Is there any evidence that any of this is affecting Amazon adversely? Or are we just wishfully thinking that it is because it should?
In some cases, there are hundreds of junk items before finding something acceptable. This is complacently allowed Amazon, in several ways: 1. they don't calculate shipping costs in price sorting (allowing dishonest sellers to sell 0.01$ items, with high shipment prices), 2. they hide where the item comes from, 3. they don't police items which should be grouped together (I think I once saw an item replicated more than a thousand times).
This makes the buying experience really tedious, and I don't think I'm the only one who thinks this is a problem.
But of course, while this affects Amazon adversely, I think it's a stretch to qualify it as "the downfall".
Just today, I wanted a new flash drive but didn't need it urgently. I checked Amazon to get an idea of fair pricing then looked at Best Buy and found one that looked good on sale. I went to the manufacturer's site to verify the specs and found they had a price 33% lower than the next closest retailer. Win.
The seller listed the dongle as one dongle per model it covered.
Example:
DONGLE for iPad Pro
DONGLE for MacBook
DONGLE for MacBook Pro 13-Inch
DONGLE for MacBook Pro 15-Inch
DONGLE for MacBook Pro 16-Inch
DONGLE for Samsung Note 7
DONGLE for Samsung Note 7 (GTA Edition)
and so on...
The first four or five pages were flooded with THE SAME DAMN ITEM. It was not the one I wanted. It was one of those "$0.01" parts with a $7.99 S&H.
This makes the "Sort by Price" worthless; and that's what I used to use to get myself into the ballpark of where I wanted to be.
Ideally Amazon should require the UPC to be fully registered and verified instead of just taking whatever a seller enters at face value.
Amazon have also made the burden of proof for getting changes to a listing made so high that it isn't really worth the time to point out the issues to them unless it is a product that sells well, so the long tail is a mess.
Ebay has the same challenge, and similar solution (Ebay uses dropdowns, while Amazon uses small clickable boxes), but I see the problem much less on Ebay, so I think Ebay is simply policing sales more than Amazon does.
My guess, sadly, is that it will round to nothing. Most likely the sheer volume of the bottom end of the mass market is worth a lot more to Amazon than elite users who post comments like these on forums like this. We may have been critical as early adopters but now have outlived our usefulness.
I hope that's not true, but that's why I asked the question: what evidence is there? Maybe it's too early to see anything more than assorted anecdotes, but it's hard to know what those objectively amount to in an operation of Amazon's scale.
The “negative PR argument” has become an indicator to me that someone has an extremely immature world view. There are anecdotes that reflect PR events that are catastrophic (Theranos). But most companies completely recover from PR bumps because most consumers only change their behavior in response to costs.
Evaluate a provider for the quality of its service. Think how others from elite to mass consumers would perceive it in the long run, and you can guess the fate of that provider. Things move fast and many competitors are working at offering better user experience. We will see I guess.