Don't forget, Subscribe and Save. Prime Pantry had a subscription service too, so people were very confused about what to do - Prime Pantry or Subscribe and Save - and what saves the most money. Also, with Subscribe and Save, it was and still is* confusing as to WHO the product is bought from. On low-profit price-flucting products (e.g. Case of Redbull), the price will differ AND sometimes it will be unavialable via the subscibed listing but if you searched for the item, you'd find it Prime from Amazon. The opposite also happens, when Amazon.com is clearly out of an item, yet somehow your subscribtion still makes it on time.
Honestly, just typing all that made me very confused.
At the end of the day, I don't care from who (as long as they're reputable) or how, just get me my product, in this price range, this many times per period.
*: I still use Subscribe and Safe for the 15% discount - a nice discount if 5 subscriptions are due in the same month.
> I still use Subscribe and Safe for the 15% discount - a nice discount if 5 subscriptions are due in the same month.
I have used Subscribe and Save for the better part of a decade, and I think there were maybe 2 times that my subscriptions lined up this way. I've tried delaying all non-essential subscriptions to get to the magic number, but in my family it almost never happens.
It sounds like you have some expierence. Would you mind elaborating on how one would enter this space, aquire supplies/products, examples of licensing deals. Even just some trusted resources would be fine. This fascinates me, as I have wondered how some sellers on Amazon (or eBay but no thanks) become so large just by reselling other people's things on Amazon -- at the same time Amazon is the one who really wants to be that middle man.
Ideally, I would love to begin some sort of revolutionary alliance that tries to fight off the behemoth Amazon and how they use their market size, analytics, and predictive analysis to see what's hot, and then either buy or make it at a cheaper cost and a lot of times---a better quality.
Sure happy to help. Your email in your profile appears to be invalid, but I'll write a few things here in case other folks are interested.
They become big because the competitive edge is not in the supply, it's in the demand, as in, they have access to a customer base. Of course, one can't sell complete crap, supplies/products should fulfill a certain market demand, but supply is always secondary to having access to customers.
If you're thinking about becoming a trader or distributor, start backwards from your potential customers. Who are they, what do they want, and what price point and average buying quantity makes sense for them. If you're trading B2B that is quite different from sourcing from a supplier to sell direct to consumers in your market. In the former, your customer is the physical retail stores (or their equivalent), in the latter it is actual consumers themselves. The usual customer profile work should be done here.
Once you have an idea of your customer profile, then you can start sourcing. Luckily there are very few barriers to entry in 2021, you can google for product names or categories, find the suppliers online (China or otherwise), and you can just email them to inquire on their prices. If you're starting out, be a simple as you can:
a) What are their prices and minimum order qtys
b) Can they waive the minimum order qtys while you test out the market on the first few orders (suppliers always have excess stock on previous production runs. You can do them "a favour" by buying that - they recover their costs, you get things for cheap).
c) Pre-sell if you can. That could be as simple as walking to stores with a catalogue, or just a sample to show them. Then collect pre-orders from 50 customers (ideally with some money down), use that to make your first supplier purchase.
d) Ideally, you have exclusive rights to the distribution for several years. When you're starting out, you don't want to spend the money to "buy" these rights, so again, it becomes a negotiation. The supplier isn't selling in your market, so you're helping them reach a wider audience. It's in their interest to support you.
e) Make sure besides exclusive rights, you get collateral support in terms of marketing materials, graphics, ads, freebies, etc. This stuff is huge when you're building up a customer base.
The best structure is pre-sell, purchase from your supplier to fulfill existing orders, then the stuff arrives and you just pack it off straight to your customers. Rinse and repeat. High volume items give you about 10-15% gross margins, but standard is about 30-40% gross margins as a trader. Again, all depends on how you negotiate your total costs. Freight is often a huge win -- get some good freight charges, and your profit can literally double on a specific shipment.
Ideally in your customer identification process, you'll have found some product ideas that they'll want to buy. You are valuable because:
1. Your customers don't want to buy the volumes a supplier would require, they just want a small subset of that total. They're happy to pay a larger price for smaller quantities.
2. Suppliers don't want to sell bits and pieces, they like having someone buy large quantities from them. So they'll give you a good price for bulk purchasing. They also don't want to do the legwork to find the 100-1000 smaller customers to fill a large production order.
Your profit is the difference between the two numbers. So you do the legwork to get that upside.
If you're attempting to sell on crowded locations like Amazon, then you will need to spend/invest on ads to drive the purchasing from you (vs. someone else with the same or similar products). Most marketplaces reward sellers with existing sales volumes, as their algorithms figure you've completed sales before, you'll continue to do so. So that's a game you do need to play to start building a seller reputation. If you have your own Shopify-or-whatever site, it's the same, you'll need to do FB/Google ads to drive that initial customer acquisition.
