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.
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.
The way I see it, the premium you pay is for the convenience brought about by Amazon having your product sitting in a warehouse waiting for you to buy it.
vs. waiting two to four weeks to ship from China.
However at least in Canada, AliExpress has fulfillment centres locally, so AliExpress can often get their items in customers' hands within a week.
So where's the advantage? Most times I can wait a week.
Amazon Prime is quite good, tbh. There’s a whole layer of complexity your life loses when you know you can get life essentials within a few hours with no planning.
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 issue is that in many cases, this is not what is being sold on Amazon. There is good chinese brand/product (I love my chinese IEM), but when looking for many household items, you will find the white label, probably not compliant with local regulation, type of product. When it is not an outright scam.
I actually have a recent example : I do woodworking and for the last step of finishing some of the thing I build, I use a mixture of beeswax and linseed oil. Beeswax has been harder and harder to find locally. Not so long ago, every hardware shop had some. Now it has been displaced by synthetic product. So unless you know a local beekeeper, you are sol.
So, resigned, I went to Amazon. It had a trove of listing for "100% natural beeswax". Turns out, ALL of them are paraffin dyed to look like beeswax. You can report it to Amazon, they don't care. They will reimburse you, but never remove the listing.
The problem for me is (and this holds across AliExpress as well), if I search for something, I get presented 30 different versions of the same thing, almost all from an unknown brand out of China, all with near-perfect reviews. I don't know if they're all the same thing, just relabeled; some are cheap copies of one original good version (and which one was is the good original); or something else. And if I end up with a cheap knockoff, how to resolve the issue - endless phone calls with a call-center in China and multiple rounds of trans-Pacific shipping? No thanks.
None of that is a knock against Chinese goods. I bought a set of Chinese carbon bicycle wheels last year and they're great. But, I went straight to the source and didn't take chances with AliExpress or Amazon.
I think some Chinese brands do try to distinguish themselves. Anker, for example, isn't a revolving door brand name. But, yeah, there's an enormous amount of noise on Amazon. Unfortunately that noise is everywhere. If I went right now to try to find another source on, "what brands don't suck?" I would probably have zero confidence that any of the sources I find aren't just SEO garbage.
I've just ordered a dining table and a set of dining chairs from China using a sourcing agent mixed with TaoBao. It's costing me about £1200 ($1500) so far delivered to the door and if I was to buy this complete setup in the UK, it would cost about £2500. The only problem has been delivery time and the back and forth with the Chinese sourcing agent hasn't been great in terms of communication, but I'll be damned if I'm going to give an extra £1000 to Western retailers that are hellbent on following the Amazon model and ripping off customers.
A lot of Chinese name brands are extremely high quality, as good as or better than the American equivalent. Anker is one of the better known examples. However, there is also a lot of unbranded or white label garbage made by the lowest bidder to try to spawn camp popular search terms.
I do wonder whether you're comparing two different versions of chinese products?
IE, you're seeing and buying things they're selling directly, so they need to manage quality control, vs what is being sold on amazon, potentially a 3rd party seller who's cutting corners to make a nicer margin?
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.
Temu’s UI is unusable. You are constantly presented with roulette wheels for coupons you can’t dismiss. Its dark patterns have dark patterns. AliExpress is only mildly better in that you can dismiss stuff.
Both T and A still have listings for things that will likely result in you getting something entirely different. This usually applies to more expensive and physically larger items. You might order a greenhouse and get a photo of one or a schematic of one. And I don’t mean that the description will make it clear.
Both have a pattern where they might list let’s say an MP3 player which costs $30 but the price on the listing will be $3 because one of the product variants is just the case.
Amazon has comparatively reliable shipping and it’s included with the price on a majority of products if you have a Prime membership. While Temu and AliExpress do have US-based shipping they still don’t guarantee when the thing will arrive and if you are looking at these products the price difference basically disappears.
I am not defending Amazon by any means, but purely on usability it wins hands down.
How are Temu and Aliexpress for returns and same day delivery options? Those are the big reasons I tend to stick with Amazon - their customer support and convenience.
Theres also no moral reason to support Amazon, they give nothing back to the society their buyers live in, much like the chinese suppliers. Might aswell just go with the cheapest.
