This is obviously part of Amazon's effort to build out their own delivery network in order to muscle out fedex, ups, usps, etc. If their drivers aren't delivering packages they can be delivering food. That makes their whole delivery network stronger because it allows them to have more drivers employed driving around town all the time. It's the same reason Uber got into food delivery.
The problem at the moment is Amazon logistics (at least here in the UK) is terrible. Prime went from a next day, 1-hour delivery window, fully tracked with DPD generally delivered by 1 pm to next day sometime between 8 and 8, no tracking and sometimes not delivered at all for no reason. If a parcel arrives at 8 pm the day after it's ordered it's not a next day service as far as I'm concerned, it might as well arrive 9 am the following day.
My new hobby seems to be not getting a prime delivery next day, calling Amazon, them apologising and giving me an extra month on my prime subscription for free - which is nice and everything but I'd rather get the service they promise.
Yeah, I get that I'm being impatient and using my own interpretation of next day but when all the decent couriers (UPS, TNT, DPD, UKMail, ParcelForce) get a package to you basically pre-early afternoon and Amazon's own delivery service makes that experience worse then it grates a little. I'd happily pay more on my prime subscription to go back to getting Amazon deliveries with DPD.
This is because your interpretation of 'day' is of being a subcomponent of a 24 hour period (which probably also includes 'evening' and 'night').
The definition Amazon and every other company offering 'next day delivery' is that 'next day' means 'the next day'. As in the day after you buy the thing. It's a much more reasonable interpretation of the term because it's not open to colloquial misunderstandings (in your interpretation there could be day, evening, dusk, night, etc.). Is 5pm day? Is 6pm day?
Amazon logistics at least do Sunday deliveries as well.
Far too many stores have "next day delivery" for which ordering on Friday night means it doesn't arrive until Tuesday.
I'm actually happy with amazon logistics (London). They deliver every day (unlike basically everyone else), so I can order on Saturday and receive the item on Sunday.
They also always find a neighbor to accept the package. Royal mail always leaves a card which means I have to pick it up from a post office (which is only open when I work). The main reason I order nearly everything from Amazon is that most other sellers here use Royal Mail 2nd class, which for my address takes at least 4 days to arrive, before christmas often 2 weeks or more.
Sometimes they leave a card without a tracking number (last month.) That was fun. But at least I knew it was for me.
Because there was the time with the card that had a tracking number but no name or flat number. And then the card that had three digits of the tracking number and no name or flat number.
The DPD service was amazing, even out in the rural hinterland where it can be trickier to provide accurate delivery windows.
Even when I lived in north Donegal (very rural) I could order parts from Overclockers UK (who use DPD) and guarantee delivery in two days and with a reasonably accurate drop off time window.
I'm less bothered about when a thing will arrive next day (and I don't mind evenings), but it's the not knowing when it'll arrive. Hell I'd settle for a four hour window rather than the current state of affairs with Amazon logistics in the UK.
What also ticks me off is how around this time of year, even in the last week in November, Amazon Prime's one day delivery magically becomes two days and yet is passed off as one day delivery.
I'm a big fan of DPD, we use them for our business dispatch, overnight half of our customer support load disappeared as they are so good we just had no delivery issues anymore.
I'd also add that arriving after 5pm is basically useless at any business address. That and they don't seem to be able to deal with pressing the buzzer for our office if the receptionist isn't there.
Agreed hence most of my parcels now land up behind my bins at home even if they are for work stuff (I run a just in time factory, Amazon Prime is useful). Funny story:
We moved into a brand new unit, first tenant, new postcode. We basically had to train the delivery companies so they could learn where we are, understandable and fine. Amazon presented a whole extra problem, though.
They use geofencing(?) for their deliveries, so the driver has to be within the bounds of the fenced area to make the delivery. The first driver must have set our fenced area up at the entrance to the trading estate, this meant that for a month a driver (never the same one twice) would show up, ask for my name, scan the package, look confused, apologise, drive 300 m back to the entrance of the estate, scan the parcel and then come back and then ask me to sign!!!
This is very different service from what fedex etc offers, because of the rapid delivery times. So maybe not direct competition on the 1-day / 2-day services.
But 1-hour for rush orders at low cost, or free if you order a meal, could be a good competitive advantage.
Especially if they could find a way for customers to order a lot of meals, like 3-4 times per week, or have a frequent order in some office in the same building you work.
I guess I don't have that much faith in Amazon's ability to prioritize the customer over themselves (i.e., prioritize routing for the least amount of driving, regardless of what is being delivered).
No, it's different at Amazon. I worked for Amazon for five years and not a day went by without me overhearing "how does this help our customers?" I've never seen anything like Amazon's company culture since, it's truly dogmatically geared towards customer experience.
Agreed. The company is much more likely to do what's best for the company at the expense of the delivery people or the restaurants, based on their track record.[1]
But making sure the customer is satisfied, with hot food, is in Amazon's interest otherwise the customer won't order again or will ask for their money back.
In your mind if Amazon was optimising for their convenience alone they'd just pocket your money and not bother to ever deliver anything? Because that would the most convenient option for them.
Delivering cold pizzas because you prioritized a product delivery is not a business model either, and yet we are discussing it seriously as if that's what Amazon will do.
A counter-argument is that fewer options helps consumers actually choose something that's good enough rather than debating and hand-wringing over their choice. Costco is pretty good at this.
For myself, I usually prefer to just go and pick up myself; that's almost always the fastest option.
For people with small kids, driving to pick up food can be a huge production, with car seats, diaper bags, strollers, etc. Curbside pickup helps, but delivery is so much easier, and sometimes just as fast.
