Canadian owned alternatives to Amazon?
Canadian owned alternatives to Amazon?
I live in a small city pretty far from any major centres so I make use of Amazon from time to time. Does anyone know of any good Canadian alternatives?
Sadly I don't think there is anything Canadian-owned that's a true alternative. Don't mind the other disingenuous commenter on here questioning your motive, they evidently think that Walmart is just as good for your community as local mom and pop shops, since they all ''employ canadians''. I think your alternative would be to simply order directly from whatever Canadian business you can find online selling whatever you're looking for. Almost all of them still take orders from their own sites and ship Fedex/DHL/CanadaPost etc to almost anywhere. Amazon really is just a convenient middle-man and they're not purely necessary. Basically a streamlined search function and ordering tool and they're completely avoidable, it just takes a bit more effort. I think people should absolutely be making efforts to avoid them, because of their ridiculous market share and their precedent of working conditions and wages, if nothing else.
I have done this from time to time. I wonder if Canada Post could profitably offer some kind of service like the shipping portion of Amazon Prime where you could pay a monthly/yearly fee and then ship through them with no extra cost at point of sale if you're shipping from a Canadian owned business.
Depends on what it is from Amazon you want, because there is no drop-in replacement that does 'everything' these behemoth companies do.
Their strategy was to use their cloud services profits to allow them to undercut all physical product delivery services, operating at a loss for many years until they were out of business. Then they also introduced Prime to get people on subscriptions and help pay for this unprofitable service. Then once competition was killed they gradually made their services shittier for 3rd party sellers and consumers. Sounds like a familiar story doesn't it?
So anyways. There are alternative cloud providers based in Canada. There is Canada Post for shipping. There is Giant Tiger and Hudson's Bay for shipping department store items, there is Memory Express, Canada Computers, PrimeCables for computer stuff. There is Canadian Tire, Partsource, Princess Auto for random automotive parts. Many medium to large sized Canadian Companies will have shipping so check there.
But there's no real "Everything store" like Walmart or Amazon that is Canadian.
Define Canadian alternatives, and what products are you even getting from Amazon?
Amazon employ's Canadians at Canadian distribution centre's. The contractors delivering to you from Amazon or other shippers are Canadian people.
So what are you attempting to avoid or what are you looking for?