I’ve been working in the last few years of getting rid of big tech services. PayPal and Amazon are left. I’ve been questioning the need for PayPal in a world of virtual credit cards. My main reason for using it was security of purchase but I feel this need is no longer there. BTW, equivalent EU service to PayPal that is equally well accepted? Feels like this one may be more difficult to satisfy.
Amazon is pretty necessary in much of the US. Between big corporate stores like Walmart and Dollar General and online shopping it’s really difficult for smaller stores to exist anymore. If there’s any market, the big stores will come in, undercut whatever they sell, push the small stores out and then probably just go bankrupt and leave the area without anything. And the fact that much of the US is rural and our infrastructure, especially in rural areas, is old and/or underdeveloped means it could take hours to get to a store and back. And because the big stores only really carry the basics, it’s really difficult to get your hands on stuff that’s less common. That’s where online shopping fills the gap.
I live in a medium sized major city that doesn’t allow Walmart to get subsidies their business model relies on to buy up land and buildings on the cheap to help take over markets, and does at least try to keep space for small businesses, and I even have a hard time finding stuff. But doesn’t help that even in most of the major cities, transportation is crap because politicians are owned by the fossil fuel companies and so public transit can’t get much tax money and traffic is insane not to mention the gas prices are quite high here compared to much of the US even. And the property is super expensive primarily because so much prime real-estate is unoccupied by investors to keep the prices high. So its difficult to set up a specialty shop. I’m sure many other cities have similar issues, but I’m most familiar with this one.
As for Amazon in particular, I used them primarily because their return policy is the best and these days all of the online shops are as likely to send you a used or broken item as a new one and secondarily because at least in my city, the shipping is pretty quick. No other online stores can match it. But that said, they have started to move away from carrying quality brands and primarily sell cheap junk since that’s where the profit is especially with their ability to price based on data they’ve mined from data brokers about you. That’s why sites like Keepa and camelcamelcamel are essential to check and track actual prices they offer in addition to doing comparison shopping.
Hey irotsoma
I do feel your dilemma
I would drive for an hour to buy anything from a small store rather than buying from amazon and increasing their profits. Obviously one person has no impact upon their obscene profits.
Amazon is the curse for small business and all its employees, drivers, sellers and customers.
good reseacrh here:
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox
The authors conclude that getting the best price on Amazon requires that you “first spend considerable time searching through pages of results and then utilize, at a minimum, spreadsheet algebraic capabilities to determine the product’s full price…[and] somehow de-bias from the psychological effects of anchoring, and labels such as ‘limited time deal’ and ‘Best Seller,’ as well as many other subtle psychological influences.”
Amazon says it’s entitled to use the consumer welfare cheat-code to get out of antitrust enforcement because it has so many bargains. But to get those bargains, you have to pay such minutely detailed attention – literally spreadsheeting your options and hand-coding mathematical formulas to compare them – that you’ll almost certainly fail. The price of failure is incredibly high – a 25-29% overcharge on every purchase.
The Amazon Paradox has dropped, and it drills into another way that Amazon overcharges most of us by as much as 29% on nearly every purchase, disqualifying it from invoking that consumer welfare cheat code. The new paper is “Amazon’s Pricing Paradox,” from law professors Rory Van Loo and Nikita Aggarwal, for The Harvard Journal of Law and Technology:
The authors concede that while Amazon does have some great bargains, it goes to enormous lengths to make it nearly impossible to get those bargains. Drawing from the literature on behavioral economics, the authors make the reasonable (and experimentally verified) assumption that shoppers generally assume that the top results in an Amazon search are the best results, and click on those.
But Amazon’s search-ordering is enshittified: it shifts value from sellers and shoppers (you!) to the company. A combination of self-preferencing (upranking Amazon’s own knock-offs), pay-for-placement (Amazon ads), other forms of payola (whether a merchant is paying for Prime), and “junk ads” (that don’t match your search) turn Amazon’s search-ordering into a rigged casino game.
From 2023:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/22/23885242/amazon-prime-tv-movies-streaming-ads-subscription-date
I hate Amazon as much as anyone. But you can’t live in a post capitalist wasteland without those kinds of things. There is no ethical consumption in such a world and avoiding using one toxic company just required using another.
I use tracking sites for things I can wait for and I shop around, but they almost inevitably have the best prices especially after considering shipping costs, exchange policies for defective or damaged goods, and especially for clothes and shoes, return policies.
Disagree. I lived in bum fuck nowhere most of my life and rarely ever needed Amazon. People are just lazy idiots that cabt do a simple web search for the same product. Amazon sucks ass now too, its not cheaper and the products are trash. Buy direct.
If you have sellers with electronic components and sensitive skin products that sell direct, charge less than amazon, have free exchange and return policies, and don’t ship direct from Asia meaning possibly several months to receive as well as fluctuating tariffs, please share. These are just two examples I’ve not been able to find.
Do you have more specific product examples?
Just use eBay
I don’t see that as any better. It’s just shifting the profit to another giant company and even worse, there’s no ubiquitous return or exchange policy if you receive items that are defective, not as advertised, don’t fit, etc.
Sellers get a larger margin on eBay. You can’t get perfect but you can get better. The return/exchange policy is a small tradeoff for not supporting one of the most evil corporations in existence. It’s also kind of a selfish thing to care about, most of Amazon’s returns are just trashed into the landfill so it’s not like it’s green or something.
I see return policies as essential for certain items.
For example clothing sizing is extremely inconsistent and many sizing charts just are plain wrong, especially for women’s clothes, and for me anyway, shoes, since I have a high arch, so if I have to pay a restocking fee and/or shipping fees every time I get something that doesn’t fit just right, it is a significant cost. For example with shoes, I often have to try on 20-30 pairs at both local and online stores for every one that fits.
Just an example, but this also extends to shipping damaged products especially if a seller is not willing to deal with shipping companies for damaged products and shipping companies won’t honor insurance if you weren’t the one who paid for it directly. So you have to catch the delivery person before they leave the damaged package and ask them to return it to the sender and hope the sender will give you a refund without needing to reverse charges.
And then there’s defective products. Often manufacturers don’t exist anymore, so you end up stuck with paying for a defective product. Amazon often covers this whereas many sellers who sell overstock and outdated products without telling the buyer, do not.
These are just a few reasons that a good return policy is necessary. Now Amazon has a huge issue where they often send open box items that someone else probably returned (not usually an issue with clothing as long as it wasn’t damaged, but can be an issue with warrantee or licenses for some items or , and you have to then get a new one, but at least that’s free. Many others will just blame you for it if the outer packaging wasn’t damaged, so they can’t get shipping companies to cover it assuming they’ll even go that far.
Those are reasons a return policy is nice to have. Yes, it’s not a great idea to shop for clothes on eBay, so that can be an exception? The point is to use the giants less, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing.