I am honestly baffled Amazon hasn't found a way to compete with Allegro. I am happy about it, but also baffled. Allegro's customer experience is just stellar, whereas Amazon's interface continues to give the impression that it's still a bunch of widgets rendered by a hundred microservices and glued together without any elegant cohesion in mind. It's as if little has changed since the famous Steve Yegge's letter.
It's even more baffling that Amazon.pl has one of the worst customer support I've ever seen while Amazon.de is a total opposite - an increadibly pleasant experience and packages almost always arrive on the next day.
I'm no fan of either - Allegro has Amazon executives and nearly identical Prime-free shipping strategy. Pretty sure Allegro has the same effect of monopolizing and driving up prices as Amazon has.
I find the eBay-esque artifact interface absurd. It's likely Amazon hasn't found a way because an environment that isn't a monopoly isn't attractive to begin with for that business model.
I think Allegro lowers prices because it forces sellers into common arena where they have no choice but to compete with each other. It's usually cheaper to buy stuff on Allegro than on dedicated e-commerce site.
But think about it - when was the last time you actually got a good comparison in this market between allegro and a dedicated e-commerce site? For many product categories the latter almost doesn't even exist anymore.
Maybe tipping point is ahead of us. But Allegro already has 20mln unique users monthly (in a country of 36mln people) and twice as many as next largest, AliExpress.
Allegro has amazing metadata allowing you to precisely filter out the results. Search experience on amazon is an utter abomination compared to Allegro.
> I am honestly baffled Amazon hasn't found a way to compete with Allegro.
If Amazon is being treated just like all the other companies, and protection agencies are doing their job, then they wouldn't be able to use their neo-colonial business model.
See: what Amazon itself has done in the Middle East among Uber, Delivery Hero, and all the other Big Companies With More Capital have done to dominate these markets. It can't work if the governmental watchdogs like market and/or consumer authorities are able to block them.
