I know there are similar communities like !buyitforlife@slrpnk.net about finding products that you don’t break after a year, and any number of buy<insert_country_here> communities. I’m looking for a community specifically for finding reputable products that aren’t sold on Amazon, regardless of where the seller or buyer is, and regardless of the ethos of the seller beyond making quality products.
Edit:
There’s also !deamazon@piefed.social, but that’s more about general anti-Amazon sentiment than specifically helping steer people away from Amazon’s online retail monopoly.
I found the best way to avoid Amazon was just to buy a lot less pointless stuff.
If you don’t buy that bluetooth shower speaker shaped like a cat, you don’t need to find a dodgy dropshipping company in a self storage unit that resells it.
Also now Amazon launched a Temu competitor called Haul. It’s just Amazon-style pointless shit, but even worse!
Seriously, http://www.ebay.com/
Or maybe your country has local e-shops aggregator.
For example, in Italy we have TrovaPrezzi. They just aggregate products from many different online shops.
Then you can easily buy the products you want from small shops.
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.
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.
Nice idea. But I guess there are still too many Amazon fanboys for that.
so, this is more in the german area, but i know about https://lmaa.space/
Already used it to inform myself for buying coffee beans, can recommend 👍
If you (or anyone else) end up making one, please tell me, I absolutely want to follow something like that.
We second this, we have a LOT of online shops that we have on our phone saved and would love to share
I predict that Amazon would be the no.1 lurker in such a community.
Possibility a mod too
I left Amazon 10 years ago. I try to buy direct from manufacturer’s websites, for instance, I just ordered a pocket hole jig from Vevor. I’ve never not gotten something because Amazon was the only source, that’s not a thing as far as I can tell. Everything Amazon sells can be bought elsewhere online, sometimes for less.
Not always, but very often in my experience, the manufacturer’s own website is more expensive than Amazon!
When I was an Amazon seller, I loved when people did this, and my website prices were always lower. Amazon takes such a large chunk from each sale.
I know some retailers that cost more on their own website and/or you had to pay for extra shipping if you didn’t buy like $100 worth of stuff
Isn’t that a violation of the terms of selling on Amazon?
Having different prices for different marketplaces? No, I think that was fine back then (almost ~10 years ago), but not sure about now. And if it wasn’t I guess I just didn’t get caught 🙂. My prices were highest on Amazon, lower on eBay, and lowest on my site. Amazon had the highest sales volume by far though.
You couldn’t directly advertise your website to Amazon customers though, if that’s what you mean. Some sellers had other ways… I think I remember some sellers including a small card in their packages that would say something like “Register your purchase at https://… to extend your return period” (or activate a warranty, receive a coupon code for another purchase, etc.). Or maybe it would ask them to send an email instead of going to a URL (Amazon sellers can’t see their customers’ email addresses). Something like that.
Not as far as we know. At the company we used to work at we sold on several different platforms including Amazon and eBay.
The one place I’m having issue with this is appliance parts. Every time I try to buy from an appliance parts retailer on line it takes weeks to get my part. It’s either that or I call a local repair shop that has parts in stock and will sell it to me if I have the time to get out to their location an hour and half away between 9 and 3. Man I’m just trying to fix the washer when I get home from work. I dont have time for all that or the time to wait for the part, laundrys gotta get done!
There will always be exceptions.
Local>Vendor>Ebay>Amazon.
Stop that workflow where it makes sense.
Lol wut. Most people on earth wash laundry without a washing machine
I think you’d survive a few weeks
With 2 people working 80hrs a week and a kid in cloth diapers I assure you I cannot wait a few weeks.
Could probably get the diapers done throughout the week by hand and I do all my own laundry in a hotel room by hand when I have to travel for work, but I dont have the littiney of other home owner crap to take care of or all the bedding and towels so its just my clothes.
At what time should I be doing my entire family’s laundry by hand including bedding for 3 to 4 weeks?
Sure could drop off at a laundry service but at that point its expensive enough to have just paid the repair guy with the part in his truck to come out and fix it defeating the whole point of fixing it myself.
I tried to make one literally called not-Amazon but pretty much everybody had an opinion on how I was doing it wrong and I just didn’t have enough emotional bandwidth to deal with it. Would be happy to be a secondary mod if somebody else has the energy to deal with those people.
This is the issue I’ve had with many of my ideas. So I stopped asking people and just started doing things the way I want to do them, instead of getting negative responses and not starting at all.
Yeah but I’ve got ideas I have more to contribute with like my biggest project on fedi is !DIYMentalHealth@lemmy.dbzer0.com which is an effort to create a slightly more structured mental health support space that gives people specific tools and education to get by when they can’t afford a professional.
The biggest thing holding me back right now is that I think the space would really benefit from a bot. I tend to be kind of flaky and lose focus and I have all the posts written but often forget to actually post them once a week. I think if I could do that plus an automatic weekly check in thread I might be able to kickstart some better engagement.
everybody had an opinion on how I was doing it wrong and I just didn’t have enough emotional bandwidth to deal with it
Straight up why larger communities often have mods with terrible personalities. They’re the only ones who dgaf enough.
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.
It seems like my local thrift store has the best quality to price for a lot of stuff, but they don’t always have something I’m looking for
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.
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.
A ton of brands and websites have rewards or loyalty programs that offer free shipping over $35 or whatever as a perk, which means I get a lot of free shipping off Amazon.
I use walmart for a select few items that are recurring monthly because I can’t get them at any other store locally. I don’t do shipping anymore because often when something is delivered it’s an individual driving for some reason (had a like 3$ item the store was out of stock with, next day some poor soul had to drive it all the way out to my place to deliver a piece of plastic)
The App for Walmart is the biggest piece of shit I’ve ever ran into! It just keeps getting worse month after month, pages of sponsored items when searching (which reloads sponsored content again when loading more results), video after video completely fucking the app up with lag. You can’t filter by unit price anymore, constant pop ups for Walmart+, trash sidescroll recommendations literally every few results, and even selecting “in-store” gets bullshit results and recommendations that have to be shipped.
Use the website.
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 with Idealo, because Idealo belongs to Axel Springer
I personally don’t use Idealo, but I’ve seen it. Good heads-up.
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!
some brand name items can be bought directly from the online store’s company website, like for phone cases, screens, toothpastes that arnt well known brand names. most of them require you to buy a certain amount in order to get a discount or free delivery, it might be more expensive than going on amazon or other online retailers.
For Germany, this webpage lists a bunch of online retailers, sorted into product categories: https://lmaa.space/
Geizhals, Hardwareschotte, etc. are paid by the stores per click. If a stores budget runs out, they stop being displayed. Seems like a mid solution.
TIL
Sure, but don’t geizhalz results include Amazon? I wish one of these product search engines would include more based filters like ‘remove ethically questionable companies from the results’
For gauging product quality, I’d also throw in repairability, with https://www.ifixit.com/repairability being a good index. Use this kind of info to choose the product model, then buy it used or refurbished on craigslist/kleinanzeigen/leboncoin/ebay.
I go to ebay and select “Canada Only” when trying to find a particular item. (Am Canadian)
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