alt Hacker News> Amazon's only core product that they care about now is their stock price.
"Only" here is incorrect. I posit every public company's primary concern is stock price. But certain behaviors and values align with driving that stock price up and for Amazon it's Customer Obsession. And they are not obsessed with it because they love you, it's because they love your repeat business. But that obsession means your happiness and their stock price are aligned, for now.
I pushed Purchase on Amazon one day and was opening the package 36 minutes later. I can barely drive down to a gas station, get a coke and come back in that time. But I wanted a particular, random item one morning and was setting it up within the hour without leaving my seat. Ebay and Walmart and Local shop can't do that.
I support leaving out of principle, that's laudable. But it won't be because they aren't good at delivering CX.
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Getting something 36 minutes after ordering it is a nice surprise and great customer experience. I’m usually happy with a day or two.
After spending close to 6 months and countless phone calls trying to get a refund processed the bad experience is outweighing the good for me.
The entire experience on the unhappy path is so obnoxiously dreadful i don’t purchase anything on Amazon over an amount I’d be fine just losing. Even though 99% of my orders have been absolutely fine.
The fact is that Amazon has at least two customers here: you, the user trying to find an item to buy, and advertisers, likely trying to convince you to buy a lower quality product. Who wins? I'm guessing the advertiser. They are far more likely to have a sales contact, anyway.
It's not very customer obsessed when their email that they send me doesn't even have which items I've ordered.
> And they are not obsessed with it because they love you, it's because they love your repeat business. But that obsession means your happiness and their stock price are aligned, for now.
But they're not maximizing repeat customers, they're maximizing repeat customers multiplied by product fees. (roughly)
They would prefer 100M customers paying $4 a product over 250M customers paying $1 a product.
They keep driving up product fees more and more, reducing how happy the buying experience is.