Yes. I actually do accept this, and it's OK with me. Prime has saved me so much time -- and, arguably more valuable, attention -- obtaining objects I need. I literally do not care about the price difference between a $1 and a $5 roll of tape: as long as I don't need it sooner than 2 days from now, it's comin' on amazon, because the alternative is either searching online and actually thinking about it, or leaving my home -- and my time and attention are worth much more than that.
Exactly. My time has a value and it is most definitely worth more than $4. If I need something but I don't need it right now, Amazon is the answer.
Need a pack of sharpies? Yeah, they might be a few bucks cheaper at Walmart, but then I'd have to go to Walmart. That's an hour of my time wasted driving to the store, walking all over the place to get the sharpies, waiting in line for 15 minutes or struggling with the annoying self checkouts that never work right, then driving home. And I would probably end up getting a few other things that I didn't really need because I don't want to waste the trip.
With Amazon Prime? 30 seconds max and they arrive 2 or days later. And I'm on to my next task. I have too much going on to quibble over the difference of a few dollars when the time savings is so dramatic.
Now, for a major purchase of a few hundred or more, I'm going to spend some time deal hunting. But for everyday items Amazon is plenty sufficient and the prices are usually good enough.
... and that is if they have the Sharpies. There is no way to check the inventory at Walmart before you go, so you are left to hope it is there. Each time we go to Walmart there are a couple of items not on the shelf.
The option isn't really between getting it from Amazon or getting it from Walmart. Realistically guessing, there are a fair number of places within a short driving distance where you don't need to walk far to find the Sharpies and don't need to wait in line for 15 minutes.
I'm a Prime subscriber and use it all the time for a lot of stuff. The nearest Walmart is 20 minutes away from me, so a trip there and back for something small actually would take close to an hour. However, I have local options that suffice. So if I need a Sharpie right now, I can drive a half a mile down the road to the dollar store and buy one. There is no line and the store is small enough to quickly navigate.
If I don't need the Sharpies right now, I mark it down on my list and get it the next time I do make a trip to Walmart or some other larger retail store/grocer.
I wonder where everyone lives where stopping into a store is so much time. Nowadays you can order and pay for things online. I walk into the store, give them my name, sign for something, and I'm done. Everyone here is like "I drive 30 minutes to the store...". I guess maybe HN has a lot of users who live in Alaska?
I'd suspect if people calculated their hourly rate on doing so they'd go right back to stores.
But that wasn't the point anyway. The point was that Amazon's high prices and sucky UI have opened the door to a competitor. I'm not sure it'll be Jet. I'm not even sure it'll be someone. I mean, they can just lower their prices and fix their sorting. But either way we end up better off.
If there were a site as convenient as Amazon, with comparable service, but lower prices and a better UI, wouldn't you use it? I think that's possible. I don't know if it will be Jet long-term. But it's possible, and that's interesting.
The last 2 times I did online order pick-up it was not that convenient. Best Buy pickup wasn't bad, but they couldn't find my order. Maybe looked for 4 minutes? At Walmart, I couldn't even find anyone at the pickup station! It took at least 20 minutes to get the "right" someone (I did flag multiple people down but they couldn't help me). Then it took at least 10 more minutes to go through the process. Admittedly, both experiences were about 3 years ago. Maybe I'll try again.
Yes, however, if you have other delivery services (e.g. Google Shopping Express) you should look around. Stuff on GSX can often be on sale (like in the retail stores), and even not on sale, stuff is often cheaper there. Inventory can vary, but I get it same-day or next, not 2 days later.
I use it so often that the yearly costs (like prime, about $100/y) is a drop in the bucket.
Amazon used to be less expensive, but in the past few years, I've noticed local stores are sometimes drastically cheaper on basic goods.
His complaint about returns is curious, not sure if it's country specific. I returned something to Amazon a couple of weeks ago in the UK due to some missing parts. I printed out the label, put it in the box and the next day a delivery guy showed up, slapped his own label on the outside and took it away. I had the refund applied 2 days later.
