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I find that 20 years ago I shopped at Amazon for the low prices, but 2020s+ I shop at Amazon due to their logistics.
The problem for everyone else is not simply that Amazon ships quickly, I almost don't even care about that. The thing is that Amazon ships & delivers on a reliable predicted schedule. When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does. I shop at specific competitors who can do similar (B&H, Sweetwater, etc).
Many online stores big & small in the year 2026 will still take days to even send shipment info, followed by using unreliable carriers that miss ETAs.
I would even be OK with these stores giving a narrow range or probability "90% of the time this arrives between Tuesday & Wednesday".. But I am not in the mood to order stuff that may arrive in 2-10 days with very little clarity on which end of the range.
And then return...
Got a dud? Quality not as expected? Ordered two by mistake? Size is not fitting? Take it to nearest post office, scan a qr code and hand it over. Done.
The other day I had to pack a product not bought from Amazon, then drive 25 minutes to a specific company's drop off point at some weird opening hours...
And that's after it took me to write manual email to get return label...the entire process took multiple weeks. And then a few more weeks until getting the refund.
At this point, I'm happy to pay 10% extra just to buy from Amazon.
I agree, returns are where amazon crushes it. I feel like there should be some startup just focusing on making the perfect returns product for small brands. Just do anything including at home pickup and then figure out how to optimize later.
The one issue here is that to achieve this result and make the customer king (or spoiled child, you choose), they exploit and abuse absolutely everyone else, people and partners.
Personally I’m happy to pay 20% extra elsewhere just to know that Bezos is not getting any of my money.
But I’m weird like that; I also think ordering everything online is inherently immoral (provided you are an able bodied person living in a city)
I had to return iSpring RO system bought through their official portal. It came as a shock to me that I had to pay for shipment that was 70% of the contents value. IMO that's the way to discourage returns.
> Got a dud? Quality not as expected? Ordered two by mistake? Size is not fitting?
I totally agree, but I find the quality of the items I get off of Amazon to generally be a lot less than other places I chose to shop. Likely due to the fact that I intentionally shop on other sites for specific products but on Amazon I get things that just aren't necessary for me so I spend less time curating the purchases.
Much better that nearest post office. Take it to the nearest whole foods and don't even bother with the box.
> Got a dud? Quality not as expected? Ordered two by mistake? Size is not fitting? Take it to nearest post office, scan a qr code and hand it over. Done.
I'd say this is probably a US privilege. Ive had some trouble returning items in india
> And then return...
My little experience with Amazon is that quality assurance has been moved to the customer. It is on you to see that a product is wrong/not what you wanted.
> At this point, I'm happy to pay 10% extra just to buy from Amazon.
As the article states, you are paying more than 10% extra because Amazon. And everybody else too.
Yeah, returning ends up being the clencher for me for a lot of Amazon stuff.
If I think there's basically no likelihood of me returning something, I'll sometimes shop elsewhere, but for anything where there's even a chance of me not liking it for whatever reason I will buy on Amazon now.
As a long time Amazon customer I stopped Prime and stopped using the platform because all of those went downhill and unreliable as their prices went up - even after they opened a local warehouse in my same city limits
i'm happy to pay a convenience fee to not have to set up an account to order from each individual store. having my address and payment info in one centralized superstore is way better than having it spread around dozens of niche businesses
I used to feel this way about Amazon returns. Then a seller sent me the wrong item and Amazon rejected the return and re-charged me and I've been trying to get my money back for over a year. I do think it will only be one more phone call, but I have thought that with every phone call. It's less than $50 but it's ridiculous. It has happened before that a seller would send me the wrong thing, which isn't great, but at least they would refund me. They have made this experience so tedious and frustrating, I'm sick of it and have moved all my physical purchases elsewhere.
The tradeoff for consumers is that convenient returns are cheaper to implement than quality control.
I was floored the other day doing an Amazon return. It was a rented office space, with just a window where you drop off your item to a clerk. I peeked inside it was floor to ceiling packages and toys and items. And there was a line behind me.
The sheer logistics and human will that made that possible is crazy to me.
Extrapolate to multiple locations in Miami alone. Then Florida. Then East Coast. Then USA. Then Europe. Global locations.
Who is in charge of all this? How do they keep track of all this? How do they identify a tiny little podunk location is fucking up and how do they find someone they can trust to run it?
It's crazy! Think about it next time you return something to Amazon.
Just bear in mind that if they don't like how often you return or the circumstances, they will issue you a sudden lifetime ban
But also if you go to support chat (not via the order details, which often rejects attempts at getting support) via the site footer, and escalate to an agent, you can tell them you don't have a post office that's easy to get to for you and don't drive etc. and they will just issue you a refund (if it's a quality problem). Done this many times when the product was damaged.
Except you don’t have the choice to “pay 10% extra just to buy from Amazon”. Amazon force sellers to set not-lower price everywhere else.
I think you're slightly wrong. It's not prices, it's not logistics. Amazon dominates because they have the power & money to do the one single thing their competiton couldn't do without going out of business: No-questions-asked returns. 9 out of 10 people i ask this is the single reason they stay at Amazon.
The flip side to this is I've on multiple occasions had Amazon ship me clearly used shit resold as new — Amazon.com was the seller.
One even came with a sticker: "Thanks for giving this product a second life!"
The worst of the worst among us use Amazon as a try-before-you-buy or rental house. Their lax return policy encourages them.
If I buy anything important, especially expensive electronics, I buy it from somewhere else. If it's a reputable store with a strict return policy, I'm doubly sure there will be no fuckery.
That used to be the case until about a year ago, but isn't the case anymore at least here in Ireland. I'm taking them to small claims court because they closed my account without a refund on a legitimate return. Their customer support has gone from excellent to nearly nonexistent. Fortunately for me, I've kept all the receipts.
I distrust Amazon for anything over about £150 now. Which seems to coincide with their threshold for needing an OTP.
The last straw was getting a blood pressure monitor (which they don’t even sell) in place of £400 smart glasses. They insisted I returned the monitor, then said I failed to return the glasses. Took months for them to refund me.
Weird. I think I might have made three returns to Amazon in 30 years of ordering from them. I research the shit out of just about everything I buy, if I have to return something it's because I either got very cleverly scammed or had a literal stroke before I made the purchase.
The point the article makes is that the other online stores without access to Amazon's logistics aren't able to lower the price to make up for the inconvenience of using a normal shipping carrier because of an Amazon policy that bans sellers from offering an item for cheaper elsewhere. Amazon then charges sellers high fees that inflate the price of the item everywhere because of that policy.
My experience is that for non-FBA fulfilled products this doesn't hold at all.
Out of the last ~20 orders (I don't order that often from them, so that's probably spanning the whole last 12 months or more), more often than not, the predicted delivery date has been adjusted upwards, often by ~2 days, and a few times by ~a week.
This may be specific to Germany/Berlin, as from what I hear, they (/ their subcontractors) have troubles finding delivery drivers. Mixed with the growing counterfeit issues, and degrading product description / details for most products, Amazon doesn't seem to be in it's prime.
I stopped shopping at Amazon because their fulfillment started to suck. And I found they kept their dates 25/100.
Most recently I ordered 10 items on September 18th (I had a gift card). All prime eligible. The first arrived on sep 20, the 4 on sep 28, 5 on sep 28, and the last is scheduled for Friday.
I didn’t get any estimates until after purchase.
Amazon is no longer good. They are coasting on their customer base and are slowing ratcheting up prices and squeezing their costs (keeping all their gains).
