> - one click "deliver to my closest branch and I will pick it up and pay there so I don't have to muck around with online payments" option
I've started using this as much as possible, especially during christmas. You find something, "in stock", supposed to be delivered the next day or a day after, you order, then nothing one day, two days, three days, then you call, "yeah, it's still with the distributer, it'll be ready tomorrow", two more days pass, you call again, want a refund, they "cannot refund now", because the product is supposedly in the mail already, then you wait, christmas goes by, and around 15. january you get a call, that they cannot get the item you wanted, and try to upsell some either more expensive or worse option.
Now I just order for physical pickup and "pay there" option.. and if it's not there, cancelling is easy, because they don't have your money yet, and they cannot lie about the item being already sent.
In India when the major e-Commerce companies opened shop they realised that having just online payment wouldn't work due to inherent distrust with online payments, lack of card access etc. and so 'Cash on Delivery' where we pay to the delivery personnel was critical for their survival.
Nowadays people prefer to use UPI[1] over cash in even local store counters making India the largest real-time payment transactions country.
Its amazing that both of those happened within a decade, Largely synonymous with mobile compute & Internet penetration.
You have more patience than me. If that happened to one of my orders I wouldn't just change from delivery to in-store pickup, I would simply stop ordering from that store altogether.
What ajsnigrutin is describing recently happened to me with Lenovo (2nd offense) and backcountry.com (1st). It seems like companies are getting more "approximate" about their inventories :-(
Super clean, very logical, everything exactly you'd expect it to be, superb filtering system for searching through long product lists, etc. It's also super-snappy, at least from within Switzerland.
> price history so you can see when sales are fake
This is now a law enforced in European Union to display such history (at least the lowest price in last 30 or more days so customer knows if the price was not fake rised just before lowering it and calling it a sale). WooCommerce has a plugin for that now[1].
Germany and Asutria are a different instance of the shop with different stock. There are several differences between these shops. That wouldn't be the issue
depends if German and French gov already implemented this EU directive. Different countries implement it in different pace. For example Poland already has this law in power and amazon.pl is aligned to it.
In response Amazon did a lot to reduce price transparency. If you notice now most categories of items are constantly 'on sale' and even if camelcamelcamel picks up that fact, there are also 'coupons' available on-site for most amazon products that only alter the price under certain conditions and they're only applied at checkout.
This makes it difficult for a human being trying to buy things to compare the prices, let alone a series of scripts.
if memory serves camelcamelcamel gets their pricing data directly from amazon via a source they aren't allowed to disclose, and bloomberg has previously reported that amazon gives camel^3 the data they have; given that, i'm not too certain they're the cause of amazon's consistent reduction in transparency to consumers - a lot of it feels like cruft built into their marketplace allowing for bad actors to effectively play the marketplace
having personally built an internal tool that was much more aggressive than camelcamelcamel, I can say they're not doing anything special in terms of sources (or if they are, it's totally unnecessary)
Was thinking about building such tool, but I couldn't come up with an idea where to source the data other than scraping it. Was looking especially for big price drops.
Cammelx3 is great. I like Keepa as well, especially the chrome extension that embeds the chart on the Amazon page. It also seems to have a bit more functionality.
The price history going quite far back was a game changer for me when shopping from Digitec/Galaxus. They don't have everything like Amazon, but the quality and the experience are on a whole different levels. Few levels above, actually.
That may be true. But overall their prices are pretty reasonable.
Personally, I prefer paying a few francs more and in return get the certainty that I get what I ordered reasonably fast.
I never had a problem with deliveries from them, alas, high ticket items I picked up personally.
The only one time where they couldn't deliver a couple of USB chargers for a couple weeks because it was out of stock and the supplier couldn't supply I cancelled the pending order and had the money credited to my credit card.
Not having to deal with some dodgy outfit is worth the slight surcharge to me.
Oh I believe it. But that's kind of like being the poorest billionaire, you're still a billionaire.
With the EEA being what it is, I'm really surprised they can keep afloat since ordering from literally anywhere else ought to be cheaper just by labour costs involved alone. These days even Amazon.de doesn't get many of my orders anymore since they're reselling the exact same crap Aliexpress has for a quarter of the price.
I’m not sure what point you’re making. How is that issue related to labor in Europe? Amazon US is all white-label Aliexpress stuff too, but the minimum wage here is literally $7.25 an hour, many states have zero sales tax, and there’s no VAT.
Even if you're selling the same item you need to pay local rates for importing, handling, stock storage, etc. which are highly dependant on labour prices and real estate costs.
As such if you're trying to sell to anyone who's not in the same purchasing power range or higher (aka literally nobody when it comes to Switzerland) you'll run into problems as you can't compete with vendors operating at lower costs in those countries. It's just basic arithmetic.
That's what makes Switzerland one of the worst places one could manufacture and/or stock things and China one of the best. Exploitation of the poor is the optimal business choice, after all it's the very foundation upon which capitalism itself is built.
I guess you never heard about Swiss import tax, and overall you don't seem very familiar with topic. They have no competition here, they offer maybe 50x more products than available in rest of eshops, and most have actually in warehouse. Stuff you simply can't buy elsewhere and its either not shipped into CH at all (thank you, Amazon) or at higher prices and utterly crappy warranty.
Not quite true, once you vos der VAT on these is 7% in CH but 20+% in the EU. Things should therefore be at least 13% cheaper in CH but they aren’t because reasons.
Most of electronics truly are, if they are sold officially here, even if eshop margins are a bit higher. And its closer to 8% on non-essential items (food, books) where its below 3%.
That's how you do VAT, compared to all EU countries around who screw their population left and right because they have big public debts and getting worse, while employing armies of unemployable bureaucrats who do almost nothing and have ridiculous safety and social nets.
