I find that 20 years ago I shopped at Amazon for the low prices, but 2020s+ I shop at Amazon due to their logistics.
The problem for everyone else is not simply that Amazon ships quickly, I almost don't even care about that. The thing is that Amazon ships & delivers on a reliable predicted schedule. When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does. I shop at specific competitors who can do similar (B&H, Sweetwater, etc).
Many online stores big & small in the year 2026 will still take days to even send shipment info, followed by using unreliable carriers that miss ETAs.
I would even be OK with these stores giving a narrow range or probability "90% of the time this arrives between Tuesday & Wednesday".. But I am not in the mood to order stuff that may arrive in 2-10 days with very little clarity on which end of the range.
I think you're slightly wrong. It's not prices, it's not logistics. Amazon dominates because they have the power & money to do the one single thing their competiton couldn't do without going out of business: No-questions-asked returns. 9 out of 10 people i ask this is the single reason they stay at Amazon.
That used to be the case until about a year ago, but isn't the case anymore at least here in Ireland. I'm taking them to small claims court because they closed my account without a refund on a legitimate return. Their customer support has gone from excellent to nearly nonexistent. Fortunately for me, I've kept all the receipts.
The flip side to this is I've on multiple occasions had Amazon ship me clearly used shit resold as new — Amazon.com was the seller.
One even came with a sticker: "Thanks for giving this product a second life!"
The worst of the worst among us use Amazon as a try-before-you-buy or rental house. Their lax return policy encourages them.
If I buy anything important, especially expensive electronics, I buy it from somewhere else. If it's a reputable store with a strict return policy, I'm doubly sure there will be no fuckery.
In my experience, the customer-friendly return experience is withering. I ordered a small table about a year ago that didn't ship with the correct hardware. I literally could not assemble the thing as documented in the instructions.
I had to call to get a refund; admittedly, I think I may have been slightly outside the ordinary return window. The customer service representative was pretty reluctant to accept it, somewhat heavily suggesting that I didn't assemble it right.
I actually just recently cancelled my Amazon Prime, which I've had for probably 10+ years. Not solely based on this one experience, but a general decline in how much perceivable value I actually get out of it.
The ease of returns was a huge factor in the early success of Walmart, as well. I worked there in high school and college (99-02 timeframe) and they harped on how much the customer was right for returns, unless it was just blatant fraud. if there was a chance the customer was not trying anything you just give them their money back
I distrust Amazon for anything over about £150 now. Which seems to coincide with their threshold for needing an OTP.
The last straw was getting a blood pressure monitor (which they don’t even sell) in place of £400 smart glasses. They insisted I returned the monitor, then said I failed to return the glasses. Took months for them to refund me.
> 9 out of 10 people i ask this is the single reason they stay at Amazon.
9 out of 10 I ask say it's about reliable delivery (not necessarily next day).
Most people order things because they need them and have read the reviews, not because they are speculating at something they may need or are ok with getting something else. Clothing being a notable exception, unpredictably sized and variable quality, which nobody is happy about.
Different forms of marketing work on different people. This one works on me. I'm going to shop at Amazon and Costco because, in the very few instances where I want to return an item that didn't live up to its promise, I can do so without incurring penalties.
When this happens, I'm already frustrated. I assembled a floor lamp for far longer than an adult should spend assembling it, and it's wobbly as shit. A corporation than nickel-and-dimes me at this point will incur my irrational wrath. Canadian Tire (a big box retailer of mostly low-quality wares here in Canada) has lost my business over a decade ago because of this. I tell myself: most Canadians are meek sheep that will return after being told "well akshually you can't return this because technically blah blah", but I'm not a sucker, I won't shop here on principle.
A company that doesn't create this experience for me will get my business and exploit whatever other blind spots I have with their marketing, dark patterns, opaque pricing, etc, because they didn't piss me off when I was ready to walk away for good.
Weird. I think I might have made three returns to Amazon in 30 years of ordering from them. I research the shit out of just about everything I buy, if I have to return something it's because I either got very cleverly scammed or had a literal stroke before I made the purchase.
I frequently have to return clothing because there's absolutely no way of figuring out which size will fit you since nothing about sizes is standardized.
And there's just a lot of stuff that research can't tell you. Sometimes listed dimensions are incorrect or missing. Sometimes it turns out that you buy a simple electronic device that seems like it will do what you need but it emits a high-pitched beep noise every time you press a button that drives you nuts and you're going to return it because of that. There are so many things that just simply are not captured in a product description, and sometimes are not captured by user reviews.
I've just ordered an inexpensive steering wheel to use with a racing game. And everything I can find online is contradictory as to whether it suffers from a dead zone problem or not. I simply cannot tell if the people complaining about the dead zone have missed where it can be configured or if it's a problem with the hardware itself. So literally the only way I can figure it out is by ordering it and trying it out and then returning it if it has a dead zone problem.
There are plenty of things that you just have to return that cannot be solved with research and have nothing to do with being scammed. Which is why returns are a big part of the economy and a big part of customer service.
>I frequently have to return clothing because there's absolutely no way of figuring out which size will fit you since nothing about sizes is standardized.
I used to take advantage of Amazon's return policy by deliberately buying 3 sizes of the same item (1 below and 1 above my expected size) because clothing manufacturers are not consistent with their sizing. I can then choose the best size at home and return the other 2 that don't fit. I did this for pants, shoes, etc. This really seemed great because I hate going to the store and changing clothes in fitting rooms.
However, I stopped doing this many years ago because I found out that some online retailers like Amazon do not restock the returned items for re-sale and instead, throw it away so it eventually ends up in a landfill. In those cases, the sellers just eat the cost of unsold goods that got thrown out.
It seemed illogical to throw away perfectly good clothes that are still NEW but somebody explained that Amazon does this because they're paranoid about bodily fluids etc tainting the returns. So to play it safe, they just throw away the returns.
I hate to break it to you, but this is true of returns across a lot of companies and product categories. If you return unopened wine to Costco, for example, they throw it out because they can't guarantee that you stored it properly.
>If you return unopened wine to Costco, for example, they throw it out
The food and groceries I already knew about. However, Amazon throwing out returned clothes was a surprise because I've seen clothing retailers like Macy's just put the returned items right back on the rack for re-sale. So I just thought Amazon just did the same thing at their warehouse. I've returned car wax to an OReilly's Auto store and I watched the clerk just put the bottle right back on the shelf for the next customer to buy.
It was disconcerting to find out I was adding to the landfill just because I returned clothes to Amazon. Nowadays, I don't order clothes from them unless I'm 100% sure I won't be returning it.
I think the general internet user doesn't actually do this. Slightly different use case but I worked at maximizing revenue/customer lifetime value at a streaming company and the biggest revenue win project I worked on was just preselecting the most expensive plan.
I was surprised since I usually do research and stuff on the options. But it turns out a lot of people just click next until they can start watching some tv.
It's probably different for everyone. For us, it's chiefly because it's the only place where we can find a gazillion things our kids' school demands they bring to school, and we can have it in twenty-four hours without having to drive to the store.
I order books from a local indie bookstore and just wait a couple weeks for the books to show up from their wholesaler.
But for other stuff, including tools, why wouldn't I just order from a place I already have free 2-day (often overnight) shipping for, when my alternatives are physical big box stores? Like why go to Lowe's to buy a cross-cut jig when I can get it delivered right to my house in 24 hours for the same price? It's not even like my money could possibly go to an indie hardware store. They don't exist. Certainly not within an hour of me, which not only requires my time, but also money in the form of electricity to drive my car, plus the wear and tear on my car.
The point the article makes is that the other online stores without access to Amazon's logistics aren't able to lower the price to make up for the inconvenience of using a normal shipping carrier because of an Amazon policy that bans sellers from offering an item for cheaper elsewhere. Amazon then charges sellers high fees that inflate the price of the item everywhere because of that policy.
And my point is that many of us aren't even shopping on price!
You could also flip around the reading to.. boohoo poor sellers have to raise their prices elsewhere and take higher margin?
Why don't they figure out how to ship/delivery more quickly with a competitor with all those extra margin dollars they are being forced by Amazon to take elsewhere?
Because Amazon benefits from massive economies of scale, and because Amazon has nearly-unlimited cash to push competition out of the market?
How could a regular webshop possibly compete with a behemoth which has warehouses in literally every major city, which has its own dedicated fleet of delivery vehicles, and which has its own fleet of cargo planes? When you've got a single warehouse and have to rely on DHL/USPS/FedEx, you will never beat them on delivery time when Amazon is actually trying: Amazon can trivially offer same-day delivery and eat the cost until you go out of business.
And don't forget: Amazon has an even bigger margin. If they were to compete on price, they would easily win. But they aren't competing on price because they know they have a quasi-monopoly, so they can just enjoy the extra profit.
It is surprising how often they are cheaper. I was ordering some glue, decided to double check the price, I could drive for 30 minutes and buy local, and pay more or order it for cheaper from Amazon. I didn't need it the same day so getting it tomorrow didn't matter. Amazon also sells everything need some M2 screws Amazon will have them, no idea where to buy something like that locally Home Depot won't carry them.
... and a lot of times I go right to the brand to buy "straight" from them and they fulfill orders from Amazon so why not just buy from AMZN where I already have an account, get lots of credit card points, can spend my credit card points, etc.
In the last year I've seen this other kind of consolidation where most of the brands that don't have an AMZN-hosted or fulfilled store are using shop.app (now shop.com!) from Shopify. I did a stint of investigating boutique perfumes [1] and it seems almost everyone in that business uses Shopify.
Some may be shopping based on price without realizing it. There's already a baked in assumption that Amazon has the lowest price and there's no need to check elsewhere.
This is a terrible argument. It’s only margin if they get the service but no one wants to pay the same to get slower shipping. Amazon has made the choice for the consumer.
Sure their logistics are better but it’s functionally tying Amazon’s logistics to access to selling on Amazon. It’s not a fair burden to say “you must convince customers to buy inferior shipping at superior shipping prices in order to not use us.
If Amazon stopped engaging in price fixing, then people like you who aren't shopping on price could still buy stuff on Amazon, and other people who are shopping on price could buy the same item from the manufacturer's site for 30% less with the knowledge that it'll probably arrive in a week rather than in a couple days. I'm not sure what problem you have with that.
My experience is that for non-FBA fulfilled products this doesn't hold at all.
Out of the last ~20 orders (I don't order that often from them, so that's probably spanning the whole last 12 months or more), more often than not, the predicted delivery date has been adjusted upwards, often by ~2 days, and a few times by ~a week.
This may be specific to Germany/Berlin, as from what I hear, they (/ their subcontractors) have troubles finding delivery drivers. Mixed with the growing counterfeit issues, and degrading product description / details for most products, Amazon doesn't seem to be in it's prime.
In the outskirts of a college town with unusually bad retail (like the clothing stores at the mall are the Loft, Target and T-shirt express) 2 day shipping became 2 week shipping during the pandemic leading to me to quit Prime. It particularly bugged me because if I expect to get something in 2 days that's more convenient that making a trip to the store, but if it 5 days or more I'll be going to that sector anyway for another reason and it is easy -- it struck me as significantly dishonest that they were promising fast shipping and not delivering.
Maybe 2 years later I tried the free trial of Prime, if only to quiet the ads, and it was great... they must of extended their logistics network into my area and I get a lot of stuff in 1 day or 2 days now. I went through a phase of taking discounted or free Prime offers when I could but broke down and I've been maintaining a Prime subscription. It's probably not really worth it because my pattern is that I am typically heads down doing this or that and every other month or so I do a burst of buying stuff that I'd wanted for a while or I am doing some project that requires a lot of stuff. Then I might go a month and buy nothing on AMZN.
It certainly varies at least by country. I'm in London, and its very unusual to get worse than next day delivery except for marketplace sellers, and often <12 hours.
I stopped shopping at Amazon because their fulfillment started to suck. And I found they kept their dates 25/100.
Most recently I ordered 10 items on September 18th (I had a gift card). All prime eligible. The first arrived on sep 20, the 4 on sep 28, 5 on sep 28, and the last is scheduled for Friday.
I didn’t get any estimates until after purchase.
Amazon is no longer good. They are coasting on their customer base and are slowing ratcheting up prices and squeezing their costs (keeping all their gains).
For me it’s not the logistics, for me it’s the catalogue. They have so many ridiculously niche items that I want that would be impossible to buy from a local store
But that's just the basic physics of mail-order shopping, it isn't anything specific to Amazon.
Every general store in every town everywhere can't possibly stock millions of individual products. When some item has a potential customer base of a few tens of thousands of people in a country of hundreds of millions, most stores would never get a single sale for that item. But when you can serve the entire country at once via the mail, having a single centralized warehouse specializing in that niche category of items is quite viable.
The only difference with Amazon is that you are buying from a single website, rather than going to the website of a small webshop specializing in your flavour of niche items. And the drawback is that Amazon has zero quality control, so rather than a store where you can browse for known-good curated high-quality niche items you will instead be drowned by piles of absolute garbage - with the occasional decent item hidden in between.
Sure, Amazon might beat your local store, but that doesn't mean it is good for buying niche items.
> When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does.
This depends heavily on where you live. I recall it used to be true, but in the three places I've spent significant time since the pandemic, all three have been less than 50% on time -- and less than 75% even giving an extra day. Because there's apparently no consequences for the last-mile delivery contractors to claim a package is delivered and not actually take it out of the truck until the next week, your local contractor determines your experience.
I find a lot of the websites I shop at for certain things do "dropshipping". So the product page will say "X in stock!" or similar when in reality they're telling you the inventory at a shared warehouse or even the original manufacturer and once you actually submit your order, the product needs to be shipped first to the store you ordered from. Then they ship to you. But both legs can take an unknown amount of time.
Agree with others' sentiments: One usually does not need that fast shipping - or that reliable. There are, of course, exceptions - but not often enough that I'd pay for Prime membership. The few times I need it fast and it's not available in town, I simply pay Amazon for fast shipping.
This. The amount of things I buy off Amazon has dropped quite a lot over the last 15-20 years. It used to be just about everything. Now it's an about once a month at most, and some of that are gifts for other people. I'm more willing to shop local now, and for everything else if I don't care a lot about when I get it I'll order it direct from a more appropriate vendor. And if I *really* don't care when I get it nor that it's fake, I'll use AliExpress. The only value Amazon has for me now is if I need an item on a predictable schedule and either I can't get it locally or its not worth my time to do so.
I'm the same way. I've also been very impressed with Chinese made goods too. Especially in the music world, M-Vave recently released a very capable synth for $50 (FM-1) that is having a massive resurgence of tinking in the community (people are sly enough to use LLMs to vibe code different firmwares that turn the device into something else entirely, like a groovebox or drum machine for example).
It's a shame neoliberals hallowed out US manufacturing but at least consumers around the world are benefitting.
> It's a shame neoliberals hallowed out US manufacturing but at least consumers around the world are benefitting.
Unfortunately, the counterpoint is... China has us all by the balls. Do something China doesn't like, such as, say... support Taiwan? Whoops, where are you going to get stuff such as medication now?
Most of our medication comes from India, actually.
And China isn't able to cut off your medication because you support Taiwan: it would have to be a country-sized ban, which for the US would immediately spark WW3. China isn't stupid, they have a sense of self-preservation. Why start a fight with the US when you can slowly milk it dry?
I'm not really worried about China, the US has been a massive force of evil and imperialism across the world my entire life. When was the last time China invaded a sovereign country? The US did it twice in the span of a few months this year, and likely to do it again.
No one benefits from US foreign policy outside of elites or capitalists, everyone else suffers under imperialism.
The US may behave irrationally from time to time. Bush, Trump, the list goes on.
The problem with China is, they play the loooooooooooong game, and their game is explicitly to destroy our industries. As a German, this has me worried, because we have seen it with solar panels (we used to be the world leader), with medicine (similarly, a lot of compounds came from Germany) and now we're seeing it with cars.
I would say in the 2010s I shopped with Amazon for the logistics. In the 2020s their logistics have been crap. Packages are slow, frequently late, and rarely packaged well enough for the items to arrive undamaged without luck. The overwhelming amount of drop shipped trash means the site is useless, too.
I've gone back to local stores. They're less convenient, but the prices are better and the quality is MUCH better. Amazon is for commodity name brand stuff that's harder to find.
I'm not an Amazon Prime customer (shocking, I know), and I noticed that the shown delivery times are overly pessimistic, probably in order to make you opt for a Prime membership to get faster delivery. And then the package arrives at least one day earlier than the predicted delivery date.
I gave up and canceled my Prime subscription years ago after repeated failures to meet even a 2-day delivery promise. I never once got anything same-day. And the Video and other services of Prime were things I never used.
Annoying when you are not home and they deliver things early. Like last week I picked deliver on the 13th, half the items arrived on the 10th and sat on my porch for 2 days.
Yeah they're insanely good at logistics. They do same day deliveries here, I've had an idea for something and then got all the materials delivered 6 hours later. Nobody else can compete with that.
A lot of that uncertainty has to do with USPS, who keeps getting slower, and their delivery date estimates are at this point often 2-3 days more optimistic than reality.
At least in my experience, UPS, Fedex, etc., tend to deliver when the estimate says.
I've been mostly happy with sweetwater - but they use USPS and I had a shipment (strings) take 2 weeks.
I've started to use more "mom and pop" stores - Philadelphia Luthery instead of Stew Mac (Stew Mac shipping is a joke, they want you to "subscribe" for $120 a year now, and places like "The Acoustic Shoppe" in Missouri for strings.
For me it’s that I know if something is wrong with the shipping that Amazon will fix it for me.
The other month my wife ordered something inexpensive from Best Buy that got shipped. I am 90% certain the FedEx delivery person took it, impossible to find the easiest way to resolve the matter with BestBuy. Amazon while historically it was not always intuitive to find the chat feature. I could always get there and the problem was fixed.
This is not my experience. I had a package simply not arrive, and Amazon AI said it would replace the missing package (which was a high dollar value). Instead, it just repeated the order, double charging me. I had 3 conversations with human CS promising me they saw the mistake and would fix it, and never did, so I was double charged. After months trying to resolve it I eventually gave up and ate the cost.
I've never had such a poor experience, including being repeatedly lied to by CS, and this was the last straw for me. I honestly don't miss Amazon, I buy less stuff and feel better about it.
Also, there's the whole taking your money and completing the deal part. A whole bunch of sites seem to be breaking their own pages these days, leaving Amazon the sole remaining venue that still works.
I used to buy a lot on ebay.com, however they began to transition to a new page layout a few years ago, which made it too difficult to screen against scam-sellers(scamming was always a bit of an issue there). I briefly switched to walmart.com, however their site started giving a stupid error page for anything but the latest version of google chrome; this started about 2 years ago now.
anyway, here's a quick test i did(in firefox-esr) of a few sites which came to mind:
ebay: still has the dumb new design; certain js features appear broken(can't read customer reviews).
walmart: still get the "technical issues" error page.
newegg: main-page still loads mangled.
zoro: is it working again!? seems functional today... surprise!(i'll have to look into this more later; i did not test checkout)
thriftbooks: the search bar does not work.
so there it is. a bunch of sites i just simply can't shop on anymore. i'm surprised by zoro. will it work when i go to checkout?
I've been an eBay customer for 25+ years and it's worse than ever with fraud. It's gotten so bad that my account now warns me that I'm at risk if I report any more purchases on there.
Examples:
1.) Bought my wife a dress, it came and had multiple defects that were not in the photographs. I reached out to the seller and they didn't offer a refund but said "sorry". I have no recourse if I don't open a dispute. If I open a dispute I get penalized.
2.) I bought "Mid Century Modern" metal wall art. The listing said 1960's and the photos were of two metal wall art items with no markings. The items came with a clear "Made in China" marking on each of them that was not in the photos. These are modern inspired pieces not actual mid century modern. I opened a dispute and got my refund from the seller who didn't even ask to have them shipped back.
3.) Purchased a video game that showed NTSC ESRB rating on the front of the game in the photos. What came was the european PAL release. Not only is that version not playable on this console but the value of the two items is distinctly different (PAL is worth far less).
I'm done shopping on eBay until they have new management. At least Amazon honors their buyers policy.
Funny, talk to sellers who use eBay and they will say how it's all stacked against them and that eBay accepts disputes from buyers almost unconditionally and they have no recourse and how much abuse there is by buyers who claim they received damaged goods or the wrong item.
As a market's trust lowers, buyers are less willing to pay a reasonable price for a square deal because of the probability being higher that it isn't. This, paradoxically, lowers the value of legitimate products from legitimate sellers because there's no way to differentiate. The risk adjusted value of the product lowers. Legitimate sellers leave. Things spiral. Everyone loses.
> I've been an eBay customer for 25+ years and it's worse than ever with fraud. It's gotten so bad that my account now warns me that I'm at risk if I report any more purchases on there.
It's always been bad but it's gotten worse and there's no recourse other than a dispute. I had a seller label a midi device a particular version (known to work with Linux and Mac) but when it arrived it was an older version that requires a proprietary Windows-only driver. I went back to the listing and the photos were of different versions. Seller refused the return. Ebay was unhelpful. Great.
ebay has hidden the "report listing" button so well i thought they removed it. but it is still accessible behind a plus sign ("+") in the corner of the page.
It's worse than that. They all put up browser surveillance / captcha blockwalls to "stop bots" (even despite bots being legitimate shoppers these days!) that make the sites just straight up not work on most of my browser configs. And they keep getting worse - I'm sure they've all got some big dashboards that say "evil bots blocked", the numbers just keep going up up up (false positives and all), and whatever middle manager championed the initiative to block customers gets a pat on the back and a mandate to do more.
