And then return...

Got a dud? Quality not as expected? Ordered two by mistake? Size is not fitting? Take it to nearest post office, scan a qr code and hand it over. Done.

The other day I had to pack a product not bought from Amazon, then drive 25 minutes to a specific company's drop off point at some weird opening hours...

And that's after it took me to write manual email to get return label...the entire process took multiple weeks. And then a few more weeks until getting the refund.

At this point, I'm happy to pay 10% extra just to buy from Amazon.

I think you're slightly wrong. It's not prices, it's not logistics. Amazon dominates because they have the power & money to do the one single thing their competiton couldn't do without going out of business: No-questions-asked returns. 9 out of 10 people i ask this is the single reason they stay at Amazon.

The point the article makes is that the other online stores without access to Amazon's logistics aren't able to lower the price to make up for the inconvenience of using a normal shipping carrier because of an Amazon policy that bans sellers from offering an item for cheaper elsewhere. Amazon then charges sellers high fees that inflate the price of the item everywhere because of that policy.

My experience is that for non-FBA fulfilled products this doesn't hold at all.

Out of the last ~20 orders (I don't order that often from them, so that's probably spanning the whole last 12 months or more), more often than not, the predicted delivery date has been adjusted upwards, often by ~2 days, and a few times by ~a week.

This may be specific to Germany/Berlin, as from what I hear, they (/ their subcontractors) have troubles finding delivery drivers. Mixed with the growing counterfeit issues, and degrading product description / details for most products, Amazon doesn't seem to be in it's prime.

I stopped shopping at Amazon because their fulfillment started to suck. And I found they kept their dates 25/100.

Most recently I ordered 10 items on September 18th (I had a gift card). All prime eligible. The first arrived on sep 20, the 4 on sep 28, 5 on sep 28, and the last is scheduled for Friday.

I didn’t get any estimates until after purchase.

Amazon is no longer good. They are coasting on their customer base and are slowing ratcheting up prices and squeezing their costs (keeping all their gains).

For me it’s not the logistics, for me it’s the catalogue. They have so many ridiculously niche items that I want that would be impossible to buy from a local store

There is also an erosion of trust out there from scammer fatigue. Amazon let's you return things and you don't worry about your credit card being stolen or any of the stupid hassles of customer service these days.

I loath Amazon because of its UI.

In Poland we have Allegro and 99,9% of sellers basically ships on the same day (for orders before 15:00) and it arrives next day.

This basically applies to most of the online stores in Poland…

It's often still cheaper to buy from Amazon than buying from vendors, unless you scour the internet for the 30% off coupon and sign up for the newsletter for the 10% welcome bonus and then promptly report the newsletter as spam.

There should be some kind of federal law against needing to do this.

Buying direct from vendor should always be the cheapest, and at least 5% cheaper than Amazon (since everything on Amazon is automatically 5% off)

All of you talking about delivery times, cost, quality...I stopped shopping at Amazon when I heard people were peeing in bottles.

This. The amount of things I buy off Amazon has dropped quite a lot over the last 15-20 years. It used to be just about everything. Now it's an about once a month at most, and some of that are gifts for other people. I'm more willing to shop local now, and for everything else if I don't care a lot about when I get it I'll order it direct from a more appropriate vendor. And if I *really* don't care when I get it nor that it's fake, I'll use AliExpress. The only value Amazon has for me now is if I need an item on a predictable schedule and either I can't get it locally or its not worth my time to do so.

This is fine, good for Amazon for setting up an excellent logistics system and having a good return policy. The problem is that Amazon charges a lot for this service. If you don't need super fast shipping or a good return policy, or don't want to pay for Amazon's profit margin, you can't go anywhere else, because Amazon will restrict your sales if you charge less somewhere else.

Given that Amazon has 40% of the e-commerce market (I'm surprised it's not more actually), this is exactly what antitrust laws were designed to stop. Customers and vendors/manufacturers should be free to use the distribution channels that meet their needs of service and speed and price the best, but Amazon, through its big market share, is preventing that.

