I've canceled my Amazon Prime account for two reasons. Firstly the advertising on Amazon has gotten out of control, I want the best product in my price range, not the one with the largest marketing budget. And secondly, I've found if I go to a more niche market (Cabela's for sporting goods, Lowes for tools, branded clothing stores, etc.) I always get something better, sometimes at a more reasonable price too.
Amazon has turned into a warehouse, you have to know what you want coming in. The only reason I kept using them was because I was lazy and didn't want to have to manage purchases across multiple different websites. But it just isn't worth it when I kept consistently getting inferior products.
A few disparate items I've ordered from Amazon recently like a ping pong table, 6ft. ladder, storage container all are resellers directly passing your order through to Walmart. I've started visiting the brick and mortar Walmart store more often. Shopping online (essentially Amazon) used to be cheap and convenient.
Now the expectations on quality have gone down to "OK if this works great, but do I really have the time to print the return label, package it again and ship it back?" Basically my level of trust in stuff sold on Amazon is much lower than what it used to be a few years back. For. e.g. 10 yrs. back - Plasma TV on Amazon? No problem. Now its Costco all the way for expensive electronics stuff.
On one level, Amazon is just fleecing the sellers on their platform - all sorts of charges for combinations of ad words. A lot of sellers have figured out how to game the system. It's just an awful mess. I have been considering cancelling my prime membership for a couple of years now... inertia keeps me from doing it. I've tried Ali express as well. It was an OK experience. Now I'm browsing Etsy. Haven't really bought anything, but it's looking more attractive for household stuff.
In summary, like theossuary, I believe figuring out your niche stores will be beneficial. Watch out for those Asics warehouse sales for workout clothes and shoes etc.
Can't believe I'm seeing Ali Express compared to Amazon, and apparently in a favorable way.
Ali Express is overrun with sellers with identical listings, but the quality may vary greatly between them. You will only know when you receive the item. It's not uncommon to receive something that looks totally different than the listing images.
Shipping something back on Ali Express is basically a total no-go. They get killer discounts on shipping to the US. Shipping something back to China is probably going to be more expensive than the product. With Amazon it is cheap or free to return things.
Sorting by price on Ali Express is totally broken, because sellers can list a variation with the lowest price that is never available. This impossible-to-get lowest price is taken into consideration by the sort.
People complain that sometimes Prime is 3 or 4 day shipping instead of actually 2 days. Ali Express is 2 weeks minimum. Probably 50% of the things I've ordered have taken 1+ month. Some things take 2 months. Some things never arrive at all.
All that said, I still use Ali Express. It's great for small, cheap and generic items. I know what I'm getting into, and I accept the risks. There is no way it could replace Amazon.
If you knew nothing about Amazon and only learned about it from HN comments you would think it was basically the Mos Eisley Cantina. The real eCommerce Mos Eisley Cantina is Ali Express.
Shopping on Amazon is still cheap and convenient. Maybe not if you consistently buy things that are exorbitant to ship like ping pong tables or 6 foot ladders, but most people buy items that could fit in a shoe box.
> Ali Express is overrun with sellers with identical listings, but the quality may vary greatly between them. You will only know when you receive the item. It's not uncommon to receive something that looks totally different than the listing images.
I see comments complaining about this and similar all the time on Amazon, and on products with very high ratings. The strategy seems to be, sell good quality cheap stuff for a while to get a good rating, the change the listing completely to a low-quality expensive product. The high ratings stick around, resulting in more sales than it otherwise would have, and more resilience to new low ratings.
Yes, and on the flip side of that you have other sellers wholesale copying a popular listing. I look at every purchase as a gamble. In the marketplace's defense, Ali Express dispute arbitration has always led to a satisfactory result for me, so the gamble is just on what I'm going to get, not on whether I'm going to lose the entire cost of the item or not.
Perhaps it's different with Prime, but Amazon has burnt a lot of my trust with their non-prime free shipping.
They have a huge warehouse infrastructure in my city. They could drop a box in the mail at their warehouse and have it to me in a day or two. They could probably strap it to a stray dog, point it in my direction, and get it here in three.
Yet, somehow, if I collect up a $25 order of in stock items, they can't get it to my door in less than about two weeks, unless I pay a premium for upgraded shipping. This makes it useless for time-sensitive orders.
Now, I know there's QoS and framing as a marketing thing, but this just comes off as a tease.
Admittedly it's probably not perfect to compare Amazon returns to Ali Express returns, because I too have received refunds without having to ship the product back. I have had significantly fewer products I've had to dispute through Amazon than Ali Express though.
I don't know where you live, but I don't think receiving an item from Ali Express in 1 week or less is normal, unless maybe you live in mainland China. I'm in the US and I really think I've never received something quicker than 2 weeks.
You said you have received things in a week or less. What do you think the average is though?
I just don't believe that Amazon does not generally provide cheap products conveniently. There are outliers, as with everything, but I think it's the norm that the prices for the majority of products are competitive, and the user experience is convenient.
> I don't know where you live, but I don't think receiving an item from Ali Express in 1 week or less is normal, unless maybe you live in mainland China. I'm in the US and I really think I've never received something quicker than 2 weeks.
Shipping options and delivery estimates are displayed in both search results and each item's page.
A good percentage of items do have delivery estimates that exceed two weeks, however either faster paid shipping options are available or other suppliers will offer the same item with a shorter delivery estimate.
You can also sort by the country an item ships from. There are increasingly more distributors in North America than there were a couple of years ago.
> I just don't believe that Amazon does not generally provide cheap products conveniently. There are outliers, as with everything, but I think it's the norm that the prices for the majority of products are competitive, and the user experience is convenient.
That hasn't been my experience, unfortunately. I used to use Amazon for the majority of my online purchases because they consistently had lower prices. Eventually, they became my supplier even for goods I'd buy in person.
However, as of last month, Walmart will ship the last item I regularly bought in bulk from Amazon at a lower individual retail price.
> Can't believe I'm seeing Ali Express compared to Amazon, and apparently in a favorable way.
I said Ali Express was OK. As in "meh" worth a look. True, stuff arrives a month to two months later. I bought the exact compression socks advertised on Amazon from Ali Express - Amazon price: $16 each. Ali Express: $3.75 each including shipping. Ali Express is catching up.
A lot of products on Amazon are essentially a branding function (name tag) applied to a functionally finished product. The Chinese manufactures probably knew that. With Ali Express, that equation is changing.
> Maybe not if you consistently buy things that are exorbitant to ship like ping pong tables or 6 foot ladders...
The point is Walmart would have shipped it to me for cheaper. Now I know better... Shop around first and then order.
yup, you can only shop on ali express with the same attitude as someone offering up a tender - you know the product you want and you know the price you want AND you have enough knowledge of the product to discern shoddy work. browsing on aliexpress is a nightmare
"In summary, like theossuary, I believe figuring out your niche stores will be beneficial ..."
As we figure out our "niche stores", I hope designers and entrepreneurs will study McMaster-Carr[1] - a site I found through the garagejournal forum that is an absolute joy to use.
Just drill down into any product category and you'll get a very simple listing, with full descriptions and very helpful diagrams of every single part.
If you need pipe fittings or hose clamps or rivets or gas regulators, please vote with your dollars at this site.
I haven't had a box from walmart yet from amazon, but know a guy who clears 6 figures a year doing this walmart arbitrage. I don't know how long he has in that business model before amazon starts price matching walmart.
Then you hire employees to do the shopping. It doesn't take too many sales to get to the point where you need employees to do the shopping and packaging if you're in eCommerce arbitrage.
The advertising is ridiculous. It used to be that the ads were one or two listings at the top or the bottom of the search results. Now they are top, bottom, side, and mixed in some of my search results and look more similar to non-sponsored listings.
Over the summer I used Prime Video to watch Sneaky Pete, and every episode would start with a 30 second ad for a different Prime show. There was a skip button, but it was hidden, and I could only find it by long tapping.
So I cancelled Prime. I felt silly paying Amazon to display ads at me.
Searched for "Avengers" on the Apple TV Amazon Prime Video app. Scroll to right through results, after the movies it turns into user videos from amazon product reviews for Avenger merch.
Same here. Amazon used to be convenient but it slowly has turned into a stressful experience. Counterfeits, 20 listings of the same product with totally different prices, advertising, fake reviews and so on. Now I prefer eBay where at least the search function works or specialized stores with one listing per product.
Newegg went the same path like Amazon and I have stopped using them. They used to be my favorite store.
Wow, "stressful" is exactly right. It crept up on me, but it's now rarely a pleasant experience.
Just today I'm returning something. I was trying to buy more of the sort of underwear I like. But I quickly end up in the junky end of Amazon where the same product is listed under slightly different names by different sellers and the interface gets all weird. It must have done that thing where you pick a size, then pick a color, but it automatically adjusts the size to whatever's available in that color. So I ended up with 3 2-packs of too-small underwear. And one of them came without the manufacturer's packaging, just two pairs of underwear in a baggie. Because that's not suspicious or anything. Now I have to package that stuff and haul it to the UPS store.
And I'm totally with you on the advertising. I get how they got there, with a bunch of teams optimizing short-term micro-metrics. But apparently nobody cares about the overall experience.
+1 on Newegg. I built a PC last year, and unknowingly bought something from newegg.com that was in their Marketplace. Paid with Paypal, got charged by Newegg, but never got a confirmation email. I called Newegg, who had no record of the transaction, so I filed a claim on Paypal. Bought the part off Amazon, built my PC, waited for the claim to resolve.
Three weeks later, suddenly the seller adds tracking to the Paypal claim, and a few days later the part that I no longer need shows up in a Newegg box. No invoice, packing sheet, etc. and it's still not listed on my Newegg account. My claim gets closed, and there's nobody I can even return this to.
Newegg has not said anything about this to me, nor explained why after a Newegg transaction my card was cancelled defensively and reissued.
I haven't been able to trust Newegg in a very long time, which is sad. They used to be the gold standard, now it's a decrepit pit of dropshipping garbage.
I was under the impression that you could filter out their marketplace sellers and that they didn't commingle their own inventory with anyone else's. Is that not the case?
Where do you go for computer stuff that you can trust these days? Every box in all the Fry's stores around me all seem to have already been opened and returned twice by the time i see them.
Instead of Newegg, for PC parts I exclusively use Microcenter now. When I was in Atlanta, there were brick-and-mortar stores on the north side. Now I just use their web site. My last PC build ended up being around $40 cheaper through Microcenter than through Newegg.
I've done my last two builds primarily through Microcenter. Their prices are similar to or better than other places and both times I've gotten $50 off by buying the motherboard and processor through them.
Amazon has all of eBay's problems but with a site that is product focused vs. seller focused. So you have all these categories of problems avoided on eBay like multiple items on the same page(), mixed reviews and the unknown of which seller is more likely to ship a good product.
eBay has some newer product-focused pages and features, but they don't create the kind of problems you see on Amazon.
