In June 2018, I ordered a soccer magazine, "Futbol Total", for my soccer-mad nephew. It said it would arrive in 4-16 weeks, which seemed weird. I waited it out, and no magazine. I contacted them and they said they were on it and it would arrive soon. At 5 months in I just canceled the order, only to get an email saying, "Unfortunately, we weren’t able to cancel the items you requested and these items will soon be shipped." I spent a bunch of time in chat and on the phone getting the runaround, complete with new ticket numbers, promises of personally following up, and even a $20 credit. But they were firm on saying, "Please be assured, we will ship this item very soon."

Occasionally I'd try again, insisting that they either cancel the order or actually ship it. Each time I was told it would be shipped. Long after I'd given up, in late October 2020, they finally canceled it, saying, "We regret to inform you that, due to a technical error, we will not be able to fulfill your order." For all of Amazon's vaunted customer focus, my impression was of a lot of unhappy, fearful customer service staff passing the buck so they could avoid bad metrics.

This seems to be a problem for all big platforms. When they’re small enough to not change the ecosystem, they can do what they do well. Eg amazon ships more conveniently and google returns better results and uber is less scammy. Then they get massive and become a viable,better understood target for fraud/manipulation, and suddenly their offering begins to suck. It’s frustrating as a consumer.

issue a chargeback and move on.

So if you're prepared to take that risk and never buy from Amazon again, sure.. go for it..

But given the centralization of vendors this can have bigger downsides than upside.

I assume all my not-downloaded Kindle books become unavailable. Does the Kindle app delete the ones I have locally? (I assume the result would be similar for movies/shows purchased.)

Does it ban my credit card, name, address, or a more abstract "buying profile"?

And while they definitely deserve the ire for doing that with 1984, even in 2018 when I left preventing 1984 like issues were commonly brought up in design reviews, calling out 1984 by name.

Which of course is nothing more than a convenient excuse for them to use when the only ones with the power to regulate what sellers end up on their platform is... Amazon.

This (soccer magazine case) does not seem like a 3rd-party seller issue. Third-party sellers only have a limited amount of time to ship (30 days in 2018) after which the order is automatically cancelled.

Also, the Amazon "we weren’t able to cancel the items" message only occurs with Amazon-fulfilled items.

The long "4-16 weeks" estimate also suggests it was not 3rd-party seller selling via FBA, either, but straight-up sold by Amazon.

As many have testified here, they just aren't like that anymore.

How does this relate to you repeatedly doubting what I said?

* I guess I’m just trying to understand what exactly has declined over two decades? Because I feel like I’ve had the opposite experience.

  Your LTV = Forecasting total revenue
             from your transactions so far
  Revenue  = The sum of your past
             transactions
  Refund?  = LTV - Revenue - Refund Cost > 0

What is frustrating to people is: it doesn't matter what happened to the package. You feel like you're this good person pursuing this great justice, but the simple facts are it doesn't matter what actually occurred. This is coming from someone who had two $3,500 computer deliveries stolen, probably because they had RTX 3080 written on them, but like, Amazon didn't care, it just refunded me. I didn't have to provide evidence or explain anything. Because my LTV was really high. Same with getting stuff refunded on my credit card. They simply did not care, and it was thousands of dollars of stuff where, obviously I was in the wrong, you can't just refund like airfare and such, but I asked for it and I got it because LTV.

Is this just? Like how else could it work? They investigate everything, spending more money than the cost of the refund? They would just not provide refunds, as was the case historically in e-commerce! And it's not Amazon, it's everyone. Indeed, the real innovation here isn't the strategy, it's that LTV forecasting has gotten really accurate. Otherwise I feel like these threads devolve into, people who don't know anything complain about stuff they keep using, and nobody critically looks into what's really going on.

There's an emotional desire, ironically, for this slow, legalistic, argumentative, plaintiff versus defense world. You know, when it suits you. The algorithmic approach, as soon as you open that Pandora's box, well of course it optimizes all that crap away - the LTV model of "justice" here is, in my opinion, a lot lot better.

It's just so inscrutable to a lay person, such a baffling reorganization of at least two decades of conditioning, I can see how the reaction is, "Oh my god, who is this blowhard, downvote." All I'm trying to do is share the facts of how remedies really work when you interact with giant, growing, successful companies.

At the very beginning we were thinking that good vs bad should also include our support costs - not just LTV. But that is amazingly correlated: high LTV means that user has very low support cost (or at least a very nice people to work with).

It is very simple.

