Noticed a big surge in pricing on Amazon for mundane crap. End up checking eBay and AliExpress for the same and both always cheaper, and sometimes in multiple. Things like blow up pool toys, > $20 on Amazon, easily half and lower on the others, and really not even worth a dollar in the scheme of things.
I've stopped shopping on Amazon entirely, and the impact on my credit card bill has been substantial.
It's not simply that products are priced poorly, but it is also that they seem to be priced just at the threshold where the purchase remains sufficiently convenient not to shop locally or elsewhere online.
Because of their predatory practices it seems online prices are roughly identical for Western branded products at all online retailers. For Chinese brands, it's long been cheaper to use AliExpress but shipping isn't as fast and returns aren't as convenient.
But that's perception. I blocked Amazon and continued shopping as usual. The volume of my purchases is now through local retailers, and I'm buying roughly the same amount of stuff but I'm spending a great deal less.
Yep. Amazon is almost no advantage here in the UK. I used to bulk buy stuff from them because it was cheaper than the supermarkets. That is no longer true. In fact it's 10-25% more expensive usually.
It's even worse in Ireland, particularly with the new import fees for non-EU goods - €7 + 23% VAT per item.
Amazon Germany/France/Spain won't ship a huge variety of items to Ireland and obviously won't have the same composition of goods as English speaking countries.
It's just about worth it for Prime Video and Deliveroo Silver, but the Irish Prime membership doesn't even support household or family sharing...
Yep, prime membership went quite a lot up; prices went up; delivery times got slower after COVID; now they are also saving on packaging, which means Royal mail brings me broken packages held by elastic bands...
Tempting to think that, but that logistical miracle machine that thus far no one has been able to fully replicate is expensive. Their global operating margin ex-AWS (which is a whole different beast) was 6.8% in Q2. (AWS was 39%)
That's actually not anything phenomenal -- and worse than I thought before I looked it up just now. I can't understand AMZN's stock valuation. They should really spin off AWS to be its own thing.
Their international margins are even worse in isolation, 4.1%. That's not even worth getting out of bed for, just buy some bonds and skip all the drama.
VAT should be done by AliExpress now, at least that is how I understood it.
Sadly it's only limited items, but you can also filter for just items that they have in their EU warehouse.
I recently bought some stuff (Ps2 controller etc) and it was still cheaper including shipping and duty then to order it in EU. Package was checked by customs.
Same problem here. In my country at least, the handling fees for the local shipping are around USD10, you can avoid those using a courier but that shipping method is much more expensive.
I discovered this because someone was nice enough to create a website which lists these things, which are very relevant, and has an RSS feed. The post states defined RFC's, I wouldn't have seen it if I didn't subscribe, and it looks like others are interested too. So over seeing bullshit "AI blah" comments, just move on, no one cares mate.
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