Moving more and more away from Amazon. If I especially like a product or company, I'll see if it costs about the same to buy direct and do that. I've found that lots of companies actually have better deals on their site or offer a coupon.
If coupons and discounts are the best the competition have to offer, then Amazon doesn’t have too much to worry about.
(1) Yes, I know that Amazon sells some millions or some such different products, but my experience shopping (recently moved and have done a LOT of shopping) is that the company making the product can have a good enough Web site that shows much wider range of products, e.g., for wool blankets many more colors and patterns.
(2) To me the key to Amazon is their quite well done Web site that makes it easy (a) to find products and (b) to get relatively good information about them. But can do well on (a) with just keyword searching at Google, Bing. For (b) can do well at the Web site of company making (importing, whatever) the product.
Then, yes, Amazon also pleases customers with better, faster, cheaper shipping options, their Prime program, good returns policies, relatively close warehouses (Walmart stands to do really well on this as they get their Web site polished), customer reviews of products, Amazon Choice house brand, one account for all the wide Amazon product choices instead of (having to type in banking, shipping details for) accounts at each of a few dozen companies, etc. I have found that if just go shopping at whatever on-line retail sites, can get some bad products, worse than my experience at Amazon; so, Amazon can have some trust from selecting relatively good product. It may be that Amazon can be responsive: The mid-tower case server I built supports error correcting coding (ECC) on both the motherboard and the processor; so I explained to Amazon that for their main memory sticks (DIMMs, duel in-line memory modules) they should offer ECC; they did, and maybe my suggestion helped. Still, IMHO the keys to Amazon have been just (a) and (b).
From the shopping I've done recently, it appears that a lot of retail Web sites just copy a LOT of software architecture and design from the Amazon Web site. So, we can expect that building such a retail Web site is becoming a widely, well understood art and, thus, no longer an advantage for Amazon. Indeed, the company might host their site at Amazon's cloud server farm AWS -- irony here!
Net, it looks to me like the US manufacturers and/or importers can start to do well cutting out the middleman Amazon. Ah, Internet disintermediation!!
Uh, shipping from many local warehouses? When I was at FedEx, and maybe still, shippers could just truck their inventory to Memphis and, thus, get faster, cheaper delivery to their customers -- order in before midnight and delivery before 10 AM the next day, that is, in about 10 hours. Well, FedEx and UPS could still do such -- open a few hundred warehouses, let vendors stock the warehouses with big trucks and deliver to customers with little trucks (bicycles, taxicabs, drones?). Again, a dozing if not sleeping giant here is Walmart.