If FedEx's platform can't promise 1 or 2-day delivery, it will never take off.
On the other end of the spectrum, Amazon promises 1-2 day delivery but has been falling through more often than first seen and can become a 2-4 day delivery. Amazon does seem to absolutely bleed their workforce to keep up, but also push more absolute junk through their platform now.
Costco is in kind of a prime position to offer quality-tested products with 1-2 day delivery... but they just do not care to offer this "Prime" type of service. Costco is still quick, just not as quick, and their website / app is trash to use compared to Amazon.
One honest competitor I see rising up - Home Depot. They are making incredible moves in this space (in terms of web/app UI/UX and expedited deliverable date).
> Costco is still quick, just not as quick, and their website / app is trash to use compared to Amazon.
Really? I feel like Amazon is always trying to trick me into a) signing up for prime, b) buying sponsored products, c) buying cheap Chinese junk or d) buying stuff in the wrong currency and getting hit with unfavourable foreign exchange rates.
Whereas the Costco website just works.
The Home Depot website is also a pile of junk. Just yesterday I probably spent 5x longer on the Home Depot site than on a competitor’s (Canadian Tire) website because of the jankiness of filtering for an extension cord. If you search for something with a lot of results (e.g. light fixtures) the result set is basically unusable because of poor filtering functionality. A few months ago the entire search functionality broke because of some ad domain that I was blocking. They harvest emails that you punch in for email receipts at checkout for marketing purposes. etc. etc.
> They harvest emails that you punch in for email receipts at checkout for marketing purposes. etc. etc.
Really? I've been using a unique email (i.e. homedepot@my.domain) at checkout for the last 2 years and haven't received any emails at that inbox except for my receipts.
TBF they may have stopped - I do the same thing with unique emails, and just checked my email history - I actually wrote to Home Depot's privacy line in January 2021 to complain about that practice, and AFAIK haven't noticed any of their marketing emails since. (Though I had manually unsubscribed as well.)
I don't really think 1-2 day delivery matters. I live in a major metropolitan area with 3 amazon distribution centers within 25 miles of me, yet with Amazon prime my orders took 3-4 days to be delivered. I canceled prime a year ago, and now my orders take 5-6 days.
Products from Amazon can no longer be trusted, So I only order things from Amazon for a few reasons...
1. I can't find it locally, or purchase it from a trusted online seller.
2. It is something I might need to return (Amazon's returns are easy).
3. I want something cheap because I'm only going to use the product once.
So my experience is that only 1 out of about 1000 times have my deliveries taken more than next day when it says next day, and almost everything I order has a next day option. So is this a locality issue, or just two competing anecdotes, and if its anecdotes then what is the actual statistical reality.
Amazon delivery estimates have been extremely accurate for me, in both Austin, TX and Portland, OR. Both places I was within 20 miles of a distribution center. We moved to Portland in early 2021 and it was a bit rough for like 6 months but it got sorted. They had some issues with their drivers apparently but I forgot about it until just now, since it’s been a non-issue. Lots of the deliveries come in electric rivians direct from Amazon. Occasionally a 3rd party person in their own car will deliver, and occasionally UPS will.
I canceled my prime over a year ago, so my deliveries taking 3-4 days was likely during and shortly after covid. Which certainly could have had an affect. I understand that staffing and inventory was difficult during that time.
So I would not be surprised if prime delivery is back to 1-2 days now.
But, I still have no desire to purchase prime again. All it did was encourage me to buy things I really didn't need. Simply being able to buy almost anything at any time is not healthy for me.
When it's 11pm and I suddenly have a desire to start a new hobby and buy a bunch of products to support it, I can no longer fill my Amazon shopping cart and click buy. The added friction of having to wait until stores open the next day means I completely forget about it before I waste my money.
Amazon went all in like google in selling ads for their search function. It has made their site junk. You even search foe a specific product brand + model & you get Chinese backend firms with nonsensical English names. Yechhh.
Someone needs to build a front end that drills down through the ad cruft to reach the products you want.
Or offer a prime plus that doesn’t have search ads.
I live in the Bay Area in a pretty commonly known city. Frequently the product listing on Amazon says eligible for 2-day or 1-day Prime Delivery. Many times despite doing that it takes 3-4 days or longer.
> Is there any data out there to support this claim?
What are you imagining?