I've never returned anything to Amazon before so was surprised at how well it worked.
The bulk of his complaint about returning is the process that you went through as well (print label, put in box).
Amazon has legitimate deficiencies ie. killing off local stores with pricing pressure, horrible ui, etc, but the article goes into the deep end, like the person wants everything to be done his way without having to do any work.
I really can't imagine a simpler return process. Each time I've had to return something, I went online, stated there was a problem with the product, they immediately shipped out a new item, and I had 30 days to return the old item. I also didn't have to print off a return label, as that was included with the replacement.
Being upset that you need to put a label on a box is one of the most first-world-problems I've ever heard.
The last time I had to return something to Amazon, the refund was issued starting from the moment UPS scanned my box into their system. I had my money before Amazon even received my box.
There are complaints to be made, but the returns process is not one of them.
I'm also in the UK. I will willingly pay a premium at Amazon for tech products just because the returns process is so painless relative to other online retailers.
I think I would probably prefer a web designed in part by a blind or deafblind person.
Less visual clutter or cute CSS or JS positioning tricks, for one. If you think hijacking the scroll bar is bad, or hate sites that present a blank page if scripts are off, imagine how you might feel about incomprehensible gibberish spewing from your screen reader.
This really just seems like the author is searching for things to gripe about. Has he tried buying most things in a major store?
His points about Amazon's UI are also missing me. The UI seems perfectly adequate and friendly - which is not to say it's the best UI/UX experience ever, but that is never the only business requirement.
Have you tried shopping at B&H, for example? I have a much easier time finding things there. Newegg is also pretty decent. I get frustrated by Amazon's UI fairly often, by comparison.
Yeah, except Amazon is no longer the "everything" store. Since their spat with Google and Apple over video streaming, many official Apple and Google products have been pulled from Amazon (I don't know if this was Apple/Google's doing or Amazon's).
Amazon is trying to be a merchant and a product developer at the same time. That's not usually a marriage that ends well for either side: the product developers will overestimate what the merchant side can do (leading to inventory problems that just get pushed off to the merchant side), and the merchants are pressured into stepping on supplier relationships. I can understand with commodity items like AmazonBasics where they basically just find the best item in a category on Alibaba, order a lot and slap an Amazon logo on it, but their actual products like the Fire and Fire TV tread dangerously close to a lot of the other merchandise they sell.
This is the biggest load of entitled BS that I've read in a long time. Wow, OP has to take out tape and actually tape up the return box? Would he prefer that Amazon send someone out to his house to pick up the item and pack/ship it on their behalf, obviously for free otherwise he would be whining that he had to pay for the service.
He sounds like he would complain about having to WAIT IN LINE if he had to return the item at a physical store. What a load of crock.
Yes, Amazon's prices aren't the lowest for many things. They never say they are. Prices at Home Depot are often much, much lower for many home items, and you definitely have to do comparison shopping. Which means continuing to sit down, and move your mouse and clicking and typing. Not exactly coal mining and not exactly driving around from store to store like how we did 20 years ago.
But for me, the combination of free, fast, reliable shipping and a decent price is enough to get me buying stuff almost 3 times a week from Amazon.
Amazon.com is just ruined by third party sellers. Hard to find anything throughout the mess, and the sellers do things like inflate their sales to push them up the popularity rankings (now called "featured" rankings, so Amazon can inject paid adverts). I often just search for things, pick the department, then select "Only sold by Amazon.com" to escape the nonsense.
I'd happily use another site, but who? Target.com and Walmart.com are both worse sites with odd offline customer service (and meh shipping policies). NewEgg used to have better search/sort but also got third party seller ruined (plus return issues). I hear a few peeps about this Jet.com site, but they've extremely new and have had some issues so far.
I want a site with Amazon's amazing customer services, Amazon's shipping polices, but with a better site design. If they're going to do filtering in the search results then having them actually work correctly would be appreciated (they often don't on Amazon).
My experience with Jet.com has so far been great. I started using it maybe a month ago (right after they ditched membership fees).
