The Core

I am curious where this goes in five years.  If I were to guess consumer habits aren't going to change that much, but the content on AMZ is going to morph more towards a mirror of AliExpress and direct sales from manufacturers.   Second prediction:  The direct from China pipeline will have some Chinese sites taking some market away from AMZ.

Bezos early on said that Amazon should not compete in price, but service and convenience. But what happens when the site is so awful that it isn’t actually convenient to use? 

I think the decision to have their own delivery fleet is key. I am shocked when I get off the mountain and go to a town to see how many Amazon vans there are. I didn’t even know about them until going for a run through suburbia while traveling my niece’s wedding 2 years ago. Now I notice them in every city.

Just today my BIL said he was going to order some items for tomorrow. It hasn’t occurred to me that you could order something in the afternoon and have it the next day. Again, it made me realize that Amazon’s warehouse network and delivery operation gives them a huge edge in urban and suburban areas that until recently was not obvious to me.

Anyway, it made me realize that no matter how shitty the website is, they have major market lock for other reasons.

>Chinese sites taking some market away from AMZ.

I've been hearing a lot about TikTok shop. Specifically, the algorithm is heavily favoring posts with the "buy now" button, so most creators are becoming salespeople to increase the chance to go viral. I'm hearing grumbling that it's ruining the app experience. I wonder if they're the biggest emerging threat to Amazon?

>convenience

That and I don't like having my credit card details spread about online with many different retailers.

>delivery fleet

I get up really early and often sit on the front porch with coffee.  I've seen Amazon delivery people, using their personal cars, delivering stuff at 3:00AM. 

>> Tik Tok

A friend who was an early adopter (and is in his 80s by the way), says it has basically become the Home Shopping Network.

>> credit cards

This is a major consideration for me. Especially after I started working on e-comm sites and realized what percentage had no clue about PCI compliance and basic security. 

>> 3am

Different world. The delivery people who use their personal cars are OnTrac, which I call OffTrac. They only come once per week. So second day delivery takes 2-8 days. But since they deliver to the wrong address 10% of the time and cancel the weekly delivery of weather is bad, it can be 3 weeks to never for a package to arrive.

They are cheap so a lot of “free” shipping goes via OffTrac. So even second day delivery is not really a thing unless you pay for the up charge for UPS/FedEx overnight…. Which is actually second day, not overnight. Nobody offers that except courrier services… maybe. Some oil-rich prince had his favorite wine courriered to the hotel for dinner once. Several hundred dollars :-)

So this infrastructure that has been built up in the cities just surprises me every time.

That said, I think online shopping and rapid delivery, even if not AS rapid, is a much bigger change for rural areas than it is for urban and suburban areas.

:-)

Very true.

Many of my online purchases are things I know I can get at Target or Home Depot. But a large number of my wife’s are probably not all in any metro area. She finds some new brush that an artist she follows loves and it is only available by direct mail order. It used be that if tou wanted to be up on things like this, you needed to subscribe to a magazine.

I know when I was looking for new computer equipment, camera gear or construction materials, I would buy magazines often mostly for the ads. My dad had two subscriptions to computer magazines for the university athletic department because it was the only way he could keep abreast of which stuff to buy for the office. That was a cost too.

On the other hand, the enshittification of Amazon means that, as people have said, you can’t find any useful guidance since it’s basically an ad auction. Which I guess was the same with the magazines, but improving on that was one of Amazon’s big advantages

>> Frequently returned

It's counterintuitive but negative reviews can actually improve profit margins ... because they reduce returns.

If I read someone else's negative opinion, I might or might not still buy the item, but if I do I have a clearer idea what I'd be getting and have decided that I could probably live with those flaws.

I have returned very few things over the years.