I never knew much about him but, after reading this article, I will go so far to say that I think he may be one of the most inspirational entrepreneurs of our time. Potentially, on the level of Steve Jobs
Lizard Squad seems to be just a bunch of attention seeking jerks. Taking down a system for the sake of gaining Twitter followers and retweets is not cool, and much less productive than what their potential has to offer
If you're not a wine enthusiast, this simply doesn't seem like a product worth anybody's time of day. However, it must be noted that this is an excellent idea for wine preservation. Just think about how great it must be to save an expensive bottle from needing quick consumption before it experience's the perils of too much oxygen.
I doubt it purely based on the fact that the movie was supposed to be released at the movie-profit climax of the year. If they really wanted to make money from it, they would have done it at any other point in the year and released it on the christmas date it just had cancelled
If Dominos can do it for pizzas, amazon can do it for much bigger ticket items.
PLUS they are not incurring the cost of shipping the item to a prime member. Right now for every physical good prime purchase they spend money on shipping.
Also see:
Amazon is not worried about short term profit [1]
They have probably planned to not profit for a while in exchange for increased cashflow. Again for Amazon, profit isn't first, the customer is.
Dominos can do it for Pizzas because the profit margin on Pizzas is about as close to 100% as you can get, and delivery-person pay is about as low as you can get, combined with subsidy via tips. A $20 pizza will have a higher total gross margin than a $100 anything-retail.
Amazon is going to lose money on this, and it will probably only ever be feasible (even as a net loss) in a handful of zip codes in the US.
They're charging $7.99 for one-hour delivery. That's about on-par with on-demand courier fees that I've seen in NYC. Presumably the two-hour free delivery will be phased out once they've reached some metric.
If we assume that a) the 1h delivery is break even for them and 2) the 2h delivery would allow the courier to do a couple of extra deliveries on the same trip, then I think the per item cost for 2h delivery could be only a couple of dollars, making it competitive with UPS and thus maybe free for prime members indefinitely.