The people reporting falsified shipping times on HN are the data you're asking for. I can personally confirm - Amazon "guarantees" two-day shipping for Prime orders, but it will not actually provide two-day shipping, and if you complain their only response is "Well, it got there eventually. What's wrong?"
After enough time where they systematically refused to honor their own purported benefits, I canceled my Prime membership.
What are you talking about, how am I biased? I use Amazon weekly to purchase things. The quality of products has gone extremely down hill and shipping is not as efficient as it once was. This is my own personal experience I'm relaying. Why would I even bother to say it if I didn't find it true for myself?
Pre-COVID it was 2-3 days. Now it's been years since I've gotten anything in less than 7, although lately it's been closer to 10. That's with a paid prime membership, too. There's not even options to purchase extra fast shipping anymore. I used to be able to pay for 1 day and get it in 3-4 at least, but they took that option away.
Walmart has next day, and most 1st party e-stores are 2-3 days, so it really just seems like an Amazon problem. (Montana)
During Covid in Bozeman, I spent too much time tracking inbound packages. With I-90 going through town, most quick-shipping packages either came in via truck from Billings (after the air freight to get it there) or direct on the morning Fedex feeder flight arriving to the airport at 8:15am.
Were those changes recent? A family member of mine once spent several hours shopping on Home Depot, asked for my help checking out. I quickly realized why shopping took them so long: every UI action blocked for 35-40 seconds. Poor soul cared about chipping in and was suffering sunk cost fallacy, but I had to explain that, while I really appreciated the amount of time they'd put into their cart, I simply could not spare the time to carry it over the finish line-- but I was happy to help them screenshot their picks and assemble+purchase a new cart on Lowes in half the time it would have takes us to get through checkout on HD. They'd probably been at in for six hours, starting well before I got home. This was on a core duo with ZorinOS (based on Ubuntu 22.04??) Firefox ~119, maybe ublock origin(?) and partly user error (nieve tolerance), but t's soured by opinion:
Home Depot really need to do more improvement of their technology. I always go into the store expecting to buy one thing and I waste so much time trying to find one of their idiots that knows enough to help me find what I am looking for. I tried relying completely on their website and app to find the exact aisle and bucket the item is located in and their new "in store experience" app is constantly crashing and locking up on my iPhone or the item has "walked away" and is not where the app tells me where it should be. I dont really think they are truly a data and tech driven organization. It seems like they are trying to bolt it onto existing legacy.
EDIT: oh yeah the filtering is horrendous as pointed out in other comments here. Its not walmart level bad but its close.
Do people really care about 1-2 day delivery in most cases? Although I can see how this can be a double whammy - I generally care about 1-2 day delivery for certain non-obscure items that I just need now, like protein powder or a screwdriver... items that are easy to cover. On the other hand, I don't care about 2-day delivery for all kinds of obscure items like old books, climbing gear, or one single side table out of 100 that happens to fit perfectly into my space; the kind of items for which the breadth of selection is hard to achieve. So low coverage, slow delivery would be a bummer. I wonder if that's how people generally treat 2-day delivery, or is everyone much more impatient than myself? :)
> Amazon promises 1-2 day delivery but has been falling through more often than first seen and can become a 2-4 day delivery.
... if you live in a big city.
I'm pretty rural, there's a city of about 6000 nearby, two cities in the 20-50k population range within an hour, and Amazon Prime takes 5-7 days to deliver here.
(Without Prime, Amazon seems to retaliate by switching from UPS to USPS, which means that on top of a 1-week delay I typically need to go to the post office to pick up the package.)
Other sellers using seem able to do 2-day shipping here when they want to, so it sure sounds like cost savings at Amazon.
FedEx/UPS + Costco + Home Depot is a fascinating anti-Amazon.
Unfortunately, Home Depot probably wouldn't be interested. They're doing their thing, have their own extremely efficient behind-the-scenes logistics system, and largely specialize in markets that Amazon isn't interested in. (Some consumer overlap, but Home Depot's bread and butter is non-consumer stuff)
Costco... what would be in it for them? Do they want to move more items / have more members? I guess so? Not sure if they're volume constrained and what their logistics flows look like.
But store-picked + shipper-delivered seems interesting. Costco assembles orders overnight, then truck stops by in morning on way to deliveries and loads. Customers get next day delivery within range of a Costco.
