Jason & Scot Show Episode 18 – Target “Goldfish”, Instacart, and Amazon Peeves

A weekly podcast with the latest e-commerce news and events. Episode 18  includes Target “Goldfish” rumors, Instacart changes, and Amazon news & peeves

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Amazon News:

• This week is the 10th anniversary of AWS.  Stratechery has a great piece about how Amazon leverages AWS with it’s novel strategy for scale 
• Journalists touring Amazon Fulfillment centers, noticed that Amazon uses video shaming to discourage theft.  You can take your own tour of an Amazon FC by signing up here. 
• Dropbox announced that they are (mostly) moving off of AWS and developing their own storage.
• Walmart has released OneOps, their platform for deploying cloud based infrastructure apps, such as Walmarts own e-commerce platform.  Apps can be agnostically deployed across Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Rackspace, and OpenStack.
• Amazon has VR guru Avi Bar-Zeev, and filed for a patent on room based headset-less VR.  Amazon also filed for a patent around using selfies for payment.
• Amazon private label suits have been favorably reviewed by business insider.: 

Jason & Scot discuss our Amazon peeves:

• Prime now not well integrated website
• Amazon Echo App Store (Skills) is just a 37 page list of apps.
• Delivery drivers, pantry GUI, and customer service edge cases could all use improvement.

Non-Amazon news:

• Ultra announced surprisingly strong earnings, and plans to open 100 new stores, and dramatically expand brand boutiques.
• US Dept of Commerce released it’s February retail sales data.
• Brands are now paying instacart for deliveries.

Target project “goldfish”

Target is running ads for engineers for a mysterious new project, codenamed “Goldfish”.  The job listings specify “You must have a deep understanding of the fundamentals of retail marketplaces, social commerce and influencer networks,” which caused Jason & Scot to speculate about what the project might be.

Scot is in Florida this week for the Bronto conference, giving a talk on “E-Commerce and the On-Demand Economy“

Episode 18 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Tuesday, March 15th, 2016.