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.
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.
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...
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...
The problem with AliExpress and other foreign retailers for us EU-ians is that you get €3 in duty per product category, then another €2 per package in processing fees (from November 2026), then you get VAT over the duty and with a bit of luck the final carrying company doesn't accept your IOSS paperwork and you have to pay the VAT, the duty, the VAT over the duty, the new processing fee and their handling fees (€5 to €50) again.
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.
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 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.
Where are you getting your info from? Wholesale markups are typically 100%, i.e. resellers generally do capture ~50% of the final retail price of merchandise.
If Amazon is charging that while also offering advertising/product discovery services that traditional distributors wouldn't offer, it sounds like a bargain based on what you're describing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We have all those same problems with western companies and they don't ACTUALLY get punished either. They get a slap on the wrist, maybe a fine, and MAYBE change their name or the name of the product and continue on.
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.
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).
> 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.
How are Temu and Aliexpress for returns and same day delivery options? Those are the big reasons I tend to stick with Amazon - their customer support and convenience.
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.
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?
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'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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seems like the guide was spot on with the paraffin and the authentic beeswax. It said nothing about the other types of wax, but the fact that they fluoresce unique colors is evidence that the method works. Why do you think it isn't a good guide?
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.
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.
On counterfeit, seeking known brands or products that are thought to be reputable can be a tough strategy.
Same as parent, I'm amazed by the quality I get, but I'm also not looking for brands or vendors that try to piggy back on some halo effect.
That means choosing carefully what to buy from where, pouring over the specs and reviews for every purchase, but as I'm getting products that just don't exist elsewhere, that's a mental burden I'm fine with.
Funny the same day we were commenting about this, a story broke out of long beach that smugglers were using counterfeit container seals (possibly made in China!) to fool CBP inspectors.
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).
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.
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.
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 it's 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
> When you open the AirPods box for the first time does the iPhone do that animation and say "Set up AirPods..." etc?
There are many amusing videos of someone in China setting up counterfeit AirPods on a train, and every single person with an iPhone on the train car did that animation. The counterfeiters took pride that their product had a “stronger connection” than the real thing.
Same here, but for _several_ electronics. Every advantage that Amazon has over other retailers is mooted by bootlegging. Being forced to authenticate or return products regularly is a major pain in the ass.
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”.
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 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?
All product is sent to Amazon warehouses from all sellers. It’s how Amazon has such fast shipping. And all product of the same type from all sellers is commingled. So you never know what you’re going to get.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 I can wait a week or more.
What's it good for? Chronic 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
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.
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.
Much faster and less discussion too. I never had a good experience with Amazon so far. The 3 times or so it took well over a month and many emails to process anything
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Good for you, nice anecdote. Whilst we are sharing, I've calculated Amazon have stolen close to $20k of my money which I am hoping to recoup through this lawsuit alone. Happy for you though.
I’m not a fan of Amazon either, but you keep spamming that link. The law suit is clearly about mistakes in the return process over 9 years claiming to account for 600 million dollars in returns. Amazon does 600 billion a year in revenue. So 600 million over 9 years is a fraction of a fraction of a percent. Hope that helps.
> I’m not a fan of Amazon either, but you keep spamming that link.
I posted it twice, but duly noted that reaches your personal threshold for defining spam.
> The law suit is clearly about mistakes in the return process over 9 years claiming to account for 600 million dollars in returns.
Maybe you should have actually read the article first, where it quoted the total settlement topped $1bn. The proposed figures were $1.1bn using Amazon’s own estimates, whereas an objector in the case proposed $1.5bn.
> Amazon does 600 billion a year in revenue. So 600 million over 9 years is a fraction of a fraction of a percent. Hope that helps.
Right. And how would their AWS, subscription, advertising, licensing, or third-party seller revenue be relevant here exactly? Why should their worldwide revenue be considered when this is a US only settlement? In fact, why would revenue be relevant at all here? Unless your point is that the figure is so insignificant for Amazon that consumer rights and stealing over $1bn from customers shouldn't be a worthwhile consideration? In which case I agree.
> 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.
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.
The covid lockdowns started my senior year in high school, so I ended up working at an Amazon distribution center and Walmart my restaurant job also laid me off.
Sure both sucked, but an Amazon warehouse is much more dull. It is truly mind numbing work, the only enjoyable aspect was seeing how many sex toys people bought when they were stuck at home. It's noisy, hot, and you do the same task for your entire shift. You could not wear headphones or listen to music. You are micromanaged to a degree I have never seen before like timing your bathroom breaks. They even had thermal cameras at the entrance to see if you were hiding any stolen product under your clothes, and insisted they were for detecting employees coming to work with a fever.
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.
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.
>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 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 a key 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 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.
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)
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").
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.
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
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.
Sure you can buy a niche product from a niche store, but it's gonna take them 3 days to get to the post office, and 2 weeks to get it to you. And they're gonna charge you $9 for the privilege.
Even the great stores like McMaster-Carr are kind of unpleasant to use, because the shipping is so slow (even though everything else about the experience is far superior to Amazon.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1. Yes, that's what I wanted to point out. Many people don't know the destinction, and can get hit even though "they are shopping on Amazon".
2. Even if it is non-FBA it should be in the interest of Amazon to have stronger enforcement for non-FBA sellers that are consistently lying about their delivery dates in order to get a sale. That should be pretty easy to track. In the past the variance of delivery dates hasn't been that bad, even for non-FBA sellers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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 they were 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.
I don't think you have a realistic idea of how much it would hurt many companies to withdraw from amazon. And no not just companies that "made themselves dependent" or whatever. I don't care if you use the word monopoly but your percentage there is silly. In the relevant markets Amazon is enormous.
And on top of "percent of sales in the world" being the wrong metric, Amazon is approaching a trillion dollars in product sales. The Amazon GDP is bigger than most countries.
> Parity means the price for the end customer, or at the very least the advertised price for the end customer.
If that's the definition, then parity is not automatically a good thing.
If I want to sell my product to different stores for $50 and let them price it how they want, I should be allowed to do that, and no contract should block that competition.
Amazon will yell at you and threaten your sales if another store drops the price, even if you had no involvement.
> Ideally the benefit is mutual. Usually the benefit has to be mutual for business to be made.
And Amazon is so powerful it's absorbing 90% of the benefit and suppressing the competition that would change that. That's bad.
> 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.
Amazon has been spending a lot of that goodwill, and they could be just as good to customers without inflating prices and squeezing their suppliers so hard.
Your average business with a real brand name might even care more about their reputation than Amazon does. You're coming across as ridiculously infatuated with Amazon if you think they're that far above the average company.
