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In order to effectively break up Amazon someone needs to deliver a trusted e-commerce layer for payments and delivery that rivals it and their delivery side. P

In order to effectively break up Amazon someone needs to deliver a trusted e-commerce layer for payments and delivery that rivals it and their delivery side. People buy from them because it’s incredibly easy to check out, and because it’s incredibly reliable for delivery and most importantly they are the verb for e-commerce on the Internet: they own “buy online” as a brand and that’s a hard thing to compete with even if it gets broken up like ma Bell. Those three elements are very hard side problems you have to overcome to build a competitor. Shopify is well on their way to delivering an easy checkout experience that could be aggregated to create a competitor of sorts, but delivery remains the hard side problem — the network of warehouses and reliable short term delivery windows you can count on. This aggregates demand and enables centralized payments, but you end up essentially replicating Amazons delivery system eventually to gain efficiency or remaining vulnerable until someone comes and takes you out with shipping rates. It’s also the Craigslist problem all over again as well, because every small category of Amazon is an ocean to a competitor and each needs to solve all three hard side problems, so peeling off each division and improving the experience to consumers is a colossal task that wouldn’t create the same potential for efficiencies of scale or would end up advancing the possibility of winner take all relocation of the exact same issues. I really do think Amazon needs to be broken up to create more competition, because the alternative seems like it would look a lot like the Costco scene from Idiocracy. That’s not a healthy end-result. Also IMO Jet.com was the last upstart of any seriousness and they got taken out by Walmart, and that’s another angle anyone who breaks up Amazon has got to think about. And then their is their oil and gas pipeline in the form of AWS, which is a strategic barrier all itself and allows Amazon to have insane scale that’s entirely paid for by entirely different customers. They can effectively operate for free on their own cloud. They have layer upon layer of network type advantages that have to be unbundled if they are to be broken up, and unless it’s done profoundly well, they’re going to remain 1100 lb gorillas. I could probably organize these thoughts better and more concisely but don’t have time at the moment, but this is what immediately comes to mind.

PaulHoule 3y ago
Maybe it's because I don't live in the 2% of the land area where 30% of people are dogpiled (if like 5% of you moved someplace else the Republican party would be gone, baby, gone...) but in my area AMZN deliveries are always UPS or USPS or FedEx delivered so insofar as AMZN deliveries are reliable it is because those systems are reliable. (I've seen an AMZN delivery truck driving around in a particular neighborhood between home and the office but it has never stopped at my place so far as I know.) In my area AMZN deliveries are 5 days which is nothing special compared to the 1-3 day deliveries I frequently get from Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and every other online store. In fact, I regularly order stuff from Japan on Ebay that arrives faster than AMZN deliveries. (As Flavor Flav would say: "I ordered from Amazon Prime a long time ago, Amazon Prime is a joke in 'yo town") I hear a lot of zip codes that have huge AMZN warehouses in them have 5 day delivery too but if you are Jim Cramer or a Congressman or something they have to have you believing AMZN is a little better than average as opposed to a little worse. If they had slow shipping in Hollywood you'd see sitcoms making jokes about slow Prime deliveries. As for payments isn't AMZN just having Mastercard, Visa, and American express do all the heavy lifting? As for easy checkout, checkout has very few clicks on Ebay. I check out from stores like Best Buy, Adorama, etc. and they all are pretty easy, in fact they don't make me click 4 times saying "NO I REALLY DON'T WANT TO SIGN UP FOR A FREE TRIAL OF AMAZON PRIME". Product listings on AMZN already look like a scene from Idiocracy; often I see the same bullshit listing spammed hundreds of times, listings that are word salad and make so sense at all (and that AMZN doesn't want to investigate unless you bought it.) I am not worried that AMZN is privileging a $5.99 product over a $3.75 product, I find it highly stressful to filter through product listings that are obviously 75% bogus and call into question if I can trust any of them. --- Maybe if you live in Manhattan they send a bicycle messenger backwards in time to deliver you packages as soon as you order them but from my viewpoint as someone who lives four hours away from a big warehouse in PA, AMZN is the Dollar General of e-Commerce and the retailer of last resort which I'll only order from if I can't find the item elsewhere. So far as I can tell Amazon Prime is a big Jedi mind trick that makes people think it is all OK because they want to watch Rings of Power that bad or maybe that Xanth series that AMZN bought the rights to but will stay in development hell forever because it's just too squicky.

PaulHoule 3y ago

Maybe it's because I don't live in the 2% of the land area where 30% of people are dogpiled (if like 5% of you moved someplace else the Republican party would be gone, baby, gone...) but in my area AMZN deliveries are always UPS or USPS or FedEx delivered so insofar as AMZN deliveries are reliable it is because those systems are reliable. (I've seen an AMZN delivery truck driving around in a particular neighborhood between home and the office but it has never stopped at my place so far as I know.) In my area AMZN deliveries are 5 days which is nothing special compared to the 1-3 day deliveries I frequently get from Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and every other online store. In fact, I regularly order stuff from Japan on Ebay that arrives faster than AMZN deliveries. (As Flavor Flav would say: "I ordered from Amazon Prime a long time ago, Amazon Prime is a joke in 'yo town") I hear a lot of zip codes that have huge AMZN warehouses in them have 5 day delivery too but if you are Jim Cramer or a Congressman or something they have to have you believing AMZN is a little better than average as opposed to a little worse. If they had slow shipping in Hollywood you'd see sitcoms making jokes about slow Prime deliveries. As for payments isn't AMZN just having Mastercard, Visa, and American express do all the heavy lifting? As for easy checkout, checkout has very few clicks on Ebay. I check out from stores like Best Buy, Adorama, etc. and they all are pretty easy, in fact they don't make me click 4 times saying "NO I REALLY DON'T WANT TO SIGN UP FOR A FREE TRIAL OF AMAZON PRIME". Product listings on AMZN already look like a scene from Idiocracy; often I see the same bullshit listing spammed hundreds of times, listings that are word salad and make so sense at all (and that AMZN doesn't want to investigate unless you bought it.) I am not worried that AMZN is privileging a $5.99 product over a $3.75 product, I find it highly stressful to filter through product listings that are obviously 75% bogus and call into question if I can trust any of them. --- Maybe if you live in Manhattan they send a bicycle messenger backwards in time to deliver you packages as soon as you order them but from my viewpoint as someone who lives four hours away from a big warehouse in PA, AMZN is the Dollar General of e-Commerce and the retailer of last resort which I'll only order from if I can't find the item elsewhere. So far as I can tell Amazon Prime is a big Jedi mind trick that makes people think it is all OK because they want to watch Rings of Power that bad or maybe that Xanth series that AMZN bought the rights to but will stay in development hell forever because it's just too squicky.