A customer "not buying much" is not "bad". If you accept his money for cheap stuff, he is your customer. There's a difference between an honest customer who usually doesn't buy much and then buys something expensive and is getting sadly scammed and a customer trying to rob you.

If you accept the customer for cheap stuff but refuse to help him when he gets scammed on an expensive item, you are the bad, pathological, person/business.

For every refund system you will unfortunately get people who attempt to game that system. They'll buy many negligible cost items without issue, then a single high cost item that they'll claim never arrived hoping they've outsmarted the store or algorithm. These bad actors are why honest consumers have a hard time. I don't know what a business can do to actually differentiate the two.

Costco kinda figured it out, by charging a membership fee they got rid of most low LTV customers from the get-go. Unfortunately, their generous refund policy still got hacked by bad actors which is why they have a lot of restrictions around returning electronics. (People were returning laptops after a year of use just to upgrade). This is why we can’t have nice things.

source: I worked at Costco before they had restrictions on their electronics return policy, when they bragged about accepting returns on anything for any reason… before the cost of doing so became prohibitively high.

LTV refunding like Amazon is doing is a huge leap forward that lets every business kind of act like Costco.

You seem to be saying 'well they did say any reason' and that good faith on the part of the buyer didn't/shouldn't enter into it. Yes they did, and people behaved the way they did. Now the generous refund policy no longer exists. See how that works?

It’s a shame the policy is gone. There was really no peace of mind quite like it, knowing that if your device failed after years of use, but still due to a defect, you had recourse. And for poor people, it was a godsend of a program especially (and not because it could be abused, but simply Costco providing a service that anything you buy will work as advertised)

[1]source: some internal training I received back in 1998

People suck, especially when they are disconnected from the human side of business.

It makes me sad. Ebay two decades ago was a lot different. I never got burned back then, and did a fair bit of buying and selling snowboard gear, including boards that get up to around $800 each. There's absolutely no way I'd do that today. Just impossible not to get ripped off on it.

Could the retail organization use a physically distributed escrow service to somehow tie payment to physical goods delivery? That essentially outsources the "brick and mortar" aspect to a third party and removes delivery risk. Amazon and Currency Exchange, for example, can have a much healthier economic relationship than Amazon and me.

Alternatively, this sounds like it could be addressed as a sort of "consumer protection" insurance similar to my homeowners or auto insurance. I file a claim so insurance covers legitimate large losses. Risk is pooled and the underwriter is the organization that is evaluating my trustworthiness, not the individual retailers.

Just ideas off the cuff, maybe there are huge holes here.

On eBay fraudsters buy large quantities of eg $1 seed packs, to build up artificial account ratings. Then they try to steal expensive things (didn't arrive, wasn't in the box, arrived broken, etc), and eBay shields the accounts heavily because they favor buyers to an extreme. All the thief has to do is be disciplined about it, buy $40-$50 of cheap items for positive feedback, then go after a $300-$500 item. Sellers can't even leave negative feedback on eBay, which further cuts off a mechanism for at least warning other sellers of a running con (sellers sometimes leave the negative language in the neutral/positive feeback segment instead, which rather points out the absurdity of eBay's broken system).

Is anyone actually arguing for fewer "easy refunds" and more investigation? I though the point was that given the fact that most of their refunds are handled algorithmically, they have plenty of time to handle the rest of the refunds quickly and with care.

If I don't get my order, I want my money back. If the algorith decides I can get that with no investigation required, sure, I'll take it. But if the algorithm thinks they shouldn't take the "shortcut", I still deserve my money back and a human should be dispatched to deal with it ASAP.

Algorithmically adjudicating in favor of the customer is fine - it's their money they're risking. But algorithmically adjudicating against the customer should never be allowed without a human looking things over.

In theory, Amazon's T&C's attempt to pass on the risk of loss to me after delivery of the item to a carrier. In practice, this is far less clear, because of merchant agreements / cardholder agreements and overall FTC regulation of goods sold directly to consumers.

But it may be moot, anyways: if Amazon decides to screw me, they have a bunch of digital assets that they hold hostage and will remove my access to if I initiate a legal dispute or chargeback, even if I'm in the right.

And I'm not just using the term "responsibility" im a moral sense here - consumer protection laws in many places agree with this. The seller is an "informed market actor, taking on the risks of the transaction". The consumer is not an "equal market actor" and is therefore afforded protections from the risk.

