Nike won’t sell directly to Amazon anymore
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Some tips I wish vendors would follow:
1. Don't capture more information than is absolutely necessary for the transaction.
2. Don't force the user to sign up or join anything if they just want to buy something.
3. Don't automatically add the user to your newsletter and send their details to your ad network. Be very explicit that you won't do this.
4. Tell the user up front how much postage will most likely cost and expected delivery time before you capture all their details. You can guess their general location from their IP address of have them select a city.
5. Have multiple payment options (like paypal for example), not just credit card.
6. Up front, tell them what you need from them before they can complete the transaction. Nobody likes working through an endless data collection wizard only to stop half way though because you don't want to give up that data or get bored filling things in.
It's really not that complicated.
Who are these people that, having bought some sneakers already, get a email about other sneakers into their nearly bottomless inbox full of junk (presumedly, given they don't avoid these kinds of marketing messages) will actually notice it amongst the noise and then actually be compelled to buy additional shoes they wouldn't have otherwise (and therefore apparently didn't need)? Certainly they exist in some number, because they show up in optimization dashboards I've built for my clients, but what portion of the market are they, truly? Is this reflective of a psychological disorder (perhaps the underlying cause of "hoarding" is a spectrum-type pathology)? Is optimizing for these customers's odd (and apparently self destructive) behavior the same thing as optimizing revenue in the total market or is it just a local optima that everyone's in a big hurry to to corner themselves in? Even if it was a true global optimum, is it ethical? Is this the microtransaction whale-hunt optimization race to the bottom that mobile games went through (and results in many such as myself avoiding participation in that market) in slow motion due to physical goods' slower cycles?
They exist, I just think it's stupid to build your business around them.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/17/sothebys-sells-sneaker-colle...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWSGN0Er18E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw9_tB1tzT4
https://www.sacbee.com/sports/nba/sacramento-kings/article23...
The reason I go through and buy them is because I know I will eventually need another pair and I would much rather buy a pair on sale then need a pair and have to pay more.
this seems like an obviously true thing. i would estimate that the majority of clothes retail is absolutely _not_ utilitarian: it isn't driven by sentiments like "my old shoes have worn out so i need new ones", but rather by ones like "i think those shoes look good and so i would like to own them as well as the ones i already have".
And maybe I am an odd customer, but I also think that the customer who buys more sneakers just due to a spammy newsletter is too.
Edit: Online casinos here in Sweden recently went through a revolution where they added e-ID login (meaning that users do not need to complete a huge form on signup) and automatic withdrawal on logging out when possible. Sure, they were lucky that they could get almost all of the old data they gathered by using the e-ID, but even if they had not been able to I think it still would have been worth it to collect less data to get more sales. And apparently slowing down withdrawals was bad for business (who could have known!) despite making some gamblers lose their money while waiting for the withdrawal to be approved. Customer hostile greedy strategies can trap you in a local optima.
It would be great to allow customers to estimate shipping as soon as possible, rather than just before clicking the "give us money" button.
People already understand the price of an object vs the cost of sending that object somewhere in the world. Everyone understands $100 shoes with a shipping fee, not $105-$130 shoes that shape-shift depending on where the person lives that opens the link.
Disclosing the shipping fees up front helps a bit, but not completely.
And if people do feel cheated (I'm unconvinced), I still don't believe they need to be manipulated into thinking that shipping doesn't have cost. These kinds of reality-distortion practices are all too common in tech and ecommerce.
It's like Verizon manipulating people into thinking they get a "free iPhone" when they sign a 2-year contract. It's 100% misleading.
If people are surprised by shipping fees, it's only because this misleading practice is widespread and we're racing to the bottom on dark patterns. All the more reason to be principled, imo.
I also often do feel cheated because the shipping fees often match or exceed non-discounted consumer postage fees, and many stores just use it to advertise deceptively low prices. The argument here is "handling cost", but a grocery store also has handling costs - and how would you feel if a "check-out fee" was added at the end?
When I'm on a shopping site to buy an individual item, I want to know "how much do I have to pay to have this item in my hand". I don't care if you charge $5 for the item and $10 for shipping, or $15 with free shipping.
