This is sad, but true. And true for other giant companies, not just for Amazon - Meta/Facebook is another good example.
What can we do about it? Not much. This is something that happens when in a "free" market you have a near monopoly, and the antitrust is too weak to even try to fine these companies.
One might think that there's a "conspiracy" of a few powerful people / billionaires, but I don't believe it it the case. Individuals are driven by results, profits, targets, metrics, etc... The company as a whole responds to shareholders, not the small retail one but large funds and such that own a significant stake in these companies. They want to make money. They lobby the government to make sure that quasi-monopolies like this one can go on undisturbed.
I don't blame Amazon. I think this is a limitation of the (supposedly) free-market society in which we live. By the way, it is not a free market when antitrust does not work, or when you need to bail-out banks, etc.
I admire and respect Seth Godin (I even met him once, years ago), and I would love to see if he had any idea of how to solve this.
I think this mentality is giving up. We as a society may or may not value some thing over another. But instead of guessing what we value we should look at our behavior. And our behavior is that our governments give lax regulations and consumer hostile legislation to growing monopolies which abuse their power dynamics to maximize profits above all else.
In other words: blame capitalism, not our value judgement.
The word monopoly has lost all meaning online, it seems to just be synonymous now with 'successful business'.
You can cut Amazon out of your life tomorrow if you wanted. You could do it almost entirely with just Walmart.com if you wanted a dropin replacement.
If you only have one internet provider in your area, that's a monopoly, the cost of switching is essentially 'start an ISP'. Having to type in walmart.com does not make Amazon a monopoly.
Amazon is almost completely unusable for search at this stage. I think perhaps 3/4 of the results are sponsored ads. Three in four. Trying to find a good deal on a product, even if you know precisely what you're looking for, is a real headache of trying to dodge the advertisement minefield.
Even without the ads, Amazon search is abysmal. It seems to ignore half the words you enter. I often resort to using Google or ChatGPT to find items on Amazon which I know are there, but which their search box doesn't surface.
I searched for "cayenne" and accidentally bought the hot pepper product that came up which was not cayenne.
After going mildly buckwild on amazon after 3 years of not ordering a single thing (after a move to the country) I let the free month of prime I was using expire. This, and the counterfeit product I got (and had to spend 45 minutes on the internet and phone to get refunded) was decisive. I'll try again in 5 years.
> and had to spend 45 minutes on the internet and phone to get refunded
anecdata and all, but i've had the exact opposite experience - I've never spent more than a couple of minutes getting a refund, and it's always been less time and effort than returning something to a B&M store.
I imagine most readers haven't tried tiktok shop (or similar Chinese consumer shopping platforms).
ByteDance has reimplemented their now infamous video suggestion algorithm for shopping and it is _very_ effective.
Once the infrastructure and logistics of the Chinese eCommerce platforms improve in the US, it will be so much better that I imagine that Bezos only recourse will be to have congress ban them (a la the Chinese EV ban).
He will likely be successful in doing this and allow the US to slide further into modern technological irrelevancy at his own benefit.
I hate videos when shopping. Videos are not skimmable. I don’t want to watch and listen to a salesperson sell the product to me. I want at least a modicum of individual agency and choice. I already skip all product videos on Amazon. I hate the product images too as they have become too salesy and they sometimes no longer even show important facts printed on the packaging itself (like the ingredient list or Nutrition Facts / Supplement Facts).
Its hard to pin down specifically. As a general rule: When I land on the homepage of the TikTok shop, without touching my screen I _generally_ see something that I am interested in buying. Its like it predicts what I am there to search for, and its quite accurate.
On the Amazon homepage that has never happened. It usually just shows some banner ad for prime day, new amazon tv show/movie, then maybe 4 little thumbnails of the last product I searched for or whatever. I have to initiate the shopping experience, I have to pique my own purchasing interest.
I’ve bought some stuff off there and can tease out some aspects, though they may be after the fact rationalizations of subconscious effects.
The first is price. The stuff is cheap, as in so cheap I know it will be terrible and I still sort of don’t care. It’s $2, if I only use it twice I got my moneys worth.
That makes it super easy to hit Buy without thinking much.
The second is that they appear to target verticals that don’t have a natural ceiling to sales. I only need one microwave, so they won’t sell me that. They do sell a lot of apparel, decorations, toys for adults (crappy 3D displays, not dildos), stuff where you don’t think “eh, I already have one though”.
The third is the marriage of entertainment and shopping. I can be doomscrolling, see an ad and buy it without ever leaving the platform. If I remember right, it doesn’t even interrupt your doomscrolling really. Swipe to next video, see it’s an ad, hit buy, confirm Apple Pay pop up, scroll to next video. You can decide you want something, buy it, and be on your next video in 15 seconds. It’s so fast it almost blurs the line where I’m not sure if I’d call it shopping or entertainment.
The last is that they’re really good at luring consumers to start selling on there. The ads for stuff tend to be sort of home made and low quality, which makes it seem attainable for your average person. That tends to mean a huge selection. I had a buddy that randomly decided to sell stickers on there just based on watching other people do it (no idea how that went, I didn’t ask)
> The third is the marriage of entertainment and shopping. I can be doomscrolling, see an ad and buy it without ever leaving the platform. If I remember right, it doesn’t even interrupt your doomscrolling really.
No trolling: This prose is wonderful. It reads like something out of a sequel to the film "A Scanner Darkly".
I have used this shop, but I do not agree that the experience is a good one. It is abysmal -- the standard for tiktok shop / aliexpress / temu is to offer you all sorts of "deals" that never actually apply. "Oh, you picked this item? Pick another four items and all of them are FREE!!! FREE!!! Also you have to buy a fifth one. Oh, and this only activates once you've spent more that $100. FREE!! FREE!!!"
Way worse than Amazon because at least Amazon is just showing you products and telling you how much they cost.
Also, even after you find precisely what you're looking for, there is no guarantee that what arrives will not be a cheap imitation or reduced-quality version of what you purchased.
Yeah, it's truly awful if you're looking for something specific. I tend to find things by finding something I don't want then clicking through 16 pages of "related to this item" ad nauseum.
I find myself more often using ChatGPT to find things now because their search is sooo bad.
Like, if I want petite clothes, I do not want clothes that are not petite, folks. Why is this hard?
I’m surprised that anyone would love Amazon so much that they resort to using third-party search so they can continue buying from Amazon. Rather than just shopping elsewhere!
There are many product categories where I know that shopping on Amazon will be a miserable experience riddled with crap goods and useless search, so I go elsewhere. Never even occurred to me to use an LLM to make up for Amazon’s own deliberate decision to serve me crap.
Eh, for me it's not about love, it's about no other retailers carrying what I want, at a price point I'll pay, with an easy return policy and easy checkout. I'm willing to put up with a lot of crap to find that, apparently.
To be clear, when I do use LLM for search, I don't limit it to one site.
It’s wild. I was trying to find a cheap bookshelf with a specific style the other day. Firstly, I couldn’t filter by exact width. It autogenerated a width range (like 24-30”) which was different on subsequent searches and several inches away from what I wanted.
Second, I found a product I liked but was the wrong size. As far as I could tell, they can’t even show you recommended similar products. They show you what other people clicked on or bought in the same order. But not just actually similar products in the same style.
I looked at well over 1000 listings when looking for a new desk. The filters are sick joke. This was pre-llm, today I'd write something to scrape the results and parse the product pages/images to filter out the crap.
Whats going to be hilarious is if brick and mortar companies become popular again because of the painful U.I., scammy companies, and broken search of Amazon.
That's just not going to happen. You have to go out in the rain or heat, pay for parking, maybe not find what you want, pay 30% more than online, so online still has advantages.
What baffles me is that e-commerce sites all tend to get worse with time. The moment a site I like turns into a marketplace, I know it will only go downhill.