Amazon, no problem, browse from anywhere. I'm sure Amazon has functionality that's doing something similar, but they just do it a lot more intelligently. Like if a user is logged in to a longstanding account with a history of real purchases, and that logged in session isn't requesting pages at some exorbitant rate that goes well beyond enthusiastic middle-clicking, then it should never end up blocked. Yet I've had this happen on most sites that aren't Amazon - they've lost sight that the primary goal is to serve customers.
Of course to me every webshop has their bread and butter of what types of things make sense to purchase there. I'm certainly not going to buy stuff from Amazon that is twice the price elsewhere because it's only on there becomes some enterprising seller put it up there as a convenience. But I can understand how others would, given how hard the other webshops want to actively reject your business.
This sounds like you are running an ad blocker that’s breaking stuff.
I also run an ad blocker in all my devices and have to periodically disable it because it’s breaking random sites in ways that look like the site’s fault.
Nah, it's Firefox, not the ad blocker. I run into similar problems all the time, and disabling my ad blocker never solves it. If you pop open the developer console and look for errors, it usually boils down to Firefox having stricter policies about cross-origin requests. Even major web properties simply don't bother testing for even the most superficial functionality on browser engines other than Blink any more.
I don't even care about shipment times at all as long as they are not completely unreasonable (e.g. multiple months for a supposedly in stock item). But I do care that the items do get to me or that thinks are resolved satisfactorily when that is not possible - without me having to hound the seller. Unfortunately that's still much more likely with Amazon than with some random internet shop - and that's even with Amazon's own enshittification of their service. With other sellers if the final courier fucks me over and wants me to pick up the package in dumbfuck nowhere district thats my problem because if I don't I might end up needing to threaten the seller with legal action before they resend/refund. With Amazon delivery issues are not my problem.
>Why is a purchase ever in such a hurry? Short delivery only really encurrage impulse purchases.
We never do impulse buys for frivolous throwaway consumerism junk but fast ~2 day delivery is still very helpful because... Life Happens ... such as stuff unexpectedly breaking and you want to have a replacement to quickly fix it.
Example of 2 events just in the last month: (1) garage door screw coupler broke. It's the piece that connects the motor shaft to the screw drive. You cannot buy this type of oddball part from Home Depot or Lowes. Amazon had it and delivered it the next day so I was able to repair the door immediately. The alternative of waiting a week+ for slower delivery means the door has to be disengaged from the track so it can be manually raised and lowered. This is not acceptable because I don't have the specific key to the garage locking mechanism from the outside. Why don't I have a key?!? Because life happens. I guess I could manually lock it from the inside and leave the car outside the garage for a week but I didn't like the idea of leaving a catalytic converter exposed to drive-by theft.
(2) was my Skechers work boots had the sole separated from the shoe. I bought the same model shoes from Amazon for $59.99 and had it in 2 days. I could drive to the local Skechers store but they charge $79.99. So either wait a week+ for slow delivery or pay $20 extra plus round trip gas money to buy at the local store.
Amazon quick delivery acts as a JIT (Just In Time) inventory system to take care of unexpected things that happen in life. That's a more sane alternative than holding a bunch of inventory of random parts for things that might go wrong.
Btw, Amazon often offers extra reward points credited to your account if you voluntarily choose slow delivery instead of 2 days. This is what we do the majority of the time. I assume Amazon does this pseudo "cashback" incentive as a way to consolidate as many customer orders as they can to optimize their delivery routes and reduce costs.
If you're in a Nielsen "A" market like 40% of the population you have a Sketchers store in your area. I'm in a "C" market, a college town with post-material values, and the local stores suck. (Great thrift stores and vintage clothes but if you want something new it is Target or Wal-Mart or the overpriced Haberdasher that will get you something appropriate for a wedding but 'not special' in my mind)
Oftentimes I'm buying maybe a tool or a part or something like that which isn't necessarily available in my local hardware store.
Having a predictable delivery date for that on top of it most of the time being way faster than anywhere else is really nice. If I buy some of these somewhere else I might wait weeks for a small part due to logistics issues or low availability compared to Amazon
Not all purchases are things that are just consumable/materialistic. I find most of the time the stuff I buy on Amazon nowadays are things like this, where I want something I need but can't easily get locally or am too busy to go out and get during stores hours.
Yeah, but will I be at home when it does? We no longer live in a world where everyone has a nuclear family and the wife is always home while dad is at work. In 2026, only the rich can afford a housewife.
Most of the time I am indeed not in a hurry to receive my purchases. For most items I genuinely could not care less if it arrived tomorrow or two weeks from now. But I do need to know when it will arrive, so that someone is home to receive it.
"A month from now, on a Monday morning" versus "A month from now, on a Tuesday afternoon" makes a huge difference for me, as one of them would result in me having to walk to my front door and the other would result in me having to rent a car and spend an entire afternoon having to go to the other side of the city to pick it up at some warehouse.
90% of the time I choose next-day delivery it is because I know I will be home tomorrow, and the alternative is "some random day next week". If they offered me the option to pick out of a bunch of guaranteed delivery moments next week which are convenient for the seller/shipper, I would!
Oh no my toilet broke, the hardware store is 45 minutes away, and I have work and kids. Don't worry, I don't want the replacement part overnight. It arrives when it arrives!
If it’s a Lowes you can get the parts delivered next day. And you’ll know the threads are compatible. Most of the stuff I’ve gotten on Amazon technically fits NPT fittings but it leaks really badly unless you coat it with thread tape because the threads are the incorrect profile.
So weird to see this right after I had Lowe’s cancel my order the first time I bought something from them online. I didn’t even choose special shipping, I just wanted them to send me an item they had in stock.
Most wealthy people do. But there's a whole lot of folks who can't really justify paying $200 for a plumber service call to replace a $20 part in the toilet tank.
Most toilets are not mil-spec. "All the parts" can be one universal Fluidmaster universal toilet repair kit, $25 at any home depot. I have one on the shelf in my garage.
While I get your point, there is obviously a middle ground between eastern block communism and unregulated anarchocapitalism that many nations can and do inhabit. Antitrust is a good example. The free market can't solve everything, and monopolies are bad for innovation despite what Thiel says.
It gives more confidence in the service at the time I'm thinking about the order. I want it to be reliable so I don't need to track and worry about it.
Precisely - Amazon is the one retailer I literally delete order emails from.
Basically everyone else I keep the latest status mail (ordered / shipped / arriving tomorrow) in my inbox because they have not earned my trust, and orders have fallen through the cracks before.
Anecdotally Amazon is 90% of my online shopping (by order volume) but only 10% of my unshipped/wrong item/misdirected/lost packages. I have had mis-delivered packages from USPS/UPS/FedEx even on large/high value items.
Amazon searches for anything that isn't a known brand such as Apple & co turn out >90% Chinese products of highly questionable quality for me these days. And you can buy those cheaper by going straight to the source. The sole point of their retail business seems to be providing a support for the inevitable issues with these sellers, but I suspect that increasingly customers won't think it justifies the massive premium they're paying for what's essentially Taobao with an American address.
You mentioned Apple products -- I purchased an Airpod Pro set through Amazon, worked for a while but had to take them into an Apple Store for troubleshooting, where they had to carefully inform me without using the word "counterfeit" that they were counterfeit. Another problem related to quality which is endemic to Amazon.
I want to like Amazon, they're just so damn convenient. But the number of reasons to avoid them is getting longer all the time. Fake/sponsored reviews, never showing me what actually searched for, allowing sellers to reuse old listings, and allowing sellers to add counterfeit and used items to genuine listings are all my main complaints.
Apple refused service and OP was left holding the bag.
Amazon sent me fake RAM a couple times years ago. It was a space blanket in a fake crucial RAM box. I’m 99% sure Amazon took the return and shipped the retuned space blanket on the next order.
I don’t understand the quality complaints. I’m actively looking for Chinese-branded products now because the quality is amazing. I’ve switched to Hongdian fountain pens, I recently bought an espresso maker stamped with an unpronounceable string of consonants, and I buy Chinese sportcoats that fit perfectly, have no label, and cost what I used to pay for clothes in the early 2000’s. Some clothing manufacturers on Amazon even email me for exact measurements, so I get a tailored fit straight from China. I get knockoff printer ink that lasts months longer than HP’s overpriced junk. The Chinese had quality issues twenty years ago, but today their products are top notch.
The issue is that in many cases, this is not what is being sold on Amazon. There is good chinese brand/product (I love my chinese IEM), but when looking for many household items, you will find the white label, probably not compliant with local regulation, type of product. When it is not an outright scam.
I actually have a recent example : I do woodworking and for the last step of finishing some of the thing I build, I use a mixture of beeswax and linseed oil. Beeswax has been harder and harder to find locally. Not so long ago, every hardware shop had some. Now it has been displaced by synthetic product. So unless you know a local beekeeper, you are sol.
So, resigned, I went to Amazon. It had a trove of listing for "100% natural beeswax". Turns out, ALL of them are paraffin dyed to look like beeswax. You can report it to Amazon, they don't care. They will reimburse you, but never remove the listing.
I closed my amazon account months ago, but I have also experienced this problem. I have a hiking staff I really like that needs to be re-oiled and waxed. I'm having the darndest time finding both things. The beeswax, and most places seem to only want to sell "boiled" (solvent treated) linseed oil so it cures faster.
The problem for me is (and this holds across AliExpress as well), if I search for something, I get presented 30 different versions of the same thing, almost all from an unknown brand out of China, all with near-perfect reviews. I don't know if they're all the same thing, just relabeled; some are cheap copies of one original good version (and which one was is the good original); or something else. And if I end up with a cheap knockoff, how to resolve the issue - endless phone calls with a call-center in China and multiple rounds of trans-Pacific shipping? No thanks.
None of that is a knock against Chinese goods. I bought a set of Chinese carbon bicycle wheels last year and they're great. But, I went straight to the source and didn't take chances with AliExpress or Amazon.
I think some Chinese brands do try to distinguish themselves. Anker, for example, isn't a revolving door brand name. But, yeah, there's an enormous amount of noise on Amazon. Unfortunately that noise is everywhere. If I went right now to try to find another source on, "what brands don't suck?" I would probably have zero confidence that any of the sources I find aren't just SEO garbage.
Those are private label brands where the US or EU owners look for ready made low cost products within a category across different Chinese factories and slap their logo on top. Like SEO they game the product search engine and listings on Amazon to appear on the first search result pages, knowing that most impulse buyers don't have much patience.
The factories usually ship directly to Amazon warehouses and it is also fulfilled by Amazon (FBA).
They might not be a revolving door brand, but I've had 2 different models of charging brick from them get recalled for spontaneous combustion in the past 3 years. So, despite their branding efforts, their QC still isn't great from my perspective.
I've had the same. But unlike a lot of today's companies, I was able to get an actual human emailing me back the same day with a few questions followed up by a "we're sending you a replacement. Throw away the broken one." That was refreshing. Maybe they haven't gotten the memo that you're supposed to hate your customers.
I'm a long time cyclist, got the name from friends on an old web forum that somehow manages to stay alive.
This particularly brand (BTLOS) will come up on searches similar to "good Chinese carbon wheel brands" with reviews on FB, Reddit, etc.
And the cycling industry has had Chinese brands making inroads for a decade or more. So, Winspace, BTLOS, and a few others have come to be known entities (some do sell through AliExpress, some direct from their own site). And there's a niche group of product testers on YT or similar that review these things.
I assume there are analogous items in other hobbies, but I can't speak to any specific examples/brands.
I've just ordered a dining table and a set of dining chairs from China using a sourcing agent mixed with TaoBao. It's costing me about £1200 ($1500) so far delivered to the door and if I was to buy this complete setup in the UK, it would cost about £2500. The only problem has been delivery time and the back and forth with the Chinese sourcing agent hasn't been great in terms of communication, but I'll be damned if I'm going to give an extra £1000 to Western retailers that are hellbent on following the Amazon model and ripping off customers.
There's a scene from Back to the Future, where 1955 doc notices that one of the failed circuits says Made in Japan. Marty then points out that all the best stuff is made in Japan.
The "problem" with China is they have a massive economy built on building to a price, no matter how low the price may be. They're perfectly capable of creating high-end electronics like iPhones and disposable crap that sells for pennies on Amazon or Ali.
There doesn't seem to be the same cohesive brand-building/reputation-buidling effort that we saw with Japanese and Korean companies in the 80s-00s+. Granted, Amazon/Ali didn't exist, and the market for "$1 junk" wasn't the same. No easy answers (if it's even a thing that needs solved).
The main problem for me is that the different price categories don't all make it to the West. I don't mind getting the $1 crap version when I am paying $1 for it, and often I would happily pay $10 for the not-complete-crap version.
But when those items arrive on Amazon the $1 crap gets sold for $9, and the $10 is completely absent because people think it is a ripoff compared to the "$9" one.
Another problem I've heard is there is absolutely no legal protection. If you outsource your manufacturing to Shenzhen, you get what you get and there is no suing them later.
No, during the 70's and part of the early 80's they were terrible quality.
But what the Japanese makers did was they analyzed the failures and rolled the findings back into the manufacturing line so that they continuously improved the product. After quite some time at this, they took the "quality built" mantle for themselves.
My father, mid to late 70's, worked as an auto-mechanic for a local Datsun dealer (Datsun is the company we know today as Nissan). Datsun corporate wanted every failed part on every car repaired returned to them for analysis as to why it failed. The other Japanese brands all did the same.
The thing I love about the Japanese automotive story is that their success was earned. It wasn't some story of regulatory capture or protectionism or blitzscaling, etc. They built an auto industry over generations and raised the quality line for everyone.
This came with a price, though. Japanese workers were squeezed extremely hard, entire generations of kids barely had any relationship with their fathers. A lot of those practices were then exported to other countries under the guise of toyotism.
That's true. This isn't meant to be a "whataboutism" but I think that's something we see every time a nation industrializes. And then there's a critical point that's hit, and we invent weekends and a healthy middle class. Not sure if Japan ever realized that second part as much (I honestly don't know)? And China seems to be grappling with some 12/6 thing, though I've heard they have an interesting middle class story.
Really out of my realm of expertise here, but I think there's something interesting going on here with how some economies evolved out of the "toil and suffer" phase while others don't?
We cannot really go there without opening a big can of politics, but I would be wary to consider this or that change fundamentally inevitable. Marx thought he could see the future, but most of his predictions did not come to pass. Humans are messy.
A lot of Chinese name brands are extremely high quality, as good as or better than the American equivalent. Anker is one of the better known examples. However, there is also a lot of unbranded or white label garbage made by the lowest bidder to try to spawn camp popular search terms.
I do wonder whether you're comparing two different versions of chinese products?
IE, you're seeing and buying things they're selling directly, so they need to manage quality control, vs what is being sold on amazon, potentially a 3rd party seller who's cutting corners to make a nicer margin?
Most things are made in China anyway. Some of it is counterfeit junk, but often it's the same factory they use to make "American" brands. They just keep the assembly line running and use a different brand name.
The way I see it, the premium you pay is for the convenience brought about by Amazon having your product sitting in a warehouse waiting for you to buy it.
vs. waiting two to four weeks to ship from China.
However at least in Canada, AliExpress has fulfillment centres locally, so AliExpress can often get their items in customers' hands within a week.
So where's the advantage? Most times I can wait a week.
Amazon Prime is quite good, tbh. There’s a whole layer of complexity your life loses when you know you can get life essentials within a few hours with no planning.
You still have same day shipping? I still get two days on basically everything even with prime, at the fastest. I thought their delivery service was getting worse after the pandemic or something
Prime has gone from guaranteed two days or less to we'll get it to you when we get it to you for a long while. Prime just guarantees you'll be ahead of people who don't pay for prime. It's fine if you can get it for free or through a family plan. But when you don't have it you do not miss it once you remember stores still exist and 99 percent of purchases don't matter if you get it tomorrow or in a week
I recently was looking for some widget on amazon and one of the chinese “brands” came up. They had 300+ reviews and 4.5 stars so I thought it had to at least be decent. But then I clicked through to read some of the reviews, and was surprised to see that there were many 1 to 3 star reviews, but none of them were counted. They all had strikethrough on the text, and then an explanation from amazon saying “because this was fulfilled by amazon, we take responsibility for this failure”.
Temu’s UI is unusable. You are constantly presented with roulette wheels for coupons you can’t dismiss. Its dark patterns have dark patterns. AliExpress is only mildly better in that you can dismiss stuff.
Both T and A still have listings for things that will likely result in you getting something entirely different. This usually applies to more expensive and physically larger items. You might order a greenhouse and get a photo of one or a schematic of one. And I don’t mean that the description will make it clear.
Both have a pattern where they might list let’s say an MP3 player which costs $30 but the price on the listing will be $3 because one of the product variants is just the case.
Amazon has comparatively reliable shipping and it’s included with the price on a majority of products if you have a Prime membership. While Temu and AliExpress do have US-based shipping they still don’t guarantee when the thing will arrive and if you are looking at these products the price difference basically disappears.
I am not defending Amazon by any means, but purely on usability it wins hands down.
> Both have a pattern where they might list let’s say an MP3 player which costs $30 but the price on the listing will be $3 because one of the product variants is just the case.
eBay do that too. Really annoying. Some day I'll make a browser extension to highlight it.
I've never had a problem with just getting a schematic, in my world that's typical of eBay (lots and lots of Apple boxes...).
The dark pattern on listing prices is real though. As it is the lower level of quality control - the same sellers will put the same product on both Amazon and Chinese stores, but the latter will get production batches that are lower quality (coil whine, etc).
Theres also no moral reason to support Amazon, they give nothing back to the society their buyers live in, much like the chinese suppliers. Might aswell just go with the cheapest.
You mean you don't want to buy the finest grade $59.95 blender for your kitchen from LONCEVON or ARVAGGCCY or ADVWUXITEKPRO ?
The tricky part now is identifying the individual CN vendors which are not yet well known in the English marketplace, that are also known to make good quality things (and generally they're not cheap), I'll use Sofirn flashlights and headlamps as an example. Mostly not sold via Amazon.
What's wrong with those? For established industrial designs small difference in better quality control is never worth overpaying few times for something.
I can't remember what YT channel recently did it, but they compared name brand batteries, third party batteries and knock-off batteries (equivalent to Temu) for some power tools.
The name brand and third party batteries from actual companies both performed great.
The garbage knockoffs were not a "small difference in better quality control", they had completely different battery cells, lower capacity, missing safety features, were easy to overheat, etc.
Also look at the reports coming in from governments around the world on clothes sold by some of these companies. All manner of illegal toxins. You report them, the seller changes some consonants around and relists under the new name.
I'd encourage everyone to do their own homework on this if they really think the differences aren't significant. And the problem is unless you test to failure or send things to labs you don't know if you rolled the dice and got lucky or not, until your house burns down or your toddler gets a weird autoimmune thing that you have no family history of.
Yeah, you are right, some categories of products are too risky and additional QA is actually worth it. Batteries, computer storage, anything that has prolonged contact with the body, items that come in contact with food and drinks, items for children.
It's all the same crap. you buy name brand from Tefal, or a local kitchen shop and it's the same crap with a different label and large markup. On Amazon you get all these letter brands with the same crap. You try to go to the source and buy from AliExpress but the lobbying worked and countries like The Netherlands introduced taxes to make it unattractive and help the local drop shippers keep their jobs. Some countries outright ban it. You think they're protecting the consumer but it's all the same crap but with extra steps.
You simplify it too much to support your argument. For example, Tefal makes some of its frying pans in France, but AFAIK they also offer some products made in China to capture the cheaper part of the market. Price does not guarantee quality or being made in Europe, but if you target the cheapest, that's what you'll get.
The problem is that the presence of the Tefal brand used to be a sign of quality. Now you've got both decent products and garbage being sold under the same brand, with only the price as a quality indicator.
This dilutes the brand, and it is only a matter of time before the reputation of the cheap items will be seen as the standard for Tefal, which leads to the sales of their expensive items dropping, which leads to them trying to bring that back by lowering their price via lowering their quality. Congratulations: Tefal is now a brand where you can choose between cheap garbage and overpriced garbage!
Next steps: they shut down the European factories, struggle to compete on the budget market, and finally kill the business and sell the brand to a Chinese company interested in milking some cash out of what remains of its reputation.
Exactly, so even heritage brands use their brand power to peddle the same low quality stuff you can find on AliExpress. And their flagship stuff continuously gets eroded and enshittified as well. YT is full of "why Dr Martens/The North Face/KitchenAid/Black & Decker/... doesn't make the same quality stuff anymore" type of content. Even when you pay for the brand name it doesn't get you far.
Their support has become increasingly worse in recent years, too. They now try to steer you out of trying to talk to a human for customer support as much as possible.
If you manage to navigate your way through a bunch of FAQ pages to find the chat button, you'll be met with a basic AI chatbot that just tries to repeat those same FAQ entries back to you. If you manage to also navigate that and convince it that you need to talk to a human (you'll need to confirm it like 3 times), you might get lucky and finally be able to chat with a person who can barely speak English and will actively lie to you in an attempt to end the chat faster.
Here's a recent experience of mine: I managed to get a deal on a 4TB Samsung SSD, something like $330 before shipping on Amazon.com. I'm in Europe, so shipping would be pretty expensive, but even so it was still an amazing deal considering how expensive SSDs are now. So I ordered it, and two months later it was still not shipped with absolutely no word whatsoever from Amazon. So I got in contact with their support, they could never once tell me what was actually happening, they'd just repeat something like "I have filed a ticket with the fulfillment center and you will receive a shipping update within 48 hours" every time. It was always a lie - I would wait, not hear anything back, and contact them again. Did this 5 times, every time I'd get a similar response, once I was thrown around between 4 different support agents and none of them said anything of value. Eventually gave up and just canceled the order.