In my house, we make good use of delivery for one major reason: sports.
Sometimes theres no dinner ready and in the hecticness of life, we forget to cook the night before so we get into an unfortunate situation of either going hungry until the game ends or cooking and miss the game.
Delivery solves this issue. Take out is definitely faster, but that usually means missing part of whatever game is on. My case obviously isn't universal but given the popularity of sports and how primetime games are only an hour or so after you get home from work, Id think there's a non negligible amount of people with similar situations.
Some people might not like this since you'll be several minutes behind "live", but an advantage is you can skip any ads and commentary you don't like and catch up to live to see the final play at the same time as everyone else. I don't know if any PVRs still allow watching "live" at 1.25x or 1.5x speed, but if they do (like MythTV did/does) you can also condense a show into the time you have available and still watch the ending live.
>For myself, I usually prefer to just go and pick up myself; that's almost always the fastest option.
It's not about being the fastest, though, it's about being more convenient.
And even fastest depends on the area. Where I live (near a city centre) I can chose among 300 restaurants from a centralized meta-ordering service, and have their food delivered in 20-40 minutes.
It will take me 20 minutes to even decide to get up, find my keys, drive around, order and wait for the food.
This is kind of terrifying after hearing so many life-ruining stories about the rash decisions Amazon makes when dealing with 3rd party sellers ([1] from last week, for example).
Everyone always says "Don't stake your livelihood on platforms you don't control" (e.g. Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), but what happens when one of those platforms suddenly forces its way into your business? How can a restaurant owner turn them down when all the short-sighted owners nearby are happily signing up?
I'm imagining a day in the future where a restaurant goes broke because Amazon had become a significant portion of their orders, but they suddenly got kicked off the service after X number of complaints (happens to FBA sellers all the time). By the time other restaurant owners realize how easily Amazon can destroy their livelihood, they might be too dependent to voluntarily leave. And then all the smug commenters from the last thread will be grateful for another opportunity to say "Well the restaurants should've known better than to sign up in the first place!"
This reminds me of the predicament that young'ish hardware component supplier companies get into. They win a huge contract with a prominent customer, but then that one customer represents 60%+ of their revenues (ex: winning a Cisco, Nintendo, or Apple contract).
I've worked at a few such companies, and they all work extra hard trying to diversify their revenue sources, for both customers and industry. If it's a startup, then such revenue dependence can mean the difference between being able to go IPO or not.
For the situation you describe for restaurants, they'd have to be vigilant about catering to multiple platform providers, and not neglecting their in-person customers (I've definitely seen a restaurant cater more to delivery rather than sit down, and slowly deteriorating in reputation among customers as order times became longer).
It's just like managing an AAPL supplier contract. Some will thrive, and others will suffer, like the sapphire supplier in Arizona.
The sapphire supplier is GTAT, and they were actually a sapphire glass manufacturing equipment manufacturer that Apple contracted to manufacture sapphire displays (a completely new business for them), then un-contracted afterwards, dropping their market cap from $1.5bn to $175m and shuttering three plants (whose workers Apple pledged to find new jobs for).
I used to work for a company that did software development work for the local subsidiary of a multinational corporation. The corporation was their sole customer.
At some point the corporation decided it wouldn't outsource software development work anymore. They hired some of the key people at my former employer (by then I had already moved somewhere else), and almost overnight they had to close shop because they didn't have a source of revenue anymore.
This kind of thing happens in Advertising all the time. Agencies will get that ">50% of the business" account that they are utterly dependent on. LOTS of layoffs if they lose the business.
Wise agencies try to diversify - but any new business brought in will have to deal with The Big Client being the squeakiest of wheels (... that get the grease).
I can't say I've see an agency that has made the "grow other business" transition successfully.
I've seen quite a few restaurants list themselves across multiple platforms lately; Uber Eats, Eat24, GrubHub, etc.
I've often wondered how well a restaurant would do in areas where those platforms are popular if it just dropped its customer-facing storefront entirely and went entirely online delivery.
The drop in operating costs versus the lack of walk-ins ...
I've started seeing this in the bay area. There are definitely places in SF which are lunch-catering only (via ZeroCater/Zesty) with no retail presence. Also there's a pizza delivery company in the East Bay (pizzamatador.com) which has no phone number, no store front (shopify website only) and will deliver you a par-baked pizza in <20mins. SpoonRocket (R.I.P.) was also delivery via app and their kitchens were in West Berkeley instead of a more expensive location that allowed foot traffic.
I expect you'll see more non-traditional kitchen locations and alternative delivery transport methods (e.g. scooters or Postmates bike couriers) to combat the high rents, congestion and parking issues common to most dense cities.
That story is just...insane. I'm glad I have a separate account for my maybe-one-day-business and one for personal use but still they need to let them talk to a real PERSON before locking out an account like so.
I can only imagine what would have happened if he didn't post to a website where it gained traction. If it wasn't upvoted out of reddit's new, would he just be completely screwed? Damn...
It's very disturbing how often we're seeing stories of someone's whole life being ruined due to some trivial error followed by poor / nonexistent customer service at Amazon or Google, and only getting their life back after they 1) plead for assistance from the general public on social media and then 2) happen to luck into getting upvoted rather than buried.
I agree many companies could do a better job of being accessible. Providing good customer service is challenging, especially at large scale. I am reminded of when Postmates first launched, and they provided a customer service phone number for assistance with orders. Eventually that number was replaced with a message saying "phone support is temporarily unavailable while we migrate to a new system" and asked you to send an email instead. Temporary must have become permanent, because it's impossible to reach someone if you have a problem now. (Part of me wonders whether their claim about it being temporary was even true at the time, or was a deliberate falsehood intended to placate customers until they'd had a chance to try the new email-only solution.)
