You must not be from a former communist country. The system worked for two-three decades during the initial industrialization phase. When that phase ended growth was hard to find (the whole system was based around factories and moving villagers to cities). That's when the numbers started going down and the system started faking numbers to give the appearance that all is well and nobody could disagree with them.
At a country level (not talking about Amazon) these systems are fragile and don't handle volatility well.
Re: Amazon - you can't compare countries with private corporations.
"Such theoretical shifts set the stage, for Berlin, for the ideologies of the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, both Communist and Fascist–Nazi, which claimed to liberate people by subjecting – and often sacrificing – them to larger groups or principles. To do this was the greatest of political evils; and to do it in the name of freedom, a political principle that Berlin, as a genuine liberal, especially cherished, struck him as a ‘strange […] reversal’ or ‘monstrous impersonation’ (2002b, 198, 180). Against this, Berlin championed, as ‘truer and more humane’, negative liberty and an empirical view of the self."
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/
The idea of positive liberty is that you are free to become the best man you can be, but there is someone or a group who defines what 'best' is. And that inevitably ends in dictatorships or similar types of abuse.
Coming from a former communist country, I don't understand why smart, capable people want to give away their money to a corrupt, incompetent state to manage it for them.
The US is fundamentally different than Nordic countries, where socialism appears to be working:
* The Nordic countries are tiny compared to the US.
* They are highly educated.
* Their society is homogenous.
It seems like everybody is assuming that there will be this rational actor collecting money from the rich and distributing them to the poor.
What actually is going to happen is that instead of entrepreneurs becoming rich, politicians will grow even richer than they are now. The politicians will have more power, power that they want to keep, and the only way to do that is to suppress the press and the people.
And that's how communism starts. It might sound like I'm taking it too far, but it's happened a number of times already.
No hard feelings here. We mean it when we say we're big fans of Patrick, John, Stripe. It's unfortunate that we have to compete, we would have loved to work with them.
Our approach is completely different than theirs: light integrations vs deep integrations. We believe their approach will do more harm than good for the industry causing retailers/platforms to invest millions of dollars in building infrastructure that's not going to be ROI positive. Retailers will end up paying to build/maintain that infrastructure part, they will pay the merchant fees, and they will have to pay Twitter/any partner promoting them.
Founder of Two Tap here. It takes an average of three minutes to send the order to the retailer via our platform. On the frontend we use a similar model to Amazon where tell the shopper we're confirming her purchase and handle the process in the background. It's working great for Amazon, and it works great for us for a thousand merchants.
Retailers are incredibly happy by the fact that they don't have to do a complicated integration where they have to maintain a new piece of infrastructure for potentially getting less than 1% of their orders.
That being said, we're huge fans of Stripe. Always have been. John Collison was our mentor during YC. We're looking forward to seeing how they handle the challenges in the space.
We don't spider retailer websites. That means we don't follow links or go hardcore on building a database of products.
We hit your website:
* if someone has asked us information about a product url
* when we place an order
* weekly for regression tests
Ping us on contact@ and we're more than happy to jump on a call and describe exactly what we're doing. Most of the time we're completely un-noticeable except for the fact that you're getting more orders.
We simulate what a shopper would do. We first go through your affiliate link (which drops a cookie) and then go on the retailer website to place the order.
All the commissioning, connecting/talking to retailers, receiving the money, is directly between you and the affiliate network. We're plug and play :)
We do have a stats backend where you can see all the purchases that went through Two Tap. And you can also use CJs dashboard just like you are probably doing right now.
One of them broke, and there was a button in the app to report it. I kid you not, a replacement arrived the second day, free of charge.