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Comment by gryzzly | Hacker News Reader

And yet not much consumer boycotts are happening, hard for me to understand that. In Germany, it’s really easy to not use Amazon – prices aren’t exclusively low on Amazon and because you have 14 days return rules and the deliveries done via the same delivery companies (I know Amazon does some of it on its own, but it’s not any better than the rest in my experience) it’s really not more superior in the general case to any other online shop. Anyway, if you are in Germany, use idealo.de or similar price comparison websites to compare the prices for the item you want and try to avoid Amazon if you can. Fuck Amazon and other schemers avoiding real taxation. It’s nasty. They use public services for their infrastructure, they benefit of the consumer society in the EU, they should pay taxes, really simple.

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Amazon's product offering is also seemingly getting worse, lots of five-star rated products which feature obviously paid reviews and are cheap copies. Other retailers feature good-quality brand names.

For technical hardware I can recommend geizhals.de over idealo.

Nice, thanks for the recommendation!

I was hoping for a friend to buy a laptop for me in Germany (generally low availability of new products where I live) and was positively blown away with how detailed and useful their (geizhals.de) search based on laptop specs is. Excellent stuff.

  >Amazon's product offering is also seemingly getting worse, lots of five-star rated products which feature obviously paid reviews...

I find ReviewMeta[0] pretty useful for flagging up this kind of thing and returning a rating which is more fairly weighted.

[0] https://reviewmeta.com/

I would love to boycott amazon, but its near impossible. In France especially with the lockdowns, most of my groceries are delivered either via amazon (for next day delivery) or from Monoprix, but that is generally two days in advance. Luckily these days I have been able to push to Monoprix directly.

For non food items, amazon are still one of the cheapest once you include delivery and interestingly, even with Amazon Prime Delivery in France, almost all items are cheaper in Amazon.de including paying the 5 euro shipping to France, so I order a lot from there too.

Looking at idealo.fr for me on all my items I bought in the last few months, they are the same price as what I paid, but are all 3 euro or more including shipping. So as a consumer, amazon is still pretty much the cheapest.

Ultimately, I could save buckets by just going to the shop, but that won’t start for me until Q3.

I guess we are lucky here in Berlin to have many of these companies sell the items at original prices directly. Also most will have 20-50€ minimal amount that allows then for delivery to be free. Sure, you might need to batch a purchase, but is it not a good cost to pay a company [and its employees] directly instead of the tax avoiding american company known for being terrible to its employees? [not so much in EU because we have laws here, but still]

There was a time when we gathered a group of friends to order books from Amazon (USA) to Spain to share shipping costs. We were students and waiting a month to save a few bucks was worthy.

I'm buying less and less from Amazon recently. And I no longer "go shopping" to Amazon and just go there to check prices. I think other companies are catching up and I was surprised when my latest laptop was delivered from a traditional retailer (El Corte Inglés) in under two hours. Just to share some anecdata.

Why haven't local shops switched to deliveries in France?

I can only speak to my experience but I've always felt that french society is aggravatingly slow to adapt to modern technology. During the height of the pandemic we'd get documentaries on small businesses struggling, it'd often be the same speech from the owners "I hate the internet, I don't want to use it but it's been 6 months and I'm on the verge of bankruptcy and my child has been begging me for years to get an online presence so maybe I'll do the bare minimum."

I'm from France and it was relatively easy to boycott Amazon for a lot of things, even after years of being a big prime user. I agree there are no good direct replacements, for me the solution was different consumption altogether (going to local food markets for food, buying less crap, going to specialized physical or web shops for board games, books, music, electronics, even if it means paying a little more it's great for socializing, etc...). Buying on Amazon is highly correlated with buying plastic from China for me, so it's a double or triple win. But yeah I still go to Amazon for tech.

  >I would love to boycott amazon, but its near impossible

I've found I use Amazon a lot less since they upped the price of Prime. When it was £49 for the year, I used to buy almost everything on Amazon because I really hate actual shopping [as in traipsing round real bricks & mortar shops]. And £49 a year was a good bargain to get all that stuff delivered free.

Then they put Prime up to £80 a year and bundled a load of shite I don't want with it [chart music and crappy American telly]. So I only ever have Prime these days whenever I get offered the 99p for a month's trial.

What I find myself doing a lot now is looking up something on Amazon, reading the reviews and then, if it's under £20 and doesn't qualify for free delivery, I get it off eBay instead --where all the same sellers are selling all the same things, but usually with free postage.

I realise that's just swapping one tax-avoiding US megacorp for another. But, to be honest, I couldn't care less about how much tax big companies avoid paying. Fair play to them for 'socking it to the man'. Does anyone seriously think that, if they coughed up their fair share, the taxman would reduce what he bleeds off the rest of us?

My experience has been that Prime doesn't even mean fast delivery anymore. My wife and children use the streaming service, or I would have dumped it years ago.

