Yes. I actually do accept this, and it's OK with me. Prime has saved me so much time -- and, arguably more valuable, attention -- obtaining objects I need. I literally do not care about the price difference between a $1 and a $5 roll of tape: as long as I don't need it sooner than 2 days from now, it's comin' on amazon, because the alternative is either searching online and actually thinking about it, or leaving my home -- and my time and attention are worth much more than that.
Exactly. My time has a value and it is most definitely worth more than $4. If I need something but I don't need it right now, Amazon is the answer.
Need a pack of sharpies? Yeah, they might be a few bucks cheaper at Walmart, but then I'd have to go to Walmart. That's an hour of my time wasted driving to the store, walking all over the place to get the sharpies, waiting in line for 15 minutes or struggling with the annoying self checkouts that never work right, then driving home. And I would probably end up getting a few other things that I didn't really need because I don't want to waste the trip.
With Amazon Prime? 30 seconds max and they arrive 2 or days later. And I'm on to my next task. I have too much going on to quibble over the difference of a few dollars when the time savings is so dramatic.
Now, for a major purchase of a few hundred or more, I'm going to spend some time deal hunting. But for everyday items Amazon is plenty sufficient and the prices are usually good enough.
I wonder where everyone lives where stopping into a store is so much time. Nowadays you can order and pay for things online. I walk into the store, give them my name, sign for something, and I'm done. Everyone here is like "I drive 30 minutes to the store...". I guess maybe HN has a lot of users who live in Alaska?
I'd suspect if people calculated their hourly rate on doing so they'd go right back to stores.
But that wasn't the point anyway. The point was that Amazon's high prices and sucky UI have opened the door to a competitor. I'm not sure it'll be Jet. I'm not even sure it'll be someone. I mean, they can just lower their prices and fix their sorting. But either way we end up better off.
If there were a site as convenient as Amazon, with comparable service, but lower prices and a better UI, wouldn't you use it? I think that's possible. I don't know if it will be Jet long-term. But it's possible, and that's interesting.
Yes, however, if you have other delivery services (e.g. Google Shopping Express) you should look around. Stuff on GSX can often be on sale (like in the retail stores), and even not on sale, stuff is often cheaper there. Inventory can vary, but I get it same-day or next, not 2 days later.
I use it so often that the yearly costs (like prime, about $100/y) is a drop in the bucket.
Amazon used to be less expensive, but in the past few years, I've noticed local stores are sometimes drastically cheaper on basic goods.
His complaint about returns is curious, not sure if it's country specific. I returned something to Amazon a couple of weeks ago in the UK due to some missing parts. I printed out the label, put it in the box and the next day a delivery guy showed up, slapped his own label on the outside and took it away. I had the refund applied 2 days later.
I've never returned anything to Amazon before so was surprised at how well it worked.
The bulk of his complaint about returning is the process that you went through as well (print label, put in box).
Amazon has legitimate deficiencies ie. killing off local stores with pricing pressure, horrible ui, etc, but the article goes into the deep end, like the person wants everything to be done his way without having to do any work.
The last time I had to return something to Amazon, the refund was issued starting from the moment UPS scanned my box into their system. I had my money before Amazon even received my box.
There are complaints to be made, but the returns process is not one of them.
I'm also in the UK. I will willingly pay a premium at Amazon for tech products just because the returns process is so painless relative to other online retailers.
I think I would probably prefer a web designed in part by a blind or deafblind person.
Less visual clutter or cute CSS or JS positioning tricks, for one. If you think hijacking the scroll bar is bad, or hate sites that present a blank page if scripts are off, imagine how you might feel about incomprehensible gibberish spewing from your screen reader.
This really just seems like the author is searching for things to gripe about. Has he tried buying most things in a major store?
His points about Amazon's UI are also missing me. The UI seems perfectly adequate and friendly - which is not to say it's the best UI/UX experience ever, but that is never the only business requirement.
Have you tried shopping at B&H, for example? I have a much easier time finding things there. Newegg is also pretty decent. I get frustrated by Amazon's UI fairly often, by comparison.
Yeah, except Amazon is no longer the "everything" store. Since their spat with Google and Apple over video streaming, many official Apple and Google products have been pulled from Amazon (I don't know if this was Apple/Google's doing or Amazon's).
