Prime in Germany is excellent - just suuuuuper-reliable. I’d actually like to use it a lot less, but:
1) My experience of shopping in either our small town or the major city nearby is that finding anything remotely out of the mainstream (eg hobby supplies, food ingredients that aren’t routine for a supermarket) is really difficult (like, hours can be spent scouring individual shops) and simple items are often priced much higher than the online cost (especially tech).
2) Failing the local option, shopping via third-party websites is often really frustrating, due to a combination of bad UX, individual signups per website, and high postage costs (€4.99 seems to be the minimum for even very small items, and €7+ is not at all uncommon).
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If you want to challenge Amazon, we need innovation:
- if local shops all used a single stock-taking system that also allowed live location-aware item searches, it would be a game changer. Imagine searching for an item you want and knowing, for sure, there was one in stock in a local shop, and the price. (My belief is many people would love to shop locally if it wasn’t such a PITA.)
- if online shops would collaborate on a system allowing a single user account to be used to buy items across multiple stores, it would massively lessen the friction. If they could also figure out a way to compete somewhat on the cost of shipping, that would also help.
I think it's a combination of Amazon murdering any competitors that can work at scale, Germany's general conservativeness around payment systems, and not-so-great shipping companies (when we lived in Germany, companies like GLS and Hermes were really bad).
In The Netherlands and we have a healthy ecosystem of larger retailers (Bol.com, CoolBlue, etc.) and smaller local shops. Everyone uses the same frictionless payment system (iDEAL) that just works with your bank account and is supported by all Dutch banks. Most companies have next-day delivery, many companies do so if you order between something before 22:00 or 23:00. Bol.com has same-day delivery for some products when you order before 12:00. Some shipping companies also deliver on Sundays, etc.
The conservativeness in Germany really jumped out at me: people still prefer paying cash (can't remember the last time I used cash outside Germany), lot of people hated internet banking (not sure if it's still the case now, but certainly was in 2018 when we left Germany), there are no store openings on Sundays, etc.
Germany is still one of the rare places where it's totally fine to buy a Porsche with cash. There was a good article (missing the link, sorry) how the Italian mafia uses this loophole to launder money.
And another thing is credit cards in restaurants. We just had a big dinner with friends, were the last ones to leave from the restaurant. They advertised credit card payment, but for some reason the machine was not working when we needed to pay and we went to the ATM to get a pile of cash. It's not the first time this happens and not the first restaurant either. I've never had issues paying with card in any other country.
Cash is the only anonymous (and widely accepted) payment option left. There's already certain regulations in place (revolving around ATM limits, buying noble metals, proof of origin, identification on payment, etc) and they're gonna get updated in 2027 with new EU regulation, so the outlook is not great on that front.
And no store openings on sunday is one person's consoomerist nuisance and another's day off. And before you say, they'll get another day off, consider the value of having synchronized leisure time.
I don't live in Germany but hate internet banking and de-letterization and other "digitalization" because it's first step in erosion of rights. The second step is forbidding the offline version.
> if online shops would collaborate on a system allowing a single user account to be used to buy items across multiple stores, it would massively lessen the friction. If they could also figure out a way to compete somewhat on the cost of shipping, that would also help.
This is basically how Allegro and Erli work in Poland. It's a platform that arranges the catalogue, shipping, payment, returns, etc. but (most[1]) items are listed and sold by individual companies that manage their own stocks in their own storage. Of course they take a cut for every purchase. For consumers there's a yearly sub that's priced just like Prime and makes most shipping free.
[1] Allegro has their own stocks that are promoted in a bit trust-y way but I digress.
And not only that, the network of paczkomats where one can get their package 24/7 from a box which is <500m away from your home allows anyone to compete. I would go to x-kom.pl for computer stuff, mistama.com for Bosch devices, empik.com for books, euro.com.pl for electronics. If I don't know the particular store, I either use allegro.pl as a catalogue or just compare prices on ceneo.pl to get to a small store directly. Most such small stores seem to use some popular platform for selling stuff, i.e. the login page is almost the same, so it's not a burden for them to set it up. I get anything next day in a paczkomat next to me. I would never go to amazon.pl. Why would I even?
I disagree with this. Amazon is filled with so much shovelware that it's virtually unusable for anything that isn't branded. And products which are (e.g. tech, like a laptop or TV, but not a USB cable), I just search on the local price comparison website, and the cheapest is often not Amazon.
I quit using Amazon a few years ago. For almost all goods, there are other German online retailers that are as convenient, for the same or better prices. Having to sign up for them is a small price to pay for not having to deal with Amazon's "search" function. Plus, many stores implement account-less Paypal/GPay/APay checkout.
The only thing I use Amazon for these days, is weird Alibaba imports that are not available from reputable stores. But even there, Ebay or Alibaba itself are usually more convenient.
> For almost all goods, there are other German online retailers that are as convenient, for the same or better prices
My experience is totally opposite. I use Idealo to compare different prices for any purchase over €50, and 90% of the time it shows that Amazon has the best offer.
The seller may not always be Amazon, often it's someone else, but if something goes wrong I'd rather deal with Amazon's 24/7 support than a small shop. Amazon's support has helped me resolve my issues in just 5 minutes or less multiple times, and with small shops — I encountered a few of them that only reply to one email per week, they simply aren't competitive.
As I said elsewhere, the problem with German retailers is when something goes wrong, and you need to deal with the German customer service. They think customer is worth nothing and are really rude when you discuss with them. Amazon just says ok, send it back (for free, show this QR code in the shop around the corner), here's your money.
