[rhuru]

Only if they do their current business well others can create effective competition for Amazon. It took me 3+ hours to just get a label from their website for a special hardware I had to ship. Fun part is that after I signup and create and account and login, they want me to "Create an account", which I suppose it is their internal terminology for some kind of payment profile. Then they did not allow me to create that either demanding I call up their customer service.

[neilv]

Similar here. I blew half an hour trying to schedule a Fedex pickup. Which left the 2 kinds of accounts on their site. Which recently they decided to start carpet-bombing with marketing emails. With unsubscribe links that led to runarounds, and no way to get to a place to opt-out in my account. Eventually got to somewhere they said I had to call their customer service to make them stop. At this point, I took the unprecedented step of adding an email rule to never see any email from that company again.

Of course Fedex figured out logistics decades ago. But their consumer IT experience I've seen thus far is ridiculously bad, and has a vibe that they really don't care. (Contrast with Amazon's vibe: Bezos once cared, and that will take a long time for the company to completely unlearn, although lately they can coast and cash out on legacy goodwill and entrenchment.)

Are businesses going to let Fedex operate any consumer-facing facet other than the package showing up on doorstep?

[Ographer]

Same experience here, seems like a bit of Conway's Law. Their website is set up to mirror their own internal structure instead of a way that is actually customer friendly. My first thought of shopping on FedEx is how awful it would be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

[ajmurmann]

It's a really bad case of Conway's Law if it doesn't only impact the design of the underlying system, but even impacts the UI