It's important to remember that the support channels a company wants you to use aren't the only options you have. If a company doesn't offer reasonable support you can always go the bezos@amazon.com route and include their highest paid person you can find (read: their still relatively highly paid secretary) so that just skimming over your mail to filter it out will cost them more than half-way decent support. Throw in a CC to a regulator when appropriate. Much better experience than dealing with chatbots or call center wait lines before that.
I've had some luck doing LinkedIn InMail to various high-level people at large companies to get support.
Once I used Inmail to get a DHL SVP to get his executive assistant to follow up why my package hadn't arrived... The assistant Cc'd me on messages a Friday afternoon and made it clear said SVP wanted updates. Monday morning the package that I had been told was on a ship being returned to the seller in the US arrived from a depot 5 minutes away from my office in London.
I'm guessing most people at that level are so insulated from their customers experiences that getting a request like that is totally novel for most of them - it's worked for me several times.
I use Amazon to buy cheap stuff like zip ties, printing paper and ink and some cleaning products. Almost every single major purchase I go directly to the manufacturer website or a specialized store. For example, I would never buy photography gear on Amazon. I go to Adorama or BH. For my favorite brands in say hiking or running gear I go to REI or RunningWarehouse or visit my local brick and mortar store. Amazon has truly become the convenience store for me, my average purchase is under $10. Almost everyone today offer free or inexpensive quick shipping and easy returns. They also have better customer service.
For the cheap stuff, I usually find the quality better and sometimes lower prices by going to a shop like Home Bargains or B&M. Thats UK specific but I'm guessing there must be these sort of shops in the US too.
> Almost every single major purchase I go directly to the manufacturer website or a specialized store.
Let's take an example: If a Brother printer is full price from Staples, Best Buy and the Brother website, but $50 off on Amazon, why would I not order on Amazon and save myself $50? As it is, Best Buy and Staples are also operating marketplaces when buying online.
> Almost everyone today offer free or inexpensive quick shipping and easy returns. They also have better customer service.
I beg to differ. I bought a GPU from a local store that turned out not to be compatible with my workstation. Returning it was a huge hassle, I paid a 15% restocking fee. The next time I ordered a GPU, I went through Amazon. When it too didn't work, they took it back, no questions asked, full funds returned.
"why would I not order on Amazon and save myself $50?"
Because of principles?
It seems that in the past 20 years the concept of boycotting a company in response to their behaviour has been lost.
The last widespread boycott I remember was from the late 2000s against Sony, I can't even remember why ( rootkits on CDs? ) but I'm still boycotting them now as it's an automatic reaction.
Unfortunately not many people have principles which overcome the desire for convenience. I stick to my principles hard, so much so I will happily go without convenience items, but I very rarely meet anyone else who does.
Are the higher prices in the room with us? Amazon is always at least as cheap. I mean they literally track the prices on competitors and auto-update them.
If a Brother printer is $150 from Amazon, but $100 on Staples, Best Buy and the Brother website, why would you not order on a non-amazon site and save yourself $50?
Answer: you probably would, but Amazon engages in illegal, coercive price fixing to drive up the prices on those other sites by $50.
Well, according to TFA, you're still paying an Amazon tax, which is itself similar to the Visa tax, which apparently we all pay even if we use cash to purchase directly from manufacturers (so long as the manufacturer also sells their product on Amazon).
I don't know about "increasingly." I think there are two places in my area of the city that offer a cash discount. These kinds of tactics really aren't convincing customers to use cash - maybe if they turned it around to "a 3% fee will be added to card transactions" then people would care. Anyway, discounts are enough of a pain that it's not worth the accounting.
Look at your costs, including card transactions fees, and spread that across your pricing. It's no different than pricing in all other business expenses - do you complain you're paying a "toilet tissue tax" because you don't use the toilet when you stop in? Paper products in the bathroom are a cost, and those costs are put into the price everyone pays for a donut.
Now, I'll agree having a minimum plus percentage of every transaction is predatory.
This is true for even mid range purchases. I was debating pre-ordering a game from Nintendo's website or Amazon and ended up chosing Amazon because of the return policy and how fast it gets delivered.
Amazon allows you to make returns and makes it convenient, quick, and easy. I made two purchases through independent sellers' websites in the last year, both with big banners guaranteeing satisfaction and easy returns for 100 days or something. And yet, when I found that the product didn't meet my needs, they would not accept my return. They wouldn't even issue a return label. Both of these sellers used Shop. Shop requires you to fill out an application for a refund and then the seller can drag their feet on processing it. In both cases they let the application sit there for days before rejecting it. In one of the cases my credit card company ruled in favor of the small business when I issued a chargeback.
On Amazon it's easy to request a return and get a return label all on the same day that you discover you have a subpar product. The long and short of it is that consumers do not want to be ripped off, and centralized sellers like Amazon and AliExpress make it easy to not be ripped off. If this raises prices across the board, so be it. It's worth it for the time saved and the accountability that comes along with it.
I guess it depends. Ordered a phone last month. Returned it because of bloatware. Waiting to this day for the refund. And support line says: please wait, nothing is wrong. While the website says, we need more details.
I rather take that risk. I buy from all sorts of online retailers and haven't had an issue in years. Ok, no, I had some pushback trying to return a sofa, but the seller offered a 50% discount for me to keep it, which I ended up accepting. The same way that VISA and Mastercard offer a service to customers, I don't think the world comes out winning when these Amazon and other global players get to raise all prices and take a cut of global commerce.
Disclaimer: I mostly shop from German, Danish, and to a lesser extend other EU sellers.
I don't get the Amazon bashing. My experience is nothing like that:
Kitchen scale, $20 bucks, looks and operates exactly as described; three years later, it still works fine.
Bed sheets, $16, two days later delivered, better than I thought - at least for the price that is. Best price/quality ratio I could get.
If I don't like something, returning is super convenient; I drop it off at Kohl's over the weekend. Time and again I am stupefied of how is it possible that in small town USA, I can get something shipped by next day while paying a one time yearly fee.
I think Amazon is the best online shopping experience on the
planet.
At the employee side, the minimum pay at Amazon is $20 per hour. Walmart is $14, AliExpress ... we can be only guessing at that
> I think Amazon is the best online shopping experience on the planet.
Be careful there. I use Allegro in Poland, where next-day is the rule, their website doesn't scream it was made in the late '00s (in the worst meaning of this comparison), and, as a bonus, they don't compete with their own merchants and even happen to pay their taxes here fairly. I'm sure there's plenty more of such websites across the 'planet'.
I expected the site to look good after all that shit talking, but it just looks like china-slop sites like shein and Alibaba. And it has all the exact same mechanics as amazon. I had to scroll the entire page to stop seeing sponsored products.
You’ll have a distinctly different experience buying clothes on there. 95% of the items don’t fit as described, the fabrics are not as pictured. My wife has a whole box of clothing returns she has to do for some shopping she did before a trip. Almost none of it was as-advertised. And Amazon will “lose” at least two or three items and claw back the refund a few times like they have every year, necessitating she call once a month for 3 or 4 months until she gets someone empowered to fix the problem permanently.
Sadly it’s still a better experience for her than shopping in-person because at least 5% of the items do fit versus nothing in-store. You used to be able to alter that stuff but the cheapness of the fabric and the intricacy of the “on-trend” design makes that impossible these days.
The problem is thats it is a 2 dollar product that could be sold and fulfilled by some other seller for 10 but you cant do that because Amazon's pricing scheme.
Shop around and you are likely see the same product with a different "name" on it for 1/2 the price.
> Amazon's Fair Pricing Policy lets it remove the Buy Box (the "Add to Cart" button), or even suspend a seller, if they're offering their item cheaper elsewhere.
This kind of abusive practice needs to be banned in whichever countries it's still legal.
You can't really aspire to improve the situation if such things continue to be legal.
Isn't this like Costco requiring manufacturers to offer SKUs at Costco that are not sold anywhere else? Or mattress stores offering to match price knowing full well that the SKUs in their store are not sold elsewhere?
This policy feels like incentive enough for Chinese manufacturers to not build behind a single brand, so the policy will not apply. Materially the same product, different SKU under a different brand name.
Why should it be illegal? Its their platform. If enough sellers don't like it and leave then Amazon will have to change their policy. There's several other platforms people can sell their stuff on.
Because its a collective action problem. Being on Amazon is the least bad option for any individual business even though they would all be better off if they left simultaneously. IMO a primary purpose of market regulation should be to counteract these types of problems so that the market can move itself out of a local maxima and become more efficient overall.
Same. I'm in the US and do not use Amazon at all. Life, and the products I buy, actually got much better. Amazon is overpriced and low quality. Pretty much everywhere else has better products, lower prices and free & fast shipping at this point (Walmart, Target, Home Depot, direct purchases, etc.). Pretty shocked at all the people defending Amazon here.
It depends on what you're buying. I've found plenty of items that are cheaper on Amazon with free shipping, than picking them up in store at Walmart. Which is just crazy.
Thousand of long-tail ecommerce sites focused on narrow markets; buying things directly from the supplier; using other large-scale marketplace e-commerce sites and aggregators like Walmert, Newegg, Rakuten, etc.
I'm in Germany, and I usually just find a good option outside Amazon, then look for the best deal, which is rarely Amazon. Thanks to express checkout (Google/Apple Pay or PayPal is almost always an option), it's pretty much zero hassle.
BUT, if I care more about getting something real fast than the quality, or if I don't want to pay 5 EUR for shipping (especially cheap stuff), I'm not aware of any competition Amazon has here. I use it quite a bit still, for these two use cases.
Amazon delivers next day or the same day many of the items if you have Prime.
I tried many times to order something directly, and most of the time it’s the same price and longer shipping. So, for me in terms of convenience Amazon wins.
What if you want to buy simple Chinese plastic stuff (e.g. someone elsewhere mentioned zip ties)? The manufacturer is somewhere in China with a minimum order of 10,000, so no, you can't go to them. Amazon is often the cheapest source for this, cheaper than any local retail.
Honestly? AliExpress wins for this stuff. The shipping is always much more expensive than the actual items, so I batch purchase stuff like this. Funnily enough, sometimes, despite paying only one shipping cost, it arrives in multiple shipments.
I prefer online retailers because there is a lot more choice there. I can't find an inflatable knee pillow in local stores. The supermarket close to me even stopped selling batteries.
This is true. Many "weird" purchases that used to be available from someone local are now impossible to get. Not sure about the supermarket not stocking batteries though... That's just insane.
You have a small shop that sells zip ties? The only place I would expect to find something like that is a big box store or a hardware store (which are all chains now).
Buying from a big box store still does support local jobs though
Like yeah, Walmart isn't really much better than Amazon in the grand scheme of things, but I would rather people be able to get stable employment at a Walmart store than have to fight it out as gig workers delivering for Amazon.
I'm not sure about where you are from, but in Australia I've recently had just as reliable service, shipping costs and delivery times from individual brands as from Amazon.
Amazon used to be better, and they still have the logistics network to be better, but they've dropped the ball. If this downward trend hasn't hit you yet, it's only a matter of time.
AFAIK, they are two completely disjoint sets of individuals. But could you clarify what that has to do with the goods and services offered by large publicly-traded firms that members of those families happened to be the original founders of?
I don’t understand the question. The reasonable alternative is to not use them and buy stuff elsewhere. There’s a million places to buy stuff. I haven’t ordered anything from Amazon in months.
Yeah, I'm with you. I also have a very specific set of requirements, including only buying from companies headquartered in the Seattle area that have at least one 'o' in their name. That narrows it down to Amazon and Costco for general merchandise. But I'm also considering adding a criterion that the vendor's logo needs to include a swoosh or arrow of some kind, which would eliminate Costco, at which point I'll be stuck only with Amazon.
I know people are going to chime in and say "the fact that all of your personal criteria align maximally with the strengths of one particular vendor doesn't represent an uncompetitive market, but to the contrary, represents an extremely competitive market in which all of the participants are distinguishing themselves by maximizing the value they offer to different market segments with diverse preferences."
But as a presumptuous narcissist, my expectation is that everyone in the market should be optimizing their business practices to satisfy my preferences in particular, rather than limiting my options by trying to appeal to anyone other than me.
How often do you buy stuff online? It’s not a factor for me. My last online purchase was water filters. Got them from Home Depot, easy peasy. Before that, I’m not sure, it’s been a few weeks at least.
In any case, there’s a big difference between “there’s no reasonable alternative” and “there are plenty of reasonable alternatives but I like Amazon more.”
At least 3-4 times a week, ranging from groceries to various household items, like water filters and what not.
I mean, different people have different behavioral patterns and preferences, if Amazon is not for you, it’s fine. It definitely works for me and saves me a lot of time.
More often than not. Why would I spend my valuable time at a big box store like Home Depot that might not even have what I need at that store? They are all functionally equivalent members of the oligarch class.
Home Depot has an online store. And almost ubiquitous free shipping without any subscription.
I didn’t order those from Amazon because their search sucks, I’d have to pay for shipping or find something else to bundle into the purchase, and I don’t trust them with anything that goes on or in my body. At least with Home Depot, if I end up in the hospital because their water filters poisoned me, I can point to their name on the label and sue them.
This is actually a good point. The policy described in the article doesn't apply in the EU, but it's not like Amazon is cheaper in the EU.
Also, it is common to see in the US competitors with lower prices than Amazon (e.g. I frequently see brand name products on Microcenter cheaper than Amazon), not to mention that it doesn't apply to sites like eBay. So you've got to wonder if it actually has a strong effect on pricing across the internet.
It's insane that it's legal for a major marketplace platform to prohibit vendors from using their platform to engage in manipulative price discrimination?
Online stores should be forced to allow manufacturers to use their sites as free advertising platforms to expose consumers to their products, while incentivizing them to actually complete the transaction someplace else?
Should brick-and-mortar stores not be allowed to offer price matching either?
Seems like a relatively simple fix, Amazon shouldn't be allowed to tell suppliers what price they can set on their site. No one should be able to tell a supplier what price they can charge to others.
Noticed a big surge in pricing on Amazon for mundane crap. End up checking eBay and AliExpress for the same and both always cheaper, and sometimes in multiple. Things like blow up pool toys, > $20 on Amazon, easily half and lower on the others, and really not even worth a dollar in the scheme of things.
I've stopped shopping on Amazon entirely, and the impact on my credit card bill has been substantial.
It's not simply that products are priced poorly, but it is also that they seem to be priced just at the threshold where the purchase remains sufficiently convenient not to shop locally or elsewhere online.
Because of their predatory practices it seems online prices are roughly identical for Western branded products at all online retailers. For Chinese brands, it's long been cheaper to use AliExpress but shipping isn't as fast and returns aren't as convenient.
But that's perception. I blocked Amazon and continued shopping as usual. The volume of my purchases is now through local retailers, and I'm buying roughly the same amount of stuff but I'm spending a great deal less.
Yep. Amazon is almost no advantage here in the UK. I used to bulk buy stuff from them because it was cheaper than the supermarkets. That is no longer true. In fact it's 10-25% more expensive usually.
It's even worse in Ireland, particularly with the new import fees for non-EU goods - €7 + 23% VAT per item.
Amazon Germany/France/Spain won't ship a huge variety of items to Ireland and obviously won't have the same composition of goods as English speaking countries.
It's just about worth it for Prime Video and Deliveroo Silver, but the Irish Prime membership doesn't even support household or family sharing...
Yep, prime membership went quite a lot up; prices went up; delivery times got slower after COVID; now they are also saving on packaging, which means Royal mail brings me broken packages held by elastic bands...
Tempting to think that, but that logistical miracle machine that thus far no one has been able to fully replicate is expensive. Their global operating margin ex-AWS (which is a whole different beast) was 6.8% in Q2. (AWS was 39%)
That's actually not anything phenomenal -- and worse than I thought before I looked it up just now. I can't understand AMZN's stock valuation. They should really spin off AWS to be its own thing.
Their international margins are even worse in isolation, 4.1%. That's not even worth getting out of bed for, just buy some bonds and skip all the drama.
VAT should be done by AliExpress now, at least that is how I understood it.
Sadly it's only limited items, but you can also filter for just items that they have in their EU warehouse.
I recently bought some stuff (Ps2 controller etc) and it was still cheaper including shipping and duty then to order it in EU. Package was checked by customs.
Same problem here. In my country at least, the handling fees for the local shipping are around USD10, you can avoid those using a courier but that shipping method is much more expensive.
I've been boycotting Amazon since early 2025. It's not hard once you get reacquainted with things taking several days or weeks to arrive. Plan a little and it all works out. The delay in gratification may even help you avoid impulse purchases.
The notion that, if more people did this, prices might come down everywhere only stiffens my resolve.
I was an early Amazon user and introduced many people to it (was nice to easily acquire books). Have deleted my account 15ish years ago and noticed weird mindsets people developed, thinking they cannot get products elsewhere, thinking that Amazon ships faster than others when using Amazon Prime, thinking Amazon has cheap products and so on.
Showed what make believes people have.
I'm a guy that is pretty lazy and spends most of his money on convenience and not having to do stuff. It's not even convenient.
It's always a bit scary what things people believe end up believing about completely depending on one company.
I've always said that the two day shipping is a useless amount of time. Two days is too long if it's an emergency and if it can wait two days it can wait a week or more.
What's it good for? Constant shopping addiction dopamine?
A few years ago I looked at the finances of a company that sells on Amazon (FBA). It was pretty astounding the number of fees they charge. They were paying to show up in sponsored results which obviously increased the fees but from what I remember between all the fees roughly 50% of the sale price of their products was just going directly to Amazon.
Compared to the wholesale -> retail markup for most goods 50% is pretty in line with what a normal store would take as their cut, maybe slightly better.
The endgame of free market was always plain and obvious: shittiest possible products at lowest possible price, and no one in the entire value chain having above-sustenance any margins.
That seems like a reasonable policy for Amazon to have. It's pretty normal practice for wholesale/distribution contracts to include clauses prohibiting the manufacturer from undercutting them in other channels after the contract is signed.
Why would Amazon want to bear the cost of people using their store as a free product billboard, or using their warehouses as cheap transient storage space, while trying to push customers to actually make their purchases elsewhere?
I'm not sure how this can be considered 'regulation' of the market, however -- to the contrary, it signifies that Amazon itself is sensitive to price pressure coming from competing distribution channels.
Amazon often have no idea what vendors sell their products for elsewhere. It's often an empty threat that vendors are very happy to ignore. Also, many of those agreements are spurious in international law. Unless there's a bullet proof contract with actual teeth, vendors will sell anywhere they can.
To steal Benn Jordan’s ideas, capitalism is replacing itself with leveragism.
You don’t buy things from Amazon because they’re the best store with the best prices, you buy them because they’re the only store that has their own massive scale delivery service that delivers more packages than FedEx or UPS (not combined, but Amazon still delivers more packages than either).
It’s not possible for another store to compete with that. There is no competition. Starting a competitor to Amazon would be more difficult and capital intensive than starting a new car or rocket company.
There is no other store that can get me the most obscure and random stuff in less than 24 hours. Walmart can’t do it, Costco can’t do it, Target can’t do it, Dollar General can’t do it.
> It’s not possible for another store to compete with that. There is no competition.
That's an interesting theory. How do you reconcile it with the observable reality of there being thousands of e-commerce stores, marketplace platforms, and other sales channels operating in direct competition with Amazon?
Not to mention the sheer number of things that they offer unrelated to the commerce side of things
I don't even live in the US or shop on Amazon anymore but I still have a Prime subscription just in case something good is on Prime Video (this doesn't happen often...)
Actually I just remembered there were several things recently that I could not find locally and so I used international shipping from Amazon.com which turned out to be way cheaper than you would expect I think mostly due to the Prime subscription
> You don’t buy things from Amazon because they’re the best store with the best prices, you buy them because they’re the only store that has their own massive scale delivery service that delivers more packages than FedEx or UPS (not combined, but Amazon still delivers more packages than either).
Speak for yourself. Their delivery service is awful and I'd choose UPS 100% of the time instead if they gave me the choice.
It was Amazon's increasingly slow and unreliable deliveries that caused me to cancel Prime earlier this year, and I'm strongly motivated to shop elsewhere now because I know that the package will be delivered by someone other than Amazon's own service.
Yeah and it's not obscure or random stuff if it is in the Amazon warehouse that is in your town. That is the only way one day works they already have it on site.
The comment is deleted now, but a user who shall remain nameless challenged folks to find a vendor that could get a "TPM module for an ASRock Rack motherboard" delivered to their house tomorrow.
Well, if you order within the next nine-ish hours and are willing to pay 29 USD for both next-day delivery and "Rush Processing", Newegg absolutely will deliver this item [0] to my door tomorrow. Maybe that's not the TPM module the user had in mind, but -if that's the case- the task being underspecified is not my problem. ;)
$29 for overnight shipping is more than the cost of one month of Prime by approximately double, which is an entire month of free expedited shipping, usually overnight and sometimes same-day.
Is anyone else remotely price competitive? I can find the module on eBay with free shipping but they quote me 3-10 day delivery.
You are missing something else: you followed the race to the bottom. You knew exactly what you wanted and nothing else can substitute (correct me if I'm wrong, but I doubt anyone else who makes a TPM that will fit your motherboard). Your only consideration is price and fast shipping - there isn't much for anyone to compete on and so only the largest will.
