Amazon reports its first unprofitable year since 2014

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/02/1153562994/amazon-reports-its-first-unprofitable-year-since-2014

133 189 3 years ago

No fear of recession. Keep up raising rates and wrecking the economy.

ceejayoz2• 3 years ago

The job market doesn't show much of a recession brewing. Unemployment rate fell, with 517,000 new jobs instead of the expected 187,000.

The real reason for Amazon's unprofitable year is in the article.

By far, the biggest culprit for Amazon's losses over the year was the company's hefty investment in the electric automaker Rivian whose value plummeted last year and ate into Amazon's bottom line.

PaulHoule12• 3 years ago

… and I think a lot of expansion that doesn’t make sense.

Wegmans supermarkets opened a new store a few years ago at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in reaction to that Whole Foods in Union Square with that dehumanizing cattle chute.

People in the cultural-industrial complex who grew up in NYC have been getting groceries at bodegas their whole life, it is easy to impress them with a grocery store that would get laughed at in Ohio. Wegmans had to move into that space as a matter of cultural self-defense.

Amazon just sent me an email pleading me to renew my Prime subscription, boasting about somebody, somewhere gets 1-day shipping for some item sometime but they are dead to me because 2-day shipping disappeared 2 years ago for me. No way am I going to pay for a subscription to get service that is worse than what I get from other retailed. (E.g. I ordered a game from GameStop on Saturday, it was postmarked an hour later.)

sharemywin• 3 years ago

They should split amazon services from retail and all the physical crap. I would even dump the ecommerce site from the marketplace

PaulHoule12• 3 years ago

Amazon’s investment in building out a delivery business is suicide.

The cost-effectiveness of a fast delivery network is related to the volume it moves. If there is always a full truck heading in the right direction packages don’t waste time and money sitting in warehouses. If every other retailer is helping UPS and FedEX fill their trucks, Flavor Flav will be singing “Amazon Prime is a joke in yo’ town”

Amazon is big but it is not big enough to be the best.

1970-01-01• 3 years ago

They are more or less done building the network. Right now they're converting to EVs. The article mentions this. When every other retailer is buying fuel to deliver those packages Amazon will be raking in the savings.

capableweb• 3 years ago

Maybe in the US they're done building it, but they are still expanding their logistics and delivery network in other countries.

darksaints• 3 years ago

UPS spends ~10x more on people than it spends on fuel. And Amazon seems to be doing far less per driver than other carriers. It’s nice that Amazon is saving money on fuel, but that isn’t going to save them… they have to figure out how to run a logistics company first.

JOnAgain• 3 years ago

Amazon logistics is bigger than Fedex, very close to UPS, and closing fast on USPS, as measured by number of packages delivered in the US. So, actually, they are big enough to be the best. Not saying they will be, but scale will not hold them back.

https://www.ajc.com/news/business/amazon-is-upss-biggest-cus...

https://www.axios.com/2022/05/24/amazon-shipping-fedex-ups

TrueGeek• 3 years ago

I don't know if it's just my area (Atlanta) but they are very bad at delivering. I've started moving away from Amazon because they keep losing my packages. I'm in an area that used to be same day delivery but now I often get the "We're sorry your package is late. If you don't get it in 3 days let us know and we'll give you a refund." And what's weird is they are the ones delivering it. So why can't they just try again? I ask customer service but they say they aren't allowed. I have wait three days, cancel the order, get a refund, and start all over.

A few times the order has been marked as delivered with a photo of what is clearly not my house and customer service didn't understand the problem. They refused to either re-deliver / refund because they had "proof" it was delivered. Only when I threatened to do a chargeback did they refund and then, once again, I had to start all over.

It's been weird shopping at other places because some of them take 4 to 5 days just to get an order out of the warehouse and then have awful return policies. It's a trade off for sure.

micahdeath• 3 years ago

Amazon appears to 'brute force' logistics. USPS, UPS & FedEX seem to be better at this. We can have 3 trucks in my small 12 house edition but the other guys only have 1 each. (That's why I call it brute force.)

I don't believe Amazon is a logistics company... or not a good one.

acdha2• 3 years ago

At least in cities I think they should be more worried about their treatment of workers and rejection of quality control. Nobody I know has any complaints about their delivery times but I know a number of people who won’t buy from them citing working conditions or a history of getting counterfeits or knockoffs. The economics of that distribution network are not going to be pretty if customers become less loyal.

PaulHoule12• 3 years ago

I know many people who like working at Amazon but I know there are many that don't.

As for the scamazon marketplace, that's a clear and present danger. Amazon's real strength relative to the Best Buys of the world is that is the "everything store" with a huge selection. The dark side of it is that the marketplace is much less trustworthy than most others (I'm sure there is some dark web site that sells drugs for Monero that is worse.)

