only count them if they click the link. It could still be "hacked," but it would be more tedious and require sufficiently more resources. If you're thinking about doing something like this for your startup launch, please at least verify email addresses. A full solution would have to depend on something that could verify that an account has one-and-only-one real person behind it. Perhaps linking a credit card, making a purchase, or shipping to a unique address. I'm really interested in jet as a service, and very excited for the launch, but I'd be incredibly disappointed if my ~5k fake entries aren't discovered before the end of this competition. As an aside: this website has really confusing UX: 1. Why does practically everything on the page flip over if I hover for ~1000ms? Things should either flip over immediately on mouse hover (which still isn't fantastic - what do you do on mobile?), or after a button press. 2. "Click to copy your unique link" doesn't work (Retina MBP OS X 10.10 Chrome 39.0.2171.95 64-bit), and only shows a pointer cursor the first time you hover over it. 3. "Click here to check your Jet Insider rank" in the welcome email doesn't have an href attribute, so the link doesn't work.
- asusmenu 12y ago
  like you say, email verification can be hacked just as easily. best answer is to use some authenticated id like facebook/twitter. regardless, why would someone bother....their terms have all sorts of stuff about securits laws, signing consulting agreements with jet etc...they must be auditing anyone in the running for stock. agree about the ui thought....flash? 1990's much?
  - christiangenco 12y ago
    I'd bet that's only there to verify granting of stock options: manually going through the top ten isn't that labor intensive. There's still an advantage to getting free service for a year. Re flash: unfortunately that's the state of the art for cross platform copying to the clipboard. Their implementation just seems broken.

98 points by magda_wang 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Lore and Baharara are quite a team. When they were Diapers.com they went down kicking and biting against Amazon. I hope a book gets written about these guys, they are incredibly inspiring.

latkin 12y ago

Also notable is that Jet.com is using F# as the core language for their backend

melling 12y ago
It'd be great if they could blog about how F# performs and the benefits of using it. e.g. Fewer bugs, less code... How are things working in practice.
- jamesn 12y ago
  Hey, I'm Jet's VP Engineering. We'll definitely be blogging about F# and some of the other tech behind Jet in the very near future!
  - NicoJuicy 12y ago
    I'm also very interested in the F# side of things, i haven't seen much articles blog posts about it.

kin 12y ago

At first it sounded like a better version of online Costco, which sounds awesome since Costco's selection is limited. But after reading how it really works I'm not so sure this will be that competitive vs. Amazon. There's a dependency on other merchants it sounds like?

dsugarman 12y ago
over 40% of Amazon sales are from their 3rd party marketplace which relies on third party merchants. If those merchants were allowed to sell without paying Amazon 15% commissions and without competing directly with Amazon's first party sales, you would imagine they could become even more competitive on price. there is no reason Jet will not be consistently lower than Amazon on price especially since they take on no infrastructure costs.
- kin 12y ago
  I see. As a prime member my perspective only shows me how I use Amazon. I always use the Prime filter and try to buy things that are Shipped from and Sold from Amazon. For 3rd party merchants than this definitely sounds impactful. I wonder if there's any room for Jet to satisfy those who seek impulse buys, convenience, and speed.
  - jplahn 12y ago
    From the article, it seems like you still can, you'll just pay a higher price. If you want next day shipping on one item, you can do that; you just won't reap the benefits of their bundling idea.

alacritythief 12y ago

I found out you can get a free 6-month membership if you sign up to their site here: https://jet.com/#/ji/cjswd https://jet.com/#/ji/cjswd

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

freshhawk 12y ago

Once I sign up, some of the resources return 403 (IP is blocked by geoblocker ...). Went through a US proxy and can see what it's supposed to look like. The funny part is that first message that is supposed to say "Thanks! You're Jet Insider No. XXX,XXXX Share to move up the ranks" instead says: Thanks! You're Jet Insider No." I could not figure out what the hell that was supposed to mean. I guess this is just some launch last minute scrambling or something? Might not have been the best choice, anyone outside the US or wherever is being blocked has the first impression "Ah, they are going to take on Amazon and can't get a signup flow to work ... right".

rada 12y ago
The whole sentence reads You're Jet Insider No. 100,000 (or whatever your number is). The number probably loads from a separate service, there is a noticeable delay before it renders.
oh_sigh 12y ago
There is a number that comes after "No." which shows your spot in line. It took a few seconds after the page was rendered to show up. Also, that entire circle is in flash. That may explain why you had that kind of experience
- jamesn 12y ago
  There's no flash on there except for some thing for copying the referral URI to the clipboard.
libraryatnight 12y ago
There was a delay before it served me my number, so I saw the same for a bit. I was rather confused myself.

