I don't find their prices are below market or the competition though. If you shop brand-for-brand and the same items they are identical or more. Example: I bought a new edging trimmer. Amazon appeared $60 cheaper but it didn't come with a battery. People love the one-stop, one-click everyhting delivered quick more than the prices or actual product. It's today's air travel experience for everything.
Now, yes, but they've already killed off much of the competition by now.
I don't really think so. You can find pretty much everything they sell on either the manufacturer's own website, or another big retail site such as ebay or walmart.com, or on a specialist website. It's more work though, to find and browse those sites than to just pull up Amazon and be done with it, and then getting back to see what you missed on TikTok.
Strange in a way how saving 2 minutes is a differentiator online. Back in the brick-and-mortar days you'd spend 2 minutes at a stoplight on the way to the store without even thinking about it.
And ordering from catalogs? If I got the item in two weeks that seemed pretty fast.
It's easy to sneeze at "deficient competitors" as well, but the whole massive spend on infrastructure - warehouses, delivery vans, etc. is hard to replicate. In one sense, it's worth an antitrust look if that whole system essentially stiles competition