Buying from an alternative ecommerce site usually sucks: you have to register for every website, enter your address, payment information and other information, they may leak data or store it improperly, you may not know the reputation of the website or business, you can't easily compare products with other vendors and more. Amazon and ebay offer a centralized good experience and you know you can trust them with your purchase. They benefit the consumer by aggregating many businesses so it fosters competition lowering prices but they have so much power and they have done some anti consumer moves. Their fees could also be a problem.
The same way mastodon offers a viable alternative to the deadbird platform and slice power to small instances while getting a better user experience. (And lemmy to Reddit.) A fediverse version of ecommerce could perhaps be viable: federated ecommerce that aggregates small business shops, handle the user details and let the business access it when you hit buy. Activity pub to communicate the listings and purchase orders. I am not a programmer and don't know the technical implementations of it. So what do you think?
For me what drives me to Amazon is their logistics (1-2 days delivery, free delivery), their no-bullshit assurance and the gigantic inventory. 3rd can certainly be reached with a decentralised alternative. 2nd maybe even though rogue actors could hop instances and trust building is I guess challenging with an open model and 1st isn’t going to happen.
I hate the marketplace thing, and the harder it became to filter out third parties the more I ordered outside of amazon.
I came to amazon back then because it was one seller offering most I cared about, and a single contact for everything. More and more stuff is now only available via 3rd parties - and with that I can just order stuff bypassing amazon.
Not to mention the ridiculous markup on everything. The last few times I've looked on there the prices for generic chinese garbage was higher than name brand stuff directly from the manufacturers website. These days I'll stop literally anywhere besides amazon.
That has happened to me. Amazon on itself was reliable and good, all the issues I had were marketplace related but so bad I look for alternatives for every purchase now.
Amazon has gone downhill massively in the last few years (in the UK anyway). Free delivery is only for orders over £20 now if you don't have Prime, and they make it really difficult for you to pay for delivery as an option. Prime is no longer next day delivery, or even guaranteed delivery by a specific date.
My last 2 orders were marked as delivered but haven't arrived. It was so difficult to get a refund for the first one (you have to go through a chat bot now which wasn't easy to find on their app) and I haven't been able to get a refund for the second one yet as it was a 3rd party seller and they haven't responded to my message.
I'm trying to use other sellers as much as possible now. It's also often cheaper to go direct I'm finding lately.
Yeah I’m not saying there isn’t a good dose of enshittyfication but a lot / most of the smaller players are shitty altogether. Exception being Coolblue here in Belgium which has yet to fail me smaller shops are either price gouging or taking 2 damn weeks to process an order.
With Amazon at the very least I can watch Prime when I’m angry at their failures …
Yeah I agree, there isn't a better option and it's frustrating.
I do missing watching Prime since cancelling my subscription 😆 But it's not worth the price imo.
I’m angry at them for cancelling The Expense but even that wasn’t enough to make me cancel prime 😅
2-day delivery is pretty much standard here in sweden lol, no matter where you buy things (so long as they're domestic)
Sweden is also 22x smaller then the USA by landmass :p
Well yeah, but then why doesn't the US just do things on a state-by-state basis and accomplish the same things? This is a very strange argument to me.
Like yeah sure sweden is smaller but that.. doesn't matter? In the end all this argument ends up saying is that america is incompetent, which i don't feel like that's what you want to say.
Case in point: the northeast corridor (washington DC through NYC to boston) has FIVE TIMES THE POPULATION OF SWEDEN, twice the population of all the nordic countries combined! And yet two day shipping is some impressive feat for amazon to pull off? It should be utterly trivial with that many people living ontop of each other!