13 ms·

The thing I don't get about Amazon is they've allowed entire categories of products to become unbuyable from their site. Batteries? Every review seems to indica

by uptown 10y ago

The thing I don't get about Amazon is they've allowed entire categories of products to become unbuyable from their site. Batteries? Every review seems to indicate what's sold is some substandard knock-off. Medical products like thermometers? They're all reviews from people who got the product for free in exchange for writing a review. Their brand is rapidly being tarnished in my view.

aresant 10y ago
Very good point on the "got product free" reviews - seems bizarrely misguided.
- mjg59 10y ago
  In the absence of name recognition, it's pretty much the only way small vendors have to differentiate themselves from any of the other vendors selling devices in the same space. The problem is that many of these reviewers end up just giving five stars and then re-selling unopened packages on ebay or craigslist, and many of the vendors expect high score reviews and will pressure reviewers if they don't get them. Blocking all incentivised reviews is one way of dealing with this, but it comes at the cost of it being more difficult to know whether a cheap equivalent from an unknown vendor is worth the savings or not. Some sort of reviewer trust weighting might be more useful here.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    Even weighting reviews on how much the reviewer spends on Amazon per year relative to the product cost would go a long way.
  - _wmd 10y ago
    Mailing customers a "3 click questionnaire" some time after purchase might be enough, it seems to work just fine for e.g. delivery food marketplaces.
sawthat 10y ago
Amazon sells Duracel and Energizer as well as super cheap shady crap from China. The same seems to be the case in every category.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
tacostakohashi 10y ago
Yes, this is true, and surprising to me as well. For certain products, the pricing + shipping is not at all competitive (toiletries, for example). In many other categories, there might be a product with a nominal price of, say, $10 offered by dozens of different merchants, at more or less every combination of price + shipping from $0.50 + $9.50 up to $10 + $0 imaginable. It's a huge waste of the consumer's time, you'd think they'd be better off either providing sensible pricing for a category, or not carrying it at all. Needless to say, it's nowhere near as much a go-to provider as it was 4-5 years ago.
tuna-piano 10y ago
It's really an awful process buying a lot of items nowadays. It seems like the exact same item will be sold under 30 different brands with different star levels, with many reviews full of the "free product" in for honest (usually 5 star) reviews. I wish Jeff Bezos would try buying a travel adapter (among many other items I've tried to buy recently) and tell me that it's a customer friendly process: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_pg_1?rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Atravel+adapter&keywords=travel+adapter https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_pg_1?rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Atravel... There are approximately 5 actually different adapters sold under maybe 50+ brands, and all the reviews are so padded with 5* free reviews, it's tough to know which ones are crap and which are good. Reviews aren't as important for retailers like Wal-Mart that curate their products. But for a marketplace like Amazon, reviews are absolutely critical to prevent scams. I hope Amazon realizes the enormity of this issue and is working on it. I believe Amazon should: 1. Fix the reviews. Disallow giving items for free or reduced prices in exchange for reviews. This may have worked originally for books, but any benefit received now is far out shadowed by the negatives. Alternatively, just limit it to 5 total free / reduced reviews per product to limit the negative effect. Police this policy heavily. 2. For the duplicate products (where one identical product is sold under 10 different brands, like in the travel adapter example above): Group the products together, and choose the brand like you might choose the color or size on a t-shirt. I recognize that there isn't a UPC numbering system that makes this easy - but there are probably only a few thousand items required to group together to make the buying process a lot easier for a large percentage of purchases.
- kordless 10y ago
  I work at Data Alchemy. We're an Amazon Merchant who runs our system on a search engine, built by search engineers who used to be at Looksmart and Loggly. Amazon does merge ASINs occasionally to help improve quality of listings (and merging comments), but we've found focusing the algos on the listings that both sell well and get a lot of good comments and support work really well. Our store on Amazon is the result of this search algorithm running on about 1.7 million listings: https://www.amazon.com/s?me=AZHZ102UTKBMA https://www.amazon.com/s?me=AZHZ102UTKBMA
  - 10y ago
honkhonkpants 10y ago
Amazon's house batteries are rebranded Sanyo. I just buy those. Takes the guesswork out of it.
- r00fus 10y ago
  Is that their goal? To ultimately outcompete all their suppliers with an inhouse brand? How utterly banal. I remember a recent article about Rain, Inc (I had one of their beautiful 2006 iMac stands) and how Amazon essentially cut their price in half offering the same product with an Amazon logo instead.
  - tluyben2 10y ago
    How can you trust a retailer like Amazon though: they are not only an e-commerce saas, they are a retailer themselves so obviously for anything they see a market they will just offer themselves. They can use the data from 3rd party sellers as market research for free (actually they get paid for their research!).
    - r00fus 10y ago
      You can't but you have little choice as Amazon rules online retail. Think Wal-Mart in the 2000s.
- creshal 10y ago
  Sanyo have a pretty bad reputation, however. From all the OEMs making Thinkapd batteries, theirs have the worst life expectancy.
  - tesseract 10y ago
    I am not sure what other commenters had in mind but the Amazon house brand batteries I'm thinking of are AA and AAA rechargeables. They are low-self-discharge NiMH - the Sanyo brand is "Eneloop" which is the original member of this category and still well respected as far as I know.
Silhouette 10y ago
I'd settle for knowing if and when the real UK version of a DVD/Blu-ray/box set is coming out and then finding it without numerous clones when it does. Apart from books, this used to be the one thing Amazon clearly did better than almost anyone else. Today, particularly for US TV shows, there are usually lots of alternatives available from non-Amazon-but-kinda-from-Amazon sources long before anything official is released here. However, prices and availability shown vary almost by the minute and sometimes rather sharply, and even whether the discs will actually play in a UK region player often seems like a random result. I've really been going off Amazon in recent years, particularly since they started trying to be all things to all people, using highly volatile pricing algorithms, and spamming upsell promotions all over their previously straightforward checkout process. Sadly, since they had also successfully killed off just about everyone selling physical media from bricks and mortar stores first, and since I prefer to actually own my media instead of renting it from some streaming service, there are few other suppliers left. Competition has utterly failed in the movie and TV show market now, and I fear this will only get worse as more films and TV shows are locked into one proprietary library/streaming service or another as the only (legal) source and even the likes of Amazon can't supply real permanent copies.
