It’s been ages since I’ve really done some deal hunting online with how ubiquitious Amazon is I’ve realized I’m not up to date with the current ecosystem for finding trustworthy online storefronts. Do you have any sources/tips for finding good quality products (especially with all the AI slop that exists nowadays)?
Posted most of this in another thread but I’m glad to help share my tricks. I have managed to nearly eliminate Amazon entirely from our lives for the past two years. I usually find things by searching what I want to buy on DuckDuckGo and then adding “-amazon”, “-etsy”, “-walmart”, “-temu” and “-pinterest” as search modifiers.
A lot of little shops are perfectly legit, but watch out for:
Things being ridiculous bargains. Small shops will almost always be more expensive due to higher overheads and less bulk
Too much variety in product (unless they’re a marketplace with 3rd party vendors). A legit shop will have inventory that makes sense together in its theme. If they sell everything from bubblebath to uranium they’re either probably not actually selling it or drop shipping it.
Pictures that look like they come from lots of different sources, or no consistency in images. If they don’t have their own pictures of products or standards of presentation that’s suspicious
Some general recs:
For anything electronic or computer related: B&H Photo or Microcenter
For music stuff: Sweetwater, but there’s a lot of great small music stores, or you can use a marketplace like Reverb
For clothes: if you have any clothes you already enjoy, go directly to their brand website. If you don’t, go to local secondhand shops and touch, handle and try on some clothes to see them in person. I’ve discovered some brands I like by finding something in a thrift store that was well made but not my size or preferred color.
For house repair and DIY stuff: we order from a local building supply store, but there’s also hardwareandtools.com, 1stoplighting, Waysource, Lightbulbs.com, Timothy’s Toolbox etc.
For food items, local grocery stores often offer online shopping and delivery. If it’s a specialty item or imported the import companies sometimes have their own websites. There’s also Hive or GroveCo for some granola type B Corp goodness
For tea, coffee and spices, Adagio and its sister websites
For super fast, need it now shipping, Target has a lot of the same things Amazon does and even does same day delivery for an extra fee for certain items.
For something hard to find you can’t find another site for, try Ebay.
I do business with all sorts of independent retailers and have only had good experiences with them. These are sites that I’ve personally bought from but there are a lot of smaller sites just trying to make a place for themselves on the internet
Check gohug.eu/join
- Search Amazon for product you want.
- Check reviews
- Throw out reviews because a) they’re for the wrong product or b) they’re bot written.
- Use the product numbers to search for the the same product elsewhere, preferably from the company’s own website or brick and mortar.
- If it’s something you actually need and can’t find it elsewhere, it’s ok to buy Amazon, just don’t pay for a Prime account. No one needs shit that quickly.
Where are you? I can recommend idealo.de & check24.de to find low prices over all the retailers with online store (e.g. mediamarkt, otto, etc.)
Piracy.
As in, plunder the ships, get the booty (treasure).
yaRrr 🏴☠️
I’m something of a Captain Jack Sparrow myself.
Edit: Serious Answer:
Boston Harbor. Dump the entire warehouse into it.
eBay
Several times I have purchased an item on email only to have it arrive from Amazon. The sellers were using both sites and there was no way to tell from the eBay listings. Big sad.
i feel like it’s important to note that this is against the ebay seller agreement, and though ebay does nothing about it if you report it after the fact, leaving feedback with a statement like “this seller drop shipped the item via amazon” helps other shoppers.
generally, though, it’s getting easier to tell: higher volume (we’re talking 1k or higher, usually) of feedback with less than ~97% positive feedback, is a good first indication of some kind of reseller/dropshipper.
personally, i started shopping on ebay to avoid amazon, so it’s a supreme annoyance to have something drop-shipped or gift-shipped through them. I get why some sellers do it, but that doesn’t make it right.
Is it delivered via Amazon or just in Amazonian packaging? I guess I don’t mind either as much, since I can’t expect a small seller to keep two separate streamlined processes…
I have actually gotten shipping notifications from Amazon when I placed the order on eBay.
This! I use eBay very often
I like iherb.com for supplements, tea, olive oil, and castile soap. And whatever else you may find there amongst the strange assortment of things they carry. Other than that, I’ve been going right to manufacturers websites, except for mechanical keyboard stuff, where I search a whole bunch of different specialty vendor sites.
I cut out Amazon completely after ordering from them four to five times a week. Heres how I did it:
- Make a list (I use Google Keep) and see if you can get it locally or from thrift stores
(Many people who do buy from Amazon immediately donate it after they’re done.)
-
If you can’t find it used or local, use eBay! They have free shipping, an ethical CEO that doesn’t make their employees piss into jars, and they are MUCH cheaper than Amazon 9/10 (not taking into account the prime membership).
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Buy directly from the vendor and look for promo codes if 1 or 2 don’t fit your lifestyle.
They have free shipping
… depending on the seller. YMMV, widely.
If you can’t find it used or local, use eBay!