You mean you don't want to buy the finest grade $59.95 blender for your kitchen from LONCEVON or ARVAGGCCY or ADVWUXITEKPRO ?
The tricky part now is identifying the individual CN vendors which are not yet well known in the English marketplace, that are also known to make good quality things (and generally they're not cheap), I'll use Sofirn flashlights and headlamps as an example. Mostly not sold via Amazon.
What's wrong with those? For established industrial designs small difference in better quality control is never worth overpaying few times for something.
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
> Almost every single major purchase I go directly to the manufacturer website or a specialized store.
Let's take an example: If a Brother printer is full price from Staples, Best Buy and the Brother website, but $50 off on Amazon, why would I not order on Amazon and save myself $50? As it is, Best Buy and Staples are also operating marketplaces when buying online.
> Almost everyone today offer free or inexpensive quick shipping and easy returns. They also have better customer service.
I beg to differ. I bought a GPU from a local store that turned out not to be compatible with my workstation. Returning it was a huge hassle, I paid a 15% restocking fee. The next time I ordered a GPU, I went through Amazon. When it too didn't work, they took it back, no questions asked, full funds returned.
If a Brother printer is $150 from Amazon, but $100 on Staples, Best Buy and the Brother website, why would you not order on a non-amazon site and save yourself $50?
Answer: you probably would, but Amazon engages in illegal, coercive price fixing to drive up the prices on those other sites by $50.
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.
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.
Same. I'm in the US and do not use Amazon at all. Life, and the products I buy, actually got much better. Amazon is overpriced and low quality. Pretty much everywhere else has better products, lower prices and free & fast shipping at this point (Walmart, Target, Home Depot, direct purchases, etc.). Pretty shocked at all the people defending Amazon here.
I'm in Germany, and I usually just find a good option outside Amazon, then look for the best deal, which is rarely Amazon. Thanks to express checkout (Google/Apple Pay or PayPal is almost always an option), it's pretty much zero hassle.
BUT, if I care more about getting something real fast than the quality, or if I don't want to pay 5 EUR for shipping (especially cheap stuff), I'm not aware of any competition Amazon has here. I use it quite a bit still, for these two use cases.
Amazon delivers next day or the same day many of the items if you have Prime.
I tried many times to order something directly, and most of the time it’s the same price and longer shipping. So, for me in terms of convenience Amazon wins.
What is you want to buy simple Chinese plastic stuff (e.g. someone elsewhere mentioned zip ties)? The manufacturer is somewhere in China with a minimum order of 10,000, so no, you can't go to them. Amazon is often the cheapest source for this, cheaper than any local retail.
I prefer online retailers because there is a lot more choice there. I can't find an inflatable knee pillow in local stores. The supermarket close to me even stopped selling batteries.
You have a small shop that sells zip ties? The only place I would expect to find something like that is a big box store or a hardware store (which are all chains now).
I don’t understand the question. The reasonable alternative is to not use them and buy stuff elsewhere. There’s a million places to buy stuff. I haven’t ordered anything from Amazon in months.
How often do you buy stuff online? It’s not a factor for me. My last online purchase was water filters. Got them from Home Depot, easy peasy. Before that, I’m not sure, it’s been a few weeks at least.
In any case, there’s a big difference between “there’s no reasonable alternative” and “there are plenty of reasonable alternatives but I like Amazon more.”
At least 3-4 times a week, ranging from groceries to various household items, like water filters and what not.
I mean, different people have different behavioral patterns and preferences, if Amazon is not for you, it’s fine. It definitely works for me and saves me a lot of time.
More often than not. Why would I spend my valuable time at a big box store like Home Depot that might not even have what I need at that store? They are all functionally equivalent members of the oligarch class.
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.
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
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.
It's even worse in Ireland, particularly with the new import fees for non-EU goods - €7 + 23% VAT per item.
Amazon Germany/France/Spain won't ship a huge variety of items to Ireland and obviously won't have the same composition of goods as English speaking countries.
It's just about worth it for Prime Video and Deliveroo Silver, but the Irish Prime membership doesn't even support household or family sharing...
