This article explains why Amazon sucks so much and I thought it was an interesting read: https://doctorow.medium.com/how-monopoly-enshittified-amazon-83f42a585c3c

Some highlights for people who find it too long to read:

Most of us have Amazon Prime. Seriously — 82% of American households! Prime users only shop on Amazon. Seriously. More than 90% of Prime members start their search on Amazon, and if they find what they’re looking for, they stop there, too. If you are a seller, you have to be on Amazon, otherwise no one will find your stuff and that means they won’t buy it.

(…) One of the unfavorable terms Amazon forces on sellers is “most favored nation” status (MFN), which means that Amazon sellers have to offer their lowest price on Amazon — they can’t sell more cheaply anywhere else.

Then Amazon hits sellers with fees. Lots of fees:

-Fees to be listed on Prime (without which, your search result is buried at the bottom of an endless scroll):

-Fees for Amazon warehouse fulfillment (without which, your search result is buried at the bottom of an endless scroll)

-And finally, there’s payola — the “ads” you have to buy to outcompete the other people who are buying ads to outcompete you.

All told, these fees add up to 45% of the price you pay Amazon — sometimes more. (…) But everyone has to sell on Amazon, and Amazon takes their 45% cut, which means that all these sellers have to raise prices. And, thanks to MFN, the sellers then have to charge the same price at Walmart, Target, and your local mom-and-pop shop.

(…) Those Amazon own-brand products? They didn’t come out of a vacuum. Amazon monitors its own sellers’ performance, and creams off the best of them, cloning them and then putting its knockoffs above of the original product in search results (Bezos lied to Congress about this, then admitted it was true).

Amazon .fr is the 5th largest webshop in Belgium, after Bol, CoolBlue, Zalando and Apple. (source) Please, let's keep it that way. We don't want Amazon to get more influential.

by Kikkervelf

4 comments

  1. What I don’t understand is how a billion dollar company like Amazon has such a bad UI. Even if you wanted to buy something their webshop is impossible to navigate with an awful search engine, horrible filters and swamped with unrelated promoted scams.
    I happily pay more to buy something elsewhere like on Coolblue cause it’s just a way more pleasant experience.

  2. In my opinion the main focus is to take Shein and Temu out. Those are a real danger for personal data and a lot of the products they sell aren’t even CE conform.

  3. One of the things that really shocked me (in a good way) when I first moved here was how busy high streets and markets still are here, and I do think a part of that is due to amazon not being that big a deal here. 

  4. Amazon is a good bookstore. That’s pretty much the only reason I occasionally use it.

    For pretty much everything else there are better alternatives, no?
    Like cheap crap is cheaper on the usual Chinese websites.
    Expensive crap is cheaper and better on the websites of the original manufacturers,…

    And one-day delivery, I never was interested and probably never will.

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