I know there are similar communities like !buyitforlife@slrpnk.net 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 !deamazon@piefed.social, but that’s more about general anti-Amazon sentiment than specifically helping steer people away from Amazon’s online retail monopoly.
Not sure but I can share one site I just love. It’s Thriftbooks.com. They sell books obviously. Usually for much cheaper than Amazon. They sell used books and new ones. You can find some seriously nice hardcover used books for cheap.
If you (or anyone else) end up making one, please tell me, I absolutely want to follow something like 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.
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.
I left Amazon 10 years ago. I try to buy direct from manufacturer’s websites, for instance, I just ordered a pocket hole jig from Vevor. I’ve never not gotten something because Amazon was the only source, that’s not a thing as far as I can tell. Everything Amazon sells can be bought elsewhere online, sometimes for less.
The one place I’m having issue with this is appliance parts. Every time I try to buy from an appliance parts retailer on line it takes weeks to get my part. It’s either that or I call a local repair shop that has parts in stock and will sell it to me if I have the time to get out to their location an hour and half away between 9 and 3. Man I’m just trying to fix the washer when I get home from work. I dont have time for all that or the time to wait for the part, laundrys gotta get done!
I go to ebay and select “Canada Only” when trying to find a particular item. (Am Canadian)
For gauging product quality, I’d also throw in repairability, with https://www.ifixit.com/repairability being a good index. Use this kind of info to choose the product model, then buy it used or refurbished on craigslist/kleinanzeigen/leboncoin/ebay.
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.
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.
It seems like my local thrift store has the best quality to price for a lot of stuff, but they don’t always have something I’m looking for
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.
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.
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.
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 was thinking of geizhals.at which is usually where I go first when I need to buy anything online. Sometimes Amazon is the cheapest option, and then I buy from Amazon, but many times something else is!
For Germany, this webpage lists a bunch of online retailers, sorted into product categories: https://lmaa.space/
I just buy most things in person. If that fails I do a web search and buy from another platform. So I’m not sure how much there is to talk about but maybe I’m missing something.
If you have questions or ideas/resources it probably makes the most sense to just post on the existing de-Amazon com, since the audience there is likely to be interested. With the size of Lemmy it’s important not to separate our communities that are too niche, or they won’t really fire.
If that fails I do a web search and buy from another platform
This is something where I think we could benefit from the wisdom of a community.
Naively searching the web will generally yield >90% results centered around Amazon. Even if you exclude all Amazon domains, you need to sift through all the listicles and “review” sites that are really just Amazon ads with Amazon affiliate links inside.
Same deal if you want to use deal aggregators like slickdeals. The overwhelming majority of posts there are from Amazon, or subsidiaries like Woot.
Heck, recently I bought something direct from a brand’s own web site, only learning that they shipped through Amazon when I got the Amazon tracking number. I’m honestly not sure if I could have known that before completing my order.
It is getting ever harder to avoid giving Jeff Bezos more money.
Really? You mean like other websites you buy from are secretly owned by Amazon?
So maybe there is more to discuss here than I thought.
Still I’m a big proponent of brick and mortar shopping. Or better yet, borrow from a friend or freecycle. So I rarely buy things online anyway.
I don’t think they’re owned by Amazon, but the shipping email gave me an “Amazon Logistics US tracking number”. I guess that means Amazon handles warehousing and shipping? I don’t know what the practical difference is between buying on their own site (which used Shop.com for payment processing, fwiw) vs buying on Amazon.
There are classes of products that are basically impossible to find locally now. Or if you can find the products, they’re outrageously expensive. One example is computer cables. 20 years ago I could walk into any dollar store and get all kinds of cables and adapters for $1-5. Now the only things I see locally are, like, $30 HDMI cables. I’m not paying $30 for a cable, especially not when that money would be going to another huge corp like Best Buy or Target. I’m willing to pay a bit more to shop local but there are limits, and there are so few truly local places left.
True that’s the main reason I would shop online because some things can’t be purchased otherwise. But I don’t run into that super often.
Next time I’ll pay attention to see if Amazon is involved in some way… I have been boycotting them for a few years now and would like to continue that as best I can. Frankly, with how awful their site has become I haven’t missed it much.
Not necessarily owned by Amazon, but plenty of websites are running on Amazon systems on the back end for stuff like payment processing and web hosting, or the business uses Amazon to ship their products. There are plenty of Amazon affiliate companies out there as well, but sometimes buying from an independent business still gives money to Amazon through delivery or processing fees or something.
Well AWS is much harder to avoid that’s true. I’m not sure how you can even tell if a site is working with them. Only way to be sure would be to never go online.
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.
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.
There was, but it’s shipped by Amazon. The site just redirects to an Amazon store.
Instantpot does it in the USA.
Nice! Thanks for updating us. Joined!
Unsure how much better ebay and etsy are 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 two 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.
edit: another way to fuck amazon over is to find the item used (cheaper) on ebay, buy it and order same one new from amazon, hold onto for few weeks and send the used one back to amazon. Fuck them entirely.
I only do these with items shipping from amazon warehouses, not private sellers.
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.
