People Now Spend More at Amazon Than at Walmart
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Not in my experience. I've seriously dialed back my usage of them, but what started me on that path several years ago was comparison shopping for the first time in a long time, and finding that local stores usually matched and sometimes beat Amazon's prices. Why wait 3+ days for two day shipping when I could literally pick it up now for the same price? Now the main issue I have is all the garbage products with fake reviews.
Also the article is worded as if Walmart is in decline- the future is bright for both of these companies, not that anyone is concerned.
I still try to use them as I trust their products more than Amazon. I love their new tool lineup, quality stuff at a decent price, with next day or 2 day delivery. I really like that for returns, they'll come pick it up. AMZ charges extra for that.
Amazon has much better CS though, hands down.
I can hazard an informed guess as to why that is -- they built .com as an independent company, in order to get it off the ground faster and with less interference from the brick and mortar side.
End result: quick iteration, but now two completely separate supply chains. You'd be amazing how complicated warehousing, inventory, shipping, etc. get when you've got 2 SKUs for every item + a bunch of hacks to duct tape everything together.
And it's not trivial to reconverged them, when you're as optimized as Walmart logistics is.
Any in store purchase made with a credit card saved in your account shows up in your purchase history. Don't even need to type in a phone number :). That's actually really new, they emailed about it sometime in the last month and I can confirm it works.
Resellers are a necessary evil for warehouse retail. You need the scale for margin and product diversity for long tail sales, but you've got to keep a tight leash on them. I can't begin to express how unreliable their submitted metadata about listed items is.
I feel like auditing and kicking people off the platform would honestly be the best approach, although that'd probably just cause more fly by night "new" vendor signups.
As long as there is a simple option to not clutter my search results with them, it does not affect me whether or not a retailer also sells their website to resellers.
They're not the best in shipping.. but I haven't see the garbage resellers on their platform.
And yeah, the "marketplace" cancer is everywhere. It's turned Amazon into trash, yet traditional companies seemingly can't help but follow in their footsteps. If I want to sort through vendor reputations for gensym-branded white label gadgets, I'll go to eBay or AliExpress.
FWIW the Home Depot website is much faster if you use noscript to block all of their surveillance vendors. Probably the worst website I've seen with regards to that - by default I think they backhaul all of your mouse movement.
My favorite was a handheld coffee grinder. The item was unbranded, and the manual had some brand name manually scratched out with an inkpen everywhere it was mentioned. It's actually a nice coffee grinder, believe it or not.
I think for a store as busy and understaffed as Walmart, real inventory gets to be a big guessing game.
Oof, not in the UK. (At least not with Prime.)
Perhaps not quite as easy (for small enough items) as when I mostly commuted, and could print a label and leave it in an outgoing mail pile, but certainly from home I way prefer that than going to a post office (even in the absence of coronavirus restrictions).
I actually bought a printer for that purpose. A direct thermal label printer, because that's all I needed it for (and it was cheaper, has no ink to run out/dry out during a period of no use, etc.).
Where I live now, Amazon delivers but uses UPS for returns. I can either drop it off at a Kohl's location, a UPS store, or pay for them to come pick it up.
Normally it's not a huge hassle, but it's a really nice gesture to me, especially for heavy items. I almost kept a TV stand, new in box, that I didn't need because I didn't feel like carrying it back into the store. Luckily, that's when I noticed they'll do free pickup on returns.
Amazon uses various couriers to deliver and return here (even me being in one location, in London, but also the same in the country) but when you select a return only Hermes offer pick-up. (Otherwise there's Amazon locker, Royal Mail print label, Royal Mail drop-off, various other drop-off places of the kind that are a sort of 'side gig' for a grocer or newsagent, etc.)
One seamless search option, no pickup/delivery and Walmart.com options. I added everything, including groceries and other non groceries to my cart. I selected delivery. Some items were not available in my local store but it didn't matter. Walmart automatically divided my order into two parts, where it decided to ship me some of the things I ordered (chips and club soda) that weren't available at my local store. It was definitely great experience and the UI was clean. I didn't get any out of stock errors at checkout too. Can't wait to use it full time.
