to be considering only ordering online from Amazon ongoing?

Have a look at "Complaining Cow", the deliver firm are not liable it's the person/company you ordered from

The thing with shops is that they thrive when there are lots of them as a street full of shops attracts customers. Trouble is the rot sets in and then they tend to close, one by one, until you're left with the charity shops and Turkish Barbers.

My parents had a newsagents shop on a parade of several shops, including a greengrocer, grocers, butchers, chemist, hairdressers, bakers, off licence, post office, hardware shop. Over the 20 or so years they owned the shop, the parade went from a vibrant parade to our shop being the only one left open, which we had to close once we got a sodding huge Asda less than a mile away. Drove past for the first time in over a decade and it's now a dodgy looking ethnic convenience store, a Turkish Barbers, a couple of charity shops and a nail bar!

What started the rot was the closure of the butchers shop - the guy retired and couldn't sell it. Once customers weren't coming for the fresh meat, they went elsewhere for their meat, so weren't buying groceries or anything else as they'd get everything at the next nearest shopping parade. And then, one by one, all the other shops closed too due to lack of footfall.

In the town I live now, there was another parade that seemed to survive pretty well. Until the council "traffic calmed" it, by narrowing the road to put in pedestrian islands, speed ramps, double yellow lines, etc., which instead of "revitalising" it as the council planned, it killed it stone dead, which is, again, now just ethnic convenience store, Turkish Barbers, charity shops etc.

So it's not just supermarkets killing off small shops, it's stupid council decisions too!

Wow! You definitely need to do what you can to keep those shops going. My town is now one of those sad places with only charity shops, nail bars and vape shops. Plus a B&M, Asda and Greggs.

I buy 70% of stuff from Amazon.

Amazon is intensely annoying because it provides a pretty good service. Their delivery guys where I live are excellent. That's not annoying, the annoying bit is the berk that owns it.

On the plus side he looks positively civil compared to Musk.

My Evri guy deserves a gold star but their service falls apart when he takes holiday so I think the people have a real effect

PS price wise Amazon is OK especially if you have prime and use them a lot
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Nope, I don’t care about greengrocers, since the supermarkets killed them anyway. I do care about garden centres but they’re not in the middle of town and are a day out in themselves so not really Amazon comparable. I prefer to buy home decor from the internet really, and cake shops can just deliver to me.

I only like bookshops so go to them. Of course, someone else may care enough about souvenir shops or fashion shops full of beige boring rubbish to want to save them - but I’ll leave caring About them to those people.

I live in a nice enough little town ( well 2 miles out of it ) but we don’t have many shops and that’s kind of sad .
We do have a pretty looking pedestrian precinct and a very nice looking high street.
However it is mainly cafes , a bakery , nail bars , hair salons , barbers, a grocery store with a cafe , vets , doctors dentist etc .
We are not too far from an out of town shopping centre with all the big name retailers so I think that’s what’s caused that .
Another small town a big further away from that we often visit is absolutely thriving and is lovely to head too when it’s bustling

There are a lot of small businesses who sell on amazon as well. I like the next day delivery so is my go to now. Xz

I don't really understand all the stuff about supporting small businesses. There are exceptions, but IME they're often terrible employers with very average customer service. Whichever company you use, you're supporting jobs etc.

Amazon is such a success because it does what it does so well. They are the only reliable delivery company round here , such that whenever I want something from another site, I have a look to see if it's available on Amazon first.

I think OP means to use Amazon in preference to other online retailers.

Why only bookshops? I mean, I get it, I love bookshops and I'm so happy you say yours have survived/are doing fine (most aren't, because of Amazon selling all books at a far lower discount, often making a loss to keep us all buying there), but why do you only care about those shops? What about fruit/veg/cake shops, gardening centres, home decor, etc. Don't care about those?

I have the feeling the tide is turning and more people want to buy local/from makers, because they're tired of getting the same old cheaply made plastic stuff that falls apart or doesn't work. One year I bought about five sets of Christmas lights before I got a set that worked properly, drove me insane! Nearly started considering candles on the Christmas tree! (Kidding.)

Out of curiosity do they spend around 750,000 on ads each year too? All those I know who make money on Amazon do so by spending at least half their turnover on ads.

I suspect Amazon is on the downturn. I've been reading/hearing of awful stories about deliveries (similar to this), quality, etc and they seem to have increased advertising too suggesting they're losing ground.