The law will oblige either of the two sides to carry the burden of proof. Either Amazon has to proof the package was delivered, or the customer has to proof it wasn't. If the other sides does not accept the proof received, it has to sue.

Update: I should be clear, the shipper can prove it. The customer themselves can't without the shipper's acquiescence.

The shipper might be able to prove that the transport company picked up a package. Beyond that it's all hearsay if we are talking about fraudulent sellers.

The transport company might have evidence of a tracking number and thus most probably an actual package making it through the system. Shipments do get lost or stolen though. No way to prove anything really.

The customer can't prove it either. There are enough cases of packages with a tracking number having arrived at my and other people's doorsteps without the tracking ever showing that it happened. Why wouldn't the opposite be true? Driver just needs to scan package arrival not actually deliver. Of course there can be repercussions and I'd gather it's easier for a package to be stolen off other parts of the delivery chain. Anyway in this case both the shipper and customer have 'proof' / no proof to various degrees and in reality something 'fell off the truck'.

It's all about being convincing enough to whoever will be adjudicating this but 100% proof is impossible. The closest the customer could get I think would be 24h Video surveillance of their front entrance. No motion detection, just 24h continuous tape.

Yep, I think this is exactly how things work. My household buys pretty much anything it can from Amazon unless it's more expensive than we can get elsewhere because our Amazon credit cards automatically give a 5% discount (cash back). Since we pay our balance every month this is basically like having 5% more income proportional to the amount spent on Amazon**

We never have a problem dealing with customer service. A simple chat solves pretty much everything immediately, and when it's Amazon's fault they'll apply a courtesy credit towards our account. (Actually that hasn't happened a lot lately-- maybe something they don't do as much any more, or maybe they've calculated that we're solid enough customers that we're not quiting Amazon just because Amazon didn't give us free money)

*The first time we used Amazon Fresh was a complete epiphany for us. I was sick so couldn't go food shopping. Instead I gave Fresh a shot, and found out that on average their prices were 10% to 15% lower than I paid at the supermarket, and* we still got the same 5% cash back from using our Amazon credit card. Even after a good tip for the driver, we were still saving money. In terms of selection, they probably lack about 10% of the things we normally buy or they're much more expensive (meats especially) so I still do the occasional trip to the local grocery store to stock up.

But Amazon has more information and uses that too. They know loss rates by zip code or by block by carrier.

Usually items I order for them that are higher shrink risk don’t go through their Amazon distribution network and come UPS or USPS. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed those returns are easier — they probably dump cost on the 3rd party shipper.

I asked the question because they spoke with the assurance of an insider... so I wondered if they worked on it.

Taken to the extreme (and I don’t see anything in the argument that prevents it being taken to the extreme) and combined with acceptance of utility functions (_i.e._ that the value of anything is comparable to anything else, including human lives) this seems to also reduce any and all rule enforcement to wergild or something radical in that vein. Which—I’m not sure how it worked historically, but it also seems to be the current state of patent law (it doesn’t matter if the patent has merit, the side with the better and more expensive lawyers will starve out the other), and the results look utterly miserable.

Vague generalities aside, the complaints (and hypothetical downvotes) seems to indicate that, however simple and transparent a rule this is from the inside, people don’t want to pay for what is not their fault (cf experiments where people rejected a $1/$99 split in favour of a $0/$0 one to punish the other guy). I’m reminded of people queueing up in droves to the first McDonald’s in Moscow nor for the food or the prices, but for the customer service, because that was literally the first time in their lives they could get that anywhere.

Unless it’s marketed as a luxury good, people will actually pay for decent customer service that, among other things, satisfies their sense of fairness. That a model which does not reflect this can be simple is not a virtue of that model, it’s shoddy model-building. Not providing that service might still be the better economic decision (with caveats), if few enough people end up bitter over it (and complain on HN, etc.), but that’s a much more involved claim than “but it’s so simple!”. It also has very little to do with its moral merit, and if the better economic decision is too far from the moral one, it may well be time to go tune the incentives again and not to give up on your set of morals.

I’m not convinced customer protection regulations are the answer here, but the results of no customer protection regulations also seem completely idiotic from the outside. The third option of piling upon the company online also seems revolting for entirely different reasons.

They're not always the cheapest, but the overall experience is great - and I just love that I can see all my orders for such a long time span.

Now, I've always had good customer support experiences with the company, and your model helps explain why I suppose; loyalty has a value of its own.

Sure, it is, when you're rich. If you're some poor bastard who's scrimped up a whole lot of money to buy an expensive item, and Amazon figures you won't spend much money in the future, you get ripped off.

