Way way back, when Amazon got bigger than just books, my motivation for using them was a) very good selection (in one order, I can order bagel chips, wiper blades and a router?) and b) price. Implicit in this was authenticity and good customer service -- for me, if the product isn't the real thing, or the company is a nightmare to deal with, it's a non-starter.
Well now here we are. Fake reviews, counterfeit products, most things (IME) are actually FBA or just outright 3rd party sellers (not automatically bad, but more opportunities for problems), their prices aren't competitive anymore...
So, they've still got a lot of selection, although it's really more like shopping at a bazaar, since really their website is almost nothing more than Ebay in some sense, and I will say their customer service has almost w/o exception been stellar. But that's not enough anymore.
We'll see. Nothing lasts forever. Either Amazon will get the wakeup call and tighten its ship, or it will become the next Ebay/Myspace/Craigslist (I'm deliberately just throwing the kitchen sink here).
One last footnote -- just within the last week or so, 2 Amazon tech products that I've praised -- the Ring Doorbell and the Eero router(s) -- had firmware problems. Ring bricked itself (firmware update gone wrong) and had to be RMA'ed (they did it w/o any problem, and this was almost 2 years after purchase). The Eeros went into a cycle of resets and couldn't update their firmware.
>their website is almost nothing more than Ebay in some sense
I would argue that it's even worse. At least, IME, the ratings at E-bay for both sellers and products mean something. With Amazon, neither mean a damned thing anymore. It's just a crap shoot, unless you know exactly what you're already looking for.
Amazon used to be nice, because you could actually do product research. The worst thing, again in my opinion, they've done is ruin the ability to actually compare products due to sketchy reviews.
> unless you know exactly what you're already looking for.
I know what I'm looking for, but most of the products are impossible to evaluate, because there is just not enough info/data. Low res bad stock photos, terse description, no full technical specs, etc.
And many Amazon sellers don't sell anywhere else, they don't even have a real website, so ... good luck deciding based on that.
And since Amazon become so big, they set the bar for quality. So now the same shit is everywhere. (Plus there's the high-end overpriced but also not perfect segment too.)
Blows my mind that this is an actual issue. It just doesn't make sense that _this_ would be an issue, yet it totally is. Oftentimes you don't even know for sure what's included with a product and you have to sift thru the comments (reviews & Q&As) to figure out if what you think is included is indeed included as there is no clear indication in the listing. Very low quality in this regard. eBay, OTOH, is very specific because sellers vying for your attention want to make sure you know exactly what you're buying.
If eBay offered something which tightly integrated 2-Day Delivery, they could become a legit competitor on the non-media services side.
Exactly. On eBay contacting the seller to ask for more specs is completely okay. I don't even know if it's possible on Amazon. And I don't even care, the listings are so bad, scammy looking, it just discourages asking, after all why wouldn't they just send back a nonsense answer.
I feel like you just entirely explained the situation. There is still a "high-end overpriced" segment for all kinds of industries. Sometimes luxury goods, but sometimes just mid-tier goods sold by companies that still follow the high-margin traditional retail model. With an MSRP price that leaves enough room for inefficient, high-touch stores to take a hefty margin as a middleman.
But even someone who actively dislikes Amazon such as yourself would still rather get the lowest price and access to the largest selection, even if it means begrudgingly putting up with a worse experience.
I don't know why Amazon has a "lowest price" reputation on HN. Everything on Amazon is overpriced. The only reason why I still use it is that people give me Amazon gift cards instead of cash. I use geizhals.de to find products and Amazon is rarely shown as the cheapest seller. The price difference isn't insignificant. Depending on the product you can expect to pay 15% more on Amazon and that's what I tell people giving me those amazon cards.
I try to simply don't buy things. Eg I want a new laptop for some time, but none seem like a good fit. The whole USB3 ecosystem is crazy, there are bad, ugly, expensive or all of the above ones only.
That's what I used to do, but the problem is that alternative sources are simply getting harder to find. So I just defer purchases nowadays until gadgets get better, polished, more reviews pile up, etc.
The content of the positive reviews is usually noise, but the percentage of negatives is generally meaningful, as are the contents of some of the negative ones.
On Amazon, you can still get some value from the 1-3 star review contents, but the average star count (which is similar to eBay's % positive ratings) is almost meaningless since any number of negatives can be outweighed by near infinite fake 5-stars. That doesn't seem to happen as much on eBay (although I'm sure it does still happen).
When I know vaguely what a product should do, I use Amazon to find the specific brand, product, and models. Then I try to buy it directly from the manufacturer whenever possible.
What's the search engine equivalent of "showrooming"?
Funny, I heard of Best Buy (a major US electronics chain of stores) being called the "Amazon showroom" more than a few years ago. I never would've thought the situation would've flipped like that.
Over a decade ago, I thought why would I ever need Best Buy and its overpriced HDMI cables. How can a business with all the liabilities of brick and mortar compete with new lean, online only business offering the best prices?
Turns out, all Best Buy had to do was not turn their inventory into a lottery of real/counterfeit/broken/returned stuff.
Perhaps Amazon Prime will be the exquisite pinch. It will have trained all of us to expect immediate gratification (ruling out other online retailers) but Amazon itself cannot be trusted to deliver what you order. So we return to the Best Buy, which offers immediate delivery and authentic products!
I did this a couple weeks ago. I shopped around, found a handful on Amazon that would be good, then went to Best Buy to buy one. The best part was that Amazon said they'd ship in May (almost 3 weeks later) while I could pick up from Best Buy the next morning.
Best Buy is actually pretty amazing. Their protection plan is a great deal too because it basically lets you pay a premium to return your item for a full refund in store credit for 2 years.
It has an abysmal user interface that seems to have been built by 100 team with an intense hatred for each other.
The feedback system is broken. You can't leave feedback if you opened a case against a seller. Many sellers I had serious problems with had stellar reviews.
The resolution system is also pretty bad. If you open a case that gets automatically closed without being solved, you better hope it all happens within 60 days. Thankfully, PayPal is better run.
> the ratings at E-bay for both sellers and products mean something.
they don't. when you buy something from a top seller, they get an automatic 5 star rating for that purchase. you have to wait many days (5 i think) after you receive the item, to lodge a less than 5 star rating. the rating is across a few categories, with unknown weighting, so even if you successfully put in a 1 star rating (which you have to justify), the weighted rating is still above 3.
"top seller" status doesn't have anything to do with quality, just as "amazon's choice" has nothing to do with quality.
Amazon has had the lowest price for basically everything I’ve shopped for in the last 4 years. When it is higher on Amazon, it’s by pennies (because algorithms) and not for very long.
At home there’s a grocery store at the bottom of my elevator. It costs less money for me to buy groceries on Amazon Fresh with same-day delivery, than it does for me to go downstairs and buy my own groceries. Not a little bit less either, like 20% less. Same products!
I don’t even have to be home, the groceries just materialize at my front door whenever I schedule them to.
I think HN just gets on a negativity roll sometimes, and the most extreme or exaggerated comments float to the top.
I’m sure there are plenty of externalities, probably moreso with Amazon than most any other company... but let’s not pretend that Amazon isn’t doing amazing things for their customers. The efficiencies they’ve added to my life have saved me hundreds of hours.
They’ve done that with a business model that (allegedly) monetizes the widespread violation of all kinds of regulations while (allegedly) externalizing all of the liability, and it’s devastating hundreds of businesses, and a million other things ... but on the other end of all of that is a very happy customer.
There would be no point to playing so dirty if there was nothing in it for the customer. It wouldn’t even work, we would all just go back to K-Mart.
Your experience might be true in a big American city, but in Europe it's the complete opposite. Amazon is relatively fast (2 day shipping), but the grocery selection is limited and full of third parties charging extortionate prices. E.g. the same brand of nappies is 2x more expensive than getting it from Tesco. Anything specialty, such as musical instruments, PC parts, furniture, etc. is more expensive than getting it at the source, and all "cheap" items are 2x-5x more expensive than buying it from China, shipping included.
Amazon beats other shops in terms of convenience and selection (you can buy lots of random unrelated items and get them delivered fast), but often it's basically just a more upmarket eBay.
It's pretty great where I live in Europe in a country where they don't even operate. If I buy on Amazon.de, they ship products from Germany and items usually arrive within a week including going through customs, as they remove EU VAT and include local VAT at time of purchase (which probably clues you in to which country I live in). This avoids the massive customs processing fees, extra VAT, and wait times I would incur from most other international sellers.
Their prices are almost always the lowest I can find on books, similar to Book Depository which they also now apparently own. Other items like the small kitchen appliances I've bought on the DE site are also almost always cheaper than I can find in brick and mortar stores.
I'm not sure they have the same grocery service in most European markets that they have in the US, where as I understand it the grocery orders are handled rather separately with local selections.
I was curious about the lower prices you mentioned. And it isn't the case for items I usually buy.
For instance, my local grocery store has 2 liter Diet Coke Caffeine Free for $0.99 (on sale, sure, but it occurs like clockwork every 2 weeks), while Amazon Fresh has it for $1.74. Plain bagels are $1.99 at the grocery store, while AF charges $3.24.
Could it be the case that your local grocery store is simply overpriced?
I think "grocery store at the bottom of my elevator" was a give away, they have to be in metro area and the grocery store has huge markups due to real estate costs.
Maybe you shop for different things? I've seen things lately that were clearly cheaper at the local grocery store.
For things like PC components, I find them hit or miss. They might be the cheapest (or near it), but they might also be way more expensive than another legit retailer. These days, I always check, because they are so variable. A lot of that is probably that Amazon doesn't carry everything, and other sellers are a crapshoot.
I don't know where you live that their groceries are so much cheaper, but it isn't true here in Texas, where HEB (the dominant grocery chain) is hard to beat.
This has been my experience-- I don't check Amazon and stop for almost anything at this point because I often find computer hardware might be cheaper elsewhere. Newegg is hit and miss but sometimes comes out way ahead-- I saved $100 on a monitor by going Newegg instead of Amazon, even after shipping.
Groceries? I find that Amazon almost never wins there compared to the local grocery chain. That most certainly is going to end up being a "where you are right now" kind of thing compared to computer parts.
For me Amazon was a way to find a selection of HIGHER quality products than I could at local stores that maybe had 1 item that was ok quality and 2 low quality products.
Now when I go to Amazon they push the lowest cost thing even if by a $1 (like Wallmart). These weird "Amazon's Choice" options are increasingly lower quality cheap stuff. And Amazon day feels like a garage sale where I think they're pushing out their back stock of rock bottom quality garbage ... more than usual. And that's not to mention fakes and etc.
At this point I'm shopping around the internet way more than I used to when I was all about Amazon first.
I've been thinking this for years now, that the free-for-all for 3rd party sellers would eventually erode trust and make Amazon less appealing. But it hasn't collapsed yet and they still keep growing.
Now I really view Amazon as two separate products in one interface - there's the Ebay style bazaar, and then there's the first-party store. If I'm looking for a brand-name item, like an iPad or some other gadget, or some camera gear, I can often find it on Amazon and it'll be "shipped from and sold by Amazon", or there are a few other sellers whose names I recognize (like Apple or Adorama for the camera gear I was recently looking at) that I trust to buy from. More and more there's also the Amazon Basics brand covering everything from batteries and usb cables to snacks like trail mix, and I have come to trust their brand as well. These things will generally ship with prime shipping and arrive in 1 or 2 days, I get 5% cash back on my amazon card, and it's convenient to check out and I generally can trust I won't have any issues.
If I'm looking for something that's not brand-name, and I want to pay the cheapest price I can for something that gets the job done, I can venture into the bazaar land. I recently bought some patio furniture and a rug that were quite cheap, and they work pretty well and have been awesome for using my outdoor space during the lockdown. In this side of the platform I know I'm making sacrifices, I often don't get prime shipping, and I may even get counterfit items. I would never buy things like vitamins or lotion or make-up here in the seedy back alleys of the store. And often I do opt to use a different e-commerce site instead of Amazon, rather than risk it here. But I still buy from here occasionally.
I still think Amazon should do more to differentiate these two worlds, the high-trust vs low-trust platforms. But as a frequent user I now know what to look for and am mostly able to distinguish between the two, and I have to admit I do appreciate that the low-trust, 3rd party world exists. It gives me more choice as a consumer, and the alternative is that most of these items wouldn't be available on Amazon at all.
> I've been thinking this for years now, that the free-for-all for 3rd party sellers would eventually erode trust and make Amazon less appealing. But it hasn't collapsed yet and they still keep growing.
I think this has more to do with a lack of meaningful competition than anything else. I'd happily go back to 1-2 week shipping if I could order from a more trustworthy source. I've only had a few total duds from amazon and they were all under $50 and not worth even returning, but I accept that I'm basically rolling the dice with every amazon purchase at this point.
> I do appreciate that the low-trust, 3rd party world exists. It gives me more choice as a consumer, and the alternative is that most of these items wouldn't be available on Amazon at all.
I'm largely fine with it 100, assuming that amazon is wiling to refund or replace anything I buy that turns out to be crap. That gives them an economic incentive to do at least the most basic policing of people selling on their site.
> I think this has more to do with a lack of meaningful competition than anything else.
