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Comment by stephen_cagle | Hacker News Reader

I... i actually wouldn't be opposed to this if it meant a return to my buying things from the website of the company that makes the product.

What Amazon really nailed, and the reason I buy like 90% of things from them, is the easy and known shipping and return policy.

But the second reason I buy from Amazon is laziness. I am too lazy to look up the (often confusing) product on their company store, I'd rather just buy that product through amazon. To compound my laziness, I don't like having to once again fill out my email, home address, and credit card for the thousandth time when I go to their site.

But if I don't have to find and navigate to their site and I don't have to fill in my information for the thousandth time. Now, we are talking about me realistically considering a direct purchase.

This is likely good for the consumer, and largely good for the world (less centralization).

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For me it's always been the opposite: I want to buy a charger, sd card or whatever. I don't want to wade through the 10 000 items on Amazon and make a decision on if the seller is trustworthy or not. Much easier to just buy it from somewhere else and skip all the mental load.

Bonus point is I don't end up with fake sd cards from Amazon's comingling (so no, being vigilant in which seller you buy from on Amazon didn't help anyways)

How do you select the “somewhere else”?

For boutique things, luxury goods, or things I am very familiar with brand reputation of, I do what you do. But for ordinary low-cost consumer goods (e.g. computer peripherals, drugstore stuff, guest linens), I struggle to identify retailers that aren’t selling low-quality crap.

Or I just look up the brand on Amazon after reading reviews. If it's reputable, like Anker or Apple, it has its own storefront on Amazon.

> What Amazon really nailed, and the reason I buy like 90% of things from them, is the easy and known shipping and return policy.

Don't forget reviews.

Decoupling these (in a trusted way) from the seller's storefront is probably not impossible, but still hard enough to add to Amazon's moat.

Can you really trust an Amazon review? It's one of the most gamed systems in all of e-commerce...

I do trust that at least negative ones don't get deleted (if drowned in fake positive ones, sometimes), unlike on merchant-operated sites.

Good point. Although on several occasions, I've left a negative review on a top rated product, only to have the seller contact me immediately in an attempt to bribe me to delete it.

Not only do they delete reviews (I'm sure you can find thousands of complaints online if you google it), they also allow sellers to take products with 5 star reviews and repurpose them for a completely different product, reviews and all, and many 3rd party sellers will bribe you in exchange for a positive review (e.g. free products).

Having not shopped on Amazon for years now, I'm sure the problem has only gotten worse but for a while an easy to use heuristic that I would personally apply was to strip all 5 star reviews, check for a minimum number of reviews, recalculate the final rating, and then read through some of the 3/4 star reviews.

These days I make it a general rule to find AMZ alternatives particularly for highend items.

- Electronics: B&H

- Music Equipment: Sweetwater

- Computer related: Local Microcenter

The return policy yes but moreover, its the speed. They intensely focused on making sure that speed of delivery combined with choice of selection would be incredibly attractive for many purchases via the internet.

> This is likely good for the consumer, and largely good for the world (less centralization).

It looks exactly like the same amount of centralization to me (if not more), only now it's openai and not amazon then one at the center of things.

Shopify has kinda fixed this for most direct merchant sales. Yeah there’s still work to do on the support and returns front but it’s a hell of a lot better than other checkout flows, lookin at you Woocommerce.

Doesnt sound like undue laziness, a unified interface and a single credential and billing data store? Super reasonable

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