I have corresponded w/ AMZN about product listings that are completely nonsensical, like they were written by GPT-0, and been told that they didn't want to hear any complaints about a listing unless I'd bought the item and been ripped off.

Now I like shopping, I like reading about products. I don't like sifting through word salad to find product listings. And the fact that AMZN just doesn't care (they say so!) is one more reason why it is the last place I shop for things instead of the first.

Contrast that to Ebay or Craiglist where the listings make sense (even if some people struggle to spell words like "cat" and "pig") and the sellers are overwhelmingly honest whether they are from the town next door or the far reaches of the "global village".

trompetenaccoun• 3 years ago

It's never that simple. These companies have highly trained staff who can do math, but there are other considerations than just cost effectiveness of the trucks.

It's a global company and I can't speak for every region but what I've seen in some places is that local infrastructure is lacking to the point that it seriously hinders the business. I.e. angry customers that stop ordering stuff because of repeated frustrations with the delivery companies. And even if UPS and FedEx were super reliable in the US (don't know if they are), it would still be risky to fully bet on them without at least controlling some of the market.

PaulHoule12• 3 years ago

That is a good point globally.

UPS, FedEx and the US Postal Service are highly reliable in the US. They used to get their trucks stuck in our driveway (nothing a farmer with a floor jack can't fix) but now they leave packages at the end of our driveway and we bring them in, which keeps the service reliable for the rest of our route.

The USPS used to be faster to send letters. What I miss most of all is that there used to be a slot in our town's post office for letters to the nearest city that would go directly there for cost-effective overnight delivery. I liked getting a letter to my bank, or the county clerk that way. Now they send all the mail to Rochester where it is photographed by some machine which provides better tracking but worse speed.

JohnFen7• 3 years ago

And even if UPS and FedEx were super reliable in the US (don't know if they are)

FedEx is problematic in my area. Just the other day, they reported that they delivered a package at my door, when they didn't. Because they reported it as delivered, the $100 I spent is just lost money.

I try hard to avoid having FedEx ship anything to me because this isn't the first time this has happened.

rwalle• 3 years ago

Looks like you are just talking out of your head with no numbers or any other evidence to support the argument.

On this point I'd believe that Amazon understands better than any outsider whether it is worth it to build their own delivery network.

PaulHoule12• 3 years ago

They sure believed more than anyone else that it was worth it spending $10 billion + on "smart" speakers.

blinding-streak• 3 years ago

AWS specifically reported 20% YoY revenue growth, which is the lowest it's ever been since they started reporting the numbers publicly.

ElevenLathe5• 3 years ago

Teams at every single AWS customer, big and small, have probably spent the last quarter finding and ending wasteful, forgotten spend lurking in their cloud footprint in a desperate attempt to prove to their MBAs that they shouldn't be in the next round of layoffs because they just saved the company 10x their salary in cloud spend.

I know I have.

londons_explore4• 3 years ago

they just saved the company 10x their salary in cloud spend.

Great. Thanks for doing that. Now that we have got our cloud costs manageable, the next biggest expense is people!

What did you say you did again? Oh, you're our cloud cost reduction guy? I don't think we need your skills anymore, that's not a problem anymore.

simplotek8• 3 years ago

Teams at every single AWS customer, big and small, have probably spent the last quarter finding and ending wasteful, forgotten spend lurking in their cloud footprint

The interesting thing about cloud costs for companies like Amazon or AWS is that in the short term it's only an accounting trick. The company is not spending money if there's a lambda deployed somewhere, or a EC3 instance idling. It's nice to erode revenue in the books from these expenses, but it's not like Besos needs to reach out of his wallet to cover the cost of a container launched by some random team at Amazon. At most he moves the cash from one pocket to the other and there's that.

esskay3• 3 years ago

Yep we did the same. Saved about 10k/mo by clearing out old junk we dont need anymore and consolodating things.

nicoburns• 3 years ago

I don't understand why this is considered anything other than normal. It's not possible for companies to continue growing forever and it's innevitable that growth will start to slow as the company matures.

ctvo• 3 years ago

What's interesting is it was Bezos who made these large, pandemic driven investments. All of this, including the Rivian investment, was under his watch. And now it falls to Jassy to clean up the mess and take the heat.

londons_explore4• 3 years ago

Could have been part of his reason to step down...

simplotek8• 3 years ago

And now it falls to Jassy to clean up the mess and take the heat.

It was Besos that drove Amazon's growth until basically now. I don't think it's fair to suddenly badmouth him for one bad year in what? Two decades worth of unparalleled growth?

ulizzle• 3 years ago

Good. They deserve it for bringing us the travesty that was rings of prime.

That billion dollar bet sure didn’t pan out either.

martinald• 3 years ago

Seems to me that some of Amazon's expansion is all over the place.

