Walmart seems most primed to do this, barring third party sales. Or Sears, if they ever had a miraculous turnaround to their old days.
I think I'm OK with Amazon being Aliexpress for the US market. Sometimes I want to get random crap from the depths of Shenzhen, and Amazon is that. What is unfortunate is that they can't get "real" brands to sell there, because of their counterfeiting issue. The "mistake" Amazon made (that has probably made them hundreds of billions of dollars) was to let someone send in a box of crap and get paid when someone shopping for "Tide Laundry Detergent" gets their box of crap instead of Tide Laundry Detergent.
Other than that, they're where they are today because they're good. I just wouldn't buy anything valuable from them; laptops, cameras, phones, etc. Those you'll have to find a dedicated electronics retailer. But sometimes I'm like building a 3D printer and I want a touchscreen display or something for it... for $20 I can have one the same day. That is super neat. It works because no "brand" makes parts for hobbyists, and some company you've never heard of in China is actually the market leader. Amazon connects you to them... but also to billions of scammers. Caveat emptor.
Edit to add: I'm talking about the in-person stores. I have no idea what Wal-Mart and Target do online.
Are you talking in-store or online? If I go to walmart.com or target.com and search for "usb cable", I don't see a dozen cables that fit 95% of use cases like in the store. Walmart shows thousands of results, the vast majority of which are marketplace sellers selling through walmart.com. Target has "only" 753 results, 600+ of which I find are not actually sold directly by Target if I dive into the filters. Basically it feels like Walmart and Target are trying to turn their online shopping experience into amazon.com.
But that brings me to the type of site I want to see. Not curated luxury products like Le Creuset cookware at a markup, but curated dirt-cheap Alibaba products with low margins that have been tested and vetted extensively.
Massdrop or Monoprice are a little bit like this, but only for a few niches like headphones or cables.
The only way for others to compete is to have a 3rd party help them all become just as easy as Amazon. We need someone to partner with Fedex and step up. Who can do it?
I want whatever program you’re on
Anecodtally: I am in a super-urban location. I order Prime 2-day, on average, twice a week. It has been late maybe once in the past year; often, it comes a day early.
Once you can no longer get every cheap bauble under the sun delivered tomorrow for free, suddenly it all looks so much more like undesirable, wall-to-wall crap.
I see more of the new Rivian Amazon vans than any other vehicle on the road in the morning, and yet somehow, every other item I order gets unexpectedly delayed for days and days.
I live in a "suburb" of about 100k people right now, and Amazon 2 day delivery is fantastic. I still canceled my subscription to prime, though.
not that 4 day delivery is bad. but promising to deliver something, and then regularly failing, is. i'd make plans for the thing being here by the promised day and just regularly be screwed.
I live driving distance to two amazon warehouses. I can get a great number of products in the same day.
We probably order 2-10 items per week and never return anything. I bet we're the perfect customer.
We also do Target pickups once every two weeks for bulky items.
I think the difference is that before a lot of white-label product factories would cut territory-based deals with resellers, so in (for example) the US, that widget is called "Acme Widget" but in France that exact same widget is called "Le Widget Magnifique".
Around the world there might be 100+ companies selling that same product but typically not competing with each other because they would each have exclusive markets.
But now with these global marketplaces, that same approach feels weird exactly because you can suddenly see the same exact products being sold under different names, and it's a lot easier for any random business to white-label a product and reach a global audience.
Amazon is a free for all when factories can just direclty dump their garbage. There is no brand recognition or reputation. It's all just random character strings attached to random products. If a QUENTOC dog leash is prone to snap and whiplash your face, they can just dump the brand and move on.
It exists for tools and parts and hardware: mcmaster.com
The kit won't include plumbing, HVAC, electric... so it isn't 100% what Sears did in the 1910s, but it is actually pretty close.
Guess what? Amazon acquired them and vaporized it.
Who loses?
You can’t get a $50 WiFi 6 access point at Best Buy, but you can find that on Amazon.
I think what you are describing is Walmart or Target but with filters applied to turn off third party sellers.
As an aside, what’s interesting about Amazon is that once you unsubscribe from Prime, it’s not incredibly competitive with AliExpress for the right types of products. Usually if you can wait a week, you can wait two and save more money.
I'm in .uk and have yet to have a problem (there was one sneakily labeled listing but the keyword they'd stuffed in wasn't one I understood and the price and product were both what I wanted/expected so -I- wasn't disadvantaged by that listing at least).
There are a whole lot of products where saving cash easily trumps having a good brand standing behind it.
Phone cases are a classic example. Some of my recent purchases like a toilet paper holder or emergency ponchos are similar. Even clothing is getting to the point where name brands are barely more dependable than Amazon off-brand clothes that probably come from the same factories.
Sometimes “untrustworthy” brands go above and beyond mass market retail options, like the LED automotive lights that AutoZone won’t sell me.
Plus, I’m in a sedan, while everyone else drives a huge SUV that rides higher than my car.
I don’t see how my light system is any more offensive than the luxury cars that have the same thing from the factory. The only difference is that I don’t blow all my money on a stupid car payment or a thousand dollar feature package just so I can see better at night.
I also installed LEDs for the license plate lights which has no negative effect on anyone, and now they won’t burn out all the time.
(I did not install turn signal, brake, or high beam LEDs, I just installed the stuff that annoyed me by burning out all the time)
It's good to have such choice.
I can't get a hitman on amazon, so technically it's not an "everything store" to begin with. But for the purposes of this conversation it clearly is
The vast vast majority of consumers will only expect to find legal products/services on an everything store. If you are going to qualify everything to include things that will potentially land the user in prison, then sure, we shouldn't call it everything.
Even BestBuy/Target/Walmart/Home Depot/Lowes/Staples/REI/etc to an extent, if the item is sold by them. Stores with physical inventory and presence that have to worry about rates of return will probably do more due diligence than an online marketplace.
It’s just an AliExpress with a better return policy, which is worth something when I need something cheap to solve a niche problem.
But my serious purchases all happen elsewhere.
Is there a "quality filter" setting you can toggle on and off? Who decides what goes on which side of the filter? At Amazon's scale, it would have to be automated.
Much like search SEO and every other algorithm, people would start to figure out how to game it, and eventually Amazon would give up trying to police it because it would cost them more money than it's worth, and you're back to where you started except now you have an additional - and inaccurate - "quality" attribute on every product.
The one time I used their ecommerce platform (due to a gift card), I got a damaged product drop-shipped as an Amazon gift.
Quality and trust are not words that I have ever associated with Walmart, even in the brick-and-mortar world where it is much harder to pull a fast one. Color me skeptical.