About half the time I try that, the seller just buys it from walmart/amazon and has it drop shipped to me. So I’m not sure how much good that does.
I’ve had this too. At least the fees don’t go to Bezos
How are they making a profit doing that? Unless I sell for very low prices (which I do sometimes) it can be difficult to sell even at market price.
They buy the item for cheaper than they sell it for
Free shipping? On eBay? Are you high? Not even local listings have free shipping on that platform. Often they’re even abused to make the listing seem really cheap only to find out that they offset that cheapness by very steep shipping costs.
Also their international shipping hub that they make you use has so little care for your purchases that there have been many reports of stuff being broken in that warehouse, despite careful wrapping around the packaging.
Meaning the seller gets screwed out of the money from the sale (because the buyer wants their money back), and the buyer gets screwed out of the product.Not high just someone that uses eBay and has had good results. There’s no perfect option in capitalism.
“Approximately 71% of eBay purchases come from listings that offer free shipping.”
I’ve had great results and I chose to share them, what’s your suggestion then?
I guess the experience of Ebay in the US is completely different from the experience of Ebay outside the US.
As for alternatives to Amazon, in my country there’s bol.com. Shopping local is also a good idea. Don’t buy groceries at amazon, but instead in grocery stores.
Then there are thrift stores. It’s better to thrift than buy new.
Thank you for the insight, that sounds like a great option!
I never considered the experience could be different based on where you buy from. My apologies for any confusion.
I started out a bit high strung, I guess. My apologies for that
My experience with eBay in the US is also, more often than not, with free shipping. I’m not sure what items you’re looking at but there are tons of options with free shipping
Outside the US?
There’s barely any product with free shipping. It’s also still more the auction site it used to be than a deals site. It’s regular people/organisations selling their wares, and they have to pay shipping costs, so they’ll charge shipping costs.
In fact, some people inflate the shipping costs, to offset the lower sales price that they set in order to show up higher in the listings.
I see, I misunderstood your comment saying “I guess the experience of Ebay in the US is completely different from the experience of Ebay outside the US.” was you saying your experience is from within the US. You didn’t specify which one was your experience, nor did the person you replied to. I was thinking your experience was from within the US, and theirs was from outside the US.
Electronics: We have a local (DACH region) to compare most electronics both in specs and price
Anything else: Search on the web and decide from there.
For example: I bought tea from a local japanese tea farm I got introduced by a youtuber visiting said farm.
Example for other stuff: I will research it and then market research where it’s available.
Is it a pain to get (example: No other payment then SEPA), then I’ll choose a shop that is more expensive but less pain to deal with.But everything is a trial and error. For drinks I am very cautious if I can’t test it while shopping and thus refrain from shopping it online.
Might as well provide the URL for the comparison site: www.geizhals.de
It’s been around forever and is still as good as ever.
As Lemmy is usually US centric (Germany is usually only 2nd or 3rd place) I didnt deem it necessary. And most on
RedditLemmy are so tech focused, they are more or less already aware anyway.
You could use Amazon as kind of a browser or search and then go directly to the brand’s web site. Any particular thing you’re looking for?
This is what I do. I sleep better at night knowing I costing them a few cents by only using them as a search engine.
You don’t cost them. You benefit them by giving them all the knowlege about what you want, how you search for it, what details are the most interesting for you etc.
Yep, this. Net positive for Amazon and you don’t even need to give them any of your money. Still better than giving them your money on top of it though, I imagine
While also being bombarded by ads by Amazon on their own website, so they even profit off of you. Or did you think those “Promoted” items in the search listings didn’t bring money into Bezos’ coffers?
I have a friend who’s high up at Amazon. He said they don’t actually do anything with the data since the algorithm already just puts ads based on what you’re searching. They don’t sell the data or process it in any way
puts ads based on what you’re searching.
they don’t actually […] process it in any way
Well, this is processing the data, isn’t it?
Back in the days, some decades ago when Amazon “invented” the tracking and processing of every single mouse click in their online shop, it was big news in the IT world. First from a technical point of view, because it needed some serious computing power on their end, and it used up some bandwidth on the user’s end, which was much more limited at that time than today. And from a data privacy point of view, because it was a huge step towards this world of total surveillance, constantly ongoing manipulation, behaviour based advertisement, George Orwell etc.
Today we have gotten used to all that, even so much that such extreme statements have become possible, somewhat…
they don’t actually do anything with the data
Your previous comment said you’re still doing them a favor by searching even if you don’t buy. If all they do is put ads on their site for your searches, then no, you’re not doing them any favors by just searching. If they were selling your data or processing it to use in other ways like market research or investments, then sure. Amazon only needs like four percent of their staff to run the site and push suggested purchases, there’s not a lot to it. Processing data is a very different beast when it comes to research and investments.
If all they do is put ads on their site for your searches
I think we should not believe it in a literal way. I guess this was simply the only kind of processing that this guy and/or his source knows and found worth mentioning.
