[HN Gopher] How e-commerce platform Elliot fell back down to Earth
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       How e-commerce platform Elliot fell back down to Earth
        
       Author : prostoalex
       Score  : 31 points
       Date   : 2020-07-19 04:54 UTC (18 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.modernretail.co)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.modernretail.co)
        
       | batt4good wrote:
       | lol. Elliot blowing up was fucking hilarious. Main take-away:
       | high-quality 3d bovine renderings don't help to solve the
       | "problem" of international shipping in e-commerce...
       | 
       | Their biggest edge that they failed to realize was the fact their
       | pricing model was a % of each item sold, not a flat fee per
       | month. However, it's hard to say I didn't see the fall of Elliot
       | coming - their initial beta was an absolute cluster a mere two
       | weeks before their slated "launch date".
       | 
       | Also, it's still unclear why some early founders at Parsley
       | Health were involved with Elliot?
        
         | xal wrote:
         | Btw, that was the pricing model that I launched my ecommerce
         | platform with. I only pivoted it to the now common saas
         | subscription after the first year (basically a move of
         | desperation at the time)
        
           | theturtletalks wrote:
           | It was genius to monetize the credit card processing fee
           | instead of the order directly. Do you see Shopify moving off
           | of Stripe eventually to get even lower rates? eBay did
           | something similar by with Paypal the past few years.
        
             | agustif wrote:
             | finix payments it's supposed to help you built a stripe for
             | yourself, not so sure about negotiating better rates.. If
             | stripe can't break the visa-mastercad duopoly
             | 
             | Stripe has a lot of stuff also in software/services
        
             | gvkhna wrote:
             | Stripe will negotiate their pricing with larger vendors
             | similar to anyone else and can probably offer competitive
             | rates.
        
             | xal wrote:
             | No! It's one of the few great partnerships in tech.
        
       | anonymousab wrote:
       | Sergio's doing an AMA in a few days it seems, it should be
       | interesting to see if any other new information comes to light.
        
         | d33lio wrote:
         | He did an AMA of sorts in the Discord Server a few days after
         | the "launch" mostly a sob story about how it "was all his
         | fault" and how he felt bad everyone was let down. No mention of
         | a number of the systemic or toxic issues mentioned in this
         | article.
         | 
         | The Discord Server has since been deleted.
         | 
         | I can attest to the beta seeming like something I'd expect from
         | a college kid and a few friends after a hackathon, definitely
         | not something you hired a "team" to work on.
         | 
         | I'm curious why anyone else joined the team in late 2019 other
         | than to attach themselves to a "cool and trendy" startup mess.
         | 
         | It should also be mentioned that his personal twitter has been
         | scrubbed.
        
           | madaxe_again wrote:
           | e-commerce is ridiculously hard - I say that as someone who
           | built a company and an e-commerce platform. It looks pretty
           | straightforward on the surface, but when you start getting
           | into discounts, into merchandising, into shipping and
           | volumetric calculations, into tax calculation and
           | distribution centre section, into CRM, into despatch
           | management, into refunds and exchanges, into
           | internationalisation, into segmentation, into all of the
           | myriad intricacies and business rules that _have to work
           | every time, in every weird scenario_ , at scale, with five
           | nines of uptime, you are deep in a world of hurt.
           | 
           | It's hard to do it properly. I mean, we somehow managed, but
           | we managed to do everything else wrong.
        
       | lkrubner wrote:
       | I recognize this pattern: people who are good at marketing think
       | they can go into a space and outcompete others thanks to
       | brilliant marketing. This works in some consumer spaces but fails
       | whenever the key to success depends on excellent engineering. The
       | use of outside contractors in this case is a red flag. Outside
       | contractors are a better bet when customizing something standard,
       | but doing original work requires a much closer feedback loop
       | between the engineering team and the leadership.
        
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       (page generated 2020-07-19 23:00 UTC)