If the shipping fee is clearly advertised (i.e. in legible, discoverable font right next to the price) and is reasonable, it's one thing. But patterns I often see and always hate:
- ridiculous shipping fees used to advertise lower prices than others when the actual price is higher (sucks if the platform you're using sorts by price, not total cost - like Amazon does!)
- charging 9.99 for shipping for something that comes in a barely padded envelope with 1.50 worth of postage on it
- shipping costs well hidden, so you have to spend time before you know what the actual price you'll pay is
I consider "free shipping" not "manipulating me into thinking that shipping doesn't have cost". I consider it a promise that what I see is what I pay (i.e. I consider that transparency). Without it, if you see $19.99 on a web site, it could mean $19.99, or $39.98, and you often can't easily tell.
The above applies ONLY when the shipping charge is the actual shipping charge. All the big shippers make it easy to figure out what shipping a package will cost so you should know when I click add to cart what the costs are. (As a bonus it would be nice if you would tell me which item in my cart costs so much to ship - some things are worth buying locally because retail can use cheaper shipping to the store)
Then allow the user to sort on base retail price or price plus shipping, as they prefer.
Being transparent about goods versus shipping makes the customer feel better about not getting manipulated and/or ripped off.
One example I found recently was a couple of small brake light bulbs. $4.13 plus $14 shipping from a parts dealer or $5.75 plus free shipping from Amazon. Initially you think the price is great, it's cheaper than Amazon! Then you find out they have a hard time sourcing padded envelopes.
But won't that typically be a worst-case estimate? I actually kinda like itemized shipping charges. Then I know if I'm buying two items then I'm not being double-charged for shipping.
And in those cases it's going to show up next to other merchants selling the same product. Inflating the price by factoring shipping into it can hurt your sales. That's why many sellers offer free shipping on orders of a certain size where the profit is large enough to cover the shipping loss.
And, of course, what happens when a customer buys multiple items? Now they're potentially paying for shipping more than once.
Shipping is really the core reason Amazon usually wins. No one can compete with their multi-billion dollar distribution system.
If only retailers with similar physical infrastructure (Walmart, Kroger, et al) hadn't been so late in building the technology to compete. Even now any chain with an existing, large warehouse and distribution system could introduce a cheaper FBA type system for merchants and capture part of the market while giving smaller MFRs and retailers a way to reasonably compete with Amazon on shipping.
Sadly they're all old school brick and mortar organizations which are notoriously bad at tech.
There's a lot more to direct-to-consumer logistics than there is to "center-to-store" logistics. Distribution-center-to-store logistics can rely on largish shipments of any individual product, very large shipments for any DC to any store, and has a backup mini-warehouse (aka the back of that Kroger's) for each delivery site.
Amazon can't store ten extra "diamond-coated Samsung Makeupsian-2" cases at your house when you order just the 1. Walmart often stores a few pallets of "nobody wants it" at their stores. Amazon doesn't drop of multiple pallets per deliver (usually, that is); Kroger's never gets less than several pallets at a time. Amazon can't predict what you're going to order months in advance; Target knows they need ten cases of "Fresh Bloom"-scented bleach per month, plus-or-minus 10%. Multi-pallet vs. singleton; buffered vs. just-in-time; predictable-load vs. "I want only one, once, randomly".... there are a lot of differences in the logistics that Amazon faces versus what Kroger/et. al. face.
I honestly do not think that most existing distribution systems could support an FBA-style system w/out massive overhaul. That's not to say that FBA is not replicable... it just requires a massive capital investment and a massive rethink of how to do product logistics. Even if they're good at tech, I don't think the old-school organizations could successfully pull it off.
https://support.google.com/googleshopping/answer/9115668?hl=...
You don't need to even visit the vendor site, you can just purchase from any vendor with your stored purchase credentials.
1. Click "Buy with Apple Pay" button.
2. Double click power button on the side of my phone to confirm.
I wish more sites would support it.
Other tips to get me to avoid Amazon: tell me your site supports Apple Pay and help me move my full cart (e.g., a cart link with a temporary token) from Chrome to Safari so I can use Apple Pay.
Is that what you were doing and were unable to do it or was there some kind of technical issue?
I have shipped to other addresses than my main address on file with Apple.
You must have been speeding through and missed it.
Even if Apple Pay comes to others I won't use it. I absolutely don't think Apple has better privacy than anyone else.
https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/
And Apple implements it.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_pay_on_the_w...
Safari supports two JavaScript APIs that let you accept Apple Pay payments from customers on your website: Apple Pay JS, and the W3C Payment Request API. The Apple Pay JS API is analogous to the PassKit (Apple Pay and Wallet) framework, used for Apple Pay in apps. The Payment Request API is a W3C candidate API.
It seems to be supported across all browsers.
I remember not being able to buy a custom Converse shoe on their vendor site because I didn't have a local US credit card. I hate it, I hate not having options. Even Newegg accepts international credit cards these days. The amount of regression on these platforms is disgusting, and then they ask why others become powerhouses and they don't...
Starting a few months ago, I now clearly see a indication if the item would ship to my country.
(also in Europe)
Also, as one of the most popular stores, it has the most reviews on items like electronics. These reviews provide a lot of value (not the star-ratings, but actual reviews, where you can see what people complain about).
For things like photography equipment and musical instruments, I'd go to other stores (BHphoto/Adorama/GuitarCenter/Sweetwater/Reverb/Ebay).
On the downside, many items are now Chinese fakes. So for brand products, I tend to not use amazon anymore, as it is basically a fake marketplace. If available, I always use the webshop of the company directly. Much less headache.
But in my experience it is usually cheapest, and no one can even touch the shipping time.
Like, I buy stuff on Amazon for my parents, friends, and family all the time.
Not to mention the common cases of shipping to work address, having multiple residence addresses (e.g. students who have a home and a dorm address), shopping while visiting family out-of-state.
It's a really common fraud scheme because it's not uncommon for regular people to do that. Otherwise, we would not have a need for a "shipping address" at all: all the purchases could go to the belling address, right?
So, basically, you are exactly the kind of bad seller that ruins it for everyone else. Your inability to deal with fraud adds so much more headache to the experience.
I hope that, as an independent seller, you have it in bold letters on the front page that you only ship to the billing address. This way, people who you won't ship to anyway won't waste their time (and people who you won't ship to will not be inconvenienced anyway).
Lol, no. It’s a common fraud scheme because users of stolen credit cards can’t update the billing address. They would love to be able to use a stolen credit card with an address matching their drop location.
My point was that if only fraudsters were shipping to non-billing addresses, we wouldn't need to specify two addresses when making a purchase.
In itself, shipping to a non-billing address is not a scheme. It's what people do. That's why that is an option to begin with, and that's why all shopping sites support it.
If it was uncommon for people to ship to non-billing address, then it would cease being a fraud scheme, because we would be able to use this as a reliable indicator of fraud -- or we'd not have this option to begin with. Therefore, fraudsters do that because it's not uncommon in general.
Also there are stores that do not ship to my country despite both being in the EU. They ship to New Caledonia (remote colony) or a poorer neighbouring country though. Maybe it has to do with lack of a VAT number and not giving a damn about getting one.
Most of the people I work with does the same thing so I think you're very much wrong in your thinking. If it works for you, then fine, but it's not foolish at all and it's the best option for a lot of people.
EDIT: Looks like Shopify is indeed setting up its own fulfillment network, but it was only announced a few months ago and is likely some ways off from launching:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-19/shopify-s...
I get part of that is funded through the Prime annual fee and Amazon's cut of the proceeds but given their large distribution networks I would think they could come to Amazon's level (but this also probably depends on the volume of other packages they handle which AREN'T retail).
I was in the market for some headphones and had a specific brand and make in mind and when I looked in their site they were more than $100 more than Amazon. This has held true for me for a lot of items and even when using price tracker it is pretty much no contest to just buy off any reputable vendor most of the time.
I think it's just that the people who make the goods often have no market sense and rely on outsourcing it for 90% of their sales.
Maybe that's why Nike is going in this direction.
I'm sure that counterfeiting is a real problem, but I don't know how pervasive it actually is.
I've worked on a few client projects that involved large, successful, but traditional consumer goods companies try their hand at a direct to consumer (D2C) model.