Their sorting actually works. Their prices are comparable to big box stores. Their shipping is fast and free (with a minimum order, of course). It's what Amazon used to be before it started kinda sucking.
> The UI on everything Amazon does looks like it was designed by Helen Keller.
Amazon's UI, in my opinion, is a case study in heavily politicized UI design. There are too many parties involved. They all want more screen real estate. They all think their widget is already the key to Amazon's sales, and if not, they think that if they just had a bit more screen real estate that they would increase sales 10X. Because of the magnitude of the involvement and the stakes at hand, proposing a major overhaul would literally create hundreds if not thousands of internal enemies, ready to do anything and everything to take you out.
As a result, we get Times Square with a cohesive font and color scheme.
From the "I can't quit you, therefore we can't quit you" department.
I find these love-hate posts interesting.
This is the halfhearted rant of an Amazon junkie. Here is someone who uses Amazon so much that he keeps spare Amazon boxes in his attic. Someone who returns items to Amazon so often, that the inconvenience of plugging his laptop into his printer drove him to buy a new printer (from Amazon, one may assume). Someone who loves Amazon so deeply, that he cannot refrain from praising it---and indeed exonerating it---even as he publicly whines about it.
I find these posts interesting because, although the author is a rather extreme example, it seems to me that this love-hate bondage is quite mainstream, not being limited to Amazon or technophiles. Never mind the first-world indignation at Amazon's failure to meet the author's admittedly unwarranted expectations. The emotion driving this is an ethical conflict: my heart is saying go, but my head is saying stay, or vice versa. Many people (in my estimation) have similarly mixed feelings about Facebook, Apple, and Google, at variously increasing rates.
This conflict is born of dependency. Your negative feelings about something you depend on (pain, shame, frustration, disappointment), strong as they may grow, are never strong enough to overcome your sense of need, along with whatever dopamine hit you get from using it. Despite being old enough to remember a world without Amazon, the OP takes for granted that someone has to do Amazon's job: if not Amazon, then some hard-to-imagine competitor. But the OP will never leave Amazon---not for another Amazon, anyway. He has love enough for both.
So yeah, this is about the author's personal struggle with the mere idea of freedom from Amazon. But it's just as well that the title says "we've all just come to accept it."
I would love to hear someone explain why their sorting fuction is so terrible. Amazon is the only eCommerce site I've ever used that is unable to properly sort items by price. Why is that?
Amazon needs to quit filling their product database with absolute garbage and show that they actually care about the customer experience. In trying to sell absolutely everything they've made it harder to find what you're looking for.
Yesterday I was shopping for an electrical box cover. The first result I clicked on was categorized as a musical instrument (specifically, a timbale). The second one I clicked on was categorized as a pair of pliers (specifically, snap-ring pliers).
Sure, customers could misplace a few things in a physical store – but Amazon has complete control here, and they're showing us they just don't give a shit.
I love the checkout and shipping experience on Amazon. The amount of reviews is great (although many reviewers are clearly morons or just fake – that sucks too). But everything leading up to making the purchase is terrible.
I totally agree with the search problems. Even a very specific search with a 'sort by price' will include thousands of completely unrelated, miscategorised items. Their product database is junk.
Conspiracy theory: Amazon's sorting is intentionally bad so that you have to look through other items you might purchase, much like grocery stores organize so that you have to work your way through them.
I don't actually believe that, but I do find myself thinking of other things I've needed/wanted when browsing Amazon.
"Conspiracy theory" is an idiomatic phrase in en_US now.
You don't need to have an actual conspiracy, just a Them that is secretively and maliciously acting against Us. You may label any possible explanation for an observed phenomenon as a "conspiracy theory" if the following conditions are met:
- You wish to pre-empt calls for citations and evidence by admitting up front that you don't have any.
- You admit that you might not necessarily even believe your own explanation is valid in any way.