It also seems somewhat harder to keep creating new seller accounts on eBay. I've been ripped off several times by highly rated sellers on Amazon that disappeared after a several weeks long case pending against them. Amazon resolved it satisfactorily, but it meant that I would have gotten the item faster from China.
All my personal experience, of course.
Of course ebay listings have multiple products, but not in the same super confusing way you see on Amazon.
"multiple items on the same page" - This is usually a positive, since it allows the user to easily look at color or size variations, there is a way to look at only reviews of certain variations
"mixed reviews and the unknown of which seller is more likely to ship a good product" - Being unsure of which seller is best also exists on eBay
I don't think Amazon's listings are confusing. You usually have size and color variations, and sometimes things like multi-packs. I guess that is subjective.
I cancelled mine a few months ago. Tomorrow is my last day. They've been harassing me on their site constantly with popups and notifications on every single page since I cancelled. It's gotten to the point where the harassment has firmly cemented my distaste for their user experience and I actively search for alternative sites first now.
This thread just got me to finally cancel mine. I had to click 4 times to get through the cancellation flow and was presented with three distinct screens that moved around the 'end membership' button and try to get you to click on buttons that keep you on as a member. This is probably the darkest pattern cancellation flow I've gone through in recent memory.
One thing you can do is if you plan to buy on amazon, you can input the order and then before you pay, send a copy of the order to the actual company and ask if they can give a discount if you place the order directly through the company. Most will do the deal outside of amazon because they save money on the amazon fees.
Interesting how this demonstrates that showrooming can affect online retailers too. Popular retail websites that introduce consumers to products can lose out on the sale if a discount is available by buying directly from a merchant, just as physical stores can be bypassed if a discount is available from an online seller.
Most people probably won't take the initiative to make an enquiry with the merchant for an Amazon marketplace order, and it'd be too inconvenient to do this consistently for small purchases, but maybe part of the motivation for promoting merchants tied exclusively to Amazon is an awareness of the threat that online showrooming might pose to some of their business in the future.
They do that for me because I have still have a university address on record associated with a .edu email from 20 years ago. Presumably deleting it would eliminate the nag.
> I cancelled mine a few months ago. Tomorrow is my last day. They've been harassing me on their site constantly with popups and notifications on every single page since I cancelled. It's gotten to the point where the harassment has firmly cemented my distaste for their user experience and I actively search for alternative sites first now.
I've switched to sharing Prime with my fiancee through "Amazon Household," and they're even nagging me as I let my now-redundant Prime membership lapse.
I've almost entirely stopped using amazon because the search is so goofy. For anyone is wondering. Try searching for clothing. The more specific you get, the more goofy the search results. For example, if you sort by "lowest to highest" price it doesn't even give you lowest price....lol the only way you find lowest price is if you literally dig through all the listings. I should be able to put in my clothing dimensions and then find all shirts/pants that fit those dimensions. I should also add in parameters like color type or style and get more refinement. Then I should be able to sort by price and see lowest price for all the shirts/pants that fit me....but that is not what happens.
My theory is that they're stuck between (cost of fixing it plus the cost to their pageview metrics if we suddenly didn't have to dig so much) and (cost of slowly simmering customer resentment from terrible UI).
I imagine there's just no manager willing to charge the hill of better search when they'd have to die on the sword of plummeting pageview metrics for succeeding.
I have to agree - the search function is, and always has been, shockingly bad - ypu have to be too specific, and there just doesn't seem to be any reasoning to how it orders results.
And then you have to be really careful before you push the button to buy, because it may turn out that the item doesn't really match your search terms after all.
It's become the walmart of the web. Lower quality or knock off products and a sometimes lower price. I canceled my prime because most the stuff I was looking to buy was never prime eligible for shipping. And Amazon steaming or music isnt worth the price either.
This has been my experience as well. 20 years ago, you could go to Walmart and buy good quality brands at good prices. E.g. you buy a Dewalt drill, it is actually a high quality drill. What happened over time is that because of the extreme price pressure Walmart was putting on suppliers, they began to build special Walmart-only products. So, the Dewalt drill you buy has a great price but is also a piece of crap. I don't enjoy shopping at Walmart at all anymore, you are much better off to find a specially store. E.g. buy your drill the same place the professional carpenters shop.
Amazon has seen a similar decline. Years ago, if you saw a product on Amazon, you could be confident it was as it was labelled, you would get it in a reasonable time and the price was about as good as buying anywhere else. Amazon quality now is total garbage. The store is littered with counterfit goods. If the price looks good, that's probably because the quality is absolutely terrible. I don't enjoy shopping there at all anymore.
This is exactly the reason I was cancelling my Prime as well. And the new delivery service Amazon introduced which had a 50% successful delivery rate. Once I was waiting for the truck to come and asked the driver how he attempted to deliver my stuff and he was just laughing at me. He and his co-workers stole 500 USD+ worth of products from Amazon and I could not get this incident reported, even the manager ignored the details and just kept saying I should report it missing and re-order it.
No customer service rep or low level manager is going to have the authority to deal with hearsay customer reports of criminal activity. That's a job for the police, and Amazon may wait to report it until there's corroborating reports or evidence.
It's just as likely that they handed the report off, and it will be handled by someone else entirely. However, none of that makes the situation with the customer right; the customer's problem is they don't have a product. Re-shipping it is just about the only thing they can do in this case.
It seems you mainly have two level of expectations, one where you wish to find the best ever product for a specific niche you are ready to research and invest time into. And the other where you need to get recommendations and find 'the best product'.
In that sense I think Amazon falls in-between. Personally I'll use sites like thewirecutter or other review sites to get an idea of what's on the market and what I should be looking for. It's only from there that I'll hit an online merchant to see what they sell and at what price.
I get why it doesn't fit you style, it's a different approach.
I paid for a year, but what used to be an obvious benefit is no longer that. I order some stuff, but had the same experience you did so I use orders less.
Twitch prime used to justify paying half of the cost on its own, but that no longer gives me the one benefit I care about (no ads). That leaves video, which is a good fringe benefit, but not a main need for me. Amazon music was not a replacement for Spotify (too much things gated behind another 9 usd a month paywall).
To me, it feels like they decided to slowly weaken the benefits of the overall package and hope inertia kept people from opting out (not to mention the dark patterns like cancelling subscription removes the benefits of the current subscription).
What's rather galling about the streaming part of the Prime subscription is that a good chunk of content is now hived off into "Prime Video Channels", where they expect you to shell out another GBP4.99/month or more to watch previously "included with subscription" stuff. There's even films where you might have paid a couple of quid to watch that are now in these silos with no other option but to pay for the channel sub to view them, i.e. there are no other payment options. And to add insult to injury many of these channels are full of absolute dross.
The cable channel subscription is an absolutely annoying business model. The nice thing about Amazon for awhile, versus, say, Netflix, was that you can rent movies ale cart for a few bucks if it wasn't already streaming. I don't want a subscription to Starz just to finally see that Spiderman movie.
I'll buy a YouTube subscription before I pay for a cable package on a streaming service.
I agree, this bullshit behaviour is not why I signed up for a Prime (and Netflix) subscription and binned Sky. But I can't help feel it's just around the corner and there's no escape.
I first do research on what specific model I gonna buy and than check who has it the cheapest with a minimum good Shoprating. Often enough I can buy it from or through Amazon.
How do you use Amazon that you will get different quality of a product in comparison to shopping somewhere else?
The problem is you may not know. I have received several items from known brands that turned out to be low quality. I don't know if these brands just have started to make low quality items (very possible) or maybe the item was fake.
I just buy high value items in person. The local economy can use the money anyway. The rest I don’t really care if they’re counterfeit so long as they function.
Why on earth would you buy a Gucci purse from anywhere but Gucci? Caveat Emptor.
My biggest problem with Amazon at this point is Prime. The free 2 day shipping use to justify the cost of Prime by itself, but at this point more often than not I don't get my stuff within the 3-5 day period, so I don't even know what I'm paying for. And it's not like I'm off in the middle of nowhere, I live in a major US city. Then when you add in the incredibly lacking search functionality, and the fact that you can no longer trust the reviews you get a company that has completely lost the trust of it's users.
but at this point more often than not I don't get my stuff within the 3-5 day period
If they miss their 2-day shipping guarantee then you call CS, complain, and get a free month of Prime added. Ad infinitum. A way to increase your chances of missed 2-day shipping is to spread out your item orders so it gives them more opportunities to screw up. This also increases their costs of S&H across the entire logistics chain and maximizes the usage of your Prime membership. Plus it feels like every day is Christmas when a new random Amazon item is coming in.
Another key is to order stuff that weighs a lot (40lbs+). Last time I did FBA the UPS rate for Amazon shipping was ~50 cents / lb . So if you're getting a 40lb item (especially if it has weird dimensions) they're likely not paying much lower than $15-20 to get that to your door in 2 days.
It sounds like you get something out of this more than stuff, you get the fun of gaming the system.
> Another key is to order stuff that weighs a lot (40lbs+). Last time I did FBA the UPS rate for Amazon shipping was ~50 cents / lb . So if you're getting a 40lb item (especially if it has weird dimensions) they're likely not paying much lower than $15-20 to get that to your door in 2 days.
This is like overeating at a buffet to feel like you got your money’s worth.
When companies become openly consumer-hostile, we should expect consumers to become company-hostile. It's true that this leads to an antagonistic race to the bottom, but the alternative is a leisurely stroll to the bottom as one party pulls the other along by the neck. I don't know of any way to really reconcile this; trust is easy to lose and hard to earn, and in an environment of perpetual betrayal no party is eager to be the first to risk having their trust be taken advantage of.
My point is that Amazon or the buffet owner will not be brought down by a few customers who are a net loss to them shipping wise. They have already done the math.
You can either use amazon because you’ve decided you need it or you can actually stop giving them money and recommend others do so. That is a much bigger threat to them. Continuing to use prime and buying things you don’t need from Amazon isn’t being “hostile” to Amazon.
It's gotten harder to get a free month of prime (I used to take advantage of that, whenever a package was late). Now they tend to just apologize, when before they offered you compensation immediately.
I've found that now what they do is just give you delivery dates that aren't 2 days in the future, even when in stock. Sometimes I've had orders on Monday with ETAs of Friday, with prime, in stock (no notice on the page saying extra processing or out of stock).
This is what drove me to cancel Prime. After having this happen to me three times (adding Prime items to cart and getting all the way to the end of checkout before noticing the lack of two day shipping).
A few bucks either way on price (including shipping costs) don't matter much to me either way. What I do value is my time. And that is what missed delivery dates and time on the phone both cost me. "Spend time dealing with customer service" is another cost with no associated value to me.
Amazon lost one of my packages (they were delivering it themselves).
No biggie by itself, but the apology mail did not lead to a reimbursement. Instead, I had to go to the website, and go through a dozen of steps that really felt like they were here to make me decide it is not worth my time.