A good way to introduce meaningful competition is leveling the playing field when it comes to return policies. The ease of returns at Amazon is often brought up by US users in these discussions. And it's indeed great. However in europe it's a non-issue since all shops have to offer a 14-day no questions asked return option. Wondering whether I'll be able to return an item isn't part of my purchasing considerations at all - regardless of where I shop.
In my opinion good legislation and reasonable minimum standards for all sellers enable competition.
I’m pretty steeped in the Amazon ecosystem. I’m a fan of the Alexa. I watch their content. I use AWS.
But I don’t trust it for anything that goes into my body any more. I’ll make a trip to a GNC to buy ON protein powder. I don’t trust Amazon to sell my something from the actual manufacturer.
That’s new for me. Just in the last couple of years. The risk profile of getting a bad knockoff is overwhelming now. And for ingestibles it’s just not worth it...
I recently made this realization and that eBay is actually better. eBay doesn't want 30% of the sale. I can order one item at a time prices are generally lower and, imo quality and risk are the same.
For me, one big competitive advantage of Amazon is that i know that they will probably give me my money back if there is an issue (without me spending a ton of time wrangling customer support, and without me paying return shipping).
For example, recently i had some items missing from Amazon and some items missing from Instacart. Refund from Amazon took a few minutes. By contrast, i've spent a very long time dealing with Instacart (and more hours sitting on hold, and weeks waiting for promised followups that never came) and no refund yet. Instacart is just an example; there are many other merchants with poor return policies (or poor execution of return policies), and many others with good return policies. The competitive advantage of Amazon here is that it's hard to quickly find out whether a merchant that you haven't used before has good customer support, which pushes you towards sticking with a merchant you know.
I would add one more thing (and that are two things), they are really sleezy with the results. You already pick a seller when you figure out that they dont ship to your country. The second one is not seeing the final price untill you go trough all the hassle of ordering. I hate shopping at amazon and typically I do it only when I exhaust all other options.
> I will say their customer service has almost w/o exception been stellar
At individual level, I’ve markedly experienced degraded customer service in last 1 year.
For instance, I have to deal with hassles in cases where product sold by amazon (not 3rd party) had defect.
The key reason I moved to Amazon bandwagon was: no hassles.
You can build something much, much better with about $100 with a Raspberry Pi, depending I guess on the camera quality. Are there any features unique to the Ring?
I am an advocate of using something like RPi's for Computer Science in Africa but I am a missionary without a following (thank goodness there isn't another crank like me going to central Africa).
Ring is battery powered, with a battery life of 4 weeks.
It may not be obvious to someone not experienced in the design of battery-powered electronics, but that much battery life from a device with wifi and streaming video is very impressive - they must be making extremely good use of low-power sleep modes on their CPU, radio and camera.
Being battery powered means it can be self-installed, even by people who don't know a serial terminal from a screw terminal.
one of my first ebay purchase turned out to be a fake headset. put me off them and i never bothered to look on the site again even though people said it was cheaper.
with amazon it's convenient and honestly the support (while hit and miss) is still better than the effort you get from minimum waged retail workers. i am getting annoyed at the rise in rubbish and duplicate listings though.
It's wild how easily SV types will tweet things like "No one trusts Amazon!" when the reality outside the Bay Area is so radically and demonstrably opposite.
Last year I made 349 orders on Amazon and cannot think of a single time I got a counterfeit item or felt tricked by the reviews.
I would really like to wonder of the people encountering frequent fake products on Amazon, what categories are you shopping in? Is it fashion items or something similar? My main Amazon purchases are household items/toiletries and then hobby electronic parts. I haven't had any issues with these - and beyond the review issue the Amazon pricing/delivery time/return policy is by far the best of any site I've dealt with.
My distrust of Amazon started when I had a baby. It felt like about 80% of the stuff I ordered at first was junk. Maybe not fake, I don't know, maybe I was just being too trusting with what I was ordering, but either way it was total junk. So I started reading reviews a lot more carefully. This didn't help, I still just got junk. So then I started only ordering things from brand names I recognized. A couple times I messed up and didn't order from the actual manufacturer, and got fake or refurbished items. Then I realized if I'm just buying brands I recognize, I can just as easily pick them up at Target for the same price. My Amazon purchasing has dropped way down since this experience.
Edit to add: just last week I ordered a potty training seat from Amazon. Great reviews. Supposedly installs into every kind of toilet. It shows up and, predictably, does not work properly with any of our toilets. I wish I would have gotten it from Target or the local consignment store where I could look at it and ask about how it works, and I probably would have if not for the lock-down. So Amazon is getting my business right now, but it's very begrudgingly.
You mean for the potty? She is too little, she falls through the seat. (It's pretty early for potty training, but she is interested in it.) We do also have a step.
Kohler makes a great kids seat. Probably not small enough for initial potty training, but it worked quite well for our household toilet until our child was about 6. Now it's on a toilet near the rec room, for guest kiddies.
I've gotten fakes from Amazon, but it is not always obvious that you've got a fake.
There was an article recently with pictures of the real and fake items, both from Amazon. You wouldn't know which was which even if they were side by side.
But the fake will probably fall apart faster, may leak poison and is overall not what you thought to buy.
And that is all aside from the issue of fake reviews, which are so prevalent as to be the nrm. So the product might be an original, but it is not what you thought you were getting in way of reliability or noise et al.
A fake watch (Armstrong IIRC. Wasn't waterproof as it should have been, and - too late - realized the word "water resistant" was misspelled.)
A fake wire sodder, which was pretty expensive and cost me in damage to the item I wanted to build. I turned to the manufacturer and complained, and they asked me to send images... it was a fake.
We got Desitin with a very weird consistency and smell. I am convinced it is not real, and have been afraid to use it.
An external disk drive, wich wasn't fake, but was also clearly not the brand it said on the box. I complained about that, and am still waiting for a resolution.
Those are what I recall offhand, but mostly have been avoiding Amazon.
We don't buy anything from Amazon which will go in or on our bodies anymore due to the prevalence of fake items. As one of the other commenters said - we'd rather go to Target or Costco to pick up brand name items.
The fake SD card problem is so bad that Amazon got an exclusive product (Samsung EVO Select) that only they can sell. Rather than solve the counterfeiting problem, they just make money off it.
This is also the strategy behind AmazonBasics. It's the only brand that is exclusively sold by Amazon. Amazon is basically destroy the reputation of other brands by letting sketchy and fraudulent sellers on their platform do as they please. There are a lot of people who exclusively buy on Amazon so over time they will only trust AmazonBasics products.
I purchased in the last year or so an Intel Core i5 processor. You know what came? A cardboard box that looked like an Intel box, but was filled with four packs of Chinese playing cards. When I called to request a WTF? The nice lady insisted it was a mistaken order to which I steadfastly replied no, this is fraud. It was pretty ridiculous.
I purchased a motorcycle air filter at a price that was too good to be true. It arrive after almost 2 weeks (basically from China) damaged. I returned it waited another two weeks and it arrived damaged again. Left a bad review and got an email response asking about my experience. Can't really fault amazon too much. The price told me there had to be a catch. At the same time, I'm annoyed that was allowed to happen at all on the platform. Now There is always a thought in my mind to have a backup plan when I purchase something I really need on Amazon.
Why is that so hard to believe? Apple has a habit of price gouging for extras. You buy a Mac and you need to spend an extra 30 bucks for a dongle to something basic, like plug in an HDMI cable. That sort of thing can rub people up the wrong way.(That precise example may not be up to date but it was 10 years ago).
Also didn't some celebs get their iCloud (or whatever their offering is) accounts hacked?
I am not saying that I personally find them less reliable than MS, but I can see why less techie people might have a mistrust.
PR campaigns is my cynical guess both positive from Microsoft and negative from FUD slingers. Since Microsoft outright betrayed their customers in the past but Apple stood in the way of the "right to backdoor". I am no Apple fan but it is consistent with the larger corrupt pattern of "smear anyone big and not giving you what you want".
How far lagging behind is that assessment, or how likely is it that perceived trust is just lagging behind?
Anecdotical, it's wasn't long ago that I was deeply impressed by Amazon's customer service and quality. This has changed drastically, and today I go as far as only using Amazon if I basically have to. Thanks to recent developments (I'd say over the past few years), I now prefer either the manufacturer's website, or shops specialized on the relevant subject. I even get my consumer electronics from Best Buy.
I might be a bit extreme there (or maybe just "further along", depending on how you look at it), but Amazon having gone downhill--from once being well-known for its customer facing qualities no less--is certainly not a new or hot take.
I agree with this. Reputation is a funny thing, we think it is quickly lost (and can be), but it can also be lost very very slowly as a slow erosion of time.
I tend to think this slow way is alot harder to bounce back from. It took what, 3 generations? For Japanese-made cars to be seen as equal to or better than, American made cars, because for a long, long time the perception was that Japanese-made was crap (and it was). It took generations to overcome that point of view (because it took generations to form it).
It looks to me like the same is happening to Amazon. Not many people fully trust Amazon anymore, but also don't distrust it enough to say "I don't trust it!" to a survey. More like "Well... kind of... ok sure... I trust them."
The context of that quote is talking about the trust of merchants which sell products on Amazon, not the trust of consumers (which is what your link is). Consumers of course don't care if Amazon rips off merchants.
As long as consumers trust Amazon and don't trust the merchants, it doesn't matter. They have to use Amazon anyway. This is presented as a strategic problem for Amazon, but it isn't.
Here's my anecdote:
I moved to SEA lately and we have no amazon here. Instead we have Lazada and Shopee - two huge store fronts with great technology and huge marketing. I don't trust neither of them, I feel like returning 30% of my orders, sometimes my returns get denied for no reason.
My last purchase was a lawn chair that was advertised with attachments, there was only one tiny 8point font note at the bottom that said translation something like "attachments are just attachments" which could vaguely be interpreted as attachments not included while all of the pictures and descriptions featured them. My return got denied.
All of the reviews are fake on thse two storefronts too. There are often promotions of "leave 5 star review with at least 3 pictures to win an iPad!" which would be illegal in many countries.
As much as I dislike Amazon, they are by far the most trustworthy general store front I've used.
Something like consumer trust only makes sense if compared relatively to competitors, otherwise you're making a statement about the general public rather than about Amazon.
One of my main reasons to go with Amazon, is how trustworthy their service is.
Package lost? They send another one free.
Package delayed too long? Get a refund (and keep the package when it arrives).
Don't like the product? Return it for free.
There's never any friction, even in the bad scenarios. Combined with the fact that they consistently have the lowest price, it's hard to argue in favour of other services.
I have noticed that they haven't hopped on the "cancel" train (led by Twitter, Facebook, and Google/YouTube). I'm not exactly an Amazon fanboy, but that in itself inspires a certain level of trust.
Well. They don't have much to cancel really... I don't know if they would, if they could. No way to know that really. Just that they're really in a different business than the others.
Is this Simpon's paradox at work? Google is more trusted than Amazon in Gen-Z Adults, Millennials, and Gen-X, but overall Amazon beats Google. Google doesn't even make the top-25 of Boomers, but Amazon is #11. That's a little weird; does it explain the overall result?
People trust the brands they grow up with. For example, Boomers trust Betty Crocker, Heinze, and AAA, which do not even show up for younger generations.
1. Is Google really all in on product search? Their product search is pretty bad at the moment and it's a very challenging search space, esp when you work with tens of thousands of retailers. Going directly to retailer/niche-platform sites usually works better for me. For example, for music related I go to reverb.com, for outdoor to rei.com, etc. I then to Google and Amazon for reviews if needed.
2. Distribution and fast shipping is something Amazon has invested in for decades. I still need to wait longer than a week to receive items from retailers such as REI and others. Not an easy problem to solve.
3. Competing with Prime. Amazon ships everything including groceries. That's a big plus of Prime. Not only you get fast shipment, but you get everything you may need so you rarely need to use a different service. And with a credit card from Amazon you get 5% cash back on purchases. Everything is included.
> Is Google really all in on product search? Their product search is pretty bad at the moment and it's a very challenging search space, esp when you work with tens of thousands of retailers.
Honestly, Amazon's own product search is pretty terrible too, unless you're searching for a specific name-brand product. Google might not even have to be very good to be competitive.
The best product search I've actually found is NewEgg's (for computer parts, specifically). They're the only one who's collected enough accurate product metadata to facet their results effectively.
There are other specific sectors with great product search - RockAuto for car parts, for example. It's a striking example because the big auto parts stores (AutoZone, Advance Auto, Pep Boys, etc) all try to have an "Amazon style" search and it doesn't work. Heck, it doesn't work well on Amazon either.
In the specific sector of car parts, search is based on the year, manufacturer, model, and trim line/options of the vehicle. What's weird to me is that every one of these retailers has a point of sale system that works on the "specify vehicle, list and search within parts" model, yet they're using a traditional/"Amazon style" search on their own website.
RockAuto's site is ugly, but it's extremely functional. Their business model has complicated shipping (sometimes buying a more expensive item from the same warehouse as another item in your cart is less expensive after shipping than buying a less expensive item from a different warehouse) but there are UI affordances that make this easier to deal with. It's kind of sad that "show the shipping cost in the shopping cart, on the same page as the product list" is a noteworthy UI affordance, but it's so rare. (Also the option to select several items that meet spec, and it will automatically select the overall lowest cost after shipping set of products)
They used to include a filter that said "including shipping". Honestly their search now is alot less functional than it used to be, which just makes it easier for them to push their ads-disguised-as-top-products crap.
