There isn’t much I could write about Amazon’s history to date that hasn’t already been said. However, for a company so famously predicated on customer service, I’ve found their storefront increasingly frustrating to use. Anyone can now sell on Amazon – which is great in theory – but in practice it has resulted in a huge amount of undifferentiated clutter, of spammy products straight off Alibaba. That endless filtering and scrolling is unfortunately familiar to eBay users.
It’s easy for Amazon to take a cut of those sales without any effort, but is that worth the cost of degrading one of the key reasons why people use their site in the first place? I don’t think it is. Even Amazon’s position is not so unassailable that people won’t look elsewhere for a better buying experience. There is value in curation when we’re bombarded with nearly infinite options.