> I don't think you have a realistic idea of how much it would hurt many companies to withdraw from amazon.
It would. That's why they're still on Amazon. That's why Amazon is charging them. That's business and running a company means competing in business.
Companies aren't people. They don't deserve any empathy. They have to compete in an antagonistic environment against other companies for the benefit and mercy of receiving the customer dollar. That's how it is supposed to be in order to benefit customers.
At most, businesses who deserve our empathy and a bit of slack should be local businesses who employ people where we live.
You argue that because Amazon is a big company they have some kind of outsized influence. In the market of consumer goods they are just a dwarf compared to the total size of the market. And they have competitors who are also giant and perfectly capable of competing in every space they operate. Nobody likes Amazon. I certainly don't like them, but I use them when it is beneficial for me as a customer.
> If I want to sell my product to different stores for $50 and let them price it how they want, I should be allowed to do that, and no contract should block that competition.
You aren't selling your product directly to Amazon. You are using them as a marketplace / sales service for selling your products to customers. If you were selling your product to Amazon directly, then there shouldn't be any price parity contract, I agree.
> Amazon will yell at you and threaten your sales if another store drops the price, even if you had no involvement.
In practice I wonder how these situations pan out. Like you say, it is impossible for a seller to control how other stores price the item.
> Companies aren't people. They don't deserve any empathy.
This isn't about empathy for corporations. I'm being overcharged because of these policies, because I'm effectively forced to pay the Amazon overhead no matter where I buy. I don't like wasting my money.
> They have to compete in an antagonistic environment against other companies for the benefit and mercy of receiving the customer dollar. That's how it is supposed to be in order to benefit customers.
And this version of price parity makes it much harder for other storefronts and marketplaces to compete.
> In the market of consumer goods they are just a dwarf compared to the total size of the market.
Their share of online consumer goods gives them tons of power. Half a trillion dollars is not weak here.
> You aren't selling your product directly to Amazon. You are using them as a marketplace / sales service for selling your products to customers. If you were selling your product to Amazon directly, then there shouldn't be any price parity contract, I agree.
And so the loophole is built.
In a marketplace setup, enforcing a version of price parity that keeps the same end price regardless of fees causes bad results.
> In practice I wonder how these situations pan out. Like you say, it is impossible for a seller to control how other stores price the item.
From what I've seen it's very effective. Beg/threaten that store to increase prices, likely drop your Amazon price to unsustainable levels in the mean time so you don't have to fight later to get Amazon to reattach you to the buy button.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I think it makes sense that the largest practitioner and beneficiary of a bad thing takes the brunt of the blame. No one can go around memorizing every factory that does bad stuff and which products originate from them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 here 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 reciepts.
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.
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.
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…
You had legal insurance that guarantees Amazon returns? I’m very curious what kind of insurance policy is that? Is that one of those custom business liability insurances?
Probably general insurance that pays for a lawyer. Is that not a thing where you live? The insurer in small cases sometimes does "claim settlement via buyout of the matter in controversy", or nuisance value settlement. Cheaper than paying for a lawyer...
No, nothing so fancy. Just general legal insurance that would give legal advice and escalate to threats from their own lawyers, and eventually sue on your behalf or settle directly with you when the amounts aren’t worth their effort (like in this case).
I also had a debacle with Turkish airlines (I will never fly this shitty airline again, and discourage anyone to do so). They tried to get the airline to pay but were stonewalled and eventually paid us what the airline should have (a couple thousand euros).
Then they canceled our policy because we weren’t profitable risks anymore haha.
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.)
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.
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??
A previous customer paid money for a new fan, and then they got a refund by returning the old fan as new.
Now they have a new fan, and they have their money back. The shitbird customer is pleased with their infinite-fan life hack.
Their return goes back normal stock.
---
It's ugly and reprehensible. It happens all the time. It happens with places that are down the street, too.
Like: Auto parts. When you stop in at Autozone to get a new water pump for your Ford, the person there retrieves it, brings it to the counter, opens the box, and looks at it.
The primary thing they're looking at is the condition. They want to make sure it looks new before they hand it over to you.
Because distributors sometimes send out used parts as new. Because customers are scumbags sometimes, and people are lazy sometimes, and shit gets put into the wrong piles sometimes, and -- like any other aspect in life -- it's imperfect.
The switcharoo could have happened anywhere. Maybe even in another store with a different marquee in another state.
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 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.
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.
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.
Amazon offers 30-60 days no-question-asked returns in most of the US instead of 14. Also no shipping, restock or return processing fees on most items (certainly on all returns I did)
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It is a fact that there are a huge number of chinese knockoff shit in there. But at the same time, a lot of chinese stuff are good enough.
I just try to buy good brand stuff. You can always ask your agent if a particular brand is high quality (e.g, ordered some BRAINGAIN weights instead of chinese crap)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
TVs returns came with a hefty restocking fee though, and designer clothes could be returned only with tags on (must be PRISTINE tags) for store credit or not at all. You may be too young to remember?
Oh wow, my bluff has been called. Boy do I have egg on my face. How can I subscribe to your newsletter of these old fashioned anecdotes of the distant aughts? Do you actually have gray hairs? Do you remember what malls were? Hey, I heard someone mention Heelys, were those real?
Last time I returned a TV on amazon the first thing the website did was offer me a no question asked $100 back if I decide to keep the TV anyway. But I returned it and after weeks of back and forth with probably LLMs I got it sorted out. They came to take the TV away and I got my money back eventually.
Safe to say I ended up buying my next TV (actually a monitor this time) from amazon, too. If they struggle with that kind of return then what would anyone else do? I don't have a car, I need someone to come and pick it up.
Fwiw, Amazon also offers sellers return as a service. Sellers do not need to onboard to Amazon logistics to use the return service. Ofc someone has to pay for that.
Taking returned items from customers is only the beginning of the process. The real difficulties show up after that. Which of the returns can be sold as new, which can be sold as-is, and which can be repaired / refurbished. What if a unit is returned once again? Did the customer return counterfeit? How to detect bad-faith actors (which may be the seller)? Who is to blame for damages? What if the item requires special handling (household chemicals, batteries, etc.)? And how to safely dispose / liquidate inventory while being compliant to all the regulations? And, imagine adding taxes, revenues, fees, on top of all that.
A lot of these questions are very labor-intense. It may be possible to automate some bits here and there, but the complexity is inherent to the problems.
It'd be really hard to imagine a random startup can handle returns half as well. Amazon's regulatory compliance team is probably many times larger than a random average startup. Here the economies of scale is really in favor of the big players.
