Zinc – Order products with a few lines of code

by FriedPickles • 13 years ago

109 59 13 years ago

johnnyg• 13 years ago

I've been waiting for someone to build this for a while but wow, that's stiff pricing.

jeffasinger3• 13 years ago

I'm surprised they're not able to give you money off on each order. Amazon gives up to 8.5% of each order to affiliates (and at least 4%).

tc98103• 13 years ago

I was thinking the same thing. Why isn't this a free service that collects an affiliate fee instead. Seems like it would lower the barrier for adoption.

arbuge5• 13 years ago

That would be offering the end user an incentive. Forbidden by Amazon affiliate program TOS Item #14 as far as I can see:

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/oper...

jessaustin3• 13 years ago

Are the prices really so bad? Those fees seem comparable to a payment service provider. This is a different service with presumably lower risks, but if you have to buy stuff and this service replaces a significant portion of an FTE it could definitely be a "reasonable cost of doing business".

ceejayoz2• 13 years ago

As Amazon doesn't offer an API for this, how's it done? Scraping? Hordes of low-wage folks filing orders manually? What's stopping Amazon from blocking this?

stephengillie• 13 years ago

I'm curious about why Amazon doesn't have an API for this.

67726e2• 13 years ago

Why would they need one? Amazon (in terms of the shopping site) is geared to consumers. Even if she could, why would my mother write a script to order things from Amazon? By using the site, you are exposed to their attempts to convince you to buy other products, or a more expensive version of their current product.

asperous• 13 years ago

Considering it's 5% per order, filing orders manually seems likely.

marban• 13 years ago

Filing via MechTurk would be really amusing.

arbuge5• 13 years ago

If Mechanical Turk really is behind this, I imagine it might stop being amusing if the Turkers make mistakes and send you incorrect orders...

infinitone• 13 years ago

If its manually done... then this an example of how not to do automation.

aarondf• 13 years ago

Unless it's done manually, automatically. Via cloudflower, Amazon Mechanical Turk, or something like it.

SethMurphy• 13 years ago

If done manually, it would also a great example of identifying a need before building a product. As long as it looks automatic why would the API user care.

FriedPickles4• 13 years ago

We use mostly automated processes, with manual intervention only for rare edge cases. One thing that's surprised us is just how many (i.e., non-rare) edge cases there are when you take into account shipping exceptions, order constraints, etc. We believe we are on solid footing both legally and technically, and this has been supported by three years of reliable operation.

Unfortunately we're unable to use most affiliate programs. At the same time, we're mostly interested in building a framework that easily scales across to all merchants.

dangerboysteve• 13 years ago

the 3% and 5% fees seem like complete BS

yefim2• 13 years ago

I think they fill out the Amazon order forms manually so they're just trying to recoup costs.

ozi• 13 years ago

But what's stopping them from collecting the affiliate fee?

This narrows the use-cases for this quite a bit. Not only are they forcing you to forgo collecting the fee yourself for somebody you referred to Amazon to make a purchase (assuming this is a service/app you've created), you have to pay _more_? So really, depending on the model, you'd have to mark up the Amazon product ~10-13% just to cut even.

yefim2• 13 years ago

Why does `gift_ship` default to true?

Jake232• 13 years ago

So the customer doesn't know the order came from amazon, or the true price of the product?

I'm guessing this is aimed at resellers. They likely wouldn't want the end-user knowing this info.

jbrooksuk• 13 years ago

Has anybody else noticed the similarities between this design and Stripe?

yangez• 13 years ago

What's with all these startups taking so much design inspiration from Stripe?

https://www.shirts.io/

https://zinc.io/

johnernaut• 13 years ago

My thoughts exactly.

jonknee3• 13 years ago

Stripe is a hit with developers because of their easy API and great documentation. It's not a surprise that other "by techies for techies" API startups are taking inspiration from a leader in the industry.

roderick3427• 13 years ago

Let's not forget https://infraprint.com. They're the Stripe for printing.

icelancer• 13 years ago

What's the problem with it?

VikingCoder• 13 years ago

Why would you send "A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates" to Norman Borlaug, the inventor of Dwarf Wheat? Is this some kind of hipster pranking?

gadders• 13 years ago

Nice to see a shout out to the great man that was Norman Borlaug in their order.

And the book they chose looks like a fascinating read.

FriedPickles4• 13 years ago

Thanks to everyone for your comments and feedback. As we shared on our site, we've been automating ecommerce tasks for a while, but this is our first attempt to open our tools up to the public--and we're learning.

We recognize that our current pricing might not make us suitable for all uses, but we think it will work for enough applications to support us as we build out a killer product.

We really appreciate your feedback as we work to improve what we view as a very flawed ecommerce environment.

arbuge5• 13 years ago

Looks like a fascinating product. What do you envisage a typical use case to be?

FriedPickles4• 13 years ago

We can't share all the specifics of what integrators are building, but some are very clever and surprising. Some are automating business processes and other are creating niche resale stores, but the most fun are the creative/novelty uses we've seen.

meritt2• 13 years ago

This fee structure (3-5%) will not work. Exactly why does Zinc need $50 to process my HDTV order but only $0.15 for my banana slicer?

Funding has no transaction fees due to Dwolla transfers and Zinc is most likely taking a cut from Amazon Affiliate program as well (which pays 5-15% commissions depending on category)

Make it a fixed per-order fee.

FriedPickles4• 13 years ago

Thank you for your feedback. While we do not earn any commission on sales, we are considering moving to a fixed-fee system.

I also want to point out that Zinc is free if you are placing fewer than 10 orders/month, which is most of our users.

meritt2• 13 years ago

Maybe I'm just having a tough time figuring out the use case for your free tier, but if I make less than 10 orders/month, exactly why would I go to the trouble of implementing an API?

coolsunglasses• 13 years ago

Yeah whoa. I was considering using this to process orders for a side project but that's just too high.

rpicard• 13 years ago

I can imagine a company using this to implement an employee incentive system where employees can get any book from Amazon for free.

brini• 13 years ago

Front page needs an editorial review:

Zinc let's you build things... -> Zinc lets you build things...

(``let's'' = ``let us'')

jdotjdot• 13 years ago

How exactly do I identify the product I want to purchase? There can be many slightly distinct versions of the same product on amazon. It sounds like I would have to pre-select the products that my users would be purchasing, because for them to search for what they want they'd have to use the amazon website anyway.

I'm just having trouble seeing the value in this, except for the very specific use case of regular, event-driven, identical, automatic orders (eg, I have my lights hooked up to an intelligent system that notices that the bulb blows out, so it then submits the pre-prepared order for the correct bulb via zinc.io).

Zinc – Order products with a few lines of code

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