Unless I want to buy something weird, in which case there's also a good chance delivery fails entirely for some reason and the order gets cancelled on the other side.
I make most of my money supporting companies on AWS, but I've stopped recommending it to new shops largely for the same reasons - if you're not big enough for them to knock on your door, they won't answer when you knock on theirs.
In 2023 I placed exactly 100 orders and this year I'm probably going to hit the same number. I've had very few problems over the years (my first order was March 29, 2000). During that time, I've lived in a bunch of different cities across three states.
This is my opinion and I'm not trying to convince you of it. Have a nice day.
I remember one move I made to a new city. I'd downsized a bunch of my stuff and got settled in pretty quickly. Everything was right with the world except my Harmony remote didn't survive the move and my guitar hanger got left behind.
So I looked at Amazon to at least get a baseline price for these two things, and they offered to deliver both of them to my door in a couple of hours.
I sanity-checked the prices and they were fine.
"What is this wizardry," I thought to myself, when I had both items at my door in a couple of hours.
I don't think they have the best name reputation. At least people my age, WalMart is synonymous with cheap and poor quality. But that was before the age of dropshipping and Amazon, where now Walmart's offerings are probably actually better quality than a lot of stuff. IMO they probably should have leveraged Jet there instead, but it is what it is.
There was a time before that when they had a better web presence for selling regular hardgoods than Amazon (which was still mostly known as just an online book store), and the Sears Parts website was the very first place to look online for manuals, diagrams, parts, and standard accessories for any random household thing (including shop vac attachments).
They also co-founded the Prodigy network back in the 80s when home computers were still very novel and people weren't broadly sure if the concept would ever catch on.
Also didn't have very good experiences in the UK (Cambridge and Portsmouth).
Sears could have been Amazon if they kept their customer obsession.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears,_Roebuck_%26_Company_Mai...
and
https://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/wm4RCM_Sears_Tower_Seatt...
Our apartment building has a package room with a camera and my packages have never been stolen from it, and the delivery instructions in my Amazon profile say to use that package room including how to get there and that Amazon can tap into the room. Often times delivery drivers don't do that and just leave the package on a shelf out in the open next to the mailboxes. I cannot even count the number of times someone has ripped into the package to see if it contained something interesting only to leave it behind when it's boring like pencils or cleaning supplies.
Amazon refuses to take any responsibility for packages stolen and has in the past denied refund requests without a police report on the incident (which I have filed multiple for just to get a refund though the package thefts are never investigated so I'm not sure what filing a police report is meant to do here).
Their delivery is inconsistent so I just don't bother. Though that does mean that I don't order as often from them as perhaps they'd like - if I can pick it up locally after work then I'll do that rather than order it and wait for it to be present and unopened only to be disappointed yet again at the Amazon driver who didn't read the delivery instructions which state multiple times not to leave the package next to the mailboxes because it will be destroyed or stolen.
The Sears Catalog was the Amazon of the early 20th century. So we must ask ourselves "Why did Sears discontinue its catalog service in 1993?" One of the answers to that question is the rise of retailers like Walmart where people could walk into a local (or at least closer to them than a Sears location) store and buy all sorts of things that they otherwise would have had to order. The catalog was inconvenient with other alternatives available.
The concern with Amazon is with its delivery ability - sure, for now, their unsustainable model that burns out drivers and pays them a pittance is working. Should that slip where they cannot deliver same-day/next day/day after reliably then that's an opportunity for other retailers to do to them what Walmart did to Sears.
You can even see it in this discussion - Walmart's online component directly competes and with many, many more local retails locations than Amazon and can often either have the items ready for pickup the same day or even deliver the same day.
So yes, there's a precedent for this, and if Amazon is focusing more on AWS and the buckets and buckets of money there but starts neglecting the retail part then that leaves a massive opening for competitors.