The world could learn a thing or two on how Swiss run things in general and especially government stuff, but the problem is this is not transferable elsewhere, people are simply... different to be polite.
But they are. At the risk of getting into specifics, all electronics I buy here are cheaper than in surrounding EU countries, the 256 GB version iPhone 14 Pro is cheaper than 128 base model in the EU, the Ultra watch is 850 at Apple store Switzerland (799 digitec), 999 at apple.de. Yes you can find rare counter examples, but I love Switzerland as a tech nerd, especially since CHF reached parity with EUR.
The best deal (although it’s a lot of hassle depending where you live) is to order things to Germany, go pick it up, get your papers stamped to get the 20% VAT back. Then pay 7% tax if worth over 300.- or no tax if less. But it takes time and isn’t always worth the hassle.
People always get that wrong. Switzerland is more expensive when human labor is involved, cheaper or same as surrounding countries when not. However that extra money also ends up with the labor, so it's a good thing for everyone.
Best example is a Brezel. A fresh Brezel is like $4, but a buttered one (done by human) $8-$9.
Not the butter is expensive. Humans just get proper money for their work.
Yes. Clicked around for a few things because I remembered their german branch from a few years, nothing has changed. At least not for the few parts I checked today.
They where much better before the Migros takeover, especially the two owners just wanted to make 10k/month the rest goes to the customer, for a short time we had better prices as..well ....whole EU.
>automatic high quality translation of all product information and reviews into all offered languages
Uh, gotta disagree here, speaking as a regular Galaxus shopper in both en & fr locales. The automated translations are mostly terrible when not entirely misleading or vulgar. For instance, the French ones are so bad there are Twitter accounts dedicated to them[1]. This applies to both product titles and descriptions.
To be fair, this is not surprising: the machine translator has very little to work with when translating short product names, in addition to these being full of puns (in whatever source language) or English-looking words for marketing purposes. It's a shame no ML company seems to have taken the opportunity to fine-tune their model for product name translation and sell that for $$$ to big marketplaces.
>- one click "deliver to my closest branch and I will pick it up and pay there so I don't have to muck around with online payments" option
That suggests a really sorry state of things, not something to copy. Online payments shouldn't be harder than physically going to a store and paying for the item.
> Online payments shouldn't be harder than physically going to a store and paying for the item
Why ?
It's probably more energy efficient to have trucks going to the few branches for pickups than to every single individual house.
I don't see why it "shouldn't" be, especially since it's optional
> That suggests a really sorry state of things,
The really sorry state of things are people ordering toilet paper &co in same day delivery on amazon because they can't bother walking 5 min to the closest store
Is this a serious question? Why should online payments be so difficult that it makes sense to spend even 2 minutes getting out of the door and walking to a store directly across the street? You autofill your card information and click "pay".
>The really sorry state of things are people ordering toilet paper &co in same day delivery on amazon because they can't bother walking 5 min to the closest store
> The really sorry state of things are people ordering toilet paper &co in same day delivery on amazon because they can't bother walking 5 min to the closest store
Also all the stores trying to railroad me into buying delivery instead of just telling me which store has it in stock.
The way they do warranty is really awesome and uncomplicated.
Recently I had a set of headphones fail after ~1 year and all I had to do was find the item in my order history click a button, answer a few questions and in this case they just credited the amount to my account, didn't even have to send them back. Instructions told me to recycle them.
There is a certain amount of trust in the system.
However it can also go wrong. Once I sent a GPU for repair because a fan stopped working and it was still under warranty. Sadly they or their repair center marked it as a no fix, recycled the card and I was credited the amount I paid, sadly that was during the GPU crunch and a card that had similar performance was not available for even close that price. Replacing a fan I could have done my self but I thought a warranty claim would be the correct thing to do incase something else breaks.
Switzerland operates on trust. You go to the car service, you get the work done, you leave, you'll receive a bill in the mail later. There is trust that they do the right work and not overcharge you, and there is trust that you'll pay.
Go to an unoccupied mountain hut, drink the beer, eat the food, use the wood for the stove, use the med kit (better to leave the morphine...), sleep in the beds, take some of the local cheese, and then leave your payment in the cookie tin, using the other few hundred CHF already there to make change.
Just be sure to mark everything in the ledger, so the hut warden can replace it easier.
Amazingly enough this can happen in the US as well. About 15 years ago I went to a sleepy little town in Northern California (might have been near Novato), where there was a used bookstore with nobody working. You pay what you think the book is worth, and just put your money in the tin by the door. Wonder if that bookstore is still around.
We have one such local produce shop in our village in western Switzerland. Nobody around, there is scale, you can pay digitally by Twint (or leave cash). Tons of farms around have ie chicken eggs or wine grapes or other products with (weather-proof) tin box (or QR code sticker for Twint) and scale for weighting, nobody around and you just go and take what you want.
Then I go home to eastern Europe (we call it central Europe back home, lol nobody wants to be branded as east European since it reeks of russian association which for a long time means something very negative) and kleptocracy is visible literally everywhere on all levels of society, its nauseating beyond any tolerance from me... Its impossible for me to accept it once I've experienced much better society. One of the reasons to never move back and not raise kids back there, even if whole family is far (which is not always a bad thing).
Also a thing in parts of rural England.
I have a walking route that takes me via ~12 of these stalls because they are the ones that sell local Honey. All are money-in-the-tin operations.
Switzerland is pretty effective at assimilating second generation migrants thanks to the dual education system. The kids of your countrymen are probably all in middle class jobs and raising a family.
I've experienced this even in French mountain huts, during winter there is no guardian and usually only part of the hut is available for whoever comes. Use fuel, any other material, leave some money behind. Everybody chipped in. Pretty good to keep them running long term, it ain't easy or well paid job.