Yep, prime membership went quite a lot up; prices went up; delivery times got slower after COVID; now they are also saving on packaging, which means Royal mail brings me broken packages held by elastic bands...
The problem with AliExpress and other foreign retailers for us EU-ians is that you get €3 in duty per product category, then another €2 per package in processing fees (from November 2026), then you get VAT over the duty and with a bit of luck the final carrying company doesn't accept your IOSS paperwork and you have to pay the VAT, the duty, the VAT over the duty, the new processing fee and their handling fees (€5 to €50) again.
VAT should be done by AliExpress now, at least that is how I understood it.
Sadly it's only limited items, but you can also filter for just items that they have in their EU warehouse.
I recently bought some stuff (Ps2 controller etc) and it was still cheaper including shipping and duty then to order it in EU. Package was checked by customs.
VAT is included in the listed price with AliExpress. The various EU duties and processing fees get added at checkout.
AliExpress has a fairly integrated shipping pipeline but the problem with smaller retailers is that you can pay VAT at check-out through IOSS, but the shipping company doesn't accept the paperwork and you have to pay VAT (and all other duties/fees) again to the shipping company. Happens a lot with packages from non-Chinese Asia (Japan, Thailand, Malaysia).
Same problem here. In my country at least, the handling fees for the local shipping are around USD10, you can avoid those using a courier but that shipping method is much more expensive.
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 I 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The endgame of free market was always plain and obvious: shittiest possible products at lowest possible price, and no one in the entire value chain having above-sustenance any margins.
Amazon often have no idea what vendors sell their products for elsewhere. It's often an empty threat that vendors are very happy to ignore. Also, many of those agreements are spurious in international law. Unless there's a bullet proof contract with actual teeth, vendors will sell anywhere they can.
To steal Benn Jordan’s ideas, capitalism is replacing itself with leveragism.
You don’t buy things from Amazon because they’re the best store with the best prices, you buy them because they’re the only store that has their own massive scale delivery service that delivers more packages than FedEx or UPS (not combined, but Amazon still delivers more packages than either).
It’s not possible for another store to compete with that. There is no competition. Starting a competitor to Amazon would be more difficult and capital intensive than starting a new car or rocket company.
There is no other store that can get me the most obscure and random stuff in less than 24 hours. Walmart can’t do it, Costco can’t do it, Target can’t do it, Dollar General can’t do it.
Not to mention the sheer number of things that they offer unrelated to the commerce side of things
I don't even live in the US or shop on Amazon anymore but I still have a Prime subscription just in case something good is on Prime Video (this doesn't happen often...)
Actually I just remembered there were several things recently that I could not find locally and so I used international shipping from Amazon.com which turned out to be way cheaper than you would expect I think mostly due to the Prime subscription
> You don’t buy things from Amazon because they’re the best store with the best prices, you buy them because they’re the only store that has their own massive scale delivery service that delivers more packages than FedEx or UPS (not combined, but Amazon still delivers more packages than either).
Speak for yourself. Their delivery service is awful and I'd choose UPS 100% of the time instead if they gave me the choice.
It was Amazon's increasingly slow and unreliable deliveries that caused me to cancel Prime earlier this year, and I'm strongly motivated to shop elsewhere now because I know that the package will be delivered by someone other than Amazon's own service.
Yeah and it's not obscure or random stuff if it is in the Amazon warehouse that is in your town. That is the only way one day works they already have it on site.
The comment is deleted now, but a user who shall remain nameless challenged folks to find a vendor that could get a "TPM module for an ASRock Rack motherboard" delivered to their house tomorrow.
Well, if you order within the next nine-ish hours and are willing to pay 29 USD for both next-day delivery and "Rush Processing", Newegg absolutely will deliver this item [0] to my door tomorrow. Maybe that's not the TPM module the user had in mind, but -if that's the case- the task being underspecified is not my problem. ;)
$29 for overnight shipping is more than the cost of one month of Prime by approximately double, which is an entire month of free expedited shipping, usually overnight and sometimes same-day.
Is anyone else remotely price competitive? I can find the module on eBay with free shipping but they quote me 3-10 day delivery.
Sure. I wasn't going to name you because I had no idea exactly why you'd deleted that comment, so I wasn't gonna be rude and attach the challenge to your name.