Anyway, one thing I'd like to add, that I think is important to keep in mind, is that there are two (or more!) sides to every story. This is especially true for stories we hear from an aggrieved party on the news or social media.
We often don't hear the other side of a story, because many companies have privacy policies or laws that limit their ability to talk about their customers or employees. For example, it's extraordinarily rare to get the kind of insight into a situation that we got when Yishan Wong posted on Reddit to correct the lies of an employee who falsely claimed to have been fired with no reason and without cause:
A similar situation happened to GitHub founder Zach Holman when he got ousted from the company -- his accuser had a soapbox in the form of her blog and Twitter; the general public only learned more sides of the story when employees decided to post some of their behind-the-scenes perspectives anonymously online.
Be careful drawing conclusions about any particular situation without hearing all sides of the story.
> We often don't hear the other side of a story, because many companies have privacy policies or laws that limit their ability to talk about their customers or employees. For example, it's extraordinarily rare to get the kind of insight into a situation that we got when Yishan Wong posted on Reddit to correct the lies of an employee who falsely claimed to have been fired with no reason and without cause:
https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r....
That's an awful example. The employee completely stopped responding after that so we don't know how much of the truth it was (like you said there are two sides and there were tons of rumors he was advised by his lawyer to stop talking; who knows what happened after that).
What's worse is this type of behavior by the CEO was downright despicable. Why? Two scenarios.
1. The employee was correct and it showed other employees that the CEO is willing to lie and berate them in the open public should they have a dissenting, public opinion about the company. Feedback, even if encourages, would completely stop after this event.
2. The employee was a liar and really was terrible. The CEO now has created a permanent remark that cannot be taken back regarding this person's work ethic. Now the employee can't redeem themselves. They can't learn from past mistakes. Every employer in the future of his employment can google search him and have this come up. Unfortunately this is likely to come up more and more as kids grow up with Facebook, post photos of themselves being drunk or otherwise and then seeking employment as they grow up.
It seems like you are responding as if I'm holding up those situations as examples of how people ought to behave -- as if I'm for or against what happened in them. I'm not. My purpose in pointing out those examples is solely to demonstrate by example that there are multiple sides to a story.
If you look at trends, people to tend to tell their story in a way that's favorable to them, while making their opponent look like a villain. Certainly not everyone tells the truth, because stories told by different people about the same event are incompatible! I find the examples I mentioned so shocking and interesting because they are examples of high-conflict situations where you can (to different extents) see both sides, where you can meaningfully evaluate a theory of what happened.
I can understand locking accounts, since it's all automated, and they probably get a ton of bogus stuff programmatically submitted all the time. That said, as soon as someone has over a thousand dollars in your warehouse or over a $1000 pending payment to them, it should get shunted to a person for review and resolution. At that point it's obviously not some automatically submitted account and form, and what's more it's likely to quickly escalate to legal action against Amazon (regardless of what their contracts say, getting Amazon lawyers to respond is expensive, so they should want to avoid that).
Even if you have separate accounts, you may have to be careful around backup e-mail addresses
> One user reported that an account that hadn’t been used to purchase a Pixel was suspended, apparently because it was listed as a back-up address for an account that had.
If you have ever logged into both accounts with the same IP, they can tie the accounts together. That is not a hypothetical if, they will ban an account if someone logs into Seller Central from an IP of a previously banned account.
Source? While they could certainly do this IP addresses are shared quite frequently due to NAT. It seems inevitable that a banned IP address will login to another account at some point.
I've seen it happen and also have spoken to people within amazon who have confirmed. They might do it with cookies instead of IP addresses but if you log into a banned account from a computer that regularly logs into a non banned account, your account will be banned, period.
> How can a restaurant owner turn them down when all the short-sighted owners nearby are happily signing up?
Sign up for all of the services: OpenTable, Doordash, Amazon Restaurants, GrubHub, Postmates, everything. That way, when one service does something terrible, you aren't crippled by the single point of failure, and as long as it wasn't terrible enough to sever the relationship, you can take your time rectifying the issue.
This works until one company monopolizes the market. See TripAdvisor.
I've worked with seven different resorts/hotels doing web-dev and every single one of them absolutely hated TripAdvisor and wished it didn't exist and they didn't have to be on it to survive.
Every time I get a little worried about a big player like Amazon having too much control in a market, I think the solution is actually another big player - Google. Not that I want google to compete, but if the knowledge graph gave info about the restaurant including delivery services that it supported, that would make it easier for everyone. The restaurant could list a few services, and you could choose the one you have an account with, or trust to serve you well. This takes the control that exposure a big player like Amazon has and really reduces how effective it is at corralling suppliers.
Now, I don't really care that it's google, but they are the biggest and most likely to be seen. Preferably Bing and Yahoo and DDG would have an equivalent.
Is signing up for an Amazon service any different to opting into something like DoorDash or Seamless? Amazon is big/established and probably has the data necessary to understand exactly when they can screw you. They also have a large enough customer base that they will take steps to automate a large percentage of day-to-day operational decision making which will occasionally go wrong such as detecting and shutting down fraudulent seller accounts as exemplified by your reddit link.
A funded startup on the other hand could go under at moment when their next round of funding doesn't come in. It's also a sure bet that any success you're seeing from them early on will diminish over as they attempt to actually make a profit.