This is not unique to Switzerland, it's pretty common for remote areas across the continent from Scandinavia to Kamchatka. I've been hiking in the Baikal taiga, and it's pretty common for local hunters and travelers to leave money if you can't refill the hut with supplies.
Sure, many cabins operate on a honor code. People hiking in this harsh environment respect the hospitality. If you don't have that kind of respect around the mountains, you won't fathom going there anyway.
And yeah, it's a high-trust society. In some farms you'll find a fridge where you can get local produce and leave your payment in the box. Especially so in the mountains where they make their own cheese. You'll find me lugging a nice cut of cheese back home from a Sunday hike. That box will be locked though, because there's more people passing than at a remote cabin :-)
On the country side you can buy fresh fruits from small unattended shops on the side of the roads: you take a fruit basket and leave the money in a jar. (I only saw this in the Swiss German part, though).
I'm familiar with the roadside produce and the honor box, but for some reason an actual dwelling being open to all, or to just be assumed that by default it is open to all, I guess caught me off guard. Assuming something like that would be open to all, here, would be a dangerous assumption on my part. I don't think I initially took into account the extreme weather conditions during that time, which in retrospect makes a lot more sense.
In wilderness parts of the US you are usually allowed, by law, to break into unoccupied cabins/homes in critical situations (eg blizzard, you're lost, etc). You're required to leave identification and contact info and pay for any damages and/or supplies used.
Often people just leave remote dwellings like that unlocked and stocked with supplies, sometimes with a signature book and/or donation box. For larger places some people even build a separate cabin next to the main house for travelers to use.
In reasonably prosperous societies that take care of all their members and lack the cult of individualism, this is quite normal. Visible inequality, corruption, systemic persecution, and dire poverty tend to erode trust.
Perhaps... But Switzerland is one of the most atomised, individualistic societies I've lived in. Swiss social trust mostly comes from an abundance of means, as far as I can tell. When you've got a full belly and a roof over your head, crime just isn't as attractive.
Its part of culture. The state is not centralized (canton over federal), which makes each state independent and highly individualistic.
This ethos percolates down, well beyond empowering the minority via direct democracy: its shameful on the individual to not carry one's weight. The smallest unit is the one to trust.
Contrast that to other collectivist societies, with top heavy bureaucracies, where the top literally cannot carry their weight (debt/deficits) and the populace is always looking for the biggest bureaucracy to rescue them.
There's no trust in people, because people are competing to weaponize the large state to screw... you.
When I was living there, I was told that you could go to a rug store, see a beautiful say, Persian Carpet worth thousands, and they would say, take it home and try it out. If you liked it, you came back to pay. They didn't take your information, just your name. I didn't try it but I believed it. Switzerland was very much that way.
Love this and it is true that trust is higher here, also lots of (high value) things are sold on tutti (ebay / fb marketplace of Switzerland), yet the country becomes increasingly a "normal" European country and trust decreases, also regarding salaries, self promotional plug: https://twitter.com/iwangulenko/status/1618865433108688896
> absolutely that!
Coming from a country with very low trust both ways I was surprised that the swiss car mechanic (big chain from vw) didn't allow me to pay at the shop and didn't even tell me how much it will be because he'll calculate it later.
Also the fact that most online businesses allow late payment via invoice shipped with the goods feels crazy.
I had the opposite experience. Bought a 75” tv there. It had an extremely uneven backlight (clouding). Support told me to send it in for inspection. Tv broke on the way there. They kept it for three weeks and sent it back without mentioning that the panel was broken on arrival. After that they refused to cover it because it was my fault for not packaging it correctly. We finally settled on 50:50, so I got half my money back
The having to ship it back is a problem with a lot of warranty these days. I have a BenQ monitor that started failing after less than a year, but since I don't have the original packaging I can't get warranty work. As TVs/monitors get larger, are we really expected to keep all of that packaging in case of warranty issues? I'm just eating the loss and will add BenQ to my list of no-gos but there needs to be a better system for this.
With BenQ you can ask for a swap, they will put a hold on your credit card, but will ship you a new display, you can send your old one back in the new packaging, pre-paid shipping label, and once they receive it, they release the hold. Costs nothing and you don't have to go without a display.
> I have a BenQ monitor that started failing after less than a year, but since I don't have the original packaging I can't get warranty work.
In the EU, to exercise your mandatory 2 year warranty, you are not required to use original packaging by law, but manufacturers may require original packaging to honor extended warranties.
> are we really expected to keep all of that packaging in case of warranty issues?
Depends on where you live and your consumer protection laws. In some places there are laws/rulings stating that no, you don't need to keep original packaging - especially for statutory minimum warranties.
If there are no laws it's up to the discretion of the seller.
>>all I had to do was find the item in my order history click a button, answer a few questions and in this case they just credited the amount to my account
Exactly the same as with Amazon here in the UK then. They have every retailer in this country absolutely beat on their approach to customer support - it's always no faff, easy, often instant refund, none of this waiting 60 minutes on the phone to speak with unhelpful CS for any of the major retailers. John Lewis were the only ones approaching Amazon in the quality of their customer service, but recently that has changed for much worse and they are as hostile as everyone else.
Consumer laws give a much longer window, and the retailer is responsible for resolving the issue [0], but any time I've had to try and get something replaced after the time limit it's involved going back to the original seller, hoping they still exist in the world of random TM company names. Never understood how Amazon gets away with this.
"The retailer is responsible
If what you’ve bought doesn’t satisfy any one of the three criteria outlined above, then the retailer that sold it to you is in breach of the Consumer Rights Act.
This means that your statutory consumer rights are against the retailer – the company that sold you the product – not the manufacturer."