For me it’s not the logistics, for me it’s the catalogue. They have so many ridiculously niche items that I want that would be impossible to buy from a local store
All of you talking about delivery times, cost, quality...I stopped shopping at Amazon when I heard people were peeing in bottles.
There is also an erosion of trust out there from scammer fatigue. Amazon let's you return things and you don't worry about your credit card being stolen or any of the stupid hassles of customer service these days.
This. The amount of things I buy off Amazon has dropped quite a lot over the last 15-20 years. It used to be just about everything. Now it's an about once a month at most, and some of that are gifts for other people. I'm more willing to shop local now, and for everything else if I don't care a lot about when I get it I'll order it direct from a more appropriate vendor. And if I *really* don't care when I get it nor that it's fake, I'll use AliExpress. The only value Amazon has for me now is if I need an item on a predictable schedule and either I can't get it locally or its not worth my time to do so.
This is fine, good for Amazon for setting up an excellent logistics system and having a good return policy. The problem is that Amazon charges a lot for this service. If you don't need super fast shipping or a good return policy, or don't want to pay for Amazon's profit margin, you can't go anywhere else, because Amazon will restrict your sales if you charge less somewhere else.
Given that Amazon has 40% of the e-commerce market (I'm surprised it's not more actually), this is exactly what antitrust laws were designed to stop. Customers and vendors/manufacturers should be free to use the distribution channels that meet their needs of service and speed and price the best, but Amazon, through its big market share, is preventing that.
I would say in the 2010s I shopped with Amazon for the logistics. In the 2020s their logistics have been crap. Packages are slow, frequently late, and rarely packaged well enough for the items to arrive undamaged without luck. The overwhelming amount of drop shipped trash means the site is useless, too.
I've gone back to local stores. They're less convenient, but the prices are better and the quality is MUCH better. Amazon is for commodity name brand stuff that's harder to find.
I'm not an Amazon Prime customer (shocking, I know), and I noticed that the shown delivery times are overly pessimistic, probably in order to make you opt for a Prime membership to get faster delivery. And then the package arrives at least one day earlier than the predicted delivery date.
> When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does.
These days my only reason to get mad at them is that they will regularly deliver an item earlier than their communicated shipping date, which is almost as annoying as delivering later.
I don't really mind if it arrives tomorrow or in two weeks, but please don't have it arrive at any other date. Also don't mind changing that date down the line, as long as I am kept in the loop and can plan accordingly.
A lot of that uncertainty has to do with USPS, who keeps getting slower, and their delivery date estimates are at this point often 2-3 days more optimistic than reality.
At least in my experience, UPS, Fedex, etc., tend to deliver when the estimate says.
> When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does
2% for me in the last 6 months (1/51 orders). I live in San Francisco not some remote location. I’ve had 3 orders where the estimate up until purchase was “arriving today” get delayed by 2+ days. And Amazon support is one of the worst at actually doing the thing they said they’d do.
So I’ve got a refund on my Prime membership for this year and won’t be renewing next because I’m in exactly the situation you say you won’t want to deal with.
This differs WILDLY from country to country, and I assume city to city.
In Tokyo I would get my stuff from Amazon in a day or two, and accuracy of time of arrival was in hours.
In Stockholm, even amazon regularly delivers a week or two later than what it says. To the point I don't see the point buying from Amazon if I can find a reliable local alternative, because they'll both be late.
Am in Europe and pivoting away from Amazon because they started using own carriers and the insane practice of leaving parcels in front of your door. Should have probably left earlier but price + convenience are often hard to beat.. Especially as different amazons all deliver for free across Europe but have different prices so you can even arbitrage between them.
Huh, this is not my experience. I have had many packages from Amazon delayed recently. But I continue to use them because their selection is the best, so it makes sense to pay for Prime and then their shipping is on average faster and cheaper than any other option. I'm still satisfied with their service.
It makes sense because shipping is a volume game and they have the most volume. Their electric van is coming down my street twice a day whether I order or not. I wish I could ship my own packages with their shipping.
My biggest problem with Amazon these days is that you can't really know if what you're ordering is any good. Amazon should start their own product testing lab and do in house reviews. Or find some other way to get trusted reviews on their product pages.
I loath Amazon because of its UI.
In Poland we have Allegro and 99,9% of sellers basically ships on the same day (for orders before 15:00) and it arrives next day.
This basically applies to most of the online stores in Poland…
> When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does.
This depends heavily on where you live. I recall it used to be true, but in the three places I've spent significant time since the pandemic, all three have been less than 50% on time -- and less than 75% even giving an extra day. Because there's apparently no consequences for the last-mile delivery contractors to claim a package is delivered and not actually take it out of the truck until the next week, your local contractor determines your experience.
This is also why I usually order on Amazon. And the few times it doesn’t go through them the experience is often bad.
FedEx delivered my Steam Frame - first it said Friday delivery by 1pm. Then on Friday, it kept saying 1pm until about 3pm after which it updated to “by 8pm”. Then, after 8, it said the item never left their facility. The next day it said delivery would be Monday by 1pm. Actual delivery was Monday around 6pm.
Amazon _rarely_ has these issues. Especially for an expensive delivery like the above, I’d want to know when to expect it and possibly actually be at home to receive it.
When you search for a product on Amazon and sort by price, it makes some products magically "disappear", and gives you more expensive products first, or plays dumb and inserts unrelated products. It's all done to discourage searching for better prices.
It's often still cheaper to buy from Amazon than buying from vendors, unless you scour the internet for the 30% off coupon and sign up for the newsletter for the 10% welcome bonus and then promptly report the newsletter as spam.
There should be some kind of federal law against needing to do this.
Buying direct from vendor should always be the cheapest, and at least 5% cheaper than Amazon (since everything on Amazon is automatically 5% off)
My experience has been different, most retailers have accurate delivery times, unless you shop for things like furniture at C&B or WestElm for which they don’t keep local inventory. The only appeal Amazon has for me is the subscribe and save option and that you can find almost anything. For example I have a legacy air filtration system for which I cannot find replacement filters for, except on Amazon. For anything else there seems to be a better alternative today.
I find a lot of the websites I shop at for certain things do "dropshipping". So the product page will say "X in stock!" or similar when in reality they're telling you the inventory at a shared warehouse or even the original manufacturer and once you actually submit your order, the product needs to be shipped first to the store you ordered from. Then they ship to you. But both legs can take an unknown amount of time.
For me it’s that I know if something is wrong with the shipping that Amazon will fix it for me.
The other month my wife ordered something inexpensive from Best Buy that got shipped. I am 90% certain the FedEx delivery person took it, impossible to find the easiest way to resolve the matter with BestBuy. Amazon while historically it was not always intuitive to find the chat feature. I could always get there and the problem was fixed.
Amazon’s logistics are shit.
You’ll get something to show up on schedule but it’s frequently needs to be returned because of a problem on their end. No I don’t accept paying full price for a used product in subpar repair. No I don’t want a convincing fake.
The hassle of even 1 return in 20 isn’t worth faster delivery. Worse even if I just throw away their junk I still need to make a new order.
> I almost don't even care about [shipping quickly]
I used to think there would be more opportunities for a patient consumer to get a discount, but perhaps what happens it that even a low-priority package takes up certain kinds of capacity once it leaves the vendor, and the delivery-system's incentive to maximize throughput leads to a kind of floor.
20/100 times, it ships faster than it estimates
Its also heavily region dependent. You can order something on Amazon.com at 10am and have it delivered by 5pm sometimes. When ordering from Amazon.de, it often takes a week just for the product to dispatch, then it takes another week for it to travel from their one warehouse in Poland to Helsinki.