While that is an unfortunate situation, I would actually imagine Amazon's entry to this market (which they actually entered over a year ago), would be good for the restaurants. Many thought they had some diversity in the early days with Grubhub and Seamless until they merged. Now there are dozens of services overlaying to deliver for restaurants, companies like Uber Eats, Foodler, Doordash, Postmates, and many more.
Amazon here is a me-too play here, and I'd be shocked if they reached the concentration to sink a restaurant given so many incumbents.
UberEats is free too, at least if you order a minimum. (Used to be $20 where I am, now it's $30.) Even when you pay a fee, it's only $4, which beats out BiteSquad's typical $10+ fee. In a contest for who can live the longest on tiny margins, I'm betting on Amazon -- hopefully they start signing up restaurants just a little bit east from Seattle so I can use them... When UberEats hiked their minimum I was a bit miffed.
It's not possible to operate an online business (any business?) without being dependent on a platform. There is no scenario under which you can build anything that functions as a serious revenue generating business without being in that position.
Search discovery: Google, Bing
Social promotion: FB, Snap, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc
There's nothing new about this. All businesses utilize platforms they don't control. There are no exceptions.
Radio, TV, newspapers, mail catalogs were discovery and promotion before Google search was. The dependency was just as high.
Want to open a hotdog stand or a gas station? The absolute minimum platform you'll be dependent on will be local political system/s in dozens of ways (infrastructure, zoning, health laws, employment regulations, and on and on).
Don't be obtuse. The grandparent poster was talking about the problem of being locked into an individual vendor's platform - a problem which does exist in many market sectors but can also be mitigated by the ancient strategy of not putting all your eggs in one basket [1]. Defining a problem out of existence is not really illuminating.
1. This is a metaphor, in case anyone else is feeling pedantic and wants to challenge the notion that eggs are commonly transported in baskets...
You could say the same of yelp, or google. Or a higher end restaurant losing a michelin star. What happens when they get bad reviews and their ranking drops? You can diversify and get traffic from other platforms, work through the platform to either fix the problems, respond to complaints, or just get more reviews.
I think the parent's worry deals with cases like we've seen with Google and other large companies where automated systems sometimes get inappropriately triggered and customer support is either ineffectual or non-existent until the user is able to make a viral stink on social media (think malicious/bad copyright flags on youtube causing channels to get demonetized). With reviews, the restaurant theoretically at least has a reasonable deal of influence in most cases.
Is it such a bad thing for society if a business fails when transparency is added to how they conduct their business? Yelp reviews are also intregal to the success of a restaurant and similar complaints are lobbed at them for destroying revenue at small companies. Have you ever gone to a restaurant that is poorly ranked on yelp? I have. They tend to deserve the poor ratings.
This is a valuable service to the consumer and good restaurants will thrive while bad ones will fail.
Also, any halfway decent owner/marketer knows you need to capture email addresses for people you want to sell to. Never rely on social media alone. Just use it to get them to give you an email.
It'd be fine if it were simply transparency, if the companies that get kicked off had all done something legitimately "bad" in some sense.
The problem is that Amazon often doesn't seem to really investigate issues in any depth at all; they just kick the seller off reflexively. It's trivially easy to be kicked off the platform for reasons other than doing something legitimately "bad," such as software error, human error, or even a deliberately orchestrated fraud campaign conducted by your competitor -- and many other sellers don't get kicked off for doing the same thing, or worse. It's all very random.
> Is it such a bad thing for society if a business fails when transparency is added to how they conduct their business?
Transparency has nothing to do with it.
Amazon has a history of shutting down Fulfillment By Amazon seller accounts in an extremely arbitrary and capricious manner.
If they only shut them down due to legitimate complaints then sure, you might have a point. The story I linked proved that's not the case, and there are many more like it. That man's life would still be in ruins if he hadn't (luckily) gotten so much attention through Reddit and HN.
> Yelp reviews are also intregal to the success of a restaurant
That's really only on the West Coast. People don't live or die by Yelp here on the East Coast. Frankly, I'm always surprised to see people are still using it after all the revelations of extortionist behavior they were engaging in against restaurants.
> Is it such a bad thing for society if a business fails when transparency is added to how they conduct their business?
Yes, because people are poor at dealing with selection bias. A data source with 100% real and true complaints and favorable reviews can tell any story you want it to with the right filtering, so especially in the presence of a malicious adversary you have to completely discard this data from your decision making.
Is it such a bad thing for society if a business fails when transparency is added to how they conduct their business?
That's a false premise, which assumes any and all complaints are made in good faith. Some people are assholes and will leave a bad review because they disliked the person who delivered a meal or any number of other spurious reasons. You really sound like the sort of person who has never worked in any other field than IT and has a naive and largely illusory view of business conditions.
My SO has lots of experience working in businesses selling stuff on-line and while negative comments "out of spite" happened rarely to her, what she often told about is how dishonest employers made workers bribe people so that they cancel/remove their negative reviews. Hearing the stories that I did from her, I no longer treat lack of negative ratings / reviews as a strong quality signal.
EDIT: Oh, and speaking of Amazon, Google and their automated bans, my SO's company's work account got temporarily blocked by Google recently, apparently for the sin of sending several files in quick succession to her boss' account. Apparently "atypical usage" is grounds for a ban now. Fortunately, the account was unlocked few hours later, and I didn't have to make fuss about it here on HN...
I think the only answer is to diversify as best you can, build a reputation of customers who love you to get word of mouth, and save as much as you can.
For an interesting view of where this has happened before, look no further than FB subsuming publishers via Instant Articles and Google recently doing the same with Amp. They stole all the control of the audience data from publishers, and give out whatever cut they feel is appropriate from ad revenue. Publishers refused to adapt or couldn't adapt fast enough and are royally screwed as a result.
