The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

by Brad Stone

Dragging screaming children to the store is a well-known parental hassle, but Amazon didn’t start selling diapers until a year after Diapers.com, and neither Walmart.com nor Target.com was investing significantly in the category. Back when the dark clouds of the dot-com bust still hung over the e-commerce industry, retailers felt that they wouldn’t make any money shipping big, bulky, lowmargin products like jumbo packs of Huggies Snug and Dry to people’s front doors. Lore and Bharara made it work by customizing their distribution system for baby gear. Quidsi’s fulfillment centers, designed by former Boeing operations manager Scott Hilton, used software to match every order with the smallest possible shipping box (there were twenty-three sizes available), minimizing excess weight and thus reducing the per-order shipping cost. (Amazon, which had to match box sizes to a much larger selection of products, was not as adept at this.) Quidsi selected warehouses outside major population centers to take advantage of inexpensive ground-shipping rates and was able to promise free overnight shipping in two-thirds of the country. The Quidsi founders studied Amazon closely and idolized Jeff Bezos, referring to him in private conversation as “sensei.”9