Agree with others' sentiments: One usually does not need that fast shipping - or that reliable. There are, of course, exceptions - but not often enough that I'd pay for Prime membership. The few times I need it fast and it's not available in town, I simply pay Amazon for fast shipping.
Is that meant to say you are willing to ignore what Amazon is doing because their shipping is convenient?
> The thing is that Amazon ships & delivers on a reliable predicted schedule.
Maybe if you live close to a distribution center. The rare occasions I order from them anymore packages are routinely delayed by a week or more
I've bought something the other week that I'm still waiting to be delivered. The shop was fine, sent it out within hours.
The carrier has been letting them down every single step of the way (and to add insult to injury, I have to use that damn "Shop" app to track the delivery.) From a pick up on the 1st of October, they've supposedly had the package go back and forth between Los Angeles and here a couple of times.
Not sure what the price difference is for them to have used this carrier, but it can't be worth it compared to the fuss both of us are having trying to get the carrier to actually deliver the shipped product. The vendor is going to send a second one if the delivery doesn't happen to day like the carrier pinky promises it will (they've promised for 3 days straight it was going to be delivered that day, so I'm not holding my breath)
Yeah they're insanely good at logistics. They do same day deliveries here, I've had an idea for something and then got all the materials delivered 6 hours later. Nobody else can compete with that.
Also, there's the whole taking your money and completing the deal part. A whole bunch of sites seem to be breaking their own pages these days, leaving Amazon the sole remaining venue that still works.
I used to buy a lot on ebay.com, however they began to transition to a new page layout a few years ago, which made it too difficult to screen against scam-sellers(scamming was always a bit of an issue there). I briefly switched to walmart.com, however their site started giving a stupid error page for anything but the latest version of google chrome; this started about 2 years ago now.
anyway, here's a quick test i did(in firefox-esr) of a few sites which came to mind:
ebay: still has the dumb new design; certain js features appear broken(can't read customer reviews).
walmart: still get the "technical issues" error page.
newegg: main-page still loads mangled.
zoro: is it working again!? seems functional today... surprise!(i'll have to look into this more later; i did not test checkout)
thriftbooks: the search bar does not work.
so there it is. a bunch of sites i just simply can't shop on anymore. i'm surprised by zoro. will it work when i go to checkout?
So then there is no reason for amazon to enforce industry wide price fixing as described in this article if its just about logistics.
Yup, and you can even cancel items in the order before it has shipped!
Don’t think any other online stores offer that in Norway, really annoying
Why is a purchase ever in such a hurry? Short delivery only really encurrage impulse purchases.
It arrives when it arrives.
If you almost don't care about how quick it is then why not take 2-10 days as 10 days?
That has not been my experience. Amazon meets their delivery estimates about half the time. It's not a huge issue because they're usually only a day late, but I suspect they may be deliberately misstating how quickly they can deliver to help with sales.
Other retailers are also off, oftentimes more, but they usually don't market based on delivery time as much as Amazon seems to and I generally order from them when they are less costly.
I don't even care about shipment times at all as long as they are not completely unreasonable (e.g. multiple months for a supposedly in stock item). But I do care that the items do get to me or that thinks are resolved satisfactorily when that is not possible - without me having to hound the seller. Unfortunately that's still much more likely with Amazon than with some random internet shop - and that's even with Amazon's own enshittification of their service. With other sellers if the final courier fucks me over and wants me to pick up the package in dumbfuck nowhere district thats my problem because if I don't I might end up needing to threaten the seller with legal action before they resend/refund. With Amazon delivery issues are not my problem.
Yup, when it's like this then the customer could, if they wanted, downsize in terms of local tool/part/food/appliance storage and save much more than if they had low prices but unreliable service. For some people, city dwellers, this service could facilitate a totally different lifestyle (bringing city-like conveniences to the suburbs).
Lmao at Amazon packages showing up on the day they say it will. Not my experience in a major city.
Probably correct analysis. It also means means that places they simply do not operate in (like Switzerland) they are completely meaningless.
Luckily local alternative(galaxus/digitec) is so much better, reviews and rating are trustable, each category has 1000s of items, services and communication stellar etc. that for me, that name symbolises just some not-so-cheap cloud I used to work with some years ago.
>The problem for everyone else is not simply that Amazon ships quickly, I almost don't even care about that. The thing is that Amazon ships & delivers on a reliable predicted schedule. When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does. I shop at specific competitors who can do similar (B&H, Sweetwater, etc).
I don’t care so much for specific delivery dates (although they are a plus). Most important are free returns. Hence, I prioritize shopping at Costco/Target/Walmart/Home Depot/Lowes/Old Navy/Amazon/etc.
I've been mostly happy with sweetwater - but they use USPS and I had a shipment (strings) take 2 weeks.
I've started to use more "mom and pop" stores - Philadelphia Luthery instead of Stew Mac (Stew Mac shipping is a joke, they want you to "subscribe" for $120 a year now, and places like "The Acoustic Shoppe" in Missouri for strings.
...and their customer care & return handling (which is basicly give me my money back) usually just works.
Amazon searches for anything that isn't a known brand such as Apple & co turn out >90% Chinese products of highly questionable quality for me these days. And you can buy those cheaper by going straight to the source. The sole point of their retail business seems to be providing a support for the inevitable issues with these sellers, but I suspect that increasingly customers won't think it justifies the massive premium they're paying for what's essentially Taobao with an American address.
You mentioned Apple products -- I purchased an Airpod Pro set through Amazon, worked for a while but had to take them into an Apple Store for troubleshooting, where they had to carefully inform me without using the word "counterfeit" that they were counterfeit. Another problem related to quality which is endemic to Amazon.
I don’t understand the quality complaints. I’m actively looking for Chinese-branded products now because the quality is amazing. I’ve switched to Hongdian fountain pens, I recently bought an espresso maker stamped with an unpronounceable string of consonants, and I buy Chinese sportcoats that fit perfectly, have no label, and cost what I used to pay for clothes in the early 2000’s. Some clothing manufacturers on Amazon even email me for exact measurements, so I get a tailored fit straight from China. I get knockoff printer ink that lasts months longer than HP’s overpriced junk. The Chinese had quality issues twenty years ago, but today their products are top notch.
The way I see it, the premium you pay is for the convenience brought about by Amazon having your product sitting in a warehouse waiting for you to buy it.
vs. waiting two to four weeks to ship from China.
However at least in Canada, AliExpress has fulfillment centres locally, so AliExpress can often get their items in customers' hands within a week.
So where's the advantage? Most times I can wait a week.
I recently was looking for some widget on amazon and one of the chinese “brands” came up. They had 300+ reviews and 4.5 stars so I thought it had to at least be decent. But then I clicked through to read some of the reviews, and was surprised to see that there were many 1 to 3 star reviews, but none of them were counted. They all had strikethrough on the text, and then an explanation from amazon saying “because this was fulfilled by amazon, we take responsibility for this failure”.
They really are no different than Temu or Aliexpress at this point.
> And you can buy those cheaper by going straight to the source.
Agents should make it easier to present the option to go cheap direct, or see the price with better delivery times and return policy (e.g. Amazon).
I still don't get this. I've never bought a fake off Amazon by accident. I don't even know how to find fake Apple products on there if I wanted to.
For me it also does that for brands. The first 2 pages are almost always just scam.
Including known brands such as dermatologica skin cream etc. - just so much fraud with Amazon it's my shop of last resort.
It's all the same crap. you buy name brand from Tefal, or a local kitchen shop and it's the same crap with a different label and large markup. On Amazon you get all these letter brands with the same crap. You try to go to the source and buy from AliExpress but the lobbying worked and countries like The Netherlands introduced taxes to make it unattractive and help the local drop shippers keep their jobs. Some countries outright ban it. You think they're protecting the consumer but it's all the same crap but with extra steps.
