Buying from an alternative ecommerce site usually sucks: you have to register for every website, enter your address, payment information and other information, they may leak data or store it improperly, you may not know the reputation of the website or business, you can't easily compare products with other vendors and more. Amazon and ebay offer a centralized good experience and you know you can trust them with your purchase. They benefit the consumer by aggregating many businesses so it fosters competition lowering prices but they have so much power and they have done some anti consumer moves. Their fees could also be a problem.
The same way mastodon offers a viable alternative to the deadbird platform and slice power to small instances while getting a better user experience. (And lemmy to Reddit.) A fediverse version of ecommerce could perhaps be viable: federated ecommerce that aggregates small business shops, handle the user details and let the business access it when you hit buy. Activity pub to communicate the listings and purchase orders. I am not a programmer and don't know the technical implementations of it. So what do you think?
Is the whole Amazon obsession just a North American thing? I've bought like 4 things from them in my life and nothing since about 2016 and I haven't felt at all inconvenienced. From my perspective it's not too hard to either buy from local companies, directly from foreign manufacturers, or from aliexpress if all else fails; that may just be because I'm not American though!
The reason why I choose Amazon is buying from many different stores without creating an account for each and every one. Nevermind that paying is easy.
Also returning stuff is very easy and uncomplicated when buying stuff from Amazon.
They have a huge market share in Europe too. And it's very hard to compete with them, because in online retail the advantages given by economy of scale are brutal.
In the Netherlands there are plenty of online retailers like Coolblue who are doing well by competing on quality and customer service, despite prices being a bit higher (ironically). Next working day delivery is standard, so that isn't an issue.
Bol.com is also really successful and much like Amazon, including its problems.
I assume this is because of a first mover advantage; for a long time, Amazon was only available in the UK, Germany and France*, so that created a major disadvantage. I'm guessing this might apply to a lot of smaller European countries.
*maybe other countries too, but at any rate not in the Benelux.
To those unfamiliar with the acronym: Be – Belgium • ne – The Netherlands • lux – Luxembourg
It's definitely not a thing in sweden, they came here a few years back and everyone just laughed and carried on business as usual.
Then they tried to automatically translate all listings and that's probably the best advertisement they could have made because people laughed themselves insensate over how mind-bendingly bad the translations were, and then a week later people promptly forgot that amazon exists again.