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▲ mindslight 4 hours ago

It's worse than that. They all put up browser surveillance / captcha blockwalls to "stop bots" (even despite bots being legitimate shoppers these days!) that make the sites just straight up not work on most of my browser configs. And they keep getting worse - I'm sure they've all got some big dashboards that say "evil bots blocked", the numbers just keep going up up up (false positives and all), and whatever middle manager championed the initiative to block customers gets a pat on the back and a mandate to do more.

Amazon, no problem, browse from anywhere. Amazon has similar functionality, but they just do it a lot more intelligently. The most I've ever seen on Amazon is a simple captcha before the login page, period. Whereas on other sites, if a user is logged in to a longstanding account with a history of real purchases, and that logged in session isn't requesting pages at some exorbitant rate that goes well beyond enthusiastic middle-clicking, then it should never end up blocked. Yet I've had this happen on most sites that aren't Amazon - they've lost sight of the primary goal being to serve customers!

Of course to me every webshop has their bread and butter of what types of things make sense to purchase there. I'm certainly not going to buy stuff from Amazon that is twice the price as it is elsewhere because it's only on Amazon becomes some enterprising seller put it up there as a convenience. But I can understand how others would, given how hard the other webshops want to actively reject your business.