More than that... there's probably no real recourse. For the same reason you mentioned.
Why sell on Amazon instead of your own site? Can’t competitors to FBA spring up that have great logistics? Are there any? Can anyone link me to them?
You don't need to boil the ocean in order to serve a single community. For example, Facebook started in Harvard and its value to everyone in Harvard was based on how many people in Harvard used it, not how many people in the world used it.
Similarly, if a single product vendor and their customers form a community, then a free market of fulfillment companies can spring up to stock that specific product, and then partner with the delivery companies (who have their own networks) to deliver the package. You might say that the delivery infrastructure is a cartel, but they're open to everyone and Amazon has been relying on them until finally spinning out their own. Same goes for CPU chips that Apple relies on etc.
Look at IPFS for example, competing with AWS for storage. It is growing every year and now powers 1% of all storage worldwide! And there is a free market.
Whereas these platforms are all centrally controlled by some billionaire (Zuck, Musk, Bezos) and his crew. You don't need to have their scale because you don't need to serve ALL COMMUNITIES IN THE WORLD on day one. If you have an open source software like Wordpress or Magento, you can serve your customers with web hosting instead of Shopify or Amazon. Now the only question is, who would do fulfilment.
This gave them a pricing advantage which drove more customers to them which they intelligently plowed back into the business in building out their own network, no small feat of course.
A newer competitor would no longer have access to that simple sales tax advantage, and so would have to find something else to compel customers with. Barring that, Amazon/Walmart/Costco/Target/Home Depot/Lowes/Best Buy are tough to compete with because they already offer rock bottom pricing and they don’t have to invest in a ton of new infrastructure for logistics.
When there's a better alternative customers are less likely to try out your new, less good idea.
Can you give an example of someone serious using IPFS instead of S3? I don't really get what "all storage worldwide" means.
MySpace
Friendster
Whimit - Russians online (LOL)
The only reason that FB, Google and yes Amazon were even able to launch, is because the open permissionless web disrupted AOL, MSN etc. Imagine them allowing Amazon to launch on top of them. They’d cannibalize them just like Amazon cannibalizes sellers.
Scale matters. You seem to be a programmer, you should know that.
Quantity has a quality all its own.
One thing that gets overlooked in this is returns.
One of the big draws of Amazon is easy returns.
Whenever you have decentralized fulfillment centers, returns become a huge pain, because the fulfillment center that is happy to take your money and ship you the product, doesn't want the liability of dealing with returns.
It was like a group of Java developers decided to write PHP code and it was horrific. I would estimate 80% of the classes in that codebase didn't have any implementing code in them.
Literally the only thing I liked about Magento was it's ability to outline everything that was being rendered to make it easier for you to identify the changes to templates you needed to make.
You are sold "the dream" by showing top sellers / influencers / etc. and told you can be like them. Kevin O'Leary became a meme for promoting this bullshit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuqemytQ5QA
In fact, even the top influencers can be deplatformed in an instant, and their speech is controlled. And same with Amazon. But the thing is that the people you never hear about, the "middle class", are far more controlled and the "long tail" produces all that free content that basically gets almost new views / buys but all that free sharecropper content is then used to train AI models or provide proof of large available inventory / product / content BY THE PLATFORM that pits them all against each other in a zero-sum game.
https://www.reddit.com/r/quotes/comments/117oh1m/the_upper_c...
The women is Amanda Lang,[1] and the two were a 'duo' for many years with a business/finance reporting show. I'm not sure how she managed to put up with him for so long. :)
in a lot of countries it would save a lot of money if the tax office had direct access to the product and purchase database. Thousands of people could move to more useful jobs.