jloughry 10y ago
Yep. Small products from Apple like chargers and cables, HP inkjet cartridges, and other things where I'd prefer to have the original product for safety or performance reasons, are impossible to buy from Amazon. Every seller insists it's "Genuine HP" in factory sealed cartons and...it's not. The same thing happens with pens. Cheap knock-offs, every time. Reading the reviews on Amazon is unhelpful, because the reviews are polluted with apparently deliberate misinformation. It's got to the point where I either order Apple chargers from Apple directly or go to one of their retail stores in person, and I always buy inkjet cartridges in person. (I don't like fires and I don't like clogged inkjet nozzles.) Amazon is great for lots of things, but not small, easily counterfeited, safety critical items.
- ricg 10y ago
  Another anecdote: I tried to buy Apple EarPods on Amazon. The first search result, ranked #13 in the best sellers claims "Apple EarPods Genuine OEM" for $9.99 when all reviews say "do not buy, not genuine!". How can Amazon let these products be listed??? I ended up buying them for $30 in person at my local electronics store.
  - ralfd 10y ago
    Had the same experience. I think there was even an Amazon EarPod review which photographed the label stating "designed in colifornia" (sic!).
  - SonicSoul 10y ago
    Off topic but why do you like those enough to pay $30? They're horrible at noise reduction (for you and those around you) and have shit for low frequencies. You can get a much better pair from Sony at that price . Always curious why people use them
    - itchyouch 10y ago
      Personally have never liked the sealed ear buds as the seals usually do not fit correctly. More importantly though, most of the time I need the ability to listen to the ambient noise around me to catch other people talking to me or hearing announcements like train stops. The sealed off from the world feeling is usually only useful when concentrating on a task and that is pretty rare.
colanderman 10y ago
Looks like a good space for Amazon Basics to expand into. In fact they already have: https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Performance-Alkaline-Batteries-48-Pack/dp/B00MNV8E0C https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Performance-Alkaline-Bat...
- tracker1 10y ago
  If they're comparable to Amazon Basics speakers or USB cables, I wouldn't touch them....
  - tehbeard 10y ago
    What's the problem with the speakers?
    - tracker1 10y ago
      One pair didn't work, another only one of the two speakers worked, the other was mostly noise and almost no sound, and the third had a really bad background hum. Note these were all on sound card(s) where other speakers had worked fine... so one good experience, and three bad ones. They were pretty cheap, in that I didn't return them, but left an appropriate review in the end. They were mainly gifted out (and later thrown in the trash) to friends at work, etc. I got mine so I could have a set of speakers to hear the occasional audio at work at the time... which worked great.. I got some of the same for a couple coworkers, and another set passed along when I'd upgraded my computer at one point. I have M-Audio AV-40's speakers on my desktop at home, and Mackie CR3's on my spare... both are great sets of speakers I can't say good enough things about. Given it's a $10=15 pair vs over $100 ... I wasn't expecting huge sound from the Amazon speakers, that said, I've seen other speakers in that price range that worked far better.
- stoolio 10y ago
  After my huge stash of AA I got from woot (before they were owned by amazon and had pretty good daily deals) ran out, I bought some of these Amazon batteries. I only use them for remotes, controllers, and the occasional flashlight, but they've worked very well.
sowbug 10y ago
I'd like the compensated-for-review bit to be a checkbox, and then to be able to set a profile setting that excludes them from reviews and ratings. As it is today, I have to scan reviews for the telltale text, then mentally recalculate the rating from whatever's left. I doubt Amazon would do this, because they probably consider these reviews to be barely on the good side of the line between fake and real, and higher ratings undoubtedly lead to more sales. Moreover, before the FCC rule change, this probably happened all the time but nobody disclosed it at all.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  I wonder if this is something that could be addressed as a userscript.
at-fates-hands 10y ago
The ironic thing for me is I'm doing more shopping on Ali Express these days. I start on Amazon, but invariably land at Ali Express. Sure you might have to wait for the slow boat from wherever your product came from, but the savings is almost always better than Amazon
- Bombthecat 10y ago
  And most of the stuff is anyway from there :)
  - makomk 10y ago
    And you can easily view feedback from people who bought that product from that particular seller, unlike on Amazon.
pmorici 10y ago
I think you are making it out to be a lot worse than it is. Simply filtering your search to only products shipped from and sold by Amazon.com eliminates all the garbage.
- tracker1 10y ago
  There are some classes of product Amazon doesn't sell, or isn't in a large enough variety... I usually stick to Prime sellers though, and I do check the 5-star reviews and reviewers...
  - hga 10y ago
    I too used to try to use that metric, but as you say, it frequently doesn't work. A highly tuned BS detector is your best tool ... and for better or worse, that's more and more true as time goes by in most venues. Assume everything might be junk. Even some items from the best companies, i.e. I've been buying and will be buying more precision tools from Starrett lately, Made in the USA and all that jazz, and it shows. But when I went to buy a small metric open wrench set, the reviews indicated their's was anomalously subpar (so I went with another vendor with a good product, and then I got straight from Amazon Prime a mispacked Imperial set in a metric labeled baggie :-( Sometimes you can't win, although the return was painless (well, after I convert the image to a raster one, the normal shipping labels are the only thing that kills my heavy duty but old Brother printer, but not my father's much newer and cheaper one) since there's a UPS drop-off in walking distance.) So, distrust and verify, and learn the particular patterns that signal relative trustworthiness, like 96% or better reputation for merchants (but if they don't do much business and are one of the few or only who sell the item, check the bad reviews because so many are self-evidently bogus), and of course shill reviews. And especially a fine tuned sense of "if it's too good to be true...." Or take another example: pretty much all US market washing machines are shit, because the government pays the companies to make them worse and worse each year by using less energy (lower water temps, and I'll bet less agitation), Whirlpool, which only does appliances, paid no Federal corporate income taxes