This piece in the New Yorker about how e-commerce, and in particular JD.com, is transforming rural China is worth a read.

In typical New Yorker fashion, it’s a good long-form read, but one that you can also listen to if that’s your thing.

What’s immediately fascinating are how important trust is to JD’s rural expansion strategy and how locals from these rural communities are used to penetrate the social networks.

Today, Xia oversees deliveries to more than two hundred villages around the Wuling Mountains, including his birthplace. But, in line with JD’s growth strategy, an equally important aspect of Xia’s job is to be a promoter for the company, getting the word out about its services. His income depends in part on the number of orders that come from his region. Across China, JD has made a policy of recruiting local representatives who can exploit the thick social ties of traditional communities to drum up business.

This is important because:

“Chinese people don’t easily believe the good will of strangers,” Liu told me. “Why do you think Chinese fight tooth and nail to get on the bus and subway?” He shook his head and laughed. “It doesn’t matter that it’s less efficient or unnecessary. It’s a complete reflex for them, because it’s what they’ve been taught since they were young.”

When you have some time, here is the full article. 

According to the New Yorker, JD.com is the third largest tech company in the world in terms of revenue. They also have the largest drone delivery platform in the world.

Last week I had something delivered from Amazon almost every single day. They weren’t necessarily big things though. One day it was a new corn broom for the patio. Another day it was a small set of hooks that I wanted to hang some lights. And the list goes on. 

This is what Amazon wants us to do. Order every little thing, instantly, as soon as you think about it. And it’s magically convenient.

Developers and architects are of course thinking about the implications of this shifting shopping habit on new residential developments. Usually it comes in the form of a large “Amazon room” and/or a parcel locker system. 

I recently measured the package room in my building (geeky, I know). It’s about 10′ x 6′ and it sometimes isn’t enough for the volume of daily packages generated by ~360 units. 

The other thing that happened last week is that my concierge said to me: “Brandon, we have become a full fledge post office with the amount of packages that come through here every day.” Every evening there’s a lineup of people waiting to collect their packages. 

That immediately signaled to me that simply providing a larger room probably isn’t enough. This trend is only going to continue. How could we better design and optimize for this shift?

I am sure that there many companies working on this problem. Hopefully they will surface in the comments and in my inbox following this post.

Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash

So Amazon is buying Ring (they make video doorbells, among other things) for north of $1 billion. Supposedly, it is the second largest acquisition that Amazon has ever made – the first was Whole Foods.

If you consider that Amazon is also looking to enter the delivery business, it should be obvious that they want to control everything related to the home delivery process.

For one, it likely enhances Amazon Key and helps with the “porch pirate” problem. Apparently Amazon has had to restrict same-day delivery from some high crime neighborhoods because of this exact problem.

And there’s already speculation about what this could mean for grocery deliveries. Amazon needs to find a frictionless way to get your food orders into your refrigerator. 

There are also many possible tie-ins to Alexa/Echo. It’s probably safe to assume that Jeff Bezos sees a lot more than just a doorbell with a camera in it.