It is surprisingly easy to not order things off of Amazon, too.
True, you do have to be wary of drop shippers on eBay though. A handful of times down I order something on eBay only to get it in Amazon packaging and with an Amazon gift packing slip - then I look up the item name on the gift receipt and find that the Amazon listing was cheaper and the eBay seller just skimmed off the top.
It helps to not click sponsored listings, and avoid listings with expedited shipping for free + free returns. Also if you do get drop shipped, mention it in your buyer feedback so others can search for it.
I really wish there was a non-profit or coop or public utility like replacement for amazon and ebay. Yeah you need a website and infrastructure and warehouses but this is becoming so fundamental to our economy that it’s not good to let this “rent seeking” to continue. Make it a fair marketplace that is democratically controlled and optimizes for customers and sellers and workers instead of for shareholders. There is no need for amazon or ebay to exist.
Similar to paypal, all they did was make wire transfers easy. At least I can finally wire money immediately in the EU without extra costs making paypal and their tax on the internet economy superfluous (damn lazy banks!).
Governments ignoring ecommerce as a vital infrastructure has created these completely useless plutocrats.
PS: Sorry for the tangential rant lol
The idea that people think it would be difficult to live without an Amazon Prime subscription absolutely blows my mind. Are y’all really that hooked on buying stupid shit and getting it as fast as possible?
I don’t understand some people who swear by it. If there’s really something I need by the next day, I probably need it the same day and will just get it myself at a store.
Where I live, getting anything at a store besides basic food isn’t a thing. You can’t find ANYTHING at Walmart. Hardware stores are the last semblance of being able to find stuff in a store in person like the olden days. If it wasn’t for the fact contractors buy entire houses worth of shit for “pro delivery” , even those would stop existing.
It saves you money because shipping is free.
Only if you make over 3 purchases per month. That’s what it came out for me when I checked if I should get Prime. That’s when you get the cheaper option by paying for the whole year. I might only have 3 purchases a month once or twice a year, so definitely not worth it for me.
I bought a lot on Amazon, never paid shipping. I can just wait a week for it to show up. Only suckers pay for Prime.
If it’s something you need right now, go to a store and buy it.
idk about where you are but where I’m from the long shipping isn’t free either without prime.
Usually have to order above a certain threshold of price to get free shipping.
That theory works if you’re only buying things you need. I know people that buy stuff they don’t really need and/or never use because it was cheap on Amazon.
yea, they obviously make a profit on it because it results in people buying more stuff. but in my situation it saves me money I’m pretty sure. just recently I bought some breadboards and tweezers for electronics projects and some rubber feet thingys for my keyboard. I would’ve bought them elsewhere if amazon didn’t exist so I saved on shipping this way. and unlike what others here have said, things always arrive on time or earlier. maybe that’s just a Germany thing tho
I think it’s also different internationally? For eg. in India, I already use credit cards, but there’s a lifetime free credit card for Amazon that allows you to earn up to 5%. But without Prime, I earn only 3%. Ofc, this is only worthwhile because I already shop from Amazon without Prime and without the credit card, admittedly, but in my scenario it’s far more worthwhile to have Prime than to not, because it pays for itself within a month or two even without me consuming a single piece of media from Amazon (whether it’s Prime Video or Prime Music or Audible, etc).
Idk if this exists in every country where Prime exists, but I assume they’re just trying to gain more market share in India so it’s an option here. 🤷🏾♂️ But it certainly makes it worthwhile for me in my specific case.
I stopped Amazon Prime because it when from being “your package will be at your house in two days” to “your package might leave our facility in two days and arrive to you some indeterminate time later.”
I also feel like anytime I get on Amazon now, I might as well be on Alibaba, but it’s 10x the price. It’s hard to find good things because there are so many cheap factory direct products with smashed-my-face-against-the-keyboard brand names. There’s a Jansport backpack for sale, but you have to sort through all the bags from JDOEBG, AHIXBX, and PRJAGG first.
Amazon: the dropshipping website white people named.