> $29 for overnight shipping is more than the cost of one month of Prime by approximately double...
What I've told you is that there are other retailers who will next-day ship you all sorts of "specialty" items like that one. So, Challenge Completed.
Whereas what you've told me is that overnight shipping for this one part is a little less than 1/6h the cost of a year of Amazon Prime. Given that I've only gotten things next-day shipped two or three times in my mumble decades of life, it sounds like not using Amazon saves me a notable chunk of money.
Also, I've heard from a ton of people out in the boonies that Prime ships very few -and sometimes no- items to them same day or overnight. The Prime Promise seems to be extremely location-dependent.
Amazon shipping and logistics are heavily subsidised by the social contract in Western Countries - it's not remotely a fair comparison even if these were removed based on Amazon's effective corporate income tax rates coming in as low as 1.4%.
In the US alone Amazon has received over $11 billion in cumulative taxpayer subsidies, and governments spend an average of nearly $43,000 per fulfillment center job created.
This is ramping up exponentially with regard to their data center rollout. In a single instance in rural Oregon, five AWS data centers will avoid $1 billion in property taxes.
This is completely aside from the qualitative damage done to traditional retail, shopping districts as a whole, SME innovation on consumer products, and distorting market competition beyond all recognition.
Who said anything about a centralized government system?
We aren’t comparing capitalism to that.
We are comparing a deeply broken antitrust regulatory environment that is ending capitalism, or ant least the free market competitive style of capitalism you are romanticizing, and replacing it with leveragism or legal cartels or whatever you want to call it.
Amazon is a failure of underregulated capitalism because it’s not possible for anyone to compete with them.
Amazon should have been required to split off AWS from Amazon years ago, and I’d say there’s a very good argument to be made that their fulfillment business constitutes a national monopoly. FedEx and UPS don’t actually provide the services that FBA does, which makes Amazon a monopoly.
> Amazon is a failure of underregulated capitalism because it’s not possible for anyone to compete with them
What do you meany nobody can compete with Amazon? It happens all the time across the various markets they're in: e-commerce, retail, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, entertainment, and artificial intelligence.
How do I start a fulfillment business that can get a roll of toilet paper delivered to the doorstep of consumers nationwide inside of 24 hours and have that transaction be profitable?
How much investment money and customer volume do I need to make that business viable?
> How do I start a fulfillment business that can get a roll of toilet paper delivered to the doorstep of consumers nationwide inside of 24 hours and have that transaction be profitable?
As with all successful businesses, you start small.
You figure out what's your edge. You are resourceful.
You don't compete with ANY competitor by trying to do 100% what they do out of the gate.
Pro-tip: selling (rather than producing) toilet paper is probably never a big business anyhow.
If all we are going to do is engage in vague inspirational idealism rather than using realistic boundaries to the discussion I fear the relevance to the subject at hand fades away.
> You don't compete with ANY competitor by trying to do 100% what they do out of the gate.
This idea bleeds into the definition of a monopoly. I can’t just make a mobile operating system like Apple and Google because I won’t have a competitive advantage. I can’t make my own Amazon competitor because their edge is that they deliver more packages than UPS or FedEx. I can’t compete with Google search because the web browser that comes with Android defaults Google on the home page.
Sure, nobody is trying to do 100% of what their competitors do, but I wouldn’t be able to do 5% of what Amazon does even if you handed me billions in seed capital.
It sounds like you’ve decided it isn’t possible to compete, there’s nothing worth trying. I suppose that’s a fair stance to take and I’m not here to convince you to be more resourceful and strategic.
Meanwhile, lots of people are starting and building successful businesses.
We can certainly agree that lots of people are starting and building successful businesses. But I would hope we can also agree that there are many business categories where entry into the market is extremely difficult.
And hopefully you can agree that, conceptually, monopoly businesses do exist and have existed in the past.
> They’re saying that starting a competitor to Amazon is now impossible regardless of capital investment.
Competing in which market? Amazon is a conglomerate operating in e-commerce, retail, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, entertainment, and artificial intelligence.
> That breadth is part of why competing is so tough.
I don't see it. In each of the industries they operate in, they face fierce competition. Many of those competitors also compete with Amazon across multiple of those industries plus others that Amazon does not compete in.