In the more typical case these is. I recently needed a compass (my son is in scouts), what do I know about a compass: not much. Amazon will give me hundreds of options, some good, some really bad: I'd have to buy the one expensive name brand I know (and hope they are still as good as they were when I was a kid), or risk buying junk - worse junk in a way I wouldn't recognize in time to return it. However I found a small niche orienteering suppler that knows their product and so was able to direct me to a brand I've never heard of that while not as good as the name bring, was both a lot cheaper and good enough. They beat the race to the bottom because for a slightly higher price than amazon they could deliver me the exact thing I need for a still reasonable price.
It's almost as though market competition precisely refers to lots of vendors targeting lots of different criteria to win business from differentiated market segments, with many being successful within particular niches, but with the largest overall at any moment being the one that's currently most adept at optimizing its operations to serve the preferences of the widest segment. Who could have guessed?
Sure. I wasn't going to name you because I had no idea exactly why you'd deleted that comment, so I wasn't gonna be rude and attach the challenge to your name.
> $29 for overnight shipping is more than the cost of one month of Prime by approximately double...
What I've told you is that there are other retailers who will next-day ship you all sorts of "specialty" items like that one. So, Challenge Completed.
Whereas what you've told me is that overnight shipping for this one part is a little less than 1/6h the cost of a year of Amazon Prime. Given that I've only gotten things next-day shipped two or three times in my mumble decades of life, it sounds like not using Amazon saves me a notable chunk of money.
Also, I've heard from a ton of people out in the boonies that Prime ships very few -and sometimes no- items to them same day or overnight. The Prime Promise seems to be extremely location-dependent.
If you don’t have Prime you can either buy it for a single month or buy overnight shipping on the individual item. Both those options are far less than $29.
You did complete the challenge, but it proved that Amazon has a nearly insurmountable logistics advantage compared to competitors.
Amazon shipping and logistics are heavily subsidised by the social contract in Western Countries - it's not remotely a fair comparison even if these were removed based on Amazon's effective corporate income tax rates coming in as low as 1.4%.
In the US alone Amazon has received over $11 billion in cumulative taxpayer subsidies, and governments spend an average of nearly $43,000 per fulfillment center job created.
This is ramping up exponentially with regard to their data center rollout. In a single instance in rural Oregon, five AWS data centers will avoid $1 billion in property taxes.
This is completely aside from the qualitative damage done to traditional retail, shopping districts as a whole, SME innovation on consumer products, and distorting market competition beyond all recognition.
Who said anything about a centralized government system?
We aren’t comparing capitalism to that.
We are comparing a deeply broken antitrust regulatory environment that is ending capitalism, or ant least the free market competitive style of capitalism you are romanticizing, and replacing it with leveragism or legal cartels or whatever you want to call it.
Amazon is a failure of underregulated capitalism because it’s not possible for anyone to compete with them.
Amazon should have been required to split off AWS from Amazon years ago, and I’d say there’s a very good argument to be made that their fulfillment business constitutes a national monopoly. FedEx and UPS don’t actually provide the services that FBA does, which makes Amazon a monopoly.
> Amazon is a failure of underregulated capitalism because it’s not possible for anyone to compete with them
What do you meany nobody can compete with Amazon? It happens all the time across the various markets they're in: e-commerce, retail, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, entertainment, and artificial intelligence.
How do I start a fulfillment business that can get a roll of toilet paper delivered to the doorstep of consumers nationwide inside of 24 hours and have that transaction be profitable?
How much investment money and customer volume do I need to make that business viable?
> How do I start a fulfillment business that can get a roll of toilet paper delivered to the doorstep of consumers nationwide inside of 24 hours and have that transaction be profitable?
As with all successful businesses, you start small.
You figure out what's your edge. You are resourceful.
You don't compete with ANY competitor by trying to do 100% what they do out of the gate.
Pro-tip: selling (rather than producing) toilet paper is probably never a big business anyhow.
If all we are going to do is engage in vague inspirational idealism rather than using realistic boundaries to the discussion I fear the relevance to the subject at hand fades away.
> You don't compete with ANY competitor by trying to do 100% what they do out of the gate.
This idea bleeds into the definition of a monopoly. I can’t just make a mobile operating system like Apple and Google because I won’t have a competitive advantage. I can’t make my own Amazon competitor because their edge is that they deliver more packages than UPS or FedEx. I can’t compete with Google search because the web browser that comes with Android defaults Google on the home page.
Sure, nobody is trying to do 100% of what their competitors do, but I wouldn’t be able to do 5% of what Amazon does even if you handed me billions in seed capital.
It sounds like you’ve decided it isn’t possible to compete, there’s nothing worth trying. I suppose that’s a fair stance to take and I’m not here to convince you to be more resourceful and strategic.
Meanwhile, lots of people are starting and building successful businesses.
We can certainly agree that lots of people are starting and building successful businesses. But I would hope we can also agree that there are many business categories where entry into the market is extremely difficult.
And hopefully you can agree that, conceptually, monopoly businesses do exist and have existed in the past.
> They’re saying that starting a competitor to Amazon is now impossible regardless of capital investment.
Competing in which market? Amazon is a conglomerate operating in e-commerce, retail, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, entertainment, and artificial intelligence.
> That breadth is part of why competing is so tough.
I don't see it. In each of the industries they operate in, they face fierce competition. Many of those competitors also compete with Amazon across multiple of those industries plus others that Amazon does not compete in.
Competition is by definition tough. But I push back against the original thesis that Amazon has such leverage that it is impossible to compete with them (in all the cases, you're not just competing against them!)
Also somehow ignoring captured markets, natural monopolies, goverment granted monopolies, regulation capture and the myriad of other unsurmountable situations that "competition" cannot overcome
Anticompetitive behavior is one of the most predictable failure modes of capitalism. Capitalism only works if you have measures in place that protect fair competition and those measures are actually used.
Not being allowed to sell your product elsewhere for cheaper seems downright anticompetitive and if our government was functioning government that would be illegal. The whole point of the ideal free market is that fees are supposed to approach zero with increasing competition.
The funny part is that our monopoly busting law that actual worked but we don't use anymore actually says that you must sell your product the same everywhere. It turns out a great way to kill monopolies to take out the part where they get a better deal because they're bigger. Making the price the same everywhere means that now companies have to compete on other things.
It sucks that sellers cannot offer their products for cheaper elsewhere, but I've also often seen sellers sell their products for a much higher price on their own website than Amazon, and in that case why wouldn't I buy it on Amazon instead?
In that sense having one big marketplace with all kinds of competing products together also seems to motivate sellers more to compete on price rather than relying on lazy consumers.
I try to avoid Amazon as much as possible. 95% of the products are throwaway junk brands. It's tiring to shop there. I think Amazon is a great example of why competition, while good in most cases, has its limits when the information asymmetry due to overwhelming and opaque choices. I wish those junk, throwaway brands were banned...
I understand logistics is an insanely hard problem, but can't sellers create a co-op? Not on Amazon's scale, but start on a much smaller scale (gotta start somewhere). Maybe at a city level - if a bunch of sellers in Chicago (for example) rent a warehouse and serve only within Chicago, it is worth a try, no? Or is this a stupid question?
I remember hearing about a Uber like app (I might have seen it on More Perfect Union channel, I think). So I guess at least some people are thinking along the same lines, maybe?
As an individual, I guess the only thing I can do is shop as little as possible on Amazon (which I am already doing). Not sure what else I can do to help
Could you sell a box of 10x Item A on amazon, and a box of 15x Item A on your own website for cheaper per unit? Without triggering the amazon Fair Pricing Policy?
Stopped using Amazon a while ago because I want to support smaller (and less controversial) businesses. But recently I went back there to look for a phone protector as for some reason that's the only time Amazon has been cheaper for something.
I was amazed at how janky the app experience was having been away for a couple of years. It felt a really dated and ad-bloated experience. Considering Amazon pioneered so many advances in e-commerce, I was surprised I don't miss it at all.
Interesting article. But I wish it explained which fees made the share that Amazon takes go from 19% to 46%. The fulfilment fee is evidently necessary, it takes people to do that, and doing it yourself may cost more. The advertisement is also evidently necessary, but could have risen. The referral fee alone can't explain the increase.
And the fulfilment fee is not a fixed percentage of the price, it depends on the size, weight and price tier of the item.
I really love how the (flow-)chart in this article has two starting points and both flow perfectly into the vicious circle loops without any awkward gap no matter from which direction you start reading the chart.
US can just legislate that one marketplace cannot force how vendors use other marketplaces. This is not about free spech but rather about price fixing (in indirect/perverse ways).
More generally, the unprecedented levels of market concentration and pricing power in the US, a consequence of the gutting of antitrust enforcement from the inside by Robert Bork and the Chicago School, have led to much higher inflation in the US.
I expect retail shops to have larger overheads than online stores.
When Amazon's policies unfairly push up prices across the Internet, it deprives us from competition pushing prices down, and having a better idea of what online overheads are.
In the UK Amazon have now raised the price of general shipping to be 2/3 the price of a months prime subscription. Before prime, delivery regularly used to be £1.99 or £2.99. Now if you dont have prime everything is £4.99 to be delivered. It makes it seem silly to pay that when you could pay £8.99 for a months subscription of free deliveries, which is their whole game.
The greatest catalogue of consumer goods with the greatest logistics to back it up of all time. And the thread complain complaining about it. What a time to be alive.
How you spend your cash has always been a better democratic tool than a vote.
If you buy Amazon, then that's what you get in society and politics. Every Amazon purchase is a vote for monopolistic behaviour, the destruction of local services/industry, and for yet another America tax.
I do everything possible to avoid them, buy locally-made, etc, but it's becoming harder and harder. It's so ironic that people will complain about a declining economy, no jobs, etc, then will joyfully donate money to promote foreign jobs and enrich middlemen on a weekly basis.
the only way to prevent such things from happening is e-commerce is spread across non-platform channels but independent ones e.g woo commerce etc where a seller runs and hosts their own shop, then maybe go to semi-platforms such as shopify etc that don't aggregate everything on one storefront.
because sellers are reliant on amazon bringing in shoppers, unlike say woo commerce & shopify - then yeah amazon feels rightly so that they need to take 50% margins on a seller's item.
the same thing plays out everywhere where some producer is reliant on someone bringing in the buyers - uber, Spotify, apple App Store.
> Because Amazon is where the shoppers are: it accounts for about 40% of all US online retail sales.
A lot of the competition is gone, so now it's time for the "price hike" step of the VC playbook - enter markets with insane amounts of cash, slowly boil the competition alive until it goes away and/or the users are hooked, raise prices.
> Amazon's Fair Pricing Policy lets it remove the Buy Box (the "Add to Cart" button), or even suspend a seller, if they're offering their item cheaper elsewhere.
IIRC that kind of shit is at least illegal in the EU. Bookingcom and other sites have had their "best price" enforcement invalidated here in the past.
The bad thing is, due to the sheer scale Amazon has, it is all but impossible to compete with it. You won't get the scale deals that Amazon gets at shippers (USPS, DHL, Fedex, UPS, DPD, whatever). You won't get the money to construct warehouses across the world that make Amazon's fast shipping work in the first place. You won't have the insane amounts of money coming in from customers that allow for its extremely generous return policies. And you won't have some sort of cash cow like AWS that allows you to run your business at near zero profit or even loss.
The only way you can compete is if you are in a market where you can provide a better experience for the customer and the customer is willing to pay a premium.
I hate Amazon and I still shop there. It's not about price, I will pay more for a product to buy it directly and not via Amazon /if/ I can find an original. The issue for me is threefold:
1. Discoverability: Many products are so rapidly and thoroughly cloned that it is difficult to impossible to identify the original maker, find their site, and purchase through them. The insane proliferation of counterfeits, clones, and sometimes outright scam products means that Amazon at least gives me an opportunity to buy a clone/counterfeit and return it if its not meeting my expectations. Sometimes the original is notably higher quality but no longer produced/sold, as well. Recently I wanted to buy a Polar Magnetic Pen as a gift. The website is up and the shopping cart works, but checkout is disabled. They're out of stock everywhere. There's hundreds of random worded Chinese clones on Amazon that are 25% of the price and 30% of the quality, so I bought a clone and risked it.
2. Logistical Certainty: I work a lot and have little free time after basic households tasks, other than the weekends. So if I want to do a project or something, I plan it for a following weekend and order things. If I can't order on a Tuesday or Wednesday and /know/ that I will get it by Friday, it's basically pointless. Sometimes I'll just roll the dice, but generally I prefer logistical certainty. I actually have gone back to buying at brick and mortar stores if possible to really cement this (I use Best Buy now a lot more than in the past, although selection is poor). There's a few other online retailers I strictly prefer to Amazon that can also deliver this like B&H Photo.
3. Breadth of Catalog / Access: There's basically nothing I can't acquire via Amazon. If I need, let's say 6 things, to do some sort of hobby project my options are generally either: A) go to 2-4 different stores, either physically and waste a day of my life or online and hope the shipments all arrive in time or B) order on Amazon everything at once delivered as one.
These things are way more important than price. I still hate Amazon PRIMARILY because of commingling of SKUs meaning there's no real quality indicators and I cannot do anything as a consumer to ensure I receive legitimate, actual, quality products. If they hadn't fucked that up, I'd probably still like Amazon despite everything else. I used to love Amazon back in the day, now I hate it, because of how often I've received counterfeits and fraudulent products and the proliferation of Chinese dropshipper fly-by-nights.
I find that 20 years ago I shopped at Amazon for the low prices, but 2020s+ I shop at Amazon due to their logistics.
The problem for everyone else is not simply that Amazon ships quickly, I almost don't even care about that. The thing is that Amazon ships & delivers on a reliable predicted schedule. When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does. I shop at specific competitors who can do similar (B&H, Sweetwater, etc).
Many online stores big & small in the year 2026 will still take days to even send shipment info, followed by using unreliable carriers that miss ETAs.
I would even be OK with these stores giving a narrow range or probability "90% of the time this arrives between Tuesday & Wednesday".. But I am not in the mood to order stuff that may arrive in 2-10 days with very little clarity on which end of the range.
I think you're slightly wrong. It's not prices, it's not logistics. Amazon dominates because they have the power & money to do the one single thing their competiton couldn't do without going out of business: No-questions-asked returns. 9 out of 10 people i ask this is the single reason they stay at Amazon.
This is a strawman. OP said " I shop at Amazon due to their logistics." Nothing in your post refutes why OP shops at Amazon.
That used to be the case until about a year ago, but isn't the case anymore at least here in Ireland. I'm taking them to small claims court because they closed my account without a refund on a legitimate return. Their customer support has gone from excellent to nearly nonexistent. Fortunately for me, I've kept all the receipts.
The flip side to this is I've on multiple occasions had Amazon ship me clearly used shit resold as new — Amazon.com was the seller.
One even came with a sticker: "Thanks for giving this product a second life!"
The worst of the worst among us use Amazon as a try-before-you-buy or rental house. Their lax return policy encourages them.
If I buy anything important, especially expensive electronics, I buy it from somewhere else. If it's a reputable store with a strict return policy, I'm doubly sure there will be no fuckery.
This happens with items where it's clear no human even glanced at it. I received a sump pump that was wet and dirty!
Returns are monitored and you will be restricted if it looks like you're abusing the return policy
And yet people continue to do it 1000s of times a day, and they are clearly re-shelving lightly used items.
Most of my recent returns were for receiving used product.
In my experience, the customer-friendly return experience is withering. I ordered a small table about a year ago that didn't ship with the correct hardware. I literally could not assemble the thing as documented in the instructions.
I had to call to get a refund; admittedly, I think I may have been slightly outside the ordinary return window. The customer service representative was pretty reluctant to accept it, somewhat heavily suggesting that I didn't assemble it right.
I actually just recently cancelled my Amazon Prime, which I've had for probably 10+ years. Not solely based on this one experience, but a general decline in how much perceivable value I actually get out of it.
The ease of returns was a huge factor in the early success of Walmart, as well. I worked there in high school and college (99-02 timeframe) and they harped on how much the customer was right for returns, unless it was just blatant fraud. if there was a chance the customer was not trying anything you just give them their money back
I worked there in the early 90s. The number of times an old, well-worn NES came in as a return, and management authorized it, boggled my mind.
I distrust Amazon for anything over about £150 now. Which seems to coincide with their threshold for needing an OTP.
The last straw was getting a blood pressure monitor (which they don’t even sell) in place of £400 smart glasses. They insisted I returned the monitor, then said I failed to return the glasses. Took months for them to refund me.
> 9 out of 10 people i ask this is the single reason they stay at Amazon.
9 out of 10 I ask say it's about reliable delivery (not necessarily next day). Most people order things because they need them and have read the reviews, not because they are speculating at something they may need or are ok with getting something else. Clothing being a notable exception, unpredictably sized and variable quality, which nobody is happy about.
>No-questions-asked returns
Different forms of marketing work on different people. This one works on me. I'm going to shop at Amazon and Costco because, in the very few instances where I want to return an item that didn't live up to its promise, I can do so without incurring penalties.
When this happens, I'm already frustrated. I assembled a floor lamp for far longer than an adult should spend assembling it, and it's wobbly as shit. A corporation than nickel-and-dimes me at this point will incur my irrational wrath. Canadian Tire (a big box retailer of mostly low-quality wares here in Canada) has lost my business over a decade ago because of this. I tell myself: most Canadians are meek sheep that will return after being told "well akshually you can't return this because technically blah blah", but I'm not a sucker, I won't shop here on principle.
A company that doesn't create this experience for me will get my business and exploit whatever other blind spots I have with their marketing, dark patterns, opaque pricing, etc, because they didn't piss me off when I was ready to walk away for good.
Weird. I think I might have made three returns to Amazon in 30 years of ordering from them. I research the shit out of just about everything I buy, if I have to return something it's because I either got very cleverly scammed or had a literal stroke before I made the purchase.
I frequently have to return clothing because there's absolutely no way of figuring out which size will fit you since nothing about sizes is standardized.
And there's just a lot of stuff that research can't tell you. Sometimes listed dimensions are incorrect or missing. Sometimes it turns out that you buy a simple electronic device that seems like it will do what you need but it emits a high-pitched beep noise every time you press a button that drives you nuts and you're going to return it because of that. There are so many things that just simply are not captured in a product description, and sometimes are not captured by user reviews.
I've just ordered an inexpensive steering wheel to use with a racing game. And everything I can find online is contradictory as to whether it suffers from a dead zone problem or not. I simply cannot tell if the people complaining about the dead zone have missed where it can be configured or if it's a problem with the hardware itself. So literally the only way I can figure it out is by ordering it and trying it out and then returning it if it has a dead zone problem.
There are plenty of things that you just have to return that cannot be solved with research and have nothing to do with being scammed. Which is why returns are a big part of the economy and a big part of customer service.
>I frequently have to return clothing because there's absolutely no way of figuring out which size will fit you since nothing about sizes is standardized.
I used to take advantage of Amazon's return policy by deliberately buying 3 sizes of the same item (1 below and 1 above my expected size) because clothing manufacturers are not consistent with their sizing. I can then choose the best size at home and return the other 2 that don't fit. I did this for pants, shoes, etc. This really seemed great because I hate going to the store and changing clothes in fitting rooms.
However, I stopped doing this many years ago because I found out that some online retailers like Amazon do not restock the returned items for re-sale and instead, throw it away so it eventually ends up in a landfill. In those cases, the sellers just eat the cost of unsold goods that got thrown out.
It seemed illogical to throw away perfectly good clothes that are still NEW but somebody explained that Amazon does this because they're paranoid about bodily fluids etc tainting the returns. So to play it safe, they just throw away the returns.
I hate to break it to you, but this is true of returns across a lot of companies and product categories. If you return unopened wine to Costco, for example, they throw it out because they can't guarantee that you stored it properly.
>If you return unopened wine to Costco, for example, they throw it out
The food and groceries I already knew about. However, Amazon throwing out returned clothes was a surprise because I've seen clothing retailers like Macy's just put the returned items right back on the rack for re-sale. So I just thought Amazon just did the same thing at their warehouse. I've returned car wax to an OReilly's Auto store and I watched the clerk just put the bottle right back on the shelf for the next customer to buy.
It was disconcerting to find out I was adding to the landfill just because I returned clothes to Amazon. Nowadays, I don't order clothes from them unless I'm 100% sure I won't be returning it.
I think the general internet user doesn't actually do this. Slightly different use case but I worked at maximizing revenue/customer lifetime value at a streaming company and the biggest revenue win project I worked on was just preselecting the most expensive plan.
I was surprised since I usually do research and stuff on the options. But it turns out a lot of people just click next until they can start watching some tv.
> No-questions-asked returns
That's the Right of withdrawal[0] by EU law, though. Do you mean something else?
I mean, sure, smaller shops might not cover the costs for the return shipping, but I don't really mind.
[0]: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/ret...
It's probably different for everyone. For us, it's chiefly because it's the only place where we can find a gazillion things our kids' school demands they bring to school, and we can have it in twenty-four hours without having to drive to the store.
I order books from a local indie bookstore and just wait a couple weeks for the books to show up from their wholesaler.
But for other stuff, including tools, why wouldn't I just order from a place I already have free 2-day (often overnight) shipping for, when my alternatives are physical big box stores? Like why go to Lowe's to buy a cross-cut jig when I can get it delivered right to my house in 24 hours for the same price? It's not even like my money could possibly go to an indie hardware store. They don't exist. Certainly not within an hour of me, which not only requires my time, but also money in the form of electricity to drive my car, plus the wear and tear on my car.