This is the reason I hemmed over my subscription for a few years, and after they announced they were adding ads to Prime Video, that was the final straw. I’ve ordered maybe 1 or 2 things without a subscription since, but I’m really happy with how much I’m able to get much faster and better elsewhere.
This is so annoying cuz it happens to me as well, yea its 2 day shipping… . After it spends 4 or 5 days in processing
Shipping is the other way around for me. It’s still two day shipping but doesn’t ship for 2-3 days. So they’re technically true to their prime benefit.
Since they added commercials to prime video we have been considering dropping prime. Video was really the only thing keeping us lately.
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Was one of the people who dropped it after the commercials were added. Started using our library instead and haven’t really missed the video streaming. I’ll log in via a browser every so often and get offered a free month or week of prime and immediately cancel. Was able to access prime day deals without paying for anything.
I use Kanopy through my library for free streaming. They have quite a bit of a selection too! Also there’s Freegal music streaming, like Spotify, but free through the library.
Hey OP I did not know we had a frugal community. Thank you for your post now I can post there. …no sarcasm.
Enjoy!
I had been considering getting rid of prime. The commercials were the last straw. I haven’t had it for 3 months now and haven’t cared at all.
What is Video? Prime member asking…
Amazon Prime is also a video streaming service like Netflix. It is included with your Prime shipping subscription but they recently started showing ads.
That’s when I dropped prime. It’s been just fine.
I can never find anything to watch on Prime Video. My subscription is any to renew in September and I’m about to turn off auto renew. I’ll still order my regular things from Amazon but now I’ll wait until my cart has $35+ in it for free shipping.
OMG YES. I canceled my subscription 2-3 years ago and I’ve never once thought about resubscribing!!! Highly recommend. 99% of the time I still get free shipping because I exceed the $30 threshold. If I don’t, then I’ll just add an item to the cart and wait until I need something else. If it’s something urgent, then I do pay for the shipping, but it’s still way cheaper than $139 per year. Bro, it’s fine.
I don’t care about Prime Video or Music, so for me it 1000000% made sense to cancel.
I hate that Amazon tries to trick me into signing up for Prime on every purchase, but that just pisses me off even more and makes it less likely for me to consider signing up.
Killed my Amazon account last decade. Shitty company that mistreats workers, sells crap.
Every dollar they get does damage.
It’s filled with Temu level shit now as well.
Amazon prime forcing ads was my final straw.
Before that, two day shipping became six day shipping became two month shipping became fuck you it’s lost forever shipping while the US patent office slowly burnt to the ground via the tens of thousands of gibberish brand names sellers were using to pedal their counterfeit child slave labor fell off a truck shitty fall apart in one day products.
Lack of Amazon has done wonders for preventing me from impulse purchases as well. Win/win.
Yep, canceled back then too, for the very reasons.
Crazy. I was out of town last week, annoyed I couldn’t order stuff as I discovered I needed it, because it would have been delivered before I got home. I did finally order last night, but had to specifically avoid the overnight delivery in favor of fewer trips/boxes. …… if Amazon is giving you these ridiculous lead times, maybe you want to take a box,over look at who you’re ordering from
Dumped prime years ago and never missed it. Here’s a secret: they will keep offering you 30 day free trials. I think I’ve had it five times now since I stopped paying.
Oh, for real? I’ve been “saving” mine for the next time I need to buy computer parts in bulk to build one.
I always look elsewhere and use Amazon as a last resort, especially for expensive or easily scammed stuff like PC parts. I prefer B&H for that in the US. They ship free and faster anyway over $50. And I save time by not needing to inspect everything to see if it’s used or counterfeit.
I really just hate the marketplace models Amazon and Newegg use.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a reliable local PC parts shop so I feel forced to shop online and import from the US if I want quality at a lower price. Items sold or shipped by Amazon have been the most reliable for me so far. It’s not that I don’t want to look elsewhere but I don’t have that luxury. Local shops have been sketchy with their quality and their prices.
Why save it when you’ll spend more than $35. Unless you want all the parts to build in 2 days and there are special discounts for Prime members.