Competition is by definition tough. But I push back against the original thesis that Amazon has such leverage that it is impossible to compete with them (in all the cases, you're not just competing against them!)
Also somehow ignoring captured markets, natural monopolies, goverment granted monopolies, regulation capture and the myriad of other unsurmountable situations that "competition" cannot overcome
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.
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?
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 try to avoid Amazon as much as possible. 95% of the products are throwaway junk brands. It's tiring to shop there. I think Amazon is a great example of why competition, while good in most cases, has its limits when the information asymmetry due to overwhelming and opaque choices. I wish those junk, throwaway brands were banned...
I expect retail shops to have larger overheads than online stores.
When Amazon's policies unfairly push up prices across the Internet, it deprives us from competition pushing prices down, and having a better idea of what online overheads are.
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 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.
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 actually have a recent example : I do woodworking and for the last step of finishing some of the thing I build, I use a mixture of beeswax and linseed oil. Beeswax has been harder and harder to find locally. Not so long ago, every hardware shop had some. Now it has been displaced by synthetic product. So unless you know a local beekeeper, you are sol. So, resigned, I went to Amazon. It had a trove of listing for "100% natural beeswax". Turns out, ALL of them are paraffin dyed to look like beeswax. You can report it to Amazon, they don't care. They will reimburse you, but never remove the listing.
None of that is a knock against Chinese goods. I bought a set of Chinese carbon bicycle wheels last year and they're great. But, I went straight to the source and didn't take chances with AliExpress or Amazon.
They sound like random letters stringed together rather than any attempt to build an actual brand.
IE, you're seeing and buying things they're selling directly, so they need to manage quality control, vs what is being sold on amazon, potentially a 3rd party seller who's cutting corners to make a nicer margin?
Temu’s UI is unusable. You are constantly presented with roulette wheels for coupons you can’t dismiss. Its dark patterns have dark patterns. AliExpress is only mildly better in that you can dismiss stuff.
Both T and A still have listings for things that will likely result in you getting something entirely different. This usually applies to more expensive and physically larger items. You might order a greenhouse and get a photo of one or a schematic of one. And I don’t mean that the description will make it clear.
Both have a pattern where they might list let’s say an MP3 player which costs $30 but the price on the listing will be $3 because one of the product variants is just the case.
Amazon has comparatively reliable shipping and it’s included with the price on a majority of products if you have a Prime membership. While Temu and AliExpress do have US-based shipping they still don’t guarantee when the thing will arrive and if you are looking at these products the price difference basically disappears.
I am not defending Amazon by any means, but purely on usability it wins hands down.
The tricky part now is identifying the individual CN vendors which are not yet well known in the English marketplace, that are also known to make good quality things (and generally they're not cheap), I'll use Sofirn flashlights and headlamps as an example. Mostly not sold via Amazon.
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.
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.
Disclaimer: I mostly shop from German, Danish, and to a lesser extend other EU sellers.
Let's take an example: If a Brother printer is full price from Staples, Best Buy and the Brother website, but $50 off on Amazon, why would I not order on Amazon and save myself $50? As it is, Best Buy and Staples are also operating marketplaces when buying online.
> Almost everyone today offer free or inexpensive quick shipping and easy returns. They also have better customer service.
I beg to differ. I bought a GPU from a local store that turned out not to be compatible with my workstation. Returning it was a huge hassle, I paid a 15% restocking fee. The next time I ordered a GPU, I went through Amazon. When it too didn't work, they took it back, no questions asked, full funds returned.
Answer: you probably would, but Amazon engages in illegal, coercive price fixing to drive up the prices on those other sites by $50.
The EU are currently running an investigation into how this affects market dynamics, which will be interesting to see
BUT, if I care more about getting something real fast than the quality, or if I don't want to pay 5 EUR for shipping (especially cheap stuff), I'm not aware of any competition Amazon has here. I use it quite a bit still, for these two use cases.
I tried many times to order something directly, and most of the time it’s the same price and longer shipping. So, for me in terms of convenience Amazon wins.
