Diapers.com profited by cross-shipping items in the empty space of diaper boxes
Marc Lore · diapers.com: Marc Lore. The ecommerce visionary who lost to Amazon but still made billions (2021) · Mar 30, 2026 · at 37:41
Marc Lore, co-founder and CEO of Diapers.com (later Quidsi), explains how the company engineered unit economics by cross-selling products into underfilled shipping boxes.
0:00 / 0:20exact quote · 20.3s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“But you could make money, because the way shipping works is, if you're shipping a box of diapers to someone, and you have empty space in that box, the marginal cost to ship the next thing you put in the box is very, very small, very low. Like, it might be, you put something that weighs a pound into that same box, it might cost you 10 cents of incremental shipping.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Marc Lore
Lore: Quidsi rejected a competing buyout offer $100M higher after Amazon threats
“Yeah, it's even, even worse that we got a higher offer that we didn't take.”
Amazon threatened to drop diaper prices to zero if Quidsi resisted sale
“They said, well, yeah, we're gonna take the price of diapers to zero, and we're gonna, you know, and they made some analogies to some other, used explicit language, and it was pretty scary stuff.”
Quidsi rejected a $100M higher buyout offer due to Amazon retaliation threats
“Because Amazon very clearly stated that if we took that offer, they would do even more to harm the business.”
Amazon explicitly threatened to price diapers at zero to force Quidsi sale
“They said, well, yeah, we're gonna take the price of diapers to zero, and we're gonna, you know, and they made some analogies to some other, used explicit language, and it was pretty scary stuff. I'll just leave it at that.”
Lore pitched investors that Jet.com would lose $3B before turning profitable
“I told the investors we needed, we were gonna lose three billion dollars.”
Jet.com raised a $618M Series A while operating with negative gross margins
“But the real key was raising, we did a six hundred and eighteen million dollar Series A. So we'd raised some money before that, and then we had the six hundred million Series A. That was a really tough round to get done. That was, at that time, we had negative…”