Must be some MBA thing. Must maximise revenue in every possible way. I have still no idea why the local white goods (and everything else) seller decided it was smart idea to pollute their own product search by becoming marketplace. I am going to you because well you are not that horrible and actually have store near me.
These companies effectively monopolize app distribution on their platforms and then make discovery so poor that developers who try to sell apps in their stores must pay for ads in those same stores.
App Store is a wasteland, I don't think there are more than 100 good apps in millions. All want in-app-purchase, none is fair to give me an upfront price. I don't want for example my kids being bugged to buy apps that cost $100/week.
It's completely insane to me that the first search for Okta in the app store isn't the actual Okta app, it's a half-page ad for something that could easily be confused with the Okta app
substitute for literally any business name
Sure, I know the right one to click on, if I'm in a sound state of mind. What if I'm sleepy? Stressed? 65+ years old?
> They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one
Thoughtless take. Say you've just invented a better looking, better functioning, cheaper air fryer. How do you expect to reach your first customers if not through ads? Sell it to your friends? That's even more invasive and annoying.
People's urge to rid the world of ads is similar to our urge to rid the world of "middlemen".
It's natural, and I get it (ads are annoying), but this is a forum where I expect people to think a little more deeply about the economics and second order effects of things.
I don't think you put much thought into the article before you carelessly bandied about the phrase "Thoughtless take."
You certainly didn't read it in much depth. The author is talking about search ads explicitly and narrowly within a category where Amazon has plenty of signals it could use to steer customers towards the highest satisfaction product.
If you make a new better product, advertise everywhere you want. And if Amazon took seriously its customer obsession, it would start driving people towards your product if it was better. Not because you paid them to.
I have to agree with OP, this phrase specifically reveals it isn't a good take:
> sales [the best product] were entitled to in the first place
Unfortunately, this is not, and has never been, how it works. The best product is never entitled to sales. Marketing, which very much includes advertising, is a massive, massive factor in sales.
right, you've spent most of your capital on product, and now you're competing with everyone else on $/ad.
Amazon, the store, has an incentive to show trending products, rather than items that sold well 10 years ago... if you already own the old standard, and you do a search and find it's still the highest in search results, you'll be unlikely to buy.
Unless your _ads_ are going to compete with your competitors' then that's not going to be effective. Ironically middlemen are probably solution here, you'd be better off going to trade shows and working with department stores that sell air fryers, they'll want to turn your lower cost into their higher margin.
You're completely ignoring the fact that the majority of people do not expect a search result ranking to be influenced by bidding. Yes it happens, but unless the item is labeled as an ad, most people will infer value that does not exist. And this is wrong. The only reason they appear in the search is so that they do not look like ads.
There's plenty of places to advertise and the best for the consumer is for transparency to exist in the first place.
Say you invent a crap product, and shove ads under my nose to bug me while I want to buy a decent product. Why should I accept that?
Just get your products reviewed by trusted reviewers, if you can budge them maybe you deserve a bit of attention from us. Someone who has a stake in being trusted for their fair reviews.
You take the money you would've spent on ads and instead offer a lower price than the current leader to make up for the buyer's uncertainty toward your product. This lets a search algorithm organically decide that you are among the top (risk-neutral) value contenders. Once that uncertainty disappears, you will have a higher value product and can therefore command a higher price.
It's a nice idea and I can see it working in some cases.
I'll be the first to admit I don't know the specifics, but I imagine in some cases, it's economically prohibitive to lower the price by such an amount that it makes up for the uncertainty in a typical search algorithm.
Amazon has the most useless search I know.
Also, idk who clicks those 'Sponsored' results, but for me they are an automatic pass. But then again Amazon is such a scumbag company that uses its own brands as a weapon to make sellers pay to be visible.
Having small mini-pcs in my basement and a couple of Cloudflare tunnels and Tailscale has been awesome. Made me realize that I've gotten used to paying for software that is free because someone else was hosting. But now I host it and it's a way better experience. I'm not crazy about using Cloudflare, but so far it's been great. Having Postgres, rabbitMQ and Redis all running locally (and then realizing my traffic doesn't need a cache or a queue and just doing it all in Postgres) has been awesome.
It's amazing how poor on-site search has gotten, while at the same time the capability to have better results and more relevancy has gone way up.
I normally use Google and/or DuckDuckGo to search YouTube and Amazon, because if I'm looking for a specific video/product, that one will be 3-4 pages in (maybe not even shown).
Brand name products are buried 3+ pages deep on Amazon, while the first 2-3 pages are always drop-shipped Chinese knockoffs now. The onsite search is almost entirely useless.
Aliexpress is also surprisingly impossible to search, you gotta use external search engines, I guess it increases there sales :S
More than half the time for me on AliExpress a very specific search term will just return completely unrelated things which are either trending or related to my past purchases.
I was recently looking for a cheap IOT camera in a specific form factor from aliexpress and the results were so irrelevant I had to develop alternative strategies like finding one good result and checking under its recommendations or image searching from the one good result to see other using the same picture.
I've slowly shifted all my consumer purchases from Amazon to local shops and other online platforms, including Etsy.
I'm now seriously contemplating deleting my Amazon account of 15 years in one whole swoop. The quality degradation is painfully apparent, and the value add of Amazon in my life has been steadily declining for a while.
I've also had terrible experiences with AWS, but that's a different story.
Amazon's only core product that they care about now is their stock price.
Amazon is just so convenient for me. They deliver within a day in a package locker next to home.
Meanwhile with other platforms it takes up to a week, the delivery timeframe is 08:00 to 21:00, I then have to wait for the delivery person to call me because they can never find my front door. And if I happen to be on the toilet when they ring the package is delivered to a parcel point ten kilometers away. So I have to rent a car to go pickup my package.
Amazon has absolutely nailed the delivery here. They looked at how people struggle with online orders and streamlined it completely. It’s such a blessing not to have to deal with delivery drivers anymore.
If Amazon charged €10 extra per package I would still order with them.
For your next 10 purchases that you don't need within 3 days, use an llm to find the best choice for your needs (have been doing this and learning a lot on how the ideas I had about a product prior to purchasing missed many things I didn't knew I dind't know, and the llm helped to find better products) and ask the LLM to find alternative shops - you may be surprised and have the nice feeling of increasing choice in the world by allowing alternate stores to keep going.
eg. wanted to purchase a FIio KA17 DAC - amazon price £150, asked an llm for an alternative, found for £120 from a decent small audiovisual real store, ordered, delivered within 3 days.
Have found you can save money for purchases from cosmetics to garden fertilizer and grass seed to audiovisual and IT equipment.
In my house we have something from Amazon show up several times per week. They usually deliver when they say they will (often the same day), returns are a breeze (occasionally they refund us and don't want the item back), and I don't think I've ever had an issue with counterfeit items.
I know Amazon often isn't the lowest price anymore, but that's okay with me as long as their customer service is great.
You live in Europe, where everything is harder, and when it comes to shopping, you have maybe one-fifth of the choices Americans have.
I spend a good four months every year in Poland and Austria, and there’s really nowhere in the world except China that offers consumers as much choice and availability as the U.S. does.
>there’s really nowhere in the world except China that offers consumers as much choice and availability as the U.S. does.
This is true, although I find it interesting that so many people then gravitate to Costco, where consumer choice in a given category is deliberately restricted to one or two product variations selected by the head office.
Over time I have come to trust Costco’s curation. Their standards seem high, and there are definitely products and brands that they sell that I don’t like, but those are subjective tastes vs objective low quality in my experience. I don’t buy everything there, but I take note of the brands and products that they either keep for a long time or dump quickly.
Quality vs variety trade off. Costco only has a couple options but they are well better and you don't have to do extra work to make sure you're not buying a piece of crap.
Also, you don't have to shop at Costco exclusively, you still have all the other options available. Costco is just a good default if you're not looking for something specific.
It really baffles me when an American can just walk into a store and buy car parts for their fairly niche model from the 1990s.
