Re:Almost Everything on Amazon Is Becoming an Ad
by fhd2 on Thursday November 24, 2022 @10:06AM
(#33732083)
I started doing the same 1-2 years ago! Felt bad about giving Jeff Bezos so much money.
At first I thought it was gonna be an impossible effort, but since I'd take Google over Amazon any day (although also not super happily), I do a lot of the last mile (finding a good/non-shady offer for a specific product I've already decided to buy through reviews) there. And usually I find it cheaper with equally fast shipping. For stuff I commonly buy, there are really strong competitors (at least in Germany) that I buy from by going directly to their website.
Had to first realise that a lot of the stuff Amazon was at first unique for, is now pretty much a commodity. And their offering certainly hasn't improved in the last years in my eyes.
Re:Almost Everything on Amazon Is Becoming an Ad
by wpietri on Thursday November 24, 2022 @03:27PM
(#33735847)
For sure. Other places have gotten better, and Amazon has gotten worse for me. The way I interpret it is that Amazon started out with a really strong customer focus, but they've shifted more and more toward revenue maximization at my expense.
This is undeniably a little more work that just searching on Amazon and buying the first option. But it's about the same amount of work as using Amazon properly (skipping the sponsored listings, filtering out the dubious non-Amazon sellers, figuring out which reviews are fake, trying to tell whether the nominal maker is a real company versus some weird algorithm cloner or re-reseller, worrying over whether Amazon's inventory-mixing means I'll get a fake, etc).
I still end up buying some things from Amazon, but it's fewer and fewer, and I'm usually happier with the total outcome now.