Amazon is trying to be a merchant and a product developer at the same time. That's not usually a marriage that ends well for either side: the product developers will overestimate what the merchant side can do (leading to inventory problems that just get pushed off to the merchant side), and the merchants are pressured into stepping on supplier relationships. I can understand with commodity items like AmazonBasics where they basically just find the best item in a category on Alibaba, order a lot and slap an Amazon logo on it, but their actual products like the Fire and Fire TV tread dangerously close to a lot of the other merchandise they sell.
This is the biggest load of entitled BS that I've read in a long time. Wow, OP has to take out tape and actually tape up the return box? Would he prefer that Amazon send someone out to his house to pick up the item and pack/ship it on their behalf, obviously for free otherwise he would be whining that he had to pay for the service.
He sounds like he would complain about having to WAIT IN LINE if he had to return the item at a physical store. What a load of crock.
Yes, Amazon's prices aren't the lowest for many things. They never say they are. Prices at Home Depot are often much, much lower for many home items, and you definitely have to do comparison shopping. Which means continuing to sit down, and move your mouse and clicking and typing. Not exactly coal mining and not exactly driving around from store to store like how we did 20 years ago.
But for me, the combination of free, fast, reliable shipping and a decent price is enough to get me buying stuff almost 3 times a week from Amazon.
Amazon.com is just ruined by third party sellers. Hard to find anything throughout the mess, and the sellers do things like inflate their sales to push them up the popularity rankings (now called "featured" rankings, so Amazon can inject paid adverts). I often just search for things, pick the department, then select "Only sold by Amazon.com" to escape the nonsense.
I'd happily use another site, but who? Target.com and Walmart.com are both worse sites with odd offline customer service (and meh shipping policies). NewEgg used to have better search/sort but also got third party seller ruined (plus return issues). I hear a few peeps about this Jet.com site, but they've extremely new and have had some issues so far.
I want a site with Amazon's amazing customer services, Amazon's shipping polices, but with a better site design. If they're going to do filtering in the search results then having them actually work correctly would be appreciated (they often don't on Amazon).
My experience with Jet.com has so far been great. I started using it maybe a month ago (right after they ditched membership fees).
Their sorting actually works. Their prices are comparable to big box stores. Their shipping is fast and free (with a minimum order, of course). It's what Amazon used to be before it started kinda sucking.
> The UI on everything Amazon does looks like it was designed by Helen Keller.
Amazon's UI, in my opinion, is a case study in heavily politicized UI design. There are too many parties involved. They all want more screen real estate. They all think their widget is already the key to Amazon's sales, and if not, they think that if they just had a bit more screen real estate that they would increase sales 10X. Because of the magnitude of the involvement and the stakes at hand, proposing a major overhaul would literally create hundreds if not thousands of internal enemies, ready to do anything and everything to take you out.
As a result, we get Times Square with a cohesive font and color scheme.
From the "I can't quit you, therefore we can't quit you" department.
I find these love-hate posts interesting.
This is the halfhearted rant of an Amazon junkie. Here is someone who uses Amazon so much that he keeps spare Amazon boxes in his attic. Someone who returns items to Amazon so often, that the inconvenience of plugging his laptop into his printer drove him to buy a new printer (from Amazon, one may assume). Someone who loves Amazon so deeply, that he cannot refrain from praising it---and indeed exonerating it---even as he publicly whines about it.
I find these posts interesting because, although the author is a rather extreme example, it seems to me that this love-hate bondage is quite mainstream, not being limited to Amazon or technophiles. Never mind the first-world indignation at Amazon's failure to meet the author's admittedly unwarranted expectations. The emotion driving this is an ethical conflict: my heart is saying go, but my head is saying stay, or vice versa. Many people (in my estimation) have similarly mixed feelings about Facebook, Apple, and Google, at variously increasing rates.
This conflict is born of dependency. Your negative feelings about something you depend on (pain, shame, frustration, disappointment), strong as they may grow, are never strong enough to overcome your sense of need, along with whatever dopamine hit you get from using it. Despite being old enough to remember a world without Amazon, the OP takes for granted that someone has to do Amazon's job: if not Amazon, then some hard-to-imagine competitor. But the OP will never leave Amazon---not for another Amazon, anyway. He has love enough for both.
So yeah, this is about the author's personal struggle with the mere idea of freedom from Amazon. But it's just as well that the title says "we've all just come to accept it."
I would love to hear someone explain why their sorting fuction is so terrible. Amazon is the only eCommerce site I've ever used that is unable to properly sort items by price. Why is that?
Amazon needs to quit filling their product database with absolute garbage and show that they actually care about the customer experience. In trying to sell absolutely everything they've made it harder to find what you're looking for.