The only reason I use Walmart is that I don't trust the products from Amazon anymore, even when they are sold by Amazon. I once ordered shampoo sold my Amazon that was obviously fake, and then I searched around and realized Amazon has a program where they gather the products from different sellers and put it in one huge bin and call all of them sold by Amazon.com
How you describe it working is exactly how I've always wished it would work. Glad to hear it.
This is a common scam. Third party sellers will send a fake product to Amazon to be FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon). When someone buys this product from the seller on the product's webpage, the seller is hoping the buyer will actually receive a genuine Amazon product instead that happens to already be in the warehouse. The buyer will be happy and will not complain, so the seller receives their money. However that fake product is still sitting in the warehouse, and when some unlucky buyer receives the fake product, they'll demand a refund. Some unlucky third party seller will have to foot the bill for that refund.
Youtuber "chaseontwowheels" ordered a $6000 camera Sold and Shipped by Amazon.com. He instead received a box of rocks. He got a refund from a suspicious Amazon and shipped him another camera. While filming a video about the incident, he opened the box and it was rocks again. He ended up buying the camera from B&H and finally got the legitimate product.
https://www.diyphotography.net/buyer-orders-6000-camera-amaz...
I've run into a similar problem. I ordered an electric beard trimmer and the box looked new but there was hair inside so it was obviously used. There were a lot of recent reviews about this from different sellers. I'm assuming some third party seller sent a bunch of returned stuff to Amazon and they threw it all into the same bin.
1) I put in my zipcode and checkmark my store. 2) I search for "AA batteries" 1) I put in my zipcode again and checkmark my store because it forgot the previous search. 3) I select In store pickup 4) As I scroll it co-mingles results that are in store with results that require a shipment. Seems like it does this for items that are not sold by walmart so while it correctly filtered out items sold by walmart that require shipment, whats the point if items not sold by walmart are still there.
As a sidenote, it does not tell me where in the store the item is. I just want to get item location, go into the store and pick it up.
Back in 2016 I tried the ship to store service. When I arrived, I went to the back of the store in order to pick it up. I was the only one there. I signed in on their kiosk and then waited. The clerk disappeared into the back and I kid you not, it took 30 mins to retrieve my order. She couldn't care less about getting my package. Keep in mind that I was the only one there and their fancy screen was listing my name as the only one in the queue!
The cherry on top of all of this is that their prices and selection are not always competitive with Amazon in my experience. It would be fine given that I am guaranteed to get legitimate equipment and get it same day but all the issues above steal enough time that it makes it not worth it most of the time.
I assume Walmart Labs is developing all this stuff. They must have better work life balance because their output is nowhere near the quality of Amazon.
I find this problem with Target to an extent as well. They have a better ship to store experience but I have found that their inventory status on their website has no correlation to reality whatsoever and their search is terrible. I have been trying to build an app to scrape all their items so I could build a personal tool that works better. I really want to avoid Amazon if I can but the competitors just make it so hard to do so.
2 weeks ago I added a Logitech mouse to my cart which Amazon claimed would arrive in 2 days per the product page. Upon checkout I was informed that it was unavailable to ship and I would get an e-mail when they knew it would ship. Going back to the product page and refreshing the 2 day promised arrival date was still there. It arrived 6 days later. Seems like Amazon has similar problems.
This is actually changing very soon, and both results will be on the same site.
Anyone who's tried to buy a video card or other in high-demand item from Amazon knows that the same thing happens there.
Edit: I just searched shelf and hot sauce on Amazon.Com on iOS Safari, and the filter options do not show any way to restrict to items sold by Amazon.com.
It only shows up if you restrict your search to a specific department, e.g. “Sports and Outdoors”.
If you need something specialized like say, upholstery glue, Walmart may have 5-6 different options, one or two of which might be sold by Walmart themselves, if you are lucky. Which means likely long shipping times for all the others as they won't qualify for Walmart plus or whatever they call it.
