This is quite significant given market is very bullish on Amazon (Goldman is just all over it). The expectations are set sky high to do well during these times. But if you look at things as consumer, it doesn't look so good. Personally, I've significantly less orders on Amazon these days because of huge delivery times. Sure, orders for "essentials" might have gone up but can that offset the gap? Also, sellers are very dissopointed with their items not getting delivered and many have started to look for alternate channels.
Given all these, I wonder how things will pan out. Wall street expectations for Amazon to do well this quarter is sky high but behind the curtain things might have taken significant hit.
This is sort of a "no one goes there anymore, it's too crowded" criticism. Huge delivery times are because they're getting so many orders (which means so much revenue, which means so much profit).
> This is sort of a "no one goes there anymore, it's too crowded" criticism. Huge delivery times are because they're getting so many orders (which means so much revenue, which means so much profit).
Is that completely true? I thought the delays were at least partially due to staffing problems (e.g. increased absenteeism, worker social distancing).
> Huge delivery times are because they're getting so many orders
From my limited probing, it doesn't look like that. Instead my guess is that operations are violently broken right now at Amazon. You can find lot of non-essentials shipping in 2-3 days while a lot more important items with waits exceeding 3 weeks. This would explain Bezos turning off self-drive button and taking the wheels.
Isn't that because they're sold out of the essential items and don't expect to get enough to satisfy your order for 3+ weeks? Or in other words, they've gotten too many orders.
Unfortunately, Amazon isn't measured against some platonic ideal of what an online retailer could be. They are measured against their competition. And, as far as I can tell, there is no credible competition.
I agree. I find myself dissatisfied with Amazon, but whenever I order from somewhere else I end up regretting it half the time. Amazon's making a lot of mistakes, especially with knockoff crap and comingling inventory. But they're still better than walmart.
I ordered a "survival" order from Walmart to restock my pantry back in early March after returning from a long trip. I made the mistake of including milk and some grocery items. Not only did I have to pay the delivery, but it took two weeks and by then they didn't have any of the things I ordered in stock anymore.
At that point I temporarily had a vehicle so I just went to Costco.
I've been using Whole Foods app for grocery delivery for a little while, and I tried using the QFC one the other day, figuring Amazon needed some competition. It was a complete joke. Half the items in the store said they were only available for pickup, not delivery (why?), and there was no way to filter for delivery items only. And then even when I filled my cart, when I went to check out it removed half the items in there because they were out of stock or because they weren't actually available for delivery after all. Why did you show them in the first place? This app was worse than having nothing, in that it wasted so much of my time.
It's hard to see how Amazon will ever be challenged when the competition is so bad.
FWIW, I'm optimistic that the grocery stores will get better. We use the Fred Meyer app to schedule grocery pickup (Fred Meyer is a grocery chain owned by Kroger, like QFC). They have consistently improved the app and the pickup experience. I think the key to any real competition for Amazon is some high ranking exec being measured by the right KPI. From what I've seen, it seems like that process is well under way at Kroger. But they're coming from way behind, so I think it'll take a while.
I'm the opposite. I use them for 99% of my shopping. Almost everything I buy can wait a few days. I hate finding parking, waiting in line at registers, and driving to the store. It's a whole morning of my weekend off to go shopping. The amount of time saved from using Amazon in my day to day life is staggering.
Delivery times are up because of the volume of business. As essentials business falls down (or 'if', if people get used to using Amazon over their local store), delivery times will fall as well. This isn't a meaningful long-term criticism.
FWIW, I think that several things are getting confused in Amazon's messaging. A while back, Amazon shut down inbound shipments of non-essential items (since opened back up, but with quantity limitations on a case-by-case basis). I think people mis-interpreted this to mean that they were shutting down outbound shipments of non-essentials. But that was not the case. Then, as my sibling commenter mentions: you can't even buy essential items right now, so they can't be over capacity in general because of shipments of essential items.
My take is that they are experiencing something akin to holiday season levels of sales, but that they're not staffed for that kind of volume, since it's spring. So they temporarily shut down inbound shipments of non-essentials so that they could free up warehouse staff for outbound shipments in general. If this is correct, then I think their delivery times are dependent on two things: 1. how quickly they can staff up for the increased volume, and/or 2. how quickly and to what degree retail spending shifts back to physical stores. But demand for essentials returning to normal will probably not make a difference.
Amazon is more than just amazon.com. AWS is a behemoth all on its own. While everything about AWS isn't amazing, it does a lot of things well, which is why they are one of the leaders in that space with a dominate market share of 33%. I don't know if Amazon breaks out profits from AWS in their financial reports or not, but I would venture AWS is probably their biggest cash cow. I bet Amazon.com could bleed money year-after-year and AWS alone would still make Amazon one of the most profitable companies.
Given all these, I wonder how things will pan out. Wall street expectations for Amazon to do well this quarter is sky high but behind the curtain things might have taken significant hit.