There are a lot of small businesses that sell their stuff through Amazon. There’s nothing wrong with supporting that.
The ‘zon does very well for supplying parts for my jalopy collection.
Rarely do I buy anything from Wally World.
I was going to mention the same thing. One option if you want to take Amazon out of the loop is note the small business and see if they also sell on their own site or another sales site like etsy, ebay, etc.
Bezos gets 15% of that transaction. That's what it used to be.
That's a very good point. Amazon is taking on an increasing amount of third party vendors. Not everything sits in an Amazon warehouse anymore.
I see that trend continuing. Online shopping is more about matching up buyers to sellers. This allows a lot of small business to compete on more or less a level playing field with the big players. I don't see that as a bad thing.
I've been told that those small businesses are put through hell by Amazon if anything goes wrong with the orders. That sort of fits in with the stories you hear about how Amazon treats their employees.
I'd rather go directly to the vendor's website whenever possible.