I guess you just have more patience with internet search (I find hunting down a specific product on a variety of 3rd party sites far slower and more frustrating than Amazon's search), expensive and slow shipping, and the frustration of oftentimes entering your various details agaaaain into another retailer's online system.
It's odd to argue that, despite all of this relative challenges being pretty objective, you find this approach "as convenient".
(And I never said Amazon is cheaper, although as noted elsewhere, it's often very competitive.)
> - if local shops all used a single stock-taking system that also allowed live location-aware item searches, it would be a game changer. Imagine searching for an item you want and knowing, for sure, there was one in stock in a local shop, and the price. (My belief is many people would love to shop locally if it wasn’t such a PITA.)
They kind of made something similar in France with a network of independent libraries.
It's still a far cry from the Amazon UX because for the ~6 physical books a year I buy, there's an issue half of the times.
Like, it says on the portal that it's in stock in this library, you pay for it, then the next morning they send you an email telling you that they don't have it in stock actually.
So you either have to wait at least a week for them to get it in stock, or you have to cancel the order and go in another library where it's actually in stock, after they checked by directly contacting them by phone...
> - If they could also figure out a way to compete somewhat on the cost of shipping, that would also help.
Despite their huge bargain power, Amazon still prefered to create their own shipping service, so there's no way smaller companies could pressure enough on existing shipping services to reduce shipping cost
For books, independent Dutch booksellers have a cooperative called Libris which allows buyers to buy any book they can order and have it delivered to your local bookshop (no postage to pay) or directly to you, with a part of the profits going to your local bookshop. This is great on the whole, and I use it as a first option for new books (if I don't just buy it in the physical shop itself).
But they use some sort of inventory system which hooks into international publishers' stocks, and when you want to order a book from some of those, the system will cheerfully sell it to you, only for the bookshop to contact you a few days later that that book cannot be ordered.
I've had a few cases where the only way to get a certain book was through Amazon (e.g., the mass market paperback editions of Sanderson's The Stormlight Archive).
My experience is that most of the smaller stores actually process the orders fast, but then give the packages to DHL and lately DHL deliver on time only if they feel like it. Last week I had a package that went in the delivery van 3 days in a row before being delivered.
With Amazon however, they probably have an ironclad contract, which they never break. If it says it will be delivered on a specific day, it will also happen
Shopify has a solution to the second bullet, at least here in the US.
Shop Pay provides a common set of login, payment and package tracking services for stores on the Shopify platform. This is great for small stores that don't want to implement Apple or Google Pay.
I have been buying direct from the manufacturer or from small shops since I cancelled my Prime subscription in 2023 [0]. Many of them use Shopify with Shop Pay enabled. It's great. The only negative about it (which I knew going in) was that next-day shipping is (rightfully) much more expensive, if they offer it at all.
As far as postage goes, you're out of luck there. Amazon runs their own logistics and shipping network. They can afford to offer next day delivery at deep discounts no-one else can match.
[0] I cancelled it but apparently still have it, and going to the Prime management page throws an error.
I worked at a startup that made exactly that, but the product failed and the company pivoted to other ways to support local businesses. Most local businesses didn't want to put much effort into getting their products listed online.
I think that’s the hard problem to solve and where a startup might succeed. Anyone can throw together an e-commerce site, but if the item creation is harder than making an insta post then small local shops won’t use it. It would be really hard though, because multichannel purchase and stock tracking and POS integration are all really difficult and all three would be a nightmare.
One weird idea that would maybe work in a big city setting only, for what your are describing, (which I would love to build/see exist one day) is a "warehouse on wheels": Throughout the city you have a fleet of UPS style trucks that contain inventory. The inventory is distributed throught the trucks so that they contain a good ratio of "hot" items and "long tail" items. Then when somebody orders something, the right truck is sent on location to deliver the product. When idle, the trucks go reload on inventory in the different local shops or wait at a charging station.
Unfortunately, the local option has already disappeared for so many product categories. In our city, buying computer peripherals in a shop has become difficult and the last stationary and toy stores are closing down.
While it might be a stretch trying to bring local shop inventories online it might be a first step to at least make their stocked brands / product categories accessible. That's much less data to manage and would already provide a first way to narrow down the options if you need something quick. Google could just ask for that data in its Maps Business Profile metadata, for example.
It's worth remembering that canceling Prime is not the same as abandoning Amazon altogether. You still have the option to turn to Amazon for hard-to-find-elsewhere items, you just have to pay for shipping, or exceed the free-shipping threshold. As far as I can tell, Prime Video is the primary element that is difficult to separate.
There are also vendors that will use Amazon for delivery on the backend. I remember being very surprised when I received an Amazon box for something fulfilled by Walmart!
Idealo is all right for a comparative overview, but then you still end-up on a site that will slap you with a €7 shipping cost with 5 day shipping, even for "expensive" products..
I appreciate this logic might work for Ikea, but it doesn't make sense for most local shops: I'm not visiting them at all unless I'm >90% sure they have something I need.
and i'll still do that, if it's a small thing that would be silly to ship and the shop is conventiently located, but i have to know what i'm looking for is there first.
For me any modern service that uses subscription model feels like unnecessary fraudulent scheme. I use bandcamp to buy music, because it's a clear and a straightforward way to do it. Never ever am I going to subscribe to anything, because every day the market comes up with more and more ideas how to mess with you. It's become a really unpleasant experience and it's depressing to see how people simply don't care and just go with everything the marketing guys come up with.
