Amazon's inventory supply chain is so many light-years ahead of the competition, especially here in Canada, I think they'll be able to screw up the UI for a decade or two.
Re:Amazon Free Shipping minimum is now $49
by prewett on Monday February 22, 2016 @03:33AM
(#11149405)
It may be light-years ahead of the competition, but if advantage doesn't produce a cost savings for the customer, it doesn't matter. I generally need about $20 of something from Amazon. At $35 I can generally find something else I will use. But if I have to buy $50 worth of stuff to get the cost advantage of free shipping, I'm much more likely to just go down to the store and buy it.
Back before my father and I decided to share a Prime subscription (I buy the stuff with my account and charge it to his credit card), I solved this by keeping in my deferred cart various items I wanted sometime in the coming months that I wasn't in a hurry to get. If you can take a long very about enough things it worked out pretty well, especially since your metric is to, over a year, pay less than a Prime subscription.
For now. The thing about reputations in business is that they can deteriorate slowly over time and up to a point it won't matter because customers will favour convenience and the brands they know. Sometimes that point can be much further from where you started than most people would expect. However, if you ever pass that point and lose a critical mass of customers, you're in real trouble.
If Play/Rakuten/whoever they are these days had a decent web site and content management, they could make a fortune out of my household given our increasing frustration with Amazon cluttering up their own site. Unfortunately, they're actually much worse and not really a useful alternative at all.