Comment by FredPret
2 years ago
Retail is so low-margin that it will never be very good.
Amazon, Walmart, Ebay, are all very imperfect businesses. Even Costco is rough to deal with for the suppliers - there’s just no way to do this at scale while being all nice and fuzzy
Amazon is especially bad though
All they have to do is get rid of the 3rd party storefront and hire people to stock and procure vetted goods instead of having it be a free-for-all.
Well, yeah but the margins on operating a platform for 3rd party sellers is way better than actually just selling stuff.
Think about it - Amazon gets to take a fee on - accepting inventory into warehouse, holding inventory, listing fees, listing ads, sales fee, shipping products, accepting returns, destroying returned merchandise.. and probably a few more things.
Amazon makes money whether the underlying sale of products is unprofitable .. because that's someone else's problem.
If you reduce usefulness of your product (your store) to the point where people can't get what they want and don't use it, it doesn't matter how much margin you have.
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There are plenty of stores that do this. The selection is much lower and prices are higher.
That’s right - being an everything store isn’t easy.
No excuse for their behaviour, but the expectation is not high.