Dear Omar
Not Everything Is Cheaper on Amazon
Honey, Rakuten, and Capital One shopping could help you find a better price
Welcome to Dear Omar, a weekly Debugger column from tech expert Omar L. Gallaga. If you have questions for Omar, send them to debugger@medium.com with the subject line “Dear Omar.”
My kids, who are 11 and 13, are too young to buy things online, so when it comes time to enter the credit card digits and place an order, they come to me, and I usually say, “No!” and on goes a cycle of parenting that will lead to decades of retail resentment on their part.
They’ve shopped at other online storefronts, but 99% of the time, it’s an Amazon order I’m going to find when I come over to see what they want to buy. To my children, there’s Amazon for buying stuff, and then there’s Everyone Else.
My kids aren’t the only ones feeling this way these days. Last year, Amazon was getting close to 40% market share of all U.S. retailers. That means that four out of every 10 sales of anything online in the United States were sold on Amazon. That’s incredibly significant for a company that didn’t exist 30 years ago.