Even if it does cost me a bit extra, continuing to have local businesses is worth it to me
In any case, there’s a big difference between “there’s no reasonable alternative” and “there are plenty of reasonable alternatives but I like Amazon more.”
At least 3-4 times a week, ranging from groceries to various household items, like water filters and what not.
I mean, different people have different behavioral patterns and preferences, if Amazon is not for you, it’s fine. It definitely works for me and saves me a lot of time.
More to the point - is it not government oversight that appears incapable of leveling the playing field for others?
That said - the only "others" we seem capable of getting is other governments' Amazons. So. Devil you know?
only if you think free market == unrestrained market
as monopoly is antithesis to capitalism itself, whose main principle is competition.
god gave us all plants to use.
they will fear monger rather than publish medical reasoning.
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.
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
It's not simply that products are priced poorly, but it is also that they seem to be priced just at the threshold where the purchase remains sufficiently convenient not to shop locally or elsewhere online.
Because of their predatory practices it seems online prices are roughly identical for Western branded products at all online retailers. For Chinese brands, it's long been cheaper to use AliExpress but shipping isn't as fast and returns aren't as convenient.
But that's perception. I blocked Amazon and continued shopping as usual. The volume of my purchases is now through local retailers, and I'm buying roughly the same amount of stuff but I'm spending a great deal less.
I really should just cancel my prime now.
Edit: just cancelled it!
Amazon Germany/France/Spain won't ship a huge variety of items to Ireland and obviously won't have the same composition of goods as English speaking countries.
It's just about worth it for Prime Video and Deliveroo Silver, but the Irish Prime membership doesn't even support household or family sharing...
Unlike the US I believe in practice it's all but guaranteed next day too
Sadly it's only limited items, but you can also filter for just items that they have in their EU warehouse.
I recently bought some stuff (Ps2 controller etc) and it was still cheaper including shipping and duty then to order it in EU. Package was checked by customs.
AliExpress has a fairly integrated shipping pipeline but the problem with smaller retailers is that you can pay VAT at check-out through IOSS, but the shipping company doesn't accept the paperwork and you have to pay VAT (and all other duties/fees) again to the shipping company. Happens a lot with packages from non-Chinese Asia (Japan, Thailand, Malaysia).
The notion that, if more people did this, prices might come down everywhere only stiffens my resolve.
Showed what make believes people have.
I'm a guy that is pretty lazy and spends most of his money on convenience and not having to do stuff. It's not even convenient.
It's always a bit scary what things people believe end up believing about completely depending on one company.
What's it good for? Constant shopping addiction dopamine?
And the fulfilment fee is not a fixed percentage of the price, it depends on the size, weight and price tier of the item.
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.
https://markupcalculation.com/markup-by-industry?hl=en-US
You don’t buy things from Amazon because they’re the best store with the best prices, you buy them because they’re the only store that has their own massive scale delivery service that delivers more packages than FedEx or UPS (not combined, but Amazon still delivers more packages than either).
It’s not possible for another store to compete with that. There is no competition. Starting a competitor to Amazon would be more difficult and capital intensive than starting a new car or rocket company.
There is no other store that can get me the most obscure and random stuff in less than 24 hours. Walmart can’t do it, Costco can’t do it, Target can’t do it, Dollar General can’t do it.
I don't even live in the US or shop on Amazon anymore but I still have a Prime subscription just in case something good is on Prime Video (this doesn't happen often...)
Actually I just remembered there were several things recently that I could not find locally and so I used international shipping from Amazon.com which turned out to be way cheaper than you would expect I think mostly due to the Prime subscription
Speak for yourself. Their delivery service is awful and I'd choose UPS 100% of the time instead if they gave me the choice.
It was Amazon's increasingly slow and unreliable deliveries that caused me to cancel Prime earlier this year, and I'm strongly motivated to shop elsewhere now because I know that the package will be delivered by someone other than Amazon's own service.
Amazon has been dropping the ball pretty regularly on shipping recently.
Well, if you order within the next nine-ish hours and are willing to pay 29 USD for both next-day delivery and "Rush Processing", Newegg absolutely will deliver this item [0] to my door tomorrow. Maybe that's not the TPM module the user had in mind, but -if that's the case- the task being underspecified is not my problem. ;)
[0] <https://www.newegg.com/asrock-tpm2-s-other/p/N82E16816775003>
$29 for overnight shipping is more than the cost of one month of Prime by approximately double, which is an entire month of free expedited shipping, usually overnight and sometimes same-day.