The point the article makes is that the other online stores without access to Amazon's logistics aren't able to lower the price to make up for the inconvenience of using a normal shipping carrier because of an Amazon policy that bans sellers from offering an item for cheaper elsewhere. Amazon then charges sellers high fees that inflate the price of the item everywhere because of that policy.
They are not allowed to do this in the country I live in.
So it's kinda like how credit cards charge the merchant a fee and in the past would disallow the merchant from offering a cash discount.
And my point is that many of us aren't even shopping on price!
You could also flip around the reading to.. boohoo poor sellers have to raise their prices elsewhere and take higher margin?
Why don't they figure out how to ship/delivery more quickly with a competitor with all those extra margin dollars they are being forced by Amazon to take elsewhere?
Because Amazon benefits from massive economies of scale, and because Amazon has nearly-unlimited cash to push competition out of the market?
How could a regular webshop possibly compete with a behemoth which has warehouses in literally every major city, which has its own dedicated fleet of delivery vehicles, and which has its own fleet of cargo planes? When you've got a single warehouse and have to rely on DHL/USPS/FedEx, you will never beat them on delivery time when Amazon is actually trying: Amazon can trivially offer same-day delivery and eat the cost until you go out of business.
And don't forget: Amazon has an even bigger margin. If they were to compete on price, they would easily win. But they aren't competing on price because they know they have a quasi-monopoly, so they can just enjoy the extra profit.
It is surprising how often they are cheaper. I was ordering some glue, decided to double check the price, I could drive for 30 minutes and buy local, and pay more or order it for cheaper from Amazon. I didn't need it the same day so getting it tomorrow didn't matter. Amazon also sells everything need some M2 screws Amazon will have them, no idea where to buy something like that locally Home Depot won't carry them.
One correction: wealthy people aren't shopping on Amazon because of price. Everyone else uses Amazon because of price and convenience.
... and a lot of times I go right to the brand to buy "straight" from them and they fulfill orders from Amazon so why not just buy from AMZN where I already have an account, get lots of credit card points, can spend my credit card points, etc.
In the last year I've seen this other kind of consolidation where most of the brands that don't have an AMZN-hosted or fulfilled store are using shop.app (now shop.com!) from Shopify. I did a stint of investigating boutique perfumes [1] and it seems almost everyone in that business uses Shopify.
[1] you gotta try "Under the Lemon Trees"!
Some may be shopping based on price without realizing it. There's already a baked in assumption that Amazon has the lowest price and there's no need to check elsewhere.
This is a terrible argument. It’s only margin if they get the service but no one wants to pay the same to get slower shipping. Amazon has made the choice for the consumer.
Sure their logistics are better but it’s functionally tying Amazon’s logistics to access to selling on Amazon. It’s not a fair burden to say “you must convince customers to buy inferior shipping at superior shipping prices in order to not use us.
If Amazon stopped engaging in price fixing, then people like you who aren't shopping on price could still buy stuff on Amazon, and other people who are shopping on price could buy the same item from the manufacturer's site for 30% less with the knowledge that it'll probably arrive in a week rather than in a couple days. I'm not sure what problem you have with that.
> You could also flip around the reading to.. boohoo poor sellers have to raise their prices elsewhere and take higher margin?
Behavior which is often ruled anti-competitive and illegal.
https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/cases/dec_docs/40...
My experience is that for non-FBA fulfilled products this doesn't hold at all.
Out of the last ~20 orders (I don't order that often from them, so that's probably spanning the whole last 12 months or more), more often than not, the predicted delivery date has been adjusted upwards, often by ~2 days, and a few times by ~a week.
This may be specific to Germany/Berlin, as from what I hear, they (/ their subcontractors) have troubles finding delivery drivers. Mixed with the growing counterfeit issues, and degrading product description / details for most products, Amazon doesn't seem to be in it's prime.
In the outskirts of a college town with unusually bad retail (like the clothing stores at the mall are the Loft, Target and T-shirt express) 2 day shipping became 2 week shipping during the pandemic leading to me to quit Prime. It particularly bugged me because if I expect to get something in 2 days that's more convenient that making a trip to the store, but if it 5 days or more I'll be going to that sector anyway for another reason and it is easy -- it struck me as significantly dishonest that they were promising fast shipping and not delivering.
Maybe 2 years later I tried the free trial of Prime, if only to quiet the ads, and it was great... they must of extended their logistics network into my area and I get a lot of stuff in 1 day or 2 days now. I went through a phase of taking discounted or free Prime offers when I could but broke down and I've been maintaining a Prime subscription. It's probably not really worth it because my pattern is that I am typically heads down doing this or that and every other month or so I do a burst of buying stuff that I'd wanted for a while or I am doing some project that requires a lot of stuff. Then I might go a month and buy nothing on AMZN.
It certainly varies at least by country. I'm in London, and its very unusual to get worse than next day delivery except for marketplace sellers, and often <12 hours.
I stopped shopping at Amazon because their fulfillment started to suck. And I found they kept their dates 25/100.
Most recently I ordered 10 items on September 18th (I had a gift card). All prime eligible. The first arrived on sep 20, the 4 on sep 28, 5 on sep 28, and the last is scheduled for Friday.
I didn’t get any estimates until after purchase.
Amazon is no longer good. They are coasting on their customer base and are slowing ratcheting up prices and squeezing their costs (keeping all their gains).
> I didn’t get any estimates until after purchase.
If they are not going to tell me the day it is going to arrive, I am not buying. Thats the "prime" reason for using Amazon these days.
when I check out there is usually a button that says "as fast as possible" or "fewer delivery days" or "slower delivery for discount"
I see the same. I checked “as fast as possible.”
My point is that Amazon used to be good. Now it’s not as fast. And the price hasn’t dropped.
It depends on the country. For the last few months here in Germany Amazon has been having major shipping issues
All of you talking about delivery times, cost, quality...I stopped shopping at Amazon when I heard people were peeing in bottles.
It’s extremely common for delivery drivers to pee in bottles. Have you ever driven delivery?
I remember a friend in the 90s excited about his job at UPS. He laughed about the pee bottle. Same for people I know who work for usps and fedex.
Kind of makes sense. Where do you expect someone to pee who is driving around for 10 hours a day.
Or having to continue to work while their dead co-workers are laying nearby under a blanket. Yikes.
For me it’s not the logistics, for me it’s the catalogue. They have so many ridiculously niche items that I want that would be impossible to buy from a local store
But that's just the basic physics of mail-order shopping, it isn't anything specific to Amazon.
Every general store in every town everywhere can't possibly stock millions of individual products. When some item has a potential customer base of a few tens of thousands of people in a country of hundreds of millions, most stores would never get a single sale for that item. But when you can serve the entire country at once via the mail, having a single centralized warehouse specializing in that niche category of items is quite viable.
The only difference with Amazon is that you are buying from a single website, rather than going to the website of a small webshop specializing in your flavour of niche items. And the drawback is that Amazon has zero quality control, so rather than a store where you can browse for known-good curated high-quality niche items you will instead be drowned by piles of absolute garbage - with the occasional decent item hidden in between.
Sure, Amazon might beat your local store, but that doesn't mean it is good for buying niche items.
Basically the only things I don't buy from Amazon is groceries and large kitchen appliances, and it's 90% due to the convenience.
I don't buy most groceries from Amazon, but certain things are hard to source locally. Popcorn salt, cinnamon Oreos, etc.
Yep, I've always been a traveller of the long tail.
> When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does.
This depends heavily on where you live. I recall it used to be true, but in the three places I've spent significant time since the pandemic, all three have been less than 50% on time -- and less than 75% even giving an extra day. Because there's apparently no consequences for the last-mile delivery contractors to claim a package is delivered and not actually take it out of the truck until the next week, your local contractor determines your experience.
I find a lot of the websites I shop at for certain things do "dropshipping". So the product page will say "X in stock!" or similar when in reality they're telling you the inventory at a shared warehouse or even the original manufacturer and once you actually submit your order, the product needs to be shipped first to the store you ordered from. Then they ship to you. But both legs can take an unknown amount of time.
Agree with others' sentiments: One usually does not need that fast shipping - or that reliable. There are, of course, exceptions - but not often enough that I'd pay for Prime membership. The few times I need it fast and it's not available in town, I simply pay Amazon for fast shipping.
This. The amount of things I buy off Amazon has dropped quite a lot over the last 15-20 years. It used to be just about everything. Now it's an about once a month at most, and some of that are gifts for other people. I'm more willing to shop local now, and for everything else if I don't care a lot about when I get it I'll order it direct from a more appropriate vendor. And if I *really* don't care when I get it nor that it's fake, I'll use AliExpress. The only value Amazon has for me now is if I need an item on a predictable schedule and either I can't get it locally or its not worth my time to do so.
I'm the same way. I've also been very impressed with Chinese made goods too. Especially in the music world, M-Vave recently released a very capable synth for $50 (FM-1) that is having a massive resurgence of tinking in the community (people are sly enough to use LLMs to vibe code different firmwares that turn the device into something else entirely, like a groovebox or drum machine for example).
It's a shame neoliberals hallowed out US manufacturing but at least consumers around the world are benefitting.
> It's a shame neoliberals hallowed out US manufacturing but at least consumers around the world are benefitting.
Unfortunately, the counterpoint is... China has us all by the balls. Do something China doesn't like, such as, say... support Taiwan? Whoops, where are you going to get stuff such as medication now?
Most of our medication comes from India, actually.
And China isn't able to cut off your medication because you support Taiwan: it would have to be a country-sized ban, which for the US would immediately spark WW3. China isn't stupid, they have a sense of self-preservation. Why start a fight with the US when you can slowly milk it dry?
I'm not really worried about China, the US has been a massive force of evil and imperialism across the world my entire life. When was the last time China invaded a sovereign country? The US did it twice in the span of a few months this year, and likely to do it again.
No one benefits from US foreign policy outside of elites or capitalists, everyone else suffers under imperialism.
The US may behave irrationally from time to time. Bush, Trump, the list goes on.
The problem with China is, they play the loooooooooooong game, and their game is explicitly to destroy our industries. As a German, this has me worried, because we have seen it with solar panels (we used to be the world leader), with medicine (similarly, a lot of compounds came from Germany) and now we're seeing it with cars.
I would say in the 2010s I shopped with Amazon for the logistics. In the 2020s their logistics have been crap. Packages are slow, frequently late, and rarely packaged well enough for the items to arrive undamaged without luck. The overwhelming amount of drop shipped trash means the site is useless, too.
I've gone back to local stores. They're less convenient, but the prices are better and the quality is MUCH better. Amazon is for commodity name brand stuff that's harder to find.
I'm not an Amazon Prime customer (shocking, I know), and I noticed that the shown delivery times are overly pessimistic, probably in order to make you opt for a Prime membership to get faster delivery. And then the package arrives at least one day earlier than the predicted delivery date.
I'm not a Prime customer. I'd wager close to 50% of my orders arrive within 2 days. I'm glad Prime members are subsidizing this :-)
I gave up and canceled my Prime subscription years ago after repeated failures to meet even a 2-day delivery promise. I never once got anything same-day. And the Video and other services of Prime were things I never used.
FWIW Prime also often delivers earlier than the set date (yes, even when it's set to next day...)
I assume they want to limit the amount of customer support more than advertising their logistics.
Annoying when you are not home and they deliver things early. Like last week I picked deliver on the 13th, half the items arrived on the 10th and sat on my porch for 2 days.
Even more shocking: I'm not an Amazon customer at all. Which, granted, is probably easier if you're outside the US.
Yeah they're insanely good at logistics. They do same day deliveries here, I've had an idea for something and then got all the materials delivered 6 hours later. Nobody else can compete with that.
A lot of that uncertainty has to do with USPS, who keeps getting slower, and their delivery date estimates are at this point often 2-3 days more optimistic than reality.
At least in my experience, UPS, Fedex, etc., tend to deliver when the estimate says.
For me, FedEx is almost always a day or two over the initial estimate, and the package looks like it's been routed through a war zone.
UPS is generally pretty good.
I've been mostly happy with sweetwater - but they use USPS and I had a shipment (strings) take 2 weeks.
I've started to use more "mom and pop" stores - Philadelphia Luthery instead of Stew Mac (Stew Mac shipping is a joke, they want you to "subscribe" for $120 a year now, and places like "The Acoustic Shoppe" in Missouri for strings.
For me it’s that I know if something is wrong with the shipping that Amazon will fix it for me.
The other month my wife ordered something inexpensive from Best Buy that got shipped. I am 90% certain the FedEx delivery person took it, impossible to find the easiest way to resolve the matter with BestBuy. Amazon while historically it was not always intuitive to find the chat feature. I could always get there and the problem was fixed.
This is not my experience. I had a package simply not arrive, and Amazon AI said it would replace the missing package (which was a high dollar value). Instead, it just repeated the order, double charging me. I had 3 conversations with human CS promising me they saw the mistake and would fix it, and never did, so I was double charged. After months trying to resolve it I eventually gave up and ate the cost.
I've never had such a poor experience, including being repeatedly lied to by CS, and this was the last straw for me. I honestly don't miss Amazon, I buy less stuff and feel better about it.
If you have evidence of these conversations and so on then you can do a charge back on your credit card.
Also, there's the whole taking your money and completing the deal part. A whole bunch of sites seem to be breaking their own pages these days, leaving Amazon the sole remaining venue that still works.
I used to buy a lot on ebay.com, however they began to transition to a new page layout a few years ago, which made it too difficult to screen against scam-sellers(scamming was always a bit of an issue there). I briefly switched to walmart.com, however their site started giving a stupid error page for anything but the latest version of google chrome; this started about 2 years ago now.
anyway, here's a quick test i did(in firefox-esr) of a few sites which came to mind:
ebay: still has the dumb new design; certain js features appear broken(can't read customer reviews).
walmart: still get the "technical issues" error page.
newegg: main-page still loads mangled.
zoro: is it working again!? seems functional today... surprise!(i'll have to look into this more later; i did not test checkout)
thriftbooks: the search bar does not work.
so there it is. a bunch of sites i just simply can't shop on anymore. i'm surprised by zoro. will it work when i go to checkout?
I've been an eBay customer for 25+ years and it's worse than ever with fraud. It's gotten so bad that my account now warns me that I'm at risk if I report any more purchases on there.
Examples: 1.) Bought my wife a dress, it came and had multiple defects that were not in the photographs. I reached out to the seller and they didn't offer a refund but said "sorry". I have no recourse if I don't open a dispute. If I open a dispute I get penalized. 2.) I bought "Mid Century Modern" metal wall art. The listing said 1960's and the photos were of two metal wall art items with no markings. The items came with a clear "Made in China" marking on each of them that was not in the photos. These are modern inspired pieces not actual mid century modern. I opened a dispute and got my refund from the seller who didn't even ask to have them shipped back. 3.) Purchased a video game that showed NTSC ESRB rating on the front of the game in the photos. What came was the european PAL release. Not only is that version not playable on this console but the value of the two items is distinctly different (PAL is worth far less).
I'm done shopping on eBay until they have new management. At least Amazon honors their buyers policy.
Funny, talk to sellers who use eBay and they will say how it's all stacked against them and that eBay accepts disputes from buyers almost unconditionally and they have no recourse and how much abuse there is by buyers who claim they received damaged goods or the wrong item.
Both can be true.
This is a market for lemons.
As a market's trust lowers, buyers are less willing to pay a reasonable price for a square deal because of the probability being higher that it isn't. This, paradoxically, lowers the value of legitimate products from legitimate sellers because there's no way to differentiate. The risk adjusted value of the product lowers. Legitimate sellers leave. Things spiral. Everyone loses.
Trust is the real rare commodity.
And the rational response to a low trust environment is to act with low trust. This is so fragile!
> I've been an eBay customer for 25+ years and it's worse than ever with fraud. It's gotten so bad that my account now warns me that I'm at risk if I report any more purchases on there.
It's always been bad but it's gotten worse and there's no recourse other than a dispute. I had a seller label a midi device a particular version (known to work with Linux and Mac) but when it arrived it was an older version that requires a proprietary Windows-only driver. I went back to the listing and the photos were of different versions. Seller refused the return. Ebay was unhelpful. Great.
ebay has hidden the "report listing" button so well i thought they removed it. but it is still accessible behind a plus sign ("+") in the corner of the page.
Do you think it's more likely all these major websites are broken, or that you are doing something to cause the problem?
I think it's extremely likely that all these major websites are built specifically to work with Google Chrome, and I would call that “broken”, yes.
It's worse than that. They all put up browser surveillance / captcha blockwalls to "stop bots" (even despite bots being legitimate shoppers these days!) that make the sites just straight up not work on most of my browser configs. And they keep getting worse - I'm sure they've all got some big dashboards that say "evil bots blocked", the numbers just keep going up up up (false positives and all), and whatever middle manager championed the initiative to block customers gets a pat on the back and a mandate to do more.
Amazon, no problem, browse from anywhere. I'm sure Amazon has functionality that's doing something similar, but they just do it a lot more intelligently. Like if a user is logged in to a longstanding account with a history of real purchases, and that logged in session isn't requesting pages at some exorbitant rate that goes well beyond enthusiastic middle-clicking, then it should never end up blocked. Yet I've had this happen on most sites that aren't Amazon - they've lost sight that the primary goal is to serve customers.
Of course to me every webshop has their bread and butter of what types of things make sense to purchase there. I'm certainly not going to buy stuff from Amazon that is twice the price elsewhere because it's only on there becomes some enterprising seller put it up there as a convenience. But I can understand how others would, given how hard the other webshops want to actively reject your business.
This sounds like you are running an ad blocker that’s breaking stuff.
I also run an ad blocker in all my devices and have to periodically disable it because it’s breaking random sites in ways that look like the site’s fault.
Nah, it's Firefox, not the ad blocker. I run into similar problems all the time, and disabling my ad blocker never solves it. If you pop open the developer console and look for errors, it usually boils down to Firefox having stricter policies about cross-origin requests. Even major web properties simply don't bother testing for even the most superficial functionality on browser engines other than Blink any more.
I don't use eBay much, but I use Firefox exclusively and never recall any issues with it there.
> walmart: still get the "technical issues" error page.
Try a different browser. I use Waterfox for most general purpose browsing and it rarely works with Walmart.com, while Chrome works fine.
"however their site started giving a stupid error page for anything but the latest version of google chrome; this started about 2 years ago now."
Responding before coffee maybe? They already stipulated this
20/100 times, it ships faster than it estimates
Is that meant to say you are willing to ignore what Amazon is doing because their shipping is convenient?
If you almost don't care about how quick it is then why not take 2-10 days as 10 days?
I don't even care about shipment times at all as long as they are not completely unreasonable (e.g. multiple months for a supposedly in stock item). But I do care that the items do get to me or that thinks are resolved satisfactorily when that is not possible - without me having to hound the seller. Unfortunately that's still much more likely with Amazon than with some random internet shop - and that's even with Amazon's own enshittification of their service. With other sellers if the final courier fucks me over and wants me to pick up the package in dumbfuck nowhere district thats my problem because if I don't I might end up needing to threaten the seller with legal action before they resend/refund. With Amazon delivery issues are not my problem.
Why is a purchase ever in such a hurry? Short delivery only really encurrage impulse purchases.
It arrives when it arrives.
>Why is a purchase ever in such a hurry? Short delivery only really encurrage impulse purchases.
We never do impulse buys for frivolous throwaway consumerism junk but fast ~2 day delivery is still very helpful because... Life Happens ... such as stuff unexpectedly breaking and you want to have a replacement to quickly fix it.
Example of 2 events just in the last month: (1) garage door screw coupler broke. It's the piece that connects the motor shaft to the screw drive. You cannot buy this type of oddball part from Home Depot or Lowes. Amazon had it and delivered it the next day so I was able to repair the door immediately. The alternative of waiting a week+ for slower delivery means the door has to be disengaged from the track so it can be manually raised and lowered. This is not acceptable because I don't have the specific key to the garage locking mechanism from the outside. Why don't I have a key?!? Because life happens. I guess I could manually lock it from the inside and leave the car outside the garage for a week but I didn't like the idea of leaving a catalytic converter exposed to drive-by theft.
(2) was my Skechers work boots had the sole separated from the shoe. I bought the same model shoes from Amazon for $59.99 and had it in 2 days. I could drive to the local Skechers store but they charge $79.99. So either wait a week+ for slow delivery or pay $20 extra plus round trip gas money to buy at the local store.
Amazon quick delivery acts as a JIT (Just In Time) inventory system to take care of unexpected things that happen in life. That's a more sane alternative than holding a bunch of inventory of random parts for things that might go wrong.
Btw, Amazon often offers extra reward points credited to your account if you voluntarily choose slow delivery instead of 2 days. This is what we do the majority of the time. I assume Amazon does this pseudo "cashback" incentive as a way to consolidate as many customer orders as they can to optimize their delivery routes and reduce costs.
If you're in a Nielsen "A" market like 40% of the population you have a Sketchers store in your area. I'm in a "C" market, a college town with post-material values, and the local stores suck. (Great thrift stores and vintage clothes but if you want something new it is Target or Wal-Mart or the overpriced Haberdasher that will get you something appropriate for a wedding but 'not special' in my mind)
Oftentimes I'm buying maybe a tool or a part or something like that which isn't necessarily available in my local hardware store.
Having a predictable delivery date for that on top of it most of the time being way faster than anywhere else is really nice. If I buy some of these somewhere else I might wait weeks for a small part due to logistics issues or low availability compared to Amazon
Not all purchases are things that are just consumable/materialistic. I find most of the time the stuff I buy on Amazon nowadays are things like this, where I want something I need but can't easily get locally or am too busy to go out and get during stores hours.
