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Comment by sixhobbits | Hacker News Reader

I love Galaxus! Most online retailers could probably increase their revenue by xx% just by copying some of their patterns.

- price history so you can see when sales are fake

- one click "deliver to my closest branch and I will pick it up and pay there so I don't have to muck around with online payments" option

- automatic high quality translation of all product information and reviews into all offered languages

- simple downloads on order page for invoice and receipt

And many other things. Some things are still annoying like they don't accept cards from some countries, but they get a lot right.

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> - one click "deliver to my closest branch and I will pick it up and pay there so I don't have to muck around with online payments" option

I've started using this as much as possible, especially during christmas. You find something, "in stock", supposed to be delivered the next day or a day after, you order, then nothing one day, two days, three days, then you call, "yeah, it's still with the distributer, it'll be ready tomorrow", two more days pass, you call again, want a refund, they "cannot refund now", because the product is supposedly in the mail already, then you wait, christmas goes by, and around 15. january you get a call, that they cannot get the item you wanted, and try to upsell some either more expensive or worse option.

Now I just order for physical pickup and "pay there" option.. and if it's not there, cancelling is easy, because they don't have your money yet, and they cannot lie about the item being already sent.

You have more patience than me. If that happened to one of my orders I wouldn't just change from delivery to in-store pickup, I would simply stop ordering from that store altogether.

What ajsnigrutin is describing recently happened to me with Lenovo (2nd offense) and backcountry.com (1st). It seems like companies are getting more "approximate" about their inventories :-(

Ah damn, that's gotta be pretty frustrating :-/

In India when the major e-Commerce companies opened shop they realised that having just online payment wouldn't work due to inherent distrust with online payments, lack of card access etc. and so 'Cash on Delivery' where we pay to the delivery personnel was critical for their survival.

Nowadays people prefer to use UPI[1] over cash in even local store counters making India the largest real-time payment transactions country.

Its amazing that both of those happened within a decade, Largely synonymous with mobile compute & Internet penetration.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface

Their whole web UI is a masterpiece.

Super clean, very logical, everything exactly you'd expect it to be, superb filtering system for searching through long product lists, etc. It's also super-snappy, at least from within Switzerland.

Access denied. But it was pretty fast, I admit. Zero JS, no weird CSS, just pure content. I almost liked it.

> price history so you can see when sales are fake

This is now a law enforced in European Union to display such history (at least the lowest price in last 30 or more days so customer knows if the price was not fake rised just before lowering it and calling it a sale). WooCommerce has a plugin for that now[1].

1: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wc-price-history/

They implemented it before it was mandated by EU. IANAL but they didint have to implement it, since switzerland is not in EU

But Galaxus is also active/targeting Germany/Austria so they would have to implement it

Germany and Asutria are a different instance of the shop with different stock. There are several differences between these shops. That wouldn't be the issue

Would that mean that amazon.fr / amazon.de would be required to provide that information?

I've never noticed it, maybe it's not in an obvious place.

depends if German and French gov already implemented this EU directive. Different countries implement it in different pace. For example Poland already has this law in power and amazon.pl is aligned to it.

I just tried looking this up on Amazon.pl but I don't see it. are you sure about this?

I am sure :) Here is example https://www.amazon.pl/Anker-Soundcore-Glo%C5%9Bnik-Bluetooth...

and screenshot

https://ibb.co/FDm2BZL

"Najniższa ostatnia cena: 179zł" just under the price is the text required by EU directive.

Oh, thanks a lot. Even translated the page but could not see it :)

Switzerland is not in the EU.

> - price history so you can see when sales are fake

in case you were unfamiliar https://camelcamelcamel.com/ does this for amazon

In response Amazon did a lot to reduce price transparency. If you notice now most categories of items are constantly 'on sale' and even if camelcamelcamel picks up that fact, there are also 'coupons' available on-site for most amazon products that only alter the price under certain conditions and they're only applied at checkout.

