If you peek into one of those reddit threads about which company is the most terrible that seem to pop up every other month, you'll reliably find companies like Ticketmaster at the top but Amazon...
If you peek into one of those reddit threads about which company is the most terrible that seem to pop up every other month, you'll reliably find companies like Ticketmaster at the top but Amazon will rarely even make the first page. In fact, if you try to criticize amazon, people will likely come out of the woodwork to defend them for "providing exposure to small sellers."
This is really frustrating to me. Do people truly not understand that if amazon didn't exist, better alternatives could flourish? Do small/individual businesses really want to be the serfs of a single monolithic company?
I doubt small businesses want to be beholden to a single monopoly marketplace, but it seems as though optimising for discoverability is always going to encourage that kind of centralisation. The...
I doubt small businesses want to be beholden to a single monopoly marketplace, but it seems as though optimising for discoverability is always going to encourage that kind of centralisation. The base services provided by Amazon, YouTube, Uber, etc. aren’t that hard to find elsewhere, but the suppliers go where the eyeballs are and the eyeballs go where the suppliers are in an ever reinforcing loop.
I think there was a great article posted on Tildes about this recently that dealt with this: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys (I don't have the Tildes link at hand and I'm...
It's the basic principle of any VC-funded platform: First you break your own bank to court customers, then you break your own bank to court businesses, and once both are locked in, you destroy the platform by bringing in the money.
That being said, despite it's absurdly awful interface, Amazon gets the job done for most people. At first they courted private customers with great no shipping charges, great shipping times and a lenient return policy, then they courted businesses by shilling out search result space to the highest bidder instead of giving customers what the best result for what they searched for (fucking customers in the process) and removing the "Customers ended up buying..." section from product pages. And now they're fucking the businesses by pushing the platform fees higher and higher when there's nowhere for them to run.
Even people like Linus from LTT has said that there is a section of customers that exclusively buy on Amazon. That's why they have to offer their shit on there. They mark up the prices so the customer is eating the fees and not them, but people still buy on there.
You're probably right, but if these sellers are doing it because (if they want to compete) they don't have a choice they should at least not be defending their overlord Bezos on the internet! They...
You're probably right, but if these sellers are doing it because (if they want to compete) they don't have a choice they should at least not be defending their overlord Bezos on the internet! They should be doing all they can to tip the scales even if it's just a little.
I’m with you there! I can’t say I’ve seen anyone specifically taking that position myself, but given the number of people I do see advocating against their own interests elsewhere I’d quite...
I’m with you there! I can’t say I’ve seen anyone specifically taking that position myself, but given the number of people I do see advocating against their own interests elsewhere I’d quite believe it.
I've read that a lot of small businesses were created specifically for selling something via Amazon. So they chose to be beholden to Amazon - that's their entire plan, and if Amazon didn't exist,...
I've read that a lot of small businesses were created specifically for selling something via Amazon. So they chose to be beholden to Amazon - that's their entire plan, and if Amazon didn't exist, the business wouldn't exist either. But they might have started a different business?
I guess that’s the (often literal) million dollar question for a lot of them: do they specifically depend on an Amazon-type behemoth, or do they depend on any marketplace above say 10 million...
if Amazon didn't exist, the business wouldn't exist either
I guess that’s the (often literal) million dollar question for a lot of them: do they specifically depend on an Amazon-type behemoth, or do they depend on any marketplace above say 10 million MAUs?
It’s hard to separate the two things because of that cycle of centralisation, big-but-not-monopoly marketplaces are fairly scarce so for a lot of sellers it’s monopoly or nothing - but anecdotally I know more than a few business owners who are scared shitless about having their fortunes tied to the whims of a monopoly partner, even while making a decent living from working with them.
I keep saying Amazon should be broken up and the marketplace handed to an NGO with tight ties to USPS.
It’s hard to separate the two things because of that cycle of centralisation, big-but-not-monopoly marketplaces are fairly scarce so for a lot of sellers it’s monopoly or nothing
I keep saying Amazon should be broken up and the marketplace handed to an NGO with tight ties to USPS.
Amazon rarely makes the front page for complaints because it's good at its job, and fundamentally better in many areas than other competitors. Ticketmaster does a very simple task, selling and...
