Online shopping works pretty well in the USA. My wife (Chinese) doesn’t see too much difference since we moved to the USA from Beijing last year. We no longer buy things like bottled water (well, we don’t need to!) or other groceries/soft goods online like we did in BJ, but we have semi daily packages of everything else.

China has great same day logistics using poorly paid guys on electric bikes (so food and soft good delivery is very reasonable), but everything else is equivalent or a bit worse than the states.

Are you joking? I lived in Seattle and so desperate about my Amazon experience. For your logistics statement, isn't that one of China's advantage? And also, for those delivery workers, most of them are from small villages or suburb, so they are happy doing logistic in the metropolis as they can make far more than as being the farmers.

My point was that it couldn’t last. And damn it, I don’t miss the backup sounds of the electric trikes beneath my apartment (we lived 13 floors above a small depot in taiyahggong).

Sorry your amazon experience has been so horrible. We live in Bellevue and it has worked out well for us. Sometimes we have to use the amazon delivery lockers at the 7-11 across the street, though.

I live in Thailand and buying from US online merchants is usually a nonstarter because of shipping costs which are often much more than the price of the item itself. When I buy something from Aliexpress it is usually free shipping, or something reasonable for heavier items. There is no Amazon here but there are a couple local versions, Lazada being one. They usually have shorter delivery times but cost more than Aliexpress, though not always. US online merchants aren't even in the ballpark.

I ordered from Amazon while I was in Thailand and it actually worked pretty well. The shipping wasn't cheap, but it wasn't prohibitive. The most expensive part was the import duties charged by Thai customs. It still ended up being cheaper than if I'd bought the items locally. Though I was on an island in the south, so that might not have been the case in Bangkok.

Still...it's definitely not a non-starter. And with the exception of shipping updates which were non-existent once Thai post got their hands on the package, everything worked surprisingly well. All told, it took 7 days to arrive, shipping was ~$50 and customs was ~$65 on a ~$300 order that would have cost over $500 locally where the selection would've meant getting something that wasn't exactly what I wanted.

That's not too bad.

Not Amazon, but a recent experience I had. I wanted to order a kit from Vex Robotics. Cost of the kit was $80. Shipping from the US was $150. Supposedly it's available from a Vex reseller in Thailand so I contacted them and they quoted $190 for the $80 kit with a one month delivery time. So they are just ordering it from the US and having it shipped at a somewhat lower cost. I am not desperate for the kit so its a nonstarter for me. I can almost certainly find a serviceable substitute from a Chinese supplier who will ship to Thailand at a fraction of the cost.

How long does it take for packages to get to you? In Australia I had a run of less than two weeks but it's been back up to a month recently.

It varies a lot. Sometimes 2 weeks, more often 3 to 4. Currently a number of items seem overdue at more than 5 weeks.