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Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by S_A_P on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @09:06AM (#6591549)
I think you hit the nail on the head where Amazon needs to go. Logistics and shipping are pretty much where that company must go to continue its path. I wouldnt be surprised if Amazon did try to venture into that arena by acquisition/merger.
Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by jb17 on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @09:40AM (#6591770)
I think they already started going there, at least in the UK. All my latest orders were delivered by 'Amazon Logistics'.
Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by awjr on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @10:36AM (#6592162)
I've just integrated all of our 7,000+ products into Amazon and one of the things Amazon is trying to do now is persuade us to use Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA).

It's quite attractive to us as a retailer as they take all the negative feedback, handle returns, etc etc. FBA makes us, as a retailer, look good and saves us money (no shipping costs), while protecting our reputation.

From a logistics point of view it simplifies things immensely (we just need to manage stocks in another warehouse).

Coding this should, however, be interesting :)

Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by cm2012 on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @10:53AM (#6592271)
I would love to chat with you (email in profile). We have 20,000 products in FBA right now and I've been selling on Amazon for years with separate companies. The only issue is that you can't ship international multichannel yet, even if you get your products approved for Global Export.
Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by bpicolo on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @11:10AM (#6592396)
The odd thing I see with fulfilled by Amazon is that nothing is necessarily stopping them from buying the goods themselves and selling them in the long run if they see fit.
Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by msy on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @11:19AM (#6592466)
Amazon logistics in the UK at least seems to be a cover for using a variety of no-name low-cost couriers, which for me at least has resulted in most deliveries now involving at least one fake 'delivery attempt' and needless runaround. I'm starting to buy things elsewhere as a result, it's not worth the hassle.
Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by nicholassmith on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @12:17PM (#6592915)
I'll purposefully try and pick an option that results in a DHL delivery to avoid the risk of Yodel/Hermes instead, as they're just awful.
Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by kuwahara on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @01:36PM (#6593469)
Report it to Amazon customer service, they can't do anything if they don't know.
Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by hershel on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @01:09PM (#6593286)
My guess is 3rd party logistics. If you follow amazon, you see 3pl logistics's share of the company revenue growing. And they ordered a place at 2015 in an important supply chain convention.

They will probably be announcing some sort of global supply chain and fulfillment service.

And the building blocks look interesting: robots, amazon level customer service and fulfillment, better supplier financing(enabled by sales data), global handling services(customs ,etc), offering better IT tools(for example demand prediction, A/B testing globally), Advertising deals on the amazon platform, etc. Almost like telling the manufacturer: you just build stuff, we'll do the rest for you.

If this guess is true, seeing all this packaged would be very interesting.

Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by mmahemoff on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @11:28AM (#6592520)
Makes sense Amazon would start a logistics service for other businesses to use. And maybe storage too.

AWS and MechTurk both came from Amazon realising it could commoditise and spin off what it was using internally as separate products. A kind of reverse dogfooding.

Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by xsace on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @09:22AM (#6591629)
Here where I live, AMZ has partnered with some terrible delivery companies, and a lot of buyers are complaining about the awful shipping experience and are starting to look elsewhere. So I suppose that's correct, they need to handle that themselves.
Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by mikeash on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @10:28AM (#6592111)
They use LaserShip for a lot of deliveries here. They seem to have improved lately, but they used to be tremendously bad. They'd deliver packages a day after their tracking system said they were delivered, they'd just lose stuff, once they delivered my package to the wrong city.

On the flip side, I have to wonder if this is actually something of a benefit for Amazon. They get to save a ton of money by using a cheap delivery service, but the delivery service takes much of the heat for bad service. I'm a little annoyed with Amazon for using LaserShip, but I'm much more annoyed with LaserShip for sucking. If Amazon handled the delivery, they would have to do better just to get the same amount of satisfaction from me.

Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by smackfu on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @11:51AM (#6592701)
It seems like Lasership is basically "some dude with a car". If you start measuring metrics in that situation, it tends to lead to people lying, like marking a package delivered when it isn't. Only 1% of people will actually complain.

http://www.lasership.com/contact-us/independent-contractors

Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by mikeash on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @12:02PM (#6592789)
They really are hilariously unprofessional. They drive shoddy white vans with "PACKAGE DELIVERY" slapped on the side. It doesn't even say "LaserShip". The vans look like the kind of thing a pedophile would drive while looking for children to kidnap.
Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by peteretep on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @09:24AM (#6591641)