An Amazon revolt could be brewing as tech giant exerts more control over brands
recode.net
recode.net
Overall, I see Amazon wanting to own more of the customer interaction as being a good thing for me as a customer. Buying and returning items from Amazon itself (not using 3rd party sellers) is a very good shopping experience for me and always has been.
You can't really avoid it. Amazon comingles its inventory with that of 3rd party sellers who sell as FBA. So even if you choose Amazon as the seller, the actual product you receive could be the one a 3rd party seller shipped to Amazon's warehouses.
For new products, that is how Amazon does it. Which will explain why many products will have inconsistent reviews about fakes. And you can ignore any review that says "Avoid seller X. He sent me a fake!" You have no way of knowing which seller's item you got.
Note that this is only for "Fulfilled by Amazon" orders. For non-FBA, the seller ships it to you directly.
And for used items, Amazon will ship you the exact one from the seller.
I should add a qualifier: What I say is true only for new products. For used products, they'll ship you the exact item the seller shipped to them.
On my Shopify store I have a tiny return percentage and an almost 0% defect rate. On Amazon people buy my product, decide they don't want it, and mark it as defective to not have to pay a return fee. Either the units I sent to Amazon have a 50x higher defect rate than the stock I ship out myself, or people are cheating the system.
When Amazon decides your defect rate is too high they remove your listing.
That's actually the worst, since that opens you up to getting counterfeit items from reputable sellers, due to Amazon's inventory commingling.
The only quality items I'm willing to order from Amazon now are small things like pens, and commodities. No more high tech stuff, no more camera equipment, etc.
Best Buy price matches. Always buy in person items such as these.
https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/39296/icv2-interview-asm...
Who knows maybe attitudes like this will be the (needed) downfall of the giant.
Honestly, it makes shopping on Amazon feel more and more like a flea market. I especially don't like how Amazon now obscures the source of the product by emphasizing the "Prime Shipping Available". I find myself having to manually look to see if the product is sold by Amazon, or merely "Fulfilled by Amazon".
It's honestly an ugly experience these days. Is it worth bringing down your UX to Ebay/AliExpress levels for a little more growth?
That's exactly my thoughts on this. Ever since the marketplace opened up it's just become more and more like eBay/AliExpress, flooded with cheap knock-offs and dubious products.
I still have Prime for regular purchases, but find myself buying special items from specialized sellers (car parts, gym equipment, etc.)
This was because Ebay took their cut off the sale price, not the shipping cost. So sellers would reduce the sale price and jack up the shipping rate, which is where they made their margins.
Haven't bought anything on Ebay in years, so I don't know if they cracked down on that practice.
Plus on eBay the shipping charged by each seller is clearly listed on the Checkout page. Amazon just lists a total shipping cost for the order and I have to remove and readd items to find the culprit charging too much.
Well, 'had' to. Now I just avoid Amazon and its dark patterns. eBay is still rather Wild West but it's sellers trying to rip me off, not the platform.
Amazon is taking a page out of Walmarts playbook. Both are juggernauts and won't fail overall. My hope is they help create new markets in the areas where they do fail.
Amazon doesn't seem to be at all interested in tackling these issues - it's only a matter of time before it degrades completely into something like AliExpress.
For electronics, I'm lucky enough to live in a decent size city with a MicroCenter. But, I've also resorted to ordering items like phones and laptops for family members at their local Best Buy, which gives them the opportunity to pick it up same day. (It's also nice to be able to talk to a person when making expensive purchases like these.)
I ordered an InstaPot and some Hue bulbs directly from the respective sites. Wal-Mart's delivery and pick-up options aren't bad, but I try to avoid them and go with Target if buying from that sort of store.
Honestly, it's the weird little things I have most trouble finding, like braille keyboard overlays or specific Halloween decorations.
Usually the time saved is more valuable to me that any price saving I might get from going to a physical store.
It happened a few times (1 in 10?) that the product didn't match my expectations, either it wasn't the one advertised or it had clear quality issues.
In that case I returned the product, which was always accepted and refunded, no question asked.
I sincerely hope they get that mess figured out.
What's actually happening is that Amazon wants to be the only seller and is trying to strong arm popular brands selling directly on the platform.
You'll probably pay around the same price, possibly even less. Worst part is that you might not get your package in two days, but you also won't have to pay for Amazon prime. In many, many cases retailers offer free shipping.
For knick-knacks(chinese garbo such as LED lights or whatever), car parts, etc. eBay is pretty good.
I don't shop at Amazon for the same reasons I don't shop at Wal-Mart. They have a history of using shady techniques to put competition out of business. I also don't buy that their treatment of the customer is as good as they claim it to be. Shopping on amazon had become a pain in the ass when I gave it up.
Which is a shame because I can remember a time when both offered amazing customer service.
I'm generally clicking Seller: amazon.com in searches because I don't want to deal with other vendors for delivery issues, which is often a problem.
It's gotten just plain more difficult to use. And I'm finding myself more likely to go to local stores as a result. Not to mention, the 2-day shipping now often means that it'll be delivered 2-days from when it ships, which could be a few days out. Where it used to always ship out the same day for 2 days later for delivery. The increased number of people that are stealing packages left on doorsteps make me more leery.
It's getting close to a point where it just isn't worth it to me.
While I’m no fan of paying more for Prime either, Prime Video is supported on practically everything - Apple TV, Roku, PS4, Xbox One, iOS, Android, desktop browsers, various smart TV vendors, all in addition to their own range of really pretty cheap streaming devices and tablets. Amazon apparently really don’t care what device you use.
It may be a bit better. My other niggle is Hulu's Live TV doesn't work on NVidia Shield TV (their offline kind of works), but that's just an aside from a different company. I got a new 4k fire stick because of Hulu in particular. My GF watches a lot of the stuff in Hulu.
Free shipping to their grocery store (Neighborhood Market) is the best deal for me. I can order my groceries for "pickup" so I just park in a designated spot and someone brings my groceries. While I'm there I pick up my regular packages. And if there's a problem, you can return to a physical Walmart where there's at least a human to talk to.
I recently noticed that all my hobbies and/or niche interests are better served by specialized shops dedicated to the interest in question - whether it's studio equipment, computer hardware, bikes, outdoor equipment, fashion, music, HIFI, furniture...you name it.
What Amazon still does best is delivering common, everyday items. I don't want to register at countless, small third party stores to do one-off purchases of low cost, everyday items that don't really matter to me. Amazon with Prime still shines here. And no, since I live in a rural area going to a brick and mortar store down the street often isn't an option.
A lot of people avoid conflict, so it's just easier to buy online than ask for price matching in store.
Perhaps it was a fluke, but if intentional, this strikes me as borderline fraud.
Do you really think that 10 mins in a chat trying to prove that you found a better price is a good experience? Same when you're in the store, looking up for the product online in your phone and chasing a floor rep to beg for the price match.
Price matching is the biggest marketing illusion I have seen to hide the fact that you're more expensive and less convenient.
The ideal customer experience should be always going into a BestBuy trusting that I will get the best possible price from any retailer. Not this scavenger hunt of prices that people claim to be great.
What you are suggesting would require every Best Buy store (or whomever) to, independently, track the pricing they see across every competitor they wish to price match, and update their posted inventory pricing (which requires manual labor to print out a pricing sticker and go put it on the shelf, even if the actual computer system updates automatically). All to reduce their own profit margins.
What benefit to them? They can offer price matching, as they do, and everyone who cares about that will take on the chore themselves. Even if they had a brick and mortar competitor who was willing to do that work and that expense (installing digital price displays on every shelf so it could automate updating pricing, and had systems that were polling Amazon every minute, say, and even if they had reason to believe Amazon wouldn't block their IPs because it looks like a DDoS attack), the number of customers who would understand and appreciate what that meant is so low they'd still be massively in the hole.
So, yes, that might be the ideal customer experience. It's also undeliverable.
This is one of the (growing) reasons I dislike Amazon. Several times I've found a decent deal that I know a friend or family member would like - sent it to them, only for them to discover (sometimes just minutes later) that the deal has suddenly vanished.
On the face of it, Amazon is doing this as a simple function of supply/demand, though it sure could be construed as form of bait-and-switch pricing!
Do you mean vaporware? Vaporwave is a music genre and aesthetic style. Although I'm not sure if vaporware fits into your sentence either; I think shovelware would work better.
Some people care about the experience of saving time with:
- No Fake Products
- same day product
It typically takes me less than a minute to validate price on an item like this while in-store and inform the person I'm talking to. Response time from there can vary a bit but at my local MicroCenter it takes them less than a minute to do a quick confirmation of their own, then mark and sign a sticker. That's it. But nobody at any store has ever asked me to beg or made it feel like it's begging to ask for a price-match.
Once, those 2 minutes saved me $800 when I was buying two monitors. The $999 MSRP to knocked down to $599 due to a sale at a competitor. There was no negotiation. The sales guy just blinked in surprise for a second when confirming it and said "Yeah, we can match that." To be fair, for this purchase I knew their price and their competitor's before showing up because I checked out their inventory on their website.
Yes, it would have been cool if they tracked their competitors' prices and automatically updated their own price (and had employees adjust the corresponding in-store price tags at every store) each time any of their competitors had a sale or lower price.
Frankly, though, that burden is not on the store selling the product. They probably would go out of business doing something like that without a huge competitor-matching supply chain behind them that can support universally thin margins. As a consumer, if I want the best possible price then I need to be willing to waggle my thumb across my phone at least a little bit to look for it.