Amazon rarely makes the front page for complaints because it's good at its job, and fundamentally better in many areas than other competitors. Ticketmaster does a very simple task, selling and tracking tickets, and does it poorly (website crashing in times of high demand, poor interface, poor structures for selling in demand tickets) and visibly charges fees that seem not representative of the value they add. On the other hand, Amazon does a very complicated task (managing one of the largest distribution networks in the US) very well (very high uptime, good customer service, good shipping and return policies), and has competitive markups with competitors.
Do people truly not understand that if amazon didn't exist, better alternatives could flourish?
That's not really an obvious fact. For one, there are some things that Amazon can do only because of their massive scale and ability to abuse economies of scale. Amazon has by far the best return policy I've ever seen with physical items; you click a few buttons, and just drop off the product at a partner shop or their lockers, and you're done. An item returned without talking to anyone, in basically no time, without additional cost. Returns are very hard and costly for smaller companies to deal with, on the other hand, to the detriment of customer experience (recently a small shopify store I bought from just gave me an address and told me to figure out how to ship it back, and of course I eat any shipping costs). And, of course, the two day shipping relies on a large number of warehouses spread throughout the country.
Your country, maybe. I've found claims of two day shipping in my country to be somewhat exaggerated, despite having prime. Is Amazon truly good at its job? It defrauds its customers regularly. In...
Your country, maybe. I've found claims of two day shipping in my country to be somewhat exaggerated, despite having prime.
Is Amazon truly good at its job? It defrauds its customers regularly. In addition to what's written in the articles, reviews are a joke, with negative reviews often rejected for nebulous reasons, even if the product is an actual literal scam (which the platform is full of). And it does have a history of competing directly against some of its (former) sellers. If you make yourself dependent on one single business that has an incentive to compete against you, that doesn't seem to me like a very reliable business plan in the long term.
In podcasts/interviews I have understood that small business were basically forced to sell on Amazon because customers weren't looking elsewhere. It was sell on Amazon, get hammerered by fees and...
If you make yourself dependent on one single business that has an incentive to compete against you, that doesn't seem to me like a very reliable business plan in the long term
In podcasts/interviews I have understood that small business were basically forced to sell on Amazon because customers weren't looking elsewhere. It was sell on Amazon, get hammerered by fees and other bogus rules, or cease to exist. Now sellers have realized that Amazon may just rip them off and undercut them anyway. So whatever incentive existed before is quickly fading.
I have anecdotally seen things change. I have noticed more retailers are selling direct and many no longer list Amazon as an official place to buy their products. It's like Amazon is so saturated it's just clones and product noise at this point.
I’m not a fan of Amazon and well aware of its issues … but it sounds to me like you formed an opinion entirely based off of internet comments. Internet comments are, remember, a digested version...
It defrauds its customers regularly.
I’m not a fan of Amazon and well aware of its issues … but it sounds to me like you formed an opinion entirely based off of internet comments.
Internet comments are, remember, a digested version of reality. The bad stuff makes it through. Nobody out there posting to Reddit receiving 1200 upvotes regularly saying “I ordered a coffee machine on Amazon the other day and it arrived and it works”.
It’s the opposite of survivorship bias. Amazon posts billions of parcels and products; many of them are bound to be scams and fake crap, because 0.001% of billions is still tens of thousands.
This is more an issue reflective of Amazon’s scale. But the fact is, if you were buying off those hypothetical flourishing competitors, you’d have a chance to get scammed too. But they won’t be selling enough for you to realise that it happens, because unless they reach amazons scale you won’t hear about it more than once.
Amazon has a ridiculously good return policy for customers. The risk to run into a scam is easy to discount in that context. At worst, you wasted a little bit of time.
With all that said, I have mostly stopped ordering off Amazon. At least in Belgium there’s enough good alternatives that I just don’t feel the need to. When I do order off it it’s usually Amazon Basics because I in fact specifically do not want to order from third party sellers; but I’ve gotten good at understanding its ui to avoid those.
The irony is palpable. Has it occured to you that I may be writing from experience? Your opening paragraphs come off as really condescending. Everyone is mentioning returns. I'm not arguing...
it sounds to me like you formed an opinion entirely based off of internet comments
The irony is palpable. Has it occured to you that I may be writing from experience? Your opening paragraphs come off as really condescending.
Everyone is mentioning returns. I'm not arguing against that. Returns are almost definitely easier than they would be otherwise. Because I also try to patronize competitors, I know they can be a bit of a headache... Currently in the middle of returning something to an outfit in Germany and it's taking forever.
