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Small business owners say Amazon is selling their products without permission
(www.newschannel5.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
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Try eBay. You're much more likely to find a small business selling whatever widget you need.
Ebay is owned by paypal and do the same shenanigans. I highly recommend to avoid ebay as well. Use these places so you can go direct to the artist or product provider if you can.
Ebay is a tricky one for me. I'm an electrician that services a lot of very old equipment, and sometimes eBay is the only place I can find oddball parts for a piece of switchgear that's 100 years old.
Yeah, sometimes it can't be helped. I should have said avoid as much as possible.
eBay owned PayPal at one point, but both companies today are independent and separate from one another.
It looks like you're right, they're both public companies now. Still, both are completely evil and use the same practices.
Yeah, eBay as a seller is just terrible. They have totally capitulated towards the large volume Chinese crapola sellers and require that you pay them for permission to list on their site or else they'll bury your listing.
It makes it very difficult to buy from another human being instead of some company that's using eBay as a storefront.
And because they are using AI to, okay, not LLM AI, but machine learning AI, to tell the sellers what the prices of their products should be listed at, they are inflating the cost of every single item you can find on eBay.
They are doing this on the one hand so the sellers get more money, but on the other hand so that they get more money for their listing fees and percentage of the final sales price.
They're basically realpage, but for person-to-person sales.
Wow, thanks for ruining it for me. Doesn't Musk own paypal?
I recently got excited when I noticed some nice, obscure finds on ebay. Some vintage stuff, some handcrafted stuff, some really niche hobby stuff. But I'm not ordering from a company owned by Musk.
I haven't ordered from amazon in years. But when I found out they own Abebooks it was a sad day...
It looks like I was wrong about that. They used to own it, but now they're both public companies. So no, Musk doesn't own them, but he might have shares.
Thank fuck. Thanks for letting me know
Most of that stuff is just drop shipped from alibaba anyways. Etsy is lousy with it too.
I bought a tool on eBay and it arrived at my doorstep... fulfilled by Amazon. I was so pissed I wrote to them. They replied saying Amazon did all of their fulfillment.
Yeah, that happens fairly frequently. I don't have an Amazon account, so I personally roll with the punches.
What's really fun is when you have to return one of those items and they don't know what to do.