Shipping isn't as fast or as cheap when using anything other than Amazon, though, so that's worth considering.
I've switched mostly to smaller single-category retailers:
Electronics - Newegg and Monoprice
Board & Table Top Games - Miniature Market
Pet Food - Chewy (owned by PetSmart now)
Clothing - Depends on your style, but I tend to stick to Eddie Bauer and Duluth Trading Company for good quality, affordable clothes
Comic trade paperbacks - InStockTrades
Books - Barnes & Noble (new) and eBay (used)
Tools - Ace, Menards, Woodcraft
Here's an example: the other day I was buying some funny socks as christmas presents. They sell on Amazon as well as their own store. The price was the same on both, but I would get free shipping, and faster shipping, from Amazon. Nonetheless, I chose to buy directly from the company because I don't like the way Amazon does business sometimes, and because buying directly gives smaller retailers a bigger cut.
As I've been running and growing a few very small online retail operations myself, I feel a lot better about supporting other small businesses directly.
At least the bad counterfeits won’t have a small concrete weight.
When that doesn’t work, weigh each corner in each orientation and compare to the original.
Some fakes are hard to discern because they are easy to clone, like small bottles of anti-fog spray or generic kitchen supplies. I imagine more slipped through than I know of as a result.
Each time you have to chat into Amazon, then send the item back (taking your time, refund held until it arrives), and then find an alternate to purchase since they can't guarantee a reshipment will be legitimate either.
But then I started getting fakes on things I buy all the time. Fake AA batteries, not Duracell but Duracell knockoffs. They last half the time and you can peel the Duracell label off to see another label beneath. Bought a steel water bottle and it was not the right brand at all. Bought a Swissgear backpack and not the right brand at all. Bought a white artificial Christmas tree, same brand as I had seen in stores and when I got it, it was a normal artificial Christmas tree wrapped in white electrical tape. Not the same brand I had purchased.
You can refund, sure, but that's a huge hassle. I ordered something, paid for it, waited for it to get here, then can't use it until I get refunded and order another one? Why would I do that more than once or twice? If it keeps happening, anyone would switch to not buying from that place again.
I bought it and it was a counterfeit book. Pretty sure if you buy it there you will get either a counterfeit book or an international edition which has significantly lower print quality.
That being said, I two copies of a the same children's book as a gift. One looked like it was scanned and reprinted, the other was hardcover.
Amazon is probably not going to fall apart over night, but it doesn't mean all of their actions are taking them in the right direction.
So how'd that Walmart revolt turn out?
I don't think I'm the only one. I am certain that Amazon is starting to lose customers because of bad returns experiences via the marketplace alone. They keep raising the price of Prime to fund other products that I don't use. There's a limit to what people will continue to pay for. Although Amazon is really good at knowing where that line is.
[0] https://taprun.com/articles/amazon-pricing-power-conspiracy
As much as I like capitalism, these tech giants have power that worry me.
In addition, this is not a new shift in policy for Amazon. They have never allowed a product sold by Retail to be sold by the same Vendor on Marketplace. They would have to compete on price with the Vendor for that item and would win absolutely zero buy-boxes. If anything, Amazon has softened on this stance recently. They now are open to "hybrid" sales models which allow the Vendor to sell & fulfill items that Amazon cannot profitably sell itself because of the always on price-matching in Amazon's pricing engine.
One gripe that many have about Amazon is their hands-off approach to policing non-authorized listings of products. Many small time players will simply purchase products through a myriad of channels and sell them on Amazon, sometimes attaching them to the Vendor listing, and sometimes creating fake UPCs and listing the product as a separate item. This causes customer confusion and a bad customer experience because of duplicate listings or unknown sellers & fulfillers on a Vendor's listing. Of course, Amazon has no incentive to police these listings because they still collect the $99/yr fee from these sellers as well as 15% of any buy-boxes they do happen to win. Amazon makes money on these sellers for the cost of the hosting the minute traffic that ends up on these listings.
Also, the fee is $39/month, not $99/year.
In the case of CRaP items, it's actually become a new strategy for VMs to allow some hybrid selling to keep assortment on the site while still allowing the company to turn a profit on the sale.
My mistake on the pricing of Seller Pro, but the point still stands.
Much of this is due to the fact that Amazon takes on the inventory risk, handles fulfillment, and has tight control over pricing. These tasks are up to the 3P seller to figure out on their own. However, being able to handle these tasks does nothing for you if you are unable to generate sales. This burden falls on both Vendors and Sellers. Amazon's Retail team does absolutely zero merchandising, product management, or market analysis. They are simply worried about monitoring profitability in their category and pitching Vendors on programs involving lots of clawback. The tools available to Sellers to manage their products and traffic to their pages are much better and more complete than those available to Vendors.