I know there are similar communities like [email protected] 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 [email protected], but that’s more about general anti-Amazon sentiment than specifically helping steer people away from Amazon’s online retail monopoly.
I look around on Amazon if I want to get idea what’s there. Then once I get better idea of what I want I go to eBay and price compare websites and buy there.
and then ot comes in Amazon packaging. At least for me it pften does.
If you (or anyone else) end up making one, please tell me, I absolutely want to follow something like that.
We second this, we have a LOT of online shops that we have on our phone saved and would love to share
Unsure how much better ebay and etsy is but I often use amazon to research products and either find a way to direct order or use ebay instead.
One of my hobbies is fucking amazon over. Often I’ll order from both amazon and ebay (or direct from manufacturer), the item comes from amazon in tqo days and start using it, when the same item comes from ebay I’ll return the used one back to amazon and keep the ebay bought one.
Fuck amazon (and fuck ebay amazon dropshippers too). But you’re that impatient you need to waste time and energy shipping something back and forth? (and likely having that product end up in an amazon discard bin anyway)
Their price already accounts for returns. You are just fucking over the delivery drivers who have quotas to meet.
Thank you for pointing out the obvious, that apparently has not come to that guys mind.
Etsy has been more or less swamped with TEMU crap that can be shipped for free. If you don’t offer free shipping TEMU, I mean Etsy, wont show people your stuff. It’s like having the word dead in a YouTube vid, the Algorithm doesn’t like it.
Of course you can bake shipping into the price, but then you’re $5-$20 more expensive than the TEMU with better images section of Etsy.
Sure, there are real people, but they’re hard to find or be.
eBay is a mixed bag, and shipping is often $10-20.
Amazon will drop customers who return too many items. They have to protect themselves from ongoing fraud just like every retailer.
Nice idea. But I guess there are still too many Amazon fanboys for that.
I tried to make one literally called not-Amazon but pretty much everybody had an opinion on how I was doing it wrong and I just didn’t have enough emotional bandwidth to deal with it. Would be happy to be a secondary mod if somebody else has the energy to deal with those people.
This is the issue I’ve had with many of my ideas. So I stopped asking people and just started doing things the way I want to do them, instead of getting negative responses and not starting at all.
Yeah but I’ve got ideas I have more to contribute with like my biggest project on fedi is [email protected] which is an effort to create a slightly more structured mental health support space that gives people specific tools and education to get by when they can’t afford a professional.
The biggest thing holding me back right now is that I think the space would really benefit from a bot. I tend to be kind of flaky and lose focus and I have all the posts written but often forget to actually post them once a week. I think if I could do that plus an automatic weekly check in thread I might be able to kickstart some better engagement.
everybody had an opinion on how I was doing it wrong and I just didn’t have enough emotional bandwidth to deal with it
Straight up why larger communities often have mods with terrible personalities. They’re the only ones who dgaf enough.
That would be great! I cancelled my subscription and have been trying to buy direct for a while now.
Some businesses won’t sell direct, like 3M or most tool brands. But yes, you can often find things on the brand sites.
Amazon and Walmart are for things you can’t find anywhere else, but neither need the membership to make it happen. Strangely, Walmart is better quality lately.
In the case of tools I’ll shop at a hardware store, usually Ace, either in person or on their online store.
Would Grainger or McMaster Carr fill in the 3M/tool gap?
The sticker shock on shipping from McMaster put me right off the first time I tried to order. Small things. Triple digit shipping even so.
You can have a good laugh at Grainger’s prices on just about everything. They exist purely to rip off other businesses with large expense accounts, in the “don’t care, it ain’t my money” tradition.
I haven’t supported Amazon in over 15 years. I just stopped buying from them. Most of the stuff they sell, you can buy directly from the manufacturer or on eBay. There was one USB hub that amazon sold that i could only find on amazon, so i just chose a different brand and got it on eBay.
Really not that hard to avoid amazon entirely.
One problem is that Amazon forces any 3rd-party vendor who sells their stuff on Amazon to charge at least the same price everywhere else, so even buying directly from them, they have to sell it to you for at least what you would pay on Amazon.
BUT Amazon has to take their huge 50% or even higher cut, so to be able to sell on Amazon the manufacturer has to raise their price on Amazon, otherwise sell at a loss.
OTOH if they don’t sell on Amazon, they lose massive amounts of sales because of Amazon’s almost total market dominance. So they sell there and then also raise the price everywhere else too because they had to agree to do that.
The loser is the consumer, no matter where you buy stuff from. It would take a massive deliberate boycott of Amazon to undo this scam. Most people don’t even realize how this scam works. There should be an outcry and the government should pass a law limiting how much of a cut Amazon can legally take, and/or block them from forcing vendors into the pricing contracts, but obviously that’s not going to happen in our oligarchy.
There was, but it’s shipped by Amazon. The site just redirects to an Amazon store.
