How to avoid Amazon: guide to online shopping

I make a purchase and it normally shows up the next day. That's unreal (I'm near a distribution center, so that's not the normal 2 days stateside).

I need to make a return, I just click a button and bring the open box and item to any UPS store (there are 3 within 3 miles). They will package it for me and ship it. I just show them the UPC code on my phone with a ripped open box and an item.

They have a good system. This may be US only, but it's easy to understand why they are so popular.

I have separated myself from Google for privacy reasons (except a few things...) and try to avoid Amazon where I can and support local shops. So this isn't advocating Amazon, just pointing out that their competitors usually can't compete on returns and shipping time.

EDIT: TIL: zvab is abebooks, which in turn is a subsidiary of... amazon. All roads lead to Rome.

Some other ones which are excellent:

Bike24.de Alternate.de Bikester.se

Living in Ireland, Irish stores can be very hit and miss. Amazon UK is often faster, very often cheaper, has cheaper shipping (even though it's coming from UK), has cheaper returns (returns through the post in Ireland are extortionate)

I'd honestly say in some ways its gotten worst over the years, probably from competition from UK retailers. If you are buying in big quantities, it's best to go with a big company, and they aren't in Ireland. If you are ordering small quantities, that's not enough to keep a company afloat.

It's so bad, when it comes to Electronics, Pet supplies or similar, it's often best to do exactly what you do, and order from Germany and deal with the language barrier and lack of credit card support.

Brexit will be interesting, but I see Amazon had announced in the last few days it's opening distribution centers in Ireland, so i guess it's inevitable that things are going that way.

I very sporadically order from Amazon if I can't find what I'm looking for elsewhere, but their website has been so infested with spam and sponsored results that it's hard to find a genuine product these days.

In general German eshop are the best (shopping from France).

but they also boycott books they don't like: https://philosophia-perennis.com/2017/09/12/buchhandel-boyko...

In my opinion a book shop should not do this.

Amazon atleast in India is better than anything else.

It's very difficult to source things which are not common place goods.

For example, if I want to buy 3 phase, 1 horsepower motor, 4 pole motor AC induction motor. There would be no websites who directly sell, and if exists then it will charge rediculous price.

Most B2B purchase in India requires going through IndiaMart, where you post requirement (that too can't upload photo, has very small description limit)

Then vendors will hammer your phone with useless calls, asking the details you already offered and no one really replies to text. They don't understand not everyone wants to be on call.

There are rediculous number of vendors who import from China and live around a port city and have goods stocked in their wharehouse, shipping all over India. And they lie about being manufacturer, I am pretty sure they aren't even inserting a bolt in the final product.

And either companies are too big where they don't care about a guy who wants 1 motor, or they are too small that they don't even know how to sell online.

Amazon expanded the available products which can be bought without BS at competitive rates but it too missed niche category stuff.

For example, I can't buy lithium iron phosphate battery online at the moment, few websites appear in Google but they ask you to contact them.

Arguably the worst things about buying from Amazon all derive from third-party sellers: long shipping times (from China, generally), commingled inventory, counterfeit products, faked/swapped listings... Companies like Newegg should be explicitly doing the opposite as a competitive advantage -- yet they seem to be copying. I don't get it.

Had a very poor experience ordering from Ikea. Just some kitchen towels, nothing particularly interesting. Took six weeks to ship, zero updates on the site about order status, estimated delivery date came and went unceremoniously, wasn’t able to contact anyone via phone. Finally got an email out of the blue that they shipped and arrived intact the next day. Pretty much a ‘never again’ experience.

Amazon’s policies and employee treatment/relationships may need improvement or complete overhaul, but their execution at getting matter into your hands and dealing with issues is, in my experience, second to none.

I think we’ve started to acclimate to how good it is that we forget the old world.

Recording gear: Long & McQuade.

Tools: Lee Valley.

Photo gear: Henry's.

Amazon provides a way for me to avoid Walmart.

We all know how frustrating and time-wasting it can be, when calling for professional service...

In the end, it's still a tech problem.

Amazon has the tech, and the customer base to form a virtuous cycle.

The smaller shop dont have that.

We need more Shopify like supplier, with varying degrees of sophistication and targeted customer groups.

Many families have quit because they lost their jobs. All of us have converted online one way or another...and trying to survive based on who has been retained. But this was like a kick in the nuts.