> Which of the returns can be sold as new, which can be sold as-is, and which can be repaired / refurbished. What if a unit is returned once again? Did the customer return counterfeit? How to detect bad-faith actors (which may be the seller)? Who is to blame for damages? What if the item requires special handling (household chemicals, batteries, etc.)? And how to safely dispose / liquidate inventory while being compliant to all the regulations?
They just sell it in bulk and leave it to regular folk to buy pallets or containers and sell the shit on WhatNot.
By necessity. They sell so many counterfeit items, items sold as new but are used, items sold with misleading pictures or descriptions, various other scams to tolerate if not encourage. They’ve managed to normalize that and to do so they had to make returns frictionless. It’s a failing strategy. People just buy less and less from Amazon, unless they have cognitive issues.
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.
Shopify seems to be helping paper over that. I've recently gotten into a hobby of 3d printer modifications (prints are great, but I also seem to like modifying and repairing just as much), and I've been broadening my online shopping horizons as a result. Quite a few "standalone" stores online are linked into Shopify.
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.
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 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.
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.
There are many good moral reasons for ordering stuff online, see my other reply.
But often I see peers ordering in groceries when there is a store literally 5 minutes down the street where they can buy everything - that’s immoral imo.
Not only because of the fucked up working conditions of delivery workers, the wasteful packaging and energy wasted on delivery vehicles but also because it’s an unhealthy and antisocial lifestyle.
And yea it kills small businesses often as well - not always ofc.
Take with a grain of salt.
Like with so many things the 80/20 rule is useful here
> I also think ordering everything online is inherently immoral (provided you are an able bodied person living in a city)
Most things that I buy on Amazon (and other online shops) are simply not easy to get in the city where I live (and it's not a small city). I very recently wrote about this topic in a HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50063708
Additionally, keep in mind that getting into the city center means a bicycle ride of nearly 25 minutes (using a tram (or hypothetically a car) wouldn't be much faster) per direction. So, any shopping that I do in the city will automatically have an overhead of at least 50 minutes just for getting there and back again. To this, you have to add the time that you need to find the respective item in the shop (for bigger shops, this can take some time even if it sells what you need).
This is still often worth it if you are very certain that you will get what you want. But if you are not certain about this, you typically wasted at least 90 minutes. I admit that for some kinds of items/shop, this risk is mitigated because some shops (e.g. the next hardware store) let you check online which items are available in the store.
Then, in Germany there are so opening times of shops. Since the city where I live is rather large, most shops are open at least until 8 pm. In smaller cities, shops often close much earlier (say 6 pm). At least if you are living in a smaller city, shopping often thus requires careful coördination with work time.
I (used to) live in big cities in Germany and for me the next big grocery store or street with a lot of small shops for basically everything I need day to day was about 10-15 minutes walking distance.
As a laptop worker I usually enjoy being able to move my body a bit.
Similar for the 20 minute bike ride for a more specialised shop.
And of course sometimes I would order online if I can’t find it in a normal store. But never from Amazon ;)
Going after the examples you mentioned in your other post:
- books of any kind i can order in a nearby book store, about 10 minutes from my home; sure it sometimes takes a week or so but it’s a real book store with actual people working there who love books. Haven’t yet found a book they couldn’t get, but my reading also isnt very obscure.
- maker supplies i cant really say, but I probably would also have to order them online, no idea
- games i buy online, I can’t remember when I last got a physical copy of a game; but then again I play the same 5 games for the last 2 decades
maybe people like you should step up and build something? Easy to "bezos this bezos that" but the man changed the world with Amazon, and created insane amount of wealth due to providing even more insane amount of benefit to the world.
How am I supposed to get japanese sharpening stone? Local shops carry garbage products. And first online non Amazon search is a site where all 3 of my clicks on various items in the page resulted in error 500 : https://www.knivesandtools.de/de/pt/-shapton-glass-stone-hr-...
yeah, the city shops, over charging things, no catalog to go thru, spend my own time going there, finding things, then carry back. Multiply by people living in the city.
Next you will say it is immoral to ride a car, we are destroying horse stable worker's lives.
Well if you want me to go there;
Cars are directly killing >1 million people per year worldwide, while for example cocaine contributes (indirectly) to maybe 200.000 deaths worldwide if you are being generous.
So driving a car is 5 times more immoral than being a cocaine dealer.
Closest city where I have any market is 30 minutes bike ride. Closest city where I can find some good stuff is 25 min car ride (3 hours bike?). I guess I should just stay home, starve and die?
Most of those deaths are fault of politicians. Make getting driving license more strict (like Germany). Apply follow distance law instead of idiotic speed limits, fine like crazy for reckles driving. DUI driving? 5 years license ban. Next time: jail.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
I'd say this is probably a US privilege. Ive had some trouble returning items in india
US customers are nuts. I recently heard from a vendor (small business) that someone demanded a refund because they didn't like the taste of the beverage they bought. That's not the crazy part. The crazy part is that the vendor refunded their money instead of laughing them out the door.
You think people are supposed to be forced to accept things they don’t like or are unhappy with as customers? Let me make sure I understand: if you go buy a sandwich, and it tastes so bad you can’t even eat it, your answer is, “aww shucks, they got me again, I should lose money!”
…and are not only “okay” with that, but enjoy it so much as to go online to ridicule others who don’t do the same? Weird.
How bad can a sandwich even taste that you can't eat it? As long as it's safe to eat and the same product as advertised I don't know why a shop should refund.
Any customer could return their half eaten sandwich and get all their money back. I can't go to the cinema and decide I don't like the movie after 10 minutes to get my money back.
That's a different matter altogether. The food is bad, get refund.
But if you've never drunk Fanta Blueberry before and you try that new flavour, you don't get to ask for a refund because you decide you don't like it and prefer the original orange flavoured Fanta.
Here is an example: my wife purchased a drink product and the product she received tastes strongly of chemicals to her. She has no way to know if that is because the company made a mistake. Do you think it is her responsibility to throw away money when she cannot consume a product that tastes of chemicals? “Too bad you don’t like the taste, you shouldn’t have tried us, pick a different brand next time!” Don’t think I’d be interested in being a customer of a company that agrees with you.
The one issue here is that to achieve this result and make the customer king (or spoiled child, you choose), they exploit and abuse absolutely everyone else, people and partners.
Foreign seller on Amazon ships from China to the US. Returns? Random person's US address. Customer is happy. Seller is happy. Random person where all the unused car seats are dumped -- very unhappy.
I'm a customer, though, not the moral police. I don't have the time, energy or inclination to screen every company before buying from them.
Everyone large enough will have a few disgruntled people making up bad things that might or might not be true. In the case of amazon, the few claims I followed up on turned out to be exaggerated or false.
