Bizarre. Poland isn’t a big market with Amazon, we have our own local monopoly in this sector called Allegro.
edit: ok this is done by UOKiK, a consumer protection agency. This agency has supposedly been doing a stellar job keeping an eye on everything from banking to e-commerce sector.
+1. When in Poland I use Allegro all the time - way more reliable than Amazon.pl. Not as good as Amazon in the states though.
My friends who moved back from the Bay Area still prefer to use Amazon, but they use Amazon.de instead - similar shipping times, and much better selection and reliability.
Not sure if this is still the case, but Amazon.de used to use fulfillment centers in Poland to deliver to Germany. So if you're in Poland and ordering from Amazon.de, your order could very well be delivered from Poland to Poland.
In fact there were 3 massive Amazon fullfilment centres in Poland before Amazon.pl even launched lol. It's a weird(but very interesting) market with its own big players that neither Amazon nor ebay managed to compete against.
I am honestly baffled Amazon hasn't found a way to compete with Allegro. I am happy about it, but also baffled. Allegro's customer experience is just stellar, whereas Amazon's interface continues to give the impression that it's still a bunch of widgets rendered by a hundred microservices and glued together without any elegant cohesion in mind. It's as if little has changed since the famous Steve Yegge's letter.
It's even more baffling that Amazon.pl has one of the worst customer support I've ever seen while Amazon.de is a total opposite - an increadibly pleasant experience and packages almost always arrive on the next day.
I'm no fan of either - Allegro has Amazon executives and nearly identical Prime-free shipping strategy. Pretty sure Allegro has the same effect of monopolizing and driving up prices as Amazon has.
I find the eBay-esque artifact interface absurd. It's likely Amazon hasn't found a way because an environment that isn't a monopoly isn't attractive to begin with for that business model.
I think Allegro lowers prices because it forces sellers into common arena where they have no choice but to compete with each other. It's usually cheaper to buy stuff on Allegro than on dedicated e-commerce site.
But think about it - when was the last time you actually got a good comparison in this market between allegro and a dedicated e-commerce site? For many product categories the latter almost doesn't even exist anymore.
Maybe tipping point is ahead of us. But Allegro already has 20mln unique users monthly (in a country of 36mln people) and twice as many as next largest, AliExpress.
Allegro has amazing metadata allowing you to precisely filter out the results. Search experience on amazon is an utter abomination compared to Allegro.
> I am honestly baffled Amazon hasn't found a way to compete with Allegro.
If Amazon is being treated just like all the other companies, and protection agencies are doing their job, then they wouldn't be able to use their neo-colonial business model.
See: what Amazon itself has done in the Middle East among Uber, Delivery Hero, and all the other Big Companies With More Capital have done to dominate these markets. It can't work if the governmental watchdogs like market and/or consumer authorities are able to block them.
I'm not sure enough to know if that's sarcastic, but the circumstances make me wonder if this was to promote local competitors or score political points.
UOKiK is pretty well known for doing a great job. I had some money returned from my ISP because of UOKiK. I saw big red banners on websites basically saying that they have to apologise for ripping off their customers because UOKiK is holding them by the balls. I had my refunds rejected but then approved immediately after mentioning UOKiK.
No no, I'm serious. I have friends in banking who had experiences coming under UOKiK scrutiny and they claim that it really has it's shit together. I have no doubt that there is dysfunction in the system, just not when it comes to regulation of this sector apparently.
edit: ok this is done by UOKiK, a consumer protection agency. This agency has supposedly been doing a stellar job keeping an eye on everything from banking to e-commerce sector.