Their support has become increasingly worse in recent years, too. They now try to steer you out of trying to talk to a human for customer support as much as possible.
If you manage to navigate your way through a bunch of FAQ pages to find the chat button, you'll be met with a basic AI chatbot that just tries to repeat those same FAQ entries back to you. If you manage to also navigate that and convince it that you need to talk to a human (you'll need to confirm it like 3 times), you might get lucky and finally be able to chat with a person who can barely speak English and will actively lie to you in an attempt to end the chat faster.
Here's a recent experience of mine: I managed to get a deal on a 4TB Samsung SSD, something like $330 before shipping on Amazon.com. I'm in Europe, so shipping would be pretty expensive, but even so it was still an amazing deal considering how expensive SSDs are now. So I ordered it, and two months later it was still not shipped with absolutely no word whatsoever from Amazon. So I got in contact with their support, they could never once tell me what was actually happening, they'd just repeat something like "I have filed a ticket with the fulfillment center and you will receive a shipping update within 48 hours" every time. It was always a lie - I would wait, not hear anything back, and contact them again. Did this 5 times, every time I'd get a similar response, once I was thrown around between 4 different support agents and none of them said anything of value. Eventually gave up and just canceled the order.
Amazon allows you to make returns and makes it convenient, quick, and easy. I made two purchases through independent sellers' websites in the last year, both with big banners guaranteeing satisfaction and easy returns for 100 days or something. And yet, when I found that the product didn't meet my needs, they would not accept my return. They wouldn't even issue a return label. Both of these sellers used Shop. Shop requires you to fill out an application for a refund and then the seller can drag their feet on processing it. In both cases they let the application sit there for days before rejecting it. In one of the cases my credit card company ruled in favor of the small business when I issued a chargeback.
On Amazon it's easy to request a return and get a return label all on the same day that you discover you have a subpar product. The long and short of it is that consumers do not want to be ripped off, and centralized sellers like Amazon and AliExpress make it easy to not be ripped off. If this raises prices across the board, so be it. It's worth it for the time saved and the accountability that comes along with it.
> Amazon allows you to make returns and makes it convenient, quick, and easy.
They currently have a $1bn settlement for failing to properly process refunds for returned products over a nine year period.
https://finance.yahoo.com/personal-finance/banking/article/d...
I guess it depends. Ordered a phone last month. Returned it because of bloatware. Waiting to this day for the refund. And support line says: please wait, nothing is wrong. While the website says, we need more details.
I rather take that risk. I buy from all sorts of online retailers and haven't had an issue in years. Ok, no, I had some pushback trying to return a sofa, but the seller offered a 50% discount for me to keep it, which I ended up accepting. The same way that VISA and Mastercard offer a service to customers, I don't think the world comes out winning when these Amazon and other global players get to raise all prices and take a cut of global commerce.
Disclaimer: I mostly shop from German, Danish, and to a lesser extend other EU sellers.
Ironically on this point, Amazon offers some of the best consumer service in Japan. Returns elsewhere are almost impossible.
I never had any problems with AliExpress returns
On the other hand, they drive up prices for everyone, and engage in other unethical businesses practices, like in the article.
I use Amazon to buy cheap stuff like zip ties, printing paper and ink and some cleaning products. Almost every single major purchase I go directly to the manufacturer website or a specialized store. For example, I would never buy photography gear on Amazon. I go to Adorama or BH. For my favorite brands in say hiking or running gear I go to REI or RunningWarehouse or visit my local brick and mortar store. Amazon has truly become the convenience store for me, my average purchase is under $10. Almost everyone today offer free or inexpensive quick shipping and easy returns. They also have better customer service.
> Almost every single major purchase I go directly to the manufacturer website or a specialized store.
Let's take an example: If a Brother printer is full price from Staples, Best Buy and the Brother website, but $50 off on Amazon, why would I not order on Amazon and save myself $50? As it is, Best Buy and Staples are also operating marketplaces when buying online.
> Almost everyone today offer free or inexpensive quick shipping and easy returns. They also have better customer service.
I beg to differ. I bought a GPU from a local store that turned out not to be compatible with my workstation. Returning it was a huge hassle, I paid a 15% restocking fee. The next time I ordered a GPU, I went through Amazon. When it too didn't work, they took it back, no questions asked, full funds returned.
Well, according to TFA, you're still paying an Amazon tax, which is itself similar to the Visa tax, which apparently we all pay even if we use cash to purchase directly from manufacturers (so long as the manufacturer also sells their product on Amazon).
For the cheap stuff, I usually find the quality better and sometimes lower prices by going to a shop like Home Bargains or B&M. Thats UK specific but I'm guessing there must be these sort of shops in the US too.
Wikipedia describes them as variety stores and has a list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_store#North_America
This is true for even mid range purchases. I was debating pre-ordering a game from Nintendo's website or Amazon and ended up chosing Amazon because of the return policy and how fast it gets delivered.
Those things are often 4x cheaper on the Chinese marketplaces, if you can tolerate 2-4 weeks shipping times. Amazon is a tax on poor planning.
> Amazon's Fair Pricing Policy lets it remove the Buy Box (the "Add to Cart" button), or even suspend a seller, if they're offering their item cheaper elsewhere.
This kind of abusive practice needs to be banned in whichever countries it's still legal.
You can't really aspire to improve the situation if such things continue to be legal.
Isn't this like Costco requiring manufacturers to offer SKUs at Costco that are not sold anywhere else? Or mattress stores offering to match price knowing full well that the SKUs in their store are not sold elsewhere?
This policy feels like incentive enough for Chinese manufacturers to not build behind a single brand, so the policy will not apply. Materially the same product, different SKU under a different brand name.
Feels trivially easy to get around this policy.
Everyone keeps talking about dynamic pricing.
But these sorts of contractual limits on a vendors pricing elsewhere should be illegal.
Walmart does this as well: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/pepsico-walmart-hit...
Why should it be illegal? Its their platform. If enough sellers don't like it and leave then Amazon will have to change their policy. There's several other platforms people can sell their stuff on.
I don't get the Amazon bashing. My experience is nothing like that:
Kitchen scale, $20 bucks, looks and operates exactly as described; three years later, it still works fine.
Bed sheets, $16, two days later delivered, better than I thought - at least for the price that is. Best price/quality ratio I could get.
If I don't like something, returning is super convenient; I drop it off at Kohl's over the weekend. Time and again I am stupefied of how is it possible that in small town USA, I can get something shipped by next day while paying a one time yearly fee.
I think Amazon is the best online shopping experience on the planet.
At the employee side, the minimum pay at Amazon is $20 per hour. Walmart is $14, AliExpress ... we can be only guessing at that
> I think Amazon is the best online shopping experience on the planet.
Be careful there. I use Allegro in Poland, where next-day is the rule, their website doesn't scream it was made in the late '00s (in the worst meaning of this comparison), and, as a bonus, they don't compete with their own merchants and even happen to pay their taxes here fairly. I'm sure there's plenty more of such websites across the 'planet'.
Amazon pays $20/hour because most people don't have the mental constitution to put up with it. It's pretty dull.
When I was hired as a part-timer (no interview!) at a warehouse there were about a dozen of us. In a month maybe four were left. It wasn't terribly physically difficult, though I was fairly sore. But there was nothing good about the work.
It was just repetitive, isolated tasks where you have to consciously decide not to meet the unrealistic standard, or just blindly follow the orders on the device, or guess how fast to work to avoid a strain injury while not being obviously slow.
