I am a prime member who likes and uses amazon, but in my personal experience there are some issues with it.
its full of fake and counterfeit items
full of fake reviews so its harder to trust
prices aren’t always the best (other websites or IRL stores can have better prices)
A grassroots opposition to Bezos is growing
I’m wondering if Amazon is going to be like myspace, a giant website everyone uses, until something replaces it and we pretty much forget about it.
I believe amazon makes up something like half of all online shopping. So its a one stop shop, which is nice. But they don’t really offer a service that can’t be replaced? It isn’t like microsoft where all our telecommunications are based on it. If everyone started shopping at other online retailers, life would go on like it does.
Then again, walmart does the same thing (a one stop shop) and other stores have tried to compete with them (target, meijer, amazon) as well as smaller general stores (dollar general) and none have succeeded. So maybe amazon will be around for a while.
Amazon is actually much more critical to our communications. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the largest cloud provider in the game, and the most profitable part of Amazon. It’s responsible for hosting Netflix, Facebook, Twitter and this very message board just to name a few. Up until recently, Microsoft has been a software company with a limited hardware division. But that’s changing with Microsoft Azure, their answer to AWS.
Wrt Amazon’s advantages retail side, they’ve got their own cheap delivery fleet, keyless entry systems for residential complexes, that creepy deliver-inside-your-home program, physical delivery lockers and more…I don’t think they’re declining anytime soon.
I’m always still shocked just how terrible Amazon’s marketplace is and has always been. Unless you know exactly the name and model number of what you’re looking for you’re inundated with complete crap or stuff that has nothing to do with your search.
Amazon isn’t just “a website”, it’s billions of dollars of warehouses, robots, planes, sensors and other capital investments. It’s possible that this gets eventually superseded by some new entity but it won’t be an overnight process.
For me, the convenience of one-stop shopping trumps other considerations, along with convenience of having things dropped off at my door. Usually in timely fashion.
However, I’m starting to be annoyed during every visit to Amazon, because the searches insert so many “sponsored” items. It is truly hurting my ability to find the things I’m looking for. A similar problem appears on the Amazon Prime streaming service — I almost never want to rent or buy, I just want to see what is included with the service. It’s a struggle to sift through the sales pitches, so 90% of the time I look at NetFlix first.
Overall though, I don’t see Amazon losing market share in retail sales anytime soon.
Yeah the website is just the means to sell the services of the huge infrastructure behind it. Alibaba is pretty much the same as Amazon, and serves China and Asia. It doesn’t have the same infrastructure in the US (or any infrastructure in the US?) so it hasn’t taken over for Amazon here.
I have not found Amazon prices to be higher for the things we buy, which are mostly household products and electronics. It’s generally cheaper or about the same. Food is more expensive. We don’t do Fresh.
I rarely, if ever, experience any of these issues. I mean, sure, it’s possible that there might be something cheaper at a brick and mortar store, but I’m not going to hunt down something in a brick and mortar store if I don’t have to. And if there’s something cheaper on another website, it’s usually offset by not having next day free shipping. And it’s my bad if I didn’t look somewhere else on the web first, not Amazon’s. The “fake reviews” can usually be overcome by ignoring the 5 and 1 star reviews, and paying special attention to the longer thoughtful posts.
I can’t stand Jeff Bezos, but it would require something better coming along for me to switch, which is possible, but bloody unlikely anytime soon. Their infrastructure is massive.
Take a look at this list of Amazon Fulfillment Centers. It goes into the hundreds. Anybody wanting to compete with Amazon on delivery has to match that investment of hundreds of billions.
More likely is that someone will try to take over Amazon Marketplace, since fulfillment for those orders is the responsibility of the individual vendors. They’ve complained about Amazon policies for years and they might welcome a location that doesn’t hassle them as much. Some functions are already standard on eBay, which seems to be 90% buy now and 10% auctions these days, at least for the stuff I look at.
Amazon could easily fight such an attempt by demanding exclusivity. Or, as a last ditch effort, cleaning up its reviews and standards. Or, the government could start an anti-trust suit, which could break them up in maybe less than twenty years. Nothing is easy.
aren’t half of amazon products sold by third parties who just use the amazon website as a sales platform? Yeah Amazon has a lot of products in their warehouses but it also seems like a lot are third party sellers. Whats to stop another website from congregating all these third party sellers into one online platform (ebay and walmart do a lot of that though and neither competes with amazon).
I’ll admit to not having used Alibaba, but I’ve understand it’s pitch to be much more wholesale-oriented, whereas Amazon is primarily retail-oriented.
The thing that stops them is that customers are doing way more searches on Amazon, so that’s where sellers want to be. Google is probably the only real potential competitor, because of their search monopoly. Google Shopping is already a thing, but it’s not quite what you describe. Google doesn’t have a clear strategy here, but if they could figure it out - and dodge antitrust concerns about abusing their search monopoly - they’d have a chance of competing in the 3rd-party retail business.
