I find that 20 years ago I shopped at Amazon for the low prices, but 2020s+ I shop at Amazon due to their logistics.
The problem for everyone else is not simply that Amazon ships quickly, I almost don't even care about that. The thing is that Amazon ships & delivers on a reliable predicted schedule. When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does. I shop at specific competitors who can do similar (B&H, Sweetwater, etc).
Many online stores big & small in the year 2026 will still take days to even send shipment info, followed by using unreliable carriers that miss ETAs.
I would even be OK with these stores giving a narrow range or probability "90% of the time this arrives between Tuesday & Wednesday".. But I am not in the mood to order stuff that may arrive in 2-10 days with very little clarity on which end of the range.
Got a dud? Quality not as expected? Ordered two by mistake? Size is not fitting? Take it to nearest post office, scan a qr code and hand it over. Done.
The other day I had to pack a product not bought from Amazon, then drive 25 minutes to a specific company's drop off point at some weird opening hours...
And that's after it took me to write manual email to get return label...the entire process took multiple weeks. And then a few more weeks until getting the refund.
At this point, I'm happy to pay 10% extra just to buy from Amazon.
I agree, returns are where amazon crushes it. I feel like there should be some startup just focusing on making the perfect returns product for small brands. Just do anything including at home pickup and then figure out how to optimize later.
My little experience with Amazon is that quality assurance has been moved to the customer. It is on you to see that a product is wrong/not what you wanted.
> At this point, I'm happy to pay 10% extra just to buy from Amazon.
As the article states, you are paying more than 10% extra because Amazon. And everybody else too.
I had to return iSpring RO system bought through their official portal. It came as a shock to me that I had to pay for shipment that was 70% of the contents value. IMO that's the way to discourage returns.
I used to feel this way about Amazon returns. Then a seller sent me the wrong item and Amazon rejected the return and re-charged me and I've been trying to get my money back for over a year. I do think it will only be one more phone call, but I have thought that with every phone call. It's less than $50 but it's ridiculous. It has happened before that a seller would send me the wrong thing, which isn't great, but at least they would refund me. They have made this experience so tedious and frustrating, I'm sick of it and have moved all my physical purchases elsewhere.
This doesn't work for all of their items- some have to go to a larger Amazon return location, and you must provide packaging. I'm not sure what triggers this.
> Got a dud? Quality not as expected? Ordered two by mistake? Size is not fitting?
I totally agree, but I find the quality of the items I get off of Amazon to generally be a lot less than other places I chose to shop. Likely due to the fact that I intentionally shop on other sites for specific products but on Amazon I get things that just aren't necessary for me so I spend less time curating the purchases.
Yeah, returning ends up being the clencher for me for a lot of Amazon stuff.
If I think there's basically no likelihood of me returning something, I'll sometimes shop elsewhere, but for anything where there's even a chance of me not liking it for whatever reason I will buy on Amazon now.
i'm happy to pay a convenience fee to not have to set up an account to order from each individual store. having my address and payment info in one centralized superstore is way better than having it spread around dozens of niche businesses
apple pay is pretty damn convenient and seemingly secure. open a webpage and scan the apple qr like code and it's all done without much worry. maybe there's a mitm attack but i feel like you have a better shot at getting a refund from apple(i admit i've only used it a few times and nothing substantial or expensive)
i believe it also autofilled the address form for me.
I was floored the other day doing an Amazon return. It was a rented office space, with just a window where you drop off your item to a clerk. I peeked inside it was floor to ceiling packages and toys and items. And there was a line behind me.
The sheer logistics and human will that made that possible is crazy to me.
Extrapolate to multiple locations in Miami alone. Then Florida. Then East Coast. Then USA. Then Europe. Global locations.
Who is in charge of all this? How do they keep track of all this? How do they identify a tiny little podunk location is fucking up and how do they find someone they can trust to run it?
It's crazy! Think about it next time you return something to Amazon.
As I understand it they just stop there. They pallet stuff up and sell it in bulk to someone who then proceeds to part ways with it on eBay or something like that. I think most of the mass market companies do this. Costco is well known for this.
At the online retailers I've worked at (not Amazon) returned items get split into a small number of groups.
A person returns a $5000 RTX 5090? A manager will be paged, who will carry it over to the high value items cage, in full view of the CCTV.
A person who returns a $5 bike light? And that person has also spent $$$$ over the years with a 0.5% return rate? Straight on the pallet of mixed returns without even opening the package.
Medium-value returns and customers with an eyebrow-raising return rate get a medium amount of inspection.
If you own some floor space and want something to do with it then you can join the amazon SPN (service provider network) and offer international returns processor.
The returns processor either boxes up many individual items heading for the same destination into a Master Carton or arranges to dispose of the item somehow depending on how the seller wants their returns handled.
Just bear in mind that if they don't like how often you return or the circumstances, they will issue you a sudden lifetime ban
But also if you go to support chat (not via the order details, which often rejects attempts at getting support) via the site footer, and escalate to an agent, you can tell them you don't have a post office that's easy to get to for you and don't drive etc. and they will just issue you a refund (if it's a quality problem). Done this many times when the product was damaged.
> Just bear in mind that if they don't like how often you return or the circumstances, they will issue you a sudden lifetime ban
I think that if I had to return frequently, I'd find a different vendor well before Amazon would decide they don't want me as a customer.
On the rare occasion I want a return, I've assumed that the reason they handle it without any issue is because they can see my lifetime purchase value vs. my return rate.
Maybe they don't care about my stats I guess but whichever way I'm currently happy in that regard.
I do worry that the competition is being wiped out, but I don't believe in boycotts for idealistic antitrust reasons.
Is your implication that they are cheating Amazon by claiming there is no easy return route? Or are you saying that their many returns drew a ban even when they were being approved for them?
There is too little detail in the GP to draw a conclusion, so this comment seems unfair.
They're accusing me of cheating Amazon and having experienced a ban myself. Neither is the case and my post didn't indicate either being so.
IDK why I'm catching an accusation and downvotes by telling people about Amazon customer support protocols that are internal policy but not documented publicly: that they will ban you for returns past some threshold of frequency and price, and they offer refunds for items that arrive damaged even if they first push you to spend your time returning them instead.
You're suggesting I've been banned for abusing the service?
I've never been banned and I don't abuse it. What I said is also true, that I don't drive etc.
I don't need to have been banned myself to know how they've operated with others. And seeking refunds for goods that were damaged upon arrival is not abuse. There's no need to give in to their first preference to return an item when it is in fact their policy to process refunds for them too, they just hide it behind customer service protocols instead of exposing it in UI. You don't need to settle for the first suggested remediation from a business's customer service to be ethical, or shaming people for escalating. That's just being a chump.
Not accusing you (or the imaginary person who returns many things but can't reach a post office, UPS store, etc, since you've made it clear that isn't you) of abuse. But it makes sense that they are doing analysis and banning customers that look like they're abusing the system, regardless of the truth of the matter. If someone is frequently receiving damaged goods and frequently requesting refunds without returns, that will be flagged for fraud.
I haven’t run into any such coupons, but have heard this complaint about how Amazon as poisoned online retail, holding sellers hostage, countless times now.
I think you're slightly wrong. It's not prices, it's not logistics. Amazon dominates because they have the power & money to do the one single thing their competiton couldn't do without going out of business: No-questions-asked returns. 9 out of 10 people i ask this is the single reason they stay at Amazon.
The flip side to this is I've on multiple occasions had Amazon ship me clearly used shit resold as new — Amazon.com was the seller.
One even came with a sticker: "Thanks for giving this product a second life!"
The worst of the worst among us use Amazon as a try-before-you-buy or rental house. Their lax return policy encourages them.
If I buy anything important, especially expensive electronics, I buy it from somewhere else. If it's a reputable store with a strict return policy, I'm doubly sure there will be no fuckery.
I remember why most of the stuff on the frys shelf was like this. I think it was their downfall and for me i stopped shopping there because of all the broken items. With Amazon at least I don't have a huge cost to drive there and back.
People do it thousands of times a day because tens of millions of people order from amazon each day. But any given person doesn't do it thousands of times, or even hundreds of times. Low tens of times in a year is going to raise alarms in their systems.
I wouldn't believe this until it happened to me. New bedding on prime day - came used and stained. This is fucking disgusting.
Amazon is like - we will send you a replacement but you have to print a label, box it back up and drive to a UPS store to return. Why are we working for them for free? You send me soiled bedding and the reply is to make us do work and then get the product we originally bought.
I tried quitting these people years ago, its hard to do.
For me it was a Noctua fan that had a thick layer of dust built up. Who the fuck returns a $20 fan with thousands of hours of use? And why did Amazon think it was appropriate to send that trash to me when I paid for new??
Just wait until they restrict your returns because of how much you've had to return highly used, or broken, or deliverer abused, or knock-off, or arrived days later than projected products.
Doesn't even take that much for some people to be restricted. I had someone steal one box with maybe $50 worth of stuff off of my porch and Amazon replaced it after a ten minute conversation with customer service, but a year or two later someone stole $10 or so worth of an order of clothes laundry/softener toss travel sheets from me (or they just never shipped and I paid for them) after a particularly larger number of orders (I lived somewhere else by then), and Amazon not only did not offer a refund or replacement, they removed any way to request it. I am not sure what their cutoff is or if it has to do with what warehouse it ships from. Maybe people just lie about laundry supplies a lot? Perhaps the cutoff is more to do with the type of products? I had never ordered that sort of stuff before.
It is rather gross to me that they let people return clothes and shoes that have been tried on. My current pair of like $110 trail running shoes that I bought on Amazon had been tried on when I got them, and I was a bit unhappy with that, but I decided to see that as more like a shoe store sorta thing. Clothes, not so much. I decided after trying the clothes returns policy once (never tried it on) years and years ago that if I do not want to get things preworn, I feel I should practice what I preach. It is a weird policy, at any rate.
Happened to me. I ended up holding the bag for about 400 EUR worth of items. Luckily I had legal insurance that tried to convince Amazon to take it back but they wouldn’t, so the assurance bought the box of stuff off me and refunded me.
Fuck bezos and Amazon. Since then, I always look for alternatives to Amazon to buy my stuff. I’ll use Amazon to see if I like it, return it, and go buy somewhere else. If I know the product I’ll just straight out buy it somewhere else. It’s often the same price or very close.
Some stuff you can’t really and practically get outside of Amazon. I don’t have a choice then. Because their quality is so low, I’ll just get 3–4 similar items and only keep the one that’s passably usable.
I try to cost Amazon as much money as I can. I hate to give them my money but by doing this it feels like I’m getting some payback for the way they treat their customers, employees, delivery people…
Enshittification: Customers get screwed because that's where vendors are (even the terrible ones) and vendors get screwed because that's where the customers are (even the terrible ones.)
Maybe this is a country thing, or tied into one's wider social credit score in the background, or the specifics of something you returned [0], or something else? I've returned plenty of shit and have never had a real problem. I returned over a dozen 32 inch Dell monitors while trying to get 3 that didn't have dead pixels or scratches out of the box. They were stacked on a pallet in my garage waiting for the pickup. You would think this would throw some flags and end up as some kind of fight. But no, Amazon refunded them all in full, no hassle (apart from the hassle of having to do that scale of logistics merely to obtain working products).
(I would have honestly given up earlier, sent them all back, and gone with a different brand. Except there had been a good one in the first tranche of 3 that I let go past its return date. I hadn't thought the actual failure rate was going to be > 80%)
[0] On my personal account I did have a big red scary warning for a while about "restocking fees", that I think had been prompted by returning a motherboard after having tested it (yet another poorly described product with no way to find out the IOMMU groups short of buying it). I have no idea if it was merely that I had opened/tested a computer component, or if it had gotten smashed up on the way back, or what. But eventually that nag screen did go away.
That used to be the case until about a year ago, but isn't the case anymore at least here in Ireland. I'm taking them to small claims court because they closed my account without a refund on a legitimate return. Their customer support has gone from excellent to nearly nonexistent. Fortunately for me, I've kept all the receipts.
I distrust Amazon for anything over about £150 now. Which seems to coincide with their threshold for needing an OTP.
The last straw was getting a blood pressure monitor (which they don’t even sell) in place of £400 smart glasses. They insisted I returned the monitor, then said I failed to return the glasses. Took months for them to refund me.
> 9 out of 10 people i ask this is the single reason they stay at Amazon.
9 out of 10 I ask say it's about reliable delivery (not necessarily next day).
Most people order things because they need them and have read the reviews, not because they are speculating at something they may need or are ok with getting something else. Clothing being a notable exception, unpredictably sized and variable quality, which nobody is happy about.
The ease of returns was a huge factor in the early success of Walmart, as well. I worked there in high school and college (99-02 timeframe) and they harped on how much the customer was right for returns, unless it was just blatant fraud. if there was a chance the customer was not trying anything you just give them their money back
I’ve only ever returned two things to Amazon: a counterfeit laptop battery (claimed to be an official part, had 30% lower capacity than labelled), and an unbearable replacement laptop keyboard (2KRO rather than the original’s NKRO, with horrific ghosting, a couple of keys that would stick if not pressed completely straight, and a space bar that had to be hit just so to activate at all). Neither of these products would have been available without Amazon, and that would have been a good thing.
Weird. I think I might have made three returns to Amazon in 30 years of ordering from them. I research the shit out of just about everything I buy, if I have to return something it's because I either got very cleverly scammed or had a literal stroke before I made the purchase.
I frequently have to return clothing because there's absolutely no way of figuring out which size will fit you since nothing about sizes is standardized.
And there's just a lot of stuff that research can't tell you. Sometimes listed dimensions are incorrect or missing. Sometimes it turns out that you buy a simple electronic device that seems like it will do what you need but it emits a high-pitched beep noise every time you press a button that drives you nuts and you're going to return it because of that. There are so many things that just simply are not captured in a product description, and sometimes are not captured by user reviews.
I've just ordered an inexpensive steering wheel to use with a racing game. And everything I can find online is contradictory as to whether it suffers from a dead zone problem or not. I simply cannot tell if the people complaining about the dead zone have missed where it can be configured or if it's a problem with the hardware itself. So literally the only way I can figure it out is by ordering it and trying it out and then returning it if it has a dead zone problem.
There are plenty of things that you just have to return that cannot be solved with research and have nothing to do with being scammed. Which is why returns are a big part of the economy and a big part of customer service.
>I frequently have to return clothing because there's absolutely no way of figuring out which size will fit you since nothing about sizes is standardized.
I used to take advantage of Amazon's return policy by deliberately buying 3 sizes of the same item (1 below and 1 above my expected size) because clothing manufacturers are not consistent with their sizing. I can then try them all at home to choose best size and return the other 2 that don't fit. I did this for pants, shoes, etc. This really seemed great because I hate going to the store and changing clothes in fitting rooms.
However, I stopped doing this many years ago because I found out that some online retailers like Amazon do not restock the returned items for re-sale and instead, throw it away so it eventually ends up in a landfill. In those cases, the sellers just eat the cost of unsold goods that got thrown out.
It seemed illogical to throw away perfectly good clothes that are still NEW but somebody explained that Amazon does this because they're paranoid about bodily fluids etc tainting the returns. So to play it safe, they just throw away the returns.
I have no more insider knowledge of how Amazon operates than you do, but judging on the amount of items I’ve received that were clearly used (stains, other people’s hairs, dust, dirt…) but sold as new I’m fairly certain they’ll resell everything that gets returns without even looking at the items.
I've returned clothes on Amazon and they told me just to keep it. I assume that's the equivalent of them just sending it to landfill. At least I can donate it to a local charity.
Also Zappos was clearly founded on the idea of ordering 3 pairs of shoes and keeping the one that fits. They say the returns go back for sale unless used and then go to charity/reuse, but happy to see other sources you have. I think a lot of that Zappos dna went into Amazon's policies.
I hate to break it to you, but this is true of returns across a lot of companies and product categories. If you return unopened wine to Costco, for example, they throw it out because they can't guarantee that you stored it properly.
>If you return unopened wine to Costco, for example, they throw it out
The food and groceries I already knew about. However, Amazon throwing out returned clothes was a surprise because I've seen clothing retailers like Macy's just put the returned items right back on the rack for re-sale. When you go to a shore store, they don't throw out every pair of shoes that customers tried on and didn't buy. So I just thought Amazon just did the same thing at their warehouse. I've also returned car wax to an OReilly's Auto store and I watched the clerk just put the bottle right back on the shelf for the next customer to buy.
It was disconcerting to find out I was adding to the landfill just because I returned clothes to Amazon. Nowadays, I don't order clothes from them unless I'm 100% sure I won't be returning it.
> because I found out that some online retailers like Amazon do not restock the returned items for re-sale and instead, throw it away so it eventually ends up in a landfill
This was essentially false, and FUD spread by the anti-Amazon crowd.
You will observe official Amazon Resale listings for many items, which is precisely Amazon restocking the returned items. For goods of any signficant value, it is bizarre to suggest that Amazon wouldn't be reselling them. Like, it's ludicrous to suggest they're tossing a $50 shirt instead of reselling it, as long as the return is in resale condition.
What Amazon sends to landfills is when items (mostly third-party seller items) aren't selling and the seller doesn't want to keep paying for warehousing or to have them shipped elsewhere so Amazon sends them to landfills. Because nobody is buying the items, there's no demand for them. Not everything sells.
Wherever you got the idea that they're paranoid about body fluids, that's somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about. People make up all sorts of things. That's why that have a small army of people inspecting returns.
>You will observe official Amazon Resale listings for many items, which is precisely Amazon restocking the returned items.
To clarify, I'm already aware Amazon re-sells returns. I often buy "Used Like New" electronics from Amazon Resale which are obviously customer returns that Amazon re-boxed. However, the category of clothes is different where it customer returns are often thrown out.
>What Amazon sends to landfills is when items (mostly third-party seller items) aren't selling and the seller doesn't want to keep paying for warehousing or to have them shipped elsewhere so Amazon sends them to landfills.
No, that's not the full story. What's also happening is that a seller has different options for Amazon's reverse logistics and they have different costs.
E.g. pay $1.50 for Amazon to inspect and resell or pay a lower $0.52 to throw it away. A lot of sellers just pay 1/3rd less and let Amazon throw it out.
That possibility of me inadvertently adding to landfills is enough to stop me from buying 3 sizes and returning 2. Maybe in some circumstances the other 2 returned items won't be thrown out -- but I can't know for sure so I won't do it. I'll continue to buy clothes from Amazon but only do so when I'm 100% sure I'm going to keep it no matter what.
If you're talking about some $4 item then sure. But most clothing on Amazon isn't $4. If you're buying $30 or $60 items then they are most definitely having them inspected.
Because it's not about $1.50 for inspection vs $0.52 to throw it out.
It's about -$1.50 + $8 profit = $6.50 gain for inspection vs. -$0.52 + $0 profit = $0.52 loss for throwing it out.
You're missing the entire resale price on the return. Companies aren't leaving money on the table. They are looking to maximize profit and minimize losses. In most places, sending resellable stock to the landfill isn't doing that.
On the surface of it, it would appear not to make sense. Why would Amazon take on the cost of handling a return item that they will have to dispose? They could just indicate to the user to keep the item --- and that in fact does happen! I had a return like that just this past week.
However, there is an obvious incentive to minimize these no-return refunds and require users to print labels and go through the motion of returning items that won't be restocked.
It discourages fraud: people abusing the no-return refund as a way of getting free stuff!
The no-return refund has to be a kind of perk for the customer who rarely returns anything or whatever.
I would say that it would be astonishing if Amazon pretending to accept returns and then throwing away is a thing that absolutely does not happen, and honestly cannot blame them for it. We are a throw-away-stuff society, and Amazon is not outside of that society.
> We are a throw-away-stuff society, and Amazon is not outside of that society.
What Amazon does with returns doesn't have anything to do with what kind of "society" you think we are.
What it does with returns is determined by the profit motive.
And in most cases, the more profitable thing to do is to resell returned merchandise. Yes, return inspections cost money, but usually less money than what is gained by reselling the item.
Returned merchandise has value, and businesses don't make profit by throwing value away when they can make money with it or reduce losses with it instead.
I genuinely don't understand all the people who think it's more cost-effective for Amazon to send a $50 shirt to the dumpster rather than resell it. That's not how anything works.
What individuals do is also motivated by profit or profit-adjacent motives. Saving money is a profit motive; so is saving time and convenience.
> It's more cost-effective for Amazon to send a $50 shirt to the dumpster rather than resell it.
It's not a $50 shirt. It's like a $5 shirt to them, which some sucker is willing to pay $50 for. Used, it becomes a $10 shirt.
A dumpster can be found right in the neck of the woods of where the returning customer lives, whereas it may have to travel far and pass through more processing if it goes to another customer elsewhere.
It needs to be inspected, repacked.
There is a risk in every returned item. Sometimes people return a perfectly good item. But sometimes it's because there is something wrong with the item, such that the next buyer is also likely to return it, even if they get it cheaper.
Basically returned items are entirely outside of the profit-optimized delivery path. They incur costs and risks, at a reduced revenue.
I'd never return an item which matches the description and isn't damaged.
If it isn't damaged in any way but does not match the description, that's a problem; if it is sold with the same description, the next customer will also see that it doesn't match. A new listing has to be created for that product. Not gonna happen, or not in the processing time frame of that particular return.
I think the general internet user doesn't actually do this. Slightly different use case but I worked at maximizing revenue/customer lifetime value at a streaming company and the biggest revenue win project I worked on was just preselecting the most expensive plan.
I was surprised since I usually do research and stuff on the options. But it turns out a lot of people just click next until they can start watching some tv.
There's nothing weird about it. A liberal return policy is not because they expect people to make many returns, it is so that customers will make their purchases without worrying and therefore make more purchases.
They became big, cause they had their customers first. They were tough to negotiate good prices and put customer experience quite forward. Any complaint and they replaced stuff, not many questions asked.
They then invested heavily in logistics, so now they could replace their support to annoying bots and use their market position to increase their margin.
FYI, when someone else says "this is why I do this thing", you don't get to argue with that. You don't get to tell other people what their opinions are. Psycho.
Most of the people I know would rank predictability is #1, price #2 and ability to do returns #3 (as a data point: I don't even remember last time I did a return, was years ago). Really depends on who your connections are and their specific needs I reckon.
In my experience, the customer-friendly return experience is withering. I ordered a small table about a year ago that didn't ship with the correct hardware. I literally could not assemble the thing as documented in the instructions.
I had to call to get a refund; admittedly, I think I may have been slightly outside the ordinary return window. The customer service representative was pretty reluctant to accept it, somewhat heavily suggesting that I didn't assemble it right.
I actually just recently cancelled my Amazon Prime, which I've had for probably 10+ years. Not solely based on this one experience, but a general decline in how much perceivable value I actually get out of it.
i'm the 10th person, we don't stay for returns. However, I am doing a lot more shopping on different websites nowadays as I see Amazon is the most expensive option.
Different forms of marketing work on different people. This one works on me. I'm going to shop at Amazon and Costco because, in the very few instances where I want to return an item that didn't live up to its promise, I can do so without incurring penalties.
When this happens, I'm already frustrated. I assembled a floor lamp for far longer than an adult should spend assembling it, and it's wobbly as shit. A corporation than nickel-and-dimes me at this point will incur my irrational wrath. Canadian Tire (a big box retailer of mostly low-quality wares here in Canada) has lost my business over a decade ago because of this. I tell myself: most Canadians are meek sheep that will return after being told "well akshually you can't return this because technically blah blah", but I'm not a sucker, I won't shop here on principle.
A company that doesn't create this experience for me will get my business and exploit whatever other blind spots I have with their marketing, dark patterns, opaque pricing, etc, because they didn't piss me off when I was ready to walk away for good.
It's probably different for everyone. For us, it's chiefly because it's the only place where we can find a gazillion things our kids' school demands they bring to school, and we can have it in twenty-four hours without having to drive to the store.
I order books from a local indie bookstore and just wait a couple weeks for the books to show up from their wholesaler.
But for other stuff, including tools, why wouldn't I just order from a place I already have free 2-day (often overnight) shipping for, when my alternatives are physical big box stores? Like why go to Lowe's to buy a cross-cut jig when I can get it delivered right to my house in 24 hours for the same price? It's not even like my money could possibly go to an indie hardware store. They don't exist. Certainly not within an hour of me, which not only requires my time, but also money in the form of electricity to drive my car, plus the wear and tear on my car.
Personally, the only webshop where I actually need so many returns is Amazon itself.
Some of that is intrinsic to a good chunk of what they're selling (poorly described imports from the Chinese market). I just ordered an assortment of cabling for shuffling PCIe signals around. Apparently there are a few different "standards" for pinouts on SFF-8643 and SFF-8654, but nobody actually describes them in their product listings! So I'll see which ones work with what I already have, and with each other, and the rest can go back. Sellers could have avoided that by doing that work once and describing their items, but they'd rather I do it instead. So when I do it, I don't feel bad about the returns.
But a lot of it is the dark patterns Amazon themselves choose to play. Nonstop pricing games make me push my actual purchasing decisions down the line. If something is on sale at a great price and I'm in the market, I'll just hit buy to lock in that price. I'll then try to do some research before it ships, but in general I've got 30+ days to make the actual purchase decision. This is what the seller must want, right? Or the same pricing games but after a purchase - if the price on something significantly drops, the answer I've gotten from CS is to buy a new one and return the old one. So if I already have other stuff I need to make a return trip for, that's what I do!
Or when I'm in the middle of building/repairing something, especially when I don't have a "trial" of "prime" (aka sunk cost fallacy), I'll order a few different types of items I think I might need. This way when they show up in a week+ (Slow, Spiteful Shipping) and I'm back focusing on the project, there is less chance of "oh I really needed this other thing" and having to wait another round trip.
With other web stores I just don't feel these type of dark pattern dynamics. Whereas Amazon is practically begging people to call their bluffs. So I call them.
The point the article makes is that the other online stores without access to Amazon's logistics aren't able to lower the price to make up for the inconvenience of using a normal shipping carrier because of an Amazon policy that bans sellers from offering an item for cheaper elsewhere. Amazon then charges sellers high fees that inflate the price of the item everywhere because of that policy.
If we approximate a credit card fee as 2% + 30 cents then I think 20% + $3.00 ends up in the same ballpark as what Amazon is pushing onto a lot of sellers. It hurts hardest for small products but it's significant for everyone.
And that price is supposedly separate from the shipping cost.
And my point is that many of us aren't even shopping on price!
You could also flip around the reading to.. boohoo poor sellers have to raise their prices elsewhere and take higher margin?
Why don't they figure out how to ship/delivery more quickly with a competitor with all those extra margin dollars they are being forced by Amazon to take elsewhere?
Because Amazon benefits from massive economies of scale, and because Amazon has nearly-unlimited cash to push competition out of the market?
How could a regular webshop possibly compete with a behemoth which has warehouses in literally every major city, which has its own dedicated fleet of delivery vehicles, and which has its own fleet of cargo planes? When you've got a single warehouse and have to rely on DHL/USPS/FedEx, you will never beat them on delivery time when Amazon is actually trying: Amazon can trivially offer same-day delivery and eat the cost until you go out of business.
And don't forget: Amazon has an even bigger margin. If they were to compete on price, they would easily win. But they aren't competing on price because they know they have a quasi-monopoly, so they can just enjoy the extra profit.
I often think about how there's an open question in this case of whether it's necessarily anti-social for a market participant to fight hard to create the level of critical mass necessary to give most people the product they want.
Everyone likes stuff showing up at their door reliably wherever they are, and this isn't possible unless you have a service with warehouses and dense customers ~everywhere, and this isn't possible unless enough people use that same service. So in one sense it's in everyone's interest to have an assurance contract where everyone says "I will use this service if you do." Then in that sense Amazon's price rule is building a mechanism to support such an assurance contract: you can't force people to sign such a contract, but you can prevent people from defecting to slightly lower prices outside of the "stuff just arrives fast" system.
In a system that was very good at collective action outside of markets, a cleaner solution in terms of consent and power might be to build an actual explicit assurance contract for an app-to-door-everything-delivered-fast service, get everyone to sign it, and make a public utility and/or separate dis-aggregated markets for the different levels of service provision, whatever they are (consumer facing app, supply, warehouse, delivery, etc.). But anyone who has ever even thought about doing anything like this will know that it's much easier said than done, and will appreciate the kludge Amazon and their investors pulled off, at least a little bit, the next time they buy a thing online.
Maybe the answer is just: use Amazon until technology (robotics e.g.) makes it easy to create something better? At this rate, we shouldn't have to wait too long?
It is surprising how often they are cheaper. I was ordering some glue, decided to double check the price, I could drive for 30 minutes and buy local, and pay more or order it for cheaper from Amazon. I didn't need it the same day so getting it tomorrow didn't matter. Amazon also sells everything need some M2 screws Amazon will have them, no idea where to buy something like that locally Home Depot won't carry them.
The proper comparison isn't Amazon vs local, it's Amazon vs other web shops (likely with more traditional supply chains) - especially for items that are only ever going to be part of a wide selection like M2 screws. HomeDepot.com and Lowes.com have M2 screws, as well as Zoro, McMaster, or other specialty web shops [0]. My specific go-to for one-off [1] screws is usually Zoro, as I usually prefer stainless (or grade 8 for larger sizes).
[0] I had been fond of "Albany County Fasteners" but I've soured as they've gradually jacked up the prices while removing free shipping. I don't even like free shipping, but it is a way for ordering to be more convenient as it prevents me from wanting to sit on an order for a while to batch it up.
What is shipping like from Zoro? The number one reason I tend to use Amazon for this stuff (nuts/bolts) is because shipping is free given a Prime subscription.
If I buy a handful of bolts from McMaster or BoltDepot, I'm paying like $10 to ship, on an order this is probably $10 in goods :(
So I'm basically always picking between Amazon and AliExpress.
Zoro shipping is free over $50 order, otherwise I think it's only $5? I generally just batch, especially with the way they rotate promo codes. I've always got some slow-roll projects going on.
Time frame it really depends - delivery dates a day or few days out are generally accurate. Most items they stock at a local distribution center, so I get them next day. Some things come from further warehouses of theirs and take a few more days. There are also third party vendor items that are all over the place for delivery time, but you know those by their estimated delivery time being more than a few days out, and saying ground shipping only. (They're slowly taking away "free shipping" from items that require LTL though, heh heh)
For fasteners specifically, their parametric search has gotten better. I'd have Digikey's interface everywhere if I could.
... and a lot of times I go right to the brand to buy "straight" from them and they fulfill orders from Amazon so why not just buy from AMZN where I already have an account, get lots of credit card points, can spend my credit card points, etc.
In the last year I've seen this other kind of consolidation where most of the brands that don't have an AMZN-hosted or fulfilled store are using shop.app (now shop.com!) from Shopify. I did a stint of investigating boutique perfumes [1] and it seems almost everyone in that business uses Shopify.
This is a terrible argument. It’s only margin if they get the service but no one wants to pay the same to get slower shipping. Amazon has made the choice for the consumer.
Sure their logistics are better but it’s functionally tying Amazon’s logistics to access to selling on Amazon. It’s not a fair burden to say “you must convince customers to buy inferior shipping at superior shipping prices in order to not use us.
Some may be shopping based on price without realizing it. There's already a baked in assumption that Amazon has the lowest price and there's no need to check elsewhere.
If Amazon stopped engaging in price fixing, then people like you who aren't shopping on price could still buy stuff on Amazon, and other people who are shopping on price could buy the same item from the manufacturer's site for 30% less with the knowledge that it'll probably arrive in a week rather than in a couple days. I'm not sure what problem you have with that.
It's not price fixing. The seller is still completely in control of the price, but they cannot discriminate against Amazon by selling it cheaper elsewhere. Or they can, but then Amazon don't want to do any business with them.
These kind of contracts are standard for all kinds of third party marketplaces. You don't have to sell through them if you don't agree with the contract.
It would be discriminating against Amazon if they sold it somewhere else for less revenue. As in, retail price minus store fees is a lower amount.
When the price advantage is the size of the fee difference or smaller, that's fair and good for competition and I support legal restrictions on contract clauses that want to block it.
Why do they want to sell on Amazon if they don't think the terms are fair?Amazon isn't a public service and businesses aren't people with inherent rights.
Demanding price parity is completely standard for all resellers and market places, pretty much on all scales and all around the world.
Of course you want more legal restrictions and regulations. That's the standard hacker response to anything that comes up, probably including if you want suger in your coffee or not.
But try to think about why Amazon would put such a thing in their contract. If they were just out to abuse any power dynamic, they would of course tell sellers that they have to put a more expensive price anywhere else. Price parity is fair for all parties involved. And if sellers think Amazon's fees are too high then they shouldn't use Amazon - which is what the great majority of product sellers have decided to.
> Why do they want to sell on Amazon if they don't think the terms are fair?
Massive monopoly power. Some profit is better than none, even as Amazon works to make 'some' as small as possible.
> Demanding price parity is completely standard for all resellers and market places, pretty much on all scales and all around the world.
Price parity would be great if they were selling the product to Amazon, and Amazon was demanding that price be the same among all retailers. Because of the structure of the deal with this markup, we need to consider the numbers with and without the markup.
> the standard hacker response
Wha.
Also I want quality competition and I only want to regulate anti-competitive things.
> But try to think about why Amazon would put such a thing in their contract.
Because it benefits them.
> If they were just out to abuse any power dynamic, they would of course tell sellers that they have to put a more expensive price anywhere else.
That would get them more scrutiny and be too obviously unfair. Demanding the same price sounds fair until you look into the details.
> Price parity is fair for all parties involved.
Parity is fair when you properly include or exclude markups based on context.
> And if sellers think Amazon's fees are too high then they shouldn't use Amazon
And lose most of their sales? It's an abusive relationship because of the power Amazon has, and they structured these rules to limit the ways other companies can compete.
No, Amazon is not a monopoly. Hackers have the notion that any big company or any company they don't like are monopolies. But that doesn't change the truth. Amazon is not a monopoly and has very limited power in the markets they act in. They have giant competitors.
> Because it benefits them.
That is how business have been conducted since the age of Moses and before: Nobody wants to do business unless they benefit from it. Ideally the benefit is mutual. Usually the benefit has to be mutual for business to be made.
> Parity is fair when you properly include or exclude markups based on context.
Parity means the price for the end customer, or at the very least the advertised price for the end customer.
> And lose most of their sales?
99,9999999999% of product sales in the world and 99,99999999% of the monetary value of product sales in the world are made without any involvement of Amazon. If a company has made themselves dependent on Amazon because they don't want to deal with sales, that is their own problem.
You have no need to fight for the sellers on Amazon. They are shrewd businesses who would prefer nothing more than to spit on you and on their customers, unless they were on fire. Amazon has grown as large as they have by being a middle man who gives better customer service and security to customers than most online shops. There is real value in that goodwill. Of course they charge sellers to let them be on their platform.
My experience is that for non-FBA fulfilled products this doesn't hold at all.
Out of the last ~20 orders (I don't order that often from them, so that's probably spanning the whole last 12 months or more), more often than not, the predicted delivery date has been adjusted upwards, often by ~2 days, and a few times by ~a week.
This may be specific to Germany/Berlin, as from what I hear, they (/ their subcontractors) have troubles finding delivery drivers. Mixed with the growing counterfeit issues, and degrading product description / details for most products, Amazon doesn't seem to be in it's prime.
The 3rd party sellers on Amazon are a mess. I’m in the US, and just waited 18 days to get the wrong item sent to me… some face lotion instead of a drone.
I picked it off someone’s wishlist, so didn’t really vet the seller. I thought I was being really proactive when I ordered, but now I will need to find an alternative at a local retail store, which will probably be difficult.
Last year at Christmas, my brother-in-law opened his gift to find a bunch of adult diapers. It was supposed to be a power tool.
Sure, Amazon takes the returns, but it’s still extremely disruptive when these things happen, and it’s happening more and more frequently.
In the outskirts of a college town with unusually bad retail (like the clothing stores at the mall are the Loft, Target and T-shirt express) 2 day shipping became 2 week shipping during the pandemic leading to me to quit Prime. It particularly bugged me because if I expect to get something in 2 days that's more convenient that making a trip to the store, but if it 5 days or more I'll be going to that sector anyway for another reason and it is easy -- it struck me as significantly dishonest that they were promising fast shipping and not delivering.
Maybe 2 years later I tried the free trial of Prime, if only to quiet the ads, and it was great... they must of extended their logistics network into my area and I get a lot of stuff in 1 day or 2 days now. I went through a phase of taking discounted or free Prime offers when I could but broke down and I've been maintaining a Prime subscription. It's probably not really worth it because my pattern is that I am typically heads down doing this or that and every other month or so I do a burst of buying stuff that I'd wanted for a while or I am doing some project that requires a lot of stuff. Then I might go a month and buy nothing on AMZN.
It certainly varies at least by country. I'm in London, and its very unusual to get worse than next day delivery except for marketplace sellers, and often <12 hours.
I stopped shopping at Amazon because their fulfillment started to suck. And I found they kept their dates 25/100.