One difference is that restaurants don't have to rely on delivery only - people still like to go out and eat, so optimizing for that experience can decrease the risk.
As many as you hear, they are still anecdotes. And anecdotes are of the political realm not the business realm. Resolving such disputes is also therefore done in the political realm (assuming there is no breach of business contract)
I received a free $20 to Amazon Restaurants for buying something on cyber Wednesday, didn't know that was a thing until I received the email. I used it to order pizza from a local joint, because who doesn't like free pizza.
Ordering was interesting, they didn't have the pizza I wanted listed under the pre-made options, so I had to make my own, but there was no option to do half and half and adding additional topping had a confusing interface. The menus do not seem to be optimized for each restaurant the way Doordash is, and you must click on an item to see the price.
Also the food wasn't kept in a thermal bag, like pizza delivery does, so it wasn't piping hot when I received it and the delivery members don't have distinct shirts. I probably won't use it ever again since I prefer Doordash, and one of my friends brother in laws is a cofounder/CTO so I feel a false tie to it.
None of my friends' brother-in-laws are cofounders at Doordash, so I'm less attached :-)
But this is a great example of the lack of customer lock-in. Even the slightest improvement over Doordash, and I'd easily switch to Amazon or just bounce between the two. There's a thai restaurant just a bit out of Doordash range -- that would do it. Pictures on the menus -- that would do it. A "re-order" button -- that would do it.
I like DD, but all I think of it is: "I order food and it gets here."
Right -- I think this is a problem for many recent startups like Doordash, Postmates, and even Uber. Their pitch to investors that this was a land grab -- whoever conquers the two-sided marketplace first dominates it and extracts profits later on. And so they need mountains of money to build up both sides of the marketplace.
But it turns out that there's no switching cost on either side of the marketplace: you or I happily switch between both depending on which drivers are closer, and an Uber driver can just open their Lyft app if Uber is slowing down. You'd happily switch from Doordash if Caviar had better photos, and a restaurant can delivery via both Doordash and Caviar.
I think Uber might be able to get out of this by saying "growth / users -> investment -> self driving cars", but I'm not sure what Doordash or Postmates plans to do about it.
When I first saw amazon restaurants (almost a year ago) I thought... meh! Why would I use this... order via phone and then wait an hour. I could order by phone call and go pick it up faster.
Turns out now we use it so much and I've found that the value is that I can order by phone when I leave work and by the time I get home the food will be arriving at my door.
The real value to me is that I can order dinner! They've had a few hiccups in the early days but now its pretty solid!
> Turns out now we use it so much and I've found that the value is that I can order by phone when I leave work and by the time I get home the food will be arriving at my door.
Does "order by phone" mean mobile app or calling in an order? I would guess app but with Alexa and the other speech recognition tech they have, voice orders doesn't sound that far off either.
Skip is very popular here in Winnipeg since this is where they're headquartered, but always seemed like the underdog in the overall market. Wondering what will become of Skip, and how Just Eat and the others will keep duking it out from here now that Amazon is in the ring too.
Just Eat is the most "commercial" among food delivery services I've seen in UK - they are very much focused on agreements with suppliers and coverage rather than UX. They figured that range and availability are more important to the average customer than a subpar web UI.
At the moment they are clearly winning (at least here), so they might be right. They have quite a bit of cash and are buying out smaller players for coverage across US and EU.
Do you mean GPS tracking of your takeaway delivery?
I've never understood why someone would want to be glued to their phone/tablet watching every move their pizza makes. Seriously, just why would you possibly care what street it's currently on?
At least Uber Eats only seems to show it when you're up next. The driver often starts appearing not at the restaurant but somewhere else.
In cities this shouldn't be easy to track anyway. And then you could also jsut follow the Uber bike. Don't think that the fact that someone ordered food is private (what they ordered might be).
DPD in the UK offer this functionality, it offers an ETA and the GPS location of the driver.
This is particularly useful for me as I then know when to listen out for the door, and I've confidence in the ETA knowing they're just a street away from me.
They REALLY do a bad job pushing prime now. People in my building had no idea they could have amazon products delivered in an hour and at no extra charge besides an (optional) tip. They use the same drivers to deliver some packages from the site as well.
Their marketing people are doing fine. This service isn't available everywhere, and when it was made available in my city, my local network quickly learned about it and started using it.
I had heard of prime now awhile ago, but didn't realize they delivered for restaurants. I'm in a non-metro area though, so this service will probably never be available for me.
So far, Amazon is just delivering for others. But perhaps they'll get into preparing food as well. Unlike Google, Facebook, GrubHub, Postmates, and Doordash, Amazon is willing to build physical infrastructure and hire people. Amazon could set up a large scale centralized catering operation like LSG Sky Chefs, which makes airline meals. For high-density metro areas, this could work quite well.
Amazon could probably beat out the low-end guys simply by using vehicles and containers capable of keeping the hot stuff hot and the cold stuff cold.
I actually think the end goal for Amazon isn't making the food themselves(in a centralized operation), but creating a platform , across the US , where such businesses can operate and compete strongly , while owning the very cheap delivery network to corporate offices(and the network effects that come with it), and the customer relationship.
And the next step, is using that network to deliver chilled meals employees will take home(in an isolated container). At low enough price point, and high quality(which munchery seem to do) this could replace many dinners,a very big business , while also offering a disruptive attack on Walmart, and restaurants in general.
