AmiAmi is a Tokyo-based online shop that sells anime figures, model kits, plush and other hobby goods, and ships them to collectors abroad. Its pre-owned stock gets two separate letter grades, one for the figure and one for the box, because for many collectors the box matters almost as much.
In
E-commerce sites that earned a spot
Shops where the storefront itself does the persuading.
8 sites · every one earned it
rareseeds is Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company's online store, selling about 1,500 heirloom vegetable, flower and herb seeds. Jere Gettle started it in 1998 with a photocopied list of 70 varieties; every variety is open-pollinated, not hybrid, so seed can be saved and replanted.
Coque Chic is a French guide to good-looking phone cases at low prices, sorted by handset model and by style. It invents no star ratings, stamps every price with the day it was checked, and says plainly that the cases are judged from photos rather than in hand.
Mando sells aluminum-free whole-body deodorant for men, made for the groin, feet and chest as much as the underarms. It is the men's line of Lume, the brand physician Shannon Klingman built on mandelic acid to neutralize odor bacteria rather than perfume over them.
Shop is Shopify's own shopping app and website, where the millions of independent brands that run on Shopify can be browsed in one place. Shopify spent years insisting it was not a marketplace; this is the one place it meets shoppers directly, and it charges the brands listed no marketplace fee.
Jolie sells one product, a filtered showerhead, to people whose skin and hair react to chlorinated tap water. Its opening move is not the product but a free Water Report on what comes out of the pipes at a given US zip code — an unusual place to begin for a company selling bathroom hardware.
LALO makes tactical boots and athletic shoes for Special Operations units, first responders and civilians who train hard. The San Diego brand is named for co-founder Nathanael "Lalo" Roberti, a former Navy SEAL who started it in 2009 because the boots issued to his teams were not good enough.
Gumroad lets creators sell digital products — courses, ebooks, software, music — directly to their audience with almost no setup. Its thick-outline comic-book design language was a deliberate 2021 rebrand away from startup polish, and the site has kept the bet ever since.