Most recently I ordered 10 items on September 18th (I had a gift card). All prime eligible. The first arrived on sep 20, the 4 on sep 28, 5 on sep 28, and the last is scheduled for Friday.
I didn’t get any estimates until after purchase.
Amazon is no longer good. They are coasting on their customer base and are slowing ratcheting up prices and squeezing their costs (keeping all their gains).
I've noticed this lately in coastal California of all places. I needed batteries by Sunday morning, was ordering on a Thursday. Plenty of 1 or 2-day options when searching and adding to cart, then when it came time for checkout... none of the 5 options I tried could be delivered in 2 days!
It seemed the interface was designed to hide the true delivery estimate in the last step and trick me into thinking the item would arrive on time.
Yeah I've never seen this despite buying from amazon multiple times a month if not week. I assume they're living somewhere with weird regulations or something.
For me it’s not the logistics, for me it’s the catalogue. They have so many ridiculously niche items that I want that would be impossible to buy from a local store
I think Amazon might have induced this problem somewhat. Most retail stores have just stopped stocking niche items because people just buy them from amazon and it frees up a lot of floorspace they could use to stock high sales volume items instead.
But that's just the basic physics of mail-order shopping, it isn't anything specific to Amazon.
Every general store in every town everywhere can't possibly stock millions of individual products. When some item has a potential customer base of a few tens of thousands of people in a country of hundreds of millions, most stores would never get a single sale for that item. But when you can serve the entire country at once via the mail, having a single centralized warehouse specializing in that niche category of items is quite viable.
The only difference with Amazon is that you are buying from a single website, rather than going to the website of a small webshop specializing in your flavour of niche items. And the drawback is that Amazon has zero quality control, so rather than a store where you can browse for known-good curated high-quality niche items you will instead be drowned by piles of absolute garbage - with the occasional decent item hidden in between.
Sure, Amazon might beat your local store, but that doesn't mean it is good for buying niche items.
I used to be very skeptical of all the stories on HN and elsewhere about amazon pages being full of poor quality knockoffs, because that simply wasn't my experience at all, ever.
But in the last couple of months, as I progress through a kitchen remodel and more importantly a kitchen reorganization, I've been seeing precisely this phenomenon every time. The most visible signs are the machine generated "brand names" ("Howonder", "Jaico", etc. etc.), closely followed by multiple instances of clearly the same low quality, SE-Asian-manufactured product being sold under 4 different brand/product names.
I think the difference is that in the past, I've actually known the product I was looking for, and amzn showed me that one and little else. At the moment, I'm casting blindly ("stainless steel kitchen turntable") and there it is: low quality, uncurated crap, everywhere.
There is also an erosion of trust out there from scammer fatigue. Amazon let's you return things and you don't worry about your credit card being stolen or any of the stupid hassles of customer service these days.
Speaking of erosion of trust Amazon does nothing to protect consumers and is fine putting peoples lives at risk. I have received multiple counterfeits from Amazon
This is fine, good for Amazon for setting up an excellent logistics system and having a good return policy. The problem is that Amazon charges a lot for this service. If you don't need super fast shipping or a good return policy, or don't want to pay for Amazon's profit margin, you can't go anywhere else, because Amazon will restrict your sales if you charge less somewhere else.
Given that Amazon has 40% of the e-commerce market (I'm surprised it's not more actually), this is exactly what antitrust laws were designed to stop. Customers and vendors/manufacturers should be free to use the distribution channels that meet their needs of service and speed and price the best, but Amazon, through its big market share, is preventing that.
Again, these aren’t unique to Amazon, per se. Just to the scale of their operation and the scrutiny Amazon has.
Assembly line jobs are rough and people pee in bottles, and die. The important piece these articles leave out is how much more common these are at Amazon.
I remember my first jobs at random companies where I was hourly and needed approval for bathroom breaks. It sucked and I would plan my day around break times.
I think these articles are more a function of being surprising to us because we work cushy desk jobs where we can break all we want and use unlimited sick days because we program.
>Assembly line jobs are rough and people pee in bottles, and die.
You phrase this as if it's acceptable that people work in terrible conditions and sacrifice their lives so that the rest of us can buy cheap products with fast shipping, and this is completely normal. "Another Amazon warehouse worker dead? Oh well!"
I think it’s phrased less that it is acceptable, and more that “why are you only focusing on Amazon, when it is like this everywhere you look in logistics?”
It would be one thing to stop shopping at Amazon because of how they treat their workers if you also stopped shopping at other companies whose workers are peeing in bottles behind the scenes. Do the things you buy get shipped at some point by truck-based logistics? If so, piss bottles are already involved, it is just that we were all blessedly unaware.
This. The amount of things I buy off Amazon has dropped quite a lot over the last 15-20 years. It used to be just about everything. Now it's an about once a month at most, and some of that are gifts for other people. I'm more willing to shop local now, and for everything else if I don't care a lot about when I get it I'll order it direct from a more appropriate vendor. And if I *really* don't care when I get it nor that it's fake, I'll use AliExpress. The only value Amazon has for me now is if I need an item on a predictable schedule and either I can't get it locally or its not worth my time to do so.
I'm the same way. I've also been very impressed with Chinese made goods too. Especially in the music world, M-Vave recently released a very capable synth for $50 (FM-1) that is having a massive resurgence of tinking in the community (people are sly enough to use LLMs to vibe code different firmwares that turn the device into something else entirely, like a groovebox or drum machine for example).
It's a shame neoliberals hallowed out US manufacturing but at least consumers around the world are benefitting.
> It's a shame neoliberals hallowed out US manufacturing but at least consumers around the world are benefitting.
Unfortunately, the counterpoint is... China has us all by the balls. Do something China doesn't like, such as, say... support Taiwan? Whoops, where are you going to get stuff such as medication now?
Most of our medication comes from India, actually.
And China isn't able to cut off your medication because you support Taiwan: it would have to be a country-sized ban, which for the US would immediately spark WW3. China isn't stupid, they have a sense of self-preservation. Why start a fight with the US when you can slowly milk it dry?
I'm not really worried about China, the US has been a massive force of evil and imperialism across the world my entire life. When was the last time China invaded a sovereign country? The US did it twice in the span of a few months this year, and likely to do it again.
No one benefits from US foreign policy outside of elites or capitalists, everyone else suffers under imperialism.
The US may behave irrationally from time to time. Bush, Trump, the list goes on.
The problem with China is, they play the loooooooooooong game, and their game is explicitly to destroy our industries. As a German, this has me worried, because we have seen it with solar panels (we used to be the world leader), with medicine (similarly, a lot of compounds came from Germany) and now we're seeing it with cars.
This feels weird to read, the US has played a direct role in your degradation of life in Germany (starting the Iraq invasion that spiraled into a massive immigration crisis that your country hasn't recovered from, inability to defend yourselves without NATO which means you have to please US benefactors to get protection that is constantly being threatened, and has caused a massive spike in your energy prices due to the Iran War) but you're scared of China because maybe they might do something in the future?
I'm sorry but this is quite sad. You're willing to blame a foreign country that is providing high quality goods that make your life better instead of your own political leaders or supposed allies that have no issues with selling your country down the drain?
I would say in the 2010s I shopped with Amazon for the logistics. In the 2020s their logistics have been crap. Packages are slow, frequently late, and rarely packaged well enough for the items to arrive undamaged without luck. The overwhelming amount of drop shipped trash means the site is useless, too.
I've gone back to local stores. They're less convenient, but the prices are better and the quality is MUCH better. Amazon is for commodity name brand stuff that's harder to find.
I'm not an Amazon Prime customer (shocking, I know), and I noticed that the shown delivery times are overly pessimistic, probably in order to make you opt for a Prime membership to get faster delivery. And then the package arrives at least one day earlier than the predicted delivery date.
I gave up and canceled my Prime subscription years ago after repeated failures to meet even a 2-day delivery promise. I never once got anything same-day. And the Video and other services of Prime were things I never used.
Annoying when you are not home and they deliver things early. Like last week I picked deliver on the 13th, half the items arrived on the 10th and sat on my porch for 2 days.
A lot of that uncertainty has to do with USPS, who keeps getting slower, and their delivery date estimates are at this point often 2-3 days more optimistic than reality.
At least in my experience, UPS, Fedex, etc., tend to deliver when the estimate says.
This differs WILDLY from country to country, and I assume city to city.
In Tokyo I would get my stuff from Amazon in a day or two, and accuracy of time of arrival was in hours.
In Stockholm, even amazon regularly delivers a week or two later than what it says. To the point I don't see the point buying from Amazon if I can find a reliable local alternative, because they'll both be late.
It's often still cheaper to buy from Amazon than buying from vendors, unless you scour the internet for the 30% off coupon and sign up for the newsletter for the 10% welcome bonus and then promptly report the newsletter as spam.
There should be some kind of federal law against needing to do this.
Buying direct from vendor should always be the cheapest, and at least 5% cheaper than Amazon (since everything on Amazon is automatically 5% off)
Huh, this is not my experience. I have had many packages from Amazon delayed recently. But I continue to use them because their selection is the best, so it makes sense to pay for Prime and then their shipping is on average faster and cheaper than any other option. I'm still satisfied with their service.
It makes sense because shipping is a volume game and they have the most volume. Their electric van is coming down my street twice a day whether I order or not. I wish I could ship my own packages with their shipping.
My biggest problem with Amazon these days is that you can't really know if what you're ordering is any good. Amazon should start their own product testing lab and do in house reviews. Or find some other way to get trusted reviews on their product pages.
This is also why I usually order on Amazon. And the few times it doesn’t go through them the experience is often bad.
FedEx delivered my Steam Frame - first it said Friday delivery by 1pm. Then on Friday, it kept saying 1pm until about 3pm after which it updated to “by 8pm”. Then, after 8, it said the item never left their facility. The next day it said delivery would be Monday by 1pm. Actual delivery was Monday around 6pm.
Amazon _rarely_ has these issues. Especially for an expensive delivery like the above, I’d want to know when to expect it and possibly actually be at home to receive it.
> When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does.
This depends heavily on where you live. I recall it used to be true, but in the three places I've spent significant time since the pandemic, all three have been less than 50% on time -- and less than 75% even giving an extra day. Because there's apparently no consequences for the last-mile delivery contractors to claim a package is delivered and not actually take it out of the truck until the next week, your local contractor determines your experience.
My experience has been different, most retailers have accurate delivery times, unless you shop for things like furniture at C&B or WestElm for which they don’t keep local inventory. The only appeal Amazon has for me is the subscribe and save option and that you can find almost anything. For example I have a legacy air filtration system for which I cannot find replacement filters for, except on Amazon. For anything else there seems to be a better alternative today.
> I almost don't even care about [shipping quickly]
I used to think there would be more opportunities for a patient consumer to get a discount, but perhaps what happens it that even a low-priority package takes up certain kinds of capacity once it leaves the vendor, and the delivery-system's incentive to maximize throughput leads to a kind of floor.
You’ll get something to show up on schedule but it’s frequently needs to be returned because of a problem on their end. No I don’t accept paying full price for a used product in subpar repair. No I don’t want a convincing fake.
The hassle of even 1 return in 20 isn’t worth faster delivery. Worse even if I just throw away their junk I still need to make a new order.
I find a lot of the websites I shop at for certain things do "dropshipping". So the product page will say "X in stock!" or similar when in reality they're telling you the inventory at a shared warehouse or even the original manufacturer and once you actually submit your order, the product needs to be shipped first to the store you ordered from. Then they ship to you. But both legs can take an unknown amount of time.
For me it’s that I know if something is wrong with the shipping that Amazon will fix it for me.
The other month my wife ordered something inexpensive from Best Buy that got shipped. I am 90% certain the FedEx delivery person took it, impossible to find the easiest way to resolve the matter with BestBuy. Amazon while historically it was not always intuitive to find the chat feature. I could always get there and the problem was fixed.
In the 90s and 00s Amazon would fix things. The last time Amazon lost a “delivered” package they told me that they could do nothing about it. My ticket got escalated a few times and they offered a discount on ordering a replacement. I just did a chargeback with my credit card. I was frustrated with Amazon because I probably ordered 30 things a year for 10+ years and they trusted their driver over me saying I never got it.
This is not my experience. I had a package simply not arrive, and Amazon AI said it would replace the missing package (which was a high dollar value). Instead, it just repeated the order, double charging me. I had 3 conversations with human CS promising me they saw the mistake and would fix it, and never did, so I was double charged. After months trying to resolve it I eventually gave up and ate the cost.
I've never had such a poor experience, including being repeatedly lied to by CS, and this was the last straw for me. I honestly don't miss Amazon, I buy less stuff and feel better about it.
Its also heavily region dependent. You can order something on Amazon.com at 10am and have it delivered by 5pm sometimes. When ordering from Amazon.de, it often takes a week just for the product to dispatch, then it takes another week for it to travel from their one warehouse in Poland to Helsinki.
Agree with others' sentiments: One usually does not need that fast shipping - or that reliable. There are, of course, exceptions - but not often enough that I'd pay for Prime membership. The few times I need it fast and it's not available in town, I simply pay Amazon for fast shipping.
Yeah they're insanely good at logistics. They do same day deliveries here, I've had an idea for something and then got all the materials delivered 6 hours later. Nobody else can compete with that.
Also, there's the whole taking your money and completing the deal part. A whole bunch of sites seem to be breaking their own pages these days, leaving Amazon the sole remaining venue that still works.
I used to buy a lot on ebay.com, however they began to transition to a new page layout a few years ago, which made it too difficult to screen against scam-sellers(scamming was always a bit of an issue there). I briefly switched to walmart.com, however their site started giving a stupid error page for anything but the latest version of google chrome; this started about 2 years ago now.
anyway, here's a quick test i did(in firefox-esr) of a few sites which came to mind:
ebay: still has the dumb new design; certain js features appear broken(can't read customer reviews).
walmart: still get the "technical issues" error page.
newegg: main-page still loads mangled.
zoro: is it working again!? seems functional today... surprise!(i'll have to look into this more later; i did not test checkout)
thriftbooks: the search bar does not work.
so there it is. a bunch of sites i just simply can't shop on anymore. i'm surprised by zoro. will it work when i go to checkout?
I've been an eBay customer for 25+ years and it's worse than ever with fraud. It's gotten so bad that my account now warns me that I'm at risk if I report any more purchases on there.
Examples:
1.) Bought my wife a dress, it came and had multiple defects that were not in the photographs. I reached out to the seller and they didn't offer a refund but said "sorry". I have no recourse if I don't open a dispute. If I open a dispute I get penalized.
2.) I bought "Mid Century Modern" metal wall art. The listing said 1960's and the photos were of two metal wall art items with no markings. The items came with a clear "Made in China" marking on each of them that was not in the photos. These are modern inspired pieces not actual mid century modern. I opened a dispute and got my refund from the seller who didn't even ask to have them shipped back.
3.) Purchased a video game that showed NTSC ESRB rating on the front of the game in the photos. What came was the european PAL release. Not only is that version not playable on this console but the value of the two items is distinctly different (PAL is worth far less).
I'm done shopping on eBay until they have new management. At least Amazon honors their buyers policy.
Funny, talk to sellers who use eBay and they will say how it's all stacked against them and that eBay accepts disputes from buyers almost unconditionally and they have no recourse and how much abuse there is by buyers who claim they received damaged goods or the wrong item.
As a market's trust lowers, buyers are less willing to pay a reasonable price for a square deal because of the probability being higher that it isn't. This, paradoxically, lowers the value of legitimate products from legitimate sellers because there's no way to differentiate. The risk adjusted value of the product lowers. Legitimate sellers leave. Things spiral. Everyone loses.
> I've been an eBay customer for 25+ years and it's worse than ever with fraud. It's gotten so bad that my account now warns me that I'm at risk if I report any more purchases on there.
It's always been bad but it's gotten worse and there's no recourse other than a dispute. I had a seller label a midi device a particular version (known to work with Linux and Mac) but when it arrived it was an older version that requires a proprietary Windows-only driver. I went back to the listing and the photos were of different versions. Seller refused the return. Ebay was unhelpful. Great.
ebay has hidden the "report listing" button so well i thought they removed it. but it is still accessible behind a plus sign ("+") in the corner of the page.
This sounds like you are running an ad blocker that’s breaking stuff.
I also run an ad blocker in all my devices and have to periodically disable it because it’s breaking random sites in ways that look like the site’s fault.
Nah, it's Firefox, not the ad blocker. I run into similar problems all the time, and disabling my ad blocker never solves it. If you pop open the developer console and look for errors, it usually boils down to Firefox having stricter policies about cross-origin requests. Even major web properties simply don't bother testing for even the most superficial functionality on browser engines other than Blink any more.
It's worse than that. They all put up browser surveillance / captcha blockwalls to "stop bots" (even despite bots being legitimate shoppers these days!) that make the sites just straight up not work on most of my browser configs. And they keep getting worse - I'm sure they've all got some big dashboards that say "evil bots blocked", the numbers just keep going up up up (false positives and all), and whatever middle manager championed the initiative to block customers gets a pat on the back and a mandate to do more.
Amazon, no problem, browse from anywhere. Amazon has similar functionality, but they just do it a lot more intelligently. The most I've ever seen on Amazon is a simple captcha before the login page, period. Whereas on other sites, if a user is logged in to a longstanding account with a history of real purchases, and that logged in session isn't requesting pages at some exorbitant rate that goes well beyond enthusiastic middle-clicking, then it should never end up blocked. Yet I've had this happen on most sites that aren't Amazon - they've lost sight of the primary goal being to serve customers!
Of course to me every webshop has their bread and butter of what types of things make sense to purchase there. I'm certainly not going to buy stuff from Amazon that is twice the price as it is elsewhere because it's only on Amazon becomes some enterprising seller put it up there as a convenience. But I can understand how others would, given how hard the other webshops want to actively reject your business.
>Why is a purchase ever in such a hurry? Short delivery only really encurrage impulse purchases.
We never do impulse buys for frivolous throwaway consumerism junk but fast ~2 day delivery is still very helpful because... Life Happens ... such as stuff unexpectedly breaking and you want to have a replacement to quickly fix it.
Example of 2 events just in the last month: (1) garage door screw coupler broke. It's the piece that connects the motor shaft to the screw drive. You cannot buy this type of oddball part from Home Depot or Lowes. Amazon had it and delivered it the next day so I was able to repair the door immediately. The alternative of waiting a week+ for slower delivery means the door has to be disengaged from the track so it can be manually raised and lowered. This is not acceptable because I don't have the specific key to the garage locking mechanism from the outside. Why don't I have a key?!? Because life happens. I guess I could manually lock it from the inside and leave the car outside the garage for a week but I didn't like the idea of leaving a catalytic converter exposed to drive-by theft.
(2) was my Skechers work boots had the sole separated from the shoe. I bought the same model shoes from Amazon for $59.99 and had it in 2 days. I could drive to the local Skechers store but they charge $79.99. So either wait a week+ for slow delivery or pay $20 extra plus round trip gas money to buy at the local store.
Amazon quick delivery acts as a JIT (Just In Time) inventory system to take care of unexpected things that happen in life. That's a more sane alternative than holding a bunch of inventory of random parts for things that might go wrong.
Btw, Amazon often offers extra reward points credited to your account if you voluntarily choose slow delivery instead of 2 days. This is what we do the majority of the time. I assume Amazon does this pseudo "cashback" incentive as a way to consolidate as many customer orders as they can to optimize their delivery routes and reduce costs.
If you're in a Nielsen "A" market like 40% of the population you have a Sketchers store in your area. I'm in a "C" market, a college town with post-material values, and the local stores suck. (Great thrift stores and vintage clothes but if you want something new it is Target or Wal-Mart or the overpriced Haberdasher that will get you something appropriate for a wedding but 'not special' in my mind)
Oftentimes I'm buying maybe a tool or a part or something like that which isn't necessarily available in my local hardware store.
Having a predictable delivery date for that on top of it most of the time being way faster than anywhere else is really nice. If I buy some of these somewhere else I might wait weeks for a small part due to logistics issues or low availability compared to Amazon
Not all purchases are things that are just consumable/materialistic. I find most of the time the stuff I buy on Amazon nowadays are things like this, where I want something I need but can't easily get locally or am too busy to go out and get during stores hours.
Oh no my toilet broke, the hardware store is 45 minutes away, and I have work and kids. Don't worry, I don't want the replacement part overnight. It arrives when it arrives!
If it’s a Lowes you can get the parts delivered next day. And you’ll know the threads are compatible. Most of the stuff I’ve gotten on Amazon technically fits NPT fittings but it leaks really badly unless you coat it with thread tape because the threads are the incorrect profile.
So weird to see this right after I had Lowe’s cancel my order the first time I bought something from them online. I didn’t even choose special shipping, I just wanted them to send me an item they had in stock.
Most wealthy people do. But there's a whole lot of folks who can't really justify paying $200 for a plumber service call to replace a $20 part in the toilet tank.
Most toilets are not mil-spec. "All the parts" can be one universal Fluidmaster universal toilet repair kit, $25 at any home depot. I have one on the shelf in my garage.
While I get your point, there is obviously a middle ground between eastern block communism and unregulated anarchocapitalism that many nations can and do inhabit. Antitrust is a good example. The free market can't solve everything, and monopolies are bad for innovation despite what Thiel says.
Yeah, but will I be at home when it does? We no longer live in a world where everyone has a nuclear family and the wife is always home while dad is at work. In 2026, only the rich can afford a housewife.
Most of the time I am indeed not in a hurry to receive my purchases. For most items I genuinely could not care less if it arrived tomorrow or two weeks from now. But I do need to know when it will arrive, so that someone is home to receive it.
"A month from now, on a Monday morning" versus "A month from now, on a Tuesday afternoon" makes a huge difference for me, as one of them would result in me having to walk to my front door and the other would result in me having to rent a car and spend an entire afternoon having to go to the other side of the city to pick it up at some warehouse.
90% of the time I choose next-day delivery it is because I know I will be home tomorrow, and the alternative is "some random day next week". If they offered me the option to pick out of a bunch of guaranteed delivery moments next week which are convenient for the seller/shipper, I would!
i'd love a 'slow amazon' variant where i could shop for things as normal throughout the week, but it would hold them all until a single specified time where i could do a final review/approval of orders for the whole household the order and then have it submitted at once.
I'd win because I could remove the late-night impulse buys and de-duplicated things added by multiple family members.
They win because it simplifies shipping logistics/packaging and actually encourages more loose/impulse driven buying ("just add it to the cart, we'll review it later").
It gives more confidence in the service at the time I'm thinking about the order. I want it to be reliable so I don't need to track and worry about it.
Precisely - Amazon is the one retailer I literally delete order emails from.
Basically everyone else I keep the latest status mail (ordered / shipped / arriving tomorrow) in my inbox because they have not earned my trust, and orders have fallen through the cracks before.
Anecdotally Amazon is 90% of my online shopping (by order volume) but only 10% of my unshipped/wrong item/misdirected/lost packages. I have had mis-delivered packages from USPS/UPS/FedEx even on large/high value items.
The point is that a slightly slower delivery feels like a rather small reason; for tolerating the collape the entire market of online purchases to a single abusive and monopolistic marketplace that is actively reducing the quality, trustwortiness and safety of everything we buy.
The reason everything else is worse than Amazon is itself because of Amazon. Once you've taken over the entire market; subsidising your delivery networks to the moon keeps the moat.
Amazon is just rentseeking the entire US consumer market while being a rather bad online marketplace. The only solution left is a antitrust breakup.
I don't even care about shipment times at all as long as they are not completely unreasonable (e.g. multiple months for a supposedly in stock item). But I do care that the items do get to me or that thinks are resolved satisfactorily when that is not possible - without me having to hound the seller. Unfortunately that's still much more likely with Amazon than with some random internet shop - and that's even with Amazon's own enshittification of their service. With other sellers if the final courier fucks me over and wants me to pick up the package in dumbfuck nowhere district thats my problem because if I don't I might end up needing to threaten the seller with legal action before they resend/refund. With Amazon delivery issues are not my problem.
Probably correct analysis. It also means means that places they simply do not operate in (like Switzerland) they are completely meaningless.
Luckily local alternative(galaxus/digitec) is so much better, reviews and rating are trustable, each category has 1000s of items, services and communication stellar etc. that for me, that name symbolises just some not-so-cheap cloud I used to work with some years ago.
>The problem for everyone else is not simply that Amazon ships quickly, I almost don't even care about that. The thing is that Amazon ships & delivers on a reliable predicted schedule. When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does. I shop at specific competitors who can do similar (B&H, Sweetwater, etc).
I don’t care so much for specific delivery dates (although they are a plus). Most important are free returns. Hence, I prioritize shopping at Costco/Target/Walmart/Home Depot/Lowes/Old Navy/Amazon/etc.
I've been mostly happy with sweetwater - but they use USPS and I had a shipment (strings) take 2 weeks.
I've started to use more "mom and pop" stores - Philadelphia Luthery instead of Stew Mac (Stew Mac shipping is a joke, they want you to "subscribe" for $120 a year now, and places like "The Acoustic Shoppe" in Missouri for strings.
Amazon searches for anything that isn't a known brand such as Apple & co turn out >90% Chinese products of highly questionable quality for me these days. And you can buy those cheaper by going straight to the source. The sole point of their retail business seems to be providing a support for the inevitable issues with these sellers, but I suspect that increasingly customers won't think it justifies the massive premium they're paying for what's essentially Taobao with an American address.
You mentioned Apple products -- I purchased an Airpod Pro set through Amazon, worked for a while but had to take them into an Apple Store for troubleshooting, where they had to carefully inform me without using the word "counterfeit" that they were counterfeit. Another problem related to quality which is endemic to Amazon.
I want to like Amazon, they're just so damn convenient. But the number of reasons to avoid them is getting longer all the time. Fake/sponsored reviews, never showing me what actually searched for, allowing sellers to reuse old listings, and allowing sellers to add counterfeit and used items to genuine listings are all my main complaints.
I read about this happening a lot here and elsewhere, and I don't get it. I buy many iDevices from Amazon, for example Apple Watch Ultra (1, 2, 3), and AirPods Pro (1, 2, 3). Most with AppleCare 2 years plan, some without. Also some accessories.
If the item is counterfeit, not only is sometimes the packaging/actual product identifiable by anyone that is actually a tech person, but lets assume that it's identical or whatever.
Unboxing?
When you open the AirPods box for the first time does the iPhone do that animation and say "Set up AirPods..." etc?
When you use it, does it sound at least kinda like the quality you expect from a 200 USD Apple headphone? Does Dolby Atmos work, the stems on both sides, the wireless charge on the box, the Find My features, live translation, transparency, noise cancellation? All of those features are present and working?
Going to settings -> AppleCare and Warranty should show the time of manufacture, of purchase, and the end time for the warranty (or if AppleCare, for AppleCare).
I guess I see a counterfeit passing my step 1: hardware, or maybe step 2: software (really shouldn't tbh? Apple should cover for this).
But the data on AppleCare and Warranty come from Apple's server. Even if they spoofed the serial number that would mean guessing a correct serial number for that same product type and spoofing the date of sale etc on AppleCare&Warranty.
I honestly don't see how this can happen. If the counterfeit is honestly so identical at that point it's just the same product, but even so.
I buy clothes, other tech stuff there. Is it really necessary to instill on me and hundreds of other OCDs the constant existential fear that everything we buy is actually an exactly identical and unverifiable impostor of the real item, but not actually real?
Edit: Just to clarify, I've indeed used warranty/AC+ on most of these items and all were real. For now.
Yes, the 'high-end' counterfeit AirPods are so good, they show up in iOS with identical set up flows; battery indicators; feature support (at least claimed to iOS), etc. I'm not sure about AppleCare though.
The packaging is basically identical, unless you carefully scrutinize font DPI or alignment.
Have a look at YouTube videos; for a good AirPods counterfeit it's genuinely hard to tell things apart.
Apple refused service and OP was left holding the bag.
Amazon sent me fake RAM a couple times years ago. It was a space blanket in a fake crucial RAM box. I’m 99% sure Amazon took the return and shipped the retuned space blanket on the next order.
I don’t understand the quality complaints. I’m actively looking for Chinese-branded products now because the quality is amazing. I’ve switched to Hongdian fountain pens, I recently bought an espresso maker stamped with an unpronounceable string of consonants, and I buy Chinese sportcoats that fit perfectly, have no label, and cost what I used to pay for clothes in the early 2000’s. Some clothing manufacturers on Amazon even email me for exact measurements, so I get a tailored fit straight from China. I get knockoff printer ink that lasts months longer than HP’s overpriced junk. The Chinese had quality issues twenty years ago, but today their products are top notch.
The issue is that in many cases, this is not what is being sold on Amazon. There is good chinese brand/product (I love my chinese IEM), but when looking for many household items, you will find the white label, probably not compliant with local regulation, type of product. When it is not an outright scam.
I actually have a recent example : I do woodworking and for the last step of finishing some of the thing I build, I use a mixture of beeswax and linseed oil. Beeswax has been harder and harder to find locally. Not so long ago, every hardware shop had some. Now it has been displaced by synthetic product. So unless you know a local beekeeper, you are sol.
So, resigned, I went to Amazon. It had a trove of listing for "100% natural beeswax". Turns out, ALL of them are paraffin dyed to look like beeswax. You can report it to Amazon, they don't care. They will reimburse you, but never remove the listing.
I closed my amazon account months ago, but I have also experienced this problem. I have a hiking staff I really like that needs to be re-oiled and waxed. I'm having the darndest time finding both things. The beeswax, and most places seem to only want to sell "boiled" (solvent treated) linseed oil so it cures faster.
The beeswax I get from a local apiarist looks nothing like that under a blacklight, and in fact is quite (pale) orange. Carnuba wax mixtures fluoresce yellow. My box of paraffin fluoresces blue brightly enough to be visible in full sunlight, much brighter than the image. Rosin fluoresces bright, radioactive orange in case you're wondering.
The problem for me is (and this holds across AliExpress as well), if I search for something, I get presented 30 different versions of the same thing, almost all from an unknown brand out of China, all with near-perfect reviews. I don't know if they're all the same thing, just relabeled; some are cheap copies of one original good version (and which one was is the good original); or something else. And if I end up with a cheap knockoff, how to resolve the issue - endless phone calls with a call-center in China and multiple rounds of trans-Pacific shipping? No thanks.
None of that is a knock against Chinese goods. I bought a set of Chinese carbon bicycle wheels last year and they're great. But, I went straight to the source and didn't take chances with AliExpress or Amazon.
I think some Chinese brands do try to distinguish themselves. Anker, for example, isn't a revolving door brand name. But, yeah, there's an enormous amount of noise on Amazon. Unfortunately that noise is everywhere. If I went right now to try to find another source on, "what brands don't suck?" I would probably have zero confidence that any of the sources I find aren't just SEO garbage.
Those are private label brands where the US or EU owners look for ready made low cost products within a category across different Chinese factories and slap their logo on top. Like SEO they game the product search engine and listings on Amazon to appear on the first search result pages, knowing that most impulse buyers don't have much patience.
The factories usually ship directly to Amazon warehouses and it is also fulfilled by Amazon (FBA).
They might not be a revolving door brand, but I've had 2 different models of charging brick from them get recalled for spontaneous combustion in the past 3 years. So, despite their branding efforts, their QC still isn't great from my perspective.
I've had the same. But unlike a lot of today's companies, I was able to get an actual human emailing me back the same day with a few questions followed up by a "we're sending you a replacement. Throw away the broken one." That was refreshing. Maybe they haven't gotten the memo that you're supposed to hate your customers.
Fair enough. I didn't need a human - Anker sent recall notices (via Amazon sales records, I guess) and all I had to do was send photos of serial numbers on the bricks and pick from a list of replacements of similar capacity. So, their customer support was better than average, no question.
I'm a long time cyclist, got the name from friends on an old web forum that somehow manages to stay alive.
This particularly brand (BTLOS) will come up on searches similar to "good Chinese carbon wheel brands" with reviews on FB, Reddit, etc.
And the cycling industry has had Chinese brands making inroads for a decade or more. So, Winspace, BTLOS, and a few others have come to be known entities (some do sell through AliExpress, some direct from their own site). And there's a niche group of product testers on YT or similar that review these things.
I assume there are analogous items in other hobbies, but I can't speak to any specific examples/brands.
The "problem" with China is they have a massive economy built on building to a price, no matter how low the price may be. They're perfectly capable of creating high-end electronics like iPhones and disposable crap that sells for pennies on Amazon or Ali.
There doesn't seem to be the same cohesive brand-building/reputation-buidling effort that we saw with Japanese and Korean companies in the 80s-00s+. Granted, Amazon/Ali didn't exist, and the market for "$1 junk" wasn't the same. No easy answers (if it's even a thing that needs solved).
The main problem for me is that the different price categories don't all make it to the West. I don't mind getting the $1 crap version when I am paying $1 for it, and often I would happily pay $10 for the not-complete-crap version.
But when those items arrive on Amazon the $1 crap gets sold for $9, and the $10 is completely absent because people think it is a ripoff compared to the "$9" one.
Another problem I've heard is there is absolutely no legal protection. If you outsource your manufacturing to Shenzhen, you get what you get and there is no suing them later.
There's a scene from Back to the Future, where 1955 doc notices that one of the failed circuits says Made in Japan. Marty then points out that all the best stuff is made in Japan.
No, during the 70's and part of the early 80's they were terrible quality.
But what the Japanese makers did was they analyzed the failures and rolled the findings back into the manufacturing line so that they continuously improved the product. After quite some time at this, they took the "quality built" mantle for themselves.
My father, mid to late 70's, worked as an auto-mechanic for a local Datsun dealer (Datsun is the company we know today as Nissan). Datsun corporate wanted every failed part on every car repaired returned to them for analysis as to why it failed. The other Japanese brands all did the same.
The thing I love about the Japanese automotive story is that their success was earned. It wasn't some story of regulatory capture or protectionism or blitzscaling, etc. They built an auto industry over generations and raised the quality line for everyone.
This came with a price, though. Japanese workers were squeezed extremely hard, entire generations of kids barely had any relationship with their fathers. A lot of those practices were then exported to other countries under the guise of toyotism.
That's true. This isn't meant to be a "whataboutism" but I think that's something we see every time a nation industrializes. And then there's a critical point that's hit, and we invent weekends and a healthy middle class. Not sure if Japan ever realized that second part as much (I honestly don't know)? And China seems to be grappling with some 12/6 thing, though I've heard they have an interesting middle class story.
Really out of my realm of expertise here, but I think there's something interesting going on here with how some economies evolved out of the "toil and suffer" phase while others don't?
We cannot really go there without opening a big can of politics, but I would be wary to consider this or that change fundamentally inevitable. Marx thought he could see the future, but most of his predictions did not come to pass. Humans are messy.
Mr. Jones related an incident from "some time back" when IBM Canada
Ltd. of Markham, Ont., ordered some parts from a new supplier in Japan.
The company noted in its order that acceptable quality allowed for 1.5
percent defects (a fairly high standard in North America at the time).
The Japanese sent the order, with a few parts packaged separately in
plastic. The accompanying letter said: "We don't know why you want 1.5
percent defective parts, but for your convenience, we've packed them
separately."
-- Excerpted from an article in The (Toronto) Globe and Mail
I've just ordered a dining table and a set of dining chairs from China using a sourcing agent mixed with TaoBao. It's costing me about £1200 ($1500) so far delivered to the door and if I was to buy this complete setup in the UK, it would cost about £2500. The only problem has been delivery time and the back and forth with the Chinese sourcing agent hasn't been great in terms of communication, but I'll be damned if I'm going to give an extra £1000 to Western retailers that are hellbent on following the Amazon model and ripping off customers.
I asked DeepSeek believe it or not and it recommended YanChao (formerly Gonest.cn).
I've had an "ok" experience so far. Not amazing, but not horrendous either. I kinda suspect it's just the specific staff member that has been assigned to me, and maybe a different member of personnel might provide a slightly better experience, but as I say, it's not been horrendous or truly awful. Just a little lacking. I generally find the Chinese to be far more eager to please and provide a good service but I think these guys are a little inundated so it's hard to keep up.
Yeah I have a bunch of Chinese products I've bought that are way better than any Western products.
For all sorts of products like various electronic devices and kitchen gadgets, they are just iterating way faster on product feedback.
I think of some product I'd like to have, and discover somebody in China invented it 9 months ago and I can buy it through Amazon for $19. I buy it and use it for six months, then realize I really wish it had some other feature. I check Amazon, and now it's in its third generation with the feature I want plus two others.
I don't get why people are complaining. It's genuinely amazing, and a kind of entrepreneurial spirit I can only respect. Why people get hung up on the random-letter brand names is beyond me, who cares?
If there's a Chinese brand that gets a good reputation, then they too will suffer from other Chinese counterfeiters. For example, the "Pinecil" soldering iron from Pine64 got popular, and then warned on their website to only purchase from their official site (or EU distributor site) because Amazon and AliExpress are rife with counterfeits of this Chinese brand soldering iron.
