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.
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.