How could a regular webshop possibly compete with a behemoth which has warehouses in literally every major city, which has its own dedicated fleet of delivery vehicles, and which has its own fleet of cargo planes? When you've got a single warehouse and have to rely on DHL/USPS/FedEx, you will never beat them on delivery time when Amazon is actually trying: Amazon can trivially offer same-day delivery and eat the cost until you go out of business.
And don't forget: Amazon has an even bigger margin. If they were to compete on price, they would easily win. But they aren't competing on price because they know they have a quasi-monopoly, so they can just enjoy the extra profit.
Everyone likes stuff showing up at their door reliably wherever they are, and this isn't possible unless you have a service with warehouses and dense customers ~everywhere, and this isn't possible unless enough people use that same service. So in one sense it's in everyone's interest to have an assurance contract where everyone says "I will use this service if you do." Then in that sense Amazon's price rule is building a mechanism to support such an assurance contract: you can't force people to sign such a contract, but you can prevent people from defecting to slightly lower prices outside of the "stuff just arrives fast" system.
In a system that was very good at collective action outside of markets, a cleaner solution in terms of consent and power might be to build an actual explicit assurance contract for an app-to-door-everything-delivered-fast service, get everyone to sign it, and make a public utility and/or separate dis-aggregated markets for the different levels of service provision, whatever they are (consumer facing app, supply, warehouse, delivery, etc.). But anyone who has ever even thought about doing anything like this will know that it's much easier said than done, and will appreciate the kludge Amazon and their investors pulled off, at least a little bit, the next time they buy a thing online.
Maybe the answer is just: use Amazon until technology (robotics e.g.) makes it easy to create something better? At this rate, we shouldn't have to wait too long?
[0] I had been fond of "Albany County Fasteners" but I've soured as they've gradually jacked up the prices while removing free shipping. I don't even like free shipping, but it is a way for ordering to be more convenient as it prevents me from wanting to sit on an order for a while to batch it up.
[1] as opposed to stocking up on an assortment
If I buy a handful of bolts from McMaster or BoltDepot, I'm paying like $10 to ship, on an order this is probably $10 in goods :(
So I'm basically always picking between Amazon and AliExpress.
Time frame it really depends - delivery dates a day or few days out are generally accurate. Most items they stock at a local distribution center, so I get them next day. Some things come from further warehouses of theirs and take a few more days. There are also third party vendor items that are all over the place for delivery time, but you know those by their estimated delivery time being more than a few days out, and saying ground shipping only. (They're slowly taking away "free shipping" from items that require LTL though, heh heh)
For fasteners specifically, their parametric search has gotten better. I'd have Digikey's interface everywhere if I could.
In the last year I've seen this other kind of consolidation where most of the brands that don't have an AMZN-hosted or fulfilled store are using shop.app (now shop.com!) from Shopify. I did a stint of investigating boutique perfumes [1] and it seems almost everyone in that business uses Shopify.
[1] you gotta try "Under the Lemon Trees"!
They don't get those margins because extremely few people are going to use other sites if they have to pay just as much.
And then for consumers it increasingly sucks because you can barely find anything below $5 despite the shipping supposedly being "free".
Sure their logistics are better but it’s functionally tying Amazon’s logistics to access to selling on Amazon. It’s not a fair burden to say “you must convince customers to buy inferior shipping at superior shipping prices in order to not use us.
Behavior which is often ruled anti-competitive and illegal.
https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/cases/dec_docs/40...
These kind of contracts are standard for all kinds of third party marketplaces. You don't have to sell through them if you don't agree with the contract.
When the price advantage is the size of the fee difference or smaller, that's fair and good for competition and I support legal restrictions on contract clauses that want to block it.
Demanding price parity is completely standard for all resellers and market places, pretty much on all scales and all around the world.
Of course you want more legal restrictions and regulations. That's the standard hacker response to anything that comes up, probably including if you want suger in your coffee or not.
But try to think about why Amazon would put such a thing in their contract. If they were just out to abuse any power dynamic, they would of course tell sellers that they have to put a more expensive price anywhere else. Price parity is fair for all parties involved. And if sellers think Amazon's fees are too high then they shouldn't use Amazon - which is what the great majority of product sellers have decided to.
Massive monopoly power. Some profit is better than none, even as Amazon works to make 'some' as small as possible.
> Demanding price parity is completely standard for all resellers and market places, pretty much on all scales and all around the world.
Price parity would be great if they were selling the product to Amazon, and Amazon was demanding that price be the same among all retailers. Because of the structure of the deal with this markup, we need to consider the numbers with and without the markup.
> the standard hacker response
Wha.
Also I want quality competition and I only want to regulate anti-competitive things.
> But try to think about why Amazon would put such a thing in their contract.
Because it benefits them.
> If they were just out to abuse any power dynamic, they would of course tell sellers that they have to put a more expensive price anywhere else.
That would get them more scrutiny and be too obviously unfair. Demanding the same price sounds fair until you look into the details.
> Price parity is fair for all parties involved.
Parity is fair when you properly include or exclude markups based on context.
> And if sellers think Amazon's fees are too high then they shouldn't use Amazon
And lose most of their sales? It's an abusive relationship because of the power Amazon has, and they structured these rules to limit the ways other companies can compete.