How about Walmart? At least to me, that seems like the true Amazon competitor in the US. Unrivaled physical footprint, strong logistics, and a growing online presence.
Walmart has the same shitty chinese crap dropshippers, but also has incorrect stock info and less reliable shipping / logistics. So it's a more discombobulated and less return-friendly version of amazon.
Walmart is having issues lately where folks login after a while away or setup a new account, and the account holder finds that there are credit cards already added to a seemingly new or disused account.
When I order from home Depot online, I end up getting 3 packages from 3 different stores (when they are common items in stock at all stores) and 1 of the 3, is always days later than the estimate.
Home Depot essentially runs a virtual logstics backend out of a surprisingly lean footprint.
Whereas Amazon has a huge warehouse / fulfillment footprint, Home Depot uses stores + a few (2?) online-specific fulfilment warehouses.
The benefit of that system has been really efficient storage costs. The limitation has been multi-item (especially rarer) pulling from multiple stores (because each only has a few pieces).
At a high level, Home Depot's logistics goal is zero warehoused inventory. Either something is (a) on a ship, (b) in transit to a store, or (c) in a store.
Amazon built its logistics from the ground-up for online fulfillment.
Home Depot has been around since 1978.
Retooling a brick and mortar logistics system into a flow-through, multi-channel one isn't simple, cheap, or easy. But they've been working on it since ~2010(?).
Suffice to say... looking at retail is like looking at the tip of an iceberg. Most of the company (the logistics), you never see.
After a confusing "new in..." section mixing relevant and irrelevant results, the top three results are all non-smart switches, with only the first sponsored result actually matching the query. The next four results are all non-smart switches, with a mix of relevant and irrelevant results after that, with more HomeKit-compatible products buried multiple pages deep.
As an european (Spanish) is very suprising to read than in the US it takes up to 2-4 days to deliver for Amazon.
Here, even in a remote village, normally it's 1 day, and if you live in the big cities you can even have the "same day" delivery.
Also a side note, but I have been reading a lot of people complaining about fake stuff on Amazon, and I feel that it's also a problem that we don't experience here, at least, not at that level to be noticeable.
I would be interested to see any data on how much the 1-2 day delivery promise drives customer purchases from Amazon? Personally, the thing that matters much more is the breadth of the offering. I would buy much more from Costco if they carried the stuff that I want. It would not matter to me if it took a day or two (or three) longer to get it as I don't really buy stuff that I need right now online.
The article mentions that FedEx acquired Shoprunner which was like Prime for AMEX holders for a while, it offered a personal 2-day delivery and free returns on many retailers.
It is seemingly all run by bots. They delisted my product and none of the humans knew why. It is a bot that decided that and no one could answer what the reason was.
I welcome any competition that is more friendly to sellers.
I almost stopped shopping at Amazon. There is very little reason left. It is filled with no-name crap by companies with auto generated names. I might as well buy it from Aliexpress or Temu, same crap but at a fraction of a cost and the latter is really aggressive about cheap shipping.
For something more serious either buy directly from the brand, or from Costco, Target, Walmart, HomeDepot, BedBath&Beyond, BestBuy, Macy's, publisher's website, some specialized hardware, electronics or hobby shops. There is still a limited number of things where Amazon beats others, but their quality went down, and hassle free return is not hassle free anymore.
On top of that, they exhibit highly unethical behavior when it comes to counterfeit books. Here is a good thread by François Chollet about his book: https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/1550930876183166976. The main takeaway is this:
Q: What is Amazon doing about it?
A: Nothing. We've notified them multiple times, nothing happened. The fraudulent sellers have been in activity for years. The issue affects ~100% of Amazon sales of the book since March or April. That's because, amazingly, since fraudsters are claiming to have inventory, Amazon has stopped carrying its own inventory for the book (i.e. it has stopped ordering new copies from the publisher).
This is mind blowing to me, that they are still in the business of selling books.
And they did not really solve last mile delivery. Yeah, it is still faster, but I can wait for my sneakers for 5 days, instead of 2-3 and many retail chains can now delivery something to you in 3-5 biz days and can beat Amazon on return policy or warranty. It's odd that market forces aren't correcting this for Amazon.
I wonder how many people don't use overstock for political reasons. I know he has done a lot, but after the former ceo tried some insurrection I really swore it off.
The only real benefit to Amazon for me has been cheap Chinese stuff I’m willing to pay 2-10x to be delivered within a couple of days instead of a couple of weeks.