Google is unusable for product search. It's too heavily gamed and optimized not to show you things you want to buy, but things Google is paid to show you. It makes it too difficult to get the information you want to make the purchases you want. Try shopping for a car or hotel room sometime on Google. None of the information is reliable, and none if it is for what you want to see or ordered in a reasonable way to navigate. They're paying too much money to try and get your eyeballs at this point, and I wound up not making purchases because of it.
I generally agree, but 3 is in abeyance right now; I'm getting faster delivery times from other places. And regarding 2, Amazon has been training me for a while (via slow-ship discounts and the Amazon Day thing) that I don't need everything right away. I don't know about everybody else, but that has definitely made it easier for me to try out other vendors.
Precisely. I don't know when the switch happened but Amazon seems to be using their own drivers to deliver and not Fedex.
The delivery quality is worse than bad, and has lead to us getting boxes stolen because Amazon drivers dump them at the quickest most convenient place for them - like Amazon drivers are incentivized to maximize time efficiency and every second counts. It's super painful.
We're now using other websites to buy from simply because their delivery takes approximately the same but goes to our door.
I’m not sure what’s going on with Amazon recently, but they’ve on multiple occasions told me that an item won’t ship or arrive until well into May, only for it to turn up next day. (edit: this is over the last 3 weeks for context)
I wonder how much of their slow delivery is them under promising and how much is them actually not being able to get things out in a day or two. None of the other vendors I’ve worked with, except Nespresso oddly enough, have been able to match Amazon’s actual performance.
I wonder if it’s just because I happen to be close to a lot of warehouses? Still very weird for Amazon to be sandbagging themselves regardless.
There was a giant banner at the top of their site that explained there was global health crisis and shipments of non-essentials could be delayed. They'd been asked (told in some cases) by governments and others to prioritize eseential product shipments, so they did. They also told suppliers to stop sending non-essentials for FBA. If they had capacity (and items on hand) they've been delivering non-essentials (I've gotten some of my stuff sooner too). There was a big article that blew up here about how France was going to fine them for shipping non-essentials/putting workers at risk and gave them 24 hours to change their entire warehouse workflow/technical systems (Amazon responded by saying they'd need to shutdown for a bit to avoid the fines as they reworked everything to comply).
And on this note, I was talking with my neighbor yesterday and he's having a related issue that only became an issue when Amazon enacted this covid-response policy. It used to be that it didn't particularly matter if your products were accurately mapped into Amazon's categories as long as they were searchable. Now, however, Amazon is refusing to ship (or receive FBA stock) for non-essential categories. My neighbor is a shoe salesman for a brand that has a full medical & industrial line ... but they weren't tagged into medical equipment categories at Amazon so he can't ship replenishment inventory. Amazon isn't allowing these mapping adjustments to be made at all right now for fear of abuse.
Also, when FBA stock depletes, sellers have the individual option of whether to direct ship or not. Some are, and some are using expedited shipping, but others are either not shipping at all or are using the cheapest freight possible.
Yep. And in the circles I'm in, some are already setting up stores outside Amazon... that's not going to bode well for Amazon when all these sellers suddenly realize they don't need Amazon anymore.
The issue isn’t that things are delayed, the issue is they are saying an item isn’t going to get here until May when they know full well that it’s been put on a truck and will arrive today.
They are advertising their shipping speed as being worse than it is, causing people to think competitors are faster, when, typically, Amazon is still superior.
Using Amazon for reviews seems ironic to me. Product reviews highlight Amazon's single biggest weakness: trust. You can't trust any Amazon review. Many of Amazon's other failings also center around trust.
You can't trust Amazon. period. full stop. Their reviews are total shite, that's for sure. However, you can't trust their product listings either that you'll actually receive what you thought you purchased.
I don't disagree. But for some products it's sometimes hard to find reviews outside of Amazon. I also learned how to spot products that have fake reviews.
There are no universal sources. Each source should be viewed with skepticism. That said, I have found small discords to be pretty good for PC hardware/tech related recommendation. Reddit on the other hand seemed a bit terrible at times with outdated or overly fishy marketing power speaking instead of the consumer.
Yes and no. They have a fake review problem, for sure. But it's usually fairly obvious which reviews are fake and which are not. And Amazon reviews have something I don't really see anywhere else -- pictures. That's a feature I really like.
And when pictures are of a product not actually being sold in the listing... just yesterday I received a product that was NOT what was in any of the photos on the listing including the listing itself. Argh.
That's the primary way fake reviews happen. The seller gets thousands of sales of a high quality, good product, gets great reviews, pictures etc. and then they bait and switch to a cheaper, lower quality product at the same (or higher, because REVIEWS) price with a bigger margin.
Huge problem over there and Amazon has done nothing to stop it.
1. The problem for me is that for any given product category, I don’t know who the online retailers are. For electronics there is microcenter.com, frys.com, tigerdirect.com, circuitcity.com, and many many more.
2. I think this is something that is burned into people’s heads but not actually true. Most retailers do offer pretty fast shipping. Even with prime you’re paying for fast shipping (in the membership fee).
I started finding deals subreddits to be a good source of alternative shops. Now I'm not going to claim that their not gamed (there are more then one site banned for trying and failing) but ones like /r/frugalmalefashion have pointed me to a lot of other retailers I wouldn't have considered.
> * For electronics there is microcenter.com, frys.com, tigerdirect.com, circuitcity.com, and many many more.*
Definitely drop frys.com from the list, they are going out of business. Actually, except for microcenter.com, I wouldn't buy from the others either. newegg.com seems to have the best attribute filtering by far.
I've been purposely going to Microcenter, and buying stuff there in the hopes that they'll stay in business. There's no other computer stores in the area of note.
If frys hasn't gone out of business yet, they're not going to - last one I was in only sold gift bags and batteries in a massive retail space and yet somehow they were still there. The retail gods must love Mr. Fry.
> If frys hasn't gone out of business yet, they're not going to - last one I was in only sold gift bags and batteries in a massive retail space and yet somehow they were still there.
I really don't understand why Fry's isn't out of business.
Do they own the real estate they're sitting on or something? Are their online operations that profitable?
Sure, a private company can carry losses for as long as they have money. But, why would you?
>Do they own the real estate they're sitting on or something?
A quick search gives some mixed results. They own their San Jose property¹ through an affiliate company. This affiliate doesn't appear to own any other Fry's property though². Conversely, the Palo Alto ___location was closed when the lease ran out³.
Tigerdirect has a pitiful selection as far as PC building goes, and usually their prices are not even remotely competitive. I'm not even sure how they're still in business.
I think just about everyone with a 401k owns Amazon stock at least indirectly, and I think it's a safe bet that unless an HN comment is coming from Daddy Bezos himself, it's unlikely-bordering-impossible to move the stock price either way.
Amazon is really good at being the ‘signal gateway’ in between inputs and outputs. Whether it is ecommerce or AWS. They take care of everything in the middle that many people don’t think about.
Investing heavily in logistics connected to transactions is what made Amazon excel over Walmart, Target, UPS, Fedex, etc. How many companies setting out in online commerce have the amount of backbone infrastructure as Amazon?
Furthermore Amazon has warehouses all over the world. I see a product on the US site, I order it while in Greece, it ships from Germany or UK. Ordinary e-commerce can't provide that. If I order a product from a US based e-commerce firm I'll end up paying custom fees. Google's intervention doesn't provide any facilitation in this aspect.
Most grocery stores still don't have online ordering. Years, and years, and years, after Amazon entered the field, the other grocers have just decided to lie down and die.
Still waiting for Chapters (a bookstore in Canada) to start sending me reading good reading recommendations.
Still waiting on VISA to make generalized gift cards which are not miserable to use.
I'm trying to think of any industry Amazon took out when even tried to fight back. Most just whined their way into oblivion.
The problem with non-Amazon companies is that they don't do anything excellently.
My thoughts on declining industries have changed a lot since listening to the Spectacular Failures podcast episode about Toys R Us and learning more about the vampiric practice of Private Equity, where firms like Bain acquire struggling businesses and win regardless of the output. Here's a similar story from The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/toys-r-...
I'm tired of people lamenting the loss of true retail and blaming disruption for any negative changes in the world. The fact is, entire industries outside of Bezos' world flourished from these failures and continue to thrive as long as Chapters doesn't use big data, Visa doesn't make an intuitive gift card option, and the family-owned grocery store doesn't have software to share inventory online.
Most of the zombie companies had excelled at some point in the past - even a joke company like Sears was once the pinnacle of innovation. At this point I'm just convinced companies that decided to "lie down and die" are cases of competing goals among the decision-makers. Some are too non-confrontational, some are egomaniacal, some stifle innovation, some are too audacious, and lots of executives, board members, and consultants flourish regardless of the result.
The result is an unhealthy economy that is constantly getting conned by those who know how to play the game. But maybe that has always been the case...
Sears just confuses the heck out of me. They had everything they needed to basically be what Amazon is now, before Amazon even existed. Heck they were basically Amazon before the web existed.
I suspect internal political dysfunction is likely to blame for that. Many would rather have their bonus, unchallenged fiefdom, or to not have to learn things rather than success so that is what they wind up with and afterwards rather than admit fault by changing their ways they double down.
An online store would "take away" business from their retail fronts and would face plentiful sabotage. It isn't like they had a frontier out west to ship to as the "new ___domain" that respected their nice little boundaries.
This is one of the most important roles of a strong leader: to swashbuckle through this kind of misalignment.
Organizations age poorly by default. People become motivated to climb the org chart--or, even easier, to stay in place while sprouting new branches under themselves. People become risk averse and unimaginative.
The only way to avoid that fate is with strong leadership. Starship will replace the Falcon 9, and I'm sure there are people on the Falcon team who are not thrilled about that, but the show goes on anyway. Everyone is on a shared mission. It's clear that SpaceX culturally doesn't tolerate people more concerned with internal politics than they are with going to space. Culture comes from the top--the founders, the CEO, and flows from there.
They could be great again if they leveraged their old "good, better, best" strategy. Instead of trying to sell all the things like Amazon and Walmart do, they should be offering a broad, curated set of items that are reliable and binned by those three quality descriptors.
This specifically addresses the issues many people have with buying from Amazon.
> Still waiting for Chapters (a bookstore in Canada) to start sending me reading good reading recommendations.
Why do you need the store to recommend to you what to buy from them next? Obviously the store is only going to recommend content which maximally increases its profits, regardless of whether that content is worth your time or really in tune with your most passionate interests. Buying the book from a shop is a necessary evil (unless you just want to read pirated ebooks from LibGen for free like many Kindle owners are doing now), but for getting recommendations on what to read next, why not look to the numerous internet communities of passionate readers who are not motivated by financial self-interest and may better serve your particular tastes?
I view it like browsing in a store. Sure I can go to the Django community and find books on that there (and I do), but Amazon recently recommended me a book on Microservices.
They had been off my radar for a while, but I purchased it for later.
It is about uncovering things that are of value, but that I might not think of immediately.
I have two bikes, and moved recently. Only had room for one, so the other went to a storage locker. I kept my beater at home because of exactly this phenomenon... since I've moved I've gone on more rides and felt little or no guilt about the unused bike in storage
lol - there’s some truth to that, depending on the definition of dream guitar. In my case my dream guitar was somewhat more expensive than all of my other one’s and it became and still is my number one every day guitar. It just feels so right and sounds so good, it makes me feel like a better player. :-)
I think it's the same reason torrents didn't completely destroy the entertainment industry. Consumers want a fresh new thing that seems to be made for them.
I have lists upon lists of of music, library ebooks (the free way to not pay!), and video games as well as multiple lifetimes worth of free content on the internet. What today's consumer craves is for anyone to reach in, show them the next perfect thing, and promise that the barrier to entry will be worthwhile. Some fans immediately know what they want next thanks to friends, critics, or their own insatiable research, but most people* desire a buzz of encouragement to get them started.
* I use the phrase "most people" very deliberately here. The Blue Ocean Strategy theorizes that there's always a new demographic to pursue. Reduce the barrier to entry and some increase in customer retention is almost guaranteed.
> Still waiting for Chapters (a bookstore in Canada) to start sending me reading good reading recommendations.
OTOH, I am still waiting for Amazon to make the ads which appear on my Kindle lock screen have even a modicum of relevance to my buying/reading habits.
As far as grocery stores are concerned, I find that their combination with Instacart does a great job on that front.
I learned last year, possibly here, that the reason you can make withdrawals from your credit union at virtually any other credit union’s ATM isn’t because of some cabal of credit unions so much as the fact they nearly all use the same vendor.
I don’t know if there’s a lesson here for grocers, or maybe Organic Valley (a farmer cooperative) is a closer model.
If you are not clear on what your secret sauce is, or what your competitors think theirs is, it’s hard to be open about commodifying things that aren’t critical to you but are to your customers. Shared logistics systems? Probably trade secrets there. Other things? Maybe not so much.
But on the flip-side, I have so little trust that Amazon will actually send me exactly what I ordered that I'll look to direct sellers whenever possible when the details matter. Just last week I didn't do this when ordering 4 identical wrought iron brackets to mount bird feeders around the yard. I received 4 separate shipments -- 2 FBA, 2 from sellers directly -- container 3 of the item I wanted and 1 of a similar but different item.
