
Jeff Bezos has confirmed Amazon’s growth is slowing - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-11/jeff-bezos-just-confirmed-amazon-s-growth-is-slowing
======
jonas21
It seems that Amazon grew its annual sales by around $50 billion from 2017 to
2018 for a growth rate of "only" 19% (compared with 24% the year before). I'm
not exactly concerned for them.

> _In 2018, Amazon’s nearly $300 billion in GMV was about a 19 percent jump
> from the prior year. That was notably slower than the rates of increase of
> 24 percent and 27 percent, respectively, in 2017 and 2016._

~~~
hedmundson
Seriously, and they grew faster than the ecommerce category as a whole. Plus,
double digit growth in the 100’s of billions of GMV is incredible in its own
right.

------
tyingq
I think the poor management of 3rd party sellers is at least part of it. I've
had several bad experiences with slow shipping, "out of stock" after the sale,
items very much not as described, counterfeits, etc. And crazy bad support
from those sellers...English bad enough that I couldn't understand the
response.

I now only buy a very specific subset of what I used to buy there.

~~~
mrfusion
I don’t understand how returns work anymore. I bought something thinking I
could return it if it didn’t fit but it turned out the cost to return it was
more than the item itself.

It doesn’t seem like they tell you that in advance.

~~~
Wheaties466
that and some items are nonreturnable. Which it does not say on the product
page.

------
olliej
It’s always weird to me when this kind of things is treated as bad news: they
haven’t said they’re shrinking, literally that they aren’t growing _as fast_.
I mean I don’t particularly like amazon but this kind of reporting irks me.

~~~
ww520
Because the stock price has factored in the growth. A slow down in growth
means the stock price has to come down. It is bad news for the stock holders.

~~~
speedplane
> Because the stock price has factored in the growth. A slow down in growth
> means the stock price has to come down.

Not necessarily. Maybe the market has factored in a slow-down in growth.

~~~
hyperbovine
But then it would not be news, and TC wouldn’t be writing articles about it,
and we wouldn’t be here discussing it.

~~~
nicoburns
This _shouldn 't_ be news. Amazon is a multi-billion dollar business that has
been growing at phenomenal rates. _Of course_ its growth is slowing.

------
Osiris
Don't investors realize that mathematically, a business cannot grow at the
same rate forever?

~~~
hunter23
Of course they do, they just value you differently. When companies announce
slower growth it impacts their valuation because it impacts the discounted
value of their future cash flows.

~~~
refurb
Exactly. You can think of the stock close price as having two
components:current value + expected future value (of cash flows).

If a company grows more slowly, you’ll see the 2nd decrease, but the first
will stay the same.

------
randomacct3847
Shopping on Amazon has become like shopping on Canal Street in NYC (e.g.
street lined with shops selling counterfeit goods). You never know what you’re
going to get.

~~~
benjaminwootton
I honestly think this is overblown on HN. We must have placed more than 100
orders a year as a family for approaching a decade, and I don’t think we’ve
ever had a counterfeit. Not sure if it’s different in the UK.

~~~
randomacct3847
It is definitely not overblown. Easy to do simple searches on Amazon and
compare to a site that doesn’t rely on 3rd party sellers like Best Buy. If you
searched “wireless headphones” the top results are all knock off airpods and
other suspect cheap Chinese made electronics with thousands of likely fake
reviews. It’s a joke

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _If you searched “wireless headphones” the top results are all knock off
> airpods and other suspect cheap Chinese made electronics with thousands of
> likely fake reviews._

But isn't it a feature of all on-line shopping? If you type a generic query
like this, you'll always get generic garbage as results. If you want to buy
quality items, you search directly for those items - by their exact name or
SKU.

E-commerce storefronts are not useful for product discovery.

~~~
superhuzza
Amazon commingles inventory, so counterfeits end up in the same bins as real
products. So even by ordering a specific product or SKU, from a reputable
seller, you can still have a decent chance of getting a counterfeit.