- You are explicitly discarding Hanlon's Razor. [0] The usual reasoning is that the observed behavior could only be explained by stupidity of such colossal magnitude that a much lesser amount of malice would actually be more plausible. This is usually a backhanded dig at the party that may actually be that colossally stupid. (Seriously, how many merchants can't sort a list of their merchandise by price?)
HN wouldn't let me reply to your most recent response, so I'm replying here:
All it takes is 2 people to conspire, whether they are co-workers or not. It fits very well with your first definition: 1. make secret plans jointly to commit an unlawful or harmful act
They let you set Amazon price watches. The browser/email interface works really well, with almost no mental overhead, and can save you significant money on items with volatile prices that you don't need immediately. I use it for collecting reference textbook, which I get at about 20% of the price if I bought them at a fixed time. (I'm not affiliated with them or anything, I just like it.)
He completely nailed the problem I've had with his description of looking for an iPad. If I know exactly what I want already (e.g., a book by title, or an electronic device by model number), it's usually easy. (In that case, though, I usually found what I wanted from some other source, and I purchase it there.) If I want to actually shop -- that is, survey several models of the same broad kind of item, there are quite often far too many to sift through, with few useful tools for narrowing it down. Even when I know exactly what I want, there's usually no way to filter for it.
Brick-and-mortar stores don't exactly solve this problem -- they just have far fewer choices, and you're relying on something like curation (based on expected sales). It's not always great, but it's generally preferable.
I have contacted Amazon several times to inform them about their Javascript that loads images from related/sponsored products. It causes Firefox to lock up and freeze with every image request because they are doing something that is out of the ordinary. I always tell them I would be glad to work with one of their teams to figure out the issue, but it just goes into some bin on their end to be forgotten about.
Basically just accept it and deal with it taking twenty seconds per page load before the web browser is usable again.
My wife and I moved all of our non-grocery shopping to Amazon 2 years ago. With the Barclay's "Sallie Mae Rewards" card you earn 5% cashback on Amazon purchases. This, stacked with their subscribe and save, has saved us money (that we can see in Mint) but also immeasurable time. We have our virtual quartermaster keeping us stocked and I couldn't be happier that my wife never asks me to stop at Target anymore.
Woah, you're right. That must have happened recently.
Amazon does offer a store card with 5% cashback. I've received targeted offers for it. Possibly you can research it and get yourself into the target group.
Chase Freedom is a 5% cashback rotating-categories card and it includes Amazon in the current quarter. That combined with a Sapphire Preferred is a lucrative way to earn chase reward points that are best used on travel purchases.
Discover also has an online shopping category. Both the Discover and the Freedom have no AF so I would consider getting both of them. Discover used to be better before they changed ShopDiscover. It was like a private FatWallet that often had the highest payouts.
Finally, the Amex Blue Cash offers 3% cashback on a variety of department stores. This is a great card to have for the 6% grocery discount and the department store rebate is a bonus.
Goodluck, and sorry I advertised a card offer that's no longer available.
Oh no problem, I actually tried to get that card a month ago, which is when I found out it wasn't available anymore. It's definitely the best general-usage cashback card out there, I think.
I don't like the idea of rotating rewards because it seems like I'll be driven to spend more than I usually would on each category while it's in-season.
Didn't know about the Amex Blue Cash, 6% grocery discount is pretty big. I might pick one up, although I need to look at how my credit could be affected, since I JUST got the Citi Double Cash last month.
Agreed. I think it's mostly the publishers fault but it's still annoying.
BTW, most libraries have a digital lending thing now where you can get a kindle book for free for a month or so. (And presumably renew it after that.)
And my local library's digital catalog can also find books that they don't actually have and let me click a "recommend purchase" button. Last time I clicked it, I got an email a few days later that the book was now available.
Amazon may have been cheap but now it's convenient.
Of course I would prefer that Amazon is as competitive as possible. However, as mentioned by others, the time savings of going to a store vs. shopping online justifies a little extra cost to me. Amazon solves a few other problems too:
* Security: The more online stores I use, the higher my risk of identify theft. Amazon isn't perfect, but they both have more resources and more incentive (higher stakes) to protect my information than small online retailers. One tradeoff that must be balanced is that Amazon knows more about me.