When you say “its customers” (rather than “I’ve been defrauded by Amazon”), you’re not implying writing from personal experience, unless that personal experience involves working at Amazon to...
When you say “its customers” (rather than “I’ve been defrauded by Amazon”), you’re not implying writing from personal experience, unless that personal experience involves working at Amazon to defraud customers.
I and the authors of those other testimonials you are so quick to dismiss are all Amazon customers. Because I, as a customer, have had that experience multiple times, I have not but they did...
I and the authors of those other testimonials you are so quick to dismiss are all Amazon customers. Because I, as a customer, have had that experience multiple times, I have not
formed an opinion entirely based off of internet comments
For all their very real problems, and for all of the totally legitimate comparisons to how they could be run better in a world where ethics were considered alongside profit, the fact remains that...
For all their very real problems, and for all of the totally legitimate comparisons to how they could be run better in a world where ethics were considered alongside profit, the fact remains that Amazon provides a better than average customer experience for most people, most of the time, when compared to the viable alternatives that exist today. And that comparison is an important one, because almost everything they sell is still a commodity: their mass distorts the market around them, but you can still go elsewhere if you like and get the exact same thing. There’s a baseline level of customer satisfaction they need to maintain because of that, and if they fuck up too hard their dominance will start to slip.
Ticketmaster have no such issue, because tickets aren’t interchangeable. You want to see Taylor Swift? Well you’re giving them money no matter how bad the experience is, and there’s nothing you can do about it. The only risk they have is becoming such an absurdly hated name that it’s a liability for the artists and venues - something they’re impressively close to managing, actually, but also a level of service that would have had customers running for the hills many years ago if they actually had a choice.
I can only speak for the US, but it's quite good here (and "here" is where the vast majority of English speaking forum users come from). I have like a 85% hit rate on the 2 day shipping, so not...
I can only speak for the US, but it's quite good here (and "here" is where the vast majority of English speaking forum users come from). I have like a 85% hit rate on the 2 day shipping, so not always or anything, but that regardless makes it markedly faster than any other delivery service used by merchants.
Yes, it is? The "fraud" element is vastly overstated in my experience, and even if it does come up, it's extremely easily remedied. Amazon has the best retail return process of any company, flat out. If you get a fraudulent item, you can have it returned in under 15 minutes, with one button press, completely automatically without any arguing with customer service.
From the merchant point of view, Amazon's core service beyond access to the customers is the "Fullfilled by Amazon program". Ship your junk to an Amazon warehouse, and they'll take care of ALL of the rest. You don't need to go through a list of shopify orders and manually package and send them to USPS. If a customer wants a return, you don't have to do anything. It just works. You'd likely have to at least hire another person if you sell with any kind of volume. That's not something anywhere else offers.
This may have been temporarily true, but as of late, Amazon Prime shipping is awful. I can order something on a weekend, and it will take almost all week to arrive. Only very occasionally does...
This may have been temporarily true, but as of late, Amazon Prime shipping is awful. I can order something on a weekend, and it will take almost all week to arrive. Only very occasionally does something arrive quickly. This has degraded over time. They also pack things poorly on a pretty regular basis. Received a breakable/fragile item in a barely-padded envelope (a light bulb).
Yes, the returns at least are usually pretty painless. I've found that Amazon is not as highly competitive on price as I thought either. I often find the same item elsewhere at the same (or even lower) price (Home Depot, BH Photo Video, etc) and with faster and better shipping (and often that is also free- without even having a "subscription" like Prime). It is very item-dependent, however. Occasionally I can find something in bulk that is a better price. But it's not "overall competitive" like I feel it used to be.
I've been debating canceling Amazon Prime altogether lately because of repeated experiences like this. I am in the eastern US, not some location that is typically difficult for them to service well. I'm starting to fail to see what I'm actually getting for when paying for Prime, because it sure as hell isn't fast shipping.
If I find a product on Amazon these days, I search for it on the brand's own site or competitor websites because I can no longer trust Amazon to be the lowest price or best shipping experience, whereas once this was often a pretty safe assumption
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ this'll always be a YMMV thing when it comes to anecdata. I ordered something yesterday (face cleanser) on Amazon which ended up arriving this morning. My hit (as in, when promised or...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ this'll always be a YMMV thing when it comes to anecdata. I ordered something yesterday (face cleanser) on Amazon which ended up arriving this morning. My hit (as in, when promised or earlier) rate has been solidly in the 90% range in January.
