The antitrust suit is likely to focus on allegations that Amazon punishes sellers who don’t use its warehousing and shipping services, per Bloomberg.
I don’t care for Amazon’s business practices as a whole. I don’t think they’re a good thing, and that’s coming from someone who drank from the Amazon hose for years. Over time more and more of their shitty practices came to light, their store’s selection and quality got worse. Lastly, they got caught copying the design of other popular products, making their own cheap version, and then promoting it over the original as “Amazon’s Choice”.
After a while, I thought about how I should probably stop shopping on Amazon if I don’t like their business practices. It turned out to be extremely easy, everything I’d normally buy online can be found else where, on other sites.
The news that they might see some ramifications for being shitty is nice, but it’ll probably result in a fine which would be the equivalent of damning me pay 1 penny for my transgressions.
Where do you buy tech like cables, cases, battery packs, etc? That’s one of the main things I end up using them for. I’ve been trying to cut down on Amazon buying as well.
The other thing I end up buying there is obscure hardware. In some cases they have stuff even McMaster Carr doesn’t have.
For cables I’ve been buying from monoprice.com for a long time. They’re reasonably priced, and that lets you buy a bunch to stock up on stuff like USB C cables etc. Hardware I’ve been buying from Bestbuy.com, but I haven’t built a PC since early 2021 and I hadn’t cut out buying from Amazon back in 2021. So for PC hardware I’d probably TRY newegg or tigerdirect if that’s still a thing.
I have to say though, shopping for PC hardware components on Amazon was a huge pain in the ass, each seller listed info different, left out certain things, so trying to find something exact, like a certain density of RAM at a certain speed with a certain voltage was just a terrible experience.
Monoprice is generally the best choice, sometimes I can get stuff from MicroCenter, but their online shopping is nowhere near as good as in-store so if you don’t live in driving distance to one, it might not be an option.
You may as well buy all that from Alibaba because if you get that stuff from Amazon then you’re paying a higher price for a middle man that ships from the US.
I rarely buy anything other than music or ebooks on Amazon. Their quality dipped so severely several years ago I actively started avoiding buying anything physical from Amazon and started buying from other sellers on other sites, and I haven’t bought more than one or two physical things from Amazon in probably over four years. There’s nothing I’ve needed that I couldn’t find from a better supplier somewhere else, usually a small shop.
I do use some AWS services quite a bit.
Forget about Ukraine for a minute, imagine if we could pump $50 billion in state of the art weaponry to the FTC 😌
Hopefully this is just the start. Selling on Amazon is a nightmare. Especially when Amazon decides they want to gobble up your part of the marketplace.