Note that if Bitcoin were more widely accepted, and retailers collected less personal information, the security offered by Amazon would be less important.
* Selection: Amazon doesn't have every product available, but it does have more selection than most retail stores. I tend to look for high value (high quality to cost ratio) products because I want things that work well and last long. It's often difficult or impossible to find the same selection at local stores.
"I think it has something to do with the fact that one item can be sold by multiple vendors at multiple prices."
It might be confusing but this will help you get lower prices often. Amazon also often lists used among the multiple vendors and you can save even more.
Search is half the battle, and admittedly searching for stuff like iPad can turn up a lot of crap iPad accessories, but after that you can shop around just on Amazon to get a really good price.
I will share one gripe though. Ever since book publishers forced Amazon to start charging more for books, it's become a lot more expensive to buy even eBooks, with a markup "violating the Geneva Convention." I very rarely buy books now. The good thing is a lot of the books I would like let you try a sample and if a book is truly outstanding I will buy it. If it's included in Kindle Unlimited I will read it too. If neither of these options are available, forget it.
I think this is a perspective that makes sense for somebody who lives in suburbia. I don't know that it would make sense to do your everyday shopping online if you have to drive to the store for other items or to return things that you bought online.
However if you live in an urban area, it's an entirely different comparison. First of all, let's face it- taping a label to a box isn't as hard as this guy describes. Second, to return it, you only have to find the closest UPS or FedEx store, which, again, in an urban environment is probably closer to you than the closest Starbucks.
That said, larger box items are almost always cheaper on Amazon than from other retailers in my experience.
So, a more appropriate title might be Amazon kind of sucks if you live in the suburbs and are trying to buy groceries or items that would retail for under three bucks.
This article is for people who haven't yet figured out that different stores sell the same things for different prices. This is the way it's always been. Come for the thing that's cheap/on sale, spend your money on something more expensive while you're there. Basic retail.
Also, you don't need packing tape or the original box to do a return. You go to a UPS or FedEx store, and they handle it for you for free. Or you order shipping supplies from FedEx, and they bring them to you for free and then come and pick up your package from you.
This isn't any harder than returning something to a physical store, and in fact it's still easier in many cases because you don't have to wait in line or answer annoying questions.
I don't see it. Can't agree with the premise. I use their site because of how convenient it has made my life. Give me something better and I'll switch, otherwise I really couldn't care less about any of these complaints.
You forgot to mention that they charge you shipping fees if the reason to return is a simple "you changed your mind". Of course that is comparable to the time you spend driving to the local store. But still, if you are a prime member returns are not free shipping.
UPS stores near my house (and fedex too) all charge to tape up boxes and print out labels.
> You forgot to mention that they charge you shipping fees if the reason to return is a simple "you changed your mind"
That is true, and it can really bite you if the item is heavy (speaker stands are my personal example - $17 to return $40 stands... I just kept them).
On the other side of the continuum though sometimes Amazon will tell you to just destroy the item and won't make you ship it back. That's always a nice surprise.
I don't know if it's a regional difference (suburban SV here), but my UPS guy always shows up to my door with his own label and tape. It's REALLY convenient.
Delivery drones (http://www.amazon.com/b?node=8037720011) could make amazon better than actually going out to buy even 1 roll of tape, and returning stuff too.
I have been a Prime member since 2012. Since having a kid, my free time has decreased, so I value being able to order something late at night and having it show up one or two days later. Time is money. I also like their return system. Its one system that works for everything I buy on Amazon. I don't have to learn a whole new return system for 10 different sites or call someone up on the phone and spend 20 minutes trying to figure out how to return something.
I've found this to be true of a lot of time, but the shipping I somewhat disagree on. I don't know any third party store that offers free two day shipping with a prime equivalent. Maybe if I stopped buying Prime and used the savings to upgrade delivery on sites it would be equivalent. But on things like microwaves and refrigerators, I don't see anyone beating two day delivery. The Amazon markup is worth it at that point, for me at least.