for at least 2 years because of this scam. So when my 2007 not so bad GE washer had a $$$ expensive problem to fix (since to make it cheaper to manufacture, and a one level more reliable in the field, with a solenoid attached to a major part that you can't fix in the field without replacing everything), I checked out the competition, and Speed Queen's consumer line was highly spoken of. Seems they bought an old Whirlpool? plant and rights to make an old model, which reading between the lines uses the old electro-mechanical cycle selectors/timers, which of course fail with some regularity. But Amazon reviews saved me from a fatal flaw in their business model: if you need a major repair, e.g., due to a manufacturing defect (fairly rare) or shipping damage (it happens on big heavy items like this), you're SOL. They pay their network of third party repairmen a fixed rate by the incident, so if one of timers needs replacement they'll do it quickly and with a smile, if it's something serious they won't give you the time of day (so I spent maybe 1/3 of the cost of new Speed Queen on a repair by the local GE shop which my family has a 3 generation relationship with (my paternal grandparents actually sold them their first store front on Main Street, where they were selling newly hatched chickens and turkey, and it helped that the washing machine is of very good design and good build quality). Which I can't blame them on, you don't make ends meet by working long hours at a loss, but let's just say that reviews like that make me a loyal Amazon customer, they've saved me enough money that I'm willing to pay them small premiums for the stuff I do buy from them, especially given how reliable that process is.
mdip 10y ago
This is the worst problem on Amazon and it plagues many of the products I buy frequently. Particularly in the rather open world of 3D printers, it's difficult to discern the brand name from the clones (E3D v6 Extruder?). But it's awful for generic "parts" like bearings, where the quality parts can't even be sold on Amazon by third-parties because the fifteen pages of generics that cost 95% less make the likelihood of selling the higher-end one very low. I guess the problem with the "everything store" is that you can't possibly get your arms around "everything" to make the purchasing experience consistent. As Amazon has moved to become "more like eBay", the quality of product listings has suffered immensely. The information needed to make an informed decision on a large chunk of their products is just missing and the wild-west of seller provided products leads to knock-offs and clone products that are difficult to discern quality versus junk. On many of these products, user reviews (if there are any) don't help because they require more than a hobbyist/amateur to provide a useful review. The usual defense is "returns are easy", but because of Prime, I use Amazon as a first choice when something breaks down. I need that part today, but there's no retail store that sells it, so tomorrow will do. If I could wait a few days, I'd use a trusted supplier who carries only the higher quality. My most recent horrible experience with this was looking for 608 bearings. 608s are the same bearings used in inline skates[0]. Searching for them, however, requires you to use a variety of terms since the inline skate bearings almost never indicate that they're 608s. The user reviews for the kind I need are worthless, as is the price (high-end bearings are often unsealed, but also overkill at sometimes upwards of $100 for a set of 16). 608s, thankfully, have a standard rating (ABEC) that many people know about (but few really understand how limited this rating is). ABEC ratings indicate the tolerances of the bearings, not the resistance, but it tends to equate that higher ABEC bearings have less resistance. That is, until you search for them on Amazon. The first time I purchased bearings, I went to the Industrial/Scientific category and grabbed a set of four ABEC9s that I supremely over-paid for. They rattled and vibrated when spinning ... these were not ABEC9 bearings despite the italicized labeling on the rim. I returned them and replaced them with a set of eight ABEC9 inline skate bearings that were priced at $3.00 shipped (I've not seen a price even close to that since)! These had a mess of reviews that had the pattern of "They spun fine when I installed them but then ceased up after a few uses", indicating that they were almost certainly not sealed bearings[1]. After testing the ones I received, I promptly purchased 15 more sets of 8 in hopes I'd never have to hunt down 608s again. [0] I learned that the inline skate versions are a little easier to discern quality from since the reviewer can tell pretty quickly. Bad bearings ruin the experience very quickly. [1] I usually avoid inline skate bearings. You can usually trust the reviews for bearings that are very well sealed. You can't trust any others (including ones that claim to be sealed but really aren't). Buyers of bearings for inline skates often don't know using unsealed bearings will last anywhere from minutes to hours of use on a city street with debris ripping through them. Using sealed bearings in 3D printers and similar devices is fine, but you need to make sure you buy very good bearings because adding lubrication is nearly impossible (taking them apart without launching parts everywhere or breaking some portion of the bearing is almost impossible).
peteretep 10y ago
I wonder how many of the products this is true for also have Amazon Basics equivalents.
- tracker1 10y ago
  Not sure... I had really good luck with a pair of Amazon Basics speakers, in that I bought 3 more pairs... all three after the first set had issues. Beyond this, their USB cables are garbage for charging, okay for data transfer. Given the poor experience, I'm unlikely to buy any more Amazon branded products.
anexprogrammer 10y ago
Unless you're buying a specific product Amazon has become a worse mess than eBay. Shill reviews and shoddy, awful products. I'll never understand why they made the marketplace choices they did - they've ruined their brand in my eyes. If you're searching for batteries or some such, the search is terrible. Far too many items that don't meet search criteria included, far too much reliance on their worthless star rating. They're ok to buy a book, CD or a known brand item. For anything else it's too much of a lottery now, I spend my money elsewhere.
- bogomipz 10y ago
  But you can tell by the reviewers if they are verified no? I have a problem with the independent kindle books, I like to support independent publishing but so many of them are unreadable due to poor formatting and spelling errors. I realize these are low margin but its still the Amazon/Kindle brand.
  - anexprogrammer 10y ago
    Even that is minimally helpful. You can't exclude non-verified reviews in search or overall rating. You can't believe that they're in any way helpfully independent - it would be the easiest thing in the world to seed your shoddy product's life on Amazon with verified reviews from employees and friends. I've seen reviews on some products that seems to indicate this is happening at least sometimes. Having lost trust it is going to be near impossible to regain it. You mention the Amazon/Kindle brand - they don;t, from the way they are managing it, appear to care very much about it. I used to believe the bad ebook formatting was an early days teething issue, but years later it is still relatively common.
