3a it shows up in an Amazon box delivered by an Amazon truck.

Step 6: Product comes shipped in an Amazon box using Amazon couriers :facepalm:

If Amazon's algorithms detect that a seller is offering the same item cheaper elsewhere (including on the seller's own e-commerce site, then Amazon will immediately strip the listing of the "Add to Cart" or "Buy Now" buttons. The algorithm will also hide or suppress the listing from search results. And for repeated or severe violations (especially related to price-gouging), Amazon may suspend or terminate selling privileges completely for sellers selling cheaper off site. And they call this "Marketplace Fair Pricing Policy". F- Amazon.

Some places don’t. 3M, for example, in spite of how big it is. I needed P100 filters. I go to 3M which links me to Amazon. I could go to Home Depot, or buy from the Amazon 3M store and pay 2/3 to half.

WEN. A tool company that actually sells their own from their site. For whatever reason, their stuff is 10% more expensive on their own site, plus shipping.

And let’s not forget returns, which are free, easy and require no packaging most of the time with Amazon. I hate to say it, but they’ve got keeping people hooked figured out.

Walmart does well. The shipping is faster with no membership. And the returns are easier than Amazon. Provided you make sure the “fulfilled by Walmart” box is checked. But it’s Walmart, run by shitheads and associated with Heritage.

Michaels does alright on the crafting materials side. As does Blick, on art supplies. Fabric Warehouse is fairly solid for fabric though their selection is a bit random.

People I’ve talked to actually like shopping in just one place. So you’re combatting the “one stop shopping” thing as well.

While I support the intent, I've personally found that:

1. Half the time the company either doesn't exist off Amazon or uses Amazon for their order fulfillment.
2. See #1
3. Price frequently ends up being mostly the same. I'm not sure if this is due to something that Amazon forces on companies, so they may have no choice.
4. Shipping ends up being expensive and is definitely not in 2 days, more like 6-10.
5. Spot on and perhaps still worth it for this reason alone.

I just try to buy what I can locally and avoid the larger companies that are all pretty disgusting. While Bezos is definitely the richest and most evil, make no mistake that the other companies would be in his place in a heartbeat if they could.

Honestly I've mostly been finding items cheaper on Amazon either because you'd have to pay for shipping on it, or because they just entirely neglect their website since nobody uses it.

Also that only really applies to "real" brands, not the gibberish named brands. Those companies only exist to use Amazons brand registry for better SEO and probably don't even have a website. AINOPE is not a "real" company, they just slap their name on whitelabel products. Of course the first random one I picked does have one, but it is more expensive than amazon.

Stop using Google as a verb. "Search" company name.

• If you stay in/get into the habit of searching for products using google, inflation will just keep happening and amazon will give them a kickback. (Google charge for the higher search results).
• They save and use your data, you are effectively an unpaid employee of google (it is how google 'work' - they also are the reason you are often paying more. The best way to do it is

1. Find a cool product (if it happens to be on amazon, so be it).
2. Search the name of that company on Duckduckgo, or qwant or many other non data collecting engines that don't have a kickback agreement with seller, or just a lower rate.
3. 10% (or any) code is the reason they are selling product higher. Some people buy at the higher price (presumably most) so why would they care if people find the 10% discount code (advertisement on search engines) to get the product for the normal price?
4. Company avoids paying both amazon and google, - it's not really "losing a 25% margin" unless you believe that they don't pass the fees on to the customer (YOU).
5. You avoid giving money to all the c**ts but more importantly, you pay the proper item value, or you help competition grow.

The old way (2007ish - 2026) is the shit way.

6. Amazon still delivered the product because they use Amazon for their own fulfillment.

Literally just had this happen.

2b. Company thinks their online store is a boutique and sell the stuff for 50% more than Amazon

Somehow it happens even more often with small businesses. My city is small and irrelevant, so when I saw a book with the history of it, I wanted to buy it. On Amazon it was sold for 15% off, on marketplace directly by the publisher + free shipping. So I went to buy it on the publisher website and... MSRP + need to pay shipping

This publisher was doing a war price against itself. A small niche book where you're the only one to sell it. Why would you need to discount this heavily on Amazon?