Yesterday I was shopping for an electrical box cover. The first result I clicked on was categorized as a musical instrument (specifically, a timbale). The second one I clicked on was categorized as a pair of pliers (specifically, snap-ring pliers).
Sure, customers could misplace a few things in a physical store – but Amazon has complete control here, and they're showing us they just don't give a shit.
I love the checkout and shipping experience on Amazon. The amount of reviews is great (although many reviewers are clearly morons or just fake – that sucks too). But everything leading up to making the purchase is terrible.
I totally agree with the search problems. Even a very specific search with a 'sort by price' will include thousands of completely unrelated, miscategorised items. Their product database is junk.
Conspiracy theory: Amazon's sorting is intentionally bad so that you have to look through other items you might purchase, much like grocery stores organize so that you have to work your way through them.
I don't actually believe that, but I do find myself thinking of other things I've needed/wanted when browsing Amazon.
They let you set Amazon price watches. The browser/email interface works really well, with almost no mental overhead, and can save you significant money on items with volatile prices that you don't need immediately. I use it for collecting reference textbook, which I get at about 20% of the price if I bought them at a fixed time. (I'm not affiliated with them or anything, I just like it.)
He completely nailed the problem I've had with his description of looking for an iPad. If I know exactly what I want already (e.g., a book by title, or an electronic device by model number), it's usually easy. (In that case, though, I usually found what I wanted from some other source, and I purchase it there.) If I want to actually shop -- that is, survey several models of the same broad kind of item, there are quite often far too many to sift through, with few useful tools for narrowing it down. Even when I know exactly what I want, there's usually no way to filter for it.
Brick-and-mortar stores don't exactly solve this problem -- they just have far fewer choices, and you're relying on something like curation (based on expected sales). It's not always great, but it's generally preferable.
I have contacted Amazon several times to inform them about their Javascript that loads images from related/sponsored products. It causes Firefox to lock up and freeze with every image request because they are doing something that is out of the ordinary. I always tell them I would be glad to work with one of their teams to figure out the issue, but it just goes into some bin on their end to be forgotten about.
Basically just accept it and deal with it taking twenty seconds per page load before the web browser is usable again.
My wife and I moved all of our non-grocery shopping to Amazon 2 years ago. With the Barclay's "Sallie Mae Rewards" card you earn 5% cashback on Amazon purchases. This, stacked with their subscribe and save, has saved us money (that we can see in Mint) but also immeasurable time. We have our virtual quartermaster keeping us stocked and I couldn't be happier that my wife never asks me to stop at Target anymore.
Agreed. I think it's mostly the publishers fault but it's still annoying.
BTW, most libraries have a digital lending thing now where you can get a kindle book for free for a month or so. (And presumably renew it after that.)
And my local library's digital catalog can also find books that they don't actually have and let me click a "recommend purchase" button. Last time I clicked it, I got an email a few days later that the book was now available.
Amazon may have been cheap but now it's convenient.
Of course I would prefer that Amazon is as competitive as possible. However, as mentioned by others, the time savings of going to a store vs. shopping online justifies a little extra cost to me. Amazon solves a few other problems too:
* Security: The more online stores I use, the higher my risk of identify theft. Amazon isn't perfect, but they both have more resources and more incentive (higher stakes) to protect my information than small online retailers. One tradeoff that must be balanced is that Amazon knows more about me.
Note that if Bitcoin were more widely accepted, and retailers collected less personal information, the security offered by Amazon would be less important.
* Selection: Amazon doesn't have every product available, but it does have more selection than most retail stores. I tend to look for high value (high quality to cost ratio) products because I want things that work well and last long. It's often difficult or impossible to find the same selection at local stores.
[+] [-] lincolnq|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peckrob|10 years ago|reply
Need a pack of sharpies? Yeah, they might be a few bucks cheaper at Walmart, but then I'd have to go to Walmart. That's an hour of my time wasted driving to the store, walking all over the place to get the sharpies, waiting in line for 15 minutes or struggling with the annoying self checkouts that never work right, then driving home. And I would probably end up getting a few other things that I didn't really need because I don't want to waste the trip.
With Amazon Prime? 30 seconds max and they arrive 2 or days later. And I'm on to my next task. I have too much going on to quibble over the difference of a few dollars when the time savings is so dramatic.
Now, for a major purchase of a few hundred or more, I'm going to spend some time deal hunting. But for everyday items Amazon is plenty sufficient and the prices are usually good enough.
