Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

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At most companies this would run the risk of poorly shoe-horning ML into a bunch of applications and making everything needlessly complex & expensive without seeing improved results (same goes for blockchain).

Sure, and in Amazon, you get a few tweaks that get the company a few bucks. It suspect the article wildly overstates the value of ML to Amazon.

Amazon's success seems to rest on: A. Attracting enough capital to get huge and stay huge with generally low margins. B. Being willing to slide into related businesses for extra-profits. C. Not jumping into one or another dumb trendy investments that would burn up all the capital they get from A & B.

Well, the memos might help B & C, for all I know.

Ten years ago, Amazon and Ebay split the ecommerce/storefront world. Ebay never managed to make themselves fully consumer friendly with hard guarantees and Amazon did. The auction-based, at-your-own-risk world is inherently limited and Ebay never escaped that - I wish they had 'cause then Amazon would have had real competition.

Feel like you've massively glossed over Amazon's strategy. From working there, data-driven decision making and automation permeated throughout the whole company culture.

For me, this was evident from the fact that quite literally everything was automated:

Physical SKU distribution was allocated by an algorithm, optimizing for space density and picker path length. Pickers carried trackers to enable the data to constantly be gathered and algo performance reassessed.

Prices were automated in real-time

Inventory management and purchasing was automated and humans were there to override when necessary.

Kiva was purchased and applied to implement an inventory store that can self-reorganize in real-time

At least in my mind, this goes far beyond the token "we do A/B testing on UX" that other webshops do.

Worth also mentioning that Amazon did collaborative filtering on book recommendation way before it was trendy to do...

When I squint, it feels like Bezos had some image of some giant razor thin machine (quite literally) selling commodity goods, constantly capitalizing on competitors' inefficiencies. I can't help but feel this was inspired by his time spent at DE Shaw...

I was discussing Machine Learning in particular. The wider use of automation is certainly something goes along with building at scale, so yeah that deserves mention.

Wal-mart is real competition.

Amazon now is something like a fusion of Ebay and Walmart. Either of those enterprises (or Target or etc) could move into the full space that Amazon operates in, it seems like.

Edit: I suspect that what keeps an enterprise like Walmart or Costco from jumping into full competition with Amazon is that each of these enterprises wants to fish some high profit zone of the eComerce ocean while Amazon wants to be the ocean.

Some specialty items should only be purchased on Ebay. You get the same products built in the same Chinese factories, without the markup for marketing and salaries required to involve USA middlemen. Inexpensive manufactured items of more general interest can be found lots of places: AMZN, WLMT, Harbor Freight, etc. Ebay is filling a niche for the less common stuff, though.

I was curious how the Amazon/eBay split looks revenue-wise.... Not exactly apples-to-apples but in 2018 Amazon was $180B in net sales vs eBay $95B GMV.

So Amazon is more than double but maybe not 10x? Amazon GMV is supposedly in the $250B range but they don't report it. And it's obviously hard to compare such different business models.

Not exactly apples-to-apples but in 2018 Amazon was $180B in net sales vs eBay $95B GMV.

So you're comparing Amazon sales to eBay market value (total stock price). Yeah, it's completely meaningless comparison [Edit: I was wrong, it's Amazon sales versus eBay's gross merchandise value but it's still entirely off as a comparison].

Btw, my quickly googled references show eBay's net sales as 10.75B and Amazon's at $141.92B, which is indeed a more than 10x relations (when I think all other statistics show Amazon an order of magnitude ahead, not that I initially made any strong assertions about this but anyone looking has notice Ebay's star fading).

[1]https://amigobulls.com/stocks/EBAY/income-statement/annual

[2] https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/article/amazon-sales/

My concern with the net sales comparison is that I think for eBay that only includes their fee, not the actual retail price of the goods, whereas for Amazon it is the entire price of goods sold. That to me seemed a much more apples-to-oranges comparison which is why I didn't cite it. I have no idea what's actually true. I would be interested if someone wanted to sort out the truth there but I hit my limit for how much more research I want to do.

GMV is Gross Merchandise Value, not stock price.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_merchandise_volume

eBay states there's here: https://ebayadvertising.com

The question is what is the GMV for Amazon's entire marketplace vs. their first-party Sales.

Okay, now I know, but the fact remains that Amazon is actually much large than Ebay by all apples-to-apples measures.

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