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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

> Amazon has literally won everywhere else in the world

I've mentioned it in another comment, too, but Amazon is not present in my Eastern European country (Romania), where Alibaba beats them by a large margin (even though they're also not officially launched here). I've just done a quick search and it seems Amazon is not winning it in Russia either, nor in Ukraine, to say nothing of India. As such, to say that they are winning "everywhere else in the world" is not really true, they're only winning in North America and some Western European countries (too lazy to search what really happens in South America or Africa).

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As far as India is concerned, Amazon is definitely giving a strong competition to Flipkart(the Indian counterpart). For most people I know, Amazon is the first go-to store for any online purchase.

It's interesting to see, how Amazon will fare in near future, due to recent change to e-commerce law by Indian govt.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/05/amazon-how-india-ecommerce-l...

I’m a Romanian. What do you mean Alibaba is beating Amazon in România?

I’d say that’s hyperbole. Neither of them are present here and if I were to guess judging by my own experience, I’d say that Amazon is still more popular.

Do you have hard numbers?

Of course neither of them hold a candle to the local eMag, but that’s only natural.

It’s hard to get hard numbers on this but in my circle of acquaintances “you can find it on Alibaba” and variations of this has become almost like a noun, like “I’m going to make a Xerox (i.e. a photocopy) of this paper”. I’ve never heard anything similar concerning Amazon. My acquaintances are mostly non/tech people, 25 to 35 years of age, from Bucharest. Emag is of course a totally different beast but I had chose to ignore it because it didn’t directly concerned the article.

Slightly OT, I’m also curious how come no analyst is mentioning FB marketplace as a competitor to Amazon.

I am not talking about literally every country in the world. But most countries that matter, in terms of the combination of their population and GDP, Amazon is there or nearly there in terms of being the top player in the market.

I have heard from friends in Germany that EBay is much preferred to Amazon.de. Perhaps that isn’t the full truth, but something I found interesting.

Also just a personal observation, but I don’t see many people using eBay anymore, maybe for some special niches (for example stuff you would find in a Home Depot is often better to get from ebay since it’s probably to large for amazons fulfillment anyways). But in general everyone here orders everything from amazon (if you look in the back of a delivery van it certainly looks like it). Only in fashion they do a very bad job, there is is Zalando all the way here.

In Romania there's also the local emag, who's doing a pretty good job at filling Amazon's shoes and has been here forever. The Chinese competition is relatively new.

There are rumors Amazon will open officially soon, but they'll have a hard time if you ask me.

> and it seems Amazon is not winning it in Russia either, nor in Ukraine

Russia is a very protected hyper nationalistic market, in exactly the same way China is. Their culture is segregated off from much of Europe in terms of being 'westernized.' Instead of westernized, it's a quasi separate, rather differentiated Russian culture (all the way down to the music). It's why Russia has Mail.ru, VK and Yandex, instead of eg Google dominating on search.

Ukraine is a partial extension of what is dominate in Russia, so for example VK and Yandex are very popular in Ukraine as well. Most of Ukraine fluently speaks Russian, and they've been culturally and politically dominated by Russia for a long time. This is why there has been a push by some prominent nationalist politicians in Ukraine recently ("Army, language, faith") to emphasize their own culture and language, and de-emphasize Russian culture and language. If you go to Kharkiv - Ukraine's second largest city, near the border with Russia - the people there often can't speak their native Ukrainian (they can usually read it), everything is in Russian.

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