Yes. Prime "One Day Delivery" used to nearly always mean you got the item the next day. Now it seems to mean "One Day Delivery --after we get around to dispatching it"

In Germany, I would still use Amazon over the local companies that have no idea what customer support is. Until they learn to care more about customers you really have no choice. I’ve banned German retailers in my household for that reason.

Can you be more specific about your experiences? I live here for 10 years and never had a bad experience with an online shop that sells items per delivery. The law makes it equal for everyone – you can return the stuff, you can get stuff replaced if it’s broken and anything else. What type of bad experience you had with other online retailers?

> What type of bad experience you had with other online retailers?

Shipping, shipping, shipping. Amazon ditches shipping providers that provide low quality, with web shops you as the customer have to pray that the shop isn't using <insert name of logistics company that has a particularly moronic local agent here>.

Many German shops ship with DHL which is expensive but has somewhat consistent quality, a wide net of post offices and Packstation lockers where you can pick up stuff yourself and (at least to my knowledge) does not engage much in using shoddy contractors. Others however... are cheap for a reason and the reason is usually underpaid to outright enslaved staff, pressured so hard by ridiculous delivery quota that they count a "not at home" delivery within 5 seconds of ringing the bell and no one answering.

Friends of mine lived in a new constructed area and they had a hard time of getting packages from anyone but DHL for months because the other services always returned packages with "unable to find address". DHL has the advantage that they are connected with the national post service which means the cities and counties provide them with always fresh information about construction works, whereas the competition is stuck on sometimes months old data.

A lot of the success of Walmart and Amazon is just them not tolerating mediocrity.

It would be great if Amazon would extend the same non-tolerance towards scammers on the seller side though. Fake products, co-mingling and "we give you 10€ gift card for 5 star review" is way too common.

My experience with Amazon delivery is comparably bad – the fact that Russia has figured out "drop boxes" and Germany hasn’t (very slowly it’s being rolled out now) is extremely strange to me. The need to "Accept" delivery instead of placing it in a locker is just stupid and requires so much unneeded energy spent by the delivery people and the receiving side it’s very strange.

Exactly same story about new building applied for 2-3 months to a friend and Amazon would simply refund him instead of making any attempts at figuring out how to deliver. It’s the same contractors who have no incentive to really deliver anything.

While in Germany simply use extensively the unconditional right to return within 14 days. Dealing with condenscending asshole customer support so prevalent there is not worth picking up the phone even, I agree.

I can highly recommend otto.de and their customer service - up until now, every time I called the customer service, everyone was extremely nice AND helpful. Delivery of even heavy household articles such as washing machines is extremely easy. Just a great service overall.

Well, a lot of people also only care about the cheapest possible price or product, same goes with the fast delivery (I see this in a lot of colleagues). We've been using Amazon less and less, and only for the low grade products that we need quickly for an emergency maybe - or for books on the kindle. But the quality, at least in Germany seems to be worse and worse. I would never trust buying anything that I want to use every day on Amazon. There are a lot of alternatives, and I know a lot of people don't like them, but I find Otto quite good and fast, and in the end would always pay a bit more to make sure the products are genuine.

In Spain, Amazon is pretty decent.

I prefer it for buying general stuff just because the delivery is fast and reliable and they have a good choice of items.

For important items though like my monitor, computer components, various electronics stuff where I can't risk getting a dodgy gangplug or whatever I use PCComponentes.

The flood of low-quality and even counterfeit items makes it pretty useless for buying electronic goods.

The question is not whether Amazon service is decent, there is no doubt it is. The question is at what expense and who you support with your money. We are discussing the fact that Amazon is evading taxes so your Spanish roads that they use, the Spanish infrastructure etc is not benefitting from Amazon benefiting off you.

Amazon has built so much goodwill with me it'll take mountains before I start boycotting it. If they're subsidized by reinvested profits, all the better.

Here's my requirements list for stores I'll patronize: online presence, less than one week delivery, relatively cheap delivery, good selection of items, honest refunds UX, UI patterns that don't say "we're trying to fuck over our customers". Amazon has had all that for 10+ years when no other store would do it, and most stores still don't manage.

The majority of small businesses in my country refuse to do as little as a facebook page and are not accessible so I won't give them money.

For food delivery from supermarkets, I checked a few years back the delivery cost more than the food and they wouldn't ship heavy items.

Almost all other online stores I try to use rely on dark patterns to trick customers, either with fake prices, fake reviews, hidden shipping policies, hidden costs that only appear at the last step of the checkout, complex refund flows, etc...

> consumer boycotts are happening

I agree with the rest of your comment, yet calling for a boycott of a company that has reached a monopoly position in the US, and will do so soon in Europe (attained through labor rights abuses and union suppression, dirty accounting/law tricks, and lobbying (read: bribery)), is impractical and somewhat misguided. “Billionaires are a policy failure“ - this is a systemic problem and needs a systemic solution.

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