I can also order groceries online from Safeway and either get it delivered or do curb-side pickup from my local store.
There's also a limit on the number of marketplaces I'm comfortable sharing my credit card with. Out of all the market places online I'm more comfortable sharing my card with Amazon and I've a higher trust on things arriving in time.
Paypal has its own issues. Such as disputes, its easier to dispute with my bank than to dispute with Paypal.
My Twitch account was accessed and the person made a whole bunch of purchases on my account. Twitch customer service basically doesn't exist, so I went to paypal. Paypals system throttled me when I tried to report each action.
With my bank, I can call a number, say "These are all fake" they instantly cancel and refund my money, and I can file chargeback / fraud paper work.
Paypal has a long ways to go customer service and customer experience wise still.
> Most grocery stores still don't have online ordering. Years, and years, and years, after Amazon entered the field, the other grocers have just decided to lie down and die.
Everyone but Trader Joe’s delivers where I love (SF). I don’t think this is true.
> I'm trying to think of any industry Amazon took out when even tried to fight back. Most just whined their way into oblivion.
Remember the Fire Phone? Amazon doesn’t always hit home runs, they have a ton of money so they can afford to fail fast and reinvest elsewhere.
Most of the majors do have online pickup now, no? At least by me, it would be weird to see a grocery store lot that doesn't have a pickup spot by now. I've had enough mixed success with delivery groceries that I much prefer picking it up. At least my packages aren't getting stolen or left out in the sun.
The thing about anti-Amazon rhetoric is that it's easily debunked because so many people transact business through them. There's no need to take any "expert" or activist opinion on the matter. The proof is in your own life experience. If it's sunny outside but someone on the internet is telling you that it's raining, you probably should discount the opinion of that person, or ignore entirely. I have no doubt that people have been ripped off from Amazon but their customer service handles the situation very well. I don't like that Amazon is taking over the global economy and won't stop growing unless it is forced to. However, they're conducting business well.
(I'm not affiliated with Amazon other than that I've been a customer since the 90s)
everything may be sunny on the outside, but it may pouring rain on the inside. most people's "life experience" with Amazon is most likely limited to shopping, but they likely don't see or consider other criticisms of Amazon such as monopoly power or anti-labor activities
I know Google's doing this for their own reasons, but I'll take the help. I've been an Amazon customer since 1997, but their recent anti-worker actions [1] were the straw [2] that broke the camel's back. I canceled my Prime account, and have decided to start my product search elsewhere. Google's product search has been long neglected, so it's great they're giving it some love.
Where are you starting your product search? For everyone claiming they have found the better amazon, the more ethical amazon they never seem to be actually willing to NAME these great places so others can use them - if you are going legitimately would be great to get the name of these product search starting points.
And I've tried google's shopping - blah. If that's your starting point we are going to be with amazon for a while.
Recently tried to avoid amazon - got some stuff from a name brand retailer. The return process required a 40 minute hold time, and because it was one order they only give one return label even though order came in two large boxes. So now it's around and around to try to figure out the second label. It's apparently an outsourced return provider (is that a thing) so the logic / communication related to the original sellers product is terrible.
The last time this happened they ended up giving a store credit for sale price, a refund and never sent the label! Ended up giving away a pretty expensive item ($150). I mean it's just a totally unintegrated system
Compared to amazon (walk into Kohl's / UPS store even unsealed / drop in a locker / give to mailroom to give to UPS guy, stack item on UPS box in garage etc etc) it's night and day different.
For me, it's leaning away from large online marketplaces entirely. I'll try to order a product directly from the manufacturer or a specialized website, or just see an example at a local store. 5 star reviews are worthless compared to holding the thing in your hand, and 2 (usually 5 for me) day shipping is a lot longer than taking 10 minutes to run to the store. I figure my biking is greener than sending out a delivery van.
Sure, I don't expect the change to happen overnight. My switch to getting most ecommerce from Amazon was slow. If the switch away takes that long, I'll live with it. But I'm definitely starting now.
You might not want to hear it, but those that were fired recently were using their company email address to organize union discussions. You just can’t do that, no matter how justified one is to pursue unionizing.
> Also, restrictions on your efforts to communicate with co-workers cannot be discriminatory. For example, your employer cannot prohibit you from talking about the union during working time if it permits you to talk about other non-work-related matters during working time.
I worked at a place where all emails had to be work related.
That was in the Cable TV Industry. Which, in it's own way makes sense; that industry has a 'Owner'->'Prime Contractor'->'Subcontractor' tiered setup for work that has always had the unspoken purpose of preventing field workers and installers from unionizing.
Wanted to send out an email about a fundraiser or special weekend craft thing? Had to have HR give the OK.
-IF- Amazon had and enforced such a policy it could be considered non-discriminatory. But I'm somehow doubting such a policy is fully enforced even if it is on the books.
I look forward to citations for both those points. But I suspect what you mean is not that the employees did anything illegal, but that you believe a company is legally allowed to fire you for that. If that company is eager to fire people for trying to organize. Because that is what I'm objecting to here.
The union was already set up at my previous employer, but they used work email including an Exchange distribution list and Outlook calendar events to organize it.
People in tech vastly overestimate the amount of people who dislike Amazon. Your Average Joe could not be happier with Amazon and does not give a second thought to their business practices or worker treatment.
Amazon works, proved it works in a serious global crisis, does better job than that other "service" that takes a lot of your paycheck. Now you maybe can't get some niche item, or you shop stupid, doesn't mean it's not a wonderful service and perfectly valid utility.
Amazon is a company that does actual stuff, it's not just software that should have "better product search".
Either you missed the point of that survey or you're deliberately misrepresenting its results. Did you miss the sentence that said 'This ranking is determined by share of "a lot" responses.'? Amazon is the 2nd most trusted brand, according to that survey.
I might have translated that survey result more into something like “No major brand deemed trustworthy by majority of consumers. Amazon a little less distrusted than most other major brands”.
I can't find anything specific about the survey methodology related to this data, but there being an 'a lot' response implies to me the existence of answers like 'a little' as well that convey trust
You're assuming most people can afford to martyr themselves to pay extra on every purchase out of a moral stance.
Even if someone can afford that, I think it's been demonstrated futile to try to affect market behavior on the basis of employee treatment that's so normalized to everyone. Boycotts have worked on other specific issues on certain brands but it seems like people just don't care enough about Amazon's worker treatment or Nestle's horrible activities in Africa. So if those are never going to change without legislation then I can't really hold it against anyone for not paying out the nose to avoid Wal Mart and Amazon.
As a consultant, I see companies struggling to compete with Amazon (or Amazon-like companies). Most companies struggle for a couple of reasons
- They are ego driven, with legacy execs & others relentlessly protecting their status - whereas Amazon is relentlessly data-driven
- They have poor incentive structures and are feature factories. They value velocity over outcomes. Amazon, by being more data driven, is focused on being extremely outcome oriented
- Because of the first 2, Amazon can give people and groups a tremendous amount of autonomy, whereas other orgs heavily micromanage or have structures that create more politics than value
- There's little place to hide at Amazon (which means you might work your ass off!)
To compete with Amazon, you have to learn from them, and be prepared to adopt their practices as the new industry norm. Not just dismiss them as some relentless and heartless evil empire.
I agree with your points, but I've also found another one that is far more common:
They sell products at a loss to gain income in other places. For example, if you are a content producer you are competing with a company that sells "ad-free" video (Prime Video) attached to a low-cost service (Prime) so that they can sell more goods online.
Amazon is killing content producers by running a negative margin content business to do sell-through on e-commerce.
Amazon is killing video encoding business by selling a negative margin video encoder to sell through AWS compute.
This is extremely common in every "field" Amazon is in. They run at negative margins in one huge sector of business because it drives massive income in another.
That is a strategy only available to... monopolies. You can't afford to compete with them, because they are not _even trying_ to make a profit in your sector.
>>Amazon is killing video encoding business by selling a negative margin video encoder to sell through AWS compute.
What product are you referring to? I'm in this industry and based on my experience their video encoding+storage+streaming offerings are actually higher priced than their competitors. The reason their services are popular is the integration with the rest of AWS (which is true for most of their offerings).
I often hear this repeated with Amazon, that it's pointless to try to compete with them because they can just undercut you on price, but I have seldom seen any evidence for it. AWS is one of the most expensive cloud/hosting services for compute, data, bandwidth, etc., the products sold on Amazon are almost always more expensive than buying them from alternate sites or directly from the source.
The only cheap thing that Amazon offers is fast shipping for low-cost products, e.g. buying a $3 cable and getting it shipped for free the next day (assuming you have Prime). But for anything above $50-$100, Amazon is almost always the more expensive option.
The whole point of predatory pricing is that you jack the price up if you don't currently face any competition and use the threat of plunging prices to scare off competitors, so of course they're going to be more expensive by default.
I agree. Amazon store products used to be the cheapest available, but as they have become the "default" e-comerce site, I find their prices are frequently not the best. Pair that trend with the current uncertainty in product quality/authenticity at Amazon, I choose to buy directly from the brands website (i.e. buy a Jansport backpack from the Jansport website.). Funnily enough, I mainly use Amazon as a search to compare products.
The prices for AWS products only tell a small part of the story. The real costs are in outgoing bandwidth.
Take the encoding example above, you might pay a competitive price for the compute time required to encode, but you'll be paying some of the highest bandwidth fees in the industry if you were to stream out your encoded video to multiple viewers.
>The only cheap thing that Amazon offers is fast shipping for low-cost products, e.g. buying a $3 cable and getting it shipped for free the next day (assuming you have Prime). But for anything above $50-$100, Amazon is almost always the more expensive option.
Where electronics are concerned, for years I would go to Best Buy to look at merchandise first-hand, then go home and buy it from Amazon, because Amazon was almost always significantly cheaper (especially before they started collecting sales tax).
Now it's the opposite.
I use Amazon to find products, read reviews, etc., and then I go to Best Buy's website to order it. It's almost always the same price or lower at Best Buy, and since I happen to have a Best Buy store only five minutes from my house, I can order it and pick it up in under an hour.
> Loss leading can be a successful strategy if executed properly. A classic example is razor blades. Gillette, for example, gives their razor units away for free knowing that customers must buy their replacement blades, which is where the company makes its profit.
It's true that big companies can find profitable loss-leaders where small companies can't -- though this isn't always true; my startup uses a loss-leader B2B product to unlock a more attractive B2B2C offering.
I think what you're observing is that monopolists tend to be more able to use loss-leaders, since their monopoly power gives them the ability to charge a premium on their monopolized good(s), which would increase the scope of profitable loss-leaders. However loss-leading is certainly not a monopoly-only strategy.
> I think what you're observing is that monopolists tend to be more able to use loss-leaders, since their monopoly power gives them the ability to charge a premium on their monopolized good(s), which would increase the scope of profitable loss-leaders. However loss-leading is certainly not a monopoly-only strategy.
It's certainly a scale thing. What's notable about Amazon is they can run a losslead for an entire sector of industry, not just a single product. Note a grocery store could loss lead toilet paper so much no one can afford to produce toilet paper (maybe); but, could you imagine one which could afford to loss lead _all paper products_ to sell more coffee for long enough to wipe out all other paper retailers?
Because amazon can, and is, doing this systematically. And after that we no longer have fair-market prices, because there is no market but amazons for these goods.
The "loss leader" behavior, in typical and non-monopolistic circumstances, does not typically last the whole year without interruption and is only performed during periods of intense consumerism such as Black Friday.
My last retail employer had multiple billions in revenue and had a really nice niche where they could apply a negative margin service to sell more goods. And a lot of their product catalog is far enough from Amazon's wheelhouse that they had room to operate.
That being said, their ecommerce org was still a complete mess. They were spending a ton of money operating a homemade ecommerce platform based on 2007 technology. They even had a mainframe running some critical features that they couldn't manage to deprecate. They ran everything focused on costs and didn't even do it right because they never considered the long-term benefits of investments. The architecture was multiple balls of mud. Teams were all aligned horizontally. Meeting customer needs wasn't never a factor in any decision making that I saw (and I spoke regularly to the CTO).
>That is a strategy only available to... monopolies.
Wait. And this is 100% not meant to be snide, it's a real question.
Isn't that the actual strategy for tech startups? Work with investor capital long enough to get established and own the market by selling at negative margins, then increase the price once you own the market?
It is the ideal for any business, but it definitely is not for the consumer or the economy, and this is why governments enact anti-trust legislation. The government is supposed to enforce against monopolies, but unfortunately in the US government this has been undermined. Matt Stoller has a great book and e-newsletter about monopolies past and present vs. government.
I think most tech startups would aspire not to increase prices, but increase market share such that selling a high volume at the original price is enough to cover the investment and start to turn a profit.
Of course you might price your product less, but from a certain point of view it's less predatory than it is just fair market price. When you are a startup with no customers, your first customer is taking a chance on you. They have no idea what the quality of your product is. They have no idea if you're going to be around to support it in 6 months. All that uncertainty should be factored into the price. If you are a more established startup then the fair market price for the exact same product all other things held equal, should be higher.
There's a school of thought that because digital goods have no cost per additional unit created, that they will always tend towards being free in a free market. Hence, the only way to get people to pay for a digital good is to have a monopoly.
