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Comment by tracer4201 | Hacker News Reader

I own a decent number of Amazon shares. I’m sure they can ship most places, but to any Amazon management folks reading this - is the longer term plan to kill Amazon.com the store? The experience has gotten somewhat akin to EBay. It seems like it’s intentional, but I can’t tell. There are any number of shady sellers selling the item I want to buy. I have to manually click often times to ensure I’m buying from Amazon. Even then, a few times I’ve received the wrong item in the wrong box. I digress but despite your earnings call and all the financial disclosures, I still have no idea what you guys are doing.

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I strongly suspect this is intentional. It feels as if amazon is doing the subcontractor/gig-economy scam, just slowly.

Amazon is attempting to shift everything to being 3rd party. That way they're a middleman who gets a cut of everything sold, but without any risk. The risk is all on the sellers, who are can be at Amazon's whims, and on the buyers who get garbage from scammers. But sellers can come and go and the customer can't keep track of which sellers are actually trustworthy.

We can already see this gradual slide with how counterfeits work on Amazon. You can't tell if or when you'll get a counterfeit. Even Sold By Amazon is no guarantee since Amazon will mix 3rd party seller goods into the same bin.

This is pure MBA thinking. They remove risk to the business and the need to have buyers of bulk goods to list them. They don't have to keep their own stock anymore. Sure they run a warehouse business too, but the risk of holding good too long is someone else's problem: The 3rd party sellers. And still they keep getting a cut of everything sold.

I don't own amazon (except through the indices) but I am a customer who buys almost all of my consumer goods through amazon. You are absolutely right.

Amazon is a luxury brand, and amazon doesn't seem to know this. I mean... it really is a pretty great luxury brand? There's a lot of crap I don't have to own if I know I can order it the day before, and I'm willing to pay extra for that convenience.

I mean, there's three tiers of amazon stuff.

1. "Shipped from and sold by Amazon.com" amazon amazon

2. "Sold by X, fulfilled by Amazon" - like ebay, but with fast shipping and reliable returns

and

3. "Shipped and sold by X" - like ebay, except you use the amazon interface.

I mean, really, for me, someone who buys everything on amazon, these markings are clear enough for situations where it's a common item that I don't need to read reviews. If I had ownership of amazon, though, I'd be pissed, 'cause they are pissing on their own brand by not making it super clear when they are actually selling the thing and when they are just acting as ebay for some maybe super shady third party.

(I mean, it may seem like the prime check solves the problem, but this is what I mean by it being a luxury brand. I don't want to have to deal with shiping something back when it wasn't quite exactly the right item or whatever; shipping stuff back is a pain

But amazon has a massive problem of mixing reviews for products in those three categories, and quite often, you end up with reviews for product X which are actually reviews for product Y or product Z that users got when trying to buy product X from a seller that was not amazon, because the reviews are mixed.

It makes amazon a lot less useful for stuff where I need reviews; things like generic brand stuff. There's just no way to reliably line up the review to the version of the product being sold.

I mean, right now? when amazon is willing to do all this shit for near cost? It doesn't really matter, 'cause they are naturally going to be better than most of the competition that has to keep their P/E below 20; It's easy to run a business if you don't have to make money.

But at some point, investors will demand returns.

Amazon is a luxury brand? Look I'm in Japan and from this side of the pond as it were, Amazon is a shitty aggregate selling site.

There are many around and they are all to be steered clear of unless you desperately can't find the item you want somewhere else

Until very recently, my experience shopping on Amazon.com was top notch. I always get what I order within a couple days. My account was opened in 2006. Between 2006 and 2014, I had one problem in total when ordering. It was for a $500 item that was marked delivered but never arrived. Amazon just sent me another shipment. I was so impressed in fact, I put every dime I had left after purchasing the Sp500 into Amazon.

They’ve come a long way since I bought them at < $300 a share. I don’t understand what’s next. Personally, I’m shopping less and less at Amazon.

In the US, I never thought of them as a luxury brand, but I did think of them as someone who understands that if you do the right thing for your customer and are insanely loyal to your customer, your customer will reciprocate. As of late, they don’t seem to care much about the customer.

What about amazon fresh? That seems like ridiculous levels of luxury to me. I mean, this is America and most of us have giant vehicles we could take to the store to get food... but amazon will deliver fresh food to your door. You don't even have to talk to anyone; they'll stack it by your door and you can deal with it when you get home. (The Safeway service makes you be there and makes you sign papers... a lot more work)

(I personally don't really relate luxury to good customer service... Luxury, to me, is about convenience and comfort. If you have to deal with customer service at all, they've blown it. But then, I guess I don't really understand the concept of loyalty, either, at least when it comes to corporations, so we might just be talking past oneanother.)

