User is ubiquitous only because of its ability to burn an astonishing amount of money. Their bet is that they am do this long enough to make themselves the market leader. I am not convinced that they can continue to lose money at the rate they currently are for the future potential as a monopoly provider. At some point investors are going to ask for a return or bail on the company.
Amazon's biggest quarterly loss ever was about $437 million. That's roughly Uber's average quarterly loss, and Amazon did it on quarterly revenues of $20B, while Uber's revenues are optimistically $5B.
Amazon can collapse really fast. My bet is that if it does it will be almost overnight and everybody will claim that nobody saw it coming.
The reason I believe that it may collapse is because now when I want to buy something online I rather go to Walmart,Target or to the specific brand store. When I think of Amazon the picture that comes to mind is of shady people trying to scam me out of my money. My perception, even if erroneous, right now is that Walmart is less shady than Amazon when it comes to buying merchandize.
If enough people start to feel this way about Amazon there may come a tipping point and the entire company will collapse. Once the tipping point happens I don't think it will be possible for Bezos to reverse it, though he will spend mountains of cash trying to.
Do you actually go to the brand stores though? The other day I needed something that wasn't on Amazon, so I bought it from the retailer directly. And then I remembered why I love Amazon and Prime. The ordering was terrible, and I had to wait 10 days for it to arrive.
With Amazon the purchasing is seamless. That's where they really win. And they just keep making it easier. Now I can order things with my voice (using Alexa).
A few times yes. So far I've had good experiences. For example, when I decided I wanted to get a new leather notebook from my favorite brand [1] They had it in B&N, Amazon and the brand store themselves. I finally decided to buy it from the brand store and had no problems.
Of course, take everything I'm saying with a big grain of sand since this is all anecdotal. I've also purchased from Columbia Sportwear Store and some other brands that I do not remember right now. I guess so far I've been lucky.
Amazon is 1000% easier to use than to compare prices from different places. I also view it as more secure than entering my information on 10 different websites. I don't know that many people share your perception.
I'm the opposite, Amazon is a bajillion times more convenient for me to use than other online stores. And judging from how their business keeps growing, I'm guessing more people are like me than you.
I really doubt they'll let it reach a tipping point. Major companies keep tabs on user sentiment, etc, and tweak their operations accordingly. Small losses like some people finding them shady are expected in a profit maximizing model, much like lawsuits by burnt people are an accepted cost by McDonalds to avoid having the rest of their clients complain about cold coffee.
Do you have any reason to believe that many other people share your perception?
Also, doesn't Amazon have unique defenses against this possibility? If sales suddenly fall off a cliff, Amazon has AWS and lots of B2B products that could keep them afloat for a time while they tried to recover. If people en masse decided to stop shopping at Walmart, they would have nothing to fall back on.
Amazon's infrastructure is not easily replicated. As far as I can see Ubers infrastructure is essentially their app and whatever routing/mapping/job matching algorithm they have. Both of which could be replaced by a better implementation relatively easily.
The same economy of scale that keeps people using Facebook despite constant privacy issues and bad press: the network effect.
That said, Facebook has a much larger network effect than Uber. The friction to create a profile and attend an driver orientation on a competing ride broker network is much smaller than telling your everyone on your Facebook friends list you're moving to Diaspora.
