Wal-Mart and Target are the 'curated' everything stores. My biggest disappointment with them is that they never have what I want.
I think I'm OK with Amazon being Aliexpress for the US market. Sometimes I want to get random crap from the depths of Shenzhen, and Amazon is that. What is unfortunate is that they can't get "real" brands to sell there, because of their counterfeiting issue. The "mistake" Amazon made (that has probably made them hundreds of billions of dollars) was to let someone send in a box of crap and get paid when someone shopping for "Tide Laundry Detergent" gets their box of crap instead of Tide Laundry Detergent.
Other than that, they're where they are today because they're good. I just wouldn't buy anything valuable from them; laptops, cameras, phones, etc. Those you'll have to find a dedicated electronics retailer. But sometimes I'm like building a 3D printer and I want a touchscreen display or something for it... for $20 I can have one the same day. That is super neat. It works because no "brand" makes parts for hobbyists, and some company you've never heard of in China is actually the market leader. Amazon connects you to them... but also to billions of scammers. Caveat emptor.
Edit to add: I'm talking about the in-person stores. I have no idea what Wal-Mart and Target do online.
> Wal-Mart and Target are the 'curated' everything stores.
Are you talking in-store or online? If I go to walmart.com or target.com and search for "usb cable", I don't see a dozen cables that fit 95% of use cases like in the store. Walmart shows thousands of results, the vast majority of which are marketplace sellers selling through walmart.com. Target has "only" 753 results, 600+ of which I find are not actually sold directly by Target if I dive into the filters. Basically it feels like Walmart and Target are trying to turn their online shopping experience into amazon.com.
Annoying but at least Walmart still has the option to filter out third party sellers (under Filters, select Retailer and then Walmart). IIRC Amazon used to support this, but not anymore. I guess it wouldn't even do you much good with the commingling issue.
They do have that filter but annoyingly it resets between each search. I don't buy a ton from Walmart but I typically buy allergy medicine there since it's cheap. So I go to walmart.com, search for "allergy medicine", scroll through the filters and then click Retailer->Walmart and then pick my poison. Then I realize I need to add a few bucks worth of stuff to hit the free shipping threshold so I search for "dark chocolate" and add something to my cart...only to realize it wasn't directly from Walmart so it doesn't apply. For every search you have to go in and filter by Retailer->Walmart specifically. Ugh.
The Walmart website is also a "marketplace". As it stands, the company's website is unreliable for finding goods and their prices and it is full of junk, which requires additional user-based filtering to find items of value. To me that is not "curated".
yeah buts its not even cheap like aliexpress. its overpriced mushroom brands!! there are no deals that I see on Amazon anymore, or at least maybe they know im more likely to pony up the extra $$, so thats what they show me…
I'm prone to losing sunglasses, so some years ago I went through the process of testing out a dozen Alibaba sunglasses to find the best ones. I settled on one that's $4/pair, sturdy, and looks/feels/functions just like a $50 pair. Of course, being Alibaba, I had to buy it in bulk, so I now have sunglasses for life.
But that brings me to the type of site I want to see. Not curated luxury products like Le Creuset cookware at a markup, but curated dirt-cheap Alibaba products with low margins that have been tested and vetted extensively.
Massdrop or Monoprice are a little bit like this, but only for a few niches like headphones or cables.
Massdrop (Drop?) has had filler garbage for quite a while. I think (maybe one) part of the issue is mechanical keyboards got much more popular and drops were less necessary for good stuff.
I used to love Drop when they did outdoor gear. My favorite pocketknife is one of their collabs. Unfortunately they just do headphones and keyboards now, a move I certainly don't understand as those are really crowded segments with hardly any bottom.
Amazon is just SO EASY though. It's a vortex I can't escape. I tried ordering a Nintendo Switch from Walmart for my son's birthday. 3 days they told me. It didn't even ship. The website said I could "try" to cancel the order. "Try" I did, and that try failed. I then waited a few weeks and had to call them up and they said oh we will just mark it as lost in transit. Oh yeah, that sounds perfect. They wasted my time, they endangered my mission, they cost me money, and then THEY MADE ME TALK TO SOMEONE (who was very pleasant and it was pretty quickly resolved but that's a little cherry on a sundae made of poo,). Screw all that nonsense.
The only way for others to compete is to have a 3rd party help them all become just as easy as Amazon. We need someone to partner with Fedex and step up. Who can do it?