That’s what I did last time and it took over a month for me to get all the parts. I figured that taking advantage of Prime would probably shorten the wait to about a week because I’m importing all the parts from the US.
Check if the sellers are ‘prime eligible’. Not all of them deliver in 2 days. There is a small list of exception. I wanted to buy a product which said 14-20 days for delivery. I ordered using my friend’s Prime account and it still took the same amount of time.
Nice tip. Thanks!
Good to know! Thank you
So you pay triple at local stores. Bravo.
Not OP but we dropped prime and basically stopped using Amazon a few years ago when they started trying to put a giga-warehouse (their branding) in our residential neighborhood and we found that aside from the useless junk we didn’t need anyways, most local stores are the same price or less than Amazon. Target especially if you have a RedCard can have great deal on decent things.
I thought I cancelled 2 months ago and I was billed this week. I went through the same steps and when I got to a page that said something like “confirm cancel” I hit it again.
The top of the page said “you have 364 days left to enjoy prime benefits”
This time I scrolled down and there was another box to click. A second confirmation. Such bs
This is an example of dark patterns. It can also include multiple steps to ‘confirm’ a decision, where the confirm button is beneath the decline button, only for the final step to have the button locations (or colours, shapes, etc) reversed. It’s done on purpose to confuse people into giving up. Unfortunately, even if it works one time, it’s justifiable for the company to continue the practice.
Reach out to their customer support and get a refund.
If you haven’t used any of the benefits since its renewal, you can call to get a full refund. It did the same to me, and I was able to get the newest renewal fee back.
I cancelled two years ago and they renewed it somehow.
Then this year I let it use a cancelled card as the default and my one working card was on a list of 20 or so cards. It kept warning me that my card would not renew my prime subscription. Nah, they just ran an if statement over my cards to renew it.
I didn’t really fight it because my family uses my prime video which has ads but I’m prepping them that it’s not gonna be there next year.
Is this satire?
I think most people think you NEED the Prime subscription to use Amazon and that’s false.
Though I’ve never used it myself, my understanding is that a subscription is actually less expensive than paying the shipping directly for lots of things.
You can get free shipping without the subscription if you spend over $35.
Amazon has free shipping on almost everything if you spend over $35 on the order. If I need to increase how much I’m spending I add some hand soap or some kind of dry grocery item.
Unfortunately the (extra) 2% back on the amazon credit card at Amazon and whole foods makes up for the cost every month for my family.
It’s pretty wild how deeply some people integrate products into their lives.
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Now granted, I don’t live in America, but I have never even considered using Amazon, and I don’t understand why anyone would…
Amazon was really great when it started out, you’d find what you were looking for, at correct/very good prices, fast shipping and good service if something was lost or broken. The whole experience was top notch.
But that was over ten years ago.
I did stop using it when it was still very good but all the abuse popped up on media.
I’m in the EU BTW.
Mail order has historically been a large part of US consumer buying. This is due to the number of people that lived in remote rural areas for most of this countries history. Access to goods was severely restricted due to that problem. And didn’t really start changing much until post WW2 and the growth of urbanization. Mailing a cheap catalog to everyone was the best way to show off your goods and get necessary goods to those who wanted them and would have no access otherwise.
Amazon is merely the latest in a very long line of those businesses that developed that marketing stratagem. And since I live in one of those remote areas, Amazon does provide me with easy, fast, and generally competitive priced goods that I would simply never be able to access without making a 600 mile round trip to get. But if you live a large dense city, there is little need for Amazon. But then, people order uber eats or whatever it’s called to get supper when they could cook something to eat cheaper instead.
I could spend hours googling for items from small and possibly sketchy websites and wait times than can stretch to several weeks or more, and sometimes I do out of boredom, but time is money as they say, and I do have other things to do.
As someone else who lives in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, I use Amazon for stuff I can’t find locally. Our local (and family owned) grocery & hardware stores are not much more expensive, so I tend to buy essentials there and save Amazon as a last resort. Amazon’s pricing isn’t anything special, and being able to talk to a knowledgeable shop owner is more than worth the extra few cents in price.