There's a lot more info, but I'll stop here for now. Happy to write more if folks are keen.
If I could upvote you many more times I would. Thank you very much this is a great help, and worthy of the VERY few times I am archive your response locally. I appreciate it. I actually hadn't thought about pre-sell! It's incredible I haven't but as long as I am confident with my supply chain it should work fine! Thanks again!
BTW: I was being too complicated with the email in the profile.
It said "me at my username dot org", I now changed it to just say mkhalil instead of "username".
It's me @ mkhalil.org. Would love to keep in touch!
How are exclusive rights promised by a manufacturer in China enforceable by a small time buyer not from China? What is the recourse in the event it’s found out the manufacturer violated the exclusivity agreement?
The same like any other relationship - have it in writing, with penalties specified, and besides the contract, do basic due diligence with your supplier. China is not some lawless backwater, despite the fake news bogeyman in recent years. You can get played out just the same by a supplier in Belgium - like any business relationship, you take steps to mitigate the risk, but nothing is ever 100% iron-clad. You should still get a written agreement.
*Edit: "Who else do you supply to" is a very common part of interacting with a supplier, and most of the time they are chomping at the bit to share their "famous customer list" with you. In fact, some suppliers even have pages on their website listing who their "authorised resllers/distributors" are. Having a chat with any of the others helps, and like any business relationship, it's a human relationship with some trust involved. You back things up with legal protections, but in the end, business is about the human aspect of things.
> China is not some lawless backwater, despite the fake news bogeyman in recent years.
Interesting. I always heard stories about designs being copied and sold under different names in very short time after releasing a product. And in Belgium, you have the EU courts to back you up in simple cases, but I was not aware if its similar in China (unless you had a certain amount of weight to throw around like a F500 company or something).
That's already a great bit of info. Thanks much. I always ran up against the can't win the but box on your own product issue. Can't believe I didn't consider ads as a bootstrap.
> This fascinates me, as I have wondered how some sellers on Amazon (or eBay but no thanks) become so large just by reselling other people's things on Amazon -- at the same time Amazon is the one who really wants to be that middle man.
All the evidence I see indicates Amazon does not want to be this middle man. Amazon wants to be the payment and platform middleman, that’s where all the profits lie due to infinite scale-ability and near zero marginal costs. They removed the ability to let you filter search results for items sold by Anazon.com years ago.
Amazon does not want to be in the 2% profit margin retail business where they are liable for inventory risk and other liabilities like product safety, etc.
They want to be like Visa and take a cut of each transaction. I would too, considering Visa’s profit margins versus Walmart’s.
Where? I just searched for microSD card, and there is nowhere on the left side to filter by seller. There used to be an option where you could check mark which sellers you wanted to see offerings from.
I definitely remember 10+ years ago, being able to restrict searches to items sold by "Amazon.com" by clicking the check box. Then they gradually removed it for certain searches. Sometimes, the option to filter by Amazon.com would show up, and sometimes it wouldn't. I thought I was going crazy for a while. Then I realized what they were doing, and then in a few years they got rid of the option completely.
Not that it would make a difference anyway, since Amazon commingles inventory with other random sellers so you never know which supply chain you're actually getting the item from.
Many years ago, a old friend of mine purhcased a new Panasonic Smart TV. It was when "Smart TVs" were just becoming a thing.
I hooked her TV up for her; wiring it into the ATT uVerse modem directly. Other devices worked, but this one did not.
After resetting the modem, factory resetting TV, and making sure the ip address on the TV's menu were displaying properly and matched the router's config (they were), as a young naive tech nerd, I just said:
"Looks like they sold you a dud. Thankfully you kept the receipt!. Either way, you still have warranty to get it replaced."
My friend replied: "Shouldn't I call them first before taking it back?"
I said I didn't think it would help, but go ahead.
About 30 mins laters, she was talking to Panasonic tech support and they asked her to manually enter the DNS entries [I believe it was 75.75.. so Comcrap's], and voila, the TV was online again.
We were very happy it was an easy fix; but that day I deftinely did a LOT of reading on DNS servers.
Till this day, DNS entries are something I always check over when troubleshooting (as well as setting my router to Cloudfare's).
I was suprised to read that OBS doesn't work with Wayland. I found some articles [0] on how it runs well using XWayland [1] - which I guess let's you run X-Clients under Wayland - but it seems that the amount of work to get this to work is not trivial, considering the official PR for the work, is on part 3 and that has been open since March![2]. Oh, how did it get so bad?