I'm not an Amazon Prime customer (shocking, I know), and I noticed that the shown delivery times are overly pessimistic, probably in order to make you opt for a Prime membership to get faster delivery. And then the package arrives at least one day earlier than the predicted delivery date.

I would say in the 2010s I shopped with Amazon for the logistics. In the 2020s their logistics have been crap. Packages are slow, frequently late, and rarely packaged well enough for the items to arrive undamaged without luck. The overwhelming amount of drop shipped trash means the site is useless, too.

I've gone back to local stores. They're less convenient, but the prices are better and the quality is MUCH better. Amazon is for commodity name brand stuff that's harder to find.

This differs WILDLY from country to country, and I assume city to city.

In Tokyo I would get my stuff from Amazon in a day or two, and accuracy of time of arrival was in hours.

In Stockholm, even amazon regularly delivers a week or two later than what it says. To the point I don't see the point buying from Amazon if I can find a reliable local alternative, because they'll both be late.

Huh, this is not my experience. I have had many packages from Amazon delayed recently. But I continue to use them because their selection is the best, so it makes sense to pay for Prime and then their shipping is on average faster and cheaper than any other option. I'm still satisfied with their service.

It makes sense because shipping is a volume game and they have the most volume. Their electric van is coming down my street twice a day whether I order or not. I wish I could ship my own packages with their shipping.

My biggest problem with Amazon these days is that you can't really know if what you're ordering is any good. Amazon should start their own product testing lab and do in house reviews. Or find some other way to get trusted reviews on their product pages.

A lot of that uncertainty has to do with USPS, who keeps getting slower, and their delivery date estimates are at this point often 2-3 days more optimistic than reality.

At least in my experience, UPS, Fedex, etc., tend to deliver when the estimate says.

> I almost don't even care about [shipping quickly]

I used to think there would be more opportunities for a patient consumer to get a discount, but perhaps what happens it that even a low-priority package takes up certain kinds of capacity once it leaves the vendor, and the delivery-system's incentive to maximize throughput leads to a kind of floor.

This is also why I usually order on Amazon. And the few times it doesn’t go through them the experience is often bad.

FedEx delivered my Steam Frame - first it said Friday delivery by 1pm. Then on Friday, it kept saying 1pm until about 3pm after which it updated to “by 8pm”. Then, after 8, it said the item never left their facility. The next day it said delivery would be Monday by 1pm. Actual delivery was Monday around 6pm.

Amazon _rarely_ has these issues. Especially for an expensive delivery like the above, I’d want to know when to expect it and possibly actually be at home to receive it.

My experience has been different, most retailers have accurate delivery times, unless you shop for things like furniture at C&B or WestElm for which they don’t keep local inventory. The only appeal Amazon has for me is the subscribe and save option and that you can find almost anything. For example I have a legacy air filtration system for which I cannot find replacement filters for, except on Amazon. For anything else there seems to be a better alternative today.

> When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does.

This depends heavily on where you live. I recall it used to be true, but in the three places I've spent significant time since the pandemic, all three have been less than 50% on time -- and less than 75% even giving an extra day. Because there's apparently no consequences for the last-mile delivery contractors to claim a package is delivered and not actually take it out of the truck until the next week, your local contractor determines your experience.

Amazon’s logistics are shit.

You’ll get something to show up on schedule but it’s frequently needs to be returned because of a problem on their end. No I don’t accept paying full price for a used product in subpar repair. No I don’t want a convincing fake.

The hassle of even 1 return in 20 isn’t worth faster delivery. Worse even if I just throw away their junk I still need to make a new order.

So then there is no reason for amazon to enforce industry wide price fixing as described in this article if its just about logistics.

I find a lot of the websites I shop at for certain things do "dropshipping". So the product page will say "X in stock!" or similar when in reality they're telling you the inventory at a shared warehouse or even the original manufacturer and once you actually submit your order, the product needs to be shipped first to the store you ordered from. Then they ship to you. But both legs can take an unknown amount of time.

Its also heavily region dependent. You can order something on Amazon.com at 10am and have it delivered by 5pm sometimes. When ordering from Amazon.de, it often takes a week just for the product to dispatch, then it takes another week for it to travel from their one warehouse in Poland to Helsinki.

