[unchaotic]

Amazon has a lot of cash & experience to pamper customers but once it wins over, all that'll change. The best outcome for millions of customers is to have 1 or 2 strong competitors to Amazon that'll be around for a long time to come. Else you'll be stuck with Amazon's monopoly !

[morgante]

Amazon has hasn't had any serious competition in the US for many years, yet it still offers great customer experience.

[mandeepj]

Amazon never changed in US. They are number 1 here

[ryao]

Prices have steadily crept upward, especially since Amazon started to branch out into video streaming. Prices have become so bad that I am discontinuing my prime membership when it runs out in 6 weeks.

I am consistently finding things cheaper on any of eBay, jet.com and Newegg. With shop runner from my Amex card, I often get free second day on Newegg. Then jet.com gives second day for free. eBay does not, but unless the seller is in China, I get fairly quick shipping.

In any case, monoprice and newegg are consistently cheaper on their main items (cables at monoprice and computer parts at newegg) while jet.com and eBay often beat Amazon by incredible margins on just about anything. I recently brought a Xeon E5-1670 for only $40 and 5lbs of paprika for only $10.49 a lb from eBay. Amazon's pricing was far higher.

I also purchased various pantry items and bananas from jet.com. They were not only cheaper than Amazon, but they were cheaper than the best brick and mortar store deals (which are also consistently better than Amazon), in one case being better by a factor of 2. The bananas were also packaged with reusable refrigerant packs that would have likely cost me more than the $0.81 each of the two banana bunches cost.

I am at the point where I am ready to stop looking up prices on Amazon because I expect one of the other sites to not only have the item, but sell it for significantly less. If by some miracle Amazon does sell it for less, it ought to appear in a search on Google shopping or pricegrabber.com.

I feel like Amazon has started taking its customers for granted. It is like they no longer feel compelled to compete on price because they expect people not to compare under the now false assumption that Amazon's pricing is good. Getting good pricing from Amazon requires using a side like camel camel camel or price zombie and playing a waiting game with them when the price is high, which is almost always the case.

Also, unlike Amazon, you can often stack cash back sites like top cash back, be frugal and fat wallet with purchases at other sites thanks to their affiliate programs. There are even comparison cashback sites like cashbackholic and cashbackmonitor. eBay is the only notable exception in making cashback limited to a small number of categories at most cashback sites.

If you have not noticed a change, you do likely not do comparison shopping to be able to have noticed.

[phatfish]

I noticed Amazon are not the cheapest anymore. However often the free shipping option with Amazon is not matched by other retailers. Amazon looks more expensive unless you factor that in, then they are the same or cheaper.

However if you spend enough at another retailer to get free shipping then it can be a much better deal.

I assume Amazon's scale allows them to put the delivery companies under a lot of pressure, so they push the free delivery to smaller spends which means they don't have to compete so strongly on the item price.