This makes it difficult for a human being trying to buy things to compare the prices, let alone a series of scripts.

if memory serves camelcamelcamel gets their pricing data directly from amazon via a source they aren't allowed to disclose, and bloomberg has previously reported that amazon gives camel^3 the data they have; given that, i'm not too certain they're the cause of amazon's consistent reduction in transparency to consumers - a lot of it feels like cruft built into their marketplace allowing for bad actors to effectively play the marketplace

having personally built an internal tool that was much more aggressive than camelcamelcamel, I can say they're not doing anything special in terms of sources (or if they are, it's totally unnecessary)

Was thinking about building such tool, but I couldn't come up with an idea where to source the data other than scraping it. Was looking especially for big price drops.

Cammelx3 is great. I like Keepa as well, especially the chrome extension that embeds the chart on the Amazon page. It also seems to have a bit more functionality.

The Firefox extension of keepa does the same btw

There's also keepa.com.

The price history going quite far back was a game changer for me when shopping from Digitec/Galaxus. They don't have everything like Amazon, but the quality and the experience are on a whole different levels. Few levels above, actually.

The pricing is on another level as well.

Yes. Clicked around for a few things because I remembered their german branch from a few years, nothing has changed. At least not for the few parts I checked today.

Believe it or not, but theirs are the lowest prices in Switzerland.

Oh I believe it. But that's kind of like being the poorest billionaire, you're still a billionaire.

With the EEA being what it is, I'm really surprised they can keep afloat since ordering from literally anywhere else ought to be cheaper just by labour costs involved alone. These days even Amazon.de doesn't get many of my orders anymore since they're reselling the exact same crap Aliexpress has for a quarter of the price.

I’m not sure what point you’re making. How is that issue related to labor in Europe? Amazon US is all white-label Aliexpress stuff too, but the minimum wage here is literally $7.25 an hour, many states have zero sales tax, and there’s no VAT.

Even if you're selling the same item you need to pay local rates for importing, handling, stock storage, etc. which are highly dependant on labour prices and real estate costs.

As such if you're trying to sell to anyone who's not in the same purchasing power range or higher (aka literally nobody when it comes to Switzerland) you'll run into problems as you can't compete with vendors operating at lower costs in those countries. It's just basic arithmetic.

That's what makes Switzerland one of the worst places one could manufacture and/or stock things and China one of the best. Exploitation of the poor is the optimal business choice, after all it's the very foundation upon which capitalism itself is built.

They are also expanding in EEA: Germany, France, Italy for sure. I don't know about other markets.

In Germany, they are usually close to the cheapest, but rarely the cheapest when I see them on Geizhals (price comparison site).

I guess you never heard about Swiss import tax, and overall you don't seem very familiar with topic. They have no competition here, they offer maybe 50x more products than available in rest of eshops, and most have actually in warehouse. Stuff you simply can't buy elsewhere and its either not shipped into CH at all (thank you, Amazon) or at higher prices and utterly crappy warranty.

I like galaxus too but they’re not the cheapest. Most of their stock can be had cheaper from other online Swiss retailers.

Toppreise and google shopping (yeah…) often can find better deals on the same items even after shipping.

That may be true. But overall their prices are pretty reasonable.

Personally, I prefer paying a few francs more and in return get the certainty that I get what I ordered reasonably fast.

I never had a problem with deliveries from them, alas, high ticket items I picked up personally.

The only one time where they couldn't deliver a couple of USB chargers for a couple weeks because it was out of stock and the supplier couldn't supply I cancelled the pending order and had the money credited to my credit card.

Not having to deal with some dodgy outfit is worth the slight surcharge to me.

Same here. Its nice to pay a bit less but it usually comes with a headache when problems arise.

I wouldn’t pay 20% more but 5 or even 10% is reasonable.

Electronics are actually cheaper in Switzerland than in most countries, thanks to low VAT.

I don't think so. It might be a bit cheaper than in other European countries, but it's probably more expensive than in the US.

Not quite true, once you vos der VAT on these is 7% in CH but 20+% in the EU. Things should therefore be at least 13% cheaper in CH but they aren’t because reasons.

