They're only good because they were repeatedly given an infinite amount of money for 2 decades by investors while their retail operations lost money so that they could nail the implementation and the promise that they would figure out how to make it profitable.
Amazon effectively leveraged investment capital to do exactly what they said they would do - innovate, learn into the market, and improve iteratively. From investors' perspectives (and probably consumers' perspectives as well), Amazon has succeeded brilliantly.
Starting in 1997 they bled money with mounting losses until about 1999, when they began to turn things around. The dotcom pop is clearly visible but they recovered almost immediately and their losses continued to shrink until about 2001-2002 when they became break even. From 2002-2011 they either made small profits or nothing, but that was obviously because they were growing at a rapid pace and putting all the money back into the business. Once AWS launches in 2006 (so about 10 years after day 1 in retail) profits start growing but then are back into the red around the time of the GFC+recession, and again in the 2012-2013 European recession. After that it's stratospheric profits.
How much investor money is "infinite money"? Somewhere between $8-$9 million before they floated on the stock market.
Obviously, investors who put money into their IPO have done extremely well and cannot claim they were shovelling money into a furnace, far from it.
The inflation in investment round sizes over the past 20 years has been staggering. I see nothing that suggests Amazon was unusual in raising so little money (comparatively speaking) before they went public.
Did they really nail the implementation? I still refuse to buy anything that would go on or inside my body from amazon because I'm worried about getting counterfeits.
Yeah, ebay has much better buyer protections unless the item is Fulfilled By Amazon (which carries a cost premium). eBay prices also tend to be better. If you're going to buy cheap chinese crap anyway, just cut out the middleman.
Finally, Amazon's marketplace is just not navigable. Their search is pathetically bad, and this is nothing new, it's been a common complaint for years. Some fairly massive amount of their traffic is inbound from Google searches like "some product amazon" just because of how pathetically bad it is. The only other reasonable way to navigate their site is if their similar product suggestions or "commonly bought together" happens to nail the item you were looking for.
I've had searches where adding an additional keyword that is in the product title will actually cause the product to disappear from the search. What in the actual fuck.
Yes! Amazon's search has been driving me crazy but it went from bad (loose interpretation of what I typed with a whole bunch of irrelevant stuff) to worse (adding more sponsored results, i.e. even less what I want).
Their recommendation engine for related prducts used to be nice but that's been replaced by sponsored products which lowers the quality.
Now, the only way I use Amazon's search is when I have a SKU or part number and type it in directly. But I also do that in Google and often find the same thing elsewhere at similar or less cost (including shipping, though to be fair it may take a day or 2 longer).
eBay's search is still one of the best for me, in that it respects the keywords I put in and allows for extended query syntax to really hunt something down (which then can be turned into a saved search).
One of the most creative things I found on eBay was tool rental. I needed a tool to replace the bearings on my washing machine, and a seller was selling one explicitely as a rental: tool was charged about $120, with $35 shipping. When done, sent it back for a refund. The "shipping" included the rental fee and shipping both ways.
Yeah, I specifically find ebay search to be very powerful and useful as well. It accepts (keywordA, keywordB) as an "or" syntax, -badkeyword as "not" syntax, and filtering for most of their internal functionality (eg auction/buy-it-now format, item location, item price, etc).
The one that they're missing that I really wish they would include is "multi item BIN" formats. People will list a $1 item so that they're the first result that comes up, and then the item you're looking for is high priced. The prices are in fact so high that I go out of my way to try and exclude these items using "not" keywords, setting a minimum price, and filtering to US only, which collectively get most of them.
I have a lot of saved searches for "rare" items that only get listed infrequently, or for items that I'm waiting to come down in price.
The contrast between the way those two sites handle their search is stark.
I personally find eBay to be much better for items that I can't buy from the manufacturer already. Individual sellers have reputations & reviews separate from product reviews, and those ratings are among the first things you're exposed to when interacting with a seller.
> Yeah, ebay has much better buyer protections unless the item is Fulfilled By Amazon (which carries a cost premium). eBay prices also tend to be better. If you're going to buy cheap chinese crap anyway, just cut out the middleman.
That's what I thought until I was scammed by a Chinese on eBay... after countless emails, calls, even police reports, eBay did not return the 800 dollars I lost... not sure if it's an isolated case but it was pretty frustrating.