Otherwise other retailers tend to price regular items much better and you’re unlikely to get used stuff sold as new.
> It's odd that market forces aren't correcting this for Amazon.
Yes, yes, quite odd. It’s almost as if these capitalist notions of self- correcting market forces that large businesses are so keen to sell us on are based on decrepit bullshit ideas peddled by the ones who stand to profit the most, with the goal of keeping themselves unregulated for as long as possible so they can squeeze every drop of value at the expense of everyone else. Who could have predicted that a system that not only allows but incentivises a handful of individuals to amass and control the world’s money, thus allowing them to effectively make the rules, would have negative repercussions for society?
As I finish writing this, I notice on the front page yet another article about rising income inequality. Because of course there is, because it’s only getting worse.
> Trees don't fall over the first day after a parasite infection
Precisely. It depends on a number of factors, including the strength of the tree and of the infection. In other words, these companies are getting stronger and more ingrained all the time, and the longer that goes on the harder it will be to do anything about it.
> Things take time in the real world
Yes, let’s all keep waiting a few more decades without doing anything or criticising the system. That’ll teach them and fix the problem, it’s been working really well so far. All that self-correcting is coming any day now, I can already feel the billionaires shaking in their gold-plated astronaut boots. Maybe the Invisible Hand of the markets will steal the olive from their cocktail.
It's all bots from the customer side too! AI-generated product names and descriptions with AI-generated reviews [0]. Half the books on there these days are AI-generated knockoffs of someone else's work.
I think it's not just sellers who would welcome some competition in this space.
Much of my work the past few years has been working with Amazon's seller-side e-commerce APIs, and it's truly infuriating how impenetrable their "support" systems are. It's ridiculously hard to get even basic problems solved, and for some reason they make it near-impossible to get access to shipping and tax addresses via their APIs [0], which makes developing pretty basic functionality really difficult.
Amazon FBA takes a big percentage, abuses sellers/brands, and significantly limits business models (e.g. international sucks) There is a market here. I hope they pull it off.
I find FBA / the logistics side great. In urban areas they are running multiple deliveries a day and reliability / speed is crazy good. So I feel like they are delivering well there. Oddly it’s the seller / brands / marketplace quality that I wish they focused on more - even if that involved more brand cancellations etc. So my experience is that the Amazon logistics side is great but seller product quality often isn’t
I’ve sold, worked with real (not dropship) businesses that sell and a customer.
As a seller going through multiple channels if you are selling books for example - Amazon basically pays - many bookstores slow pay, even distributors can get way behind and require lots of phone time. The trade is that it’s all on amazons terms. Same thing with fulfillment- many sellers complaining have never actually run a warehouse and done pick / ship. I don’t doubt complaints by sellers are valid, I just wish Amazon dialed down the marketplace side because it’s too full of junk for me
I work with a bunch of brands and the marketplace itself is a huge problem. Stolen goods, return fraud, Amazon directly competing after finding a profitable brand/product, chinese knockoffs/junk, mixed inventory, ads, many more. The tools amazon provides to combat these are largely useless.
Diving into one I think is detrimental to both sellers and customers, Ads. If you are not a huge brand this is a ~mandatory additional cost on top of FBA (or you won't show in results). As a customer it sucks because many of the top results are trash. Why bother having a decent product if you can just buy a ranking and some fake reviews? Amazon is pushing this so hard right now as it is a quickly growing revenue stream for them :(
I'm going to venture a guess that logistics is far more difficult than ecommerce, and that Shopify buying FedEx would be far worse than FedEx venturing into ecommerce.
An e-commerce website is trivial. That’s why Home Depot, Target and all the other big Amazon competitors have it nailed.
Seriously, I don’t understand how so many major players are so bad at it. Search that doesn’t work (heck, Home Depot can’t consistently get their search bar to display if an ad blocker is running) or can’t find the item you’re searching for even if it’s there. Item displays that are absolutely awful (the item I’m currently looking at and probably want to buy is far below the fold). Delivery that is “FREE” but mysteriously is not free in the cart. The list goes on. Shipping address verification that wants to “correct” your address to something wrong in an infinite loop.
Sometimes I feel like Amazon’s competitive advantage is that its website is so-so in a field where everyone else’s is truly awful.