I don't know that I'd call it abuse. I'd expect Amazon to fall afoul of advertisement and consumer protection laws in many jurisdictions if they claim "guaranteed" delivery times, and their response to missing said guaranteed times is "do nothing".
I'm in the UK, and we get free next day delivery with a Prime sub.
In 3 years, we've had only a handful of deliveries that haven't arrived on time. I only cared about 2 of those, and on both occasions they gave me a free month of Prime after I sent a single, short email saying delivery was late. Pretty amazing customer service, especially for the UK!
Amazon isn't always the cheapest (altho they usually are, or are very close), but their customer service is great, and if I have issues they make returns really simple. This is the reason I buy more stuff from Amazon than from anywhere else.
I should add, I've never (knowingly) had any counterfeits from Amazon, and don't personally know of anyone who has, but it seems from HN it's a much bigger issue in the US than in the UK.
I pretty much solely buy things from Amazon when their algorithm screws up and chances of counterfeits are low. I've bought several metal cabinets by a major manufacturer with free shipping for a price that had to be lower than the cost of shipping itself; much less the cabinets.
Were they beat up in transit, and take forever? Oh most definitely, one was even lost somehow; however they were so undervalued it was worth the fact they were bound to screw up.
Prime may be "2-Day Shipping" but they state in their TOS processing time may make an item take longer than 2 days to get to you. I've have "2-Day" shipping items take a week to get to me and they just point to the TOS.
They changed that policy last year. You're no longer guaranteed a free month of Prime to compensate for shipping failures. CS reps can still give you this if they choose, but people are now being denied, especially if they've already been given free months before.
The dark pattern the retail side now seem to employ is listing everything under the 2-day shipping Prime label, but not _actually_ shipping it for several days to weeks. Sure, they technically honor 2-day shipping once they actually ship, but as an end user, if something listed as 2-day shipping takes 8 days to be delivered... it isn't actually 2 day shipping.
It used to be go to amazon, enable the "Only Show Prime items" filter, and BAM, get your item 2 days later. Now the prime label is completely useless. You've got to manually investigate each option to see when it will actually be delivered. God help you if you mindlessly decide to change the color on the product page and expect the shipping date to hold.
I started ordering at Target. They have a similar program for free "2-day" shipping (through USPS, so the same issues as Amazon. Averages 2-3 days) if you sign up for their credit card.
Obviously a vastly smaller selection, but the prices are competitive and often cheaper than Amazon at this point. Feels good breaking away from Amazon as I was only shopping there from the momentum of what was once a good company.
Thanks for the tip about the Target debit card. I'd heard about their credit card but didn't want to open a credit account. Their debit card links to your existing checking account:
There is also Google Shopping/Express, which works with major retailers including Target, and from unknown reasons I was able to order from Target via Google Express for cheaper than directly from Target..
> and the fact that you can no longer trust the reviews you get a company that has completely lost the trust of it's users.
Aren't many (maybe most) of these fake reviews done through Amazon Mechanical Turk? It's like instead of taking the cost to moderate the reviews, they decided to monetize them. Why pay money, when you can earn it?
> Aren't many (maybe most) of these fake reviews done through Amazon Mechanical Turk? It's like instead of taking the cost to moderate the reviews, they decided to monetize them. Why pay money, when you can earn it?
I know a lot of them come though Facebook. There hundreds of groups (like this one https://www.facebook.com/groups/amznlove/), where sellers are soliciting fake reviews in exchange for free product and PayPal refunds and commissions.
That's crazy because I'm in Canada and it's the reverse. I don't care about the free 2 day shipping because I usually get it quicker using their actual free shipping.
I used the free 2 day shipping of Prime a few time in the past using the student discount but each time, they ship the day after, which still means I receive it in 2 days. When I get the free shipping, more often than not, they ship it the same day and I receive pretty quickly. It's like on Prime they still hope I'm going to buy the overnight shipping while not on it they just ship whenever they can.
IMO Prime to me is about more than shipping. I actually don't shop on Amazon often, though my wife for sure appreciates the quick shipping (we live in a suburb).
Prime Photos/Amazon Cloud Drive has been my most used Prime perk, probably. I use it a ton as a Dropbox alternative (it's not as nice as Dropbox but whatever). Followed closely by Prime Video. Then Prime Music, which I actually don't use on purpose but allows our Echo to 'just work' when it comes to playing music (I often forget to say "...on Spotify") especially themed stations. Twitch Prime is a thing I don't use much, but happy to be ad-free there. Not sure how they do ads anyway.
Honestly I think Prime Video alone is worth the subscription.
$10 per month for prime video alone would be worth the subscription? Netflix is $8 and at least its UI doesn't completely suck. Every time I used prime video in the past it seems like one of the intended dark-patterns of the prime video UI is to direct you to as many pay-to-watch videos as possible, even if you were browsing by the "included in my prime video account" filter.
Exactly. My 2 day shipping is always 4-5 days. I am not including non shipping days in this, either. My last item was a small SSD that took 5 days to arrive.It was bubble packed and about the size and weight of a Blu ray movie case.
I ordered SUV tires from Tire Rack, and they had them to me in 18 hours.
Interesting. We order on Prime multiple times per week and I can think of once, maybe twice where they didn't get it to us in 2 days. Conversely, I can think of times where it came in 1 day also.
I don't mind it at all. I've been relatively impressed with the price to quality ratio and I usually seek the Amazon label brand where I can and the price is right—just like any other store brand.
- It started with batteries, which are awesome for the price
- I bought a throwaway comforter + sheets to use for couch-sharing with the dog and they're my favorite set now. Better than my Ikea set which cost 2x as much.
I could go on but for random items the Amazon brand is often pretty decent.
The problem with this is that it's built in the backs of brands who were at one point well recognized brands on Amazon. Amazon took their sales data, determined it was a good market to move into, created specifications and reached out to their hundreds of sellers for a "private label opportunity".
Cue making dozens of companies compete to supply Amazon with the manufacturing contract and constant downward pressure and you get a good product from Amazon at a good price. Not a problem right?
Until the private label brand forces 90% of those formerly quality-focused small brands to shut down and due to their "algorithms" detecting less competition, begins raising prices again. And now the expertise of small brands is gone and no competition springs up in the market.
I've seen this happen in a couple product lines over the year and is one reason we pulled off Amazon. Amazon customers are entitled pains in the ass, and the margin there isn't sustainable. The only way for small brands to make Amazon work is to aggressively sell a single SKU and put in remarketing/back-channel outreach to customers and make the conversions to the rest of your product line off Amazon.
This is explicitly against Amazon's policy, but their policy is in place to ensure they profit and you never gain traction so you remain reliant on them until they day they put you out of business with their own private label line.
> The problem with this is that it's built in the backs of brands who were at one point well recognized brands on Amazon. Amazon took their sales data, determined it was a good market to move into, created specifications and reached out to their hundreds of sellers for a "private label opportunity".
Not sure I'm seeing the problem. On the surface it sounds pro-consumer. Plus, this is already common in brick & mortar stores, I think Costco is particularly well-known for doing this (and of course private-label/house/generic store brands are hardly uncommon elsewhere too). If it was that destructive, why do we still have brand names in regular stores as it is?
Until the second part of OP's story happens - which is the competitors die off and then Amazon jacks up the prices.
Most of these sellers are much smaller than the brand names you see in supermarkets, and also much newer. Spigen, Anker etc. don't have the same sentimental decades long attachment that Kellogs, or Pepsi have with consumers either.
> Until the second part of OP's story happens - which is the competitors die off and then Amazon jacks up the prices.
Whenever some disrupter comes into a market, you always see some people saying this "just you wait, they'll jack up the prices sky high any minute now!!" and it seems to happen rarely, if ever.
For example, there are plenty of small towns where Wal-mart was able to dominate and drive out small mom and pop retail shops. I've heard plenty of complaints about that, but I've never heard anyone say, "...and then after they drove out all the little shops, the prices went through the roof!!"
> Whenever some disrupter comes into a market, you always see some people saying this "just you wait, they'll jack up the prices sky high any minute now!!" and it seems to happen rarely, if ever.
It's happening at Amazon. When they started, their prices were often much cheaper than physical retail. Now they're about the same, and sometimes outrageously higher.
> For example, there are plenty of small towns where Wal-mart was able to dominate and drive out small mom and pop retail shops. I've heard plenty of complaints about that, but I've never heard anyone say, "...and then after they drove out all the little shops, the prices went through the roof!!"
I doubt Wal-Mart makes pricing decisions like that at the store level, so your example doesn't really hold up.
> It's happening at Amazon. When they started, their prices were often much cheaper than physical retail. Now they're about the same, and sometimes outrageously higher.
I'm curious if you have any examples. I have been very happy with Amazon. Even though every now and then I look up competitor's prices and selection Amazon is usually better at one or both. When they aren't it's not by a lot.
Many people in this thread have complaints about Amazon but my experience has been great so I'm wondering where the disconnect is coming from.
> I'm curious if you have any examples. I have been very happy with Amazon. Even though every now and then I look up competitor's prices and selection Amazon is usually better at one or both. When they aren't it's not by a lot.
All $29.99. A couple years ago I was buying a lot of these in ones and twos. I was also also having a lot of trouble with Amazon Logistics messing things up (and Amazon refusing to allow me to "deprioritize" them, so I could get my package through another carrier with fewer issues). That struggle lead me to take another look at local retail, and removed my illusions about Amazon's automatic superiority. The local stores have most of the same items, for the same price, and available more quickly without shipping delays. They also don't have the fake-review fueled counterfeit problems that Amazon has.
As I've learned more about shopping at local stores, my Amazon use has been reduced to items that are only available on it or that I don't know where to find elsewhere.
If their data is correct there were times when it was available for 10-20% off.
Having read more comments in this thread I'm starting to think that my experience has been different (for the better) because 80+% of the time I know what I'm looking for before I visit Amazon. I rely on Wirecutter and other websites for recommendations if I'm looking for something I know little about.
Another thing is that Amazon has almost everything. It's much simpler to buy a couple of books + nail clippers + socks (one of my recent purchases) from them than make separate orders elsewhere.
And unlike probably most of the posters here I'm from Europe and I haven't experience any unusual issues with shipping so maybe it's a real and more recent concern in the US.
Amazon offers the exact same product for the exact same cost, I don't see the problem. Do you have any examples where Amazon is selling a product for "outrageously higher"?
> Amazon offers the exact same product for the exact same cost, I don't see the problem.
It's not much of a problem, but not much of an advantage either.
So, the question I'm confronted with is: why pay the same for a worse experience? The Amazon route forces me to pay more (Prime) to get it within 2-5 days, or even more to get it faster. Then there are the AMZL_US delivery hassles on top of that. The Home Depot route costs me 25 cents of gas and a 20-40 min of time to get it now-now.
> Do you have any examples where Amazon is selling a product for "outrageously higher"?
Not offhand, but I specifically recall seeing outrageously higher prices for some grocery/drugstore type items. Stuff like a $2 item selling for $6.
