Amazon has been pretty horrible for ages, but the thing I'm confused about is why there doesn't seem to be a serious competitor, one that has a good interface, search, and which doesn't allow 3rd party sellers that flood the offerings with low quality knockoffs, etc.
First and foremost, you have to understand why people use Amazon. Amazon has a good chance of having whatever it is I'm looking for, the price is generally about the same as I'd expect to pay elsewhere, and the shipping (with Prime, in the US, can't speak for UK/EU/RoW) absolutely can't be beat. People don't generally feel like messing around on three or four different websites to find the item, add it to their cart, and start the checkout process to determine how long the shipping will take and how much it'll cost, so the mental heuristic of "Amazon shipping is always free and if it's the sort of thing I'd find at Walgreens it'll usually be same-day/next-day" is incredibly valuable for Amazon.
So, with that in mind: The margins for most of the products people buy on Amazon these days are miniscule, so you really need to be able to sell at scale right out the gate, and it's a gargantuan investment to be able to do that. Shipping costs have also shot through the roof. I can't really speak for the U.K. or EU, but in the continental US, free shipping is a money-loser if you're shipping items heavier than 1 pound and not making a $20 average profit per order. Amazon can do it because they have their own shipping network, so if you want parity there, it's a gargantuan^2 investment.
Amazon didn't become "Amazon" overnight. They started by just selling books (which, in the US, can be shipped at much cheaper rates than the size/weight would otherwise cost, because the USPS subsidizes media mail), pivoted into CDs and DVDs just in time for the tail end of the CD money-printing heyday and the middle of the Reign of DVD, and slowly incrementalized into offering drugstore / grocery / big-box-store items and faster and faster free shipping. A competitor won't be able to copy that strategy. I think the most likely path in 2025 would be a company that started with a focus on just one geographic region (a state or three in the US, a single country in Europe) and was able to slowly expand as cashflow allowed.
So the short answer is "nobody has the money". The longer answer is "nobody has the money, and also the time and patience".
> the price is generally about the same as I'd expect to pay elsewhere
I've increasingly found that prices on amazon are higher than you'd pay on the manufacturers website. Sometimes much higher. It's worth checking. Some sites have been cheaper and had free shipping. The only catch is that shipping times were 3-5 weeks as opposed to the 3-14 days it would take for prime's 3 day shipping to actually show up.
So many terrible trends are driven purely by people's over reliance on mobile phones. When you're at a personal computer, it's not terribly hard to search for the same product on multiple web stores and see which one makes the most sense, or build up a cart over a few days to hit a shipping minimum. "Fast" shipping is overstated for Amazon and overrated for most purchases - on average, with the Sunk Cost Fallacy membership, it's maybe a day or two quicker than other web stores. If you really do need something urgently then it's worth it to spend a little effort comparing who can actually get it to you the quickest. And over time you build up a regular intuition of where to shop for various types of things, and for many things independent stores have much better curation. Weighing competitive options is only hard when you've disempowered yourself by using a tiny touch screen with an attacker-owned operating system.
A few years ago I noticed that my shipments all took a week or more regardless, but other retailers would have it here in a day or two, sometimes same day. Cancelled prime and haven’t regretted it.
I pay for Prime, so that's my mental heuristic. Plenty of other people are in the same boat. For those who don't pay for Prime, "free over $35" is an acceptable drop-in replacement.
> but the thing I'm confused about is why there doesn't seem to be a serious competitor
Why does this confuse you? It's the same in every single industry in the US right now.
Go ahead, try and start up a competitor to Amazon. Most likely you will just fail for normal business reasons, but if you ever even come close to being a threat, Amazon will just immense weight to steal your market out from under you. They can subsidize anything they want with AWS profits and can outspend you in any direction.
Meanwhile the DOJ will look away from obvious anti-competitive behavior because Reagan was a moron who thought regulating markets was magically bad.
Even Google ran into this with Fiber. Everywhere they went, Spectrum and Comcast just dropped prices to make Google's offer not very impressive, which is easy for them to do since they've spent decades extracting unbounded profits and paying off infrastructure investments, so their costs will be lower than any market entrant. Demonstrating like this that you COULD have significantly lowered prices but just chose not to SHOULD make people angry at you, but Americans are allergic to requiring companies actually be good for consumers.
This is the clear, obvious, trivial direction that any market operating in a capitalistic system is attempting to become. People need to stop being surprised.
If you want a competitive market, that doesn't happen naturally. You must force it.
