Comment on Is there an "Avoid Amazon" community for people who want to support smaller online retailers?
AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev 6 hours agoIf that fails I do a web search and buy from another platform
This is something where I think we could benefit from the wisdom of a community.
Naively searching the web will generally yield >90% results centered around Amazon. Even if you exclude all Amazon domains, you need to sift through all the listicles and “review” sites that are really just Amazon ads with Amazon affiliate links inside.
Same deal if you want to use deal aggregators like slickdeals. The overwhelming majority of posts there are from Amazon, or subsidiaries like Woot.
Heck, recently I bought something direct from a brand’s own web site, only learning that they shipped through Amazon when I got the Amazon tracking number. I’m honestly not sure if I could have known that before completing my order.
It is getting ever harder to avoid giving Jeff Bezos more money.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 4 hours ago
Really? You mean like other websites you buy from are secretly owned by Amazon?
AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev 2 hours ago
I don’t think they’re owned by Amazon, but the shipping email gave me an “Amazon Logistics US tracking number”. I guess that means Amazon handles warehousing and shipping? I don’t know what the practical difference is between buying on their own site (which used Shop.com for payment processing, fwiw) vs buying on Amazon.
There are classes of products that are basically impossible to find locally now. Or if you can find the products, they’re outrageously expensive. One example is computer cables. 20 years ago I could walk into any dollar store and get all kinds of cables and adapters for $1-5. Now the only things I see locally are, like, $30 HDMI cables. I’m not paying $30 for a cable, especially not when that money would be going to another huge corp like Best Buy or Target. I’m willing to pay a bit more to shop local but there are limits, and there are so few truly local places left.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 1 hour ago
True that’s the main reason I would shop online because some things can’t be purchased otherwise. But I don’t run into that super often.
Next time I’ll pay attention to see if Amazon is involved in some way… I have been boycotting them for a few years now and would like to continue that as best I can.
EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 hours ago
Not necessarily owned by Amazon, but plenty of websites are running on Amazon systems on the back end for stuff like payment processing and web hosting, or the business uses Amazon to ship their products. There are plenty of Amazon affiliate companies out there as well, but sometimes buying from an independent business still gives money to Amazon through delivery or processing fees or something.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 1 hour ago
Well AWS is much harder to avoid that’s true. I’m not sure how you can even tell if a site is working with them. Only way to be sure would be to never go online.