Such is the reality as we perceive it through our senses. Everyone has to put up with certain corrupt practices in order to preserve their sanity and resources, such as time and money.
And they fail at making the customer king even. I can't name a single other platform where customer support is so bad and unreachable. Directly ordering in china even offers better customer support in case something is wrong.
I am using Amazon for 15+ years and I have nothing but the best to say about their customer support.
The issues with the monopoly are true, but in this instance I am happy to pay a bit more and not to be vulnerable to fake sites, dodgy sellers who do not replace an obviously bad product and the like
I bought a pack of cell batteries a while ago. They arrived after 2 months instead of a few days, have been the wrong kind, the packaging was really dirty and the cells didn't all work. Still took several weeks and like 5 emails to get my money back.
I couldn't imagine a worse customer support than this.
> Directly ordering in china even offers better customer support
That is 180-degrees off of my experience.
Chinese sellers go so far as to actually claim they are US or UK sellers, right up until you have to return something. I bought a size 6-1/2 blue hat; they shipped a size 7 black hat; the return mail to China ("We're a USA company!") would have cost me 75% of the initial purchase.
I protested to Discover; they eventually decided I ordered what I got (WHAT???), and sided with the seller.
As a long time Amazon customer I stopped Prime and stopped using the platform because all of those went downhill and unreliable as their prices went up - even after they opened a local warehouse in my same city limits
Eh, this seems to depend on the product and/or whether it was fulfilled by Amazon? In the last year we had to ship articles 3 times to Slovakia, 2 of them being lost along the way. It was also a “you pay for your own return and we’ll reimburse you 8€” thing, which is not the cost of shipping items to Slovakia. What’s up?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
That has not been my experience. Amazon meets their delivery estimates about half the time. It's not a huge issue because they're usually only a day late, but I suspect they may be deliberately misstating how quickly they can deliver to help with sales.
Other retailers are also off, oftentimes more, but they usually don't market based on delivery time as much as Amazon seems to and I generally order from them when they are less costly.
When you search for a product on Amazon and sort by price, it makes some products magically "disappear", and gives you more expensive products first, or plays dumb and inserts unrelated products. It's all done to discourage searching for better prices.
Yup, when it's like this then the customer could, if they wanted, downsize in terms of local tool/part/food/appliance storage and save much more than if they had low prices but unreliable service. For some people, city dwellers, this service could facilitate a totally different lifestyle.
Am in Europe and pivoting away from Amazon because they started using own carriers and the insane practice of leaving parcels in front of your door. Should have probably left earlier but price + convenience are often hard to beat.. Especially as different amazons all deliver for free across Europe but have different prices so you can even arbitrage between them.
> When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does
2% for me in the last 6 months (1/51 orders). I live in San Francisco not some remote location. I’ve had 3 orders where the estimate up until purchase was “arriving today” get delayed by 2+ days. And Amazon support is one of the worst at actually doing the thing they said they’d do.
So I’ve got a refund on my Prime membership for this year and won’t be renewing next because I’m in exactly the situation you say you won’t want to deal with.
> When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does.
These days my only reason to get mad at them is that they will regularly deliver an item earlier than their communicated shipping date, which is almost as annoying as delivering later.
I don't really mind if it arrives tomorrow or in two weeks, but please don't have it arrive at any other date. Also don't mind changing that date down the line, as long as I am kept in the loop and can plan accordingly.
I've bought something the other week that I'm still waiting to be delivered. The shop was fine, sent it out within hours.
The carrier has been letting them down every single step of the way (and to add insult to injury, I have to use that damn "Shop" app to track the delivery.) From a pick up on the 1st of October, they've supposedly had the package go back and forth between Los Angeles and here a couple of times.
Not sure what the price difference is for them to have used this carrier, but it can't be worth it compared to the fuss both of us are having trying to get the carrier to actually deliver the shipped product. The vendor is going to send a second one if the delivery doesn't happen to day like the carrier pinky promises it will (they've promised for 3 days straight it was going to be delivered that day, so I'm not holding my breath)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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. “
That part is fine. The fact that Amazon controls their vendor's pricing across the rest of their channels is a major issue though. It's price fixing tbh.
I really don't understand this monopoly argument at all for Amazon. What category of product is sold there, but nowhere else? Between big box stores, Wal-Mart, Target, eBay, B&H, local stores, independent online stores. I don't feel at all that I'm forced to shop at Amazon for lack of choice. Is this an American thing?
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.
Yes, Costco's proprietary program has different rules from Amazon's proprietary program. This is obvious.
I am suggesting that for a manufacturer larger than the very smallest, compliance is simple. They just create another SKU (or brand) and sell it for less off Amazon. Voila, the customer cannot purchase the same product for less money off of Amazon.
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 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.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 77.2 ms ] threadAnd 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)
https://markupcalculation.com/markup-by-industry?hl=en-US
It's not simply that products are priced poorly, but it is also that they seem to be priced just at the threshold where the purchase remains sufficiently convenient not to shop locally or elsewhere online.
Because of their predatory practices it seems online prices are roughly identical for Western branded products at all online retailers. For Chinese brands, it's long been cheaper to use AliExpress but shipping isn't as fast and returns aren't as convenient.
But that's perception. I blocked Amazon and continued shopping as usual. The volume of my purchases is now through local retailers, and I'm buying roughly the same amount of stuff but I'm spending a great deal less.
I really should just cancel my prime now.
Unlike the US I believe in practice it's all but guaranteed next day too
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...
The EU are currently running an investigation into how this affects market dynamics, which will be interesting to see
Also, it is common to see in the US competitors with lower prices than Amazon (e.g. I frequently see brand name products on Microcenter cheaper than Amazon), not to mention that it doesn't apply to sites like eBay. So you've got to wonder if it actually has a strong effect on pricing across the internet.
Online stores should be forced to allow manufacturers to use their sites as free advertising platforms to expose consumers to their products, while incentivizing them to actually complete the transaction someplace else?
Should brick-and-mortar stores not be allowed to offer price matching either?
This is clearly manipulative and is regulated outside the US.
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.
If Amazon is charging that while also offering advertising/product discovery services that traditional distributors wouldn't offer, it sounds like a bargain based on what you're describing.
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.
If you think this exists for your benefit, please feel free to bask in the illusion of your wild runaway success.
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.
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.
The tricky part now is identifying the individual CN vendors which are not yet well known in the English marketplace, that are also known to make good quality things (and generally they're not cheap), I'll use Sofirn flashlights and headlamps as an example. Mostly not sold via Amazon.
The name brand and third party batteries from actual companies both performed great.
The garbage knockoffs were not a "small difference in better quality control", they had completely different battery cells, lower capacity, missing safety features, were easy to overheat, etc.