To give some examples, we'd take bags (totes) from specific locations as indicated on our device, pack them on a large push-cart, and shuttle them halfway across the warehouse. Or we'd pick packages for a specific location off a conveyer belt (which usually moved too fast). Or we'd spend 5+ hours, alone, unfolding bags and putting them back onto the shelves.
There's probably some analogy to be made with software development here, based on what I've heard, but I'm only a CS student.
You’ll have a distinctly different experience buying clothes on there. 95% of the items don’t fit as described, the fabrics are not as pictured. My wife has a whole box of clothing returns she has to do for some shopping she did before a trip. Almost none of it was as-advertised. And Amazon will “lose” at least two or three items and claw back the refund a few times like they have every year, necessitating she call once a month for 3 or 4 months until she gets someone empowered to fix the problem permanently.
Sadly it’s still a better experience for her than shopping in-person because at least 5% of the items do fit versus nothing in-store. You used to be able to alter that stuff but the cheapness of the fabric and the intricacy of the “on-trend” design makes that impossible these days.
> I think Amazon is the best online shopping experience on the planet.
Does the best online shopping experience on the planet normally include routinely shortchanging customers on their refunds for close to $1bn?
https://finance.yahoo.com/personal-finance/banking/article/d...
Really Lowes and Home Depot have been doing better imo for anything they have. Their website actually has filters and decent search and most stuff is free next day delivery. On top of that, the Chinese knockoffs are fairly minimal or at least more established knock-off brands.
On top of that, that's without a $150/yr subscription.
Costco and Chewy are also pretty good.
> Kitchen scale, $20 bucks
The problem is thats it is a 2 dollar product that could be sold and fulfilled by some other seller for 10 but you cant do that because Amazon's pricing scheme.
Shop around and you are likely see the same product with a different "name" on it for 1/2 the price.
> the minimum pay at Amazon is $20
The same way Uber Eats pay is 22$ an hour, and yet most people working either of these gigs need food stamps to live?
Amazon Fair Price Policy doesn't apply in the UK and EU (it's illegal)
The EU are currently running an investigation into how this affects market dynamics, which will be interesting to see
Every time I read something like this I think "wow the US so fucked".
This is actually a good point. The policy described in the article doesn't apply in the EU, but it's not like Amazon is cheaper in the EU.
Also, it is common to see in the US competitors with lower prices than Amazon (e.g. I frequently see brand name products on Microcenter cheaper than Amazon), not to mention that it doesn't apply to sites like eBay. So you've got to wonder if it actually has a strong effect on pricing across the internet.
It's absolutely insane that this is legal in the US.
Noticed a big surge in pricing on Amazon for mundane crap. End up checking eBay and AliExpress for the same and both always cheaper, and sometimes in multiple. Things like blow up pool toys, > $20 on Amazon, easily half and lower on the others, and really not even worth a dollar in the scheme of things.
I've stopped shopping on Amazon entirely, and the impact on my credit card bill has been substantial.
It's not simply that products are priced poorly, but it is also that they seem to be priced just at the threshold where the purchase remains sufficiently convenient not to shop locally or elsewhere online.
Because of their predatory practices it seems online prices are roughly identical for Western branded products at all online retailers. For Chinese brands, it's long been cheaper to use AliExpress but shipping isn't as fast and returns aren't as convenient.
But that's perception. I blocked Amazon and continued shopping as usual. The volume of my purchases is now through local retailers, and I'm buying roughly the same amount of stuff but I'm spending a great deal less.
Yep. Amazon is almost no advantage here in the UK. I used to bulk buy stuff from them because it was cheaper than the supermarkets. That is no longer true. In fact it's 10-25% more expensive usually.
I really should just cancel my prime now.
Edit: just cancelled it!
The fees for sellers on Amazon is ridiculous and definitely keeps these prices higher.
Frustrating thing is when I then buy the small crap on eBay and then it shows up days later in an Amazon package.
-Post removed as this account is rate limited and I can't reply to comments-
A few years ago I looked at the finances of a company that sells on Amazon (FBA). It was pretty astounding the number of fees they charge. They were paying to show up in sponsored results which obviously increased the fees but from what I remember between all the fees roughly 50% of the sale price of their products was just going directly to Amazon.
Logistics and shipping cost a lot. Amazon is one of the cheapest warehouses that you can use for this purpose.
Compared to the wholesale -> retail markup for most goods 50% is pretty in line with what a normal store would take as their cut, maybe slightly better.
Their margin is Bezos' opportunity. I don't know how he could have been more direct.
The endgame of capitalism is a big corporation with a nested market which is completely regulated to death by that big corporation.
I've been boycotting Amazon since early 2025. It's not hard once you get reacquainted with things taking several days or weeks to arrive. Plan a little and it all works out. The delay in gratification may even help you avoid impulse purchases.
The notion that, if more people did this, prices might come down everywhere only stiffens my resolve.
I was an early Amazon user and introduced many people to it (was nice to easily acquire books). Have deleted my account 15ish years ago and noticed weird mindsets people developed, thinking they cannot get products elsewhere, thinking that Amazon ships faster than others when using Amazon Prime, thinking Amazon has cheap products and so on.
Showed what make believes people have.
I'm a guy that is pretty lazy and spends most of his money on convenience and not having to do stuff. It's not even convenient.
It's always a bit scary what things people believe end up believing about completely depending on one company.
I've always said that the two day shipping is a useless amount of time. Two days is too long if it's an emergency and if it can wait two days it can wait a week or more.
What's it good for? Constant shopping addiction dopamine?
Not being allowed to sell your product elsewhere for cheaper seems downright anticompetitive and if our government was functioning government that would be illegal. The whole point of the ideal free market is that fees are supposed to approach zero with increasing competition.
The funny part is that our monopoly busting law that actual worked but we don't use anymore actually says that you must sell your product the same everywhere. It turns out a great way to kill monopolies to take out the part where they get a better deal because they're bigger. Making the price the same everywhere means that now companies have to compete on other things.
I understand logistics is an insanely hard problem, but can't sellers create a co-op? Not on Amazon's scale, but start on a much smaller scale (gotta start somewhere). Maybe at a city level - if a bunch of sellers in Chicago (for example) rent a warehouse and serve only within Chicago, it is worth a try, no? Or is this a stupid question?
I remember hearing about a Uber like app (I might have seen it on More Perfect Union channel, I think). So I guess at least some people are thinking along the same lines, maybe?
As an individual, I guess the only thing I can do is shop as little as possible on Amazon (which I am already doing). Not sure what else I can do to help
I stopped buying from amazon (except books tbh) a long time ago. The thing that really did it for me is the price of cables. Where before it would be e.g. $5 for a cable plus shipping ($4-5 or so) now it's $9.99 with PriMe ShiPpIng if you pay the hundred dollars plus per year for it. Two cables? That's $20 now, and you can't exactly combine free shipping.
In addition, whenever I pass a SKU and exact model number to purchasing, they inevitably buy the wrong item, because the search page is actually just advertisements and not search results.
The compulsory combined bins where an official seller shares a shipping pool with less reputable ones which put in counterfeit items so that unsuspecting customers pay full price for an item just to get a knock-off is another stupid little trick they do and then take NO responsibility for it.
Amazon is an ugly platform now and I avoid it at low cost.
It was my mistake for recommending Amazon to people before. It was my mistake for recommending Google Chrome to people in the same way. And Apple products. I do not make this mistake anymore.
It sucks that sellers cannot offer their products for cheaper elsewhere, but I've also often seen sellers sell their products for a much higher price on their own website than Amazon, and in that case why wouldn't I buy it on Amazon instead?
