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Amazon is the giant online retailer. A monster that put CompUSA, Circuit City, Borders, and soon probably Best Buy out of business.

It carries a huge selection, offers free shipping, and most of the time it has best prices. With its tech smarts and logistics prowess it will drive some $75 billion in sales this year. Looks tough for any other single retailer to stop them. Even mighty Walmart has started to get scared, they launched @walmartlabs to compete on the tech side - long overdue - and started 2 offices in Silicon Valley.

The one thing Amazon cannot seem to do is deliver profits for investors. With their Q3 earnings call only a few days ahead, it is not expected it will be any different this time around. And so, the debate rages on: will it deliver profits, ever. Some will say that is by design, Amazon operates at break even with razor thin margins on all the products it sells, and that it's investing in the future. Others say it's a slippery slope and with their "discount" business model running at scale it will be very difficult to course correct and start generating profits. The only way to do it will be by raising prices, and consumers will notice, and cry foul.

Carefully observing Amazon as a consumer, I see chips in the armor, a few signs that Amazon is starting to feel the pressure to deliver profit. Here are 3 you may have picked up on as well:

1) It recently announced that it will raise the threshold for Free Shipping from $25 to $35. That is non-insignificant
2) Their Amazon Warehouse marketplace has become far less attractive for bargain hunters, and generally issues very stingy discounts on used merchandise anymore. Not surprising, it's the first place where one would expect they would start to tighten the screws.
3) They have changed their "next day shipping" fee for Prime customers. It used to cost $3.99 to get any time delivered next day. All of a sudden, with no warning or explanation, Amazon changed that to a variable fee based on the weight and dimensions of the item

And I am sure, more changes will come. The one megatrend retailers have started to catch on to is building coalitions in the form of their own marketplaces to compete with Amazon. What no single merchant can accomplish, maybe many banding together can. These marketplaces are of uneven quality and success, from the relatively weak Rakuten-owned Buy.com, to Sears or Walmarts' own, or gated ones like CorporatePerks which have the advantage of being able to deliver higher quality customers and in exchange can generally drive better pricing - yes, "better than Amazon" in some cases - from merchants.

Interesting times ahead as ecommerce continues to unfold and mature. We are only at the beginning.

Disclaimer: my company, Next Jump, has built a shopping marketplace for employees - CorporatePerks - that indirectly competes with Amazon.