Also look at the reports coming in from governments around the world on clothes sold by some of these companies. All manner of illegal toxins. You report them, the seller changes some consonants around and relists under the new name.
I'd encourage everyone to do their own homework on this if they really think the differences aren't significant. And the problem is unless you test to failure or send things to labs you don't know if you rolled the dice and got lucky or not, until your house burns down or your toddler gets a weird autoimmune thing that you have no family history of.
Project Farm?
Temu’s UI is unusable. You are constantly presented with roulette wheels for coupons you can’t dismiss. Its dark patterns have dark patterns. AliExpress is only mildly better in that you can dismiss stuff.
Both T and A still have listings for things that will likely result in you getting something entirely different. This usually applies to more expensive and physically larger items. You might order a greenhouse and get a photo of one or a schematic of one. And I don’t mean that the description will make it clear.
Both have a pattern where they might list let’s say an MP3 player which costs $30 but the price on the listing will be $3 because one of the product variants is just the case.
Amazon has comparatively reliable shipping and it’s included with the price on a majority of products if you have a Prime membership. While Temu and AliExpress do have US-based shipping they still don’t guarantee when the thing will arrive and if you are looking at these products the price difference basically disappears.
I am not defending Amazon by any means, but purely on usability it wins hands down.
The dark pattern on listing prices is real though. As it is the lower level of quality control - the same sellers will put the same product on both Amazon and Chinese stores, but the latter will get production batches that are lower quality (coil whine, etc).
eBay do that too. Really annoying. Some day I'll make a browser extension to highlight it.
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?
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.
This particularly brand (BTLOS) will come up on searches similar to "good Chinese carbon wheel brands" with reviews on FB, Reddit, etc.
And the cycling industry has had Chinese brands making inroads for a decade or more. So, Winspace, BTLOS, and a few others have come to be known entities (some do sell through AliExpress, some direct from their own site). And there's a niche group of product testers on YT or similar that review these things.
I assume there are analogous items in other hobbies, but I can't speak to any specific examples/brands.
The "problem" with China is they have a massive economy built on building to a price, no matter how low the price may be. They're perfectly capable of creating high-end electronics like iPhones and disposable crap that sells for pennies on Amazon or Ali.
There doesn't seem to be the same cohesive brand-building/reputation-buidling effort that we saw with Japanese and Korean companies in the 80s-00s+. Granted, Amazon/Ali didn't exist, and the market for "$1 junk" wasn't the same. No easy answers (if it's even a thing that needs solved).
But when those items arrive on Amazon the $1 crap gets sold for $9, and the $10 is completely absent because people think it is a ripoff compared to the "$9" one.
Labelling requirements have a long history of backfiring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1QcjsjjtRc
I actually have a recent example : I do woodworking and for the last step of finishing some of the thing I build, I use a mixture of beeswax and linseed oil. Beeswax has been harder and harder to find locally. Not so long ago, every hardware shop had some. Now it has been displaced by synthetic product. So unless you know a local beekeeper, you are sol. So, resigned, I went to Amazon. It had a trove of listing for "100% natural beeswax". Turns out, ALL of them are paraffin dyed to look like beeswax. You can report it to Amazon, they don't care. They will reimburse you, but never remove the listing.
* https://imgur.com/gallery/beeswax-test-with-uv-lamp-c3uBW3G
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.
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.
“Poorly made in china” was an edifying book to read.
Same as parent, I'm amazed by the quality I get, but I'm also not looking for brands or vendors that try to piggy back on some halo effect.
That means choosing carefully what to buy from where, pouring over the specs and reviews for every purchase, but as I'm getting products that just don't exist elsewhere, that's a mental burden I'm fine with.
Deviant Ollam did a video about it.
how do they have your email? this makes me worried
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?
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).
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.
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.
In UK, the average for my AliExpress orders is now 1 week.
If you manage to navigate your way through a bunch of FAQ pages to find the chat button, you'll be met with a basic AI chatbot that just tries to repeat those same FAQ entries back to you. If you manage to also navigate that and convince it that you need to talk to a human (you'll need to confirm it like 3 times), you might get lucky and finally be able to chat with a person who can barely speak English and will actively lie to you in an attempt to end the chat faster.
Here's a recent experience of mine: I managed to get a deal on a 4TB Samsung SSD, something like $330 before shipping on Amazon.com. I'm in Europe, so shipping would be pretty expensive, but even so it was still an amazing deal considering how expensive SSDs are now. So I ordered it, and two months later it was still not shipped with absolutely no word whatsoever from Amazon. So I got in contact with their support, they could never once tell me what was actually happening, they'd just repeat something like "I have filed a ticket with the fulfillment center and you will receive a shipping update within 48 hours" every time. It was always a lie - I would wait, not hear anything back, and contact them again. Did this 5 times, every time I'd get a similar response, once I was thrown around between 4 different support agents and none of them said anything of value. Eventually gave up and just canceled the order.
Once I used Inmail to get a DHL SVP to get his executive assistant to follow up why my package hadn't arrived... The assistant Cc'd me on messages a Friday afternoon and made it clear said SVP wanted updates. Monday morning the package that I had been told was on a ship being returned to the seller in the US arrived from a depot 5 minutes away from my office in London.
I'm guessing most people at that level are so insulated from their customers experiences that getting a request like that is totally novel for most of them - it's worked for me several times.
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.
Prices are much better than the consumer-focused brands and normally everything is higher quality as well.
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.
Oh and prime video has ads now.
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.
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
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.
Do the Airpods Max sound like you'd expect from a 550 USD Apple headphone?
There are many amusing videos of someone in China setting up counterfeit AirPods on a train, and every single person with an iPhone on the train car did that animation. The counterfeiters took pride that their product had a “stronger connection” than the real thing.
https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Wireless-Bluetooth-Headphones-C...
[0] https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t...
Agents should make it easier to present the option to go cheap direct, or see the price with better delivery times and return policy (e.g. Amazon).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Answer: you probably would, but Amazon engages in illegal, coercive price fixing to drive up the prices on those other sites by $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.
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.
(2) Unbending idealism is self-destructive. We wouldn't even be able to touch money, nevermind credit cards, if we were fully principled.
(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.
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.
Wikipedia describes them as variety stores and has a list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_store#North_America
The notion that, if more people did this, prices might come down everywhere only stiffens my resolve.
Showed what make believes people have.
I'm a guy that is pretty lazy and spends most of his money on convenience and not having to do stuff. It's not even convenient.
It's always a bit scary what things people believe end up believing about completely depending on one company.
What's it good for? Chronic shopping addiction dopamine?
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
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.
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.
That however can be solved with laws, like we did in Europe.
