I'm very happy with Galaxus. It's a market leader in Switzerland, also available in France and Germany. What I like: their pages displays return rates, repair times, and price history. I can find what I'm looking for easily, as their listings have more metadata and their business is still in online sales, not advertising. What could be better: more inventory.
Galaxus is great and I much prefer the UX, but note that Amazon doesn't exist in the Swiss market for some reason. I never found out why. If you buy from Amazon it has to be imported from Germany and you pay import taxes on that. It's possible that if Amazon had a Swiss subsidiary and competed directly in the market they'd win.
You can use amazon france and amazon italy in south of swiss. I dont remember paying import taxes
Amazon has a rival in the Netherlands called Bol. Founded by entrepreneurs who were not asleep in the early 2000s. It's what Dutch entrepreneurs do: travel all over the world to see what's going on and copy it. Money never sleeps!
Took Amazon twenty years to get off their ass and launch their Dutch website. And now the market is a bloodbath.
I haven't used amazon since I moved to the Netherlands. I sometimes use bol, I exclusively use coolblue for electronics, but outside of that there's an absolute ton of smaller local websites, often focusing on a narrower subset of products.
With a functioning delivery service, even mom and pop shops can afford to offer free next day delivery.
Amazon is a very "American" thing, at least here in Australia, Amazon is near useless and its almost always better to shop directly with a site/company.
Eh, I think this depends on what you're shopping for?
I'm in Australia as well, and Amazon is good for certain products, regularly price matching (or slightly cheaper than) other stores.
That said, Amazon's product and shipping coverage is much better on the east coast of Australia than the west coast.
Surprised to hear that. In the UK it’s very good and popular so it’s not just a US thing. I’d never really thought about it before but I had assumed it was like that everywhere in the western world.
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Because Amazon is not really a web store - that's the "easy" bit. Amazon is really a logistics company.
It took something like 20 years of insane investment and no shareholder returns to build this out in the US.
And as time goes on, it becomes more and more like Ebay with a liberal returns policy.
Alza in the Czech Republic + Allegro in Poland and some surrounding countries are basically Amazon on steroids.
It basically looks like Amazon gave up in at least Central Europe and local companies are eating their lunch, but better.
This is and has been the number one question over at WalMart for a long time. They have the money and resources, the supply chain, seemingly all thats necessary to at least get a really strong start at solving the remaining problems.
I forget but I believe Amazon gets a decent chunk of its earnings from AWS too.
Amazon gets the majority of its revenue from AWS I believe, it also always re-invests everything right back into Amazon including buying up competitors or ripping off the most popular items in their website.
Walmart interface also just sucks.
Amazon gets 1/3 of its revenue from selling things to users. This is by far the largest single revenue source.
However, it's also expensive. I believe the statistics show AWS is their biggest source of profits.
Never used walmart, different continent, but i would be surprised if there is a large webshop with a worse interface than amazons.
aliexpress
It is in general more awful, i will give you that, but atleast the search there is more likely to give something relevant than amazons.
Gods be good and we'll never see Walmart Web Services.
The number of times I have ordered an item and recieved texts confirming both that the item was unavailable and recently delivered is extremely high. It almost always goes "thank you for your order" "we do not have any X but will replace it with X.1" "we can't deliver your order" "your order has been delivered" with no interaction from me other than to accept replacements when I placed the order.
More competition is rarely worse, even if the competition sucks - in that case you just pretend it doesn't exist. Like I do with Azure.
I distinctly remember being literally unable to complete a purchase through Walmart's mobile site or phone app the one time I had the misfortune of trying. Must be internally dominated by brick-and-mortar people or something because it really is crazy how bad their digital presence is.
Aldi on global scale is bigger than WalMart.
Walmart is terrible, at least in my area. You order from the website, which has far less selection than Amazon, and they send a personal shopper to the nearest Walmart store to shop for your items. So it's a lot more like Instacart than Amazon.
I have never had a correct order delivered from Walmart. There are always missing or wrong items.
There’s different kinds of Walmart ecommerce shopping. Marketplace is from a third party seller. Often the same sellers as selling on Amazon. It may even ship from an Amazon warehouse.
In Germany many people also buy some stuff from Zalando, Conrad, and other smaller online commerce shops, depending on the goods.
Same in Portugal, many reach out to Wook, FNAC, and others, specially because ordering from Amazon means UK or Spain as closest delivery center.
Presumptive question as an article title is silly - Walmart is Amazon's biggest competitor.
USA tends to create monopolies and oligopolies. There is something structural ans systematic about it. Too many industries ends up being ruled by one or two companies.
Regulatory capture + tax breaks + Government contracts.
Hard for a new player to compete when Amazon is getting hundreds of millions from government contracts funded by our tax dollars
Suspect there's a cultural aspect as well. As in, US is more of a monoculture (particulary, consumption-wise), than many other countries.
Oh and advertising being widespread and effective means there's more of a winner-take-all dynamic.
Some businesses have powerful economies of scale. You're going to get a monopoly in a business like that unless you take affirmative steps to prevent it.
The problem is that 95% of the products on Amazon are just chinese garbage. Most people do not research the products they are buying, they are buying because of the convenience. The "default" quality of products on Amazon are utter complete overpriced shit. Even if you have done your research and ACTIVELY look for a specific locally manufactured product on Amazon you're flooded with sponsored products with unpronounceable names. There's a whole hidden industry about Chinese companies have a streamlined process to create a shell company, apply for various trademarks to skirt rules even if their product is obviously copied. It's horrible if you look into it. I try really hard to only support companies that manufactures products in the US/EU/UK. You should do, too! It's good for the economy.
I find that if you are going to buy Chinese stuff, you might as well look on Temu. It is cheaper and has greater selection.
I’d say eBay is a kind of distributed Amazon.
There was Quelle, Europe's largest mail-order and retail company. They were excited about mailing their catalogue on CD-ROM, but slept on the Internet. In 2009, they went bankrupt.
Because Western rivals are mainly retailers first, and marketplaces second.
So their goal is to try to squeeze as much from the end customer as possible, sometimes even with absurd price differences in physical locations vs online.
Promotional events are absurd with how they manage pricing in order to claim big discounts, it's almost insulting.
The general feeling is that these guys are out to get us, while on Amazon you don't get that feeling. And I'm not a fan of Amazon, I just find retailers turned marketplace despicable.