Apple manufactures a lot in China, you can get amazing stuff made in China and many do. The problem is trust (perhaps more specifically, provenance). Is this thing really what it says it is? It is just a strange phenomenon that China has an incredible un-matched industry in making cheap decent-looking imitations (in addition to the actual high-quality products that trusted brands sell).
I do wonder whether you're comparing two different versions of chinese products?
IE, you're seeing and buying things they're selling directly, so they need to manage quality control, vs what is being sold on amazon, potentially a 3rd party seller who's cutting corners to make a nicer margin?
A lot of Chinese name brands are extremely high quality, as good as or better than the American equivalent. Anker is one of the better known examples. However, there is also a lot of unbranded or white label garbage made by the lowest bidder to try to spawn camp popular search terms.
Most things are made in China anyway. Some of it is counterfeit junk, but often it's the same factory they use to make "American" brands. They just keep the assembly line running and use a different brand name.
The way I see it, the premium you pay is for the convenience brought about by Amazon having your product sitting in a warehouse waiting for you to buy it.
vs. waiting two to four weeks to ship from China.
However at least in Canada, AliExpress has fulfillment centres locally, so AliExpress can often get their items in customers' hands within a week.
So where's the advantage? Most times I can wait a week.
Once upon a time, AliExpress had a really bad reputation for missing packages. I imagine they ramped up the notifications to help repair their reputation.
Amazon Prime is quite good, tbh. There’s a whole layer of complexity your life loses when you know you can get life essentials within a few hours with no planning.
You still have same day shipping? I still get two days on basically everything even with prime, at the fastest. I thought their delivery service was getting worse after the pandemic or something
Yep, and I live in a rural area about 10 miles outside town. Amazon Prime was reliably within 2 days until a couple years ago when they opened a fulfillment center about 20 miles away. Now I often see an item I'm buying as available within hours.
I basically use Amazon Prime as a way to avoid having to drive everywhere. Ease of returns, Prime Video, etc., are just icing on the cake.
Prime has gone from guaranteed two days or less to we'll get it to you when we get it to you for a long while. Prime just guarantees you'll be ahead of people who don't pay for prime. It's fine if you can get it for free or through a family plan. But when you don't have it you do not miss it once you remember stores still exist and 99 percent of purchases don't matter if you get it tomorrow or in a week
>They must still be chasing growth in the UK. It was once like that in the US as well
Where I live (in a large US city) many things are same day delivery, an enormous amount are next day delivery and, weirdly, except for four-serving Strawberry Jell-O (which ships from Texas), almost everything is two-day delivery.
Not sure where you live, but my experience is completely different from yours.
I recently was looking for some widget on amazon and one of the chinese “brands” came up. They had 300+ reviews and 4.5 stars so I thought it had to at least be decent. But then I clicked through to read some of the reviews, and was surprised to see that there were many 1 to 3 star reviews, but none of them were counted. They all had strikethrough on the text, and then an explanation from amazon saying “because this was fulfilled by amazon, we take responsibility for this failure”.
Temu’s UI is unusable. You are constantly presented with roulette wheels for coupons you can’t dismiss. Its dark patterns have dark patterns. AliExpress is only mildly better in that you can dismiss stuff.
Both T and A still have listings for things that will likely result in you getting something entirely different. This usually applies to more expensive and physically larger items. You might order a greenhouse and get a photo of one or a schematic of one. And I don’t mean that the description will make it clear.
Both have a pattern where they might list let’s say an MP3 player which costs $30 but the price on the listing will be $3 because one of the product variants is just the case.
Amazon has comparatively reliable shipping and it’s included with the price on a majority of products if you have a Prime membership. While Temu and AliExpress do have US-based shipping they still don’t guarantee when the thing will arrive and if you are looking at these products the price difference basically disappears.
I am not defending Amazon by any means, but purely on usability it wins hands down.
> Both have a pattern where they might list let’s say an MP3 player which costs $30 but the price on the listing will be $3 because one of the product variants is just the case.
eBay do that too. Really annoying. Some day I'll make a browser extension to highlight it.
I've never had a problem with just getting a schematic, in my world that's typical of eBay (lots and lots of Apple boxes...).
The dark pattern on listing prices is real though. As it is the lower level of quality control - the same sellers will put the same product on both Amazon and Chinese stores, but the latter will get production batches that are lower quality (coil whine, etc).
Theres also no moral reason to support Amazon, they give nothing back to the society their buyers live in, much like the chinese suppliers. Might aswell just go with the cheapest.
You mean you don't want to buy the finest grade $59.95 blender for your kitchen from LONCEVON or ARVAGGCCY or ADVWUXITEKPRO ?
The tricky part now is identifying the individual CN vendors which are not yet well known in the English marketplace, that are also known to make good quality things (and generally they're not cheap), I'll use Sofirn flashlights and headlamps as an example. Mostly not sold via Amazon.
What's wrong with those? For established industrial designs small difference in better quality control is never worth overpaying few times for something.
I can't remember what YT channel recently did it, but they compared name brand batteries, third party batteries and knock-off batteries (equivalent to Temu) for some power tools.
The name brand and third party batteries from actual companies both performed great.
The garbage knockoffs were not a "small difference in better quality control", they had completely different battery cells, lower capacity, missing safety features, were easy to overheat, etc.
Also look at the reports coming in from governments around the world on clothes sold by some of these companies. All manner of illegal toxins. You report them, the seller changes some consonants around and relists under the new name.
I'd encourage everyone to do their own homework on this if they really think the differences aren't significant. And the problem is unless you test to failure or send things to labs you don't know if you rolled the dice and got lucky or not, until your house burns down or your toddler gets a weird autoimmune thing that you have no family history of.
Yeah, you are right, some categories of products are too risky and additional QA is actually worth it. Batteries, computer storage, anything that has prolonged contact with the body, items that come in contact with food and drinks, items for children.
You just buy an Apple product and they send you a fake. They commingle counterfeit stuff with legit products (at least they used to) so it was luck of the draw.
But what seller even does this? If I search any Apple product, the sellers are Apple or Amazon Renewed. The Apple ones are definitely Apple themselves. The renewed mention some other name under "shipped/sold by," so maybe those can be fake?
It's all the same crap. you buy name brand from Tefal, or a local kitchen shop and it's the same crap with a different label and large markup. On Amazon you get all these letter brands with the same crap. You try to go to the source and buy from AliExpress but the lobbying worked and countries like The Netherlands introduced taxes to make it unattractive and help the local drop shippers keep their jobs. Some countries outright ban it. You think they're protecting the consumer but it's all the same crap but with extra steps.
For kitchen stuff, look for a local restaurant supply place. Check first that they aren't wholesale only, but enough restaurants are small that many of them do retail sales as well.
Prices are much better than the consumer-focused brands and normally everything is higher quality as well.
You simplify it too much to support your argument. For example, Tefal makes some of its frying pans in France, but AFAIK they also offer some products made in China to capture the cheaper part of the market. Price does not guarantee quality or being made in Europe, but if you target the cheapest, that's what you'll get.
The problem is that the presence of the Tefal brand used to be a sign of quality. Now you've got both decent products and garbage being sold under the same brand, with only the price as a quality indicator.
This dilutes the brand, and it is only a matter of time before the reputation of the cheap items will be seen as the standard for Tefal, which leads to the sales of their expensive items dropping, which leads to them trying to bring that back by lowering their price via lowering their quality. Congratulations: Tefal is now a brand where you can choose between cheap garbage and overpriced garbage!
Next steps: they shut down the European factories, struggle to compete on the budget market, and finally kill the business and sell the brand to a Chinese company interested in milking some cash out of what remains of its reputation.
Exactly, so even heritage brands use their brand power to peddle the same low quality stuff you can find on AliExpress. And their flagship stuff continuously gets eroded and enshittified as well. YT is full of "why Dr Martens/The North Face/KitchenAid/Black & Decker/... doesn't make the same quality stuff anymore" type of content. Even when you pay for the brand name it doesn't get you far.
Their support has become increasingly worse in recent years, too. They now try to steer you out of trying to talk to a human for customer support as much as possible.
If you manage to navigate your way through a bunch of FAQ pages to find the chat button, you'll be met with a basic AI chatbot that just tries to repeat those same FAQ entries back to you. If you manage to also navigate that and convince it that you need to talk to a human (you'll need to confirm it like 3 times), you might get lucky and finally be able to chat with a person who can barely speak English and will actively lie to you in an attempt to end the chat faster.
Here's a recent experience of mine: I managed to get a deal on a 4TB Samsung SSD, something like $330 before shipping on Amazon.com. I'm in Europe, so shipping would be pretty expensive, but even so it was still an amazing deal considering how expensive SSDs are now. So I ordered it, and two months later it was still not shipped with absolutely no word whatsoever from Amazon. So I got in contact with their support, they could never once tell me what was actually happening, they'd just repeat something like "I have filed a ticket with the fulfillment center and you will receive a shipping update within 48 hours" every time. It was always a lie - I would wait, not hear anything back, and contact them again. Did this 5 times, every time I'd get a similar response, once I was thrown around between 4 different support agents and none of them said anything of value. Eventually gave up and just canceled the order.
It's important to remember that the support channels a company wants you to use aren't the only options you have. If a company doesn't offer reasonable support you can always go the bezos@amazon.com route and include their highest paid person you can find (read: their still relatively highly paid secretary) so that just skimming over your mail to filter it out will cost them more than half-way decent support. Throw in a CC to a regulator when appropriate. Much better experience than dealing with chatbots or call center wait lines before that.
I've had some luck doing LinkedIn InMail to various high-level people at large companies to get support.
Once I used Inmail to get a DHL SVP to get his executive assistant to follow up why my package hadn't arrived... The assistant Cc'd me on messages a Friday afternoon and made it clear said SVP wanted updates. Monday morning the package that I had been told was on a ship being returned to the seller in the US arrived from a depot 5 minutes away from my office in London.
I'm guessing most people at that level are so insulated from their customers experiences that getting a request like that is totally novel for most of them - it's worked for me several times.
Amazon allows you to make returns and makes it convenient, quick, and easy. I made two purchases through independent sellers' websites in the last year, both with big banners guaranteeing satisfaction and easy returns for 100 days or something. And yet, when I found that the product didn't meet my needs, they would not accept my return. They wouldn't even issue a return label. Both of these sellers used Shop. Shop requires you to fill out an application for a refund and then the seller can drag their feet on processing it. In both cases they let the application sit there for days before rejecting it. In one of the cases my credit card company ruled in favor of the small business when I issued a chargeback.
On Amazon it's easy to request a return and get a return label all on the same day that you discover you have a subpar product. The long and short of it is that consumers do not want to be ripped off, and centralized sellers like Amazon and AliExpress make it easy to not be ripped off. If this raises prices across the board, so be it. It's worth it for the time saved and the accountability that comes along with it.
I guess it depends. Ordered a phone last month. Returned it because of bloatware. Waiting to this day for the refund. And support line says: please wait, nothing is wrong. While the website says, we need more details.
I rather take that risk. I buy from all sorts of online retailers and haven't had an issue in years. Ok, no, I had some pushback trying to return a sofa, but the seller offered a 50% discount for me to keep it, which I ended up accepting. The same way that VISA and Mastercard offer a service to customers, I don't think the world comes out winning when these Amazon and other global players get to raise all prices and take a cut of global commerce.
Disclaimer: I mostly shop from German, Danish, and to a lesser extend other EU sellers.
I use Amazon to buy cheap stuff like zip ties, printing paper and ink and some cleaning products. Almost every single major purchase I go directly to the manufacturer website or a specialized store. For example, I would never buy photography gear on Amazon. I go to Adorama or BH. For my favorite brands in say hiking or running gear I go to REI or RunningWarehouse or visit my local brick and mortar store. Amazon has truly become the convenience store for me, my average purchase is under $10. Almost everyone today offer free or inexpensive quick shipping and easy returns. They also have better customer service.
> Almost every single major purchase I go directly to the manufacturer website or a specialized store.
Let's take an example: If a Brother printer is full price from Staples, Best Buy and the Brother website, but $50 off on Amazon, why would I not order on Amazon and save myself $50? As it is, Best Buy and Staples are also operating marketplaces when buying online.
> Almost everyone today offer free or inexpensive quick shipping and easy returns. They also have better customer service.
I beg to differ. I bought a GPU from a local store that turned out not to be compatible with my workstation. Returning it was a huge hassle, I paid a 15% restocking fee. The next time I ordered a GPU, I went through Amazon. When it too didn't work, they took it back, no questions asked, full funds returned.
"why would I not order on Amazon and save myself $50?"
Because of principles?
It seems that in the past 20 years the concept of boycotting a company in response to their behaviour has been lost.
The last widespread boycott I remember was from the late 2000s against Sony, I can't even remember why ( rootkits on CDs? ) but I'm still boycotting them now as it's an automatic reaction.
Unfortunately not many people have principles which overcome the desire for convenience. I stick to my principles hard, so much so I will happily go without convenience items, but I very rarely meet anyone else who does.
I do sympathize with them though. Convenience isn't necessarily bad, but when it's at odds with important principles, it seems there are too few people willing to take the hit anymore.
oh please. where do you stop boycotting? can you name a few companies that aligns with your principles? I feel like every major company I deal with has skeletons in its closet. if i were to start boycotting companies, i'll have a hard time getting anything done.
Better to have no morals or principles than have any, as I always say! /s
Every company is going to have competitors that would love your business over these major companies. Pick your battles and do your best. It's only hard because the status quo is designed to be stupidly easy.
If you find a Brother printer is full price from Staples, Best Buy, and the Brother website, but $50 off on Amazon, you take that price information to your in person Staples or Best Buy and ask if they price match it. They look at your rewards card/members card, say "Sure" and throw in extra toner at a good price. Or they point out that you are looking at a counterfeit product on Amazon and you get a good collective laugh.
Yeah sure, except that benefits the consumer. Amazon offers three things that are incredibly convenient for the consumer:
(1) Same day or next day shipping
(2) No hassle returns for a full refund
(3) No cost for return shipping. In some cases, the shipper will come to my door (!) to pick up the return package at no cost.
What was it like before Amazon? An internet filled with every possible storefront someone threw together with a CGI script, sketchy payment processes and dark patterns that hide information or trick you into extras. Getting something actually delivered was a crapshoot at best unless one went with a known vendor (ex. Best Buy).
What's the next credible alternative for merchants without Amazon? There's Shopify. I hold my breath every time I order from a website using Shop Pay. There's no clarity on when it will ship, sometimes details are excellent, other times the merchant forgets to add a tracking number. Return policies are merchant specific (read: very inconsistent), and Shopify takes zero liability if a package goes missing. They leave it up to me to sort it out with the merchant, as a result, ordering anything above $100 feels risky.
The lower risk of ordering from known vendors was a thing all the way back to the days of the Sears Catalog and other big mail-order houses. That wasn't new with the internet.
With Amazon, there is a whole tier of customers who order stuff, use it for their one-time need, and then return it. All for ultimately no cost to them, but all the rest of us pay for it.
That's not just happening on Amazon, tho. Hang out on /r/smallbusiness and you'll find tons of tiny retailers asking for help on how to deal with the same problem.
Returns for store credit only; restocking fees; buyer pays return shipping are the things most other retailers do. You just need to add a little reasonable friction to the process.
Are the higher prices in the room with us? Amazon is always at least as cheap. I mean they literally track the prices on competitors and auto-update them.
If a Brother printer is $150 from Amazon, but $100 on Staples, Best Buy and the Brother website, why would you not order on a non-amazon site and save yourself $50?
Answer: you probably would, but Amazon engages in illegal, coercive price fixing to drive up the prices on those other sites by $50.
Well, according to TFA, you're still paying an Amazon tax, which is itself similar to the Visa tax, which apparently we all pay even if we use cash to purchase directly from manufacturers (so long as the manufacturer also sells their product on Amazon).
I don't know about "increasingly." I think there are two places in my area of the city that offer a cash discount. These kinds of tactics really aren't convincing customers to use cash - maybe if they turned it around to "a 3% fee will be added to card transactions" then people would care. Anyway, discounts are enough of a pain that it's not worth the accounting.
Look at your costs, including card transactions fees, and spread that across your pricing. It's no different than pricing in all other business expenses - do you complain you're paying a "toilet tissue tax" because you don't use the toilet when you stop in? Paper products in the bathroom are a cost, and those costs are put into the price everyone pays for a donut.
Now, I'll agree having a minimum plus percentage of every transaction is predatory.
If you have enough cash customers, total card transaction costs are not 3-5% of revenue. If you don’t, you’re definitely putting 3-5% back into your pricing to cover the fees.
You're right. But in my anecdotal experience, there are about half as many adding the surcharge as providing the discount.
Ultimately, my point is (not even addressing the legality of Visa's compulsory pricing attempts) the cost of upfront analysis to set pricing appropriately is easily dwarfed by the cost of labor and throughput when adjusting the price by employees at the point of sale. Maybe the merchants adjusting at sale are getting a benefit in the form of customer awareness, but I have doubts.
For the cheap stuff, I usually find the quality better and sometimes lower prices by going to a shop like Home Bargains or B&M. Thats UK specific but I'm guessing there must be these sort of shops in the US too.
This is true for even mid range purchases. I was debating pre-ordering a game from Nintendo's website or Amazon and ended up chosing Amazon because of the return policy and how fast it gets delivered.
> Amazon's Fair Pricing Policy lets it remove the Buy Box (the "Add to Cart" button), or even suspend a seller, if they're offering their item cheaper elsewhere.
This kind of abusive practice needs to be banned in whichever countries it's still legal.
You can't really aspire to improve the situation if such things continue to be legal.
Isn't this like Costco requiring manufacturers to offer SKUs at Costco that are not sold anywhere else? Or mattress stores offering to match price knowing full well that the SKUs in their store are not sold elsewhere?
This policy feels like incentive enough for Chinese manufacturers to not build behind a single brand, so the policy will not apply. Materially the same product, different SKU under a different brand name.
Why should it be illegal? Its their platform. If enough sellers don't like it and leave then Amazon will have to change their policy. There's several other platforms people can sell their stuff on.
Yes, because “free” market deregulation has worked out so well for consumers over the last 30 years.
“Don’t like the monopoly? You’re free to go elsewhere. No wait, there is no elsewhere. Oh well, I guess you must like it here then since you keep coming back. “
Because its a collective action problem. Being on Amazon is the least bad option for any individual business even though they would all be better off if they left simultaneously. IMO a primary purpose of market regulation should be to counteract these types of problems so that the market can move itself out of a local maxima and become more efficient overall.
I don't get the Amazon bashing. My experience is nothing like that:
Kitchen scale, $20 bucks, looks and operates exactly as described; three years later, it still works fine.
Bed sheets, $16, two days later delivered, better than I thought - at least for the price that is. Best price/quality ratio I could get.
If I don't like something, returning is super convenient; I drop it off at Kohl's over the weekend. Time and again I am stupefied of how is it possible that in small town USA, I can get something shipped by next day while paying a one time yearly fee.
I think Amazon is the best online shopping experience on the
planet.
At the employee side, the minimum pay at Amazon is $20 per hour. Walmart is $14, AliExpress ... we can be only guessing at that
Amazon pays $20/hour because most people don't have the mental constitution to put up with it. It's pretty dull.
When I was hired as a part-timer (no interview!) at a warehouse there were about a dozen of us. In a month maybe four were left. It wasn't terribly physically difficult, though I was fairly sore. But there was nothing good about the work.
It was just repetitive, isolated tasks where you have to consciously decide not to meet the unrealistic standard, or just blindly follow the orders on the device, or guess how fast to work to avoid a strain injury while not being obviously slow.
To give some examples, we'd take bags (totes) from specific locations as indicated on our device, pack them on a large push-cart, and shuttle them halfway across the warehouse. Or we'd pick packages for a specific location off a conveyer belt (which usually moved too fast). Or we'd spend 5+ hours, alone, unfolding bags and putting them back onto the shelves.
There's probably some analogy to be made with software development here, based on what I've heard, but I'm only a CS student.
> I think Amazon is the best online shopping experience on the planet.
Be careful there. I use Allegro in Poland, where next-day is the rule, their website doesn't scream it was made in the late '00s (in the worst meaning of this comparison), and, as a bonus, they don't compete with their own merchants and even happen to pay their taxes here fairly. I'm sure there's plenty more of such websites across the 'planet'.
I expected the site to look good after all that shit talking, but it just looks like china-slop sites like shein and Alibaba. And it has all the exact same mechanics as amazon. I had to scroll the entire page to stop seeing sponsored products.
Really Lowes and Home Depot have been doing better imo for anything they have. Their website actually has filters and decent search and most stuff is free next day delivery. On top of that, the Chinese knockoffs are fairly minimal or at least more established knock-off brands.
On top of that, that's without a $150/yr subscription.
You’ll have a distinctly different experience buying clothes on there. 95% of the items don’t fit as described, the fabrics are not as pictured. My wife has a whole box of clothing returns she has to do for some shopping she did before a trip. Almost none of it was as-advertised. And Amazon will “lose” at least two or three items and claw back the refund a few times like they have every year, necessitating she call once a month for 3 or 4 months until she gets someone empowered to fix the problem permanently.
Sadly it’s still a better experience for her than shopping in-person because at least 5% of the items do fit versus nothing in-store. You used to be able to alter that stuff but the cheapness of the fabric and the intricacy of the “on-trend” design makes that impossible these days.
I returned two products, got two different return codes, was supposed to send each back separately.
During the return (it was a Kohl's return), I forgot about the two different codes and gave both items to the clerk, who then packaged both items with only one code.
I got credited for the first item a few hours later.
At that point, I realized my mistake of packaging both in the same return, but thought it was a lost case and chalked it up as a loss.
Imagine my surprise when, a few weeks (!) later , I got credited for the second return as well. How did they figure that one out? I don't know.
The most amazing customer service, where I did not even have to mention it and the error was still rectified.
The problem is thats it is a 2 dollar product that could be sold and fulfilled by some other seller for 10 but you cant do that because Amazon's pricing scheme.
Shop around and you are likely see the same product with a different "name" on it for 1/2 the price.
Same. I'm in the US and do not use Amazon at all. Life, and the products I buy, actually got much better. Amazon is overpriced and low quality. Pretty much everywhere else has better products, lower prices and free & fast shipping at this point (Walmart, Target, Home Depot, direct purchases, etc.). Pretty shocked at all the people defending Amazon here.
It depends on what you're buying. I've found plenty of items that are cheaper on Amazon with free shipping, than picking them up in store at Walmart. Which is just crazy.
I'm in Germany, and I usually just find a good option outside Amazon, then look for the best deal, which is rarely Amazon. Thanks to express checkout (Google/Apple Pay or PayPal is almost always an option), it's pretty much zero hassle.
BUT, if I care more about getting something real fast than the quality, or if I don't want to pay 5 EUR for shipping (especially cheap stuff), I'm not aware of any competition Amazon has here. I use it quite a bit still, for these two use cases.
You gave me the idea to buy something I was thinking of ordering from Amazon (a Time Timer) and see how it compares. The timer I got is $24.95 on their site, 15% off welcome discount (-$3.74), +$10.00 shipping, and "orders ship within 3-5 business days." On Amazon they have the one I ordered for $19.95 list price minus 15% = $16.96 and I could have it within 1 hour for $9.99 (lol... I've never seen that option before) or tomorrow for free, although I do have Prime which is why that's an option. I do like to buy a lot of things directly from their original sellers or a specialized store (Loop earplugs, or speed cubes from TheCubicle, electronics from adafruit or jameco or digikey, etc...) but it shows you a big difference in service level.
What if you want to buy simple Chinese plastic stuff (e.g. someone elsewhere mentioned zip ties)? The manufacturer is somewhere in China with a minimum order of 10,000, so no, you can't go to them. Amazon is often the cheapest source for this, cheaper than any local retail.
Honestly? AliExpress wins for this stuff. The shipping is always much more expensive than the actual items, so I batch purchase stuff like this. Funnily enough, sometimes, despite paying only one shipping cost, it arrives in multiple shipments.
I prefer online retailers because there is a lot more choice there. I can't find an inflatable knee pillow in local stores. The supermarket close to me even stopped selling batteries.
This is true. Many "weird" purchases that used to be available from someone local are now impossible to get. Not sure about the supermarket not stocking batteries though... That's just insane.
You have a small shop that sells zip ties? The only place I would expect to find something like that is a big box store or a hardware store (which are all chains now).
Buying from a big box store still does support local jobs though
Like yeah, Walmart isn't really much better than Amazon in the grand scheme of things, but I would rather people be able to get stable employment at a Walmart store than have to fight it out as gig workers delivering for Amazon.
Amazon delivers next day or the same day many of the items if you have Prime.
I tried many times to order something directly, and most of the time it’s the same price and longer shipping. So, for me in terms of convenience Amazon wins.
I'm not sure about where you are from, but in Australia I've recently had just as reliable service, shipping costs and delivery times from individual brands as from Amazon.
Amazon used to be better, and they still have the logistics network to be better, but they've dropped the ball. If this downward trend hasn't hit you yet, it's only a matter of time.
Thousand of long-tail ecommerce sites focused on narrow markets; buying things directly from the supplier; using other large-scale marketplace e-commerce sites and aggregators like Walmert, Newegg, Rakuten, etc.
AFAIK, they are two completely disjoint sets of individuals. But could you clarify what that has to do with the goods and services offered by large publicly-traded firms that members of those families happened to be the original founders of?
I don’t understand the question. The reasonable alternative is to not use them and buy stuff elsewhere. There’s a million places to buy stuff. I haven’t ordered anything from Amazon in months.
Yeah, I'm with you. I also have a very specific set of requirements, including only buying from companies headquartered in the Seattle area that have at least one 'o' in their name. That narrows it down to Amazon and Costco for general merchandise. But I'm also considering adding a criterion that the vendor's logo needs to include a swoosh or arrow of some kind, which would eliminate Costco, at which point I'll be stuck only with Amazon.
I know people are going to chime in and say "the fact that all of your personal criteria align maximally with the strengths of one particular vendor doesn't represent an uncompetitive market, but to the contrary, represents an extremely competitive market in which all of the participants are distinguishing themselves by maximizing the value they offer to different market segments with diverse preferences."
But as a presumptuous narcissist, my expectation is that everyone in the market should be optimizing their business practices to satisfy my preferences in particular, rather than limiting my options by trying to appeal to anyone other than me.
How often do you buy stuff online? It’s not a factor for me. My last online purchase was water filters. Got them from Home Depot, easy peasy. Before that, I’m not sure, it’s been a few weeks at least.
In any case, there’s a big difference between “there’s no reasonable alternative” and “there are plenty of reasonable alternatives but I like Amazon more.”
At least 3-4 times a week, ranging from groceries to various household items, like water filters and what not.
I mean, different people have different behavioral patterns and preferences, if Amazon is not for you, it’s fine. It definitely works for me and saves me a lot of time.
More often than not. Why would I spend my valuable time at a big box store like Home Depot that might not even have what I need at that store? They are all functionally equivalent members of the oligarch class.
Home Depot has an online store. And almost ubiquitous free shipping without any subscription.
I didn’t order those from Amazon because their search sucks, I’d have to pay for shipping or find something else to bundle into the purchase, and I don’t trust them with anything that goes on or in my body. At least with Home Depot, if I end up in the hospital because their water filters poisoned me, I can point to their name on the label and sue them.
This is actually a good point. The policy described in the article doesn't apply in the EU, but it's not like Amazon is cheaper in the EU.
Also, it is common to see in the US competitors with lower prices than Amazon (e.g. I frequently see brand name products on Microcenter cheaper than Amazon), not to mention that it doesn't apply to sites like eBay. So you've got to wonder if it actually has a strong effect on pricing across the internet.
It’s funny to me that people look at the wild runaway success of the American experiment and conclude that it needs more cronyism like every other country.
Please feel free to implement whatever unfavorable policies you like in your own nations. You are welcome to further drive down your GDP per capita if you’d like. That’s not what the US is though.
The issue is that those policies drive prices up globally, and the article touches on that exact point. Sellers have to absorb Amazon's fees while being required to keep the same price. As a result, their sales outside of Amazon have to factor in those expenses, which drives up prices for those products in general. Even if someone could sell that product at a lower price outside of Amazon, they won't lowball themselves and would rather improve their own margins.
Then, in the EU, you have to factor in fluctuating currency exchange rates and sales tax/VAT set individually by each country. This is another issue altogether.
It's insane that it's legal for a major marketplace platform to prohibit vendors from using their platform to engage in manipulative price discrimination?
Online stores should be forced to allow manufacturers to use their sites as free advertising platforms to expose consumers to their products, while incentivizing them to actually complete the transaction someplace else?
Should brick-and-mortar stores not be allowed to offer price matching either?
You would have a point if not for Amazon's exorbitant fees which it expects to be absorbed by the seller and then requires that seller to set the same prices everywhere.
This is clearly manipulative and is regulated outside the US.
You have all the info you need in the article. Technically, Amazon's basic commission is ~15%, and that is in line with other marketplaces.
The issue is that when you pay only that basic referral fee, you won't make a lot of sales. You have to pay more to actually make those sales, which amounts to ~46%. Advertising, fulfillment, and other fees. You have to pay for all of this while being required to keep your price "fair," so you have to raise prices on other platforms to stay afloat.
You could just ignore selling on Amazon altogether, but in the US that's rather unrealistic at this point, and they know that.
Noticed a big surge in pricing on Amazon for mundane crap. End up checking eBay and AliExpress for the same and both always cheaper, and sometimes in multiple. Things like blow up pool toys, > $20 on Amazon, easily half and lower on the others, and really not even worth a dollar in the scheme of things.
I've stopped shopping on Amazon entirely, and the impact on my credit card bill has been substantial.
It's not simply that products are priced poorly, but it is also that they seem to be priced just at the threshold where the purchase remains sufficiently convenient not to shop locally or elsewhere online.
Because of their predatory practices it seems online prices are roughly identical for Western branded products at all online retailers. For Chinese brands, it's long been cheaper to use AliExpress but shipping isn't as fast and returns aren't as convenient.
But that's perception. I blocked Amazon and continued shopping as usual. The volume of my purchases is now through local retailers, and I'm buying roughly the same amount of stuff but I'm spending a great deal less.
Yep. Amazon is almost no advantage here in the UK. I used to bulk buy stuff from them because it was cheaper than the supermarkets. That is no longer true. In fact it's 10-25% more expensive usually.
It's even worse in Ireland, particularly with the new import fees for non-EU goods - €7 + 23% VAT per item.
Amazon Germany/France/Spain won't ship a huge variety of items to Ireland and obviously won't have the same composition of goods as English speaking countries.
It's just about worth it for Prime Video and Deliveroo Silver, but the Irish Prime membership doesn't even support household or family sharing...
Yep, prime membership went quite a lot up; prices went up; delivery times got slower after COVID; now they are also saving on packaging, which means Royal mail brings me broken packages held by elastic bands...
Tempting to think that, but that logistical miracle machine that thus far no one has been able to fully replicate is expensive. Their global operating margin ex-AWS (which is a whole different beast) was 6.8% in Q2. (AWS was 39%)
That's actually not anything phenomenal -- and worse than I thought before I looked it up just now. I can't understand AMZN's stock valuation. They should really spin off AWS to be its own thing.
Their international margins are even worse in isolation, 4.1%. That's not even worth getting out of bed for, just buy some bonds and skip all the drama.
VAT should be done by AliExpress now, at least that is how I understood it.
Sadly it's only limited items, but you can also filter for just items that they have in their EU warehouse.
I recently bought some stuff (Ps2 controller etc) and it was still cheaper including shipping and duty then to order it in EU. Package was checked by customs.
Same problem here. In my country at least, the handling fees for the local shipping are around USD10, you can avoid those using a courier but that shipping method is much more expensive.
A few years ago I looked at the finances of a company that sells on Amazon (FBA). It was pretty astounding the number of fees they charge. They were paying to show up in sponsored results which obviously increased the fees but from what I remember between all the fees roughly 50% of the sale price of their products was just going directly to Amazon.
Well, it's usually much cheaper to use a non-Amazon 3PL to ship your Amazon volume (along with other D2C channels), but then you might not have the prime badge if you go on the cheaper side of the market.
And even if you want a prime badge, it's often/usually cheaper to go with a 3PL that can do some sort of SFP setup if you have reasonable volumes.
Although Amazon has a stranglehold on 3PL's too (or if you are a seller offering SFP), as they will force you to use Amazon Logistics at a certain % of volume if you want the prime badge which can be more expensive than other carriers.
(I work in logistics consulting and do network strategy design & 3PL selection as part of that so have a reasonably up to date view on comparative/competitive costs for this sort of thing - mostly in Europe though and appreciate the USA market is different)
Compared to the wholesale -> retail markup for most goods 50% is pretty in line with what a normal store would take as their cut, maybe slightly better.
The endgame of free market was always plain and obvious: shittiest possible products at lowest possible price, and no one in the entire value chain having above-sustenance any margins.
That seems like a reasonable policy for Amazon to have. It's pretty normal practice for wholesale/distribution contracts to include clauses prohibiting the manufacturer from undercutting them in other channels after the contract is signed.
Why would Amazon want to bear the cost of people using their store as a free product billboard, or using their warehouses as cheap transient storage space, while trying to push customers to actually make their purchases elsewhere?
I'm not sure how this can be considered 'regulation' of the market, however -- to the contrary, it signifies that Amazon itself is sensitive to price pressure coming from competing distribution channels.
A monopoly store is charging (according to sibling posts) about a 50% tax to its suppliers, and will ban them if they sell their products for a fair price anywhere else. The tax percentage keeps increasing over time, as the monopoly uses this policy to prevent anyone else from competing on price.
50% "tax", or 100% markup, is the typical reseller markup for consumer products across the market, and anti-undercutting clauses are also universal.
Every bit of what you're describing is the way retail distribution works across the industry in general. Amazon isn't doing anything out of the ordinary in any way.
Amazon often have no idea what vendors sell their products for elsewhere. It's often an empty threat that vendors are very happy to ignore. Also, many of those agreements are spurious in international law. Unless there's a bullet proof contract with actual teeth, vendors will sell anywhere they can.
To steal Benn Jordan’s ideas, capitalism is replacing itself with leveragism.
You don’t buy things from Amazon because they’re the best store with the best prices, you buy them because they’re the only store that has their own massive scale delivery service that delivers more packages than FedEx or UPS (not combined, but Amazon still delivers more packages than either).
It’s not possible for another store to compete with that. There is no competition. Starting a competitor to Amazon would be more difficult and capital intensive than starting a new car or rocket company.
There is no other store that can get me the most obscure and random stuff in less than 24 hours. Walmart can’t do it, Costco can’t do it, Target can’t do it, Dollar General can’t do it.
Not to mention the sheer number of things that they offer unrelated to the commerce side of things
I don't even live in the US or shop on Amazon anymore but I still have a Prime subscription just in case something good is on Prime Video (this doesn't happen often...)
Actually I just remembered there were several things recently that I could not find locally and so I used international shipping from Amazon.com which turned out to be way cheaper than you would expect I think mostly due to the Prime subscription
> You don’t buy things from Amazon because they’re the best store with the best prices, you buy them because they’re the only store that has their own massive scale delivery service that delivers more packages than FedEx or UPS (not combined, but Amazon still delivers more packages than either).
Speak for yourself. Their delivery service is awful and I'd choose UPS 100% of the time instead if they gave me the choice.
It was Amazon's increasingly slow and unreliable deliveries that caused me to cancel Prime earlier this year, and I'm strongly motivated to shop elsewhere now because I know that the package will be delivered by someone other than Amazon's own service.
> It’s not possible for another store to compete with that. There is no competition.
That's an interesting theory. How do you reconcile it with the observable reality of there being thousands of e-commerce stores, marketplace platforms, and other sales channels operating in direct competition with Amazon?
Yeah and it's not obscure or random stuff if it is in the Amazon warehouse that is in your town. That is the only way one day works they already have it on site.
The comment is deleted now, but a user who shall remain nameless challenged folks to find a vendor that could get a "TPM module for an ASRock Rack motherboard" delivered to their house tomorrow.
Well, if you order within the next nine-ish hours and are willing to pay 29 USD for both next-day delivery and "Rush Processing", Newegg absolutely will deliver this item [0] to my door tomorrow. Maybe that's not the TPM module the user had in mind, but -if that's the case- the task being underspecified is not my problem. ;)
$29 for overnight shipping is more than the cost of one month of Prime by approximately double, which is an entire month of free expedited shipping, usually overnight and sometimes same-day.
Is anyone else remotely price competitive? I can find the module on eBay with free shipping but they quote me 3-10 day delivery.
You are missing something else: you followed the race to the bottom. You knew exactly what you wanted and nothing else can substitute (correct me if I'm wrong, but I doubt anyone else who makes a TPM that will fit your motherboard). Your only consideration is price and fast shipping - there isn't much for anyone to compete on and so only the largest will.