If you search that on Amazon, you will find probably 30-40 different brands and types of upholstery glue available in all difference sizes, in a jug, in a spray bottle, bulk sized, etc. Most of which is available for Prime 1-2 day shipping and will show up next day.
Walmart and other retailers need to be working with some warehouse logistics companies that basically do what amazon FBA. Because as it is, most of the 3rd party listings on other retail sites are just drop shippers trying to arbitrage off Amazon or ebay products. If you buy from them, the seller will just purchase it from Amazon or ebay and have it shipped to you.
The rest are sellers that already sell on Amazon and ebay and just check the Walmart box in their listing management software to add a few more sales here and there. But without amazon and ebay, they wouldn't be able to maintain their business on Walmart, target, and probably about every other retail platform combined.
And I'm not even sure if ebay amounts to much any more. When I was in the business a few years ago, ebay did still account for maybe 20% of sales. I assume that has gone down, but likely varies depending on category.
However, Amazon does have one key appealing, regardless who's the seller Amazon almost guarantees the free return, where in Walmart you'd better take it back to Walmart store even it's sold by Walmart themselves.
The return policy is the one single reason Amazon trumped all other online e-commerce which is not hard to see but difficult to clone.
I try to avoid using Amazon out of practical (e.g. products often being cheaper elsewhere, often have less worry about getting some SKU-identical knockoff that amazon absorbed from some FBA hack) and sometimes ideological (a CEO who rides a particularly phallic rocket into space and then gloats about it while his employees are treated like subhuman machines is an infuriating character to say the least).
However, I'm not sure if there is a reliable non-Google way to search a wide variety of other shopping sites without getting hits for bad aliexpress or ebay auctions for clearly stolen / counterfeit items. I already own a pair of Abibas and that is more than enough :/
I'm at the point where I trust a few stores to not sell me bogus stuff. Target, Walmart, Costco, REI. All are good. Yes I know walmart and target have 3rd party sellers, just don't buy from those.
I am okay with paying a little more, or getting a slightly worse deal to get something I know is "genuine" or well made. Especially if I plan on putting it in/on my body.
I know ethically walmart isn't way better. But afaik they still have old fashioned relationships with their product sourcers. Meaning they're probably buying all their cereals/foods directly from manufacturers, for example.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Costco/comments/ojhrts/costco_is_de...
Newegg is really great for electronics in general
Sparkfun/mouser/adafruit is great for hobbiest parts.
For specific niche stuff check your favorite forums.
I have major concerns over fraudulent or quid pro quo reviews on Amazon, and the prices generally aren't the best around. Free (or rather included) next day shipping is great though.
$610 billion is starting to resemble the tax revenue of some nation states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
Amazon has much more discretionary budget to try and extract from their customers, so time on site is absolutely critical.
I'd say the two aren't even competitive at this point. Amazon will need many years to build out a robust vertically integrated grocery logistics network that reaches Walmart customers. A few Whole Foods in rich neighborhoods isn't going to cut it. On the other hand, Walmart will never figure out how to sell stuff online without losing money, and will probably kill itself trying to chase Amazon for some unknown reason.
People with credit cards shop at Walmart too, and there's a significant amount of marketing effort done to convince people to get new items they weren't planning on while they're there. Plenty of people there can be sold new things without going into a "oh, this new toy for my kid on the aisle endcap looks nice, time to put away the dozen eggs because I only have X dollars allocated for this trip" same-net-spending reaction.
(Anecdotally, my behavior is basicaly the opposite of what you describe: I got to Amazon when I already want a specific thing, and I find their browsing experience god-awful. I go to a physical store when I want to browse or shop without direction. Maybe I'll end up with a new shirt, or a book, or a video game, or a plant... maybe nothing...)
If people spend next months wages, that only temporarily increases sales.
Long term I would expect that non-Walmart credit would decrease sales, since shopper’s income remains constant but they pay more on interest so less remaining for other goods.