vinhboy 10y ago
As someone who really likes Amazon, I really hope someone at Amazon read this and brings it to Jeff Bezos. The fake reviews are absolutely killing Amazon's usefulness to me. This, and the practice of grouping reviews for unrelated items (notorious for things like phone cases). I am guessing that this is probably the result of doing data analytics and finding that sales increase by allowing these shady practices. But eroding your brand and making the site less useful to loyal customers will eventually catch up to you when dedicated customers leave and evangelize other services. Please fix it!
- tracker1 10y ago
  What's funny, is it's really upset me that Newegg has headed in this direction as well... It's better than most things when you're looking for very specific products, but the generic items on Amazon are horrible.
- mlvljr 10y ago
  >> I really hope someone at Amazon read this and brings it to Jeff Bezos I imagine the huge smile on Jeff's face
tracker1 10y ago
Yeah, I'll usually check those user's other reviews, when the top reviews are all 5-star... if they don't have any other reviews at 3 or less, I'll generally move on to another product. The worst ones is when there's 4-5 unrelated products, and the same reviewers on all 5 of them all 5-star reviews. It's getting pretty bad... I think they should remove the weight of all ratings for users that have spent less than $1k on Amazon, and those that haven't continued to spend at least $100 a year... there's enough people that do spend that much regularly to count those reviews as a higher weighting..
- emp_zealoth 10y ago
  I'm super aggravated that you cannot easily check negative reviews. Most of the time positive ones are so vague (even if not shilled), meanwhile the negative ones will say "flimsy switch that will break", "500000 lumen standby diode", "leaks", etc etc
  - tracker1 10y ago
    Yeah, but plenty of the 1-star reviews are because of shipping issues with the seller... I'd love to see the 2-4 star reviews... I also avoid most things that are all 1 or 5 star... if there aren't a few 2-4 and there's more than a dozen reviews, it's obviously got issues... It sucks that I have to think about though.
dotch 10y ago
This is exactly why I slowly shifted my amazon purchases to their prime-now app. With that service, Amazon seems to only offer the most successful, products in each category, significantly reducing the burden of choice it puts on me. It also does not include products of third party sellers, which decreases the risk of accidentally buying knock offs. The experience of buying e.g. Apple accessories on Amazon's main website is horrible, on prime now it is effortless and safe.
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  >decreases the risk of accidentally buying knock offs...now it is... safe. I'm not sure it really decreases the risk that much, maybe some. With stickerless commingled inventory a third party seller can easily mix their fakes in with the real products and those fakes can end up "sold and shipped by Amazon." and stuff like this - http://www.wsj.com/articles/on-amazon-pooled-merchandise-opens-door-to-knockoffs-1399852852 http://www.wsj.com/articles/on-amazon-pooled-merchandise-ope... >German knife maker Wüsthof recently told its authorized distributors that come June 30, they can no longer store its products in Amazon's warehouses, because the manufacturer doesn't want the merchandise commingled with items from unauthorized third-party sellers, said Todd Myers, vice president of sales at Wüsthof-Trident of America Inc. >Authorized Wüsthof distributors may still sell through Amazon, they just can't use its fulfillment service, meaning they have to ship purchases themselves to customers. Wüsthof itself stopped selling its knives directly to Amazon around two years ago, according to Mr. Myers.
  - hga 10y ago
    Is there anything more stupid that they do than pool merchandise? I've heard a horror story about a DVD reseller who was foolish enough to do that, an "equivalent" pirated unit was shipped to a customer, which prompted Amazon to cancel his account and force him to pay money he couldn't afford to either ship the inventory back or destroy it (Amazon is very sensitive to media piracy, I've gathered, with their video service I guess they have to be, which suggests to me they should have stayed more focused).
    - 10y ago
madshiva 10y ago
Totally agree. I would also add that I can't buy anything from Amazon. Why? because they don't care about Switzerland. We have 3 language and should be able to switch from DE/FR/IT, but no, if we want in FR we need to go the amazon.fr because amazon.ch redirect to amazon.de why? I don't talk German and then we can't buy anything. This is a mess because you see the product, seem everything fine until you want click the buy button and see after that you can't buy this items. Thanks Amazon, I'm using now only Ebay & AliExpress for crap Chinese things.
- Paradigma11 10y ago
  This is strange since i shop from amazon.de and changed my display language to english.
arien 10y ago
A side effect from this is that their Amazon Basics brand becomes more valuable, as the products are actually decent and from someone you trust. Perhaps this was the plan all along...
- antisthenes 10y ago
  All I can tell you is that they aren't doing the whole 3rd party marketplace out of the goodness of their heart. What better way to do market research than to pit tens of thousands of individual resellers and manufacturers against each other to determine demand and equilibrium prices of the end consumer? Then you just private label it and cut out all the middlemen, and sell direct. There's no way they can now compete with you, because: 1. You're Amazon, so you have the brand behind your product 2. You're Amazon, so you have efficiencies of enormous scale (in both manufacturing and distribution) 3. You're Amazon, so you can actually kick them off the market and delete their listing for any bullshit reason you can put in your TOS
rossng 10y ago
Agreed. My parents bought a hard drive from Amazon a couple of months ago - something I used to assume would have been absolutely fine. When it arrived, it became clear that the drive had been pulled out of a server, possibly relabelled and then sold as new. Now I just buy PC components from Scan. As for Amazon - I stick to the stuff that comes directly from their warehouses. Even the items that they handle distribution for can't be trusted anymore.
iwontreddit 10y ago
What's even worse is that their prices aren't even competitive anymore! It is cheaper for me to buy floss refills at my local supermarket than it is to buy on amazon. WTF! The crazy part is when I see reviews last year of a window fan where they say "the fan is made of cheap plastic but decent for $19.99" and this year, the same exact fan is listed as $39.99. It's sad how everything that was good about amazon is slowly getting whittled away. But hey, at least the stock is at all time highs and bezos is making a killing.
hackaflocka 10y ago
Knock-offs abound on not only Amazon, but also on eBay. There was an article on HN recently about the difference between a knock-off Macbook charger and a real Apple one. I'm one of those who unknowingly bought a knock-off charger off of eBay (the price was low so I bought it). I can't believe that they could make such an exact copy (externally). From the outside it's indistinguishable from my original Apple charger.