Meanwhile in Europe I spend many evening on internet forums and Facebook groups doing research trying to find a part that will work with my car, then finding someone willing to sell it and finally using Google Translate getting someone to ship it to my foreign (to them) country. I even had to resort to proxies just to get car parts from Eastern to Western Europe.
Weird, I rather have more government mandated vacation, public healthcare, and a pension system that doesn't mean I have to work in my 60s but I understand people have different priorities in life. Hopefully you move beyond the consumerist phase as it's probably the lowest rung of the human experience.
You really think you have a gotcha by mentioning public healthcare and mandated vacation when I talk about car parts?
Jokes on you, in my part of Europe I don’t have access to public healthcare, I don’t have mandated vacation, I don’t have a pension system. And I can’t even have a consumerist phase apparently since car parts are so hard to acquire.
Not only are they mutually exclusive, the current neoliberal regime has dismantling the welfare state as its explicit goal.
Wish to live in your reality tho, where I can buy a dozen different brands of hot dogs while visiting the doctor for elevated blood pressure without needing to take out a payment plan on klarna.
The ease of buying things that the prior poster referred to is basically just three things:
- A massive common market with few to no internal trade barriers/complications. The EU is still nowhere near as integrated and has all sorts of odd hidden complications to actually moving + selling things.
- Hell, just this week I've seen that one of the indie record labels I pay attention to will no longer sell merch within the EU other than to the country they're based in, because the new EU packaging regulations make it infeasibly expensive to comply with for every country for the small volumes they move.
- A common language that ~92% of the population speak fluently.
- Relatively efficient logistics.
None of this has anything to do with "dismantling the welfare state" and has only a little to do with differences in workers rights/benefits - giving delivery workers in the US better wages/job security would not make the "Amazon" logistics model infeasible.
There are a lot of cases where I go direct-to-vendor. Particularly for niche products such as supplements and men's cosmetics, it is easier to find one or two trustworthy distributors or manufacturers who have most of what I want.
There has been a lot of consolidation in this space. Part of that means that independent webstores closed up and moved exclusively to Amazon. If they did not close up shop, they now use Shop/Shopify or a similar SaaS, which streamlines sign-ups, sign-ins, and checkouts, for better or worse. All the better if you've got PayPal or Apple/Google Pay.
I've noticed that a lot of "click and mortar" stores have really abysmal product on their physical shelves. Like, it's discontinued, or all the wrong sizes, subtly defective, or just undesirable. It's like their stores are kind of dumping grounds, and it makes sense, because the sort of person in 2026 who gets in a car, and shops in a store, and grabs stuff uncritically off the shelf is not your most discerning or astute shopper.
Target's shopping experience remains better than most. Their stores include everyday needs like groceries and medicine, so I can meet a lot of my needs by dropping in. Furthermore, their app-based shopping (marketplace) is pretty good too, so if I need housewares delivered or something, or I need to look up something and find it right now, in-store, their app is right there. And their shopping carts now have little dedicated slots to drop in your smartphone next to the cupholders.
The best online shopping is Office Depot/OfficeMAX. They've shrunk their retail footprint, but their online store is still a non-marketplace, and really good for buying the kinds of things they sell. That includes some non-intuitive buys, like you can find kitchen supplies, because they stock many breakrooms for small/medium businesses. Good place for electronics and accessories and art supplies, even if you are just comparison-shopping. Their delivery is rapid and often just comes from the nearest store!
I love that Perplexity just beat them in court because AIs are at least one hammer that might smash this bullshit. It's so sad, Amazon is chasing every short-term dollar at the expense of long-term success. I have also been moving my purchases away from them - might as well buy direct from the Chinese sellers rather than use Amazon as a middleman.
I deleted my Amazon account earlier this year. I have yet to feel like I am stuck and unable to get something. It has made me turn directly to the seller, so it then I know every single dollar is going to them, versus most of it going to the seller and Amazon getting a cut. It has also made me look closely at places in my city where I can pick things up. I've found a few new shops I didnt know existed because the default was Amazon. The only bummer was I lost about 5 years of Audible books, most I listened to once but a few were repeat listens. I will just pick them up on Libro when I get the desire to listen to it again.
This. I only have an Amazon account for a specific item - a dried soup mix that my mom who is off the grid, lives for. No PRime, no other purchases and if I could find the product elsewhere, I'd leave Amazon in a heartbeat. For the rest of it, my online shopping is mostly ebay. Been on it since the start and have had zero issues with any merchant or product (mostly used computer kit or repair items) that I've purchased.
As someone who sells actually custom created stuff on Etsy, it’s still definitely the best place for that but the alibaba and temu junk is growing on the platform.
If it is only 25% more, you are NOT getting ripped off. Mere economies of scale and purchasing power yield Amazon more than 25% lower costs. the mom & pop stores you accuse of ripping you off likely have even slimmer margins than Amazon, even at their prices.
Yes, all of us who are not wealthy must have an upper limit to what we can support, and maybe 25% is over your limit, but please don't ignorantly accuse them of ripping you off when you clearly know nothing of the costs of vastly different scales of business.
If you take the view of a simpleton, sure, it seems "Better", for now, and depending on your definition of "Better". If it is only price, then sure.
But remember, the economies of scale first make things more the same and reduce variety, then enable eliminating competitors from the market, thus enabling enshittification at scale (not possible when there are readily available competitors and switching is easy).
For prices that are temporarily lower, getting a worse selection of worse products or services and no real choice, then prices higher than ever when the market is cornered, is not better. Yet this is the cycle that has happened for centuries, to the point where it can be considered inevitable if not fought.
And it is visible in this weeks earnings reports — corporate profits higher than ever, labor's portion of the economy smaller than ever, inflation increasing, and products universally shittier than ever.
But sure, they can go on complaining about how the small store is "ripping them off" whilst taking "LESS" profit from the system and providing a better service. That myopic approach to life, clueless about how things actually work, is what got us in this predicament in the first place.
> But remember, the economies of scale first make things more the same and reduce variety, then enable eliminating competitors from the market, thus enabling enshittification at scale
Start with the excellent articles and books on the topic of enshittification by Cory Doctorow.
Also, simply observe the economy, without the prior bias of holding paramount values of tropes like "free market" and "shareholder value".
Also read about the tendency towards monopolization/oligopolization and how it creates systemic risk in everything from banking to food supply (e.g., the huge network of Taylor Farms supplying dozens+ of brands that seem individual, but aren't, and are now subject to the same deadly contamination risks).
Or, just try to buy a concert ticket and observe the overcharges, surcharges, and excess costs, and compare that to the experience of someone buying a ticket for a major band in the 1970s or '80s, before the entire business got bought up by one company.
Or, just don't be so deliberately obtuse and willfully ignorant.
> Amazon's only core product that they care about now is their stock price.
"Only" here is incorrect. I posit every public company's primary concern is stock price. But certain behaviors and values align with driving that stock price up and for Amazon it's Customer Obsession. And they are not obsessed with it because they love you, it's because they love your repeat business. But that obsession means your happiness and their stock price are aligned, for now.
I pushed Purchase on Amazon one day and was opening the package 36 minutes later. I can barely drive down to a gas station, get a coke and come back in that time. But I wanted a particular, random item one morning and was setting it up within the hour without leaving my seat. Ebay and Walmart and Local shop can't do that.
I support leaving out of principle, that's laudable. But it won't be because they aren't good at delivering CX.
That's because you probably are using gmail, and Google is reading your emails and harvesting your shopping history. That's why Amazon is being secretive: to deny Google that information.
I am not using Gmail. I like having the actual order details in my email so I can keep track of various orders without needing to go to Amazon's increasingly sluggish website.
Not to mention that finding previous orders via email is much, much faster than going through their website.
The fact is that Amazon has at least two customers here: you, the user trying to find an item to buy, and advertisers, likely trying to convince you to buy a lower quality product. Who wins? I'm guessing the advertiser. They are far more likely to have a sales contact, anyway.