For desktop software I think JetBrains have the right model here; it's a subscription, but at the end of the year you have a perpetual license to the version from the start of the year.
If I decide I don't want the subscription with updates I can just cancel and fall back to that version.
Otherwise the subscription ensures that there will be a new version coming along and that the users are the customers.
Yeah, I agree. If I was not a minority, the market would be different.
I don't mind buying major updates for the software I'm using. The issue with software subs is that the moment I stop it, I don't have access to it anymore. But that's not what I want. I want to pay once and be able to use it as long as I want. It should not be different from buying... a bicycle for example. But that's me, as you said.
You may want to consider one-time (full price) and optional annual renewal fees (a fraction of the full price, depending on the value/upgrades delivered in the new version). It's then up to the customer to pay an annual fee to get updates or stay on the old version (which may be a pain to support...).
Basically, what you mentioned—' I don't want to pay a full price' and 'try the full functionality out without paying the full price'—are the primary drivers behind customers' preference for a subscription-based model.
>think it's a subscription (q: is it monthly or yearly subscription?),
I've heard from a friend that some of his customers complain that his one off cost is more than the monthly subscription of one of his competitors. If you aren't serving consumers you might be surprised by how financially illiterate the average person is.
I generally agree though I have to say - Costco has proven worth it to me and them sticking to DEI recently has made me appreciate them more. I admit though if they were introduced today I'd probably scoff.
I commend this viewpoint, but it is just untenable for me.
How much media do you consume? I can’t imagine paying “retail” price for the amount of TV, movies, songs, etc. that my household consumes. Not even factoring in that I share my subscriptions with out-of-house family/friends. You get a couple of months of streaming for price cost of one season of one relatively recent show. For the price of one movie ticket for one person, you get at least one month of a subscription to Disney+.
And while there _is_ a lot of content that we repeat (especially songs), most of it we don’t, so I don’t care to have my own copy of it.
Sure there are many ways to find it cheaper or free (such as a library), but those all take up valuable time.
Serious question: how does Bandcamp manage purchases? Are you buying a "license for listening to music" or can you actually download a DRM-free copy etc.?
You can get a ZIP of OGGs if you want. Those will last as least as long as a 2005 DVD rip from Pirate Bay. Feels good.
(You can also stream through their site and app, and I think they have all sorts of social features... but you can ignore the hell out of it and just get tunes for money. Really one of my top 5 sites, Bandcamp, though I wish they were still independent.)
Indeed, what others have said. Bandcamp files are DRM-free, and they say as much on their site. The only time I use their app to listen is when I'm driving, since the app plays nice with Android Auto, but you can use any capable player you wish. I have probably purchased around 200 albums from there over the years with an average of about $12USD per and discovered TONS of new-to-me artists from there. It is my sole source of music these days and all my purchases are backed up on my home media server in the event Bandcamp shutters its doors or does something ethically stupid.
In addition to streaming, you can (and should) download the mp3 or flac files. Once you have them, they are yours.
Be warned though, the artist/label can decide for whatever reason to take the music they have listed on the website down, which includes what you’ve purchased, so while it’s rare, it’s possible for things to just disappear, so make sure you download before then.
I just create a tmux session on my proxmox homeserver and copy+paste a command whenever I make purchases. I can paste the command I use tomorrow if anyone likes.
I recently learned that foobar2000 can load the zip files of songs directly without having to unpack them, which is nice.
You get DRM-free copy, and unlimited amount of downloads for the music. In multiple formats, including flac and nowadays quite often 24bit flacs are also available.
I once bought https://djemynai.bandcamp.com/album/zao. Once is the keyword here, because it allowed me to download the audio files. You are essentially paying for the ability to be able to download, and then you are free to do whatever, just like old times. :D
> For me any modern service that uses subscription model feels like unnecessary fraudulent scheme.
I actually think the incentives are aligned better with a subscription than with a one-off sale. With a subscription, the companies have to work to keep you a member. (Having said that, I still prefer open source software or commodity services since I don't like being rugpulled.)
I think Spotify is an outlier in a way that Netflix isn't. Spotify doesn't just let you stream music. Spotify:
a) let's you stream music on any device that is desktop/mobile/watch or has a browser. It's frictionless and uptime is as good as it gets based on my more than a decade of continuous use (over 8 hours daily)
b) lets you search for artists directly (search artist, song, lyrics) or indirectly (similarity engine by way of radio or automatic playlist generation)
c) let's you share your listening habits with friends
d) let's you make friend playlists
The top 3 are the killer features and the reason why I would not move to Tidal/Apple Music/bandcamp. None of these services have target those 3 areas anywhere near as good as Spotify has.
While I could see myself buying albums from bandcamp, the lack of advanced music search or recommendation functionality as well as the inability to make playlists is just a deal breaker for me. The days where music listening was just playing an album on a loop are long gone just like the days where listening to music meant exclusively live music. In 2025, music discovery and music tagging (as in making playlists) is part of the music listening experience and any service that does not let me make that is sadly not going to make it.
In addition to this, I feel that due to the way music is experience today but many young people means that music discovery and social sharing needs to be at heart of any service that aims for mass appeal. If your business model does not address social sharing or discovery as part of its listening experience, it is unlikely to succeed in my opinion.
People listening to albums on repeat, people buying single albums, people not sharing their listening habits directly (i.e not by just mentioning the artist/song/album) are the minority. The future of popular music at least short terms leans heavily towards single songs over albums, streaming over downloads, subscription over purchases, social listening over individual listening.