A lot of this is coming from the supreme court allowing companies to enforce Minimum Advertised Prices for items, and to require high prices. Amazon largely doesn't want to play the "see the price in your cart" game, and so, the price is what the manufacturer says, unless it's during a specifically authorized sale.
Before the MAP ruling, manufacturers could not ban resellers based on pricing, and you saw a lot more Internet discounting on products that the manufacturer saw as "premier" items, that they didn't want reputationally-impacted by low sale prices.
Yeah, in some of the branded Cosmetics you will be Amazon plus 4 or 5 other sellers all at the MAP. Brands where they have banned the grey market so it is all authorized sellers having the follow the MAP to keep their deal.
I've seen this happen too. And have some insight from the seller side:
6 companies might sell the same product at varying prices, some of them uploading 1000s of items they have dropshopping for, but no real inventory. 1 or 2 may legitimately sell the product at a manually entered price that's competitive - when those sellers sell out, the others who dropship at cost+100% show up as the default seller.
The big dropshippers make their profit off infrequent, high margin sales that can be auto fulfilled when legitimate sellers run out of inventory.
I live in the sprawl of Houston. If I need things from a couple of local stores that close in early evening, it may take longer for me to get by the stores for pickup than to have items shipped from Amazon even if everything I want is in stock. Ordering online for store pickup helps.
The troubles don't show themselves on the consumer side, they show up on the labor side. Monopsony makes it hard to find competing job offers when all the competing stores have been closed.
Oh, that's a good point. I've often thought that the reason unions are so important is that employers bargain collectively by default because, well, companies are groups of people, not individuals.
On the other hand, IIRC studies show that larger companies pay more than smaller ones, and I think there have even been suggestions that this explains some of the GDP per capita differences between developed nations, that some have more large companies that are then more productive due to economies of scale and specialization.
I can't speak to mom and pop shops in small towns. I think while the concept is the same, this would be more along the lines of the town opening it's own discount store and putting the mom and pops out of business.
But I can attest to 2 products I've ordered yearly for the past 3 years, increase in price about 10% each year. The diversity of competing products has decreased substantially.
I think the problem (for consumers) is usually the lower selection. Walmart focuses on the best sellers in any category, and the "long tail" that specialty stores can provide goes away.
(Well, that and the problem that Walmart sometimes drives out all the mom and pop shops and then closes the Walmart a few years later, leaving the town with nothing but the next closest Walmart 30 miles away.)
I don't think this is accurate even for the brands you listed. spigen and anker are consistently the most recommended brand even by relatively tech illiterate youtubers. they've built up some trust with me and I've only owned one spigen phone case for my nexus 6P - if I see someone complaining about a generic powerbank/case I recommend anker/spigen respectively and tell them to check out whatever content creator(youtuber or tech site) they trust to see a review of it
I just have a hard time picturing the dystopian world where everyone walks around with figurative chains around their neck, working lifetimes of drudgery, because we let Amazon finally get monopoly power in all the stuff they sell and we have to pay double for our pens, notepads, backpacks and soap. And not a single company is popping up to reap the profits of selling a comparable item at a price that by construction of this scenario could be well below Amazon's but well above the cost of production.
The second part of the theory has been the hammer dropping for 15 years.
Amazon makes no money in retail to drive out competitors and when that day finally happens! Just you wait! The prices! I'm still waiting. The ride has been beneficial so far.
The stock market isn't psychic. They believe all sorts of irrational things and are perfectly capable of being turkeys who vote for Thanksgiving. Price raising on commodities hasn't worked out all that well in general. While the network effect helps it isn't
omnipotent. People are already returning to brick and mortar for better prices.
Companies don't jack up prices anymore. They lower their costs (ie reduce labor). It ends up inore profit and doesn't set off alarms at the FTC, which looks for harm to the consumer. Monopsony has been shown to reduce wages[1].
Nah, this is no different from what brick-and-mortar retailers have been doing for decades.
Buying private-label items in supermarkets over name brand has been recommendation #1 in personal finance circles for at least as long as I've been alive. Hell, some private label products are better than brand... I'll go out of my way to buy Kroger's private label ice cream and sodas.
And it's not just food. Half the stuff you see in Walmart is private label, including clothing and pharmacy products (and I've found that I actively prefer their private label sleepwear over name brand). And whenever I buy OTC meds at CVS, of course I always take the private-label bottle, which has the same ingredients yet is half the price.
> I've seen this happen in a couple product lines over the year and is one reason we pulled off Amazon
Oh, I see. You have a personal financial stake in spreading FUD against private-label brands because you operate a name-brand business.
> The problem with this is that it's built in the backs of brands who were at one point well recognized brands on Amazon. Amazon took their sales data, determined it was a good market to move into, created specifications and reached out to their hundreds of sellers for a "private label opportunity".
I believe Costco (Kirkland brand) and likely Amazon also contract with one of the major brands (e.g., Tide detergent) to make a store-label parallel product with perhaps slightly different formulation, but often the exact same formulation. The name brand saves on their marketing costs and sells at higher margin, Costco gets a great product they can sell to customers for less than the competition, and customers willing to trust the Costco "Kirkland" brand save a lot of money ... it's a three-way win.
>> It’s a common misconception that the generic is made from a cheaper brand.
>> Sometimes the generic is made overseas with inferior products, but a lot
>> of Kirkland Signature products are actually the exact same product as the
>> name brand product. ... Sometimes, they’re even manufactured in the
>> same facility!
I've bought a few Amazon-brand products, e.g., USB cables, backpacks. The Amazon Basic backpack is quite good quality, seems very similar to the Targus brand backpack designs, and handles some decent abuse.
The thing I suspect about Costco Kirkland brands is that even if the same maker makes the item, Costco often elects to upgrade the quality in some way. Especially in ways where the maker could do, but doesn't for market reasons on their general line of goods. In a similar way, a lot of supermarket generic goods have some sort of minor downgrade in the quality of ingredients to differentiate with the original makers product.
>The problem with this is that it's built in the backs of brands who were at one point well recognized brands on Amazon. Amazon took their sales data, determined it was a good market to move into, created specifications and reached out to their hundreds of sellers for a "private label opportunity".
It's different imo. They see what private label products sell on FBA (and the specs they need to fulfill), and then can just negotiate better deals from the same suppliers, because most FBA sellers ship straight from chinese factories to Amazon warehouses it's no secret where it's coming from. And for many product categories there aren't that many high quality factories anyway.
The important part are the specs and quality of the product, if you don't specify and interact with the factories, you'll get crap, if you spec by focusing on the wrong things you pay too much and still get crap. The FBA sellers are basically just testing the right mixture until Amazon steps in adopting their formula. A successfull low cost product is just that, a good enough quality at an as low as possible price.
that's how competitions work....in your second part, some other people who can make the stuff cheaper will just come onto amazon's platform, preventing the price from going up.
If you're looking from a supplier side, yeah this business is bleak. But keep in mind someone will always accept a lower margin, run the same business more efficiently, or can produce your goods at a lower cost.
Just because you guys can't stay in the game, doesn't mean the game is broken. You got beat by open competition.
There's definitely something to be said about economies of scale and efficiency.
But I'm talking about design and product expertise. People sourcing knockoffs can create a cheaper version 1 of a product, but only a brand connected to it's customers will use their feedback for version 2, 3, 4, n+1.
I'm a little insulated in the food niche because product quality and freshness and expiry dates are huge risk factors, but this applies to other industries as well.
You can buy a knock-off Amazon branded chain lubricant from China that lists the same ingredients if you want, and it may work well in low impact situations. But for my motorcycle, you bet your ass I'm spend 2-3x the lowest price I can find on Amazon for a well known brand with a reputation and uses quality inputs and filters and has no additives. When my health is on the line, brand expertise is essential.
Same with food. There's a floor for quality, and you can't escape the value trade-off. Something being cheaper doesn't mean it's quality is unaffected, but the short-term, inexperienced people at Amazon don't care about that.
I can buy and sell our "product" at half price by buying last year's crop or a lower grade, and I can sell that garbage exclusively through Amazon and "win" the completion, but nobody really wins in that case - me or the customer or our competitors - only Amazon.
How is that different from large supermarkets determining own-brand cereal and peanut butter are good markets to move into?
It's just capitalism at work. Yesterday's high-quality high-price item becomes today's low-priced low-quality commodity. Quality-focused small brands in every industry and every market need to be constantly improving, developing new product improvements, new niches, new products. (E.g. an even-higher quality version for the luxury niche.)
It's extremely unlikely that Amazon will be be able to raise prices long-term on an own-brand item with "no competition" simply because... well, capitalism. As soon as they do, manufacturers in China or whoever sells the equivalent product at Wal-Mart will list on Amazon for a lower price and make money... so Amazon lowers the price again... and as always, the invisible hand of capitalism keeps prices low for the consumer.
I think it's different because of intent. Supermarkets and large retailers (e.g. WMT) seek deals to relabel and sell products as "house brand" but it's generally done in such a way that they are selling to customers who would not have purchased the name brand in any case. That's the pitch anyway, and judging from the longevity of these arrangements it's likely that the "name brand" is seeing enough benefit to continue in that way. The two entities seem to find a way to balance their interests.
With Amazon, I don't think they are seeking that balance at all. I do not think it's a good long-term move for their retail side. The problem with stabbing all of your friends in the back is that you also have a back.
> they are selling to customers who would not have purchased the name brand
When I was a kid, the supermarket had an isle named "generic", and all the generic stuff was relegated to that isle and came in plain yellow packaging. Back then, I would have accepted that they're not selling to the same customers as the name brands.
Today, store brand stuff at the supermarket is sitting on the shelf right next to the name brand stuff, with intentionally similar packaging. They are absolutely competing with the name brand stuff. And thats true at Home Depot and Walmart and Costco and everywhere else I shop that has a mix of store-brand and third-party brand stuff.
Of all the places I shop, Amazon is the only one whose store-brand is plainly labeled as such, and I give them kudos for that. Some places like the grocery store and Costco have a single store-brand, so you don't have to work too hard to figure out whats name brand and what isn't. While yet other places have several store brands that aren't really marketed as such in an attempt to confuse you into thinking you're getting a name brand (plumbing and electrical fixtures at Home Depot and Lowes is where I've seen this most rampantly)
You are correct that more stores are mixing their house brand in with "national" brands (or whatever term you want), and that stores have discovered the good ROI that comes from upping their house brand game (which is the point of the linked article).
I want to add that there is a hidden benefit for name brands to having the house brands there, at a lower price point. There's plenty of fascinating reading on "price positioning" and how having a lower house brand right next to the national brand results in increased sale of the national brand.
My main point was that I don't think Amazon sees its relationship with vendors the same way that older retailers do. WMT has a deserved reputation for being very aggressive with their suppliers, but I believe that their culture still sees the relationship goal as win-win (they would argue that they are helping their suppliers achieve better efficiency, or often licensing the national brand's stock to make their house brand so more sales for all). I know nothing about Amazon's buyer culture, but their own brand activity does not seem to give much consideration to supplier health.
