Capitalism might be eating itself, it has become impossible to shop online in the past few years.
Speaking from Brazil:
- Google shopping shows very few local stores, most of the listings I get are from overseas stores, many don't even ship to Brazil, and prices don't reflect shipping and import fees
- Google Ads are useless, as they're often unrelated to the query, tailored simply to whoever company pays more for words
- Amazon, besides the fake and bad listings, now has ads on itself, so it's not only hard to find what you need, now you need to scroll past the unwanted ads, too, just like in Google
- Most previously nice online shops have copied Amazon and turned into marketplaces, and suffer from the exact same issues, with shitloads of fake listings, drop-shipping scams, bot-reviews, etc.
- Local giants like Mercado Libre have their own issues, like absent categorization or indexing of listings, so you're left with randomly writing queries that might or not match what you need, so you never know if you can't find an item because it's not available or because you just didn't guess correctly how it's listed
- Chinese giants like Shopee and AliExpress suffer from the usual issues of long delivery times, bad customer service, low quality ripoff, etc.
So contrary to my own previous beliefs and predictions, I find myself doing MORE brick-and-mortar shopping, not less.
Speaking from Brazil:
- Google shopping shows very few local stores, most of the listings I get are from overseas stores, many don't even ship to Brazil, and prices don't reflect shipping and import fees
- Google Ads are useless, as they're often unrelated to the query, tailored simply to whoever company pays more for words
- Amazon, besides the fake and bad listings, now has ads on itself, so it's not only hard to find what you need, now you need to scroll past the unwanted ads, too, just like in Google
- Most previously nice online shops have copied Amazon and turned into marketplaces, and suffer from the exact same issues, with shitloads of fake listings, drop-shipping scams, bot-reviews, etc.
- Local giants like Mercado Libre have their own issues, like absent categorization or indexing of listings, so you're left with randomly writing queries that might or not match what you need, so you never know if you can't find an item because it's not available or because you just didn't guess correctly how it's listed
- Chinese giants like Shopee and AliExpress suffer from the usual issues of long delivery times, bad customer service, low quality ripoff, etc.
So contrary to my own previous beliefs and predictions, I find myself doing MORE brick-and-mortar shopping, not less.