Disclaimer: I mostly shop from German, Danish, and to a lesser extend other EU sellers.
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...
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.
And the fulfilment fee is not a fixed percentage of the price, it depends on the size, weight and price tier of the item.
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
Sadly it’s still a better experience for her than shopping in-person because at least 5% of the items do fit versus nothing in-store. You used to be able to alter that stuff but the cheapness of the fabric and the intricacy of the “on-trend” design makes that impossible these days.
The problem is thats it is a 2 dollar product that could be sold and fulfilled by some other seller for 10 but you cant do that because Amazon's pricing scheme.
Shop around and you are likely see the same product with a different "name" on it for 1/2 the price.
That "shopping around" for with price being the sole factor is the problem. That's what drives quality down. Not the Amazon markup.
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 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.
Good for you, nice anecdote. Whilst we are sharing, I've calculated Amazon have stolen close to $20k of my money which I am hoping to recoup through this lawsuit alone. Happy for you though.
I posted it twice, but duly noted that reaches your personal threshold for defining spam.
> The law suit is clearly about mistakes in the return process over 9 years claiming to account for 600 million dollars in returns.
Maybe you should have actually read the article first, where it quoted the total settlement topped $1bn. The proposed figures were $1.1bn using Amazon’s own estimates, whereas an objector in the case proposed $1.5bn.
> Amazon does 600 billion a year in revenue. So 600 million over 9 years is a fraction of a fraction of a percent. Hope that helps.
Right. And how would their AWS, subscription, advertising, licensing, or third-party seller revenue be relevant here exactly? Why should their worldwide revenue be considered when this is a US only settlement? In fact, why would revenue be relevant at all here? Unless your point is that the figure is so insignificant for Amazon that consumer rights and stealing over $1bn from customers shouldn't be a worthwhile consideration? In which case I agree.
Hope that helps.
Be careful there. I use Allegro in Poland, where next-day is the rule, their website doesn't scream it was made in the late '00s (in the worst meaning of this comparison), and, as a bonus, they don't compete with their own merchants and even happen to pay their taxes here fairly. I'm sure there's plenty more of such websites across the 'planet'.
The same way Uber Eats pay is 22$ an hour, and yet most people working either of these gigs need food stamps to live?
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.
And Walmart gets away with $14 because Walmart is intellectually stimulating?
Sure both sucked, but an Amazon warehouse is much more dull. It is truly mind numbing work, the only enjoyable aspect was seeing how many sex toys people bought when they were stuck at home. It's noisy, hot, and you do the same task for your entire shift. You could not wear headphones or listen to music. You are micromanaged to a degree I have never seen before like timing your bathroom breaks. They even had thermal cameras at the entrance to see if you were hiding any stolen product under your clothes, and insisted they were for detecting employees coming to work with a fever.
Walmart was a relaxing experience by comparison.
On top of that, that's without a $150/yr subscription.
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.
It arrives when it arrives.
We never do impulse buys for frivolous throwaway consumerism junk but fast ~2 day delivery is still very helpful because... Life Happens ... such as stuff unexpectedly breaking and you want to have a replacement 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 a key 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 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.
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 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").
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.
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]
Even the great stores like McMaster-Carr are kind of unpleasant to use, because the shipping is so slow (even though everything else about the experience is far superior to Amazon.)
At least in my experience, UPS, Fedex, etc., tend to deliver when the estimate says.
UPS is generally pretty good.
Out of the last ~20 orders (I don't order that often from them, so that's probably spanning the whole last 12 months or more), more often than not, the predicted delivery date has been adjusted upwards, often by ~2 days, and a few times by ~a week.
This may be specific to Germany/Berlin, as from what I hear, they (/ their subcontractors) have troubles finding delivery drivers. Mixed with the growing counterfeit issues, and degrading product description / details for most products, Amazon doesn't seem to be in it's prime.
Maybe 2 years later I tried the free trial of Prime, if only to quiet the ads, and it was great... they must of extended their logistics network into my area and I get a lot of stuff in 1 day or 2 days now. I went through a phase of taking discounted or free Prime offers when I could but broke down and I've been maintaining a Prime subscription. It's probably not really worth it because my pattern is that I am typically heads down doing this or that and every other month or so I do a burst of buying stuff that I'd wanted for a while or I am doing some project that requires a lot of stuff. Then I might go a month and buy nothing on AMZN.
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.
2. Even if it is non-FBA it should be in the interest of Amazon to have stronger enforcement for non-FBA sellers that are consistently lying about their delivery dates in order to get a sale. That should be pretty easy to track. In the past the variance of delivery dates hasn't been that bad, even for non-FBA sellers.
You could also flip around the reading to.. boohoo poor sellers have to raise their prices elsewhere and take higher margin?
Why don't they figure out how to ship/delivery more quickly with a competitor with all those extra margin dollars they are being forced by Amazon to take elsewhere?
How could a regular webshop possibly compete with a behemoth which has warehouses in literally every major city, which has its own dedicated fleet of delivery vehicles, and which has its own fleet of cargo planes? When you've got a single warehouse and have to rely on DHL/USPS/FedEx, you will never beat them on delivery time when Amazon is actually trying: Amazon can trivially offer same-day delivery and eat the cost until you go out of business.
And don't forget: Amazon has an even bigger margin. If they were to compete on price, they would easily win. But they aren't competing on price because they know they have a quasi-monopoly, so they can just enjoy the extra profit.
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.
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?
Behavior which is often ruled anti-competitive and illegal.
https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/cases/dec_docs/40...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Massive monopoly power.
> 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 they were 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.
> 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.
And on top of "percent of sales in the world" being the wrong metric, Amazon is approaching a trillion dollars in product sales. The Amazon GDP is bigger than most countries.
> Parity means the price for the end customer, or at the very least the advertised price for the end customer.
If that's the definition, then parity is not automatically a good thing.
If I want to sell my product to different stores for $50 and let them price it how they want, I should be allowed to do that, and no contract should block that competition.
Amazon will yell at you and threaten your sales if another store drops the price, even if you had no involvement.
> Ideally the benefit is mutual. Usually the benefit has to be mutual for business to be made.
And Amazon is so powerful it's absorbing 90% of the benefit and suppressing the competition that would change that. That's bad.
> 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.
Amazon has been spending a lot of that goodwill, and they could be just as good to customers without inflating prices and squeezing their suppliers so hard.
Your average business with a real brand name might even care more about their reputation than Amazon does. You're coming across as ridiculously infatuated with Amazon if you think they're that far above the average company.
It would. That's why they're still on Amazon. That's why Amazon is charging them. That's business and running a company means competing in business.