The price is what it is. Like Netflix there was a moment where things were cheaper, but in the end, it's up to the merchants to determine pricing and Amazon takes a cut. I'll almost always take a marginally (in the 10-20% range) price increase to buy on Amazon because returns at smaller stores are an utter nightmare online, and it's just worth the peace of mind. The main reason something would be cheaper on Amazon is when compared to physical retailers; when online, there is basically no idea of localized supply and demand, so everything has to compete with everything else.
I will say as an addendum to my agreement that returns are easy- the only place I've ordered from and needed to deal with returns is Amazon also... I might just be lucky but it appears when I shop...
I will say as an addendum to my agreement that returns are easy- the only place I've ordered from and needed to deal with returns is Amazon also... I might just be lucky but it appears when I shop elsewhere I get less messed up (and more properly-shipped) orders. So Amazon is good at solving the problems it appears to be creating in the first place, for my anecdotal experience at least
I may just not live in a close enough area to a warehouse, but I've never in my entire order history had something arrive next day from Amazon, and lately very few things arrive 2-day
Most smaller sellers I've purchased < $100 items from just issue me a refund and don't even want me to ship it back. They probably figured out that the effort of accepting return is much more...
Most smaller sellers I've purchased < $100 items from just issue me a refund and don't even want me to ship it back.
They probably figured out that the effort of accepting return is much more valuable than getting the questionable item back.
Not naming names cause I don't want assholes spoiling it for everyone.
To me Amazon's only real competitive edge is having its own courier and distribution network that can offer subsidised next day delivery on a subscription model. No other online retailer can...
To me Amazon's only real competitive edge is having its own courier and distribution network that can offer subsidised next day delivery on a subscription model. No other online retailer can really make that claim.
I don't like how the storefront has become a vessel to push cheap bootleg quality overseas goods.
I've gotten more high-quality products off Ebay these days than Amazon. Third-party sellers should really give them a shot. They're probably the second biggest player in the US.
I've gotten more high-quality products off Ebay these days than Amazon.
Third-party sellers should really give them a shot. They're probably the second biggest player in the US.
Cory Doctorow has a term for this: Enshittification. In this post he shows how Amazon has walked the same path as Facebook, Twitter, and most recently TikTok. Enshittification works like this:...
Cory Doctorow has a term for this: Enshittification. In this post he shows how Amazon has walked the same path as Facebook, Twitter, and most recently TikTok. Enshittification works like this:
Step 1: A new company creates a powerful innovation, and consumers flock to it. For Amazon, this was the ability to buy basically anything over the internet in one place with a great customer experience. For Facebook, it was the ability to get status updates from all your friends. At this stage, everything is wonderful and the product is a joy to use because the company re-invests all the money and hype from its customers into making itself even better so it can attract even more customers.
Step 2: Once the consumers have become loyal and using the product has become habitual, the company uses its large, loyal customer base to entice business partners by giving them the surpluses it's gotten from its customers. For Amazon, this was third-party sellers; for Facebook, it was advertisers.
Step 3: Once the consumers and the business partners are sufficiently locked in, the company takes the surpluses from both groups and reallocates them to its shareholders. You Are Here. At this stage the company is horribly unpleasant for both its customers and its business partners, but it's become such an institution that it's very difficult to get rid of. With the resources its investors provide, it can continue leeching off consumers and other businesses indefinitely, reshaping the legal and competitive landscape to cement its market dominance.
At this stage, the only two ways I can think of to bring down such a behemoth are antitrust law (which is rarely enforced these days, and the companies work to keep it that way) and a new innovation that renders older business models obsolete. Of course, innovations are usually bought out by the big companies, which brings us back to antitrust law.
But Google is currently being threatened with a breakup from the DoJ and with obsolescence from ChatGPT. All this right after shareholders demanded a wave of layoffs. We'll see how that plays out. Maybe even the giants are not invulnerable.
If you peek into one of those reddit threads about which company is the most terrible that seem to pop up every other month, you'll reliably find companies like Ticketmaster at the top but Amazon will rarely even make the first page. In fact, if you try to criticize amazon, people will likely come out of the woodwork to defend them for "providing exposure to small sellers."