I've had Amazon refund me even a full year after purchase, no problem. Basically you go on chat, say you have a problem with some item, they say "please contact manufacturer" to which you say "I'd like you to resolve this problem under the consumer rights act as you are the retailer who sold me this product" and 10/10 times they just go "ok, would you like a refund or a replacement". Then I have the refund 10 minutes later. I've had hundreds and hundreds of orders from Amazon in the last few years and this hasn't failed me once.
This is essentially the same as the EU laws. However, my experience in the UK (pre-Brexit) is that these kind of laws are commonly ignored, For example, the same (EU) laws require that the full price is always displayed up front and that you can't tack on costs later. But e.g. ebay.co.uk has it hiding behind some link with some misleading language that makes it appear as if selling stuff is free (it's not). None of the other EU ebay.tld sites had that when I checked at the time: they always displayed the price on front.
I also had some other service where they advertised a particular price, and after filling in my personal details to order the service there was suddenly an extra mandatory charge which doubled the total price. wtf?! This was 100% illegal. I stopped as that was too much for me and they even had the guys to call me out of bed in the weekend to try and sell me their stupid stuff. I gave an unfiltered version of my opinion on that.
Can confirm, I had that happen with a cable. I filed a warranty claim and the response was "you dispose it, we credit it". When a second cable broke (oh no) they wanted me to send it in though.
Logitech actually ended up sending me two keyboards. First they sent me the same model but with a different layout (but still usable) and when I complained about the layout they sent me a more expensive model with the expected layout. No returns, few questions asked. Excellent RMA experience but that being said their mechanical keyboards AFAIK all have some sort of chronic issue and just aren't worth the price.
Anker didn't ask me to return the earphones but refunded only 1/3 of what I paid (6m remaining in a 18m warranty). Mixed feelings about it though the experience was positive. On general I expect things to last a lot more than the warranted period. Anyway I still have the earphones and they still work (with reduced functionality) so let's say that I remained with a residual + the refunded amount.
My experience is 15 years out of date, but back in those days many "big brands" insisted we only use their repair centres, and all we could do was ship stuff to them and hope for the best. Some were a little more flexible in this than others, but the flexibility was always very limited.
Especially with components like mainboards or GPUs this could be awkward, because turn-around times were often weeks or even months. We usually just replaced them without too much fuss, and then a month later we were sent back a repaired spare part that could perhaps maybe be used for a repair later. We generally accepted this as a "cost of business", but never seemed quite right to me.
While turnarounds on laptops were usually fairly decent, they could also be weeks, and replacing a €800 laptop on which we made €50 profit was kind of a non-starter. This also included stupid stuff like broken memory modules, or a broken hinge cover. The only way we could get reimbursed at all was by sending the entire laptop to them and hope it didn't take them 2 weeks to spend 5 minutes replacing a broken RAM module or something silly like that.
My point in all of this being: it's not necessarily the store's fault.
This sounds like pretty much how we use our credit card's extended warranty on purchases, except we do it via the bank's website (Chase or Amex, our credit card issuer), instead of the retailer. A couple clicks, and done.
In Europe, by law it is the retailer responsible for warranty claims.
Many manufacturers will also offer warranty service, and it is up to you the customer which you want to use. Often manufacturers try to persuade you to contact them first because it costs them less than a refund would (typically retailers just refund rather than attempt a repair or replacement)
The law requires the retailer to deal with warranty claims. The law also requires a 2 year warranty minimum. Additionally a retailer must take back old electronics and recycle them at no cost to the customer.
The idea is that as a consumer, I made a contract of sale with the retailer, not the manufacturer or anyone else. So, if there's a problem I go to the entity I have the contract with, i.e. the retailer.
You can often claim warranty with the manufacturer if you want; depending on the item. It can be faster to do so, but you're not required.
You can also re-sell a product you've bought there with a click and answering a couple questions, right from your order history. It's a pretty nice experience, just recently did so with a Dell screen I no longer needed.
If you’re not home and the package doesn’t fit your mailbox, they will just leave it in front of the door of the apartment complex. Lived there for two and a half years and nothing was ever stolen.
this is worth checking before buying something because 97% reliability is for instance extremely bad compared to 99%, you are 3 times more likely to get faulty piece
there is also monopolistic price comparison website heureka.cz where you can check price history years back, compare all shops and set price tracking with notification covering pretty much all online shops
Yes, I am have never heard of stores doing this. Please add comments of more places where this is done. (I'm from Australia - you only see similar things from consumer groups)
This might be true, but both czc and alza have much to learn from digitec/galaxus regarding their website useability/cleanliness/etc. Alza nowadays is closer to Aliexpress than anything else with their endless dark patterns/spam/clutter.
I wish we had something like Digitec/Galaxus in Czechia. Mironet is probably the closest, but their product range is limited and they're still not quite there.
honestly i don't care about website design at all, I just go to heureka, find which shop had lowest price with shipping and is well established and then just click buy after redirecting, can't imagine looking for something directly on particular website and be loyal to some shop and not to my wallet, only reason I'm willing to pay slightly more for Softcom or Datart is they are next to my home so no need shipping and can use easy return/RMA, but if price difference is more than cost of return shipping, them I just choose cheapest (non shady) option (and for the record I almost never buy from CZC and especially Alza, which is like the most expensive shop among the big ones)
Heureka/Toppreise/... is nice if you know which model you want exactly and you are looking for the lowest price with shipping. But if you're for example searching for a new laptop or dishwasher, having a website with a clean interface, fast response times, good filters, and consistent item classification/description is priceless. And that is exactly what galaxus/digitec is.
(It doesn't hurt that they also very often have close to the lowest price in Switzerland, or only a few CHF more than the absolute lowest, which often made it worth it for me just to have "most of my orders in one place" and know that I will have a good RMA experience if it comes to that.)
When I buy from AliExpress I feel like perhaps only 80% of items work properly for a reasonable lifespan...
I still buy there because I quite like the challenge of repairing the things that don't work, and prices there are typically half of what things cost on Amazon.