As other comments have alluded to, there's tension involved when a manufacturer starts to be seen as a direct competitor by their distributors. Shopper marketing teams can quickly shift from having incredibly collaborative relationships and partnerships with their retailers to adversarial relationships with cutbacks on shelf space and promotional support. Some manufacturers are more risk tolerant than others on the impact that a D2C channel will create, and that may be reflected in the pricing for their D2C channel.
But that's only one side of the picture. Even at clients that don't care at all about the risk to existing distributor relations, they can rarely make their D2C channel profitable, let alone cost-competitive with retail channels. At manufacturers: marketing teams are competent in mass market campaigns and retailer-driven promotions, designed and measured using approximations and proxy metrics (due to having limited if any access to consumer level information), digital teams are competent in creating promo microsites and brochure sites, and operations teams are competent in efficiently moving goods at pallet and truckload scales. And all of the vendor and agency relationships are also around those competencies.
All of that tends to work against the D2C model. Direct response, performance marketing campaigns tend to require a completely different skillset than your marketing team currently has (and the agencies they use have). Your creative, UX, and development teams and processes are likely not the best fit for the needs of ecommerce and conversion rate optimization. And you'll either need to outsource order fulfillment to a third party or be very disruptive to your logistics org when they have to mix in packing and shipping $50 orders with 10+ SKUs to consumers along with their usual duties of shipping $5,000+ orders of 1 SKU to a retailer. Plus your shipping costs will be incredibly painful, as consumers have come to expect shipping to be quick and cheap/free, but you'll need to use new shipping vendors for retail package delivery and likely won't have the volume to get all that great of prices.
Add up the inefficiencies at each stage, and even with pricing that isn't competitive with retail distributors, many manufacturers operate their D2C channel at a loss. They're happy if their loss is low enough to write off the D2C channel as a marketing expense and strategically important enough to subsidize. Breaking even and being self-sufficient is seen as a success, and profit (and growth) is only ever talked about when you need to pitch executives internally for a cash infusion every couple of years.
(which to be fair, is indeed more convenient than paying it in-person.)
1) I object to being charged to give someone money. If you tell me I owe you $90 and that you accept this list of methods to pay and I go to use one of those methods and you reply "oh to use that method I will charge you an extra $3.95," I am going to use the method that costs me an extra $0 because I already agreed to give you $90; you can work out how to collect that $90 in a way that only costs me the $90 I owe you.
2) It is an outdated fee. When it first started, electronic payments were new, novel, and cost actual money to put into a workflow. Now, physically handling checks and cash often have more cost to the merchant than paying electronically because the cost and logistics of electronic payments have been so streamlined. This fee has turned into a cash grab.
(That first point is why I still use paper checks. My apartment complex charges almost $50 to pay rent with a credit card and $10 to use a debit card. But walking the check three minutes from my front door to the night drop the day I get paid is entirely free since my credit union gives me a box of checks every year and I go through far fewer than one box per year. If my apartment complex finds that taking paper checks costs them money but electronic payments don't, they can adjust their pricing to reflect that.)
Of course apartments charge high fees for rent - they want to ensure they collect the full amount of their monthly rent according to the contract. A $50 fee on say 1000 dollar rent is 5%, ensuring they cover whatever Visa is going to charge them on the transaction. And if they get a little extra income for themselves - then all the better for then as you got some convenience out of it by not having to write a check!
Though presumably that's $50 a month.. So perhaps not.
I won’t pay extra convenience fees just for online ACH. I’ll just use my bank’s free bill pay service to mail them a check and they can deal with having to deposit paper.
I.e as a merchant I can easily integrate Apple Pay as an available payment option in the same way as others, but as a customer I can't use Apple Pay unless I'm using Apple sanctioned devices/software and have an Apple account. Other commenters mentioned it only working in Safari, and according to Wikipedia it only works on Apple devices.
Apple Pay is Safari’s implementation of the standard. Apple stores your payment information and uses the Secure Enclave for authorization. How could Apple ensure a secure path on non Apple browsers or on non Apple hardware?
What’s the use case where you would use Apple Pay as opposed to your hardware vendors implementation on a non Apple device?
Just a snippet from the standard.
https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/
This specification standardizes an API to allow merchants (i.e. web sites selling physical or digital goods) to utilize one or more payment methods with minimal integration. User agents (e.g., browsers) facilitate the payment flow between merchant and user.