I think the difference might be in that startups often do not have their own dominant & profitable products that they can leverage to undercut the profit in complements.
Yeah I agree. A lot of large companies can invest deeply just to drive out their competition. WalMart famously did the same to drive out other businesses in the 90s and 00s.
I think though we need to recognize that Amazon is succesful for a reason, and those reasons are why they are in a position to invent even deeper and more relentlessly...
The thing to recognize (or at least something I feel is under-recognized) is that Capitalism prefers monopolies or monopsonies, whichever the case may be. Capitalism talks a big game about the benefits of competition, but history tell us that it is actually their enemy. It reminds me of a Big Lie:
No thanks, the internet has fundamentally changed society. Software companies can now steal software and hack everyones machine on an unprecedented scale.
The last 20 years of PC gaming has been one of theft and grand larceny by steam, valve, EA and co. We used to get dedicated servers and level editors in games.
The internet allows companies to steal software from the point of production, because 2 or more computers in a network act as a single machine. So that means the internet is one giant world sized computer that companies de-facto own and control because they now "issue commands" to other nodes in the network.
We now live in a digital authoritarian society where we must get permission to use our software and have no privacy if we want to participate in the culture.
AKA the internet has been the greatest force for software theft and dispossession in all human history.
Because of the criminal way in which IP law was coded the public never got any property rights and this has created the greatest human rights disaster in all of history.
DRM in the OS, apps or games is literally you living in an open air prison and CEO's and government orgs can literally spy on everything you do.
Windows 10 is a case in point. There's no reason for client-server software anything for a home user.
>The last 20 years of PC gaming has been one of theft and grand larceny by steam, valve, EA and co. We used to get dedicated servers and level editors in games.
We used to have to deposit a quarter every time our character died, and with zero save points.
Trying to conflate arcade games with games you software you buy are non comparable, trying to justify theft of software when the population clearly doesn't want drm or authoritarian software as a service models.
Steam would have never got off the ground in 2004 if we had portal technology, man would have gotten killed.
Is it still capitalism with strong antitrust? If so, why do capitalists keep chipping away at and denigrating antitrust laws? What about capitalism's concurrent drive: toward slavery for its workers? What about a third drive: zero taxes? Taken together, what is the benefit of the capitalist ideology at all, and to whom do those benefits accrue?
IMO, this is like asking "is it still a democracy if the people don't decide on every bill directly?" In a sense, the answer is no–but I still feel comfortable using the word democracy.
I'm going to keep going with this analogy—IMO, idolizing the idea of a completely unregulated market is akin to idolizing the governing structure of ancient Athens. Yes, the rules we've added over the past millennia make us less free in a way—but they also make for a more sustainable system. These refinements are a sign of maturity.
I hope that in this light we can agree that using the term "free market" as a cudgel is a sign of immaturity.
I think you're caught up in an is/ought conundrum though: "idolizing the idea of a completely unregulated market" is the discourse! That's the pro-side rhetoric in a nutshell, how bills and laws get passed, and how the (US) economic system is constructed. So don't blame my inference, it's just what I'm reading in the newspaper.
Large retailers can't push competitors' products to the back of the shelf to leave their cheaper alternatives in prominent display. This is basically what Amazon does once they develop a Basics product -- push it to the top of your search results, leaving the original producers down at the bottom.
You're joking right? That's literally what grocery stores do. There's an entire strategy to organizing stores, stocking shelves, and designing price tags to funnel customers to store brand products.
And retailers like Target who get consistent customers that compare products in-store just stop carrying their competition.
There are many companies that give out Software for free with their hardware. We sold sensor chips with sw solution included. The SW was free and our team has negative margins but was essential to present a competitive product vs the low cost leader. We were hardly a monopoly.
Your home built video compression software does _not_ achieve the compression ratios of commercial software. Differences can be between 20-50% pretty easily. It also does _not_ have the reliability.
x264 is good but not the benchmark. x265 is simply mediocre.
That aside, as others have pointed out, there is the whole "in the cloud" thing which has to do with global TCO.
Also the pricing you can get of the AWS site doesn't look a thing like what an actual content distributor with 100 of thousands of hours of content gets.
BAMTech (now Disney Stream Services) does not build their own video encoder IIRC. That's because encoding costs are a drop in the bucket compared to their distribution costs.
What does them "building their own encoder" instead of using someone else's encoder have to do with whether they do encoding using AWS's managed services or not?
It depends on both what you are optimizing for. People cost money. If you can trade enough of your time by having a cloud provider do the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” to focus on your core competency, then it makes sense to use a provider.
For instance it didn’t make sense for DropBox to stay on Amazon but it did make sense for Netflix.
Vertical integration, even to the point of being a vertical monopoly (which they aren't, because you're not locked into other services, they're just cheaper and more convenient) isn't necessarily anticompetitive.
If they really are dumping, then I look forward to the lawsuit from all of their would-be competitors. That would help the increasingly centralized industry figure out what can be independent and what can only be done by monopolies.
Amazon paid 7 billion in content costs this year, I would estimate it cost another 1.5billion to do the distribution. That doesn't include internal development costs, advertising costs, etc.
Prime all together only made 14 billion. Considering that prime almost assuredly doesn't cover its 2day shipping we can be very sure, the video unit is _certainly_ not positive.
What's even more important is this quote from Bezos, which directly states it's their strategy:
"We get to monetize [our subscription video] in a very unusual way," Bezos said. "When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes. And it does that in a very direct way. Because if you look at Prime members, they buy more on Amazon than non-Prime members, and one of the reasons they do that is once they pay their annual fee, they're looking around to see, 'How can I get more value out of the program?' And so they look across more categories — they shop more. A lot of their behaviors change in ways that are very attractive to us as a business. And the customers utilize more of our services"
That's just describing the strategy of likely the majority of retailers in existence, from grocery stores to theaters though isn't it? Grocery stores have lead products that get people in the stores (like cheap roast chicken) and then make more margins elsewhere. Fast food sells burgers and hope people will buy fries. When theaters have movies that have won awards and have big buzz, it helps them sell more snacks. Department stores, classic electronics stores, and so on all have window display items and major flashy things that they hope will get people to come inside at all, at which point they may get those, get add-ons, or something else entirely.
Maybe for subscription video specifically Amazon is more unusual, but it's certainly not because Bezos came up with some wild strategy. Movie and TV producers themselves aim for far more monetization than just the sticker; merchandizing, product placement, ancillary media (sountracks/interviews/tie-ins), etc are all things commonly aimed for. And even for subscriptions there are players like Apple, who clearly are interested in selling more Apple hardware.
I guess what bothers me about what you're saying is that I don't think it makes sense that every single unit in a company needs to "pay its own way", and on the contrary that sort of reasoning in management is the source of a lot of horrors many of us have experienced in IT. Security say gets cut to the bone because it's "not a revenue generator" and down the road systems get broken into causing tons of costly damage (infuriatingly often externalized too to add salt to the wound). Outsourcing sometimes can be an answer, but that sometimes creates its own major headaches as well. Amazon's size and weight certain give rise to concerns that might be lower elsewhere, but some of the bonuses they bring represent quite genuine economic value, and either way I don't think justify what seems to be a general argument against vertical integration.
It's a different strategy. Prime is an investment up front, so it puts people in the mindset of wanting to come up ahead. By buying full Prime, you've essentially prepaid $120 in shipping costs, so you want to take advantage of it and order more than $120 worth in free shipping. Which means you'll likely shift your non-Amazon purchases to Amazon (especially with free shipping making it a cheaper option for some of your orders), and as a result order more there than you would have otherwise.
My guess is that Prime Video exists as a "gateway drug"; you get it for the videos and then realize that extra $4/month or $11/year will get you free shipping, and then you're back to "if I order $120 worth of shipping, it'll pay itself back" thinking.
>It's a different strategy. Prime is an investment up front, so it puts people in the mindset of wanting to come up ahead
So, Costco? Or other member/buyer-club type things across many industries? It seems to have become somewhat less common, but it's still not remotely a unique idea. Psychologically, even expiring coupons and sales invoke some of that feeling of "use it or lose it".
>My guess is that Prime Video exists as a "gateway drug"; you get it for the videos and then realize that extra $4/month or $11/year will get you free shipping, and then you're back to "if I order $120 worth of shipping, it'll pay itself back" thinking.
It's interesting you have that perspective because I've always heard and experienced it as the opposite, though I haven't followed it for a while. Prime of course started based fully around shipping, and it has seemed fairly common for a lot of old Prime users at least to never use any other Amazon services at all despite them really, really pushing them. I never have either personally fwiw. If you're doing enough business with Amazon (~$5.1k+/year) it's also probably more direct to just use their dedicated card I guess.
And there's a reason upfront costing has faded in general, it's usually discouraging rather then encouraging. Causation seems more likely to flow the other way: somebody looks and sees they're doing quite a lot with Amazon already, and then decides to try to further leverage it. Of course, Amazon certainly wants to encourage this and support it so that customers don't "grow out of them", and being a full fat full service provider probably can aid them in retention. I'm not sure all this supports the original contention however.
> It's a different strategy. Prime is an investment up front, so it puts people in the mindset of wanting to come up ahead. By buying full Prime, you've essentially prepaid $120 in shipping costs, so you want to take advantage of it and order more than $120 worth in free shipping.
Some retailers do this too, mainly warehouse clubs (e.g. Costco and Sam's Club).
>That is a strategy only available to... monopolies.
I'm not sure I agree with your characterization of that as a monopoly strategy, and I'm also genuinely curious how you know those are "negative margin" services. To the first, the strategy seems more about vertical integration than monopoly per se. Plenty of businesses aim to make a profit overall, but either have an outright strategy of loss leaders or more commonly have individual services that are absolutely necessary to the rest of the business yet are not profitable in and of themselves. And if the opportunity comes to leverage some of those internal divisions to some degree it can be completely reasonable.
To the first, the console market would be an example of a competitive sector (at least since the mid-90s) where players have quite fairly run one part at an initial loss (hardware in the first few years) with the plan to make it up on add-ons. They can further average break-even or profit over the product lifespan, because the hardware functionality is fixed but will be vastly cheaper to manufacture in Year 7 vs Year 1.
To the second, it's not uncommon at all for a business to require a certain amount of internal hardware or services for operations that is sitting idle a fair amount of the time, generates no direct revenue, or both. This is part of the whole logic behind cloud computing, or the constant tension of critical IT being seen as a "cost center". There isn't much minimal size for that to be the case either, even a small company may easily have a share of underutilized kit. In those cases, the marginal cost can be extremely low, even near-zero. If it can be turned into any sort of useful service or value-add at all with low enough overhead then it's still of value.
So I'm concerned your formulation is overly reductive of any company to its parts. The vertical strategy has real advantages as well as disadvantages, gains that are quite genuinely win-wins which is why they work. For AWS for example, that's a core business for Amazon and also something they require for their own activities. How much of the capacity is sitting idle at any given time so they can be prepared for when actual high priority customers need to spin things up? They certainly require significant margin to respond to variations in demand. Video encoding seems like a great way to fill troughs and average things out, since it can easily be run low priority, and the marginal cost is going to just be the electricity running chips at full vs power saving. Compared to all the cost of having the datacenter and hardware and staff supporting it at all, even just sitting around doing nothing, that's probably a pretty low fraction. Is video coding actually costing Amazon money vs what value they gain, or is it simply an area where they quite genuinely can do it for less, putting otherwise idle necessary capacity to use? And what about Azure or GCP, or even someone just running dedicated encoding hardware? How does Amazon have a monopoly on compute? If they're merely able to do it cheaper thanks to scale, what exactly is the problem? If they raised prices above what competitors or someone could do themselves where is the lock-in for video encoding?
>To compete with Amazon, you have to learn from them, and be prepared to adopt their practices as the new industry norm.
Amazon has taught me to go out of my way to buy directly from manufacturer or a reputable retailer that doesn't offer third party sellers on their website.
I don't want to save 10%, 20%, even 50% to risk any chance of getting some counterfeit crap. Hopefully, there will be sufficient customers like me to make it economical to offer quality, vetted goods at whatever price it takes. Sadly, I see even target.com now allows third party sellers.
I wouldn't care about third party sellers if the retailer explicitly mentioned they don't commingle and allowed me to restrict all of my searches to items procured, shipped, and sold directly by the retailer.
>We will not be required to physically mark or segregate Units from other inventory units (e.g., products with the same standard identification number) owned by us, our affiliates or third parties in the applicable fulfillment center(s).
>other orgs heavily micromanage or have structures that create more politics than value
Isn't it hard to generalize like this? Consider Apple under Jobs: arguably Apple succeeded because of Jobs micromanagement because Jobs had (to quote Bill Gates) "great taste". Without that unifying sense of taste, you get something like Google, which is quite data-driven, and which doesn't have any unifying personality.
Although, in a way it feels funny drawing general conclusions from observations of unicorns which are, by definition, extremely rare and unique. It feels akin to cargo-culting.
I think the problem is actually what Steve Jobs had once mentioned [1]. Companies get taken over by sales/marketing teams as a company grows in size, and the product/customer focused people get removed from the decision making.
The quality of the companies products then stagnate or rot, as the product people are always in a rush to meet the requests of upper management - who of which have no idea what it takes to make a good product. So everyone's being micromanaged to meet stupid metrics - rather than the outcome - a good product.
