[HN Gopher] How e-commerce platform Elliot fell back down to Earth ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-07-19 23:00 UTC)