In that sense having one big marketplace with all kinds of competing products together also seems to motivate sellers more to compete on price rather than relying on lazy consumers.
Seems like a relatively simple fix, Amazon shouldn't be allowed to tell suppliers what price they can set on their site. No one should be able to tell a supplier what price they can charge to others.
I try to avoid Amazon as much as possible. 95% of the products are throwaway junk brands. It's tiring to shop there. I think Amazon is a great example of why competition, while good in most cases, has its limits when the information asymmetry due to overwhelming and opaque choices. I wish those junk, throwaway brands were banned...
Stopped using Amazon a while ago because I want to support smaller (and less controversial) businesses. But recently I went back there to look for a phone protector as for some reason that's the only time Amazon has been cheaper for something.
I was amazed at how janky the app experience was having been away for a couple of years. It felt a really dated and ad-bloated experience. Considering Amazon pioneered so many advances in e-commerce, I was surprised I don't miss it at all.
I didn't notice it until earlier this year. I was shopping for some new shoes of a specific brand that I like. Was about to pull the trigger on Amazon and then realized I would happen to walk by a shoe store while doing other errands later in the day and thought it would be nice to get them even sooner than 1-2 day prime shipping. I went to the store and tried them on and realized I needed a 1/2 size smaller than what I ordered. Then I paid and realized the shoe store price was $10 less than Amazon. So you really are paying for laziness/convenience with Amazon, which if you think about it from first principles, makes sense given there is a dude delivering this stuff to your house. It's just that this convenience fee was hidden for the longest time as Amazon was growing its industry dominance. What's next? If they follow the Walmart model they will continue to squeeze suppliers and also push competitors out of business. So if you can, try to use alternatives.
So you really are paying for laziness/convenience with Amazon, which if you think about it from first principles, makes sense given there is a dude delivering this stuff to your house.
If you make more money doing {whatever} than the delivery driver gets paid, its not lazyness or convenience.
Its task delegation and opportunity cost evaluation.
That's really contextual. Many times I'll go to a manufacturers site and the price is $3-$10 more than just using that same manufacturers store front on Amazon. Especially factoring in the "free shipping" w/Prime.
Is the rise of AI agents going to change the shopping paradigm? Was interested to listen to Tim Ferris podcast with Kevin Rose:
Kevin Rose: So, this is actually, you’re hitting on a very fascinating trend, which is this idea where applications, destination websites, all those things go away. So, in a world where you say, “Hey, I just need some new towels for my house.” Rather than going on Amazon and searching for new towels or whatever it may be, or Shopify or whatever independent shop, you just ask ChatGPT. Now what Amazon is worried about is if they are top of funnel, if ChatGPT is the entry point, they can just be swapped out.
Kevin Rose: Right? So, it’s like, “Oh, you know what? Walmart has the same thing for $10 less.” And they just push that right into the feed. And so for them, they’re like, “Oh, shit, this was our moat because we were the destination. Everyone comes to Amazon.com, they shop there and now the AI is deciding and buying on their behalf.”
This has already been possible before, with price comparison portals like idealo.de and geizhals.de (in Germany)
It's possible that AI agentic shopping brings this technology to those who haven't used it before. But I think it's also possible that AI agentic shopping becomes an extension of their users' shopping habits
Could you sell a box of 10x Item A on amazon, and a box of 15x Item A on your own website for cheaper per unit? Without triggering the amazon Fair Pricing Policy?
Depends on the title and gap
A factor I don't see mentioned that I think is relevant: Repricers
Google "FBA repricer" and you'll find companies like https://goaura.com/ and https://sellersnap.io/.
These are a must for any mid-size seller. Their goal is to pretty self-explanatory; reprice your ASIN, live, to hit maximum sales. If your competitor is selling the same mug for $10.00, the repricer sees that and immediately reprices your mug for $9.99.
Its one of those "Well, if I don't use one, others will" situations.
I'm in UE. Given most products on Amazon are Chinese products rebranded and imported by UE resellers, it only make sense to shop there today because of tariffs the UE put on Aliexpress etc. which are not useful for users but only for Amazon.
I really don't feel bad for resellers which have some margin on something you can get directly from the source with Aliexpress and other over border stores. It's a good thing their margin is shrinking. This way of doing business doesn't make sense anymore.
I feel bad for us as consumers and those few companies really innovating on products.
The problems with Amazon these days, which may or may not be related to a buyer's specific location:
- Shipping delays. Prime's biggest selling point, is useless if orders aren't shipped in the advertised Prime timeframe. I've quit my Prime subscription multiple times this year because this keeps happening.
- Excessive advertising/sponsored listings. Over half the listings in a search are now sponsored listings, which are often lower quality listings. And Amazon now puts unrelated banner ads next to listings.
- Returns. While returns are typically hassle-free, this leads to abuse of the system. The returns get put back on the "shelf" without much inspection, and there have been more than a few times where I got an item listed as New, which was very clearly Used.
And then there are the cases where someone returns an item, but puts something else in the box for weight, so you end up getting a completely different thing than you ordered.
I once ordered a parallel LiPo battery charging board, and in the box was a LiPo battery, which someone clearly put in the box for weight. That situation was particularly dangerous, because a LiPo, let alone a used LiPo of unknown charge state, cannot be shipped by air and must be shipped by ground. If Amazon had put that box on a plane, that'd be a serious safety issue.
Amazon offer an incredible customer experience, but it comes at an incredible cost. I avoid shopping their at all costs, it’s just not worth it for all the times they make headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Interesting article. But I wish it explained which fees made the share that Amazon takes go from 19% to 46%. The fulfilment fee is evidently necessary, it takes people to do that, and doing it yourself may cost more. The advertisement is also evidently necessary, but could have risen. The referral fee alone can't explain the increase.
And the fulfilment fee is not a fixed percentage of the price, it depends on the size, weight and price tier of the item.
I don't see much of a need to buy from Amazon anymore. Almost always there is a smaller business selling same stuff cheaper, and as a plus I feel good about not supporting big American corporation.
Of course there are exceptions, like some businesses selling exclusively through Amazon.
Shopify has been a game-changer in that regard. With millions of small stores it’s easier to find anything, have a fast and familiar checkout, and some channel for recourse if you didn’t receive fair treatment by the merchant.
It’s not a bad deal at the end of the day for any party IMO.
> But today, many sellers hand close to half of every sale to Amazon. Half!
This is how resellers work.
Back in the 80s, I was selling my compiler direct. I also engaged a reseller, if you recall, those were ones that advertised in computer magazines with full page ads crammed with items for sale.
The resellers demanded that I sell it to them at half the retail price. I was shocked and horrified! I soon found out, however, that all resellers are like that. They cannot make money otherwise.
Amazon is no different.
> They cannot make money otherwise.
This is obviously, hilariously untrue when Amazon produces hundreds of billions of dollars of profit every year: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN/financials/
US can just legislate that one marketplace cannot force how vendors use other marketplaces. This is not about free spech but rather about price fixing (in indirect/perverse ways).
I love Amazon because they have a wide variety of goods that ship very quickly, and if something is wrong it’s easy to get support. If there’s a return, it’s super simple to do and often free.
If I am ever given the choice between Amazon and some third party site I’ll always choose Amazon. It’s just too convenient.
saves me time.
on one hand, ups guys are cool with it, but on the other I think the postal service workers don't like dealing with amazon packages.
On the other hand, "works with alexa" is such garbage.
I bought a garmin car GPS that had alexa built in. Why would you want alexa to be part of your car nav?
