Not sure I understand what you're saying. What if I just order the same products otherwise sold on Amazon, but from a different store?

Honestly? AliExpress wins for this stuff. The shipping is always much more expensive than the actual items, so I batch purchase stuff like this. Funnily enough, sometimes, despite paying only one shipping cost, it arrives in multiple shipments.

Personally I buy that stuff locally anyways to support my local economy.

Even if it does cost me a bit extra, continuing to have local businesses is worth it to me

I'm not sure about where you are from, but in Australia I've recently had just as reliable service, shipping costs and delivery times from individual brands as from Amazon.

Amazon used to be better, and they still have the logistics network to be better, but they've dropped the ball. If this downward trend hasn't hit you yet, it's only a matter of time.

AFAIK, they are two completely disjoint sets of individuals. But could you clarify what that has to do with the goods and services offered by large publicly-traded firms that members of those families happened to be the original founders of?

In all seriousness, yes - competition is the answer.

There can be no alternative when Amazon is able to buy them out, or dominate the market through network effects.

Yeah, I'm with you. I also have a very specific set of requirements, including only buying from companies headquartered in the Seattle area that have at least one 'o' in their name. That narrows it down to Amazon and Costco for general merchandise. But I'm also considering adding a criterion that the vendor's logo needs to include a swoosh or arrow of some kind, which would eliminate Costco, at which point I'll be stuck only with Amazon.

I know people are going to chime in and say "the fact that all of your personal criteria align maximally with the strengths of one particular vendor doesn't represent an uncompetitive market, but to the contrary, represents an extremely competitive market in which all of the participants are distinguishing themselves by maximizing the value they offer to different market segments with diverse preferences."

But as a presumptuous narcissist, my expectation is that everyone in the market should be optimizing their business practices to satisfy my preferences in particular, rather than limiting my options by trying to appeal to anyone other than me.

How often do you buy stuff online? It’s not a factor for me. My last online purchase was water filters. Got them from Home Depot, easy peasy. Before that, I’m not sure, it’s been a few weeks at least.

In any case, there’s a big difference between “there’s no reasonable alternative” and “there are plenty of reasonable alternatives but I like Amazon more.”