Took Amazon twenty years to get off their ass and launch their Dutch website. And now the market is a bloodbath.
I'm in Australia as well, and Amazon is good for certain products, regularly price matching (or slightly cheaper than) other stores.
That said, Amazon's product and shipping coverage is much better on the east coast of Australia than the west coast.
With a functioning delivery service, even mom and pop shops can afford to offer free next day delivery.
Hard for a new player to compete when Amazon is getting hundreds of millions from government contracts funded by our tax dollars
Oh and advertising being widespread and effective means there's more of a winner-take-all dynamic.
I forget but I believe Amazon gets a decent chunk of its earnings from AWS too.
Walmart interface also just sucks.
However, it's also expensive. I believe the statistics show AWS is their biggest source of profits.
The number of times I have ordered an item and recieved texts confirming both that the item was unavailable and recently delivered is extremely high. It almost always goes "thank you for your order" "we do not have any X but will replace it with X.1" "we can't deliver your order" "your order has been delivered" with no interaction from me other than to accept replacements when I placed the order.
It basically looks like Amazon gave up in at least Central Europe and local companies are eating their lunch, but better.
It took something like 20 years of insane investment and no shareholder returns to build this out in the US.
Same in Portugal, many reach out to Wook, FNAC, and others, specially because ordering from Amazon means UK or Spain as closest delivery center.
So their goal is to try to squeeze as much from the end customer as possible, sometimes even with absurd price differences in physical locations vs online.
Promotional events are absurd with how they manage pricing in order to claim big discounts, it's almost insulting.
The general feeling is that these guys are out to get us, while on Amazon you don't get that feeling. And I'm not a fan of Amazon, I just find retailers turned marketplace despicable.
I have never had a correct order delivered from Walmart. There are always missing or wrong items.