Companies aren't people. They don't deserve any empathy. They have to compete in an antagonistic environment against other companies for the benefit and mercy of receiving the customer dollar. That's how it is supposed to be in order to benefit customers.
At most, businesses who deserve our empathy and a bit of slack should be local businesses who employ people where we live.
You argue that because Amazon is a big company they have some kind of outsized influence. In the market of consumer goods they are just a dwarf compared to the total size of the market. And they have competitors who are also giant and perfectly capable of competing in every space they operate. Nobody likes Amazon. I certainly don't like them, but I use them when it is beneficial for me as a customer.
> If I want to sell my product to different stores for $50 and let them price it how they want, I should be allowed to do that, and no contract should block that competition.
You aren't selling your product directly to Amazon. You are using them as a marketplace / sales service for selling your products to customers. If you were selling your product to Amazon directly, then there shouldn't be any price parity contract, I agree.
> Amazon will yell at you and threaten your sales if another store drops the price, even if you had no involvement.
In practice I wonder how these situations pan out. Like you say, it is impossible for a seller to control how other stores price the item.
This isn't about empathy for corporations. I'm being overcharged because of these policies, because I'm effectively forced to pay the Amazon overhead no matter where I buy. I don't like wasting my money.
> They have to compete in an antagonistic environment against other companies for the benefit and mercy of receiving the customer dollar. That's how it is supposed to be in order to benefit customers.
And this version of price parity makes it much harder for other storefronts and marketplaces to compete.
> In the market of consumer goods they are just a dwarf compared to the total size of the market.
Their share of online consumer goods gives them tons of power. Half a trillion dollars is not weak here.
> You aren't selling your product directly to Amazon. You are using them as a marketplace / sales service for selling your products to customers. If you were selling your product to Amazon directly, then there shouldn't be any price parity contract, I agree.
And so the loophole is built.
In a marketplace setup, enforcing a version of price parity that keeps the same end price regardless of fees causes bad results.
> In practice I wonder how these situations pan out. Like you say, it is impossible for a seller to control how other stores price the item.
From what I've seen it's very effective. Beg/threaten that store to increase prices, likely drop your Amazon price to unsustainable levels in the mean time so you don't have to fight later to get Amazon to reattach you to the buy button.
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".
And that price is supposedly separate from the shipping cost.
It's a shame neoliberals hallowed out US manufacturing but at least consumers around the world are benefitting.
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.
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).
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 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.
...and I am being generous by focusing on the pee instead of the deaths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon_worker_fataliti...
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.
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!"
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.
The other month my wife ordered something inexpensive from Best Buy that got shipped. I am 90% certain the FedEx delivery person took it, impossible to find the easiest way to resolve the matter with BestBuy. Amazon while historically it was not always intuitive to find the chat feature. I could always get there and the problem was fixed.
I've never had such a poor experience, including being repeatedly lied to by CS, and this was the last straw for me. I honestly don't miss Amazon, I buy less stuff and feel better about it.
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.
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.
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.
Most of my recent returns were for receiving used product.
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…
I also had a debacle with Turkish airlines (I will never fly this shitty airline again, and discourage anyone to do so). They tried to get the airline to pay but were stonewalled and eventually paid us what the airline should have (a couple thousand euros).
Then they canceled our policy because we weren’t profitable risks anymore haha.
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.
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.
Now they have a new fan, and they have their money back. The shitbird customer is pleased with their infinite-fan life hack.
Their return goes back normal stock.
---
It's ugly and reprehensible. It happens all the time. It happens with places that are down the street, too.
Like: Auto parts. When you stop in at Autozone to get a new water pump for your Ford, the person there retrieves it, brings it to the counter, opens the box, and looks at it.
The primary thing they're looking at is the condition. They want to make sure it looks new before they hand it over to you.
Because distributors sometimes send out used parts as new. Because customers are scumbags sometimes, and people are lazy sometimes, and shit gets put into the wrong piles sometimes, and -- like any other aspect in life -- it's imperfect.
The switcharoo could have happened anywhere. Maybe even in another store with a different marquee in another state.
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.
The last straw was getting a blood pressure monitor (which they don’t even sell) in place of £400 smart glasses. They insisted I returned the monitor, then said I failed to return the glasses. Took months for them to refund me.
9 out of 10 I ask say it's about reliable delivery (not necessarily next day). Most people order things because they need them and have read the reviews, not because they are speculating at something they may need or are ok with getting something else.
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...
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.
Why? If I sell a quality product I have no fear of excess returns.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU
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.
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 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.
I just try to buy good brand stuff. You can always ask your agent if a particular brand is high quality (e.g, ordered some BRAINGAIN weights instead of chinese crap)
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.
There is too little detail in the GP to draw a conclusion, so this comment seems unfair.
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.
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.
Safe to say I ended up buying my next TV (actually a monitor this time) from amazon, too. If they struggle with that kind of return then what would anyone else do? I don't have a car, I need someone to come and pick it up.
Taking returned items from customers is only the beginning of the process. The real difficulties show up after that. Which of the returns can be sold as new, which can be sold as-is, and which can be repaired / refurbished. What if a unit is returned once again? Did the customer return counterfeit? How to detect bad-faith actors (which may be the seller)? Who is to blame for damages? What if the item requires special handling (household chemicals, batteries, etc.)? And how to safely dispose / liquidate inventory while being compliant to all the regulations? And, imagine adding taxes, revenues, fees, on top of all that.
A lot of these questions are very labor-intense. It may be possible to automate some bits here and there, but the complexity is inherent to the problems.
It'd be really hard to imagine a random startup can handle returns half as well. Amazon's regulatory compliance team is probably many times larger than a random average startup. Here the economies of scale is really in favor of the big players.
They just sell it in bulk and leave it to regular folk to buy pallets or containers and sell the shit on WhatNot.
i believe it also autofilled the address form for me.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
There are many good moral reasons for ordering stuff online, see my other reply.
But often I see peers ordering in groceries when there is a store literally 5 minutes down the street where they can buy everything - that’s immoral imo.
Not only because of the fucked up working conditions of delivery workers, the wasteful packaging and energy wasted on delivery vehicles but also because it’s an unhealthy and antisocial lifestyle.
And yea it kills small businesses often as well - not always ofc.
Take with a grain of salt.
Like with so many things the 80/20 rule is useful here
Most things that I buy on Amazon (and other online shops) are simply not easy to get in the city where I live (and it's not a small city). I very recently wrote about this topic in a HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50063708
Additionally, keep in mind that getting into the city center means a bicycle ride of nearly 25 minutes (using a tram (or hypothetically a car) wouldn't be much faster) per direction. So, any shopping that I do in the city will automatically have an overhead of at least 50 minutes just for getting there and back again. To this, you have to add the time that you need to find the respective item in the shop (for bigger shops, this can take some time even if it sells what you need).