It's also interesting to note that their own brands are immune to the commingling problem, which gives them a perverse incentive to let that problem ride. That makes me very uncomfortable.
> ...they are selling to customers who would not have purchased the name brand in any case... it's likely that the "name brand" is seeing enough benefit to continue in that way. The two entities seem to find a way to balance their interests.
I'm sorry but I just can't buy that. Generics in the supermarket and drugstore (at least the ones I go to) are directly next to the name-brand and clearly compete directly. There's no "arrangement" or "balancing of interests" between the two, any more than Coca-Cola and Pepsi have an arrangement or balance of interests to appear on the shelf next to each other -- which they of course don't, but rather are in cutthroat competition with each other, the same way they have been for decades.
It's flat-out competition pure and simple, there's zero difference of intent from what Amazon is doing. And both survive, because some people prefer to pay a little extra for name-brand or quality, and some people prefer to save a little money and trust generics. The only balance is between pricing and demand.
> I'm sorry but I just can't buy that. Generics in the supermarket and drugstore (at least the ones I go to) are directly next to the name-brand and clearly compete directly.
Many store-brand generics are manufactured by the exact same company that manufactures the name brand. The arrangement works because the manufacturer know that some consumers are cost conscious, some are brand conscious and willing to pay more. If they lower the price of the name-brand to get the cost conscious consumers, they lose out on the name brand markup. The solution is often two slightly different brand from the same company at different price points. For this to work, it's important that the store brand packaging have zero connection to the name brand.
Costco is especially known for doing this. IIRC, Kirkland batteries are probably Duracells in different packaging.
tivert's reply is correct, and WMT does it on a surprising array of goods. The most visible example is "Great Value" frozen pizzas, which are produced by the same company that makes and sells Red Baron. Cost conscious consumers buy GV, brand conscious consumers by RB, both companies make money.
The invisible hand of capitalism works slowly. The fingers of the invisible hand are unhappy consumers communicating their demand; the thumb is holders of capital hearing it and building better products. This process requires time to communicate that information and time for new suppliers to enter the market, and in the meantime consumers are unhappy and existing suppliers aren't making as many sales as they could.
The invisible hand corrects mistakes, but that's no defense of making mistakes.
Well, maybe, if we judge that Amazon does not exercise monopolistic control over online retail. But a lot of people are going to never look anywhere besides Amazon (gotta take advantage of that Amazon Prime subscription, of course) and just buy the product and not know that a lower-price option is available.
The way this system works is not normal brand vs. brand competition, it's the sales channel (distributor) which starts to compete with the established supplier.
This is what creates the imbalance in the competition.
The distributor uses a private-label to bundle the sales of a lucrative product-tier that is sold across multiple brands in his channel into a single in-house brand.
For the original-brand to enter this channel again after it has left, it would have to be _cheaper_ than the private-label (to exceed the profit the channel makes with its private-label product), or prove that it can sell MORE VOLUME than the private-label for whatever reason (=more profit for the channel).
Unfortunately for both cases the brand is entering at a steep disadvantage, because it would have to finance its own brand to overpower the brand of the private-label, market their product to push sales, yet sell-in at a lower price, and even rely on the very same brand it now competes with (100% of the channel customers are shopping there because of the channel-brand).
At this point in the game, creating consumer-value becomes a niche-topic, because the barrier is now to create more profit for the channel, otherwise he will not allow you to reach the consumer...
That's one of the reasons why we keep seeing an increase in own-brand stores of major companies.
It's the lack of "brick and mortar net-neutrality"...
My understanding used to be that it's OK if one company has a natural monopoly, but it's not ok to leverage that monopoly to gain an unfair competitive advantage in a different area. That was the rationale for the antitrust suits against Microsoft in the 90s: being the natural OS monopoly was OK, but they couldn't leverage that position to be the natural browser monopoly, too (which they did anyway, but whether the sanctions against them worked is a separate topic).
So, I would think the same would apply here: it's ok that Amazon has won a monopoly as a retail channel, but starting to leverage that to sell their own goods should be against antitrust laws. However, it seems that in the last 2 decades the only thing that courts have considered is "is the price lower for the consumer", so most antitrust laws appear to have been eviscerated in any case.
That seems a bit all or nothing. It could be worth considering if someone has monopolistic power (or some oligopoly) in one area such as distribution of products, any product business must be run separately via Chinese walls or just not allowed.
People seem to forget a fundamental part of capitalism is that government should intervene to maintain a level playing field. Then...what defines a level playing field..
That's fair, but Amazon has only a small % of total retail sales (4% in 2017, according to a quick search). I'm not sure at what point it's commonly assumed that a company has monopoly or market power, but I'm pretty confident it's not 4% or even close to that.
I'm not sure that's a super meaningful distinction for market power. It's a different method of selling, but ultimately you're selling largely the same things. You probably wouldn't separate out "Ford has this much market share in dealerships vs online sales" most of the time, for example.
Well, I suppose that's the key question. But I think that yuo might argue it is, because there's a huge "long tail" of goods that you can only really hope to sell online.
That's an interesting take but I think there's a bigger problem. Because of how they handle inventory, buying the Amazon brand of something is the only way for me to know that the item I'm buying is the item that I ordered.
Citation needed. As far as I can tell, post-scarcity is almost fundamentally unachievable; and, at best, achievable with technology that today's eyes would confuse for magic.
Seems like it's more an economics issue than technology. We're already most of the way there as seen by the sheer quantity of throwaway product - where it's cheaper to make another than allow repair and maintenance. (I'm ignoring DRM on repairs - that's a different issue).
We could probably have post-scarcity as Keynes envisaged right now if we hadn't created rampant throwaway consumerism along with increase in capability post WW2. The moment an issue is "solved" fake problems will be invented to sell a needless alternative. e.g. The creation and marketing of liquid soap that's worse in essentially all respects to bar soap, or the whole creation of body and looks insecurity to sell a cosmetic or cream.
So, surely in x years when technologically we're able to achieve post-scarcity it'll just spawn another fake solution to another fake problem? Another reason to keep working 40 hrs instead of dropping to 20.
Maybe it can truly appear after World War 3, the banking and finance wars.
You're thinking solely about materials, and thusly forgetting about energy. (So did Star Trek, I reckon, but I degress.)
Humans require a timely supply energy to live and act. Converting energy into human-usable form, requires energy. Recycling and remanufacturing require energy just like mining and "unsustainable" manufacturing do. And even renewable sources can collectively provide only a finite amount of energy per unit time.
> best achievable with technology that today's eyes would confuse for magic
That's a pretty low bar, isn't it? Show an iPhone's capabilities to, say, a WWII soldier or industrial revolution textile worker, and they'll deem it pretty magical.
The revolutionary war was 250 years ago which seems to reinforce the parent's point. That's several generations of human beings and outside of the lifetimes of ourselves, our children, almost all our grandchildren and many if not most of our great grandchildren.
Electronic computers were being built in WWII and television existed. I doubt many would see an iphone as magical.
Show it to the people who designed the PDP11 at the time they designed it, and chances are they won't.
The uneducated masses of soldiers and workers are much easier to dazzle and fool than technical personnel; and I apologize for not qualifying my previous comment enough to convey the idea that the Star Trek replicator, if it were to exist and be transported to the present day, would indeed be magic to any sane scientist or engineer.
No, you would be very disappointed. The vast majority of usefulness from a smart phone happens because it is connected. Since there would be now towers for the phone to connect to, most of the things you want to show couldn't be done.
You could use it as a personal organizer - but without connectivity it can be argued that a paper organizer is easier to use. There are a few other programs that will also work in a fashion, but again lacking connectivity the paper equivalents are as good if not better.
There are also a few games that will work: you can really impress them with the games you can play.
The only thing impressive will be the camera - a full color picture that you can zoom in on and save is interesting. Having 10000 photos (plus some videos) in your pocket will get attention. Of course once the phone breaks you lose all that, but still it will be impressive.
Maybe GP here's phrasing didn't communicate the idea well, but just because one item might be seen as magical to some particular people doesn't mean that anything we might see as magical is possible.
This would defeat the purpose of private labeling, which is to make you rely on the private label brand and not the manufacturer. The private label brands wants the freedom to change manufacturers and have you stick with them instead of going to the manufacturer.
The manufacture also reserves the right to package a lower quality product. I've bought generic cereal that I'm sure was Kelloggs, most of the time I couldn't tell the difference - every once in a while there was a slight burnt taste. Still food safe, but not as high quality.
Because even though the product might be from the same supplier, it is not a product of this brand.
There is a big difference.
The customer-expectation of a brand-product is based on the perception, the history and the presence of that brand, a well-crafted association and experience that is funded with the profit of the product.
The private-label product is cutting this funding. It will not finance the supplier-brand and it sets its own expectation and quality-thresholds on the product.
The supplier accepts that and waives his control to get the volume-order and fill production-gaps in its factory.
In this kind of deal there is no direct relationship between the original brand and the private-label product anymore.
Edit, for clarification:
It's not said that the potato-chips will be exactly the same. The minimum requirements of the brands may not match with the minimum-requirements of the private-label, i.e. for the private-label a different grade of potato, oil, salt might be used.
Ok, but the whole concept of capitalism optimising resource use is based on availability of information, so it's surely essential for a properly functioning market?
Isn't it time we grew up as society, get forthright and stop trying to trick people into buying stuff by hiding information so sellers can bait-and-switch, cut quantities, cut ingredient value, etc..
Isn't it embarrassing? You sell great batteries at a good price, but only long enough to capture the market so you can push bad value on millions of people and cause excess damage to the environment .. so you can make a personal fortune. Straight theft seems almost moral compared to this.
I bought biscuits yesterday, same box, same price, 17% less biscuits. Just now the packaging is very wasteful, but they managed to use extra plastic to disguise the reduction of food content. Oh, and apparently as the small print on the back gives the contents this is all fine. Some manager got a bonus for that I imagine.
No, deception has nothing to do with that.
The point is to disconnect the product from its brand and connect it to another (in-house) brand instead, practically negotiating away the brand/marketing portion of the price by committing to an attractive purchase-volume.
If I'm Pepsi and you want to white-label my product but then again still want to tell everyone it's Pepsi, you still make your sales on the back of my brand-investment, so you'll have to pay for the brand as well.
That would cause quite a lot of changes. A lot of stuff in super markets, at least here in Europe, is private label, too. The manufacturers use it to test different prices, taste, etc. and I guess also to deter competition from entering the market.
Amazon label stuff is mid-tier quality at best. An example using batteries as you mentioned. Costco's private label(Kirkland signature) is so much better and cheaper. Costco's batteries are rebranded Engergizers. I
I've heard that too. I think I have some of the China batteries. I haven't really been able to tell the difference. They still last 2x as long as the crappy bulk hardware store batteries I used to buy.