Beyond a certain scale (when you're becoming more of a logistics company and less of a store front) there are a whole heap of rather tricky problems sitting there waiting to bite you in the arse. Preventing exponential cache growth is my favourite, especially for b2b. Search is also highly non-trivial, again especially b2b.
For a company like Home Depot or Target, there is an actual finite inventory of sellable objects in the physical possession of the retailer, and this inventory is small by computer standards. Any remotely reasonable full-text-searchable database should be able to search it accurately and efficiently.
That leaves items in the supplier’s inventory (or made to order) and third-party listings, I suppose. To the extent that items in the supplier’s inventory are curated, they should still be finite and in a database. Made to order is more complex, since the actual number of distinct orderable items may well be effectively infinite, but the number of item listings is still finite.
Third-party is a mess, and this is where I think many large retailers mess up. A large part of the value proposition of a store like Home Depot or Target or the in-store part of Walmart, etc is curation and first-party responsibility: if I buy electronic stuff at Home Depot, I expect it to have appropriate safety listings and generally not be utter crap. If I buy housewares at Target, I expect them not to be made out lead. By allowing third-party crap into their sites, these companies dilute the very thing that makes them better than Amazon. (And they apparently mess up their websites, too.)
At the very least, search should be entirely reliable for first-party listings.
you can think of b2b as "every customer has access to different products at a different price" and optionally "they want to integrate their ERP with the ecommerce vendor's ERP". Also that the concept of customer is not what you might think it is.
I’ll ignore the ethics and wisdom of a major retailer showing different customers different pricing, especially a retailer that operates physical stores with price tags on the shelves. Instead I’ll point out that, if you run a successful business (physical retail) and you want to add a secondary business (online sales of the same goods plus some other stuff), then getting the simplest model working well should be a much higher priority than adding fancy complications (bespoke pricing, for example).
yeah b2b is pretty much at the wholesale end, where everyone has different accounts with their own pricing negotiated as part of the contract and so on. If you go into an electrical wholesaler for example, you can buy at consumer prices, but the tradies will definitely be getting some kind of negotiated price depending on the scale they're operating at.
From my experience in this space b2c is kind of a subset of b2b where you can treat the c as a single customer (see - users and customers are related but not the same) in the rest of the b2b mess. But totally for the simple case - a retailer who sells a particular kind of thing - the basic solution is pretty trivial. Search is tricky once you start moving from single product category into general catalogue. Then you're going to want things like rules to feed back search results from customer behaviour (one example of a few curly ones). Algolia seems to have solved that kind of problem adequately for now given the assumption of a certain level of quality of data in the licence holder's back end systems and aggregation code. Then there's things like variants (e.g. same product different colour / size) where it's tempting to make a naive implementation that won't scale and will be a maintenance nightmare, or where your data modeling fits the arbitrary case instead ...
another one to consider is that product classification should be thought of as arbitrary efficient representations of a hierarchy subject to structural change at any time. And that different customers can see different hierarchies. They're all simple problems once you start thinking about them int he right way, but getting them into a coherent architecture with minimimum spaghetfication is challenging. I'm definitely interested to hear about good agencies working in this space (not because I'm hiring).
Is there anything to search not working because the platform has allowed itself to be gamed with key word stuff to the point of simple things like a title being useless in and of itself?
Places like Target and Home Depot do not have an unlimited number of suppliers for the same object. So each object has one page and not a varying number of pages for the same product for different vendors.
And yet Home Depot is regularly unable to find items using its internal search. So I fall back to using a web search engine to find things on Home Depot’s website.
Other the main complaint I've heard about shopify is their endless Nicole dime fees. Followed by so-so support and poor export when leaving the platform.
I would consider those rather normal complaints. Is there something else?
So-so support is huge compliment. It's either horrible or very bad. That's for a client paying $2k/mo for "dedicated support", can't imaging what people on free tier have.
Frequent API outages. Things just don't work. Then it works next day.
Management don't keep their words.
Besides aggressive and deceiving marketing I don't understand why people would use it.
Only if they do their current business well others can create effective competition for Amazon. It took me 3+ hours to just get a label from their website for a special hardware I had to ship. Fun part is that after I signup and create and account and login, they want me to "Create an account", which I suppose it is their internal terminology for some kind of payment profile. Then they did not allow me to create that either demanding I call up their customer service.
