[torginus]

Sorry this is a bit off topic (but relevant to your post).

I'm not American, but what do people like in Amazon, as in the retailer?

I have experience with the German Amazon, and often they're not the cheapest, they often don't have stock of the most popular items (as in the stuff you'd actually want, like iPhones or NVIDIA GPUs), and same day delivery, while nice, is something I can usually live without (and I'm willing to trade it in exchange for lower prices).

They seem to have an endless back catalog of cheap and cheerful mystery products of dubious quality, but I hardly consider that a decisive competitive edge.

[spacebanana7]

Amazon is excellent at selling physical books. I can order pretty much any vaguely popular book and have it delivered the next day at a price rarely higher than anywhere else.

That’s Amazon’s core business philosophically, everything else is an add on or side project that happened to be profitable.

I think that just like the original sin of web development is trying to run apps in a document browser, the original sin of Amazon is trying to sell everything in a bookstore.

[sofixa]

> I'm not American, but what do people like in Amazon, as in the retailer?

I'm not American either, but I use Amazon.fr occasionally. It has going for it:

* it's a trustworthy site. If I order something, I'm 100% sure I'll get it or get my money back. If I'm looking for something rather niche like an ESP32-S3 microcontroller, it beats buying on it vs a random site I've never heard of before that it will have longer delivery times and might be a scam or might have nonexistant support

* it has a large catalogue. I can buy coffee, kimchi, small electronics (PWM servo motors), larger electronics (toaster), power bank, USB C charger, mouse, outdoor furniture. It's easy to buy all sorts of stuff off it without hunting specialised physical stores or a ton of different websites. (of course for some things I know and already trust various websites or stores, so I buy off them; but for more generic or niche things, Amazon is pretty good)

* support, returns, delivery are all very good and there is barely anyone that is even close.

[dboreham]

US Amazon isn't like that, but iphones and short supply GPUs aren't widely available anyway. Apple controls where you can buy an iPhone and NVidia controls who gets GPUs.

[whiplash451]

Lowest click-to-package-at-my-door number (especially for books).