As so it's not so much about micromanagement, as so much as having the best decision makers throughout the company. But none of this matters much when you're big, or have a monopoly...
For Jobs-era Apple, your incentive is to make something Jobs liked and the only reason that worked was because Jobs had great taste (subjective ofc) and a strong vision of what he wanted.
Amazon is very very focused on outcomes and that's what incentives a lot of decisions. Being data-driven is a tool to understand and measure the outcomes and inform decisions.
Google from the outside may be data-driven but data-driven to do what?
Jobs wanted to make a great phone, amazon wants to be your everything store, Google wanted to organize the world's information but the company has far exceeded that original goal and it's not clear what they want to do now.
That's what we keep seeing products that seem to exist for their own sake in many companies imo and those products struggle to find footing and die with no learnings.
Interesting point, particularly in light of their history of starting up products only to kill them off 2-5 years later. One could say they are data-driven to sell ads, but that's almost overly broad and makes it hard to explain niches like self-driving cars.
It seems to me that when it comes to growing and scaling their successful products, Google is data-driven. However when bringing new products to market Google basically has been driven by what leadership thinks is interesting/important, instead of analyzing what the market wants.
Sometimes they hit a big opportunity like Gmail and it grows like crazy, but a lot of the time there's actually no market for their product, or the technology is nowhere near ready to work at scale. This leads to a lot of canceled projects.
I think the idea that Jobs had "great taste" is a myth. What he was good at was implementing an all-encompassing product strategy that established Apple products as status symbols. I don't think it's an accident that Apple "arrived" in the late 90s. Why? Because that's when their experience with education enterprise could be combined with the broad marketing lessons to be learned from products like Air Jordans.
Apple products were visually-distinctive, but I wouldn't call them beautiful; they were relatively easy to use, though I wouldn't call them intuitive. But because they passed the bar in those two respects - in other words, because Apple products were not ugly nor difficult to use, and therefore not completely repellant on their face - the way was opened for Jobs to execute his coup de grace: positioning (through advertisement, third-party association, and pricing) the iMac, iPod, and eventually iPhone as markers of one's own affluence and taste. Everything else coalesces around that kernel of desirability, whether it's warranted or not. The "unifying sense of taste" of the products themselves is an illusion; what matters is that everyone agrees that Apple is the premium choice, in a society where premium (not necessarily fit) is of utmost importance.
This is why Apple stores and support are so crucial. Every generation of Apple product has a competitor that's more elegant, better-performing, more durable and reliable, better integrated within its own ecosystem, etc. But, again, what Jobs understood was that humanity always trumps engineering in the way our social and cultural hierarchies are constructed. Concierge and community are more desirable - more premium - when problems inevitably arise or UX inevitably fails. They maintain the illusion of usability when usability itself breaks down.
>Every generation of Apple product has a competitor that's more elegant, better-performing, more durable and reliable, better integrated within its own ecosystem, etc.
Just the fact that Apple actually provides software updates for devices for years longer than their competitors seems to disprove at least part of this statement. Their investment in retail stores and customer service is laudable, but to say the iPad has any competition in any of the metrics mentioned above is not true.
I suppose that depends on what device category you place the iPad. To many, it's a particularly hobbled laptop, especially with the advent of 2-in-1s.
>Apple actually provides software updates for devices for years longer than their competitors
This is also debatable. The nature of Apple's sandbox means that it's much harder to find third-party support. A nominal official upgrade that effectively bricks your older device doesn't compare favorably to a PC or phone that can have FOSS replacements installed that actually increase performance.
Why then in other markets are there multiple premium brands? Say for example cars, Lamborghini, Ferrari, Porsche... There is no Apple in that market. Or take watches as another example, so much choice.
Apple is the only company that has nailed the premium computer. Why?
I don't agree that there aren't multiple premium brands within the phone, computer, and media player spaces, but humoring you, I would say that platform lock-in is a factor. If I sell my Ferrari to buy a Lambo, I don't have to find new gas stations and roads to use.
First of all the media player space is dead. Secondly just because Samsung Andriod phones or Dell XPS laptops are nominally premium doesn't mean they are on par with Apple in terms of how they are perceived by consumers. They are also certainly not status symbols. A Lambo or a Ferrari are pretty much on par in the eyes of the consumer for how premium they are and how much of a status symbol they are. Not so with X premium android vs iPhone or X premium windows laptop vs a Macbook.
I think you're right that platform lock-in is one factor. I think the other factor is that Apple uses their own proprietary operating system. They have control all the way down to the hardware level and that gives them an advantage. When I close a MacBook it goes to sleep. When I close a premium Windows laptop there is a fairly high chance it's going to overheat in my bag. This is of course an issue that can be fixed but its only one of many smaller things that make up the whole product. Because Apple consistently gets enough of them right people look past the smaller flaws and see a polished product in a way that is not often seen in consumer electronics.
Not quite. In fact, the premium media player space is essentially the only one that still exists. They're mostly Android-based devices with high-quality DACs for the playback of lossless, high-bitrate music files.
>Secondly just because Samsung Andriod phones or Dell XPS laptops are nominally premium doesn't mean they are on par with Apple in terms of how they are perceived by consumers.
I disagree. Microsoft's Surface line is also seen as premium, and Lenovo's Thinkpad line is still considered to offer top performance for business and enterprise customers. In phones, Apple is not unassailable in the US, and outside it, deals with heavy competition from Samsung and Chinese brands.
>I think the other factor is that Apple uses their own proprietary operating system.
Niche market for audio enthusiasts is the same as dead next to the old market. I'll admit that the surface line up is closing the gap but they are still not there yet in terms of brand recognition. As for Samsung and the Chinese brand phones my old point still stands, they are not status symbols, the latest iPhone is.
I'm not a fanboy, I have plenty of qualms with Apple. For example they run their new MacBooks so hot that they are constantly throttling. The lack of 32 bit support on Catalina is a pain in the ass and Apple won't let anyone else repair their machines which is BS. I personally use an Android because iPhones are way overpriced but I have a MacBook because I need it for work (React Native). I'm not arguing that Apple is the best I'm arguing that they have a brand image that is well above the competition in a way that you don't see in other markets.
I am not sure how Google is data-driven. Many decisions look like emotional/political rather than data-driven. On top of that, because Google's primary business is, ads it does not matter how badly they do in any other business unit. Once executives had enough, they are going to cancel the product and call it a day. I lost how many Google services got canceled this way.
These sound like platitudes. And in particular the claim of Amazon's tremendous autonomy for workers doesn't even ring true to me (though I could be wrong since I'm basing this on anecdotal conversations with Amazon engineers).
I think there are real, deterministic reasons why Amazon is successful (other than its unscrupulous practices) but I'm not sure your comment adequately covers them. It's hard to make these determinations post hoc because they are not easily falsifiable.
Engineering teams at Amazon does indeed have a lot of autonomy. I have been part of multiple teams over a fairly long periods of time (7+ years), and it's been my experience every time. There were times when it felt like each team was its own start up, at least when it came to deciding what to build / prioritize.
Agreed, engineering teams are effectively stable startups. You make your own decisions & get compete for funding (recs), while delivering products for other teams. If your team is unable to deliver for a customer team, they might make the solution themselves, and then end of with more recs (growing startup), at which point their team may break up into 2 teams if it gets to large. On the flip side, if you see a need within your greater org or company, you can get buy-in and build a great product for the teams around you.
At least in engineering, there's quite a lot of autonomy. Senior leaders set the overall vision/objective, but in the end it is up the engineers and product managers to figure out what actually to work on.
I think the characteristics you mention to be mostly meaningless to be honest.
To think Amazon doesn't have internal politics doesn't sound too believable.
I think Amazon had a very good business strategy and that has foremost been expansion at any cost, extending reach even at a loss by having multiple revenue streams. They leveraged the tendency for convenience in a fast world where everyone works hard, not just at Amazon. Solid business strategy, but the factors about incentives sound exotic to me.
> Not just dismiss them as some relentless and heartless evil empire.
This sentence could be straight from the middle of the last century and probably the cradle of literature. I am sure you will find many comparable quotes.
<Some "relentless and heartless" decisions need to be made, John>.
I'm pretty sure Amazon runs a tight ship, but isn't the real issue just trust? I know i can trust Amazon to deliver the goods and a few other large Amazon-like sites I can also trust but I have had trouble with some smaller etailers so i only use those if i have to. Just this week I had a lunchbox not get shipped because they were out of stock. Not just that (I should not have been able to buy it if they werent able to deliver) but I actually had to email them before they noticed it and paid back the money.
have you talked to engineers who actually work at Amazon? they aren’t exactly running a tight ship.
Market forces can make up for having a dysfunctional culture.
This is roughly analogous to the role of luck in personal success- people say “I must have done something right!” when in reality you have far less control than you imagine
I have plenty of friends who are ex-Amazon engineers, and for all of their (valid) complaints about the place (management, incentive structure, culture, etc.), one thing no one has ever complained about was the efficiency and quality of Amazon’s engineering work. The stuff i heard about their internal build systems alone is straight up awe-inspiring, and that’s even compared to other tech giants (which is where i met most of the ex-Amazonians in the first place).
I think it's hard to generalize about anything as broad as engineering at companies at this scale. It's pretty clear they all have some really good engineering teams, especially on core functions. They also have some much weaker ones, and I've heard stories of flakiness from reliable people from all the big ones.
We're not talking to the same engineers. I hear about vast quantities of unmaintained code, still running, half-forgotten, across codebases in multiple languages, using ancient pre-AWS APIs
Sure, some teams might have their codebase in a really poor condition. Would be hard not to, given the size of the company.
But the core engineering stuff is high quality there. The build system that the whole company uses seems extremely well made. And I doubt that such a core thing can be done so well by a company with an overall poor engineering culture.
And the inverse seems to ring true as well. Even in large companies with overall poor engineering culture, you can find a few small pockets of teams that produce great small stuff. But they are fighting against the overall inefficiency of the company, while with Amazon, the opposite is happening, as poorly performing teams are being boosted by the core things (such as build systems) being done really well.
Interestingly enough, for each anecdote I head about the awe-inspiring internal build system, I hear a story from one of my ex-Amazon friends or coworkers about one time when they had to respond to a page about service for which they lost the source code.
I have a friend who recently managed to spend 6 months without writing a single line of code, just getting shuffled from team to team (within Amazon retail), going to meetings, being reassigned, but not ever really being asked to do anything
You could be right, but you also could simply be suffering from result-oriented thinking. I'm more inclined to believe that Amazon dominates simply because it had a brilliant idea that it executed well at the right time. The reality is that Amazon solidified itself into a monopolistic position, and exploits that advantage in ways competitors can't compete with, first and foremost by selling products at a loss until competitors dry up. Everything about the culture, data driven decisions, management style, may have had little impact at all and is simply dressing up the boring reality.
> To compete with Amazon, you have to learn from them, and be prepared to adopt their practices as the new industry norm. Not just dismiss them as some relentless and heartless evil empire.
Amazon has figured out how to appeal to the typical consumer and keep them real happy.
Exploiting workers, suppliers, distributors, the country it's founded in are some of they way they deliver that promise.
Jeff Bezos is not the monster here - he's just responding to market forces.
Until the fundamental consumer model changes, competing with Amazon is not very logical or effective. It might make people feel good, but not effective.
Your last point is bogus, the other are fine but you’re leaving out just how monopolized Amazon is. They have loads of shady and anti competitive practices, why anyone would overlook them is beyond me.
Maybe there’s just a really big advantage to being the biggest monopoly in the room and whatever management quirks they happen to have are just window dressing?
Who are some of these companies competing with Amazon in your experience?
Are they big, small? What kinds of firepower could they compete with?
Just wondering about the efficacy for these companies of trying to compete against a behemoth like Amazon versus carving out their own niche or redefining their market.
That’s all good; when are they going to take issue with fakes, knockoffs product/review swapping and so on, which, being a data-driven company, they could execute if they wanted to?
Let's also replace them with institutions with either strong unions, worker co-ops, or at least fair trade agreements in place. What good is it to replace one heartless empire with just a different (perhaps slightly less) heartless empire?
> Kind of like how people continue to complain about their cable provider being evil but they don't do anything about it except complain.
> Want to solve your cable provider being evil? Start a cheap WISP. Anyone can do it, yet no one does.
> Complaining is cheap. It takes a lot of work to actually do something.
That "answer" elides so many problems that it smells strongly of BS:
* Most people who complain about their cable company barely have the technical capability to set up their own router, let alone run an ISP.
* Even a small ISP would require thousands to tens-of-thousands of dollars of equipment, very few people have that kind of money laying around to fund a quixotic endeavor like that.
* The person who runs such an ISP will probably have to deal with a significant administrative burden, including things like child porn investigations. The smaller the ISP the more likely the police are to treat the operator as a suspect himself.
* Even if someone's willing to deal with all of the above, they'd still have to sign up their neighbors. It's unlikely many of them are Sancho Panzas.
* etc.
The solution to most monopolies and other over-concentrations of market power isn't small-fry consumers attempting to compete with them directly; that idea doesn't even pass the smell test. The actual solution is some kind of government regulatory action, and the complaining you deride is part of the process to (possibly) make that happen.