Similar here. I blew half an hour trying to schedule a Fedex pickup. Which left the 2 kinds of accounts on their site. Which recently they decided to start carpet-bombing with marketing emails. With unsubscribe links that led to runarounds, and no way to get to a place to opt-out in my account. Eventually got to somewhere they said I had to call their customer service to make them stop. At this point, I took the unprecedented step of adding an email rule to never see any email from that company again.
Of course Fedex figured out logistics decades ago. But their consumer IT experience I've seen thus far is ridiculously bad, and has a vibe that they really don't care. (Contrast with Amazon's vibe: Bezos once cared, and that will take a long time for the company to completely unlearn, although lately they can coast and cash out on legacy goodwill and entrenchment.)
Are businesses going to let Fedex operate any consumer-facing facet other than the package showing up on doorstep?
Same experience here, seems like a bit of Conway's Law. Their website is set up to mirror their own internal structure instead of a way that is actually customer friendly. My first thought of shopping on FedEx is how awful it would be.
If y'all are struggling to find good customer service from an online storefront, please allow me to recommend Office Depot / Office Max.
I have found that they've got a great selection of electronics, kitchen supplies, and of course office goods, and they are not a marketplace: they do not permit 3rd-party sellers. They have house brands and name brands, and they sell all through their own stores and warehouses.
The shopping experience both online and in-person is a breeze. Their logistics are great; when I went shopping for my Christmas gifts in the evening of 12/25, I scored free next-day delivery. I picked up a cable modem, some plasticware, and an executive office chair. They were all delivered via Uber next-day to my doorstep. Some originated from my local store, and some from across town.
As a bonus, their CopyMAX location allows me to securely shred documents for a song. They contract that out with Iron Mountain. I've got a membership; I earn points and valuable coupons every time I shop. It's basically worry-free, and the staff at my store is friendly, and they seem to be respected and supported by management, even though the storefront is a veritable ghost town by now.
I've been able to avoid any entanglements with Newegg and Target and Best Buy, where I've had some bad experiences. Office Depot/MAX is my go-to, first choice now for just about anything.
Sold! Thank you for sharing. It seems the marketplace nonsense and its fake vendors who have their products comingled with legit vendors have ruined almost every online store.
Yeah it's crazy how many do it now, too. I just noticed the other day that Decathlon (in Spain, at least) is now selling crap from other vendors as well.
I've known a fair amount of people that have worked at FedEx corporate, poached talent from there, etc. I sincerely don't think they are going to turn the ship with the technical culture they have in place. It's abysmal, dysfunctional, and weighed down with so much red tape. Many engineers are just a cog in some large machine. Communication seems absolutely draconian.
Perhaps this is most companies that age and size but I simply would bet against any of their new technical endeavors without radical change in their organizational structures. I'd love to be proven wrong though. Healthy competition is a good thing.
This is interesting. Putting aside AWS, Amazon has for a long time been a logistics company at it's core - the website is terrible from a customer perspective, pricing isn't great and the seller/supplier experience is certainly weighted in Amazon's favour. What they have is the critical mass of customers who are invested in prime and it's the default choice. I hate them but if I need something quick I generally hold my nose and ask my wife to order on her account. Other sellers can achieve delivery just as quick, it's just inconsistent between sites.
As someone who builds ecommerce sites and has seen Amazon become dominant I've thought about how to solve this problem many times - it requires deep pockets and most importantly good logistics. I've often thought if a logistics company expanded their shopping cart plugins to also (optionally) feed back data to a central ordering system and included their own payment solution to allow direct from customer ordering with centralised ordering, payment and logistics - perhaps at a loss until a prime type offering could be built there would be a potential for a strong business. Amazon take a huge amount of fees a chunk of which go to putting the wrong product in front of the customer!
Whilst Amazon has nailed logistics (especially last mile), it's real value is in reduced cognitive load.
You know when you shop there that what you order will arrive quickly, no convoluted delivery charges, and a returns policy that shook the industry up completely
Agreed. In fact there are significant parts of the US where 1 or 2 day delivery is not available. But people who live there, like me, use Amazon often because it's the 'easy button'.
Beautiful... except they can't even compete with Amazon on shipping (literally had to have 3 things re-delivered just in the last 2 weeks). I would focus on their current business first.
As usual, anecdotes are anecdotes. I consistently have a great experience with FedEx. It's almost like its a huge company that is only as effective as the humans that execute it's operations in a given area.