In the more typical case these is. I recently needed a compass (my son is in scouts), what do I know about a compass: not much. Amazon will give me hundreds of options, some good, some really bad: I'd have to buy the one expensive name brand I know (and hope they are still as good as they were when I was a kid), or risk buying junk - worse junk in a way I wouldn't recognize in time to return it. However I found a small niche orienteering suppler that knows their product and so was able to direct me to a brand I've never heard of that while not as good as the name bring, was both a lot cheaper and good enough. They beat the race to the bottom because for a slightly higher price than amazon they could deliver me the exact thing I need for a still reasonable price.
It's almost as though market competition precisely refers to lots of vendors targeting lots of different criteria to win business from differentiated market segments, with many being successful within particular niches, but with the largest overall at any moment being the one that's currently most adept at optimizing its operations to serve the preferences of the widest segment. Who could have guessed?
Sure. I wasn't going to name you because I had no idea exactly why you'd deleted that comment, so I wasn't gonna be rude and attach the challenge to your name.
> $29 for overnight shipping is more than the cost of one month of Prime by approximately double...
What I've told you is that there are other retailers who will next-day ship you all sorts of "specialty" items like that one. So, Challenge Completed.
Whereas what you've told me is that overnight shipping for this one part is a little less than 1/6h the cost of a year of Amazon Prime. Given that I've only gotten things next-day shipped two or three times in my mumble decades of life, it sounds like not using Amazon saves me a notable chunk of money.
Also, I've heard from a ton of people out in the boonies that Prime ships very few -and sometimes no- items to them same day or overnight. The Prime Promise seems to be extremely location-dependent.
If you don’t have Prime you can either buy it for a single month or buy overnight shipping on the individual item. Both those options are far less than $29.
You did complete the challenge, but it proved that Amazon has a nearly insurmountable logistics advantage compared to competitors.
> ...has a nearly insurmountable logistics advantage...
Nah.
People in the boonies wouldn't be able to get gratis next-day shipping on that part. Based on the reports I've been hearing, they'd often be lucky to get six day shipping. Ya'll are now squarely in the part of the lifecycle where Amazon quietly practices aggressive "service differentiation" in order to keep its margins where they want them.
Amazon shipping and logistics are heavily subsidised by the social contract in Western Countries - it's not remotely a fair comparison even if these were removed based on Amazon's effective corporate income tax rates coming in as low as 1.4%.
In the US alone Amazon has received over $11 billion in cumulative taxpayer subsidies, and governments spend an average of nearly $43,000 per fulfillment center job created.
This is ramping up exponentially with regard to their data center rollout. In a single instance in rural Oregon, five AWS data centers will avoid $1 billion in property taxes.
This is completely aside from the qualitative damage done to traditional retail, shopping districts as a whole, SME innovation on consumer products, and distorting market competition beyond all recognition.
Who said anything about a centralized government system?
We aren’t comparing capitalism to that.
We are comparing a deeply broken antitrust regulatory environment that is ending capitalism, or ant least the free market competitive style of capitalism you are romanticizing, and replacing it with leveragism or legal cartels or whatever you want to call it.
Amazon is a failure of underregulated capitalism because it’s not possible for anyone to compete with them.
Amazon should have been required to split off AWS from Amazon years ago, and I’d say there’s a very good argument to be made that their fulfillment business constitutes a national monopoly. FedEx and UPS don’t actually provide the services that FBA does, which makes Amazon a monopoly.
> Amazon is a failure of underregulated capitalism because it’s not possible for anyone to compete with them
What do you meany nobody can compete with Amazon? It happens all the time across the various markets they're in: e-commerce, retail, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, entertainment, and artificial intelligence.
How do I start a fulfillment business that can get a roll of toilet paper delivered to the doorstep of consumers nationwide inside of 24 hours and have that transaction be profitable?
How much investment money and customer volume do I need to make that business viable?
Fulfillment business is very hard. Amazon has invested well into the hundreds of billions building it out, and that's supported by their economy of scale of Amazon.com. A fulfillment business for toilet paper would never pencil out profitably no matter how hard you try.
This is actually a great example of the consumer winning out due to Amazon's business. Pre-Amazon, 24 hour shipping was literally not a thing, even 2 day shipping, especially for free, was a major innovation of the site.
So for fulfillment for general goods, I do think this is something that you will never be able to compete with Amazon on as a small player profitably. However, there is plenty of competition in specific verticals, such as Instacart or Doordash for groceries specifically. And if you want to be a toilet paper producer/seller, that is possible too (just not the fulfillment part but again I'm not sure why we expect "toilet paper fulfillment" to be a valid category that needs to be a thing), for example I bought my phone case from Dbrand due to the strength of their product and marketing. As a small player you need to compete on specific verticals but that has always been the case. Amazon was originally a book seller.
> How do I start a fulfillment business that can get a roll of toilet paper delivered to the doorstep of consumers nationwide inside of 24 hours and have that transaction be profitable?
As with all successful businesses, you start small.
You figure out what's your edge. You are resourceful.
You don't compete with ANY competitor by trying to do 100% what they do out of the gate.
Pro-tip: selling (rather than producing) toilet paper is probably never a big business anyhow.
If all we are going to do is engage in vague inspirational idealism rather than using realistic boundaries to the discussion I fear the relevance to the subject at hand fades away.
> You don't compete with ANY competitor by trying to do 100% what they do out of the gate.
This idea bleeds into the definition of a monopoly. I can’t just make a mobile operating system like Apple and Google because I won’t have a competitive advantage. I can’t make my own Amazon competitor because their edge is that they deliver more packages than UPS or FedEx. I can’t compete with Google search because the web browser that comes with Android defaults Google on the home page.
Sure, nobody is trying to do 100% of what their competitors do, but I wouldn’t be able to do 5% of what Amazon does even if you handed me billions in seed capital.
It sounds like you’ve decided it isn’t possible to compete, there’s nothing worth trying. I suppose that’s a fair stance to take and I’m not here to convince you to be more resourceful and strategic.
Meanwhile, lots of people are starting and building successful businesses.
We can certainly agree that lots of people are starting and building successful businesses. But I would hope we can also agree that there are many business categories where entry into the market is extremely difficult.
And hopefully you can agree that, conceptually, monopoly businesses do exist and have existed in the past.
> They’re saying that starting a competitor to Amazon is now impossible regardless of capital investment.
Competing in which market? Amazon is a conglomerate operating in e-commerce, retail, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, entertainment, and artificial intelligence.
> That breadth is part of why competing is so tough.
I don't see it. In each of the industries they operate in, they face fierce competition. Many of those competitors also compete with Amazon across multiple of those industries plus others that Amazon does not compete in.
Competition is by definition tough. But I push back against the original thesis that Amazon has such leverage that it is impossible to compete with them (in all the cases, you're not just competing against them!)
Also somehow ignoring captured markets, natural monopolies, goverment granted monopolies, regulation capture and the myriad of other unsurmountable situations that "competition" cannot overcome
Anticompetitive behavior is one of the most predictable failure modes of capitalism. Capitalism only works if you have measures in place that protect fair competition and those measures are actually used.
Not being allowed to sell your product elsewhere for cheaper seems downright anticompetitive and if our government was functioning government that would be illegal. The whole point of the ideal free market is that fees are supposed to approach zero with increasing competition.
The funny part is that our monopoly busting law that actual worked but we don't use anymore actually says that you must sell your product the same everywhere. It turns out a great way to kill monopolies to take out the part where they get a better deal because they're bigger. Making the price the same everywhere means that now companies have to compete on other things.
It sucks that sellers cannot offer their products for cheaper elsewhere, but I've also often seen sellers sell their products for a much higher price on their own website than Amazon, and in that case why wouldn't I buy it on Amazon instead?
In that sense having one big marketplace with all kinds of competing products together also seems to motivate sellers more to compete on price rather than relying on lazy consumers.
I've been boycotting Amazon since early 2025. It's not hard once you get reacquainted with things taking several days or weeks to arrive. Plan a little and it all works out. The delay in gratification may even help you avoid impulse purchases.
The notion that, if more people did this, prices might come down everywhere only stiffens my resolve.
I was an early Amazon user and introduced many people to it (was nice to easily acquire books). Have deleted my account 15ish years ago and noticed weird mindsets people developed, thinking they cannot get products elsewhere, thinking that Amazon ships faster than others when using Amazon Prime, thinking Amazon has cheap products and so on.
Showed what make believes people have.
I'm a guy that is pretty lazy and spends most of his money on convenience and not having to do stuff. It's not even convenient.
It's always a bit scary what things people believe end up believing about completely depending on one company.
I think it is interesting you think that people are believing fiction about Amazon when it comes to convenience. This reminds of the AI debate. Some people think AI is great and others think it is stupid. Neither side can see the others perspective.
I've always said that the two day shipping is a useless amount of time. Two days is too long if it's an emergency and if it can wait two days it can wait a week or more.
What's it good for? Constant shopping addiction dopamine?
I understand logistics is an insanely hard problem, but can't sellers create a co-op? Not on Amazon's scale, but start on a much smaller scale (gotta start somewhere). Maybe at a city level - if a bunch of sellers in Chicago (for example) rent a warehouse and serve only within Chicago, it is worth a try, no? Or is this a stupid question?
I remember hearing about a Uber like app (I might have seen it on More Perfect Union channel, I think). So I guess at least some people are thinking along the same lines, maybe?
As an individual, I guess the only thing I can do is shop as little as possible on Amazon (which I am already doing). Not sure what else I can do to help
Seems like a relatively simple fix, Amazon shouldn't be allowed to tell suppliers what price they can set on their site. No one should be able to tell a supplier what price they can charge to others.
These are a must for any mid-size seller. Their goal is to pretty self-explanatory; reprice your ASIN, live, to hit maximum sales. If your competitor is selling the same mug for $10.00, the repricer sees that and immediately reprices your mug for $9.99.
Its one of those "Well, if I don't use one, others will" situations.
I try to avoid Amazon as much as possible. 95% of the products are throwaway junk brands. It's tiring to shop there. I think Amazon is a great example of why competition, while good in most cases, has its limits when the information asymmetry due to overwhelming and opaque choices. I wish those junk, throwaway brands were banned...
The problems with Amazon these days, which may or may not be related to a buyer's specific location:
- Shipping delays. Prime's biggest selling point, is useless if orders aren't shipped in the advertised Prime timeframe. I've quit my Prime subscription multiple times this year because this keeps happening.
- Excessive advertising/sponsored listings. Over half the listings in a search are now sponsored listings, which are often lower quality listings. And Amazon now puts unrelated banner ads next to listings.
- Returns. While returns are typically hassle-free, this leads to abuse of the system. The returns get put back on the "shelf" without much inspection, and there have been more than a few times where I got an item listed as New, which was very clearly Used.
And then there are the cases where someone returns an item, but puts something else in the box for weight, so you end up getting a completely different thing than you ordered.
I once ordered a parallel LiPo battery charging board, and in the box was a LiPo battery, which someone clearly put in the box for weight. That situation was particularly dangerous, because a LiPo, let alone a used LiPo of unknown charge state, cannot be shipped by air and must be shipped by ground. If Amazon had put that box on a plane, that'd be a serious safety issue.
I didn't notice it until earlier this year. I was shopping for some new shoes of a specific brand that I like. Was about to pull the trigger on Amazon and then realized I would happen to walk by a shoe store while doing other errands later in the day and thought it would be nice to get them even sooner than 1-2 day prime shipping. I went to the store and tried them on and realized I needed a 1/2 size smaller than what I ordered. Then I paid and realized the shoe store price was $10 less than Amazon. So you really are paying for laziness/convenience with Amazon, which if you think about it from first principles, makes sense given there is a dude delivering this stuff to your house. It's just that this convenience fee was hidden for the longest time as Amazon was growing its industry dominance. What's next? If they follow the Walmart model they will continue to squeeze suppliers and also push competitors out of business. So if you can, try to use alternatives.
That's really contextual. Many times I'll go to a manufacturers site and the price is $3-$10 more than just using that same manufacturers store front on Amazon. Especially factoring in the "free shipping" w/Prime.
Could you sell a box of 10x Item A on amazon, and a box of 15x Item A on your own website for cheaper per unit? Without triggering the amazon Fair Pricing Policy?
Interesting article. But I wish it explained which fees made the share that Amazon takes go from 19% to 46%. The fulfilment fee is evidently necessary, it takes people to do that, and doing it yourself may cost more. The advertisement is also evidently necessary, but could have risen. The referral fee alone can't explain the increase.
And the fulfilment fee is not a fixed percentage of the price, it depends on the size, weight and price tier of the item.
Stopped using Amazon a while ago because I want to support smaller (and less controversial) businesses. But recently I went back there to look for a phone protector as for some reason that's the only time Amazon has been cheaper for something.
I was amazed at how janky the app experience was having been away for a couple of years. It felt a really dated and ad-bloated experience. Considering Amazon pioneered so many advances in e-commerce, I was surprised I don't miss it at all.
> But today, many sellers hand close to half of every sale to Amazon. Half!
This is how resellers work.
Back in the 80s, I was selling my compiler direct. I also engaged a reseller, if you recall, those were ones that advertised in computer magazines with full page ads crammed with items for sale.
The resellers demanded that I sell it to them at half the retail price. I was shocked and horrified! I soon found out, however, that all resellers are like that. They cannot make money otherwise.
I love Amazon because they have a wide variety of goods that ship very quickly, and if something is wrong it’s easy to get support. If there’s a return, it’s super simple to do and often free.
If I am ever given the choice between Amazon and some third party site I’ll always choose Amazon. It’s just too convenient.
I don't see much of a need to buy from Amazon anymore. Almost always there is a smaller business selling same stuff cheaper, and as a plus I feel good about not supporting big American corporation.
Of course there are exceptions, like some businesses selling exclusively through Amazon.
Shopify has been a game-changer in that regard. With millions of small stores it’s easier to find anything, have a fast and familiar checkout, and some channel for recourse if you didn’t receive fair treatment by the merchant.
It’s not a bad deal at the end of the day for any party IMO.
My issue is buying groceries from Amazon. You have to fill up your cart to > $30 to get a free delivery (in NYC). So you start searching for whatever you might want to include to get the free delivery. But the items like milk can come from
a) Amazon ("proper")
b) Amazon Groceries
c) Amazon Fresh
d) Whole Foods
Each of these have their own "cart" which must have goods > $25 etc. to get a free delivery. If you add an item from another list it does not count, so you must add things which you maybe don't really need just because they come from the same list as milk. Or, you will need to fill up multiple carts.
Then once you reach the threshold for free delivery and make the order, you may, or may not notice an extra line in the total bill: A tip for $5 in very small print which you have to edit away, or it is NOT FREE DELIVERY AFTER ALL, like promised.
What I lament is that Amazon is making me feel guilty for not tipping the delivery person. It is making me take extra action to NOT tip -- I must be a bad person. And it's making delivery people angry at me if I don't include the tip. And Amazon is adding the $5 there always as a default, even though they already said I have earned a free delivery.
It's a transaction between me and Amazon but now Amazon can implicitly blame bad service on the lack of tipping. I assume they would like to not pay their delivery people at all, just let them live on the tips.
I expect retail shops to have larger overheads than online stores.
When Amazon's policies unfairly push up prices across the Internet, it deprives us from competition pushing prices down, and having a better idea of what online overheads are.
I really love how the (flow-)chart in this article has two starting points and both flow perfectly into the vicious circle loops without any awkward gap no matter from which direction you start reading the chart.
More generally, the unprecedented levels of market concentration and pricing power in the US, a consequence of the gutting of antitrust enforcement from the inside by Robert Bork and the Chicago School, have led to much higher inflation in the US.
US can just legislate that one marketplace cannot force how vendors use other marketplaces. This is not about free spech but rather about price fixing (in indirect/perverse ways).
One thing that pushes prices up is the expectation that "free" shipping is offered on all products. The shipping cost gets rolled in to the price of the product, and the Fair Pricing Policy prevents selling the product cheaper elsewhere, even if you charge for shipping there.
I think people over index on “convenience” for lower quality products that further the growth of businesses like Amazon that can now fuck you over like this as a result.
We live in a convenience era (delivery services, etc) that allow people to “live” their life from a couch. There is a great Kurt Vonnegut quote I’ll paraphrase
“My wife says to buy a hundred envelopes online, but I’d rather go out and buy just one. Along the way, I’ll meet people, see interesting things, and enjoy life. The point isn’t the envelope—it’s everything that happens while getting it.”
In the UK Amazon have now raised the price of general shipping to be 2/3 the price of a months prime subscription. Before prime, delivery regularly used to be £1.99 or £2.99. Now if you dont have prime everything is £4.99 to be delivered. It makes it seem silly to pay that when you could pay £8.99 for a months subscription of free deliveries, which is their whole game.
It's not settled yet that it IS illegal. The FTC alleges it is, and that's what the FTC's case will decide. In the US, it isn't illegal to be big or even to have a monopoly. What's illegal under antitrust law is using unfair tactics to keep a monopoly by blocking competition rather than winning it.
5-10 years ago we did pretty much all our shopping besides groceries, on Amazon.
~2 years ago I cancelled Prime and rarely ship at Amazon these days, instead buying directly from manufacturers' websites. It is useful for items that are hard to find elsewhere.
One side effect of cancelling Prime is that we buy less stuff that we don't really need. Reducing our consumption is a good thing.
the only way to prevent such things from happening is e-commerce is spread across non-platform channels but independent ones e.g woo commerce etc where a seller runs and hosts their own shop, then maybe go to semi-platforms such as shopify etc that don't aggregate everything on one storefront.
because sellers are reliant on amazon bringing in shoppers, unlike say woo commerce & shopify - then yeah amazon feels rightly so that they need to take 50% margins on a seller's item.
the same thing plays out everywhere where some producer is reliant on someone bringing in the buyers - uber, Spotify, apple App Store.
The greatest catalogue of consumer goods with the greatest logistics to back it up of all time. And the thread complain complaining about it. What a time to be alive.
How you spend your cash has always been a better democratic tool than a vote.
If you buy Amazon, then that's what you get in society and politics. Every Amazon purchase is a vote for monopolistic behaviour, the destruction of local services/industry, and for yet another America tax.
I do everything possible to avoid them, buy locally-made, etc, but it's becoming harder and harder. It's so ironic that people will complain about a declining economy, no jobs, etc, then will joyfully donate money to promote foreign jobs and enrich middlemen on a weekly basis.
I own a dozen brands that sell primarily on Amazon, and I have to say that this whole issue seems quite overstated, especially with regard to its impact on consumers. I don't get the impression that the person writing this actually sells things on Amazon, which seems to be par for the course with these critiques.
People love to complain about Amazon fees, but when I read things like "In 2014, this was about 19% of sales. But today, many sellers hand close to half of every sale to Amazon. Half!" I wonder why people who are so lacking in subject matter expertise decide to write these articles.
The main reason that Amazon charges so many fees is that they provide a truly mind-boggling amount of infrastructure for you. The main reason the percent you pay to Amazon has gone up is because they've added more services. The author of the post notes that only the referral fee is mandatory, but doesn't manage to quite put together why going from only referral fee to a bunch of extra services means that Amazon now takes more of every dollar.
Once upon a time, you'd list your stuff on Amazon, and when someone ordered a product, you'd ship it yourself. Then Amazon decided to allow third party sellers to use Amazon's storage and fulfillment. Now suddenly the percentage of each sale's revenue that went to Amazon doubled! And yet, this was 100% positive for merchants, because Amazon's storage and fulfillment prices are cheaper than almost any alternative. When you move from a 3PL to Amazon's fulfillment, you pay Amazon more, but your profit margins increase. (There are exceptions for some product types, but the overwhelming majority of the time you save money.)
Of course, Amazon's fulfillment centers started running out of storage, so they'd limit how many units people could store there. That meant larger sellers would still have to maintain their own storage solution for anything that wouldn't fit at Amazon. But then Amazon introduced AWD, an upstream storage solution where you can store basically an infinite amount of stuff still packed by the case, and it ships to FBA warehouses when needed. More money for Amazon! But AWD is cheaper than basically any 3PL's storage, so more money for me too.
Amazon then introduced a service that let you book freight in the US with them to get things to their warehouses. Then they introduced freight to get things into the US from overseas. Then they introduced even cheaper AWD warehouses in China. You're not required to use these things, but Amazon wins a lot of business with them because they're cheaper than competitors.
This is not to say that everything Amazon does is great or that all of their fee increases have been net positive. First they introduced a fee if your products sit in FBA warehouses more than six months, then they introduced a fee if your inventory gets too low relative to demand. These are annoying! (Though also I have almost never been affected by them, because the amount of inventory Amazon wants you to have is basically the optimal amount from a planning perspective anyway.)
There's advertising, which, yes, is very annoying to have to pay for, but y'know what? You have to pay for that on your own site too! I have one brand where I do a healthy business on my own Shopify site, but I keep less of every dollar on there than on Amazon because I have to spend more on Meta ads to get a sale than I do on Amazon ads.
People love to hate on Amazon (and, again, lots of valid reasons for this!), but at the end of the day they collect an enormous amount of money because they provide an enormous amount of value.
Direct result of the weakening of antitrust from a 2007 case legalizing vertical price-fixing, justified by the dumb fake rationale that Wikipedia paraphrases as:
> manufacturer-imposed minimum resale prices can lead retailers to compete efficiently for customer sales in ways other than cutting the retail price.
It has nothing to do with technology, just oligarchy and corruption. Nothing "capitalists" hate more than competition.
edit: as an aside, why are almost none of the top level comments, and absolutely none of the 5 most upvoted comments, about Amazon pricing policies? They're all about how people like to (or don't like to) shop at Amazon. Who cares?
>Setting a price on a product or service that is significantly higher than recent prices offered on or off Amazon;
This is the text from the policy that the article says "And they can't charge less elsewhere." This is just wrong. They just can't randomly charge Amazon a higher price. If it's solely due to Amazon's cut that sounds like a reasonable increase. There are tons of products on Amazon that are above their fair market value.
> Because Amazon is where the shoppers are: it accounts for about 40% of all US online retail sales.
A lot of the competition is gone, so now it's time for the "price hike" step of the VC playbook - enter markets with insane amounts of cash, slowly boil the competition alive until it goes away and/or the users are hooked, raise prices.
> Amazon's Fair Pricing Policy lets it remove the Buy Box (the "Add to Cart" button), or even suspend a seller, if they're offering their item cheaper elsewhere.
IIRC that kind of shit is at least illegal in the EU. Bookingcom and other sites have had their "best price" enforcement invalidated here in the past.
The bad thing is, due to the sheer scale Amazon has, it is all but impossible to compete with it. You won't get the scale deals that Amazon gets at shippers (USPS, DHL, Fedex, UPS, DPD, whatever). You won't get the money to construct warehouses across the world that make Amazon's fast shipping work in the first place. You won't have the insane amounts of money coming in from customers that allow for its extremely generous return policies. And you won't have some sort of cash cow like AWS that allows you to run your business at near zero profit or even loss.
The only way you can compete is if you are in a market where you can provide a better experience for the customer and the customer is willing to pay a premium.
I hate Amazon and I still shop there. It's not about price, I will pay more for a product to buy it directly and not via Amazon /if/ I can find an original. The issue for me is threefold:
1. Discoverability: Many products are so rapidly and thoroughly cloned that it is difficult to impossible to identify the original maker, find their site, and purchase through them. The insane proliferation of counterfeits, clones, and sometimes outright scam products means that Amazon at least gives me an opportunity to buy a clone/counterfeit and return it if its not meeting my expectations. Sometimes the original is notably higher quality but no longer produced/sold, as well. Recently I wanted to buy a Polar Magnetic Pen as a gift. The website is up and the shopping cart works, but checkout is disabled. They're out of stock everywhere. There's hundreds of random worded Chinese clones on Amazon that are 25% of the price and 30% of the quality, so I bought a clone and risked it.
2. Logistical Certainty: I work a lot and have little free time after basic households tasks, other than the weekends. So if I want to do a project or something, I plan it for a following weekend and order things. If I can't order on a Tuesday or Wednesday and /know/ that I will get it by Friday, it's basically pointless. Sometimes I'll just roll the dice, but generally I prefer logistical certainty. I actually have gone back to buying at brick and mortar stores if possible to really cement this (I use Best Buy now a lot more than in the past, although selection is poor). There's a few other online retailers I strictly prefer to Amazon that can also deliver this like B&H Photo.
3. Breadth of Catalog / Access: There's basically nothing I can't acquire via Amazon. If I need, let's say 6 things, to do some sort of hobby project my options are generally either: A) go to 2-4 different stores, either physically and waste a day of my life or online and hope the shipments all arrive in time or B) order on Amazon everything at once delivered as one.
These things are way more important than price. I still hate Amazon PRIMARILY because of commingling of SKUs meaning there's no real quality indicators and I cannot do anything as a consumer to ensure I receive legitimate, actual, quality products. If they hadn't fucked that up, I'd probably still like Amazon despite everything else. I used to love Amazon back in the day, now I hate it, because of how often I've received counterfeits and fraudulent products and the proliferation of Chinese dropshipper fly-by-nights.
I find that 20 years ago I shopped at Amazon for the low prices, but 2020s+ I shop at Amazon due to their logistics.
The problem for everyone else is not simply that Amazon ships quickly, I almost don't even care about that. The thing is that Amazon ships & delivers on a reliable predicted schedule. When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does. I shop at specific competitors who can do similar (B&H, Sweetwater, etc).
Many online stores big & small in the year 2026 will still take days to even send shipment info, followed by using unreliable carriers that miss ETAs.
I would even be OK with these stores giving a narrow range or probability "90% of the time this arrives between Tuesday & Wednesday".. But I am not in the mood to order stuff that may arrive in 2-10 days with very little clarity on which end of the range.
And then return...
Got a dud? Quality not as expected? Ordered two by mistake? Size is not fitting? Take it to nearest post office, scan a qr code and hand it over. Done.
The other day I had to pack a product not bought from Amazon, then drive 25 minutes to a specific company's drop off point at some weird opening hours...
And that's after it took me to write manual email to get return label...the entire process took multiple weeks. And then a few more weeks until getting the refund.
At this point, I'm happy to pay 10% extra just to buy from Amazon.
I agree, returns are where amazon crushes it. I feel like there should be some startup just focusing on making the perfect returns product for small brands. Just do anything including at home pickup and then figure out how to optimize later.
Amazon does not equally crush it with returns as you may discover when facing issues with things like televisions or expensive clothing
> And then return...
My little experience with Amazon is that quality assurance has been moved to the customer. It is on you to see that a product is wrong/not what you wanted.
> At this point, I'm happy to pay 10% extra just to buy from Amazon.
As the article states, you are paying more than 10% extra because Amazon. And everybody else too.
I had to return iSpring RO system bought through their official portal. It came as a shock to me that I had to pay for shipment that was 70% of the contents value. IMO that's the way to discourage returns.
I used to feel this way about Amazon returns. Then a seller sent me the wrong item and Amazon rejected the return and re-charged me and I've been trying to get my money back for over a year. I do think it will only be one more phone call, but I have thought that with every phone call. It's less than $50 but it's ridiculous. It has happened before that a seller would send me the wrong thing, which isn't great, but at least they would refund me. They have made this experience so tedious and frustrating, I'm sick of it and have moved all my physical purchases elsewhere.
Much better that nearest post office. Take it to the nearest whole foods and don't even bother with the box.
I had the option to return to a Sheetz a couple of weeks back. Totally unattended kiosk, scan QR code, bag item and drop it in.
And while you're there....look at these delicious organic local strawberries for $4.99....
This doesn't work for all of their items- some have to go to a larger Amazon return location, and you must provide packaging. I'm not sure what triggers this.
> Got a dud? Quality not as expected? Ordered two by mistake? Size is not fitting?
I totally agree, but I find the quality of the items I get off of Amazon to generally be a lot less than other places I chose to shop. Likely due to the fact that I intentionally shop on other sites for specific products but on Amazon I get things that just aren't necessary for me so I spend less time curating the purchases.
Yeah, returning ends up being the clencher for me for a lot of Amazon stuff.
If I think there's basically no likelihood of me returning something, I'll sometimes shop elsewhere, but for anything where there's even a chance of me not liking it for whatever reason I will buy on Amazon now.
i'm happy to pay a convenience fee to not have to set up an account to order from each individual store. having my address and payment info in one centralized superstore is way better than having it spread around dozens of niche businesses
apple pay is pretty damn convenient and seemingly secure. open a webpage and scan the apple qr like code and it's all done without much worry. maybe there's a mitm attack but i feel like you have a better shot at getting a refund from apple(i admit i've only used it a few times and nothing substantial or expensive)
i believe it also autofilled the address form for me.
Personally I’m happy to pay 20% extra elsewhere just to know that Bezos is not getting any of my money.
But I’m weird like that; I also think ordering everything online is inherently immoral (provided you are an able bodied person living in a city)
Why is it immoral to order things online?
i'm guessing he means "and thereby putting a neighbor out of business."
recycling isn't convenient, but people do it with an eye to the greater good.
it's not hard to imagine that an Amazon monopoly is not for the greater good.
I agree entirely that shopping on Amazon is immoral, but it's hard to understand how that extends to ALL online shopping.
The tradeoff for consumers is that convenient returns are cheaper to implement than quality control.
I was floored the other day doing an Amazon return. It was a rented office space, with just a window where you drop off your item to a clerk. I peeked inside it was floor to ceiling packages and toys and items. And there was a line behind me.
The sheer logistics and human will that made that possible is crazy to me.
Extrapolate to multiple locations in Miami alone. Then Florida. Then East Coast. Then USA. Then Europe. Global locations.
Who is in charge of all this? How do they keep track of all this? How do they identify a tiny little podunk location is fucking up and how do they find someone they can trust to run it?
It's crazy! Think about it next time you return something to Amazon.
As I understand it they just stop there. They pallet stuff up and sell it in bulk to someone who then proceeds to part ways with it on eBay or something like that. I think most of the mass market companies do this. Costco is well known for this.
At the online retailers I've worked at (not Amazon) returned items get split into a small number of groups.
A person returns a $5000 RTX 5090? A manager will be paged, who will carry it over to the high value items cage, in full view of the CCTV.
A person who returns a $5 bike light? And that person has also spent $$$$ over the years with a 0.5% return rate? Straight on the pallet of mixed returns without even opening the package.
Medium-value returns and customers with an eyebrow-raising return rate get a medium amount of inspection.
If you own some floor space and want something to do with it then you can join the amazon SPN (service provider network) and offer international returns processor.
The returns processor either boxes up many individual items heading for the same destination into a Master Carton or arranges to dispose of the item somehow depending on how the seller wants their returns handled.
Modern slave labour economics
Just bear in mind that if they don't like how often you return or the circumstances, they will issue you a sudden lifetime ban
But also if you go to support chat (not via the order details, which often rejects attempts at getting support) via the site footer, and escalate to an agent, you can tell them you don't have a post office that's easy to get to for you and don't drive etc. and they will just issue you a refund (if it's a quality problem). Done this many times when the product was damaged.
> Just bear in mind that if they don't like how often you return or the circumstances, they will issue you a sudden lifetime ban
I think that if I had to return frequently, I'd find a different vendor well before Amazon would decide they don't want me as a customer.
On the rare occasion I want a return, I've assumed that the reason they handle it without any issue is because they can see my lifetime purchase value vs. my return rate.
Maybe they don't care about my stats I guess but whichever way I'm currently happy in that regard.
I do worry that the competition is being wiped out, but I don't believe in boycotts for idealistic antitrust reasons.
Your second paragraph seems to explain your first.
Is your implication that they are cheating Amazon by claiming there is no easy return route? Or are you saying that their many returns drew a ban even when they were being approved for them?
There is too little detail in the GP to draw a conclusion, so this comment seems unfair.
They're accusing me of cheating Amazon and having experienced a ban myself. Neither is the case and my post didn't indicate either being so.
IDK why I'm catching an accusation and downvotes by telling people about Amazon customer support protocols that are internal policy but not documented publicly: that they will ban you for returns past some threshold of frequency and price, and they offer refunds for items that arrive damaged even if they first push you to spend your time returning them instead.
You're suggesting I've been banned for abusing the service?
I've never been banned and I don't abuse it. What I said is also true, that I don't drive etc.
I don't need to have been banned myself to know how they've operated with others. And seeking refunds for goods that were damaged upon arrival is not abuse. There's no need to give in to their first preference to return an item when it is in fact their policy to process refunds for them too, they just hide it behind customer service protocols instead of exposing it in UI. You don't need to settle for the first suggested remediation from a business's customer service to be ethical, or shaming people for escalating. That's just being a chump.
Not accusing you (or the imaginary person who returns many things but can't reach a post office, UPS store, etc, since you've made it clear that isn't you) of abuse. But it makes sense that they are doing analysis and banning customers that look like they're abusing the system, regardless of the truth of the matter. If someone is frequently receiving damaged goods and frequently requesting refunds without returns, that will be flagged for fraud.
Except you don’t have the choice to “pay 10% extra just to buy from Amazon”. Amazon force sellers to set not-lower price everywhere else.
That’s the article’s story, but in practice vendors offer coupons that give a lower price on their own site.
I haven’t run into any such coupons, but have heard this complaint about how Amazon as poisoned online retail, holding sellers hostage, countless times now.
I think you're slightly wrong. It's not prices, it's not logistics. Amazon dominates because they have the power & money to do the one single thing their competiton couldn't do without going out of business: No-questions-asked returns. 9 out of 10 people i ask this is the single reason they stay at Amazon.
The flip side to this is I've on multiple occasions had Amazon ship me clearly used shit resold as new — Amazon.com was the seller.
One even came with a sticker: "Thanks for giving this product a second life!"
The worst of the worst among us use Amazon as a try-before-you-buy or rental house. Their lax return policy encourages them.
If I buy anything important, especially expensive electronics, I buy it from somewhere else. If it's a reputable store with a strict return policy, I'm doubly sure there will be no fuckery.
This happens with items where it's clear no human even glanced at it. I received a sump pump that was wet and dirty!
You'd better pray it was not a model that can double as a sewage/effluent pump...
I returned it, got another used one, gave up and went to home depot.
I remember why most of the stuff on the frys shelf was like this. I think it was their downfall and for me i stopped shopping there because of all the broken items. With Amazon at least I don't have a huge cost to drive there and back.
Returns are monitored and you will be restricted if it looks like you're abusing the return policy
And yet people continue to do it 1000s of times a day, and they are clearly re-shelving lightly used items.
Most of my recent returns were for receiving used product.
People do it thousands of times a day because tens of millions of people order from amazon each day. But any given person doesn't do it thousands of times, or even hundreds of times. Low tens of times in a year is going to raise alarms in their systems.
I wouldn't believe this until it happened to me. New bedding on prime day - came used and stained. This is fucking disgusting.
Amazon is like - we will send you a replacement but you have to print a label, box it back up and drive to a UPS store to return. Why are we working for them for free? You send me soiled bedding and the reply is to make us do work and then get the product we originally bought.
I tried quitting these people years ago, its hard to do.
For me it was a Noctua fan that had a thick layer of dust built up. Who the fuck returns a $20 fan with thousands of hours of use? And why did Amazon think it was appropriate to send that trash to me when I paid for new??
Just wait until they restrict your returns because of how much you've had to return highly used, or broken, or deliverer abused, or knock-off, or arrived days later than projected products.
Doesn't even take that much for some people to be restricted. I had someone steal one box with maybe $50 worth of stuff off of my porch and Amazon replaced it after a ten minute conversation with customer service, but a year or two later someone stole $10 or so worth of an order of clothes laundry/softener toss travel sheets from me (or they just never shipped and I paid for them) after a particularly larger number of orders (I lived somewhere else by then), and Amazon not only did not offer a refund or replacement, they removed any way to request it. I am not sure what their cutoff is or if it has to do with what warehouse it ships from. Maybe people just lie about laundry supplies a lot? Perhaps the cutoff is more to do with the type of products? I had never ordered that sort of stuff before.
It is rather gross to me that they let people return clothes and shoes that have been tried on. My current pair of like $110 trail running shoes that I bought on Amazon had been tried on when I got them, and I was a bit unhappy with that, but I decided to see that as more like a shoe store sorta thing. Clothes, not so much. I decided after trying the clothes returns policy once (never tried it on) years and years ago that if I do not want to get things preworn, I feel I should practice what I preach. It is a weird policy, at any rate.
Happened to me. I ended up holding the bag for about 400 EUR worth of items. Luckily I had legal insurance that tried to convince Amazon to take it back but they wouldn’t, so the assurance bought the box of stuff off me and refunded me.
Fuck bezos and Amazon. Since then, I always look for alternatives to Amazon to buy my stuff. I’ll use Amazon to see if I like it, return it, and go buy somewhere else. If I know the product I’ll just straight out buy it somewhere else. It’s often the same price or very close.
Some stuff you can’t really and practically get outside of Amazon. I don’t have a choice then. Because their quality is so low, I’ll just get 3–4 similar items and only keep the one that’s passably usable.
I try to cost Amazon as much money as I can. I hate to give them my money but by doing this it feels like I’m getting some payback for the way they treat their customers, employees, delivery people…
Enshittification: Customers get screwed because that's where vendors are (even the terrible ones) and vendors get screwed because that's where the customers are (even the terrible ones.)
