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Amazon has been pretty horrible for ages, but the thing I'm confused about is why there doesn't seem to be a serious competitor, one that has a good interface,

Amazon has been pretty horrible for ages, but the thing I'm confused about is why there doesn't seem to be a serious competitor, one that has a good interface, search, and which doesn't allow 3rd party sellers that flood the offerings with low quality knockoffs, etc.

lazystar 2y ago
...isn't that basically Costco.com? the trade-off is that you can't sell a million different things if you want to ensure quality among all the things you sell
- HWR_14 2y ago
  There is a middle ground between a carefully curated list of vendors and any company can fill out some paperwork and signup.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    Technology and automation (especially software) allow 90% of the market to be grabbed by 10% of the sellers, or even 1%. It is tough (seemingly impossible) for the middle ground to exist in this environment.
    - drew870mitchell 2y ago
      We (us, the people reading here, the demographic building the software and technology and automation) would do well as a community to spend more time on introspection about what ends it serves that tech, which was sometimes promoted as a great equalizer, gets built so often in practice only to make the walls of an aspiring monopolist's fortress more steep with no benefit to anybody else.
      - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
        Unironically https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWF74KMRq04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWF74KMRq04 We as an industry are seen as defined by crap/enshitification now. The world gave us good faith, cheered us on, mostly excitedly hyped us. And we picked, by small choice after small choice, this.
      - int_19h 2y ago
        Technological advancement by itself merely creates the potential for equalization. Whether that potential is actually realized depends on the culture of society, though. You can use the same basic tech to build Star Trek communism or a cyberpunk dystopia.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    Does anybody live in that middle ground?
    - mananaysiempre 2y ago
      Amazon ten years ago?
    - lazystar 2y ago
      id argue that amazon is the middle ground; temu has lower quality
- tonyedgecombe 2y ago
  Someone should tell the person in charge of Apple’s App Store that.
MyPasswordSucks 2y ago
First and foremost, you have to understand why people use Amazon. Amazon has a good chance of having whatever it is I'm looking for, the price is generally about the same as I'd expect to pay elsewhere, and the shipping (with Prime, in the US, can't speak for UK/EU/RoW) absolutely can't be beat. People don't generally feel like messing around on three or four different websites to find the item, add it to their cart, and start the checkout process to determine how long the shipping will take and how much it'll cost, so the mental heuristic of "Amazon shipping is always free and if it's the sort of thing I'd find at Walgreens it'll usually be same-day/next-day" is incredibly valuable for Amazon. So, with that in mind: The margins for most of the products people buy on Amazon these days are miniscule, so you really need to be able to sell at scale right out the gate, and it's a gargantuan investment to be able to do that. Shipping costs have also shot through the roof. I can't really speak for the U.K. or EU, but in the continental US, free shipping is a money-loser if you're shipping items heavier than 1 pound and not making a $20 average profit per order. Amazon can do it because they have their own shipping network, so if you want parity there, it's a gargantuan^2 investment. Amazon didn't become "Amazon" overnight. They started by just selling books (which, in the US, can be shipped at much cheaper rates than the size/weight would otherwise cost, because the USPS subsidizes media mail), pivoted into CDs and DVDs just in time for the tail end of the CD money-printing heyday and the middle of the Reign of DVD, and slowly incrementalized into offering drugstore / grocery / big-box-store items and faster and faster free shipping. A competitor won't be able to copy that strategy. I think the most likely path in 2025 would be a company that started with a focus on just one geographic region (a state or three in the US, a single country in Europe) and was able to slowly expand as cashflow allowed. So the short answer is "nobody has the money". The longer answer is "nobody has the money, and also the time and patience".
- coliveira 2y ago
  > "Amazon shipping is always free" No, Amazon shipping is not always free. It is only if you pay for Prime membership or if it's above certain price.
  - MyPasswordSucks 2y ago
lotsofpulp 2y ago
Buying land (or renting), building warehouses, and employing people to move stuff is extremely costly. >one that has a good interface, search, and which doesn't allow 3rd party sellers that flood the offerings with low quality knockoffs, etc. This is kind of the space that Costco/Nordstrom/Apple/Best Buy/Lowes/Home Depot/Staples occupy. But even they find it tough, so more and more allow 3rd party sellers to make money off the platform, even if it lowers the brand value in the long term.
