habbott

I think you analysis is extensive but misses a few points. To analyze the economics you have to look at the entire value chain. For e-commerce fulfillment it looks likes this roughly - sending products into the warehouse, receiving, storing and pick packing the products in the warehouse, shipping the products out. Traditionally each of these items are decided on sequentially in isolation. Without any regard on how it impact the others in the value chain. This causes inefficiency in the system and bloated costs for everyone.

To consider all of these value chains at once requires your to evaluate literally millions of data points (no exaggeration here) for every SKU inventory placement decisions; evaluate different states of the world and choose the is likely to represent the future. Majority of efficiency comes from this and that is what is reflected in the cost savings merchants get from using Deliverr.

Second - the state of the world is changing and we hope to be leading that change - 1 day shipping and same day shipping are not far away. That requires more distributed infrastructure and radically different placement strategies to keep overall costs in the systems down.

Unfortunately not today.

Having worked at Amazon; one of the things I respect a lot about Amazon is that they not competitor focussed - they really do not spend much time thinking about competition; they are maniacally customer focussed. I am sure Amazon is really working on upping the game on faster delivery whether is 1 day prime for large number of SKUs or same day.

Two things a) I dont think this is competing with Amazon infrastructure. Outside of Amazon, this is a very large industry and very broken which needs to be fixed.

b) I agree with you 7M is not going to be enough to fix this industry; its complex and moves physical things (way harder than moving bits) but you gotta start somewhere.

Interesting so in your opinion Amazon has gotten less reliable for you? In what regards ?

Please email [email protected] - Deliverr is pre-integrated into shopify so it should be very easy to get started

I disagree with you on many fronts -

First any business should ask for metrics on past performance and that is how you should judge the performance and not by assertions or business models - Case in point -- Taxis were fully controlled they all looked the same, the drivers were all trained the same way -- yet the consumer experience was bad. Then Uber/Lyft came in and they don't drive the taxis but they are able to orchestrate demand and supply and offer visibility and a better price to customers. So going by your analogy Taxis >> Uber. But I think it is settled that Uber/Lyft >> Taxi. Judge Uber/Lyft with their metrics such (a) time to get a taxi (b) on time delivery and (b) cost to consumer. And businesses and consumers are smart enough to do that.

Second - marketplaces are in business of connecting buyers with sellers; laying out rules of engagement so trust is built for discovery and transaction. They are enablers. But a merchant participates in many markets and not just one. You cannot ask each marketplace to do fulfillment for the merchant because that will mean the merchant will have to predict and send inventory for eBay and Walmart and Shopify separately which is not efficient for anyone in the market.

In fact it is designed for small merchants - and enables you to sell on Walmart, eBay and Shopify stores with fast shipping