There's a couple of externalities you've left out, too, because your LTV doesn't predict them:

* Reputational costs

* Risk of adverse legal outcomes, where you decline to provide deserved refunds after failing to deliver merchandise.

You’re talking like there’s no legal recourse (or even financial, like a chargeback). There simple aren’t enough resources to track down the source of every sob story, the hard truth is this “inhuman” efficiency is a huge boon for the vast majority of us.

There may be very valid reason to shortcut claims and to grant dubious claims of high value customers. But you really shouldn't just ship an empty box and say "sorry, you're not getting your money back unless you sue us". (And worse, break the customer's existing digital content if they do, because you can hold it hostage).

I mean, I get that it's financially appealing to externalize the costs of in-warehouse and in-transit shrinkage to random low-value customers, but brah-- that's just not right.

IMO this should be a flag for regulators to start taking a look, too, to understand how systemic this is.

If Amazon chooses to refund without question to save disputes money, that's their choice. But it's not the customer's problem. If you pay for something and you don't receive it, you must get refunded.

I wonder if that factors in somehow.

I also wonder - since the box containing five CPUs looked like a "single product" box - how often that must have happened.

For instance, in the short term it's better to take the loss instead of investigate. But that then makes your platform an easy pick for fraudsters, so you end up with way more fraud and way more costs overall. If you were a bit more thorough and spotted scammers better, you would have a higher cost _per incident_ but lower cost overall in the long term.

This is particularly true if you are such a big player that you are the market in practice (so general equilibrium effects cannot be ignored anymore). And reminds me a bit of what eBay did in the past (sided with buyers almost every time without investigating, and made selling much more difficult).

Where people haven’t seemed to have learned their lesson with this is with airlines and to a lesser extent hotels. People will just buy the cheapest ticket, which is completely fine if that’s what you want or need to do, but they then complain that the airlines don’t bend over backwards when things go awry.

Example: you have to check in to international flights 60 minutes or more before the flight leaves (from the US). This is a reasonably strict rule. I once arrived 45 minutes prior and they checked me in anyway. I give that airline a lot of business and they know it.

So I order a lot of packages from Amazon and have had zero problems with returns and cancellations but almost all my purchases are low end.

For, say, new electronics, I’ll just go straight to B&H or Adorama. Or even Best Buy.

No. If you're 30, they might (or might not) group you with other 30 year olds, if that's important, and run this model against you all as a group. But you don't punch in "he has 50 years left to live" in the model. The model doesn't know any of that, it just knows your transaction history, and it works better when the population of histories are more similar than dissimilar. Though it's also very effective when run against a large population too.

Basically, these models can pretty much predict whether you are pathological or good one. I know that models also include things like if you are a pet owner, number of pets, siblings, number of disputes in cc, etc.

(I have never bought anything expensive from Amazon, and so I have no idea what its stated policy is.)

Behaving otherwise would just be shooting yourself in the foot for weird ideas of fairness.

I'd say three centuries, but who's counting ...

(or whenever printing got cheap enough to use for advertising)

For "prosumer" items a store that serves professionals is likely to watch their suppliers very carefully and have customer-friendly policies when things hit a snag. For cameras and optics (and flash sticks) B&H is my go-to place. My 2c.

I will also throw in a vote for B&H.

A customer service rep from NYC once called to personally answer some questions I had about a sub-$100 product. This happens often.

This week I ordered a display with free shipping that was scheduled to arrive 5 days later. I received it in 24 hours - 4 days earlier than expected.

Their return policy is also hassle-free.

For music or audio products, I buy from Sweetwater.

Same good points as B&H, but you have an assigned "sales engineer" which some people find annoying, but I really like - whenever I have a problem or question, I get the same person on the phone every time.

I don't order from Amazon if I'm not comfortable outright losing my money, getting it late, or receiving a counterfeit.

I like buying Amazon Warehouse deals when the item makes sense to me. With larger items I think their quality control is higher, and the saving tend be bigger. The box may arrive super beat-up, but item is just fine.

My motivation is probably less about overall savings, but more about me feeling like I'm doing Amazon a favor. Weird, isn't it? I'm conditioned.

As a tangent: I've also purchased used that ended up being a return of a similar looking, but much less expensive item. So I just re-return it. In this case I assume it was fraud on the original return. With my patterns I doubt Amazon thinks -I- returned them the wrong item. Without customer context their job figuring stuff like that out would be much more difficult.