Interestingly enough, the culture of returns in Switzerland is very different compared to the US.
Also the quality of service vs price makes it a very appealing market but very hard to penetrate. This is why international players have always had issues to do so. Swiss customers care more about quality than price.
A 'slow delivery' option is a great idea. There have definitely been a few times when I've ordered something and would've been totally happy for it to arrive any time within the next few weeks. At the same time, it would need a different kind of delivery service which isn't totally optimised around speedy delivery.
Prime delivery day is awesome, especially sharing the same house with someone that orders excessively. We tend to order things throughout the week, then have to deal with a mountain of shipping waste. Prime delivery day condenses the orders as best possible. It's not like I need every single item within 24 hours...
Somewhat tangential, but can't help sharing: It's counter-intuitive, but you should feel good ordering things with same-day delivery, even if you don't need it and it "feels" wasteful. Energy-intensity of delivery basically boils down to "did it go on an airplane?". If so, it has a ton of emissions associated with it. If not, it doesn't. And (of course) the less distance the item has to travel, the less emissions. If it can be delivered same-day, then it's not going on an airplane, and it's not traveling very far.
One weird thing is that it seems like they play a bit fast and loose with the actual meaning of this. Several times I've ordered for "Prime day" because I didn't care and then later got a notification because they just shipped it early anyways. No real complaint per se, but it was still odd.
You need to have Prime, and it usually requires you to have 2-3 items in your cart.
But if they're items that would normally ship in 1-2 days, then it will provide a credits option if you have an Amazon Day (day of the week for combined deliveries) selected and that Amazon Day is at least 3 days in the future. It will also sometimes instead show a "no-rush shipping" option that is usually something like 5-7 days out, with credits.
I'm not going to lie, I almost always select it (even constantly changing my Amazon Day to be at least 3 days out from today), and I'm pretty sure I make back my Prime membership fee and then some. The credits are usually $1.50-$4.50 per shipment, expire after 3 months, and can only be used for digital purchases like Kindle and videos.
This might be a factor but it must be stated that the primary reason why international players had trouble penetrating Swiss markets was due to trade regulations which prevent retailers to sell anything duty-free or at a reasonable duty in Swiss markets. This is why Amazon et. al. don't even attempt to sell there; you're simply not competitive if you have to add 8% or something on top of every item.
If you open Amazon from Switzerland and search for anything at all, you do get tons of products that seem nice & at a reasonable price, but click on any of them and it will say that the vendor doesn't ship to Switzerland. And this is when you set your location to Switzerland! There's no way to filter for products that ship there, Amazon simply doesn't bother.
This is why e commerce stores like Galaxus & Digitec (the tech-products twin of Galaxus) were even capable of getting so large in Switzerland, while in other countries any competition was swept away by Amazon.
There are some exceptions to this, e.g. Zalando, a clothes retailer, does deliver into Switzerland... I know that they have large logistics centers in Switzerland and basically send their products b2b, maybe that doesn't pay off for Amazon? I don't know.
That's not quite right. I'd say about 80% of products I find on amazon.de are delivered to Switzerland. If Amazon is handling the logistics, then they normally deliver. They don't need to charge German VAT and Swiss VAT is a lot lower.
Duty is more relevant to food products. Meat is the big one. If you like meat, it's very profitable to take your whole family on a trip to a German supermarket across the border, since prices are ridiculous in CH and the meat is low quality - particularly the beef, which is from "dual purpose" cows, where "dual purpose" is like 95% milk cows.
This sounds a bit surprising. Tons of online clothes retailers ship to Switzerland.
8% doesn't matter that much, you'll see bigger differences than that for the same item between different retailers within Switzerland. A lot of people here don't shop around and aren't that price sensitive.
> the culture of returns in Switzerland is very different compared to the US
I am curious, how is it different?
Here in the US, I have met seen whole spectrum where some people will never return anything even if it is obviously defective. And others who will return almost perfect items for tiny issues or for not meeting their expectations.
I am not sure how I would define the US return culture.
The filtering system was way, way better than everything else we had for a very long time and they often also where the cheapest. I write was because honestly I haven't visited many other shops for quite some time. But whenever I check on toppreise it's only marginaly more expensive then the other shops. It's convenient to have everything from the same shop where you know you have it the next day. And the "Geiz ist geil" mentality just doesn't realy exist in Switzerland.
Their website - and tech in general - are way better than the competition. Their prices are competitive (sometimes the best, sometimes not, but rarely an unreasonable rip-off). I often prefer local pickup over mail. They already have my information on file, I don't need to futz around with making an account.
Price comparison sites are fine if I know exactly the item I want, less so if I just have an idea of the category.
It's not that I buy everything there. But it is my default option.
Because consumer protection is nonexistent and it's easier to just go with Digitec/Galaxus where you already have an account than figuring out if this dealer is trustworthy, shipping in a reasonable timeframe, and whether they will be a PITA to sign up with.
Reliability, consistency, convenience, laziness. I know by and large if something goes wrong, Galaxus will just refund me no questions asked. Having tried some other retailers (that I found on toppreise)... that was not always the case
Switzerland didn't have the kind of return anything for any reason culture as the US has had for a long time. The fact you can return a non defective item is something newer and you still find retailers that will not take your item back unless it is defective.
So you don't see people to go Jumbo (home depot equivalent) buy a tool and return it a week later after the job is done to get a full refund.
In fact even digitec/galaxus will charge you a 10% restocking fee if you opened the item and it isn't not defective in anyway.
Many...if your on a mountain and your touchscreen is literately frozen you wish you have a other one...also if you have to trust in a technology you better have 2 devices or a additional map and a compass.
I heard people do this with expensive cameras and equipment. Instead of renting, they can buy one for a vacation, then return it when they get back home.