I have a theory that every popular website will ultimately become MySpace clone, ramping up advertising/revenue until it drives off all of their users. With all of the ads, and promoted products, Amazon is stepping closer everyday.
I've been an amazon customer since they started. I've ordered thousands of books. However, this year, I cancelled my prime membership. I got tired of them not delivering packages. Sometimes they were delivered to our postal box; sometimes the front door; and sometimes not at all. I gave up and discovered that brick and mortar stores often have better products and I can get it immediately.
As far as people saying they get free months of Prime, my wife had packages never delivered and we would complain, they would just apologize and refund the purchase. Packages that were late? They just apologized. Once, the driver couldn't find our address, so he called the technical support who called my cell phone. I had to walk two blocks waving my arms before he found me.
Now, I find when I'm searching for something, I find that I don't get the best price. If I search long enough, I will find the same exact item cheaper. I'm convinced the search results are prioritized to make them the most money, not the best price or best match.
After canceling, I bought an electronic device and paid for fast shipping. The package was shipped out of the local warehouse, where they gave it to the U.S. Postal Service to deliver. The shipping cost via USPS was probably around $4. If I remember, they charged me around $12.50 for expedited shipping. They arbitraged the postage. I felt scammed.
My amazon usb hub blocks the wifi whenever turned on... I should have returned it. Junk.
They are such a mess. The amount of items that have changed the product but kept the reviews, often from a phone case but now its a video projector pretending the 200 reviews belong to it. Not to mention one items page can have multiple sellers selling different varieties of the item.
Mine is crap too. I thought it was the hard drive plugged in to it but it seems to lose contact to all peripherals attached to it. It's got 3x "usb charging ports" but doesn't seem to have enough juice to power those either. Shame, cause Amazon Basics really appeals to me.
Just got a replacement on a hub that seemed to have a faulty power-switching “feature” that would cause any connected hard drives to lose power whenever my computer woke up from Power Nap. At least getting the replacement was easy…
One of the best things about Amazon Basics is the simplicity of their 1 year warranty.
If you got it in the last 12 months, call Amazon and explain the problem to them. They'll likely send you a replacement and probably refund your money, if the issue continues.
Haha I had the same, returned it for a refund and ended up getting a much more expensive one from charjen, which actually works and doesn't block the WiFi. Seems a bit overpriced, but at least it works without fault now.
I'd never heard any of these before, I thought they would be talking about AmazonBasics. I've been pretty happy with the quality of that so far. Are their private label brand products generally high quality or cheap knockoffs?
The only serious issue I've had with AmazonBasics so far was with a portable battery which was at risk of exploding or catching fire unexpectedly, so it was recalled.
Two things to look out for are that they no longer tend to offer the lowest prices, and you could probably receive counterfeits. A lot of companies have changed their tune after taking a beating from Amazon, but unfortunately I think many customers have grown used to going to them for everything, even when it's not the best choice. To give a few examples:
You can often find electronics for the same price at Best Buy, and they allow in-store pickup so you might get what you want even faster. Fry's takes it one step further by price matching other technology stores. I'd also trust both to not sell counterfeits.
If you're looking for cables or adapters, Monoprice has very competitive prices and they've always been reliable. I've had all sorts of issues with adapters or cables purchased through Amazon.
For home and everyday items, Target and Walmart can often be quite competitive as well. Why pay $10 for a shower liner when a $1 or $2 one works just as fine?
I think the issue is less that the goods are of low quality (actually direct-selling private-label goods seems to partly be intended as an anti-counterfeiting measure) and more that manufacturers who sell on Amazon are crying foul because Amazon is undercutting them.
"Name brand" is the key thing, isn't it? If you already independently have name recognition, no problem. If you're a nobody it's hard to break through.
Amazon is swamped with products from China of dubious quality. Just search for 'earphones' for example. All top results are very poor products from unknown brands.
Amazon needs to handle this now unless they want to turn into Aliexpress.
Dubious quality is one thing, but dubious legality is the stuff that worries me the most.
I ordered some food processing gadget, but it does not come with any kind of EU certification (i.e. not stamped or anything) and it is shipped direct from China in a box that says "gift". The same product on Alibaba have different seller and some claim they are selling the "food-safe" one and not others.
The brand from China are all mysterious from a foreign buyer point of view, so I cannot even buy from a brand and trust that the brand is serious about its reputation. Anyway, on Alibaba/express, there are often several brand claiming the same product despite using the same picture than another.
That's a mess, and indeed if I bother buying from Amazon (instead of Aliexpress), I hope the stuff coming to be at least legal. I can understand some amount of counterfeiting, not the current level though.
When you ship a rebranded OEM product, you don't have to recertify it if the original white box product was.
It is ironic how all kinds of certifications, originally conceived as a mean to kneecap Chinese/Asian exporters, now play into their hand.
Now, it is Western companies that don't want to develop a thing on their own, or make any original products as such, as that will require them to undergo certification for every self-developed, original product. Unlike with white box designs that were specifically designed for OEM industry, and allow for all kinds of effortless customisation without losing certification, and reaping the benefit of economies of scale (one OEM design being sold to many customers under a single certificate).
On a somewhat related note, I recently bought a chocolate from a local discount store (in the EU).
Apparently the list of ingredients is a machine-translation of the original (unknown) language.
It listed "palm-oil" as an ingredient. Sounds reasonable, but my language has different words for Palm, the tree and Palm, the palm of your hand.
Apparently my chocolate was made from oil extracted from human hands. Pretty disgusting.
If I had the required time or energy I'd try to file some sort of complain, but unfortunately I don't. Mostly because that's outright dangerous (imagine a potentially lethal allergen lost in machine translation).
I understand what you're getting at, but do people actually buy those items with the understanding that they are getting something of a higher quality? If you pay $2 for headphones and all the ones in the store cost $10+, it's hard to argue that you thought the quality was going to be higher.
I know we're in the tech bubble so most of us probably do research before buying anything online, that's why I ask.
Yeah those don't bother me too much, you pretty much know ahead of time when you buy super cheap crappy products. Counterfeits are the real problem, and to an only slightly lesser extent fake reviews.
> it's hard to argue that you thought the quality was going to be higher.
Oh, but argue people will!
Some people have a fairly un-nuanced view and assume that instead of the cheaper option being a cheap knockoff the more expensive ones are attempting to rip them off (because if one company can offer X for Y, anyone asking more is creaming extra profit). And some pretend to be that naive when it comes to refund/replacement/negative-review-designed-to-encourage-an-out-of-warranty-replacement/refund time.
You can't use review scores. They are not a proxy for quality at all. They are a proxy for perceived value. I have noticed, subjective of course, that people rate more expensive products more harshly. If I buy some $5 head phones and they work alright I am really happpy. If I buy $200 head phones and they are not perfect I am going to be disappointed, my rating will reflect that. So you have to compare products that cost a similar amount to get a real feel for the product quality. Reviews of vastly different costed items doing the same thing are kind of meaningless.
That is how reviews work, yes. When I buy $5 headphones for the gym, I'm happy they generally don't have static and seem to work. If I buy $200 headphones for the office, I'm going to complain if the 13khz range is a bit muddy. Likewise, I'm happy when my $40 bookshelf doesn't fall over, but I expect more from a $400 bookshelf.
Do you have an adblocker running? I did the same search, I got one result from Panasonic. The rest were nonsense brands I've never heard of: omnigates, mpow, gloue, arrela, otium, actionpie, byz, etc..
European and American brands have higher quality standards than Chinese brands. Whether the manufacturing happens in china or elsewhere is completely irrelevant to the actual quality of the product.
For popular global brands in the lucrative consumer electronics sector - where good reviews are everything - I am not so sure.
> Whether the manufacturing happens in china or elsewhere is completely irrelevant to the actual quality of the product.
Completely irrelevant? What makes you think that?
Anecdotally again, most of those numerous bad reviews for Beats by Dr. Dre exist because apparently they tend to fall apart after only days of use. So much for western quality control.
Doesn't appear to work for amazon.de, but amazon.co.uk has most of these under the same product IDs.
Here are the grades according to that website:
Gritin - A (90%)
KLIM - F (62%)
Panasonic - A (90%)
Beats by Dr. Dre - Not available on .co.uk
qubbi - Not enough reviews on .co.uk
Anker - A (90%)
Mpow - Not enough reviews on .co.uk
I spent far too long looking for a second USB charging block for my phone. The first page is full of < $5 chargers, none of them from a brand I'd heard of before, with mostly 5 star reviews from bots and a few 1 star reviews of "this caught fire and almost burned my house down"
You'd think to see an Anker product on the first page given their reputation for reliable electronics and (at least in my circles) popularity.
I wouldn't trust Anker too much either, I got an Anker 3-Port USB-C to USB-A hub + ethernet jack (because like you, I heard they made good stuff) and it blacked my wifi whenever I tried it use it. Maybe I got a counterfeit one, IDK, it was sold by "AnkerDirect" (the hub looked to be made pretty cheaply too). Either way, I returned it and got a charjen hub.
How true is this... and there are products with false ETL and other certificates and Amazon is not removing them from the marketplace... in the last 2 months I've started looking on Amazon like a bit better Aliexpress - at least for electronics...
I don't necessarily mind buying cheap goods from unknown brands. With something like earphones, I'm not optimistic they'll last that long before breaking or my wife losing them or something in the first place.
With earphones, if they get too loud for even a split second, they could damage your hearing or give you permanent tinnitus. I wouldn't put stuff of unknown provenience or quality into any of my body's orifices, ears included.
Chinese IEM's & earphones are actually starting to compete with the big guys in USA and some simple research can yield wonderful results. TRN, KZ, LZ, Tin Audio, are all wonderful.
The article mentions they're setting up their own brands in order to get a better grip on product quality. I'm quite sure Bezos does not want to be Aliexpress.
Presumably, you can trust that when you buy Amazon's private label brands, you're getting the actual Amazon private label, and not a counterfeit?
If not, let's hope that this eventually creates incentive for Amazon to handle the counterfeiting problem to protect their own brands.
If so, one would hope that Amazon is able to extend whatever tech/business practices are protecting these private label brands to other product on Amazon?
Probably they will be the only sellers for these items, so no counterfeit problem there. I doubt this will fix the situation for other items.
Personally I've switched away from amazon, after twice in a row getting a box with a switched item (HDD and SSD, respectively, both replaced with smaller and cheaper versions, and both "Sold by and shipped from Amazon"). Amazon support was good, they replaced the product, but it's a hassle to have to return-ship and wait. Now I either buy off aliexpress (if I'm okay with cheap/counterfeit, which is fine for many items) or local stores (if it's a product where I really care about quality).
> I doubt this will fix the situation for other items.
That's the point. The only way to buy genuine product, not co-mingled, will be buy it Amazon labeled.
Many Chinese brands have official stores at Aliexpress by the way, so you don't need to be okay with fakes if you don't want to. Not so many as at Tmall, but still.