Ironically, my purchases on Amazon these days are almost exclusively books and ebooks.

I've been meaning to check out alternative ebook vendors too. Anybody have something they like on Android?

If you like SciFi/Fantasy, Baen sells ebooks direct with no DRM on their website in multiple formats and have for like 20 years. Some other publishers do this too like Image comics. Most don't though so you need to go through one of the bigger stores unfortunately.

If you watch all the videos on how to make money on Amazon. It involves buying liquidation items from places like TJ Maxx or other retailers selling second quality items. These items are commingled into regular inventory. The consumer ends up buying a second quality item for the “new” price.

I called amazon every time it happened. I told them the various things that their driver did, explicitly asking them to replace that specific driver. And after a while it was like they flagged my account as fraudulent (customer service began issuing canned responses with no follow up).

Eventually, after a few egregious cases, my property management company sued Amazon. Overnight, packages started being delivered correctly, and I haven't had to call CS since...but I now refuse to buy anything of value from Amazon anymore due to a combination of fraudulent marketplace items and the lingering fear that if something goes wrong I won't be able to get any compensation for it because my account has been flagged.

Funnily enough, Ali Express is now the more reputable company in my eyes.

I would watch the same thing with Amazon (Music, Alexa, Photos, AWS, etc.)

-edit-

If you think we're centralized and you're "downvoting to disagree" at least have some decency to explain how we're centralized. There is nothing that Amazon sells that I can't buy an alternative product at a dozen other retailers for comparable prices, for example.

Due to network effects, there often aren't good alternatives for social media like Facebook or collaborative cloud tools like Google docs.

For games, it's not unusual for indy games to only release on Steam. Even when there is a physical release, that option is becoming increasingly difficult (e.g. many computers no longer have a built in disc drive, many stores no longer carry PC games, etc.).

This is less common than the previous two examples, but it may be difficult to find niche products outside of Etsy. For example, I haven't been able to find another place to purchase this specialized martial arts equipment: https://www.etsy.com/listing/175827423/

So Steam and Etsy themselves trend toward some amount of centralization, but in the case of Stream for example you have Playstation, Microsoft's platform, Stadia (soon to be cancelled I'm sure), Switch, Epic game store, iOS, and others. They aren't all exactly 1-1 comparable but I think that's ok. Frankly, you can get games from a lot of sources. You might say you can't get an indy title from one of these sources that you can on Steam, but you can't buy Halo on Playstation either - that doesn't make things centralized. It's a very competitive market.

In the case of Etsy I think you're a little more right, but there's no reason that has to continue to be that way.

Steam and Etsy are actually two companies that, if I were unable to use them starting tomorrow, that would basically have zero impact on my life.

Whereas, although I do order from a variety of online retailers, going cold turkey on Amazon would be a fairly significant inconvenience for me--although some seem not to use them much.

But what about your gmail? You'll lose all access to your email

The antitrust laws prohibit conduct by a single firm that unreasonably restrains competition by creating or maintaining monopoly power. Most Section 2 claims involve the conduct of a firm with a leading market position, although Section 2 of the Sherman Act also bans attempts to monopolize and conspiracies to monopolize. As a first step, courts ask if the firm has "monopoly power" in any market. This requires in-depth study of the products sold by the leading firm, and any alternative products consumers may turn to if the firm attempted to raise prices. Then courts ask if that leading position was gained or maintained through improper conduct—that is, something other than merely having a better product, superior management or historic accident. Here courts evaluate the anticompetitive effects of the conduct and its procompetitive justifications.

"Market Power"

Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

What you may think has little relation to governing regulatory law.

If they want to purchase insurance on their package, that's their choice. On the flip side if they want to "self insure" by not doing so, and assuming that on average they would pay more for insurance than insurance would pay them, that's also their choice.

Either way I'm certainly not going to purchase insurance myself, paying extra money to mitigate their risk.

They even screwed up and shipped a cancelled order, I was on the other side of the world when I saw the e-mail and by the time they were satisfied I really was me their attempt to intercept the package failed. $500 worth of stuff sat on our front porch for 10 days and was still there when we got back. (We live in a low-crime area and our front porch makes it basically impossible to see a package from the street unless it's large. A porch pirate would have to come to within 10' of the door to see most things, they'll go elsewhere where they don't have to be so obvious.)

One of the early-on Prime benefits for me was fairly deterministic delivery. At a time when I ordered lot of physical books, CDs, and DVDs, the minimum amount for free shipping wasn't a big deal. But random order arrivals when I was traveling much of the time were.