Interesting - it appears that Amazon handles the delivery part, theoretically freeing restaurants up from having to worry about that side of the business. Makes sense, though I wonder what % of costs delivery drivers really are (and, of course, what % Amazon is charging)
Either way, Seamless/Grubhub have turned to utter garbage since their merger. I'm happily using Delivery, but much like Uber/Lyft, these are commodity businesses that I can switch between at zero cost to myself. So I'll give Amazon a try too.
Cavier and DoorDash have been way superior to Grubhub in Chicago lately. Better selections, faster delivery (anecdotal). I've also had Amazon deliver when they were beta testing with $10 off, definitely worth it.
There's also Sprig, Fooda and some other food delivery services I've left out.
Amazon Prime Now has a $10 minimum, free delivery, and no markup allowed on the restaurant menus in New York. For me, that makes it the best service available hands down, and actually starts to change my behavior as a customer.
If it doesn't cost any more than what I'd pay in person schlepping to the restaurant, the psychological barrier to ordering on a whim is virtually eliminated. It also has that Uber-esque impersonality to it: the delivery guy doesn't wait around after dropping of your food in your typical managed NY apartment building (literally racing down when I get the call, I've never been able to spot them), since they're tipped up front. In fact, the last service I can remember that was such a no-brainer improvement when introduced, was Uber X.
That's not sustainable you might say. But members do pay $99/year for Prime, which isn't a whole lot since it does so much, but is increasingly a larger part where Amazon makes their margin from.
>But members do pay $99/year for Prime, which isn't a whole lot since it does so much
What do you get out of Prime? I don't have it in Australia (although there's rumblings that Amazon might be starting here) and I thought it was just faster delivery and video.
One differentiation with amazon restaurants is at least in my market they don't mark up food prices (like door dash and kindof postmates) and they don't charge for delivery.
Uber eats is the best of these I've found, but it's a pain meeting at the curb.
Amazon restaurants has by far the worst drivers though, I think compounded by tipping before they deliver, and no ratings system
> One differentiation with amazon restaurants is at least in my market they don't mark up food prices (like door dash and kindof postmates) and they don't charge for delivery.
That can't possibly be sustainable over the long run.
I'm sure they still get a cut of the price from the restaurant. No delivery and no markup just means the restaurant keeps less of the revenue to themselves.
> Amazon restaurants has by far the worst drivers though, I think compounded by tipping before they deliver, and no ratings system
A friend of mine is a Dasher. You do tip before they arrive, and they have no idea how they've been tipped--they just get whatever the total of all the tips of their shift are... I've never been so disincentivized to tip.
The rating system also sucks because the app will force you to rate your last experience if you haven't the next time you try to order. Lots of five stars from me because, when I'm trying to get my dinner to my house ASAP, I can't be bothered to give an accurate and fair rating.
> Uber eats is the best of these I've found, but it's a pain meeting at the curb.
This is an option, you should be able to select whether you want to meet your courier at the curb for faster food or wait for them to find parking and come to your door.
A few years ago when I began to use Grubhub more exclusively to order food, I realized that I was effectively being shut out from other establishments that weren't on Grubhub, simply because I hadn't checked to look at what was nearby, and because the options on Grubhub were usually good enough on their own. It was "post-Google," in a way.
I imagine this effect would be even more pronounced with "the everything store" encompassing an ever-larger portion of total commerce.
I intentionally shut out a restaurant that didn't have online ordering. I like their food, one sandwich in particular was a favorite, but they had a nearby competitor I liked just as much that DID have online ordering.
I'm hard-of-hearing, so online ordering is a godsend compared to the old days of calling up a fast speaking, often accented person with terrible background noise. So if the choice is between calling one restaurant, or ordering online from a different restaurant, I will always pick the online ordering.
The restaurant without online ordering eventually closed, despite the fact the neighborhood has really boomed, and I'm sure no small part of it is because of their refusal to do online ordering.
I usually go to menupages if I'm hunting. Since they merged with seamless it's one-click to do an online order, or I'll just call. I'm a pretty dedicated Amazon user, but I'm not sure what this service actually offers beyond that or even to match it.
I used to believe Foodler was the category killer. Then I found a restaurant I like a lot has lower prices on a more obscure site, MixMenu. Definitely shop around.
Meh. I have prime and keep getting $10 off coupons but here in Minneapolis I don't see anywhere I want to order from. Bitesquad has places that I order from every now and then. If Amazon had a decent network they might entice me in to becoming a restaurants customer... but as it is, it is like the crappy prime video selection.
This is a great opportunity for some restaurants to outsource cooking. Just provide a place for people to sit, eat and chat with some alcohol options. One can order food an hour before arriving and eat at the restaurant. The advantage is that folks can order from any number of cuisines. This can still be cost effective in the long run when kitchens can be bigger and in the outskirts and the premium place in the city is reserved only to sit customers.
That doesn't sound like a great idea. When I order take out, I have certain expectations, like the food may not be totally hot, or it'll be a little soggy after sitting in a bag and traveling for awhile. But that's the price I pay for getting to sit on my couch.
If I'm going to a sit down restaurant, I'm making the effort to leave my couch, so I want the food to be a higher quality. Trucking in potentially cheaper lukewarm soggy food doesn't feel like it can be made up for with just ambiance of the new place I'm sitting.
Depends. It has its own pros and there are definite cons. I don't know how much time me and my friends spend picking a restaurant/cuisine. Everyone wants something different. It is hard to pick a place when you have more than a certain number of folks. I can totally see people who are going there for socializing, rather than just for eating, having fun at this place. Also, keep in mind that this would be a full size bar as well.
Good luck telling table 12 they've got to wait because there's a traffic jam on the freeway, or that the drones are having a hard time with this northerly wind system.