> It arrives when it arrives.
Yeah, but will I be at home when it does? We no longer live in a world where everyone has a nuclear family and the wife is always home while dad is at work. In 2026, only the rich can afford a housewife.
Most of the time I am indeed not in a hurry to receive my purchases. For most items I genuinely could not care less if it arrived tomorrow or two weeks from now. But I do need to know when it will arrive, so that someone is home to receive it.
"A month from now, on a Monday morning" versus "A month from now, on a Tuesday afternoon" makes a huge difference for me, as one of them would result in me having to walk to my front door and the other would result in me having to rent a car and spend an entire afternoon having to go to the other side of the city to pick it up at some warehouse.
90% of the time I choose next-day delivery it is because I know I will be home tomorrow, and the alternative is "some random day next week". If they offered me the option to pick out of a bunch of guaranteed delivery moments next week which are convenient for the seller/shipper, I would!
Oh no my toilet broke, the hardware store is 45 minutes away, and I have work and kids. Don't worry, I don't want the replacement part overnight. It arrives when it arrives!
If it’s a Lowes you can get the parts delivered next day. And you’ll know the threads are compatible. Most of the stuff I’ve gotten on Amazon technically fits NPT fittings but it leaks really badly unless you coat it with thread tape because the threads are the incorrect profile.
Lowes is even better than that - they'll often cancel your order the very same day!
Saves you the frustration of wondering if they'll actually deliver.
https://toolguyd.com/another-horrible-lowes-shopping-experie...
So weird to see this right after I had Lowe’s cancel my order the first time I bought something from them online. I didn’t even choose special shipping, I just wanted them to send me an item they had in stock.
let's be honest most people on here are buying USB cables, videogames and other non-essentials
Most people call a plumber.
Most wealthy people do. But there's a whole lot of folks who can't really justify paying $200 for a plumber service call to replace a $20 part in the toilet tank.
> But there's a whole lot of folks who can't really justify paying $200 for a plumber service call to replace a $20 part in the toilet tank.
You guys are hilarious. Where are you going to get such cheap plumbers?
I just had a plumber out for nontrivial work. Definitely over $200 per hour!
(Although I will say: If you have CPVC pipes, best to call a plumber and tell them up front you have CPVC and let them take the liability...)
Eh - most toilet repairs are doable with the help of Youtube videos (the primary benefit of Youtube for me).
This guy DIYs
I ain't waiting overnight for a toilet part. If it isn't in my plumbing box, we're taking a trip.
Your nearest hardware store is 45mins away and you dont have the tools on hand to fix a toliet?
Yes… because places like Amazon mean I don’t have to :) that’s the point!
You keep all the parts for toilet repair around just in case? Do you live on a navy vessel?
Most toilets are not mil-spec. "All the parts" can be one universal Fluidmaster universal toilet repair kit, $25 at any home depot. I have one on the shelf in my garage.
Actually, yeah. Wax rings, gaskets, supply lines, maybe a flap. Maybe not an entire fill valve, but they're available at any small hardware store.
I just said its often not even the hurry. I just want an ETA!
Purchasing decisions for "this arrives in 2 days" are different than "this may take 2 weeks".
It's the difference between saving me a run to the local big box store or not.
In the former German Democratic Republic waiting for your car (Trabant) to arrive after ordering took 12+ years on average
The old joke that went with that-
A citizen goes to buy a Trabant. The salesman tells him to come back to pick it up in nine (or ten) years.
The customer asks: “Shall I come back in the morning or in the evening then?”
The salesman asks: “You're joking, aren't you?”
The customer replies: “No, not at all. It's just that I need to know whether the plumber can come at 3:00 PM or not.
But people richer than me exist, so I'd rather have that world than what we have now.
While I get your point, there is obviously a middle ground between eastern block communism and unregulated anarchocapitalism that many nations can and do inhabit. Antitrust is a good example. The free market can't solve everything, and monopolies are bad for innovation despite what Thiel says.
POV: you just completed the order and discovers you have ordered from China and it will comme in 100 small packages over a period of three months.
It gives more confidence in the service at the time I'm thinking about the order. I want it to be reliable so I don't need to track and worry about it.
Precisely - Amazon is the one retailer I literally delete order emails from.
Basically everyone else I keep the latest status mail (ordered / shipped / arriving tomorrow) in my inbox because they have not earned my trust, and orders have fallen through the cracks before.
Anecdotally Amazon is 90% of my online shopping (by order volume) but only 10% of my unshipped/wrong item/misdirected/lost packages. I have had mis-delivered packages from USPS/UPS/FedEx even on large/high value items.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
I almost never impulse buy. When I order something, it's because I need it. And if I need it, I definitely care that it arrives quickly.
This is such a remarkably silly take that I’m struggling to believe it’s being offered in good faith.
Amazon searches for anything that isn't a known brand such as Apple & co turn out >90% Chinese products of highly questionable quality for me these days. And you can buy those cheaper by going straight to the source. The sole point of their retail business seems to be providing a support for the inevitable issues with these sellers, but I suspect that increasingly customers won't think it justifies the massive premium they're paying for what's essentially Taobao with an American address.
You mentioned Apple products -- I purchased an Airpod Pro set through Amazon, worked for a while but had to take them into an Apple Store for troubleshooting, where they had to carefully inform me without using the word "counterfeit" that they were counterfeit. Another problem related to quality which is endemic to Amazon.
I want to like Amazon, they're just so damn convenient. But the number of reasons to avoid them is getting longer all the time. Fake/sponsored reviews, never showing me what actually searched for, allowing sellers to reuse old listings, and allowing sellers to add counterfeit and used items to genuine listings are all my main complaints.
Oh and prime video has ads now.
What happened after that? How was it resolved?
Apple refused service and OP was left holding the bag.
Amazon sent me fake RAM a couple times years ago. It was a space blanket in a fake crucial RAM box. I’m 99% sure Amazon took the return and shipped the retuned space blanket on the next order.
I don’t understand the quality complaints. I’m actively looking for Chinese-branded products now because the quality is amazing. I’ve switched to Hongdian fountain pens, I recently bought an espresso maker stamped with an unpronounceable string of consonants, and I buy Chinese sportcoats that fit perfectly, have no label, and cost what I used to pay for clothes in the early 2000’s. Some clothing manufacturers on Amazon even email me for exact measurements, so I get a tailored fit straight from China. I get knockoff printer ink that lasts months longer than HP’s overpriced junk. The Chinese had quality issues twenty years ago, but today their products are top notch.
The issue is that in many cases, this is not what is being sold on Amazon. There is good chinese brand/product (I love my chinese IEM), but when looking for many household items, you will find the white label, probably not compliant with local regulation, type of product. When it is not an outright scam.
I actually have a recent example : I do woodworking and for the last step of finishing some of the thing I build, I use a mixture of beeswax and linseed oil. Beeswax has been harder and harder to find locally. Not so long ago, every hardware shop had some. Now it has been displaced by synthetic product. So unless you know a local beekeeper, you are sol. So, resigned, I went to Amazon. It had a trove of listing for "100% natural beeswax". Turns out, ALL of them are paraffin dyed to look like beeswax. You can report it to Amazon, they don't care. They will reimburse you, but never remove the listing.
I closed my amazon account months ago, but I have also experienced this problem. I have a hiking staff I really like that needs to be re-oiled and waxed. I'm having the darndest time finding both things. The beeswax, and most places seem to only want to sell "boiled" (solvent treated) linseed oil so it cures faster.
Try https://linseedoilpaint.com. They offer raw and boiled linseed oil as well as paints etc.
Tip for anyone wondering how pure their beeswax is: you can use a blacklight to check its fluorescence:
* https://imgur.com/gallery/beeswax-test-with-uv-lamp-c3uBW3G
The problem for me is (and this holds across AliExpress as well), if I search for something, I get presented 30 different versions of the same thing, almost all from an unknown brand out of China, all with near-perfect reviews. I don't know if they're all the same thing, just relabeled; some are cheap copies of one original good version (and which one was is the good original); or something else. And if I end up with a cheap knockoff, how to resolve the issue - endless phone calls with a call-center in China and multiple rounds of trans-Pacific shipping? No thanks.
None of that is a knock against Chinese goods. I bought a set of Chinese carbon bicycle wheels last year and they're great. But, I went straight to the source and didn't take chances with AliExpress or Amazon.
I think some Chinese brands do try to distinguish themselves. Anker, for example, isn't a revolving door brand name. But, yeah, there's an enormous amount of noise on Amazon. Unfortunately that noise is everywhere. If I went right now to try to find another source on, "what brands don't suck?" I would probably have zero confidence that any of the sources I find aren't just SEO garbage.
Any known brand seems like a good sign to me compared to AWOLP, IPOW and whatever else Amazon surfaces.
They sound like random letters stringed together rather than any attempt to build an actual brand.
I agree completely, user43928.
Those are private label brands where the US or EU owners look for ready made low cost products within a category across different Chinese factories and slap their logo on top. Like SEO they game the product search engine and listings on Amazon to appear on the first search result pages, knowing that most impulse buyers don't have much patience.
The factories usually ship directly to Amazon warehouses and it is also fulfilled by Amazon (FBA).
They might not be a revolving door brand, but I've had 2 different models of charging brick from them get recalled for spontaneous combustion in the past 3 years. So, despite their branding efforts, their QC still isn't great from my perspective.
I've had the same. But unlike a lot of today's companies, I was able to get an actual human emailing me back the same day with a few questions followed up by a "we're sending you a replacement. Throw away the broken one." That was refreshing. Maybe they haven't gotten the memo that you're supposed to hate your customers.
How did you come to learn the original source in the case of the wheels? Can this be applied to other products?
I'm a long time cyclist, got the name from friends on an old web forum that somehow manages to stay alive.
This particularly brand (BTLOS) will come up on searches similar to "good Chinese carbon wheel brands" with reviews on FB, Reddit, etc.
And the cycling industry has had Chinese brands making inroads for a decade or more. So, Winspace, BTLOS, and a few others have come to be known entities (some do sell through AliExpress, some direct from their own site). And there's a niche group of product testers on YT or similar that review these things.
I assume there are analogous items in other hobbies, but I can't speak to any specific examples/brands.
> Some clothing manufacturers on Amazon even email me for exact measurements
how do they have your email? this makes me worried
I've just ordered a dining table and a set of dining chairs from China using a sourcing agent mixed with TaoBao. It's costing me about £1200 ($1500) so far delivered to the door and if I was to buy this complete setup in the UK, it would cost about £2500. The only problem has been delivery time and the back and forth with the Chinese sourcing agent hasn't been great in terms of communication, but I'll be damned if I'm going to give an extra £1000 to Western retailers that are hellbent on following the Amazon model and ripping off customers.
How did you find your sourcing agent?
My dad likes to tell me how when he was a kid, "Made in Japan" meant "this is garbage." When I was a kid "Made in China" meant, "this is garbage."
There's a scene from Back to the Future, where 1955 doc notices that one of the failed circuits says Made in Japan. Marty then points out that all the best stuff is made in Japan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1QcjsjjtRc
Japan, Korea, and others.
The "problem" with China is they have a massive economy built on building to a price, no matter how low the price may be. They're perfectly capable of creating high-end electronics like iPhones and disposable crap that sells for pennies on Amazon or Ali.
There doesn't seem to be the same cohesive brand-building/reputation-buidling effort that we saw with Japanese and Korean companies in the 80s-00s+. Granted, Amazon/Ali didn't exist, and the market for "$1 junk" wasn't the same. No easy answers (if it's even a thing that needs solved).
The main problem for me is that the different price categories don't all make it to the West. I don't mind getting the $1 crap version when I am paying $1 for it, and often I would happily pay $10 for the not-complete-crap version.
But when those items arrive on Amazon the $1 crap gets sold for $9, and the $10 is completely absent because people think it is a ripoff compared to the "$9" one.
Another problem I've heard is there is absolutely no legal protection. If you outsource your manufacturing to Shenzhen, you get what you get and there is no suing them later.
"Made in Germany" started as a trade protection measure in the UK in 1887...
Labelling requirements have a long history of backfiring.
Weren't japanese cars basically better than american ones from the jump?
No, during the 70's and part of the early 80's they were terrible quality.
But what the Japanese makers did was they analyzed the failures and rolled the findings back into the manufacturing line so that they continuously improved the product. After quite some time at this, they took the "quality built" mantle for themselves.
My father, mid to late 70's, worked as an auto-mechanic for a local Datsun dealer (Datsun is the company we know today as Nissan). Datsun corporate wanted every failed part on every car repaired returned to them for analysis as to why it failed. The other Japanese brands all did the same.
The thing I love about the Japanese automotive story is that their success was earned. It wasn't some story of regulatory capture or protectionism or blitzscaling, etc. They built an auto industry over generations and raised the quality line for everyone.
This came with a price, though. Japanese workers were squeezed extremely hard, entire generations of kids barely had any relationship with their fathers. A lot of those practices were then exported to other countries under the guise of toyotism.
That's true. This isn't meant to be a "whataboutism" but I think that's something we see every time a nation industrializes. And then there's a critical point that's hit, and we invent weekends and a healthy middle class. Not sure if Japan ever realized that second part as much (I honestly don't know)? And China seems to be grappling with some 12/6 thing, though I've heard they have an interesting middle class story.
Really out of my realm of expertise here, but I think there's something interesting going on here with how some economies evolved out of the "toil and suffer" phase while others don't?
We cannot really go there without opening a big can of politics, but I would be wary to consider this or that change fundamentally inevitable. Marx thought he could see the future, but most of his predictions did not come to pass. Humans are messy.
I've often heard Toyota cited as the Japanese manufacturing exemplar, with their "kaizen" (constant improvement) approach.
Japanese cars from 1945-1970 were pretty bad. It took a while.
https://www.fda.gov/food/alerts-advisories-safety-informatio...
You got a link for the clothes?
A lot of Chinese name brands are extremely high quality, as good as or better than the American equivalent. Anker is one of the better known examples. However, there is also a lot of unbranded or white label garbage made by the lowest bidder to try to spawn camp popular search terms.
Spam camping requires paying Amazon for placement fees, so the system is working just as Bezos intended.
I do wonder whether you're comparing two different versions of chinese products?
IE, you're seeing and buying things they're selling directly, so they need to manage quality control, vs what is being sold on amazon, potentially a 3rd party seller who's cutting corners to make a nicer margin?
Hongdian's primary retail front in the west is through Amazon.
Most things are made in China anyway. Some of it is counterfeit junk, but often it's the same factory they use to make "American" brands. They just keep the assembly line running and use a different brand name.
The way I see it, the premium you pay is for the convenience brought about by Amazon having your product sitting in a warehouse waiting for you to buy it.
vs. waiting two to four weeks to ship from China.
However at least in Canada, AliExpress has fulfillment centres locally, so AliExpress can often get their items in customers' hands within a week.
So where's the advantage? Most times I can wait a week.
> vs. waiting two to four weeks to ship from China.
In UK, the average for my AliExpress orders is now 1 week.
And the frequent delivery status updates make sure that I am very aware how much time the parcel sits around waiting to clear customs, too.
Amazon Prime is quite good, tbh. There’s a whole layer of complexity your life loses when you know you can get life essentials within a few hours with no planning.
You still have same day shipping? I still get two days on basically everything even with prime, at the fastest. I thought their delivery service was getting worse after the pandemic or something
It depends on your location.
Yep still same day. Sometimes they offer 3 hour delivery.
Prime has gone from guaranteed two days or less to we'll get it to you when we get it to you for a long while. Prime just guarantees you'll be ahead of people who don't pay for prime. It's fine if you can get it for free or through a family plan. But when you don't have it you do not miss it once you remember stores still exist and 99 percent of purchases don't matter if you get it tomorrow or in a week
Seems to depend on where. I'm in the UK, and same day delivery is more and more common.
I recently was looking for some widget on amazon and one of the chinese “brands” came up. They had 300+ reviews and 4.5 stars so I thought it had to at least be decent. But then I clicked through to read some of the reviews, and was surprised to see that there were many 1 to 3 star reviews, but none of them were counted. They all had strikethrough on the text, and then an explanation from amazon saying “because this was fulfilled by amazon, we take responsibility for this failure”.
A lot of the time when i visit such a listing all the good reviews turn out to be for some unrelated product, the listing was clearly swapped.
They really are no different than Temu or Aliexpress at this point.
There are some differences.
Temu’s UI is unusable. You are constantly presented with roulette wheels for coupons you can’t dismiss. Its dark patterns have dark patterns. AliExpress is only mildly better in that you can dismiss stuff.
Both T and A still have listings for things that will likely result in you getting something entirely different. This usually applies to more expensive and physically larger items. You might order a greenhouse and get a photo of one or a schematic of one. And I don’t mean that the description will make it clear.
Both have a pattern where they might list let’s say an MP3 player which costs $30 but the price on the listing will be $3 because one of the product variants is just the case.
Amazon has comparatively reliable shipping and it’s included with the price on a majority of products if you have a Prime membership. While Temu and AliExpress do have US-based shipping they still don’t guarantee when the thing will arrive and if you are looking at these products the price difference basically disappears.
I am not defending Amazon by any means, but purely on usability it wins hands down.
> Both have a pattern where they might list let’s say an MP3 player which costs $30 but the price on the listing will be $3 because one of the product variants is just the case.
eBay do that too. Really annoying. Some day I'll make a browser extension to highlight it.
I've never had a problem with just getting a schematic, in my world that's typical of eBay (lots and lots of Apple boxes...).
The dark pattern on listing prices is real though. As it is the lower level of quality control - the same sellers will put the same product on both Amazon and Chinese stores, but the latter will get production batches that are lower quality (coil whine, etc).
Theres also no moral reason to support Amazon, they give nothing back to the society their buyers live in, much like the chinese suppliers. Might aswell just go with the cheapest.
You mean you don't want to buy the finest grade $59.95 blender for your kitchen from LONCEVON or ARVAGGCCY or ADVWUXITEKPRO ?
The tricky part now is identifying the individual CN vendors which are not yet well known in the English marketplace, that are also known to make good quality things (and generally they're not cheap), I'll use Sofirn flashlights and headlamps as an example. Mostly not sold via Amazon.
Those flashlight are amazing and amazing value. I would also include in this Triangle Labs and MKS offerings for 3D printer parts.
What's wrong with those? For established industrial designs small difference in better quality control is never worth overpaying few times for something.
I can't remember what YT channel recently did it, but they compared name brand batteries, third party batteries and knock-off batteries (equivalent to Temu) for some power tools.
The name brand and third party batteries from actual companies both performed great.
The garbage knockoffs were not a "small difference in better quality control", they had completely different battery cells, lower capacity, missing safety features, were easy to overheat, etc.
Also look at the reports coming in from governments around the world on clothes sold by some of these companies. All manner of illegal toxins. You report them, the seller changes some consonants around and relists under the new name.
I'd encourage everyone to do their own homework on this if they really think the differences aren't significant. And the problem is unless you test to failure or send things to labs you don't know if you rolled the dice and got lucky or not, until your house burns down or your toddler gets a weird autoimmune thing that you have no family history of.
> I can't remember what YT channel recently did it,
Project Farm?
Yeah, you are right, some categories of products are too risky and additional QA is actually worth it. Batteries, computer storage, anything that has prolonged contact with the body, items that come in contact with food and drinks, items for children.
I still don't get this. I've never bought a fake off Amazon by accident. I don't even know how to find fake Apple products on there if I wanted to.
It's all the same crap. you buy name brand from Tefal, or a local kitchen shop and it's the same crap with a different label and large markup. On Amazon you get all these letter brands with the same crap. You try to go to the source and buy from AliExpress but the lobbying worked and countries like The Netherlands introduced taxes to make it unattractive and help the local drop shippers keep their jobs. Some countries outright ban it. You think they're protecting the consumer but it's all the same crap but with extra steps.
You simplify it too much to support your argument. For example, Tefal makes some of its frying pans in France, but AFAIK they also offer some products made in China to capture the cheaper part of the market. Price does not guarantee quality or being made in Europe, but if you target the cheapest, that's what you'll get.
The problem is that the presence of the Tefal brand used to be a sign of quality. Now you've got both decent products and garbage being sold under the same brand, with only the price as a quality indicator.
This dilutes the brand, and it is only a matter of time before the reputation of the cheap items will be seen as the standard for Tefal, which leads to the sales of their expensive items dropping, which leads to them trying to bring that back by lowering their price via lowering their quality. Congratulations: Tefal is now a brand where you can choose between cheap garbage and overpriced garbage!
Next steps: they shut down the European factories, struggle to compete on the budget market, and finally kill the business and sell the brand to a Chinese company interested in milking some cash out of what remains of its reputation.
Exactly, so even heritage brands use their brand power to peddle the same low quality stuff you can find on AliExpress. And their flagship stuff continuously gets eroded and enshittified as well. YT is full of "why Dr Martens/The North Face/KitchenAid/Black & Decker/... doesn't make the same quality stuff anymore" type of content. Even when you pay for the brand name it doesn't get you far.
Including known brands such as dermatologica skin cream etc. - just so much fraud with Amazon it's my shop of last resort.
Their support has become increasingly worse in recent years, too. They now try to steer you out of trying to talk to a human for customer support as much as possible.
If you manage to navigate your way through a bunch of FAQ pages to find the chat button, you'll be met with a basic AI chatbot that just tries to repeat those same FAQ entries back to you. If you manage to also navigate that and convince it that you need to talk to a human (you'll need to confirm it like 3 times), you might get lucky and finally be able to chat with a person who can barely speak English and will actively lie to you in an attempt to end the chat faster.