Getting something 36 minutes after ordering it is a nice surprise and great customer experience. I’m usually happy with a day or two.
After spending close to 6 months and countless phone calls trying to get a refund processed the bad experience is outweighing the good for me.
The entire experience on the unhappy path is so obnoxiously dreadful i don’t purchase anything on Amazon over an amount I’d be fine just losing. Even though 99% of my orders have been absolutely fine.
> And they are not obsessed with it because they love you, it's because they love your repeat business. But that obsession means your happiness and their stock price are aligned, for now.
But they're not maximizing repeat customers, they're maximizing repeat customers multiplied by product fees. (roughly)
They would prefer 100M customers paying $4 a product over 250M customers paying $1 a product.
They keep driving up product fees more and more, reducing how happy the buying experience is.
Mostly I'm buying Amazon groceries because here in Boston if you don't have a car and access to Costco, wow are your local shops over-priced. Wholefoods, Star Market, and Trader Joes are all at least 25% more expensive.
The best part about not using Amazon is I get to get my stuff quicker, and I can see/feel it. Buying clothes off Amazon is basically the worst thing ever, for instance.
One day shipping is fast, but I can run to the store in 15 minutes. Can't beat that.
Amazon built their own in-house logistics network because UPS et al. weren’t cutting it. They offer one-hour delivery for a lot of basic items where I am and it’s not even a particularly urban area. I think in urban centers those same items have 15 minute delivery. They are also the only ones who will consistently deliver on Sunday, when your local store might not even be open.
There are still lots of good reasons to shop local, but I’m not sure speed is the best reason.
I have a place in upstate NY, near the vermont/canada border. I have prime. The best shipping they usually do is a week. Nigh useless.
Best Buy, Microcenter, B&H, Walmart all do better. They just don't have the range or sometimes do not respect my tax forms.
I am an hour drive from a larger town with a big box store like Walmart. The Best Buy closed. The closest thing nearby is something called Tractor Supply. They put out a big sign each year saying "We Have Chicks!!!" which means they have baby chickens, ducks and turkeys. They are super cute.
> I have a place in upstate NY, near the vermont/canada border. I have prime. The best shipping they usually do is a week. Nigh useless.
We're in rural Vermont, but not particularly remote. Amazon is the same for us, with a minimum 1 week quoted delivery time. And it's not because it actually takes that long to get to us, since Walmart is reliably 2 day. Prime used to be 2 day delivery, like Walmart still is. Amazon has just decided to deprioritize rural northeastern delivery, and just don't ship it out for several days. Even random Ebay sellers using USPS are typically faster. This doesn't make Amazon useless, but it's definitely not my preferred place to buy from anymore.
> They put out a big sign each year saying "We Have Chicks!!!" which means they have baby chickens, ducks and turkeys.
They also sell bees in season, although I think you might have to preorder.
I have noticed that too!! I order something, they take 3-5 days to ship, it arrives in 1-2 days after that. Why not just ship it straight away? Shouldn't AmazonPrime be sued for fraudulence?
In my experience, Etsy and Amazon are both following the same trajectory. Lower quality, lower value, fake and imitation products becoming more common, etc. On Etsy, it used to be the norm that a product would be unique, interesting, and probably handmade. Now, there’s a decent amount of 3D/screen printed junk that might also have some AI slop thrown in for good measure. The corporations have also moved in, just like they did with Airbnb.
The most common issue for me is what happened when I bought a custom dog bowl, thinking the ceramic was made by the seller. Later stumbled upon something similar and realized it was just an off the shelf bowl and the dog’s name had been painted on. That not worth nothing, and it was still probably nicer than what I could’ve gotten on Amazon, and maybe I should’ve asked before buying. But there’s just a lot of that, “make a quick buck” type of stuff and it’s not always obvious.
>I've slowly shifted all my consumer purchases from Amazon to local shops and other online platforms, including Etsy.
This is why I'm so bullish on Shopify. It increasingly is getting network effects (Shop.app) and people are starting to become even more brand loyal than before. Even Chinese companies are creating strong brand categories at a fraction of US counterparts and selling direct on Shopify to (e.g. Anker, Fnirsi, Fanttik, etc.)
I live in Bellevue so by supporting Amazon I'm supporting a local business. It's hard to imagine replacing most of the things I get from the site with someplace else. (Though it'd be nice to have a Micro Center.) I've even started getting more grocery products as Safeway/QFC/Fred Meyer up their prices, and the Redmond Fred Meyer closed which had the best produce. Etsy is mainly useful to me for the occasional copyright-infringing merch.
Just going off the "TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION" license plates, I'd guess not. Federal tax dollars are spent according to the whims of literally everyone else in the country except them.
It's a local business to nearly everyone in the US. Anyways, it's not a local shop as the person you replied to called out.
Shopping at Amazon perpetuates the monopolization and consolidation of players in the economy. That means less competition. That means less incentive to improve the value they provide.
Seems pretty clear to me that shopping with Amazon makes things worse for everyone in the long run.
Yeah, same here. Shopping on Amazon is awful. Logistics and delivery, A-OK, but I don't want what they are selling.
I'm happy to wait 3 more days, and have inaccurate delivery estimates, in order to get what I actually want.
It also spurred me to move most of stuff off of AWS, which is saving me money now too! The cloud ecosystem has grown in the past 10 years, and I hadn't shopped around, and was missing out on better experience that cost far less.
Alot of things are just fine, or more than fine, on Amazon (behemoth or not). If I know what brand I want, or I want a cheap version of something and the more or less guarantee if they screw up, it will be replaced or refunded, I absolutely would use Amazon. Some of the Amazon Essentials are a godsend if you cannot stand shopping. It is looking for new things, being unable to find exactly what I need without being overwhelmed, or not being sure of what of something to get, that gets me anxious.
Amused so many people here seem to be pushing etsy. I saw the same supposedly hand-made mugs on sale by hundreds of people on etsy a few years ago.
I’m trying to get rid of Amazon but honestly it’s very hard. All vendor websites are shit, high friction, high bugs. Vendors consistently delivers significantly slower (like 2-3 weeks sometimes)
There is no single website that offers similar solution where my payment is saved and I can just buy and forget.
Only thing I’ve successfully replaced is grocery shopping.
I havent bought anything on Amazon for 10 years. Sure the local prices are infrequently higher but with 20%+ inflation over the last half decade comparison shopping is pretty much dead. Glad to support my local places or find an alternative or just live without whatever.
When searching on Amazon I always change sort to Best Sellers. The default is Featured Items which shows ads at the top and throughout results. For some searches that have a small number of real results, the majority of the list will be ads. Sorting by Best Sellers eliminates all ads in the results.
Since most things I buy from amazon are commodity type items I need quickly and cheaply, my method has been "Prime Only" + "Sort Lowest First". Add on a score minimum filter if the first results are junk.
If you're just looking for something that's all whitelabeled stuff all coming from the same alibaba source, you can just find who's selling the same thing at the cheapest price currently. The prime only label is needed to filter out the stuff with extreme shipping pricing and times selling for $1. Would be much nicer if they could just properly sort everything with shipping included like ebay but whatever.
The results have long been flooded with brands with names like XEZAXFE all selling the exact same thing so it's the fastest and easiest way to find what I'm looking for if it's not brand name (which I wouldn't trust amazon to send me a non-bootleg version of otherwise if I want brand name).
I would have thought the Amazon tax is “free shipping” that has altered the pricing of every item, and now B&M retail is picking up the same pricing despite a much lower shipping overhead
I feel at least in major urban areas Amazon’s delivery network is efficient enough that they have to artificially delay non-Prime orders. I order from Amazon only occasionally, and while sometimes there’s actual step-by-step tracking I’ll usually see no movement at all for 3+ days, and suddenly the item has dispatched from the warehouse and it is reaching my house in an hour.