Honestly? I just drive over to Best Buy now. Yeah it costs a few bucks more and I have to leave the house (this is actually a good thing), but I can be certain that the box on the shelf that says "surge protector" is actually a surge protector and I don't need to spend 15 frustrating minutes sorting through intentionally misleading trash to find it and then cross my fingers that what I order is what I actually receive.
The best buys in my area are getting kind of sketch in the past few years. Numerous empty shelves. Products sitting on the floors in boxes not put up for display. Wish I had a Microcenter close.
Microcenter’s commission scheme has made their sales people intolerable. Last time I was in there I had to tell no less than 6 employees I was perfectly comfortable choosing a router and DisplayPort cable without them.
I am also capable of reading the back of the box. It’s actually much easier without having employees interrupt and hover around me.
All the stores are like this now, not just Best Buy. Walmart used to be, as I remember it, this insane level of consumerism store where the shelves were overfilled and there was no product so niche that they didn't have at least a few of nearly any product you can imagine. They used to sell hard drives, for fuck's sake, even if it seems like they were locked behind the glass near the electronics checkout. Now you go in there, and it's just a wasteland. Home Depot no longer sells home improvement or hardware store goods... it tries to sell the cheap junk you'd think would be in the Walmart. There are no tools at Home Depot unless a contractor would use them. Absolutely nothing for woodworking (I seem to remember them carrying at least one display piece for a wood lathe back around 1999-2003), now there are no table saws. I often end up going with my wife or my daughter to Michael's or Hobby Lobby, the former has reduced their store inventory so much that the only way to hide it was to remove shelves and spread them thinner so that you could march a school band through the aisles without them having to step closer to each other. The latter has changed their inventory to have fewer craft supplies, and more Temu-style junk.
Caveat - I haven't gone to primary sources, but all indications are that they're doing pretty well. Increase of 1.8~% in number of store locations in the last 5 years.
Inflation adjusted, revenue is up 38% since late 2009.
Wal-Mart is similarly doing very well.
If you thought HD and WMT were dying, this may be a moment to reevaluate the heuristics you're using to gauge the health of retail businesses.
Also, Amazon cedes control of their supply chain to any rando who will ship them product. So it’s just as likely that you receive a power strip without surge protection, even if it claims to have it.
I don't really care about knockoffs (hell, I would happily shop on a site that ONLY sold knockoffs for basically everything but electronics), I just want to spend as little time actually looking through products as possible. Google is good for a lot of things but finding good places to buy stuff is not one of them. The entire process of making a profile and entering payment information is sufficient to ensure I don't buy from your site at all.
Tbh, amazon should probably be run as a public service. We've long since passed the point where their profit incentives benefit anyone but shareholders. By about fifteen-twenty years by my estimate.
I think it was horrible form the start. When e-commerce was starting to be a thing it was quickly establish how a store should look, what should it have and where. Like when TVs were made everybody settled on a rectangular display pretty quickly. Amazon is sort of first of TV companies that initially made their first commercial TV a globe and ignoring that every other competitor started making rectangular TVs pretty quickly Amazon to this day manufactures globe TVs and they still sell, not because they are good or what people think TV should look like, but just because they are cheap and delivery is convenient.
Buying land (or renting), building warehouses, and employing people to move stuff is extremely costly.
>one that has a good interface, search, and which doesn't allow 3rd party sellers that flood the offerings with low quality knockoffs, etc.
This is kind of the space that Costco/Nordstrom/Apple/Best Buy/Lowes/Home Depot/Staples occupy. But even they find it tough, so more and more allow 3rd party sellers to make money off the platform, even if it lowers the brand value in the long term.
Because other retailers treat their customers like pieces of shit. That's it. Everybody has been burnt, shoppers want to be able to purchase safely. Price, interface, and everything else is of less importance.
Will other retailers start treating their customers like human beings? Not a chance in hell. They'd rather let Amazon bankrupt them than do that.
...isn't that basically Costco.com? the trade-off is that you can't sell a million different things if you want to ensure quality among all the things you sell
We (us, the people reading here, the demographic building the software and technology and automation) would do well as a community to spend more time on introspection about what ends it serves that tech, which was sometimes promoted as a great equalizer, gets built so often in practice only to make the walls of an aspiring monopolist's fortress more steep with no benefit to anybody else.
Technological advancement by itself merely creates the potential for equalization. Whether that potential is actually realized depends on the culture of society, though. You can use the same basic tech to build Star Trek communism or a cyberpunk dystopia.
We as an industry are seen as defined by crap/enshitification now. The world gave us good faith, cheered us on, mostly excitedly hyped us. And we picked, by small choice after small choice, this.
If you look at Walmart and others most 3rd party sellers just duplicate their listing across platforms. E-commerce has fewer "competitors" and more carbon copies