But they are. At the risk of getting into specifics, all electronics I buy here are cheaper than in surrounding EU countries, the 256 GB version iPhone 14 Pro is cheaper than 128 base model in the EU, the Ultra watch is 850 at Apple store Switzerland (799 digitec), 999 at apple.de. Yes you can find rare counter examples, but I love Switzerland as a tech nerd, especially since CHF reached parity with EUR.

The best deal (although it’s a lot of hassle depending where you live) is to order things to Germany, go pick it up, get your papers stamped to get the 20% VAT back. Then pay 7% tax if worth over 300.- or no tax if less. But it takes time and isn’t always worth the hassle.

Most of electronics truly are, if they are sold officially here, even if eshop margins are a bit higher. And its closer to 8% on non-essential items (food, books) where its below 3%.

That's how you do VAT, compared to all EU countries around who screw their population left and right because they have big public debts and getting worse, while employing armies of unemployable bureaucrats who do almost nothing and have ridiculous safety and social nets.

The world could learn a thing or two on how Swiss run things in general and especially government stuff, but the problem is this is not transferable elsewhere, people are simply... different to be polite.

People always get that wrong. Switzerland is more expensive when human labor is involved, cheaper or same as surrounding countries when not. However that extra money also ends up with the labor, so it's a good thing for everyone.

Best example is a Brezel. A fresh Brezel is like $4, but a buttered one (done by human) $8-$9.

Not the butter is expensive. Humans just get proper money for their work.

Stop a minute and think about the potential causes, it might be good for your wallet but bad for everything else

> They don't have everything like Amazon

They didn’t seem to reach Day 2 yet either.

If Bezos and company weren’t being either disingenuous or delusional, Amazon has reached day two years ago.

It's day 5. They've reached Oracle levels of bureaucracy and disregard for the customer.

They where much better before the Migros takeover, especially the two owners just wanted to make 10k/month the rest goes to the customer, for a short time we had better prices as..well ....whole EU.

But still it's the best we have...

>automatic high quality translation of all product information and reviews into all offered languages

Uh, gotta disagree here, speaking as a regular Galaxus shopper in both en & fr locales. The automated translations are mostly terrible when not entirely misleading or vulgar. For instance, the French ones are so bad there are Twitter accounts dedicated to them[1]. This applies to both product titles and descriptions.

To be fair, this is not surprising: the machine translator has very little to work with when translating short product names, in addition to these being full of puns (in whatever source language) or English-looking words for marketing purposes. It's a shame no ML company seems to have taken the opportunity to fine-tune their model for product name translation and sell that for $$$ to big marketplaces.

[1] https://twitter.com/digithequeg

Just spent 400 CHF at Galaxus, same day no charge delivery. Ho hassles.

>- one click "deliver to my closest branch and I will pick it up and pay there so I don't have to muck around with online payments" option

That suggests a really sorry state of things, not something to copy. Online payments shouldn't be harder than physically going to a store and paying for the item.

> Online payments shouldn't be harder than physically going to a store and paying for the item

Why ?

It's probably more energy efficient to have trucks going to the few branches for pickups than to every single individual house.

I don't see why it "shouldn't" be, especially since it's optional

> That suggests a really sorry state of things,

The really sorry state of things are people ordering toilet paper &co in same day delivery on amazon because they can't bother walking 5 min to the closest store

>Why ?

Is this a serious question? Why should online payments be so difficult that it makes sense to spend even 2 minutes getting out of the door and walking to a store directly across the street? You autofill your card information and click "pay".

>The really sorry state of things are people ordering toilet paper &co in same day delivery on amazon because they can't bother walking 5 min to the closest store

But why? It's cheaper on Amazon.

> The really sorry state of things are people ordering toilet paper &co in same day delivery on amazon because they can't bother walking 5 min to the closest store

Also all the stores trying to railroad me into buying delivery instead of just telling me which store has it in stock.

- 2,288 sitemap files see /sitemap.xml

Amazon does not even support sitemaps. (They did in the early days.)

It's also super easy to return bought products.

Late to the party. But they also accept crypto for many years now as online payment.

Only Twint is just as easy as paying with crypto.

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