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
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.
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.
Yep! The monopoly is strong.
Sometimes, the item directly from the company website use Amazon to ship it.
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.
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.
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 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!