I shop on Amazon like I eat steaks. I get individual value out of Amazon and the steak, but at macro scale, Amazon is harming other businesses, and my steaks increase carbon emissions (amongst other things).
Same price / more + $6.50 in postage arriving in 4 days time. And you are going to harass me with emails because now you have it...
It's the exact opposite here in the Netherlands, where Amazon has only recently started to gain some ground.
My preferred boots have a catalogue number. It's printed inside the boots, it's printed on the box they come in, it has remained the same for many years and it clearly identifies the exact model of boots and foot size.
If you type that number in to the manufacturer's own retail web site they're confused, what can this possibly be? It's unclear to them apparently, maybe I want er... women's boots? [What even are women's boots? Answer: The same boots, but limited to small foot sizes. I actually have size 10 feet.]
When I type the same code into Amazon, unsurprisingly it matches a product advertised by a seller, because the sellers have a strong incentive to advertise codes that result in sales. I get the exact product I want, admittedly it still doesn't auto-select the correct size but at least I'm on a page showing the product I want, one drop-down away from buying my boots.
So, Amazon gets the sale and the manufacturer misses out on what's presumably a considerable gap between their wholesale price and the retail price I'd have paid on their own store.
So you are knowingly paying more than MSRP because you can’t be bothered with using keywords to search the manufacturer’s website instead? Weird. How often and how many boots are you buying that this would be worth the trade off?
Then I go to the big box stores’ websites that do not have 3rd party sellers or offer the ability to filter them out.
And then I might go to Amazon. Amazon prices are notoriously high for any liquid or household product bought regularly, Costco and Target and Walmart are way cheaper for those.
It’s unfortunate, because free postage is a complete myth that everyone now expects. A company the size of Amazon can afford to burn money for years and years until they’re at the point where they have their own logistics network and make the numbers work.
There are very few companies that can do that—or that should, really.
Take hassle free returns and credit card points. Both features look like pro-consumer policies but end up forcing all online retailers to bake the cost into their prices. At the end of the day consumers just get no choice on this cost.