Maybe this is a country thing, or tied into one's wider social credit score in the background, or the specifics of something you returned [0], or something else? I've returned plenty of shit and have never had a real problem. I returned over a dozen 32 inch Dell monitors while trying to get 3 that didn't have dead pixels or scratches out of the box. They were stacked on a pallet in my garage waiting for the pickup. You would think this would throw some flags and end up as some kind of fight. But no, Amazon refunded them all in full, no hassle (apart from the hassle of having to do that scale of logistics merely to obtain working products).
(I would have honestly given up earlier, sent them all back, and gone with a different brand. Except there had been a good one in the first tranche of 3 that I let go past its return date. I hadn't thought the actual failure rate was going to be > 80%)
[0] On my personal account I did have a big red scary warning for a while about "restocking fees", that I think had been prompted by returning a motherboard after having tested it (yet another poorly described product with no way to find out the IOMMU groups short of buying it). I have no idea if it was merely that I had opened/tested a computer component, or if it had gotten smashed up on the way back, or what. But eventually that nag screen did go away.
That used to be the case until about a year ago, but isn't the case anymore at least here in Ireland. I'm taking them to small claims court because they closed my account without a refund on a legitimate return. Their customer support has gone from excellent to nearly nonexistent. Fortunately for me, I've kept all the receipts.
I distrust Amazon for anything over about £150 now. Which seems to coincide with their threshold for needing an OTP.
The last straw was getting a blood pressure monitor (which they don’t even sell) in place of £400 smart glasses. They insisted I returned the monitor, then said I failed to return the glasses. Took months for them to refund me.
> 9 out of 10 people i ask this is the single reason they stay at Amazon.
9 out of 10 I ask say it's about reliable delivery (not necessarily next day). Most people order things because they need them and have read the reviews, not because they are speculating at something they may need or are ok with getting something else. Clothing being a notable exception, unpredictably sized and variable quality, which nobody is happy about.
The ease of returns was a huge factor in the early success of Walmart, as well. I worked there in high school and college (99-02 timeframe) and they harped on how much the customer was right for returns, unless it was just blatant fraud. if there was a chance the customer was not trying anything you just give them their money back
I worked there in the early 90s. The number of times an old, well-worn NES came in as a return, and management authorized it, boggled my mind.
I would love to know the actual numbers. I bet the customer lifetime value for eating this cost probably won out eventually.
I’ve only ever returned two things to Amazon: a counterfeit laptop battery (claimed to be an official part, had 30% lower capacity than labelled), and an unbearable replacement laptop keyboard (2KRO rather than the original’s NKRO, with horrific ghosting, a couple of keys that would stick if not pressed completely straight, and a space bar that had to be hit just so to activate at all). Neither of these products would have been available without Amazon, and that would have been a good thing.
Weird. I think I might have made three returns to Amazon in 30 years of ordering from them. I research the shit out of just about everything I buy, if I have to return something it's because I either got very cleverly scammed or had a literal stroke before I made the purchase.
I frequently have to return clothing because there's absolutely no way of figuring out which size will fit you since nothing about sizes is standardized.
And there's just a lot of stuff that research can't tell you. Sometimes listed dimensions are incorrect or missing. Sometimes it turns out that you buy a simple electronic device that seems like it will do what you need but it emits a high-pitched beep noise every time you press a button that drives you nuts and you're going to return it because of that. There are so many things that just simply are not captured in a product description, and sometimes are not captured by user reviews.
I've just ordered an inexpensive steering wheel to use with a racing game. And everything I can find online is contradictory as to whether it suffers from a dead zone problem or not. I simply cannot tell if the people complaining about the dead zone have missed where it can be configured or if it's a problem with the hardware itself. So literally the only way I can figure it out is by ordering it and trying it out and then returning it if it has a dead zone problem.
There are plenty of things that you just have to return that cannot be solved with research and have nothing to do with being scammed. Which is why returns are a big part of the economy and a big part of customer service.
>I frequently have to return clothing because there's absolutely no way of figuring out which size will fit you since nothing about sizes is standardized.
I used to take advantage of Amazon's return policy by deliberately buying 3 sizes of the same item (1 below and 1 above my expected size) because clothing manufacturers are not consistent with their sizing. I can then try them all at home to choose best size and return the other 2 that don't fit. I did this for pants, shoes, etc. This really seemed great because I hate going to the store and changing clothes in fitting rooms.
However, I stopped doing this many years ago because I found out that some online retailers like Amazon do not restock the returned items for re-sale and instead, throw it away so it eventually ends up in a landfill. In those cases, the sellers just eat the cost of unsold goods that got thrown out.
It seemed illogical to throw away perfectly good clothes that are still NEW but somebody explained that Amazon does this because they're paranoid about bodily fluids etc tainting the returns. So to play it safe, they just throw away the returns.
> they just throw away the returns.
I have no more insider knowledge of how Amazon operates than you do, but judging on the amount of items I’ve received that were clearly used (stains, other people’s hairs, dust, dirt…) but sold as new I’m fairly certain they’ll resell everything that gets returns without even looking at the items.
I've returned clothes on Amazon and they told me just to keep it. I assume that's the equivalent of them just sending it to landfill. At least I can donate it to a local charity.
Also Zappos was clearly founded on the idea of ordering 3 pairs of shoes and keeping the one that fits. They say the returns go back for sale unless used and then go to charity/reuse, but happy to see other sources you have. I think a lot of that Zappos dna went into Amazon's policies.
I hate to break it to you, but this is true of returns across a lot of companies and product categories. If you return unopened wine to Costco, for example, they throw it out because they can't guarantee that you stored it properly.
>If you return unopened wine to Costco, for example, they throw it out
The food and groceries I already knew about. However, Amazon throwing out returned clothes was a surprise because I've seen clothing retailers like Macy's just put the returned items right back on the rack for re-sale. When you go to a shore store, they don't throw out every pair of shoes that customers tried on and didn't buy. So I just thought Amazon just did the same thing at their warehouse. I've also returned car wax to an OReilly's Auto store and I watched the clerk just put the bottle right back on the shelf for the next customer to buy.
It was disconcerting to find out I was adding to the landfill just because I returned clothes to Amazon. Nowadays, I don't order clothes from them unless I'm 100% sure I won't be returning it.
> because I found out that some online retailers like Amazon do not restock the returned items for re-sale and instead, throw it away so it eventually ends up in a landfill
This was essentially false, and FUD spread by the anti-Amazon crowd.
You will observe official Amazon Resale listings for many items, which is precisely Amazon restocking the returned items. For goods of any signficant value, it is bizarre to suggest that Amazon wouldn't be reselling them. Like, it's ludicrous to suggest they're tossing a $50 shirt instead of reselling it, as long as the return is in resale condition.
What Amazon sends to landfills is when items (mostly third-party seller items) aren't selling and the seller doesn't want to keep paying for warehousing or to have them shipped elsewhere so Amazon sends them to landfills. Because nobody is buying the items, there's no demand for them. Not everything sells.
Wherever you got the idea that they're paranoid about body fluids, that's somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about. People make up all sorts of things. That's why that have a small army of people inspecting returns.
>You will observe official Amazon Resale listings for many items, which is precisely Amazon restocking the returned items.
To clarify, I'm already aware Amazon re-sells returns. I often buy "Used Like New" electronics from Amazon Resale which are obviously customer returns that Amazon re-boxed. However, the category of clothes is different where it customer returns are often thrown out.
>What Amazon sends to landfills is when items (mostly third-party seller items) aren't selling and the seller doesn't want to keep paying for warehousing or to have them shipped elsewhere so Amazon sends them to landfills.
No, that's not the full story. What's also happening is that a seller has different options for Amazon's reverse logistics and they have different costs.
E.g. pay $1.50 for Amazon to inspect and resell or pay a lower $0.52 to throw it away. A lot of sellers just pay 1/3rd less and let Amazon throw it out.
That possibility of me inadvertently adding to landfills is enough to stop me from buying 3 sizes and returning 2. Maybe in some circumstances the other 2 returned items won't be thrown out -- but I can't know for sure so I won't do it. I'll continue to buy clothes from Amazon but only do so when I'm 100% sure I'm going to keep it no matter what.
Deep link to a video comment about online returned clothes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66qOop6J8Q8&t=2m56s
If you're talking about some $4 item then sure. But most clothing on Amazon isn't $4. If you're buying $30 or $60 items then they are most definitely having them inspected.
Because it's not about $1.50 for inspection vs $0.52 to throw it out.
It's about -$1.50 + $8 profit = $6.50 gain for inspection vs. -$0.52 + $0 profit = $0.52 loss for throwing it out.
You're missing the entire resale price on the return. Companies aren't leaving money on the table. They are looking to maximize profit and minimize losses. In most places, sending resellable stock to the landfill isn't doing that.
On the surface of it, it would appear not to make sense. Why would Amazon take on the cost of handling a return item that they will have to dispose? They could just indicate to the user to keep the item --- and that in fact does happen! I had a return like that just this past week.
However, there is an obvious incentive to minimize these no-return refunds and require users to print labels and go through the motion of returning items that won't be restocked.
It discourages fraud: people abusing the no-return refund as a way of getting free stuff!
The no-return refund has to be a kind of perk for the customer who rarely returns anything or whatever.
I would say that it would be astonishing if Amazon pretending to accept returns and then throwing away is a thing that absolutely does not happen, and honestly cannot blame them for it. We are a throw-away-stuff society, and Amazon is not outside of that society.
> We are a throw-away-stuff society, and Amazon is not outside of that society.
What Amazon does with returns doesn't have anything to do with what kind of "society" you think we are.
What it does with returns is determined by the profit motive.
And in most cases, the more profitable thing to do is to resell returned merchandise. Yes, return inspections cost money, but usually less money than what is gained by reselling the item.
Returned merchandise has value, and businesses don't make profit by throwing value away when they can make money with it or reduce losses with it instead.
I genuinely don't understand all the people who think it's more cost-effective for Amazon to send a $50 shirt to the dumpster rather than resell it. That's not how anything works.
What individuals do is also motivated by profit or profit-adjacent motives. Saving money is a profit motive; so is saving time and convenience.
> It's more cost-effective for Amazon to send a $50 shirt to the dumpster rather than resell it.
It's not a $50 shirt. It's like a $5 shirt to them, which some sucker is willing to pay $50 for. Used, it becomes a $10 shirt.
A dumpster can be found right in the neck of the woods of where the returning customer lives, whereas it may have to travel far and pass through more processing if it goes to another customer elsewhere.
It needs to be inspected, repacked.
There is a risk in every returned item. Sometimes people return a perfectly good item. But sometimes it's because there is something wrong with the item, such that the next buyer is also likely to return it, even if they get it cheaper.
Basically returned items are entirely outside of the profit-optimized delivery path. They incur costs and risks, at a reduced revenue.
I'd never return an item which matches the description and isn't damaged.
If it isn't damaged in any way but does not match the description, that's a problem; if it is sold with the same description, the next customer will also see that it doesn't match. A new listing has to be created for that product. Not gonna happen, or not in the processing time frame of that particular return.
I think the general internet user doesn't actually do this. Slightly different use case but I worked at maximizing revenue/customer lifetime value at a streaming company and the biggest revenue win project I worked on was just preselecting the most expensive plan.
I was surprised since I usually do research and stuff on the options. But it turns out a lot of people just click next until they can start watching some tv.
There's nothing weird about it. A liberal return policy is not because they expect people to make many returns, it is so that customers will make their purchases without worrying and therefore make more purchases.
They became big, cause they had their customers first. They were tough to negotiate good prices and put customer experience quite forward. Any complaint and they replaced stuff, not many questions asked.
They then invested heavily in logistics, so now they could replace their support to annoying bots and use their market position to increase their margin.
FYI, when someone else says "this is why I do this thing", you don't get to argue with that. You don't get to tell other people what their opinions are. Psycho.
Most of the people I know would rank predictability is #1, price #2 and ability to do returns #3 (as a data point: I don't even remember last time I did a return, was years ago). Really depends on who your connections are and their specific needs I reckon.
In my experience, the customer-friendly return experience is withering. I ordered a small table about a year ago that didn't ship with the correct hardware. I literally could not assemble the thing as documented in the instructions.
I had to call to get a refund; admittedly, I think I may have been slightly outside the ordinary return window. The customer service representative was pretty reluctant to accept it, somewhat heavily suggesting that I didn't assemble it right.
I actually just recently cancelled my Amazon Prime, which I've had for probably 10+ years. Not solely based on this one experience, but a general decline in how much perceivable value I actually get out of it.
i'm the 10th person, we don't stay for returns. However, I am doing a lot more shopping on different websites nowadays as I see Amazon is the most expensive option.
>No-questions-asked returns
Different forms of marketing work on different people. This one works on me. I'm going to shop at Amazon and Costco because, in the very few instances where I want to return an item that didn't live up to its promise, I can do so without incurring penalties.
When this happens, I'm already frustrated. I assembled a floor lamp for far longer than an adult should spend assembling it, and it's wobbly as shit. A corporation than nickel-and-dimes me at this point will incur my irrational wrath. Canadian Tire (a big box retailer of mostly low-quality wares here in Canada) has lost my business over a decade ago because of this. I tell myself: most Canadians are meek sheep that will return after being told "well akshually you can't return this because technically blah blah", but I'm not a sucker, I won't shop here on principle.
A company that doesn't create this experience for me will get my business and exploit whatever other blind spots I have with their marketing, dark patterns, opaque pricing, etc, because they didn't piss me off when I was ready to walk away for good.
This is a strawman. OP said " I shop at Amazon due to their logistics." Nothing in your post refutes why OP shops at Amazon.
Ehh, maybe for some people. I've almost never returned anything to Amazon, so for me the logistics is definitely the biggest factor.
> No-questions-asked returns
That's the Right of withdrawal[0] by EU law, though. Do you mean something else?
I mean, sure, smaller shops might not cover the costs for the return shipping, but I don't really mind.
[0]: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/ret...
It's probably different for everyone. For us, it's chiefly because it's the only place where we can find a gazillion things our kids' school demands they bring to school, and we can have it in twenty-four hours without having to drive to the store.
I order books from a local indie bookstore and just wait a couple weeks for the books to show up from their wholesaler.
But for other stuff, including tools, why wouldn't I just order from a place I already have free 2-day (often overnight) shipping for, when my alternatives are physical big box stores? Like why go to Lowe's to buy a cross-cut jig when I can get it delivered right to my house in 24 hours for the same price? It's not even like my money could possibly go to an indie hardware store. They don't exist. Certainly not within an hour of me, which not only requires my time, but also money in the form of electricity to drive my car, plus the wear and tear on my car.
> their competiton couldn't do without going out of business
Why? If I sell a quality product I have no fear of excess returns.
Personally, the only webshop where I actually need so many returns is Amazon itself.
Some of that is intrinsic to a good chunk of what they're selling (poorly described imports from the Chinese market). I just ordered an assortment of cabling for shuffling PCIe signals around. Apparently there are a few different "standards" for pinouts on SFF-8643 and SFF-8654, but nobody actually describes them in their product listings! So I'll see which ones work with what I already have, and with each other, and the rest can go back. Sellers could have avoided that by doing that work once and describing their items, but they'd rather I do it instead. So when I do it, I don't feel bad about the returns.
But a lot of it is the dark patterns Amazon themselves choose to play. Nonstop pricing games make me push my actual purchasing decisions down the line. If something is on sale at a great price and I'm in the market, I'll just hit buy to lock in that price. I'll then try to do some research before it ships, but in general I've got 30+ days to make the actual purchase decision. This is what the seller must want, right? Or the same pricing games but after a purchase - if the price on something significantly drops, the answer I've gotten from CS is to buy a new one and return the old one. So if I already have other stuff I need to make a return trip for, that's what I do!
Or when I'm in the middle of building/repairing something, especially when I don't have a "trial" of "prime" (aka sunk cost fallacy), I'll order a few different types of items I think I might need. This way when they show up in a week+ (Slow, Spiteful Shipping) and I'm back focusing on the project, there is less chance of "oh I really needed this other thing" and having to wait another round trip.
With other web stores I just don't feel these type of dark pattern dynamics. Whereas Amazon is practically begging people to call their bluffs. So I call them.
I have never returned anything to amazon. Maybe it's a US culture thing.
The point the article makes is that the other online stores without access to Amazon's logistics aren't able to lower the price to make up for the inconvenience of using a normal shipping carrier because of an Amazon policy that bans sellers from offering an item for cheaper elsewhere. Amazon then charges sellers high fees that inflate the price of the item everywhere because of that policy.
So it's kinda like how credit cards charge the merchant a fee and in the past would disallow the merchant from offering a cash discount.
Like that, but if the fee climbed up 10x higher.
Maybe for small products where the shipping is relatively expensive? Cause that'd be like 50%.
If we approximate a credit card fee as 2% + 30 cents then I think 20% + $3.00 ends up in the same ballpark as what Amazon is pushing onto a lot of sellers. It hurts hardest for small products but it's significant for everyone.
And that price is supposedly separate from the shipping cost.
They are not allowed to do this in the country I live in.
And my point is that many of us aren't even shopping on price!
You could also flip around the reading to.. boohoo poor sellers have to raise their prices elsewhere and take higher margin?
Why don't they figure out how to ship/delivery more quickly with a competitor with all those extra margin dollars they are being forced by Amazon to take elsewhere?
Because Amazon benefits from massive economies of scale, and because Amazon has nearly-unlimited cash to push competition out of the market?
How could a regular webshop possibly compete with a behemoth which has warehouses in literally every major city, which has its own dedicated fleet of delivery vehicles, and which has its own fleet of cargo planes? When you've got a single warehouse and have to rely on DHL/USPS/FedEx, you will never beat them on delivery time when Amazon is actually trying: Amazon can trivially offer same-day delivery and eat the cost until you go out of business.
And don't forget: Amazon has an even bigger margin. If they were to compete on price, they would easily win. But they aren't competing on price because they know they have a quasi-monopoly, so they can just enjoy the extra profit.
I often think about how there's an open question in this case of whether it's necessarily anti-social for a market participant to fight hard to create the level of critical mass necessary to give most people the product they want.
Everyone likes stuff showing up at their door reliably wherever they are, and this isn't possible unless you have a service with warehouses and dense customers ~everywhere, and this isn't possible unless enough people use that same service. So in one sense it's in everyone's interest to have an assurance contract where everyone says "I will use this service if you do." Then in that sense Amazon's price rule is building a mechanism to support such an assurance contract: you can't force people to sign such a contract, but you can prevent people from defecting to slightly lower prices outside of the "stuff just arrives fast" system.
In a system that was very good at collective action outside of markets, a cleaner solution in terms of consent and power might be to build an actual explicit assurance contract for an app-to-door-everything-delivered-fast service, get everyone to sign it, and make a public utility and/or separate dis-aggregated markets for the different levels of service provision, whatever they are (consumer facing app, supply, warehouse, delivery, etc.). But anyone who has ever even thought about doing anything like this will know that it's much easier said than done, and will appreciate the kludge Amazon and their investors pulled off, at least a little bit, the next time they buy a thing online.
Maybe the answer is just: use Amazon until technology (robotics e.g.) makes it easy to create something better? At this rate, we shouldn't have to wait too long?
It is surprising how often they are cheaper. I was ordering some glue, decided to double check the price, I could drive for 30 minutes and buy local, and pay more or order it for cheaper from Amazon. I didn't need it the same day so getting it tomorrow didn't matter. Amazon also sells everything need some M2 screws Amazon will have them, no idea where to buy something like that locally Home Depot won't carry them.
The proper comparison isn't Amazon vs local, it's Amazon vs other web shops (likely with more traditional supply chains) - especially for items that are only ever going to be part of a wide selection like M2 screws. HomeDepot.com and Lowes.com have M2 screws, as well as Zoro, McMaster, or other specialty web shops [0]. My specific go-to for one-off [1] screws is usually Zoro, as I usually prefer stainless (or grade 8 for larger sizes).
[0] I had been fond of "Albany County Fasteners" but I've soured as they've gradually jacked up the prices while removing free shipping. I don't even like free shipping, but it is a way for ordering to be more convenient as it prevents me from wanting to sit on an order for a while to batch it up.
[1] as opposed to stocking up on an assortment
What is shipping like from Zoro? The number one reason I tend to use Amazon for this stuff (nuts/bolts) is because shipping is free given a Prime subscription.
If I buy a handful of bolts from McMaster or BoltDepot, I'm paying like $10 to ship, on an order this is probably $10 in goods :(
So I'm basically always picking between Amazon and AliExpress.
Zoro shipping is free over $50 order, otherwise I think it's only $5? I generally just batch, especially with the way they rotate promo codes. I've always got some slow-roll projects going on.
Time frame it really depends - delivery dates a day or few days out are generally accurate. Most items they stock at a local distribution center, so I get them next day. Some things come from further warehouses of theirs and take a few more days. There are also third party vendor items that are all over the place for delivery time, but you know those by their estimated delivery time being more than a few days out, and saying ground shipping only. (They're slowly taking away "free shipping" from items that require LTL though, heh heh)
For fasteners specifically, their parametric search has gotten better. I'd have Digikey's interface everywhere if I could.
One correction: wealthy people aren't shopping on Amazon because of price. Everyone else uses Amazon because of price and convenience.
... and a lot of times I go right to the brand to buy "straight" from them and they fulfill orders from Amazon so why not just buy from AMZN where I already have an account, get lots of credit card points, can spend my credit card points, etc.
In the last year I've seen this other kind of consolidation where most of the brands that don't have an AMZN-hosted or fulfilled store are using shop.app (now shop.com!) from Shopify. I did a stint of investigating boutique perfumes [1] and it seems almost everyone in that business uses Shopify.
[1] you gotta try "Under the Lemon Trees"!
This is a terrible argument. It’s only margin if they get the service but no one wants to pay the same to get slower shipping. Amazon has made the choice for the consumer.
Sure their logistics are better but it’s functionally tying Amazon’s logistics to access to selling on Amazon. It’s not a fair burden to say “you must convince customers to buy inferior shipping at superior shipping prices in order to not use us.
> boohoo poor sellers have to raise their prices elsewhere and take higher margin?
They don't get those margins because extremely few people are going to use other sites if they have to pay just as much.
And then for consumers it increasingly sucks because you can barely find anything below $5 despite the shipping supposedly being "free".
Some may be shopping based on price without realizing it. There's already a baked in assumption that Amazon has the lowest price and there's no need to check elsewhere.
> You could also flip around the reading to.. boohoo poor sellers have to raise their prices elsewhere and take higher margin?
Behavior which is often ruled anti-competitive and illegal.
https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/cases/dec_docs/40...
If Amazon stopped engaging in price fixing, then people like you who aren't shopping on price could still buy stuff on Amazon, and other people who are shopping on price could buy the same item from the manufacturer's site for 30% less with the knowledge that it'll probably arrive in a week rather than in a couple days. I'm not sure what problem you have with that.
It's not price fixing. The seller is still completely in control of the price, but they cannot discriminate against Amazon by selling it cheaper elsewhere. Or they can, but then Amazon don't want to do any business with them.
These kind of contracts are standard for all kinds of third party marketplaces. You don't have to sell through them if you don't agree with the contract.
It would be discriminating against Amazon if they sold it somewhere else for less revenue. As in, retail price minus store fees is a lower amount.
When the price advantage is the size of the fee difference or smaller, that's fair and good for competition and I support legal restrictions on contract clauses that want to block it.
Why do they want to sell on Amazon if they don't think the terms are fair?Amazon isn't a public service and businesses aren't people with inherent rights.
Demanding price parity is completely standard for all resellers and market places, pretty much on all scales and all around the world.
Of course you want more legal restrictions and regulations. That's the standard hacker response to anything that comes up, probably including if you want suger in your coffee or not.
But try to think about why Amazon would put such a thing in their contract. If they were just out to abuse any power dynamic, they would of course tell sellers that they have to put a more expensive price anywhere else. Price parity is fair for all parties involved. And if sellers think Amazon's fees are too high then they shouldn't use Amazon - which is what the great majority of product sellers have decided to.
> Why do they want to sell on Amazon if they don't think the terms are fair?
Massive monopoly power. Some profit is better than none, even as Amazon works to make 'some' as small as possible.
> Demanding price parity is completely standard for all resellers and market places, pretty much on all scales and all around the world.
Price parity would be great if they were selling the product to Amazon, and Amazon was demanding that price be the same among all retailers. Because of the structure of the deal with this markup, we need to consider the numbers with and without the markup.
> the standard hacker response
Wha.
Also I want quality competition and I only want to regulate anti-competitive things.
> But try to think about why Amazon would put such a thing in their contract.
Because it benefits them.
> If they were just out to abuse any power dynamic, they would of course tell sellers that they have to put a more expensive price anywhere else.
That would get them more scrutiny and be too obviously unfair. Demanding the same price sounds fair until you look into the details.
> Price parity is fair for all parties involved.
Parity is fair when you properly include or exclude markups based on context.
> And if sellers think Amazon's fees are too high then they shouldn't use Amazon
And lose most of their sales? It's an abusive relationship because of the power Amazon has, and they structured these rules to limit the ways other companies can compete.
No, Amazon is not a monopoly. Hackers have the notion that any big company or any company they don't like are monopolies. But that doesn't change the truth. Amazon is not a monopoly and has very limited power in the markets they act in. They have giant competitors.
> Because it benefits them.
That is how business have been conducted since the age of Moses and before: Nobody wants to do business unless they benefit from it. Ideally the benefit is mutual. Usually the benefit has to be mutual for business to be made.
> Parity is fair when you properly include or exclude markups based on context.
Parity means the price for the end customer, or at the very least the advertised price for the end customer.
> And lose most of their sales?
99,9999999999% of product sales in the world and 99,99999999% of the monetary value of product sales in the world are made without any involvement of Amazon. If a company has made themselves dependent on Amazon because they don't want to deal with sales, that is their own problem.
You have no need to fight for the sellers on Amazon. They are shrewd businesses who would prefer nothing more than to spit on you and on their customers, unless they were on fire. Amazon has grown as large as they have by being a middle man who gives better customer service and security to customers than most online shops. There is real value in that goodwill. Of course they charge sellers to let them be on their platform.
My experience is that for non-FBA fulfilled products this doesn't hold at all.
Out of the last ~20 orders (I don't order that often from them, so that's probably spanning the whole last 12 months or more), more often than not, the predicted delivery date has been adjusted upwards, often by ~2 days, and a few times by ~a week.
This may be specific to Germany/Berlin, as from what I hear, they (/ their subcontractors) have troubles finding delivery drivers. Mixed with the growing counterfeit issues, and degrading product description / details for most products, Amazon doesn't seem to be in it's prime.
The 3rd party sellers on Amazon are a mess. I’m in the US, and just waited 18 days to get the wrong item sent to me… some face lotion instead of a drone.
I picked it off someone’s wishlist, so didn’t really vet the seller. I thought I was being really proactive when I ordered, but now I will need to find an alternative at a local retail store, which will probably be difficult.
Last year at Christmas, my brother-in-law opened his gift to find a bunch of adult diapers. It was supposed to be a power tool.
Sure, Amazon takes the returns, but it’s still extremely disruptive when these things happen, and it’s happening more and more frequently.
In the outskirts of a college town with unusually bad retail (like the clothing stores at the mall are the Loft, Target and T-shirt express) 2 day shipping became 2 week shipping during the pandemic leading to me to quit Prime. It particularly bugged me because if I expect to get something in 2 days that's more convenient that making a trip to the store, but if it 5 days or more I'll be going to that sector anyway for another reason and it is easy -- it struck me as significantly dishonest that they were promising fast shipping and not delivering.
Maybe 2 years later I tried the free trial of Prime, if only to quiet the ads, and it was great... they must of extended their logistics network into my area and I get a lot of stuff in 1 day or 2 days now. I went through a phase of taking discounted or free Prime offers when I could but broke down and I've been maintaining a Prime subscription. It's probably not really worth it because my pattern is that I am typically heads down doing this or that and every other month or so I do a burst of buying stuff that I'd wanted for a while or I am doing some project that requires a lot of stuff. Then I might go a month and buy nothing on AMZN.
It certainly varies at least by country. I'm in London, and its very unusual to get worse than next day delivery except for marketplace sellers, and often <12 hours.
I stopped shopping at Amazon because their fulfillment started to suck. And I found they kept their dates 25/100.
Most recently I ordered 10 items on September 18th (I had a gift card). All prime eligible. The first arrived on sep 20, the 4 on sep 28, 5 on sep 28, and the last is scheduled for Friday.
I didn’t get any estimates until after purchase.
Amazon is no longer good. They are coasting on their customer base and are slowing ratcheting up prices and squeezing their costs (keeping all their gains).
I've noticed this lately in coastal California of all places. I needed batteries by Sunday morning, was ordering on a Thursday. Plenty of 1 or 2-day options when searching and adding to cart, then when it came time for checkout... none of the 5 options I tried could be delivered in 2 days!
It seemed the interface was designed to hide the true delivery estimate in the last step and trick me into thinking the item would arrive on time.
> I didn’t get any estimates until after purchase.
If they are not going to tell me the day it is going to arrive, I am not buying. Thats the "prime" reason for using Amazon these days.
Yeah I've never seen this despite buying from amazon multiple times a month if not week. I assume they're living somewhere with weird regulations or something.
I’m in the US in a top 10 metro area.
Before checkout, it’s a generic “free super saver shipping” then a few hours after with proper estimates.
You're in a top 10 metro, and Amazon doesn't give you accurate Prime delivery estimates?
That sounds incredibly unlikely unless we're missing something.
Are you a Prime member?
when I check out there is usually a button that says "as fast as possible" or "fewer delivery days" or "slower delivery for discount"
I see the same. I checked “as fast as possible.”
My point is that Amazon used to be good. Now it’s not as fast. And the price hasn’t dropped.
It depends on the country. For the last few months here in Germany Amazon has been having major shipping issues
For me it’s not the logistics, for me it’s the catalogue. They have so many ridiculously niche items that I want that would be impossible to buy from a local store
I think Amazon might have induced this problem somewhat. Most retail stores have just stopped stocking niche items because people just buy them from amazon and it frees up a lot of floorspace they could use to stock high sales volume items instead.
But that's just the basic physics of mail-order shopping, it isn't anything specific to Amazon.
Every general store in every town everywhere can't possibly stock millions of individual products. When some item has a potential customer base of a few tens of thousands of people in a country of hundreds of millions, most stores would never get a single sale for that item. But when you can serve the entire country at once via the mail, having a single centralized warehouse specializing in that niche category of items is quite viable.
The only difference with Amazon is that you are buying from a single website, rather than going to the website of a small webshop specializing in your flavour of niche items. And the drawback is that Amazon has zero quality control, so rather than a store where you can browse for known-good curated high-quality niche items you will instead be drowned by piles of absolute garbage - with the occasional decent item hidden in between.
Sure, Amazon might beat your local store, but that doesn't mean it is good for buying niche items.
I used to be very skeptical of all the stories on HN and elsewhere about amazon pages being full of poor quality knockoffs, because that simply wasn't my experience at all, ever.
But in the last couple of months, as I progress through a kitchen remodel and more importantly a kitchen reorganization, I've been seeing precisely this phenomenon every time. The most visible signs are the machine generated "brand names" ("Howonder", "Jaico", etc. etc.), closely followed by multiple instances of clearly the same low quality, SE-Asian-manufactured product being sold under 4 different brand/product names.
I think the difference is that in the past, I've actually known the product I was looking for, and amzn showed me that one and little else. At the moment, I'm casting blindly ("stainless steel kitchen turntable") and there it is: low quality, uncurated crap, everywhere.
Still .. not yet quite as bad as Aliexpress :)
[disclaimer: i was employee #2 at amzn]
Basically the only things I don't buy from Amazon is groceries and large kitchen appliances, and it's 90% due to the convenience.
I don't buy most groceries from Amazon, but certain things are hard to source locally. Popcorn salt, cinnamon Oreos, etc.
Yep, I've always been a traveller of the long tail.
There is also an erosion of trust out there from scammer fatigue. Amazon let's you return things and you don't worry about your credit card being stolen or any of the stupid hassles of customer service these days.
Speaking of erosion of trust Amazon does nothing to protect consumers and is fine putting peoples lives at risk. I have received multiple counterfeits from Amazon
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU
This is fine, good for Amazon for setting up an excellent logistics system and having a good return policy. The problem is that Amazon charges a lot for this service. If you don't need super fast shipping or a good return policy, or don't want to pay for Amazon's profit margin, you can't go anywhere else, because Amazon will restrict your sales if you charge less somewhere else.
Given that Amazon has 40% of the e-commerce market (I'm surprised it's not more actually), this is exactly what antitrust laws were designed to stop. Customers and vendors/manufacturers should be free to use the distribution channels that meet their needs of service and speed and price the best, but Amazon, through its big market share, is preventing that.
All of you talking about delivery times, cost, quality...I stopped shopping at Amazon when I heard people were peeing in bottles.
It’s extremely common for delivery drivers to pee in bottles. Have you ever driven delivery?
I remember a friend in the 90s excited about his job at UPS. He laughed about the pee bottle. Same for people I know who work for usps and fedex.
Kind of makes sense. Where do you expect someone to pee who is driving around for 10 hours a day.
I'm not talking about delivery drivers. https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17243026/amazon-warehouse...
...and I am being generous by focusing on the pee instead of the deaths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon_worker_fataliti...
Again, these aren’t unique to Amazon, per se. Just to the scale of their operation and the scrutiny Amazon has.
Assembly line jobs are rough and people pee in bottles, and die. The important piece these articles leave out is how much more common these are at Amazon.
I remember my first jobs at random companies where I was hourly and needed approval for bathroom breaks. It sucked and I would plan my day around break times.
I think these articles are more a function of being surprising to us because we work cushy desk jobs where we can break all we want and use unlimited sick days because we program.
>Assembly line jobs are rough and people pee in bottles, and die.
You phrase this as if it's acceptable that people work in terrible conditions and sacrifice their lives so that the rest of us can buy cheap products with fast shipping, and this is completely normal. "Another Amazon warehouse worker dead? Oh well!"
I think it’s phrased less that it is acceptable, and more that “why are you only focusing on Amazon, when it is like this everywhere you look in logistics?”
It would be one thing to stop shopping at Amazon because of how they treat their workers if you also stopped shopping at other companies whose workers are peeing in bottles behind the scenes. Do the things you buy get shipped at some point by truck-based logistics? If so, piss bottles are already involved, it is just that we were all blessedly unaware.
Or having to continue to work while their dead co-workers are laying nearby under a blanket. Yikes.
This. The amount of things I buy off Amazon has dropped quite a lot over the last 15-20 years. It used to be just about everything. Now it's an about once a month at most, and some of that are gifts for other people. I'm more willing to shop local now, and for everything else if I don't care a lot about when I get it I'll order it direct from a more appropriate vendor. And if I *really* don't care when I get it nor that it's fake, I'll use AliExpress. The only value Amazon has for me now is if I need an item on a predictable schedule and either I can't get it locally or its not worth my time to do so.
I'm the same way. I've also been very impressed with Chinese made goods too. Especially in the music world, M-Vave recently released a very capable synth for $50 (FM-1) that is having a massive resurgence of tinking in the community (people are sly enough to use LLMs to vibe code different firmwares that turn the device into something else entirely, like a groovebox or drum machine for example).
It's a shame neoliberals hallowed out US manufacturing but at least consumers around the world are benefitting.
> It's a shame neoliberals hallowed out US manufacturing but at least consumers around the world are benefitting.
Unfortunately, the counterpoint is... China has us all by the balls. Do something China doesn't like, such as, say... support Taiwan? Whoops, where are you going to get stuff such as medication now?
Most of our medication comes from India, actually.
And China isn't able to cut off your medication because you support Taiwan: it would have to be a country-sized ban, which for the US would immediately spark WW3. China isn't stupid, they have a sense of self-preservation. Why start a fight with the US when you can slowly milk it dry?
I'm not really worried about China, the US has been a massive force of evil and imperialism across the world my entire life. When was the last time China invaded a sovereign country? The US did it twice in the span of a few months this year, and likely to do it again.
No one benefits from US foreign policy outside of elites or capitalists, everyone else suffers under imperialism.
The US may behave irrationally from time to time. Bush, Trump, the list goes on.
The problem with China is, they play the loooooooooooong game, and their game is explicitly to destroy our industries. As a German, this has me worried, because we have seen it with solar panels (we used to be the world leader), with medicine (similarly, a lot of compounds came from Germany) and now we're seeing it with cars.
This claim feels like a novel, nation-state-level variation on the "fundamental attribution error".
This feels weird to read, the US has played a direct role in your degradation of life in Germany (starting the Iraq invasion that spiraled into a massive immigration crisis that your country hasn't recovered from, inability to defend yourselves without NATO which means you have to please US benefactors to get protection that is constantly being threatened, and has caused a massive spike in your energy prices due to the Iran War) but you're scared of China because maybe they might do something in the future?
I'm sorry but this is quite sad. You're willing to blame a foreign country that is providing high quality goods that make your life better instead of your own political leaders or supposed allies that have no issues with selling your country down the drain?
