Without good technology you cannot achieve any of the things you mentioned better than Amazon without spending so much money (on humans, etc.) that you lose any

Without good technology you cannot achieve any of the things you mentioned better than Amazon without spending so much money (on humans, etc.) that you lose anyway. Amazon's technology gives them higher margins and thus they can use that money on things like lower prices, better service, etc. Their other technologies allow them to do recommendations and other automatically curated approaches without spending money on humans to maintain everything. edit: Seriously, retailers have something like 0.5-1.0% profit margin, it's abysmal, they don't have the leeway to compete with on anything that costs them more.