It's like people complaining of the inability of popular artits to project their voices without using amplifiers. Artists complaining about electrical instruments over acoustic ones. The wave is here to stay, you can ride with it or end up at the bottom of it never to be seen again.
>The top 3 are the killer features and the reason why I would not move to Tidal/Apple Music/bandcamp.
For regular people, the #1 reason they can't use Bandcamp is it doesn't have mainstream artists on the Big 3 Record Labels like Universal+Sony+Warner. In contrast, Bandcamp is deliberately designed for the smaller independent artists to upload and sell their music.
If people want to listen to today's Taylor Swift or yesterday's Beatles and Led Zeppelin, that music is only (legally) found on the major subscription services like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, etc. A very small hardcore subset buy Big Label artists music from HDTracks but that site doesn't have the selection of Spotify and it's a lot more expensive.
Oh, man. I get the social thing around these experiences. People nowadays asking me what I watched and the next question is it on Netflix? Yeah, alright. I don't want the life to roll back to old days, I'm completely fine with things going their way.
The problem of subscription world is that it fucks you over in various ways, makes you spend more and more money and attention on stuff you don't really need or need in a much lower scale than your are forced to consume. It's a much deeper and bigger problem than just the social aspect or the aspect of convenience.
And you simply don't own anything. It's like renting an apartment/house for life instead of buying one. And your rent service can be shut down at any time. I'm just not ok with this. It may be fine with young people, but the moment you start taking life seriously it becomes obvious how wrong everything is.
In my country at least Amazon delivery drivers are the only reliable and trustworthy ones, they call when they can't get in the building, they never pretend to deliver something, they never pretend you were not in they deliver fast and reliably, you can get it delivered to lots of stores if you know you wont be in and Amazon customer service actually sorts it out and dispatches replacements fast in the rare cases it does go wrong or and its next day.
Any other delivery service just causes way more stress.
Feel like this article is downplaying which was the real reason because it's definitely only one of the three things listed and we can rule out ethics if you happily used it for decades you didn't suddenly start caring about that out of nowhere.
Same here in London. I've ordered items from Amazon even if they are more expensive there, because I know it'll be delivered. Random storefronts relying on Royal Mail or who knows what delivery service just can't compete and waste my time.
This one depends a ton on where you live though. I'm in the Midlands and we have parcels go missing and ending up at neighbours houses down the road probably 30% of the time. Royal Mail and Evri are bizarrely the most consistent. Our house is not difficult to find.
I found when we lived in a flat it was a total write off, things never went in the right place.
fedex (home delivery) is the worst. Ordered some shelves and found them dropped in front of the bushes of the neighbors.
It's hard to tell who's responsible though, it's like shell corporations all the way down. I remember talking to one delivery driver and even though the van said their name, they were a private contractor and the van wasn't owned by the company.
Looks like Day 2 snuck up on Amazon while they weren't looking.
The retail site is drowning under a wave of off brand no name muck. Even buying a brand name (say, Oxo kitchen tools) gives one no comfort that what arrives wont be a knockoff.
The purchase experience, once world beating, remains excellent, but not especially different from other stores. That leaves delivery, which with Prime is still a differentiator, but then again when it asks me to defer shipping for a few days to save boxes, which I do, I start to wonder why I'm paying for fast shipping only to pick slower shipping when I check out.
As for the TV, it has an uncanny valley feel for me. The documentaries, for example, seem like the kind of low grade filler you get on inflight TV. A few talking heads, voiceovers over still images, etc.
This is one of those times where the shared article isn't very insightful but the topic and discussion that ensues are interesting.
I've had Prime every now and then to watch some shows. I've now stopped using it entirely because I don't want to support the company. Unsubscribing within the Prime Video app was a horrendous experience where I got stuck in a loop. I've also been re-subscribed without my knowledge and the only reason I can find to explain this is that opening the app on my TV and clicking "ok" once re-subscribes me. I have since removed my payment methods from the site.
As an e-commerce platform, it's been going downhill for a long time. Now it just feel like a more expensive Temu/Wish.com. Full of dark patterns, low quality items, and cheating 3rd party resellers.
It's got more dark patterns than Temu. So many sneaky patterns to try and trick you in to signing up for Prime. I've never had an issue with Temu - not somewhere to get name brand products, but if I want something cheap and don't mind waiting a couple of weeks then it works better than Amazon.
Amazon basics is so hit or miss anyway. I bought a bunch of their rechargable batteries, but it's hard to discern the quality of invisible specifications.
I kind of wonder if they suck, because some physical amazonbasics things I've bought were actually not great.
This is why some people are turning to piracy for a more pleasant experience. It reminds me of when DVD producers started using unskippable intros to their DVDs - it's basically being hostile to the customers.
In France you still get free shipping for orders > €35; it's not "next day" but it's extremely rare one would need something so urgently as for 24 hours to make a difference.
In fact nowadays the biggest competitor to Amazon is Aliexpress. Extremely reliable, free shipping for orders > €10, and prices often 50-60% less than on Amazon, for exactly the same products. The only drawbacks are 1/ shipping takes 10 days and 2/ returns are complicated. But for less than half the price it's worth it.
The main problem with Prime is that Amazon tries to justify its super high cost with Amazon Video, which nobody asked for, and nobody wants because of the incredibly low quality of the catalog.
I'm not sure I even understand the strategy. Is it working? Do people actually like Amazon Video Prime and watch it, rather than the myriad other streaming services they're probably also subscribed to? Or is it still an experiment for Amazon?
