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.
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.
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 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.
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 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 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.
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?
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.
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"!
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.
Behavior which is often ruled anti-competitive and illegal.
https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/cases/dec_docs/40...
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.
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.
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).
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.
My point is that Amazon used to be good. Now it’s not as fast. And the price hasn’t dropped.
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.
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.
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?
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?
No one benefits from US foreign policy outside of elites or capitalists, everyone else suffers under imperialism.
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 assume they want to limit the amount of customer support more than advertising their logistics.
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.
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.
At least in my experience, UPS, Fedex, etc., tend to deliver when the estimate says.
UPS is generally pretty good.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Try a different browser. I use Waterfox for most general purpose browsing and it rarely works with Walmart.com, while Chrome works fine.
Responding before coffee maybe? They already stipulated this
It arrives when it arrives.
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.
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!
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.
Saves you the frustration of wondering if they'll actually deliver.
https://toolguyd.com/another-horrible-lowes-shopping-experie...
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.
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.
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.
Oh and prime video has ads now.
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.
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.
* https://imgur.com/gallery/beeswax-test-with-uv-lamp-c3uBW3G
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.
They sound like random letters stringed together rather than any attempt to build an actual brand.
The factories usually ship directly to Amazon warehouses and it is also fulfilled by Amazon (FBA).
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.
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).
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.
Labelling requirements have a long history of backfiring.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Answer: you probably would, but Amazon engages in illegal, coercive price fixing to drive up the prices on those other sites by $50.
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.
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...
Disclaimer: I mostly shop from German, Danish, and to a lesser extend other EU sellers.
That however can be solved with laws, like we did in Europe.
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
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'.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
The EU are currently running an investigation into how this affects market dynamics, which will be interesting to see
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 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.
Even if it does cost me a bit extra, continuing to have local businesses is worth it to me
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
only if you think free market == unrestrained market
as monopoly is antithesis to capitalism itself, whose main principle is competition.
god gave us all plants to use.
they will fear monger rather than publish medical reasoning.
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.
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?
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.
I really should just cancel my prime now.
Edit: just cancelled it!
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...
Unlike the US I believe in practice it's all but guaranteed next day too
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.
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.
The notion that, if more people did this, prices might come down everywhere only stiffens my resolve.
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.
What's it good for? Constant shopping addiction dopamine?
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.
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
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.
Amazon has been dropping the ball pretty regularly on shipping recently.
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>
$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.
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.
You did complete the challenge, but it proved that Amazon has a nearly insurmountable logistics advantage compared to competitors.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 much investment money and customer volume do I need to make that business viable?
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.
> 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.
Meanwhile, lots of people are starting and building successful businesses.
And hopefully you can agree that, conceptually, monopoly businesses do exist and have existed in the past.
Amazon itself is not going to be shy about changing the rules in its favor.
I have no idea what this means.
Competing in which market? Amazon is a conglomerate operating in e-commerce, retail, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, entertainment, and artificial intelligence.
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!)
I think you’re confusing a system of private ownership of capital (capitalism) with free markets.
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 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
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.
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.
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 care for the return policy and warranty being attached to an entity that will still exist in 6 month.
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.
I hate that they have done this with a passion.
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.
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.
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.