- They have exceptionally high customer satisfaction. Routinely ranked among the best.
- They have great inventory management and warehousing, delivering stellar shipping times (assisting their customer happiness numbers).
- AWS is arguably the best overall cloud service. Google and Microsoft - tech giants bar none - are still struggling to catch up to where AWS was years ago.
- Their prices are extremely competitive across the board, with even the king of cheap Walmart.
- The Kindle reader service is the best, there really isn't even a close second these days. The Nook is being buried.
- I pay more fees to Amazon to sell a product and take on more losses than other online marketplaces.
- I had to quit Amazon S3 due to glitches hosting and streaming simple mp3 files. After days of troubleshooting, I just moved my files over to another service and all my problems went away.
- Crappy video streaming. I stopped buying episodes and movies from them and just bought them on YouTube where the streaming and quality was much better, at the same price.
- "AWS is arguably the best overall cloud service." Absolute Nonsense. But it's good to see their marketing efforts paid off. They offered good deals to startups which made them popular with Silicon Valley / Tech Crunch types. Every few months here on HN we get an "AWS vs Rackspace vs Other competitor" article. Amazon is NOT the best when it comes to price nor value.
- The user experience is terrible, the control panel even worse. The Seller Control Panel behaves like it's from 1997.
Not to mention:
- The slave-like conditions in their warehouses that keeps those prices low which so many people have blogged about.
Bezos is smart. But calling Amazon a master of something just because of their throughput quanity seems uncalled for. They're a giant company that was the first to make such a giant land grab in marketplaces & they use their weight to get to high places, not their "mastery".
I normally just take my losses and refund asap in these situations, but I was given no chance because the customer filed it right away.
Amazon banned my account within an hour of the claim. I thought it was a mistake and tried to contact seller support. Little did I know that there is no support. There was a maze of automated responses..and then a permanent ban. I can't signup to any Amazon services to this day.
I'm just shocked that Amazon can get away with taking as much as 16% from a seller..and then offer almost no support.
Even worse is the fact that you can build a business for years on Amazon..with little to show for it. You don't get any contact info. When your account is banned, your business is done. It's too much power to put in the hands of a company that has no respect for its sellers.