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Comment by slibhb | Hacker News Reader

Legality aside, I'm not sure that Amazon is winning in the long run with this strategy. I mostly buy products direct from the manufacturer these days and virtually all manufacturers have high quality websites with solid ordering experiences. As long as they have the name recognition, they can either sell for higher on Amazon and take the advertising hit or just ignore Amazon altogether.

I continue to buy some stuff on Amazon. Mostly books (they're way cheaper than book stores) and gadgets (I bought a 12 volt car fan recently). The sort of stuff where I don't care who makes it.

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i would pay more money to not have to put my credit card into or attach my identity to 100 different random websites all of which almost certainly have worse security practices than amazon and many of which absolutely will have that data stolen at some point.

even for people who don't think about stuff like that, it's way easier for the average person to buy everything from a single place than to go to a bunch of different random websites to buy things they want.

There was this feature provided by banks. I remember BofA was one. Unfortunately they removed it. You could create a temporary credit card number for specific vendor.

It even had option to set one time limit or recurring limit.

I don't understand why it was taken away, was it giving too much control to the customer?

I use Revolut alone for that reason. Single-use virtual cards they call it.

Google offers virtual credit card numbers fyi. I don’t think they are vendor locked, but offer a potential solution for you. Albeit one with additional drawbacks.

Capital one Eno browser extension for chrome generates a new CC number for any site. I love using it!

Many sites support Paypal which means your payment data is safe

I really wish there was an open standard for something like this.

There is. https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/

Supported everywhere except Firefox (where there's currently a flag to enable). https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Payment_Req...

Isn't this basically what Shopify is, nowadays? Or "buy with Amazon" or a few other options that I can't remember the names of.

It is. I've even found myself searching within the shop app to find products from smaller stores vs the larger stores. It's nice they have a shipment tracker built in and so far i've not had any issues. They're even running promotions / incentives with their Shop Cash, so they're trying for sure.

I coded a credit card payment a few times in my career and from what I saw it's always just a token. That token could be only used to make transactions from your account to the specific vendor's account. Of course there's always could be some incompetent developer who thought that saving credit card data into a database is a great idea, but overall it's not as risky as people think.

I would (and sometimes do) pay more money to not give money to Amazon. Also, I feel like the vast majority of sites support Google Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal and/or Venmo these days so I rarely find myself entering my credit card number.

privacy dot com does this really well

Many countries have solved this without needing monopolies/monopsonies by having sane payment methods.

I don't know why people get paranoid about this, in the US and most Western countries payment processing has minimum security requirements and you have blanket protection from fraud by credit card companies anyway. All of this means in practice consumers are very safe putting credit card details on websites. The websites that don't have the skill to meet minimum security requirements find a payment processor, so a hacker wouldn't get it from website, they'd have to get it from a processor like Stripe or Paypal.

> I'm not sure that Amazon is winning in the long run with this strategy

Completely agreed. Anecodotally, I used to shop on Amazon for things. As in, use the search function to find items to buy. These days, that is impossible. The only way to use Amazon today is to know exactly what you want, or for the item's value to be small enough that it doesn't matter (deoderant, ethernet cable, etc...).

It's quite frustrating to shop on the internet today. Google search sucks since SEO has made the results terrible. Amazon search is a frustrating mix of FANPOP brands and Amazon Basics. DDG, Brave, Bing, etc.. are all slightly better, but still very difficult to find anything genuine. Appending " reddit" to searches sometimes help, but the quality of reddit is quickly declining.

It seems like there is a significant opportunity for disruption in this space. The user experience sucks and prices are high. Sure, shipping is fast and free, but that doesn't help with product search.

> I mostly buy products direct from the manufacturer these days and virtually all manufacturers have high quality websites with solid ordering experiences.

I can’t say I agree. I’m not defending Amazon here but shipping is a nightmare with literally every other business. You aren’t going to get 2-day and you’re lucky if it ships within a week of ordering. In most cases there aren’t even options for faster processing/shipping for an increased cost.

I was recently at my parents at they have Bartesian (think Keurig for alcoholic drinks). I wanted to try some drinks they didn’t have so I went to the official site and started adding some stuff to my cart. IIRC the free shipping minimum was higher than Amazon (without prime) and there was _zero_ information on when I could expect the stuff to ship or the shipping time. I did some googling and found people complaining about how long it took to ship and I was only going to be at my parents for a little under a week. I went to Amazon and while there was a significant markup (20-30% IIRC) I was able to get it next day or 2 day depending on what I got. I bit the bullet and ordered from Amazon.

Not everything has to come in 2 days or less but some things absolutely do and I rarely see fast shipping from even big names like Apple that that rival Amazon (I just bought a mouse and keyboard from them and it took 4 days vs same day with Amazon, same price). In a number of cases you have literally no information on processing or shipping time to make an informed decision.

Again, not defending Amazon, I wish there were better alternatives, but it’s not as easy as “just order from the manufacturer”. I’ve been burned so many times doing that.

I do the same. I try to buy on manufacture sites when I can. Mainly because of the 1 bin policy. Feels like some times I get products that a seller bought at a discount because of defects or package damage, and these are treated the same as new.

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