coldpie 2y ago
Honestly? I just drive over to Best Buy now. Yeah it costs a few bucks more and I have to leave the house (this is actually a good thing), but I can be certain that the box on the shelf that says "surge protector" is actually a surge protector and I don't need to spend 15 frustrating minutes sorting through intentionally misleading trash to find it and then cross my fingers that what I order is what I actually receive.
- pixl97 2y ago
  The best buys in my area are getting kind of sketch in the past few years. Numerous empty shelves. Products sitting on the floors in boxes not put up for display. Wish I had a Microcenter close.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
    All the stores are like this now, not just Best Buy. Walmart used to be, as I remember it, this insane level of consumerism store where the shelves were overfilled and there was no product so niche that they didn't have at least a few of nearly any product you can imagine. They used to sell hard drives, for fuck's sake, even if it seems like they were locked behind the glass near the electronics checkout. Now you go in there, and it's just a wasteland. Home Depot no longer sells home improvement or hardware store goods... it tries to sell the cheap junk you'd think would be in the Walmart. There are no tools at Home Depot unless a contractor would use them. Absolutely nothing for woodworking (I seem to remember them carrying at least one display piece for a wood lathe back around 1999-2003), now there are no table saws. I often end up going with my wife or my daughter to Michael's or Hobby Lobby, the former has reduced their store inventory so much that the only way to hide it was to remove shelves and spread them thinner so that you could march a school band through the aisles without them having to step closer to each other. The latter has changed their inventory to have fewer craft supplies, and more Temu-style junk. Big box stores are all dying or dead.
    - 0_____0 2y ago
      HD revenue is 250% ish vs what it was 15 years ago. Currently at ATH. Hard to say they're dying.
wnc3141 2y ago
If you look at Walmart and others most 3rd party sellers just duplicate their listing across platforms. E-commerce has fewer "competitors" and more carbon copies
scotty79 2y ago
I think it was horrible form the start. When e-commerce was starting to be a thing it was quickly establish how a store should look, what should it have and where. Like when TVs were made everybody settled on a rectangular display pretty quickly. Amazon is sort of first of TV companies that initially made their first commercial TV a globe and ignoring that every other competitor started making rectangular TVs pretty quickly Amazon to this day manufactures globe TVs and they still sell, not because they are good or what people think TV should look like, but just because they are cheap and delivery is convenient.
mrguyorama 2y ago
> but the thing I'm confused about is why there doesn't seem to be a serious competitor Why does this confuse you? It's the same in every single industry in the US right now. Go ahead, try and start up a competitor to Amazon. Most likely you will just fail for normal business reasons, but if you ever even come close to being a threat, Amazon will just immense weight to steal your market out from under you. They can subsidize anything they want with AWS profits and can outspend you in any direction. Meanwhile the DOJ will look away from obvious anti-competitive behavior because Reagan was a moron who thought regulating markets was magically bad. Even Google ran into this with Fiber. Everywhere they went, Spectrum and Comcast just dropped prices to make Google's offer not very impressive, which is easy for them to do since they've spent decades extracting unbounded profits and paying off infrastructure investments, so their costs will be lower than any market entrant. Demonstrating like this that you COULD have significantly lowered prices but just chose not to SHOULD make people angry at you, but Americans are allergic to requiring companies actually be good for consumers. This is the clear, obvious, trivial direction that any market operating in a capitalistic system is attempting to become. People need to stop being surprised. If you want a competitive market, that doesn't happen naturally. You must force it.
oofManBang 2y ago
I don't really care about knockoffs (hell, I would happily shop on a site that ONLY sold knockoffs for basically everything but electronics), I just want to spend as little time actually looking through products as possible. Google is good for a lot of things but finding good places to buy stuff is not one of them. The entire process of making a profile and entering payment information is sufficient to ensure I don't buy from your site at all. Tbh, amazon should probably be run as a public service. We've long since passed the point where their profit incentives benefit anyone but shareholders. By about fifteen-twenty years by my estimate.
carlosjobim 2y ago
Because other retailers treat their customers like pieces of shit. That's it. Everybody has been burnt, shoppers want to be able to purchase safely. Price, interface, and everything else is of less importance. Will other retailers start treating their customers like human beings? Not a chance in hell. They'd rather let Amazon bankrupt them than do that.

