Fed Up With Them?
If, like me, you’re sick of always being directed to Amazon, when you know they are a very controlling company, who don’t look after their staff well, who treat their suppliers badly and who don’t pay their fair share of UK taxes, then there is an alternative.
There is an assumption that you can’t find it cheaper than on Amazon but that is mostly just not true. There are plenty of online stores out there who are very competitive and often cheaper than Amazon. You just need to know how best to find them.
I’m starting to build a directory of online stores where you can buy products or categories at the same or very similar price or cheaper than Amazon.
You can help me by doing a small amount of research when you are tempted to just follow that link when you see an item recommended online. When you have found the best price just let me know and I will include it on my “Amazon Alternative Directory” page.
The Truth About Links To Amazon
First up is to recognise the nature of sites that recommend products to you, you know, the ones you get to when you search on “Best Four-Slot Toaster 2022” or something like that. Well, they make money from Amazon every time you follow the link and buy. It’s called an “Affiliate Link”. I am an “Affiliate” too (but not of Amazon) and I use links on this and my other sites for some, but not all, of the products and sites I recommend, because I need to make an income and it’s a small pay-back for the work I put into this site.
Amazon make it easy for affiliates because they sell almost everything and they deal directly with their affiliates. So a site specialising in testing or comparing products can take pretty much any household item you care to name, pick ten different ones from Amazon and rank them in any order they choose. You pick one based on the recommendation and on your budget, click through and buy and, ker-ching, the affiliate makes their commission.
There is no guarantee that the product has actually been tested by the affiliate but you follow the link anyway. AND there’s no guarantee that the price is the best. But we fall into habits very easily and that’s what makes it so lucrative for Amazon and the affiliates.
There are many online stores out there that stock no products at all but simply gather together a bunch of products that work together. When you click to pay you are directed straight to Amazon to complete your purchase. I have this in this site to for items available from other sites, such as Hive, for books.
Easy Research Method
You can easily do your own research and get the best price for something. Using your mouse, highlight a product title (name and model) by left clicking your mouse at the start of the title and releasing at the end. The right click on the highlighted text and you will get some options, one of which is “search Google for…” and your product name, as highlighted. Select that option and you will get a Googe page with the results of that search.
You can do this for any text anywhere on any page. So if, for example, you are looking at a product on Amazon and the item model number is not clear you can highlight a section of the description text – usually the bullet point features and search on that using the right click method. Usually sellers take the features text straight from the manufacturer so it will be repeated on each site selling that exact item. If the item is no longer available you will get the closest match.
