I'd grant that Amazon has a large selection and that's an advantage over competitors.
As for pricing, I wouldn't say Amazon is expensive but it is not consistently low cost and it is not unusual to see something on the shelves at Target for $50 that is selling for $70 on AMZN. I think after all these years, and particularly with Prime, AMZN has gotten people in the habit of looking to AMZN first and you'd expect them to cash in on it.
The better selection than other retailers is a durable advantage. I'd call out Best Buy for having a poor selection in comparison, particularly being overly wide (they sell washing machines, grilles, and mirrorless cameras and parts to build PCs) but not sufficiently deep (no selection of lenses for those cameras, no quality tripods, a very limited supply of PC parts.) It begs the question of "Why am I going to drive to Best Buy where they might have some of the things I need when I can order them all online from Amazon or a specialist retailer?"
The flip side is that the marketplace puts a lot of junk products in the AMZN catalog. I'd never buy anything that is likely to be counterfeit on AMZN (Nike only from the Nike store) and I learned the hard way not to buy a thermal printer that is marketed with a size in mm instead of inches.
I'd grant that Amazon has a large selection and that's an advantage over competitors.
As for pricing, I wouldn't say Amazon is expensive but it is not consistently low cost and it is not unusual to see something on the shelves at Target for $50 that is selling for $70 on AMZN. I think after all these years, and particularly with Prime, AMZN has gotten people in the habit of looking to AMZN first and you'd expect them to cash in on it.
The better selection than other retailers is a durable advantage. I'd call out Best Buy for having a poor selection in comparison, particularly being overly wide (they sell washing machines, grilles, and mirrorless cameras and parts to build PCs) but not sufficiently deep (no selection of lenses for those cameras, no quality tripods, a very limited supply of PC parts.) It begs the question of "Why am I going to drive to Best Buy where they might have some of the things I need when I can order them all online from Amazon or a specialist retailer?"
The flip side is that the marketplace puts a lot of junk products in the AMZN catalog. I'd never buy anything that is likely to be counterfeit on AMZN (Nike only from the Nike store) and I learned the hard way not to buy a thermal printer that is marketed with a size in mm instead of inches.