This is really frustrating to me. Do people truly not understand that if amazon didn't exist, better alternatives could flourish? Do small/individual businesses really want to be the serfs of a single monolithic company?
I doubt small businesses want to be beholden to a single monopoly marketplace, but it seems as though optimising for discoverability is always going to encourage that kind of centralisation. The base services provided by Amazon, YouTube, Uber, etc. aren’t that hard to find elsewhere, but the suppliers go where the eyeballs are and the eyeballs go where the suppliers are in an ever reinforcing loop.
I think there was a great article posted on Tildes about this recently that dealt with this: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys (I don't have the Tildes link at hand and I'm at work)
It's the basic principle of any VC-funded platform: First you break your own bank to court customers, then you break your own bank to court businesses, and once both are locked in, you destroy the platform by bringing in the money.
That being said, despite it's absurdly awful interface, Amazon gets the job done for most people. At first they courted private customers with great no shipping charges, great shipping times and a lenient return policy, then they courted businesses by shilling out search result space to the highest bidder instead of giving customers what the best result for what they searched for (fucking customers in the process) and removing the "Customers ended up buying..." section from product pages. And now they're fucking the businesses by pushing the platform fees higher and higher when there's nowhere for them to run.
Even people like Linus from LTT has said that there is a section of customers that exclusively buy on Amazon. That's why they have to offer their shit on there. They mark up the prices so the customer is eating the fees and not them, but people still buy on there.
Tildes link: https://tildes.net/~tech/1483/tiktoks_enshittification.
You're probably right, but if these sellers are doing it because (if they want to compete) they don't have a choice they should at least not be defending their overlord Bezos on the internet! They should be doing all they can to tip the scales even if it's just a little.
I’m with you there! I can’t say I’ve seen anyone specifically taking that position myself, but given the number of people I do see advocating against their own interests elsewhere I’d quite believe it.
I've read that a lot of small businesses were created specifically for selling something via Amazon. So they chose to be beholden to Amazon - that's their entire plan, and if Amazon didn't exist, the business wouldn't exist either. But they might have started a different business?
I guess that’s the (often literal) million dollar question for a lot of them: do they specifically depend on an Amazon-type behemoth, or do they depend on any marketplace above say 10 million MAUs?
It’s hard to separate the two things because of that cycle of centralisation, big-but-not-monopoly marketplaces are fairly scarce so for a lot of sellers it’s monopoly or nothing - but anecdotally I know more than a few business owners who are scared shitless about having their fortunes tied to the whims of a monopoly partner, even while making a decent living from working with them.
I keep saying Amazon should be broken up and the marketplace handed to an NGO with tight ties to USPS.
Amazon rarely makes the front page for complaints because it's good at its job, and fundamentally better in many areas than other competitors. Ticketmaster does a very simple task, selling and tracking tickets, and does it poorly (website crashing in times of high demand, poor interface, poor structures for selling in demand tickets) and visibly charges fees that seem not representative of the value they add. On the other hand, Amazon does a very complicated task (managing one of the largest distribution networks in the US) very well (very high uptime, good customer service, good shipping and return policies), and has competitive markups with competitors.
That's not really an obvious fact. For one, there are some things that Amazon can do only because of their massive scale and ability to abuse economies of scale. Amazon has by far the best return policy I've ever seen with physical items; you click a few buttons, and just drop off the product at a partner shop or their lockers, and you're done. An item returned without talking to anyone, in basically no time, without additional cost. Returns are very hard and costly for smaller companies to deal with, on the other hand, to the detriment of customer experience (recently a small shopify store I bought from just gave me an address and told me to figure out how to ship it back, and of course I eat any shipping costs). And, of course, the two day shipping relies on a large number of warehouses spread throughout the country.
Your country, maybe. I've found claims of two day shipping in my country to be somewhat exaggerated, despite having prime.
Is Amazon truly good at its job? It defrauds its customers regularly. In addition to what's written in the articles, reviews are a joke, with negative reviews often rejected for nebulous reasons, even if the product is an actual literal scam (which the platform is full of). And it does have a history of competing directly against some of its (former) sellers. If you make yourself dependent on one single business that has an incentive to compete against you, that doesn't seem to me like a very reliable business plan in the long term.