For example, Amazon Fresh stores in London are shutting down in places (Dalston) but opening enormous new ones in other spots (Monuement and Croydon) in the same month. I've barely seen anyone in one; with more staff than customers.

londons_explore4• 3 years ago

The Ealing Broadway one, having been open 18 months, still sometimes has queues out of the door to let people in...

blitzar2• 3 years ago

Thats the queue from the Louisiana Chicken shop 3 doors down.

londons_explore4• 3 years ago

The main selling point of Amazons stores is that with no checkouts they can have fewer staff, and less shop footprint for the same number of items sold. Both translate into being cheaper to run.

That should mean they can afford to sell items cheaper than competitors, and win custom.

Yet... Amazon Fresh is the most expensive shop of its kind around.

zxcvbn4038• 3 years ago

Amazon Go stores are the same way - very bright and attractive, definite cool factor to no checkout, food is always fresh - but everything is overpriced and there usually more employees than customers. I usually see one person restocking and two people to answer questions and help with installing the Amazon Go app.

I only bought drinks there because they were the only thing not marked up ridiciously - plus every food item seemed to have quinoa in it and I am not a fan.

diceduckmonk• 3 years ago

There was a 5+ year period in my life where I was receiving Amazon deliveries every week.

Last year, I purchased a single item on Amazon.

In the midst of moving apartments right now, and looking for basics + upgrades. I've noticed what made Amazon so great and dare I say addicting was trustworthy reviews and crowd-wisdom curation of good-enough products. This shopping cycle, that magic felt gone. The audacity of product search to be littered with ads. A few years into that Amazon habit, I started reaching for "fake amazon reviews" on Google to get an estimate of how authentic the reviews are. Even that step has been gamed and noisy now.

sauwan• 3 years ago

Agree 100%. And now the majority of the products are made by a 7 digit letter soup brand who just popped up out of no where and likely will be gone in 6 months as the product is shifted to some other brand to avoid bad reviews building up.

I have very little faith in Amazon these days and specifically order from smaller specialty shops regularly again.

kps• 3 years ago

Amazon is now Aliexpress with (sometimes) local shipping.

For years we've been told that the worker in Shenzhen is cheaper than the one in Seattle. Now I tell you, Jeff, that the entrepreneur in Shenzhen is cheaper than the one in Seattle.

chollida1• 3 years ago

You may be surprised to know that Jeff doesn’t run Amazon anymore.

staringback• 3 years ago

Have you ever tried to search for something on Aliexpress? It is the worst experience I have ever had. "Free Shipping" button (sometimes) shows things with free shipping, or the actual price of the item showing as $0.99 when that is for the optional plastic lid or whatever. Only about half the time I try to use Aliexpress it gives me the results I want.

Furthermore, it is stupidly obvious when something is just being dropshipped vs coming from Amazon's warehouse, just look for the Prime logo on the items. At least with Amazon I get things relatively quickly even compared to other US based options such as Ebay or even going through the retailer directly

esskay3• 3 years ago

I stopped buying after recieving one too many fake items. Not even listings that were for blatently fabricated products like the 16TB portable hard drives for $45. Just everyday items, being dispatched from Amazon that were clearly fakes.

Amazon doesn't give a damn, so I don't give them my business anymore.

vanilla_nut• 3 years ago

Used to use Amazon as my go-to source for bulk gum. Silly, I know, but they stock the big 14-packs that you can only find at massive bulk stores like Costco, and even then, it's hard to find them reliably.

After receiving a number of fakes and problematic items off Amazon a couple of years ago, I instated a new rule: you can order off Amazon as long as the a fake product won't seriously hurt you.

Turns out, whether it's a set of bolts for my bicycle, a battery replacement for a phone, or a piece of gum I plan on chewing in my mouth, I'm really scared of the awful thing that could happen if I got an unsafe fake item. I would rather not chew gum tainted with microplastics, explode a battery in my pocket without warning, or shear a bolt from my bike in the middle of the wilderness miles away from help.

On the other hand, Amazon is a great place to order bulk body soap. Haven't figured out a way for that to kill me yet.

jerpint• 3 years ago

This is a great point. For years, Amazon had good quality and prices. Now, shopping on Amazon you have to actively look out for scammy items and search for the good deals. Very easy to get fooled. “Verified purchases” don’t mean much either

rlawson2• 3 years ago

Same, switched to Walmart+ and can get as good shipping and also local groceries

onlyrealcuzzo• 3 years ago

Also switched to Walmart+, and will never look back.

After Amazon decided that the way the webstore would make money is not by selling things, but instead by selling ads - the quality of search and overall usability of the webstore has become terrible.

You need to use it longer (thus see more ads) to find what you want.

This is part of the plan.

genericone• 3 years ago

And you can search for items by the "In-store" filter, which has guaranteed supply logistics sold and shipped by Walmart to avoid danger and fakery. At least I don't think Walmart comingles "their own" inventory with marketplace inventory items of the same SKU.

simplotek8• 3 years ago

Each customer feels differently, but to me what makes Amazon the go-to solution for most consumerist problems is it's logistics network, and how fast and reliable it became.