Yeah, they don’t sell their data because it would be useful for their competition. They do use it internally to push products but if you only use them for window shopping you end up costing them fractions of a cent while still feeding their algorithms which helps them push products to others.
Showrooming Amazon. How Ironic. I love it!
In a few cases I saved over 10% by going straight to the manufacturer. Shipping was slower but rarely do I need stuff next day.
This has also saved me on more than one occasion as I’ve tried to find the same “brand” of something I was going to buy on another site, only to find it was actually an Amazon product they were trying to push. Dodged that bullet for sure
I personally look to see if the company has their own storefront. And sometimes it pays off in unexpected ways.
For example I was in the market for a soldering iron. I found a solid Hakko one on Amazon, but I decided to check their site first and, lo and behold, they had the exact same one for sale for the exact same price. BUT I could choose what color I wanted; Amazon only had the standard blue/yellow, whereas they had two other color choices.
On top of that they included an extra goodie of my choosing, which I chose their coffee mug (I forget the other options).So because I took the extra time to look around, I was able to get one in a color I preferred, got an extra item out of it, and cut out the unnecessary middle man. Win-win-win as they say.
Sometimes, though, it’s just not possible. I was in the market for a triple monitor stand as I use a unique configuration (ultrawide as my main, with two regular widescreens side-by-side above it). The only viable stand I found was available either through Amazon or Walmart. They did not sell directly from their site. So I had to choose which devil I wanted to support.
From what I heard it is the same price because amazon doesn’t allow them to sell cheaper anywhere else.
It especially kills me when the vendor DOES have their own website, and it looks like they have their own store. You go to buy it and it redirects you to their Amazon page.
I’m guessing that some manufacturers just don’t want to bother with the setup of their own PoS system, or they find Amazon lands them so many more sales that the alternative upkeep isn’t really worth it.
Buy directly from the seller. Due to most people using Amazon the past decade, created a modern shipping infrastructure. Everyone has similar shipping pricing and timeframes. Amazon doesn’t provide anything special now. Other big box store just use their stores as shipping hubs like edge computing. There’s a lot of same day delivery.
A lot of that is also Amazon, but an individual can only do so much
When Amazon started it was next day delivery, now a lot of stuff is two days.
What are you talking about? Amazon started as an online book store in 1994. They were not doing next day delivery, that’s for sure. Amazon had a big push for “Prime 2 day delivery” for a long time, but from my anecdotal experience it’s more than often longer than two days. Sometimes they offer one or two day shipping, but it’s not the norm.
Ten years ago two-day shipping meant two days from order to delivery. It now means two-day delivery once shipped in one to five business days. Most prime eligible purchases now just mean “free shipping.”
I got attached to Prime as a student where two-day shipping and a $50 annual student subscription made it a useful service. There are Prime features on parts of the Amazon website I couldn’t find my way back to the same way twice. The site is riddled with dark patterns from customer service to Prime video.
I haven’t been able to transition my household fully off Amazon, but I have switched to alibris.com as an alternative storefront for books and other media. Used sellers like thriftbooks, half-price books, and goodwill are all Amazon booksellers on alibris for the same price. They’re all shipping via media mail anyway, so Prime is useless on both sites.
Yes, they used to, and still do, do next day delivery depending on the item and where you live. It is certainly not the norm. That forum post is also not the evidence you think it is.
Regardless, you said when Amazon started it was next day delivery. That is simply not true. Perhaps you were talking about when Amazon was first available in your area it had next day deliver, which would be fair, but it’s not when it started.
Yeah, I meant to say up until just after the pandemic Amazon did next day delivery on almost everything, now it’s 2-3 days on at least half of stuff. …makes it lose its appeal.
I’m in Germany and have never used prime. When I used to order stuff from Amazon, it would take 3-7 days to arrive. That’s how much they care about customers that refuse to pay their damn subscription.
Reminds me of a thread I saw here a while ago on “What if advertising were illegal?”
I’ve found the best method for reducing my need on Amazon is to just buy less crap. Online shopping is simple because you can get stuff immediately, but I don’t think anybody “needs” 3-4 new products per week.
Aside from that, I try and support local: find local shops that sell items similar to my style, or trust word of mouth for online retailers that are good. At the end of the day, as long as you’re buying good-quality stuff (which oddly seems to spend less on advertisements) it doesn’t really matter where exactly you buy from, as it’s all pretty similar in price / quality.
Amazon used to not deliver in my country so we developed our own, with 24h free delivery, blackjack and hookers.
Now that Amazon figured out the custom taxes for us, it is too late as we have our own local alternative.
Flapjacks*
Ebay, first party sites, dedicated sites.
If you have chase cc, eBay gift card is 10% off with pts quite often
Wait, is this for all Chase CCs? Where do we go for this?
I’m not super knowledgeable about credit card stuff, so it might vary between cards. What you can do to check though is on your chase app just click on the points on the homepage under the Ultimate Rewards section. From there go to Redeem for gift cards and then just sort by best value so that you’re seeing discounted cards first.
Dope, unfortunately I don’t use chase