In podcasts/interviews I have understood that small business were basically forced to sell on Amazon because customers weren't looking elsewhere. It was sell on Amazon, get hammerered by fees and other bogus rules, or cease to exist. Now sellers have realized that Amazon may just rip them off and undercut them anyway. So whatever incentive existed before is quickly fading.
I have anecdotally seen things change. I have noticed more retailers are selling direct and many no longer list Amazon as an official place to buy their products. It's like Amazon is so saturated it's just clones and product noise at this point.
I’m not a fan of Amazon and well aware of its issues … but it sounds to me like you formed an opinion entirely based off of internet comments.
Internet comments are, remember, a digested version of reality. The bad stuff makes it through. Nobody out there posting to Reddit receiving 1200 upvotes regularly saying “I ordered a coffee machine on Amazon the other day and it arrived and it works”.
It’s the opposite of survivorship bias. Amazon posts billions of parcels and products; many of them are bound to be scams and fake crap, because 0.001% of billions is still tens of thousands.
This is more an issue reflective of Amazon’s scale. But the fact is, if you were buying off those hypothetical flourishing competitors, you’d have a chance to get scammed too. But they won’t be selling enough for you to realise that it happens, because unless they reach amazons scale you won’t hear about it more than once.
Amazon has a ridiculously good return policy for customers. The risk to run into a scam is easy to discount in that context. At worst, you wasted a little bit of time.
With all that said, I have mostly stopped ordering off Amazon. At least in Belgium there’s enough good alternatives that I just don’t feel the need to. When I do order off it it’s usually Amazon Basics because I in fact specifically do not want to order from third party sellers; but I’ve gotten good at understanding its ui to avoid those.
The irony is palpable. Has it occured to you that I may be writing from experience? Your opening paragraphs come off as really condescending.
Everyone is mentioning returns. I'm not arguing against that. Returns are almost definitely easier than they would be otherwise. Because I also try to patronize competitors, I know they can be a bit of a headache... Currently in the middle of returning something to an outfit in Germany and it's taking forever.
When you say “its customers” (rather than “I’ve been defrauded by Amazon”), you’re not implying writing from personal experience, unless that personal experience involves working at Amazon to defraud customers.
I and the authors of those other testimonials you are so quick to dismiss are all Amazon customers. Because I, as a customer, have had that experience multiple times, I have not
but they did inform my opinion.
For all their very real problems, and for all of the totally legitimate comparisons to how they could be run better in a world where ethics were considered alongside profit, the fact remains that Amazon provides a better than average customer experience for most people, most of the time, when compared to the viable alternatives that exist today. And that comparison is an important one, because almost everything they sell is still a commodity: their mass distorts the market around them, but you can still go elsewhere if you like and get the exact same thing. There’s a baseline level of customer satisfaction they need to maintain because of that, and if they fuck up too hard their dominance will start to slip.
Ticketmaster have no such issue, because tickets aren’t interchangeable. You want to see Taylor Swift? Well you’re giving them money no matter how bad the experience is, and there’s nothing you can do about it. The only risk they have is becoming such an absurdly hated name that it’s a liability for the artists and venues - something they’re impressively close to managing, actually, but also a level of service that would have had customers running for the hills many years ago if they actually had a choice.
I can only speak for the US, but it's quite good here (and "here" is where the vast majority of English speaking forum users come from). I have like a 85% hit rate on the 2 day shipping, so not always or anything, but that regardless makes it markedly faster than any other delivery service used by merchants.
Yes, it is? The "fraud" element is vastly overstated in my experience, and even if it does come up, it's extremely easily remedied. Amazon has the best retail return process of any company, flat out. If you get a fraudulent item, you can have it returned in under 15 minutes, with one button press, completely automatically without any arguing with customer service.
From the merchant point of view, Amazon's core service beyond access to the customers is the "Fullfilled by Amazon program". Ship your junk to an Amazon warehouse, and they'll take care of ALL of the rest. You don't need to go through a list of shopify orders and manually package and send them to USPS. If a customer wants a return, you don't have to do anything. It just works. You'd likely have to at least hire another person if you sell with any kind of volume. That's not something anywhere else offers.
This may have been temporarily true, but as of late, Amazon Prime shipping is awful. I can order something on a weekend, and it will take almost all week to arrive. Only very occasionally does something arrive quickly. This has degraded over time. They also pack things poorly on a pretty regular basis. Received a breakable/fragile item in a barely-padded envelope (a light bulb).
