Comment on Is there an "Avoid Amazon" community for people who want to support smaller online retailers?
LoafedBurrito@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
I haven’t supported Amazon in over 15 years. I just stopped buying from them. Most of the stuff they sell, you can buy directly from the manufacturer or on eBay. There was one USB hub that amazon sold that i could only find on amazon, so i just chose a different brand and got it on eBay.
Really not that hard to avoid amazon entirely.
leadore@lemmy.world 1 week ago
One problem is that Amazon forces any 3rd-party vendor who sells their stuff on Amazon to charge at least the same price everywhere else, so even buying directly from them, they have to sell it to you for at least what you would pay on Amazon.
BUT Amazon has to take their huge 50% or even higher cut, so to be able to sell on Amazon the manufacturer has to raise their price on Amazon, otherwise sell at a loss.
OTOH if they don’t sell on Amazon, they lose massive amounts of sales because of Amazon’s almost total market dominance. So they sell there and then also raise the price everywhere else too because they had to agree to do that.
The loser is the consumer, no matter where you buy stuff from. It would take a massive deliberate boycott of Amazon to undo this scam. Most people don’t even realize how this scam works. There should be an outcry and the government should pass a law limiting how much of a cut Amazon can legally take, and/or block them from forcing vendors into the pricing contracts, but obviously that’s not going to happen in our oligarchy.