>Second, for a lot of things you want to order, the manufacturer has its own online store these days and a lot of them are actually well-built, perfectly pleasant to use.
It depends on what you buy but in general, the manufacturer's website will often cost more than Amazon. E.g. In the USA, Apple Watch 46mm GPS+Cellular is currently $429 on amazon.com but $529 on apple.com
Also, manufacturers are often contractually required to have higher prices (i.e. MSRP) than the retailers that sell their products. So getting a discount from Amazon is more realistic than the manufacturer's official website. Another example is buying TurboTax software on Amazon ($55.99) costs less than Intuit's website ($80)
>Third, Amazon’s prices aren’t notably cheaper than the alternatives.
Again, it depends on what types of products you're buying. For things like USB cables and rechargeable batteries, Amazon costs less than Best Buy. Buying a Fiskars garden shears cost $10 less at Amazon than Home Depot and Lowe's. What's happening is that those local stores are using price discrimination to upcharge the impatient walk-in customers who need "instant gratification". Home Depot charges $5 more for a toilet plumbing repair kit than Amazon because they know customers are likely making an emergency purchase. Yes, the local stores sometimes have a "match Amazon's price" policy but it's a hassle to hunt down a manager and get an override of the price at the cash register.
Where Amazon often costs more (often 2x because of shipping) is commodity household items like toothpaste and Windex glass cleaner. A local Walmart will have cheaper prices on those.
Lastly, I recently went through my 200+ accounts in my password manager to migrate my email address and the lesson I've learned is to avoid creating new accounts at more ecommerce websites. It's not worth it. Maybe I'll make an exception for Shopify in the future because a lot of sellers have consolidated there but I'm going to hold out as long as I can.
I really like having my orders history in one website instead of scattered across Newegg, ZipZoomFly, BHPhotoVideo, etc, etc.
>It depends on what you buy but in general, the manufacturer's website will often cost more than Amazon. E.g. In the USA, Apple Watch 46mm GPS+Cellular is currently $429 on amazon.com but $529 on apple.com
This pretty much, I do not buy from Amazon because of the experience but because of price. Like you said very often Amazon is significantly cheaper than local stores here in Europe, like I was buying woodworking tools and I could get same tool, same manufacturer warranty for 20 percent less. Apple devices cost even more than official Apple store in my country because Apple does have a first party store, meanwhile Amazon has below MSRP prices always. The only downside is that they dont have customization options.
Different experience here in Germany. Amazon is often 2-10% more expensive than cheaper alternatives on most goods (just check a random product on idealo.de). People are still buying at Amazon, frequently citing the "hassle-free returns" experience. I'm satisfied with the alternatives (no issues with returns so far) and rarely use Amazon. Also, most shops have guest checkout, no need to open an account on all of them.
I don't think Amazon's return policy is matched by anyone in my country. I dread even thinking of purchasing something and make use of the warranty, it's usually a pointless exercise that deprives you of your purchase for months.
Compare that to Amazon that will easily refund a purchase made 18 months earlier no questions asked.
I almost never buy from Amazon, but there's no denying I feel much safer ordering there than elsewhere. My last expensive non-Amazon purchase got me an opened box (either a return or plain used item). Even PayPal didn't care to do anything about it.
Your mileage may vary. I've had horrible experience with German shops, when you have an issue they do whatever to make it look like it's your own fault. And you can only call them or send them snail mail, which is still quite common.
Amazon has their chat, which replies immediately and you get your money back pretty easily.
Both of those stores price match Amazon unless the item is not fulfilled by them (and could be counterfeit)
It also depends on the items you're buying. Household goods, like laundry detergent and deodorant, are usually more expensive on Amazon, sometimes by a wide margin.
The whole market is one big price discrimination where you spend time to avoid getting ripped off by shameless decoy prices. I haven't noticed Amazon being routinely less for any category. It is generally more for household items, but that still isn't a hard rule. If you're not shopping around, you've already lost - most other large retailers have free shipping as well, and frankly it's often quicker than Amazon's slow spiteful shipping.
Really I want some user-representing local-first software that searches many stores with one query. Of course these sites fight tooth and nail to make that comparison harder (the main point of captchas). Still maybe we'll get there as the surveillance industry enters its screw-turning extractive phase.
As for (sub)Prime, it still boggles my mind that people pay for it as an ongoing subscription. I activate the free trials when they're conducive to some other goal (eg fixing/making something that's going to require a bunch of iterated rounds of parts). Between my account, my partner's account, and my "business" account (more price discrimination, hooray!), I'd say there's a free trial more than half the time. And the once or twice a year I need something quick and don't have a trial, there's always the $2 for one week option.
(Also, I'm sure it's been mentioned elsewhere in this thread - one of the "economic blackout" flyers has March 7-14 as Amazon-specific boycott. I don't think this kind of thing is going to move the needle on overall revenue any time soon, but rather it's about sending some kind of message to the neofascists and those who readily support them. Frankly we need many more of these days. And if that seems inconvenient, look at it as practice for when we're back to full blown Trumponomics with empty store shelves everywhere)
Readit News
1) My experience of shopping in either our small town or the major city nearby is that finding anything remotely out of the mainstream (eg hobby supplies, food ingredients that aren’t routine for a supermarket) is really difficult (like, hours can be spent scouring individual shops) and simple items are often priced much higher than the online cost (especially tech).
2) Failing the local option, shopping via third-party websites is often really frustrating, due to a combination of bad UX, individual signups per website, and high postage costs (€4.99 seems to be the minimum for even very small items, and €7+ is not at all uncommon).
