Amazon FBA takes a big percentage, abuses sellers/brands, and significantly limits business models (e.g. international sucks) There is a market here. I hope they pull it off.
As a seller going through multiple channels if you are selling books for example - Amazon basically pays - many bookstores slow pay, even distributors can get way behind and require lots of phone time. The trade is that it’s all on amazons terms. Same thing with fulfillment- many sellers complaining have never actually run a warehouse and done pick / ship. I don’t doubt complaints by sellers are valid, I just wish Amazon dialed down the marketplace side because it’s too full of junk for me
Diving into one I think is detrimental to both sellers and customers, Ads. If you are not a huge brand this is a ~mandatory additional cost on top of FBA (or you won't show in results). As a customer it sucks because many of the top results are trash. Why bother having a decent product if you can just buy a ranking and some fake reviews? Amazon is pushing this so hard right now as it is a quickly growing revenue stream for them :(
Maybe, Shopify should buy FedEx.
Seriously, I don’t understand how so many major players are so bad at it. Search that doesn’t work (heck, Home Depot can’t consistently get their search bar to display if an ad blocker is running) or can’t find the item you’re searching for even if it’s there. Item displays that are absolutely awful (the item I’m currently looking at and probably want to buy is far below the fold). Delivery that is “FREE” but mysteriously is not free in the cart. The list goes on. Shipping address verification that wants to “correct” your address to something wrong in an infinite loop.
Sometimes I feel like Amazon’s competitive advantage is that its website is so-so in a field where everyone else’s is truly awful.
Beyond a certain scale (when you're becoming more of a logistics company and less of a store front) there are a whole heap of rather tricky problems sitting there waiting to bite you in the arse. Preventing exponential cache growth is my favourite, especially for b2b. Search is also highly non-trivial, again especially b2b.
For a company like Home Depot or Target, there is an actual finite inventory of sellable objects in the physical possession of the retailer, and this inventory is small by computer standards. Any remotely reasonable full-text-searchable database should be able to search it accurately and efficiently.
That leaves items in the supplier’s inventory (or made to order) and third-party listings, I suppose. To the extent that items in the supplier’s inventory are curated, they should still be finite and in a database. Made to order is more complex, since the actual number of distinct orderable items may well be effectively infinite, but the number of item listings is still finite.
Third-party is a mess, and this is where I think many large retailers mess up. A large part of the value proposition of a store like Home Depot or Target or the in-store part of Walmart, etc is curation and first-party responsibility: if I buy electronic stuff at Home Depot, I expect it to have appropriate safety listings and generally not be utter crap. If I buy housewares at Target, I expect them not to be made out lead. By allowing third-party crap into their sites, these companies dilute the very thing that makes them better than Amazon. (And they apparently mess up their websites, too.)
At the very least, search should be entirely reliable for first-party listings.
From my experience in this space b2c is kind of a subset of b2b where you can treat the c as a single customer (see - users and customers are related but not the same) in the rest of the b2b mess. But totally for the simple case - a retailer who sells a particular kind of thing - the basic solution is pretty trivial. Search is tricky once you start moving from single product category into general catalogue. Then you're going to want things like rules to feed back search results from customer behaviour (one example of a few curly ones). Algolia seems to have solved that kind of problem adequately for now given the assumption of a certain level of quality of data in the licence holder's back end systems and aggregation code. Then there's things like variants (e.g. same product different colour / size) where it's tempting to make a naive implementation that won't scale and will be a maintenance nightmare, or where your data modeling fits the arbitrary case instead ...
Places like Target and Home Depot do not have an unlimited number of suppliers for the same object. So each object has one page and not a varying number of pages for the same product for different vendors.
Their next biggest competitor is Wal-Mart with 6%.
Logistics isn’t trivial but Amazon literally built their business overnight while FedEx literally has tons of global competitors.
FedEx needs to capture more of the upstream revenue.
New Idea!
Shopify buys FedEx then merges with TikTok :)
I trust random street thug much more than Shopify.
I would consider those rather normal complaints. Is there something else?