The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

I wonder if the shrink wrap T&Cs on allowed web usage, combined with lawsuits could help.

“By using this site, you agree you are not an agent of Amazon. You also agree that you will not use pricing information except as allowed herein.”

Maybe it's because I don't live in the 2% of the land area where 30% of people are dogpiled (if like 5% of you moved someplace else the Republican party would be gone, baby, gone...) but in my area AMZN deliveries are always UPS or USPS or FedEx delivered so insofar as AMZN deliveries are reliable it is because those systems are reliable. (I've seen an AMZN delivery truck driving around in a particular neighborhood between home and the office but it has never stopped at my place so far as I know.)

In my area AMZN deliveries are 5 days which is nothing special compared to the 1-3 day deliveries I frequently get from Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and every other online store. In fact, I regularly order stuff from Japan on Ebay that arrives faster than AMZN deliveries. (As Flavor Flav would say: "I ordered from Amazon Prime a long time ago, Amazon Prime is a joke in 'yo town")

I hear a lot of zip codes that have huge AMZN warehouses in them have 5 day delivery too but if you are Jim Cramer or a Congressman or something they have to have you believing AMZN is a little better than average as opposed to a little worse. If they had slow shipping in Hollywood you'd see sitcoms making jokes about slow Prime deliveries.

As for payments isn't AMZN just having Mastercard, Visa, and American express do all the heavy lifting?

As for easy checkout, checkout has very few clicks on Ebay. I check out from stores like Best Buy, Adorama, etc. and they all are pretty easy, in fact they don't make me click 4 times saying "NO I REALLY DON'T WANT TO SIGN UP FOR A FREE TRIAL OF AMAZON PRIME".

Product listings on AMZN already look like a scene from Idiocracy; often I see the same bullshit listing spammed hundreds of times, listings that are word salad and make so sense at all (and that AMZN doesn't want to investigate unless you bought it.) I am not worried that AMZN is privileging a $5.99 product over a $3.75 product, I find it highly stressful to filter through product listings that are obviously 75% bogus and call into question if I can trust any of them.

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Maybe if you live in Manhattan they send a bicycle messenger backwards in time to deliver you packages as soon as you order them but from my viewpoint as someone who lives four hours away from a big warehouse in PA, AMZN is the Dollar General of e-Commerce and the retailer of last resort which I'll only order from if I can't find the item elsewhere. So far as I can tell Amazon Prime is a big Jedi mind trick that makes people think it is all OK because they want to watch Rings of Power that bad or maybe that Xanth series that AMZN bought the rights to but will stay in development hell forever because it's just too squicky.

Much of what Amazon does is what other retailers already do. Amazon just does it more overtly and with smaller businesses. In fact, various aspects of this where pioneered by WalMart and Costco. 1. WalMart determines the expected product and expected price and tells vendors to take it or leave it. The agreement often has a stipulation that the same product can never be cheaper elsewhere which is sometimes easy as WalMart gets specific SKUs. 2. On the other side, Costco makes the majority of its money from memberships. The membership is a significant sunk cost and maintains brand loyalty from a mass affluent customer base (notice the similarity to Amazon Prime). Existing vendors will work closely with Costco to tailor products to this desirable market (see Costco specific SKUs for TVs, routers, etc). Upstart brands will go even further to get their wares in front of an audience with ample disposable income.

The Amazon policy basically says that the vendor must offer free shipping. Coincidentally, nobody can offer shipping for less than what Amazon offers therefore Amazon(FBA) is by default the lowest price. The only other company that can fight this with a logistics network of its own is...WalMart.

Then you have Chinese vendors who sell through networks of dropshippers and resellers at Amazon and other venues. It's why you see many vendors of seemingly the same item.

One thing to note is that it's mostly small and medium vendors of relatively low margin items that are the most hurt by Amazon's policies. Seller's of high margin items just eat into their margins while large vendors push back at Amazon and sometimes win e.g. Toilet Paper that comes directly out of a Georgia Pacific warehouse instead an Amazon warehouse despite being labeled as Prime and sold by Amazon.com, not a third party.

FBA de-risks the transaction for Amazon and the vendor. You sell a known quantity with a known delivery window. Small businesses often struggle with this and criminals use this to their advantage.

If eBay/non-FBA is a flea market, FBA is a online mall.

I coded a credit card payment a few times in my career and from what I saw it's always just a token. That token could be only used to make transactions from your account to the specific vendor's account. Of course there's always could be some incompetent developer who thought that saving credit card data into a database is a great idea, but overall it's not as risky as people think.