[MyPasswordSucks]

First and foremost, you have to understand why people use Amazon. Amazon has a good chance of having whatever it is I'm looking for, the price is generally about the same as I'd expect to pay elsewhere, and the shipping (with Prime, in the US, can't speak for UK/EU/RoW) absolutely can't be beat. People don't generally feel like messing around on three or four different websites to find the item, add it to their cart, and start the checkout process to determine how long the shipping will take and how much it'll cost, so the mental heuristic of "Amazon shipping is always free and if it's the sort of thing I'd find at Walgreens it'll usually be same-day/next-day" is incredibly valuable for Amazon.

So, with that in mind: The margins for most of the products people buy on Amazon these days are miniscule, so you really need to be able to sell at scale right out the gate, and it's a gargantuan investment to be able to do that. Shipping costs have also shot through the roof. I can't really speak for the U.K. or EU, but in the continental US, free shipping is a money-loser if you're shipping items heavier than 1 pound and not making a $20 average profit per order. Amazon can do it because they have their own shipping network, so if you want parity there, it's a gargantuan^2 investment.

Amazon didn't become "Amazon" overnight. They started by just selling books (which, in the US, can be shipped at much cheaper rates than the size/weight would otherwise cost, because the USPS subsidizes media mail), pivoted into CDs and DVDs just in time for the tail end of the CD money-printing heyday and the middle of the Reign of DVD, and slowly incrementalized into offering drugstore / grocery / big-box-store items and faster and faster free shipping. A competitor won't be able to copy that strategy. I think the most likely path in 2025 would be a company that started with a focus on just one geographic region (a state or three in the US, a single country in Europe) and was able to slowly expand as cashflow allowed.

So the short answer is "nobody has the money". The longer answer is "nobody has the money, and also the time and patience".

[autoexec]

> the price is generally about the same as I'd expect to pay elsewhere

I've increasingly found that prices on amazon are higher than you'd pay on the manufacturers website. Sometimes much higher. It's worth checking. Some sites have been cheaper and had free shipping. The only catch is that shipping times were 3-5 weeks as opposed to the 3-14 days it would take for prime's 3 day shipping to actually show up.

[mindslight]

So many terrible trends are driven purely by people's over reliance on mobile phones. When you're at a personal computer, it's not terribly hard to search for the same product on multiple web stores and see which one makes the most sense, or build up a cart over a few days to hit a shipping minimum. "Fast" shipping is overstated for Amazon and overrated for most purchases - on average, with the Sunk Cost Fallacy membership, it's maybe a day or two quicker than other web stores. If you really do need something urgently then it's worth it to spend a little effort comparing who can actually get it to you the quickest. And over time you build up a regular intuition of where to shop for various types of things, and for many things independent stores have much better curation. Weighing competitive options is only hard when you've disempowered yourself by using a tiny touch screen with an attacker-owned operating system.

[abracadaniel]

A few years ago I noticed that my shipments all took a week or more regardless, but other retailers would have it here in a day or two, sometimes same day. Cancelled prime and haven’t regretted it.

[coliveira]

> "Amazon shipping is always free"

No, Amazon shipping is not always free. It is only if you pay for Prime membership or if it's above certain price.

[MyPasswordSucks]

I pay for Prime, so that's my mental heuristic. Plenty of other people are in the same boat. For those who don't pay for Prime, "free over $35" is an acceptable drop-in replacement.

[autoexec]

Even if you pay for prime not everything sold on amazon is "prime eligible"