European All Purpose Online Shop?
European All Purpose Online Shop?
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
You're in Germany? Have you tried Otto.de
These all sound like you could get them at a sporting store like Decathlon?
I'm not sure there's a European level online shop that could replace Amazon. In the Netherlands there's bol.com (individual suppliers but also their own stock), in France you could try maybe from a supermarket like Auchan as it has a pretty large selection.
If your concern is shipping and packing, maybe you can buy some items in bulk, like the sunscreen and vanilla drops? If there is someone in your circle that also uses these things, then you can purchase them together in a single order?
The items above reside on my shopping list for ~2 months and I've been to EDEKA, Kaufland, Rewe, Globus, Decathlon, Hornbach, DM, Rossmann and Reno in the meantime. :-D I guess it also depends on the specific store, the season and some luck to get what you're looking for. My local EDEKA e.g. did have these flavor drops in the past and DM typically sells sun sticks in summer. But if I couldn't pick specific items after some time, I usually go online to get them out of my mind.
Will check out bol.com, thank you! :)
Bol no longer sells outside the Benelux. Dutch companies and banks and the Dutch government have become increasingly isolationist.
Our Edeka sells flavour drops, by the way.
haha decathlon just closed their business in sweden, wonderful
I know this isn't what you asked for as it is a single shop, but for shoelaces I would recommend Senkels. They are Austrian and their shoelaces are really good! You can choose from a variety of styles and colours and lengths. I got a set last year and I really like them.
Is that really what we want though? Another mega corporation to eat all the smaller ones? Why not a marketplace where it is easy to find smaller and maybe even local suppliers?
It is convenient though with Amazon, I agree to that. Especially for the random selection of thingies. I'm struggling with making that sacrifice and giving it up too.
That's also a valid perspective. Still, I don't like the idea of shipping numerous items separately. From my perspective, it wouldn't necessarily need to be a megacorp. There could be like a big warehouse that is provided by company A. Within that building there could be shelves or departments owned by different suppliers. Then there could be yet another company that picks the goods from all the different suppliers, puts them in a box and ships them with a - once again - independent shipping company.
It's somehow like the concept of a huge shopping mall, just without access for end customers but only for mail order. For end customers it would be similar to the 'Amazon Prime' experience, maybe not as fast and maybe more expensive but IMO it doesn't need to be a single legal entity to provide such a service to consumers.
I get your thinking. Well, there are plenty of online stores that have products from many different brands. And there are plenty of warehouses as a service that do the logistics for multiple companies in one facility. But they are sent separately because it is by separate orders for different companies. It would make sense to send them together as one, right?
However I think it would be difficult to run a warehouse sharing business like this without running into red tape of market competition because it would favour those companies using that particular warehouse service and small companies not using their warehouse service would be at disadvantage. But if they manage to work around it, sooner or later that warehouse business would want to make a bigger cut themselves and start selling the product they see most profitable as they have all the data and all the logistics and eventually no longer need the other businesses as the risk takers. And there we are with another Amazon with all the nasty business practices. I think it would be inevitable in this era and economy.