Agreed. It's most likely a sin of omission, creating a broken system because it's not in their interests to fix the general counterfeiting problem.
There may be ancillary benefits, like increased seller competition into their monopsony, but it's not a priority for them to fix, because apparently it doesn't affect their bottom line enough.
It's not like it's hard to come up with a solution to the problem - they have lots of ways of surfacing prime-eligible items, you could have a similar way of surfacing manufacturer-approved resellers for some items. And as others have mentioned, there are no counterfeit kindles on amazon.com
> it's not in their interests to fix the general counterfeiting problem
But really it is, because judging on comments here, people are looking at aliexpress when they don't care that they are buying a cheap chinese product.
If Amazon is known as the place where you pay for a brand and get a counterfeit, and aliexpress is where you can just pay less for the counterfeit, that seems to me like a problem Amazon would want to fix.
I'm okay with cheap/counterfeit goods for some items, if I know what I'm buying and the price reflects that. I'm not okay with paying full price and receiving a worse product than I paid for.
Examples of things I would not buy knockoff/counterfeit would be power supplies, battery packs or anything dealing line voltage due to the obvious fire hazard. Examples of things I am fine with buying off aliexpress might be flash programmers, project boxes, clothes, etc.
Also, the examples I gave off amazon were not counterfeits, but rather wrong products. I bought a 12TB HDD and received a 6TB one from the same brand. Obviously I'm not okay with that, having paid full price for the 12TB one.
I'm pretty sure that hasn't stopped the counterfeiters in other cases where there's only one provider and items are being sold directly by the manufacturer through Amazon. I think it would be fascinating if someone were to set up and provide through FBA sales of some of those products.
That's super common, and not specifically a bad thing.
Unsure about other countries, but here in France super/hypermarket are even presenting it as an advantage on various points, "XYZ own brand means the cheapest price", ...
Eg I once consulted for the "Super U" chain and the fact that one of their own brand is a certainty of locally produced agricultural product in relation to each supermarket was a big thing they massively insisted on. Or "french origin" etc ...
Like for myself, I love LIDL's "chef to go" brand for salad/smoothies, always fresh and at a good price (their smoothies are awesome and contain nothing but fruits). I will now look for and buy those instead of other "regular" brands. I discovered their smoothies, because they already convinced me with their salad earlier.
Yep super common, usually the supermarket deals directly with a producer and puts their own brand name on the product. However, there are two different ways of doing it:
* the open one (U, Carrefour, Amazon Basics...) the brand is the name of the chain, they must ensure some quality and good price so the customer does not equate the whole shop with shitty products. They can even develop specific brands for high quality products, for organic products, etc. (U bio , Carrefour Sélection...)
* the indirect one (Leclerc, Amazon private brands...) the fact that the brand is owned by the chain is not immediately obvious. This allows them to have low cost/high margin exclusive products whose quality won't damage the chain's image. And they can rename the brand at will...
LIDL's "chef to go" is an indirect one yet focus on quality. Their elctronic brand "Silvercrest", while long being low quality crap, is now trying to focus on being "as good for cheaper" and is succeeding (they're getting great results with their cooking "robot" at half the price of competitors)
You're looking at the brighter side of the private label take over. What you should be noticing is that the majority of private label sellers are simply resellers of China-made crap. Things you can get for pennies on AliExpress/Alibaba costs $20-$30 on Amazon to cover storage, dropshipping, etc. The sales tactics are just as sleazy with brands being similar or products being sold to look like Amazon inventory. I've lost faith in Amazon's quality control and cannot trust what I am buying is the real deal.
>Are you thinking of "white label"? Private label means Amazon-branded.
In later years, the line in between these two kinda began to disappear. Amazon may well fly their private label unit people to China, and actually pay companies there to stuff their marketplace with properly made and maintained listings from inventories of Chinese trade companies.
In retail - the term for such things are "shelf filler": for as long as you don't have any "real deal" product for the category, you may well desire to just have some crappy goods put on shelves just so shelf space still makes at least some money, and investment analysts be happy with that.
That's not my experience with "AmazonBasics" products, I almost always go with those when I look for cables or very basic electronic devices and they generally do the job just fine at a very reasonable price. I'm sure it's just rebranded "china-made crap" but as long as they have decent selection and quality control that's not necessarily an issue.
> What you should be noticing is that the majority of private label sellers are simply resellers of China-made crap. Things you can get for pennies on AliExpress/Alibaba costs $20-$30 on Amazon to cover storage, dropshipping, etc.
And on top of that Amazon themselves barely spend a penny developing their own private brands or run their operations. There are companies specialising in exactly that - "private brands as a service." You can outsource basically everything till the moment goods get to the shelves, an in case of e-Commerce, even that is irrelevant.
Their logic - if we can't win against Aliexpress and Co., we will become Aliexpress and Co. This is them acknowledging that the entire business model they had had weakness at root - no matter how successful and sophisticated they are at selling stuff, the stuff they sell still comes from China.
You make it sound like "private brands as a service" was a bad thing. But unlike the numerous direct to customer nonames on aliexpress, amazon or ebay (the platform is irrelevant) who will never have a reputation to lose, a "private brands as a service" provider is dealing with long term customers. For them, quality issues will have consequences. Even if they both sell the same design, a "private brands as a service" manufacturer (or reseller) will have to balance price and quality, whereas a pop-up noname brand will only ever compete on price.
Long time ago, I worked in one called Yameen in Singapore. Named after the owner. I'm sure that they are not around anymore as I been googling what has became of the company for last 10 years without any result. The second one I worked with was AMR International HK (aka AMR Global Sourcing).
Just any other trade company would also do that - Marubeni, Sojitz, Itochu, Canada Export Centre - (the later should be really called Canada Import Centre) and others
Yes, they are "making a coherent product line from what is possible to customize or source as is" they will not pick a project developing a complex product from scratch.
Seems like a great time for someone to make an extension to show the "true" brand of products on Amazon. Nestlé is a great example of a company that people have tried to boycott and failed because of the sheer amount of brands at its disposal (2000+ according to Wikipedia[0])
Among water, Carola no longer belongs to Nestlé, since 2013, it is a subsidiary of Spadel (independent belgian of Spa mineral water). Similarly, Quézac now belongs to Ogeu.
This boycott may harm companies not related with Nestlé!
I scanned through that list. Granted, I don't buy much coffee, candy, bottled water, cookies, yogurt, cosmetics, or processed foods in general. But I think I could avoid their brands quite easily. Maybe I'm and outlier.
I read through the list as well, and I don’t buy any of those brands normally pretty much.
However, I would see more the issue being if I wanted to boycott nestle remembering all those brands are nestle when I’m at the supermarket shopping etc.
Used to work in a few companies doing "sourcing agency" work for this style of operations. Made some brands for big retailers, Amazon included: Adreama, Trigse, Avani etc, as well as trying at that myself during college years.
Nothing complicated: you pick something sounding vaguely Italian or French - Whopani Schmopani etc, make a convincing looking website, and order the most banal plasticky goods from dudes on 1688.com with your "brand" silk screened on it. Then you list that stuff on ebays, amazons for $200 each. And once a day, there will be few misfortunate dudes buying into that.
I love quality private labels. One more is good news. Competition keeps price low and quality higher. I buy a lot of Kirkland stuff at Costco, some Great Value stuff at Walmart, and increasingly more AmazonBasics stuff on Amazon.
My rule of thumb tends to be: Always try the cheaper private label at first, and only if it's not good enough do I move on to branded stuff. With most things, the private label stuff is just as good.
Not really a surprise, why would Amazon constrain it's ambitions to being the store front, when it could control the whole product lifecyle from manufacturing to delivery.
Perhaps not great news for people who sell on amazon though. It would be very easy for amazon to tilt the table on their site in favour of their own brands.
I've found that ordering products through Amazon is a much better experience then ordering through a company's own website.
One click ordering, reliable order tracking, and faster shipping times.
I recently tried to purchase a pair of shoes from steve madden. They canceled my order without even notifying me, and I didn't notice until I checked my order status. Turns out they were failing to process my payment, and they couldn't even explain why.
They also sell through Amazon. One click later and I'm getting the same product faster and cheaper from the same seller.
Many retailers, supermarkets, etc do this. Best Buy for example has the brands Insignia, Dynex, Rocket Fish, etc. Given that Amazon owns Whole Foods and has several retail locations, it makes sense that they are adopting this classic strategy.
I guess I'm in the minority here, since my Amazon experience has been pretty decent still. Its certainly worse than it was in ~2010 or so, but every time a package gets lost, or something goes wrong, Amazon corrects it. My perception might also be insulated by the fact that I live in an apartment building without open access, so packages are somewhat secure (unless someone in my smallish building wants to be a dick).
I still order most of my PC hardware off Amazon, and unless its significantly cheaper to go else where, I'm sticking with them.
Large retailers do this with store brands (Walmart), but it's generally more opaque to the consumer.
It's really quite clever, you sell third-party products, but also control all transaction data — so you see which products are successful, somewhat well reviewed, and profitable... then you just steal the business.
It's kind of how Apple/Google adopt features. Watch which utility apps are popular, then just build the features into the OS.
If you're relying on a third-party to sell your product in a marketplace, you can't get too comfortable.
Are you sure you mean "opaque" but actually meant "transparent"? Over here in the UK we have ASDA which is owned by Walmart. They have their own store brands such as "George" for clothing and home/domestic goods such as electricals. It's pretty clear, or transparent, that stuff labelled George is ASDA's own-brand goods and no secret is made of this by ASDA.
As another example, Tesco have their own clothing brand, "F&F" and like ASDA they don't hide the fact that it's their own in-house brand.
I mean opaque when it comes to 'this is a successful third-party product we sell, let's hijack the business' rather than the clarity of what a store brand is in general.
Stores do distance themselves a bit further though — Walmart has "Best Value" brand or whatever, which isn't as explicitly a Walmart brand.
It's the same here in the US, too. They don't hide the fact, but it's certainly not as transparent as just labeling everything with their own name. There's still a bit of a stigma attached to knockoff brands and the stores don't want to make it too obvious.
The biggest reason I use Amazon, and I'm careful to only buy from Amazon is because of their logistic velocity.
I ordered electrical switch plates from a company that specialized in electrical switch plates, it's all they sell. After 5 days the product hadn't shipped, I cancelled the order and place a prime Amazon order and received the wall plates the next day. I paid a slightly higher price from Amazon but I actually got the product.
Anyone here knows what makes amazon that efficient ? What is the thing they managed to do right, that their competitor couldn't , that makes them the giant of online shops they are today ?
i have the intuition it is related to supply chain, but i'm not an expert at all, so i don't understand what someone could invent in that field that make them unreachable by competitors.
Basically, the services they offer (AWS, handling of storage and shipment of goods for third-party retailers) are using the systems and workflows they build for themselves. If it is something others use, then it is the best system that can be built and is most profitable.
