The Enshittification of Amazon

Today Amazon wanted $6.99 to ship me a $25.95 bottle of vitamins.

It’s a supplement I take for my knees, and $25.95 is a good price for it. But the order came in under Amazon’s $35 free-shipping line, so the cart tacked on $6.99. I’m not paying almost seven dollars to ship one small bottle.

So I went to the manufacturer’s website. Same supplement, $25.99, no shipping fee.

Four cents more and seven dollars less. There’s Amazon in one checkout page. The company that taught America to shop online because it was the cheapest, easiest place to buy anything is now, for a lot of what I buy, neither. Cory Doctorow has a word for what happened. He calls it enshittification, and it’s the same disease I traced through American business in The Enshittification of America.

What does enshittification mean for Amazon?

Doctorow describes it in three stages. First a platform is good to its users, so they show up and stay. Then it squeezes those users to favor its business customers. Then it squeezes the business customers too, and keeps the value for itself.

Amazon ran that play almost perfectly. For years it was the best deal on the internet. Prices were low, shipping was fast, returns were easy and the reviews were real. People stopped comparison shopping because there was no reason to. Then the sellers came, because the customers were there, and Amazon started charging them for everything: referral fees, fulfillment fees, storage fees and advertising that’s optional the way breathing is optional.

Now we’re in stage three. The customers who made Amazon what it is are paying for it, one sponsored listing at a time.

Watch: Amazon's Inevitable Enshitification..., How Money Works

Is Amazon still cheaper than buying direct?

For a lot of what I buy, no.

The vitamins weren’t a fluke. I’ve been doing this over and over, and I keep finding the same thing. The manufacturer’s own site, or some other site, has it for less.

Take the hand soap I like. On Amazon it’s expensive. A vitamin site sells it for much less, with a $35 minimum to get free shipping. So I buy eleven or twelve bottles at once, put them in the closet and I’m set for a long time. Overall it’s cheaper than Amazon. It gets here faster, or a little slower, and I don’t care. These aren’t things I need tomorrow.

That used to be Amazon’s whole pitch. You didn’t have to hunt. You didn’t have to compare. It was right there and it was the best price. When a shopper has to go around Amazon to get a fair deal, the pitch is dead.

Why are Amazon search results full of sponsored listings?

Because the ads pay Amazon more than the right answer does.

The ads are unbelievable. I run ad blockers, and the site is still full of them everywhere. Sponsored listings sit on top of the search results, and the sponsored listing is never the right one. It’s whoever paid the most to be there.

Say I search for something and the product I want is Tim’s. It’s the right size, the right brand, the thing I bought last time. But first I get XYZ’s product, with a little “Sponsored” label, and another one after that, and another. Tim’s product shows up after all of them. People are more likely to buy whatever’s on top, so the sponsored listing wins the sale even when it’s the wrong thing.

That’s backwards. A store’s job is to help you find what you came for. Amazon’s search now helps advertisers find you. This sucks.

The government thinks the ad system has problems too. In late August 2026, the FTC and 22 states sued Amazon, alleging it secretly inflated the prices of its sponsored-listing auctions and overcharged about 1.2 million advertisers since 2019. Amazon disputes it. A separate FTC antitrust case, over claims that Amazon monopolizes online retail, degrades quality for shoppers and overcharges sellers, is set for trial early next year.

What did the FTC do about Amazon Prime?

It made Amazon pay $2.5 billion.

In September 2025, a few days into a trial, Amazon settled the FTC’s case over how it signed people up for Prime and how hard it made cancelling. The deal was a $1 billion civil penalty and $1.5 billion back to an estimated 35 million customers. Amazon didn’t admit wrongdoing. It did agree to add a clear button for declining Prime and to spell out the terms. Cancelling has to be as easy as signing up.

A company had to be ordered to let you say no.

I gave up Prime a long time ago, so I wasn’t one of the 35 million. I left for a different reason.

Is Amazon Prime Video worth it?

Not to me. I don’t do streaming, so Prime Video was never going to keep me, and what Amazon did with it made leaving easy.

Start with The Rings of Power. It’s one of the biggest pieces of shit I’ve ever seen in my entire life. It’s so far from Tolkien that only the names are the same. That’s it. It’s just poor writing, poor CGI and poor acting, and I’m being generous with the word poor on all three. I wrote the long version in my Rings of Power critique.

