[tyrw]

I ran an ecommerce company for about a year, and one click checkout was the least of our concerns when it came to Amazon.

The speed of delivery, prime benefits, brand recognition, and willingness to lose money on many if not most items are absolutely brutal to compete against.

I'm glad one click checkout will be more broadly available, but it's probably not going to make much of a difference...

[twothamendment]

I use amazon for many of the reasons you listed - but the first thing I do on a new device is turn off 1-click. I can't see this patent changing the game for anyone.

[freehunter]

On the other hand, many more people actually do use 1-click.

A tip: if you ever find yourself saying "why does a company have X feature/product, I don't use it, no one uses it!" you might be right on the first statement but you're almost certainly wrong on the second.

It wouldn't be there if no one used it.

[twothamendment]

Of course - if nobody used it Amazon would remove the button. I doubt that adding 1-click to some other site will greatly increase their sales - that is all I'm saying.

[ipqk]

Well, you would be wrong.

Every step between a customer and completing an order is a loss of sales.

[wernercd]

If Google can measure how many people they lose by a millisecond of added time between a question and a response ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerdooley/2012/12/04/fast-sit... )...

Then there has to be some sort of measurement out there on how each step causes cart abandonment (or whatever it's called).

Its the same reason sites add Single-Sign-On... click click, I'm on a website... vs filling out forms, verification, etc...

[Buge]

Yes, but adding 1-click also inserts an extra semi-step into every purchase: the choice of whether to click the 1-click button or the add to cart button.

Apparently Amazon finds that adding 1-click does more good than harm.

[sah2ed]

Like the article said, Apple licensed the 1-click patent from Amazon in order to offer the same frictionless experience to iTunes shoppers. This was for music sales, before the iPhone was even a thing, if memory serves me right.

[judahjr88]

Well since we're using anecdotal evidence, I would certainly buy from more stores if they had one click. There have been countless times I've abandoned a shopping cart because there was too many steps

[vacri]

Amazon didn't start out as an online retail behemoth. There was a time when that patent made them more competitive, especially in the early years of the online shopping experience.

[obsurveyor]

Amazon forces 1-click use in places like Kindle and Video purchases. I find this is a detriment if I want to purchase multiple things from these areas since each results in a credit card charge and too many similar charges or too little time between will result in my card getting flagged and locked out.

[elboru]

I love paper books, I love seeing them in my shelf, but since I bought a Kindle I just stopped buying paper books. It is just too easy to buy a kindle book with one click.

The process goes like this, someone recommends a book in HN, they provide an Amazon link, I read a couple of reviews, at this point I'm convinced about buying the book or not, or even if I'm not totally convinced, the price, and the easiness of just one click makes me do it. That process has increased the amount of books I read per year. Sure the button is only a small part of that, but I think is an esencial part, I think Walmart can get a lot of benefit from this.

[marcosdumay]

Would you buy less books if you had to click a confirmation window?

It's much easier to buy books when you don't need to wait for delivery, unpack, carry around, get up to get them, etc. But your process already consist of several clicks and waiting for many pages.

[jerf]

People may self-report "no", but the evidence is abundant that at the margin, the answer is "yes". You are some probably-some-single-digit percentage less likely to buy. That matters very little to you as an individual, it can be life-or-death for a retailer.

[enraged_camel]

>>Would you buy less books if you had to click a confirmation window?

Isn't it well-documented that the more steps you have during th purchase process, the lower your conversion rates? I'm sure this is especially true at Amazon's scale.

To be specific though, if I'm on my phone and I see a confirmation window, I might postpone the purchase until I'm in front of my computer - and by then I might forget about it. One click purchase completely bypasses these types of scenarios.

[skybrian]

Better yet, you can download a sample and defer buying until you get to the end of the sample. That way you don't have to worry about books piling up that you don't get around to reading. It's a handy "books I want to read" list.

[bduerst]

I'm kind of the same. I would definitely kill to be able to buy DRM-free epub books from someone else other than Amazon and have it 1-click integrate with my kindle.

Maybe some epub sellers could email it to your kindle with 1-click purchasing now?

[jsjohnst]

PragProg has (or had at least) email delivery to Kindle after order, so maybe they'll do it?

[dexterdog]

Buy from Amazon. Remove DRM w/ Calibre.

[pnathan]

I buy paper for books that I think are likely to be worth reading years down the road, long after Amazon has collapsed.