I’m shocked that people are having good experiences with Amazon delivery in 2023. For me, 2-day delivery means it’ll get here in a week or 2. And forget about customer service that can actually solve my issue.
Where are you located? Not specifically, but urban, suburban, rural, remote?
Anecodtally: I am in a super-urban location. I order Prime 2-day, on average, twice a week. It has been late maybe once in the past year; often, it comes a day early.
As somebody located outside the few main western market centres (US, EU, perhaps Australia), and thus having most Amazon orders also incur added domestic tax, plus shipping, plus wait-time, most of the advantages of Amazon are stripped away.
Once you can no longer get every cheap bauble under the sun delivered tomorrow for free, suddenly it all looks so much more like undesirable, wall-to-wall crap.
I’m within 15 miles of two Amazon warehouses and still share the poor-delivery experience.
I see more of the new Rivian Amazon vans than any other vehicle on the road in the morning, and yet somehow, every other item I order gets unexpectedly delayed for days and days.
That's my experience, and yes I am in an urban location. And returns are so easy too. In fact, I tried to return something the other day, and they said it was not returnable so they were like you just keep it and we will refund the money.
Small city (~70k). I’ve also ordered to some of my friends/families houses who live in suburbs and large cities. The only time I ever didn’t have issues is when I lived in NYC and ordered to Amazon lockers
it can vary pretty tremendously within the same city. i lived 3 miles from the "downtown" part of Seattle in a house, and 50% of my Amazon deliveries were late by 1-3 days. my friends lived 2 miles further out from the downtown in the same direction, but in a 100-unit apartment and they never had issues.
not that 4 day delivery is bad. but promising to deliver something, and then regularly failing, is. i'd make plans for the thing being here by the promised day and just regularly be screwed.
It's your distance to a warehouse and if you order what everyone orders. If I order a winter coat in summer while in Florida, I'm gonna have a bad time.
I live driving distance to two amazon warehouses. I can get a great number of products in the same day.
Anecdotally, I live in the Atlanta metro and Prime usually means 2-3 days. No issues with counterfeits or busted packages. All in all a positive experience 100% of the time.
We probably order 2-10 items per week and never return anything. I bet we're the perfect customer.
We also do Target pickups once every two weeks for bulky items.
I have several times ordered what appeared to be genuine, but turned out to be counterfeit products from Amazon which made it very easy to stop using the platform all together. Not only due to a concern about the build quality, but also safety. Who wants to give their kids, or cook with, counterfeit products which may contain toxic or carcinogenic materials?
Rebranded .. I'm getting really annoyed with the same product, different prices, different brand names apparently generated by some China-based anagram generator
But.. that's how a lot of products have always worked.
I think the difference is that before a lot of white-label product factories would cut territory-based deals with resellers, so in (for example) the US, that widget is called "Acme Widget" but in France that exact same widget is called "Le Widget Magnifique".
Around the world there might be 100+ companies selling that same product but typically not competing with each other because they would each have exclusive markets.
But now with these global marketplaces, that same approach feels weird exactly because you can suddenly see the same exact products being sold under different names, and it's a lot easier for any random business to white-label a product and reach a global audience.
The difference is that many big brands will vet the products before they put their name and warranty on it.
Amazon is a free for all when factories can just direclty dump their garbage. There is no brand recognition or reputation. It's all just random character strings attached to random products. If a QUENTOC dog leash is prone to snap and whiplash your face, they can just dump the brand and move on.
Sure, but before it didn't bother me because I didn't have to browse through eight pages of search results that show the same four products over and over again with different brands slapped on before I might find a fifth one that suits my needs better. If you're lucky they're all using the same images, but sometimes there's a couple of variations so it takes you a couple seconds for each listing to figure out if it's one of the four you already seen a dozen times and don't want.
That's fine. I'm just waiting for the day when the Chinese brands will stop using that insipid default Latin alphabet serif font that they use 90% of the time for labeling buttons and GUIs.
If you go to a real lumber yard - the type of places the pros go - they will look at any blueprint print and prepare you the kit. Prices are better than Home Depot after you account for free delivery and they pick up your returns.
The kit won't include plumbing, HVAC, electric... so it isn't 100% what Sears did in the 1910s, but it is actually pretty close.
This seems like a solid business idea. Start up a company that deshittifies some BigCorp experience, become an existential threat to BigCorp, get acquired by BigCorp. Rinse and repeat.
