It happened so fast too. I'm in Finland but used to buy from a.de on a regular basis because there was no VAT, shipping was sensible, and often the prices were

It happened so fast too. I'm in Finland but used to buy from a.de on a regular basis because there was no VAT, shipping was sensible, and often the prices were much better than local markup (which is infamously bad in Finland), especially on stuff like video games. Sometime in the past few years something changed though. Shipping prices went up. Prices on name brand goods started climbing up too, sometimes higher than I pay locally even. Savings basically disappeared so I stopped bothering 90% of the time. Then the flood came. IG without the international competition, the knockoff and counterfeit and aliexpress sellers saw an opportunity and absolutely flooded the site. Now you can't find a name brand fucking anything unless you explicitly search for it, and more often than not it's out of stock. It will sell you a million suspiciously cheap knockoffs with obviously fake brand names, often the same knockoff under dozens of different names and prices. It really is basically just a shit overpriced Wish now, and it is baffling to me that Amazon have seemingly just allowed this to happen.