Interesting to see them grow so big then - they used to be the minnow to the Walmarts / Targets etc.

At least in my experience (retail product ordering) their service flat out IS head and shoulders above much of the compeitition.

I order off a Facebook ad - I get a drop shipment from china that takes forever, is effectively not returnable etc etc.

I order from Amazon - delivery is insanely reliable, when I have an issue refunds are handled incredibly well. Even special cases (I had a weird issue with an iphone order that required a manual override and refund despite what looked like a failure to return - I got a real person and a refund promptly - they would have been relatively justified NOT to refund but I thought I'd ask).

Even on AWS my support contract get's real responses. When I had a billing / customer service issue - a real person (sounded like native English speaking US call center) handled it very well.

My brokers is constantly experiencing "unexpected call volume" (hour long waits). The IRS when I call has "unexpected call volume" and hour long waits. Calling southwest they have "unexpected call volume" and hour long waits. A ton of places make it virtually impossible to actually call and talk to anyone (much smaller than Amazon BTW) - you can search website all day long. Or you are speaking to call centers that can't do anything at all.

I contrast AWS to the treatment we got as a paying google suite customer (endless different sales people calling us, but you don't have good paths in to trouble shoot weird state issues etc beyond basic customer service). And AWS devices support employees work calendars (via gsuite) while google devices DO NOT!

I’ve had very poor experiences with gsuite support. Once your issue gets past the front line support it disappears into an opaque void where nobody knows anything or can talk to anyone. Once I was asked to write a business case clarifying why answering my support question benefits Google. (Found a bug in gmail css handling, wanted a workaround).

With AWS support I can get an answer to my toughest “found a bug” issues in hours or a couple days at worst.

I’m pretty sure if I called AWS support on Thanksgiving and asked for help cooking a turkey they would send me a recipe. Their support is really amazing.

> I contrast AWS to the treatment we got as a paying google suite customer

Did you have an additional paid support contract with that Google Suite/Workspace account? What would your customer service have been with AWS if you didn't have that additional support contract? If you're paying for premium support on one service it seems a little unfair to compare that to the included base tier support of the other.

> In literally every business domain, Amazon succeeds not because of "customer obsession", but because of their willingness to engage in anti-competitive or outright monopolistic practices.

You're obviously casting a blanket that is far too wide. That's the hate Amazon train running out of control.

They legitimately do a great job for retail customers, re customer obsession. Their retail customer service and willingness to make things right, is excellent.

I've been buying from Amazon.com for ~23 years or so now. They've never failed to make something right. I've had maybe three bad purchases in those 23 years out of hundreds of orders (meaning something arrived that I didn't order, or it arrived damaged), all were made right with little effort on my part. Amazon almost never protests if something goes wrong with an order.

Their retail customers by and large adore them for that reason.

Their kindle ebook solution won because it was an excellent experience overall with a vast selection that was priced very much in the favor of consumers (and still is). They produced a great ebook at a great price. It's very easy to use and their pricing was so tremendous publishers sued them to try to force book prices higher on consumers.

Their Prime membership program has been no more anti-competitive than Costco's membership program.

Your scenario damns Amazon every direction no matter what they do, which reveals the plot. If they raise prices, they're a brutal monopolist taking advantage to gouge consumers. If they give consumers cheap prices, they're an anti-competitive monopolist undercutting on prices. And if by chance they perfectly align with everyone else on pricing, well they're obviously colluding to set prices, a clear anti-competitive practice.

Amazon.com is full of drop-shipped no-name almost literal polished plastic turds from China. A few useless stock-photo level product images. No technical specifications, just the same generic terms repeated as `description`. A completely unknown brand and company name. Of course only available for a few months, so bad reviews with this product name and brand don't accumulate all over the Internet. Rinse, repeat.

It's great that they "make things right" somehow. But their marketplace is crap, they are the embodiment of a cancerous flea market that grew to enormous proportions.

The problem is, Amazon shouldn't be able to set prices so freely. Market forces don't apply when you can just dump all your profit into a new niche, obliterate the competition, capture the audience, then set prices to maximize profit, and move to the next market segment. (Just as Google's money distorts the browser market.)

(Books happen to be the segment where most of this doesn't apply, because books, like any content are not substitutable, yet copies are perfectly fungible. At best there's a very minimal concern about the condition of used books. And it shows that Amazon's whole model is built on this. One completely unknown PowerBank/USB-hub/gadget is just as good as an other.)

> Their retail customer service and willingness to make things right, is excellent.

Excellent, right. I could tell you a story about how one of my German business accounts got closed after they allowed me to: a) open it, b) place an order with a line of credit payment type - only option possible because I couldn't even link a SEPA bank account to it c) they have shipped the order d) the line of credit was repaid, outstanding balance: €0.

A week later, account closed. They have sent me an automated email asking for "company documents". To my questions regarding which documents do they want, which I explicitly listed out what I can provide, they have sent me a blanket email asking for "company documents". Managed to get in touch with a human, the woman said "documents", any further communication would trigger the blanket email with request for "company documents". What documents, never figured out, it was outrageous. Stopped buying with Amazon (via 3 businesses and 1 private account, 4 accounts in total). Wife dumped Amazon too. Now giving money to German online shops or buy directly from manufacturer / supplier / distributor / merchant online store, even if less convenient than Amazon.

What I found out by that, many items offered on Amazon are about 40% more expensive than buying directly from manufacturer / supplier / merchant store. People are getting ripped off left and right and even pay for Prime delivery. Amazing. The best example was a t the beginning of the covid mess. Wanted to buy 4 bottles of hand sanitizer for the office. They wanted €180 and given me a delivery estimate of 2 weeks. So I listed the shops where the article comes from. Went to the first one, found the article in stock, paid €68.99 and had it delivered two days later. From the same shop that Amazon told me it would take TWO WEEKS to deliver.

Or another story, happened before the first one: as self employed, opened a business account next to the regular one. After they have changed their tax locality to Luxemburg, they lost all my purchase history on the business account. They couldn't figure out where it went. The only way to get invoices for past purchases for my own accounting, was to dig out all the purchase confirmation emails which had direct links to invoices. They've lost my history. If I did not keep the confirmation emails, I could have been deep in trouble because I had these expenses on business books but no invoices, and they couldn't be bothered. Nuts.

Never going back to Amazon for reason other than listing merchant shops to buy directly from.

Other than the timeframe (since they've opened), i can say the same thing about AliExpress. Same day support. Out of the 2 issues I had in the many years and hundreds of orders, all were resolved with a quick refund. Amazon isn't special. They just have such a high price tag, on our expense and not to the manufacturer's benefit, that they can afford to throw money at human support.

I wonder if net neutrality rules, combined with the absolute dominance of public cloud infrastructure in the US, could force providers to have more reasonable egress pricing.