Comment by jonahx
1 day ago
Per the article, in exchange for that goodwill they get a billion dollars per week. Do we need more explanation?
To be clear, it's gross, but they are doing it just enough that their convenience and average sufficient product quality keeps me using them. I'd guess they do a lot of research to keep that balance where it is.
I don't expect to get any sort of explanation from Amazon of course. I do think they are probably doing something that is hurting them financially. Acquired goodwill is extremely hard to measure and shows up in things like long-term customer retention and engagement, so you're not going to see it on an A/B test -- on a A/B test users come in with the same level of goodwill on both sides of the fork and thus their immediate behavior is not going to be dictated by this.
In many ways this is symptomatic of larger trends in society and managerial culture of looking for ways to measure things rather than confronting the messy subjective non-measurable reality.
The only time we'll get a true counterfactual is when a competitor arises who can meet Amazon's very high bar for logistic excellence but can offer a more appealing interaction, and then Amazon retail will die off without anyone understanding how or why it happened.
I still use Amazon despite them being burned because they seem slightly more reliable than other places, but only slightly and my goodwill to them is completely burned. Yesterday they delivered a package to a parcel locker 150 miles away, which is a double screw up because it was supposed to be to the door. They've also made it really difficult to see where a package will be shipped from (and so whether or not you'll pay import taxes).
But I'm close. My purchases through them are down probably somewhere around 80%. My girlfriend never really used Amazon and doesn't see the appeal at all - telling someone "it used to be good" makes you wonder what you're doing.
Even AWS has burned me and clients enough times that we pretty much don't use them anymore - an idea that was unthinkable a decade ago.
The other thing is that the more they burn this goodwill the more they'll be tempted to increase ad revenue, and the more the goodwill will disappear.