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Comment by BLKNSLVR | Hacker News Reader

The thing I always underestimate, in regards to bad / anti-consumer behaviour, is the size of the customer base (and sometimes in combination with the bell curve / normal distribution of intelligence, but maybe not in this case).

The scope of humanity that use Amazon is gigantic, and the percentage of us pedantic, technically knowledgeable folks who'd give up some convenience, time, or even the purchase of an item, as part of a "righteous crusade" is vanishingly small.

Amazon may even increase their sales as consumer X purchases a replacement "thing 2" because "thing 1" was dead on arrival, and money these days ain't worth the hassle of returning or getting a refund on "thing 1".

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It works until people look at things like Temu, and figure out “why should I get from Amazon, when I can buy something for the same quality”. It’s just a battle of giants.

Or, if like me, you end up realizing "why should I have something shipped to my home when I can grab it from a local store for roughly the same price minus shipping".

Specialty items are still hard, but I'm not buying a hammer from Amazon when my local supermarkets all carry it and I can physically inspect and heft the product.

It does seem ridiculous that chain stores still haven't figured out how to have a good online shopping experience.

Yes. When I need something, my first stop is the physical stores in my area. I only go online if nobody carries what I'm looking for.

> Specialty items are still hard

I stopped using Amazon years ago, and what I've done for specialized items is to find the actual manufacturer and order directly from them. This works 80-90% of the time. When it doesn't work, then I hit up the likes of craigslist, eBay, etc.

The question is what will happen once Temu burn through their marketing budget. Will there be another investor with Temu 2.0?

It's owned by Pinduoduo. Publicly traded on Nasdaq, and looking at their numbers roughly, they probably have a lot of marketing budget from where it came from.

Who? There's your problem. I have never heard of Temu, and neither have many who know (and use) Amazon.

That’s only a matter of time and advertising though.

Temu has been advertising hard in the US. But it doesn't have to be temu specifically, any Chinese retailer will have all the crap you can imagine for next to nothing with the caveat of long shipping times.

They also all seem to have an orange colored website.

If you believe their stats, they have 70M+ active users in US, so I’m assuming you’re just not their target customer.

Not everybody lives in the US. Stats indicate that 53% of Temu users are from the US, and 7.5% are from the UK where I live.

Thanks for advertising it to me, but it might be futile. After having had my experience with the Amazon shopping giant, and how it fell from grace, I do not care to "invest" in another giant that will eventually end the same way.

It only launched in the UK a year ago, but is now the "UK's most-downloaded shopping app" according to The Times: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/money-mentor/consumer-rights/what...

Sure, not all of those downloads will have resulted in a purchase - but the same is true of Amazon.

The point is that Temu is takes the "masses of cheap crap" aspect of Amazon, and makes a virtue of it. It's effectively the Ryanair model - most people want cheap crap, so why bother with the last vestiges of Amazon-style customer service when you can ditch all that and be even cheaper and crappier?

Yeah, fair. I’ve never used it to be honest, but from what I’ve heard from my friends it’s good at “cheap crap that I need” category. My point wasn’t advertising it to someone, but saying even the giants like Amazon could see its lunch being chipped away slowly if they don’t fix their issues. That being said, I won’t be surprising once the competition starts heating up, they’ll start banning other Chinese tech companies in US.

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