We could say the same for other big box retailers. I don’t know any that even comes close to te amazon experience, short of Yodobashi.con in Japan.

I think it requires something very special for an organization to accept to canibalize itself. Apple is the only exemple that I would see at a behemoth scale.

What is "The Amazon experience"? Ads being served as the first few rows of results? A review system that cannot be trusted? The same item listed multiple times by different sellers? Extreme price variance when choosing different colors and sizes?

That's a relatively decent development AFAIK. 10 years ago I mostly trusted results and reviews. I suppose it's getting a lot worse lately because 1/ Amazon being hugely successful means that it's a prime target for advertisers and scammers and 2/ Amazon being hugely successful means that they have less of an incentive to solve the issue now than they did back then.

The experience today is not what made them great in the past. 10 years ago the negatives you list didn't exist.

Perhaps all of these too big to be good utility services- Amazon, Google, Facebook, even Apple should just offer “classic” slimmed down versions of their previous offerings, for a paid subscription in the case of the online services.

How would this help eliminate any of the current issues? Why would giving them money and/or building a slimmed-down version reduce fake reviews, fake articles, ads as search results, et al?

Use the subscription fees to cover up the lack of search result ads, to pay for better policing of fake reviews, moderating, etc.

These are all valid point. I’d add to that bad knock off items mixed with the real ones.

But most of these issues are plaguing every other major site. Ads that stick with you for days and days whatever site you look at are becoming the norm.

No ec site review system can be trusted in my opinion, they are usually way to easy to game. For anything that actually matters reputable and dedicated review sites end up to be the most useful.

Different sellers and different price are fine to me, it actually helps to mitigate the knock off issues in my experience.

All in all amazon has degraded a lot in these aspects, but I feel the whole industry took the dive and don’t see competing retailers coming up with fresh ideas.

apparently amazon can't even replicate it in their own Amazon Book stores. QR codes just to get prices? really?

Walmart is following this exact strategy right now.

How are they doing?

After years of getting many if not most things from Amazon, my last several big ticket tech items were bought from Walmart online. The prices on identical items were better at Walmart.

Other things I've stopped buying from Amazon are the frequently-counterfeited categories of items (USB chargers, etc etc). I'll just go to Microcenter or Walmart or wherever local whose supply chain I have more faith in.

Also you can do pickup at Walmart on a ton of items and have it in an hour or less—and usually at the same price or lower, now that Amazon charges sales tax; very few places have prime instant or whatever the same-day service is for Prime.

Lately I've seen WalMart labels on stuff I've ordered from Amazon. Feels kind of surreal.

At that time, they may not have had a central database of what items were in stock in which stores. Might not have been possible to route the order to the closest store that had the item.

Agreed that Sears never moved much beyond the 1970s in store layouts and merchandise display/organization.