> The solution to most monopolies and other over-concentrations of market power isn't small-fry consumers attempting to compete with them directly; that idea doesn't even pass the smell test. The actual solution is some kind of government regulatory action, and the complaining you deride is part of the process to (possibly) make that happen.
You do realize that all the problems you listed exist because of regulation or can also be solved with regulation? Maybe instead of regulating how Comcast does business we should regulate things so it's easy to have many ISPs. That has a lot more benefits than trying to baby sit the one ISP:
* more jobs (many small companies are less efficient than one large company, economy of scale in reverse, leading to more jobs to do the same amount of work)
* better local community impact (decisions that impact the community aren't being made by people living somewhere far)
* more competition (better services, better prices, see some of the places where there's a lot of ISP competition are also the places that have the best cheap Internet and also overlaps with places with not very strong regulation, or enforcement, that directly affects running an ISP)
When I talk about relaxed regulation that affects ISPs I don't mean relaxed labor regulation (minimum wages, benefits), the bulk of the labor costs for an ISP comes from people that are payed much over minimum wage and get good benefits. But I do mean things like copyright strikes/enforcement and other Internet regulations, I mean things that control who and how can install wires, a fair market to rent existing wires and interconnect with existing ISPs.
> You do realize that all the problems you listed exist because of regulation or can also be solved with regulation? Maybe instead of regulating how Comcast does business we should regulate things so it's easy to have many ISPs.
I was mainly just responding to the weird idea that "anyone" who doesn't like Comcast should start their own ISP.
More competition would be great, but I think it'd only occur within some kind of regulatory framework that explicitly encourages it, which I think is along the lines you're thinkging. ISPs are basically natural monopolies that require significant amounts of expensive physical plant to operate. The unregulated free market handles such situations poorly, so some kind of regulation is a necessity even if it's not the current regulatory regime.
It's not the job of the average consumer to conduct antitrust enforcement. That's what governments are for.
The fact that ours is for sale to the highest bidder is problematic, clearly, but the whole point of antitrust as a concept is you can't just start a competitor, because of the predatory anti-competitive actions of the monopolist.
> It's not the job of the average consumer to conduct antitrust enforcement. That's what governments are for.
Ah the "government" playbook.
Life does not work that way. If I want to affect change, I have to get the job done.
The "government" is you and I. There's no group of people up in the sky listening to our complaints.
How many of the people here complaining about Amazon being evil have even written a grievance letter to this "government" that is supposed to step in and stop Amazon from being evil?
People are voting with their wallets and they want cheap consumer products with a great return policy made by sweat shops delivered by people urinating into bottles barely making minimum wage after accounting for overhead.
Every single Amazon customer knows this and they don't care.
> There's no group of people up in the sky listening to our complaints.
Do you not believe the government exists? Regulatory agencies aren't mythic gods, they're law enforcing bodies constructed by the people we vote for in every single election. You don't have to pray to them, you can just write them letters or call them.
Life does work that way, and has always worked that way since the beginning of the US. We have always regulated the market, even from the very first day that this country was founded.
> People are voting with their wallets
Yeah. And they're also voting by actually voting in the real elections that phrase is based on.
It's normal and realistic for government to break up monopolies and force regulations that help the market overall, especially in cases where market forces overall can't be trusted to enforce the same outcomes. We do this all the time; see pollution, price fixing, privacy violation, false advertising, and so on.
Arguably, Amazon itself only exists because of broad Title 2 classifications on the early Internet. No online business can in good faith argue that market regulation is unrealistic or impossible or inherently immoral, when the entire Internet ecosystem is built on top of the exact kinds of market regulation they're protesting: a forced level playing field that was forced by the government even though no individual consumer would have turned down zero-rated, prioritized, or access bundles through their ISPs.
Why did you a few days ago complain that YouTube was banning covid-related content? Shouldn't you have followed your own advice and start a YouTube competitor instead?
There's a lot to unpack here -- people don't always vote with their wallet in their own best interests, because the market introduces a real cost against making purchasing decisions around the long-term instead of the short-term, and because not everything is easy for consumers to quantify with money, and because information disparity exists.
But that's a longer conversation. Ignoring all of that, the ISP argument is really weird to me.
> Start a cheap WISP. Anyone can do it, yet no one does.
Google started their own ISP, and then almost got forced out of the market by crony regulations that made it impossible for them to compete, despite offering a product that across the board was better priced and had higher customer satisfaction. And this is Google, who else in the US market was better positioned to start an ISP?
A big part of capitalist theory is the idea that markets trend towards efficiency. If you believe that ISPs are ruthlessly incompetent, and that the only thing blocking consumers from jumping ship to a better alternative is that nobody else has built one yet, then an efficient market should have solved that problem at some point in the last two decades.
If you're a Capitalist, and you believe there's an obviously underserved market where customers are constantly complaining about their current options, and nobody is stepping into that market even though anybody could -- well, there are two possibilities there:
A) Either the market doesn't actually trend towards efficiency, and all of Capitalism is wrong.
or
B) There's some kind of regulation, monopoly, or other barrier of entry that means ordinary people can't actually step in and easily compete.
Believing in Capitalism means believing that people follow money. You're telling me there's a massive underserved ISP market, everybody already knows that it exists, and that the only reason nobody has stolen every Comcast customer over the past decade is because people today are lazy? That's not how a free market works.
But of course, Capitalism does (at least mostly) work. So once you do the research on ISPs to figure out why they don't have competitors, you start to discover how many states ban community wifi efforts. You discover how many states still don't have decent one-touch-make-ready laws surrounding telephone poles. You find out how much money ISPs are willing to spend to sue and bully competitors out of the market, and how much government money ISPs rely on to keep their services running. You figure out that a lot of the free market businesses you're championing are basically publicly funded utilities that convert taxpayer money into private profits via exclusive government-funded contracts.
And once you discover all of that stuff, you realize that solving those problem requires serious legislative intervention, and it's not actually trivial to just vote with your wallet, and it's not actually that people are lazy or that they just want to complain. Some of the people you think are just complaining are actually working really hard to try and build (through legislative solutions) the type of market you think is going to magically solve the problem.
ISPs are a really good example of how sometimes if you want a legitimately free market, you have to work for it in government, and not just complain that other people haven't started their own business yet.
It is interesting. There is definitely a concerted effort to take Amazon down. I can't really say I am against that outcome. The reason I find it interesting is that is not appear to be some grass root movement of customers ( despite good reasons, in my opinion, to switch ). And if that is the case, the question becomes what is behind that steady stream of anti-Amazon stories. Competitors? Bezos crossed someone too big to cross? My guess is as good as yours.
Amazon is successful because they allow people to order cheap consumer goods real fast, sometimes same day and have a great return policy to boot.
The typical consumer does not care about "Made in U.S.A" vs "Made in China" vs "Made in Taiwan".
They do care whether it's $9 vs $27.
The typical consumer does not care whether the workers were paid fair wages and given enough bathroom breaks so as not to urinate in a bottle to meet strict deadlines.
They do care whether it's $9 vs $27.
The typical consumer does not care whether the IP of a company was stolen and cheap copies were made that were defective and buggy compared to the original product.
They do care whether it's $9 vs $27.
If the $9 product does not work, they can buy 2 more to even break even or just return it and get something cheap instead.
Thus, Amazon has figured out how to appeal to the typical consumer.
Exploiting workers, suppliers, distributors, the country it's founded in are some of they way they deliver that promise.
Jeff Bezos is not the monster here - he's just responding to market forces.
Until the fundamental consumer model changes, competing with Amazon is not very logical or effective. It might make people feel good, but not effective.
Can the competition provide the same product at $9 while doing all the warm and fuzzy things?
>The typical consumer does not care whether the IP of a company was stolen and cheap copies were made that were defective and buggy compared to the original product. They do care whether it's $9 vs $27.
People might not care if they are knowingly buying a counterfeit item, but they certainly do care if they think they are getting a legitimate brand name item and then receive a different (especially inferior) product.
> People might not care if they are knowingly buying a counterfeit item, but they certainly do care if they think they are getting a legitimate brand name item and then receive a different (especially inferior) product.
I personally would be very cautious if I saw a $1500 Gucci handbag on sale for $45 and expected it to be genuine.
Have I come across a $1500 Gucci handbag on sale for $45 and it was genuine? Yes, at an auction because a colleague of mine flips these as a side business.
Would this pricing be available retail? No.
If you're saying someone was sold a $1500 Gucci for $1500 and it turned out to be counterfeit - I feel for them.
Solution: Return it and file a chargeback if the seller does not take returns.
I don't understand the relationship between a made up scenario about a gucci bag and my comment.
Problem # 1 is the cost of returning an item and chargebacks is very high. I (and hopefully many others) are willing to pay a premium to a vendor that performs quality checks on their vendors. It's the whole reason premium brands exist.
Problem # 2 is there exist many items which consumers are not able to easily determine the legitimacy of, for example USB wall outlet AC adapters or batteries and many other small consumer electronic items where inferior parts can be used but are indiscernible to most people.
That's not what happens with Amazon though. You're buying a widget at 10% less than it sells retail at the nearest big box, and what you receive is either a genuine but returned and obviously used item, or a knock off that someone sent in and that was co-mingled with the real SKUs others sent in. Yes, even if you buy "shipped and sold by Amazon".
If you've never seen the original, some knockoffs are very hard to tell apart from the genuine item. They won't perform as well or be as high quality, but if it's your first ever experience with the brand/item, you'll just assume that's what a widget from ACME inc feels like.
In that case, there is no way to tell and it is a lottery whether you get what you pay for or something subpar. It's not as obvious as the 1500$ Gucci bag for 45$ from the back of a pickup on the parking lot.
Warm and fuzzies go away pretty quickly when you get a counterfeit product.
Wal-Mart won the retail game because it won the price war, like you said, but it held the keys to the kingdom for so long because it also enforced a minimum quality standard with suppliers.
Ebay used to be inexpensive and widely used until it was overrun with counterfeits and scams. Amazon is on the same path with it's lax counterfeit enforcement with suppliers and fake reviews.
> Wal-Mart won the retail game because it won the price war, like you said, but it held the keys to the kingdom for so long because it also enforced a minimum quality standard with suppliers.
Wal-Mart is nearly just as guilty of selling shoddy items as Amazon. Wal-Mart has struck deals with brands so that lesser-quality versions of popular products are shipped to Wal-Mart stores than to more upscale shops. These lower-quality versions are not clearly marked as such, and it is difficult for the average consumer to notice how the plastic molding is thinner and less durable – they will only find out when it breaks on them.
> enforced a minimum quality standard with suppliers.
I'm not saying Wal-Mart is top tier quality. The point is that their product quality vetting with suppliers is still magnitudes more than what Amazon does.
> the competition provide the same product at $9 while doing all the warm and fuzzy things?
The other real question is "Will it continue to be legal for Amazon NOT to provide the warm and fuzzy things".
In virtually all other developed countries the answer is NO, but with legal bribery (unlimited campaign contributions & lobbying) the US may never change.
America has a weird wealth worship complex, though maybe worship isn't the right word. It's assumed that if you have wealth you are some sort of genius to be listened to about what's the moral right thing to do.
You also don't get a free pass to cry bloody murder after resisting all market regulation efforts and then having your ass handed to you by Jeff Bezos.
The way different societies organize themselves is they tend to incentivize behavior that is beneficial to their continuation. Society who incentivizes non-beneficial behavior will eventually collapse and be replaced by a more fitting one.
If society is to give out free passes for suboptimal behavior to anyone, it's going to be to those who provide it the most value. Kind of like Amazon does to a lot of people right now.
No, you've just swallowed the marketspeak to the point where you think that societies are actively favoring rational net benefits over short-term, destructive cashouts. Calling unethical behavior on a massive scale "suboptimal" and smoothing over the fallout doesn't make you sound smart and analytical, it means you're not thinking hard enough.
Societies organize themselves and collapse all the time--what exactly makes Amazon beneficial to the continuation of our own? It would be beneficial to think critically about what goes on inside.
> If society is to give out free passes for suboptimal behavior to anyone, it's going to be to those who provide it the most value. Kind of like Amazon does to a lot of people right now.
Right on!
I don't understand why this is so hard to understand.
> A contract killer is also responding to market forces. Sometimes people are willing to pay for things we don't want to allow them, and we judge (and punish) the people who provide them.
I'm not taking a position on monstrosity, or lack there of, but the reasoning provided seems flawed.
The reasoning was provided in context.
It's reasonable to strip a murderer of their physical freedom - it's unreasonable for anyone to do it to you unless you are a murderer.
You would agree that your neighbors or even you are ordering regularly from Amazon, yes?
In other words, your neighbors or even you are explicitly condoning the processes adopted by Amazon, yes?
The reasoning was provided in that context.
If your neighbors are regularly engaging the services of a contract killer, I would perhaps, move.
Is your comment motivated by actual confusion, misguided rhetorical posturing, or trolling? If the first, I'm happy to walk you through the reasoning should camelite's comment prove insufficient.
I don’t think Amazon is doing anything comparable to “murder”, and it’s disappointing that HN discussions are turning into a Reddit like hive mind to downvote and censor discordant views.
RE: “Misguided rhetorical posturing“ and “trolling”.
You’re basically writing indirect personal attacks. If you really wanted to “walk me through the reasoning” you could have just posted that reasoning instead of what you actually wrote.
