Comment on Is there an "Avoid Amazon" community for people who want to support smaller online retailers?
cymbal_king@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
I want more on this too. Amazon’s monopoly has made it so hard to find alternative online stores to buy a lot of stuff, particularly if I don’t already know the name of a trusted manufacturer off the top of my head. Even competitor companies like Target and Walmart often offer less selection with higher prices and slower shipping. Also why is it that online retailers seem so scammy these days? Most brands seem to be new/disposable Chinese company names I’ve never heard of and reviews seem inflated/bot generated.
Drop shipping has become a really big thing online. I just watched a video about people creating fake sad stories to push “handmade products”. All cheap mass manufactured shit from China.
Hard to find legit businesses right off the rip since it seems everyone is trying to scam these days.
I see it on social media all the time, some sob story about how “we are closing our store of handmade stuff due to personal circumstances, please buy our stuff at 90% off!” And it’s mass produced Chinese crap that is way overpriced even at supposedly “90% off”. People fall for it all the time.
Yep! The monopoly is strong.
Sometimes, the item directly from the company website use Amazon to ship it.
I actually don’t totally agree with the shipping part of this.
Anecdotally, I’ve found that pretty much all of the “big box” stores have good shipping now, and often for free (so long as you hit a price point, of course). And at least in my city, Walmart or Best Buy often ships within a day and it only takes 2-3 days to get the product(s).
Now, there can certainly be a conversation on whether or not it’s good to buy things from these companies, which is a good conversation to have. But their shipping is often good.
Amazon’s monopoly has made it so hard to find alternative online stores to buy a lot of stuff
Where in the world do you live? Don’t you have price comparison websites with a lot of different online stores? We do for my country.
Gonna guess Idealo and Geizhals. They don’t cover everything, but they’re pretty decent, yeah.
Go with Geizhals, not Idealo, because Idealo belongs to Axel Springer
I was thinking of geizhals.at which is usually where I go first when I need to buy anything online. Sometimes Amazon is the cheapest option, and then I buy from Amazon, but many times something else is!
QualifiedKitten@discuss.online 5 hours ago
Another issue: multiple times I have gone out of my way to avoid Amazon only to find out the company is still using Amazon for delivery anyway. The most recent one was shoes. I literally went to the physical store to try on shoes, but decided on a color/size combination that they didn’t have in stock. The sales person did their magic to order the shoes for me, and they were still fucking delivered by Amazon.