by uptown 10y ago

aresant 10y ago

Very good point on the "got product free" reviews - seems bizarrely misguided.

mjg59 10y ago
In the absence of name recognition, it's pretty much the only way small vendors have to differentiate themselves from any of the other vendors selling devices in the same space. The problem is that many of these reviewers end up just giving five stars and then re-selling unopened packages on ebay or craigslist, and many of the vendors expect high score reviews and will pressure reviewers if they don't get them. Blocking all incentivised reviews is one way of dealing with this, but it comes at the cost of it being more difficult to know whether a cheap equivalent from an unknown vendor is worth the savings or not. Some sort of reviewer trust weighting might be more useful here.
- tracker1 10y ago
  Even weighting reviews on how much the reviewer spends on Amazon per year relative to the product cost would go a long way.
- _wmd 10y ago
  Mailing customers a "3 click questionnaire" some time after purchase might be enough, it seems to work just fine for e.g. delivery food marketplaces.

sawthat 10y ago

Amazon sells Duracel and Energizer as well as super cheap shady crap from China. The same seems to be the case in every category.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

tacostakohashi 10y ago

Yes, this is true, and surprising to me as well. For certain products, the pricing + shipping is not at all competitive (toiletries, for example). In many other categories, there might be a product with a nominal price of, say, $10 offered by dozens of different merchants, at more or less every combination of price + shipping from $0.50 + $9.50 up to $10 + $0 imaginable. It's a huge waste of the consumer's time, you'd think they'd be better off either providing sensible pricing for a category, or not carrying it at all. Needless to say, it's nowhere near as much a go-to provider as it was 4-5 years ago.

tuna-piano 10y ago

It's really an awful process buying a lot of items nowadays. It seems like the exact same item will be sold under 30 different brands with different star levels, with many reviews full of the "free product" in for honest (usually 5 star) reviews. I wish Jeff Bezos would try buying a travel adapter (among many other items I've tried to buy recently) and tell me that it's a customer friendly process: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_pg_1?rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Atravel+adapter&keywords=travel+adapter https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_pg_1?rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Atravel... There are approximately 5 actually different adapters sold under maybe 50+ brands, and all the reviews are so padded with 5* free reviews, it's tough to know which ones are crap and which are good. Reviews aren't as important for retailers like Wal-Mart that curate their products. But for a marketplace like Amazon, reviews are absolutely critical to prevent scams. I hope Amazon realizes the enormity of this issue and is working on it. I believe Amazon should: 1. Fix the reviews. Disallow giving items for free or reduced prices in exchange for reviews. This may have worked originally for books, but any benefit received now is far out shadowed by the negatives. Alternatively, just limit it to 5 total free / reduced reviews per product to limit the negative effect. Police this policy heavily. 2. For the duplicate products (where one identical product is sold under 10 different brands, like in the travel adapter example above): Group the products together, and choose the brand like you might choose the color or size on a t-shirt. I recognize that there isn't a UPC numbering system that makes this easy - but there are probably only a few thousand items required to group together to make the buying process a lot easier for a large percentage of purchases.

kordless 10y ago
I work at Data Alchemy. We're an Amazon Merchant who runs our system on a search engine, built by search engineers who used to be at Looksmart and Loggly. Amazon does merge ASINs occasionally to help improve quality of listings (and merging comments), but we've found focusing the algos on the listings that both sell well and get a lot of good comments and support work really well. Our store on Amazon is the result of this search algorithm running on about 1.7 million listings: https://www.amazon.com/s?me=AZHZ102UTKBMA https://www.amazon.com/s?me=AZHZ102UTKBMA
- 10y ago

honkhonkpants 10y ago

Amazon's house batteries are rebranded Sanyo. I just buy those. Takes the guesswork out of it.

r00fus 10y ago
Is that their goal? To ultimately outcompete all their suppliers with an inhouse brand? How utterly banal. I remember a recent article about Rain, Inc (I had one of their beautiful 2006 iMac stands) and how Amazon essentially cut their price in half offering the same product with an Amazon logo instead.
- tluyben2 10y ago
  How can you trust a retailer like Amazon though: they are not only an e-commerce saas, they are a retailer themselves so obviously for anything they see a market they will just offer themselves. They can use the data from 3rd party sellers as market research for free (actually they get paid for their research!).
  - r00fus 10y ago
    You can't but you have little choice as Amazon rules online retail. Think Wal-Mart in the 2000s.
creshal 10y ago
Sanyo have a pretty bad reputation, however. From all the OEMs making Thinkapd batteries, theirs have the worst life expectancy.
- tesseract 10y ago
  I am not sure what other commenters had in mind but the Amazon house brand batteries I'm thinking of are AA and AAA rechargeables. They are low-self-discharge NiMH - the Sanyo brand is "Eneloop" which is the original member of this category and still well respected as far as I know.

