Hacker News Reader

Comment by johansch | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there's so much idiocy going on with Amazon sites. How can such a successful company make something so idiotic such as the current Amazon.com? It's beyond belief.

People visiting Amazon.com intending to buy various items:

a) want the shipment and customer care to be handled by Amazon. (Since they have showed that they area really good at that kind of thing)

b) want to have the goods vetted for basic safety etc etc.

Basically, Amazon needs to rewind/rebrand/remove its second-supplier Bazaar style listings from its main index.

Maybe the could display a two column search result page? Most people have wide screens now. Amazon-handled to the left, rest of the world to the right.

View on HN

A lot of the bazaar style stuff is handled by Amazon through the Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) program. For instance, this rather nice ratcheting wrench set:

https://smile.amazon.com/GearWrench-Metric-Flex-Head-Combina...

is fulfilled by Amazon.com, but sold by tooldeals. Tooldeals ships the product to an Amazon warehouse, and Amazon handles all of the selling and logistics.

If Amazon were to eliminate the FBA program, their vast product selection would be greatly curtailed.

But is a vast product selection valuable if everything is assumed to be counterfeit junk?

They'd have to convince amazon to sell it like they would with a traditional store.

I wanted to make the same comment, but for some reason assumed I was an outlier. I badly want to see only Prime and only sold by Amazon directly. Fulfilled by Amazon might be a OK alternative if I have a hard time finding something. Otherwise I am happy to pay extra to get it from Amazon itself. To me the "market place" aspect has just been undermining their brand and has been a nuisance. First because you hadn't been able to get Prime shipping for many of those products and it was inconvenient to constantly have to filter by that and now this stuff. To me this is just as annoying as airline alliances. If I buy from Amazon, I want to buy from Amazon, not some place I've never heard of. If I book Lufthansa I want to fly Lufthansa and not Delta or American. To me this is good brands allowing themselves to be undermined by crappy or even non-existent once.

> If I buy from Amazon, I want to buy from Amazon, not some place I've never heard of. If I book Lufthansa I want to fly Lufthansa and not Delta or American.

Exactly. So the mystifying thing is: why do they keep making it harder and harder for the consumers to do so? My thought: the have no fucking clue. They are not A/B tester ninjas, but rather clueless idiots.

They do it because it makes them tons of money.

It does. But will it continue to do so in the long run or are they burning their brand to the ground?

Amazon makes money hand over fist from third party sellers. They also makes up half their business. They aren't going anywhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com