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If you want to challenge Amazon, we need innovation:
- if local shops all used a single stock-taking system that also allowed live location-aware item searches, it would be a game changer. Imagine searching for an item you want and knowing, for sure, there was one in stock in a local shop, and the price. (My belief is many people would love to shop locally if it wasn’t such a PITA.)
- if online shops would collaborate on a system allowing a single user account to be used to buy items across multiple stores, it would massively lessen the friction. If they could also figure out a way to compete somewhat on the cost of shipping, that would also help.
In The Netherlands and we have a healthy ecosystem of larger retailers (Bol.com, CoolBlue, etc.) and smaller local shops. Everyone uses the same frictionless payment system (iDEAL) that just works with your bank account and is supported by all Dutch banks. Most companies have next-day delivery, many companies do so if you order between something before 22:00 or 23:00. Bol.com has same-day delivery for some products when you order before 12:00. Some shipping companies also deliver on Sundays, etc.
The conservativeness in Germany really jumped out at me: people still prefer paying cash (can't remember the last time I used cash outside Germany), lot of people hated internet banking (not sure if it's still the case now, but certainly was in 2018 when we left Germany), there are no store openings on Sundays, etc.
(Disclaimer: I lived in Germany)
And another thing is credit cards in restaurants. We just had a big dinner with friends, were the last ones to leave from the restaurant. They advertised credit card payment, but for some reason the machine was not working when we needed to pay and we went to the ATM to get a pile of cash. It's not the first time this happens and not the first restaurant either. I've never had issues paying with card in any other country.
And no store openings on sunday is one person's consoomerist nuisance and another's day off. And before you say, they'll get another day off, consider the value of having synchronized leisure time.
This is basically how Allegro and Erli work in Poland. It's a platform that arranges the catalogue, shipping, payment, returns, etc. but (most[1]) items are listed and sold by individual companies that manage their own stocks in their own storage. Of course they take a cut for every purchase. For consumers there's a yearly sub that's priced just like Prime and makes most shipping free.
[1] Allegro has their own stocks that are promoted in a bit trust-y way but I digress.
I quit using Amazon a few years ago. For almost all goods, there are other German online retailers that are as convenient, for the same or better prices. Having to sign up for them is a small price to pay for not having to deal with Amazon's "search" function. Plus, many stores implement account-less Paypal/GPay/APay checkout.
The only thing I use Amazon for these days, is weird Alibaba imports that are not available from reputable stores. But even there, Ebay or Alibaba itself are usually more convenient.
My experience is totally opposite. I use Idealo to compare different prices for any purchase over €50, and 90% of the time it shows that Amazon has the best offer.
The seller may not always be Amazon, often it's someone else, but if something goes wrong I'd rather deal with Amazon's 24/7 support than a small shop. Amazon's support has helped me resolve my issues in just 5 minutes or less multiple times, and with small shops — I encountered a few of them that only reply to one email per week, they simply aren't competitive.
In a chat.
In many languages if needed.
It's odd to argue that, despite all of this relative challenges being pretty objective, you find this approach "as convenient".
(And I never said Amazon is cheaper, although as noted elsewhere, it's often very competitive.)
They kind of made something similar in France with a network of independent libraries. It's still a far cry from the Amazon UX because for the ~6 physical books a year I buy, there's an issue half of the times. Like, it says on the portal that it's in stock in this library, you pay for it, then the next morning they send you an email telling you that they don't have it in stock actually. So you either have to wait at least a week for them to get it in stock, or you have to cancel the order and go in another library where it's actually in stock, after they checked by directly contacting them by phone...
> - If they could also figure out a way to compete somewhat on the cost of shipping, that would also help.
Despite their huge bargain power, Amazon still prefered to create their own shipping service, so there's no way smaller companies could pressure enough on existing shipping services to reduce shipping cost
But they use some sort of inventory system which hooks into international publishers' stocks, and when you want to order a book from some of those, the system will cheerfully sell it to you, only for the bookshop to contact you a few days later that that book cannot be ordered.
I've had a few cases where the only way to get a certain book was through Amazon (e.g., the mass market paperback editions of Sanderson's The Stormlight Archive).
With Amazon however, they probably have an ironclad contract, which they never break. If it says it will be delivered on a specific day, it will also happen
Shop Pay provides a common set of login, payment and package tracking services for stores on the Shopify platform. This is great for small stores that don't want to implement Apple or Google Pay.
I have been buying direct from the manufacturer or from small shops since I cancelled my Prime subscription in 2023 [0]. Many of them use Shopify with Shop Pay enabled. It's great. The only negative about it (which I knew going in) was that next-day shipping is (rightfully) much more expensive, if they offer it at all.
As far as postage goes, you're out of luck there. Amazon runs their own logistics and shipping network. They can afford to offer next day delivery at deep discounts no-one else can match.
[0] I cancelled it but apparently still have it, and going to the Prime management page throws an error.
While it might be a stretch trying to bring local shop inventories online it might be a first step to at least make their stocked brands / product categories accessible. That's much less data to manage and would already provide a first way to narrow down the options if you need something quick. Google could just ask for that data in its Maps Business Profile metadata, for example.
It will point you to the most affordable site for your product.
- think it's a subscription (q: is it monthly or yearly subscription?),
- would prefer it be a subscription (q: I don't want to pay a full price of I don't know if I will use it for life),
- or sometimes demand a subscription so that they can try the full functionality out without paying the full price
And then there are those who pay one-time and are angry they don't get all newest upgrades for free.
My next product will be a subscription for sure.