I can see why people are voting for AfD.
I would say in the 2010s I shopped with Amazon for the logistics. In the 2020s their logistics have been crap. Packages are slow, frequently late, and rarely packaged well enough for the items to arrive undamaged without luck. The overwhelming amount of drop shipped trash means the site is useless, too.
I've gone back to local stores. They're less convenient, but the prices are better and the quality is MUCH better. Amazon is for commodity name brand stuff that's harder to find.
Maybe it's regional, here in Baltimore it's still head and shoulders above.
I'm not an Amazon Prime customer (shocking, I know), and I noticed that the shown delivery times are overly pessimistic, probably in order to make you opt for a Prime membership to get faster delivery. And then the package arrives at least one day earlier than the predicted delivery date.
I gave up and canceled my Prime subscription years ago after repeated failures to meet even a 2-day delivery promise. I never once got anything same-day. And the Video and other services of Prime were things I never used.
FWIW Prime also often delivers earlier than the set date (yes, even when it's set to next day...)
I assume they want to limit the amount of customer support more than advertising their logistics.
Annoying when you are not home and they deliver things early. Like last week I picked deliver on the 13th, half the items arrived on the 10th and sat on my porch for 2 days.
I'm not a Prime customer. I'd wager close to 50% of my orders arrive within 2 days. I'm glad Prime members are subsidizing this :-)
Even more shocking: I'm not an Amazon customer at all. Which, granted, is probably easier if you're outside the US.
I loath Amazon because of its UI.
In Poland we have Allegro and 99,9% of sellers basically ships on the same day (for orders before 15:00) and it arrives next day.
This basically applies to most of the online stores in Poland…
A lot of that uncertainty has to do with USPS, who keeps getting slower, and their delivery date estimates are at this point often 2-3 days more optimistic than reality.
At least in my experience, UPS, Fedex, etc., tend to deliver when the estimate says.
For me, FedEx is almost always a day or two over the initial estimate, and the package looks like it's been routed through a war zone.
UPS is generally pretty good.
This differs WILDLY from country to country, and I assume city to city.
In Tokyo I would get my stuff from Amazon in a day or two, and accuracy of time of arrival was in hours.
In Stockholm, even amazon regularly delivers a week or two later than what it says. To the point I don't see the point buying from Amazon if I can find a reliable local alternative, because they'll both be late.
It's often still cheaper to buy from Amazon than buying from vendors, unless you scour the internet for the 30% off coupon and sign up for the newsletter for the 10% welcome bonus and then promptly report the newsletter as spam.
There should be some kind of federal law against needing to do this.
Buying direct from vendor should always be the cheapest, and at least 5% cheaper than Amazon (since everything on Amazon is automatically 5% off)
Huh, this is not my experience. I have had many packages from Amazon delayed recently. But I continue to use them because their selection is the best, so it makes sense to pay for Prime and then their shipping is on average faster and cheaper than any other option. I'm still satisfied with their service.
It makes sense because shipping is a volume game and they have the most volume. Their electric van is coming down my street twice a day whether I order or not. I wish I could ship my own packages with their shipping.
My biggest problem with Amazon these days is that you can't really know if what you're ordering is any good. Amazon should start their own product testing lab and do in house reviews. Or find some other way to get trusted reviews on their product pages.
This is also why I usually order on Amazon. And the few times it doesn’t go through them the experience is often bad.
FedEx delivered my Steam Frame - first it said Friday delivery by 1pm. Then on Friday, it kept saying 1pm until about 3pm after which it updated to “by 8pm”. Then, after 8, it said the item never left their facility. The next day it said delivery would be Monday by 1pm. Actual delivery was Monday around 6pm.
Amazon _rarely_ has these issues. Especially for an expensive delivery like the above, I’d want to know when to expect it and possibly actually be at home to receive it.
> When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does.
This depends heavily on where you live. I recall it used to be true, but in the three places I've spent significant time since the pandemic, all three have been less than 50% on time -- and less than 75% even giving an extra day. Because there's apparently no consequences for the last-mile delivery contractors to claim a package is delivered and not actually take it out of the truck until the next week, your local contractor determines your experience.
My experience has been different, most retailers have accurate delivery times, unless you shop for things like furniture at C&B or WestElm for which they don’t keep local inventory. The only appeal Amazon has for me is the subscribe and save option and that you can find almost anything. For example I have a legacy air filtration system for which I cannot find replacement filters for, except on Amazon. For anything else there seems to be a better alternative today.
> I almost don't even care about [shipping quickly]
I used to think there would be more opportunities for a patient consumer to get a discount, but perhaps what happens it that even a low-priority package takes up certain kinds of capacity once it leaves the vendor, and the delivery-system's incentive to maximize throughput leads to a kind of floor.
Amazon’s logistics are shit.
You’ll get something to show up on schedule but it’s frequently needs to be returned because of a problem on their end. No I don’t accept paying full price for a used product in subpar repair. No I don’t want a convincing fake.
The hassle of even 1 return in 20 isn’t worth faster delivery. Worse even if I just throw away their junk I still need to make a new order.
I find a lot of the websites I shop at for certain things do "dropshipping". So the product page will say "X in stock!" or similar when in reality they're telling you the inventory at a shared warehouse or even the original manufacturer and once you actually submit your order, the product needs to be shipped first to the store you ordered from. Then they ship to you. But both legs can take an unknown amount of time.
For me it’s that I know if something is wrong with the shipping that Amazon will fix it for me.
The other month my wife ordered something inexpensive from Best Buy that got shipped. I am 90% certain the FedEx delivery person took it, impossible to find the easiest way to resolve the matter with BestBuy. Amazon while historically it was not always intuitive to find the chat feature. I could always get there and the problem was fixed.
For me, this was a key reason I cancelled Prime.
In the 90s and 00s Amazon would fix things. The last time Amazon lost a “delivered” package they told me that they could do nothing about it. My ticket got escalated a few times and they offered a discount on ordering a replacement. I just did a chargeback with my credit card. I was frustrated with Amazon because I probably ordered 30 things a year for 10+ years and they trusted their driver over me saying I never got it.
This is not my experience. I had a package simply not arrive, and Amazon AI said it would replace the missing package (which was a high dollar value). Instead, it just repeated the order, double charging me. I had 3 conversations with human CS promising me they saw the mistake and would fix it, and never did, so I was double charged. After months trying to resolve it I eventually gave up and ate the cost.
I've never had such a poor experience, including being repeatedly lied to by CS, and this was the last straw for me. I honestly don't miss Amazon, I buy less stuff and feel better about it.
If you have evidence of these conversations and so on then you can do a charge back on your credit card.
My research on chargebacks to Amazon was that they just ban you.
Its also heavily region dependent. You can order something on Amazon.com at 10am and have it delivered by 5pm sometimes. When ordering from Amazon.de, it often takes a week just for the product to dispatch, then it takes another week for it to travel from their one warehouse in Poland to Helsinki.
Agree with others' sentiments: One usually does not need that fast shipping - or that reliable. There are, of course, exceptions - but not often enough that I'd pay for Prime membership. The few times I need it fast and it's not available in town, I simply pay Amazon for fast shipping.
20/100 times, it ships faster than it estimates
> The thing is that Amazon ships & delivers on a reliable predicted schedule.
Maybe if you live close to a distribution center. The rare occasions I order from them anymore packages are routinely delayed by a week or more
So then there is no reason for amazon to enforce industry wide price fixing as described in this article if its just about logistics.
Yeah they're insanely good at logistics. They do same day deliveries here, I've had an idea for something and then got all the materials delivered 6 hours later. Nobody else can compete with that.
Yup, and you can even cancel items in the order before it has shipped!
Don’t think any other online stores offer that in Norway, really annoying
Also, there's the whole taking your money and completing the deal part. A whole bunch of sites seem to be breaking their own pages these days, leaving Amazon the sole remaining venue that still works.
I used to buy a lot on ebay.com, however they began to transition to a new page layout a few years ago, which made it too difficult to screen against scam-sellers(scamming was always a bit of an issue there). I briefly switched to walmart.com, however their site started giving a stupid error page for anything but the latest version of google chrome; this started about 2 years ago now.
anyway, here's a quick test i did(in firefox-esr) of a few sites which came to mind:
ebay: still has the dumb new design; certain js features appear broken(can't read customer reviews).
walmart: still get the "technical issues" error page.
newegg: main-page still loads mangled.
zoro: is it working again!? seems functional today... surprise!(i'll have to look into this more later; i did not test checkout)
thriftbooks: the search bar does not work.
so there it is. a bunch of sites i just simply can't shop on anymore. i'm surprised by zoro. will it work when i go to checkout?
I've been an eBay customer for 25+ years and it's worse than ever with fraud. It's gotten so bad that my account now warns me that I'm at risk if I report any more purchases on there.
Examples: 1.) Bought my wife a dress, it came and had multiple defects that were not in the photographs. I reached out to the seller and they didn't offer a refund but said "sorry". I have no recourse if I don't open a dispute. If I open a dispute I get penalized. 2.) I bought "Mid Century Modern" metal wall art. The listing said 1960's and the photos were of two metal wall art items with no markings. The items came with a clear "Made in China" marking on each of them that was not in the photos. These are modern inspired pieces not actual mid century modern. I opened a dispute and got my refund from the seller who didn't even ask to have them shipped back. 3.) Purchased a video game that showed NTSC ESRB rating on the front of the game in the photos. What came was the european PAL release. Not only is that version not playable on this console but the value of the two items is distinctly different (PAL is worth far less).
I'm done shopping on eBay until they have new management. At least Amazon honors their buyers policy.
Funny, talk to sellers who use eBay and they will say how it's all stacked against them and that eBay accepts disputes from buyers almost unconditionally and they have no recourse and how much abuse there is by buyers who claim they received damaged goods or the wrong item.
Both can be true.
This is a market for lemons.
As a market's trust lowers, buyers are less willing to pay a reasonable price for a square deal because of the probability being higher that it isn't. This, paradoxically, lowers the value of legitimate products from legitimate sellers because there's no way to differentiate. The risk adjusted value of the product lowers. Legitimate sellers leave. Things spiral. Everyone loses.
Trust is the real rare commodity.
And the rational response to a low trust environment is to act with low trust. This is so fragile!
> I've been an eBay customer for 25+ years and it's worse than ever with fraud. It's gotten so bad that my account now warns me that I'm at risk if I report any more purchases on there.
It's always been bad but it's gotten worse and there's no recourse other than a dispute. I had a seller label a midi device a particular version (known to work with Linux and Mac) but when it arrived it was an older version that requires a proprietary Windows-only driver. I went back to the listing and the photos were of different versions. Seller refused the return. Ebay was unhelpful. Great.
ebay has hidden the "report listing" button so well i thought they removed it. but it is still accessible behind a plus sign ("+") in the corner of the page.
This sounds like you are running an ad blocker that’s breaking stuff.
I also run an ad blocker in all my devices and have to periodically disable it because it’s breaking random sites in ways that look like the site’s fault.
Nah, it's Firefox, not the ad blocker. I run into similar problems all the time, and disabling my ad blocker never solves it. If you pop open the developer console and look for errors, it usually boils down to Firefox having stricter policies about cross-origin requests. Even major web properties simply don't bother testing for even the most superficial functionality on browser engines other than Blink any more.
Do you think it's more likely all these major websites are broken, or that you are doing something to cause the problem?
I think it's extremely likely that all these major websites are built specifically to work with Google Chrome, and I would call that “broken”, yes.
It's worse than that. They all put up browser surveillance / captcha blockwalls to "stop bots" (even despite bots being legitimate shoppers these days!) that make the sites just straight up not work on most of my browser configs. And they keep getting worse - I'm sure they've all got some big dashboards that say "evil bots blocked", the numbers just keep going up up up (false positives and all), and whatever middle manager championed the initiative to block customers gets a pat on the back and a mandate to do more.
Amazon, no problem, browse from anywhere. Amazon has similar functionality, but they just do it a lot more intelligently. The most I've ever seen on Amazon is a simple captcha before the login page, period. Whereas on other sites, if a user is logged in to a longstanding account with a history of real purchases, and that logged in session isn't requesting pages at some exorbitant rate that goes well beyond enthusiastic middle-clicking, then it should never end up blocked. Yet I've had this happen on most sites that aren't Amazon - they've lost sight of the primary goal being to serve customers!
Of course to me every webshop has their bread and butter of what types of things make sense to purchase there. I'm certainly not going to buy stuff from Amazon that is twice the price as it is elsewhere because it's only on Amazon becomes some enterprising seller put it up there as a convenience. But I can understand how others would, given how hard the other webshops want to actively reject your business.
I don't use eBay much, but I use Firefox exclusively and never recall any issues with it there.
> walmart: still get the "technical issues" error page.
Try a different browser. I use Waterfox for most general purpose browsing and it rarely works with Walmart.com, while Chrome works fine.
"however their site started giving a stupid error page for anything but the latest version of google chrome; this started about 2 years ago now."
Responding before coffee maybe? They already stipulated this
Is that meant to say you are willing to ignore what Amazon is doing because their shipping is convenient?
Why is a purchase ever in such a hurry? Short delivery only really encurrage impulse purchases.
It arrives when it arrives.
>Why is a purchase ever in such a hurry? Short delivery only really encurrage impulse purchases.
We never do impulse buys for frivolous throwaway consumerism junk but fast ~2 day delivery is still very helpful because... Life Happens ... such as stuff unexpectedly breaking and you want to have a replacement to quickly fix it.
Example of 2 events just in the last month: (1) garage door screw coupler broke. It's the piece that connects the motor shaft to the screw drive. You cannot buy this type of oddball part from Home Depot or Lowes. Amazon had it and delivered it the next day so I was able to repair the door immediately. The alternative of waiting a week+ for slower delivery means the door has to be disengaged from the track so it can be manually raised and lowered. This is not acceptable because I don't have the specific key to the garage locking mechanism from the outside. Why don't I have a key?!? Because life happens. I guess I could manually lock it from the inside and leave the car outside the garage for a week but I didn't like the idea of leaving a catalytic converter exposed to drive-by theft.
(2) was my Skechers work boots had the sole separated from the shoe. I bought the same model shoes from Amazon for $59.99 and had it in 2 days. I could drive to the local Skechers store but they charge $79.99. So either wait a week+ for slow delivery or pay $20 extra plus round trip gas money to buy at the local store.
Amazon quick delivery acts as a JIT (Just In Time) inventory system to take care of unexpected things that happen in life. That's a more sane alternative than holding a bunch of inventory of random parts for things that might go wrong.
Btw, Amazon often offers extra reward points credited to your account if you voluntarily choose slow delivery instead of 2 days. This is what we do the majority of the time. I assume Amazon does this pseudo "cashback" incentive as a way to consolidate as many customer orders as they can to optimize their delivery routes and reduce costs.
If you're in a Nielsen "A" market like 40% of the population you have a Sketchers store in your area. I'm in a "C" market, a college town with post-material values, and the local stores suck. (Great thrift stores and vintage clothes but if you want something new it is Target or Wal-Mart or the overpriced Haberdasher that will get you something appropriate for a wedding but 'not special' in my mind)
Oftentimes I'm buying maybe a tool or a part or something like that which isn't necessarily available in my local hardware store.
Having a predictable delivery date for that on top of it most of the time being way faster than anywhere else is really nice. If I buy some of these somewhere else I might wait weeks for a small part due to logistics issues or low availability compared to Amazon
Not all purchases are things that are just consumable/materialistic. I find most of the time the stuff I buy on Amazon nowadays are things like this, where I want something I need but can't easily get locally or am too busy to go out and get during stores hours.
Oh no my toilet broke, the hardware store is 45 minutes away, and I have work and kids. Don't worry, I don't want the replacement part overnight. It arrives when it arrives!
If it’s a Lowes you can get the parts delivered next day. And you’ll know the threads are compatible. Most of the stuff I’ve gotten on Amazon technically fits NPT fittings but it leaks really badly unless you coat it with thread tape because the threads are the incorrect profile.
Lowes is even better than that - they'll often cancel your order the very same day!
Saves you the frustration of wondering if they'll actually deliver.
https://toolguyd.com/another-horrible-lowes-shopping-experie...
So weird to see this right after I had Lowe’s cancel my order the first time I bought something from them online. I didn’t even choose special shipping, I just wanted them to send me an item they had in stock.
let's be honest most people on here are buying USB cables, videogames and other non-essentials
Most people call a plumber.
Most wealthy people do. But there's a whole lot of folks who can't really justify paying $200 for a plumber service call to replace a $20 part in the toilet tank.
> But there's a whole lot of folks who can't really justify paying $200 for a plumber service call to replace a $20 part in the toilet tank.
You guys are hilarious. Where are you going to get such cheap plumbers?
I just had a plumber out for nontrivial work. Definitely over $200 per hour!
(Although I will say: If you have CPVC pipes, best to call a plumber and tell them up front you have CPVC and let them take the liability...)
Eh - most toilet repairs are doable with the help of Youtube videos (the primary benefit of Youtube for me).
This guy DIYs
I ain't waiting overnight for a toilet part. If it isn't in my plumbing box, we're taking a trip.
Your nearest hardware store is 45mins away and you dont have the tools on hand to fix a toliet?
You keep all the parts for toilet repair around just in case? Do you live on a navy vessel?
Most toilets are not mil-spec. "All the parts" can be one universal Fluidmaster universal toilet repair kit, $25 at any home depot. I have one on the shelf in my garage.
Actually, yeah. Wax rings, gaskets, supply lines, maybe a flap. Maybe not an entire fill valve, but they're available at any small hardware store.
Yes… because places like Amazon mean I don’t have to :) that’s the point!
In the former German Democratic Republic waiting for your car (Trabant) to arrive after ordering took 12+ years on average
The old joke that went with that-
A citizen goes to buy a Trabant. The salesman tells him to come back to pick it up in nine (or ten) years.
The customer asks: “Shall I come back in the morning or in the evening then?”
The salesman asks: “You're joking, aren't you?”
The customer replies: “No, not at all. It's just that I need to know whether the plumber can come at 3:00 PM or not.
But people richer than me exist, so I'd rather have that world than what we have now.
While I get your point, there is obviously a middle ground between eastern block communism and unregulated anarchocapitalism that many nations can and do inhabit. Antitrust is a good example. The free market can't solve everything, and monopolies are bad for innovation despite what Thiel says.
I just said its often not even the hurry. I just want an ETA!
Purchasing decisions for "this arrives in 2 days" are different than "this may take 2 weeks".
It's the difference between saving me a run to the local big box store or not.
> It arrives when it arrives.
Yeah, but will I be at home when it does? We no longer live in a world where everyone has a nuclear family and the wife is always home while dad is at work. In 2026, only the rich can afford a housewife.
Most of the time I am indeed not in a hurry to receive my purchases. For most items I genuinely could not care less if it arrived tomorrow or two weeks from now. But I do need to know when it will arrive, so that someone is home to receive it.
"A month from now, on a Monday morning" versus "A month from now, on a Tuesday afternoon" makes a huge difference for me, as one of them would result in me having to walk to my front door and the other would result in me having to rent a car and spend an entire afternoon having to go to the other side of the city to pick it up at some warehouse.
90% of the time I choose next-day delivery it is because I know I will be home tomorrow, and the alternative is "some random day next week". If they offered me the option to pick out of a bunch of guaranteed delivery moments next week which are convenient for the seller/shipper, I would!
POV: you just completed the order and discovers you have ordered from China and it will comme in 100 small packages over a period of three months.
i'd love a 'slow amazon' variant where i could shop for things as normal throughout the week, but it would hold them all until a single specified time where i could do a final review/approval of orders for the whole household the order and then have it submitted at once.
I'd win because I could remove the late-night impulse buys and de-duplicated things added by multiple family members.
They win because it simplifies shipping logistics/packaging and actually encourages more loose/impulse driven buying ("just add it to the cart, we'll review it later").
They have had that for years now, you can set your "Amazon Day" and they'll batch your orders together.
It gives more confidence in the service at the time I'm thinking about the order. I want it to be reliable so I don't need to track and worry about it.
Precisely - Amazon is the one retailer I literally delete order emails from.
Basically everyone else I keep the latest status mail (ordered / shipped / arriving tomorrow) in my inbox because they have not earned my trust, and orders have fallen through the cracks before.
Anecdotally Amazon is 90% of my online shopping (by order volume) but only 10% of my unshipped/wrong item/misdirected/lost packages. I have had mis-delivered packages from USPS/UPS/FedEx even on large/high value items.
I almost never impulse buy. When I order something, it's because I need it. And if I need it, I definitely care that it arrives quickly.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
This is such a remarkably silly take that I’m struggling to believe it’s being offered in good faith.
The point is that a slightly slower delivery feels like a rather small reason; for tolerating the collape the entire market of online purchases to a single abusive and monopolistic marketplace that is actively reducing the quality, trustwortiness and safety of everything we buy.
The reason everything else is worse than Amazon is itself because of Amazon. Once you've taken over the entire market; subsidising your delivery networks to the moon keeps the moat.
Amazon is just rentseeking the entire US consumer market while being a rather bad online marketplace. The only solution left is a antitrust breakup.
If you almost don't care about how quick it is then why not take 2-10 days as 10 days?
I don't even care about shipment times at all as long as they are not completely unreasonable (e.g. multiple months for a supposedly in stock item). But I do care that the items do get to me or that thinks are resolved satisfactorily when that is not possible - without me having to hound the seller. Unfortunately that's still much more likely with Amazon than with some random internet shop - and that's even with Amazon's own enshittification of their service. With other sellers if the final courier fucks me over and wants me to pick up the package in dumbfuck nowhere district thats my problem because if I don't I might end up needing to threaten the seller with legal action before they resend/refund. With Amazon delivery issues are not my problem.
Probably correct analysis. It also means means that places they simply do not operate in (like Switzerland) they are completely meaningless.
Luckily local alternative(galaxus/digitec) is so much better, reviews and rating are trustable, each category has 1000s of items, services and communication stellar etc. that for me, that name symbolises just some not-so-cheap cloud I used to work with some years ago.
>The problem for everyone else is not simply that Amazon ships quickly, I almost don't even care about that. The thing is that Amazon ships & delivers on a reliable predicted schedule. When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does. I shop at specific competitors who can do similar (B&H, Sweetwater, etc).
I don’t care so much for specific delivery dates (although they are a plus). Most important are free returns. Hence, I prioritize shopping at Costco/Target/Walmart/Home Depot/Lowes/Old Navy/Amazon/etc.
I've been mostly happy with sweetwater - but they use USPS and I had a shipment (strings) take 2 weeks.
I've started to use more "mom and pop" stores - Philadelphia Luthery instead of Stew Mac (Stew Mac shipping is a joke, they want you to "subscribe" for $120 a year now, and places like "The Acoustic Shoppe" in Missouri for strings.
...and their customer care & return handling (which is basicly give me my money back) usually just works.
The funny thing is Amazon is awful compared to what Alibaba and JD provide to their customers in China. IYKYK
Amazon searches for anything that isn't a known brand such as Apple & co turn out >90% Chinese products of highly questionable quality for me these days. And you can buy those cheaper by going straight to the source. The sole point of their retail business seems to be providing a support for the inevitable issues with these sellers, but I suspect that increasingly customers won't think it justifies the massive premium they're paying for what's essentially Taobao with an American address.
You mentioned Apple products -- I purchased an Airpod Pro set through Amazon, worked for a while but had to take them into an Apple Store for troubleshooting, where they had to carefully inform me without using the word "counterfeit" that they were counterfeit. Another problem related to quality which is endemic to Amazon.
I want to like Amazon, they're just so damn convenient. But the number of reasons to avoid them is getting longer all the time. Fake/sponsored reviews, never showing me what actually searched for, allowing sellers to reuse old listings, and allowing sellers to add counterfeit and used items to genuine listings are all my main complaints.
Oh and prime video has ads now.
I read about this happening a lot here and elsewhere, and I don't get it. I buy many iDevices from Amazon, for example Apple Watch Ultra (1, 2, 3), and AirPods Pro (1, 2, 3). Most with AppleCare 2 years plan, some without. Also some accessories.
If the item is counterfeit, not only is sometimes the packaging/actual product identifiable by anyone that is actually a tech person, but lets assume that it's identical or whatever.
Unboxing?
When you open the AirPods box for the first time does the iPhone do that animation and say "Set up AirPods..." etc?
When you use it, does it sound at least kinda like the quality you expect from a 200 USD Apple headphone? Does Dolby Atmos work, the stems on both sides, the wireless charge on the box, the Find My features, live translation, transparency, noise cancellation? All of those features are present and working?
Going to settings -> AppleCare and Warranty should show the time of manufacture, of purchase, and the end time for the warranty (or if AppleCare, for AppleCare).
I guess I see a counterfeit passing my step 1: hardware, or maybe step 2: software (really shouldn't tbh? Apple should cover for this).
But the data on AppleCare and Warranty come from Apple's server. Even if they spoofed the serial number that would mean guessing a correct serial number for that same product type and spoofing the date of sale etc on AppleCare&Warranty.
I honestly don't see how this can happen. If the counterfeit is honestly so identical at that point it's just the same product, but even so.
I buy clothes, other tech stuff there. Is it really necessary to instill on me and hundreds of other OCDs the constant existential fear that everything we buy is actually an exactly identical and unverifiable impostor of the real item, but not actually real?
Edit: Just to clarify, I've indeed used warranty/AC+ on most of these items and all were real. For now.
Yes, the 'high-end' counterfeit AirPods are so good, they show up in iOS with identical set up flows; battery indicators; feature support (at least claimed to iOS), etc. I'm not sure about AppleCare though.
The packaging is basically identical, unless you carefully scrutinize font DPI or alignment.
Have a look at YouTube videos; for a good AirPods counterfeit it's genuinely hard to tell things apart.
1. You’d be surprised at how good counterfeits can look nowadays, including packaging
2. If you’ve never seen/held the genuine item or don’t have them side to side, it can be very difficult to tell which is the genuine one
I bought an Apple Polishing Cloth and it turned out to be counterfeit (no Apple logo embroided on it). Thankfully easy returns even 6+ months later.
What happened after that? How was it resolved?
Apple refused service and OP was left holding the bag.
Amazon sent me fake RAM a couple times years ago. It was a space blanket in a fake crucial RAM box. I’m 99% sure Amazon took the return and shipped the retuned space blanket on the next order.
I don’t understand the quality complaints. I’m actively looking for Chinese-branded products now because the quality is amazing. I’ve switched to Hongdian fountain pens, I recently bought an espresso maker stamped with an unpronounceable string of consonants, and I buy Chinese sportcoats that fit perfectly, have no label, and cost what I used to pay for clothes in the early 2000’s. Some clothing manufacturers on Amazon even email me for exact measurements, so I get a tailored fit straight from China. I get knockoff printer ink that lasts months longer than HP’s overpriced junk. The Chinese had quality issues twenty years ago, but today their products are top notch.
The issue is that in many cases, this is not what is being sold on Amazon. There is good chinese brand/product (I love my chinese IEM), but when looking for many household items, you will find the white label, probably not compliant with local regulation, type of product. When it is not an outright scam.
I actually have a recent example : I do woodworking and for the last step of finishing some of the thing I build, I use a mixture of beeswax and linseed oil. Beeswax has been harder and harder to find locally. Not so long ago, every hardware shop had some. Now it has been displaced by synthetic product. So unless you know a local beekeeper, you are sol. So, resigned, I went to Amazon. It had a trove of listing for "100% natural beeswax". Turns out, ALL of them are paraffin dyed to look like beeswax. You can report it to Amazon, they don't care. They will reimburse you, but never remove the listing.
I closed my amazon account months ago, but I have also experienced this problem. I have a hiking staff I really like that needs to be re-oiled and waxed. I'm having the darndest time finding both things. The beeswax, and most places seem to only want to sell "boiled" (solvent treated) linseed oil so it cures faster.
Try https://linseedoilpaint.com. They offer raw and boiled linseed oil as well as paints etc.
Tip for anyone wondering how pure their beeswax is: you can use a blacklight to check its fluorescence:
* https://imgur.com/gallery/beeswax-test-with-uv-lamp-c3uBW3G
I wouldn't use this as a guide.
The beeswax I get from a local apiarist looks nothing like that under a blacklight, and in fact is quite (pale) orange. Carnuba wax mixtures fluoresce yellow. My box of paraffin fluoresces blue brightly enough to be visible in full sunlight, much brighter than the image. Rosin fluoresces bright, radioactive orange in case you're wondering.
The problem for me is (and this holds across AliExpress as well), if I search for something, I get presented 30 different versions of the same thing, almost all from an unknown brand out of China, all with near-perfect reviews. I don't know if they're all the same thing, just relabeled; some are cheap copies of one original good version (and which one was is the good original); or something else. And if I end up with a cheap knockoff, how to resolve the issue - endless phone calls with a call-center in China and multiple rounds of trans-Pacific shipping? No thanks.
None of that is a knock against Chinese goods. I bought a set of Chinese carbon bicycle wheels last year and they're great. But, I went straight to the source and didn't take chances with AliExpress or Amazon.
I think some Chinese brands do try to distinguish themselves. Anker, for example, isn't a revolving door brand name. But, yeah, there's an enormous amount of noise on Amazon. Unfortunately that noise is everywhere. If I went right now to try to find another source on, "what brands don't suck?" I would probably have zero confidence that any of the sources I find aren't just SEO garbage.
Any known brand seems like a good sign to me compared to AWOLP, IPOW and whatever else Amazon surfaces.
They sound like random letters stringed together rather than any attempt to build an actual brand.
I agree completely, user43928.
Those are private label brands where the US or EU owners look for ready made low cost products within a category across different Chinese factories and slap their logo on top. Like SEO they game the product search engine and listings on Amazon to appear on the first search result pages, knowing that most impulse buyers don't have much patience.
The factories usually ship directly to Amazon warehouses and it is also fulfilled by Amazon (FBA).
They might not be a revolving door brand, but I've had 2 different models of charging brick from them get recalled for spontaneous combustion in the past 3 years. So, despite their branding efforts, their QC still isn't great from my perspective.
I've had the same. But unlike a lot of today's companies, I was able to get an actual human emailing me back the same day with a few questions followed up by a "we're sending you a replacement. Throw away the broken one." That was refreshing. Maybe they haven't gotten the memo that you're supposed to hate your customers.
Fair enough. I didn't need a human - Anker sent recall notices (via Amazon sales records, I guess) and all I had to do was send photos of serial numbers on the bricks and pick from a list of replacements of similar capacity. So, their customer support was better than average, no question.
How did you come to learn the original source in the case of the wheels? Can this be applied to other products?
I'm a long time cyclist, got the name from friends on an old web forum that somehow manages to stay alive.
This particularly brand (BTLOS) will come up on searches similar to "good Chinese carbon wheel brands" with reviews on FB, Reddit, etc.
And the cycling industry has had Chinese brands making inroads for a decade or more. So, Winspace, BTLOS, and a few others have come to be known entities (some do sell through AliExpress, some direct from their own site). And there's a niche group of product testers on YT or similar that review these things.
I assume there are analogous items in other hobbies, but I can't speak to any specific examples/brands.
My dad likes to tell me how when he was a kid, "Made in Japan" meant "this is garbage." When I was a kid "Made in China" meant, "this is garbage."
Japan, Korea, and others.
The "problem" with China is they have a massive economy built on building to a price, no matter how low the price may be. They're perfectly capable of creating high-end electronics like iPhones and disposable crap that sells for pennies on Amazon or Ali.
There doesn't seem to be the same cohesive brand-building/reputation-buidling effort that we saw with Japanese and Korean companies in the 80s-00s+. Granted, Amazon/Ali didn't exist, and the market for "$1 junk" wasn't the same. No easy answers (if it's even a thing that needs solved).
The main problem for me is that the different price categories don't all make it to the West. I don't mind getting the $1 crap version when I am paying $1 for it, and often I would happily pay $10 for the not-complete-crap version.
But when those items arrive on Amazon the $1 crap gets sold for $9, and the $10 is completely absent because people think it is a ripoff compared to the "$9" one.
Another problem I've heard is there is absolutely no legal protection. If you outsource your manufacturing to Shenzhen, you get what you get and there is no suing them later.
There's a scene from Back to the Future, where 1955 doc notices that one of the failed circuits says Made in Japan. Marty then points out that all the best stuff is made in Japan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1QcjsjjtRc
"Made in Germany" started as a trade protection measure in the UK in 1887...
Labelling requirements have a long history of backfiring.
Weren't japanese cars basically better than american ones from the jump?
No, during the 70's and part of the early 80's they were terrible quality.
But what the Japanese makers did was they analyzed the failures and rolled the findings back into the manufacturing line so that they continuously improved the product. After quite some time at this, they took the "quality built" mantle for themselves.
My father, mid to late 70's, worked as an auto-mechanic for a local Datsun dealer (Datsun is the company we know today as Nissan). Datsun corporate wanted every failed part on every car repaired returned to them for analysis as to why it failed. The other Japanese brands all did the same.
The thing I love about the Japanese automotive story is that their success was earned. It wasn't some story of regulatory capture or protectionism or blitzscaling, etc. They built an auto industry over generations and raised the quality line for everyone.
This came with a price, though. Japanese workers were squeezed extremely hard, entire generations of kids barely had any relationship with their fathers. A lot of those practices were then exported to other countries under the guise of toyotism.
That's true. This isn't meant to be a "whataboutism" but I think that's something we see every time a nation industrializes. And then there's a critical point that's hit, and we invent weekends and a healthy middle class. Not sure if Japan ever realized that second part as much (I honestly don't know)? And China seems to be grappling with some 12/6 thing, though I've heard they have an interesting middle class story.
Really out of my realm of expertise here, but I think there's something interesting going on here with how some economies evolved out of the "toil and suffer" phase while others don't?
We cannot really go there without opening a big can of politics, but I would be wary to consider this or that change fundamentally inevitable. Marx thought he could see the future, but most of his predictions did not come to pass. Humans are messy.
I've often heard Toyota cited as the Japanese manufacturing exemplar, with their "kaizen" (constant improvement) approach.
From the Freebsd fortune file:
Japanese cars from 1945-1970 were pretty bad. It took a while.
I've just ordered a dining table and a set of dining chairs from China using a sourcing agent mixed with TaoBao. It's costing me about £1200 ($1500) so far delivered to the door and if I was to buy this complete setup in the UK, it would cost about £2500. The only problem has been delivery time and the back and forth with the Chinese sourcing agent hasn't been great in terms of communication, but I'll be damned if I'm going to give an extra £1000 to Western retailers that are hellbent on following the Amazon model and ripping off customers.
How did you find your sourcing agent?
I asked DeepSeek believe it or not and it recommended YanChao (formerly Gonest.cn).
I've had an "ok" experience so far. Not amazing, but not horrendous either. I kinda suspect it's just the specific staff member that has been assigned to me, and maybe a different member of personnel might provide a slightly better experience, but as I say, it's not been horrendous or truly awful. Just a little lacking. I generally find the Chinese to be far more eager to please and provide a good service but I think these guys are a little inundated so it's hard to keep up.
Yeah I have a bunch of Chinese products I've bought that are way better than any Western products.
For all sorts of products like various electronic devices and kitchen gadgets, they are just iterating way faster on product feedback.
I think of some product I'd like to have, and discover somebody in China invented it 9 months ago and I can buy it through Amazon for $19. I buy it and use it for six months, then realize I really wish it had some other feature. I check Amazon, and now it's in its third generation with the feature I want plus two others.
I don't get why people are complaining. It's genuinely amazing, and a kind of entrepreneurial spirit I can only respect. Why people get hung up on the random-letter brand names is beyond me, who cares?
If there's a Chinese brand that gets a good reputation, then they too will suffer from other Chinese counterfeiters. For example, the "Pinecil" soldering iron from Pine64 got popular, and then warned on their website to only purchase from their official site (or EU distributor site) because Amazon and AliExpress are rife with counterfeits of this Chinese brand soldering iron.
Apple manufactures a lot in China, you can get amazing stuff made in China and many do. The problem is trust (perhaps more specifically, provenance). Is this thing really what it says it is? It is just a strange phenomenon that China has an incredible un-matched industry in making cheap decent-looking imitations (in addition to the actual high-quality products that trusted brands sell).
https://www.fda.gov/food/alerts-advisories-safety-informatio...
> Some clothing manufacturers on Amazon even email me for exact measurements
how do they have your email? this makes me worried
He probably means contact via Amazon?
I do wonder whether you're comparing two different versions of chinese products?
IE, you're seeing and buying things they're selling directly, so they need to manage quality control, vs what is being sold on amazon, potentially a 3rd party seller who's cutting corners to make a nicer margin?
Hongdian's primary retail front in the west is through Amazon.
A lot of Chinese name brands are extremely high quality, as good as or better than the American equivalent. Anker is one of the better known examples. However, there is also a lot of unbranded or white label garbage made by the lowest bidder to try to spawn camp popular search terms.
Spam camping requires paying Amazon for placement fees, so the system is working just as Bezos intended.
You got a link for the clothes?
