the thresholds are quite bad. one of the issues is the FTc by itself isn’t tasked to regulate companies growing out of control. really only mergers and such are scrutinized, and even then the big deals need senators to pay attention. so yeah, enforcement and audits need to be scaled up.
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Wait herpes are natural?
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that’s not the way amazon controls for returns. if a vendor or product is returned at 2x the rate for comparable items, they will delist them and investigate. average return rate is order of .1-1% (estimated here by me based on decade old memory, don’t ask i cannot cite it), and liquidation rate (broken faulty wasted items) is lower than that, which is really incredible.
costco return rate is probably lower (don’t know, but it’s generally lower at food grocers), but liquidation rate in retail is higher. home depot return rate is ridiculously high, also due to the industry. clothing return rate is higher still.
best selling products by amazon have the pattern that the entire shipment is sold before it arrives at amzn FC. it spends literally minutes at the warehouse. that’s better for consumers, even when achieved by hammering the free returns marketing. does that give them power to charge more? of course, there’s noone who can do the same thing.
i’m more in favor of 1) limitations on what products amazon can make or white label themselves, that clearly concentrates their market share, and 2) splitting delivery biz into regional entities, perhaps more than one per region, and 3) opening up delivery to competitors.
i am not in favor of fucking with return policies as a way of punishing amazon.
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my company competes with amazon and seems to do pretty well. They’re not direct competitors though. The ecommerce economy is so massive that the sliver that amazon doesn’t gobble up is massive enough for even billion dollar companies to do pretty well on.
I’m just stating a fact not really taking a stance on this one way or another.
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The reason isn’t feeling better, it’s that if sellers can’t offer a suckers price on Amazon and a fair price elsewhere, maybe they’ll just offer the fair price everywhere. After, if they can get away with charging the suckers price everywhere, why wouldn’t they? It’s just the price.
It’s purely a matter of framing whether you describe this arrangement as “you have to charge everyone as much as you charge on Amazon” vs “you have to give Amazon customers as good of a price as you give anyone else.” It’s obvious why Amazon customers want it when you put it the second way though.
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I think you’re missing what the issue is here. It has nothing to do with sucker’s pricing. Amazon charges sellers higher fees than other markets, but forbids them from reflecting that fact in what customers pay. I can provide you with the exact same product and the exact same buying experience from somewhere else with lower seller fees, but Amazon won’t let me pass that savings on to you, the customer. It’s blatantly abusing their retail dominance, forcing sellers to be complicit in anti-competitive behavior that removes any edge their competitors might have.
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This Karen eat-my-cake-and-have-it ideology right here is the consumer psychology linchpin of this thing. What you are asking for is zero search cost, zero uncertainty, zero friction, and a nominal (yet fake) low price guarantee. Of course the dominant market player with the lowest search cost wants to bring this home by fixing prices for you, because then you literally have no reason to ever look anywhere else. The reason you need to eat shit and pay the sucker price is because you are the sucker.
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i’m not sure what you are asking. conversion barrier is a moving target. you have to continuously nurture shoppers, which amzn lovingly calls “customer engagement”. so i’ll reply with my own anecdote.
imo (but there’s data to back it up), if you tried to classify amazon shoppers 10 years ago, there was an important cohort of customers that went from shopping primarily b&m and a few web fronts to shopping almost entirely on amazon. first of all, they started buying several times more stuff. second, they returned more items than they used to, but a smaller share of their overall purchases. (btw, mattresses seems like a pretty special category, which i wouldn’t extrapolate to everyday purchases). big categories like household items and electronics (and later digital) exploded, partly because they hated going to walmart and bestbuy, and were actually very happy with the amazon experience.
by itself, this cohorts isn’t best described as swayed by website interface or return policies, even as their shifted their behavior towards amazon. they just became bigger spenders. that was normal, customers started out as students, then got jobs, earned more, beget a few kids, etc.
to say that amazon went HAM from the get-go after that demographic is inaccurate. the bounty on that customer was less than half the cost of prime, although over the entire nurture campaign they may have been given gift certificates in hundreds of dollars. analysts thought the golden goose was somewhere else at first, e.g. google search (turned out to be very big obv), facebook ads (lol nope), affiliates (important early on, less so now), biz customers (didn’t work out), and personal shoppers (way too small but loyal). let me qualify this that this somewhat differed by country.
this cohort used to be (and maybe still is) amazon’s most profitable demographic. it was amazon’s current and former employees. now it might encompass all tech industry, and other entitled professionals.
in essence, there is a minority cohort where amazon is making most of the profit, and then there’s everyone else. that’s how ALL retailers look now.
times have changed though, third party sellers are several times more important to amazon bottomline now. they’ve become users of the backend, and they get access to some very sweet cohort buyers, who cannot buy enough stuff from the convenience of their smartphones.
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Yes because it minimizes Sklansky regret. This feeling isn’t unique to bobman as I suspect most people have at least some anxiety / uncertainty / regret buying online with the specter of better deals looming somewhere in the dark corners of the internet. That dissonance is real and palpable in 2021 where we have more choice and price knowledge than at any time in history and to a highly nonlinear degree. It’s The Matrix where you can keep taking red pills forever in the form of novel retailers, fake coupon sites, newsletter signups, new account creations, email confirmations, screens to checkout, and shipping fee jump scares. The search space is so big that you can (1) almost guarantee yourself you aren’t getting the best deal and (2) have little chance of locating it. So the psychology checks out, but the request is patently ridiculous.
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Like, god damn, leaving that promo code box empty and clicking “submit order” is one of the worst feelings in the world. How hasn’t anyone figured that shit out yet?
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Ban
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Pretty sure the number of things I’ve bought on Amazon is in the single digits.
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Because they’re nice?
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Because Jeff Acme also wants a mansion with 25 bathrooms?
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Never once. And not even due to Fuck Amazon even though fuck Amazon duh.
What are people buying out there?
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Ok, sorry for what is essentially a mini-derail, but am I imagining the parody of the Skymall magazine?
I wanted to make a joke about Tiger Arm Extenders. For when the pet tiger you bought for your personal zoo has too-short arms.
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This actually might be a pandora’s box for me and I’m afraid. I mean, the few times I’ve even looked on Amazon to buy something they actually didn’t have the stuff, but this was years ago.
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Last thing I bought from Amazon just a couple weeks ago:
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