Here's a recent experience of mine: I managed to get a deal on a 4TB Samsung SSD, something like $330 before shipping on Amazon.com. I'm in Europe, so shipping would be pretty expensive, but even so it was still an amazing deal considering how expensive SSDs are now. So I ordered it, and two months later it was still not shipped with absolutely no word whatsoever from Amazon. So I got in contact with their support, they could never once tell me what was actually happening, they'd just repeat something like "I have filed a ticket with the fulfillment center and you will receive a shipping update within 48 hours" every time. It was always a lie - I would wait, not hear anything back, and contact them again. Did this 5 times, every time I'd get a similar response, once I was thrown around between 4 different support agents and none of them said anything of value. Eventually gave up and just canceled the order.
It's important to remember that the support channels a company wants you to use aren't the only options you have. If a company doesn't offer reasonable support you can always go the bezos@amazon.com route and include their highest paid person you can find (read: their still relatively highly paid secretary) so that just skimming over your mail to filter it out will cost them more than half-way decent support. Throw in a CC to a regulator when appropriate. Much better experience than dealing with chatbots or call center wait lines before that.
I've had some luck doing LinkedIn InMail to various high-level people at large companies to get support.
Once I used Inmail to get a DHL SVP to get his executive assistant to follow up why my package hadn't arrived... The assistant Cc'd me on messages a Friday afternoon and made it clear said SVP wanted updates. Monday morning the package that I had been told was on a ship being returned to the seller in the US arrived from a depot 5 minutes away from my office in London.
I'm guessing most people at that level are so insulated from their customers experiences that getting a request like that is totally novel for most of them - it's worked for me several times.
I use Amazon to buy cheap stuff like zip ties, printing paper and ink and some cleaning products. Almost every single major purchase I go directly to the manufacturer website or a specialized store. For example, I would never buy photography gear on Amazon. I go to Adorama or BH. For my favorite brands in say hiking or running gear I go to REI or RunningWarehouse or visit my local brick and mortar store. Amazon has truly become the convenience store for me, my average purchase is under $10. Almost everyone today offer free or inexpensive quick shipping and easy returns. They also have better customer service.
For the cheap stuff, I usually find the quality better and sometimes lower prices by going to a shop like Home Bargains or B&M. Thats UK specific but I'm guessing there must be these sort of shops in the US too.
Wikipedia describes them as variety stores and has a list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_store#North_America
> Almost every single major purchase I go directly to the manufacturer website or a specialized store.
Let's take an example: If a Brother printer is full price from Staples, Best Buy and the Brother website, but $50 off on Amazon, why would I not order on Amazon and save myself $50? As it is, Best Buy and Staples are also operating marketplaces when buying online.
> Almost everyone today offer free or inexpensive quick shipping and easy returns. They also have better customer service.
I beg to differ. I bought a GPU from a local store that turned out not to be compatible with my workstation. Returning it was a huge hassle, I paid a 15% restocking fee. The next time I ordered a GPU, I went through Amazon. When it too didn't work, they took it back, no questions asked, full funds returned.
"why would I not order on Amazon and save myself $50?"
Because of principles?
It seems that in the past 20 years the concept of boycotting a company in response to their behaviour has been lost.
The last widespread boycott I remember was from the late 2000s against Sony, I can't even remember why ( rootkits on CDs? ) but I'm still boycotting them now as it's an automatic reaction.
Unfortunately not many people have principles which overcome the desire for convenience. I stick to my principles hard, so much so I will happily go without convenience items, but I very rarely meet anyone else who does.
All those easy returns are paid for by Amazon's higher prices.
Are the higher prices in the room with us? Amazon is always at least as cheap. I mean they literally track the prices on competitors and auto-update them.
If a Brother printer is $150 from Amazon, but $100 on Staples, Best Buy and the Brother website, why would you not order on a non-amazon site and save yourself $50?
Answer: you probably would, but Amazon engages in illegal, coercive price fixing to drive up the prices on those other sites by $50.
Well, according to TFA, you're still paying an Amazon tax, which is itself similar to the Visa tax, which apparently we all pay even if we use cash to purchase directly from manufacturers (so long as the manufacturer also sells their product on Amazon).
The Visa tax is illegal now btw. Places are increasingly offering cash or debit discounts.
I don't know about "increasingly." I think there are two places in my area of the city that offer a cash discount. These kinds of tactics really aren't convincing customers to use cash - maybe if they turned it around to "a 3% fee will be added to card transactions" then people would care. Anyway, discounts are enough of a pain that it's not worth the accounting.
Look at your costs, including card transactions fees, and spread that across your pricing. It's no different than pricing in all other business expenses - do you complain you're paying a "toilet tissue tax" because you don't use the toilet when you stop in? Paper products in the bathroom are a cost, and those costs are put into the price everyone pays for a donut.
Now, I'll agree having a minimum plus percentage of every transaction is predatory.
At least when I buy direct from the manufacturer the extra tax I pay goes straight to them and not amazon.
Those things are often 4x cheaper on the Chinese marketplaces, if you can tolerate 2-4 weeks shipping times. Amazon is a tax on poor planning.
This is true for even mid range purchases. I was debating pre-ordering a game from Nintendo's website or Amazon and ended up chosing Amazon because of the return policy and how fast it gets delivered.
Amazon allows you to make returns and makes it convenient, quick, and easy. I made two purchases through independent sellers' websites in the last year, both with big banners guaranteeing satisfaction and easy returns for 100 days or something. And yet, when I found that the product didn't meet my needs, they would not accept my return. They wouldn't even issue a return label. Both of these sellers used Shop. Shop requires you to fill out an application for a refund and then the seller can drag their feet on processing it. In both cases they let the application sit there for days before rejecting it. In one of the cases my credit card company ruled in favor of the small business when I issued a chargeback.
On Amazon it's easy to request a return and get a return label all on the same day that you discover you have a subpar product. The long and short of it is that consumers do not want to be ripped off, and centralized sellers like Amazon and AliExpress make it easy to not be ripped off. If this raises prices across the board, so be it. It's worth it for the time saved and the accountability that comes along with it.
> Amazon allows you to make returns and makes it convenient, quick, and easy.
They currently have a $1bn settlement for failing to properly process refunds for returned products over a nine year period.
https://finance.yahoo.com/personal-finance/banking/article/d...
I guess it depends. Ordered a phone last month. Returned it because of bloatware. Waiting to this day for the refund. And support line says: please wait, nothing is wrong. While the website says, we need more details.
I rather take that risk. I buy from all sorts of online retailers and haven't had an issue in years. Ok, no, I had some pushback trying to return a sofa, but the seller offered a 50% discount for me to keep it, which I ended up accepting. The same way that VISA and Mastercard offer a service to customers, I don't think the world comes out winning when these Amazon and other global players get to raise all prices and take a cut of global commerce.
Disclaimer: I mostly shop from German, Danish, and to a lesser extend other EU sellers.
Ironically on this point, Amazon offers some of the best consumer service in Japan. Returns elsewhere are almost impossible.
> Returns elsewhere are almost impossible.
That however can be solved with laws, like we did in Europe.
I never had any problems with AliExpress returns
On the other hand, they drive up prices for everyone, and engage in other unethical businesses practices, like in the article.
I don't get the Amazon bashing. My experience is nothing like that:
Kitchen scale, $20 bucks, looks and operates exactly as described; three years later, it still works fine.
Bed sheets, $16, two days later delivered, better than I thought - at least for the price that is. Best price/quality ratio I could get.
If I don't like something, returning is super convenient; I drop it off at Kohl's over the weekend. Time and again I am stupefied of how is it possible that in small town USA, I can get something shipped by next day while paying a one time yearly fee.
I think Amazon is the best online shopping experience on the planet.
At the employee side, the minimum pay at Amazon is $20 per hour. Walmart is $14, AliExpress ... we can be only guessing at that
> I think Amazon is the best online shopping experience on the planet.
Be careful there. I use Allegro in Poland, where next-day is the rule, their website doesn't scream it was made in the late '00s (in the worst meaning of this comparison), and, as a bonus, they don't compete with their own merchants and even happen to pay their taxes here fairly. I'm sure there's plenty more of such websites across the 'planet'.
I expected the site to look good after all that shit talking, but it just looks like china-slop sites like shein and Alibaba. And it has all the exact same mechanics as amazon. I had to scroll the entire page to stop seeing sponsored products.
> I think Amazon is the best online shopping experience on the planet.
Does the best online shopping experience on the planet normally include routinely shortchanging customers on their refunds for close to $1bn?
https://finance.yahoo.com/personal-finance/banking/article/d...
You’ll have a distinctly different experience buying clothes on there. 95% of the items don’t fit as described, the fabrics are not as pictured. My wife has a whole box of clothing returns she has to do for some shopping she did before a trip. Almost none of it was as-advertised. And Amazon will “lose” at least two or three items and claw back the refund a few times like they have every year, necessitating she call once a month for 3 or 4 months until she gets someone empowered to fix the problem permanently.
Sadly it’s still a better experience for her than shopping in-person because at least 5% of the items do fit versus nothing in-store. You used to be able to alter that stuff but the cheapness of the fabric and the intricacy of the “on-trend” design makes that impossible these days.
> Kitchen scale, $20 bucks
The problem is thats it is a 2 dollar product that could be sold and fulfilled by some other seller for 10 but you cant do that because Amazon's pricing scheme.
Shop around and you are likely see the same product with a different "name" on it for 1/2 the price.
> Amazon's Fair Pricing Policy lets it remove the Buy Box (the "Add to Cart" button), or even suspend a seller, if they're offering their item cheaper elsewhere.
This kind of abusive practice needs to be banned in whichever countries it's still legal.
You can't really aspire to improve the situation if such things continue to be legal.
Isn't this like Costco requiring manufacturers to offer SKUs at Costco that are not sold anywhere else? Or mattress stores offering to match price knowing full well that the SKUs in their store are not sold elsewhere?
This policy feels like incentive enough for Chinese manufacturers to not build behind a single brand, so the policy will not apply. Materially the same product, different SKU under a different brand name.
Feels trivially easy to get around this policy.
Why should it be illegal? Its their platform. If enough sellers don't like it and leave then Amazon will have to change their policy. There's several other platforms people can sell their stuff on.
Because it's monopolistic and hinders other competitors from entering the marketplace which harms consumers in the longterm.
Because its a collective action problem. Being on Amazon is the least bad option for any individual business even though they would all be better off if they left simultaneously. IMO a primary purpose of market regulation should be to counteract these types of problems so that the market can move itself out of a local maxima and become more efficient overall.
It's already illegal in EU and UK
Everyone keeps talking about dynamic pricing.
But these sorts of contractual limits on a vendors pricing elsewhere should be illegal.
Walmart does this as well: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/pepsico-walmart-hit...
Amazon Fair Price Policy doesn't apply in the UK and EU (it's illegal)
The EU are currently running an investigation into how this affects market dynamics, which will be interesting to see
Every time I read something like this I think "wow the US so fucked".
Try having a discussion with anyone here in the US about not using Amazon. The free market is a myth.
The free market is a myth because the market players aren't acting how you think they should?
I'm in the US and I gave up Amazon two years ago, and I haven't noticed any decrease in my quality of life.
Same. I'm in the US and do not use Amazon at all. Life, and the products I buy, actually got much better. Amazon is overpriced and low quality. Pretty much everywhere else has better products, lower prices and free & fast shipping at this point (Walmart, Target, Home Depot, direct purchases, etc.). Pretty shocked at all the people defending Amazon here.
It depends on what you're buying. I've found plenty of items that are cheaper on Amazon with free shipping, than picking them up in store at Walmart. Which is just crazy.
I’ll bite, what’s the reasonable alternative to Amazon?
Thousand of long-tail ecommerce sites focused on narrow markets; buying things directly from the supplier; using other large-scale marketplace e-commerce sites and aggregators like Walmert, Newegg, Rakuten, etc.
I'm in Germany, and I usually just find a good option outside Amazon, then look for the best deal, which is rarely Amazon. Thanks to express checkout (Google/Apple Pay or PayPal is almost always an option), it's pretty much zero hassle.
BUT, if I care more about getting something real fast than the quality, or if I don't want to pay 5 EUR for shipping (especially cheap stuff), I'm not aware of any competition Amazon has here. I use it quite a bit still, for these two use cases.
I think EU still has a chance but here in America we’ve succumbed to the Bezos convenience
Buying online direct from the manufacturer? Almost everyone sells direct. Use Amazon to find the seller and then contact them directly.
Amazon delivers next day or the same day many of the items if you have Prime.
I tried many times to order something directly, and most of the time it’s the same price and longer shipping. So, for me in terms of convenience Amazon wins.
What if you want to buy simple Chinese plastic stuff (e.g. someone elsewhere mentioned zip ties)? The manufacturer is somewhere in China with a minimum order of 10,000, so no, you can't go to them. Amazon is often the cheapest source for this, cheaper than any local retail.
Honestly? AliExpress wins for this stuff. The shipping is always much more expensive than the actual items, so I batch purchase stuff like this. Funnily enough, sometimes, despite paying only one shipping cost, it arrives in multiple shipments.
Personally I buy that stuff locally anyways to support my local economy.
Even if it does cost me a bit extra, continuing to have local businesses is worth it to me
I prefer online retailers because there is a lot more choice there. I can't find an inflatable knee pillow in local stores. The supermarket close to me even stopped selling batteries.
This is true. Many "weird" purchases that used to be available from someone local are now impossible to get. Not sure about the supermarket not stocking batteries though... That's just insane.
You have a small shop that sells zip ties? The only place I would expect to find something like that is a big box store or a hardware store (which are all chains now).
Buying from a big box store still does support local jobs though
Like yeah, Walmart isn't really much better than Amazon in the grand scheme of things, but I would rather people be able to get stable employment at a Walmart store than have to fight it out as gig workers delivering for Amazon.
Maybe I'm overthinking it though
Walmart employees are historically on food stamps. Neither is sufficiently better than the other imo
I'm not saying that Walmart is great, but maybe that Walmart+food stamps is better than just food stamps?
It's not like being a delivery gig worker is great income either
yup
Why would I do that? Now I’m spending time verifying individual random brands all to get the same price (plus shipping)?
I'm not sure about where you are from, but in Australia I've recently had just as reliable service, shipping costs and delivery times from individual brands as from Amazon.
Amazon used to be better, and they still have the logistics network to be better, but they've dropped the ball. If this downward trend hasn't hit you yet, it's only a matter of time.
I’m in the US and they continue to beat competitors. The logistics network is unparalleled.
Amazon isn't the only place to buy things. There are millions of other retailers both online and offline.
I wasn’t aware thank you
Depending on your constraints, the Walmart app
Is the Walton family not approximately equivalent to the Bezos family?
AFAIK, they are two completely disjoint sets of individuals. But could you clarify what that has to do with the goods and services offered by large publicly-traded firms that members of those families happened to be the original founders of?
Yes it has to do with oligarchs being oligarchs.
Please disable the polemic_buzzwords flag, adjust reasoning level up to medium-high, and re-run the prompt.
Competition.
Helpful thanks.
In all seriousness, yes - competition is the answer.
There can be no alternative when Amazon is able to buy them out, or dominate the market through network effects.
I don’t understand the question. The reasonable alternative is to not use them and buy stuff elsewhere. There’s a million places to buy stuff. I haven’t ordered anything from Amazon in months.
I’m not interested in a million places, I’m interested in one that has everything with 1-2 day shipping included. Convenience is a major factor.
Yeah, I'm with you. I also have a very specific set of requirements, including only buying from companies headquartered in the Seattle area that have at least one 'o' in their name. That narrows it down to Amazon and Costco for general merchandise. But I'm also considering adding a criterion that the vendor's logo needs to include a swoosh or arrow of some kind, which would eliminate Costco, at which point I'll be stuck only with Amazon.
I know people are going to chime in and say "the fact that all of your personal criteria align maximally with the strengths of one particular vendor doesn't represent an uncompetitive market, but to the contrary, represents an extremely competitive market in which all of the participants are distinguishing themselves by maximizing the value they offer to different market segments with diverse preferences."
But as a presumptuous narcissist, my expectation is that everyone in the market should be optimizing their business practices to satisfy my preferences in particular, rather than limiting my options by trying to appeal to anyone other than me.
How often do you buy stuff online? It’s not a factor for me. My last online purchase was water filters. Got them from Home Depot, easy peasy. Before that, I’m not sure, it’s been a few weeks at least.
In any case, there’s a big difference between “there’s no reasonable alternative” and “there are plenty of reasonable alternatives but I like Amazon more.”
> How often do you buy stuff online?
At least 3-4 times a week, ranging from groceries to various household items, like water filters and what not.
I mean, different people have different behavioral patterns and preferences, if Amazon is not for you, it’s fine. It definitely works for me and saves me a lot of time.
More often than not. Why would I spend my valuable time at a big box store like Home Depot that might not even have what I need at that store? They are all functionally equivalent members of the oligarch class.
Home Depot has an online store. And almost ubiquitous free shipping without any subscription.
I didn’t order those from Amazon because their search sucks, I’d have to pay for shipping or find something else to bundle into the purchase, and I don’t trust them with anything that goes on or in my body. At least with Home Depot, if I end up in the hospital because their water filters poisoned me, I can point to their name on the label and sue them.
Isn't "free market capitalism" is doing its job here, rewarding the best player of the game into brand-godhood?
More to the point - is it not government oversight that appears incapable of leveling the playing field for others?
That said - the only "others" we seem capable of getting is other governments' Amazons. So. Devil you know?
>Isn't "free market capitalism" is doing its job here, rewarding the best player of the game into brand-godhood?
only if you think free market == unrestrained market
as monopoly is antithesis to capitalism itself, whose main principle is competition.
And where is any monopoly involved in this situation?
Capitalism's main principle is not competition, it is merely the private ownership of the "means of production".
the free market has been a myth since they scheduled marijuana.
god gave us all plants to use.
they will fear monger rather than publish medical reasoning.
This is actually a good point. The policy described in the article doesn't apply in the EU, but it's not like Amazon is cheaper in the EU.
Also, it is common to see in the US competitors with lower prices than Amazon (e.g. I frequently see brand name products on Microcenter cheaper than Amazon), not to mention that it doesn't apply to sites like eBay. So you've got to wonder if it actually has a strong effect on pricing across the internet.
It's absolutely insane that this is legal in the US.
It's insane that it's legal for a major marketplace platform to prohibit vendors from using their platform to engage in manipulative price discrimination?
Online stores should be forced to allow manufacturers to use their sites as free advertising platforms to expose consumers to their products, while incentivizing them to actually complete the transaction someplace else?
Should brick-and-mortar stores not be allowed to offer price matching either?
Seems like a relatively simple fix, Amazon shouldn't be allowed to tell suppliers what price they can set on their site. No one should be able to tell a supplier what price they can charge to others.
Noticed a big surge in pricing on Amazon for mundane crap. End up checking eBay and AliExpress for the same and both always cheaper, and sometimes in multiple. Things like blow up pool toys, > $20 on Amazon, easily half and lower on the others, and really not even worth a dollar in the scheme of things.
I've stopped shopping on Amazon entirely, and the impact on my credit card bill has been substantial.
It's not simply that products are priced poorly, but it is also that they seem to be priced just at the threshold where the purchase remains sufficiently convenient not to shop locally or elsewhere online.
Because of their predatory practices it seems online prices are roughly identical for Western branded products at all online retailers. For Chinese brands, it's long been cheaper to use AliExpress but shipping isn't as fast and returns aren't as convenient.
But that's perception. I blocked Amazon and continued shopping as usual. The volume of my purchases is now through local retailers, and I'm buying roughly the same amount of stuff but I'm spending a great deal less.
Yep. Amazon is almost no advantage here in the UK. I used to bulk buy stuff from them because it was cheaper than the supermarkets. That is no longer true. In fact it's 10-25% more expensive usually.
I really should just cancel my prime now.
Edit: just cancelled it!
It's even worse in Ireland, particularly with the new import fees for non-EU goods - €7 + 23% VAT per item.
Amazon Germany/France/Spain won't ship a huge variety of items to Ireland and obviously won't have the same composition of goods as English speaking countries.
It's just about worth it for Prime Video and Deliveroo Silver, but the Irish Prime membership doesn't even support household or family sharing...
Yep, prime membership went quite a lot up; prices went up; delivery times got slower after COVID; now they are also saving on packaging, which means Royal mail brings me broken packages held by elastic bands...
Yeah the broken packages thing is getting terrible. I think about 1/4 of what I was ordering turns up damaged or broken.
I'm no Amazon fan but very cheap next day is still an Amazon advantage, and a pretty big one. £9/mo vs £4-8 per delivery from other retailers
Unlike the US I believe in practice it's all but guaranteed next day too
I've just stopped buying a lot of stuff. I think the availability of the cheap delivery just made me buy things I didn't need for convenience.
The fees for sellers on Amazon is ridiculous and definitely keeps these prices higher.
Tempting to think that, but that logistical miracle machine that thus far no one has been able to fully replicate is expensive. Their global operating margin ex-AWS (which is a whole different beast) was 6.8% in Q2. (AWS was 39%)
That's actually not anything phenomenal -- and worse than I thought before I looked it up just now. I can't understand AMZN's stock valuation. They should really spin off AWS to be its own thing.
Their international margins are even worse in isolation, 4.1%. That's not even worth getting out of bed for, just buy some bonds and skip all the drama.
