The "mom and pop" shops can offer value in curation though.
The "mom and pop" shops can offer value in curation though. One of Amazon's biggest problems is that, since they sell everything, and even more everything through third party vendors, they understand very little about most of what they sell. This is why their search is so terrible in many verticals, and probably part of the reason behind the counterfeit goods problem they have. Ship them live weevils in boxes marked "Galaxy S10"-- nobody in recieving will know the difference. It's a problem with no good solution for them-- even benign stuff like removing obvious duplicates from their catalog would probably cost them precious search results and require huge manual efforts. Going so far as to actually cut off products that sell just because they suck would shake their business model to pieces. If you go to a "mom-and-pop" shop that's dedicated to one specific niche, they're probably not going to be full of the "noise" products Amazon will have. The specialist enthusiast PC shop won't be stocking weird off-brand SSDs and heatsinks too anemic for modern processors. The camera store doesn't push those $35 Vivitar cameras with a three-megapixel sensor interpolated to 48. In a way, you're selling confidence-- if I buy any random product in this store, it's much more likely to be an authentic and non-garbage product. While obviously not a mon-and-pop store, I've definitely heard this argument thrown around about Costco-- they don't have 75 TVs on the store floor, but the 20 they have are probably all reasonable selections in their price range.
Posted by hakfoo on Jul 28, 2019, 7:55 PM
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Related issues
- Fake websites pretending to be legitimate websites in order to steal your passwords was considered a HUGE problem.
- 3.5 Flash was always too expensive for a "flash" model.
- I don't think the realistic alternative here was “hire a team for a month and get a better semantic conversion” For a rewrite of this si...
- I was hosting on a PC at home like 10 years ago.
- I live in walking distance of all these things, and the farthest I’ve gotten my kid to do things alone is to walk to and from school (a w...
- It was a long time ago, so I don't remember.
Raise real-world problems, find people facing the same issue, and discuss solutions.3,500 issues0 comments
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Fake websites pretending to be legitimate websites in order to steal your passwords was considered a HUGE problem.
3.5 Flash was always too expensive for a "flash" model.
I don't think the realistic alternative here was “hire a team for a month and get a better semantic conversion” For a rewrite of this si...
I was hosting on a PC at home like 10 years ago.
I live in walking distance of all these things, and the farthest I’ve gotten my kid to do things alone is to walk to and from school (a w...
It was a long time ago, so I don't remember.
I still like to buy my cheap and esoteric Chinese stuff from Amazon.
My local area used to be great to find old used woodworking tools for cheap.
The "mom and pop" shops can offer value in curation though.
The "mom and pop" shops can offer value in curation though. One of Amazon's biggest problems is that, since they sell everything, and even more everything through third party vendors, they understand very little about most of what they sell. This is why their search is so terrible in many verticals, and probably part of the reason behind the counterfeit goods problem they have. Ship them live weevils in boxes marked "Galaxy S10"-- nobody in recieving will know the difference. It's a problem with no good solution for them-- even benign stuff like removing obvious duplicates from their catalog would probably cost them precious search results and require huge manual efforts. Going so far as to actually cut off products that sell just because they suck would shake their business model to pieces. If you go to a "mom-and-pop" shop that's dedicated to one specific niche, they're probably not going to be full of the "noise" products Amazon will have. The specialist enthusiast PC shop won't be stocking weird off-brand SSDs and heatsinks too anemic for modern processors. The camera store doesn't push those $35 Vivitar cameras with a three-megapixel sensor interpolated to 48. In a way, you're selling confidence-- if I buy any random product in this store, it's much more likely to be an authentic and non-garbage product. While obviously not a mon-and-pop store, I've definitely heard this argument thrown around about Costco-- they don't have 75 TVs on the store floor, but the 20 they have are probably all reasonable selections in their price range.
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