Silhouette 10y ago

I'd settle for knowing if and when the real UK version of a DVD/Blu-ray/box set is coming out and then finding it without numerous clones when it does. Apart from books, this used to be the one thing Amazon clearly did better than almost anyone else. Today, particularly for US TV shows, there are usually lots of alternatives available from non-Amazon-but-kinda-from-Amazon sources long before anything official is released here. However, prices and availability shown vary almost by the minute and sometimes rather sharply, and even whether the discs will actually play in a UK region player often seems like a random result. I've really been going off Amazon in recent years, particularly since they started trying to be all things to all people, using highly volatile pricing algorithms, and spamming upsell promotions all over their previously straightforward checkout process. Sadly, since they had also successfully killed off just about everyone selling physical media from bricks and mortar stores first, and since I prefer to actually own my media instead of renting it from some streaming service, there are few other suppliers left. Competition has utterly failed in the movie and TV show market now, and I fear this will only get worse as more films and TV shows are locked into one proprietary library/streaming service or another as the only (legal) source and even the likes of Amazon can't supply real permanent copies.

jloughry 10y ago

Yep. Small products from Apple like chargers and cables, HP inkjet cartridges, and other things where I'd prefer to have the original product for safety or performance reasons, are impossible to buy from Amazon. Every seller insists it's "Genuine HP" in factory sealed cartons and...it's not. The same thing happens with pens. Cheap knock-offs, every time. Reading the reviews on Amazon is unhelpful, because the reviews are polluted with apparently deliberate misinformation. It's got to the point where I either order Apple chargers from Apple directly or go to one of their retail stores in person, and I always buy inkjet cartridges in person. (I don't like fires and I don't like clogged inkjet nozzles.) Amazon is great for lots of things, but not small, easily counterfeited, safety critical items.

ricg 10y ago
Another anecdote: I tried to buy Apple EarPods on Amazon. The first search result, ranked #13 in the best sellers claims "Apple EarPods Genuine OEM" for $9.99 when all reviews say "do not buy, not genuine!". How can Amazon let these products be listed??? I ended up buying them for $30 in person at my local electronics store.
- ralfd 10y ago
  Had the same experience. I think there was even an Amazon EarPod review which photographed the label stating "designed in colifornia" (sic!).
- SonicSoul 10y ago
  Off topic but why do you like those enough to pay $30? They're horrible at noise reduction (for you and those around you) and have shit for low frequencies. You can get a much better pair from Sony at that price . Always curious why people use them
  - itchyouch 10y ago
    Personally have never liked the sealed ear buds as the seals usually do not fit correctly. More importantly though, most of the time I need the ability to listen to the ambient noise around me to catch other people talking to me or hearing announcements like train stops. The sealed off from the world feeling is usually only useful when concentrating on a task and that is pretty rare.

colanderman 10y ago

Looks like a good space for Amazon Basics to expand into. In fact they already have: https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Performance-Alkaline-Batteries-48-Pack/dp/B00MNV8E0C https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Performance-Alkaline-Bat...

tracker1 10y ago
If they're comparable to Amazon Basics speakers or USB cables, I wouldn't touch them....
- tehbeard 10y ago
  What's the problem with the speakers?
  - tracker1 10y ago
    One pair didn't work, another only one of the two speakers worked, the other was mostly noise and almost no sound, and the third had a really bad background hum. Note these were all on sound card(s) where other speakers had worked fine... so one good experience, and three bad ones. They were pretty cheap, in that I didn't return them, but left an appropriate review in the end. They were mainly gifted out (and later thrown in the trash) to friends at work, etc. I got mine so I could have a set of speakers to hear the occasional audio at work at the time... which worked great.. I got some of the same for a couple coworkers, and another set passed along when I'd upgraded my computer at one point. I have M-Audio AV-40's speakers on my desktop at home, and Mackie CR3's on my spare... both are great sets of speakers I can't say good enough things about. Given it's a $10=15 pair vs over $100 ... I wasn't expecting huge sound from the Amazon speakers, that said, I've seen other speakers in that price range that worked far better.
stoolio 10y ago
After my huge stash of AA I got from woot (before they were owned by amazon and had pretty good daily deals) ran out, I bought some of these Amazon batteries. I only use them for remotes, controllers, and the occasional flashlight, but they've worked very well.

sowbug 10y ago

I'd like the compensated-for-review bit to be a checkbox, and then to be able to set a profile setting that excludes them from reviews and ratings. As it is today, I have to scan reviews for the telltale text, then mentally recalculate the rating from whatever's left. I doubt Amazon would do this, because they probably consider these reviews to be barely on the good side of the line between fake and real, and higher ratings undoubtedly lead to more sales. Moreover, before the FCC rule change, this probably happened all the time but nobody disclosed it at all.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
I wonder if this is something that could be addressed as a userscript.

at-fates-hands 10y ago

The ironic thing for me is I'm doing more shopping on Ali Express these days. I start on Amazon, but invariably land at Ali Express. Sure you might have to wait for the slow boat from wherever your product came from, but the savings is almost always better than Amazon

Bombthecat 10y ago
And most of the stuff is anyway from there :)
- makomk 10y ago
  And you can easily view feedback from people who bought that product from that particular seller, unlike on Amazon.

pmorici 10y ago

I think you are making it out to be a lot worse than it is. Simply filtering your search to only products shipped from and sold by Amazon.com eliminates all the garbage.

tracker1 10y ago
There are some classes of product Amazon doesn't sell, or isn't in a large enough variety... I usually stick to Prime sellers though, and I do check the 5-star reviews and reviewers...
- hga 10y ago
  I too used to try to use that metric, but as you say, it frequently doesn't work. A highly tuned BS detector is your best tool ... and for better or worse, that's more and more true as time goes by in most venues. Assume everything might be junk. Even some items from the best companies, i.e. I've been buying and will be buying more precision tools from Starrett lately, Made in the USA and all that jazz, and it shows. But when I went to buy a small metric open wrench set, the reviews indicated their's was anomalously subpar (so I went with another vendor with a good product, and then I got straight from Amazon Prime a mispacked Imperial set in a metric labeled baggie :-( Sometimes you can't win, although the return was painless (well, after I convert the image to a raster one, the normal shipping labels are the only thing that kills my heavy duty but old Brother printer, but not my father's much newer and cheaper one) since there's a UPS drop-off in walking distance.) So, distrust and verify, and learn the particular patterns that signal relative trustworthiness, like 96% or better reputation for merchants (but if they don't do much business and are one of the few or only who sell the item, check the bad reviews because so many are self-evidently bogus), and of course shill reviews. And especially a fine tuned sense of "if it's too good to be true...." Or take another example: pretty much all US market washing machines are shit, because the government pays the companies to make them worse and worse each year by using less energy (lower water temps, and I'll bet less agitation), Whirlpool, which only does appliances, paid no Federal corporate income taxes for at least 2 years because of this scam. So when my 2007 not so bad GE washer had a $$$ expensive problem to fix (since to make it cheaper to manufacture, and a one level more reliable in the field, with a solenoid attached to a major part that you can't fix in the field without replacing everything), I checked out the competition, and Speed Queen's consumer line was highly spoken of. Seems they bought an old Whirlpool? plant and rights to make an old model, which reading between the lines uses the old electro-mechanical cycle selectors/timers, which of course fail with some regularity. But Amazon reviews saved me from a fatal flaw in their business model: if you need a major repair, e.g., due to a manufacturing defect (fairly rare) or shipping damage (it happens on big heavy items like this), you're SOL. They pay their network of third party repairmen a fixed rate by the incident, so if one of timers needs replacement they'll do it quickly and with a smile, if it's something serious they won't give you the time of day (so I spent maybe 1/3 of the cost of new Speed Queen on a repair by the local GE shop which my family has a 3 generation relationship with (my paternal grandparents actually sold them their first store front on Main Street, where they were selling newly hatched chickens and turkey, and it helped that the washing machine is of very good design and good build quality). Which I can't blame them on, you don't make ends meet by working long hours at a loss, but let's just say that reviews like that make me a loyal Amazon customer, they've saved me enough money that I'm willing to pay them small premiums for the stuff I do buy from them, especially given how reliable that process is.

