Hi all,
Does anyone know an online shop with a big and wide-spread assortment that isn’t just a marketplace with individual suppliers?
I haven’t bought expensive stuff from amazon for years but still used it occasionally to fill some gaps from my shopping list for small special items that I couldn’t find offline. You can easily get all of that in other online shops or marketplaces like eBay but you’d have to order everything separately: You’ll pay shipping multiple times and produce way more waste for packaging.
Sample shopping list:
- Sweetening vanilla flavor drops (you typically get those in sport related shops where you also get protein powder)
- Yellow or green shoe laces with 140cm length
- Environment-friendly sunscreen stick with UV protection of 50
I know individual online shops where I can all of that but is there a shop where I might get this (or similar weird combinations of stuff) all in one box?
Kind regards, rbn
In Germany Otto.de has a lot. Still not as wide a selection as Amazon. But they have a marketplace. I don’t know where they deliver to though.
In Romania they have eMAG.ro, I heard that they are looking to move to other countries too. They are pretty big there.
Emag looks indeed really interesting. i found a sugar free syrup, laces in different colors, sun screen and a lot of other stuff that I ordered from Amazon in the past. But it seems like they don’t ship outside Romania. I didn’t even got to the point to enter my address or calculate shipping. The system requires a phone number and German numbers are all rejected as invalid.
Oh, that’s too bad. It would be such a big win if they start making deliveries outside Romania, being that they are so big there and a potential competitor for companies in the EU.
I think we’ve been a bit spoiled by amazon’s quasi monopoly and undercutting prices thst gave us free shipping and everything in the same place. One must be ready to work a little harder to find products in a post-amazon life.
For bigger purchases I found it pretty easy to get rid of Amazon. Clothes and electronics I mostly buy second hand on Vinted or Kleinanzeigen (German Craigslist). If I need something new, there are usually plenty of alternative shops for everything. It’s the small stuff that bothers me. If I buy a ~5€ article online from a specialized shop, the shipping costs double the price and if you have a separate (often oversized) box to dispose afterwards.
Benelux has bol.com
They should seize the initiative and expand tbh
They’re isolationist, like the Dutch government. They used to deliver to the whole of Europe and then stopped. Dutch banks have done the same.
That’s wrong in many ways. Bol.com is part of ahold Delhaize which has multiple pan-European assets.
All big Dutch banks are part of the European banking supervision by the European Central Bank.
It governement isn’t isolationist, we can’t. As a small country where trade is immensely important you can’t afford to be isolationist. Even the right wing Putin enthousiasts have stopped calling for nexit as a result of the dramatic outcome of Brexit.
The Dutch banks have been closing down services abroad and are even closing down the accounts of Dutch people living abroad. They no longer allow Dutch citizens abroad to have a visa debit card. You can also no longer get an account if you’re a foreigner living abroad. You used to be able to. I have no idea what being subject to EU regulations has to do with anything.
Bol.com used to deliver outside the Benelux. Now does not. Doesn’t matter who owns it, it’s a fact.
Wilders supports Russia. He literally has a Russian friendship pin and is refusing to condemn Trump’s behaviour towards Zelenskyy. His government also said “no” when parliament said they must increase defence spending.
You might want to read up on how badly Dutch citizens living abroad are treated purely because they moved to get a job instead of sitting on their arse and whining about being unemployed.
I don’t think anyone would go for amazon route “let’s put all of the item in one box in the werehouse and mix originals and fakes together”.
In Poland there is allegro.pl that services the visegrad group. Use of locker boxes instead of direct delivery is very convenient.
There is food delivery app that uses big supermarkets to buy from and pack all items into one delivery.
If you want the Amazon-like experience of an everything bazaar with a terrible UX and their own logistics (plus marketplace), cdiscount.com is a decent French alternative that serves a large part of continental Western Europe.
Galaxus, Proshop
Thanks. Galaxus.ch (the Swiss version) seems to be pretty close. They indeed have vanilla drops (even from multiple brands), shoe laces in 140 cm (even though unfortunately not green or yellow) and sun screen sticks.
Their German version of the shop unfortunately seems to sell mainly electronics.
Which ProShop are you referring to? Proshop.de seems to be also mainly electronics.
Galaxus is our own Amazon, it has Digitec for everything computer related (it is the same company).
But Galaxus is growing, they opened Galaxus.fr a year or two ago, maybe that one being in the EU makes it simpler to deliver inside the EU (I never tried it as I’m on the .ch)