[twothamendment]

I see e-books as a fee for a one time read. I'm not likely to read them again and I can't hand it to my neighbor to borrow. A paper book - I can read it, donate it, lend it out - whatever. I do like how many e-books can fit in my pocket, but I'm finding fewer reasons to buy them and more reasons to own the book instead of owning the right to view the book on some specific platform.

[YCode]

A lot of people don't realize (or maybe care?) that Amazon makes up a fair amount of that loss from screwing over distributors and third party sellers.

The Walmart of the Internet, I suppose.

FWIW I usually try to find more direct sources before buying on Amazon. If the other source can drop a few bucks off the Amazon price and offer free shipping I'll buy it direct from them.

[sidlls]

Free shipping for what delivery time frame?

Amazon Prime's fees are quite small compared to direct shipping costs with carriers. It depends on the product type, of course, but typically third-party sellers are already on thin margins selling on Amazon. It's very likely that "drop a few bucks off the Amazon price and offer free shipping" means they're selling to you at a loss.

[YCode]

I'm not generally in a rush; if they can get it here in a week or two that's fine as long as they tell me what day it'll be here.

I'm not saying it's a great deal for the company, but what can you expect consumers to do if Amazon has the cheapest price AND prime shipping you already paid for?

That said some companies at least raise their prices on purpose when posting to Amazon in order to meet their standards for things like returns and Prime shipping.

[nostrebored]

You say this like it's somehow a bad thing? Amazon has built an extremely efficient distribution network comprised of all major shipping companies and a vast array of third party sellers. The price you're seeing is the result of billions of dollars of investment paying off.

[twothamendment]

Most of the time I'm not in a rush, but I still pick 2-day Prime because it gets delivered to my door by UPS or sometimes FedEx. If I select slower shipping or order from another site it might come USPS or SurePost (handed off to the USPS). Best case with USPS is it ends up in the mail box down the road - worst case I have to drive to town and get it at the post office.

If Amazon would let me pick a slow option that was still UPS/Fedex, I'd do it. Same with other sites, sometimes I won't buy from them if they only ship USPS and I know it won't fit in the box.

For me, Prime is great because it means most thing come to my door at no extra (other than the yearly fee) cost.

[SubiculumCode]

thin profit margins on amazon is not the same as costs of doing business on amazon. Amazon takes a hefty cut.

[sidlls]

Amazon's cut all in (shipping, listing, stocking, etc.) is often on par with the shipping cost for the slowest option with carriers.

[omarchowdhury]

15-20% of price sold at? No way.

[djsumdog]

I stopped shopping at Wal-Mart around 2009. When I returned to the US in 2012, I saw Amazon as the new Wal-Mart and stopped shopping there.

I realize Target and Kroger probably implement the same tactics as WM now, same with eBay/Newegg sellers and Amazon, so I realize it's more symbolic than anything.

[trendroid]

Do you have good resources in mind on Walmart's harmful practices? Yes, I can search internet but looking for long sophisticated essays or even good books on the topic that you may have come across.

I am not from US but currently studying here and haven't thought much about this topic. Walmart, Walgreen and Amazon feel too convenient. I would love to learn more on the topic before it becomes a habit.

[xxXXxx-]

Wikipedia has a good summary with 180+ citations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Walmart

[YCode]

You definitely want to review that page, especially the working conditions and health insurance sections.

[thaumasiotes]

You don't avoid shopping at Walmart because of "Walmart's harmful practices". You avoid shopping at Walmart because you're better than the kind of people who shop at Walmart. Then you start talking about Walmart's harmful practices to try to confuse other people.

[someone7x]

This wikipedia page[1] is a good start. In particular the last section about dead peasants insurance is the first story I encountered about Walmart's harmful practices.

> Critics, as well as the United States Internal Revenue Service, charge that the company was trying to profit from the deaths of its employees, and take advantage of the tax law which allowed it to deduct the premiums.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Walmart

[adventured]

Going back a quarter century or so, the biggest complaints against Walmart have commonly been thus:

- Extremely aggressive about interrupting unionization attempts.

- Relatively low pay, particularly for the bottom 1/2 of employees.

- They squeeze suppliers to restrain prices to the benefit of consumers. This essentially adds another aggrieved voice in the crowd.

- Then there's a very broad, vague, low value argument about the soul of communities being destroyed by their presence. This premise was particularly common ~15 years ago. It has turned out to be almost entirely bunk, so it's an argument rarely used against them today. Today, the focus is overwhelmingly on pay, specifically that their low wages force tax payers to subsidize said wages.

