This was 100% true of me as well for a decade or more. But getting into the Google Shopping Express beta changed everything. Same day delivery (i.e., even faster than Prime), competitive prices, up-to-the-minute order and delivery tracking, and sharply dressed and exceptionally polite and courteous couriers, means that for a large portion of "just use Amazon" products I'm now going with Google instead. See http://google.com/shopping/express/about/.
Selection and availability are of course the caveats of the early Google tests (limited to just San Francisco and parts of the Bay Area for now), and I was skeptical at first, but boy is this a game changer if we can pull it off. I've averaged almost an order a day since we started.
Granted, Amazon's use of OnTrac in San Francisco for Prime is also a factor. I may not renew my Prime membership for the first time since it launched as a result of OnTrac's poor service here.
(Ob. disclosure: I've worked at both companies.)
I've resorted to having stuff delivered to a location where I know that OnTrac is less likely to be used. They do such a shoddy job of delivering on time and seem cheerfully incapable of reading delivery instructions.
OnTrac will sink Amazon Prime.
It's a pretty blatant case of acting against your customer's interests to save a buck, something Amazon has traditionally prided itself on not doing.
Googling I see it's some west coast shipping thing, for those curious.
The last thing I've recently bought at a retailer other than amazon felt like a hassle.
I decided to buy some glasses from "39 dollar glasses".com -- they offered overnight shipping, which is something I've gotten used to thanks to Amazon.
I've been sitting in my office all day waiting for them to get here, and they haven't, so I got on their website and talked to a person via chat. I found out that they ship 2nd air...but only after a 3-5 day order processing time.
To somebody used to shopping on amazon, that seems completely preposterous. That seems especially insane given that I paid almost $20 for the shipping.
Half the stuff I order on amazon I get delivered on the same day.
Going to some other retailer and finding out that my order won't get here until next week has turned from "normal for ordering things online" to "an awful experience".
--
Obviously amazon doesn't sell glasses, but my point is that unless somebody can offer at least the service level that amazon does, I won't shop with them for anything ever.
My impression is that when I buy glasses at lenscrafters, they're grinding lenses there, in house.
Are you saying that they're couriered around my city when I order them or something?
A big one is Newegg. Most things I'll search for on Amazon first (or sometimes Google if I suspect there might be review content somewhere else). But computer parts are always cleanest on Newegg, and it's not even close. Their selection is better, and their parametrized search is far more comprehensive.
Now, computer parts are a shrinking market, and Amazon isn't hurting because of this. But I think the broader point is that while Amazon does things really well, they don't do everything perfectly. And customers (like me) are fickle, and will happily kick them to the curb if something better comes along.
Basically Amazon, for all their power, are still selling what are essentially commoditized products. And the barrier to entry there is very low for a player that can actually compete on price or quality. Whether Google is such a player is an open question.
Put more simply, Amazon's warehouses are filled with knockoff RAM chips, memory cards, and other such hard-to-identify components. Amazon isn't doing this deliberately, but your odds of getting bad RAM, HDD, or flash memory is really quite high.
It's been a while since I worked there - when I was there there was a big problem with inventory mixing. Third party merchants selling on Amazon would routinely ship items to Amazon warehouses to take advantage of Amazon's fulfillment process (this is known as Fulfillment By Amazon), and a huge amount of gray market goods were able to get into warehouses this way. Amazon's own supply chain integrity is, by itself, actually pretty good.
For a long time Amazon allowed these third party-sourced items to mix freely with the legitimate items they purchased themselves, and if you ordered the item (regardless of which merchant you ordered from) you'd be drawing from this shared pool. It was frustrating, and I'm not sure if they've fixed it yet.
- I only shop on Amazon
- every general question(1) is answered on Wikipedia
- every programming question(1) is answered on StackOverflow
so a generalist search engine isn't as essential as it was when those category killers didn't exist.
(1): that I can think of