In my defense, they started it. (I had purchased a stainless steel muffler with a lifetime warranty off of Amazon Auto, the thing was counterfeit, completely rusted through in less than a year, and Amazon would not honor their written warranty and I didn't care to fight it legally...)
So the next time they dropped my package off in my lobby when I have specific instructions to bring it to my front door? I never got it.
And unfortunately for them... it keeps happening now?
Like every other package that gets delivered?!
(They always believe this, apparently... either that, or their agreement with their delivery insurance services must eat the cost).
I've more than gotten my muffler refunded now and they're none the wiser, so win win really!
Most likely they're sticking it to a delivery contractor. Amazon gets paid, you get your free stuff, and some working class stiff is peeing in a bottle driving a leased truck and not getting paid for their labor. Win win win, right?
I would be pretty surprised if Amazon insures their package delivery. Do you have a source for them using insurance?
Maybe when they use a 3rd party delivery service they can strongarm that service into eating the loss. But, where I am, Amazon is usually doing 1st party delivery.
(the reason I assume they don't is that a) they are big enough to eat any loss and b) losses happen at a pretty constant rate. So they would basically be paying an insurer $loss_amount * (1+insurer_margin) in premiums to immediately get payed back $loss_amount. not a great deal.)
The search ads ostensibly solve the cold start problem: If a seller introduces a new product, how is that to be ranked? Well, they can buy some ads, get some ratings, and boot up their sales & search ranking. Great.
It of course also creates essentially perfect competition. Amazon will even tell you the top selling products across categories, so that no seller can make excess profits for long - others will quickly jump into the fray to compete that away.
This is of course the market working as intended - the sellers compete away any and all surplus. Normally that would be a good thing for consumers! Unfortunately the search ad tax is very real, and siphons off a good chunk of the surplus as monopolist rent.
This is all structural. A marketplace like this is a natural monopoly with massive network effects. And the allure of the search ad is irresistible - they literally can't not do it, lest their shareholders rebel.
Google ads work exactly the same way.
As a seller your only options are to either have better conversion economics than the competition (so you can win the ads bidding war - guess why every successful site on the internet is gameified to all hell, and why the amazon listing titles & descriptions look like they do) or to not play.
If you can create a viral hit for a product you can probably eke out excess profits for a few months - people want precisely your branded product and not a cheap knockoff, at least for a while.
("Excess profits" = anything above what will literally make the marginal seller say "it's not worth it", which is a very low bar when competing with the entire world)
> It leads to two perverse side effects. First, producers realize that if brand reputation matters less than a budget for clicks, they will shift to shoddy and cheap versions of their products so they have a bigger budget for clicks.
This assertion lacks evidence. An alternate hypothesis: if you tried to sell literal garbage on Amazon, poor reviews and a high return rate will be visible in the product itself. The ad will earn you a click-through to the product, but buyers will begin to back out instead of following through with a purchase. Ad purchases cannot overcome insufficient revenue - it won't be profitable long-term.
Yes, Amazon has a problem with vendors buying good reviews as well. It doesn't overcome a high number of poor reviews, or a high number of returns.
> And second, Amazon (and Google before it) have an incentive to make their organic search results worse–giving producers more incentive to buy more ads.
Reeks of a conspiracy theory. Most customers simply don't have the time or energy to research any more than the top handful of results. Only a rare person goes 10 pages deep into the search results. Organic search results will produce less traffic when people don't even look at them. But that's not evidence in and of itself that the organic search results were nerfed in some way.
I hate to remind people of the basic truth about modern Amazon, but here goes: the vast majority of the inventory is made in China and the exact same product can be found at a tiny, tiny fraction of the Amazon price on AliExpress and similar sites. The value that Amazon adds is their logistic network that can deliver to domestic US addresses in a day or two, compared to weeks. The difference in price between Amazon and AliExpress justifies sellers spending enormous sums on ads and review purchases, because even if they do sell garbage on Amazon, enough people bought it at such ridiculous margins that the seller can tear down the product with the bad reviews and high return rate and re-offer it under a new brand with the same ad and review purchase strategy and still make a profit. But the person to blame for that is not Amazon, and it's not the seller, it's the fool who decides to pay the ridiculous price compared to the AliExpress price.
Books are one of the categories where they aren't printed in China, they're not sold on AliExpress, and searching for "seth godin the knot" returns the actual correct listing as the first organic search result. So I'm not sure why the author brings his book up as evidence. He might do better by reminding his publisher that "selling on Amazon" is not a homogenous experience and they ought to reconsider flushing money down the drain on advertisements they don't need.
> An alternate hypothesis: if you tried to sell literal garbage on Amazon, poor reviews and a high return rate will be visible in the product itself.
Yeah but at the time when I buy it it's gonna have thousands of 5 star reviews, and the images themselves will be the shiniest most beautiful garbage ever seen by mankind.
Would love a similar post breaking down the rightmove (UK equivalent of zillow) tax.
Fortunately there is currently a court case against them that might help. I am also starting a #RightmoveHygiene campaign to encourage people to spend less time on there.
Why do you expect an AI developed in the same economic system would optimize for your preferences rather than their revenue? I think this only works if people can run, fine-tune and update their own models -- otherwise the giant AI vendors have every incentive to nudge you towards whichever retailer is bidding most on your Sponsored Responses, right?
I think the only difference will be that instead of advertising to target a query, they'll eventually need to target a vector and its neighborhood, and there will be some greater opacity facing advertisers trying to match "middle-income US users shopping for airfryers who have product height limits posed by kitchen upper cabinets" or something.
Yeah I truly do not understand some people’s logic. Like the ones talking about some post scarcity world where universal income will offset AI related job loss. So the people in power, the ones who have constantly tried to cut back government spending, are now going to flip and support universal income? Right.
Well same people had expected self-service restaurants, self-pay terminals will cause no tip. And even more fun future robotic servers can just work without expecting/asking for tips.
Or maybe I am wrong and "This time its really different".
I'd believe that if this article wasn't an obvious counter example to this.
People go where the mindshare is. It doesn't matter if its ad-ridden drivel and slop, it just needs to be popular.
The number of people who use OpenAI's products because "ai == chatgtp [sic]" in their minds is immense. Just like how to a ton of people, "online shopping == amazon".
I'm not arguing Amazon or OpenAI will always have this role, but while they have that the benefits of this position is immense.
I have no doubt this will work out even less well than your typical SEO marketing spam site in the offering the best choice for you. AIs recommendations will be those of the highest bidder. Which will also be the lowest quality product they can get away with.
"If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place)"
I don't get this part. Aren't those things unrelated? The aim of ads is to convince to buy regardless of the quality and other data points.
No wonder Amazon sued Perplexity to forbid agents on their site, agents could cut through the crap and find what users wanted instead of what Amazon peddles. They even won the suit.
I think our only hope against platform enshitification is using agents that optimize our interests not theirs. They don't deserve human eyes on those SERPs.
> The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). The ads make the search worse.
"The best" is not a static product. If Amazon had no way for vendors to showcase their product, the best would be a stale product that accumulated decades of reviews. Maybe it's still the best , maybe not. But there is value to show some noise in the search long term.
Another way to look at it is through the vail of ignorance. Suppose you're a manufacturer of air fryers, but don't know where you stand in terms of how competitive or popular your product is. Would you want to live in a world in which you CAN'T bump your placement? Sure if you're the top 3 manufacturer, maybe you would prefer not to pay the tax. But if you're not, you'd much rather prefer the system in which you can.
>"The best" is not a static product. If Amazon had no way for vendors to showcase their product ... Would you want to live in a world in which you CAN'T bump your placement?
Agreed about it not being static, but I don't see why ads should be that answer. The easiest way to "bump" a product is just sell it for less for an introduction period, so that people sorting Low->High will see it before the current highest rated one, at least until they get high ratings, and then can increase the price. If they're going to be losing money on marketing, it would be nicer if it goes to consumers.
