mtbc | (Reply)

From:

Over the past twenty years or so I've found that their website moved slowly from being fairly seamlessly helpful and useful (indeed, not only descriptions and reviews, but also when they introduced what people also/instead bought), to being cluttered and making it increasingly hard to e-mail them but instead trying heavy-handedly getting me to buy more. I've lived with a lot of small irritations for a while, but their pushing of Prime has been a particular annoyance: I can live with having to keep trying to find the right links to let me buy something without giving Prime a trial, and I can live with that their idiot app won't let me play either US or UK Prime video content even though Netflix's works fine, and I can even somewhat live with the risibly low rates of tax they pay on the profits they make from their UK operations and others' miserable accounts of life as one of their warehouse workers, but with my consumer hat on the straw that's been breaking the camel's back is the appearance of many products that are available only to Prime members and which I have no way to filter out of my search results. (I don't know if they do that on Amazon US, I do find that Amazon UK tends to be a bit different, though often better in that it tends to be behind the curve on UI "improvements".) I'd very happily buy from the Amazon of the late-90's but they're now too obviously maximizing their profit over my convenience.

(Edited to add: also their pushing sponsored/featured stuff.)