There were a couple of times where the time I had to wait between clicking "buy" and receiving the package on my doorstep was not measured in days but hours.

Amazon's logistics network has improved constantly. The shopping experience is getting better, not worse.

Sure, sometimes I can't spot the difference between Amazon and AliExpress. So many cheap, shady products with autogenerated brand names and obviously all from the same factory. Low quality stuff whose seller is eager to bribe you to not get a bad review after you return the item. Yes, that's a problem. But if you stick with Amazon-managed products you always get refunds.

And you know what? You also can decide to not go for the cheap stuff and buy things from reputable sellers.

So knock-offs are a problem but you can actually avoid those, and the ones you didn't you can always return them. And with Amazon's logistics, things get resolved in a few days.

It's a shame about exploiting every single worker though.

OJFord• 3 years ago

So knock-offs are a problem but you can actually avoid those

I do wish that was easier though. Sometimes I add 'but not crap from nonsense brand' to my search, hoping someone will notice.

Some ideas: verified list for the brands filter (often it's some bizarre subset anyway, and there are clearly genuine respected names missing?), search that respects literal quotes and not/-, price sort/filter that isn't comically wrong and that operates on Amazon price only or else includes shipping.

Ideally (I know Amazon would never do this, seller-hostile) just roll up all the duplicates into one, so the 'from' price is the cheapest seller from all sellers of the supposedly different products, and the results list is much cleaner.

I suppose an extension could fairly easily have some heuristics (all-caps 4-6 letter brand name) to hide these results. Sometimes I do want them, and then could just toggle the extension off. Is there anything like that?

lotsofpulp2• 3 years ago

So knock-offs are a problem but you can actually avoid those,

How? They commingle inventory, and there might not be a perceivable difference based on appearance, so who knows if the internals or quality of materials is the same until it fails?

JohnFen7• 3 years ago

Amazon's logistics network has improved constantly.

So you can get crap delivered faster?

The shopping experience is getting better, not worse.

My experience is exactly the opposite. Amazon is one of the worst online shopping experiences I've encountered. It wasn't always that way -- I happily shopped with them for almost two decades before I finally had to give them up.

I honestly can't think of a single advantage Amazon has over just ordering directly from the companies whose products I want to buy.

AtlasBarfed• 3 years ago

"Amazon's logistics network has improved constantly. The shopping experience is getting better, not worse."

WHAT???? Prime no longer delivers in 2-3 days. The reviews are junk, the search words are gamed, the production information metadata is junk, the quality is terrible, the search results are all placed/gamed.

Things I have to do on Amazon's site that I didn't have to once upon a time:

1) immediately go to the second or third page of results to eliminate paid placement

2) immediately filter reviews by 4 star reviews to eliminate fake ads

3) cross-search the product on other sites to get a sense of legitimacy of the source

4) very carefully examine the photos of it and similar products from the company to gauge a sense of how legitimate their engineering is overall

It's exhausting. I only use Amazon for weirdo products now, but Walmart and NewEgg are steadily eating into their selection advantage. For any tech product I 100% prefer to order from NewEgg over Amazon, even if it is slower and slightly cheaper.

You know what Amazon is good for? Find the bare minimum engineering on products, and then try to find the slightly better engineered ones elsewhere for comparison. Amazon has the scrape-the-barrel quality, then you can see why the products at Walmart or Target are worth it or not.

Even then, I know they are a horrible company to their employees, predatory, arrogant, etc.

If anyone thinks Amazon represents some vanguard of good online retail, they are astroturfing or have no real historical basis of understanding.

Any logistics improvements of the last 5 years have been to expand their monopoly and "shareholder value". Delivery is worse now. Their abuse of delivery workers means you can't get a package reliably delivered in an urban area, they don't have time for delivery instructions.

"The missing chair is for the Customer". Yeah uh no.

PaulHoule12• 3 years ago

Some neighborhoods (where opinion-makers live) are getting fast shipping, for the rest of us Amazon seems to have the worst logistics network

https://www.rather-be-shopping.com/blog/amazon-no-longer-off...

In the same time frame every other retailer thinks they can win me over through service, AMZN increasingly thinks I will keep subscribing to Prime since I've subscribed to Prime since 2006.

As it is you'll hear Jim Cramer and David Brooks talk about how fast Amazon shipping is and you'll never see it be a joke on a sitcom that Amazon deliveries are late, but for the rest of us it is quicker to wait to the weekend and drive to the store. I wonder if my Congressman thinks I get shipping from AMZN as fast as he gets in D.C.

ulfw• 3 years ago

100% this. I would add that it's also hard to find an item being unique. When I search for let's say "Braun Alarm clock", I get the same item (so I guess? because it looks the same) 8 times. So which one should I buy? What's the difference? I just can't be bothered to figure out the different sellers/prices/terms/delivery times etc for such a simple thing.

