Because the margins are incredibly low (thanks, Walmart and Amazon?), which means you need capital-heavy hyperefficient warehousing/distribution to even compete, which means you need scale, which means there's little competition to make things better.
I think there'd be a lot of room for innovation if you turned Amazon/Walmart/Home Depot's logistics into their own companies, then allowed people to put whatever between that and the customer that they wanted to.
Which is essentially what Amazon does now... the only difference is they get to control that link and the revenue flow from it.
Segregating market functions forevermore would go a long way towards returning competition to marketplaces, imho. (E.g. logistics|retail, advertising|everything, etc.)
About Amazon, how fucking hard is it to use a fucking Naive Bayes classifier to just check if product title or description changes significantly? Hell, do it with Babbage or some other (not L)LM that's cheap as fuck. We already have clear leaks showing that they fuck over sellers with their price lockins, are you really hurting them more by dropping all those product reviews? You can also do way better by using an image classifier. I have a hard time believing a company that's bragging about how many robots it uses in its warehouses and replaces shitty support with even shittier LLMs is not going to actually result in higher profits by doing this. A few returns probably covers the cost because shipping is expensive (something they already don't get right. Haven't had 2 day prime delivered in 2 days since 2018...)
Also, anyone else find it weird that stores on Amazon don't list all their products? Like you can click on the store page from the product and then that product is nowhere to be found. Want to reduce scams? Force the listing of their entire product directory. I already can't rely on reviews, you just are making it harder to trust you.
I really do wish there was a halfway decent alternative to Amazon. Even Target and Walmart's online stores are more attractive, just limited. But this seems to be a generally sucky space and I don't understand why. Don't even get me started on NewEgg...
> Money is one hell of a drug because they are high.
They're so high they're even turning down higher profits. But I guess the issue is caring FAR more about short term profits (quarterly statements) than long term (hell, even a fucking year). I really don't get this metric hacking bullshit bureaucracy we've built (and its not just isolated to the US or the West).