I'm very happy with Galaxus. It's a market leader in Switzerland, also available in France and Germany. What I like: their pages displays return rates, repair times, and price history. I can find what I'm looking for easily, as their listings have more metadata and their business is still in online sales, not advertising. What could be better: more inventory.

Amazon has a rival in the Netherlands called Bol. Founded by entrepreneurs who were not asleep in the early 2000s. It's what Dutch entrepreneurs do: travel all over the world to see what's going on and copy it. Money never sleeps!

Took Amazon twenty years to get off their ass and launch their Dutch website. And now the market is a bloodbath.

Amazon is a very "American" thing, at least here in Australia, Amazon is near useless and its almost always better to shop directly with a site/company.

I haven't used amazon since I moved to the Netherlands. I sometimes use bol, I exclusively use coolblue for electronics, but outside of that there's an absolute ton of smaller local websites, often focusing on a narrower subset of products.

With a functioning delivery service, even mom and pop shops can afford to offer free next day delivery.

USA tends to create monopolies and oligopolies. There is something structural ans systematic about it. Too many industries ends up being ruled by one or two companies.

This is and has been the number one question over at WalMart for a long time. They have the money and resources, the supply chain, seemingly all thats necessary to at least get a really strong start at solving the remaining problems.

I forget but I believe Amazon gets a decent chunk of its earnings from AWS too.

Alza in the Czech Republic + Allegro in Poland and some surrounding countries are basically Amazon on steroids.

It basically looks like Amazon gave up in at least Central Europe and local companies are eating their lunch, but better.

Because Amazon is not really a web store - that's the "easy" bit. Amazon is really a logistics company.

It took something like 20 years of insane investment and no shareholder returns to build this out in the US.

In Germany many people also buy some stuff from Zalando, Conrad, and other smaller online commerce shops, depending on the goods.

Same in Portugal, many reach out to Wook, FNAC, and others, specially because ordering from Amazon means UK or Spain as closest delivery center.

There was Quelle, Europe's largest mail-order and retail company. They were excited about mailing their catalogue on CD-ROM, but slept on the Internet. In 2009, they went bankrupt.

Presumptive question as an article title is silly - Walmart is Amazon's biggest competitor.

The problem is that 95% of the products on Amazon are just chinese garbage. Most people do not research the products they are buying, they are buying because of the convenience. The "default" quality of products on Amazon are utter complete overpriced shit. Even if you have done your research and ACTIVELY look for a specific locally manufactured product on Amazon you're flooded with sponsored products with unpronounceable names. There's a whole hidden industry about Chinese companies have a streamlined process to create a shell company, apply for various trademarks to skirt rules even if their product is obviously copied. It's horrible if you look into it. I try really hard to only support companies that manufactures products in the US/EU/UK. You should do, too! It's good for the economy.

I’d say eBay is a kind of distributed Amazon.

Because Western rivals are mainly retailers first, and marketplaces second.

So their goal is to try to squeeze as much from the end customer as possible, sometimes even with absurd price differences in physical locations vs online.

Promotional events are absurd with how they manage pricing in order to claim big discounts, it's almost insulting.

The general feeling is that these guys are out to get us, while on Amazon you don't get that feeling. And I'm not a fan of Amazon, I just find retailers turned marketplace despicable.