Good thing Godwin has never had to worry about writing the best book then. If it weren’t for internet marketing I doubt he’d have survived on the quality of his snake oil alone.
"The best" for many products is often static, on the level of decades. Better e-commerce websites than Amazon will curate away all the garbage and only show you the best things. At this point you can pretty much use the top 5 results from any Amazon search to rule out things NOT to buy.
There is basically no category of anything where there is something that is THE best, once you take buyer preferences and tradeoffs like cost, quality, time, brand, etc. into account.
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[ 0.77 ms ] story [ 47.5 ms ] threadWhat can we do about it? Not much. This is something that happens when in a "free" market you have a near monopoly, and the antitrust is too weak to even try to fine these companies.
One might think that there's a "conspiracy" of a few powerful people / billionaires, but I don't believe it it the case. Individuals are driven by results, profits, targets, metrics, etc... The company as a whole responds to shareholders, not the small retail one but large funds and such that own a significant stake in these companies. They want to make money. They lobby the government to make sure that quasi-monopolies like this one can go on undisturbed.
I don't blame Amazon. I think this is a limitation of the (supposedly) free-market society in which we live. By the way, it is not a free market when antitrust does not work, or when you need to bail-out banks, etc.
I admire and respect Seth Godin (I even met him once, years ago), and I would love to see if he had any idea of how to solve this.
In the end, we as a society value convenience more than global optima. So we will always land in some local optima. We deserve it.
In other words: blame capitalism, not our value judgement.
You can cut Amazon out of your life tomorrow if you wanted. You could do it almost entirely with just Walmart.com if you wanted a dropin replacement.
If you only have one internet provider in your area, that's a monopoly, the cost of switching is essentially 'start an ISP'. Having to type in walmart.com does not make Amazon a monopoly.
After going mildly buckwild on amazon after 3 years of not ordering a single thing (after a move to the country) I let the free month of prime I was using expire. This, and the counterfeit product I got (and had to spend 45 minutes on the internet and phone to get refunded) was decisive. I'll try again in 5 years.
anecdata and all, but i've had the exact opposite experience - I've never spent more than a couple of minutes getting a refund, and it's always been less time and effort than returning something to a B&M store.
ByteDance has reimplemented their now infamous video suggestion algorithm for shopping and it is _very_ effective.
Once the infrastructure and logistics of the Chinese eCommerce platforms improve in the US, it will be so much better that I imagine that Bezos only recourse will be to have congress ban them (a la the Chinese EV ban).
He will likely be successful in doing this and allow the US to slide further into modern technological irrelevancy at his own benefit.
On the Amazon homepage that has never happened. It usually just shows some banner ad for prime day, new amazon tv show/movie, then maybe 4 little thumbnails of the last product I searched for or whatever. I have to initiate the shopping experience, I have to pique my own purchasing interest.
The first is price. The stuff is cheap, as in so cheap I know it will be terrible and I still sort of don’t care. It’s $2, if I only use it twice I got my moneys worth.
That makes it super easy to hit Buy without thinking much.
The second is that they appear to target verticals that don’t have a natural ceiling to sales. I only need one microwave, so they won’t sell me that. They do sell a lot of apparel, decorations, toys for adults (crappy 3D displays, not dildos), stuff where you don’t think “eh, I already have one though”.
The third is the marriage of entertainment and shopping. I can be doomscrolling, see an ad and buy it without ever leaving the platform. If I remember right, it doesn’t even interrupt your doomscrolling really. Swipe to next video, see it’s an ad, hit buy, confirm Apple Pay pop up, scroll to next video. You can decide you want something, buy it, and be on your next video in 15 seconds. It’s so fast it almost blurs the line where I’m not sure if I’d call it shopping or entertainment.
The last is that they’re really good at luring consumers to start selling on there. The ads for stuff tend to be sort of home made and low quality, which makes it seem attainable for your average person. That tends to mean a huge selection. I had a buddy that randomly decided to sell stickers on there just based on watching other people do it (no idea how that went, I didn’t ask)
No reason to get congress involved when you can have the president suspend duty-free de minimus with executive authority.
Way worse than Amazon because at least Amazon is just showing you products and telling you how much they cost.
There are many product categories where I know that shopping on Amazon will be a miserable experience riddled with crap goods and useless search, so I go elsewhere. Never even occurred to me to use an LLM to make up for Amazon’s own deliberate decision to serve me crap.
To be clear, when I do use LLM for search, I don't limit it to one site.
Second, I found a product I liked but was the wrong size. As far as I could tell, they can’t even show you recommended similar products. They show you what other people clicked on or bought in the same order. But not just actually similar products in the same style.
What baffles me is that e-commerce sites all tend to get worse with time. The moment a site I like turns into a marketplace, I know it will only go downhill.
These companies effectively monopolize app distribution on their platforms and then make discovery so poor that developers who try to sell apps in their stores must pay for ads in those same stores.
substitute for literally any business name
Sure, I know the right one to click on, if I'm in a sound state of mind. What if I'm sleepy? Stressed? 65+ years old?
Thoughtless take. Say you've just invented a better looking, better functioning, cheaper air fryer. How do you expect to reach your first customers if not through ads? Sell it to your friends? That's even more invasive and annoying.
People's urge to rid the world of ads is similar to our urge to rid the world of "middlemen".
It's natural, and I get it (ads are annoying), but this is a forum where I expect people to think a little more deeply about the economics and second order effects of things.
You certainly didn't read it in much depth. The author is talking about search ads explicitly and narrowly within a category where Amazon has plenty of signals it could use to steer customers towards the highest satisfaction product.
If you make a new better product, advertise everywhere you want. And if Amazon took seriously its customer obsession, it would start driving people towards your product if it was better. Not because you paid them to.
> sales [the best product] were entitled to in the first place
Unfortunately, this is not, and has never been, how it works. The best product is never entitled to sales. Marketing, which very much includes advertising, is a massive, massive factor in sales.
Amazon, the store, has an incentive to show trending products, rather than items that sold well 10 years ago... if you already own the old standard, and you do a search and find it's still the highest in search results, you'll be unlikely to buy.
Just get your products reviewed by trusted reviewers, if you can budge them maybe you deserve a bit of attention from us. Someone who has a stake in being trusted for their fair reviews.
Ads are a scourge.
I'll be the first to admit I don't know the specifics, but I imagine in some cases, it's economically prohibitive to lower the price by such an amount that it makes up for the uncertainty in a typical search algorithm.
I normally use Google and/or DuckDuckGo to search YouTube and Amazon, because if I'm looking for a specific video/product, that one will be 3-4 pages in (maybe not even shown).
Brand name products are buried 3+ pages deep on Amazon, while the first 2-3 pages are always drop-shipped Chinese knockoffs now. The onsite search is almost entirely useless.
I'm now seriously contemplating deleting my Amazon account of 15 years in one whole swoop. The quality degradation is painfully apparent, and the value add of Amazon in my life has been steadily declining for a while.
I've also had terrible experiences with AWS, but that's a different story.
Amazon's only core product that they care about now is their stock price.
For the past decade Etsy has been a rebranded Temu/Ali Express. There's almost nothing local, or original, or worth anything on it.
All large online shopping services converge onto the same Amazon model.
Meanwhile with other platforms it takes up to a week, the delivery timeframe is 08:00 to 21:00, I then have to wait for the delivery person to call me because they can never find my front door. And if I happen to be on the toilet when they ring the package is delivered to a parcel point ten kilometers away. So I have to rent a car to go pickup my package.
Amazon has absolutely nailed the delivery here. They looked at how people struggle with online orders and streamlined it completely. It’s such a blessing not to have to deal with delivery drivers anymore.
