A tip: if you ever find yourself saying "why does a company have X feature/product, I don't use it, no one uses it!" you might be right on the first statement but you're almost certainly wrong on the second.
It wouldn't be there if no one used it.
Every step between a customer and completing an order is a loss of sales.
Then there has to be some sort of measurement out there on how each step causes cart abandonment (or whatever it's called).
Its the same reason sites add Single-Sign-On... click click, I'm on a website... vs filling out forms, verification, etc...
Apparently Amazon finds that adding 1-click does more good than harm.
The process goes like this, someone recommends a book in HN, they provide an Amazon link, I read a couple of reviews, at this point I'm convinced about buying the book or not, or even if I'm not totally convinced, the price, and the easiness of just one click makes me do it. That process has increased the amount of books I read per year. Sure the button is only a small part of that, but I think is an esencial part, I think Walmart can get a lot of benefit from this.
It's much easier to buy books when you don't need to wait for delivery, unpack, carry around, get up to get them, etc. But your process already consist of several clicks and waiting for many pages.
Isn't it well-documented that the more steps you have during th purchase process, the lower your conversion rates? I'm sure this is especially true at Amazon's scale.
To be specific though, if I'm on my phone and I see a confirmation window, I might postpone the purchase until I'm in front of my computer - and by then I might forget about it. One click purchase completely bypasses these types of scenarios.
Maybe some epub sellers could email it to your kindle with 1-click purchasing now?
The Walmart of the Internet, I suppose.
FWIW I usually try to find more direct sources before buying on Amazon. If the other source can drop a few bucks off the Amazon price and offer free shipping I'll buy it direct from them.
Amazon Prime's fees are quite small compared to direct shipping costs with carriers. It depends on the product type, of course, but typically third-party sellers are already on thin margins selling on Amazon. It's very likely that "drop a few bucks off the Amazon price and offer free shipping" means they're selling to you at a loss.
I'm not saying it's a great deal for the company, but what can you expect consumers to do if Amazon has the cheapest price AND prime shipping you already paid for?
That said some companies at least raise their prices on purpose when posting to Amazon in order to meet their standards for things like returns and Prime shipping.
If Amazon would let me pick a slow option that was still UPS/Fedex, I'd do it. Same with other sites, sometimes I won't buy from them if they only ship USPS and I know it won't fit in the box.
For me, Prime is great because it means most thing come to my door at no extra (other than the yearly fee) cost.
I realize Target and Kroger probably implement the same tactics as WM now, same with eBay/Newegg sellers and Amazon, so I realize it's more symbolic than anything.
I am not from US but currently studying here and haven't thought much about this topic. Walmart, Walgreen and Amazon feel too convenient. I would love to learn more on the topic before it becomes a habit.
> Critics, as well as the United States Internal Revenue Service, charge that the company was trying to profit from the deaths of its employees, and take advantage of the tax law which allowed it to deduct the premiums.
- Extremely aggressive about interrupting unionization attempts.
- Relatively low pay, particularly for the bottom 1/2 of employees.
- They squeeze suppliers to restrain prices to the benefit of consumers. This essentially adds another aggrieved voice in the crowd.
- Then there's a very broad, vague, low value argument about the soul of communities being destroyed by their presence. This premise was particularly common ~15 years ago. It has turned out to be almost entirely bunk, so it's an argument rarely used against them today. Today, the focus is overwhelmingly on pay, specifically that their low wages force tax payers to subsidize said wages.
Most of these arguments collapse upon rational inspection. For example, they universally pay better than mom & pop local stores and employ far more people in small & mid size towns / communities. Then the argument gets flipped: it then gets said that they intentionally pay higher than local competitors, and advocate in favor of higher minimum wage laws, to crush local competition (ie damned if they do, damned if they don't).
The same people that dislike Walmart, you'll find, will frequently lodge 'for the common good' arguments economically. Walmart acts for the good of the many, as they squeeze supplier margins to hold prices down. Somehow saving 200 million people money is turned against them as a negative.
Their low pay is an interesting issue unto itself. Their margins are hyper low, at 2.5% net income margins; their sales have been flat and profits have been falling for years. If they pay each employee just another $4,000 to $5,000 per year, they'd go bankrupt (particularly as they begin the long hard war with Amazon). They're often contrasted with Costco, which pays meaningfully higher wages; however Costco manages that by employing far fewer people per dollar of sales. To match Costco on that, Walmart would have to fire at least half a million people, most of whom have few skills to do any other higher paying jobs.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the low pay / tax payer subsidy issue, is who the tax payers are that are doing the subsidizing: mostly the rich. The top 1/3 in America pay almost all the income taxes that go toward subsidizing Walmart's bottom 1/2 of employees who earn low wages. This almost never gets discussed when the topic comes up, in fact it's aggressively dodged. The people doing the arguing, are overwhelmingly in favor of the rich subsidizing the poor, but for some reason it's not ok when it comes to this (ie they're actually arguing it's bad that the rich tax payers subsidize Walmart's poorest employees, it's comical). This is just a baseless attack on Walmart, because of what they are. The only alternative to having the top 1/3 subsidize Walmart's poorest employees, is to have those employees lose their jobs and then the subsidy goes to 100% instead of being partial as it is today.
What I'm hopeful of is that (barring evil patents or monopolies) all of those things should be able to be outsourced a third party vendor or service. Hopefully in the future you will be able to simply contract out alternative delivery service, or drone delivery, or "prime"-like membership programs with the click of a button or an API call.
Amazon have a lot but are a long way off having everything. Health and Beauty for example, they may have the top 50k sales ranks pretty well covered but at least the top 100k are probably worth a middle mans time.
If we could rerun the timeline without this patent, then the e-commerce field would likely not be so lopsided.
If you've been to a Costco recently you may be surprised to find that they're much less expensive than Amazon. They have more buying power and stronger vendor relationships that AMZN simply doesn't have. Prime Day 2017 was also a huge disappointment (Mostly overpriced junk like bluetooth speakers).
Honestly I think the only thing that works in Amazon's favor is the convenience, and their private distribution/delivery network. Beyond that they're nothing more than a generic online marketplace.
You just want a native advertisement and Top 10 lists.
The speed of delivery, prime benefits, brand recognition, and willingness to lose money on many if not most items are absolutely brutal to compete against.
I'm glad one click checkout will be more broadly available, but it's probably not going to make much of a difference...