Yes, the returns at least are usually pretty painless. I've found that Amazon is not as highly competitive on price as I thought either. I often find the same item elsewhere at the same (or even lower) price (Home Depot, BH Photo Video, etc) and with faster and better shipping (and often that is also free- without even having a "subscription" like Prime). It is very item-dependent, however. Occasionally I can find something in bulk that is a better price. But it's not "overall competitive" like I feel it used to be.
I've been debating canceling Amazon Prime altogether lately because of repeated experiences like this. I am in the eastern US, not some location that is typically difficult for them to service well. I'm starting to fail to see what I'm actually getting for when paying for Prime, because it sure as hell isn't fast shipping.
If I find a product on Amazon these days, I search for it on the brand's own site or competitor websites because I can no longer trust Amazon to be the lowest price or best shipping experience, whereas once this was often a pretty safe assumption
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ this'll always be a YMMV thing when it comes to anecdata. I ordered something yesterday (face cleanser) on Amazon which ended up arriving this morning. My hit (as in, when promised or earlier) rate has been solidly in the 90% range in January.
The price is what it is. Like Netflix there was a moment where things were cheaper, but in the end, it's up to the merchants to determine pricing and Amazon takes a cut. I'll almost always take a marginally (in the 10-20% range) price increase to buy on Amazon because returns at smaller stores are an utter nightmare online, and it's just worth the peace of mind. The main reason something would be cheaper on Amazon is when compared to physical retailers; when online, there is basically no idea of localized supply and demand, so everything has to compete with everything else.
I will say as an addendum to my agreement that returns are easy- the only place I've ordered from and needed to deal with returns is Amazon also... I might just be lucky but it appears when I shop elsewhere I get less messed up (and more properly-shipped) orders. So Amazon is good at solving the problems it appears to be creating in the first place, for my anecdotal experience at least
I may just not live in a close enough area to a warehouse, but I've never in my entire order history had something arrive next day from Amazon, and lately very few things arrive 2-day
Most smaller sellers I've purchased < $100 items from just issue me a refund and don't even want me to ship it back.
They probably figured out that the effort of accepting return is much more valuable than getting the questionable item back.
Not naming names cause I don't want assholes spoiling it for everyone.
"Small businesses" are one of the biggest problems Amazon has right now. Amazon's marketplace is poorly curated and regularly full of scams.
To me Amazon's only real competitive edge is having its own courier and distribution network that can offer subsidised next day delivery on a subscription model. No other online retailer can really make that claim.
I don't like how the storefront has become a vessel to push cheap bootleg quality overseas goods.
I've gotten more high-quality products off Ebay these days than Amazon.
Third-party sellers should really give them a shot. They're probably the second biggest player in the US.
Cory Doctorow has a term for this: Enshittification. In this post he shows how Amazon has walked the same path as Facebook, Twitter, and most recently TikTok. Enshittification works like this:
Step 1: A new company creates a powerful innovation, and consumers flock to it. For Amazon, this was the ability to buy basically anything over the internet in one place with a great customer experience. For Facebook, it was the ability to get status updates from all your friends. At this stage, everything is wonderful and the product is a joy to use because the company re-invests all the money and hype from its customers into making itself even better so it can attract even more customers.
Step 2: Once the consumers have become loyal and using the product has become habitual, the company uses its large, loyal customer base to entice business partners by giving them the surpluses it's gotten from its customers. For Amazon, this was third-party sellers; for Facebook, it was advertisers.
Step 3: Once the consumers and the business partners are sufficiently locked in, the company takes the surpluses from both groups and reallocates them to its shareholders. You Are Here. At this stage the company is horribly unpleasant for both its customers and its business partners, but it's become such an institution that it's very difficult to get rid of. With the resources its investors provide, it can continue leeching off consumers and other businesses indefinitely, reshaping the legal and competitive landscape to cement its market dominance.
At this stage, the only two ways I can think of to bring down such a behemoth are antitrust law (which is rarely enforced these days, and the companies work to keep it that way) and a new innovation that renders older business models obsolete. Of course, innovations are usually bought out by the big companies, which brings us back to antitrust law.
But Google is currently being threatened with a breakup from the DoJ and with obsolescence from ChatGPT. All this right after shareholders demanded a wave of layoffs. We'll see how that plays out. Maybe even the giants are not invulnerable.