I view the original competitive edge to be the "Warehouse as a Service". Anyone can sell their products without having to own an online store or get the bulk shipping logistics figured out, just ship it in to Amazon, and they can load balance your product out across the US to make that 2 day delivery possible.
They also did have the original patent on "1 Click Purchase" which I'm sure has always helped sales.
EDIT: So the only reason I think it hasn't been copied is the high barrier to entry and market inertia as the other commenter said.
I think that one of the main reasons for Amazon to grow so fast is that the competition fails to integrate into the web.
Do any product related search on Google and then look at the sites that come up. They almost all link to Amazon when it comes to the question where to buy the product.
And its not like Amazon is paying particularly much for that. From 0% to 10%, depending on the type of item purchased. As an affiliate, I average around 3%.
That is low. I know what companies spend to acquire customers via other channels. Adsense and other types of advertising. Several times more.
Why is the competition not in that game? I guess because they don't have the expertise to correctly track the value of the visitors.
My message to them: You cannot just stand on the sideline of the web and hope for people to pave their way to your online shop via a miracle. You have to integrate. You have to build that expertise.
The "law of the pipe" strikes again. No pipe company wants to be in the pipe business--they always want to be in the content business. At the first opportunity, they will start creating their own content and deprecating everybody else's.
This is what anti- net neutrality looks like with atoms rather than electrons.
I've heard it as "commoditize your complements". When you're the heavyweight in a certain market (e.g. discovery and delivery), you want nearby markets to be competitive and prices to be low. You can greatly contribute to bringing that about by getting into it yourself like Amazon has with Amazon basics. They know they'll never make loads of money from those-- it's a highly competitive market after all-- but the better they can make it for consumers, the more consumers will use their actual product, the Amazon website.
Ebay does not compete with its customers, sadly it lost the fight.
Amazon knows which products are the most profitable based on its own selling data collection, then it will make its own white-labelled version to compete, what a strategy! again, sadly, it has no competitors these days so it can do whatever it wants.
Ebay is still good. You can often find what you want for much cheaper than on Amazon, often with free shipping. Shipping usually takes 3-4 days instead of 2 days, but it's almost always cheaper. Unfortunately Ebay can't get its act together regarding product listing organization and reviews, so much so that I'll often check reviews of matching products from other sites before I buy it from Ebay. There are now shady sellers on Ebay and Amazon, so the comparison is a wash in that area. They also have comparable buyer protection if a seller does something dishonest.
At least with ebay its clear what product you are getting and from which seller from the listing. There aren't a dozen counterfeit products from various sellers and SKUs lumped together with combined reviews.
Yeah, its crazy. This would be like walking into a grocery store and seeing grocery store branded items right next to other name brands!
Except that isn't crazy at all and is something that retailers have been doing for decades, in basically every segment of the retail business. And the reasons are essentially the same. The store knows what items sell well and thus knows exactly which items could be profitable when sold this way.
If successful, add more items.
If successful, add more stores.
If successful, add more items.
If successful, sell top shelf space at premium.
Gather and analyze ALL data.
Identify highest selling and most profitable items.
Find manufacturers of those items.
Seed those products directly from manufacturers.
Create own brands. Sell those products under store/new brands.
Use your foot/online traffic, reputation, edge, consumer behavior data to cut out the middle man in select products.
Continue to offer sellers a superior marketplace to sell their goods.
Experiment with your product placements, ads and optimize.
Gather and analyze ALL data.
REPEAT
Nothing new here. For more info see - Walgreens, CVS, Walmart, Target, Whole foods, Safeway, Costco, et al.
Reading so many "frustrated shopper" posts is... frustrating.
• Search problems?
Also use Google to search Amazon. And clicking through to similar products in Amazon's comparison section is one of the best ways to find things. Of course don't ONLY search Amazon...or any other online vendor. I've listed some extensions that do a lot of heavy lifting. Yes, manipulating placement in search result is sub-optimal for the end user, but with some browser extensions and an overall strategy, Amazon will always have a place in my overall search strategy.
• Quality problems?
Install the Fakespot Chrome browser extension. Avoid products with few reviews initially. Read the 1-star reviews to see if there's a problem you can live with (e.g. complex installation). And Amazon is NOT right for some kinds of products.
• Price?
Check WalMart and local stores online first. Many stores make in-store pickup painless, e.g. Home Depots lobby lockers. Enter code, grab your stuff and go.
Install the WikiBuy and official Amazon Chrome extension. WikiBuy often shows you the same product cheaper on eBay, and Amazon will sometimes give you a coupon if you follow it's link back to Amazon it when you are shopping elsewhere (e.g. Walmart).
I like to always look for a used fulfilled by Amazon product. There is often no significant issue, and small issues can be overlooked. But even if you get a backwards or missing part the return is pretty painless.
For simple stuff, of course check AliExpress and Ebay first.
• Overall experience?
Amazon should not of course be relied for everything, by anyone, ever. Microcenter (as several have pointed out) is currently great and reliable for computer parts.
• Shipping speed?
Yeah, don't trust the two-day shipping. But the (sometimes) free one-day shipping option is awesome. And complain from time-to-time and get discounts on your Prime. Sure, some people are dropped for complaining too much, which really sucks. But it's pretty rare.
This is a great move insofar as it help manage their huge problem with counterfeits, knockoffs, review scams, etc.. This is the is the antithesis of those fly-by-night Chinese+ scammers.
As long as they go for high quality and well-managed, this is an excellent idea. Also great that they base it on 3rd parties.
Seems that they might have figured out that what people come to Amazon for is convenience -- to get a solid product at an ok price, delivered soon and free (w/Prime) -- and that the influx of cheap knock-off/counterfeit goods and review cheating is ruining that experience.
The masses want one place to buy from a variety. Marketplace models want to offer these masses, a vast assortment. A fully functional ecosystem is now online.
This is particularly beneficial to brands with little to no presence. They invest in these marketplaces, buy prime spaces on the marketplace.
Once you have the masses captured, you have a lot of people looking for low-priced, value-for-money products.
Now, when you have the prime product positioning in your control, for free, and the enormous margins in place for your private labels, you can start reeling in the bumper prize.
Probably. Although plenty of people are starting to notice that Amazon is often no longer the lowest price source for many name brand items. But the majority of the public probably won’t think to check and just automatically assumes Amazon is the place to buy everything now. Kind of how some older folks think of Facebook as “the internet” itself. Sigh.
I've seen enough cases to be worried where their prices are substantially marked higher than other sites. I used to be able to safely assume Amazon was the best price. Now I don't feel it's safe to do that. You really do need to shop around to make sure you're not getting a bad price. On the other hand I still have too many bad experiences with other merchant websites to go with the other merchant if price is comparable. Amazon is still just too reliable IMO.
I've found the Amazon branded non electronic generics pretty good. Generic cases for electronics and etc... although they're noticeably less cheap than they used to be. I feel like over time their price has risen to match other brands after they were established.
The actual Amazon electronics and such... are decidedly bare bones and wonky even for a generic electronics brand. I've had mice and other Amazon generics not just feel cheap, but don't work at times.
Article mentions smallparts.com - however, SmallParts was an independent company that Amazon bought years ago (2005). I remember getting their (awesome) catalog in the mail before the takeover.
Does Amazon copy or undercut successfull products?
A few years ago I bought some high quality monitor arms; heavy duty cast aluminum, etc. for about $150 each.
A couple years later I go to buy another, and now there is an Amazon branded clone for $100. The only difference is black painted vs. the original polished aluminum.
Does anyone have a good list of alternatives to Amazon, perhaps labeled by category?
The few times I've wanted something and checked Jet.com first, what I wanted wasn't there. Only successful gotos I have are backcountry.com and rei.com.
In the sense that more competition sometimes produces better outcomes, absolutely. However, going by Amazon's historic behaviour, it's an aggressive move which seems to continue their strategy of just using their massive scale to crush the competition, at which point there's no longer a need for them to act in pro-consumer ways any more.
Yes and no. A store brand can be a good thing for value and consistency, but at the same time, if it crowds out variety and selection and makes it harder for other suppliers to thrive, that's not good for consumers long-term.
If you're looking for another option check what Costco carries. They seem pretty good to me (certainly better than what I've seen in many medical offices) and when I was price shopping a bit they turned out to be well priced.
Honestly, my bigger issue with Amazon is the fact that they have a real problem with counterfeits and the way the comingle FBA inventory without any indication to the buyer makes it impossible to avoid by buying from trusted sellers. It's especially bad with electronic components.
I needed a solid state relay a few weeks ago. I buy most things from Amazon because of Prime, but I ended up ordering from Digikey, paying extra shipping, and waiting an extra couple of days because I needed to know that the component I was buying was actually legit and could actually meet its rated specs since I didn't want to risk a $20 part potentially wrecking a few hundred dollars of equipment.
Not even close. Walmart at its peak - prior to Amazon acquiring serious scale - had a dramatically greater dominance over retail than anything Amazon has reached so far. Currently Walmart has retail sales three times that of Amazon.
Walmart's version of this, is Great Value products. They have dozens of product categories it covers. They use it to restrain branded products from being able to easily raise prices. If Kraft Velveeta decides to raise its mac & cheese box to $2.99, Walmart will sell their Great Value brand version right next to it for $1.29. It's extremely consumer friendly and introduces price competition into the market place.
Clothing, too. I have so much White Stag clothing, Secret Treasures sleepwear is so good that I actually go out of my way to buy their soft nighties, and my favorite belts are NOBO.
I’m sick of seeing the lazy argument that moves like this are in the best interests of consumers. Yeah, the prices may be a little lower and the buying experience a little easier right now. But those are tiny short term benefits relative to the medium to longer term impact a move like this can have as we allow a massive centralization of commerce to take place. The long term impact is that wealth, power, and control are all centralized in the hands of a small number of people, with fewer and fewer opportunities for anyone else to build a thriving business. Platform capitalism has us headed for a dystopian future and the saddest thing is that few people seem to be able to imagine anything better.
A lot of this depends on how far Amazon takes this.
Online, you have an infinite shelf space. So many people have used that to create those so called "private labels" that contribute nothing of value and just add confusion and cost to the market.
So if those we're gone, it would be great.
But maybe we can be optimistic, given that Bezos thinks long term:
Maybe the goal is to create a thriving, competitive market of brands that only belong to Amazon ? Maybe, as long as you can provide significant new value to consumers, you'd get access, and you'd get all your logistics,customer service,and marketing taken care for you ? And who knows, maybe one day, your supply-chain and a lot of your manufacturing ?
And this would advance us towards a world where most companies are more focused on r&d(similar to what AWS did for software), and many startups will thrive.
Sure, we would have to find ways to decrease concentration for power in certain companies, but it won't be all bad.
Amazon has turned into a warehouse, you have to know what you want coming in. The only reason I kept using them was because I was lazy and didn't want to have to manage purchases across multiple different websites. But it just isn't worth it when I kept consistently getting inferior products.