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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

20/100 times, it ships faster than it estimates

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

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

>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.

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.

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

It arrives when it arrives.