The Best Thing About Amazon Was Never Going to Last | If shopping on the site feels different now, that’s because it is

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There was a whitepaper that Amazon published like....5-10 years into their market dominance where they shared how they wanted to get into drone-based delivery because the vast majority of items purchased on Amazon were very light-weight items.

This tracks with me. The problem that Amazon solved (at least for me) was the ability to find small items that are near impossible to find in a Walmart or other superstore. For example, say you are looking for some wax for your car. You go to Walmart and you see a wall of products. Now did they put the wax in the right place or did they put it with the cleaning stuff? You spend 20-30 minutes looking for this one item that you're not going to buy again for maybe a few years when you can go on amazon, find it, buy it, and have it at your door in two days.

Walmart and other stores have gotten better with their apps but they need to do what Home Depot/Lowes have done and do aisle AND bay, and, ideally, where on the shelf to find it. They already have this information but they don't want you you to exactly know where it is because Walmart wants you to browse.

Canadian Tire moved over to digital shelf tags that link up with thier app.
Not only will the app tell you exactly where the item is but if you are having trouble there is a button on the app that will make the tag blink a bright led to help you find it.
https://ruk.ca/content/canadian-tire-digital-price-tags
Hah, I was pulling my hair out trying to find bouillon cubes literally the other day at Walmart. It was in the spices section, not the soups or sauces. I should've thought to check the website.

There is a way to avoid buying utter shit on Amazon most of the time, but it's annoying- type in the full product name including the manufacturer. Like instead of "noise-cancelling earbuds," you have to type in "Skullcandy sesh ANC" (highly recommended and inexpensive wireless earbuds, by the way). Then the result is at least near the top of the list. Of course, this requires you to know what you want before you go there, which can sometimes, due to researching it, require going to some other website to make the same purchase anyway.

I basically don't do non-specific searches Amazon at this point unless I want it to be cheap and I honestly don't care if it sucks. If I buy a male-to-male cable converter and it craps out after a month... well, it was only $1.

The problem with this is that if a non-manufacturer sells the "same" product, and they both use the same warehouse, Amazon keeps both versions of the product in the same bin, and there's no way to guarantee whether you're getting the real product or the knockoff.
If you buy post-it notes from the official post-it's Amazon store, they're not necessarily giving you post-its from the official post-its stock. You could be getting post-its from seller A6Zodiyn which were never stored properly and several years old so the sticky note glue doesn't hold anymore. But both sellers were selling post-its in the same packaging, so they're in the same box in the warehouse and what the pickers grab is random.
But also the completely fake post-its are in that box too, and they don't stick as well plus their color is off, and there are fewer sheets per pad. But because the outer packaging is the same, same same warehouse box.
- This has been a big problem in beauty products particularly, I know. People having sudden reactions to a cream they’ve used for years, because it’s actually a counterfeit.
- I personally haven't had that issue so far, so I can't speak for that.
- That's not the issue. If the wrong product was sent to you, you just make a refund and reorder.
Also, sort reviews for things by "newest" and read the reviews. Most of the time companies will do the majority of their fake spamming of reviews during the first weeks of release and if you read the more recent reviews you're likely to get more truth to them. I've looked at 4.5 star rated stuff with a thousand reviews before, but sorting by most recent I've seen 4 out of 5 of the reviews show up as 1 star rated.
- It's really hard to know whether or not the reviews are astroturf though. Sometimes poor English is a clue, but not always.
This is it.
Nonspecific searches will show you the same three keyboards branded differently because they're dropshipped by some rando, and rated highly from purchased reviews.
Always look up what you want through a actual review site (not like bestvacuumstobuy2023 .com - which are also owned by dropshipper) and then shop around on Amazon and around the rest of the internet.
I'll sometimes buy CDs off Amazon, but even that is happening less and less.
Yessss! Awesome earbuds!
- Right? I use them every day at work. They sound good enough for me (I'm not an audiophile), the noise cancelling is good enough to block out any real distractions, and the range is impressive. So is the battery life. Just all-around good earbuds and they're like $60-70.

Last week I canceled my Amazon Prime membership. It felt so good on so many levels. I asked myself why I am paying prime membership? For expedited shipping on products I haven't purchased yet and don't know what they will be? To pay for products that will be shipped in two days instead of 5 days? I can wait. If it's urgent, I will go to a brick and mortar. Finally, for Amazon prime video, a crappy streaming service in comparison? I hardly use this streaming service. It was an easy decision.

