Amazon is a marketplace, and more and more different vendors came to that place selling cheaper, shady things. They seems to have an open door policy. It's somewhat understandable.
But that same strategy got adopted in many different places.
Decathlon on their website offer products from other vendors. It's really shady as they advertise hassle free returns everywhere but that only applies to products sold by them specifically, not to majority of products available in their shop.
Kaufland (if you're in US think Germany's Walmart) has the same thing going on.
Unfortunately, a "marketplace" is precisely what I don't want from a lot of the commerce sites that include them on top of their "first party" inventory, and they're seemingly becoming ubiquitous.
At least the decathlon site has an easy way to limit search results to only Decathlon products. I kind of like how it is because it also allows me to discover products from alternatives that might be better while keeping the option to stick to decathlon.
This is happening everywhere, making a quick buck and completely ruining your reputation. The main Amazon competitor in The Netherlands bol.com has gone down the exact same path
The marketplaces in brand shops are completely annoying. If you choose to buy from Decathlon, you expect their coverage over all products, not some of them.
Only imagine the same in the physical shop, completely crazy trying to avoid falling into non-decathlon things along the display racks.
Darty, Fnac, Leroy Merlin do the same. It’s impossible to go to a shop’s website and expect to buy their products. They’re all just copying Amazon in a cheaper, scratchier version.
But Amazon started as marketplace and people associate the brand with that, also with their Amazon Basics stuff. But is the experience for the user is not equal for brands that have been working in their solely brand reputation.
I think that they fall into “I do it because the competitors have done it before”, it would be nice to know the revenue for the marketplace part and time invested in development.
Amazon is a marketplace, and more and more different vendors came to that place selling cheaper, shady things. They seems to have an open door policy. It's somewhat understandable.
But that same strategy got adopted in many different places.
Decathlon on their website offer products from other vendors. It's really shady as they advertise hassle free returns everywhere but that only applies to products sold by them specifically, not to majority of products available in their shop.
Kaufland (if you're in US think Germany's Walmart) has the same thing going on.