Realistically, pizzas are a pretty poorly shaped thing for a drone to carry since it would block all of the propellers and it would definitely be way more effort to keep warm. Self driving cars are probably perfect for this, though. In California, self driving cars are classified as neighborhood vehicles which can't go over 25 which is probably fine for restaurant delivery.
"Cooler" scale ground drones seem like the thing being done for pizza now. See starship.xyz and Domino's DRU for examples that are already entering service. Potentially very effective stuff that can beat the flying and car-sized stuff just by being simpler to engineer and faster to market, with minimal regulatory issue.
While my first order was close to a year ago, what I have to say about this and all the other food delivery services (Postmates, UberEats, Grubhub) is that I typically have a hard time meeting delivery minimums or straight up find the delivery fee too expensive to justify an order.
So far, I've only ever used Amazon when I have a coupon. It would be cool if I could accumulate Amazon restaurant credit as an option when I choose No Rush Shipping or have some form of loyalty/rewards system. Else, I'm just going to choose whatever is cheapest, even if slightly less convenient. And that's just me. Other users' loyalty could be even more elusive I'm sure.
They also don't charge a ton in "service fees" and have inflated menu prices. Nothing but good experiences with Amazon delivering food (except this one time where the driver had never seen an apartment building before...)
So, Amazon is having some issues with retailers trying to sell you some gadget that really isn't what you thought you were going to get. Like a USB stick that says it's 256GB, but is actual 2 Mb. The 'reviews' of these shadier products are shilled out or just 'bots and amazon is trying to get these types of things off their market.
So, what happens when this happens to these restaurants? Like, say I 'open' up a restaurant inside of my apartment. Maybe I list the address as some other place, or I just risk the local health inspector showing up unannounced. But I only sell via Amazon, and I get some friends and family to write reviews of my kitchen, or maybe I just pay some 'bots to do it too. Amazon has problems already with that fly-by-night operation, how are they going to combat it?
For reference, this was an issue with GrubHub last year:
They streetview your business and check if you have a previous presence elsewhere? During your first transaction from a schlub the delivery driver will drive to your fake address, see that there is nothing there and you wont even get money since there would be nothing to pick up.
* cost of vehicle, gas and other logistics = $5/hr
...then they must charge $10 per delivery. If you squeeze and wiggle may be you can bring this down to $7 or so likely not considering downtimes in between peak hours. I thought this was the reason why most door-to-door delivery services eventually failed or switched to catering. What is the new business innovation here?
The places I order from (in urban Europe) have been around for years. Delivery is usually free.
30 minutes delivery time per order seems way too high, I'd expect 10 minutes or less per order. They don't deliver just one order at a time. That said I'm sure margins are razor thin and the drivers get paid like shit.
Amazon is moving forward with a GREAT momentum to dominate consumer market and extends its monopoly. It is not Amazon vs small businesses anymore. Amazon is in a ferocious battle right now with big players in various domains (Google, Walmart, Apple etc). So far it is turning out to be beneficial for an average middle-class consumer who conveniently gets to purchase cheap products and services. The way Amazon has extended its tentacles deep into TV content (Netflix vs Prime Video), produce (FreshDirect vs Amazon Fresh), Amazon Basics and Amazon elements, Alexa in home automation, e-readers, Spotify vs Amazon Prime Music, Rackspace vs AWS cloud, (failed) cellphones venture, and now Seamless vs Amazon Restaurants. Is it becoming more possible for Amazon to either acquire FedEx/UPS or create its own shipping company? I mean why not? This seems like a missing piece of puzzle.
> Is it becoming more possible fore Amazon to ... create its own shipping company?
It's not just possible, it's already in the works.
Back in March Amazon announced plans to lease 20 Boeing 767s. Their first plane flew at an airfair in Seattle a few months ago. Recently they've been showing off their long-haul Prime semitrucks around Seattle.
Factor in Amazon Logistics (last-mile Fedex/ups/usps alternative) and Amazon Fresh (last-mile food delivery)... it's happening. I think we can expect big plays in 2017.
* they also have their drone thing... I think that's just a moonshot hype project.
At its core Amazon has always been a logistics company. They already put warehouses close to airports so it's not much of a stretch to take over the air freight. Last mile is another issue, UPS, USPS, FedEx and the rest will continue doing that for a long time.
Amazon Restaurants is a great service which has been around for some time now, at least here in Seattle. I use it pretty much exclusively now instead of other similar services I've used in the past. The minimum order is much lower ($20 instead of $30 or $40 a lot of other services add), there's no delivery fees, and your driver is tracked via GPS with guaranteed delivery windows, so you have a much better idea of when you're order will actually arrive. There's also a better selection of restaurants than other services.
That said, the UI isn't quite as user friendly. It feels bolted on top of Prime Now, so you don't really have a typical menu, a regular shopping cart is used and shared with Prime Now which just feels a bit off. I think it would feel much nicer if they built a website specific to food ordering instead of trying to shoehorn it into Prime Now.
Hybrid car + amazon + uber + lyft + no education other than reading a gps map = lifetime job for drivers. Just like broadband, just need to figure out that last mile for these services.
Clever turn of phrase. My question stands -- what are the logistical reasons for serving a suburban area but not its urban counterpart? All of the other areas being served by AR are urban cores. Mind you, northern VA is not the only suburb of DC.
I should add that Amazon did this with Amazon locker as well. Northern VA got coverage well before DC. My suspicion is some kind of incentive that VA is providing to Amazon, the same one that attracted Amazon to build its huge us-east data center in VA.
I was going to suggest that No VA is more affluent than DC, but in that case they shouldn't be in Baltimore.