If Amazon charged €10 extra per package I would still order with them.
eg. wanted to purchase a FIio KA17 DAC - amazon price £150, asked an llm for an alternative, found for £120 from a decent small audiovisual real store, ordered, delivered within 3 days.
Have found you can save money for purchases from cosmetics to garden fertilizer and grass seed to audiovisual and IT equipment.
I know Amazon often isn't the lowest price anymore, but that's okay with me as long as their customer service is great.
I spend a good four months every year in Poland and Austria, and there’s really nowhere in the world except China that offers consumers as much choice and availability as the U.S. does.
This is true, although I find it interesting that so many people then gravitate to Costco, where consumer choice in a given category is deliberately restricted to one or two product variations selected by the head office.
Also, you don't have to shop at Costco exclusively, you still have all the other options available. Costco is just a good default if you're not looking for something specific.
Meanwhile in Europe I spend many evening on internet forums and Facebook groups doing research trying to find a part that will work with my car, then finding someone willing to sell it and finally using Google Translate getting someone to ship it to my foreign (to them) country. I even had to resort to proxies just to get car parts from Eastern to Western Europe.
Jokes on you, in my part of Europe I don’t have access to public healthcare, I don’t have mandated vacation, I don’t have a pension system. And I can’t even have a consumerist phase apparently since car parts are so hard to acquire.
They're not mutually exclusive, two things can be had at the same time.
Wish to live in your reality tho, where I can buy a dozen different brands of hot dogs while visiting the doctor for elevated blood pressure without needing to take out a payment plan on klarna.
The ease of buying things that the prior poster referred to is basically just three things:
- A massive common market with few to no internal trade barriers/complications. The EU is still nowhere near as integrated and has all sorts of odd hidden complications to actually moving + selling things.
- Hell, just this week I've seen that one of the indie record labels I pay attention to will no longer sell merch within the EU other than to the country they're based in, because the new EU packaging regulations make it infeasibly expensive to comply with for every country for the small volumes they move.
- A common language that ~92% of the population speak fluently.
- Relatively efficient logistics.
None of this has anything to do with "dismantling the welfare state" and has only a little to do with differences in workers rights/benefits - giving delivery workers in the US better wages/job security would not make the "Amazon" logistics model infeasible.
There has been a lot of consolidation in this space. Part of that means that independent webstores closed up and moved exclusively to Amazon. If they did not close up shop, they now use Shop/Shopify or a similar SaaS, which streamlines sign-ups, sign-ins, and checkouts, for better or worse. All the better if you've got PayPal or Apple/Google Pay.
I've noticed that a lot of "click and mortar" stores have really abysmal product on their physical shelves. Like, it's discontinued, or all the wrong sizes, subtly defective, or just undesirable. It's like their stores are kind of dumping grounds, and it makes sense, because the sort of person in 2026 who gets in a car, and shops in a store, and grabs stuff uncritically off the shelf is not your most discerning or astute shopper.
Target's shopping experience remains better than most. Their stores include everyday needs like groceries and medicine, so I can meet a lot of my needs by dropping in. Furthermore, their app-based shopping (marketplace) is pretty good too, so if I need housewares delivered or something, or I need to look up something and find it right now, in-store, their app is right there. And their shopping carts now have little dedicated slots to drop in your smartphone next to the cupholders.
The best online shopping is Office Depot/OfficeMAX. They've shrunk their retail footprint, but their online store is still a non-marketplace, and really good for buying the kinds of things they sell. That includes some non-intuitive buys, like you can find kitchen supplies, because they stock many breakrooms for small/medium businesses. Good place for electronics and accessories and art supplies, even if you are just comparison-shopping. Their delivery is rapid and often just comes from the nearest store!
I am sorry, but I will not buy 20 cents water at $2.
Yes, all of us who are not wealthy must have an upper limit to what we can support, and maybe 25% is over your limit, but please don't ignorantly accuse them of ripping you off when you clearly know nothing of the costs of vastly different scales of business.
But remember, the economies of scale first make things more the same and reduce variety, then enable eliminating competitors from the market, thus enabling enshittification at scale (not possible when there are readily available competitors and switching is easy).
For prices that are temporarily lower, getting a worse selection of worse products or services and no real choice, then prices higher than ever when the market is cornered, is not better. Yet this is the cycle that has happened for centuries, to the point where it can be considered inevitable if not fought.
And it is visible in this weeks earnings reports — corporate profits higher than ever, labor's portion of the economy smaller than ever, inflation increasing, and products universally shittier than ever.
But sure, they can go on complaining about how the small store is "ripping them off" whilst taking "LESS" profit from the system and providing a better service. That myopic approach to life, clueless about how things actually work, is what got us in this predicament in the first place.
Source?
Also, simply observe the economy, without the prior bias of holding paramount values of tropes like "free market" and "shareholder value".
Also read about the tendency towards monopolization/oligopolization and how it creates systemic risk in everything from banking to food supply (e.g., the huge network of Taylor Farms supplying dozens+ of brands that seem individual, but aren't, and are now subject to the same deadly contamination risks).
Or, just try to buy a concert ticket and observe the overcharges, surcharges, and excess costs, and compare that to the experience of someone buying a ticket for a major band in the 1970s or '80s, before the entire business got bought up by one company.
Or, just don't be so deliberately obtuse and willfully ignorant.
You can find yourself a nice laptop for cheap. "It's got a cop CPU, an i5 10th gen. It's got cop RAM, cop SSD, cop 12v power input."
"Only" here is incorrect. I posit every public company's primary concern is stock price. But certain behaviors and values align with driving that stock price up and for Amazon it's Customer Obsession. And they are not obsessed with it because they love you, it's because they love your repeat business. But that obsession means your happiness and their stock price are aligned, for now.
I pushed Purchase on Amazon one day and was opening the package 36 minutes later. I can barely drive down to a gas station, get a coke and come back in that time. But I wanted a particular, random item one morning and was setting it up within the hour without leaving my seat. Ebay and Walmart and Local shop can't do that.
I support leaving out of principle, that's laudable. But it won't be because they aren't good at delivering CX.
That doesn’t sound like being customer focused or obsessed at all.
Not to mention that finding previous orders via email is much, much faster than going through their website.
After spending close to 6 months and countless phone calls trying to get a refund processed the bad experience is outweighing the good for me.
The entire experience on the unhappy path is so obnoxiously dreadful i don’t purchase anything on Amazon over an amount I’d be fine just losing. Even though 99% of my orders have been absolutely fine.
But they're not maximizing repeat customers, they're maximizing repeat customers multiplied by product fees. (roughly)
They would prefer 100M customers paying $4 a product over 250M customers paying $1 a product.
They keep driving up product fees more and more, reducing how happy the buying experience is.
One day shipping is fast, but I can run to the store in 15 minutes. Can't beat that.
There are still lots of good reasons to shop local, but I’m not sure speed is the best reason.
Best Buy, Microcenter, B&H, Walmart all do better. They just don't have the range or sometimes do not respect my tax forms.
I am an hour drive from a larger town with a big box store like Walmart. The Best Buy closed. The closest thing nearby is something called Tractor Supply. They put out a big sign each year saying "We Have Chicks!!!" which means they have baby chickens, ducks and turkeys. They are super cute.
We're in rural Vermont, but not particularly remote. Amazon is the same for us, with a minimum 1 week quoted delivery time. And it's not because it actually takes that long to get to us, since Walmart is reliably 2 day. Prime used to be 2 day delivery, like Walmart still is. Amazon has just decided to deprioritize rural northeastern delivery, and just don't ship it out for several days. Even random Ebay sellers using USPS are typically faster. This doesn't make Amazon useless, but it's definitely not my preferred place to buy from anymore.
> They put out a big sign each year saying "We Have Chicks!!!" which means they have baby chickens, ducks and turkeys.
They also sell bees in season, although I think you might have to preorder.