You are not being downvoted because of a discordant view. I bet most people who downvoted you agree, some of them strongly, that Amazon isn't doing anything as bad as murder.
You're being downvoted because you reacted strongly to something I didn't say.
> If you really wanted to “walk me through the reasoning” you could have just posted that reasoning instead of what you actually wrote.
In a sibling comment, camelite had already provided an explanation that seemed clear to me. My offer was in case confusion nonetheless persisted. Since that seems to be the case, I'll try again.
"Comparable" is a bit of a poor word. It's true that I was drawing a comparison, so in that sense I obviously think they can be compared. But I was not saying "the badness of these things are of similar magnitude." I was saying that the argument raised in defense of Bezos, where we might be undecided as to culpability, would seem to also apply in defense of someone whose culpability we are clear on. The implication being that the argument is weak. If I am correct in that, this doesn't tell us anything about Bezos except that we should use other arguments in deciding what we think of him, ignoring that particular one.
It's proof by contradiction. He's responding to somebody saying that Bezos is not a monster (because) he is just responding to market forces. But if you follow that logic, neither is a contract killer. But a contract killer is a monster. So, by contradiction, Bezos is not acquitted just because he is responding to market forces.
Most companies are not customer obsessed, that's why they fail. Let me give you an example;
I've bought a sofa set from Coleman, and supposedly I needed to measure the door, if the sofa can fix or not. Because of the shape of the hallway and entrance, the sleeper did not fix from door. And carrier guys did not want to push further. Luckily, my patio's door was large enough to fit. I've called Coleman and explained the situation, they demanded extra money from me, to deliver through patio's door, or they were gonna send it back, which I have to pay for shipment and 15% re-stocking fee.
I come from another country, this would never be an issue. No matter what, carrier would deliver inside my home (either through front or back, or patio's door, or window), and never ask for extra.
If I would have bought from Amazon, I'm sure that I could send back, or speak for another delivery option. This is why Amazon is winning, they are customer obsessed, they are there to help, even if they lose money.
>This is why Amazon is winning, they are customer obsessed, they are there to help, even if they lose money.
They are so customer obsessed that I can't trust the brand name AC adapter I purchase from them is made with quality materials from a trusted brand, or if it's a counterfeit sent to their warehouses and commingled with all of the other inventory.
And they're so customer focused that they removed the option to restrict product searches to only show "shipped and sold by Amazon.com".
The only thing their actions show me is that they're obsessed with higher profit margins, which can't be obtained by providing traditional retail services. They can achieve higher profit margins by simply being a platform and collecting a commission of all the transactions.
Amazon would have the sense to have a popup with measurement instructions as they would learn from the first 5 times that happened and take action to ensure it never happened again.
I used to work for a relatively large bank that for years didn't even track what customers were calling our mega call centre about. It took them a long time to realize that 25% of calls were password resets because the button was hard to see. They had recently expanded the call centre and all over a hard to see button.
Amazon lost me as a customer completely. They're not at all customer focused. Their shipping care/quality is horrendous (stuff is damaged all the time). Any non-trivial issues (anything that can't be resolved by refunding money, re-sending the item) have no path to resolution. Amazon.com itself is like a flea market: tons of untrustworthy/counterfeit merchandise, fake reviews everywhere.
Apple is customer obsessed. Amazon is efficiency obsessed.
Refund and replacement aren't always easy depending on where you live or which amazon firm it is (different countries, different contractor company). But that's not even the point, wasted time and headache is not something many want to deal with.
They are so customer obsessed that they sent me 5 defective different products one after another last time I purchased electronics from them (feb). In the end, I simply gave up and decided I would never buy anything remotely expensive there. The customer rep didn't do anything. I needed a laptop urgent but the laptop came wrong twice and after emailing jeff (because their customer rep didn't do anything for days mentioning warehouse investigation). I got some indian guy who forgot about me again after telling me to wait a few days. Then another indian guy taking his place told me to wait, that repeated until march of 10-15th. Copy paste responses looking like spam. (gmail even put one of their email in my spambox)
I got nothing in the end and wasted damn time with customer support + money stuck twice... since refunds take time to appear.
Not that I, too, find it ridiculous that the delivery person doesn't take a minute to try and get it into your house another way instead of bringing it all the way back, but do note that restocking and delivery fees are real. Amazon does free shipping not because it makes them more money but because they know the competition doesn't have as deep pockets.
A podcast from "the university of Flanders" (which is more than one university, but alas) talked about this and that free shipping offers are ways to bind customers but that it's typically not actually viable with current profit margins and just an attempt to squeeze others out of the market. (If someone speaks Dutch/Flemish and cares for the original, I could probably find it again.)
These days when Sweden is often touted as “the experiment”, you can actually go there to see what e-commerce looks like in 2020 without Amazon. It might sound crazy but there is... no Amazon.
If I go to amazon.se I end up at amazon.de
There is no same day delivery of household products (like toilet paper). If I want a book I need to go to an online bookstore.
Same in the Netherlands, it was recently announced that Amazon will open a Dutch store (not sure when) but it was quite a shock for me when moving to Germany that people here have no clue how to order things other than by going to Amazon. Too much effort to use google and try different web shops if all the web shops can come to a monopolizing marketplace instead I guess? Too bad that the marketplace also competes with its own sellers and has deeper pockets than any of them because they all pay the Amazon tax on every purchase anyway.
I'm trying to avoid it but between my poor German and few web shops catering to the tiny non-Amazon-going audience, it's hard.
In Germany there are a lot of price comparison sites, geizhals and idealo being just two examples. If I am looking for electronics the filtering capabilities of geizhals are way better than Amazon and it is often the case that I can get a better price in one of the many other web shops.
Same in Sweden. What’s missing is the rock bottom pricing, simple listing and cheap delivery for more everyday items such as cables, toilet paper, ...
The price comparison sites tend to be good for books, electronics etc but not food etc.
I don’t need Amazon for books or computers but I envy those who can get a cable for $5 with shipping in a few hours when in a pickle. In that situation I have to go to the physical store.
Geizhals is really crappy compared to the Tweakers Pricewatch I was used to, but yes I use that one to at least narrow down the comparison. Still, thanks for the tip!
Amazon.de delivers to the Netherlands and Poland, for example. They offer Prime for the Netherlands too. And you can set language to English.
No Amazon would mean I’d have to use comparison sites, make a bunch of accounts on different websites, pay for shipping each time, and make more orders in total. I’m beyond happy that Amazon.de works perfectly for Poland. I see almost no upside to the alternative.
It’s significantly harder to shop there, especially as an American. I found the same products I would get on Amazon to be 2 or 3x the price when I would shop in stores or online there excluding VAT and exchange rates. Maybe it allows more competition? But it surely isn’t an easier, cheaper experience in general. And as far as not being a Swedish speaker(which many people in Sweden are not), online shopping is even harder because the e-commerce options there tend to primarily work in Swedish, and have limited or no English support
Amazon.de does free delivery to Sweden, but it is not next-day of course.
To me the idea for ordering toilet paper online is a bit foreign. In order to collect the package, I would have to go to my local store, where they already sell toilet paper.
An increasing number of sites are offering next delivery in major cities like Stockholm by partnering with Budbee or Airmee, usually at no extra charge. Same day delivery? It's rare and probably a more expensive delivery option only available in Stockholm.
Ultimately, I think that the small market size, taxes and staffing costs are why lots of international brands - Amazon included - skip Sweden as a market or fail to make an impact after many years.
Lately (since the start of the COVID crisis), I find Amazon has become much worse. 2-week deliveries instead of 2-3 days, prices that are way too high, a lot of items out of stock, etc. For instance, I was looking at a cordless drill, and it was twice the price of Home Depot.
Maybe Amazon will just fall on its own at some point.
It's common to dogpile on whoever's in the lead. I wish companies would just learn from Amazon and emulate the good parts.
All the news articles about worker safety are about Amazon, but in my local grocery store chains, I see a total lack of masks and social distancing by workers.
When he went and talked about AIDA - and presented the Swiffer video (which was great) - I was anticipating the classic scene from Glengarry Glenn Ross (aka Death of a Fucking Salesman).
The most obvious problems I face with Amazon are due almost entirely to how it's built and how it runs its third-party seller platform. There are duplicate product listings, fake products, fake reviews, and mixed inventory now to the extent that even buying something where "Amazon" is listed as the seller does not prevent you from getting inventory sourced by one of the third-party sellers of the same product. Because of this, I've found myself more and more going to alternatives where I can actually know and trust the retailer and supply chain. I long for the pre-platform Amazon days.
The news that Amazon has also abused sellers on their platform should shock nobody. As soon as they got into selling house brands, the writing was on the wall. Ironically, I can actually trust Amazon's house brands to at least be legitimate, non-fake products even if they do tend to be cheaply made.
If you’re trying to buy anything on Amazon right now, you’ll likely be frustrated by shipping times. It’s super inconsistent. For example, I got a keyboard delivered to me next day, but if I wanted to have cloth delivered it would take a month. So I’ve started sourcing things that I want to buy directly from the manufacturers.
I really like the Shopify model, as they (currently) don’t compete with their customers unlike Amazon. I was rather surprised that I didn’t see more Shopify stores at some of the sites that I bought things from recently. My one recent example (a ski movement analysis sensor called Carv) was incredible - one click checkout using Apple Pay without having to enter anything to order. I’m hopeful that we can get a credible competitor to Amazon for independent manufacturers in the near future.
Personally, this is the issue with the largest effect on my willingness to try other e-commerce sites. When 1-2 day shipping becomes normal, it's hard to want to shop somewhere else like eBay when shipping times are usually in the 1-2+ week time frame. So when Amazon started telling me it would be 3-4 weeks before I got what I ordered (because apparently their definition of essential doesn't overlap completely with my own), I started looking other places.
At least at the moment, amazon is the only online shop operating here in the UK (also, Union coffee). 20 years ago, they were the only place with a website. Now they're the only place who can keep that website working and keep the infrastructure behind it working.
Is modularisation really an answer or is this another case of "A Hundred Authors Against Einstein"? The reason why many people are still driven to Amazon is that dealing with separate entities is just annoying as hell. Small business is definitely less reliable than Amazon and even if client service has been declining, it's still has a predictable baseline. Product search also seems to be working much better in Amazon than in web search engines. If I have to choose between one average retailer and 100 better-and-worse retailers, then I will still use Amazon.
Also - the long tail exists almost exclusively on Amazon.
I have a lot of issues with Amazon in terms of worker treatment, etc - but admittedly, out of all the online shopping I've done, I still go back to Amazon because I get items delivered quickly, the prices in most categories (as a Prime member with free shipping) are still competitive with only the occasional exception, and every return I've done so far has been super easy.
Despite its problems, it's still for sure the best shopping experience online overall for me, as much as I hate that to be true
If the competition involves other Trillion-or-so USD companies, than this is another step in the process of concentration of capital in society - as is the ascendance of Amazon. The amount of power Amazon already has in society is obscenely huge - even if it's not expressed in the form of giant portraits of Jeff Bezos hanging from the sides of buildings.
Would be nice to see more competition, but not because of prices or selection but because we want small nice-guys/girls to have a significant presence. If google and other huge companies are the competition, it doesn’t really improve that
Shopify is cool for that: enables a ton of tiny online businesses to thrive
Google has been the starting shopping point for me, not Amazon. Probably because:
1. Easy to access - I just need to type the item I want in browser address bar
2. I feel Google is relatively quicker at returning result - couple hundred millisecond that I can feel
3. I usually do find what I need in Google result
At this point I'd argue it's better to shop at alibaba or aliexpress. Sure it might come from China, and sure it might be fake or broken, or a scam, but at least you _know_ you might get screwed.
I use a website called "Fakespot" to help identify all the spam. It isn't perfect though, but it helps to get a good idea on who is filling their products with fake reviews.
First, WordPress stuck with React after Facebook made the smallest licensing concession, then WordPress coordinated with Google developers on the WordPress.org source code to integrate with AMP, and now WooCommerce is partnering with Google, which of course they would feel compelled to do via a kind of prisoner's dilemma with their competitor, Shopify.
People tend to deride WordPress source code on a technical level, but they forget about it and the ecosystem's importance as _free_, GPL tools that power over 1/4 of the web. Google is swinging its full weight into undermining this ecosystem so that it can turn WordPress.org source code into more ad real estate.
Well now here we are. Fake reviews, counterfeit products, most things (IME) are actually FBA or just outright 3rd party sellers (not automatically bad, but more opportunities for problems), their prices aren't competitive anymore...
So, they've still got a lot of selection, although it's really more like shopping at a bazaar, since really their website is almost nothing more than Ebay in some sense, and I will say their customer service has almost w/o exception been stellar. But that's not enough anymore.
We'll see. Nothing lasts forever. Either Amazon will get the wakeup call and tighten its ship, or it will become the next Ebay/Myspace/Craigslist (I'm deliberately just throwing the kitchen sink here).
One last footnote -- just within the last week or so, 2 Amazon tech products that I've praised -- the Ring Doorbell and the Eero router(s) -- had firmware problems. Ring bricked itself (firmware update gone wrong) and had to be RMA'ed (they did it w/o any problem, and this was almost 2 years after purchase). The Eeros went into a cycle of resets and couldn't update their firmware.