Amazon is the only big tech firm I like. They're the only one that I feel I get my money's worth, and that says a lot considering most of the other ones offer free services. They make my life better. I can find things for half the price than at a brick and mortar, it comes fast, and it's almost always about what I expect. I have never gotten the wrong item.
And that's just their product marketplace and logistics services. I don't use any of their other services, I don't use AWS or prime video or any of that stuff. I just use their store.
I have some gripes with them. The big one is their return policy requires me to pay for shipping back or drive an hour to a specific location. I don't like how they're becoming more like eBay by the day. I think the antitrust lawsuit by the FTC has merit. They should not be charging a cut from merchants and then disallowing them from discounting their products on their own websites, it's predatory. But out of all the big online service companies out there, they're the only one I'm happy to allow a little spot in my life. My life is better because I use amazon.
Half the price, not sure, but for me the main appeal is I can find the things in the first place. If you need something specific, it's just impossible to find it in the city. There are 10 places that may have it, you go there, nobody knows where what is.
If there was a search engine for brick and mortar I might be inclined to buy there again. But I just can't find anything.
The reviews are fake, the no-name brands are hallucinations, and no one should ever buy supplements, food, or safety equipment like climbing rope or fuses from a disreputable platform that sells electrocution hazard USB chargers and does nothing about them. Watch a video or 3 from Louis Rossmann and BigClive.
The biggest issue with reviews in the UK are the Vine reviews, and occasionally sellers aggregating reviews for unrelated products. Fake products seem to be almost nonexistent (maybe because of stronger market regulation?).
Same/next day delivery is hard to compete with anyway.
But then I can't find the thing I want. Amazon seems to be doing their level best to make searching a pain in the ass, but it's still leagues ahead of using Maps to hunt down the type of store that may have an item, then going to the website of the store (if they even have one), then looking for the item if they have a shopping/product-list section on their website, then hoping it's even accurate and I don't drive out there just to find they don't actually have the item.
So instead I go on Amazon and deal with scrolling through pages of not-the-thing-I-actually-want and hopefully find the item available for delivery sometime in the next 1-5 days.
I buy all my supplements on Amazon. I buy paracord and carabiniers on amazon, I've hung more than my body weight from them no problem.
Carabiners break when they break. You'll only notice if you get unlucky. I think there's carabiners you wouldn't want to use that can hang weight "no problem" for a while.
Problems with supplements are even more undetectable.