My original experience with Alibaba led me to believe that, too. But in the past 10 years I’ve kept hearing their name and how they have taken over all of the online shopping in China. In fact, they are responsible for 80% of online shopping sales in China. I guess the site Tmall is their Amazon-like site that is “B2C” where Alibaba.com is in fact their B2B site still. And Taobao is their C2C site, ala Amazon Marketplace/eBay/Etsy.
I have a client for whom we do a web store and she’s raking in the dough via Amazon. More or better sales than her website. The draw for her is that someone looking for Item X will go straight to Amazon to look for it, and having her listing there gives her a fighting chance for their dollars. If someone has to find you via Google, or figure out what specific aggregate site to find you on, I don’t think you have as much of a chance.
Now, getting her shit to Amazon has been a struggle, and I’m sure the fees Amazon takes and the rules it sets are limiting. But for her I’m sure it’s a quantity thing - yes she has a lower margin than if she sells the thing in her brick-and-mortar store but her customer base is vastly larger.
Someone can come along and offer better rates for sellers but they can’t quite offer better exposure. I think Marketplace sellers are willing to put up with a lot of shit from Amazon (and from other sellers who cheat the system) to be able to sell there.
I made a $2,000+ purchase for business purposes from a vendor on Alibaba a couple years ago. I was sent a similar product except this one was unapproved by the Authorities Having Jurisdiction. It would be illegal to use. The vendor would neither refund me nor pay for return shipping. Alibaba told me I was shit out of luck and banned my account for reasons I still don’t understand. That product sits in my warehouse to this day. I was able to create a new account with the same info but still…
Alibaba is more similar to eBay in that it provides a marketplace for matching different vendors to customers and makes money via advertising. Tmall is their curated store which you have to be invited to join while Taobao is their anything goes store. JD is China’s equivalent of Amazon in that they are an actual retailer who owns inventory and sells it directly to consumers (as well as having a JD marketplace similar to Amazon marketplace).
The reason why the Alibaba model proved more popular in China is because most things are made there so factories can just sell directly to consumers right out of their own warehouses without the need for a middleman and deliveries are done via courier so there’s not significant savings to batching up orders. In the US, on the other hand, most things are arriving via container so you want someone else to handle the logistics of warehousing and distributing your goods and you want things arriving in one box to save on shipping costs.
AliExpress is the more small consumer oriented side. Downside to purchasing from the US, besides the counterfeits and difficulty in setting up returns, is that it can take literal months to get your stuff. I usually use it for ordering cheap sets of polyhedral dice ($2 versus $12-$16 stateside) when late-night fancy gets to me and let myself be surprised when they arrive nine weeks later. Low risk, decent reward.
As someone who buys physical items off the internet probably once a week, Walmart is eating Amazon’s lunch. Shipping times are shorter, I don’t have to wade through all the same products with vastly different pricing and shipping times. And amazon prime seems to never help with the specialty items I’m looking to buy.
Anytime I search on google for an item, and a Walmart or amazon add appears, I tend to gravitate towards the Walmart add cause I know it will be less of a hassle.
Are you ordering directly from WalMart or are you ordering from their “affiliates”? I was just wondering how good those affiliates are. Walmart.com basically seems a lot more like Amazon now because of all of those affiliates, but if you’re getting a lot of good stuff fast from them, that’s cool.
To be honest, I have no idea. For example, I recently typed “loctite 242” into the googler. The Walmart add popped up with the exact bottle I needed for $6.99 and delivery on Monday. The amazon add showed much higher prices, probably the wrong quantity, and longer shipping times. I have zero desire to wade through the amazon add, when Walmart popped up with exactly what I was looking for. Maybe if I’d of searched further, amazon would have a better deal, but I’m pretty lazy, lol
In my experience Amazon is getting slowly worse, their search has always been bad, the reviews are becoming less useful and legitimate, the ads are maddening (but I’ve blocked most of them) and their “partners” are best avoided. But who else is there? Walmart.com has occasional deals but their partners have been considerably worse in my experience, and trying to buy something means choosing between an item shipped to you from Walmart, store pickup, or a partner shipping the item. Some items can’t be shipped, some can’t be picked up in stores, it’s a mess. eBay is nothing but “partners.” Target.com isn’t too bad but I just never find myself compelled to shop there.
For better or worse, Amazon is still the best all-around combination for me.
I would never have guessed that Sears couldn’t have converted their paper catalogue service into an on line service. They had the infrastructure in place how hard could that be? Just hire some good electronic geeks and get on with it. But NO!
Who can say with Amazon? If they get greedy maybe they will be in trouble. Just this morning I looked for an electrical switch on Amazon and their price is nearly double the price at Rona. Before shipping.