> the argument is that after including Fukushima and Chernobyl nuclear power is still, according to the evidence, safer and more environmentally friendly than solar or wind.
That's really not the argument, but also please don't pretend that this is a fact. This might of been true in the long ago past, but solar has and is innovating and advancing way faster than nuclear. Solar is also on the order of 10x cheaper to build per kWh, 10x faster to build, safer, and doesn't leave you with radioactive materials that you need to store safely for some 50-10,000's years.
300 years for dangerous nuclear waste, 2000 if you want to go to average mS levels.
You have your orders of magnitude wrong. Solar panels (as in photovoltaic energy) is the worst "green" energy when accounting for waste and probably the one that caused the most cancer with children near zinc/cadmium mines, but fear not, in the following years they will start killing people near landfills[0][1]. More wastefull in term of minerals too, but veolia might have something to say bout this (Best company working with renewable imo). Maybe in 50 years.
You can't smelt rare earth without a lot of energy, whereas you can reduce iron and CaCO3 with hydrogen and make steel and cement almost carbon-free. And as Fe and CaCO3 are present almost everywhere, you also don't have to globablize the production.
Ow, and if you evalutate the CO2 ton to be around 100$ (i think its at least 4 time this price), solar energy is twice as expensive to build and install as nuclear per kWh(and if we start reducing iron and cement with hydrogen, the difference will only grow). Thats only installed power, not produced power, also not counting energy storage.
I really like wind though and geotermic energy though, i think thermo solar is a good idea (not as good as passive) and maybe next gen solar won't use as much rare earth. Also if you're really interested, you should check how a power grid works.
One thing that is nice about solar is that it flips the entire idea of "power" on its head. Solar theoretically allows you to power your own life without needing to be a part of any power grid. That's pretty neat, and I think will be very useful in the coming decades.
But I think the argument here is a little convoluted. In my opinion, nuclear power is still the best "bang for your buck", and that's probably not going to change considering the same rules apply in the rest of the universe. Absorbing the energy of photons that were created by a nuclear reaction is going to net far less energy than simply using the full energy from the original nuclear reaction to power a turbine, no matter which way you slice it. On a large scale, nuclear makes sense. And even though there have been a number of high-profile incidents in the past 50 years, nuclear doesn't even come close to the amount of deaths and sickness people have suffered over the past couple hundred years by working in coal mines. I'd much rather take my chances with a bit of radiation than go into one of those mines, knowing that my lungs are going to be pitch black by the time I'm 45...and if it catches fire, I'm done.
I'm guessing this had to due to surge in stock market.
In my opinion the only way to get this large inequality between CEO comp. and employee compensation under control is for employees to also be rewarded with more options for reduced stock-price purchases and a tax-incentive or tax-reduction on those realizing those profits instantly (as oppose to the waiting period in order to avoid capital gains tax).
Maybe an overall tax haul for people who profit less than X amount of dollars per year with stocks.
This doesn't solve much directly for people under a private employer, but I think it's a start. Maybe indirectly, people will have more money to spend on stuff therefore helping everyone, but it might also cause prices to rise.
Disclaimer: Not a financial advisor (anymore) nor a economics professional.
Create two restaurants with the same exact look, menu, appliances and prep but different names and Yelp/Google entities. Enter bad reviews in one, and see what happens. That's how we would be able to tell if its the reviews or the restaurant that hurt the restaurant.
An aside: With this mesh of human and company rights [whether or not you agree], does a company -- like people + GDPR -- have the right to be forgotten, or not exist somewhere they wish not to?
I left my last company because one of my co-devs would always do crazy hack-job things, and when I complained to them or higher-ups, the excuse was:
< "Well all the work was already developed, and it would take too much time to rewrite it. You should have said something earlier"
> "When?" I asked, considering she had just put up the (big) PR's and PR's ARE the time to review...
< "Check her commits as she pushes them to the repo" - as in her bugfix/feature branches, not master...
My jaw dropped. Especially since I was hired on as "Lead" and had all the accountability but no actual power.
It's incredibly frustrating because during code reviews I will request changes so it's not such a broken hack job, and the response will basically be "No, it's not worth changing". At which point I'm the one "holding up development". We wasted hundreds of development hours during the last project because of this persons "inventive" code, and nobody seems to understand what's going on.
It's hard to get more strength to push back with out of thin air. I'd encourage you to try pushing for more detailed post-mortems (if you don't already have them) and just keep an eye out on how much curtailed reviews cost the company. You also really want an advocate for code maintenance and if you don't have one of these with a loud voice there isn't a really feasible way to solve it except becoming it yourself and earning the trust of those above you.
