In theory, with the right tools competition could sort that out.

But this theory doesn't work, not in Amazon, and not in many other online marketplaces.

So the solution is: exclusive brands, controlled by Amazon.

Amazon works hard on scaling that strategy.

And once Amazon is deeply invested in that strategy, a low-quality marketplace seems like a good thing.

I can't find anything to confirm or deny if this is still the case, but I haven't had any issues personally when sticking with products where Amazon is the seller of record. Although I have noticed the pricing and shipping time tend to be less competitive (I presumed because they don't access co-mingled inventory that's at a closer fulfillment center).

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1983918/warning-seems-be-lo...

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1923659/amazon-counterfeits

We found that the majority of online shopping today consisted of 1) buying basics (read: cheap mass products) on Amazon or 2) getting advertised brands to you on Instagram/Fb/Google and hoping the one you like finds you. We hope that Indieshops provides an alternative where you can discover high quality brands.

And how big is too big to be called 'indie'? If you take it quite literally it disallows having two shop fronts, but then to disallow that and allow online-only international-shipping... Just curious how you draw a line.

We too are wrestling with that question, what should be the threshold for an "indie" company? We don't want to limit it so much that it's not useful for day-to-day shopping (ie too niche/etsy-ish), but haven't been too prescriptive yet about how big is too big. Hopefully users like you could help us define it!

I wonder this too. How does this problem track with other problems they're trying to solve, though? Is it commonly lamented just on Hacker News, or are they getting direct feedback from customers? Are their returns skyrocketing? I suspect it's more subtle and longtime power purchasers are starting to buy less and less, like me.

More and more people will start drawing lines like you just did, and I have done. Poop bags for my dog? Definitely Amazon -- it took me 15 seconds end to end on their website, on my phone [!] and were here the next day. No way for electronics, vitamins, or anything that will actually go into my or my family's body (or my dog's body, for that matter).

Does anyone know what happened generally to Amazon's relationship with brands over the past six years? Presumably over this time, Amazon has only gained in bargaining power over brands at the expense of physical locations, in accordance with Ben Thompson's Aggregation Theory. As an outsider, it seemed like Amazon and brand buyers have done well at the expense of brands and retail stores.

How many of them work on the (loss-making) shop app though?

I'm honestly curious, because presumably it's supposed to eventually come out insanely profitable and awesome, but the UX sucks, has done for years, and rarely changes.

I assume (but may well be completely wrong) that most engineers at Amazon work on keeping AWS's managed offerings up with the hype train (only one needs to be lasting mega usage to make it all worthwhile), and a whole load of SRE and performance work (I wouldn't like to guess how small a fractional optimisation to EC2 would result in an $X saving across the whole fleet!).

Until it affects Amazon's stock price, it's not a problem.

I'd guess it is not that they don't know or they can't fix it, it is that they just don't care. Considering the resources at their disposal, they can fix this problem easily. It is probably not (yet) a problem big enough to hurt them financially, so they don't put any effort into it. Every decision is probably purely driven by financial motive.