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They usually offer free shipping if you buy past a certain minimum as well, with a handful offering free shipping on everything.

Amazon already exploits it at a lower floor of $35 so they can price everything at 34.99 to get you to buy more stuff.

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.

I highly recommend https://shop.app/ which is Shopify's aggregator for all shopify powered e-commerce sites and in some areas like Europe shopify is the dominant platform for small companies. Obviously it's no ideal to replace one corporation with another but it's pretty good for supporting small businesses with zero effort.

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.

Yeah they will often just USPS that.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Haven't used Amazon for the last three years. There are plenty of other online shops in my country. Unlike Amazon, they are not flooded with cheap noname trash, but have a well curated inventory.

Tried that, the company fulfills web orders with Amazon.

Now I just buy local.

The disappearnce of brick-and-mortar stores is one the biggest catastrophes caused by Big Tech. The 'free to return if dissatisfied' option creates higher prices for everything you'd have avoided purchasing at the store, along with the added environmental costs of two wasted trips, and the product possibly being disposed-of.

The brick-and-mortar loss also means that consumers of necessities have far fewer options to buy locally.

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

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.

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.