I'm always a little shocked when people ask me if my product is on Amazon. I never even considered it because I've known what they are for so long; it's been a bit of a wakeup call that most people still have no idea how fucking awful Amazon is. It sucks struggling with market visibility, selling just from my own website, but it beats the hell out of being bullied like this until I'm big enough to have my product stolen and copied by Amazon Basics.

This is OK because our Leaders are Looking out For the COMMON man! That's why I'm going to ENTHUSIASTICALLY Vote for the Billionaire AGAIN!

And nothing will be done about it probably

I'm just gonna leave this here

When you have a government of criminals, it emboldens those not in government

Holy shit guys! S-so, if you have a monopoly, it's like, you can do whatever the fuck you want? So it's like in THE FUCKING GAME OF MONOPOLY? Jee, we are learning something new every day

Amazon in shambles!

Can openers is what did it for me.

In 2015 I needed a new manual can opener. The local big-box stores had two basic styles. A cheap, all metal one that was just stamped from a single sheet, and a more expensive one with better handles.
The more expensive one had previously rusted and began to look nasty within a few years.
Amazon had a bunch of different styles at less than the price point of the more expensive one.

I bought one. It was fine. I didn’t love the operation. It cut the whole top off from the side, rather than from the top in a downwards cut. The sharp edges were on the can rather than on the lid. It would catch the paper labels and sometimes wad them up into the can while you cut. Cans with no air space would leak when opened.

Anyway. Replaced it in 2019. Amazon still had a broad selection, but all except for obvious crap was as expensive as the local big box store’s expensive option. Wound up going to a smaller local(ish) bulk foods store and bought a cheapo restaurant one for less than Amazon’s/the big box store’s similar offerings. Minimal rusting to date.

Amazon has reached out to its vendors and instructed them to increase retail prices on competitors’ websites

This is and has been part of Amazon's contract to be listed on their site since the beginning. They are not even remotely the only one doing this. It's an industry norm in digital storefronts. Valve has also been sued for this several times. I don't know why we're acting like this is a recent discovery.

We need to just ban this practice, because as long as they're allowed to, they will.

The only time that I use Amazon now is when I cannot get the item that I need either in the city that I live in first or another online retailer. My Amazon spending as decreased significantly since I left prime in January of 2025.

The issue I've had with the "Just shop somewhere else. Don't use Amazon" is that it's very US-specific response. Amazon has absolutely dominated the online shopping space in Canada for years because they are one of the few companies that dealt with the biggest reason why shopping online in Canada has been difficult: Shipping. $20-$40+ domestic shipping fees are normal in Canada for most other retailers which means you could be paying double the cost of your order (or more) just on shipping alone, so as soon as Amazon came in and offered free coast-to-coast shipping they had basically won the market instantly. There were teething issues, of course, and their earlier shipping contractors were horrendous but they did smooth most of that out.

Nowadays they still have very little competition that can beat them on shipping, but there are more and more options popping up. There are some Canadian online stores that offer free shipping or free if over a certain reasonable amount. The COVID pandemic really pushed a lot of local retailers to set up affordable online ordering and delivery systems for local customers, so that has also become an option. Aliexpress has also greatly improved their free shipping process to Canada and considering most of what Amazon sells is just rebranded Aliexpress stuff, it's a great way of getting the same items for cheaper if you're ok waiting a few extra days. So most of my online purchases these days have been a mixture of Canadian retailers and Aliexpress.

I’ve pointed out Valve doing basically the same thing; games can’t be priced lower than Steam on competing game storefronts (not Steam key resellers), or Valve will threaten to delist your game. Which would be essentially kill it. And they obviously do this to protect their chunky store fee.

But personal loyalty goes a long way.

I’m trying to reframe the perspective here, not drag into an argument about Valve. A whole lot of people feel good about finding “deals” on Amazon, about Amazon services that have helped them, and especially about the value and convenience the whole platform provides. It’s easy for Lemmy to hate on Amazon, but for the average person, I think this is a harder sell than most of us realize. They’ll dismiss it as the “market working” or California sensationalism or, more likely, just filter it out as noise in their feed, just like most PC gamers would when they read something bad about Valve.