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09D5PW315
obviously to get better product placement on the site.
One thing that pushes prices up is the expectation that "free" shipping is offered on all products. The shipping cost gets rolled in to the price of the product, and the Fair Pricing Policy prevents selling the product cheaper elsewhere, even if you charge for shipping there.
But to put it into perspective, a retail shop would also expect to take at least 50% of the sale price. Often much more.
My issue is buying groceries from Amazon. You have to fill up your cart to > $30 to get a free delivery (in NYC). So you start searching for whatever you might want to include to get the free delivery. But the items like milk can come from
a) Amazon ("proper")
b) Amazon Groceries
c) Amazon Fresh
d) Whole Foods
Each of these have their own "cart" which must have goods > $25 etc. to get a free delivery. If you add an item from another list it does not count, so you must add things which you maybe don't really need just because they come from the same list as milk. Or, you will need to fill up multiple carts.
Then once you reach the threshold for free delivery and make the order, you may, or may not notice an extra line in the total bill: A tip for $5 in very small print which you have to edit away, or it is NOT FREE DELIVERY AFTER ALL, like promised.
What I lament is that Amazon is making me feel guilty for not tipping the delivery person. It is making me take extra action to NOT tip -- I must be a bad person. And it's making delivery people angry at me if I don't include the tip. And Amazon is adding the $5 there always as a default, even though they already said I have earned a free delivery.
It's a transaction between me and Amazon but now Amazon can implicitly blame bad service on the lack of tipping. I assume they would like to not pay their delivery people at all, just let them live on the tips.
More generally, the unprecedented levels of market concentration and pricing power in the US, a consequence of the gutting of antitrust enforcement from the inside by Robert Bork and the Chicago School, have led to much higher inflation in the US.
Aside from the whole amazon problem:
I really love how the (flow-)chart in this article has two starting points and both flow perfectly into the vicious circle loops without any awkward gap no matter from which direction you start reading the chart.
Recently some big billion sale.
Since i run low on funds i use to add things to cart, not buy though.
I added an item for its cost was 48$.
Now during sale, i revisited same product, they say original price is 80$ and on sale 13% off, so 70$ around
The funny thing is Amazon is awful compared to what Alibaba and JD provide to their customers in China. IYKYK
In the UK Amazon have now raised the price of general shipping to be 2/3 the price of a months prime subscription. Before prime, delivery regularly used to be £1.99 or £2.99. Now if you dont have prime everything is £4.99 to be delivered. It makes it seem silly to pay that when you could pay £8.99 for a months subscription of free deliveries, which is their whole game.
I hate that they have done this with a passion.
Prices in Amazon in my area are significantly less than in local shops. Amazon has improved the life greatly for us!
I usually don’t care for the price.
I care for the return policy and warranty being attached to an entity that will still exist in 6 month.
Maybe the time has come to stop cheering for quasi-monopolies as some success story. They hurt everybody besides their shareholders.
boycott, but nobody does
I think people over index on “convenience” for lower quality products that further the growth of businesses like Amazon that can now fuck you over like this as a result.
We live in a convenience era (delivery services, etc) that allow people to “live” their life from a couch. There is a great Kurt Vonnegut quote I’ll paraphrase
“My wife says to buy a hundred envelopes online, but I’d rather go out and buy just one. Along the way, I’ll meet people, see interesting things, and enjoy life. The point isn’t the envelope—it’s everything that happens while getting it.”
Cory Doctorow (whom she mentions) published an article today about Expedia, who is employing the same tactics as Amazon, if not worse: https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/15/enshittipedia/#
Amazon is the internet enabled cargo cult we've all been living in since at least the 50's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
Brawndo's got what plants crave.
oh boy my time to complain: i made this comment 7 month ago and was downvoted for it. Now i can read it as an article! :D
"So If Amazon wants to be the lowest price Destination, but Takes fees for Listings, FBA etc, then the product price needs to include that fees. That will make the product more expensive and since amazon wanted to be the cheapest Destination, the price does need to go up everywhere? It's maybe the Fairest Thing, but is it good for the Overall Economy?"
5-10 years ago we did pretty much all our shopping besides groceries, on Amazon.
~2 years ago I cancelled Prime and rarely ship at Amazon these days, instead buying directly from manufacturers' websites. It is useful for items that are hard to find elsewhere.
One side effect of cancelling Prime is that we buy less stuff that we don't really need. Reducing our consumption is a good thing.
never buy from third party sellers and you won't have an issue
How you spend your cash has always been a better democratic tool than a vote.
If you buy Amazon, then that's what you get in society and politics. Every Amazon purchase is a vote for monopolistic behaviour, the destruction of local services/industry, and for yet another America tax.
I do everything possible to avoid them, buy locally-made, etc, but it's becoming harder and harder. It's so ironic that people will complain about a declining economy, no jobs, etc, then will joyfully donate money to promote foreign jobs and enrich middlemen on a weekly basis.
Heard from our business partners, that every 4$ out of 10$ go to Amazon nowadays
I love Amazon. I'm unbothered by voluntary contracts between individuals.
Why is this legal?
It's not settled yet that it IS illegal. The FTC alleges it is, and that's what the FTC's case will decide. In the US, it isn't illegal to be big or even to have a monopoly. What's illegal under antitrust law is using unfair tactics to keep a monopoly by blocking competition rather than winning it.
The real "how" is in the last section: Amazon pushes up prices by being so big that people feel they have to sell there. That is the root of the issue and the place to solve it, by destroying Amazon and breaking it up into small pieces.
In my view all of the conveniences that people are referencing in the comments (e.g., easy returns) are also consequences of that, and they are also bad, in the same way that it is more convenient to eat a bag of potato chips than it is to cook a meal, but the potato chips are worse for you. The convenience derived from large market share (Amazon's or any other similar excessively large market player) is not worth the downsides. We need to rip the band-aid off and accept that less convenience is better.
wish they would push up their delivery speed
classic aggregation theory to create a monopoly.
the only way to prevent such things from happening is e-commerce is spread across non-platform channels but independent ones e.g woo commerce etc where a seller runs and hosts their own shop, then maybe go to semi-platforms such as shopify etc that don't aggregate everything on one storefront.
because sellers are reliant on amazon bringing in shoppers, unlike say woo commerce & shopify - then yeah amazon feels rightly so that they need to take 50% margins on a seller's item.
the same thing plays out everywhere where some producer is reliant on someone bringing in the buyers - uber, Spotify, apple App Store.
The greatest catalogue of consumer goods with the greatest logistics to back it up of all time. And the thread complain complaining about it. What a time to be alive.
Any seller charges 50%+ margin on anything.
wish they delivered faster
It just keeps on going
I own a dozen brands that sell primarily on Amazon, and I have to say that this whole issue seems quite overstated, especially with regard to its impact on consumers. I don't get the impression that the person writing this actually sells things on Amazon, which seems to be par for the course with these critiques.
People love to complain about Amazon fees, but when I read things like "In 2014, this was about 19% of sales. But today, many sellers hand close to half of every sale to Amazon. Half!" I wonder why people who are so lacking in subject matter expertise decide to write these articles.
The main reason that Amazon charges so many fees is that they provide a truly mind-boggling amount of infrastructure for you. The main reason the percent you pay to Amazon has gone up is because they've added more services. The author of the post notes that only the referral fee is mandatory, but doesn't manage to quite put together why going from only referral fee to a bunch of extra services means that Amazon now takes more of every dollar.