[+] [-] jessriedel|10 years ago|reply
Still, the world would be better with a viable Amazon competitor, especially with tools that would let you search both simultaneously.
[+] [-] mattmaroon|10 years ago|reply
I'd suspect if people calculated their hourly rate on doing so they'd go right back to stores.
But that wasn't the point anyway. The point was that Amazon's high prices and sucky UI have opened the door to a competitor. I'm not sure it'll be Jet. I'm not even sure it'll be someone. I mean, they can just lower their prices and fix their sorting. But either way we end up better off.
If there were a site as convenient as Amazon, with comparable service, but lower prices and a better UI, wouldn't you use it? I think that's possible. I don't know if it will be Jet long-term. But it's possible, and that's interesting.
[+] [-] r00fus|10 years ago|reply
I use it so often that the yearly costs (like prime, about $100/y) is a drop in the bucket.
Amazon used to be less expensive, but in the past few years, I've noticed local stores are sometimes drastically cheaper on basic goods.
[+] [-] hockeybias|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lmorris84|10 years ago|reply
I've never returned anything to Amazon before so was surprised at how well it worked.
[+] [-] barkingcat|10 years ago|reply
Amazon has legitimate deficiencies ie. killing off local stores with pricing pressure, horrible ui, etc, but the article goes into the deep end, like the person wants everything to be done his way without having to do any work.
[+] [-] brewdad|10 years ago|reply
There are complaints to be made, but the returns process is not one of them.
[+] [-] gabemart|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r00fus|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Stratoscope|10 years ago|reply
Ugh. That is just nasty.
If you are ever tempted to write something like that, don't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller
[+] [-] logfromblammo|10 years ago|reply
Less visual clutter or cute CSS or JS positioning tricks, for one. If you think hijacking the scroll bar is bad, or hate sites that present a blank page if scripts are off, imagine how you might feel about incomprehensible gibberish spewing from your screen reader.
[+] [-] carlmcqueen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dark12222000|10 years ago|reply
His points about Amazon's UI are also missing me. The UI seems perfectly adequate and friendly - which is not to say it's the best UI/UX experience ever, but that is never the only business requirement.
[+] [-] klodolph|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exelius|10 years ago|reply
Amazon is trying to be a merchant and a product developer at the same time. That's not usually a marriage that ends well for either side: the product developers will overestimate what the merchant side can do (leading to inventory problems that just get pushed off to the merchant side), and the merchants are pressured into stepping on supplier relationships. I can understand with commodity items like AmazonBasics where they basically just find the best item in a category on Alibaba, order a lot and slap an Amazon logo on it, but their actual products like the Fire and Fire TV tread dangerously close to a lot of the other merchandise they sell.
[+] [-] steven2012|10 years ago|reply
He sounds like he would complain about having to WAIT IN LINE if he had to return the item at a physical store. What a load of crock.
Yes, Amazon's prices aren't the lowest for many things. They never say they are. Prices at Home Depot are often much, much lower for many home items, and you definitely have to do comparison shopping. Which means continuing to sit down, and move your mouse and clicking and typing. Not exactly coal mining and not exactly driving around from store to store like how we did 20 years ago.
But for me, the combination of free, fast, reliable shipping and a decent price is enough to get me buying stuff almost 3 times a week from Amazon.
[+] [-] Someone1234|10 years ago|reply
I'd happily use another site, but who? Target.com and Walmart.com are both worse sites with odd offline customer service (and meh shipping policies). NewEgg used to have better search/sort but also got third party seller ruined (plus return issues). I hear a few peeps about this Jet.com site, but they've extremely new and have had some issues so far.
I want a site with Amazon's amazing customer services, Amazon's shipping polices, but with a better site design. If they're going to do filtering in the search results then having them actually work correctly would be appreciated (they often don't on Amazon).
[+] [-] mattmaroon|10 years ago|reply
Their sorting actually works. Their prices are comparable to big box stores. Their shipping is fast and free (with a minimum order, of course). It's what Amazon used to be before it started kinda sucking.
[+] [-] saosebastiao|10 years ago|reply
Amazon's UI, in my opinion, is a case study in heavily politicized UI design. There are too many parties involved. They all want more screen real estate. They all think their widget is already the key to Amazon's sales, and if not, they think that if they just had a bit more screen real estate that they would increase sales 10X. Because of the magnitude of the involvement and the stakes at hand, proposing a major overhaul would literally create hundreds if not thousands of internal enemies, ready to do anything and everything to take you out.
