Ebay now Products are supplied by neighborhood stores, so ebay
doesn’t need warehouses or inventory, as Amazon does. Delivery is by “valets”
who are dispatched by smartphone, rush to the designated store to buy the products, and then rush to deliver it to you, wherever you are. This is another of the attempts to merge online shopping with brick-and-mortar stores.
The $5 delivery charge for each order over $25 seems unsustainable to
me: an hour of a valet’s time plus transportation, but then Amazon offers free
delivery for orders over $35, so …?
“Amazon
Ramps Up $13.9 Billion Warehouse Building Spree (Bloomberg August 21, 2013)
… signaling the urgency of getting products to customers more quickly amid
rising competition … -- including 50 new facilities -- since 2010. That’s more
than the company spent on warehouses in its lifetime and brought the total to
89 at the end of 2012. Amazon has announced five more in the U.S. this year. … Amazon’s
spending on fulfillment jumped more than 40 percent annually from 2010 to 2012,
compared with 24 percent in 2009, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.”
"Amazon,
Postal Service to Start Sunday Package Deliveries (Bloomberg November 11, 2013), ... Customers in New York
and Los Angeles can start choosing Sunday delivery at no extra cost from this
week. The service will expand to Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, New Orleans and
other cities next year, Amazon said in a statement today.”
It’s ironic that “speed” in Manhattan is achieved using bicycles,
although cars are used in other cities. I can’t wait for Autonomous
Vehicles J.
