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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

>They're now in the same business Webvan had 15 years ago, but their costs are low enough that it works.

People frequently mistake Amazon's business. They're not a store or a delivery service, Amazon is a logistics company.

What they do at the frontend is important, but their value as a business is everything in between... warehouses, picking systems, delivery logistics, AWS... doing as much of that stack themselves as possible and doing it very efficiently is their core.

Just try to buy AAA batteries to convince yourself that being a store isn't Amazon's core competence. (the review system, the recommendation engine, the product organization, it's all mediocre at best)

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> Amazon is a logistics company

We hear this said of Amazon, and that's also Uber's ambition.

But isn't Walmart also a logistics company?

Isn't every big company that makes or moves around physical items?

Yes. Some are more successful than others.

Not as much.

Amazon sells it's fulfillment services directly. AWS should be obvious, but they also sell fulfillment services. Not just whitelabel spam products from /r/Entrepreneur either.

Amazon can do the entire logistics chain from accepting products shipped from your manufacturer to processing the payment in your own web store. [1]

[1] https://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon/benefits.h...

Trying to understand: WalMart is logistics, but their logistics customer is WalMart, and the only way in is to sell in a WalMart store.

Amazon effectively thinks outside the Big Box, and will let anyone sell anything within the Amazon marketplace. I'm not sure if third-party websites w/ Amazon back-end and fulfillment are a thing, but that's a possibility.

In which case, Amazon effectively sells a marketplace, ordering, and delivery logistics system to its merchandise suppliers.

Maybe. I'm not entirely sure I'm a fan of the "Company X isn't in Market Y, they're actually in Market Z" meme, but it's got utility.

The problems I'm seeing with Amazon now are on two fronts. One is that the actual product review/selection process stinks -- too little control over quality and relevance of what's presented. If I go to a third party, one specialising only in the products of interest to me, I can get a far more appropriate selection of items, and I value that.

The other is morality. Bezos is an asshole and screws people over -- techies, noncompetes, warehouse workers, competitors, and more. I've got a problem with that. I may be in the minority, but that is something which ultimately matters. Perhaps it's the only thing which ultimately matters.

The future of massively computation intensive personal level logistics is the amazon drone delivers your daily packet of stuff which contains four AAA batteries because amazon has figured out your remote control battery which is currently working, should be dead by this evening. Also it'll have two rolls of TP and one of your favorite breath mints and one squeeze packet of ketchup because it knows you're having french fries with dinner tonight.

Personal logistics is going to look a lot more like the star trek replicator (although enormously higher latency... for now) than like a web page store.

The blind faith that "... on the internet" will make you a millionaire, will be replaced by a blind faith in the infallibility of personal logistics. Why if Amazon is sending my wife baby clothes, no need to even bother taking a pregnancy test because how could Amazon ever be wrong, etc.

I disagree on the "daily packet of stuff" bit from the standpoint that I don't think Amazon is really great at the "we'll pick which specific product/brand you should get" part yet.

Part of that is the rise of 3rd party sellers and fake reviews has really impacted my (and many others I've spoken with) trust in Amazon. To continue the battery example, I could totally see some knockoff brand arriving that blows my remote up down the line because they were cheap, poorly made no-name batteries (possibly expired) that happened to have great margins for Amazon.

I just don't have that trust there. But maybe that's been my experiences and personal preference to research things to death.

Buying AAA batteries is a great experience. You can even order by voice via Alexa. What experience are you actually looking for? Who does it best?

This result is perfect after a few key presses of the a key: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/s/ref=is_s_ss_i_0_3?k=aaa+batte...

I'll reframe what I said a little.

I want to buy the least expensive (per unit) CR123A batteries from a brand/seller that meets my own standard of trust.

Search for CR123A batteries ... 14,000 results, 27 departments, about 100 sub-departments. On the first page 2 of the 17 results include per-unit pricing. There's no way to sort by unit price. Package size varies from 1 to 12, there's no way to sort or select by package size. Cost ranges from $1.44/unit to $5.02/unit

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CR123A batteries are expensive enough to care how much they cost. They can also burn your house down if the proper protection circuits aren't in place (cheap Chinese manufacturers don't always include it)

They are also very frequently overpriced. A healthy market where you could do easy price comparisons would be good for the consumer but it doesn't exist.

To find the least expensive, I'd have to manually sift through 14000 entries and divide the price by the number of batteries manually. It's a big frustration, and I've legitimately tried and given up on buying them on amazon because of the bad experience.

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