[https://sellercentral.amazon.ca/gp/help/external/G200141480?...](https://sellercentral.amazon.ca/gp/help/external/G200141480?language=en_CA)

[https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-fake-products-project-
zer...](https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-fake-products-project-zero/)

[https://www.climbing.com/gear/counterfeited-how-illegal-
knoc...](https://www.climbing.com/gear/counterfeited-how-illegal-knockoffs-
harm-outdoor-brands/)

------
iambateman
I wonder if Amazon’s days as the de facto online retailing site are numbered.

For nearly everything I buy on Amazon now, I wonder: “is this real? Are these
reviews real? Will it break in 10 minutes?”

Obviously, Amazon is doing just fine, and we are a long way from my parents
asking those same questions, and they have tons of businesses beside retail.
So yes, they’ll be ok.

But I think they’ve left the door open for competition with their approach to
third party sellers.

~~~
Innominate
This is my concern as well. They're becoming victims of their own success with
knockoffs and scammers increasingly gaming the system. Everything from
knockoffs piggybacking on real listings, to entire lines of products being
dominated by no-name Chinese companies throwing armies of shills at the
reviews.

Amazon figuring out how to deal with the problem is critical for their future.

~~~
my_username_is_
They've had a long time to figure that out. It's been an issue for a while.
They've just neglected to do anything about it.

It doesn't take a genius to look at all the reviews that some products have
and realize that they're fake

~~~
mhaymo
This is a common sentiment, but seems wrong to me. It doesn't take a genius to
recognise a spam or phishing email either, and yet no company has created a
perfect email filter.

It's not neglect, it's a very hard problem, as is any problem where you are
trying to make an inference with limited information controlled by an
adversary. Amazon could spend billions on incredibly sophisticated fake-
review-detection algorithms, but they still couldn't stop sellers finding real
amazon customers and paying them to buy and review their products.

~~~
schredder
Neither the sentiment nor the difficulty of the problem matters. Big A gets a
cut of a sale whether or not the reviews or products are genuine so they won’t
do more than the bare minimum to deal with it, until their tide starts to
change.

------
throwawaa743892
They've clearly spent the last 10 years spending like crazy, in a frantic (and
successful) effort to diversify their offerings.

Yes, they'll first and foremost be "internet walmart", but only a fool would
think that the insane growth was unstoppable - Jeff Bezos is many things but
he's not an idiot.

------
ggm
isn't there an upside? feels like a return to bricks-and-mortar competition is
good, not bad. well.. depends if you own amazon shares or not. Im a non-direct
shareholder, my pension fund might have a consequence but I'd expect it to be
both sides of this anyway.

totally feels like an upside to me.

~~~
martinpw
> a return to bricks-and-mortar competition

That's not what is happening at all. Amazon dominates the ecommerce market, is
still growing like crazy, is even still growing faster than the overall
ecommerce market, and the ecommerce market is growing faster than the overall
retail market.

No return to bricks-and-mortar competition remotely in sight here. It's a pity
the spin in the article seems to have been accepted so uncritically in many
posts here.

~~~
ggm
Well, thats a shame then. I might add I believed it because of the false
assumption "what I do is what everyone does" and I stopped using AMZN and buy
in bricks-and-mortar deliberately for a reason.

I do however, in some cases continue to buy online but from shops direct, not
via their Amazon channel.

I assumed the background was this is a "thing" but your story makes more
sense: the rate of growth of underlying trends makes a single-line measure
"drop" but it isn't what they say it is, its a decline in relative scale.

------
cs702
Amazon is doing _great_... but its _stock price_ now seems _much riskier_.

This is because many self-professed "growth investors" head for the exits,
swiftly and silently, the moment they get a whiff that growth is slowing down.

~~~
koreyb
The growth numbers to keep an eye on aren't ecomm, it's AWS and Prime
subscriptions.