I seldom need to talk to a shop owner unless I want to talk about the fishing or weather. The price difference between items in local stores and amazon is generally measured in whole dollars. And I always balance the cost to buy on line vs the cost of gas money, (when the nearest real grocery store is a 100 mile round trip and still is limited in choice and availability and the local one sells milk, some bread, a few canned goods and such), also gets considered. Amazon almost always wins on price if I can wait the week it takes to get an item.
This next week I need to pull and test some ice cube relays in my tractor. I hope the blower fans stopped working because of a bad relay. If not, I will need to pull to roof off the cab to get at the blower motors. I already know I will need to order any parts. I could have the local John Deere dealer get them for me, but the price will be outrageous. The relays should be available from amazon, not sure about the blower motors though.
As someone who lives in a major US metro, I order online because I’d rather have a truck that’s already on the road make an extra stop at my house than drive a single passenger vehicle 20 minutes each way to get it. Put stuff in the shopping cart, wait for it to hit the free shipping threshold, order. May cost slightly more than stores, but I save on gas and CO2. Groceries, definite go to the store.
Same here. Never ordered anything off Amazon. Not sure about the U.S., but I’ve never had trouble finding anything in other places, so I never had to resort to Amazon. Maybe certain things are harder to get in the U.S. except on Amazon? Some kind of monopoly thing?
Sort of. For me, it is the trouble finding things elsewhere part, but maybe not quite how you’re thinking.
There are all sorts of stores, way too many stores, stores in all directions, stores of all sizes, but especially really big. If I want to get something, I need to go to one of these stores, more likely multiple of these stores. Even the biggest store will only have a limited selection and only at a specific price. Back in the old days, I might spend a day shopping to find what I wanted, I might look for it many weekends in a row, I might pay attention to sales so I can get a better price, then go in as the store opened so I could get it before it sold out. Why do that to myself? Why waste so much of my time and attention? Why drive around so much? It doesn’t make sense. Meanwhile Amazon has it, every brand and variation (even if most are identical), usually to be delivered in a couple days. If it’s not a good price point, I don’t have to click on it.
Amazon has made my life much easier by reducing the time and travel I spend on various necessities. Now in a typical week, my only “chore” driving might be to goto the grocery
Oh, right. I completely understand. Shopping sucks. I always order everything online too, because I hate shopping. But I’ve just never needed Amazon for it. Pretty much every store delivers and if you don’t want to pay for delivery, you can just order and pick up at the store. This way you don’t have to physically ‘shop around’ and you don’t run the risk of something being sold out. Kinda like take-out.
Absolutely not against ordering stuff online, it’s a time-saver. It’s just… Amazon in particular. I prefer not condoning their terrible employee treatment.
I can order stuff from Amazon and ship them to my house for cheaper than walking 100m to a store. During COVID this was a game-changer, post-covid it’s still super convenient.
I’m not even talking about the Amazon drop point that’s across the street from the store. I mean to the 24-hour BlueBox drop in my building for no-contact deliveries I can pick up any time.
The only reason is not having to register to thousands of crappy webshops that don’t know shit about itsec and get data leaks all the time. There are other platforms than Amazon but I don’t think their business practices are significantly more ethical.
I miss those Sears outlets, mere kiosk windows on the sides of warehouses where you pick up your catalogue selections.
If Sears could have held on for just a bit and gotten on that Internet ordering wave, its presence in every town across 5 time zones would give it a massive head start.
Maybe they woulda had to up-armour the wickets like a NJ white castle drive-through but even a “go pick it up” workflow would have been great.
There was a time in the long ago times when it was a really good, customer focused service that didn’t have all of the issues it has today. It then of course got worse every year like everything else but now many people use it out of habit or addiction.
Yeah but those fuckers stay trying to trick you back into it.
They’re also trying to trick you into staying.
I specifically remember canceling a few months ago but they decided to just charge me for another year anyways. It’s a total mystery to me.
Duh?
I dropped it months ago. Only had it for 2 shows and you can get free shipping if you look elsewhere. Plus got tired of being ripped off with fake clothes and junk. The time for Amazon has passed.