As a result, we get Times Square with a cohesive font and color scheme.
[+] [-] gavinpc|10 years ago|reply
I find these love-hate posts interesting.
This is the halfhearted rant of an Amazon junkie. Here is someone who uses Amazon so much that he keeps spare Amazon boxes in his attic. Someone who returns items to Amazon so often, that the inconvenience of plugging his laptop into his printer drove him to buy a new printer (from Amazon, one may assume). Someone who loves Amazon so deeply, that he cannot refrain from praising it---and indeed exonerating it---even as he publicly whines about it.
I find these posts interesting because, although the author is a rather extreme example, it seems to me that this love-hate bondage is quite mainstream, not being limited to Amazon or technophiles. Never mind the first-world indignation at Amazon's failure to meet the author's admittedly unwarranted expectations. The emotion driving this is an ethical conflict: my heart is saying go, but my head is saying stay, or vice versa. Many people (in my estimation) have similarly mixed feelings about Facebook, Apple, and Google, at variously increasing rates.
This conflict is born of dependency. Your negative feelings about something you depend on (pain, shame, frustration, disappointment), strong as they may grow, are never strong enough to overcome your sense of need, along with whatever dopamine hit you get from using it. Despite being old enough to remember a world without Amazon, the OP takes for granted that someone has to do Amazon's job: if not Amazon, then some hard-to-imagine competitor. But the OP will never leave Amazon---not for another Amazon, anyway. He has love enough for both.
So yeah, this is about the author's personal struggle with the mere idea of freedom from Amazon. But it's just as well that the title says "we've all just come to accept it."
[+] [-] rabidonrails|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exogen|10 years ago|reply
Yesterday I was shopping for an electrical box cover. The first result I clicked on was categorized as a musical instrument (specifically, a timbale). The second one I clicked on was categorized as a pair of pliers (specifically, snap-ring pliers).
Sure, customers could misplace a few things in a physical store – but Amazon has complete control here, and they're showing us they just don't give a shit.
I love the checkout and shipping experience on Amazon. The amount of reviews is great (although many reviewers are clearly morons or just fake – that sucks too). But everything leading up to making the purchase is terrible.
[+] [-] joosters|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gjreda|10 years ago|reply
I don't actually believe that, but I do find myself thinking of other things I've needed/wanted when browsing Amazon.
[+] [-] themetrician|10 years ago|reply
Do you know what "conspiracy" means? Do you think a "conspiracy" can be achieved by fewer than two different parties?
[+] [-] jessriedel|10 years ago|reply
http://camelcamelcamel.com/
They let you set Amazon price watches. The browser/email interface works really well, with almost no mental overhead, and can save you significant money on items with volatile prices that you don't need immediately. I use it for collecting reference textbook, which I get at about 20% of the price if I bought them at a fixed time. (I'm not affiliated with them or anything, I just like it.)
[+] [-] dap|10 years ago|reply
Brick-and-mortar stores don't exactly solve this problem -- they just have far fewer choices, and you're relying on something like curation (based on expected sales). It's not always great, but it's generally preferable.
[+] [-] Washuu|10 years ago|reply
Basically just accept it and deal with it taking twenty seconds per page load before the web browser is usable again.
[+] [-] nulltype|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] encoderer|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xenihn|10 years ago|reply
Next best thing I found for my shopping habits was the Citibank one with 2% flat on everything
[+] [-] Alex3917|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lujim|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nfriedly|10 years ago|reply
BTW, most libraries have a digital lending thing now where you can get a kindle book for free for a month or so. (And presumably renew it after that.)
And my local library's digital catalog can also find books that they don't actually have and let me click a "recommend purchase" button. Last time I clicked it, I got an email a few days later that the book was now available.
[+] [-] dwg|10 years ago|reply
Of course I would prefer that Amazon is as competitive as possible. However, as mentioned by others, the time savings of going to a store vs. shopping online justifies a little extra cost to me. Amazon solves a few other problems too:
* Security: The more online stores I use, the higher my risk of identify theft. Amazon isn't perfect, but they both have more resources and more incentive (higher stakes) to protect my information than small online retailers. One tradeoff that must be balanced is that Amazon knows more about me.
Note that if Bitcoin were more widely accepted, and retailers collected less personal information, the security offered by Amazon would be less important.
* Selection: Amazon doesn't have every product available, but it does have more selection than most retail stores. I tend to look for high value (high quality to cost ratio) products because I want things that work well and last long. It's often difficult or impossible to find the same selection at local stores.