~~~
cs702
I would say keep an eye on the whole top line, not just those two contributors
to revenue. And also, watch out for any warning signs in the industry
suggesting that cloud services are starting to become utility-like (low-
margin, capital-intensive) businesses. That would not be good for AWS.

------
Simulacra
I'm curious if acquisitions impact the rate of growth, Amazon has been on a
buying spree these past couple of years.

~~~
gcb0
they finally stagnated. the site is still as unusable as when I first used it.

Search and categories are complete garbage.

The listings that breakdown price (e.g. $/unit or $/Gb or $/ounce) are a
inconsistent mess in the same search result, sometimes showing different units
for the same product from two sellers!

and I still have no idea if a listing will be OK or from a seller worse thab
ebay.

~~~
toufiqbarhamov
I can live with the unpleasant UX as far as that goes, but where it implodes
for me is having to sift through endless fake reviews, counterfeits, and shit
products. “Amazon’s Choice” is frequently garbage, and everything else is a
coin flip at best. I have to use Fakespot just to sift through the more
obvious dreck.

Of course it’s AWS printing their money, not retail.

~~~
whoisjuan
Fakespot is pure trash. That thing doesn't work at all. According to Fakespot
everything in Amazon is fake. Even small legitimate third-party sellers get
bad ratings from Fakespot. But that's not even the worst part. I have found
dubious listings where Fakespot didn't detect anything and gave them a semi-
decent rating when it's obvious that the reviews were manipulated just by
looking at them.

If you want to understand a product reliability is pretty simple. Just browse
the 1 and 2 star reviews. You can find a lot of valuable information about the
products in those reviews.

If you still want to use something to evaluate the reviews use Reviewmeta.
It's much better and transparent than Fakespot.

~~~
bunderbunder
> According to Fakespot everything in Amazon is fake.

[http://www.chioka.in/class-imbalance-problem/](http://www.chioka.in/class-
imbalance-problem/)

~~~
paul7986
And probably half or more that’s on the Internet is fake too especially if it
revolves around making money.

I’ve told my older parent not to buy a product or use a svc based on Internet
reviews.. go with personal recommendations only!

------
randomacct3847
I think the market has already realized that Amazon retail is beatable.
There’s been a resurgence in stocks that were once falling like a knife
because everyone thought Amazon would destroy them...among them Best Buy,
Etsy, Shopify, etc.

------
zamalek
Hopefully such a signal doesn't turn the market bearish. There's enough
economists saying that we're overdue for a correction and I hope for them to
be wrong.

~~~
tareqak
Why do you hope for them to be wrong?

Edit: Fix typo.

~~~
cm2012
People suffer in recessions.

~~~
jhwang5
On the contrary, I think a recession - and hence a discount in asset prices -
is good for people.

~~~
cm2012
Good for rich people (those with money to spend on assets). Absolutely not
good for most people.

~~~
jhwang5
Rich (<1%) already own assets, but the rest aren't invested enough. Asset
prices right now are unaffordable. A big correction will give the rest a much
needed discount. Agreed that there is a big segment in population who can't
afford assets either way. But usually recessions impact the middle class the
most.

------
vernie
I guess they have to get into the people-making business now.

------
aiphex
I see Amazon now like Aliexpress with a worse UI. Side note - I got an
Amazon.ca Visa 4 years ago. Then two years later I got a letter saying in a
month or so they (Chase and Amazon) were ending the card service. So I was a
student stuck with paying off the card without access to the credit I had
factored into my budget while I was in school. I wasn't impressed. Haven't
shopped on Amazon since.

------
rongenre
I'm noticing that there's a lack of hot products that I "must have" and would
jump onto Amazon to buy. Lately my consumption is largely driven by stuff I
have wearing out -- this wasn't the case a few years ago.

------
snrji
It's time for massive M&As.

------
digitaltrees
Now begins the monopoly, rent seeking, price hikes.