lazystar 2y ago

...isn't that basically Costco.com? the trade-off is that you can't sell a million different things if you want to ensure quality among all the things you sell

HWR_14 2y ago
There is a middle ground between a carefully curated list of vendors and any company can fill out some paperwork and signup.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  Technology and automation (especially software) allow 90% of the market to be grabbed by 10% of the sellers, or even 1%. It is tough (seemingly impossible) for the middle ground to exist in this environment.
  - drew870mitchell 2y ago
    We (us, the people reading here, the demographic building the software and technology and automation) would do well as a community to spend more time on introspection about what ends it serves that tech, which was sometimes promoted as a great equalizer, gets built so often in practice only to make the walls of an aspiring monopolist's fortress more steep with no benefit to anybody else.
    - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
      Unironically https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWF74KMRq04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWF74KMRq04 We as an industry are seen as defined by crap/enshitification now. The world gave us good faith, cheered us on, mostly excitedly hyped us. And we picked, by small choice after small choice, this.
    - int_19h 2y ago
      Technological advancement by itself merely creates the potential for equalization. Whether that potential is actually realized depends on the culture of society, though. You can use the same basic tech to build Star Trek communism or a cyberpunk dystopia.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Does anybody live in that middle ground?
  - mananaysiempre 2y ago
    Amazon ten years ago?
  - lazystar 2y ago
    id argue that amazon is the middle ground; temu has lower quality
tonyedgecombe 2y ago
Someone should tell the person in charge of Apple’s App Store that.

MyPasswordSucks 2y ago

First and foremost, you have to understand why people use Amazon. Amazon has a good chance of having whatever it is I'm looking for, the price is generally about the same as I'd expect to pay elsewhere, and the shipping (with Prime, in the US, can't speak for UK/EU/RoW) absolutely can't be beat. People don't generally feel like messing around on three or four different websites to find the item, add it to their cart, and start the checkout process to determine how long the shipping will take and how much it'll cost, so the mental heuristic of "Amazon shipping is always free and if it's the sort of thing I'd find at Walgreens it'll usually be same-day/next-day" is incredibly valuable for Amazon. So, with that in mind: The margins for most of the products people buy on Amazon these days are miniscule, so you really need to be able to sell at scale right out the gate, and it's a gargantuan investment to be able to do that. Shipping costs have also shot through the roof. I can't really speak for the U.K. or EU, but in the continental US, free shipping is a money-loser if you're shipping items heavier than 1 pound and not making a $20 average profit per order. Amazon can do it because they have their own shipping network, so if you want parity there, it's a gargantuan^2 investment. Amazon didn't become "Amazon" overnight. They started by just selling books (which, in the US, can be shipped at much cheaper rates than the size/weight would otherwise cost, because the USPS subsidizes media mail), pivoted into CDs and DVDs just in time for the tail end of the CD money-printing heyday and the middle of the Reign of DVD, and slowly incrementalized into offering drugstore / grocery / big-box-store items and faster and faster free shipping. A competitor won't be able to copy that strategy. I think the most likely path in 2025 would be a company that started with a focus on just one geographic region (a state or three in the US, a single country in Europe) and was able to slowly expand as cashflow allowed. So the short answer is "nobody has the money". The longer answer is "nobody has the money, and also the time and patience".

coliveira 2y ago
> "Amazon shipping is always free" No, Amazon shipping is not always free. It is only if you pay for Prime membership or if it's above certain price.
- MyPasswordSucks 2y ago

lotsofpulp 2y ago

Buying land (or renting), building warehouses, and employing people to move stuff is extremely costly. >one that has a good interface, search, and which doesn't allow 3rd party sellers that flood the offerings with low quality knockoffs, etc. This is kind of the space that Costco/Nordstrom/Apple/Best Buy/Lowes/Home Depot/Staples occupy. But even they find it tough, so more and more allow 3rd party sellers to make money off the platform, even if it lowers the brand value in the long term.