Sometimes curation just means higher prices. My local Best Buy curates electronics, but none of them are cheaper than the hundreds of additional brands you can find on Amazon.
You can’t get a $50 WiFi 6 access point at Best Buy, but you can find that on Amazon.
I think what you are describing is Walmart or Target but with filters applied to turn off third party sellers.
As an aside, what’s interesting about Amazon is that once you unsubscribe from Prime, it’s not incredibly competitive with AliExpress for the right types of products. Usually if you can wait a week, you can wait two and save more money.
I've been hearing a lot of complaints of later that amazon has also become a complete crapshoot, primarily from .us based friends.
I'm in .uk and have yet to have a problem (there was one sneakily labeled listing but the keyword they'd stuffed in wasn't one I understood and the price and product were both what I wanted/expected so -I- wasn't disadvantaged by that listing at least).
The amount of trust you need in a device varies based on what you’re buying.
There are a whole lot of products where saving cash easily trumps having a good brand standing behind it.
Phone cases are a classic example. Some of my recent purchases like a toilet paper holder or emergency ponchos are similar. Even clothing is getting to the point where name brands are barely more dependable than Amazon off-brand clothes that probably come from the same factories.
Sometimes “untrustworthy” brands go above and beyond mass market retail options, like the LED automotive lights that AutoZone won’t sell me.
AutoZone is doing us all a favor. Most people whack in an LED replacement for their turn signals and end up with a quick flashing mess that may be partially green. Or they put in LED brake lights that are blindingly bright and have no differentiation between idle and braking.
I made sure the lights had the same projection pattern as the halogens. I put in one on one side first and compared to the old bulb. No difference: they both cut off at the same height. Neither halogen nor these LEDs are directional, it’s the housing that determines the projection pattern.
Plus, I’m in a sedan, while everyone else drives a huge SUV that rides higher than my car.
I don’t see how my light system is any more offensive than the luxury cars that have the same thing from the factory. The only difference is that I don’t blow all my money on a stupid car payment or a thousand dollar feature package just so I can see better at night.
I also installed LEDs for the license plate lights which has no negative effect on anyone, and now they won’t burn out all the time.
(I did not install turn signal, brake, or high beam LEDs, I just installed the stuff that annoyed me by burning out all the time)
You make a good and constructive point. A real everything store _should_ have both a "100w USB-C Power Adapter", and a "Long Life 100W USB C Premium Apple Android Galaxy Power Adapter US International iPad iPhone good luck LIFESTYLE".
Ah but which one to pick? There's 20 with different capitalized names, all using the same 3 stock images, all with a mix of good reviews and reviews for entirely different products.
no, now, you're thinking of Silk Road or some such.
The vast vast majority of consumers will only expect to find legal products/services on an everything store. If you are going to qualify everything to include things that will potentially land the user in prison, then sure, we shouldn't call it everything.
I think you’re making gps point. No customer wants or expects spam crap in the everything store. The everything store doesn’t literally need to sell “everything”.
Even BestBuy/Target/Walmart/Home Depot/Lowes/Staples/REI/etc to an extent, if the item is sold by them. Stores with physical inventory and presence that have to worry about rates of return will probably do more due diligence than an online marketplace.
Is there a "quality filter" setting you can toggle on and off? Who decides what goes on which side of the filter? At Amazon's scale, it would have to be automated.
Much like search SEO and every other algorithm, people would start to figure out how to game it, and eventually Amazon would give up trying to police it because it would cost them more money than it's worth, and you're back to where you started except now you have an additional - and inaccurate - "quality" attribute on every product.
Talk to friends and family, and only buy when someone has had a positive experience with a product before. Use outlets like consumer reports that do long-term reviews, etc.
It’s almost a stretch of the definition of “exist” but yeah. They mostly sell crap you’d find at a TJ Maxx or something, because they have neither name brands, nor most of their famous private labels that were good.
The one time I used their ecommerce platform (due to a gift card), I got a damaged product drop-shipped as an Amazon gift.
Quality and trust are not words that I have ever associated with Walmart, even in the brick-and-mortar world where it is much harder to pull a fast one. Color me skeptical.
See I’m always kinda amused when I encounter Amazon arbitrage plays. I’m like “welp. I guess this one is on me for not knowing my item was cheap enough on Amazon to have room for the middleman to pay retail and still make money!”
Walmart seems most primed to do this, barring third party sales. Or Sears, if they ever had a miraculous turnaround to their old days.