In other news, people in different areas share wildly different experiences with the quality of their local McDonalds service. The jury is out, is McDonalds service entirely and objectively good or entirely and objectively bad? We investigate at 11.
I dread receiving anything by FedEx. UPS is fine. I would frequently just get stuff not delivered by FedEx and then be expected to go to a warehouse to pick it up, which via public transportation is a two/three hour round trip.
In the past few years (including this past week) Fedex has lost or broken quite a few of the packages I've sent or received. They took no responsibility for smashing a monitor I shipped for RMA that their Fedex Store employees packed, using the box that those employees recommended. (I know better now. Do not trust them to pack anything fragile or important. Always take pictures before shipping.) I now actively avoid them as a choice if there's any other option.
This is actually a pretty interesting comparison. McDonald’s is franchised and so quality is highly dependent on the franchisee. FedEx is the odd one out in major delivery companies in that their model subcontracts to local companies in a similar fashion with the expected wild variance in quality. UPS is wholly owned and operated as a comparison.
Interesting, but I contend that even without a franchise model, you still have humans doing the work in the end, and human error and inconsistency varies greatly per human. You might say the bad workers would get fired in a well functioning company, but then if there's a high churn rate, that isn't a guarantee of high quality at that low a level in an organization.
The problem is that with how these companies are set up, if the humans are doing the work well they're basically doing it in spite of the company. Left to their own judgement, vanishingly few humans are going to (leave a package that's actively leaking oil paint; have a local terminal that can never be reached; leave packages down by the road instead of delivering them; falsely mark packages as delivered and then do it surreptitiously the next day). But the systems that command them highly incentivize such behavior in the name of never-ending "optimization" (aka corporate looting).
I also consistently have a great time working with FedEx, UPS, and USPS for both shipping and receiving. If something comes up for me, more than likely it's actually the shipper/receiver screwing something up with the paperwork on their end or the information provided to me.
Also, I'll mention that Amazon FBA isn't even competing for my money or time. I can't use them, since I don't sell anything through Amazon nor pay for Amazon Prime if I buy something from Amazon.
Meanwhile, FedEx and UPS are almost always available anywhere, and USPS also remains an option everywhere if the shipment is something they handle.
The FedEx driver for my route misdelivers constantly. I get deliveries for my house number but three streets away (1234 Foo St. instead of 1234 Bar Dr.) just about every couple of weeks. I've spoken to the driver and to customer support, but it still keeps happening.
I now know that "neighbor" and get greeted with a laugh every time I swing by to drop off their packages.
To be in that same boat as your story makes me wonder if it's a systemic bug. But also, holy hell, how is routing a truck to a street address not a solved problem in 2024?
I would also have accepted if they'd leave the EXIF data in their "delivery proof" images, so I can do my own GPS navigation, because the picture of some piece of grass with my box sitting on it, shockingly, is not a good way to track down lost parcels
If I could snap my fingers and end FedEx as a company I would do it without any hesitation. Hell, in a more constructive vein: if I could pay to ensure that no one ever used FedEx to ship something to me, I'd do that, too (even as I write that I'm cognizant that's perverse incentives for FedEx improving, but it would be a more likely fix than just praying for FedEx to go out of business anytime soon; it'd be like shipping insurance but in the other direction)
Funny how the article talks about Amazon using contractors - at least around here FedEx ground looks very similar staffing side - but article didn’t mention that
Yeah, this is actually a more important point than many realize. And it’s not just like they pay their drivers via 1099. There are third party companies that use fleets of their own, marked with FedEx branding to deliver packages. This is different from e.g. UPS, who afaik owns all their own fleets. It is imo more difficult to maintain consistent quality and predictable service with FedEx’s model, which I think is why their service is so bad in my area in particular.
My family has a running joke that if it’s FedEx the delivery date is like the pirate code… “more like a guideline”
I’m glad it’s a “platform,” because FedEx appears institutionally incapable of making a usable website or mobile app. But maybe they can pull off a “platform.” :)
You're absolutely right. Their website is terrible to book anything on or do any admin with, probably got many different antiquated systems in the background
was looking for this comment. If their core website is anything to go by, I doubt they can run an ecommerce business. I've never felt more nervous about using an online service than when I had to internationally Fedex my passport to get it renewed.
