Dominant online vendors

[mtbc]

I have mentioned wishing for viable alternatives to sites like Amazon that have a good range of stuff. I am willing to pay a little more for a site that annoys me less. Still, I am not very good at finding them. I sold a couple of things through not-eBay but do not now recall which sites I used. Recently I tried to avoid Amazon by buying through eBay instead and the seller then bought me the item through Amazon as a gift.

It is not as if there are not other fairly wide-ranging vendors out there so much as, at least for the UK-based ones I have looked at in recent years, mostly their websites are rather poor from my point of view. Perhaps they are tailored more toward people wanting to look at photographs from their tablets than to actually read information. At least one success last week was buying a book through AbeBooks.

Comments

[emperor]

I find hive.co.uk quite good for books &c, and less evil than amazon.

[mtbc]

Ooooh. Thank you. At first glance, looks promising.

Update: For my first orders, for books, they are working out well.

[goldibehr]

What's the objection to amazon? I find their product descriptions and user comments quite helpful.

[mtbc]

Over the past twenty years or so I've found that their website moved slowly from being fairly seamlessly helpful and useful (indeed, not only descriptions and reviews, but also when they introduced what people also/instead bought), to being cluttered and making it increasingly hard to e-mail them but instead trying heavy-handedly getting me to buy more. I've lived with a lot of small irritations for a while, but their pushing of Prime has been a particular annoyance: I can live with having to keep trying to find the right links to let me buy something without giving Prime a trial, and I can live with that their idiot app won't let me play either US or UK Prime video content even though Netflix's works fine, and I can even somewhat live with the risibly low rates of tax they pay on the profits they make from their UK operations and others' miserable accounts of life as one of their warehouse workers, but with my consumer hat on the straw that's been breaking the camel's back is the appearance of many products that are available only to Prime members and which I have no way to filter out of my search results. (I don't know if they do that on Amazon US, I do find that Amazon UK tends to be a bit different, though often better in that it tends to be behind the curve on UI "improvements".) I'd very happily buy from the Amazon of the late-90's but they're now too obviously maximizing their profit over my convenience.

(Edited to add: also their pushing sponsored/featured stuff.)