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 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
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.
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.
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.
Most online retailers have ALWAYS been scammy. Its part of what helped grow Amazon in the first place. They were actually trustworthy, reliable, and offered good consumer protections in simple and straight forward refund policies
This is basically true of all the current giants. No company that gets that big can start out entirely fucked up. They have to get their legitimately THEN go to shit.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I just buy most things in person. If that fails I do a web search and buy from another platform. So I’m not sure how much there is to talk about but maybe I’m missing something.
If you have questions or ideas/resources it probably makes the most sense to just post on the existing de-Amazon com, since the audience there is likely to be interested. With the size of Lemmy it’s important not to separate our communities that are too niche, or they won’t really fire.
That would be great! I cancelled my subscription and have been trying to buy direct for a while now.
I go to ebay and select “Canada Only” when trying to find a particular item. (Am Canadian)
No idea, but it’s great that many of y’all and us are doing this. Buy local, buy from worker co-ops, buy from ethical countries!
I’d recommend to also use Buybeaver & No Thanks, to boycot the US and the like. Generally I exclude Russia & Belarus, most of the Middle East (Israel included), and North & Middle Africa.
Nice! Thanks for updating us. Joined!
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.
There was, but it’s shipped by Amazon. The site just redirects to an Amazon store.
I look around on Amazon if I want to get idea what’s there. Then once I get better idea of what I want I go to eBay and price compare websites and buy there.
and then ot comes in Amazon packaging. At least for me it pften does.
Not my stuff.
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Unsure how much better ebay and etsy are but I often use amazon to research products and either find a way to direct order or use ebay instead.
One of my hobbies is fucking amazon over. Often I’ll order from both amazon and ebay (or direct from manufacturer), the item comes from amazon in two days and start using it, when the same item comes from ebay I’ll return the used one back to amazon and keep the ebay bought one.
edit: another way to fuck amazon over is to find the item used (cheaper) on ebay, buy it and order same one new from amazon, hold onto for few weeks and send the used one back to amazon. Fuck them entirely.
I only do these with items shipping from amazon warehouses, not private sellers.
Fuck amazon (and fuck ebay amazon dropshippers too). But you’re that impatient you need to waste time and energy shipping something back and forth? (and likely having that product end up in an amazon discard bin anyway)
Their price already accounts for returns. You are just fucking over the delivery drivers who have quotas to meet.