I tend to pick up prime every few months or so when I know we’ll be making a few purchases - birthdays, Christmas etc.
About 2 months ago I did my usual google search for the prime sign up link. Hit the student page by mistake. Whatever, I thought, it’ll realise I’m not a student and bill me correctly when I don’t prove it.
Nope, I’m still on a 6 month trial and still not entirely sure how I pulled it off. But hey, that’s money better in my pocket than Jeffrey’s.
- That happened to me somehow and there was no way to correct it. It lasted for over 2 years for me if I remember correctly

I'm just glad I just avoid Amazon entirely.

Same. It’s changed like 10 years ago I would say. It was always a safer bet than eBay, but it’s sort of swung back. I use eBay more now .
What are the alternatives you’re using?
I cancelled prime years ago but still struggle to find a decent replacement.
I mean, books alone are tough with AMZ often being 30% cheaper than most online retailers. In that case, I sometimes go to eBay to get a used book (if it’s not a new release).
This past week though, I bought some athletic wear, waterproofing wax, a heat gun, and picture frames. Without prime, everything was delivered within three days. For free.
- I use Amazon for research and then purchase the product for about $5-$10 more on other websites, ideally the company selling on a Amazon has their own website. I’d rather pay a little more than give a dime to Jeff Bezos.
- It depends on what you're buying - I don't buy (commodity) books much anymore so can't comment on those. What I can say is for "random tat" that I don't need quickly, Temu is an unabashedly "cheap chinese stuff" that is often the same as the Amazon version, but usually a lot cheaper. I'm assuming they charge less fees to the sellers. They deliver in under 2 weeks. AliExpress has now started offering the same service. Downside is there's not really returns - or at least I've never wanted to deal with the hassle. However, for most stuff under $10, I wasn't going to return to Amazon either.
  For "Brand Name Stuff" I kind of go to ebay and/or the specific retailer like Best Buy or B&H or the manufacturers site. They seem far less likely now to have counterfits because with e-bay the actual seller is tied to the specific product where Amazon isn't, and the other stores don't want counterfeits and have a more controlled supply chain.
  For stuff like spices or the like, ebay or Walmart.com seems reasonably good. Walmart also has a lot of random sellers, but as far as I can tell, they don't do the binning Amazon does, if you buy from Walmart it's from them, if you buy from a third party, it ships from that third party.

Amazon at it's core is a hyper-localized logistics company. Their entire product is logistics, the bulk of their revenue comes from that, and that's how the company got started. This is just the next evolution of that as they see it, and it's fucking gross. Other companies take their lead so as not to attract negative attention when they emulate this crappy behavior, so expect much more of this in odd places you wouldn't expect.

Article without paywall - https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Ftechnology%2Farchive%2F2023%2F09%2Famazon-shopping-experience-decline%2F675472%2F

I don't get it

I worked in retail on and off for 7 years and every store charged markup. Some products were marked up 70-80%. One place I worked was Best Buy. I regularly sold USB cables where the store cost was $2 for $32.

Amazon fees are essentially their markup. It's impossible to run a store without it

The difference is who pays the markup. Amazon charges that to the seller, and passes that "discount" to the buyer effectively locking in buyers because nobody else can afford to compete
- Yeah. And that's fine.
  Cost is a concept in retail that gets manipulated a lot. In my previous example there is no way the actual "cost" of the USB cable was $2. When you factor in employees, rent, bills, logistics, customer service, etc etc the cable was likely more like $5. Best Buy made have paid $2 for that cable, but the actual cost to sell it, taken as a whole, was more like $5.
  That other $3 is essentially what Amazon is making. If you sell on Amazon they build and maintain the website, logistics, warehousing, etc etc. You can create an online store and have exactly 0 employees or logistical infrastructure. Amazon has spent literally billions and billions of dollars building all of that.
This is why the mall or bazaar analogy make more sense. Kind of.
When you buy things from Amazon which Amazon purchased from a wholesaler, this is the same as going to a retail store. (In recent years, Amazon has become their own wholesaler / manufacturer.)
But what has become more common is the “retail stores” are buying from wholesalers and then listing items on Amazon.
So, if you’re selling pet goods and you pay $2 for a bone wholesale that you’d typically resell for $5, Amazon is cutting into your profit and making it more difficult for you to market your product among competitors.
Although, there’s been a couple times where I’ve gone to a seller’s website and found the same product they had on Amazon for less money. So I wonder if sellers aren’t marking up products that are less competitive to account for Amazon’s cut.