retail therapy

Amazon’s lowering fees to compete with Shein.

The author of this post suggests this won’t really solve anything… “Amazon rarely changes referral fees, and reducing the fee by 70% for items in Shein’s key price segment is unquestionably a response to Shein. But even if fees were […]

retail therapy

Amazon CEO talks logistics.

“Jassy said 60% of shipments in Amazon’s top 60 metropolitan areas have been same-day or one-day deliveries in the first half of the year. Amazon has found that delivery speed meaningfully changes customers’ conversion rates and the rate at which […]

retail therapy

The junkification of Amazon.

This writer explored the incentives that drive this: “Some of the spatulas you encounter first will carry brand names you’ve heard of before, like KitchenAid or Rubbermaid, while others will have names like IOCBYHZ, BANKKY, or KLAQQED.” I learned that […]

tech, startups, internet

And here come multimodal Chain of Thought.

Amazon researchers paired text with images as input to drive LLM ability ever higher. And they did it with a model that’s only 770 million params (vs the 175 Billion in GPT-3.5). “Our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the […]

retail therapy

In praise of Amazon’s hand scanners.

They have these at my local Whole Foods and I’ve always been a bit turned off by them. But maybe that’s a knee-jerk reaction? “Holding my hand a few inches over an Amazon One scanner next to the cash register […]

retail therapy

Amazon’s restocking issue.

Amazon places limits on how much inventory a 3rd party seller can store in its warehouses. Around holiday time, they tend to cut these limits, which creates a lot of extra stress (and stockouts) for those independent sellers. Why do […]