I purchased a Chinese brand scooter from a US-based dealer.
Their customer service was awful. They had a phone number that changed often and didn't work, and lied about their intent to honor warranty claims. It was broken for 4 months. In the end, they decided to cancel my warranty and refuse any further assistance because I dared to ask for a functional product.
I suggest no one ever buy a Kaabo scooter from any of the 3 major dealers in the US.
Kaabo itself is even worse providing no support to customers at all.
reverse the credit card charge, that usually works like a charm and weakens the company you bought it from, and enough do the same, they can't do business any more
That doesn't work in the US. Too much time elapsed and it's not something a credit card company would adjudicate. My one little encounter isn't something a credit card company would care about.
It could be a small claims court matter if they were in the same state.
It's cheaper to write-off the matter as a learning experience.
Voro Motors. They're a fly-by-night operation like the other Kaabo dealers I found in the US. Ship from China and expect no support or warranty.
Also, no e-scooter shops will touch Kaabos because they're not designed for repair and parts are difficult to source. The wiring inside looks like spaghetti with random colors that don't match their wiring diagram and wires that go nowhere. In addition, the early model forks would break spontaneously due to manufacturing defects that lead to a number of grotesque injuries and perhaps a death or two.
PS: BBB is itself a widely-held misconception and fraud, perhaps the inverse of Yelp. It's mostly a feel good badge businesses pay for. Any business can join it and they have little incentive to police their "members" because, like binding arbitration, the "members" are the customers, not retailer's customers.
I have never had a credit card dispute my challenge to reverse a charge (including in the U.S.). You are the credit card's more important customer, not the business. If you follow their steps, they will reverse the charge. It's not a lot of effort and bad business do go out of business when enough customers reverse the charges because then the business can't use credit cards any more.
> If you bought a product or a service online or outside of a shop (by telephone, mail order, from a door-to-door salesperson), you also have the right to cancel and return your order within 14 days, for any reason and without a justification.
I get the legal differences, but in practice EU-like return policies are extremely common in the US. Are there really significant cultural differences with regards to returns?
Depends on the goods. Not many places will accept returns for opened/used underwear, for example. Same with digital goods (dvd/cd/games), if the seal is broken the shop will not accept a return.
True, there are some obvious exceptions. But suppose I buy a vacuum cleaner and use it for a month and don't like it, doesn't matter how much I used it, I can return it in the EU.
The law doesn't seem to cover that, or one pretty large retailer in France is ostensibly not abiding by it.
Darty.com says that you can only return an item if it can be resold as new. Basically, you may only open it to inspect it. If there are signs of use, you won't get the full refund.
Other retailers, like Amazon, may not care about this and refund fully no questions asked. But in my experience, Amazon is pretty unique in doing this.
>If you bought a product or a service online or outside of a shop (by telephone, mail order, from a door-to-door salesperson), you also have the right to cancel and return your order within 14 days, for any reason and without a justification.
In my experience, all retailers (have not tried in France, though) follow this law.
I think the issue turns around the "any reason" part. It doesn't say anything about the condition of the item, which, in my opinion, is the crux of the issue.
Unfortunately, I only have French references. The actual French law is at [0]. It says that the buyer is on the hook for any depreciation resulting from handling, apart from what is necessary to determine the characteristics and good working condition of the goods. So opening the vacuum box to see that it's not missing a part or something is fine. Vacuuming your house for 2 weeks is probably not. "Determine the characteristics" is ambiguous to me, so it's not clear where the line is.
For example, Zalando, an online clothes retailer, will accept returns for garments that have been "tried on" but not "worn" [1].
LDLC, an online electronics retailer, will accept returns for items in "original condition and packaging". I expect that if I buy a mouse, use it for a week and there are marks on the pads, they won't accept the return. [2]
Not true. It may work. However your return period should serve as a way to test the item similar to what would be possible in store. Using a vacuum cleaner for a month may result in a partial refund if there are clear signs of usage. There are limits to what is considered appropriate testing.
Here are the B2C rules for e-commerce in the EU, which are supposed to be the norm: https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/selling-in-eu/selling-... . Anything beyond that is retailer-specific. Note that this concerns all forms of remote selling, i.e. phone sales, webshops goods, but even door-to-door vending -- basically anything that does not involve the customer setting foot in your brick-and-mortar store.
> When can your customer withdraw from the contract?
If you have given all the necessary information about the right to withdraw, your customer has 14 days to withdraw from the contract - without any penalty and without having to give any reason:
For goods – this means 14 days after delivery
For services – this means 14 days after the contract was concluded
> What are your obligations after the consumer withdraws from the contract?
You must reimburse the money received from your customer (or cancel their payment) within 14 days of being notified they are withdrawing.
You may withhold this reimbursement until you have received the goods back from the customer, or at least received evidence they have actually sent them.
> Who pays what?
The Customer pays the cost of returning the goods (unless you failed to inform them of this in advance — in which case you will be liable for these costs).
Seems like this isn't per-product, but rather per-brand in a particular category.
So while it seems like a big step forwards (great!), it's still not going to tell you if a particular item from a brand is a big lemon. And in my experience, that's often what happens when a well-known brand starts putting out a few "budget" items. (Happened to me recently on a blender that burned out on first use, and going back to search the user reviews, it seems to be a notorious problem for that specific model of blender, but not the brand overall.)
Would be amazing if Amazon could display per-product stats on returns, at least for items with >10,000 total sales.
(In contrast, warranties usually/always seem to be handled directly through the manufacturer in the US at least, so Amazon wouldn't even have that data.)
Alza (a czech retailer also available in Germany) has had it for many years as well but none of them appear to provide a comparison between brands in a category as Galaxus does.
I really like this step... especially because they sell a mix of "good" brands and stuff you could get on Aliexpress for a tenth of the price.