How do I know if one of the 8 Braun clocks that look the same has some 'extra feature'? So I got to read all descriptions which can be vastly different and hard to compare. This isn't easy and reliable ecommerce anymore. It's messy and frankly if I have to do all this research WITHIN Amazon I might as well extend the scope and do it OUTSIDE of Amazon as well.

A4ET8a8uTh0• 3 years ago

Interesting. It is possible I was lucky on items 9 times out of 10. What I seem to be having issue with is timely delivery on items since Covid despite having Prime. I was more strict about it before, but I made a dispensation for Covid since I didn't order that much anymore. FWIW, I am in Chicagoland, which has a hub that is close enough to me so I will admit that the whole situation baffles me sometimes, but I don't know what is really happening behind the scenes..

matsemann• 3 years ago

I stopped after getting fake items. Yes, getting my money in return was fairly easy. But then I still needed to buy it from somewhere else and had wasted a few days.

And it's quite scary, as some of these items go on/into my body. Like cosmetics, toothpaste, whatever. Or are electronics that can catch fire, like a charger.

Add to that, I don't want to figure out which of 5000 different USB chargers is the best or the cheapest or not a scam. Just give me one I can trust. When I have to do that for every search, the mental load is too high and I just grab it from somewhere else.

edgyquant• 3 years ago

Yeah, this. All but the most trivial of items I’ve bought this year I was disappointed with. I don’t want my money back, I want the item to be what I expected.

amdolan2• 3 years ago

I was scammed hundreds of dollars buying counterfeit microphones on amazon[0]. Amazon did not provide any way to handle this other than a generic form. The sellers refused to send my money unless I removed my reviews, which I was not going to do at all. I followed the seller's page around, and after a few weeks they renamed themselves to "Sally's Cosmetics"[1] or something, and I posted more reviews on their page. Eventually they disappeared with one of the Amazon counterfeit seller purges. How convenient for Amazon and the seller.

Amazon is like eBay to me. I value my time and cash too much to get involved.

[0] I know, I hadn't been on amazon in a while. I forgot not to buy music equipment (or anything not disposable) from Amazon.

[1] So counterfeit sellers have sold cosmetics on Amazon, and that should be obvious from the state of the store, I guess..

gptgpp3• 3 years ago

Yep, I just ordered from them again for the first time in a while... Big mistake.

My order was very simple, just a pack of head bands since when I go for runs I sweat way too much.

After my run I took the head band off and my forehead was DYED the color of the band and later broke out in hives...

Grimly reminded me Victorian Era arsenic-based green dyes, which leached from fabrics into people's skin and made them very sick.

Amazon desperately needs content curation somehow, the experience of figuring out which headband to buy was so awful... And after all that, it caused a mild injury from god-knows-what chemicals.

karmakaze2• 3 years ago

I went through this exact thought process. Maybe I could find the perfect one and get it delivered quick at a the best price. It wasn't worth the downside risk. Instead I went to a brick-and-mortar store, got the most appropriate GaN compact charger they had in stock and couldn't be happier.

abracadaniel• 3 years ago

And there’s no recourse if there’s a serious problem. When people found melamine in the toothpaste at Walmart, lawsuits were filed and things were recalled. If that happens from EBANEZCR, NKAM, or PLCEM, who are real sellers I just looked up, they disappear and Amazon isn’t held liable. Then the same contaminated fake product continues to be sold under a dozen other sellers.

boringg3• 3 years ago

To be fair I don't think that's the fault of Amazon I think that's the same thing with all new tech adoption - especially over the last couple of decades. As new tech enabled new capabilities people were honest and scammers didn't know how to manipulate the system. Nowadays its a lot of work and money to block to fake reviews/fake products.

This goes for all tech --> social media, financial processing etc.

I agree it really does ruin it but I think it's pervasive in tech 20-30 years into the internet/tech adoption into our lives. And now when new tech pops up scammers hop aboard immediately.

Retric2• 3 years ago

Amazon has actively supported selling counterfeit items for years.

Allowing companies to take over product pages with lots of positive reviews is actively misleading. If they actually cared then new product = remove all old review.

Mixing inventory between different sellers actively drives away reputable business. You can ship a box of legit items to Amazon and they send a counterfeit item to your customer who then dings your reputation. That’s crazy.

afavour3• 3 years ago

I'm the exact same way. We now order a lot from Target. It's not like it's a world-beating service but the site is good, the app is good, deliveries and on time and I have the ability to place a pickup order from a location near me.

We even decided to splash out on the $100 a year same-day delivery service. We get more value from that than our Prime membership. Even as a family that watches plenty of TV there's really one only show or so a year we watch on Prime.