For me it’s that I know if something is wrong with the shipping that Amazon will fix it for me.

The other month my wife ordered something inexpensive from Best Buy that got shipped. I am 90% certain the FedEx delivery person took it, impossible to find the easiest way to resolve the matter with BestBuy. Amazon while historically it was not always intuitive to find the chat feature. I could always get there and the problem was fixed.

> The thing is that Amazon ships & delivers on a reliable predicted schedule.

Maybe if you live close to a distribution center. The rare occasions I order from them anymore packages are routinely delayed by a week or more

Agree with others' sentiments: One usually does not need that fast shipping - or that reliable. There are, of course, exceptions - but not often enough that I'd pay for Prime membership. The few times I need it fast and it's not available in town, I simply pay Amazon for fast shipping.

20/100 times, it ships faster than it estimates

Yup, and you can even cancel items in the order before it has shipped!

Don’t think any other online stores offer that in Norway, really annoying

Yeah they're insanely good at logistics. They do same day deliveries here, I've had an idea for something and then got all the materials delivered 6 hours later. Nobody else can compete with that.

Also, there's the whole taking your money and completing the deal part. A whole bunch of sites seem to be breaking their own pages these days, leaving Amazon the sole remaining venue that still works.

I used to buy a lot on ebay.com, however they began to transition to a new page layout a few years ago, which made it too difficult to screen against scam-sellers(scamming was always a bit of an issue there). I briefly switched to walmart.com, however their site started giving a stupid error page for anything but the latest version of google chrome; this started about 2 years ago now.

anyway, here's a quick test i did(in firefox-esr) of a few sites which came to mind:

ebay: still has the dumb new design; certain js features appear broken(can't read customer reviews).

walmart: still get the "technical issues" error page.

newegg: main-page still loads mangled.

zoro: is it working again!? seems functional today... surprise!(i'll have to look into this more later; i did not test checkout)

thriftbooks: the search bar does not work.

so there it is. a bunch of sites i just simply can't shop on anymore. i'm surprised by zoro. will it work when i go to checkout?

Is that meant to say you are willing to ignore what Amazon is doing because their shipping is convenient?

Why is a purchase ever in such a hurry? Short delivery only really encurrage impulse purchases.

It arrives when it arrives.

If you almost don't care about how quick it is then why not take 2-10 days as 10 days?

I don't even care about shipment times at all as long as they are not completely unreasonable (e.g. multiple months for a supposedly in stock item). But I do care that the items do get to me or that thinks are resolved satisfactorily when that is not possible - without me having to hound the seller. Unfortunately that's still much more likely with Amazon than with some random internet shop - and that's even with Amazon's own enshittification of their service. With other sellers if the final courier fucks me over and wants me to pick up the package in dumbfuck nowhere district thats my problem because if I don't I might end up needing to threaten the seller with legal action before they resend/refund. With Amazon delivery issues are not my problem.

Probably correct analysis. It also means means that places they simply do not operate in (like Switzerland) they are completely meaningless.

Luckily local alternative(galaxus/digitec) is so much better, reviews and rating are trustable, each category has 1000s of items, services and communication stellar etc. that for me, that name symbolises just some not-so-cheap cloud I used to work with some years ago.

>The problem for everyone else is not simply that Amazon ships quickly, I almost don't even care about that. The thing is that Amazon ships & delivers on a reliable predicted schedule. When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does. I shop at specific competitors who can do similar (B&H, Sweetwater, etc).

I don’t care so much for specific delivery dates (although they are a plus). Most important are free returns. Hence, I prioritize shopping at Costco/Target/Walmart/Home Depot/Lowes/Old Navy/Amazon/etc.

I've been mostly happy with sweetwater - but they use USPS and I had a shipment (strings) take 2 weeks.

I've started to use more "mom and pop" stores - Philadelphia Luthery instead of Stew Mac (Stew Mac shipping is a joke, they want you to "subscribe" for $120 a year now, and places like "The Acoustic Shoppe" in Missouri for strings.

...and their customer care & return handling (which is basicly give me my money back) usually just works.