If I decide I don't want the subscription with updates I can just cancel and fall back to that version.
Otherwise the subscription ensures that there will be a new version coming along and that the users are the customers.
It feels fair to me as a customer.
I don't mind buying major updates for the software I'm using. The issue with software subs is that the moment I stop it, I don't have access to it anymore. But that's not what I want. I want to pay once and be able to use it as long as I want. It should not be different from buying... a bicycle for example. But that's me, as you said.
Basically, what you mentioned—' I don't want to pay a full price' and 'try the full functionality out without paying the full price'—are the primary drivers behind customers' preference for a subscription-based model.
I've heard from a friend that some of his customers complain that his one off cost is more than the monthly subscription of one of his competitors. If you aren't serving consumers you might be surprised by how financially illiterate the average person is.
(You can also stream through their site and app, and I think they have all sorts of social features... but you can ignore the hell out of it and just get tunes for money. Really one of my top 5 sites, Bandcamp, though I wish they were still independent.)
Be warned though, the artist/label can decide for whatever reason to take the music they have listed on the website down, which includes what you’ve purchased, so while it’s rare, it’s possible for things to just disappear, so make sure you download before then.
The tool I use is: https://github.com/easlice/bandcamp-downloader
I just create a tmux session on my proxmox homeserver and copy+paste a command whenever I make purchases. I can paste the command I use tomorrow if anyone likes.
I recently learned that foobar2000 can load the zip files of songs directly without having to unpack them, which is nice.
I actually think the incentives are aligned better with a subscription than with a one-off sale. With a subscription, the companies have to work to keep you a member. (Having said that, I still prefer open source software or commodity services since I don't like being rugpulled.)
a) let's you stream music on any device that is desktop/mobile/watch or has a browser. It's frictionless and uptime is as good as it gets based on my more than a decade of continuous use (over 8 hours daily)
b) lets you search for artists directly (search artist, song, lyrics) or indirectly (similarity engine by way of radio or automatic playlist generation)
c) let's you share your listening habits with friends
d) let's you make friend playlists
The top 3 are the killer features and the reason why I would not move to Tidal/Apple Music/bandcamp. None of these services have target those 3 areas anywhere near as good as Spotify has.
While I could see myself buying albums from bandcamp, the lack of advanced music search or recommendation functionality as well as the inability to make playlists is just a deal breaker for me. The days where music listening was just playing an album on a loop are long gone just like the days where listening to music meant exclusively live music. In 2025, music discovery and music tagging (as in making playlists) is part of the music listening experience and any service that does not let me make that is sadly not going to make it.
In addition to this, I feel that due to the way music is experience today but many young people means that music discovery and social sharing needs to be at heart of any service that aims for mass appeal. If your business model does not address social sharing or discovery as part of its listening experience, it is unlikely to succeed in my opinion.
People listening to albums on repeat, people buying single albums, people not sharing their listening habits directly (i.e not by just mentioning the artist/song/album) are the minority. The future of popular music at least short terms leans heavily towards single songs over albums, streaming over downloads, subscription over purchases, social listening over individual listening.
It's like people complaining of the inability of popular artits to project their voices without using amplifiers. Artists complaining about electrical instruments over acoustic ones. The wave is here to stay, you can ride with it or end up at the bottom of it never to be seen again.
For regular people, the #1 reason they can't use Bandcamp is it doesn't have mainstream artists on the Big 3 Record Labels like Universal+Sony+Warner. In contrast, Bandcamp is deliberately designed for the smaller independent artists to upload and sell their music.
If people want to listen to today's Taylor Swift or yesterday's Beatles and Led Zeppelin, that music is only (legally) found on the major subscription services like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, etc. A very small hardcore subset buy Big Label artists music from HDTracks but that site doesn't have the selection of Spotify and it's a lot more expensive.
The problem of subscription world is that it fucks you over in various ways, makes you spend more and more money and attention on stuff you don't really need or need in a much lower scale than your are forced to consume. It's a much deeper and bigger problem than just the social aspect or the aspect of convenience.
And you simply don't own anything. It's like renting an apartment/house for life instead of buying one. And your rent service can be shut down at any time. I'm just not ok with this. It may be fine with young people, but the moment you start taking life seriously it becomes obvious how wrong everything is.
Any other delivery service just causes way more stress.
Feel like this article is downplaying which was the real reason because it's definitely only one of the three things listed and we can rule out ethics if you happily used it for decades you didn't suddenly start caring about that out of nowhere.
I found when we lived in a flat it was a total write off, things never went in the right place.
It's hard to tell who's responsible though, it's like shell corporations all the way down. I remember talking to one delivery driver and even though the van said their name, they were a private contractor and the van wasn't owned by the company.
The retail site is drowning under a wave of off brand no name muck. Even buying a brand name (say, Oxo kitchen tools) gives one no comfort that what arrives wont be a knockoff.
The purchase experience, once world beating, remains excellent, but not especially different from other stores. That leaves delivery, which with Prime is still a differentiator, but then again when it asks me to defer shipping for a few days to save boxes, which I do, I start to wonder why I'm paying for fast shipping only to pick slower shipping when I check out.
As for the TV, it has an uncanny valley feel for me. The documentaries, for example, seem like the kind of low grade filler you get on inflight TV. A few talking heads, voiceovers over still images, etc.
if they have a name, it is ALLUPPERCASENONSENSE and the images look exactly like UPPERCASEOTHERGUY but 1 cent cheaper.
I really hate what amazon is doing to brands. Brands can be abused, but sometimes they actually stand for engineering, design, reliability and trust.