Most things are made in China anyway. Some of it is counterfeit junk, but often it's the same factory they use to make "American" brands. They just keep the assembly line running and use a different brand name.
Or not. You just can’t tell. Sometimes they’ll swap materials and build something that is worse using the same blueprints and processes.
“Poorly made in china” was an edifying book to read.
The way I see it, the premium you pay is for the convenience brought about by Amazon having your product sitting in a warehouse waiting for you to buy it.
vs. waiting two to four weeks to ship from China.
However at least in Canada, AliExpress has fulfillment centres locally, so AliExpress can often get their items in customers' hands within a week.
So where's the advantage? Most times I can wait a week.
> vs. waiting two to four weeks to ship from China.
In UK, the average for my AliExpress orders is now 1 week.
And the frequent delivery status updates make sure that I am very aware how much time the parcel sits around waiting to clear customs, too.
Oh indeed, but the one time I ordered at AliExpress and was inundated in emails pretty much turned me off.
Once upon a time, AliExpress had a really bad reputation for missing packages. I imagine they ramped up the notifications to help repair their reputation.
Amazon Prime is quite good, tbh. There’s a whole layer of complexity your life loses when you know you can get life essentials within a few hours with no planning.
You still have same day shipping? I still get two days on basically everything even with prime, at the fastest. I thought their delivery service was getting worse after the pandemic or something
Yep, and I live in a rural area about 10 miles outside town. Amazon Prime was reliably within 2 days until a couple years ago when they opened a fulfillment center about 20 miles away. Now I often see an item I'm buying as available within hours. I basically use Amazon Prime as a way to avoid having to drive everywhere. Ease of returns, Prime Video, etc., are just icing on the cake.
It depends on your location.
Yep still same day. Sometimes they offer 3 hour delivery.
Prime has gone from guaranteed two days or less to we'll get it to you when we get it to you for a long while. Prime just guarantees you'll be ahead of people who don't pay for prime. It's fine if you can get it for free or through a family plan. But when you don't have it you do not miss it once you remember stores still exist and 99 percent of purchases don't matter if you get it tomorrow or in a week
Seems to depend on where. I'm in the UK, and same day delivery is more and more common.
Geographic advantage. It’s a small country so it’s hard to be that far from a distribution center.
They must still be chasing growth in the UK. It was once like that in the US as well
>They must still be chasing growth in the UK. It was once like that in the US as well
Where I live (in a large US city) many things are same day delivery, an enormous amount are next day delivery and, weirdly, except for four-serving Strawberry Jell-O (which ships from Texas), almost everything is two-day delivery.
Not sure where you live, but my experience is completely different from yours.
I recently was looking for some widget on amazon and one of the chinese “brands” came up. They had 300+ reviews and 4.5 stars so I thought it had to at least be decent. But then I clicked through to read some of the reviews, and was surprised to see that there were many 1 to 3 star reviews, but none of them were counted. They all had strikethrough on the text, and then an explanation from amazon saying “because this was fulfilled by amazon, we take responsibility for this failure”.
A lot of the time when i visit such a listing all the good reviews turn out to be for some unrelated product, the listing was clearly swapped.
Yeah, it was for some electronics gadget and one of the reviews was for some lettering on the trailer of a pickup truck
They really are no different than Temu or Aliexpress at this point.
There are some differences.
Temu’s UI is unusable. You are constantly presented with roulette wheels for coupons you can’t dismiss. Its dark patterns have dark patterns. AliExpress is only mildly better in that you can dismiss stuff.
Both T and A still have listings for things that will likely result in you getting something entirely different. This usually applies to more expensive and physically larger items. You might order a greenhouse and get a photo of one or a schematic of one. And I don’t mean that the description will make it clear.
Both have a pattern where they might list let’s say an MP3 player which costs $30 but the price on the listing will be $3 because one of the product variants is just the case.
Amazon has comparatively reliable shipping and it’s included with the price on a majority of products if you have a Prime membership. While Temu and AliExpress do have US-based shipping they still don’t guarantee when the thing will arrive and if you are looking at these products the price difference basically disappears.
I am not defending Amazon by any means, but purely on usability it wins hands down.
> Both have a pattern where they might list let’s say an MP3 player which costs $30 but the price on the listing will be $3 because one of the product variants is just the case.
eBay do that too. Really annoying. Some day I'll make a browser extension to highlight it.
In my opinion, Amazon has terrible ui. It's impossible to find something unless you are looking for a particular product of well-known brand.
I didn’t say it was good. I said it was better than Temu and AliExpress.
I've never had a problem with just getting a schematic, in my world that's typical of eBay (lots and lots of Apple boxes...).
The dark pattern on listing prices is real though. As it is the lower level of quality control - the same sellers will put the same product on both Amazon and Chinese stores, but the latter will get production batches that are lower quality (coil whine, etc).
Theres also no moral reason to support Amazon, they give nothing back to the society their buyers live in, much like the chinese suppliers. Might aswell just go with the cheapest.
You mean you don't want to buy the finest grade $59.95 blender for your kitchen from LONCEVON or ARVAGGCCY or ADVWUXITEKPRO ?
The tricky part now is identifying the individual CN vendors which are not yet well known in the English marketplace, that are also known to make good quality things (and generally they're not cheap), I'll use Sofirn flashlights and headlamps as an example. Mostly not sold via Amazon.
Those flashlight are amazing and amazing value. I would also include in this Triangle Labs and MKS offerings for 3D printer parts.
What's wrong with those? For established industrial designs small difference in better quality control is never worth overpaying few times for something.
I can't remember what YT channel recently did it, but they compared name brand batteries, third party batteries and knock-off batteries (equivalent to Temu) for some power tools.
The name brand and third party batteries from actual companies both performed great.
The garbage knockoffs were not a "small difference in better quality control", they had completely different battery cells, lower capacity, missing safety features, were easy to overheat, etc.
Also look at the reports coming in from governments around the world on clothes sold by some of these companies. All manner of illegal toxins. You report them, the seller changes some consonants around and relists under the new name.
I'd encourage everyone to do their own homework on this if they really think the differences aren't significant. And the problem is unless you test to failure or send things to labs you don't know if you rolled the dice and got lucky or not, until your house burns down or your toddler gets a weird autoimmune thing that you have no family history of.
> I can't remember what YT channel recently did it,
Project Farm?
Yeah, you are right, some categories of products are too risky and additional QA is actually worth it. Batteries, computer storage, anything that has prolonged contact with the body, items that come in contact with food and drinks, items for children.
I still don't get this. I've never bought a fake off Amazon by accident. I don't even know how to find fake Apple products on there if I wanted to.
You just buy an Apple product and they send you a fake. They commingle counterfeit stuff with legit products (at least they used to) so it was luck of the draw.
But what seller even does this? If I search any Apple product, the sellers are Apple or Amazon Renewed. The Apple ones are definitely Apple themselves. The renewed mention some other name under "shipped/sold by," so maybe those can be fake?
https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Wireless-Bluetooth-Headphones-C...
It just shows up in the box. Their inventory is comingled.
Including known brands such as dermatologica skin cream etc. - just so much fraud with Amazon it's my shop of last resort.
It's all the same crap. you buy name brand from Tefal, or a local kitchen shop and it's the same crap with a different label and large markup. On Amazon you get all these letter brands with the same crap. You try to go to the source and buy from AliExpress but the lobbying worked and countries like The Netherlands introduced taxes to make it unattractive and help the local drop shippers keep their jobs. Some countries outright ban it. You think they're protecting the consumer but it's all the same crap but with extra steps.
For kitchen stuff, look for a local restaurant supply place. Check first that they aren't wholesale only, but enough restaurants are small that many of them do retail sales as well.
Prices are much better than the consumer-focused brands and normally everything is higher quality as well.
You simplify it too much to support your argument. For example, Tefal makes some of its frying pans in France, but AFAIK they also offer some products made in China to capture the cheaper part of the market. Price does not guarantee quality or being made in Europe, but if you target the cheapest, that's what you'll get.
The problem is that the presence of the Tefal brand used to be a sign of quality. Now you've got both decent products and garbage being sold under the same brand, with only the price as a quality indicator.
This dilutes the brand, and it is only a matter of time before the reputation of the cheap items will be seen as the standard for Tefal, which leads to the sales of their expensive items dropping, which leads to them trying to bring that back by lowering their price via lowering their quality. Congratulations: Tefal is now a brand where you can choose between cheap garbage and overpriced garbage!
Next steps: they shut down the European factories, struggle to compete on the budget market, and finally kill the business and sell the brand to a Chinese company interested in milking some cash out of what remains of its reputation.
Exactly, so even heritage brands use their brand power to peddle the same low quality stuff you can find on AliExpress. And their flagship stuff continuously gets eroded and enshittified as well. YT is full of "why Dr Martens/The North Face/KitchenAid/Black & Decker/... doesn't make the same quality stuff anymore" type of content. Even when you pay for the brand name it doesn't get you far.
Their support has become increasingly worse in recent years, too. They now try to steer you out of trying to talk to a human for customer support as much as possible.
If you manage to navigate your way through a bunch of FAQ pages to find the chat button, you'll be met with a basic AI chatbot that just tries to repeat those same FAQ entries back to you. If you manage to also navigate that and convince it that you need to talk to a human (you'll need to confirm it like 3 times), you might get lucky and finally be able to chat with a person who can barely speak English and will actively lie to you in an attempt to end the chat faster.
Here's a recent experience of mine: I managed to get a deal on a 4TB Samsung SSD, something like $330 before shipping on Amazon.com. I'm in Europe, so shipping would be pretty expensive, but even so it was still an amazing deal considering how expensive SSDs are now. So I ordered it, and two months later it was still not shipped with absolutely no word whatsoever from Amazon. So I got in contact with their support, they could never once tell me what was actually happening, they'd just repeat something like "I have filed a ticket with the fulfillment center and you will receive a shipping update within 48 hours" every time. It was always a lie - I would wait, not hear anything back, and contact them again. Did this 5 times, every time I'd get a similar response, once I was thrown around between 4 different support agents and none of them said anything of value. Eventually gave up and just canceled the order.
It's important to remember that the support channels a company wants you to use aren't the only options you have. If a company doesn't offer reasonable support you can always go the bezos@amazon.com route and include their highest paid person you can find (read: their still relatively highly paid secretary) so that just skimming over your mail to filter it out will cost them more than half-way decent support. Throw in a CC to a regulator when appropriate. Much better experience than dealing with chatbots or call center wait lines before that.
I've had some luck doing LinkedIn InMail to various high-level people at large companies to get support.
Once I used Inmail to get a DHL SVP to get his executive assistant to follow up why my package hadn't arrived... The assistant Cc'd me on messages a Friday afternoon and made it clear said SVP wanted updates. Monday morning the package that I had been told was on a ship being returned to the seller in the US arrived from a depot 5 minutes away from my office in London.
I'm guessing most people at that level are so insulated from their customers experiences that getting a request like that is totally novel for most of them - it's worked for me several times.
You can also buy the contact details (and phone numbers) to many execs for a few cents on platforms like rocket reach etc.
Amazon allows you to make returns and makes it convenient, quick, and easy. I made two purchases through independent sellers' websites in the last year, both with big banners guaranteeing satisfaction and easy returns for 100 days or something. And yet, when I found that the product didn't meet my needs, they would not accept my return. They wouldn't even issue a return label. Both of these sellers used Shop. Shop requires you to fill out an application for a refund and then the seller can drag their feet on processing it. In both cases they let the application sit there for days before rejecting it. In one of the cases my credit card company ruled in favor of the small business when I issued a chargeback.
On Amazon it's easy to request a return and get a return label all on the same day that you discover you have a subpar product. The long and short of it is that consumers do not want to be ripped off, and centralized sellers like Amazon and AliExpress make it easy to not be ripped off. If this raises prices across the board, so be it. It's worth it for the time saved and the accountability that comes along with it.
> Amazon allows you to make returns and makes it convenient, quick, and easy.
They currently have a $1bn settlement for failing to properly process refunds for returned products over a nine year period.
https://finance.yahoo.com/personal-finance/banking/article/d...
I guess it depends. Ordered a phone last month. Returned it because of bloatware. Waiting to this day for the refund. And support line says: please wait, nothing is wrong. While the website says, we need more details.
I rather take that risk. I buy from all sorts of online retailers and haven't had an issue in years. Ok, no, I had some pushback trying to return a sofa, but the seller offered a 50% discount for me to keep it, which I ended up accepting. The same way that VISA and Mastercard offer a service to customers, I don't think the world comes out winning when these Amazon and other global players get to raise all prices and take a cut of global commerce.
Disclaimer: I mostly shop from German, Danish, and to a lesser extend other EU sellers.
Ironically on this point, Amazon offers some of the best consumer service in Japan. Returns elsewhere are almost impossible.
> Returns elsewhere are almost impossible.
That however can be solved with laws, like we did in Europe.
I never had any problems with AliExpress returns
On the other hand, they drive up prices for everyone, and engage in other unethical businesses practices, like in the article.
I use Amazon to buy cheap stuff like zip ties, printing paper and ink and some cleaning products. Almost every single major purchase I go directly to the manufacturer website or a specialized store. For example, I would never buy photography gear on Amazon. I go to Adorama or BH. For my favorite brands in say hiking or running gear I go to REI or RunningWarehouse or visit my local brick and mortar store. Amazon has truly become the convenience store for me, my average purchase is under $10. Almost everyone today offer free or inexpensive quick shipping and easy returns. They also have better customer service.
> Almost every single major purchase I go directly to the manufacturer website or a specialized store.
Let's take an example: If a Brother printer is full price from Staples, Best Buy and the Brother website, but $50 off on Amazon, why would I not order on Amazon and save myself $50? As it is, Best Buy and Staples are also operating marketplaces when buying online.
> Almost everyone today offer free or inexpensive quick shipping and easy returns. They also have better customer service.
I beg to differ. I bought a GPU from a local store that turned out not to be compatible with my workstation. Returning it was a huge hassle, I paid a 15% restocking fee. The next time I ordered a GPU, I went through Amazon. When it too didn't work, they took it back, no questions asked, full funds returned.
"why would I not order on Amazon and save myself $50?"
Because of principles?
It seems that in the past 20 years the concept of boycotting a company in response to their behaviour has been lost.
The last widespread boycott I remember was from the late 2000s against Sony, I can't even remember why ( rootkits on CDs? ) but I'm still boycotting them now as it's an automatic reaction.
Unfortunately not many people have principles which overcome the desire for convenience. I stick to my principles hard, so much so I will happily go without convenience items, but I very rarely meet anyone else who does.
I need a rag to wipe up the condescension this post is dripping all over my monitor.
I do sympathize with them though. Convenience isn't necessarily bad, but when it's at odds with important principles, it seems there are too few people willing to take the hit anymore.
oh please. where do you stop boycotting? can you name a few companies that aligns with your principles? I feel like every major company I deal with has skeletons in its closet. if i were to start boycotting companies, i'll have a hard time getting anything done.
Better to have no morals or principles than have any, as I always say! /s
Every company is going to have competitors that would love your business over these major companies. Pick your battles and do your best. It's only hard because the status quo is designed to be stupidly easy.
If you find a Brother printer is full price from Staples, Best Buy, and the Brother website, but $50 off on Amazon, you take that price information to your in person Staples or Best Buy and ask if they price match it. They look at your rewards card/members card, say "Sure" and throw in extra toner at a good price. Or they point out that you are looking at a counterfeit product on Amazon and you get a good collective laugh.
All those easy returns are paid for by Amazon's higher prices.
Yeah sure, except that benefits the consumer. Amazon offers three things that are incredibly convenient for the consumer:
(1) Same day or next day shipping (2) No hassle returns for a full refund (3) No cost for return shipping. In some cases, the shipper will come to my door (!) to pick up the return package at no cost.
What was it like before Amazon? An internet filled with every possible storefront someone threw together with a CGI script, sketchy payment processes and dark patterns that hide information or trick you into extras. Getting something actually delivered was a crapshoot at best unless one went with a known vendor (ex. Best Buy).
What's the next credible alternative for merchants without Amazon? There's Shopify. I hold my breath every time I order from a website using Shop Pay. There's no clarity on when it will ship, sometimes details are excellent, other times the merchant forgets to add a tracking number. Return policies are merchant specific (read: very inconsistent), and Shopify takes zero liability if a package goes missing. They leave it up to me to sort it out with the merchant, as a result, ordering anything above $100 feels risky.
The lower risk of ordering from known vendors was a thing all the way back to the days of the Sears Catalog and other big mail-order houses. That wasn't new with the internet.
With Amazon, there is a whole tier of customers who order stuff, use it for their one-time need, and then return it. All for ultimately no cost to them, but all the rest of us pay for it.
That's not just happening on Amazon, tho. Hang out on /r/smallbusiness and you'll find tons of tiny retailers asking for help on how to deal with the same problem.
Returns for store credit only; restocking fees; buyer pays return shipping are the things most other retailers do. You just need to add a little reasonable friction to the process.
Are the higher prices in the room with us? Amazon is always at least as cheap. I mean they literally track the prices on competitors and auto-update them.
If a Brother printer is $150 from Amazon, but $100 on Staples, Best Buy and the Brother website, why would you not order on a non-amazon site and save yourself $50?
Answer: you probably would, but Amazon engages in illegal, coercive price fixing to drive up the prices on those other sites by $50.
Well, according to TFA, you're still paying an Amazon tax, which is itself similar to the Visa tax, which apparently we all pay even if we use cash to purchase directly from manufacturers (so long as the manufacturer also sells their product on Amazon).
At least when I buy direct from the manufacturer the extra tax I pay goes straight to them and not amazon.
The Visa tax is illegal now btw. Places are increasingly offering cash or debit discounts.
I don't know about "increasingly." I think there are two places in my area of the city that offer a cash discount. These kinds of tactics really aren't convincing customers to use cash - maybe if they turned it around to "a 3% fee will be added to card transactions" then people would care. Anyway, discounts are enough of a pain that it's not worth the accounting.
Look at your costs, including card transactions fees, and spread that across your pricing. It's no different than pricing in all other business expenses - do you complain you're paying a "toilet tissue tax" because you don't use the toilet when you stop in? Paper products in the bathroom are a cost, and those costs are put into the price everyone pays for a donut.
Now, I'll agree having a minimum plus percentage of every transaction is predatory.
They phrase it as surcharge sometimes, or just cash vs credit prices at most gas stations. Toilet paper isn't 3-5% of revenue.
If you have enough cash customers, total card transaction costs are not 3-5% of revenue. If you don’t, you’re definitely putting 3-5% back into your pricing to cover the fees.
But the ones in the second case don't put 3-5% back into their pricing, they do a credit surcharge.
You're right. But in my anecdotal experience, there are about half as many adding the surcharge as providing the discount.
Ultimately, my point is (not even addressing the legality of Visa's compulsory pricing attempts) the cost of upfront analysis to set pricing appropriately is easily dwarfed by the cost of labor and throughput when adjusting the price by employees at the point of sale. Maybe the merchants adjusting at sale are getting a benefit in the form of customer awareness, but I have doubts.
For the cheap stuff, I usually find the quality better and sometimes lower prices by going to a shop like Home Bargains or B&M. Thats UK specific but I'm guessing there must be these sort of shops in the US too.
Wikipedia describes them as variety stores and has a list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_store#North_America
This is true for even mid range purchases. I was debating pre-ordering a game from Nintendo's website or Amazon and ended up chosing Amazon because of the return policy and how fast it gets delivered.
Those things are often 4x cheaper on the Chinese marketplaces, if you can tolerate 2-4 weeks shipping times. Amazon is a tax on poor planning.
> Amazon's Fair Pricing Policy lets it remove the Buy Box (the "Add to Cart" button), or even suspend a seller, if they're offering their item cheaper elsewhere.
This kind of abusive practice needs to be banned in whichever countries it's still legal.
You can't really aspire to improve the situation if such things continue to be legal.
Isn't this like Costco requiring manufacturers to offer SKUs at Costco that are not sold anywhere else? Or mattress stores offering to match price knowing full well that the SKUs in their store are not sold elsewhere?
This policy feels like incentive enough for Chinese manufacturers to not build behind a single brand, so the policy will not apply. Materially the same product, different SKU under a different brand name.
Feels trivially easy to get around this policy.
Costco is a membership club, and AFAIK these have different rules.
Why should it be illegal? Its their platform. If enough sellers don't like it and leave then Amazon will have to change their policy. There's several other platforms people can sell their stuff on.
Yes, because “free” market deregulation has worked out so well for consumers over the last 30 years.
“Don’t like the monopoly? You’re free to go elsewhere. No wait, there is no elsewhere. Oh well, I guess you must like it here then since you keep coming back. “
But there is “elsewhere”. You can buy directly from the manufacturer.
I do not get the complaint. People shop at Amazon because they see the value Amazon provides: easy returns, free and fast shipping, etc.
Because it's monopolistic and hinders other competitors from entering the marketplace which harms consumers in the longterm.
In what way is it monopolistic? Amazon has many competitors
Are they really competing if they can't have a lower price than Amazon?
Because its a collective action problem. Being on Amazon is the least bad option for any individual business even though they would all be better off if they left simultaneously. IMO a primary purpose of market regulation should be to counteract these types of problems so that the market can move itself out of a local maxima and become more efficient overall.
It's already illegal in EU and UK
This is not even remotely a response to the question asked by the comment you’re replying to.
Everyone keeps talking about dynamic pricing.
But these sorts of contractual limits on a vendors pricing elsewhere should be illegal.
Walmart does this as well: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/pepsico-walmart-hit...
I don't get the Amazon bashing. My experience is nothing like that:
Kitchen scale, $20 bucks, looks and operates exactly as described; three years later, it still works fine.
Bed sheets, $16, two days later delivered, better than I thought - at least for the price that is. Best price/quality ratio I could get.
If I don't like something, returning is super convenient; I drop it off at Kohl's over the weekend. Time and again I am stupefied of how is it possible that in small town USA, I can get something shipped by next day while paying a one time yearly fee.
I think Amazon is the best online shopping experience on the planet.
At the employee side, the minimum pay at Amazon is $20 per hour. Walmart is $14, AliExpress ... we can be only guessing at that
Amazon pays $20/hour because most people don't have the mental constitution to put up with it. It's pretty dull.
When I was hired as a part-timer (no interview!) at a warehouse there were about a dozen of us. In a month maybe four were left. It wasn't terribly physically difficult, though I was fairly sore. But there was nothing good about the work.
It was just repetitive, isolated tasks where you have to consciously decide not to meet the unrealistic standard, or just blindly follow the orders on the device, or guess how fast to work to avoid a strain injury while not being obviously slow.
To give some examples, we'd take bags (totes) from specific locations as indicated on our device, pack them on a large push-cart, and shuttle them halfway across the warehouse. Or we'd pick packages for a specific location off a conveyer belt (which usually moved too fast). Or we'd spend 5+ hours, alone, unfolding bags and putting them back onto the shelves.
There's probably some analogy to be made with software development here, based on what I've heard, but I'm only a CS student.
> Amazon pays $20/hour because most people don't have the mental constitution to put up with it. It's pretty dull.
And Walmart gets away with $14 because Walmart is intellectually stimulating?
> I think Amazon is the best online shopping experience on the planet.
Be careful there. I use Allegro in Poland, where next-day is the rule, their website doesn't scream it was made in the late '00s (in the worst meaning of this comparison), and, as a bonus, they don't compete with their own merchants and even happen to pay their taxes here fairly. I'm sure there's plenty more of such websites across the 'planet'.
I expected the site to look good after all that shit talking, but it just looks like china-slop sites like shein and Alibaba. And it has all the exact same mechanics as amazon. I had to scroll the entire page to stop seeing sponsored products.
Really Lowes and Home Depot have been doing better imo for anything they have. Their website actually has filters and decent search and most stuff is free next day delivery. On top of that, the Chinese knockoffs are fairly minimal or at least more established knock-off brands.
On top of that, that's without a $150/yr subscription.
Costco and Chewy are also pretty good.
You’ll have a distinctly different experience buying clothes on there. 95% of the items don’t fit as described, the fabrics are not as pictured. My wife has a whole box of clothing returns she has to do for some shopping she did before a trip. Almost none of it was as-advertised. And Amazon will “lose” at least two or three items and claw back the refund a few times like they have every year, necessitating she call once a month for 3 or 4 months until she gets someone empowered to fix the problem permanently.
Sadly it’s still a better experience for her than shopping in-person because at least 5% of the items do fit versus nothing in-store. You used to be able to alter that stuff but the cheapness of the fabric and the intricacy of the “on-trend” design makes that impossible these days.
> I think Amazon is the best online shopping experience on the planet.
Does the best online shopping experience on the planet normally include routinely shortchanging customers on their refunds for close to $1bn?
https://finance.yahoo.com/personal-finance/banking/article/d...
I have the exact opposite experience.
I returned two products, got two different return codes, was supposed to send each back separately.
During the return (it was a Kohl's return), I forgot about the two different codes and gave both items to the clerk, who then packaged both items with only one code.
I got credited for the first item a few hours later. At that point, I realized my mistake of packaging both in the same return, but thought it was a lost case and chalked it up as a loss.
Imagine my surprise when, a few weeks (!) later , I got credited for the second return as well. How did they figure that one out? I don't know.
The most amazing customer service, where I did not even have to mention it and the error was still rectified.
> the minimum pay at Amazon is $20
The same way Uber Eats pay is 22$ an hour, and yet most people working either of these gigs need food stamps to live?
> Kitchen scale, $20 bucks
The problem is thats it is a 2 dollar product that could be sold and fulfilled by some other seller for 10 but you cant do that because Amazon's pricing scheme.
Shop around and you are likely see the same product with a different "name" on it for 1/2 the price.
definitely not a $2 product, it is big, glass surface, heavy etc.
That "shopping around" for with price being the sole factor is the problem. That's what drives quality down. Not the Amazon markup.
Amazon Fair Price Policy doesn't apply in the UK and EU (it's illegal)
The EU are currently running an investigation into how this affects market dynamics, which will be interesting to see
Every time I read something like this I think "wow the US so fucked".
Try having a discussion with anyone here in the US about not using Amazon. The free market is a myth.
I'm in the US and I gave up Amazon two years ago, and I haven't noticed any decrease in my quality of life.
Same. I'm in the US and do not use Amazon at all. Life, and the products I buy, actually got much better. Amazon is overpriced and low quality. Pretty much everywhere else has better products, lower prices and free & fast shipping at this point (Walmart, Target, Home Depot, direct purchases, etc.). Pretty shocked at all the people defending Amazon here.
It depends on what you're buying. I've found plenty of items that are cheaper on Amazon with free shipping, than picking them up in store at Walmart. Which is just crazy.
The free market is a myth because the market players aren't acting how you think they should?
because they aren't and they never will act in good faith
That's a free market in action.
I’ll bite, what’s the reasonable alternative to Amazon?
I'm in Germany, and I usually just find a good option outside Amazon, then look for the best deal, which is rarely Amazon. Thanks to express checkout (Google/Apple Pay or PayPal is almost always an option), it's pretty much zero hassle.
BUT, if I care more about getting something real fast than the quality, or if I don't want to pay 5 EUR for shipping (especially cheap stuff), I'm not aware of any competition Amazon has here. I use it quite a bit still, for these two use cases.
I think EU still has a chance but here in America we’ve succumbed to the Bezos convenience
Buying online direct from the manufacturer? Almost everyone sells direct. Use Amazon to find the seller and then contact them directly.
You gave me the idea to buy something I was thinking of ordering from Amazon (a Time Timer) and see how it compares. The timer I got is $24.95 on their site, 15% off welcome discount (-$3.74), +$10.00 shipping, and "orders ship within 3-5 business days." On Amazon they have the one I ordered for $19.95 list price minus 15% = $16.96 and I could have it within 1 hour for $9.99 (lol... I've never seen that option before) or tomorrow for free, although I do have Prime which is why that's an option. I do like to buy a lot of things directly from their original sellers or a specialized store (Loop earplugs, or speed cubes from TheCubicle, electronics from adafruit or jameco or digikey, etc...) but it shows you a big difference in service level.
What if you want to buy simple Chinese plastic stuff (e.g. someone elsewhere mentioned zip ties)? The manufacturer is somewhere in China with a minimum order of 10,000, so no, you can't go to them. Amazon is often the cheapest source for this, cheaper than any local retail.
Honestly? AliExpress wins for this stuff. The shipping is always much more expensive than the actual items, so I batch purchase stuff like this. Funnily enough, sometimes, despite paying only one shipping cost, it arrives in multiple shipments.
Personally I buy that stuff locally anyways to support my local economy.
Even if it does cost me a bit extra, continuing to have local businesses is worth it to me
I prefer online retailers because there is a lot more choice there. I can't find an inflatable knee pillow in local stores. The supermarket close to me even stopped selling batteries.
This is true. Many "weird" purchases that used to be available from someone local are now impossible to get. Not sure about the supermarket not stocking batteries though... That's just insane.
You have a small shop that sells zip ties? The only place I would expect to find something like that is a big box store or a hardware store (which are all chains now).
Lots of art stores (not just chains) have them. Not as much variety as Amazon, but still.
Buying from a big box store still does support local jobs though
Like yeah, Walmart isn't really much better than Amazon in the grand scheme of things, but I would rather people be able to get stable employment at a Walmart store than have to fight it out as gig workers delivering for Amazon.
Maybe I'm overthinking it though
Walmart employees are historically on food stamps. Neither is sufficiently better than the other imo
I'm not saying that Walmart is great, but maybe that Walmart+food stamps is better than just food stamps?
It's not like being a delivery gig worker is great income either
yup
Amazon delivers next day or the same day many of the items if you have Prime.
I tried many times to order something directly, and most of the time it’s the same price and longer shipping. So, for me in terms of convenience Amazon wins.
Why would I do that? Now I’m spending time verifying individual random brands all to get the same price (plus shipping)?
I'm not sure about where you are from, but in Australia I've recently had just as reliable service, shipping costs and delivery times from individual brands as from Amazon.
Amazon used to be better, and they still have the logistics network to be better, but they've dropped the ball. If this downward trend hasn't hit you yet, it's only a matter of time.
I’m in the US and they continue to beat competitors. The logistics network is unparalleled.
Thousand of long-tail ecommerce sites focused on narrow markets; buying things directly from the supplier; using other large-scale marketplace e-commerce sites and aggregators like Walmert, Newegg, Rakuten, etc.
you just have to find and want products from these suppliers that aren't sold on amazon. easy
Not sure I understand what you're saying. What if I just order the same products otherwise sold on Amazon, but from a different store?
Amazon isn't the only place to buy things. There are millions of other retailers both online and offline.
I wasn’t aware thank you
Depending on your constraints, the Walmart app
Is the Walton family not approximately equivalent to the Bezos family?
AFAIK, they are two completely disjoint sets of individuals. But could you clarify what that has to do with the goods and services offered by large publicly-traded firms that members of those families happened to be the original founders of?
Yes it has to do with oligarchs being oligarchs.
Please disable the polemic_buzzwords flag, adjust reasoning level up to medium-high, and re-run the prompt.
Initiating self destruct
Competition.
Helpful thanks.
In all seriousness, yes - competition is the answer.
There can be no alternative when Amazon is able to buy them out, or dominate the market through network effects.
I don’t understand the question. The reasonable alternative is to not use them and buy stuff elsewhere. There’s a million places to buy stuff. I haven’t ordered anything from Amazon in months.
I’m not interested in a million places, I’m interested in one that has everything with 1-2 day shipping included. Convenience is a major factor.
Yeah, I'm with you. I also have a very specific set of requirements, including only buying from companies headquartered in the Seattle area that have at least one 'o' in their name. That narrows it down to Amazon and Costco for general merchandise. But I'm also considering adding a criterion that the vendor's logo needs to include a swoosh or arrow of some kind, which would eliminate Costco, at which point I'll be stuck only with Amazon.
I know people are going to chime in and say "the fact that all of your personal criteria align maximally with the strengths of one particular vendor doesn't represent an uncompetitive market, but to the contrary, represents an extremely competitive market in which all of the participants are distinguishing themselves by maximizing the value they offer to different market segments with diverse preferences."
But as a presumptuous narcissist, my expectation is that everyone in the market should be optimizing their business practices to satisfy my preferences in particular, rather than limiting my options by trying to appeal to anyone other than me.
How often do you buy stuff online? It’s not a factor for me. My last online purchase was water filters. Got them from Home Depot, easy peasy. Before that, I’m not sure, it’s been a few weeks at least.
In any case, there’s a big difference between “there’s no reasonable alternative” and “there are plenty of reasonable alternatives but I like Amazon more.”
> How often do you buy stuff online?
At least 3-4 times a week, ranging from groceries to various household items, like water filters and what not.
I mean, different people have different behavioral patterns and preferences, if Amazon is not for you, it’s fine. It definitely works for me and saves me a lot of time.
More often than not. Why would I spend my valuable time at a big box store like Home Depot that might not even have what I need at that store? They are all functionally equivalent members of the oligarch class.
Home Depot has an online store. And almost ubiquitous free shipping without any subscription.
I didn’t order those from Amazon because their search sucks, I’d have to pay for shipping or find something else to bundle into the purchase, and I don’t trust them with anything that goes on or in my body. At least with Home Depot, if I end up in the hospital because their water filters poisoned me, I can point to their name on the label and sue them.
Isn't "free market capitalism" is doing its job here, rewarding the best player of the game into brand-godhood?
More to the point - is it not government oversight that appears incapable of leveling the playing field for others?
That said - the only "others" we seem capable of getting is other governments' Amazons. So. Devil you know?
>Isn't "free market capitalism" is doing its job here, rewarding the best player of the game into brand-godhood?
only if you think free market == unrestrained market
as monopoly is antithesis to capitalism itself, whose main principle is competition.
And where is any monopoly involved in this situation?
Capitalism's main principle is not competition, it is merely the private ownership of the "means of production".
the free market has been a myth since they scheduled marijuana.
god gave us all plants to use.
they will fear monger rather than publish medical reasoning.
you guys are so messed up, i have more of a right to medical access to an herb or herb product than a data center has water rights.
This is actually a good point. The policy described in the article doesn't apply in the EU, but it's not like Amazon is cheaper in the EU.
Also, it is common to see in the US competitors with lower prices than Amazon (e.g. I frequently see brand name products on Microcenter cheaper than Amazon), not to mention that it doesn't apply to sites like eBay. So you've got to wonder if it actually has a strong effect on pricing across the internet.
It's absolutely insane that this is legal in the US.
It’s funny to me that people look at the wild runaway success of the American experiment and conclude that it needs more cronyism like every other country.
Please feel free to implement whatever unfavorable policies you like in your own nations. You are welcome to further drive down your GDP per capita if you’d like. That’s not what the US is though.
This specific policy mostly benefits Amazon and its shareholders.
If you think this exists for your benefit, please feel free to bask in the illusion of your wild runaway success.
But it doesn’t. If it was true prices in the EU would be lower. But the EU is by far and large more expensive, even after accounting for VAT.
The issue is that those policies drive prices up globally, and the article touches on that exact point. Sellers have to absorb Amazon's fees while being required to keep the same price. As a result, their sales outside of Amazon have to factor in those expenses, which drives up prices for those products in general. Even if someone could sell that product at a lower price outside of Amazon, they won't lowball themselves and would rather improve their own margins.
Then, in the EU, you have to factor in fluctuating currency exchange rates and sales tax/VAT set individually by each country. This is another issue altogether.
It's insane that it's legal for a major marketplace platform to prohibit vendors from using their platform to engage in manipulative price discrimination?
Online stores should be forced to allow manufacturers to use their sites as free advertising platforms to expose consumers to their products, while incentivizing them to actually complete the transaction someplace else?
Should brick-and-mortar stores not be allowed to offer price matching either?
You would have a point if not for Amazon's exorbitant fees which it expects to be absorbed by the seller and then requires that seller to set the same prices everywhere.
This is clearly manipulative and is regulated outside the US.
Can you cite some specific examples of fees imposed by Amazon that are unnecessary or non-standard in comparison to the rest of the industry?
You have all the info you need in the article. Technically, Amazon's basic commission is ~15%, and that is in line with other marketplaces.
The issue is that when you pay only that basic referral fee, you won't make a lot of sales. You have to pay more to actually make those sales, which amounts to ~46%. Advertising, fulfillment, and other fees. You have to pay for all of this while being required to keep your price "fair," so you have to raise prices on other platforms to stay afloat.
You could just ignore selling on Amazon altogether, but in the US that's rather unrealistic at this point, and they know that.
Noticed a big surge in pricing on Amazon for mundane crap. End up checking eBay and AliExpress for the same and both always cheaper, and sometimes in multiple. Things like blow up pool toys, > $20 on Amazon, easily half and lower on the others, and really not even worth a dollar in the scheme of things.
I've stopped shopping on Amazon entirely, and the impact on my credit card bill has been substantial.
It's not simply that products are priced poorly, but it is also that they seem to be priced just at the threshold where the purchase remains sufficiently convenient not to shop locally or elsewhere online.