This is why I'm so bullish on Shopify. It increasingly is getting network effects (Shop.app) and people are starting to become even more brand loyal than before. Even Chinese companies are creating strong brand categories at a fraction of US counterparts and selling direct on Shopify to (e.g. Anker, Fnirsi, Fanttik, etc.)
Shopping at Amazon perpetuates the monopolization and consolidation of players in the economy. That means less competition. That means less incentive to improve the value they provide.
Seems pretty clear to me that shopping with Amazon makes things worse for everyone in the long run.
I'm happy to wait 3 more days, and have inaccurate delivery estimates, in order to get what I actually want.
It also spurred me to move most of stuff off of AWS, which is saving me money now too! The cloud ecosystem has grown in the past 10 years, and I hadn't shopped around, and was missing out on better experience that cost far less.
Amused so many people here seem to be pushing etsy. I saw the same supposedly hand-made mugs on sale by hundreds of people on etsy a few years ago.
There is no single website that offers similar solution where my payment is saved and I can just buy and forget.
Only thing I’ve successfully replaced is grocery shopping.
wrt to article insight, Benedicts Evans has been mentioning Ads being the major profit driver at Amazon in his newsletter since 2-3 years ago.
This needs to be pinned as the top comment. Thank you!
If you're just looking for something that's all whitelabeled stuff all coming from the same alibaba source, you can just find who's selling the same thing at the cheapest price currently. The prime only label is needed to filter out the stuff with extreme shipping pricing and times selling for $1. Would be much nicer if they could just properly sort everything with shipping included like ebay but whatever.
The results have long been flooded with brands with names like XEZAXFE all selling the exact same thing so it's the fastest and easiest way to find what I'm looking for if it's not brand name (which I wouldn't trust amazon to send me a non-bootleg version of otherwise if I want brand name).
There’s really no knowing what contaminating or failed spec made that batch super cheap.
It’s a race to the bottom, corners will be cut.
Ads too, I guess
In my defense, they started it. (I had purchased a stainless steel muffler with a lifetime warranty off of Amazon Auto, the thing was counterfeit, completely rusted through in less than a year, and Amazon would not honor their written warranty and I didn't care to fight it legally...)
So the next time they dropped my package off in my lobby when I have specific instructions to bring it to my front door? I never got it.
And unfortunately for them... it keeps happening now?
Like every other package that gets delivered?!
(They always believe this, apparently... either that, or their agreement with their delivery insurance services must eat the cost).
I've more than gotten my muffler refunded now and they're none the wiser, so win win really!
This isn't a restaurant and they're not waiters.
What about Amazon's business and subcontracting practices makes you think they're willing to eat any operating expenses whatsoever?
Maybe when they use a 3rd party delivery service they can strongarm that service into eating the loss. But, where I am, Amazon is usually doing 1st party delivery.
(the reason I assume they don't is that a) they are big enough to eat any loss and b) losses happen at a pretty constant rate. So they would basically be paying an insurer $loss_amount * (1+insurer_margin) in premiums to immediately get payed back $loss_amount. not a great deal.)
It of course also creates essentially perfect competition. Amazon will even tell you the top selling products across categories, so that no seller can make excess profits for long - others will quickly jump into the fray to compete that away.
This is of course the market working as intended - the sellers compete away any and all surplus. Normally that would be a good thing for consumers! Unfortunately the search ad tax is very real, and siphons off a good chunk of the surplus as monopolist rent.
This is all structural. A marketplace like this is a natural monopoly with massive network effects. And the allure of the search ad is irresistible - they literally can't not do it, lest their shareholders rebel.
Google ads work exactly the same way.
As a seller your only options are to either have better conversion economics than the competition (so you can win the ads bidding war - guess why every successful site on the internet is gameified to all hell, and why the amazon listing titles & descriptions look like they do) or to not play.
If you can create a viral hit for a product you can probably eke out excess profits for a few months - people want precisely your branded product and not a cheap knockoff, at least for a while.
("Excess profits" = anything above what will literally make the marginal seller say "it's not worth it", which is a very low bar when competing with the entire world)
This assertion lacks evidence. An alternate hypothesis: if you tried to sell literal garbage on Amazon, poor reviews and a high return rate will be visible in the product itself. The ad will earn you a click-through to the product, but buyers will begin to back out instead of following through with a purchase. Ad purchases cannot overcome insufficient revenue - it won't be profitable long-term.
Yes, Amazon has a problem with vendors buying good reviews as well. It doesn't overcome a high number of poor reviews, or a high number of returns.
> And second, Amazon (and Google before it) have an incentive to make their organic search results worse–giving producers more incentive to buy more ads.
Reeks of a conspiracy theory. Most customers simply don't have the time or energy to research any more than the top handful of results. Only a rare person goes 10 pages deep into the search results. Organic search results will produce less traffic when people don't even look at them. But that's not evidence in and of itself that the organic search results were nerfed in some way.
I hate to remind people of the basic truth about modern Amazon, but here goes: the vast majority of the inventory is made in China and the exact same product can be found at a tiny, tiny fraction of the Amazon price on AliExpress and similar sites. The value that Amazon adds is their logistic network that can deliver to domestic US addresses in a day or two, compared to weeks. The difference in price between Amazon and AliExpress justifies sellers spending enormous sums on ads and review purchases, because even if they do sell garbage on Amazon, enough people bought it at such ridiculous margins that the seller can tear down the product with the bad reviews and high return rate and re-offer it under a new brand with the same ad and review purchase strategy and still make a profit. But the person to blame for that is not Amazon, and it's not the seller, it's the fool who decides to pay the ridiculous price compared to the AliExpress price.
Books are one of the categories where they aren't printed in China, they're not sold on AliExpress, and searching for "seth godin the knot" returns the actual correct listing as the first organic search result. So I'm not sure why the author brings his book up as evidence. He might do better by reminding his publisher that "selling on Amazon" is not a homogenous experience and they ought to reconsider flushing money down the drain on advertisements they don't need.
Yeah but at the time when I buy it it's gonna have thousands of 5 star reviews, and the images themselves will be the shiniest most beautiful garbage ever seen by mankind.
"Buy me the best Air Fryer" -> finds the best given my preferences and constraints and directly purchases it from the cheapest distributor
Or maybe I am wrong and "This time its really different".
People go where the mindshare is. It doesn't matter if its ad-ridden drivel and slop, it just needs to be popular.
The number of people who use OpenAI's products because "ai == chatgtp [sic]" in their minds is immense. Just like how to a ton of people, "online shopping == amazon".
I'm not arguing Amazon or OpenAI will always have this role, but while they have that the benefits of this position is immense.
I don't get this part. Aren't those things unrelated? The aim of ads is to convince to buy regardless of the quality and other data points.
I think our only hope against platform enshitification is using agents that optimize our interests not theirs. They don't deserve human eyes on those SERPs.
"The best" is not a static product. If Amazon had no way for vendors to showcase their product, the best would be a stale product that accumulated decades of reviews. Maybe it's still the best , maybe not. But there is value to show some noise in the search long term.
Another way to look at it is through the vail of ignorance. Suppose you're a manufacturer of air fryers, but don't know where you stand in terms of how competitive or popular your product is. Would you want to live in a world in which you CAN'T bump your placement? Sure if you're the top 3 manufacturer, maybe you would prefer not to pay the tax. But if you're not, you'd much rather prefer the system in which you can.
Yes. I’d rather compete on quality and customer satisfaction than who can burn the most money on ads.
By making it almost necessary to buy their ads, Amazon is harming my margin.
I don’t hate all advertising, but I do hate this form, where it’s perverting search.
Agreed about it not being static, but I don't see why ads should be that answer. The easiest way to "bump" a product is just sell it for less for an introduction period, so that people sorting Low->High will see it before the current highest rated one, at least until they get high ratings, and then can increase the price. If they're going to be losing money on marketing, it would be nicer if it goes to consumers.
You're also just one step away from suggesting it should be put higher up in the search results - which is the entire complaint!