Amazon really replaces so many webshops in many countries. And after taking over the webshop market, they start copying products that sell well on the platform.
I’m so happy that here in the Netherlands, they still are a small player that has to compete with the other stores. And in the cloud market we at least have Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and some other that really compete with them. Even in the tech sector, we see more and more companies just reselling services provided by Amazon (but with added value, by making it easier to use them).
And I’ve just remembered belsimpel.nl / Gomibo Group as well. They are one-stop webshop for smartphones, tablets and mobile accessories, and in Germany and the Netherlands you can also take out postpaid contracts (+ apply bundling discounts) straight from belsimpel/Gomibo. IIRC they are also one of the few official distributors of Oneplus devices in Europe.
I think in general they’re not so we’ll established in the countries where they never bothered to build a true national store. If I’m not mistaken their national stores in Europe, still from the time they were known for selling books, were France, UK, Germany and Italy. Spain came later and I think it’s also a bit less dominant there.
I shopped with them years ago for my running watch. Never again, been boycotting it for years and it’s really not that hard. There are alternatives, including physical shops.
For e-books I became a client of Kobo and one of the things I like about it is that you don’t have to just buy them from Kobo. I’ve been actively buying ebooks directly from publishers and manually transferring to the e-reader. It’s worth the effort to prevent new monopolies. Shop with the small guy whenever the price difference is small or the quality difference is worth it.
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