Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

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> I am happy the parts company is ditching Amazon, but its so much more important for us consumers to ditch amazon.

Conversely, maybe it's important for both big and small businesses to realize that investing in your online presence and building out a high-quality local delivery network is much more important than the high-rent place on Main Street?

A lot of the reasons I buy on Amazon are that it offers a much more pleasant experience. In fact, if you go to the manufacturers' sites for a lot of the products Amazon sells, they have a slow checkout process, scammy discount codes and email signup incentives, and generally optimize for consumer lock-in rather than getting the product to the consumer quickly. Imagine Google if it had popped up a discount code for "Get 200 searches at 15% off!" every time you searched for something, and think of how successful they would be if they did that.

As for a lot of small-time local shops I know, they seem to place an unduly high value on prime real estate, and their websites are at the level of “My nephew says he knows Dreamweaver”.

In summary, I am not super surprised they are being beaten out by Amazon, and it is unclear to me as to why I should subsidize their bad web design and reluctance to invest in building a consumer-friendly online experience.

Thankfully you are not the only person to realize this and a multi-billion dollar industry sprung up to help independent retailers compete. A Shopify website has a customer experience similar to Amazon. The real issue is Amazon has so much market capture that most people don't even look for independent retailers. In fact even suggesting that you can go other places online gets a bunch of push back from people insisting that nothing can compete, and that somehow it's moral to ignore all externalities in the name of pure market efficiency.

Maybe I am looking in the wrong places, but precisely zero of my local retailers have anything that looks like a Shopify storefront. And it's about the tools (Shopify is a great one), but also about the attitude. Amazon has the attitude of “get the thing to the customer, immediately”. Most of the other places have an attitude of “we want to build a long-lasting relationship with you, the consumer”. Hence they ignore fast deliveries and push coupons and loyalty programs and crowded stores.

Ironically, this leads to a place where the only long-lasting relationship the customer ends up having is with Amazon, which is a pretty shitty company.

> somehow it's moral to ignore all externalities in the name of pure market efficiency

I am not saying that, or I don't think I am anyway. I think the retailers are not taking the externality of reduced attention span in a serious way like Google or Amazon. The technology totally exists for a local retailer to get my location, and deliver a product to me with 3 clicks in under an hour.

And yet, apart from food delivery startups (that are not local, and simulate such an experience via a layer), few actual goods retailers (say, my local hardware store) have invested in building such an experience. I can't recall any of them having the courage to at least test out a pilot program with such an experience.

Either way, I do try to support my local retailers as much as I can; and my usage of Amazon has seen a slow but steady drop-off over the last 3 years. But that's mainly due to the fact that Amazon makes

> Amazon has the attitude of “get the thing to the customer, immediately”. Most of the other places have an attitude of “we want to build a long-lasting relationship with you, the consumer”.

Sometimes that long-lasting relationship is what ends up paying dividends in better service, though. I'm by no means unwilling to shop around, but I have been a long-time customer at my LBS and will always look to them first. I crashed in a weekend cross race two years ago and bent my rear brake rotor when the rider behind me rode over it. My LBS didn't have my rotor in stock, but they called around and found when at another shop in the US and had it shipped up before the weekly Tues night series. That's for a lowly low-category masters racer.

When you have a personal relationship with a business, it is possible for them to pull out all the stops when it matters.

At its peak point of customer experience value (which Amazon has definitely past), Amazon was great because it was generally easy to find a good set of options for whatever you were looking to buy, in one place/one search.

Now, it’s full of fake/cheap crap with manipulated reviews and “sponsored” search results. Before it was good about exposing useful data (e.g.: “others who searched for x eventually bought y” and other similar features. That’s all but gone now. You only see what is useful to Amazon for you to see.

So, my question is, where do I go to find that same general search function for shopping? It’s not google. I’m not sure it exists but it’s needed. (Or anyone have a link?)

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