I bought a pfSense-style router recently, and a Pi 4B, both from small shops (one Swedish[1], one French[2]). They shipped within 24h. These people are hard at work, and they deserve all the credit they can get.

In particular, the Swedish one had a very nice knowledge base on their products (they select / assemble parts themselves, cost is as low as it gets, I value the work they do since it's saving me time and hassle).

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[1]: https://teklager.se/en/

[2]: https://www.kubii.fr/ (sadly, language is Fr-Es-It only, but I guess we've got Google Trad for that)

Where you inconvenience yourself for some time to line up in a booth to select someone who you more likely just hated less.

Now imagine doing that all day every day, the inconveniences each time might be smaller, but hey, Amazon is always there. The 'voter turnout' is going to drop to 0 real fast.

Most people are happy with Amazon and like the service they provide - this kind of thing is a non-story.

I say this as someone who buys directly from suppliers like Dell or Logitech when I think there's a risk to getting repackaged or counterfeit items from Amazon, but the experience is often worse (Dell monitors took 5 weeks to arrive).

I think these articles are a symptom of something else, but I'm not quite sure what it is. It feels like a political or tribal position, anti-large company, or anti-success? - I'm not quite sure, but I think there's an underlying theme that drives these types of articles and it isn't what they're directly about. They're okay with a small under-dog company story, but if you become large and successful then you're automatically written about in the most uncharitable way possible.

It's important to also recognize how individuals and families have benefited from Amazon during this time, including myself.

There's a growing sense that we ("the free world", western countries + usual friends like Japan, Oz, etc) are about to enter a cold war with China, though, following the COVID-19 debacle.[1] The CPC's ultimate responsibility will likely define the magnitude of that (which may range from mild such as tariffs, to hard e.g. Soviet era, passing by sanctions of various degrees, forbidding companies to even trade let alone joint-venture in China, etc).

Independently of diplomacy, the particular conditions of a pandemic seem to call for less dependence on foreign powers, at least on a continental basis (some capacity for autarky on a temporary basis).

Independently of the above, history shows that out of the 16 last times there was a shift in world's first GDP (here US → China), no less than 12 led to war.[2]

Again independently, the general sentiment towards China has deteriorated faster than ever in 2019 (before crisis), due to the White House posture notably (trade tensions, mutual racism/xenophobia).[3][4] This went even lower recently.[5]

A key factor notably, in my opinion, is that anti-China sentiment used to be correlated with age: people over 50 were more likely to have such a view, while younger categories held a more favorable view; but recent events are likely to sway the opinion across the board. Anyone old enough to have a political opinion isn't likely to "forget" COVID-19 or "forgive" wrongdoings in the matter if responsibility is proven in the public eye.

There is little substance to redeem any of these facts, I'm afraid.

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A personal take on this [Disclaimer: opinion still in flux as information comes in. Strong conviction, but loosely held.]

I don't see how China doesn't lose most of their international credibility in this affair. Once global production and logistics flows are restructured to take China out of the equation (it'll take years, a decade at least I think), it will take an even longer time to come back, if ever (other superpowers, more worthy of trust, may emerge in a generation's time). It will cost the world a lot, may prolong the depression much more than if we looked the other way, but deaths in the 6 figures (possibly an order of magnitude more by then, even two...) is simply unacceptable, reason enough to do it, to isolate them and take the collective hit. We can take it, the combined power of the world minus China is still overwhelmingly capable to drive growth. There are tons of candidates where investment will flock to fund factories, and some of these will come back 'home' for a number of strategic sectors.

I'm afraid China's economic appeal has all but collapsed for this generation (next 10-20 years). I don't think most people realize it yet, but the pile of arguments for a cold war is damning, historically aligned with most precedents, and actually a rare occurrence of too much at once.

(Let us pray there was no malign intent towards the world, for that would likely remove the "cold" adjective above.)

China may just have lost its shot at becoming the world's "leader", and it seems they only have themselves to blame, as their lack of transparency and their negligence for human life are cold hard choices they still keep making, some 30 years after Tiananmen. We hoped China was ready and could change, we thought it would evolve towards a more trustable partner, but instead it maintained its internal dystopia more strongly than ever, and actually engaged actively in trying to change us (remember how, very recently, they were trying to force the NBA and so many corporations to essentially bend to the CPC's propaganda... needless to say, that ship has most likely sailed for good). If we needed a reminder (apparently we did), authoritarianism kills.

