Hacker News Reader

Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

Anazon is better than ever for brand name, known buys. Eg I recently ordered a UHD bluray movie, took about 15 seconds end to end and arrived in a day.

They are terrible for everything else. Eg I bought a reading light.

Which was a 10 minute sorting excersise trying to figure out which of a dozen nearly identical products was the least likely to burn down my house. Then trying to uncover which had real reviews and not switched etc. I hit the roulette wheel and ultimately got a unit that arrived DOA.

My trust in the last two years has deteriorated massively in their platform, as a consumer I am absolutely suseptable to a “quality first” disruptor.

And amazon is obviously jam packed with smart people, so what am I missing about their apparent lack of focus or execution on this commonly lamented problem?

View on HN

The thing that "sucks" in Amazon's marketplace - is having US entrepneurs , buying some Chinese crap, doing some marketing and playing some tricks(SEO, fake reviews, etc) and over-charging on products.

In theory, with the right tools competition could sort that out.

But this theory doesn't work, not in Amazon, and not in many other online marketplaces.

So the solution is: exclusive brands, controlled by Amazon.

Amazon works hard on scaling that strategy.

And once Amazon is deeply invested in that strategy, a low-quality marketplace seems like a good thing.

And even for brand name items, you still have counterfeit worries (IE, many people refuse to buy flash storage at all from Amazon now), due to counterfeits from intermingling of "sold by amazon" and "shipped by amazon" items.

I'm not sure if the situation has changed, but it used to be that co-mingling was exclusively an aspect/option of FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon). They did not co-mingle their own inventory, so you could still be somewhat confident in purchasing products with Amazon as the seller of record, i.e. "Sold by Amazon".

I can't find anything to confirm or deny if this is still the case, but I haven't had any issues personally when sticking with products where Amazon is the seller of record. Although I have noticed the pricing and shipping time tend to be less competitive (I presumed because they don't access co-mingled inventory that's at a closer fulfillment center).

Amazon does co-mingle their own stock with marketplace stock, although exactly how often and for what items they do so is unknown. The board game industry has been hit hard by counterfeits (it's really not that hard to print a game), and there are many reports of people ordering games sold-and-shipped-by-amazon, and getting a counterfeit:

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1983918/warning-seems-be-lo...

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1923659/amazon-counterfeits

That's frustrating. It was the last remaining hope I had for Amazon purchases.

Yeah, it is. Thinking about it a little more, it possible that the counterfeits in this case are entering the flow at the distributor level, not at the amazon level, but we can't really tell from our perch at the consumer level.

I totally agree - we built https://indieshops.co/ in order to solve for the "quality first" alternative you mentioned.

We found that the majority of online shopping today consisted of 1) buying basics (read: cheap mass products) on Amazon or 2) getting advertised brands to you on Instagram/Fb/Google and hoping the one you like finds you. We hope that Indieshops provides an alternative where you can discover high quality brands.

Bookmarked!

Just shared this with my group looking for Amazon alternatives as well. Awesome.

Nice! Any plans for other markets (and filtering for them)? I gather it's all 'made with love in the USA' currently.

And how big is too big to be called 'indie'? If you take it quite literally it disallows having two shop fronts, but then to disallow that and allow online-only international-shipping... Just curious how you draw a line.

Thanks for the feedback! We're not deliberately making it US-only (in fact we have a few Canadian and Euro companies) but agree that navigating by market (or delivers-to) would be very useful!

We too are wrestling with that question, what should be the threshold for an "indie" company? We don't want to limit it so much that it's not useful for day-to-day shopping (ie too niche/etsy-ish), but haven't been too prescriptive yet about how big is too big. Hopefully users like you could help us define it!

> And amazon is obviously jam packed with smart people, so what am I missing about their apparent lack of focus or execution on this commonly lamented problem?

I wonder this too. How does this problem track with other problems they're trying to solve, though? Is it commonly lamented just on Hacker News, or are they getting direct feedback from customers? Are their returns skyrocketing? I suspect it's more subtle and longtime power purchasers are starting to buy less and less, like me.

More and more people will start drawing lines like you just did, and I have done. Poop bags for my dog? Definitely Amazon -- it took me 15 seconds end to end on their website, on my phone [!] and were here the next day. No way for electronics, vitamins, or anything that will actually go into my or my family's body (or my dog's body, for that matter).

I recently finished Brad Stone's The Everything Store, written in 2013. In the last chapter, brands complained about Amazon pricing below the their Minimum Advertised Price (MAP), to the detriment of physical sellers. Stone used the German knife company Wüsthof as an example. Wüsthof at one point around 2010 stopped supplying Amazon, but its products were still sold by third parties. Looking at Amazon now, there are at least 100 in-house Wüsthof products being sold by Amazon at prices that seem lower than the mid-hundred dollar price ranges cited in The Everything Store.

Does anyone know what happened generally to Amazon's relationship with brands over the past six years? Presumably over this time, Amazon has only gained in bargaining power over brands at the expense of physical locations, in accordance with Ben Thompson's Aggregation Theory. As an outsider, it seemed like Amazon and brand buyers have done well at the expense of brands and retail stores.

> And amazon is obviously jam packed with smart people, so what am I missing

How many of them work on the (loss-making) shop app though?

I'm honestly curious, because presumably it's supposed to eventually come out insanely profitable and awesome, but the UX sucks, has done for years, and rarely changes.

I assume (but may well be completely wrong) that most engineers at Amazon work on keeping AWS's managed offerings up with the hype train (only one needs to be lasting mega usage to make it all worthwhile), and a whole load of SRE and performance work (I wouldn't like to guess how small a fractional optimisation to EC2 would result in an $X saving across the whole fleet!).

Does it even have to be a disruptor? Can't people just figure out how to put a better storefront on Amazon's backend and just filter out the garbage?

Amazon has an API but it is severely rate-limited and has had some functionality cut to prevent such a thing.

So why can't there be a service that runs for each user with his own API key?

what am I missing about their apparent lack of focus or execution on this commonly lamented problem?

Until it affects Amazon's stock price, it's not a problem.

what am I missing about their apparent lack of focus

I'd guess it is not that they don't know or they can't fix it, it is that they just don't care. Considering the resources at their disposal, they can fix this problem easily. It is probably not (yet) a problem big enough to hurt them financially, so they don't put any effort into it. Every decision is probably purely driven by financial motive.

As you get bigger, the people organization becomes more complex. Changing the simplest of things become a complex song and dance of internal political posturing and maneuvering. Then changing people's mindsets and attitudes become even more difficult as people above them fear they will kill the golden goose if they try to change the mechanisms of how people work. This is a problem as old as time itself. This is why smaller startups disrupt bigger companies.

What is political about banning products that are counterfeit, dangerous, obviously poor quality etc? And fake reviews too. This is something that requires no discussion or thought, isn't it?

I don't think it's necessarily an easy problem to fix. They have one of the world's largest logistics systems built around letting anyone use it to sell or buy, all while keeping one product page per unique item being exchanged. How do they easily filter out bad actors from such a massive system?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com