And so you can't use it without being an account holder just like with Mastercard or Visa.
Yeah. It is called the Apple ecosystem. Don't like it? Don't use it. I personally have been very satisfied with Apple so far.
If more companies did this I’d be more inclined to shop around than default to Amazon.
>> 2. Don't force the user to sign up or join anything if they just want to buy something.
>> 3. Don't automatically add the user to your newsletter and send their details to your ad network. Be very explicit that you won't do this.
>> 4. Tell the user up front how much postage will most likely cost and expected delivery time before you capture all their details. You can guess their general location from their IP address of have them select a city.
Yeah, alright, because marketing and the higher-ups will be totally a-ok with all of those missed opportunities...not?
>> Don't force the user to sign up or join anything if they just want to buy something
Especially isn't going to happen. The marketing team is honestly stupid if they don't do this. If a customer has purchased something, companies do everything they can to encourage a repeat purchase. Part of that is offering newsletters on updates for new products or sales.
I've definitely just aborted out of a purchase flow for pretty much all of these things. You're supposed to be making profits, not happiness for your marketing team.
These two things have a strong positive correlation. Marketing teams don't become happy just because you get a newsletter. They become happy because you engage with the brand and the brand makes more sales. Which in turn makes for more profits.
Making people jump through hoops to stop the barrage of spam certainly means your users will be engaged. But it also means they'll be unhappy. Which in turn makes for fewer profits.
That sort of shit works because the utility is being measured incorrectly. All those hoops to opt out really juice the engagement metrics but don't determine if someone is interested in using your product or flailing about trying to escape the clutches of unwanted spam.
Take for instance Western Digital. In order to provide feedback on their (lousy) customer support you have to opt into all sorts of marketing surveys. If nobody opts in, nobody's complaining and so everything must be fine, right?
lol
Everyone unchecks those boxes anyway. The ones that don't and actually want that crap are engaged enough in the product/company that they'd gladly sign up for the spam if you asked right on the front page or anywhere else but the checkout screen. Why annoy the crap out of 99% of your customers so that you can catch that 1%?
And what does the spam cost in terms of lost sales?
Especially isn't going to happen. The marketing team is honestly stupid if they don't do this. If a customer has purchased something, companies do everything they can to encourage a repeat purchase. Part of that is offering newsletters on updates for new products or sales.
You know how to encourage repeat business? By not spamming me. I've got a list of companies that continue to spam me that I'll refuse to patronize. I'd say the marketing team is honestly stupid if they annoy paying customers.
A recent example in my life was signing up for a warehouse club type membership. It's a company that's well known for treating their employees and customers well. I signed up online and went to the local store to complete the process. As I was completing the in-person part of the process the employee helping me kept pushing the store credit card (annoying but not a deal breaker). By the time I got home a couple hours later I'd gotten multiple emails from the company. No problem, right? Welp the server(s) handling the unsubscribe requests was offline. I could get the unsubscribe landing page but nothing else. Online chat support was a 10-15 minute wait. A phone call was similar. Eventually I found some corporate email addresses and fired off a few missives. End result? Someone in corporate support managed to unsubscribe me but I'm deciding between outright cancelling the membership or purchasing a few loss leaders and then cancelling the membership. How's that for a missed opportunity?
Another great example is Newegg. They had a promo a couple years ago that required me to sign up for their spam mailing list. I subscribed, used the discount, and unsubscribed after a constant barrage of irrelevant crap. They've also started allowing third-party sellers. As a result of both of those behaviors Newegg went from one of the first places I looked for computer components to one of the last just like that.
It's death by a thousand paper cuts really. If your company insists on opting me into more noise I'll shop elsewhere.
I since set up an email alias with fastmail to deal with this crap. I recently had a similar thing go down at DSW -- they sent my junk account via my alias 4 emails in the space of two days.
I'd like to add to your points, especially for brick and mortar stores going online, make sure the shopping experience is good! Few of the stores we have 10x harder experiences in shopping and browsing.
Amazon is so bad when it comes to counterfeits that there are only two conditions that will lead me to purchase an item there anymore:
- Either the item is listed as being sold by its original manufacturer and fulfilled by Amazon
- Or I just need something and don't care if it's cheap Chinese crap
I'm sure with Nike officially leaving Amazon this will only get worse. But practically any other big brand you're still looking at paying full price for knock-off merchandise. I can't believe Amazon gets away with having their "head in the sand" to this degree.