Frustrating thing is when I then buy the small crap on eBay and then it shows up days later in an Amazon package.
-Post removed as this account is rate limited and I can't reply to comments-
VAT should be done by AliExpress now, at least that is how I understood it.
Sadly it's only limited items, but you can also filter for just items that they have in their EU warehouse.
I recently bought some stuff (Ps2 controller etc) and it was still cheaper including shipping and duty then to order it in EU. Package was checked by customs.
Same problem here. In my country at least, the handling fees for the local shipping are around USD10, you can avoid those using a courier but that shipping method is much more expensive.
I've been boycotting Amazon since early 2025. It's not hard once you get reacquainted with things taking several days or weeks to arrive. Plan a little and it all works out. The delay in gratification may even help you avoid impulse purchases.
The notion that, if more people did this, prices might come down everywhere only stiffens my resolve.
I was an early Amazon user and introduced many people to it (was nice to easily acquire books). Have deleted my account 15ish years ago and noticed weird mindsets people developed, thinking they cannot get products elsewhere, thinking that Amazon ships faster than others when using Amazon Prime, thinking Amazon has cheap products and so on.
Showed what make believes people have.
I'm a guy that is pretty lazy and spends most of his money on convenience and not having to do stuff. It's not even convenient.
It's always a bit scary what things people believe end up believing about completely depending on one company.
I've always said that the two day shipping is a useless amount of time. Two days is too long if it's an emergency and if it can wait two days it can wait a week or more.
What's it good for? Constant shopping addiction dopamine?
A few years ago I looked at the finances of a company that sells on Amazon (FBA). It was pretty astounding the number of fees they charge. They were paying to show up in sponsored results which obviously increased the fees but from what I remember between all the fees roughly 50% of the sale price of their products was just going directly to Amazon.
Logistics and shipping cost a lot. Amazon is one of the cheapest warehouses that you can use for this purpose.
Sure, but that was only several of the couple dozen fees
Compared to the wholesale -> retail markup for most goods 50% is pretty in line with what a normal store would take as their cut, maybe slightly better.
https://markupcalculation.com/markup-by-industry?hl=en-US
Their margin is Bezos' opportunity. I don't know how he could have been more direct.
The endgame of capitalism is a big corporation with a nested market which is completely regulated to death by that big corporation.
The endgame of free market was always plain and obvious: shittiest possible products at lowest possible price, and no one in the entire value chain having above-sustenance any margins.
Or we just go somewhere else that's cheaper, because capitalism means competition.
Amazon's regulation often means sellers are blocked from selling the same items at a lower price elsewhere.
That seems like a reasonable policy for Amazon to have. It's pretty normal practice for wholesale/distribution contracts to include clauses prohibiting the manufacturer from undercutting them in other channels after the contract is signed.
Why would Amazon want to bear the cost of people using their store as a free product billboard, or using their warehouses as cheap transient storage space, while trying to push customers to actually make their purchases elsewhere?
I'm not sure how this can be considered 'regulation' of the market, however -- to the contrary, it signifies that Amazon itself is sensitive to price pressure coming from competing distribution channels.
Amazon often have no idea what vendors sell their products for elsewhere. It's often an empty threat that vendors are very happy to ignore. Also, many of those agreements are spurious in international law. Unless there's a bullet proof contract with actual teeth, vendors will sell anywhere they can.
To steal Benn Jordan’s ideas, capitalism is replacing itself with leveragism.
You don’t buy things from Amazon because they’re the best store with the best prices, you buy them because they’re the only store that has their own massive scale delivery service that delivers more packages than FedEx or UPS (not combined, but Amazon still delivers more packages than either).
It’s not possible for another store to compete with that. There is no competition. Starting a competitor to Amazon would be more difficult and capital intensive than starting a new car or rocket company.
There is no other store that can get me the most obscure and random stuff in less than 24 hours. Walmart can’t do it, Costco can’t do it, Target can’t do it, Dollar General can’t do it.
> It’s not possible for another store to compete with that. There is no competition.
That's an interesting theory. How do you reconcile it with the observable reality of there being thousands of e-commerce stores, marketplace platforms, and other sales channels operating in direct competition with Amazon?
Not to mention the sheer number of things that they offer unrelated to the commerce side of things
I don't even live in the US or shop on Amazon anymore but I still have a Prime subscription just in case something good is on Prime Video (this doesn't happen often...)
Actually I just remembered there were several things recently that I could not find locally and so I used international shipping from Amazon.com which turned out to be way cheaper than you would expect I think mostly due to the Prime subscription
https://youtube.com/watch?v=NFt3KKBT00M
A similar scenario played out in my head recently when I needed to forward some of my mail internationally
> You don’t buy things from Amazon because they’re the best store with the best prices, you buy them because they’re the only store that has their own massive scale delivery service that delivers more packages than FedEx or UPS (not combined, but Amazon still delivers more packages than either).
Speak for yourself. Their delivery service is awful and I'd choose UPS 100% of the time instead if they gave me the choice.
It was Amazon's increasingly slow and unreliable deliveries that caused me to cancel Prime earlier this year, and I'm strongly motivated to shop elsewhere now because I know that the package will be delivered by someone other than Amazon's own service.
> no other store that can get me the most obscure and random stuff in less than 24 hours
Amazon has been dropping the ball pretty regularly on shipping recently.
Yeah and it's not obscure or random stuff if it is in the Amazon warehouse that is in your town. That is the only way one day works they already have it on site.
Not necessarily because I'm sure they have bigger warehouses that ship to the smaller regional ones very often and streamlined
Any one store, but there are plenty of niche stores that compete for whatever thing you are looking for.
The comment is deleted now, but a user who shall remain nameless challenged folks to find a vendor that could get a "TPM module for an ASRock Rack motherboard" delivered to their house tomorrow.
Well, if you order within the next nine-ish hours and are willing to pay 29 USD for both next-day delivery and "Rush Processing", Newegg absolutely will deliver this item [0] to my door tomorrow. Maybe that's not the TPM module the user had in mind, but -if that's the case- the task being underspecified is not my problem. ;)
[0] <https://www.newegg.com/asrock-tpm2-s-other/p/N82E16816775003>
That was me. That is the correct module.
$29 for overnight shipping is more than the cost of one month of Prime by approximately double, which is an entire month of free expedited shipping, usually overnight and sometimes same-day.
Is anyone else remotely price competitive? I can find the module on eBay with free shipping but they quote me 3-10 day delivery.
You are missing something else: you followed the race to the bottom. You knew exactly what you wanted and nothing else can substitute (correct me if I'm wrong, but I doubt anyone else who makes a TPM that will fit your motherboard). Your only consideration is price and fast shipping - there isn't much for anyone to compete on and so only the largest will.
In the more typical case these is. I recently needed a compass (my son is in scouts), what do I know about a compass: not much. Amazon will give me hundreds of options, some good, some really bad: I'd have to buy the one expensive name brand I know (and hope they are still as good as they were when I was a kid), or risk buying junk - worse junk in a way I wouldn't recognize in time to return it. However I found a small niche orienteering suppler that knows their product and so was able to direct me to a brand I've never heard of that while not as good as the name bring, was both a lot cheaper and good enough. They beat the race to the bottom because for a slightly higher price than amazon they could deliver me the exact thing I need for a still reasonable price.
It's almost as though market competition precisely refers to lots of vendors targeting lots of different criteria to win business from differentiated market segments, with many being successful within particular niches, but with the largest overall at any moment being the one that's currently most adept at optimizing its operations to serve the preferences of the widest segment. Who could have guessed?
> That was me.
Sure. I wasn't going to name you because I had no idea exactly why you'd deleted that comment, so I wasn't gonna be rude and attach the challenge to your name.
> $29 for overnight shipping is more than the cost of one month of Prime by approximately double...
What I've told you is that there are other retailers who will next-day ship you all sorts of "specialty" items like that one. So, Challenge Completed.
Whereas what you've told me is that overnight shipping for this one part is a little less than 1/6h the cost of a year of Amazon Prime. Given that I've only gotten things next-day shipped two or three times in my mumble decades of life, it sounds like not using Amazon saves me a notable chunk of money.
Also, I've heard from a ton of people out in the boonies that Prime ships very few -and sometimes no- items to them same day or overnight. The Prime Promise seems to be extremely location-dependent.
If you don’t have Prime you can either buy it for a single month or buy overnight shipping on the individual item. Both those options are far less than $29.
You did complete the challenge, but it proved that Amazon has a nearly insurmountable logistics advantage compared to competitors.
Amazon shipping and logistics are heavily subsidised by the social contract in Western Countries - it's not remotely a fair comparison even if these were removed based on Amazon's effective corporate income tax rates coming in as low as 1.4%.
In the US alone Amazon has received over $11 billion in cumulative taxpayer subsidies, and governments spend an average of nearly $43,000 per fulfillment center job created.
This is ramping up exponentially with regard to their data center rollout. In a single instance in rural Oregon, five AWS data centers will avoid $1 billion in property taxes.
This is completely aside from the qualitative damage done to traditional retail, shopping districts as a whole, SME innovation on consumer products, and distorting market competition beyond all recognition.
https://goodjobsfirst.org/amazon-tracker/
https://cictar.org/all-research/amazon
> There is no other store that can get me the most obscure and random stuff in less than 24 hours.
Thats an edge case isn’t it?
Your example actually is in support of capitalism, because I can guarantee you that under some centralized government system this would not happen!
Who said anything about a centralized government system?
We aren’t comparing capitalism to that.
We are comparing a deeply broken antitrust regulatory environment that is ending capitalism, or ant least the free market competitive style of capitalism you are romanticizing, and replacing it with leveragism or legal cartels or whatever you want to call it.
Amazon is a failure of underregulated capitalism because it’s not possible for anyone to compete with them.
Amazon should have been required to split off AWS from Amazon years ago, and I’d say there’s a very good argument to be made that their fulfillment business constitutes a national monopoly. FedEx and UPS don’t actually provide the services that FBA does, which makes Amazon a monopoly.
> Amazon is a failure of underregulated capitalism because it’s not possible for anyone to compete with them
What do you meany nobody can compete with Amazon? It happens all the time across the various markets they're in: e-commerce, retail, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, entertainment, and artificial intelligence.
How do I start a fulfillment business that can get a roll of toilet paper delivered to the doorstep of consumers nationwide inside of 24 hours and have that transaction be profitable?
How much investment money and customer volume do I need to make that business viable?
> How do I start a fulfillment business that can get a roll of toilet paper delivered to the doorstep of consumers nationwide inside of 24 hours and have that transaction be profitable?
As with all successful businesses, you start small.
You figure out what's your edge. You are resourceful.
You don't compete with ANY competitor by trying to do 100% what they do out of the gate.
Pro-tip: selling (rather than producing) toilet paper is probably never a big business anyhow.
If all we are going to do is engage in vague inspirational idealism rather than using realistic boundaries to the discussion I fear the relevance to the subject at hand fades away.
> You don't compete with ANY competitor by trying to do 100% what they do out of the gate.
This idea bleeds into the definition of a monopoly. I can’t just make a mobile operating system like Apple and Google because I won’t have a competitive advantage. I can’t make my own Amazon competitor because their edge is that they deliver more packages than UPS or FedEx. I can’t compete with Google search because the web browser that comes with Android defaults Google on the home page.
Sure, nobody is trying to do 100% of what their competitors do, but I wouldn’t be able to do 5% of what Amazon does even if you handed me billions in seed capital.
It sounds like you’ve decided it isn’t possible to compete, there’s nothing worth trying. I suppose that’s a fair stance to take and I’m not here to convince you to be more resourceful and strategic.
Meanwhile, lots of people are starting and building successful businesses.
We can certainly agree that lots of people are starting and building successful businesses. But I would hope we can also agree that there are many business categories where entry into the market is extremely difficult.
And hopefully you can agree that, conceptually, monopoly businesses do exist and have existed in the past.
But will you do what it takes to make sure that it could happen again?
Amazon itself is not going to be shy about changing the rules in its favor.
> But will you do what it takes to make sure that it could happen again?
I have no idea what this means.
They’re saying that starting a competitor to Amazon is now impossible regardless of capital investment.
> They’re saying that starting a competitor to Amazon is now impossible regardless of capital investment.
Competing in which market? Amazon is a conglomerate operating in e-commerce, retail, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, entertainment, and artificial intelligence.
That breadth is part of why competing is so tough.
> That breadth is part of why competing is so tough.
I don't see it. In each of the industries they operate in, they face fierce competition. Many of those competitors also compete with Amazon across multiple of those industries plus others that Amazon does not compete in.
Competition is by definition tough. But I push back against the original thesis that Amazon has such leverage that it is impossible to compete with them (in all the cases, you're not just competing against them!)
This is not capitalism, it’s tech feudalism
> because capitalism means competition.
I think you’re confusing a system of private ownership of capital (capitalism) with free markets.
Also somehow ignoring captured markets, natural monopolies, goverment granted monopolies, regulation capture and the myriad of other unsurmountable situations that "competition" cannot overcome
What competition?
Anticompetitive behavior is one of the most predictable failure modes of capitalism. Capitalism only works if you have measures in place that protect fair competition and those measures are actually used.
Not being allowed to sell your product elsewhere for cheaper seems downright anticompetitive and if our government was functioning government that would be illegal. The whole point of the ideal free market is that fees are supposed to approach zero with increasing competition.
The funny part is that our monopoly busting law that actual worked but we don't use anymore actually says that you must sell your product the same everywhere. It turns out a great way to kill monopolies to take out the part where they get a better deal because they're bigger. Making the price the same everywhere means that now companies have to compete on other things.
It sucks that sellers cannot offer their products for cheaper elsewhere, but I've also often seen sellers sell their products for a much higher price on their own website than Amazon, and in that case why wouldn't I buy it on Amazon instead?
In that sense having one big marketplace with all kinds of competing products together also seems to motivate sellers more to compete on price rather than relying on lazy consumers.
I try to avoid Amazon as much as possible. 95% of the products are throwaway junk brands. It's tiring to shop there. I think Amazon is a great example of why competition, while good in most cases, has its limits when the information asymmetry due to overwhelming and opaque choices. I wish those junk, throwaway brands were banned...
I understand logistics is an insanely hard problem, but can't sellers create a co-op? Not on Amazon's scale, but start on a much smaller scale (gotta start somewhere). Maybe at a city level - if a bunch of sellers in Chicago (for example) rent a warehouse and serve only within Chicago, it is worth a try, no? Or is this a stupid question?
I remember hearing about a Uber like app (I might have seen it on More Perfect Union channel, I think). So I guess at least some people are thinking along the same lines, maybe?
As an individual, I guess the only thing I can do is shop as little as possible on Amazon (which I am already doing). Not sure what else I can do to help
Could you sell a box of 10x Item A on amazon, and a box of 15x Item A on your own website for cheaper per unit? Without triggering the amazon Fair Pricing Policy?
Depends on the title and gap
Stopped using Amazon a while ago because I want to support smaller (and less controversial) businesses. But recently I went back there to look for a phone protector as for some reason that's the only time Amazon has been cheaper for something.
I was amazed at how janky the app experience was having been away for a couple of years. It felt a really dated and ad-bloated experience. Considering Amazon pioneered so many advances in e-commerce, I was surprised I don't miss it at all.
Interesting article. But I wish it explained which fees made the share that Amazon takes go from 19% to 46%. The fulfilment fee is evidently necessary, it takes people to do that, and doing it yourself may cost more. The advertisement is also evidently necessary, but could have risen. The referral fee alone can't explain the increase.
And the fulfilment fee is not a fixed percentage of the price, it depends on the size, weight and price tier of the item.
Doesn't the second graph show exactly this?
I only see the graph in the paragraph titled "Where an Amazon sale goes", which tells what the fees are now, not which fees have increased since 2014.
Aside from the whole amazon problem:
I really love how the (flow-)chart in this article has two starting points and both flow perfectly into the vicious circle loops without any awkward gap no matter from which direction you start reading the chart.
US can just legislate that one marketplace cannot force how vendors use other marketplaces. This is not about free spech but rather about price fixing (in indirect/perverse ways).
More generally, the unprecedented levels of market concentration and pricing power in the US, a consequence of the gutting of antitrust enforcement from the inside by Robert Bork and the Chicago School, have led to much higher inflation in the US.
I usually don’t care for the price.
I care for the return policy and warranty being attached to an entity that will still exist in 6 month.
But to put it into perspective, a retail shop would also expect to take at least 50% of the sale price. Often much more.
I expect retail shops to have larger overheads than online stores.
When Amazon's policies unfairly push up prices across the Internet, it deprives us from competition pushing prices down, and having a better idea of what online overheads are.
In the UK Amazon have now raised the price of general shipping to be 2/3 the price of a months prime subscription. Before prime, delivery regularly used to be £1.99 or £2.99. Now if you dont have prime everything is £4.99 to be delivered. It makes it seem silly to pay that when you could pay £8.99 for a months subscription of free deliveries, which is their whole game.
I hate that they have done this with a passion.
Maybe the time has come to stop cheering for quasi-monopolies as some success story. They hurt everybody besides their shareholders.
boycott, but nobody does
The greatest catalogue of consumer goods with the greatest logistics to back it up of all time. And the thread complain complaining about it. What a time to be alive.
Any seller charges 50%+ margin on anything.
wish they would push up their delivery speed
How you spend your cash has always been a better democratic tool than a vote.
If you buy Amazon, then that's what you get in society and politics. Every Amazon purchase is a vote for monopolistic behaviour, the destruction of local services/industry, and for yet another America tax.
I do everything possible to avoid them, buy locally-made, etc, but it's becoming harder and harder. It's so ironic that people will complain about a declining economy, no jobs, etc, then will joyfully donate money to promote foreign jobs and enrich middlemen on a weekly basis.
classic aggregation theory to create a monopoly.
the only way to prevent such things from happening is e-commerce is spread across non-platform channels but independent ones e.g woo commerce etc where a seller runs and hosts their own shop, then maybe go to semi-platforms such as shopify etc that don't aggregate everything on one storefront.
because sellers are reliant on amazon bringing in shoppers, unlike say woo commerce & shopify - then yeah amazon feels rightly so that they need to take 50% margins on a seller's item.
the same thing plays out everywhere where some producer is reliant on someone bringing in the buyers - uber, Spotify, apple App Store.
wish they delivered faster
> Because Amazon is where the shoppers are: it accounts for about 40% of all US online retail sales.
A lot of the competition is gone, so now it's time for the "price hike" step of the VC playbook - enter markets with insane amounts of cash, slowly boil the competition alive until it goes away and/or the users are hooked, raise prices.
> Amazon's Fair Pricing Policy lets it remove the Buy Box (the "Add to Cart" button), or even suspend a seller, if they're offering their item cheaper elsewhere.
IIRC that kind of shit is at least illegal in the EU. Bookingcom and other sites have had their "best price" enforcement invalidated here in the past.
The bad thing is, due to the sheer scale Amazon has, it is all but impossible to compete with it. You won't get the scale deals that Amazon gets at shippers (USPS, DHL, Fedex, UPS, DPD, whatever). You won't get the money to construct warehouses across the world that make Amazon's fast shipping work in the first place. You won't have the insane amounts of money coming in from customers that allow for its extremely generous return policies. And you won't have some sort of cash cow like AWS that allows you to run your business at near zero profit or even loss.
The only way you can compete is if you are in a market where you can provide a better experience for the customer and the customer is willing to pay a premium.
I hate Amazon and I still shop there. It's not about price, I will pay more for a product to buy it directly and not via Amazon /if/ I can find an original. The issue for me is threefold:
1. Discoverability: Many products are so rapidly and thoroughly cloned that it is difficult to impossible to identify the original maker, find their site, and purchase through them. The insane proliferation of counterfeits, clones, and sometimes outright scam products means that Amazon at least gives me an opportunity to buy a clone/counterfeit and return it if its not meeting my expectations. Sometimes the original is notably higher quality but no longer produced/sold, as well. Recently I wanted to buy a Polar Magnetic Pen as a gift. The website is up and the shopping cart works, but checkout is disabled. They're out of stock everywhere. There's hundreds of random worded Chinese clones on Amazon that are 25% of the price and 30% of the quality, so I bought a clone and risked it.
2. Logistical Certainty: I work a lot and have little free time after basic households tasks, other than the weekends. So if I want to do a project or something, I plan it for a following weekend and order things. If I can't order on a Tuesday or Wednesday and /know/ that I will get it by Friday, it's basically pointless. Sometimes I'll just roll the dice, but generally I prefer logistical certainty. I actually have gone back to buying at brick and mortar stores if possible to really cement this (I use Best Buy now a lot more than in the past, although selection is poor). There's a few other online retailers I strictly prefer to Amazon that can also deliver this like B&H Photo.
3. Breadth of Catalog / Access: There's basically nothing I can't acquire via Amazon. If I need, let's say 6 things, to do some sort of hobby project my options are generally either: A) go to 2-4 different stores, either physically and waste a day of my life or online and hope the shipments all arrive in time or B) order on Amazon everything at once delivered as one.
These things are way more important than price. I still hate Amazon PRIMARILY because of commingling of SKUs meaning there's no real quality indicators and I cannot do anything as a consumer to ensure I receive legitimate, actual, quality products. If they hadn't fucked that up, I'd probably still like Amazon despite everything else. I used to love Amazon back in the day, now I hate it, because of how often I've received counterfeits and fraudulent products and the proliferation of Chinese dropshipper fly-by-nights.
Big Tech always becomes Big Enshittification; it is the only way the scaling economics work for the massive returns expected by VC.