I can recommend looking up Yanis Varoufakis and his Technofeudalism.
The Amazon tax
101–110 of 731 posts
Re: The Amazon tax
#102This is so true!
I rarely order anything from Amazon these days, maybe once or twice a year. Everything feels like a rip-off or fake. I don't trust the search function at all. Nor do I trust the customer ratings. The only exception is if I buy from a brand I already know that has its own brand-shop, owned directly by the manufacturer.
Re: The Amazon tax
#103I've slowly shifted all my consumer purchases from Amazon to local shops and other online platforms, including Etsy. I'm now seriously contemplating deleting my Amazon account of 15 years in one whole swoop. The quality degradation is painfully apparent, and the value add of Amazon in my life has been steadily declining for a while. I've also had terrible experiences with AWS, but that's a different story. Amazon's o…
This. I only have an Amazon account for a specific item - a dried soup mix that my mom who is off the grid, lives for. No PRime, no other purchases and if I could find the product elsewhere, I'd leave Amazon in a heartbeat. For the rest of it, my online shopping is mostly ebay. Been on it since the start and have had zero issues with any merchant or product (mostly used computer kit or repair items) that I've purchased.
Re: The Amazon tax
#104See also: ads for apps in app stores. These companies effectively monopolize app distribution on their platforms and then make discovery so poor that developers who try to sell apps in their stores must pay for ads in those same stores.
Apple should really be ashamed of itself. But alas, corporations don't have shame, Steve would have been ashamed though.
App Store is a wasteland, I don't think there are more than 100 good apps in millions. All want in-app-purchase, none is fair to give me an upfront price. I don't want for example my kids being bugged to buy apps that cost $100/week.
Re: The Amazon tax
#105I've slowly shifted all my consumer purchases from Amazon to local shops and other online platforms, including Etsy. I'm now seriously contemplating deleting my Amazon account of 15 years in one whole swoop. The quality degradation is painfully apparent, and the value add of Amazon in my life has been steadily declining for a while. I've also had terrible experiences with AWS, but that's a different story. Amazon's o…
Amazon is just so convenient for me. They deliver within a day in a package locker next to home. Meanwhile with other platforms it takes up to a week, the delivery timeframe is 08:00 to 21:00, I then have to wait for the delivery person to call me because they can never find my front door. And if I happen to be on the toilet when they ring the package is delivered to a parcel point ten kilometers away. So I have to r…
For your next 10 purchases that you don't need within 3 days, use an llm to find the best choice for your needs (have been doing this and learning a lot on how the ideas I had about a product prior to purchasing missed many things I didn't knew I dind't know, and the llm helped to find better products) and ask the LLM to find alternative shops - you may be surprised and have the nice feeling of increasing choice in the world by allowing alternate stores to keep going.
eg. wanted to purchase a FIio KA17 DAC - amazon price £150, asked an llm for an alternative, found for £120 from a decent small audiovisual real store, ordered, delivered within 3 days.
Have found you can save money for purchases from cosmetics to garden fertilizer and grass seed to audiovisual and IT equipment.
Re: The Amazon tax
#106Amazon is almost completely unusable for search at this stage. I think perhaps 3/4 of the results are sponsored ads. Three in four. Trying to find a good deal on a product, even if you know precisely what you're looking for, is a real headache of trying to dodge the advertisement minefield.
Yeah, it's truly awful if you're looking for something specific. I tend to find things by finding something I don't want then clicking through 16 pages of "related to this item" ad nauseum.
I find myself more often using ChatGPT to find things now because their search is sooo bad.
Like, if I want petite clothes, I do not want clothes that are not petite, folks. Why is this hard?
Re: The Amazon tax
#107I've slowly shifted all my consumer purchases from Amazon to local shops and other online platforms, including Etsy. I'm now seriously contemplating deleting my Amazon account of 15 years in one whole swoop. The quality degradation is painfully apparent, and the value add of Amazon in my life has been steadily declining for a while. I've also had terrible experiences with AWS, but that's a different story. Amazon's o…
As someone who sells actually custom created stuff on Etsy, it’s still definitely the best place for that but the alibaba and temu junk is growing on the platform.
Re: The Amazon tax
#108> The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). The ads make the search worse. "The best" is not a static product. If Amazon had no way for vendors to showcase their product, the best would be a stale product that accumulated decades of reviews. Maybe it's still the best , maybe not. Bu…
Isn't that what independent reviews are generally useful for? To try all the options and share feedback for someone to make their own choice.
Yes, if you can even get your product high enough on the rankings to make a sale.
The incumbent has a massive advantage, making it harder for a new (but better) product to get on the first page.
Re: The Amazon tax
#109Counterpoint: Amazon among the most favorable institutions in the US https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/HHP...
38% of people also think opposing fascism is very unfavourable according to that. Assuming it's real, I'm not going to put much faith in the opinions of the American public.
Re: The Amazon tax
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> other online platforms, including Etsy. For the past decade Etsy has been a rebranded Temu/Ali Express. There's almost nothing local, or original, or worth anything on it. All large online shopping services converge onto the same Amazon model.
There are people who rent time at my local makerspace who sell on Etsy. Maybe the issue is that Etsy doesn't make it easy to find them?
Etsy still welcomes small craft artists and makers and provides a convenient e-commerce portal for them, but yes, it's the discovery that's been ruined.
They originally broke through and defined themselves by insisting that vendors only sell original cottage-crafted work, but gave up on that requirement years ago and the sincere low-volume, low-margin crafters can't compete with high-volume, high-margin importers in either advertising spend or in the etsy-profiting metrics that drive algorithmic discovery.