They advertise Bay Area as one of the regions they deliver, yet it's not available in the South Bay. I wonder what's the logistics overhead to make it available elsewhere in the Bay Area where you already have a Prime Now delivery network.
I like DoorDash and I hoped that they would end up winning in this space but it seems unlikely when their two competitors have other things that the supply side (delivery people) can do if food deliveries aren't needed. Amazon is likely re-using prime instant delivery and Uber is transparently using their drivers to deliver food.
It's kind of like competing with Amazon or Google for cloud infrastructure. Very few companies need all of those machines or that tech, they have no use for it other than renting to people. Amazon and Google on the other hand already needed that tech. They are essentially renting their own excess.
I wanted to order food just for myself. I didn't due to minimal 20.00 USD price.
If I am with a group of people we can go to restaurant anyway. On the other hand, eating out alone is awkward, so ordering online becomes more attractive.
Once you realize that you can't buy shit anymore without some simple platforms get a huge cut/fee in the middle: rental cars, hotel bookings, flights, meals, everything else... oh I forgot: taxi rides!
I am really missing something here.
If I click the link it brings me to my Amazon application and I don't see anything new.
My first order with Amazon restaurant was at the beginning of September.
So I guess that I am missing something?
Amazon restaurant is three months old and the useless link that just brings me to their app doesn't really help me to shed any light.
I'm curious...are there restaurants (or I guess kitchens) that are delivery only? If the infrastructure works well you could have strongly automated kitchen in a warehouse type of setups and deliver via Amazon. Guess the branding/word of mouth could be a problem but that might be solvable with money (free stuff, hope people like and recommend it)
As much as I love Uber...I don't feel bullish that they will beat out amazon and their network of vendors/merchants. Uber might go the way of replicating the last mile as a service model that amazon is exploring with their prime now networks, but I'm not sure how Uber will scale this late game since it's not a real core competency.
Interesting. This probably makes a couple of food delivery companies rather nervous.
Are they delivering 24/7 or at least in the evening? A killer feature for normal amazon would be delivery at a time where people are home from work instead of during working hours...not sure why this isn't a thing yet.
Interesting when companies have different names in different countries. It's called Delivery Hero in Australia. I suspect it's a UK based company which eventually got large enough to buy a similar AU based company and just kept the name in order to maintain an already established brand.
Unilever has like 8 different ice cream brands in different countries all sharing the same logo and mostly selling the same products.
I think Just Eat came first in the UK and was actually pitched on Dragons Den and they have subsequently bought other similar ventures, retained the brand identity of their acquisitions and I assume centralised everything else, I didn't know thet had branched out internationally.
My general rule of thumb is to use Prime Now for jelly bellys, Amazon Fresh for salads, Restaurants for vindaloo, or regular Amazon for bizzare chinese candies shipped direct. Also I'm enjoying Amazon dark web for crack.
I think I have like 2 or 3 amazon apps on my phone. Some have a tiny 'prime' or some other logo to differentiate them, but I can never tell instant which app to do what.
So, how does this make money? Other than the Prime membership, I don't see any reference to fees on either the customer or restaurant side. Is this a freebie land grab?
This has been around for a while. I wish there was a better integration with the Amazon Echo.
The benefit is that the delivery fee is included into your Amazon Prime plan.
Now, in my opinion, Sprig is a much more affordable everyday meal option when you get the membership. There's also Doordash, GrubHub, EAT24, UberEATS, Postmates... etc. You'll find some restaurants are not available in some apps.
I've talked to a restaurant owner that uses this. He said it's now a very large portion of his business and he's looking to hire more staff to stay open longer (currently pretty weird hours since its just him and a couple others). Because of the way it's setup, Amazon is more of the consumer than the boss. The only negative thing is some of the drivers don't use the heat bags correctly or toss the food around which ends up looking bad for the restaurants.
Of course, you're valuable. A company is much more interesting to assess according to how they treat less valued workers, like warehouse staff. Amazon does not rate highly in that regard.
I don't think we can use that as a benchmark, since software engineers are treated much better on average across the industry.
IMO, the best indication of a company's general sense of ethics is the way they treat their lowest-paid employees. Amazon doesn't instill confidence in that regard.
If you ask Amazon warehouse workers who've worked at numerous large fulfillment centers for different companies, they say that by and large the work is about the same everywhere. Tough and not very well paid, but what do you expect for completely menial labour that will be replaced with robots in a couple of years.
Question for the HN mods (and community): At what point is a post like this not simply an advertisement? This isn't a link to a press release, an article, a blog post, etc. that discusses the project, and this isn't even new (I've been getting snail mail ads for this for a month or two).
Should big companies just start linking directly to things they want us to buy on HN, with no context? Is that encouraged here?
Since this is a community that cares equally about new ventures and technology, a direct pointer to a new venture makes sense. The community is getting introduced to the venture directly and is free to click around to understand more.
Amazon does interesting things with tech and logistics. This is their latest foray and is interesting to this audience/niche. I understand your concern, but if this was just mindless advertising, I would think it would receive short shrift from the down voters and would disappear fairly quickly. As it happens this is pretty interesting zeitgeist news.
I'd prefer links to stories about new ventures, their strategic impact, etc, but given that anything worth discussing usually produces multiple stories it's better that all the discussion occur on a single thread with a link to the announcement.
You guys have no clue...pizzas turning up piping hot, food within 10mins. Here in the UK we have Justeat and bloody Uber psycho moped riders. I regularly visit and order in my local indian restaurant and hear online bookings coming in on the phone with between an hour and 90mins delivery time. Talk about #firstworldproblems