rbcgerard 12y ago

slightly off topic, but what still amazes me is the variability in price over time on amazon... www.camelcamelcamel.com is mind blowing

rtkwe 12y ago
There's quite a bit of algorithmic pricing going on @ Amazon by all parties. Sometimes it leads to hilarious results. http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358 http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

jbob2000 12y ago

They'll still lose. Amazon has Prime. They have the fastest shipping in the world. Fuck, they practically invented Just-In-Time warehouses. Amazon is diverse too; they have one of the largest clouds in the world. People know about Amazon. Amazon has tons of reviews on products too, so I know if a product is shitty or not. I order online like 3 or 4 times a year, I'm not going to pay $50 to shave a few percentage points off my total bill.

joelthelion 12y ago
I hope some other people who understand the value of competition will be more willing than you to give the new entrant a chance...
MediaSquirrel 12y ago
Do you have kids? Are you a middle-class homeowner? Because I think that's where the real money is and who these guys are really targeting. Costco launched in 1980, 30+ years after Wal Mart, and won by offering less selection and lower prices. I believe there's a real opportunity here.
- tokenadult 12y ago
  You wrote: Do you have kids? Are you a middle-class homeowner? Because I think that's where the real money is and who these guys are really targeting. Costco did not launch thirty-plus years after WalMart. "THE HISTORY OF COSTCO "The company's first location, opened in 1976 under the Price Club name, was in a converted airplane hangar on Morena Boulevard in San Diego. Originally serving only small businesses, the company found it could achieve far greater buying clout by also serving a selected audience of non-business members. With that change, the growth of the warehouse club industry was off and running. In 1983, the first Costco warehouse location was opened in Seattle. Costco became the first company ever to grow from zero to $3 billion in sales in less than six years. When Costco and Price Club merged in 1993, the combined company, operating under the name PriceCostco, had 206 locations generating $16 billion in annual sales." http://www.costco.com/about.html http://www.costco.com/about.html "1962 "On July 2, 1962, Sam Walton opened the first Walmart store in Rogers, Ark." http://corporate.walmart.com/our-story/history/history-timeline http://corporate.walmart.com/our-story/history/history-timel... I have four children (three still living at home in my care, one grown up) and am solidly part of the United States middle-income category. We don't own a house however, but rent a townhouse. I have lived longer at this address than at any other I have lived at in my whole lifetime. I am a member of Amazon Prime, of Costco, and of Sam's Club. I buy different things at different stores. (I buy a lot more at Sam's Club than at Costco mostly because our local Sam's Club is much more on my way to and from other destinations than the local Costco is.) I don't see anything about the new Jet business venture that appeals to me, but I'll listen to my Facebook friends, other middle-aged parents like me, and see what they think about it. I often talk about deals I've found on Amazon to my friends on Facebook. I hardly ever talk up Costco or Sam's Club.

umsm 12y ago

The signup process reminds me of a ponzi-style scheme. After entering your email, you can "unlock" features or free service by referring people.

efuquen 12y ago
Other than having more tiers how is this any different then sign up incentives any number of other sites offer? When Uber gives you free rides for signing up other users is that a ponzi-style scheme as well?

gsands 12y ago

They lose right off for me because the back button doesn't work on jet.com to even exit back to the previous site you were on.

chrischen 12y ago

How is a bunch of disparate geographically disjointed retailers going to out-price one massive local Amazon warehouse doing a large volume of local deliveries? Plus I'm already paying prime, which is > $50 membership fee Jet is charging.

shittyanalogy 12y ago

Jet sounds pretty disingenuous to me. "We're basically not making a dime on any of the transactions." - If that's how you really feel then take the word basically out. You are making money off transactions but you would very much like to give the impression you aren't. Their example of "How Jet Works" involves supposedly wholesale prices that somehow get magically discounted and a shipping arrangement that somehow magically works that, if you pay with a debit card, saves you $6 off your contrived amazon order... Then it goes into a story about the guy who's starting jet and how he is and always has been a money hungry, cut-throat business man looking to make millions and then sell. Nothing about his "bio" sounds very consumer focused. Exerpt from the site: "Refer friends to boost your Insider rank. The more friends you refer, the more perks you unlock." Yeah, no thanks. Costco is consumer focused, amazon is consumer focused, this is money focused and the businessweek piece is a complete puff job.

xur17 12y ago
I think the point is that they want to make all of their money off the $50 yearly charge.

