Which is an interesting assumption, but certainly not a correct one. They have lost a lot of my business in recent years due to frequent poor quality control and customer service issues.

This is similar to the chronological vs. algorithmic timeline debates in social media: it's annoying to many users, but the overall result must be positive, otherwise they probably wouldn't be doing it, in face of the backlash.

Anecdotally, I am far from alone among my friends and family in perceiving that Amazon's quality, reliability and customer service have degraded sharply in recent years. It's not just the counterfeits issue. Their basic product organisation is terrible these days, and it's often difficult to figure out if I'm ordering the correct edition of something. They've also failed to deliver Christmas shopping by the guaranteed dates. They've sent many items out that were packaged in obviously absurd ways and arrived predictably damaged, and then had basic problems with their returns procedures causing customers a lot of hassle.

Perhaps more dangerous for Amazon, though, is that they are not always competitive on pricing with my local book and general stores any more. I can buy a new movie from Amazon and have it arrive tomorrow with perhaps a 5-10% chance that it's a bad copy and won't play. If I can buy the same movie for the same or less from my local store when I do my grocery shopping, and be guaranteed a proper UK product that I can see looks undamaged when I pick it off the shelf, which I can then enjoy watching this evening, what am I going to do? It's a similar story for buying books from a good local bookshop, and rumours of their demise have been greatly exaggerated.

A business that is large enough to generally not care any more. To not care about the fakes, the deliberately poor search that promotes crap every single time, the increasingly hostile policies, the increasingly hostile way things are offered. The promotion of horrible ideas like "global store" that will hold some indeterminate amount in anticipation of customs fees and intl delivery, but not let you exclude it from all search and choose local products only.

No business that felt customer reactions actually mattered would do the things you describe intentionally with the possible exception of pricing (and Amazon should be able to be cheapest most of the time).

These are all styles of doing business prior to a major readjustment. Tesco before the recession and before they lost a chunk of customers to Lidl and Aldi - half of whom will never go back as they discovered that Aldi are better than Tesco as well as cheaper.

Personally I already reached a point where Amazon are way down the list of choices to shop from.

Amazon's time will come, but right now they, or perhaps just Bezos - who knows, don't believe it will.

Yes, I think that sums it up nicely. History is full of big businesses that were invulnerable and could get away with anything, until they weren't and couldn't. History is also full of big businesses whose senior management seemed to be the last people in the world to realise when one situation was slowly but steadily turning into the other, often because they were focussed on short term plans and quarterly reports and somehow failed to see the wood for the trees.

Boss: Look, revenues are way up! Q4 last year was huge! Best. Christmas. Season. Ever.

Consultant: That's true, and congratulations. But be careful, the majority of your recent growth looks like it comes from segments outside your core online store business.

Boss: I know. Isn't that great? Our retail marketplace services are making twice what they brought in just a couple of years ago!

Consultant: That's also true, but it does seem the customer experience of your online store has been adversely affected because the marketplace aspect is confusing them and causing problems with poor quality control and fake products, and that online store still brings in the largest part of your revenues.

Boss: Experience, exshmerience! Look at our quarterly numbers. Our main online store is still growing.

Consultant: Well, yes, the main online store is still growing. However, it's been close to saturation in a lot of markets for a while. Part of that revenue growth is because you've been relying less on undercutting the competition and started pushing prices up. But that leaves you more vulnerable to competition again.

Boss: Well, it looks like our customers love us and they'll keep coming back anyway.

Consultant: Perhaps, but consumer shopping habits often change slowly. Brand loyalty is slow to build, and that goes for your competitors too. But it's built by good customer experiences, and sometimes lost all too quickly after bad ones.

Boss: As I said, experience, exshmerience. Look, revenues are way up! Q4 last year was huge!

But create a trillion dollar companies by "stealing" taxes (as Jeff Bezos did), and states notice, and there's one thing that unites Republicans and Democrats, Obamas Bushes and Trumps, and it's green. To put it another way, people managed to untangle all the knots and ... it happened. Lots of laws got changed, but the real breakthrough was here:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/21/states-will-be-able-to-cha...

Bezos essentially gave Americans a tax loophole for goods ordering and made it work, and took ~18% of what he gave them for his company (and about 4% for himself). He now has a trillion dollars. Americans have lots of stuff delivered to them.

But now, Amazon has the same problem mail-order has had for a very long time: it's just not cheap anymore, and so they cheat, underdeliver and overcharge, just like mail order has to do. It's trying to fix this, but the truth is that home delivery is just a lot more expensive than stores, and there is no fix.

And surprise ! Walmart suddenly stopped losing against Amazon. Weird, no ? Well, no, not that weird at all.

Of course Amazon is constantly criticized for being an example of what's wrong with capitalism. Reality: government created Amazon through tax law. I'm not saying that's all there is to it, but it's close.

But yeah this is a silicon valley forum, and the idea that the founders of the US, and a good lawyer and a supreme court decision from 1992 were the real power behind one of the great silicon valley tech companies is just not going to be a great explanation in many people's opinions. Amazon just isn't a great technical accomplishment. It's an incredible financial engineering accomplishment.

Of course, this makes it very ironic that people like Bernie Sanders criticize Amazon, as Mr. Sanders is part of the institution that made it possible in the first place. If Bezos didn't build Amazon, someone else would have figured it out and built it (it took Bezos >6 years). However, if the Federal government would have taxed Amazon the way it taxes everything else, there would have been no Amazon. Any other companies that were created would never have been anywhere near the size Amazon grew to.

Note that the rise of China, the gearbest, jd, banggood ... rise is the result of a similar tax fuckup, this time at the united nations postal union. Or: China only works because they get to offload the cost of shipping on the taxpayers. And now Trump is

However, I strongly disagree with Trump's approach. I would prefer to see the opposite happen: that US companies get brought on a level playing field with China. If you can ship from Delaware to New York for 1.6$/kg, what would happen ? It'd be then end of Chinese exports to America, but without Americans having to give up what they gained in the past 10 years. I think there should be a lesson for our government in here. Namely, that financing the post office was one of the best decisions ever made in government, and that we should look into having 50% or so of the cost of shipping paid by the (ideally Federal) taxpayer, not just when shipping from China. Why ? Look what it's done to the economy !

You can add me to that list. I've had an Amazon account since 1998, and I'm at a point where I use it only as a measure of a last resort.

Nevertheless, Amazon revenue from retail business [1] over the past few years is way up, suggesting that our position seems to be a minority one.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/672747/amazons-consolida...