Numbers:

On Amazon: 13€ + shipping paid by the seller (+customer has free returns in one month). They can't have more than 50 cents of profit for each copy sold

On their own website: 15€+5€ shipping (+customer needs to pay 7€ to return it within 2 weeks). Healthy profit for each copy sold.

You need to be an anti-bezos activist to choose the second option, though.

I want something like amazon as a public utility. But much better, Amazon is such shit as a website today. And with 0% take from producer. And make online banking and free instant wire transfer as easy as using paypal, but without paying a rent to plutocrats. Two factor authentication using phone is a plague.

2.a.i.) find out they don't have an actual shop, they just send you to Amazon

ah yes, i do love buying from GAAMALASORF LLC. the family photos on their website are so charming.

Sadly, I offen see stuff being more expensive on the company website...

One big antitrust issue with Amazon is that they require vendors to use their fulfillment services in order to get the best terms on being listed on Amazon: prime shipping, etc.

That deal for shipping/fulfillment itself isn't too bad, even if they charge a pretty high price to sellers for the service, because the seller is actually getting something valuable in return, and it's hard for Amazon to promise fast shipping not in their control.

But the FTC lawsuit a while back alleged that Amazon does more than that. They downgrade the search results of anyone who isn't a paying advertiser, so they're squeezing sellers in more ways than one. And worse, part of the contract for fulfillment is a prohibition on competing with Amazon's listed price.

So if you're selling something that you need $30 to earn a profit, and it costs you 40% to list on Amazon, you'll need to list it at $50 on Amazon in order to make your profit, and you've hamstrung yourself from selling that same thing for $30 on your own site and turning the same profit by cutting Amazon out. That's what's anticompetitive and harms the consumer, even when that consumer intentionally avoids Amazon and goes straight to the seller's own site.

Yes and no. Some are actually not reachable outside Amazon. Some tell you they only work over Amazon. Some offer only Paypal as payment method, which I don't use. Some only offer some Chinese payment methods that I'm not going to use, either. Or their non-Amazon shop is only available in Chinese. And some have suspicious online presences where i think it is good to have Amazon in between, in case they do something fishy.

Tried that, the company fulfills web orders with Amazon.

Now I just buy local.

I do this a lot because often the company website has more product selection than what is soleld on Amazon. So, it is a net win for shoppers. Bonus! Sometimes the company's prices are slightly lower than Amazon (even without the code).

half of you wouldn't have survived the pre-internet world, "oh no i have to shop locally??"

Step 6: Company is a US only company, and Im not in the US so it'd be a lot more money due to increased shipping fees, later shipping times, and import fees.

I thought i was ordering a product directly from a company and avoiding Amazon. The thing was delivered in an Amazon package

Last time I did this I ordered from the companies website actually paid a couple dollars more and it shipped from an Amazon warehouse.

I tried that last year with a power supply, but the little German company that made it sold it only on Amazon :-(

This isn't always an option, unfortunately. Some books for example are only available on Amazon. When I go to the author's website, they just link to Amazon.

This used to be a thing but hasn't been for quite a while now to the best of my knowledge. It's hard to outcompete Amazon's logistics as a small seller, their whole store business operates at less than a 3% profit margin and they have scale to drive costs down which small sellers don't. They effectively subsidize the logistics with AWS, there's a reason Amazon became a monopoly after all.

Try to not use google in the process too.

Is there a browser extension that does this automatically? There should be.

Any suggestions on buying lots of cheap random electronic parts for projects and avoiding racking up shipping costs from ordering from multiple sites? E.g. I had to order ~20 different cheap parts (boost converter, charge controller, micro switches, a cheap devboard, USB breakouts, etc) for a personal hobby project recently. I used Amazon unfortunately. Curious about good alternatives for this kind of stuff.