My holiday shopping adventures and Amazon’s continued retail dominance

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From Kotke.org:

I did quite a bit of holiday shopping this year…went a bit nuts making up for some not-so-great efforts the past two years. The kids and I shopped for Toys for Tots (twice), I bought gifts for them from me and from Santa, I bought non-holiday stuff like clothes for myself, and I shopped virtually for the gift guide. I shopped every which way: small, locally, at big box stores, and online at 4-5 different retailers. My main takeaway from that experience? Amazon is miles and miles and miles ahead of everyone else. It is not even close.

Sure, Walmart had the drone in stock, but when I’d tried shopping with them earlier in the month, the product page threw a 404 error. I switched to Safari and was able to put the item into my cart, but then a form in the ordering flow wouldn’t work, so I had to get that item elsewhere. (When I did finally create an account while ordering the drone, Walmart thought my name was “Ashley”?!)

Target’s site was so slow that it was nearly unusable (like 30-40 seconds for a product page to start loading). But I persevered because they had an item I really wanted that no one else had in stock. I got an email two days before Xmas saying they were out of stock and couldn’t ship until Jan 4 at the earliest, but that if I still wanted the item, I would have to log in to my account to verify the new shipping date. I didn’t want the item later, so I did nothing. Guess what arrived on my doorstep last week?

. . . .

And Amazon? The site is always fast, I have never seen a 404’d product page, the URLs for their products haven’t changed in almost 20 years,
each product page was clearly marked with holiday shipping information, they showed the number of items in stock if they were running low, shipping was free (b/c I’m a Prime member), returns are often free, and the items arrived on time as promised. More than 20 years after the invention of online retailing, how is it that Amazon seems to be the only one that’s figured all this out?

Link to the rest at Kotke.org and thanks to JR for the tip.

18 thoughts on “My holiday shopping adventures and Amazon’s continued retail dominance”

  1. Even though this site has sometimes been accused as a shill for Amazon, I recommended the share for this article mostly because of that statement in the last paragraph that Amazon’s URLs remain good even after years of changes. Just an astonishing accomplishment for as large and diverse a site as Amazon. Speaks highly of their original planning.

    The article also talks about how difficult it will be to displace Amazon in its market. The most affordable way to do so is to start building with an AWS backend, but then you are paying Amazon and it can easily undercut your prices.

    Overall an interesting article for the PV readers.

    • The article also talks about how difficult it will be to displace Amazon in its market.

      Jack Ma disagrees. Bezos takes him very seriously.

      Riggio once thought it was very hard to displace B&N.

    • I honestly don’t know. If there were more interesting items about the legacy publishing industry, I would like use more of those than I do. There’s very little innovation in that business.

    • Common sense does not exist, or, if it does, it exists only in the negative; for example, “He lacks common sense.”

      If sense were common, everyone would have it; thus, A -> B. But they don’t; thus, ~B -> ~A.

      In my experience, people who use this phrase are really saying, “That’s not what I would have done.” In effect, “My judgment is better than yours.”

      Rather than say that common sense was lacking, I prefer to ask if the individual exercised good judgment before the fact. I mean, yeah, the Wright Brothers flew in December 1903, but their control system was a complicated and complex mess. That was their best judgment at that time. Took ’em 3 years to work out 3-axis control. They learned from their mistakes.

      I can’t always make the right decision, but I can make a decision and then make it right.

  2. True story.

    Our family Christmas present was a flat screen smart TV. Turns out it does not have bluetooth. I wanted to hook it up so the kids could watch a movie without bothering us. A popular item for this purpose is a bluetooth audio transmitter that plugs into the TV audio out and pairs with one or two bluetooth headphones (which we have.)

    I browsed Amazon and there were a number of different models, all carefully detailing their features. It is important to have A2DP compression to eliminate lag, and many explicitly mention that they support multiple headphone pairing. Each device had detailed reviews describing real-world experiences. Costs averaged around $30.

    But I sort of wanted it sooner, so while I was at Target I asked if they had any. They had one Google Chromecast Audio device for $50, but the package did not mention any of the above features, particularly multiple headphone pairing.

    I made a deliberate stop at Frys, a Silicon Valley institution, a huge building filled with computers and electronics. Like Ikea, it has it’s own restaurant. Someone led me to a shelf and showed me two items, the only two they had in stock. One was $60 and had no meaningful information on the box, and the other was $24, had obviously been opened and resealed more than once, and looked like it should have “as seen on TV” on it somewhere. I walked out of the store, past shelves of cheap toys muttering “what a dump.”

    At home I went to Amazon and ordered one of the better reviewed items for about $27. Then I went about the business of life, of which I have plenty, thank you very much. The item arrived 3 days later while I was sitting peacefully reading on my Kindle. It works perfectly, as detailed on the product page, and I am very happy.

    Small business owners know one bit of truth. The customers who keep you in business are not the ones that come in the door the first time, they are the ones that keep coming back. Bezos consistently says that the customer comes first, for good reason, and it shows.

  3. Nintendo’s newest video game console was put up for pre-ordering last night. As of this morning it is sold out on Amazon, but could still be bought on Walmart, Target and Best Buy at the time I looked (7 AM-ish EST; no clue where things stand at present). Since Nintendo has a long history of deliberately creating shortages to spur interest I’m kind of guessing there’s a lot of people who simply no longer shop anywhere else on-line but Amazon. And when the quota Nintendo allocated to Amazon ran out, these people didn’t look elsewhere.

  4. I’ve never worked for Bezos, but I have known a number of people who have worked for him over the years. My impression is that he is a hard manager in the sense that he knows what he wants and insists that he get it. He seems to give his people a lot of leeway, but no leeway at all when it comes to customer service. I would not be surprised that a 404 gets someone fired. That’s good! Too many places run their office like a cell block, but get all gushy when a prize yes-man screws up.

  5. My Amazon experience was (technically) worse than ever this year. They seems to be shipping a lot of orders by USPS and on three separate occasions over the holiday period. I got a notification from Amazon that my order would be delivered by 8PM (I get the texts).

    Then when the order didn’t show up, I checked Amazon’s page and got the lovely message “Your order is delayed, if you don’t receive it by [5 days from now] check back.” Thankfully, I didn’t actually need any of the items, but if I had, I would have been on the phone complaining to Amazon since I’m a Prime customer and I shouldn’t have to wait 5 days for anything even if they have to ship a duplicate. This USPS experiment of Amazon’s is really damaging the value of Prime.

    • This causes a lot of problems for me because USPS does not deliver to my house, but UPS/FedEx does. If anyone uses the awful UPS->USPS service, I never get it. Now I use the normally blank second address line to say “No USPS Delivery: Return to Sender”. If it was sent via the UPS->USPS service, it gets rejected right away.

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