Once upon a time, you'd list your stuff on Amazon, and when someone ordered a product, you'd ship it yourself. Then Amazon decided to allow third party sellers to use Amazon's storage and fulfillment. Now suddenly the percentage of each sale's revenue that went to Amazon doubled! And yet, this was 100% positive for merchants, because Amazon's storage and fulfillment prices are cheaper than almost any alternative. When you move from a 3PL to Amazon's fulfillment, you pay Amazon more, but your profit margins increase. (There are exceptions for some product types, but the overwhelming majority of the time you save money.)
Of course, Amazon's fulfillment centers started running out of storage, so they'd limit how many units people could store there. That meant larger sellers would still have to maintain their own storage solution for anything that wouldn't fit at Amazon. But then Amazon introduced AWD, an upstream storage solution where you can store basically an infinite amount of stuff still packed by the case, and it ships to FBA warehouses when needed. More money for Amazon! But AWD is cheaper than basically any 3PL's storage, so more money for me too.
Amazon then introduced a service that let you book freight in the US with them to get things to their warehouses. Then they introduced freight to get things into the US from overseas. Then they introduced even cheaper AWD warehouses in China. You're not required to use these things, but Amazon wins a lot of business with them because they're cheaper than competitors.
This is not to say that everything Amazon does is great or that all of their fee increases have been net positive. First they introduced a fee if your products sit in FBA warehouses more than six months, then they introduced a fee if your inventory gets too low relative to demand. These are annoying! (Though also I have almost never been affected by them, because the amount of inventory Amazon wants you to have is basically the optimal amount from a planning perspective anyway.)
There's advertising, which, yes, is very annoying to have to pay for, but y'know what? You have to pay for that on your own site too! I have one brand where I do a healthy business on my own Shopify site, but I keep less of every dollar on there than on Amazon because I have to spend more on Meta ads to get a sale than I do on Amazon ads.
People love to hate on Amazon (and, again, lots of valid reasons for this!), but at the end of the day they collect an enormous amount of money because they provide an enormous amount of value.
Honestly, these costs are very reasonable considering what you get.
The real crime is that Apple takes more as its mandatory fee and is only storing and moving bits. A good with essentially zero marginal cost.
Fulfillment is hard.
And, as much as people hate it, advertising is real value for a business owner.
And given the high cost of financing and holding physical inventory, Amazon's referral fee is worth it for faster inventory turnover.
Apple is the enterprise that borders on criminal. 30% to move bits. I haven't looked it up, but the margins on Apple's fees have to be outrageous.
Direct result of the weakening of antitrust from a 2007 case legalizing vertical price-fixing, justified by the dumb fake rationale that Wikipedia paraphrases as:
> manufacturer-imposed minimum resale prices can lead retailers to compete efficiently for customer sales in ways other than cutting the retail price.
It has nothing to do with technology, just oligarchy and corruption. Nothing "capitalists" hate more than competition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leegin_Creative_Leather_Produc....
edit: as an aside, why are almost none of the top level comments, and absolutely none of the 5 most upvoted comments, about Amazon pricing policies? They're all about how people like to (or don't like to) shop at Amazon. Who cares?
>Setting a price on a product or service that is significantly higher than recent prices offered on or off Amazon;
This is the text from the policy that the article says "And they can't charge less elsewhere." This is just wrong. They just can't randomly charge Amazon a higher price. If it's solely due to Amazon's cut that sounds like a reasonable increase. There are tons of products on Amazon that are above their fair market value.
Big Tech always becomes Big Enshittification; it is the only way the scaling economics work for the massive returns expected by VC.
> Because Amazon is where the shoppers are: it accounts for about 40% of all US online retail sales.
A lot of the competition is gone, so now it's time for the "price hike" step of the VC playbook - enter markets with insane amounts of cash, slowly boil the competition alive until it goes away and/or the users are hooked, raise prices.
> Amazon's Fair Pricing Policy lets it remove the Buy Box (the "Add to Cart" button), or even suspend a seller, if they're offering their item cheaper elsewhere.
IIRC that kind of shit is at least illegal in the EU. Bookingcom and other sites have had their "best price" enforcement invalidated here in the past.
The bad thing is, due to the sheer scale Amazon has, it is all but impossible to compete with it. You won't get the scale deals that Amazon gets at shippers (USPS, DHL, Fedex, UPS, DPD, whatever). You won't get the money to construct warehouses across the world that make Amazon's fast shipping work in the first place. You won't have the insane amounts of money coming in from customers that allow for its extremely generous return policies. And you won't have some sort of cash cow like AWS that allows you to run your business at near zero profit or even loss.
The only way you can compete is if you are in a market where you can provide a better experience for the customer and the customer is willing to pay a premium.
I hate Amazon and I still shop there. It's not about price, I will pay more for a product to buy it directly and not via Amazon /if/ I can find an original. The issue for me is threefold:
1. Discoverability: Many products are so rapidly and thoroughly cloned that it is difficult to impossible to identify the original maker, find their site, and purchase through them. The insane proliferation of counterfeits, clones, and sometimes outright scam products means that Amazon at least gives me an opportunity to buy a clone/counterfeit and return it if its not meeting my expectations. Sometimes the original is notably higher quality but no longer produced/sold, as well. Recently I wanted to buy a Polar Magnetic Pen as a gift. The website is up and the shopping cart works, but checkout is disabled. They're out of stock everywhere. There's hundreds of random worded Chinese clones on Amazon that are 25% of the price and 30% of the quality, so I bought a clone and risked it.
2. Logistical Certainty: I work a lot and have little free time after basic households tasks, other than the weekends. So if I want to do a project or something, I plan it for a following weekend and order things. If I can't order on a Tuesday or Wednesday and /know/ that I will get it by Friday, it's basically pointless. Sometimes I'll just roll the dice, but generally I prefer logistical certainty. I actually have gone back to buying at brick and mortar stores if possible to really cement this (I use Best Buy now a lot more than in the past, although selection is poor). There's a few other online retailers I strictly prefer to Amazon that can also deliver this like B&H Photo.
3. Breadth of Catalog / Access: There's basically nothing I can't acquire via Amazon. If I need, let's say 6 things, to do some sort of hobby project my options are generally either: A) go to 2-4 different stores, either physically and waste a day of my life or online and hope the shipments all arrive in time or B) order on Amazon everything at once delivered as one.
These things are way more important than price. I still hate Amazon PRIMARILY because of commingling of SKUs meaning there's no real quality indicators and I cannot do anything as a consumer to ensure I receive legitimate, actual, quality products. If they hadn't fucked that up, I'd probably still like Amazon despite everything else. I used to love Amazon back in the day, now I hate it, because of how often I've received counterfeits and fraudulent products and the proliferation of Chinese dropshipper fly-by-nights.
Greedy and Evil.
I stopped using Amazon some time ago though, so no more money from me goes into that monster. There were several reasons for this. The number one reason was actually ... prime. I feel that ever since amazon prime came about, things decayed quality-wise. But my habits also changed; I used to buy hardcopy books. I still love them, but I rarely use them anymore. I used to purchase hardware on amazon, but I no longer want to support companies that are part of the evil Trump clique, so no more money into US corporations from my side - the canadians led the way here (though Canada also has troublemakers such as Shopify; look at how much damage they caused in the ruby ecosystem in the last three years. Unsurprisingly DHH is on board of Shopify, so you can see how greed inter-connects these people in their agenda.)
The bigger problem is that Amazon and other US companies actively eliminate competition in other countries. It is a form of colonialism. Sadly, the other countries so attacked often don't really have a good means to retaliate. Just look how obedient the EU is to Trump - it is disgusting behaviour from EU officials here, in particular Leyen. These work for the USA (and probably for personal benefits too) rather than Europeans.
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