One more observation:
If you look at the smartphone scores, you'll see that Apple warranty rates are WAY below other brands. I assume the reason for this is that for Apple you don't have to go through the retailer you bought it to have it fixed under warranty. For Samsung et al. there's little option to have your phone or tablet fixed without reaching out to the place you bought it.
>> For Samsung et al. there's little option to have your phone or tablet fixed without reaching out to the place you bought it.
I've had my personal phones repaired a handful of times in recent years (screens). All Samsung. I have never even considered taking them back to the place I bought them. I have always gone to whatever repair shop is local.
So direct repair service network works well to make the rate lower. It looks good incentive for all. Shop don't need support cost, customer get better service, manufacturer make products looks reliable.
I believe the amount of apple devices sold in comparison to other devices is very low as Apple has stores selling directly to customers. Also you can probably get your apple device repaired at the Apple store even if you purchased it at digitec/galaxus. That may heavily skew the numbers.
That's what I'm saying, for Apple it's much easier to contact Apple directly (or any authorized repair shop) to have your device repaired or replaced. It may be possible for other Brands but their network is much smaller, so you usually end up going to the shop you bought it.
I don't know the situation in Switzerland, but in the EU, the manufacturer warranty (whether from Apple or Samsung) is usually only 1 year. EU consumer law mandates a 2-year minimum warranty, so after the first year, you have to go through the store.
In Switzerland, the retailer must provide a two year warranty. The retailers can not shorten that span, but (strangely) can remove it entirely. The customer needs to know this before buying though.
The manufacturers warranty is up to them and is not mandatory.
2 years ago, I went to an Samsung authorized third party repair shop to to have a cracked screen replaced. They told me it will take 5 weeks to have my phone repaired.
I then went to an unauthorized repair shop and they replaced my cracked screen with an unauthorized replacement part that only had 2 finger multi-touch (without telling me of course).
I don't personally own Apple devices, but from people close to me I know first hand that Apple's service is usually better than my experience two years ago.
This post in HN has made my day! I have been a Digitec customer for over 15 years and I still buy all my tech items from them. Or from Galaxus if it is a non-tech. I am thrilled to see this "little Swiss" company getting wider exposure. I am glad to say that my overall experience with them has been 5-star. I remember I bought computer components from them in the early days as that was the cheapest way to get a custom computer built with the best parts. There were other sites but Digitec stood out when it came to dependability. Hat's off to you, Digitec/Galaxus!!
I also bought my first PC with them in 2001. Back then their site was just for ordering custom pc’s. I spent hours on their site building the perfect custom setup. Then went to pick it up at their “warehouse” which was just a room with racks full of pc components and the guys sitting on the floor building the machines haha.
For many items, they have much bigger stock than anybody else. Ie kids stuff and toys etc. You open similar category on web, and there is 10,000 products when any competition has 200. Often if I look for something a bit non-mainstream, they are the only one in CH who has it, at reasonable prices.
Finnish retailer Verkkokauppa.com has had something similar for a couple of years now. If I for example look up the 64 GB Apple iPad (Wi-Fi), I can see that it has 0.43% repairs and 0.17% returns, and that the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip3 has 0% returns and 2.17% repairs.
When I worked retail sales you definitely saw different return rates on different SKUs. I tried to collect data for a college project but the sample size was too small. (My class was in the spring, and sales boomed in the fall)
I was always surprised that the company didn’t do that, as they definitely lost alot of money to shrink and exceptions for high fail devices. At one point the company self-funded warranties, so a lemon had to kill profitability.
And then scroll down and click warranty and then click "Detailed view", it says
> How often does a product of this brand in the «AV Receiver» category have a defect within the first 24 months?
This doesn't mean what the title says, right? I'm not a native english speaker, but I hope my reading skill is not that bad. I read it like: Yamaha return scores in "AV Reciever". If Yamaha had 100 product in "AV Reciever", it doesn't say almost nothing to me regarding the Yamaha RX-V4A I'm seeing. It could be that all 3% (example number) defect are Yamaha RX-V4A, or completely 3 (assuming Yamaha has 100 different products) different products.
Identifying a "product" isn't as straightforward as it seems. Large retailers insist (and get) custom product codes from major manufacturers, which are just a different code slapped onto the same box, but accomplish the goal of making price comparisons impossible. And then you've got more legitimate reasons for different codes, like the same physical product ships with 27 different types of power plugs, warranty leaflets etc for various countries.
After moving from UK to Switzerland I was missing Amazon until I discovered galaxus/digitech. It’s great and feels so much faster, amazon has tons of clutter and dishonest reviews. Historic price is awesome, the whole thing is just much more honest.
Amazon is miserable unless you know what you’re looking for. If I have to search for something it’s almost game over immediately — I’m not going to wade through page after page of cheap junk with no sensible way to filter the results.
I live in Switzerland and shop a lot from Galaxus. This new initiative is very welcome and innovative, I hope other retailers follow and especially manufacturers stop shopping products that end up in landfill.
Galaxus is great in terms of range and delivery time. They have local stores in city centers where you can pick up items to get them even quicker and avoid the packaging associated with shipping.
However, their return policy is terrible. If you return something with an opened box, there is a 10% return tax. https://www.galaxus.ch/en/wiki/560
Indeed. Sounds good in principle, but how do you prevent someone from repeatedly returning items just to hurt a competitor and/or making frivolous defect/warranty claims against them?
Faking a product defect is probably way harder than just submitting a fake review. Eventually the retailer will notice that something is off as you have to send the product back and it has to be defective. How do you create a plausible warranty defect in a TV, for example?
There are hidden reputation and anti-fraud mechanisms at play in a lot of consumer areas (incentives, reviews, etc.), it would be trivial to apply them to this too.