Electronics I buy from either Best Buy or B&H Photo.

For non-electronic "Name Brand" items where counterfeit is likely, I'll go to Target.com, etc.

Or were you afraid of getting banned from Amazon?

I'm sure the shipper was who lost/stole the package. But my point is that you can't take your great support experience with Amazon buying $50 sheets and expect that you get the same experience when they lose something expensive. For expensive or specialist items, you can often get the item faster and cheaper going to a different retailer despite how all your experience buying cheap stuff on Amazon tells you otherwise.

In both cases bestbuy's free shipping could get the items to my house 1 day quicker than amazon so I went with them.

They basically just have the order sit around, sometimes with the tracking number already created and in the system but it takes 3 or 4 days before the shipment actually leaves their facilities. They basically have an incentive not to be fast now unlike when they started out and the fast an free shipping was one of their great selling points over other online retailers.

The only problem I've had over the past year or two was with a headset that didn't work properly. I returned it via a UPS will pick up the box and slap on a shipping label option. They never did. But there was eventually a tracking number in the system anyway. UPS basically shrugged and said that the computer says it was picked up. But the refund went through anyway. I assume Amazon decided that UPS had picked it up and lost it.

Somewhere around $1,000-ish seems to be the magic threshold where their rules change and you get lost in the management void.

Also, people new to a hobby won't know that B&H, or Thomann, or Sweetwater, etc, also have great customer support like Amazon.

You can’t call Amazon and ask them what equipment you need to accomplish a task. Among many other differences…

Was only trying to improve the info you offered a bit more.

Some examples:

Random camera: Amazon: 2000 €, any photo dealer: 1800 €

Random high-end lens: Amazon: 2500 €, photo dealer: 2000 €

Random microphone: Amazon: 275 €, A/V distributor: 220 €

Studio microphone: Amazon: <not authorized to sell>, A/V distributor: 600 €

And that's before considering that Amazon is probably going to ship more slowly (even on prime) than most other "pro" dealers, and that Amazon is probably going to throw a box in a more or less empty parcel, while someone at a proper dealer will actually bother to package the stuff correctly.

I decided to think on it for a day, and sure enough by the next day B&H had the same price. Pretty sure it was a manufacturer discount but in general I think they try to match prices.

This is not me shilling Walmart. I've been pleasantly surprised by it in the last year, and find it to be a real competitor to shopping at Amazon.

If you care a lot about the price, you already need to consider other shops, since Amazon isn't necessarily the cheapest anyway.

I have ordered one thing from Amazon in the past five years, where the manufacturer only sold to consumers through Amazon.

Same with steam (that takes a big money cut and their buggy launcher is awful)

Or you could just ask your local store to order it for you and you would have it in a week. It's not like this was an unusual situation.

Nowadays, I'm not going to pay full price to wait for a week either, but there are alternatives to Amazon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Book_Agreement

Once I had an order "delivered" without trace and Amazon asked my to check with neighbours first as, according to their records, the van has stopped at my house. On another occasion I knew that the van never came despite order again listed as "delivered" and they refunded instantly.

(not expensive items, though)

I had a similar issue to what you describe ordering a vintage item on Etsy and the tracking info provided was fake and delivered to a different address. That was a huge hassle to prove and get refunded for.

However, I buy all my new camera bodies and lenses direct from the manufacturer. I have found the price to be identical (or nearly so) to B&H, shipping to often be free and from time to time, without a local tax. If Nikon, Sigma, etc are selling as 'new' what are returns/refurbs then there is no hope in the system at all.

edit: grammar

In the 1980's, B&H was the queen of the "grey market". Now, I trust them to deliver authentic goods with legitimate warranties, and I'm profoundly suspicious of unnecessary transactions with Amazon.

Between this experience and my lack of trust in their supply chain, I now never buy anything expensive on amazon.

That said, how would you have expected this to go? I assume everybody is in agreement that this wasn't going to be sorted out the next day. I think you might be overestimating how smoothly this would go when dealing with another company, although obviously there would be exceptions to that.

Based on this, as you say, "rare" experience? That seems unwise when aiming for the best average outcome.

Also what would be a better alternative (provided you still want to shop and pay online)? I suspect that, while the rate of problematic experience might be slightly lower with smaller dealers, the average lost value for the customer is not (since there is no Amazon middleman that has any financial interest in keeping the customer around for future shopping, and hence their money is probably just lost when something goes wrong that the dealer is unable or unwilling to resolve)