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Why doesn't Amazon care?

by tpmx 3y ago

PaulHoule 3y ago
Cause you keep buying. Or rather, because you haven’t canceled your Prime yet. Do it now.
- tpmx 3y ago
  I guess I'm happy to live in a country where Amazon showed up too late (Sweden). Their offering for non-Chinese brands seems like a joke in comparison to the online retail landscape here. It's good for cheap noname (weirdname?) Chinese electronics (think e.g. TPA3116D2-based amplifier boards) though.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    AMZN is actually not that good in much of the U.S. If you live in a ZIP code full of congressional staffers, sitcom writers or stock market analysts you get 1 day shipping with Prime. If you’re not so lucky (say you live in the same ZIP code as the warehouse) it could be 5 days. I just ordered the lens that I need to shoot volleyball games, a famous camera store can get it to me one day sooner than AMZN can despite being closed for a Jewish holiday. AMZN would sell me a ‘refreshed’ lens but the last one of those I bought from them failed in six months. All the time I see something on the shelf at Target for $45 that is $65 on AMZN. The chattering classes who are bought off with 1 day shipping wax about AMZN’s logistics network (always seems to use USPS, UPS and FedEx to reach me, maybe they get a better deal because they threaten to leave…) or payments (hmmm… Visa, Mastercard, American Express, …) but it is gaslighting end-to-end. Once a store gets one of those membership programs they quit thinking straight (how do I make money off sales?) and wind up thinking crooked (line goes up…) The only thing harder than canceling your Prime is making an order without being signed up for a “trial” subscription which is one more reason to shop elsewhere.
    - notacoward 3y ago
      Not too long ago, my daughter at college lost her favorite headphones. For reasons not worth going into, we needed a replacement fast so I went to Amazon. I figured that Prime shipping would be able to get the kind she likes to her before I could get there myself (I was some hundreds of miles away but planning to swing by on my way home). Isn't that what I paid the subscription fee for? Well ... no go. IIRC the best they could do was four, maybe five, days. And not because they were out of stock. Then I went to B&H, who could get them there next day for a better price. No prizes for guessing who got my business that day. Amazon was a pretty decent bookstore once, then a pretty decent "everything" store, then they just enshittified the hell out of everything. While it's good that anti-trust actions are finally being taken, it would have been even better if the practice of predatory pricing sustained by VC money (not just at Amazon) had been nipped in the bud long ago.
      - tpmx 3y ago
        What the US needs is a great price comparison service. That is how we get by in Sweden before and after Amazon. Google Shopping is not it. Such a price comparison service needs a large team manually curating categories and most of all: the product metadatas. So much manual work. Yet it all made sense, even in a country of just 10M people. (The company is called Prisjakt and is now starting to go to shit for unrelated reasons.)
distract8901 3y ago
I'd guess that juicing total review scores for a product results in more sales
RoyalHenOil 3y ago
Like many companies, they prioritize short-term profits over their long-term reputation. This is very common with publicly traded companies.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Why doesn't Amazon care?

by tpmx 3y ago

Why doesn't Amazon care?

PaulHoule 3y ago

Cause you keep buying. Or rather, because you haven’t canceled your Prime yet. Do it now.

tpmx 3y ago
I guess I'm happy to live in a country where Amazon showed up too late (Sweden). Their offering for non-Chinese brands seems like a joke in comparison to the online retail landscape here. It's good for cheap noname (weirdname?) Chinese electronics (think e.g. TPA3116D2-based amplifier boards) though.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  AMZN is actually not that good in much of the U.S. If you live in a ZIP code full of congressional staffers, sitcom writers or stock market analysts you get 1 day shipping with Prime. If you’re not so lucky (say you live in the same ZIP code as the warehouse) it could be 5 days. I just ordered the lens that I need to shoot volleyball games, a famous camera store can get it to me one day sooner than AMZN can despite being closed for a Jewish holiday. AMZN would sell me a ‘refreshed’ lens but the last one of those I bought from them failed in six months. All the time I see something on the shelf at Target for $45 that is $65 on AMZN. The chattering classes who are bought off with 1 day shipping wax about AMZN’s logistics network (always seems to use USPS, UPS and FedEx to reach me, maybe they get a better deal because they threaten to leave…) or payments (hmmm… Visa, Mastercard, American Express, …) but it is gaslighting end-to-end. Once a store gets one of those membership programs they quit thinking straight (how do I make money off sales?) and wind up thinking crooked (line goes up…) The only thing harder than canceling your Prime is making an order without being signed up for a “trial” subscription which is one more reason to shop elsewhere.
  - notacoward 3y ago
    Not too long ago, my daughter at college lost her favorite headphones. For reasons not worth going into, we needed a replacement fast so I went to Amazon. I figured that Prime shipping would be able to get the kind she likes to her before I could get there myself (I was some hundreds of miles away but planning to swing by on my way home). Isn't that what I paid the subscription fee for? Well ... no go. IIRC the best they could do was four, maybe five, days. And not because they were out of stock. Then I went to B&H, who could get them there next day for a better price. No prizes for guessing who got my business that day. Amazon was a pretty decent bookstore once, then a pretty decent "everything" store, then they just enshittified the hell out of everything. While it's good that anti-trust actions are finally being taken, it would have been even better if the practice of predatory pricing sustained by VC money (not just at Amazon) had been nipped in the bud long ago.
    - tpmx 3y ago
      What the US needs is a great price comparison service. That is how we get by in Sweden before and after Amazon. Google Shopping is not it. Such a price comparison service needs a large team manually curating categories and most of all: the product metadatas. So much manual work. Yet it all made sense, even in a country of just 10M people. (The company is called Prisjakt and is now starting to go to shit for unrelated reasons.)

distract8901 3y ago

I'd guess that juicing total review scores for a product results in more sales

RoyalHenOil 3y ago

Like many companies, they prioritize short-term profits over their long-term reputation. This is very common with publicly traded companies.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]