mdip 10y ago

This is the worst problem on Amazon and it plagues many of the products I buy frequently. Particularly in the rather open world of 3D printers, it's difficult to discern the brand name from the clones (E3D v6 Extruder?). But it's awful for generic "parts" like bearings, where the quality parts can't even be sold on Amazon by third-parties because the fifteen pages of generics that cost 95% less make the likelihood of selling the higher-end one very low. I guess the problem with the "everything store" is that you can't possibly get your arms around "everything" to make the purchasing experience consistent. As Amazon has moved to become "more like eBay", the quality of product listings has suffered immensely. The information needed to make an informed decision on a large chunk of their products is just missing and the wild-west of seller provided products leads to knock-offs and clone products that are difficult to discern quality versus junk. On many of these products, user reviews (if there are any) don't help because they require more than a hobbyist/amateur to provide a useful review. The usual defense is "returns are easy", but because of Prime, I use Amazon as a first choice when something breaks down. I need that part today, but there's no retail store that sells it, so tomorrow will do. If I could wait a few days, I'd use a trusted supplier who carries only the higher quality. My most recent horrible experience with this was looking for 608 bearings. 608s are the same bearings used in inline skates[0]. Searching for them, however, requires you to use a variety of terms since the inline skate bearings almost never indicate that they're 608s. The user reviews for the kind I need are worthless, as is the price (high-end bearings are often unsealed, but also overkill at sometimes upwards of $100 for a set of 16). 608s, thankfully, have a standard rating (ABEC) that many people know about (but few really understand how limited this rating is). ABEC ratings indicate the tolerances of the bearings, not the resistance, but it tends to equate that higher ABEC bearings have less resistance. That is, until you search for them on Amazon. The first time I purchased bearings, I went to the Industrial/Scientific category and grabbed a set of four ABEC9s that I supremely over-paid for. They rattled and vibrated when spinning ... these were not ABEC9 bearings despite the italicized labeling on the rim. I returned them and replaced them with a set of eight ABEC9 inline skate bearings that were priced at $3.00 shipped (I've not seen a price even close to that since)! These had a mess of reviews that had the pattern of "They spun fine when I installed them but then ceased up after a few uses", indicating that they were almost certainly not sealed bearings[1]. After testing the ones I received, I promptly purchased 15 more sets of 8 in hopes I'd never have to hunt down 608s again. [0] I learned that the inline skate versions are a little easier to discern quality from since the reviewer can tell pretty quickly. Bad bearings ruin the experience very quickly. [1] I usually avoid inline skate bearings. You can usually trust the reviews for bearings that are very well sealed. You can't trust any others (including ones that claim to be sealed but really aren't). Buyers of bearings for inline skates often don't know using unsealed bearings will last anywhere from minutes to hours of use on a city street with debris ripping through them. Using sealed bearings in 3D printers and similar devices is fine, but you need to make sure you buy very good bearings because adding lubrication is nearly impossible (taking them apart without launching parts everywhere or breaking some portion of the bearing is almost impossible).

peteretep 10y ago

I wonder how many of the products this is true for also have Amazon Basics equivalents.

tracker1 10y ago
Not sure... I had really good luck with a pair of Amazon Basics speakers, in that I bought 3 more pairs... all three after the first set had issues. Beyond this, their USB cables are garbage for charging, okay for data transfer. Given the poor experience, I'm unlikely to buy any more Amazon branded products.

anexprogrammer 10y ago

Unless you're buying a specific product Amazon has become a worse mess than eBay. Shill reviews and shoddy, awful products. I'll never understand why they made the marketplace choices they did - they've ruined their brand in my eyes. If you're searching for batteries or some such, the search is terrible. Far too many items that don't meet search criteria included, far too much reliance on their worthless star rating. They're ok to buy a book, CD or a known brand item. For anything else it's too much of a lottery now, I spend my money elsewhere.

bogomipz 10y ago
But you can tell by the reviewers if they are verified no? I have a problem with the independent kindle books, I like to support independent publishing but so many of them are unreadable due to poor formatting and spelling errors. I realize these are low margin but its still the Amazon/Kindle brand.
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  Even that is minimally helpful. You can't exclude non-verified reviews in search or overall rating. You can't believe that they're in any way helpfully independent - it would be the easiest thing in the world to seed your shoddy product's life on Amazon with verified reviews from employees and friends. I've seen reviews on some products that seems to indicate this is happening at least sometimes. Having lost trust it is going to be near impossible to regain it. You mention the Amazon/Kindle brand - they don;t, from the way they are managing it, appear to care very much about it. I used to believe the bad ebook formatting was an early days teething issue, but years later it is still relatively common.

