I think a lot of the “replace Amazon” proposals miss the most important thing about Amazon to consumers: easy returns.
I absolutely love the fact that if I order anything from Amazon, I can return it just by clicking a few buttons and taking it to a UPS store, Kohls, Whole Foods, among other options without even boxing it up.
The problem with these other solutions, is that they are not responsible for the whole experience. Package lost in the mail, that is between you and the seller. Need to return, that is between you and the seller. Amazon, however makes that pretty frictionless for the consumer.
Agreed! I think the sheer size of Amazon has allowed them to build a really pro-consumer platform, which is why I prefer shopping there over other in-person stores - I know amazon will not make trouble if I do want to return something, or there is an issue with an item.
Ironically, I feel like they are acting in some ways like a union of purchasers, imposing the consumer will on merchants. Not sure if it is possible to achieve this without centralization.
I think having a chronic problem with counterfeit items and having the shadowy blessing of the "buy box" on a common item, which requires sellers to basically eat returns that they shouldn't have to, isn't very pro-consumer. This all serves to make them more money at your expense and safety and by essentially gaming the seller against their own long term interests.
I also think shaking the "machine learning" stick at the counterfeit problem is going to be fraught with newer problems that expose the deeper monopoly issues on the logistics and seller platforms that would also be the back end for what this article proposes.
If you care about the products you buy, and they have actual value to you, you're harming your own interests by using the Amazon monopoly power to "impose consumer will on merchants." Functional marketplaces don't and probably can't operate like that.
> If you care about the products you buy, and they have actual value to you, you're harming your own interests by using the Amazon monopoly power to "impose consumer will on merchants."
Most merchants don’t, and won’t, which is why regulators step in on the customers’ behalf, with e.g. lemon laws, right to return laws.
Costco, Amazon, Apple, some others, step in on the consumers’ behalf, which creates (as comments you are replying to) consumer loyalty and a kind of “brand halo” of consumer trust that the merchants all benefit from.
To say the marketplace platform shouldn’t be allowed to empower customers at the expense of sellers is to say markets shouldn’t be allowed to decide how much service customers can have and how much profits merchants are willing to forgo to be where customers want.
> Most merchants don’t, and won’t, which is why regulators step in on the customers’ behalf
You're implying that regulators just show up out of nowhere and make tasteful decisions for a market. That's not at all how it typically works, and you should look into the history of the "lemon law" you reference. Customers have remedies of their own that don't require regulation or monopolies to exist.
> Costco, Amazon, Apple, some others, step in on the consumers’ behalf, which creates (as comments you are replying to) consumer loyalty and a kind of “brand halo” of consumer trust that the merchants all benefit from.
Costco is membership based. People have lost their memberships for gaming the return system. Amazon just passes the costs on. And Apple mostly manufactures their own devices. And, I can guarantee you, every single one of them has been sued by their customers at some point because of one of their practices.
Arguing that monopoly power is the "secret sauce" to achieving this is absurd.
> To say the marketplace platform shouldn’t be allowed to empower customers at the expense of sellers
The purpose of a marketplace is to create beneficial arrangements for everyone involved. Amazon interferes in this arrangement and then tilts it solely in their favor at the expense of both the customer and the seller.
> is to say markets shouldn’t be allowed to decide how much service customers can have and how much profits merchants are willing to forgo to be where customers want.
Markets should do this. A single monopoly player controlling a market shouldn't. You're splitting the argument right at it's fundamental point.
Great execution of customer service (before they abandoned their retail business to 3rd party merchants and commingled garbage) was certainly a big factor in their success, but so was taking advantage of the fact that people would not pay the use tax they owed for purchasing items without sales tax from out of state sellers.
This effectively gave Amazon a ~7% pricing advantage against businesses with physical presence in a state, and Bezos has mentioned it was a factor in choosing to be based in Washington rather than California, so as to not have to collect and remit sales tax to California’s 40M residents.
The Supreme Court changed this in Jun 2018 when it ruled that states could collect sales taxes from sellers without physical presence in the state.
Sure, but the danger is that they just tune based on return rate without any consideration of quality standards. Amazon has shown they are more than willing to mix merchant inventory and allow unlimited streams of counterfeit merchandise which undermines all third party merchant reputations. This is problematic because a manufacturer / merchant has more time / expertise / money to chip away at quality until it's just barely good enough to not get returned within a limited window. Ideally you want brands / manufacturers to care about quality, but if there is no means to establish a reputation then it's just a race to the bottom.
I don't know what my local stores return policies are because I've never had to return an item to them. They curate their inventory and generally don't stock chinesium garbage. That's what being an actual "pro consumer" platform is like. Amazon is pro-shovelware-merchant.
I absolutely love the fact that if I order anything from Amazon, I can return it just by clicking a few buttons and taking it to a UPS store, Kohls, Whole Foods, among other options without even boxing it up.
The problem with these other solutions, is that they are not responsible for the whole experience. Package lost in the mail, that is between you and the seller. Need to return, that is between you and the seller. Amazon, however makes that pretty frictionless for the consumer.