Does anyone have a link or remember what I’m talking about?
Just checked and the only counterfeit product I’ve received was RAM and it was sold by Amazon.com. The box was not similar to the original and contained a foil space blanket.
I've ordered a ton of stuff from Amazon.com, from electronics to foodstuffs, and never received a counterfeit. However, almost every FBA product I've purchased was sketchy.
I wouldn't trust that one. Since Amazon co-mingles inventory, stuff that's sold by the original manufacturer but FBA could still get mixed up with counterfeit product.
What you'd really want to do to make sure that it's coming from the original manufacturer is look for stuff that is sold by the original manufacturer and not fulfilled by Amazon.
Supposedly Amazon now maintains separate inventories for each FBA vendor at some but not all of their distribution warehouses (like their San Bernardino facility).
Note that the WSJ article is from 2014--several years before my visit. I can't speak to what Amazon was doing with inventory in 2014, but it sure isn't what they were doing in 2017 at their SoCal distribution facilities.
If that was once accurate, I don't believe it remains accurate.
So I believe in your case something else must have happened.
Now that you mention it, though, I'll bet I wasn't getting authentic stuff. I'm going to purchase a pair from Adidas directly and see if the quality is better.
If it is better quality, I'll be kicking myself. I know Amazon has these kinds of problems, but I just didn't connect it to those shoes before.
It's basically the reverse of the "browse in store, buy on Amazon for cheaper" experience.
Now I choose Amazon as a last resort after checking the manufacturer or other more reputable vendors. In cases where I need something immediately (and can't get it at a brick and mortar), I'll check PrimeNow as I haven't received any knock-offs there yet. But the selection there is pretty limited.
The Worst category in my experience, by far, is batteries. I haven't even bothered with shoes in a few years, but Zappos tends to be a better experience in that regard. I realize, of course, that Amazon owns Zappos, but the experience is all their own.
That said, amazon's fashion/footwear is a bit of a hit and miss experience here in the UK. Multiple listings for the same product, poor quality own brand merchandise, branded products with very limited colour/size combinations, and so on.
I expected amazon would have smashed this by now but it seems to get worse and worse?
I honestly much prefer shopping on the Nike app over Amazon, but I'm going to go to Amazon to buy whatever I found on that app.
There's lots of sellers who buy from Nike outlet stores and resell it on Amazon.
Of course, many companies add returns back to inventory, and some customers commit return fraud.
I assume you don't buy from Walmart, in case someone resold them counterfeit products?
It's interesting because any Birkenstock Amazon sells is basically an assumed fake one.
ugh.
Fluffy Subjective Possibly wrong
I don’t need a massive hero image of a sports star to order gym shorts or a gym bag. I’m just searching amazon for what I need. My "experience" is worse if I never even see Nike's products, not better.
I’m not a sneaker guy, but recently tried to buy a launch pair of sneakers as a gift - only available by Nike’s store. It was a terrible experience with their storefront - crashing, erroring out, empty HTTP responses, app errors, redirect loops, self-emptying cart, etc. Finally got to chat with someone at Nike support after trying for an hour - sold out. They seemed completely indifferent to their storefront being a technical dumpster fire. Essentially, “better luck next time”. No thanks, I’m done - there will not be a next time.
I’m not sure your single experience of the worst case shopping scenario for Nike is representative of the average costumer experience.
Besides that, as someone who has bought Nike/Adidas gear on Amazon, it can be a very bad experience. Description information is often lacking, especially if you are trying to see if this is the most recent model or care about sizing information, let alone if it’s going to be a legitimate product. And if it isn’t, good luck being able to immediately tell it’s fake.
I can definitely see why Nike thinks this is a costumer experience improvement (as well as all the business benefits too, of course).
I think a lot of people kinda lazily settled into using Amazon.com for all/most of their online shopping years ago when it was clearly better its problems weren't as pronounced. Those people aren't even bothering to find or look at other sites, and just buy whatever's on Amazon.com. It takes some extremely bad experience or serendipitous exposure to change that habit.
