Herring
Muriel's Inn
- Joined
- Aug 29, 2023
- Messages
- 987
I'm with you @Latearrival
Personally, I won't use Amazon at all, any of their online/TV/delivery services until they pay proper tax on their UK operations. It even annoys me if I buy from elsewhere and they use Amazon shipping without my knowledge.
It would only take a couple of weeks if the UK customer base boycotted all Amazon UK services, for them to reassess their tax position and pay fair taxes to UK plc.
Isn't that drop shipping? Whoever you bought it from doesn't have stock. They pretend to, but they actually just buy it from Amazon for you and get it sent it your address. Amazon still gets your money, but you pay someone else a few quid for the privilege of ordering it for you.
I'd just cut out the middle man .
Amazon have third-party sellers of course, but if Amazon doesn't hold their stock in its warehouse (e.g., like the stuff TJC sell on there) it can't be sent by an Amazon courier. Thus, if it arrives by one, or in an Amazon box, that's a giveaway you've bought from a drop shipper.
(AliExpress has embraced drop-shippers - for a small fee, it'll send packages out with a different company name on the packet. I sometimes wonder if IW3's "order today and it'll arrive in 2-4 weeks" items are using that…).
That said, Amazon is increasingly full of junk anyway: flood of shonky Chinese products for everything imaginable, identical items sold under 50 different (made up, seemingly randomly generated) brand names, varying prices, backed up by fake reviews, "Vine" reviews (i.e. they get a free product if they leave a review), and pseudo-real reviews, i.e. real people using using AI to write it so saying absolutely nothing of subjective or specific substance about the item, just generic marketing speak).
And the amount of "sponsored" products you now have to scroll through when trying to find something you want - the first 4 results are sponsored, and usually completely irrelevant, then every 6th one is. if I'm searching for Whiskas cat food, I expect to see Whiskas cat food as the first results, not XYSHFNA Feline Food, Supa-Cat Worming Tablets, Copper Socks, and Amazon own brand cat milk.
I've gone off on a tangent — apologies!
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