[lisper]

I 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.

[joe_the_user]

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.

[al_borland]

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.

[PhoneTag]

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.

[Tadpole9181]

I'll show my ass on this, but calling someone is absolutely an order of magnitude more effort than checking online. Anytime I have to put in an order via phone or place a reservation, I do a mental check of if I actually care enough to not just go with something else. There's a social battery cost associated with it, even higher than talking to someone in person.

[mitthrowaway2]

For a lot of random things, like... say, a suction cup thingy that mounts my smartphone to a car dashboard, I have no idea which stores are likely to sell such things, and they could have a wide discrepancy in prices. I can type into Amazon and see a list of products and prices, but if I want to buy one at a local retailer I might have to call three or four stores before finding someone who carries the thing I'm looking for. It would be really nice to have a search engine that can search products across brick-and-mortar retailers.

[jjulius]

>... a suction cup thingy that mounts my smartphone to a car dashboard.

Try your local phone store. Most carriers have brick and mortar locations.

[mitthrowaway2]

So for another example, I wanted to get a stainless steel pasta strainer. I checked four different kitchen/cooking stores and the ones that had them them only had ones that were too deep, and they were all priced as ridiculously luxurious items, over $90. Then I checked a local hardware store and they had exactly what I wanted and it was only $12. I only thought of that place because I passed it on the way home and was desperate.

[jjulius]

Sure, sometimes things take a bit of work and might not be instantaneous or easy. It all boils down to whether or not one values immense convenience over not supporting Amazon.

[mitthrowaway2]

Right, this is why I'm suggesting it would be awesome if someone were to make a retail search engine, so we could have both at the same time.

[tptacek]

How is patronizing your "local phone store" better than just going to Amazon?

[9283409232]

My hardware store is locally own and carries phone mounts. I realize this is an outlier though.

[jjulius]

Similar to the other response, I have locally-owned options in my area that sell them. I'd imagine many areas do.

Beyond that, if it's a national carrier brick-and-mortar spot, it could be argued that it's a case of the lesser of two evils.

[ndegruchy]

I honestly wish this were the case for 80% of the calls I make to local stores. Most people they have working the phones do not care about the inventory and will just say they're out of stock or don't know if there are any on the shelves. This goes double for requesting a special item from a store that would normally carry it, but doesn't. They put the order into their "system" and then it disappears, never to be heard from again.

Calling retail stores to do anything other than to see if they're open or, in the case of restaurants, get a reservation is just wasting time. At least for the retailers that I've communicated with.

[HappMacDonald]

> 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.

Your username suggests otherwise

[mvanbaak]

Will they do this outside businesshours?

[yupitsme123]

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.

[tkgally]

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...

[mitthrowaway2]

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.

[zhivota]

I worked on this, it was called Milo.com. we had crazy scraping and xml/csv feed ingestion. It was a terribly difficult business because most retailers hated us. ebay bought it and eventually killed it.

[FreezerburnV]

Why did retailers hate you? Wouldn’t they want a solution that brings people to their store because you listed their product as being there and available?

[mitthrowaway2]

That's what I'd hope as well. But maybe they didn't like it because it makes price competition too transparent?

[zhivota]

That's a big part of it, yes. Retailers take advantage of information assymetry after all. While you're in Best buy, you may pay more than online to walk out with an item, but would you pay more if you could instantly confirm it's at Walmart next door for $20 less? Maybe not.

Funnily enough though Best Buy loved us and provided real time data via API and daily CSV data dumps just for us. They were like that, along with Toys R Us and AutoZone. Most others hated us, including Guitar Center after we accidentally DDOSed their web site with our scrapers.

[mitthrowaway2]

Huh! Well thank you for your efforts! When was that? Do you think it would be possible to build it again?

[vector_spaces]

> 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

[briHass]

It must be cheaper than UPS/FedEx for some items, because Home Depot and Lowes have started using DoorDash and other similar services for 'shipping'. I'm sure they batch up the orders and get discounted rates, but that seems to be their preferred method for items that exist in a store within 20 miles and can't be shipped directly from the manufacturer.

It

[rescbr]

In my country (and this might be very specific to my city), one of the drugstore chains partnered with Uber, so you get deliveries within a few hours at a cheaper rate compared to other last-mile delivery options, probably by allocating drivers in off-peak hours.

[Hikikomori]

Doordash (Wolt) does this in parts of Europe already.

[elcritch]

Wolt is great. I’m in Cyprus currently and Wolt feels so much nicer to use than DoorDash, UberEats, etc. Much of it’s the user interface which feels a bit like Waze back in the day and without all the gimmicky ads and in your face junk. Bummer to hear DoorDash owns them.

That you can do groceries, order flowers, drinks, or dinner makes it great for dates.

Downside is that apparently Wolt charges stores something like a €250 fee a month. It’s ridiculous how much any of these services charge small businesses.

I hope automated drone delivery becomes a thing and make it easier to bring up competitors.

[Hikikomori]

Doordash (Wolt) does this in parts of Europe already

[vidro3]

i mean, you could call them up