As somebody with big feet, who used to have to stomp from store to store Amazon was and still is a life-saver. Filter by size and click and all available shoes are displayed before you; no questions asked upon return if it's not quite right. E-Bay was always that little bit more precarious. For anybody whose ever on the long tail of anything Amazon has saved the day.
It's pretty easy to find competitors that are cheaper than amazon, but it's not as common to find ones who will ship as quickly and still be cheaper. (Even if you exclude prime.)
Also, why does Amazon seem to be the only site on the internet that will give you a guaranteed delivery date and refund you the shipping cost if they miss it?
I've been a customer of Amazon since 1999 and I've never had a problem with them. They treat me better than Walmart, they cost less than the corner store, and it's quick and easy. I'm tired of people saying I should pay more and put up with more bullshit just to support a smaller company.
I still remember the day I typed in cdnow.com and it took me to amazon.com, sometime around 2002 I believe. That was when I started to take amazon seriously. I wonder if they are making so much from their cloud computing services that the retailing will become less of a concern for them.
Speaking as a very careful shopper, my experiences at AMZN are quite different from the blogger's.
- Pricing
Amazon has excellent prices, even after they started charging sales tax in my state, and even after factoring in the annual Prime fee. Often the affiliate vendors don't charge sales tax[1], and sometimes they are a couple of bucks cheaper than the Prime price. I keep trying to find better deals elsewhere -- Ebay sometimes beats them -- but other vendors really can't compete.
- Selection
Selection at Amazon is fabulous. You can find literally anything there. Between Amazon and Ebay, they've got you covered for probably any kind of product you could imagine.
- User Experience
Well I haven't found it that difficult to do things like sort by price. You have to fast forward past the irrelevant items but many other online retailers have the same problem with false positives and deceptive categorization. After a while, people just get used to it and learn how to deal with it.
- Books
Amazon began as a book seller, and it remains one of their core competencies. The Kindle Paperwhite reader is an excellent product (the Fire tablets less so). Amazon has created a first rate ecology for e-books, self-publishers, and of course traditional printed material.
- Deals
I'm a shopping junkie and I'm always looking for bargains. I do online polls and other tasks to acquire Amazon gift cards, so I may not be the typical shopper. But there are opportunities to knock $5 off here, $10 off there, and really get some deals. Fill out this poll after the AnDevCon and receive a $20 gift card. Really? I'm all in! I live for this stuff.
- Returns
If you want the luxury of free returns for non-defective merchandise, then shop locally. That's what retail pricing is for -- to pay for the overhead of 10-20% return rates. If you can do your research and shop online very carefully, you can avoid the need to return. If a product is defective, on the other hand, Amazon has first rate service. Usually just print the label, stick it on the box, and leave it on the porch. OK, yeah, you probably need to have a roll of packing tape handy, and tape the box closed -- a rather trivial effort in the grand scheme of things.
Amazon's not perfect, not by a long stretch. Once in a while, there are better deals elsewhere. But if you shop realistically, efficiently, and try to accumulate gift cards, you make out like a bandit.
[1] Retail sales tax is gradually being extended to online sales. I respect the law, but I feel that I do not "owe" my state any more money than they already get from me (which is a lot). Just because a business has a "presence" in my state should not require them to charge sales tax on an item I ordered over the internet that was shipped from Seattle or Texas or China.
Can't believe this clickbait is at the top of HN. Look at the quality of analysis this guy gives.
>Amazon "Kind of sucks"
>Amazon "has a world-class distribution system"
Which is it?
> I started looking around, comparing prices, and found that this is not unusual. Pretty much anything Amazon sells that is also sold at your local big box store costs much more.
Care to provide even just one example?
> I’m too lazy to figure out which page the first one pops up on, because I gave up on page 12. Even if you sort by Apple as the manufacturer, you get a bewildering array of crap that isn’t what you’re looking for. Walk into an Apple store or Best Buy and you can figure it out in seconds.