Two pieces of actual useful advice I can offer are:
1. A review style I picked up based off of RFC 2119[1] basically the reviewing software we use allows us to mark particular comments as blocking of non-blocking and I pair that with the usage of MAY/SHOULD/MUST within the comment language i.e. "We're using the old `array()` syntax here instead of `[]` we MAY wish to use the more modern syntax" this allows me some room to elevate necessary change while keeping in the nitpicks I really want to throw in (and I do try and minimize them) without lowering the power of the strong comments. I've used MUST maybe three times always for something incredibly terrible like pages not loading or migrations to the DB that are unsafe and cause data loss.
2. Agree on syntax and style rules and enforce them. It's easier to get people to agree to rules once than try and argue for them on each PR - anything like brace placement or line limit shouldn't come up repeatedly since it wastes everyone time and makes folks feel belittled.
This is great advice. Just have some minor thoughts to tack on.
Post-mortems are great for many reasons. For the case of GP, one particular advantage is that they align senior peoples' understanding: we shouldn't do X again. If you have a strong narrative for why a project failed, post-mortems are a formal setting in which you can present this narrative with concrete evidence to higher-ups.
In the future, when you see warning signs that a mistake is approaching repetition, you can raise the concern up the chain, invoking the memory of the post-mortem to motivate their intervention.
I also totally agree that a sincere and high-quality code review process is required for high quality code. Your 2119 recommendation is excellent. I'd also recommend doing some reading on commit message templates that smart people follow, they've improved my commit game, big-time.
At our company no commits get into the trunk without going by another set of eyes. We're probably creeping up to mid-sized right now so those eyes can vary in stringency and reliability more so than they would have when it was just a handful of devs, but I think mandatory code reviews are a good habit to get into - so long as you empower every reviewer to be critical and make it clear that both the reviewer and dev are owning the code and must ensure it is acceptable during the process.
We've had that process on for quite a while, and while there are some big weaknesses and holes in it we've also adopted a principle to keep PRs as small as possible[1] with those two tools we've had some pretty reasonable success with a lot of our biggest incidents being related to times when we've made large changes or a review was skimped on.
1. Even if that isn't measure in LoC - moving a dependency and updating references to it is something I'd count as a single action - but one I'd want isolated from any logic changes.
Many good companies enforce a no-origin-branches policy, with rare and well-justified exceptions. Because, used as you describe, a "feature branch" is just a future massive diff in disguise (when it's eventually merged), and massive diffs are a big no-no because they're a huge pain to iterate on via code review.
Doesn't every git repo have an origin branch? What is the alternative to creating a feature branch for developing something you don't want in production until it's ready?
Yep! Sorry, I meant that the only developed branch on origin is `master` (or whatever it’s called at your org). You can create branches locally, but pushing a local branch is strongly discouraged.
At this point, you submit the code for review, and upon approval the branch is merged into master and pushed. It’s not possible to push a commit hash to master that has not been reviewed.
If you have a feature that’s composed of many steps, you can “stack” multiple commits, and review/merge them in order.
If you want to develop the entire stack at once, you’re most likely doing something wrong (according to this culture). You can incrementally merge pieces of code to master in such a way that’s impossible for it to be deployed, and your final diff can be what makes it deployable.
Encouraging smaller changes isn't nearly as useful if those changes aren't isolated - if it's just half the picture then you can't accurately review it.
I hit a similar sort of issue recently - I've been incrementally developing a complex data migration, each change to the migration has worked on its own and been reviewed separately but I'm still going to go in and request a full review once the piece of logic is fully assembled. This is also happening on an integration branch on origin - we do try and keep these to a minimum but we're making a backwards incompatible change that would be quite expensive to do in a fully backwards compatible manner.
There are things that are infeasible to reasonably do without an integration branch (nothing is impossible technically, but it might be a huge waste of time) but even those things are pretty few and far between. If integration branches are common place at your company it might be good to examine coding practices and see if you can slice up tickets to be smaller.
Yeah, organizing work in such a way that you can make isolated, incremental change requires a nontrivial amount creativity and discipline, and that takes time like you say.
But, I do believe it pays off in the form of a higher quality end-product (fewer bugs, more testable/legible components, more extensible), which saves you time in the long run.
Honestly, just typing all that made me very confused.
At the end of the day, I don't care from who (as long as they're reputable) or how, just get me my product, in this price range, this many times per period.
*: I still use Subscribe and Safe for the 15% discount - a nice discount if 5 subscriptions are due in the same month.