Philadelphia• 3 years ago

Target is starting to become scammy itself. The top search results for a lot of things I’ve shopped for lately have been questionable-looking products from their third-party sellers.

geraldwhen• 3 years ago

I’ve gotten upwards of $50 to leave fake reviews. For a while every Chinese product had a card in it you could email to make some serious cash.

jrd2592• 3 years ago

I hope you mean you were offered money for fake reviews, but declined.

munificent• 3 years ago

For kicks, I just did a search for a fairly generic item on Amazon, "bookshelf". The "brands" in the top results are:

MOYIPIN, Furrino, Hoctieon, Sauder, Rolanstar, Vasagle, Amazon Basics, Homidec, JIUYOTREE, NUMENN, IOTXY, Topfurny, RIIPOO, Homykic, IRONCK.

RIIPOO is definitely my favorite name here.

Amazon Marketplace is inundated with garbage. It gets harder and harder to find a product that I'm willing to actually buy and assume will work. At some point, Amazon's chickens are going to come home to roost and they'll have to deal with this.

therealdrag02• 3 years ago

OTOH I’ve bought from plenty of random name brands and never had a problem with the products.

ranting-moth2• 3 years ago

I once got a note with the product that I'd get could get it refunded if I left a 5 star review. I mentioned that in the review, and guess what? It got rejected, as "that fact wasn't about the item" or something like that.

It's not only that they don't care, they seem to know and and take action in protecting the fake reviews.

jjav• 3 years ago

Couple years ago I bought a camera from Amazon. What arrived what a beat up, very used camera in a box that was falling apart with parts missing. I returned it (thankfully that part was easy, but what a waste of time). Left a review saying they are shipping used stuff in place of new and that review was also blocked.

So yes, the reviews don't mean anything since they remove everything they don't like people to know.

nunez• 3 years ago

Agreed.

It is increasingly difficult to find items on Amazon that aren't from drop-shippers. Items from companies with call signs will rank higher than legit products, and it's annoying as hell.

Additionally, it is becoming easier to buy from retailers directly and return things when they don't work out.

Example. I like barefoot shoes. I only buy Vivobarefoot. In the past, searching for Vivobarefoots or even Merrell Vapor Gloves while logged into my Prime account would return crap from WHITIN as a cheaper alternative. Even though I tried Whitin and returned them because cheap shoes are cheap for a reason.

Same thing with merino wool stuff. Meriwool and call sign dropshipper bullshit will rank higher even if I look for stuff from Woolly (and definitely if I look for stuff from a supplier that doesn't partner with Amazon, like Wool and Prince).

urthor• 3 years ago

Amazon is excellent for books. A category it maintains a genuine, unique advantage in (Amazon prints books and generally speaking does many different extra operations in that market.)

One notable part of Amazon's success story: book readers are rich. Paper books are a significant indicator of genuine wealth.

What's unique about books however, is that you never discover what to buy on Amazon.

You get the title recommended to you off-Amazon. Then go straight to Amazon and find the title, in a commoditised print on demand operation.

For just about every other product under the sun, not the same.

lostoldsession• 3 years ago

I cancelled prime a few year ago and haven't looked back. Amazon has basically turned into a flea market chock full of counterfeit goods, goods of questionable origin, and a relentless "review optimization" schemes under the hood.

Recently my mother threw out a bunch of Christmas decorations because "they gave up the ghost". What had actually happened is she got counterfeit energizer batteries from amazon (which had 5-star reviews ofc). This story is not that big of a deal, but perfectly emblematic of the mess that is Amazon's store and hardly the only bad experience I have had with the junk they sell there.

Also this has been going on for years now and amazon has done _nothing_ to address it. I suppose it's because people keep voting with their dollars for them to do nothing. Maybe now they'll start to think about it.

noveltyaccount• 3 years ago

Also this has been going on for years now and amazon has done _nothing_ to address it.

Even worse, I think Amazon has done tons to address it, but they just can't keep up with the evolving garbage.

Or as the Red Queen said in Alice in Wonderland, "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."

rhaway847734• 3 years ago

Amazon’s fees are so high, and sellers pay it a massive amount of money on every return (something Amazon encourages by encouraging people to buy products they don’t need), which means that legitimate businesses find it extremely hard to survive.

It’s no wonder Amazon is filled with illegitimate businesses because they are the only ones that can survive Amazon’s punitive terms of operation.

BluePen73• 3 years ago

There are certain categories you can basically guarantee to get fakes.

Brand name batteries is one of them, I guess that's one more thing pushing people towards "Amazon Basics", it's the only one that's not going to be counterfeit.

pen2l• 3 years ago

It dawns on me now that perhaps every market and every community is fated to suffer some variation of the Eternal September effect at some certain critical point of capturing majority market share. Every community that matures enough to have argued certain key topics will have decided with confidence on those topics and not kowtowing to the consensus will seem heretical -- the stagnation in some measure spells its doom, Google is thinking how to deal with an increasingly adversarial ground in which many know how to game it with sophisticated SEO thus rendering its main capability a little bit muted, sellers saw that Amazon was a dominant market and sought to exploit the rating system to their advantage, and the end-result is a market saturated with players who were adept at gaming the system.