Most of these arguments collapse upon rational inspection. For example, they universally pay better than mom & pop local stores and employ far more people in small & mid size towns / communities. Then the argument gets flipped: it then gets said that they intentionally pay higher than local competitors, and advocate in favor of higher minimum wage laws, to crush local competition (ie damned if they do, damned if they don't).

The same people that dislike Walmart, you'll find, will frequently lodge 'for the common good' arguments economically. Walmart acts for the good of the many, as they squeeze supplier margins to hold prices down. Somehow saving 200 million people money is turned against them as a negative.

Their low pay is an interesting issue unto itself. Their margins are hyper low, at 2.5% net income margins; their sales have been flat and profits have been falling for years. If they pay each employee just another $4,000 to $5,000 per year, they'd go bankrupt (particularly as they begin the long hard war with Amazon). They're often contrasted with Costco, which pays meaningfully higher wages; however Costco manages that by employing far fewer people per dollar of sales. To match Costco on that, Walmart would have to fire at least half a million people, most of whom have few skills to do any other higher paying jobs.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the low pay / tax payer subsidy issue, is who the tax payers are that are doing the subsidizing: mostly the rich. The top 1/3 in America pay almost all the income taxes that go toward subsidizing Walmart's bottom 1/2 of employees who earn low wages. This almost never gets discussed when the topic comes up, in fact it's aggressively dodged. The people doing the arguing, are overwhelmingly in favor of the rich subsidizing the poor, but for some reason it's not ok when it comes to this (ie they're actually arguing it's bad that the rich tax payers subsidize Walmart's poorest employees, it's comical). This is just a baseless attack on Walmart, because of what they are. The only alternative to having the top 1/3 subsidize Walmart's poorest employees, is to have those employees lose their jobs and then the subsidy goes to 100% instead of being partial as it is today.

[oceanplexian]

> The speed of delivery, prime benefits, brand recognition, and willingness to lose money on many if not most items are absolutely brutal to compete against.

What I'm hopeful of is that (barring evil patents or monopolies) all of those things should be able to be outsourced a third party vendor or service. Hopefully in the future you will be able to simply contract out alternative delivery service, or drone delivery, or "prime"-like membership programs with the click of a button or an API call.

[tyrw]

That is what's happening today, offered by the only company with the scale to do it: Amazon (It's called FBA). Then when they see your products are selling particularly well, they stock them, undercut you, and put you out of business.

[concede_pluto]

Amazon can't undercut manufacturers (not without becoming a manufacturer). If they undercut middlemen who weren't adding any value, what do I care?

[hobofan]

The middlemen are adding value by making niche items available on the marketplace. If they are gone the diversity of products will shrink.

[robryan]

But either Amazon will have the product or it will still be valuable to another middle man.

Amazon have a lot but are a long way off having everything. Health and Beauty for example, they may have the top 50k sales ranks pretty well covered but at least the top 100k are probably worth a middle mans time.

[hobofan]

Not all products are really valuable to a middle man. From my insights regarding Amazon sellers, ~70% of the profit is made from ~5% of the products, and those are the products Amazon is taking away from them. If they then only have the low-profit items remaining, they aren't able to be profitably on Amazon anymore, unless they operate at significant scale - a scale that becomes very hard to grow to when Amazon is constantly taking away your means to do so.

[em3rgent0rdr]

But you have to realize that Amazon was able to become so advanced in all those areas because they had an (arguably) unfair 20-year advantage thanks to this patent.

If we could rerun the timeline without this patent, then the e-commerce field would likely not be so lopsided.

[andrepd]

Absolutely. They have the capital and the scale to outcompete you and anyone that tries to go against them. Bar regulations to protect competition, you have no chance.

[oceanplexian]

I've heard this, but I honestly don't see it in practice.

If you've been to a Costco recently you may be surprised to find that they're much less expensive than Amazon. They have more buying power and stronger vendor relationships that AMZN simply doesn't have. Prime Day 2017 was also a huge disappointment (Mostly overpriced junk like bluetooth speakers).

Honestly I think the only thing that works in Amazon's favor is the convenience, and their private distribution/delivery network. Beyond that they're nothing more than a generic online marketplace.

[wbl]

That's great for consumers.

[sidlls]

Not necessarily. It could easily lead to inferior products as every point on the pipeline from manufacturers to distributors cut costs. It can, in addition, lead to a monopoly situation providing for relatively unconstrained pricing.

[erikpukinskis]

Amazon can't compete on curation, except through third parties which will be a clunky experience.

[nonconvergent]

lolwut? Selection + Collaborative Filtering factored against a huge dataset...Amazon's standardizing automatic curation.

You just want a native advertisement and Top 10 lists.