We’re in a race to the bottom. There’s no way a company selling legitimate products will be able to compete or grow a customer base in the AI future, because we’ll be swimming in garbage.
This assumes that the only ways people have to find companies are search engines and other mediums that are prone to AI takeover. If everyone starts to realize that most of the surface internet is garbage, they would start communicating with humans they know about which places are not garbage. It was possible to find good businesses to interact with before Google existed.
Obviously in a world where every online retailer is nearly useless, a guy who creates an online retailer that is not useless would immediately have anyone he personally tells about it as customers, and anyone they tell about it, and so on (since in this hypothetical, everyone is desperate for a good retailer).
And the few, lone, honest online retailers get early discovered by online scammers who turn that honest retailer inside out, destroy them financially, and then take over their URL. I've seen it happen, and it nearly happened to me but I shut down rather than spiral down, unable to wage war on so many fronts.
Even when you take a recommendation from yourself ... ie re-buy a product, it often seems that the company has been captured by VC and the brand has been used to make short term profits and it's no longer any better than whatever white label products you can find on AliExpress.
Sweet water is great - they even have a dedicated rep call you a little after your order arrives to make sure you’re happy with the product and that it’s just what you wanted.
Newegg is a shadow of its former self, but it is still possible to turn the 'sold my newegg' knob on relatively easily. It seems impossible to do that with Amazon. Walmart online you can do it but you'll have to watch it like a hawk as it gets aggressively disabled again.
I mean you get scammed maybe twice by a company, then buy somewhere else. You quickly realize that it is better spending 3-4 times the amount of money for something that will last 10 years than buying stuff that do not work or keep breaking after a few months/years.
I am too poor to be able to afford buying cheap stuff.
Most people buy the cheapest version because they don't have a reliable way of knowing if the more expensive items are actually higher quality. It's a "market for lemons" problem:
I'm already switching to buying in person, though in my case because of the delivery service usually redirecting to depots further away than the shops selling the same items.
Yeah, I'd rather go to target or something and choose from the 3 spatulas they have then spend any time trying to figure out which of the 1000 listings are good on amazon. It's just less work.
It's not less time, however. It's easier and cheaper to buy all of the top 5 spatulas on amazon (and throw 4 away) than to drive to a strip mall and find parking.
Lol, sure. Personally I don't like dealing with online returns and I dislike the idea of buying things just to immediately throw them in the garbage. I'm picking an item I plan to use regularly, I want to see it irl and know what I'm getting.
Also, I am not trying to hyper optimize my use of time, but rather I find the experience of huge selection, fake reviews mixed with sponsored listings to be very unpleasant. I have slightly more faith in quality control at a department store, or even a dedicated housewares store.
It takes me longer to put my shoes on and walk down a few flights of stairs to reach the main entrance of my apartment, than to get from that entrance (by foot) to the nearest place selling spatulas.
One of the depots used by DHL when they "can't find" my building (even though the place predates the formation of the Soviet Union, let alone its collapse) is about a mile away and I don't have a car. This is fine unless it rains, but it's not even conveniently on my way to anything interesting.
For the most part, I already mostly buy stuff in person. For physical goods, I cannot stand not being able to hold, touch, examine a thing before buying it. Or at least the floor model or the exhibited item.
I bought a VOIP phone from the media store recently. When I was there looking at them, and feeling them etc, I was thinking how there is no way I could have picked the right one from an online shop. I might have never known there was something better, I guess. But being able to hold them helped me pick one I thought I would like.
What Amazon is missing is buyers. Actual professional buyers who evaluate products and make determinations if products meet standards and deserves to be placed in front of customers.
Plenty of niche, premium, or physical stores out there. People might need to pay a little more for it, but they do exist. Not everyone buys everything from the same super stores.
Maybe Amazon brands will at least be predictable, but the non-Amazon brands on Amazon will be increasingly counterfeits and noise.