If Amazon offered such a postal service I'd use that in a heartbeat with full confidence.
I feel like folks are hyper focused on the delivery side. That just seems super important to me. Just me, but there's like 2-3 times a year I want something fast. I bounce on and off Prime because it just doesn't matter to me.
The real problems seem much deeper to me. Amazon's warehouses, their online store, their ability to handle disputes: that much deeper integration feels like the challenge FedEx faces.
I'm confused by this. Amazon's not an "e-commerce platform"; it's a store that's half Walmart and half flea-market. Shopify is an "e-commerce platform" to me. Which of these is FedEx intending to be?
Amazon is a mediocre storefront on top of a high performance logistics company. FedEx already has much of the logistics and it wouldn’t take much to compete with Amazon on the storefront side because the experience is so bad.
FedEx can't get a package delivered on time... I have a really hard time seeing how a technologically outdated legacy corporation could compete with Amazon fulfillment and other 3PLs...
My personal experience with FedEx is they can't even match UPS for last mile delivery. How do they expect to compete with Amazon (and by extension Walmart) on e-commerce?
FedEx won't even complete the last mile for me. UPS and USPS bring packages to my front door. FedEx, despite having identical instructions, leaves my packages in the street.
Do you figure it's easier to become a shipping company or an ecommerce platform? I don't suspect they'll pull it off, but it's not the worst idea I've heard.
Walmart always makes me think similar but not in the same way. Ultimately, the in-person retail experience still offers its own conveniences so that's a good feature.
Only if they have what you want in stock. I was shopping at my local Walmart Supercenter today and they had no black shoe polish. I can get it through their website, if I want to pay for shipping.
As a resident of a major metropolitan area, FedEx shipping is the worst of the providers (including DHL and Lazership). They regularly claim to attempt a delivery but don't even come to my home, nor do they deliver to my front (as called out in my delivery instructions), but instead leave packages by my garbage bins.
I think the quality of delivery service for the other carriers is highly dependent on your local market, UPS in the town I recently moved to is godawful. Their customer support process is equally shit though and that's the same across most of the world though I'd assume.
FedEx is a terrible delivery service. I refuse to use them. Maybe before attempting to rival Amazon, they should focus on improving their core operations first.
Is FedEx going to allow ecom customers to access the same same-day blisteringly fast Amazon drivers or are we stuck with their garbage delivery network?
... because it could reduce amazon's marketshare and pricing power? which would reduce the supposed need for such efforts. is this just schadenfreude desire to see amazon get fucked in court?
Because it’s likely not going to be successful but would be, like Apple to Microsoft in the 90s, the small slice competitor that keeps government action from happening.
> enabling merchants to give estimated delivery dates to customers during shopping and ordering
It’ll be a new era when FedEx can give accurate delivery estimates. Last time I recall paying for next day delivery and wondering how my package will traverse all of Canada in that time. I then watched the delivery estimate update to “tomorrow” every day for a week until it finally delivered.
Came here to report similarly. They cannot estimate package delivery times with any accuracy for my rural address. They virtually always gaslight us with false delivery dates. They are a running joke in our household.
For a company that should have all of the data necessary for training a system to do a better job, their systems are a farce. I would love to hear the FedEx engineers defend this status quo.
I can't remember the last time FedEx actually correctly delivered a package to either my house, or my place of business. They have left expensive switches in the middle of parking lots at wrong buildings in the rain and marked it as delivered. Whenever I see that a company is using FedEx to deliver something to me, I lose all hope that it will actually arrive at the correct address, let alone arriving on time.
I'm sure it'll be no problem to compete with Amazon warehouses, gargantuan stockpiles of product strategically placed across the country (and increasingly, the world) for rapid fulfillment.
If FedEx's platform can't promise 1 or 2-day delivery, it will never take off.
On the other end of the spectrum, Amazon promises 1-2 day delivery but has been falling through more often than first seen and can become a 2-4 day delivery. Amazon does seem to absolutely bleed their workforce to keep up, but also push more absolute junk through their platform now.
Costco is in kind of a prime position to offer quality-tested products with 1-2 day delivery... but they just do not care to offer this "Prime" type of service. Costco is still quick, just not as quick, and their website / app is trash to use compared to Amazon.
One honest competitor I see rising up - Home Depot. They are making incredible moves in this space (in terms of web/app UI/UX and expedited deliverable date).