ChikkaChiChi 12y ago

Saying that Amazon is an e-commerce provider is like saying Microsoft is a hardware company because it sells (good) keyboards. Amazon is positioned to become the biggest distributor of computing power to leverage you to sell a good that Amazon's army of distribution centers and local courier agreements can get to you in as little as a few hours. Yet-Another-Hyperbole-Filled-Buying-Club is not something I believe Bezos would be scared of. If anyone should be scared, it should be UPS, FedEx, and the USPS. Amazon is much more likely to be coming for them.

thethrows 12y ago

I went to the website. Signed up for the insider thing. It said "Share <link> with your friends to be top 100,000 to get access". BYE! Really? Their strategy to starting a business is making a pyramid scheme?

sp332 12y ago
Sign up for Jet Insider: Earn a free 6-month membership Be in our Top 100,000: Earn early access to our site Be in our Top 10,000: Earn a free 1-year membership Be in our Top 1,000: Earn a free 5-year membership Be in our Top 100: Earn a free lifetime membership Be in our Top 10: Earn 10,000 shares of Jet stock Be the No. 1 Insider: Earn 100,000 shares of Jet stock
perishabledave 12y ago
Isn't this just the same as, "share with your friends to get a better place in our waiting list" that others have employed. I remember Robinhood doing this and wondered if it really moved my place or was simply a growth hack lie.

swingbridge 12y ago

Amazon will kick their ass on logistics. Amazon already does most of the bundling, dynamic pricing, discounts for slower shipping and other tricks that jet.com mentions. Amazon will also kick their ass in pricing (that's what they did to diapers.com). They only real viable option is to have products that Amazon doesn't have, but citing Sears as a key early partner doesn't really bode much hope in that dept. They'll also need to burn insane amounts of cash on marketing and customer acquisition to get people to pay for subscriptions (which they say is their only source of revenue). This at a time when VCs appetite for startups burning cash like crazy is starting to come back to reality... If there are investors are willing to set piles of cash on fire poke Amazon in the side then I'm happy to watch such a blood sport, but the business plan and concept at this point seems rather weak.

ChrisNorstrom 12y ago

Finally! If Jet.com doesn't charge amazon style fees this means I can mark my products down by 25-50% ! and still make the same profit as I do on Amazon. Amazon fees are massive even without the penny pricing snag. Here's mine: http://i3.minus.com/i0tJucuLy5zPB.jpg http://i3.minus.com/i0tJucuLy5zPB.jpg When Jet opens up to small sellers I'll be the first in line. Hopefully consumers will notice the big price differences and buy a membership.

pavel 12y ago
You can! https://partner.jet.com/ https://partner.jet.com/

libraryatnight 12y ago

This sounds gimmicky, but I fed them an e-mail address. I found the weirdo smiley face logo to be off-putting. It's jarring somehow.

christiangenco 12y ago

These "share your link to move up in line" things are a fun mechanic, and seem to work well for virality, but the way they're currently being implemented is embarrassingly easy to gamify. In a line of curl and about ten minutes, I went from ~130,000 to #2 (proof: https://twitter.com/cgenco/status/553651179779940352 https://twitter.com/cgenco/status/553651179779940352). Anyone with an elementary knowledge of the Chrome web inspector and bash could do the same. This could be halfway patched by only counting verified accounts. ie: send a verification email to everyone who signs up, and only count them if they click the link. It could still be "hacked," but it would be more tedious and require sufficiently more resources. If you're thinking about doing something like this for your startup launch, please at least verify email addresses. A full solution would have to depend on something that could verify that an account has one-and-only-one real person behind it. Perhaps linking a credit card, making a purchase, or shipping to a unique address. I'm really interested in jet as a service, and very excited for the launch, but I'd be incredibly disappointed if my ~5k fake entries aren't discovered before the end of this competition. As an aside: this website has really confusing UX: 1. Why does practically everything on the page flip over if I hover for ~1000ms? Things should either flip over immediately on mouse hover (which still isn't fantastic - what do you do on mobile?), or after a button press. 2. "Click to copy your unique link" doesn't work (Retina MBP OS X 10.10 Chrome 39.0.2171.95 64-bit), and only shows a pointer cursor the first time you hover over it. 3. "Click here to check your Jet Insider rank" in the welcome email doesn't have an href attribute, so the link doesn't work.

asusmenu 12y ago
like you say, email verification can be hacked just as easily. best answer is to use some authenticated id like facebook/twitter. regardless, why would someone bother....their terms have all sorts of stuff about securits laws, signing consulting agreements with jet etc...they must be auditing anyone in the running for stock. agree about the ui thought....flash? 1990's much?
- christiangenco 12y ago
  I'd bet that's only there to verify granting of stock options: manually going through the top ten isn't that labor intensive. There's still an advantage to getting free service for a year. Re flash: unfortunately that's the state of the art for cross platform copying to the clipboard. Their implementation just seems broken.