Because of their predatory practices it seems online prices are roughly identical for Western branded products at all online retailers. For Chinese brands, it's long been cheaper to use AliExpress but shipping isn't as fast and returns aren't as convenient.
But that's perception. I blocked Amazon and continued shopping as usual. The volume of my purchases is now through local retailers, and I'm buying roughly the same amount of stuff but I'm spending a great deal less.
Yep. Amazon is almost no advantage here in the UK. I used to bulk buy stuff from them because it was cheaper than the supermarkets. That is no longer true. In fact it's 10-25% more expensive usually.
I really should just cancel my prime now.
Edit: just cancelled it!
It's even worse in Ireland, particularly with the new import fees for non-EU goods - €7 + 23% VAT per item.
Amazon Germany/France/Spain won't ship a huge variety of items to Ireland and obviously won't have the same composition of goods as English speaking countries.
It's just about worth it for Prime Video and Deliveroo Silver, but the Irish Prime membership doesn't even support household or family sharing...
Yep, prime membership went quite a lot up; prices went up; delivery times got slower after COVID; now they are also saving on packaging, which means Royal mail brings me broken packages held by elastic bands...
Yeah the broken packages thing is getting terrible. I think about 1/4 of what I was ordering turns up damaged or broken.
I'm no Amazon fan but very cheap next day is still an Amazon advantage, and a pretty big one. £9/mo vs £4-8 per delivery from other retailers
Unlike the US I believe in practice it's all but guaranteed next day too
I've just stopped buying a lot of stuff. I think the availability of the cheap delivery just made me buy things I didn't need for convenience.
The fees for sellers on Amazon is ridiculous and definitely keeps these prices higher.
Tempting to think that, but that logistical miracle machine that thus far no one has been able to fully replicate is expensive. Their global operating margin ex-AWS (which is a whole different beast) was 6.8% in Q2. (AWS was 39%)
That's actually not anything phenomenal -- and worse than I thought before I looked it up just now. I can't understand AMZN's stock valuation. They should really spin off AWS to be its own thing.
Their international margins are even worse in isolation, 4.1%. That's not even worth getting out of bed for, just buy some bonds and skip all the drama.
Frustrating thing is when I then buy the small crap on eBay and then it shows up days later in an Amazon package.
-Post removed as this account is rate limited and I can't reply to comments-
VAT should be done by AliExpress now, at least that is how I understood it.
Sadly it's only limited items, but you can also filter for just items that they have in their EU warehouse.
I recently bought some stuff (Ps2 controller etc) and it was still cheaper including shipping and duty then to order it in EU. Package was checked by customs.
Same problem here. In my country at least, the handling fees for the local shipping are around USD10, you can avoid those using a courier but that shipping method is much more expensive.
A few years ago I looked at the finances of a company that sells on Amazon (FBA). It was pretty astounding the number of fees they charge. They were paying to show up in sponsored results which obviously increased the fees but from what I remember between all the fees roughly 50% of the sale price of their products was just going directly to Amazon.
Logistics and shipping cost a lot. Amazon is one of the cheapest warehouses that you can use for this purpose.
Well, it's usually much cheaper to use a non-Amazon 3PL to ship your Amazon volume (along with other D2C channels), but then you might not have the prime badge if you go on the cheaper side of the market.
And even if you want a prime badge, it's often/usually cheaper to go with a 3PL that can do some sort of SFP setup if you have reasonable volumes.
Although Amazon has a stranglehold on 3PL's too (or if you are a seller offering SFP), as they will force you to use Amazon Logistics at a certain % of volume if you want the prime badge which can be more expensive than other carriers.
(I work in logistics consulting and do network strategy design & 3PL selection as part of that so have a reasonably up to date view on comparative/competitive costs for this sort of thing - mostly in Europe though and appreciate the USA market is different)
Sure, but that was only several of the couple dozen fees
Compared to the wholesale -> retail markup for most goods 50% is pretty in line with what a normal store would take as their cut, maybe slightly better.
https://markupcalculation.com/markup-by-industry?hl=en-US
Their margin is Bezos' opportunity. I don't know how he could have been more direct.
The endgame of capitalism is a big corporation with a nested market which is completely regulated to death by that big corporation.
The endgame of free market was always plain and obvious: shittiest possible products at lowest possible price, and no one in the entire value chain having above-sustenance any margins.
Or we just go somewhere else that's cheaper, because capitalism means competition.
Amazon's regulation often means sellers are blocked from selling the same items at a lower price elsewhere.
That seems like a reasonable policy for Amazon to have. It's pretty normal practice for wholesale/distribution contracts to include clauses prohibiting the manufacturer from undercutting them in other channels after the contract is signed.
Why would Amazon want to bear the cost of people using their store as a free product billboard, or using their warehouses as cheap transient storage space, while trying to push customers to actually make their purchases elsewhere?
I'm not sure how this can be considered 'regulation' of the market, however -- to the contrary, it signifies that Amazon itself is sensitive to price pressure coming from competing distribution channels.
A monopoly store is charging (according to sibling posts) about a 50% tax to its suppliers, and will ban them if they sell their products for a fair price anywhere else. The tax percentage keeps increasing over time, as the monopoly uses this policy to prevent anyone else from competing on price.
That’s clearly in violation of antitrust laws.
50% "tax", or 100% markup, is the typical reseller markup for consumer products across the market, and anti-undercutting clauses are also universal.
Every bit of what you're describing is the way retail distribution works across the industry in general. Amazon isn't doing anything out of the ordinary in any way.
Amazon often have no idea what vendors sell their products for elsewhere. It's often an empty threat that vendors are very happy to ignore. Also, many of those agreements are spurious in international law. Unless there's a bullet proof contract with actual teeth, vendors will sell anywhere they can.
To steal Benn Jordan’s ideas, capitalism is replacing itself with leveragism.
You don’t buy things from Amazon because they’re the best store with the best prices, you buy them because they’re the only store that has their own massive scale delivery service that delivers more packages than FedEx or UPS (not combined, but Amazon still delivers more packages than either).
It’s not possible for another store to compete with that. There is no competition. Starting a competitor to Amazon would be more difficult and capital intensive than starting a new car or rocket company.
There is no other store that can get me the most obscure and random stuff in less than 24 hours. Walmart can’t do it, Costco can’t do it, Target can’t do it, Dollar General can’t do it.
Not to mention the sheer number of things that they offer unrelated to the commerce side of things
I don't even live in the US or shop on Amazon anymore but I still have a Prime subscription just in case something good is on Prime Video (this doesn't happen often...)
Actually I just remembered there were several things recently that I could not find locally and so I used international shipping from Amazon.com which turned out to be way cheaper than you would expect I think mostly due to the Prime subscription
https://youtube.com/watch?v=NFt3KKBT00M
A similar scenario played out in my head recently when I needed to forward some of my mail internationally
> You don’t buy things from Amazon because they’re the best store with the best prices, you buy them because they’re the only store that has their own massive scale delivery service that delivers more packages than FedEx or UPS (not combined, but Amazon still delivers more packages than either).
Speak for yourself. Their delivery service is awful and I'd choose UPS 100% of the time instead if they gave me the choice.
It was Amazon's increasingly slow and unreliable deliveries that caused me to cancel Prime earlier this year, and I'm strongly motivated to shop elsewhere now because I know that the package will be delivered by someone other than Amazon's own service.
> It’s not possible for another store to compete with that. There is no competition.
That's an interesting theory. How do you reconcile it with the observable reality of there being thousands of e-commerce stores, marketplace platforms, and other sales channels operating in direct competition with Amazon?
> no other store that can get me the most obscure and random stuff in less than 24 hours
Amazon has been dropping the ball pretty regularly on shipping recently.
Yeah and it's not obscure or random stuff if it is in the Amazon warehouse that is in your town. That is the only way one day works they already have it on site.
Not necessarily because I'm sure they have bigger warehouses that ship to the smaller regional ones very often and streamlined
In a day you have to be kidding me. You haven't ran any logistics.
Any one store, but there are plenty of niche stores that compete for whatever thing you are looking for.
The comment is deleted now, but a user who shall remain nameless challenged folks to find a vendor that could get a "TPM module for an ASRock Rack motherboard" delivered to their house tomorrow.
Well, if you order within the next nine-ish hours and are willing to pay 29 USD for both next-day delivery and "Rush Processing", Newegg absolutely will deliver this item [0] to my door tomorrow. Maybe that's not the TPM module the user had in mind, but -if that's the case- the task being underspecified is not my problem. ;)
[0] <https://www.newegg.com/asrock-tpm2-s-other/p/N82E16816775003>
That was me. That is the correct module.
$29 for overnight shipping is more than the cost of one month of Prime by approximately double, which is an entire month of free expedited shipping, usually overnight and sometimes same-day.
Is anyone else remotely price competitive? I can find the module on eBay with free shipping but they quote me 3-10 day delivery.
You are missing something else: you followed the race to the bottom. You knew exactly what you wanted and nothing else can substitute (correct me if I'm wrong, but I doubt anyone else who makes a TPM that will fit your motherboard). Your only consideration is price and fast shipping - there isn't much for anyone to compete on and so only the largest will.
In the more typical case these is. I recently needed a compass (my son is in scouts), what do I know about a compass: not much. Amazon will give me hundreds of options, some good, some really bad: I'd have to buy the one expensive name brand I know (and hope they are still as good as they were when I was a kid), or risk buying junk - worse junk in a way I wouldn't recognize in time to return it. However I found a small niche orienteering suppler that knows their product and so was able to direct me to a brand I've never heard of that while not as good as the name bring, was both a lot cheaper and good enough. They beat the race to the bottom because for a slightly higher price than amazon they could deliver me the exact thing I need for a still reasonable price.
It's almost as though market competition precisely refers to lots of vendors targeting lots of different criteria to win business from differentiated market segments, with many being successful within particular niches, but with the largest overall at any moment being the one that's currently most adept at optimizing its operations to serve the preferences of the widest segment. Who could have guessed?
> That was me.
Sure. I wasn't going to name you because I had no idea exactly why you'd deleted that comment, so I wasn't gonna be rude and attach the challenge to your name.
> $29 for overnight shipping is more than the cost of one month of Prime by approximately double...
What I've told you is that there are other retailers who will next-day ship you all sorts of "specialty" items like that one. So, Challenge Completed.
Whereas what you've told me is that overnight shipping for this one part is a little less than 1/6h the cost of a year of Amazon Prime. Given that I've only gotten things next-day shipped two or three times in my mumble decades of life, it sounds like not using Amazon saves me a notable chunk of money.
Also, I've heard from a ton of people out in the boonies that Prime ships very few -and sometimes no- items to them same day or overnight. The Prime Promise seems to be extremely location-dependent.
If you don’t have Prime you can either buy it for a single month or buy overnight shipping on the individual item. Both those options are far less than $29.
You did complete the challenge, but it proved that Amazon has a nearly insurmountable logistics advantage compared to competitors.
> ...has a nearly insurmountable logistics advantage...
Nah.
People in the boonies wouldn't be able to get gratis next-day shipping on that part. Based on the reports I've been hearing, they'd often be lucky to get six day shipping. Ya'll are now squarely in the part of the lifecycle where Amazon quietly practices aggressive "service differentiation" in order to keep its margins where they want them.
Amazon shipping and logistics are heavily subsidised by the social contract in Western Countries - it's not remotely a fair comparison even if these were removed based on Amazon's effective corporate income tax rates coming in as low as 1.4%.
In the US alone Amazon has received over $11 billion in cumulative taxpayer subsidies, and governments spend an average of nearly $43,000 per fulfillment center job created.
This is ramping up exponentially with regard to their data center rollout. In a single instance in rural Oregon, five AWS data centers will avoid $1 billion in property taxes.
This is completely aside from the qualitative damage done to traditional retail, shopping districts as a whole, SME innovation on consumer products, and distorting market competition beyond all recognition.
https://goodjobsfirst.org/amazon-tracker/
https://cictar.org/all-research/amazon
> There is no other store that can get me the most obscure and random stuff in less than 24 hours.
Thats an edge case isn’t it?
Your example actually is in support of capitalism, because I can guarantee you that under some centralized government system this would not happen!
Who said anything about a centralized government system?
We aren’t comparing capitalism to that.
We are comparing a deeply broken antitrust regulatory environment that is ending capitalism, or ant least the free market competitive style of capitalism you are romanticizing, and replacing it with leveragism or legal cartels or whatever you want to call it.
Amazon is a failure of underregulated capitalism because it’s not possible for anyone to compete with them.
Amazon should have been required to split off AWS from Amazon years ago, and I’d say there’s a very good argument to be made that their fulfillment business constitutes a national monopoly. FedEx and UPS don’t actually provide the services that FBA does, which makes Amazon a monopoly.
> Amazon is a failure of underregulated capitalism because it’s not possible for anyone to compete with them
What do you meany nobody can compete with Amazon? It happens all the time across the various markets they're in: e-commerce, retail, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, entertainment, and artificial intelligence.
How do I start a fulfillment business that can get a roll of toilet paper delivered to the doorstep of consumers nationwide inside of 24 hours and have that transaction be profitable?
How much investment money and customer volume do I need to make that business viable?
Fulfillment business is very hard. Amazon has invested well into the hundreds of billions building it out, and that's supported by their economy of scale of Amazon.com. A fulfillment business for toilet paper would never pencil out profitably no matter how hard you try.
This is actually a great example of the consumer winning out due to Amazon's business. Pre-Amazon, 24 hour shipping was literally not a thing, even 2 day shipping, especially for free, was a major innovation of the site.
So for fulfillment for general goods, I do think this is something that you will never be able to compete with Amazon on as a small player profitably. However, there is plenty of competition in specific verticals, such as Instacart or Doordash for groceries specifically. And if you want to be a toilet paper producer/seller, that is possible too (just not the fulfillment part but again I'm not sure why we expect "toilet paper fulfillment" to be a valid category that needs to be a thing), for example I bought my phone case from Dbrand due to the strength of their product and marketing. As a small player you need to compete on specific verticals but that has always been the case. Amazon was originally a book seller.
> How do I start a fulfillment business that can get a roll of toilet paper delivered to the doorstep of consumers nationwide inside of 24 hours and have that transaction be profitable?
As with all successful businesses, you start small.
You figure out what's your edge. You are resourceful.
You don't compete with ANY competitor by trying to do 100% what they do out of the gate.
Pro-tip: selling (rather than producing) toilet paper is probably never a big business anyhow.
If all we are going to do is engage in vague inspirational idealism rather than using realistic boundaries to the discussion I fear the relevance to the subject at hand fades away.
> You don't compete with ANY competitor by trying to do 100% what they do out of the gate.
This idea bleeds into the definition of a monopoly. I can’t just make a mobile operating system like Apple and Google because I won’t have a competitive advantage. I can’t make my own Amazon competitor because their edge is that they deliver more packages than UPS or FedEx. I can’t compete with Google search because the web browser that comes with Android defaults Google on the home page.
Sure, nobody is trying to do 100% of what their competitors do, but I wouldn’t be able to do 5% of what Amazon does even if you handed me billions in seed capital.
It sounds like you’ve decided it isn’t possible to compete, there’s nothing worth trying. I suppose that’s a fair stance to take and I’m not here to convince you to be more resourceful and strategic.
Meanwhile, lots of people are starting and building successful businesses.
We can certainly agree that lots of people are starting and building successful businesses. But I would hope we can also agree that there are many business categories where entry into the market is extremely difficult.
And hopefully you can agree that, conceptually, monopoly businesses do exist and have existed in the past.
But will you do what it takes to make sure that it could happen again?
Amazon itself is not going to be shy about changing the rules in its favor.
> But will you do what it takes to make sure that it could happen again?
I have no idea what this means.
They’re saying that starting a competitor to Amazon is now impossible regardless of capital investment.
> They’re saying that starting a competitor to Amazon is now impossible regardless of capital investment.
Competing in which market? Amazon is a conglomerate operating in e-commerce, retail, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, entertainment, and artificial intelligence.
That breadth is part of why competing is so tough.
> That breadth is part of why competing is so tough.
I don't see it. In each of the industries they operate in, they face fierce competition. Many of those competitors also compete with Amazon across multiple of those industries plus others that Amazon does not compete in.
Competition is by definition tough. But I push back against the original thesis that Amazon has such leverage that it is impossible to compete with them (in all the cases, you're not just competing against them!)
> because capitalism means competition.
I think you’re confusing a system of private ownership of capital (capitalism) with free markets.
Also somehow ignoring captured markets, natural monopolies, goverment granted monopolies, regulation capture and the myriad of other unsurmountable situations that "competition" cannot overcome
This is not capitalism, it’s tech feudalism
What competition?
Anticompetitive behavior is one of the most predictable failure modes of capitalism. Capitalism only works if you have measures in place that protect fair competition and those measures are actually used.
Not being allowed to sell your product elsewhere for cheaper seems downright anticompetitive and if our government was functioning government that would be illegal. The whole point of the ideal free market is that fees are supposed to approach zero with increasing competition.
The funny part is that our monopoly busting law that actual worked but we don't use anymore actually says that you must sell your product the same everywhere. It turns out a great way to kill monopolies to take out the part where they get a better deal because they're bigger. Making the price the same everywhere means that now companies have to compete on other things.
It sucks that sellers cannot offer their products for cheaper elsewhere, but I've also often seen sellers sell their products for a much higher price on their own website than Amazon, and in that case why wouldn't I buy it on Amazon instead?
In that sense having one big marketplace with all kinds of competing products together also seems to motivate sellers more to compete on price rather than relying on lazy consumers.
I've been boycotting Amazon since early 2025. It's not hard once you get reacquainted with things taking several days or weeks to arrive. Plan a little and it all works out. The delay in gratification may even help you avoid impulse purchases.
The notion that, if more people did this, prices might come down everywhere only stiffens my resolve.
I was an early Amazon user and introduced many people to it (was nice to easily acquire books). Have deleted my account 15ish years ago and noticed weird mindsets people developed, thinking they cannot get products elsewhere, thinking that Amazon ships faster than others when using Amazon Prime, thinking Amazon has cheap products and so on.
Showed what make believes people have.
I'm a guy that is pretty lazy and spends most of his money on convenience and not having to do stuff. It's not even convenient.
It's always a bit scary what things people believe end up believing about completely depending on one company.
I think it is interesting you think that people are believing fiction about Amazon when it comes to convenience. This reminds of the AI debate. Some people think AI is great and others think it is stupid. Neither side can see the others perspective.
I've always said that the two day shipping is a useless amount of time. Two days is too long if it's an emergency and if it can wait two days it can wait a week or more.
What's it good for? Constant shopping addiction dopamine?
Well if you live in some areas (Greater Seattle any ways) it's often same-day arrival so it's even more addictive and useful.
I understand logistics is an insanely hard problem, but can't sellers create a co-op? Not on Amazon's scale, but start on a much smaller scale (gotta start somewhere). Maybe at a city level - if a bunch of sellers in Chicago (for example) rent a warehouse and serve only within Chicago, it is worth a try, no? Or is this a stupid question?
I remember hearing about a Uber like app (I might have seen it on More Perfect Union channel, I think). So I guess at least some people are thinking along the same lines, maybe?
As an individual, I guess the only thing I can do is shop as little as possible on Amazon (which I am already doing). Not sure what else I can do to help
Seems like a relatively simple fix, Amazon shouldn't be allowed to tell suppliers what price they can set on their site. No one should be able to tell a supplier what price they can charge to others.
A factor I don't see mentioned that I think is relevant: Repricers
Google "FBA repricer" and you'll find companies like https://goaura.com/ and https://sellersnap.io/.
These are a must for any mid-size seller. Their goal is to pretty self-explanatory; reprice your ASIN, live, to hit maximum sales. If your competitor is selling the same mug for $10.00, the repricer sees that and immediately reprices your mug for $9.99.
Its one of those "Well, if I don't use one, others will" situations.
I try to avoid Amazon as much as possible. 95% of the products are throwaway junk brands. It's tiring to shop there. I think Amazon is a great example of why competition, while good in most cases, has its limits when the information asymmetry due to overwhelming and opaque choices. I wish those junk, throwaway brands were banned...
The problems with Amazon these days, which may or may not be related to a buyer's specific location:
- Shipping delays. Prime's biggest selling point, is useless if orders aren't shipped in the advertised Prime timeframe. I've quit my Prime subscription multiple times this year because this keeps happening.
- Excessive advertising/sponsored listings. Over half the listings in a search are now sponsored listings, which are often lower quality listings. And Amazon now puts unrelated banner ads next to listings.
- Returns. While returns are typically hassle-free, this leads to abuse of the system. The returns get put back on the "shelf" without much inspection, and there have been more than a few times where I got an item listed as New, which was very clearly Used.
And then there are the cases where someone returns an item, but puts something else in the box for weight, so you end up getting a completely different thing than you ordered.
I once ordered a parallel LiPo battery charging board, and in the box was a LiPo battery, which someone clearly put in the box for weight. That situation was particularly dangerous, because a LiPo, let alone a used LiPo of unknown charge state, cannot be shipped by air and must be shipped by ground. If Amazon had put that box on a plane, that'd be a serious safety issue.
I didn't notice it until earlier this year. I was shopping for some new shoes of a specific brand that I like. Was about to pull the trigger on Amazon and then realized I would happen to walk by a shoe store while doing other errands later in the day and thought it would be nice to get them even sooner than 1-2 day prime shipping. I went to the store and tried them on and realized I needed a 1/2 size smaller than what I ordered. Then I paid and realized the shoe store price was $10 less than Amazon. So you really are paying for laziness/convenience with Amazon, which if you think about it from first principles, makes sense given there is a dude delivering this stuff to your house. It's just that this convenience fee was hidden for the longest time as Amazon was growing its industry dominance. What's next? If they follow the Walmart model they will continue to squeeze suppliers and also push competitors out of business. So if you can, try to use alternatives.
That's really contextual. Many times I'll go to a manufacturers site and the price is $3-$10 more than just using that same manufacturers store front on Amazon. Especially factoring in the "free shipping" w/Prime.
Fair. It's going to vary by category and other factors. But more and more I'm seeing stuff that is actually cheaper IRL.
Could you sell a box of 10x Item A on amazon, and a box of 15x Item A on your own website for cheaper per unit? Without triggering the amazon Fair Pricing Policy?
Depends on the title and gap
Prices in Amazon in my area are significantly less than in local shops. Amazon has improved the life greatly for us!
Interesting article. But I wish it explained which fees made the share that Amazon takes go from 19% to 46%. The fulfilment fee is evidently necessary, it takes people to do that, and doing it yourself may cost more. The advertisement is also evidently necessary, but could have risen. The referral fee alone can't explain the increase.
And the fulfilment fee is not a fixed percentage of the price, it depends on the size, weight and price tier of the item.
Doesn't the second graph show exactly this?
I only see the graph in the paragraph titled "Where an Amazon sale goes", which tells what the fees are now, not which fees have increased since 2014.
Stopped using Amazon a while ago because I want to support smaller (and less controversial) businesses. But recently I went back there to look for a phone protector as for some reason that's the only time Amazon has been cheaper for something.
I was amazed at how janky the app experience was having been away for a couple of years. It felt a really dated and ad-bloated experience. Considering Amazon pioneered so many advances in e-commerce, I was surprised I don't miss it at all.
> But today, many sellers hand close to half of every sale to Amazon. Half!
This is how resellers work.
Back in the 80s, I was selling my compiler direct. I also engaged a reseller, if you recall, those were ones that advertised in computer magazines with full page ads crammed with items for sale.
The resellers demanded that I sell it to them at half the retail price. I was shocked and horrified! I soon found out, however, that all resellers are like that. They cannot make money otherwise.
Amazon is no different.
> They cannot make money otherwise.
This is obviously, hilariously untrue when Amazon produces hundreds of billions of dollars of profit every year: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN/financials/
Good luck finding a reseller for your product that does not do it.
> This is obviously, hilariously untrue when Amazon produces hundreds of billions of dollars of profit every year
It's an irrelevant figure to your claim. The relevant statistic would be the markup, not the aggregate profit.
I love Amazon because they have a wide variety of goods that ship very quickly, and if something is wrong it’s easy to get support. If there’s a return, it’s super simple to do and often free.
If I am ever given the choice between Amazon and some third party site I’ll always choose Amazon. It’s just too convenient.
I don't see much of a need to buy from Amazon anymore. Almost always there is a smaller business selling same stuff cheaper, and as a plus I feel good about not supporting big American corporation.
Of course there are exceptions, like some businesses selling exclusively through Amazon.
Shopify has been a game-changer in that regard. With millions of small stores it’s easier to find anything, have a fast and familiar checkout, and some channel for recourse if you didn’t receive fair treatment by the merchant.
It’s not a bad deal at the end of the day for any party IMO.
My issue is buying groceries from Amazon. You have to fill up your cart to > $30 to get a free delivery (in NYC). So you start searching for whatever you might want to include to get the free delivery. But the items like milk can come from
a) Amazon ("proper")
b) Amazon Groceries
c) Amazon Fresh
d) Whole Foods
Each of these have their own "cart" which must have goods > $25 etc. to get a free delivery. If you add an item from another list it does not count, so you must add things which you maybe don't really need just because they come from the same list as milk. Or, you will need to fill up multiple carts.
Then once you reach the threshold for free delivery and make the order, you may, or may not notice an extra line in the total bill: A tip for $5 in very small print which you have to edit away, or it is NOT FREE DELIVERY AFTER ALL, like promised.
What I lament is that Amazon is making me feel guilty for not tipping the delivery person. It is making me take extra action to NOT tip -- I must be a bad person. And it's making delivery people angry at me if I don't include the tip. And Amazon is adding the $5 there always as a default, even though they already said I have earned a free delivery.
It's a transaction between me and Amazon but now Amazon can implicitly blame bad service on the lack of tipping. I assume they would like to not pay their delivery people at all, just let them live on the tips.
Recently some big billion sale. Since i run low on funds i use to add things to cart, not buy though.
I added an item for its cost was 48$.
Now during sale, i revisited same product, they say original price is 80$ and on sale 13% off, so 70$ around
But to put it into perspective, a retail shop would also expect to take at least 50% of the sale price. Often much more.
I expect retail shops to have larger overheads than online stores.
When Amazon's policies unfairly push up prices across the Internet, it deprives us from competition pushing prices down, and having a better idea of what online overheads are.
Aside from the whole amazon problem:
I really love how the (flow-)chart in this article has two starting points and both flow perfectly into the vicious circle loops without any awkward gap no matter from which direction you start reading the chart.
Author of the article here: Thank you! I worked hard on that design :)
More generally, the unprecedented levels of market concentration and pricing power in the US, a consequence of the gutting of antitrust enforcement from the inside by Robert Bork and the Chicago School, have led to much higher inflation in the US.
US can just legislate that one marketplace cannot force how vendors use other marketplaces. This is not about free spech but rather about price fixing (in indirect/perverse ways).
One thing that pushes prices up is the expectation that "free" shipping is offered on all products. The shipping cost gets rolled in to the price of the product, and the Fair Pricing Policy prevents selling the product cheaper elsewhere, even if you charge for shipping there.
I usually don’t care for the price.
I care for the return policy and warranty being attached to an entity that will still exist in 6 month.
I think people over index on “convenience” for lower quality products that further the growth of businesses like Amazon that can now fuck you over like this as a result.
We live in a convenience era (delivery services, etc) that allow people to “live” their life from a couch. There is a great Kurt Vonnegut quote I’ll paraphrase
“My wife says to buy a hundred envelopes online, but I’d rather go out and buy just one. Along the way, I’ll meet people, see interesting things, and enjoy life. The point isn’t the envelope—it’s everything that happens while getting it.”
Maybe the time has come to stop cheering for quasi-monopolies as some success story. They hurt everybody besides their shareholders.
boycott, but nobody does
never buy from third party sellers and you won't have an issue
Heard from our business partners, that every 4$ out of 10$ go to Amazon nowadays
In what context? Online shopping?
I love Amazon. I'm unbothered by voluntary contracts between individuals.
The article is about Amazon (who is not an individual) forcing non-customers to involuntarily pay higher prices at non-Amazon sites.
How is that a voluntary contract between individuals?
In the UK Amazon have now raised the price of general shipping to be 2/3 the price of a months prime subscription. Before prime, delivery regularly used to be £1.99 or £2.99. Now if you dont have prime everything is £4.99 to be delivered. It makes it seem silly to pay that when you could pay £8.99 for a months subscription of free deliveries, which is their whole game.
I hate that they have done this with a passion.
Why is this legal?
It's not settled yet that it IS illegal. The FTC alleges it is, and that's what the FTC's case will decide. In the US, it isn't illegal to be big or even to have a monopoly. What's illegal under antitrust law is using unfair tactics to keep a monopoly by blocking competition rather than winning it.
5-10 years ago we did pretty much all our shopping besides groceries, on Amazon.
~2 years ago I cancelled Prime and rarely ship at Amazon these days, instead buying directly from manufacturers' websites. It is useful for items that are hard to find elsewhere.
One side effect of cancelling Prime is that we buy less stuff that we don't really need. Reducing our consumption is a good thing.
classic aggregation theory to create a monopoly.
the only way to prevent such things from happening is e-commerce is spread across non-platform channels but independent ones e.g woo commerce etc where a seller runs and hosts their own shop, then maybe go to semi-platforms such as shopify etc that don't aggregate everything on one storefront.
because sellers are reliant on amazon bringing in shoppers, unlike say woo commerce & shopify - then yeah amazon feels rightly so that they need to take 50% margins on a seller's item.
the same thing plays out everywhere where some producer is reliant on someone bringing in the buyers - uber, Spotify, apple App Store.
The greatest catalogue of consumer goods with the greatest logistics to back it up of all time. And the thread complain complaining about it. What a time to be alive.
Any seller charges 50%+ margin on anything.
How you spend your cash has always been a better democratic tool than a vote.
If you buy Amazon, then that's what you get in society and politics. Every Amazon purchase is a vote for monopolistic behaviour, the destruction of local services/industry, and for yet another America tax.
I do everything possible to avoid them, buy locally-made, etc, but it's becoming harder and harder. It's so ironic that people will complain about a declining economy, no jobs, etc, then will joyfully donate money to promote foreign jobs and enrich middlemen on a weekly basis.
It just keeps on going
wish they would push up their delivery speed
wish they delivered faster
I own a dozen brands that sell primarily on Amazon, and I have to say that this whole issue seems quite overstated, especially with regard to its impact on consumers. I don't get the impression that the person writing this actually sells things on Amazon, which seems to be par for the course with these critiques.
People love to complain about Amazon fees, but when I read things like "In 2014, this was about 19% of sales. But today, many sellers hand close to half of every sale to Amazon. Half!" I wonder why people who are so lacking in subject matter expertise decide to write these articles.
The main reason that Amazon charges so many fees is that they provide a truly mind-boggling amount of infrastructure for you. The main reason the percent you pay to Amazon has gone up is because they've added more services. The author of the post notes that only the referral fee is mandatory, but doesn't manage to quite put together why going from only referral fee to a bunch of extra services means that Amazon now takes more of every dollar.
Once upon a time, you'd list your stuff on Amazon, and when someone ordered a product, you'd ship it yourself. Then Amazon decided to allow third party sellers to use Amazon's storage and fulfillment. Now suddenly the percentage of each sale's revenue that went to Amazon doubled! And yet, this was 100% positive for merchants, because Amazon's storage and fulfillment prices are cheaper than almost any alternative. When you move from a 3PL to Amazon's fulfillment, you pay Amazon more, but your profit margins increase. (There are exceptions for some product types, but the overwhelming majority of the time you save money.)
Of course, Amazon's fulfillment centers started running out of storage, so they'd limit how many units people could store there. That meant larger sellers would still have to maintain their own storage solution for anything that wouldn't fit at Amazon. But then Amazon introduced AWD, an upstream storage solution where you can store basically an infinite amount of stuff still packed by the case, and it ships to FBA warehouses when needed. More money for Amazon! But AWD is cheaper than basically any 3PL's storage, so more money for me too.
Amazon then introduced a service that let you book freight in the US with them to get things to their warehouses. Then they introduced freight to get things into the US from overseas. Then they introduced even cheaper AWD warehouses in China. You're not required to use these things, but Amazon wins a lot of business with them because they're cheaper than competitors.
This is not to say that everything Amazon does is great or that all of their fee increases have been net positive. First they introduced a fee if your products sit in FBA warehouses more than six months, then they introduced a fee if your inventory gets too low relative to demand. These are annoying! (Though also I have almost never been affected by them, because the amount of inventory Amazon wants you to have is basically the optimal amount from a planning perspective anyway.)
There's advertising, which, yes, is very annoying to have to pay for, but y'know what? You have to pay for that on your own site too! I have one brand where I do a healthy business on my own Shopify site, but I keep less of every dollar on there than on Amazon because I have to spend more on Meta ads to get a sale than I do on Amazon ads.
People love to hate on Amazon (and, again, lots of valid reasons for this!), but at the end of the day they collect an enormous amount of money because they provide an enormous amount of value.
Direct result of the weakening of antitrust from a 2007 case legalizing vertical price-fixing, justified by the dumb fake rationale that Wikipedia paraphrases as:
> manufacturer-imposed minimum resale prices can lead retailers to compete efficiently for customer sales in ways other than cutting the retail price.
It has nothing to do with technology, just oligarchy and corruption. Nothing "capitalists" hate more than competition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leegin_Creative_Leather_Produc....
edit: as an aside, why are almost none of the top level comments, and absolutely none of the 5 most upvoted comments, about Amazon pricing policies? They're all about how people like to (or don't like to) shop at Amazon. Who cares?
>Setting a price on a product or service that is significantly higher than recent prices offered on or off Amazon;
This is the text from the policy that the article says "And they can't charge less elsewhere." This is just wrong. They just can't randomly charge Amazon a higher price. If it's solely due to Amazon's cut that sounds like a reasonable increase. There are tons of products on Amazon that are above their fair market value.
> Because Amazon is where the shoppers are: it accounts for about 40% of all US online retail sales.
A lot of the competition is gone, so now it's time for the "price hike" step of the VC playbook - enter markets with insane amounts of cash, slowly boil the competition alive until it goes away and/or the users are hooked, raise prices.
> Amazon's Fair Pricing Policy lets it remove the Buy Box (the "Add to Cart" button), or even suspend a seller, if they're offering their item cheaper elsewhere.
IIRC that kind of shit is at least illegal in the EU. Bookingcom and other sites have had their "best price" enforcement invalidated here in the past.
The bad thing is, due to the sheer scale Amazon has, it is all but impossible to compete with it. You won't get the scale deals that Amazon gets at shippers (USPS, DHL, Fedex, UPS, DPD, whatever). You won't get the money to construct warehouses across the world that make Amazon's fast shipping work in the first place. You won't have the insane amounts of money coming in from customers that allow for its extremely generous return policies. And you won't have some sort of cash cow like AWS that allows you to run your business at near zero profit or even loss.
The only way you can compete is if you are in a market where you can provide a better experience for the customer and the customer is willing to pay a premium.
I hate Amazon and I still shop there. It's not about price, I will pay more for a product to buy it directly and not via Amazon /if/ I can find an original. The issue for me is threefold:
1. Discoverability: Many products are so rapidly and thoroughly cloned that it is difficult to impossible to identify the original maker, find their site, and purchase through them. The insane proliferation of counterfeits, clones, and sometimes outright scam products means that Amazon at least gives me an opportunity to buy a clone/counterfeit and return it if its not meeting my expectations. Sometimes the original is notably higher quality but no longer produced/sold, as well. Recently I wanted to buy a Polar Magnetic Pen as a gift. The website is up and the shopping cart works, but checkout is disabled. They're out of stock everywhere. There's hundreds of random worded Chinese clones on Amazon that are 25% of the price and 30% of the quality, so I bought a clone and risked it.
2. Logistical Certainty: I work a lot and have little free time after basic households tasks, other than the weekends. So if I want to do a project or something, I plan it for a following weekend and order things. If I can't order on a Tuesday or Wednesday and /know/ that I will get it by Friday, it's basically pointless. Sometimes I'll just roll the dice, but generally I prefer logistical certainty. I actually have gone back to buying at brick and mortar stores if possible to really cement this (I use Best Buy now a lot more than in the past, although selection is poor). There's a few other online retailers I strictly prefer to Amazon that can also deliver this like B&H Photo.
3. Breadth of Catalog / Access: There's basically nothing I can't acquire via Amazon. If I need, let's say 6 things, to do some sort of hobby project my options are generally either: A) go to 2-4 different stores, either physically and waste a day of my life or online and hope the shipments all arrive in time or B) order on Amazon everything at once delivered as one.
These things are way more important than price. I still hate Amazon PRIMARILY because of commingling of SKUs meaning there's no real quality indicators and I cannot do anything as a consumer to ensure I receive legitimate, actual, quality products. If they hadn't fucked that up, I'd probably still like Amazon despite everything else. I used to love Amazon back in the day, now I hate it, because of how often I've received counterfeits and fraudulent products and the proliferation of Chinese dropshipper fly-by-nights.
Big Tech always becomes Big Enshittification; it is the only way the scaling economics work for the massive returns expected by VC.