This is still often worth it if you are very certain that you will get what you want. But if you are not certain about this, you typically wasted at least 90 minutes. I admit that for some kinds of items/shop, this risk is mitigated because some shops (e.g. the next hardware store) let you check online which items are available in the store.
Then, in Germany there are so opening times of shops. Since the city where I live is rather large, most shops are open at least until 8 pm. In smaller cities, shops often close much earlier (say 6 pm). At least if you are living in a smaller city, shopping often thus requires careful coördination with work time.
I (used to) live in big cities in Germany and for me the next big grocery store or street with a lot of small shops for basically everything I need day to day was about 10-15 minutes walking distance. As a laptop worker I usually enjoy being able to move my body a bit. Similar for the 20 minute bike ride for a more specialised shop.
And of course sometimes I would order online if I can’t find it in a normal store. But never from Amazon ;)
Going after the examples you mentioned in your other post:
- books of any kind i can order in a nearby book store, about 10 minutes from my home; sure it sometimes takes a week or so but it’s a real book store with actual people working there who love books. Haven’t yet found a book they couldn’t get, but my reading also isnt very obscure.
- maker supplies i cant really say, but I probably would also have to order them online, no idea
- games i buy online, I can’t remember when I last got a physical copy of a game; but then again I play the same 5 games for the last 2 decades
Just now ordered two Japanese glass sharpening stones, from amazon :)
How am I supposed to get japanese sharpening stone? Local shops carry garbage products. And first online non Amazon search is a site where all 3 of my clicks on various items in the page resulted in error 500 : https://www.knivesandtools.de/de/pt/-shapton-glass-stone-hr-...
Next you will say it is immoral to ride a car, we are destroying horse stable worker's lives.
Good luck though.
Most of those deaths are fault of politicians. Make getting driving license more strict (like Germany). Apply follow distance law instead of idiotic speed limits, fine like crazy for reckles driving. DUI driving? 5 years license ban. Next time: jail.
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'd say this is probably a US privilege. Ive had some trouble returning items in india
…and are not only “okay” with that, but enjoy it so much as to go online to ridicule others who don’t do the same? Weird.
Any customer could return their half eaten sandwich and get all their money back. I can't go to the cinema and decide I don't like the movie after 10 minutes to get my money back.
I bought a ham sandwich at a convenience store one time.
Got in the car, started to peel back the plastic. The ham was green.
Bright green.
Went back inside, tried to explain and get a refund. Store clerk initially refused.
After a brief explanation of economics, he agreed, refunded my money, and then put the sandwich back in the cooler to resell. {facepalm}
Welcome to Earth.
The bottom of package had like 5 of those little price tag gun expiration date stickers on it, stacked on top of each other.
Inspector Clouseau could have solved the case.
But if you've never drunk Fanta Blueberry before and you try that new flavour, you don't get to ask for a refund because you decide you don't like it and prefer the original orange flavoured Fanta.
you, uh, typically can? I don't think you're understanding the concept here.
Certain items like quickly spoiling food or tickets for specific events are excluded. Items damaged by buyer are also excluded, obviously.
Law was introduced in Poland in 2014. Not sure is it EU-wide invention or local one.
Certain scam-prone cases have an extended deadline of 30 days.
Returns are often getting free shipping, but that is at discretion of seller.
https://abc7news.com/post/huge-pile-amazon-packages-fills-ba...
Foreign seller on Amazon ships from China to the US. Returns? Random person's US address. Customer is happy. Seller is happy. Random person where all the unused car seats are dumped -- very unhappy.
Everyone large enough will have a few disgruntled people making up bad things that might or might not be true. In the case of amazon, the few claims I followed up on turned out to be exaggerated or false.
The issues with the monopoly are true, but in this instance I am happy to pay a bit more and not to be vulnerable to fake sites, dodgy sellers who do not replace an obviously bad product and the like
I couldn't imagine a worse customer support than this.
That is 180-degrees off of my experience.
Chinese sellers go so far as to actually claim they are US or UK sellers, right up until you have to return something. I bought a size 6-1/2 blue hat; they shipped a size 7 black hat; the return mail to China ("We're a USA company!") would have cost me 75% of the initial purchase.
I protested to Discover; they eventually decided I ordered what I got (WHAT???), and sided with the seller.
Returns are weird because usually I just get my money back and have the keep the wrong product. Had this happen easily over 100 times already.
Besides Amazon's own faults the rest of the return process is actually good.
Still all paid for by high prices on EVERY purchase
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.
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.
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.
Don’t think any other online stores offer that in Norway, really annoying
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.
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.
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…
There should be some kind of federal law against needing to do this.
Buying direct from vendor should always be the cheapest.
Other retailers are also off, oftentimes more, but they usually don't market based on delivery time as much as Amazon seems to and I generally order from them when they are less costly.
2% for me in the last 6 months (1/51 orders). I live in San Francisco not some remote location. I’ve had 3 orders where the estimate up until purchase was “arriving today” get delayed by 2+ days. And Amazon support is one of the worst at actually doing the thing they said they’d do.
So I’ve got a refund on my Prime membership for this year and won’t be renewing next because I’m in exactly the situation you say you won’t want to deal with.
These days my only reason to get mad at them is that they will regularly deliver an item earlier than their communicated shipping date, which is almost as annoying as delivering later.
I don't really mind if it arrives tomorrow or in two weeks, but please don't have it arrive at any other date. Also don't mind changing that date down the line, as long as I am kept in the loop and can plan accordingly.
The carrier has been letting them down every single step of the way (and to add insult to injury, I have to use that damn "Shop" app to track the delivery.) From a pick up on the 1st of October, they've supposedly had the package go back and forth between Los Angeles and here a couple of times.
Not sure what the price difference is for them to have used this carrier, but it can't be worth it compared to the fuss both of us are having trying to get the carrier to actually deliver the shipped product. The vendor is going to send a second one if the delivery doesn't happen to day like the carrier pinky promises it will (they've promised for 3 days straight it was going to be delivered that day, so I'm not holding my breath)
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.
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...
“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. “
I do not get the complaint. People shop at Amazon because they see the value Amazon provides: easy returns, free and fast shipping, etc.
Yes?
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.
I am suggesting that for a manufacturer larger than the very smallest, compliance is simple. They just create another SKU (or brand) and sell it for less off Amazon. Voila, the customer cannot purchase the same product for less money off of Amazon.
If Costco requires a separate SKU, the seller still has complete pricing freedom everywhere else.
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 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.