Seriously, http://www.ebay.com/
Or maybe your country has local e-shops aggregator.
For example, in Italy we have TrovaPrezzi. They just aggregate products from many different online shops.
Then you can easily buy the products you want from small shops.
Nice! Thanks for updating us. Joined!
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.
Most online retailers have ALWAYS been scammy. Its part of what helped grow Amazon in the first place. They were actually trustworthy, reliable, and offered good consumer protections in simple and straight forward refund policies
This is basically true of all the current giants. No company that gets that big can start out entirely fucked up. They have to get their legitimately THEN go to shit.
Amazon’s monopoly has made it so hard to find alternative online stores to buy a lot of stuff
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 personally don’t use Idealo, but I’ve seen it. Good heads-up.
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.
Yep! The monopoly is strong.
Sometimes, the item directly from the company website use Amazon to ship it.
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 $35 or whatever as a perk, which means I get a lot of free shipping off Amazon.
Another issue: multiple times I have gone out of my way to avoid Amazon only to find out the company is still using Amazon for delivery anyway. The most recent one was shoes. I literally went to the physical store to try on shoes, but decided on a color/size combination that they didn’t have in stock. The sales person did their magic to order the shoes for me, and they were still fucking delivered by Amazon.
I use walmart for a select few items that are recurring monthly because I can’t get them at any other store locally. I don’t do shipping anymore because often when something is delivered it’s an individual driving for some reason (had a like 3$ 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.
I found the best way to avoid Amazon was just to buy a lot less pointless stuff.
If you don’t buy that bluetooth shower speaker shaped like a cat, you don’t need to find a dodgy dropshipping company in a self storage unit that resells it.
i have somehow gotten through life just fine without ever touching amazon, weird huh?
Also now Amazon launched a Temu competitor called Haul. It’s just Amazon-style pointless shit, but even worse!
No idea, but it’s great that many of y’all and us are doing this. Buy local, buy from worker co-ops, buy from ethical countries!
I’d recommend to also use Buybeaver & No Thanks, to boycot the US and the like. Generally I exclude Russia & Belarus, most of the Middle East (Israel included), and North & Middle Africa.
What countries are ethical??
Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Costa Rica, Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Portugal, New Zealand, Slovenia, to name a few, are relatively ethical. I’d also give props to Brazil for managing to stave off an authoritarian coup. Denmark in my opinion scores the best of them all.
I’d at the very least exclude these;
- Israel
- US*
- Russia
- Belarus
- North Korea
- China
- Iran
- Eritrea
- Turkey
- Malaysia
- Literally all of Northern Africa, the broader Middle East, most of Central Africa, and South Asia for horrendous human rights, except for Cyprus and possibly India.
There’s probably a lot more, but yeah.
* If it were possible, I’d only invest in states that have a solid labour and civil rights’ record, without giving a penny to Trump and the fossil & military industry. New England (minus New Hampshire), the West coast, Hawaii, Minnesota, to take a few, would be best.
Sweden is swinging to fascism, and they have the largest arms industry per capita in the world. They literally profit from unethical wars.
Norway is drilling and exporting oil, which is profiting from mass extinction and one of the biggest existential threats to most life on earth.
Canada usually joins the US in their unethical wars for oil. Also, their tar sands project in Alberta is one of the most ecologically devistating projects on the planet. And also profiting from contributing to the climate catastrophe.
Belgium, by god, their wealth is built from the severed hands of workers in the Congo.
Counterpoints;
Agree on the swinging to fascism being problematic, however, Sweden has a Nordic model and generally is pretty inclusive, Norway has been moving away aplenty from oil (most of its vehicles drive electric now and energy production is largely renewables), Belgium’s wealth is no longer built upon that.
Alberta is a stain on Canada, and I think it should be addressed by urbanising that state, plus tackling socioeconomic inequality and the bands farmers have to oil and gas companies.
What countries in your perspective, would be ethical? And don’t say “none”, just say closest to ethical in that case.
Intergenerational wealth doesn’t go away on its own. Belgium would need to return every penny extracted from their slavery and torture in the Congo to even reach neutral status.
Norway’s oil isn’t much domestically. The problem is that they sell it. It’s irrelevant if they use it domestically or not. It’s still being dug up and burned. That’s the problem.
I don’t think there exists an ethical country. It’s a sad reality. Cuba is maybe one of the closest to ethical (specifically thinking of State-sposnored efforts to send aid workers to disaster areas for altruistic reasons), but they certainly are not an ethical country.
so, this is more in the german area, but i know about https://lmaa.space/
Already used it to inform myself for buying coffee beans, can recommend 👍
some brand name items can be bought directly from the online store’s company website, like for phone cases, screens, toothpastes that arnt well known brand names. most of them require you to buy a certain amount in order to get a discount or free delivery, it might be more expensive than going on amazon or other online retailers.