Is anyone else remotely price competitive? I can find the module on eBay with free shipping but they quote me 3-10 day delivery.
Sure. I wasn't going to name you because I had no idea exactly why you'd deleted that comment, so I wasn't gonna be rude and attach the challenge to your name.
> $29 for overnight shipping is more than the cost of one month of Prime by approximately double...
What I've told you is that there are other retailers who will next-day ship you all sorts of "specialty" items like that one. So, Challenge Completed.
Whereas what you've told me is that overnight shipping for this one part is a little less than 1/6h the cost of a year of Amazon Prime. Given that I've only gotten things next-day shipped two or three times in my mumble decades of life, it sounds like not using Amazon saves me a notable chunk of money.
Also, I've heard from a ton of people out in the boonies that Prime ships very few -and sometimes no- items to them same day or overnight. The Prime Promise seems to be extremely location-dependent.
In the US alone Amazon has received over $11 billion in cumulative taxpayer subsidies, and governments spend an average of nearly $43,000 per fulfillment center job created.
This is ramping up exponentially with regard to their data center rollout. In a single instance in rural Oregon, five AWS data centers will avoid $1 billion in property taxes.
This is completely aside from the qualitative damage done to traditional retail, shopping districts as a whole, SME innovation on consumer products, and distorting market competition beyond all recognition.
https://goodjobsfirst.org/amazon-tracker/
https://cictar.org/all-research/amazon
Thats an edge case isn’t it?
Your example actually is in support of capitalism, because I can guarantee you that under some centralized government system this would not happen!
We aren’t comparing capitalism to that.
We are comparing a deeply broken antitrust regulatory environment that is ending capitalism, or ant least the free market competitive style of capitalism you are romanticizing, and replacing it with leveragism or legal cartels or whatever you want to call it.
Amazon is a failure of underregulated capitalism because it’s not possible for anyone to compete with them.
Amazon should have been required to split off AWS from Amazon years ago, and I’d say there’s a very good argument to be made that their fulfillment business constitutes a national monopoly. FedEx and UPS don’t actually provide the services that FBA does, which makes Amazon a monopoly.
What do you meany nobody can compete with Amazon? It happens all the time across the various markets they're in: e-commerce, retail, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, entertainment, and artificial intelligence.
How much investment money and customer volume do I need to make that business viable?
As with all successful businesses, you start small.
You figure out what's your edge. You are resourceful.
You don't compete with ANY competitor by trying to do 100% what they do out of the gate.
Pro-tip: selling (rather than producing) toilet paper is probably never a big business anyhow.
> You don't compete with ANY competitor by trying to do 100% what they do out of the gate.
This idea bleeds into the definition of a monopoly. I can’t just make a mobile operating system like Apple and Google because I won’t have a competitive advantage. I can’t make my own Amazon competitor because their edge is that they deliver more packages than UPS or FedEx. I can’t compete with Google search because the web browser that comes with Android defaults Google on the home page.
Sure, nobody is trying to do 100% of what their competitors do, but I wouldn’t be able to do 5% of what Amazon does even if you handed me billions in seed capital.
Meanwhile, lots of people are starting and building successful businesses.
And hopefully you can agree that, conceptually, monopoly businesses do exist and have existed in the past.
Amazon itself is not going to be shy about changing the rules in its favor.
I have no idea what this means.
Competing in which market? Amazon is a conglomerate operating in e-commerce, retail, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, entertainment, and artificial intelligence.
I don't see it. In each of the industries they operate in, they face fierce competition. Many of those competitors also compete with Amazon across multiple of those industries plus others that Amazon does not compete in.
Competition is by definition tough. But I push back against the original thesis that Amazon has such leverage that it is impossible to compete with them (in all the cases, you're not just competing against them!)
I think you’re confusing a system of private ownership of capital (capitalism) with free markets.
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 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
When Amazon's policies unfairly push up prices across the Internet, it deprives us from competition pushing prices down, and having a better idea of what online overheads are.
the 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.