The Atlantic has a piece about how an “open embrace” of cheap products from around the world, more often than not sold by third-party merchants via its Marketplace has done two things – it has given shoppers access to an endless supply of merchandise, but also has transformed Amazon “into something that functions more like a global flea market than a traditional retail store.”
The argument that Amazon actually is diminishing its own value as a trusted retailer hinges on a willingness to make available to shoppers an inexhaustible stock of “good enough” products of questionable provenance, and often not good enough products so cheap that when they break or don’t live up to expectations it is more cost effective to refund shoppers’ money and allow them to keep the items instead of returning them.
The Atlantic writes:
“This approach has, on some level, been a boon to all parties. Sellers get more direct access to American consumers than they’d ever had with traditional retail models, and those consumers get access to an abundance of cheap goods, even if sorting through all of them requires more guesswork than picking up something at your local Target. The biggest beneficiary of all, though, has been Amazon, which has managed to convince its customers to accept a fundamental jankiness in both the site and many of its goods. The success of this system is what has made the retailer into the Everything Store. It might also be what leads to the eventual end of Amazon’s dominance.”
Fascinating piece, and you can read it here.
KC’s View:
I actually had to look up jankiness – it is a word with which I was unfamiliar. Janky, according to the dictionary, “is a slang term for something run down, of poor quality, or unreliable. It can also be used for someone considered undesirable in some way.”
We’ve talked often here about how Amazon’s site has been diminished by the plethora of paid advertising through which shoppers often have to plow in order to find what they want and what they specifically searched for. I wouldn’t have thought about it being janky, but I do think that is a reasonable assessment, as is the observation that it sometimes seems more like a flea market than a store, especially if you get burned when buying something.
When a retailer is trusted by its shoppers, that is one of the most important – and, in some ways, fragile – connections that it can have with customers. I think people trust Amazon for a lot of things – speed being at the top of the list – but if it loses most people’s trust in the quality and dependability of the products it sells, it could be a fatal and perhaps irreparable problem.
Remember the Latin proverb we often cite here on MNB:
Trust, like the soul, never returns once it goes.
Or, because I am a retired altar boy:
Fide, sicut anima, nunquam redit semel.
(Retired. But also apostatic.)
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