The interesting flipside observation is that in each of these cases, we see the ground fertile then for a new approach to bud out -- a manifestation of Goodhart's law being consummate. New communities arise in the ashes of old ones, ChatGPT is maybe coming to displace Google in some places, what will take place of Amazon now that its rating system and reputation has tarnished?

erichocean• 3 years ago

the stagnation in some measure spells its doom

I'm not sure where you learned about "Eternal September", but it's the exact opposite of what you're describing: not stagnation of culture, but degradation to a pre-existing, high-quality culture due to the rapid influx of new individuals who don't give a shit about maintaining it.

Amazon is going down with Americans precisely because the (predominantly) Chinese sellers on there now couldn't care less about the "nice online garden" Americans created and are instead using up the pre-existing cultural capital Americans had built up for their own selfish advancement—destroying the garden in the process.

But yeah, sure, maybe after the garden has been burned to the ground, something new will replace it. Sounds great.

pessimizer3• 3 years ago

Amazon isn't failing on customer experience because of the Chinese. The Chinese didn't make Amazon lower their standards so far that it became profitable for Chinese factories to operate on Amazon the way they do. Chinese factories would also make money on a non-shitty Amazon.

comte7092• 3 years ago

Why make this into a weird nationalism issue when Amazon is the one that is responsible for what’s on their platform?

Apple is a similarly massive company that prioritizes curation on their marketplace. Whatever you may feel about App Store policies, Apple has managed the reputation of their online store much better than Amazon (though I will grant that there is somewhat of a difference between physical and digital products).

pessimizer3• 3 years ago

What we need is antitrust. Eventually companies capture so much of the market that they can afford to get lazy and profit-take, and still grow. Then the shittier they get, the shittier they have to get in order to maintain financial returns. The decline has to accelerate.

Unless the reason they've become unprofitable again is because they're reinvesting before they've fallen too far, but there's a collective action problem in that depending on how many big shareholders there are.

BizarroLand• 3 years ago

We need a government that cares about the individual over the corporate. I think we still mostly have it, but there are enough chinks in the armor to introduce doubt.

We need Antitrust on steroids coupled with vision and a hand on the wheel steering the boat.

Raed667• 3 years ago

I was on a student Prime subscription and forgot about it since 2015.

Mid 2022 they emailed me to let me know that I need to pay the full price or lose my Prime access. They gave me a moment and enough friction to think about my subscription and I ended-up deciding that it wasn't worth it.

I would have probably spent close to 1k on Amazon in that period, but instead it went to local/alternative shops.

I feel the same about the friction Netflix is introducing with their IP address check, it will be enough friction for people to start asking "do i really need this?"

sebazzz2• 3 years ago

I would have probably spent close to 1k on Amazon in that period, but instead it went to local/alternative shops.

I don't see the direct relation to Prime. Above a threshold of about 25 euro shipping is free, and otherwise it is often free or not too expensive.

specialist2• 3 years ago

Did everyone forget Jeff Bezos semi-famous shareholder letter about "Day 1"?

Seems clear to me that Amazon has entered "Day 2".

u/lostoldsession's comment comparing Amazon Prime to a flea market is spot on. And demonstrates that Amazon has abandoned "Day 1" ethos wrt "customer obsession".

manv12• 3 years ago

Amazon has historically said that they don't care about their stock price.

The losses in question are a mark-to-market loss on Rivian. If you look at their operational numbers they're mostly fine.

That's the problem with the lack of financial literacy. Is the loss a paper loss or a hard dollar loss? On a hard dollar basis amazon is doing great, for the most part. Most people don't know the difference, and most reporters for some odd reason don't either.

They'll use this "loss" to talk about how the end is nigh, etc. But that's really bullshit. The end isn't near for amazon.

green-eclipse• 3 years ago

No one is claiming the end is near for Amazon. That's a strawman. But it's clear from the earnings release that the business is experiencing strong headwinds in multiple areas of the empire. Amazon closed out its slowest year of growth in its quarter century as a public company.

And Amazon does care about the stock price. If they didn't, they wouldn't issue guidance to Wall St analysts every quarter about expected revs and earnings. Not all big tech companies issue guidance. Apple stopped doing it several years ago. Google has never issued guidance. Maybe Amazon didn't care about the stock price a decade ago, but that's definitely not the case now.

manv12• 3 years ago

I suppose you haven't been reading the normal press.

skee8383• 3 years ago

Economy is in recession. people don't have the money for chinese junk on amazon.

ranting-moth2• 3 years ago

It's not junk. It clearly says in the tile "HIGH QUALITY". It also has 120,000 5 star reviews.