Then there’s The Expanse. When it was on Syfy, it was phenomenal, the best science fiction on television. Syfy canceled it after three seasons, and Amazon picked it up. It turned to shit, especially season four. Seasons five and six are watchable, but the quality is way below the first three. It went from a nine or ten down to a five or six, and that’s me being generous. I’ve written about why the first three seasons worked and what changed.

Apple did the same thing to Foundation over on Apple TV+. It’s okay. Not great. It’s Foundation in name only. There’s no genetic dynasty in Asimov’s books. The show made that up, and I’ll admit it’s a cool idea, but it doesn’t belong in Foundation. They compressed the timelines and changed the concepts. It would have made a great show under a different name. When you buy the name, you owe the source some loyalty.

Amazon has also put ads into Prime Video. Since January 2024, the default plan shows commercials, and getting rid of them costs another $2.99 a month. You pay for Prime, and then you pay again to stop paying with your attention.

Is Walmart better than Amazon?

For what I need, yes. Walmart has its own problems, and I’m not going into them here. But I like its services better.

I buy my DVDs and Blu-rays from Walmart now. They cost less than on Amazon, and the selection is better. I’m a Walmart+ member, so shipping is free. What Walmart doesn’t have is Prime Video, and I don’t care.

Groceries are the big one. I get two grocery deliveries a week through Walmart+, and I don’t pay a delivery fee. I don’t have to go to the store anymore. I’ve never found anything from Amazon that works that well for me.

Amazon’s regular home delivery is fine. Things get here. What else do you expect from home delivery? Walmart does a better job at roughly the same price.

Can you trust Alexa?

I don’t anymore.

I have four of them, two Dots and two Echoes. They answer me when I haven’t said the wake word. I’m not going to type that word here, because then one of them will start talking to me. A few times they’ve grabbed my speakers and started coming out of them. Why is it taking over my speakers when I didn’t tell it to? They’re not even configured for that.

Accidental wake-ups aren’t my imagination. Researchers have documented smart speakers waking on words that only sound like their wake word, and recording what follows. And in March 2025, Amazon ended the Echo setting that let some devices process requests on the device without sending voice recordings to Amazon. Everything you say to it goes to the cloud now.

The Dots are getting more obsolete by the month, and I’m about ready to throw those two away or disconnect them. I don’t trust Amazon with my data anymore. Every big platform makes money from what it knows about you. Amazon knows a lot. Data and the companies that warehouse it deserve a whole series of their own, and they’ll get one.

What about the authors?

I’ve been on the wrong end of Amazon as a writer, too. KDP terminated my account overnight after I followed their own instructions to change a paperback’s subtitle, and I could never reach a human being about it. I wrote that story in Why Amazon KDP Sucks. I moved my books to IngramSpark. It still gets them onto Amazon.

The random bans, the reviews that real readers can’t post, the flood of junk books and the publishing limits that punish the wrong people all come from the same place. A platform this big doesn’t have to care about any one author, so it doesn’t.

And Amazon isn’t the only marketplace going this way. eBay has the same sponsored-listing problem and a fee structure that keeps getting worse. I laid out the numbers in Why eBay Sucks Now, and it probably deserves a full enshittification treatment of its own.

How do you shop around Amazon?

It’s easier than it sounds. Before you buy, search for the manufacturer’s own site. Check a specialty retailer or two. If there’s a free-shipping minimum, stock up on something you go through anyway and clear it. Use Walmart+ or a local delivery service for groceries. Buy movies and books where the selection and the price are better.

You’ll pay less on a lot of it. Now and then you’ll wait a day longer. And every order you place somewhere else is a small vote for a market where stores compete for you, instead of one giant store that’s figured out it doesn’t have to.

The cart that tells the truth

Amazon didn’t get worse all at once. It got worse one sponsored listing, one fee and one ad at a time, and each change was small enough to shrug off. Then one day the cart asks for $6.99 to ship a $25.95 bottle of vitamins, and you notice the store you trusted has been charging you for that trust for years.

The full argument about how good businesses get hollowed out from the inside is in The Enshittification of America, and I wrote the story behind the book too. As for the vitamins, the manufacturer has them for four cents more, and the shipping is free.

From the author

The Enshittification of America
Amazon is one chapter of a bigger pattern. The Enshittification of America is my book on how good businesses were taken apart, following the same playbook across thirteen industries.

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