Honestly, it feels like Amazon's admittedly great customer service is just a band-aid over the systemic problems their website has with spam, fake reviews and scammers. Instead of fixing the problem they just patch a solution.

>Amazon is a shitty aggregate selling site.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was complaining about. The "shipped and sold by amazon.com" experience is super luxury. For consumer goods, and a whole lot of industrial parts? I have next-day access to a giant warehouse of stuff. I'd pay a lot extra for that. They cheapen that by adding in the shitty aggregator capabilities. (though, like I said, the biggest problem is mixing reviews, and making it hard to limit your search to just 'shipped and sold by amazon' - when looking at a listing, an experienced user can easily see if it's amazon or a shady third party)

A lot of my friends have big storage units full of stuff for projects, books they found that they want to read at some point, etc, etc... things we have bought before we needed them because we didn't know that those things would be available when we needed them.

As amazon gets better, there are more and more classes of things I don't need to own until the day before I need them. For those of us who live in areas where storage or living space costs way more than "stuff" - this is huge.

Think about a world where we don't have to go shopping. Especially where we don't have to go exploratory shopping, where you don't have to buy the things you will need ahead of time.

(actually, I mean, this is a very silicon valley perspective; I visit family members elsewhere in the USA, and it is so weird to me that one day shipping isn't available if I forgot to pack a thing I needed. At that point, it becomes a lot less luxury.)

It used to be. For years, you just knew a few things. One, Amazon would probably have it. Two, it'd be a good price. Three, you'd reliably get what you wanted in just a few days.

Now its a mire of junk and finding something solid is hard. And even if you find it, you get to wonder if you got a counterfeit or not.

I imagine in other countries Amazon largely skipped the build up phase where they bought and sold everything themselves. Now they're just an ebay without the auction.

It gets worse. They used to call themselves Earth's most customer centric company. Well, recently they shipped me a pack of women's briefs rather than the fountain pens I ordered. Customer service was abhorrent and they would not take them back - the cherry on that cake was that the pens I wanted had now gone out of stock as well.

I cancelled my prime subscription immediately. I don't think I'll be giving them any of my business anymore. I used to work there so I still own a lot of shares, though.

Okay, as a shopper of both sites I have to say one thing. I have never had an issue with a dispute on Ebay and they act on the dispute faster. They put forward the rules and follow it.

With regards to the article.

First I am amazed it was cost effective to buy such a huge fleet of vehicles and train the delivery people than use existing providers. Just on observation with my nearly thirty mile commute I can see quite a few of their trucks running about. Oddly I still can get items from Amazon delivered by both them and UPS even on the same day though that frequency has dropped. Wal Mart was not much better, having a shipment split and both arrive separately on the same day, one Fed Ex Home and the other regular Fed Ex.

Second, one day delivery only works if the product isn't excluded some how. There have been more that a few items marked "Prime" that have disclaimers on ship time.

Two day is more than fine for me. Plus knowing that everything arrives on two days lets me be prepared. If something randomly arrives one day and the rest on the second it is a bother. Another site I use (nuts.com) can get me any order in two days from New Jersey to Atlanta so I don't see Amazon as all that special. Just have an efficient warehouse with good arrangements with your shipper.

Amazon IS like eBay. That's how it is designed.

The majority of merchandise transactions on Amazon is conducted by 3rd party sellers. The 3rd party sellers on Amazon ARE the 3rd party sellers on eBay. To them Amazon and eBay are simply 2 of the many channels they use to reach buyers. There's no difference. So of course you'll get the same experience from them.

> I have to manually click often times to ensure I’m buying from Amazon. Even then, a few times I’ve received the wrong item in the wrong box.

It has been explained repeatedly here, but since Amazon commingles all products of the same SKU, regardless if they are genuine or fake, you can easily receive bad products from trustworthy sellers.

Years ago I submitted feedback on their website asking for a switch to limit search results to stuff sold by Amazon itself.

Anytime I find something I want to buy but it is sold by a third-party, I have to go through the list of other sellers and look for Amazon. A switch would save me time.

they are doing what everyone do at wildly successful silicon valley companies: building silos/fiefdoms to be the leader behind their money burning next-big-thing-nobody-asked-for project, such as cashierless store or 1984 listening device or whatever.

Cashier less store is a great idea. I’ve been to it in Seattle. I have concerns as an investor about the long term prospects of Amazon.com, but I do think they’re an innovative company. The cashierless stuff will shift all kinds of retail businesses and it’s a win for consumers IMO.

I wonder if they'll license the tech to other companies. They could just take a percentage fee of all transactions by customer purchases. I reckon the cost savings in staff would be enough for most businesses to justify it.

Has anyone had any luck with cloning this technology yet? I suppose the devil's in the details (and the hardware) with this one.

Cavalry’s here ?

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