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Comment by yifanlu | Hacker News Reader

I haven’t used amazon for a while (and haven’t had prime in years) and a couple months ago, after reading some posts about amazon I decided to see what my life would have been like if I had used amazon exclusively for all my non-grocery shopping.

Rules: I only buy it if it’s Prime eligible, otherwise it’s skipped. If I bought something because it’s on sale, I take the lowest price amazon ever offered for that item (with prime). Otherwise, I take the price of the item on the same day.

Results: https://i.imgur.com/kDeM2pM.jpg I saved about $330 by not having a prime membership and buying stuff only from prime eligible stores. However I spent at most 27 more days waiting for items (in reality a lot of these shipping times overlapped).

So the takeaway is that amazon made things easier and faster but not cheaper. I know a lot of people still think amazon is the cheapest place to get things but that hasn’t been true for a while.

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Amazon is like a Turkish spice bazaar. Bargains exist, but you don't necessarily go there to save money. Rip-off artists exist, and you have to be careful.

The reason you go is for the vast variety of stuff, and the ability to buy things you can't get anywhere else all in one place.

This is how Amazon conquered large-scale retail: by out department-storing the department stores. When the stores cut back ("laser focused!") inventory in response to Amazon's pressure, Amazon expanded further, bringing in even more people and sending the big stores into a death spiral.

I did all of my online Christmas shopping through Amazon Global, and Marks and Spencer. Both ship things to my country that I wouldn't be able to get any other way.

That's the value of Amazon to me.

Thanks for sharing.

Much like your experience, eBay (and NewEgg) has filled the general consumer electronics hole created by allowing my Prime account to lapse in 2016. I started seriously noticing diminished value mid-2014 while tracking prices for a personal workstation build during the 6 months leading up to Black Friday that year. For shits and grins, I did the same analysis again in 2017 for a second build; Amazon didn't come through for a single component even when Prime benefits were assumed.

Increased annual fee, state sales tax, proliferation of marketplace garbage, workplace stories on HN, gamed product review system...a part of me wants to see Amazon win a few shots just to keep the competition in check, but dropping Prime after 10 years of patronage wasn't particularly difficult and I haven't regretted the decision since.

Savings because other stores didn't charge tax and Amazon did shouldn't count, because that'll change soon as the Supreme Court overturned Quill earlier this year

Money leaving my layman bank account today looks all the same regardless if it's colored product, shipping, or tax. When the Supreme Court's decision becomes the global ecommerce status quo, a reassessment of value will clearly be in order. Until then...

I'm saying it'll be applied to all major US sellers relatively soon

I understood and wasn't contesting the implication. I was merely objecting to the notion that a favorable purchasing decision made by a consumer today by today's rules "shouldn't count" because a legal decision that will normalize ecommerce but has yet to be acted upon at scale (as perceived by consumers) is imminent.

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