Interestingly I've found Amazon shipping has gone to the dump too, which was one of the final things they had going for them. At first it was completely understandable with the pandemic, but they seem to have taken that as an excuse to just give up on the Prime shipping promise period indefinitely. I was starting to order everything sensitive, from electronics to health, elsewhere anyway over counterfeit and fraud worries. But now I find other places ship massively faster than Amazon, "Prime" shipping on Amazon routinely takes a week or even weeks, plural, even when it says "in stock". Other places ship right away and have it my rural area in days.

So for me at least Amazon has finally exited default territory, because it doesn't even have the "well it's more risky, but it's fast and reliable" rush argument anymore. Of course I don't expect the general population to move instantly, and it's not like I've dumped them entirely either. There are even some manufacturers I like who use them for fulfillment pretty exclusively (at least for small orders). But I do wonder in cases like this whether we'll see a non-linear curve: everything seems to be going swell for a business, right until some tipping point is reached and suddenly things go backwards fairly quickly. And that can be hard to recover from. Of course Amazon does have some moats overall, I don't expect them as a going concern to have any real trouble particularly on the service side, AWS and all that. But the moats actually seem weakest for Amazon-as-a-B2C-market, there isn't really anything inherently sticky there beyond habit.

Amazon Prime shipping transit times have been rock solid for me throughout. There was a period when their estimated delivery dates were pushed way out, but the actual delivery was never late.

The delivery issues may be regional, or maybe it's just certain product categories. Where I live, Prime shipping from March-May was about a week to 10 days, but now it's back up to 1-2 days for almost everything. I'm in the North East though where there's a warehouse about 15 miles away, and at least half a dozen major national shipping hubs within ~100 miles.

Same in terms of delivery. It was bad for awhile, but got better a few months back. I'm in the southwest; local warehouse is about 30-40 miles out but not everything is in the local warehouse so I often get stuff from other states' warehouses. Still getting the 2-3 day thing in general for those, 1-2 if local.

The north has been waaay more affected by lockdown restrictions than the south. We have not seen a single slow down in prime deliveries

Same here. Recently, if it's anything that's health related, I absolutely avoid Amazon because of the mass of fake products out there. I needed some vitamins recently and my first thought was that I'm better off paying CVS or Walgreens prices and being practically guaranteed that the product is legit, versus trying to weed through the fake reviews and counterfeit products on Amazon.

That thought has occurred with increasing frequency over the past few years as Amazon continues to completely ignore the issue.

Do be aware that CVS and Walgreens stock homeopathic garbage for any symptom that doesn't have a good OTC remedy, and aside from a little fine print and weird units on the "active ingredients" the packaging is identical to real medicine.

Their reputation is shot. I wanted to buy a NAS, and look at the prices in Canada. I stopped myself from going to Amazon because I was too wary of weird reviews and long discontinued products with completely strange prices.

I went to Canada Computers instead.

I know what you mean. There’s some category of purchases for which I still look at Amazon—basically <30$ and doesn’t-matter-if-it’s-fake type items. Anything that doesn’t fit those criteria, and especially brand name electronic items, I’m buying elsewhere. Knowing it’s genuine is worth a higher price.

This has basically meant that I went from a Prime member making 5-10k$ worth of purchase per year a few years ago, to a non-prime member spending only a few hundred $ per year at Amazon. I suspect I’m not unique in the HN crowd, but I’m shocked at how often I see friends, family, and coworkers continue to trust this company with large, important purchases.

> Now people know the reviews are fake

I am not 100% sure about this, I wish it were so. Maybe it's just that we get this feeling because of the people we usually talk to, the people in our close circle of connections who are likely to be like us in terms of this kind of rasoning/thinking. I think most people may not be aware of it.

> They had little short-term interest in doing so

I just want to add a possible scenario here and I would like to hear opinions about it:

As we all know, people really tend to buy products with 4.5+ stars and we think twice if the product has 3 or even 4 stars. On the other hand, let's suppose that since everyone is selling on Amazon now, worse products are likely to be put on sale, so the average scores start to decrease.

Having said the above, if I, as a user, periodically look for products on Amazon, I will probably start seeing/finding bad products, so it may be that in a long period of time, I will start looking for alternatives other than Amazon and may attribute the image of "not high quality products" to Amazon as an e-commerce.

[Edit]: So if my two previous scenarios are correct, if you follow the money, they actually have some long-term interest in allowing some fake(good) reviews and eliminating some real bad ones. In the end, most people will not be aware of these fake reviews and the quality of the products will be perceived as higher, resulting in more sales and in a better reputation of Amazon products, thus avoiding the scenario discussed in the second answer.

> I am not 100% sure about this, I wish it were so.

Well, not everyone, but there's growing knowledge about it, and popular media podcasts that do whole episodes on it, etc.

> I will probably start seeing/finding bad products, so it may be that in a long period of time, I will start looking for alternatives other than Amazon and may attribute the image of "not high quality products" to Amazon as an e-commerce.

I think that depends on whether the ratings are for product quality or product accuracy/authenticness/amazon fulfillment issues.

> they actually have some long-term interest in allowing some fake(good) reviews and eliminating some real bad ones.

I think the important part of that is some. While it may be in Amazon's interest to manipulate the reviews to some degree, it's definitely not in their best interest to let people know or assume they or anyone else is doing so.