(A contributor to the current problem of eroding non-Amazon brands with counterfeits seems to be Amazon's commingling from different marketplace sellers of the "same ASIN". And the current mass-spam search DoS of random-name brands and near-identical products from overseas sellers is also a problem. Amazon can not only shield their own brands from both of those problems, but can also exercise more supply chain integrity control for its brands than is possible for the non-Amazon brands if Amazon doesn't cooperate.)
Yet I think Amazon brands are setup to eliminate competition due to their insider information in the market place. I wouldn’t put my money in them because they aren’t playing fairly in the market.
>I wouldn’t put my money in them because they aren’t playing fairly in the market.
They identify widely ordered products and source their own version to sell. Why is that a negative? Costco does the same. As long as they vet the quality (my experience with AmazonBasic products has been fine), seems like a win-win?
I really don't see how one follows the other without then in sequence, as the comment you replied to describes, value-based businesses emerge to fill the obvious gap and compete.
It’s the delivery. I can often get something inconsequential for net cheaper, faster from Amazon. Local stock is usually next day. And I can often get stuff internationally cheaper and faster through Amazon than the real retailer.
The delivery part of the service is really good when things go right.
Very difficult to get a hold of someone when they lose a package even when they explicitly tell you “contact us”.
But if you stick to inconsequential items, it’s great. I needed a few USBC cables and charging cables the other day and got them next day at half the price. I checked the local stores and none had what I was after.
I have gotten a fake product one time (public domain book, PoD instead of what I wanted and what apparently used to be under that URL) refunded, no questions asked, even got to keep the book (anyone in Germany interested in an HP Lovecraft decent quality hardcover PoD book?).
I realize that it’s apparently way worse in the US, but there supposedly are issues here as well, I just never encountered them (or the products are so well-faked that it’s a distinction without a difference).
Fast delivery, a lot of choices, both "Aliexpress but faster delivery for a price", but also EU products, and a customer service that does pretty much anything asked.
This might be why physical bookstores are making a comeback. Trustworthy curation is essential, and worth paying a premium for. This has always been the case, but maybe not fully appreciated.
There’s a big difference between limiting SKU count to simplify operations and products being curated to be “the best” and most trustworthy options.
Natural foods stores have much more stringent standards on things like artificial colors, animal treatment, and use of chemicals.
For example, Tide Original is banned in New York for having too much of a cancer-causing chemical. Costco sells it. Costco sells products with artificial colors linked to ADHD in children. Costco’s best organic eggs are visibly and nutritionally inferior to eggs from pasture-raised chickens.
The fact that Costco doesn’t sell low quality private label and discount brand items has more to do with customer demographic than trust and curation.
This is also the store that allows third-party companies’ representatives to harass customers about solar panels and DirecTV in the store. “Trustworthy.”
They’re really no different on “trust” than Walmart or Target, and I think people need to stop being a part of its retail cult and take it for what it is: a store with good prices on staple goods.
No one said Costco offers the very best product in any or all categories.
What they said is that Costco is upfront about what they're selling, rarely sells defective products, and offers a very generous return policy in the (rare) case you are dissatisfied with a purchase.
Those aren't that far off from Walmart or Target, because those are also generally reasonable retailers. I would say Costco offers better value on their products overall.
If you ask more of that from any retailer, good luck finding anyplace to purchase anything.
I think that's an ok workaround, but I don't want to go to physical bookstores, and I don't want physical books. As much as I do like the feel of a physical book, I much prefer the convenience and portability of a digital book.
And speaking of convenience, it would be a big shame if we had to go back to physical stores for non-trivial purchases because we can't trust anything online.
Many physical bookstores have web pages where they sell e-books as well. Find the store that serves what you want, instead of finding faults with the ones who don't and going with the huge sell-everything-store.
Or I can go with the huge sell-everything store because I'm perfectly fine with the service it provides. Not everyone is looking for some bespoke curated experience when buying a product.
In short, the store that serves what I want is usually the huge sell-everything store.