I've had Prime every now and then to watch some shows. I've now stopped using it entirely because I don't want to support the company. Unsubscribing within the Prime Video app was a horrendous experience where I got stuck in a loop. I've also been re-subscribed without my knowledge and the only reason I can find to explain this is that opening the app on my TV and clicking "ok" once re-subscribes me. I have since removed my payment methods from the site.
As an e-commerce platform, it's been going downhill for a long time. Now it just feel like a more expensive Temu/Wish.com. Full of dark patterns, low quality items, and cheating 3rd party resellers.
I kind of wonder if they suck, because some physical amazonbasics things I've bought were actually not great.
I dumped prime when they added adverts.
Comments mention The Expanse, and they're right. I'm currently watching it, on Blueray. It's not the price I find objectional, it's the adverts.
(I actually went to resubscribe to prime when Clarksons Farm season 3 came out, but there was no option to subscribe on my tv without adverts)
And of course a hierarchy of piracy that Louis Rossman came up with
In fact nowadays the biggest competitor to Amazon is Aliexpress. Extremely reliable, free shipping for orders > €10, and prices often 50-60% less than on Amazon, for exactly the same products. The only drawbacks are 1/ shipping takes 10 days and 2/ returns are complicated. But for less than half the price it's worth it.
The main problem with Prime is that Amazon tries to justify its super high cost with Amazon Video, which nobody asked for, and nobody wants because of the incredibly low quality of the catalog.
I'm not sure I even understand the strategy. Is it working? Do people actually like Amazon Video Prime and watch it, rather than the myriad other streaming services they're probably also subscribed to? Or is it still an experiment for Amazon?
But then they put ads during the episodes.
Back to torrenting then.
It depends on what you buy but in general, the manufacturer's website will often cost more than Amazon. E.g. In the USA, Apple Watch 46mm GPS+Cellular is currently $429 on amazon.com but $529 on apple.com
Also, manufacturers are often contractually required to have higher prices (i.e. MSRP) than the retailers that sell their products. So getting a discount from Amazon is more realistic than the manufacturer's official website. Another example is buying TurboTax software on Amazon ($55.99) costs less than Intuit's website ($80)
>Third, Amazon’s prices aren’t notably cheaper than the alternatives.
Again, it depends on what types of products you're buying. For things like USB cables and rechargeable batteries, Amazon costs less than Best Buy. Buying a Fiskars garden shears cost $10 less at Amazon than Home Depot and Lowe's. What's happening is that those local stores are using price discrimination to upcharge the impatient walk-in customers who need "instant gratification". Home Depot charges $5 more for a toilet plumbing repair kit than Amazon because they know customers are likely making an emergency purchase. Yes, the local stores sometimes have a "match Amazon's price" policy but it's a hassle to hunt down a manager and get an override of the price at the cash register.
Where Amazon often costs more (often 2x because of shipping) is commodity household items like toothpaste and Windex glass cleaner. A local Walmart will have cheaper prices on those.
Lastly, I recently went through my 200+ accounts in my password manager to migrate my email address and the lesson I've learned is to avoid creating new accounts at more ecommerce websites. It's not worth it. Maybe I'll make an exception for Shopify in the future because a lot of sellers have consolidated there but I'm going to hold out as long as I can.
I really like having my orders history in one website instead of scattered across Newegg, ZipZoomFly, BHPhotoVideo, etc, etc.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Cellular-Smartwatch-Aluminium-A...
[1] https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-watch/apple-watch
This pretty much, I do not buy from Amazon because of the experience but because of price. Like you said very often Amazon is significantly cheaper than local stores here in Europe, like I was buying woodworking tools and I could get same tool, same manufacturer warranty for 20 percent less. Apple devices cost even more than official Apple store in my country because Apple does have a first party store, meanwhile Amazon has below MSRP prices always. The only downside is that they dont have customization options.
Have you considered not using Amazon, and giving up those slight conveniences, to not keep supporting such an unethical company?
Compare that to Amazon that will easily refund a purchase made 18 months earlier no questions asked.
I almost never buy from Amazon, but there's no denying I feel much safer ordering there than elsewhere. My last expensive non-Amazon purchase got me an opened box (either a return or plain used item). Even PayPal didn't care to do anything about it.
Amazon has their chat, which replies immediately and you get your money back pretty easily.
It also depends on the items you're buying. Household goods, like laundry detergent and deodorant, are usually more expensive on Amazon, sometimes by a wide margin.
Really I want some user-representing local-first software that searches many stores with one query. Of course these sites fight tooth and nail to make that comparison harder (the main point of captchas). Still maybe we'll get there as the surveillance industry enters its screw-turning extractive phase.
As for (sub)Prime, it still boggles my mind that people pay for it as an ongoing subscription. I activate the free trials when they're conducive to some other goal (eg fixing/making something that's going to require a bunch of iterated rounds of parts). Between my account, my partner's account, and my "business" account (more price discrimination, hooray!), I'd say there's a free trial more than half the time. And the once or twice a year I need something quick and don't have a trial, there's always the $2 for one week option.
(Also, I'm sure it's been mentioned elsewhere in this thread - one of the "economic blackout" flyers has March 7-14 as Amazon-specific boycott. I don't think this kind of thing is going to move the needle on overall revenue any time soon, but rather it's about sending some kind of message to the neofascists and those who readily support them. Frankly we need many more of these days. And if that seems inconvenient, look at it as practice for when we're back to full blown Trumponomics with empty store shelves everywhere)