So this:

> But good luck with that, since China is a massive trade partner and every country is turning a blind eye to them imprisoning people in concentration camps and harvesting organs. It’s unlikely The States are going to have a change of heart anytime soon.

Seems incredibly anachronic to me. It was true in 2019, but that world is now over, for good.

I agree with everything else you said.

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[1]: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3081601/co...

[2]: https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/09/the-thucydides-trap/

[3]: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/08/13/u-s-views-of-c...

[4]: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/12/05/attitudes-towa...

[5]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-public-opinion-toward-c...

Your phrasing suggests so.

support independently-owned businesses not trying to corner the market on all your personal data.

People are stuck at home and as result are forced to shop online which results in increase revenue for the largest online commerce store.

Not sure why it is government's business unless some law is being violated. Using government to enforce "I feel good about it" policies through violence is a sure shot way to harming everyone.

Treatment given to Amazon (or any other employee) employee has nothing to do with the profits of the company, it is all about what the competitors are able to give to those employees.

Constant vilification of factories and large manufacturing corps eventually took all those jobs to China, same might happen with tech companies as well.

I think the worker safety issues are completely orthogonal and shouldn't have anything to do with how profitable you are. In fact, you'll like find far worse conditions (and more tax evasion) in small local businesses than Amazon.

It's a bit annoying to have to do this on every search, though.

Replace krill with humans and sooner or later Jeff the Blue Whale needs full time protection in a special sanctuary. In Nature if the Whale gets too efficient the eco system collapses and then reboots. Stability trumps Bigness.

Book reco - Serangeti Rules - Sean Carroll.

Plus, as you get bigger, you start looking at how you can marginally increase your growth. You go from "just make people happy" to "we could probably exclude a lot of low-margin items from Prime shipping and not see cancelations while improving our profits". You start trying to tie things together so that if people want one part of your experience, they need to accept other parts. You start trying to figure out how to optimize your labor cost, potentially in ways that aren't great for your workers. You start getting a lot of people that can improve the company in ways that aren't necessarily evil, but aren't exactly friendly. By this time, people don't really have an alternative.

I mean, a lot of people loved Walmart when it was new. It was this all-in-one store with great prices. Over time, competing businesses were crowded out of the market by Walmart and customers had less choice. It also meant that retail labor had less choice with Walmart becoming a greater percentage of the jobs. It also meant that businesses selling things like TVs had less choice and Walmart could pressure them.

I think power is ultimately pretty toxic. Amazon has succeeded in part because it's really good at what it does. However, another part of its success is the power it exerts on competitors, over labor, over suppliers, and over customers. Small companies just never have power to exert so they can never seem that unfriendly. Unfriendly small companies just cease to exist or at least can be ignored. Unfriendly large companies can use their power to force a lot of things to try and keep their throne.

It was only after talking to activists that he realized they were also well aware that everyone else in the coffee industry was even worse than Starbucks but because they weren't as famous, activists would intentionally target the #1 player because that's the way to play the news cycle.

Well, we should if behind the scenes those weaving machines were kept operational by an army of low-wage workers.

Don't worry, the government will get the money from somewhere. If not from Amazon then from you.

To point 2: Monopolies are Bad Thing.

To point 3: You really don't believe that billionaires should pay their share, the way the rest of us do? Also, given the lockdown, there's no option but for the government to offer handouts. A huge proportion of the country is unable to work, through no fault of their own.

To point 4: You're right that economies of scale have allowed Amazon to undercut everyone else on price. WalMart did the same. I don't blame you for buying from Amazon, but the problems with their monopoly shouldn't be downplayed.

That’s what makes me weary that there’s any way you can truly avoid Amazon. For many sellers it’s just easier to outsource their warehousing and fulfillment operations to FBA and use Amazon’s warehouse as a 3PL (third party logistics), and I wouldn’t be surprised if <random eBay/Shopify seller> used Amazon for fulfillment purposes.

Do treat the delivery guy with something though, I usually offer homemade sweets and/or free alcohol beer. They deserve it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_boycotts

Going back to photography, you totally trust B&H. You know the equipment has been treated well since it arrived from the factory. No chance of grey market stuff either.