Competition only works when barriers to entry are absent, small, or at least surmountable. “Disruption” is one way to circumvent that, but it isn’t magic, either.
On the other hand customer trust is also a great moat to protect you from being usurped, and no company will ever come to rue having too much consumer trust. Amazon is foolish to spend this consumer trust down for increased profits.
They don't even have to spend cash to price-dump. Wallyworld and the membership warehouses get cheap prices by dangling huge purchase orders in front of companies. "We can always go to your competitor" is the unspoken threat.
The playbook to disrupt this was made clear when AirBNB disrupted, or at least bit a good chunk out of, the hotel industry, which could have been described in very similar terms. And they didn't have to replicate any of their physical infrastructure to do it.
Shopify, BigCommerce, and similar players are already doing it to Amazon. I predict this trend will continue.
Maybe, just maybe, that isn't the best investment. The competitors could pause while Amazon is having its fit.
Moderation doesn't scale well, so hundreds of engineers don't go very far even if you put them all on moderation. Google doesn't like to put money on anything that can't be automated (even when it's the appropriate, like customer service), hence you see only ML filters that of course can't tell the difference.
Also, careful what you wish for. As we've seen, one man's moderation is another man's 1A violation. I'd much more prefer comments, downvotes and user defined filters to do the accountability, than a guaranteed-shitty DOA moderation/truth keeper team. I worry much more about YT's slow creep towards a fully auto-play, advertiser friendly TV equivalent.
Like… wtf. If an actual content creator uploads something they filmed in their own garage but there’s a sliver of a poster in the background with Mickey Mouse in it, it’s instantly flagged as a copyright violation.
Straight up reposting of 5 minutes of a movie pretending I be a new one? Fine, go ahead…
Meanwhile the one with 200 views gets their channel banned along with their Google account.
And if someone is a partner, how much money would they make just by the views? Let's exclude followers etc. Do they get something for just the views or do they have to have ads in the video?
I am generally interested in space related subjects, but my feed is constantly full of fake 'live' SpaceX and Elon Musk videos. These are just old SpaceX streams overlayed with crypto scams.
No matter how often I report these videos as misleading, the keep being recommended to me. At the beginning, reporting a video would make it disappear from my feed instantly, but now, even after reporting the video stays in my feed. My guess is that the report/view ratio of my account is probably so bad now that Youtube is no longer processing my reports as trustworthy.
Amazon are very good at making money. This is not a problem for them; it's an opportunity.
Before Amazon lose all their credibility they'll introduce something like "Amazon Assured" that sells customers a guaranteed real item. They'll charge sellers for the privilege of having the "assured" status on the product page, and make filtering by assured status something that's only accessible to Amazon Prime users.
Users will believe Amazon are doing this to protect them.
It sounds like you think this information should be priced in. I'm accustomed to that as well, since it has mostly been the commercial default for most of my life, but maybe unbundling it is worth a shot.
After all, "Consumer Reports" isn't free either, and caveat emptor has forever been the law of the market.
Is that true of Yelp? People I know still use it (I don't).
This is why this is not a problem for Amazon. Removing Amazon from my life would require substantially restructuring it and losing a lot more time procuring goods. Have I been burned a few times by shoddy goods? Yes, the alternative is spending time in stores or spending days waiting for packages. I can order something in the morning and have it delivered by the evening.
Yelp does serve as a sort of index of shops.
I've also done Del Mar (110 restaurants), Downtown SD (around 80 before I stopped) and 30th Street (maybe 35 or so?).
Oh, and I've been in a group for the last 10 years that goes out to eat at a new restaurant every couple months.
But it's widely accepted by the public. I can barely complete a sentence about it without people dismissing it.
At this rate, Amazon will be on its way to becoming Yelp -- untrusted, irrelevant, ultimately deserted.