Although for some reason it has no 2-4 star reviews. It has 12,000 1 star review who seem to be confused like you. They say it's junk and doesn't work and suggest the 5 star reviews are fake.

mint22• 3 years ago

Interesting that everyone commenting on why Amazon is no longer their choice is pointing out that it’s scamazon now but no one mentions worker treatment so far. Amazon truly is a race to the bottom.

Even if it were the cheapest, the dehumanization of workers is a deal breaker.

There’s been a lot of consternation around the recent tech layoffs and how ai like chat gpt is a bullshit generator. Now imagine if layoffs are not an abnormal occurrence but are a daily possibility and have zero benefits packages. And that they based on badly trained models that constantly monitor one’s performance, and are set to demand 110% at all times.

renewiltord• 3 years ago

Everyone going all like “I canceled prime and didn’t buy anything. This makes sense”. Guys, their retail and Prime stuff is going gangbusters, your cancelation notwithstanding. The loss is because of other stuff. I won’t spoil it for you. Sometimes articles contain details.

dahfizz• 3 years ago

Net loss was $2.7 billion in 2022, or $0.27 per diluted share, compared with net income of $33.4 billion, or $3.24 per diluted share, in 2021.
2022 net loss includes a pre-tax valuation loss of $12.7 billion included in non-operating income (expense) from the common stock investment in Rivian Automotive, Inc., compared to a pre-tax valuation gain of $11.8 billion from the investment in 2021.

So, not counting the rivian investment, they gained ~$10B?

This just feel like accounting crap to me. The business itself is still growing. The rivian stock has just been moving like a rollercoaster the past two years. And Amazon didn't invest in rivian for the capital gains, they did it to jumpstart their own EV delivery fleet.

Not very impressive results, but this doesn't exactly spell doom for the company. Reading the comments here would make you think otherwise...

https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/2/amazon-com-announces-fo...

pfdietz• 3 years ago

I still use Amazon for books. It's not bad there, although the local library is cheaper. :)

JohnFen7• 3 years ago

I've switched back to my neighborhood bookshop (who thankfully still exists). If they don't have it in stock, they can get it pretty quickly.

nixcraft• 3 years ago

I sent a $25 Xbox gift card to a kid as Xmas gift. Guess what? The card was faulty, and the numbers were not visible at all. They sent me a picture and asked if Amazon would replace it. So, I contacted Amazon support, and they asked me to send a card back and gave me a return shipping label assuring me that it was under Amazon A-Z Guarantee. When my friend sent the card to them, they only refunded $0.32 and said the rest was restocking fees. Imagine if someone is buying MacBook Air worth $1000 and Amazon is giving you $1 as a refund saying $999 was a restocking fee. I explained to support over chat that it was a damaged Xbox gift card, but they refused and thought my friend messed it up while scratching it. So fuck Amazon. Their support is gone down hill, and it is all money-grabbing and scamming sellers. Also, they deleted my review. Only 5 stars reviews are appearing on the page except one person with similar issue.

throwawayacc6• 3 years ago

Has anyone else experienced a gigantic degradation in Amazon's search over the past 5 or so years? Even when searching for a specific part number, the results are packed full of obviously fake unrelated items from shady sellers. The reviews are obviously fake as well, but they're all five stars. Amazon is unusable.

Ancalagon• 3 years ago

There was a recent analysis video someone posted on HN about this. Most of the search results these days are actually ads, even 3 pages into the results!

karmakaze2• 3 years ago

Buying on Amazon now is like going to the casino. Sometimes I'll play but only if I'm content to take the risk and lose.

ChildOfChaos• 3 years ago

It seems for all the comments online that Amazon has gone to crap in the US.

It's still pretty decent and my go too for online shopping here in the UK, however the delivery has gotten awful and that is with Prime increasing it's price. Almost nothing is next day anymore, which is what the service was meant to be.

With Prime you can set a delivery day, but often they want to deliver different items in your order on different days, despite setting a 'prime' day, with no really clear reason why or how to avoid this. It's really annoying.

BluePen73• 3 years ago

As a Canadian, there isn't actually an alternative with reliable and fast shipping.

And if you live outside of a major city, it's still like 4 days.

The only downside is there's entire categories of amazon lost to fakes, if I need batteries I either have to buy amazon basics, or drive to the store.

wojciii• 3 years ago

Amazon is crap. It's impossible to find anything on the site that is not Chinese garbage. It's not possible to remove Chinese sellers .. not its possible to sort by 5 stars reviews .. I mean I can sort, but the reviews are mostly fake.

I mostly stopped using the site. I live in DK and therefore use the German site.

I had one experience where they refused to take my credit card for some reason and I had to wire the money using the bank. It cost me 20% more and after this I stopped to use the site since the support just keept on repeating the same statements.

Amazon reports its first unprofitable year since 2014

Related Stories