Then they got greedy and decided to turn the site into Aliexppress US.
Because physical retail is a single digit profit margin business. It might not even be worth their time anymore now that they have AWS and Prime Video.
Walmart’s market cap is $400B and they have to do a ton more work managing a customer facing business on top of all their warehouses and logistics and website.
Amazon has a 1.75T market cap, without even having to deal with physical stores and customer interactions liabilities that come with it. They already have to deal with all the negative PR of paying warehouse workers less than their other employees…even though they pay more than other companies for warehouse work.
I would be surprised if Amazon would bother entering retail if they had already had AWS and Prime Video. It might be worth the 15% commission as a platform though, but I suspect that’s why I see less and less “shipped and sold by Amazon.com” and more obfuscation of what is and is not coming directly from Amazon.
Remember that retail gives you a lot of cashflow, and Amazon only allows you to transfer part of your funds, and transfers are made every 2-3 weeks. They probably have more money sitting around then many banks.
At the end of the day, a sub 5% profit margin is still a sub 5% profit margin.
If you know exactly what you want and can find that from sellers on Aliexpress who actually know what they are selling,
and put that in clear english language on there, everything is fine. If there is any vagueness, which is not resolvable by
messaging/mail/chat, then I don't order.
When I ordered with the above conditions met, I never had any trouble. Also fast delivery by air to *.de.
edit: That was for electronic parts, boards, development kits, measuring equipment, and some tools so far.
Don't know about the other stuff on offer there, but I'd guess it would be the same.
The problem is the knowing and the sometimes horribly translated descriptions there,
which make it look like alien gibberish.
Apart from that I'm thinking it's mostly the same stuff, not even 'bootlegged', just directly from the source/ODM/OEM,
while the usual 'high-quality' stuff just has a different label on it, and it is the greed for that label/brand which enables
countless middlemen/upsellers/marketeers and their shady schemes.
(been looking at automatic soap dispensers, fwiw - after hours of research however i gathered that all are trash and didn't bother to find out if was going to get lucky)
It's funny though, we were talking about this at dinner the other night. Both my wife and I are still a bit surprised that we'd trust Walmart quality over Amazon at this point. We don't buy anything from Amazon with the expectation that it'll last, or that it's even real - just things that we'll use lightly and nothing we'd eat (minus Prime Now for Whole Foods delivery now and then). Amazon feels like some weird amalgamation of online Walmart + Harbor Freight.
At least with aliexpress that's exactly what you expect, and exactly what you're paying for.