Haven't had any issues with Evri myself but it is undoubtedly harder to get a refund from a smaller provider if something doesn't show up and you can't prove it (plus it's hard to prove something hasn't happened when the 'system' says it has!). Amazon is able to give refunds easily because they can afford to lose money.

It really is stressful, when I had a parcel dumped a mile and a half away earlier this year and didn't have a clue where it was, the retailer went into radio silence and wouldn't respond and this was me supporting an independent local brewery by buying some merch to put away for my partner for Xmas and they left me in the lurch so it was a good job I found the parcel via community Facebook pages!

I had a situation last week where royal mails parcel force tracking was out of synch and initially told me something was coming on Weds but it didn't, then I got message about 5pm on Thursday that it was out for delivery and then 6pm got a message to say it had been delivered - I had heart attack because I was waiting for my partner's expensive Xmas present, nobody came here to deliver anything, the online chat bot told me to contact the retailer but they don't tell you who the sender is and when you've a few things you've ordered for Xmas outstanding, you don't know what it is! Rang the number and an automated message told me it was the parcel I had received at 1.55 in the afternoon! They panicked me for nothing!

Thats terrible with tracked . Its the stress isn’t it. I spend hours on customer service call wait chasing a Special delivery parcel for my mother . Parcel had return to sender clearly marked had to trust my mothers word but they sent it to their no return to sender location in Ireland. If a parcel has no return to sender address it gets sent there luckily it was Special delivery so I could get them to look into it. Parcel came back with return to sender address clearly marked . I ended up delivering the parcel by hand in the end as didn’t trust it would get there. Why it got sent off course was meant to be looked into but of course they never did.

That depends if the retailer and/or their courier offer such a service. Many don't! That's why Amazon are so popular as there are usually loads of options and you know before you order what your delivery options are going to be.

I'm more inclined to order from Amazon because they use decent packaging. I’ve had three things ordered for birthday/Christmas presents recently, from two different retailers, that arrived with their boxes badly crushed because they’d been sent with just a thin plastic bag round the box - no padding.

Yeh we had a bad experience with Royal mail last year, we had £700 of Vietnamese money coming to us tracked delivery and it went missing and the company that sent it, wouldn't refund us or send anymore out until royal mail refunded them and that had a 4 week lead time and we were due away before that, it was a good job we could afford to buy extra currency before going away or we'd have been screwed.

I use Amazon almost exclusively and will only order from somewhere else if I can see they dont use Royal Mail as a delivery service. SO many issues with RM, who barely turn up and on the odd occasion they do they lob a card and it takes me 3 days to track down my item at their miles away depot with no parking. No thank you. Evri are fine though, largely.

I'm fine with my high street being nice cafes and delis and experience places like board game cafes. There will always be pop in card shop type places and pharmacies etc. A high street shop can no longer compete on price or service level for things like clothes, houseware items etc. Makes sense to centralise physical shops in destination areas imo, not local high streets.

I've had some nightmares with DHL this year, one of my parcels was dumped 1.5 miles away in a different suburb, my partner was in all that day and they didn't even bring it here, they clearly decided to cut the round short and dump it a huge distance away and all they put on the email
was "left with neighbour"! How was I ever meant to find it! It was only by luck of tracking it down via community Facebook groups that I found it!

Just had my partner's main & expensive Xmas delivered by parcel force which is a relief as I've been worried about it getting here for months since I pre-ordered it.

And I don't have the shops in my area for Xmas shopping, I wish we did have loads of interesting independent shops but we don't. If you can find things you need locally, you'd paying a far higher price for it than online too.

I understand where the OP is coming from because deliveries seem to be a nightmare where I live unless it's Amazon and the reality is that it's a myth that towns have all these wonderful shops we can Christmas shop in, the town centre is my area is all bargain shops and pawnbrokers.

Same.

If I get at-home deliveries, they are always here around the same sort of time of day, around 6pm, so I know to be looking out for them. I often see the driver on his route as I'm arriving home from work.
9 times out of 10 though, I get my Amazon delivered to a local supermarket a 5-minute drive away. Very convenient, and I know my package is safe until I can conveniently pick it up.
I also used to use the lockers. Also very convenient.

Honestly, if I can't get it from Amazon, or from a local shop in person, then more often than not, I don't bother.