Most fraudulent activity isn't attacking competitors, as it's prohibitively expensive, but instead propping up their own reputation. i.e. Amazon's fake reviews are mostly five-stars.
For one or two attacks, sure, but at the scales to having impact we're talking prohibitively expensive, especially with antifraud detection whacking the moles.
Just maybe a product for boring people looks better, because they are a bit more careful than a kind of same product for teens. But still, I like idea, finally we have something from "big data".
This is really a great way to sabotage your competitor.
Have a bunch of friend and family buy a product and flood Galaxus with bogus returns and warranty claims.
We'll see how it works.
I actually don't care that much about these numbers, as they are not my problem. 5 year warranty by law (no matter what the maker gives you), makes it their risk if they make brittle products. Compared to in a market with little consumer protection laws (US), where what you buy is a uninformed gamble as to how it will last.
You don't want faulty equipment. Not because you won't get a replacement, but because you'll have faulty equipment and will have to spend time dealing with it.
I’ve seen this exactly in an online shop in Romania. Then they tried refusing my return of a product citing a gross misinterpretation of the law. They caved in after I threatened invoking the great goods of consumer protection. Found out afterwards that they’re notorious for such gimmicks
One feature of Galaxus that I love and didn’t see anywhere else is that you can sell back on the marketplace the stuff you bought on Galaxus once you don’t need it anymore. Tt facilitates the payment and communication in a very straightforward manner.
I wish they delivered to the UK, I would switch so much of my online buying to them instantly for this. It's still incredibly useful as a resource when buying elsewhere though, I just wish I could reward them for this consumer advocacy.
I wonder if the warranty information is correct? From some of the comments, it sounds like they do warranty service in-house for some items at least? I wonder if Apple really has that much lower % of warranty issues, or if Apple owners tend to get warranty service direct from Apple instead of going through Galaxus, and so they don't have the data on Apple products?
I'd like to see Amazon do similar and make this data available publicly on each product's page.
Some return rate data is currently figured into "Amazon's Choice" labeling - for example, low return rate on an established product, more likely to be labeled Amazon's Choice.
But I'd like to see if Amazon has the guts to just make it all public.
Yep I like them too but let's not repeat the Amazon issue on a small scale and support alternative web shops like Brack and Microspot. The latter has one huge advantage over Digitec Galaxus, a show room in HB to go and pick up delivery.
Meanwhile, on Amazon I ordered something with "same-day delivery", and it hasn't even been shipped 5 days later by the seller. There is no way to leave a review, because by their policy if there were shipment issues, you can't leave a review for the product (I tried once, when I paid for a shelf that I really needed, and it took 2 weeks before the order was marked as cancelled, I left a review that I never received the product, it was deleted).
But that is private feedback, right? There is not even a rating for sellers, as on eBay, so buying from a 3rd party seller feels as risky as buying it from a random website. This doesn't even go to Amazon I think, it goes directly to the seller.
EDIT: I stand corrected, you can leave public feedback on the seller's page (it's a bit hard to get there, you have to go through the sold product). That being said, refunding the non-delivered item doesn't seem to be possible without contacting support.
Does it matter? Any shoddy goods on Amazon are immediately pulled from the store, re-stickered, and then reintroduced under a new brand name, possibly recycling the listing of a popular and successful product using the shit-of-Theseus trick.
Very cool, but if we've learned anything from Amazon et al, it's that features that effectively reduce engagement- and therefore, sales- are ultimately doomed to be scrapped.
I'd love to see re-purchase delay[0] and re-purchase rate[1] as well. Useful looking at multiple highly rated products and products that you go through more quickly (Eg. many bathroom supplies).
--
[0] Time between a customer's purchase and re-purchase of a product.
Hi r2b2! I'm sorry to address you like this, but I believe you to be a creator of Owlmail.io service and on website there is no contact information for the site, also no contact information on your profile and no direct-messaging feature on HN. So here's a super off-topic message - sorry!!
I can't create account, simply nothing happens when I enter my email address and click "Next" or hit Enter key and so on and such.
As Firefox Relay is not available in my country I was hoping to try your service.
I have few more questions about Owlmail so I would appreciate if you could let me know if there is a more appropriate channel for asking those.
If I'm mistaken or you'd rather not engage like this - apologies!
I think this is great, and it serves both the interests of galaxus and the user. The user will pick things that have less returns, and in the process galaxus will (hopefully) have to field less returns as well.
The Amazon website is just pure and utter garbage. I seriously don't know why anyone can buy anything there. They would have to sell everything at least at halve the price for me even considering using them instead of Digitec. Amazon has little traction because Switzerland is small so they don't care, not as price sensitive as others and hence people don't like to torment themselves just to save a few bucks.
That is one of the cases where someone does something and you ask yourself: Why has this not happened since forever and is absolute standard everywhere?
This is the biggest online retailer in Switzerland, and they got to this position by being the most trustworthy. People will pay a small premium over other places because they know it will always arrive in good condition, quickly, with accurate descriptions and easy returns. There are also physical locations you can go to for pickup, returns, etc. if you need a person to speak to.
I obviously disagree. Reviews are not a new thing. Yes this is a slightly different spin on it but ultimately it is less information than reviews since we don't know why things were returned.
I don’t see how you can equate this with reviews. Reviews are almost useless these days, because they can be (and are) spammed by bots and only a small minority of real buyers post reviews.
But since returns are handled by Galaxus themselves, these numbers can’t be easily fudged. You’d have to actually buy the product and return it to negatively affect these scores.
- price history so you can see when sales are fake
- one click "deliver to my closest branch and I will pick it up and pay there so I don't have to muck around with online payments" option
- automatic high quality translation of all product information and reviews into all offered languages
- simple downloads on order page for invoice and receipt
And many other things. Some things are still annoying like they don't accept cards from some countries, but they get a lot right.