alt Hacker NewsI would love to avoid Amazon, and indeed I would love to support local retailers, but more often than not it is simply impossible. The only way I can find out if a local vendor carries an item I'm interested in, and if they have it in stock, is to physically go there. The amount of time that requires is orders of magnitude more than what it takes to order the item on Amazon, where I am all but guaranteed that it will be available.
It is astonishing to me that brick-and-mortar retailers have not banded together to put an on-line front-end onto their stock. It would technically straightforward (albeit not trivial) to build a web site as easy to use as Amazon, but with guaranteed same-day or next-day delivery via a partner like doordash, and with more reliable quality because local vendors have more of an incentive to vet their suppliers. I would love to use a service like that, but AFAICT it doesn't exist.
Someone here, please build this. I will be your first customer.
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Some stores do have their stock available online. I know Home Depot does. The website tells you what aisle the item is in, which rack in that aisle, and how many they have.
I've also seen where stores won't have it at the store I have selected, but it will also check the stock of nearby stores to tell me of one of those other stores have it.
It's not ubiquitous yet, but I'm seeing it more and more. I've also found with things like Apple Pay that checkout on random online stores is just as fast and easy as Amazon, which is quite nice.
In Japan, the Yodobashi Camera chain has a web interface tied to their huge retail stores. The page for each product [1, for example] has a link to a list of stores where it is in stock [2]. If you’re in a hurry and near one of those stores, you can have it held for pickup later that day. If not, you can have it delivered.
I buy a lot from Amazon Japan as well, and I haven’t had the problems with shoddy or counterfeit products that others have reported. I don’t know if that’s just my luck or if Amazon Japan screens its suppliers better. But it’s nice to have strong competitors to Amazon in online shopping. In addition to Yodobashi, there are Rakuten, Yahoo Japan, Bic Camera, and Yamada Denki for a wide range of products, as well as Kinokuniya, Maruzen Junkudo, Sanseido, and others for books.
[1] https://www.yodobashi.com/product/100000001004349962/
[2] https://www.yodobashi.com/ec/product/stock/10000000100434996...
You seem to forget that you can call nearly any local retailer and they will check their inventory for you and often even set it aside for you. A phone call does not require orders of magnitude more time than an online order and you can build a friendly connection in your community that way, too.
I've been hoping someone would build the same thing. Even without delivery, I'd love to be able to search for products across multiple stores through a web interface and see their availability in a map view, with price and in-stock status. I would be happy to go to the store and buy it, as long as I only need to make one trip and I know it will be in stock and at a certain price.
> via a partner like doordash
I do technical consulting for small food companies
This is an immediate non-starter for most local retail businesses because of the steep (25+%) transaction fees Doordash and other consumer last-mile providers charge, and the razor-thin margins of many retail stores
To be clear I agree with your proposal overall and suspect this particular challenge is surmountable, but it's very difficult to get it right, and either way relying on another parasitic platform won't be the answer
The other thing is local retailers have cut back on all specialty items because they expect people to buy those items online.
The problem is that buying specialized things actually makes sense to do online. But online buying has the problem that an average online retailer gives no guarantee that they will fulfill an order faithfully (I still remember trying to order shoe from Target online and getting ... a used masked and I assume others remember online "burn" as well) so Amazon has a key position of online guarantor. As a "natural monopoly", one might imagine such a role would be regulated but not in the present climate, ha ha ha.
Doordash (Wolt) does this in parts of Europe already
I fear it's too late for this. For any category of item, pretty much all the stuff you buy from Amazon or elsewhere online generally comes from the same few factories in China. Any other potential suppliers probably went out of business years ago, are too expensive, or are too small or local to work with.
You could open a brick and mortar store tomorrow but you'd be selling the exact same products that come from the same factories as Amazon.