Enshittification
“Enshittification” is Cory Doctorow’s brutal but accurate term for the slow rot that takes hold of online platforms. The pattern is always the same:
- Start by delighting users.
- Shift to abusing users in favour of business customers.
- Finally, extract maximum value from both to feed shareholders.
Each stage involves luring people in, monetising them, and once the monopoly is secure, squeezing every last drop out of the system.
Amazon is the textbook case.
What Amazon looks like from both sides of the counter
I use Amazon as a customer, but I also sell through Amazon using FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon). Before that, we used a small local distributor in Birtley. People often complain — rightly — that Amazon’s working conditions are grim. But the Birtley depot was worse: genuinely squalid.
This is the point: the problem isn’t just Amazon; it’s that UK distribution has become a monopsony. A handful of giant buyers — Amazon and the supermarkets — set prices and conditions for the entire supply chain. They set them so low that squalor becomes the only possible outcome.
From clean marketplace to ad-riddled bazaar
As a customer, Amazon used to be simple, clean and useful. Today it’s a swamp of ads, dodgy sellers, SEO spam and irrelevant sponsored listings. Finding a product feels like scrolling through an infinite Times Square of junk.
Prime traps you with the illusion of “free shipping”, but the real function is to make it uneconomic to shop elsewhere.
For sellers, it’s worse
For a while, Amazon protected FBA sellers even as the retail experience deteriorated. That era is over.
The pricing system for sellers is now so opaque and baroque that it’s impossible to understand what you’re being charged. “Referral fees” are supposedly payments for Amazon directing customers to your products — but in practice they’re protection money. Pay, and you’re visible; don’t pay, and you vanish.
You can fulfil orders yourself, but do that and Amazon pushes you even further down the rankings.
And then there are the ads.
Amazon extracts $31 billion a year from sellers competing to outbid one another simply to appear in the search results. Whoever pays most gets the top slot, regardless of quality or relevance.
The result?
Search results stacked with rubbish — irrelevant items, AI-generated listing spam, and endless lookalike products masquerading as legitimate options.
These costs add roughly 45% to the price of selling on Amazon — costs that naturally end up passed onto customers. Sellers who dare to offer lower prices off-Amazon are punished further, exiled to the bottom of the listings.
No wonder the first result in an Amazon search is almost always worse and more expensive than the best match.
The top of an Amazon search page is now a museum of low-quality, high-price tat underwritten by fake reviews.
Amazon’s circular scam: clone, replace, profit
The most cynical element is Amazon’s habit of monitoring which independent sellers are performing well, copying their products, and then prioritising Amazon’s own clones above the originals.
They know which factories you use. They know your demand profile. They know your return data. So they simply replicate you — and outrank you.
Spotify does the same trick with ambient musicians, replacing them with AI-generated soundalikes that don’t require paying royalties.
This is the enshittification cycle
This is what online platforms do once they reach dominance:
- degrade the user experience
- hollow out quality
- raise prices
- extract monopoly rents
- punish competitors
- copy creators
Everything gets worse — deliberately — because the platform no longer needs to keep it good.
And that, in a nutshell, is enshittification. Or modern Capitalism as it likes to be called.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/05/way-past-its-prime-how-did-amazon-get-so-rubbish
Enshittification – the not so subtle art of finding the balance between extracting the highest price and providing the least amount of service without the client jumping ship.
Yep amazon is bad for it. In additional to the above they also use all their marketing data to push amazon basics, their own brand. They often award their own brand the amazon choice badge, also because they put their own goods at the top of the search, which will get the most clicks, they often would be in the position to award themselves the best seller badge.
Amazon isn’t as good as it used to be, they only reason I use them these days is if I need something quick. In my mind, they are the most reliable delivery company, 99% of the time next day, my parcels never go missing or delivered to a neighbour (3 streets away). I remember they used to be cheap, it just isn’t the case anymore, and if I can get something from a UK based business for the same price and can wait a few days, then that is what I will do.
