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Comment by zzleeper | Hacker News Reader

> Lore defended the company’s aggressive advertising spending, saying the market opportunity is too huge to ignore. The e-commerce market is about $300 billion in the U.S., but it still only accounts for somewhere around 10 percent of all retail transactions, depending upon how you measure it.

Isn't this the exact phrase from the Livingsocial article from a few days ago?

Sure, if you are rushing to a new market (Uber, Airbnb, Ebay) you might get network externalities from being first.. but this?

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Eh, for things like diapers where I am getting the same thing from them amazon, or elsewhere Jet does it cheaper and so they have been getting my $ the last few months. And the other day I ended up putting together a larger shopping cart of misc items and every single one was cheaper on jet than on amazon. I have noticed that in the last year I could find things just slightly cheaper elsewhere than Amazon, but when I factored in the convenience and shipping cost amazon usually won. So this cart full of stuff that was all cheaper than amazon was a bit surprising. For the pile of random stuff I seem to order every month or two I might just be looking to use Jet first in the future. They don't yet have the breadth of Amazon, but I was surprised at what they have which is what feels like a ton more than when I checked them out six months ago. For random disposable staples like diapers, batteries, super glue, pens, etc I don't have any real loyalty to any one retailer over another, but once I there I will probably keep re-ordering these for a while so as long as they are near the cheapest I'll stick around.

Oh and Jet's search works. I started writing up a comparison and grabbed quaker popped as my random selection choice and how amazon would have more, but honestly I couldn't get amazon's search to work to prove it so I was forced to conclude that maybe Jet's limited selection is just as good as Amazons. :| And if anyone from Jet is listening, can you add pepper flavor?

If the uniqueness is 'being cheaper' than Amazon then this story is not going to end well. I believe that this is a terrible way to start a business. And I would bet that they do not have the efficiencies of Amazon's scale so they are probably riding on super thin margins - there's a lot of catch up to do. But again, maybe the market is big enough to sustain another player...

Amazon just seems to have let it's core business slide somewhat. Sure, they are focused on efficiency, but they are trying to let customers order 1 item at a time which means huge shipping costs. A large chunk of there selection is from re-sellers which means so-so customer support, and they have a lot of other products out there, kindle, fire, AWS, even a streaming service.

I think Amazon is also trying to pad their retail margins so customers don't really see the savings. Worse, they don't really have anything unique to support those margins other than a wide if somewhat padded selection. So, I doubt Jet is going to unseat them, but they are vulnerable.

"Being cheaper" worked out pretty well for Walmart. Amazon definitely has scale, and advantages of doing things in-house. Amazon's current problem though, they have spread themselves too thin, reporting losses a quarter ago, and AWS appears to be what is carrying them now. They could be ripe for an aggressive competitor to come in and cut their throat in retail. Do to Amazon what Amazon did to Borders.

However Jet is only cheaper because it's VC subsidized. Walmart was cheap because of their efficiency and vendor contracts (and abysmal employee conditions that followed). They were profitable from the beginning.

Jet will eventually have to IPO for the investors to liquidate. I feel as a pure ecommerce store, they're going to have to be profitable or wall street will tear them up.

Not exactly, here's my comment on why Jet is cheaper. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10631311

Do your orders who up in Amazon boxes? Mine didn't but after reading about that, I started to wonder how much of this is Value America 2.0.

Not yet, so far they have all showed up in Jet boxes.

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