coldpie 2y ago

Honestly? I just drive over to Best Buy now. Yeah it costs a few bucks more and I have to leave the house (this is actually a good thing), but I can be certain that the box on the shelf that says "surge protector" is actually a surge protector and I don't need to spend 15 frustrating minutes sorting through intentionally misleading trash to find it and then cross my fingers that what I order is what I actually receive.

pixl97 2y ago
The best buys in my area are getting kind of sketch in the past few years. Numerous empty shelves. Products sitting on the floors in boxes not put up for display. Wish I had a Microcenter close.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  All the stores are like this now, not just Best Buy. Walmart used to be, as I remember it, this insane level of consumerism store where the shelves were overfilled and there was no product so niche that they didn't have at least a few of nearly any product you can imagine. They used to sell hard drives, for fuck's sake, even if it seems like they were locked behind the glass near the electronics checkout. Now you go in there, and it's just a wasteland. Home Depot no longer sells home improvement or hardware store goods... it tries to sell the cheap junk you'd think would be in the Walmart. There are no tools at Home Depot unless a contractor would use them. Absolutely nothing for woodworking (I seem to remember them carrying at least one display piece for a wood lathe back around 1999-2003), now there are no table saws. I often end up going with my wife or my daughter to Michael's or Hobby Lobby, the former has reduced their store inventory so much that the only way to hide it was to remove shelves and spread them thinner so that you could march a school band through the aisles without them having to step closer to each other. The latter has changed their inventory to have fewer craft supplies, and more Temu-style junk. Big box stores are all dying or dead.
  - 0_____0 2y ago
    HD revenue is 250% ish vs what it was 15 years ago. Currently at ATH. Hard to say they're dying.

wnc3141 2y ago

If you look at Walmart and others most 3rd party sellers just duplicate their listing across platforms. E-commerce has fewer "competitors" and more carbon copies

scotty79 2y ago

I think it was horrible form the start. When e-commerce was starting to be a thing it was quickly establish how a store should look, what should it have and where. Like when TVs were made everybody settled on a rectangular display pretty quickly. Amazon is sort of first of TV companies that initially made their first commercial TV a globe and ignoring that every other competitor started making rectangular TVs pretty quickly Amazon to this day manufactures globe TVs and they still sell, not because they are good or what people think TV should look like, but just because they are cheap and delivery is convenient.

mrguyorama 2y ago

> but the thing I'm confused about is why there doesn't seem to be a serious competitor Why does this confuse you? It's the same in every single industry in the US right now. Go ahead, try and start up a competitor to Amazon. Most likely you will just fail for normal business reasons, but if you ever even come close to being a threat, Amazon will just immense weight to steal your market out from under you. They can subsidize anything they want with AWS profits and can outspend you in any direction. Meanwhile the DOJ will look away from obvious anti-competitive behavior because Reagan was a moron who thought regulating markets was magically bad. Even Google ran into this with Fiber. Everywhere they went, Spectrum and Comcast just dropped prices to make Google's offer not very impressive, which is easy for them to do since they've spent decades extracting unbounded profits and paying off infrastructure investments, so their costs will be lower than any market entrant. Demonstrating like this that you COULD have significantly lowered prices but just chose not to SHOULD make people angry at you, but Americans are allergic to requiring companies actually be good for consumers. This is the clear, obvious, trivial direction that any market operating in a capitalistic system is attempting to become. People need to stop being surprised. If you want a competitive market, that doesn't happen naturally. You must force it.

oofManBang 2y ago

I don't really care about knockoffs (hell, I would happily shop on a site that ONLY sold knockoffs for basically everything but electronics), I just want to spend as little time actually looking through products as possible. Google is good for a lot of things but finding good places to buy stuff is not one of them. The entire process of making a profile and entering payment information is sufficient to ensure I don't buy from your site at all. Tbh, amazon should probably be run as a public service. We've long since passed the point where their profit incentives benefit anyone but shareholders. By about fifteen-twenty years by my estimate.

carlosjobim 2y ago

Because other retailers treat their customers like pieces of shit. That's it. Everybody has been burnt, shoppers want to be able to purchase safely. Price, interface, and everything else is of less importance. Will other retailers start treating their customers like human beings? Not a chance in hell. They'd rather let Amazon bankrupt them than do that.