A few weeks ago I needed to reseal the bath and sink, I saw this on amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DLW7Q8Q1 – not bad value right, and handy tool to have. Except, you can get the same thing on sheen for £1.22, it has less attachments but you can buy those for a quid as well. This is what people do, but cheap from China and sell on Amazon – drop shipping I think its called.,
How much of a role do you think super-cheap direct-from-China retailers (Shein, Temu, AliExpress, Wish.com) have played in the decline of the high street?
The high street has been dying for a long time. Shein etc are just taking advantage of the gap that was left behind
And similarly the drop shippers that Stephen mentioned are likely taking advantage of the people (likely mostly Amazon Prime subscribers) who don’t shop on non-Amazon sites.
I’m not sure those retailers have had much of an effect. Its hard to describe an equivalent for them, I guess they are like the worlds biggest Sunday Market, with loads of dodgy stuff on sale, you know its crap but you can’t help buying it anyway – like the first time you went into Poundland thinking it would be a waste of time but come out with 20 quids worth of stuff anyway.
It was other online retailers that killed the high street, Amazon, AO.com, online news, Kindle (e-books), clothes retailers that offered free returns. With tiny overheads compared to physical stores the writing was on the wall.
I think high street and independent retails that have survived, will continue to survive and even thrive. High streets are going through changes, they are more leisure and service focused and are being made to look nicer, all which should increase footfall to help these businesses.
When Amazon are great they are great. When they mess up they are hell to deal with!
Re; Stephen (for some reason I can’t reply to you!). When I did my MBA 30 years ago (!!!!) one of the popular questions was “WH Smiths – why?” or “Woolworths – why?”. The problems with big high street names was obvious even back then
Jon, there has been a few times where I have replied to your articles, often as the first, and the reply hasn’t appeared.
Do you think local councils could do anything to help the high streets? Reduced or free parking, subsidies for public transport going into city centres, maybe more events? It isn’t just online retailers that are hurting high streets, its also out-of-town retail parks – which do offer free parking. With Dalton Park more or less on my doorstep, there is little incentive to go elsewhere unless its for something specific, and even then more than likely it will be somewhere like B&Q, PC World or Currys, which are all also located in out of town retail parks.
Look at the Debenhams building in Sunderland City centre – closed for how long now? Its on 3 floors, you could easily have 3 big retailers in that space like a B&Q, Currys, or even several big brand smaller stores like Apple.
That’s a tough one. City Centres are complicated, multiple owners, often funds, many of them based outside the UK. Lots of leveraged property transactions which means that if the Council cuts rates they are effectively valuing the building lower, which impacts on the owners who won’t be happy. Add to that Universities and other institutions who often own big chunks of Cities. A really good Council can bring together multiple parties and get them to talk and work together, often accessing central Government funds. Sunderland is actually doing pretty well with this at the moment, unlike Durham were Reform councillors couldn’t care less
Sounds like a lot of moving parts. For Sunderland, its much needed.
Whats going on in Durham with reform? I love Durham, not so much for shopping, but for a wander about, maybe a pint or 10 on a nice afternoon, its one of the most underrated cities in the UK – the castle/cathedral backdrop is as good a scenery as anywhere else in the world – used to love a few pints in the coach and eight at night with it all lit up.
Now I can reply!! The simple answer is not a lot. The new councillors don’t turn up, when they do the meetings are shambolic, they are more interested in shit posting than governing. They have a lot of issues in the city that they need to address, starting with the mess on the passport office site, which the Council have the head list, but the whole build has a structural problem apparently, which is why it is empty. They sold the new Council HQ to the Uni for political reasons, but the current building isn’t fit for purpose, and they don’t want to spend money on council officers. Prince Bishops is half empty, and the owners want to redevelop it into a mix of shops, student accommodation and a hotel, but there is no sign of work starting, the old M&S is meant to becoming a stack, but work on that has stalled, leaving some big metal hordings in the middle of the street. Fixing all of that means that Councillors and Council officers need to be smart in how they work with developers, agents, the church, the university so they can help get deals over the line, but the Reform lot don’t know how to do that and they don’t care- their voters don’t live in Durham so it’s not their priority.