I was in that boat until I had serious problems with the quality of Amazon Logistics delivery and went to a Best Buy and discovered that (for many products I was buying) Amazon doesn't have any price advantage over physical retail anymore (and often its prices are far, far worse).
Why wouldn't I? I already have the account, app, and shipping set up. Why are shoes different to anything else?
Well, apparently not. They sell all sorts of clothes, eyewear, jewelry, etc.
It's just a smaller Amazon that has less, offers no obvious upside, and is yet another place you need to register an account for and give your payment details to. Though if counterfeiting is as big of a problem as it appears to be, that would be one reason to consider Zappos.
I just clicked the "Men's" section and got everything from pants to cute jock straps[1] before I saw my first shoe. So clearly they gave up their "shoes only" shtick.
[1]: https://www.zappos.com/p/2-x-ist-3-pack-stretch-jock-strap-b...
Screenshot of the order page:
This same basic issue has happened multiple times. Product and images are originally high quality, then at some point the manufacturing process is optimized to produce an inferior product without updating the listing.
Edit: This even happens with stores like Kohl's. The same exact product sold in stores will be sold online for the same price, but the quality is significantly lower.
I've also noticed Zappos is also frequently out of stock in a lot of sizes, it seems very plausible they could be out of stock on a color or size that's in stock on amazon.com.
Hmm, I see..
To be fair, Amazon is the LAST place I would buy Nikes. Counterfeit risk is too high. Comingling inventory is the worst.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racket_(crime)
... promises to protect the target business or person
from dangerous individuals in the neighborhood and then
either collects the money or causes damage to the
business until the owner pays1.) Search Amazon for Nike shoes
2.) Buy shoes
3.) Close Amazon
4.) Receive (possibly counterfeit) shoes. If low quality or fake, perhaps think less of Nike.
After:
1.) Search Amazon for Nike shoes
2.) Observe no Nike shoes in results
3.) Google 'buy nike shoes'
4.) Visit nike.com
5.) Nike promotes sweatpants/sweatshirts/is running a sale/etc on landing page
6.) Possible conversion (customer is drawn in by promotions; ends up buying more than just the shoes)
7.) Receive authentic Nike merchandise, think highly of brand
It's a couple extra steps and this is oversimplified for a generic case. There's also places it could go wrong, such as if Nike chooses to collect and sell customer/transaction data. But if executed correctly, the switch benefits both Nike and the consumer while only hurting Amazon. Seems like a win-win-win.
Nike is just no longer doing business with one (large) retailer who is apparently 'unable' to separate counterfeit products from genuine ones.
Assuming that Amazon doesn't? They have reciprocity agreements with credit card companies.
I can't believe any trademarked brand would sell on Amazon, given they do not care to control their supply chain. It's a lose-lose: unhappy customers getting ripped off, and name brands getting disappointed customers of their faked products.
1. https://www.amazon.com/Creed-Aventus-Parfum-Spray-Ounce/dp/B...
I wonder if they're more careful in Italy or France, since those countries take a very dim view on fakes, entities that sell them and even buyers.
Buying knock-offs in Italy can cost you a fine of EUR 7'000[1]
[1] https://www.godsavethepoints.com/italy-knock-off-goods-fine-...
Reviewers apparently even complained about fakes of this product[1].
I guess the margin must be immense, when you can have a knock-off manufactured for a couple bucks and then sell it for "half price" compared to the original.
Your "savings" won't lead to a happy kitchen experience, though.
[1] https://ch.kuhnrikon.com/en/kitchen-essentials/kitchen-essen...
Hence, if I order a pair of Nike shoes on Amazon, there is a good chance I receive an absolutely inferior product and blame it on the brand. Once that damage is done, I - and a perhaps a portion of my friends - will never buy the brand again. Ever.
For example, how am I supposed to know if the Sandisk flash drive I bought was directly from the manufacturer, and not a 3rd party who is part of an industrial espionage effort? How about a Yubikey?
This is likely not just a problem with Amazon, but it sure would be nice if they gave me an option to buy things directly from the oem, guaranteed.
A caveat - I used the tool and it said the card was genuine. Afterwards I put it back in my dashcam, and the dashcam said the card was bad. I just had to reformat it in the dashcam and then it was fine.