vinhboy 10y ago

As someone who really likes Amazon, I really hope someone at Amazon read this and brings it to Jeff Bezos. The fake reviews are absolutely killing Amazon's usefulness to me. This, and the practice of grouping reviews for unrelated items (notorious for things like phone cases). I am guessing that this is probably the result of doing data analytics and finding that sales increase by allowing these shady practices. But eroding your brand and making the site less useful to loyal customers will eventually catch up to you when dedicated customers leave and evangelize other services. Please fix it!

tracker1 10y ago
What's funny, is it's really upset me that Newegg has headed in this direction as well... It's better than most things when you're looking for very specific products, but the generic items on Amazon are horrible.
mlvljr 10y ago
>> I really hope someone at Amazon read this and brings it to Jeff Bezos I imagine the huge smile on Jeff's face

tracker1 10y ago

Yeah, I'll usually check those user's other reviews, when the top reviews are all 5-star... if they don't have any other reviews at 3 or less, I'll generally move on to another product. The worst ones is when there's 4-5 unrelated products, and the same reviewers on all 5 of them all 5-star reviews. It's getting pretty bad... I think they should remove the weight of all ratings for users that have spent less than $1k on Amazon, and those that haven't continued to spend at least $100 a year... there's enough people that do spend that much regularly to count those reviews as a higher weighting..

emp_zealoth 10y ago
I'm super aggravated that you cannot easily check negative reviews. Most of the time positive ones are so vague (even if not shilled), meanwhile the negative ones will say "flimsy switch that will break", "500000 lumen standby diode", "leaks", etc etc
- tracker1 10y ago
  Yeah, but plenty of the 1-star reviews are because of shipping issues with the seller... I'd love to see the 2-4 star reviews... I also avoid most things that are all 1 or 5 star... if there aren't a few 2-4 and there's more than a dozen reviews, it's obviously got issues... It sucks that I have to think about though.

dotch 10y ago

This is exactly why I slowly shifted my amazon purchases to their prime-now app. With that service, Amazon seems to only offer the most successful, products in each category, significantly reducing the burden of choice it puts on me. It also does not include products of third party sellers, which decreases the risk of accidentally buying knock offs. The experience of buying e.g. Apple accessories on Amazon's main website is horrible, on prime now it is effortless and safe.

nommm-nommm 10y ago
>decreases the risk of accidentally buying knock offs...now it is... safe. I'm not sure it really decreases the risk that much, maybe some. With stickerless commingled inventory a third party seller can easily mix their fakes in with the real products and those fakes can end up "sold and shipped by Amazon." and stuff like this - http://www.wsj.com/articles/on-amazon-pooled-merchandise-opens-door-to-knockoffs-1399852852 http://www.wsj.com/articles/on-amazon-pooled-merchandise-ope... >German knife maker Wüsthof recently told its authorized distributors that come June 30, they can no longer store its products in Amazon's warehouses, because the manufacturer doesn't want the merchandise commingled with items from unauthorized third-party sellers, said Todd Myers, vice president of sales at Wüsthof-Trident of America Inc. >Authorized Wüsthof distributors may still sell through Amazon, they just can't use its fulfillment service, meaning they have to ship purchases themselves to customers. Wüsthof itself stopped selling its knives directly to Amazon around two years ago, according to Mr. Myers.
- hga 10y ago
  Is there anything more stupid that they do than pool merchandise? I've heard a horror story about a DVD reseller who was foolish enough to do that, an "equivalent" pirated unit was shipped to a customer, which prompted Amazon to cancel his account and force him to pay money he couldn't afford to either ship the inventory back or destroy it (Amazon is very sensitive to media piracy, I've gathered, with their video service I guess they have to be, which suggests to me they should have stayed more focused).
  - 10y ago

madshiva 10y ago

Totally agree. I would also add that I can't buy anything from Amazon. Why? because they don't care about Switzerland. We have 3 language and should be able to switch from DE/FR/IT, but no, if we want in FR we need to go the amazon.fr because amazon.ch redirect to amazon.de why? I don't talk German and then we can't buy anything. This is a mess because you see the product, seem everything fine until you want click the buy button and see after that you can't buy this items. Thanks Amazon, I'm using now only Ebay & AliExpress for crap Chinese things.

Paradigma11 10y ago
This is strange since i shop from amazon.de and changed my display language to english.

arien 10y ago

A side effect from this is that their Amazon Basics brand becomes more valuable, as the products are actually decent and from someone you trust. Perhaps this was the plan all along...

antisthenes 10y ago
All I can tell you is that they aren't doing the whole 3rd party marketplace out of the goodness of their heart. What better way to do market research than to pit tens of thousands of individual resellers and manufacturers against each other to determine demand and equilibrium prices of the end consumer? Then you just private label it and cut out all the middlemen, and sell direct. There's no way they can now compete with you, because: 1. You're Amazon, so you have the brand behind your product 2. You're Amazon, so you have efficiencies of enormous scale (in both manufacturing and distribution) 3. You're Amazon, so you can actually kick them off the market and delete their listing for any bullshit reason you can put in your TOS

rossng 10y ago

Agreed. My parents bought a hard drive from Amazon a couple of months ago - something I used to assume would have been absolutely fine. When it arrived, it became clear that the drive had been pulled out of a server, possibly relabelled and then sold as new. Now I just buy PC components from Scan. As for Amazon - I stick to the stuff that comes directly from their warehouses. Even the items that they handle distribution for can't be trusted anymore.

iwontreddit 10y ago

What's even worse is that their prices aren't even competitive anymore! It is cheaper for me to buy floss refills at my local supermarket than it is to buy on amazon. WTF! The crazy part is when I see reviews last year of a window fan where they say "the fan is made of cheap plastic but decent for $19.99" and this year, the same exact fan is listed as $39.99. It's sad how everything that was good about amazon is slowly getting whittled away. But hey, at least the stock is at all time highs and bezos is making a killing.

hackaflocka 10y ago

Knock-offs abound on not only Amazon, but also on eBay. There was an article on HN recently about the difference between a knock-off Macbook charger and a real Apple one. I'm one of those who unknowingly bought a knock-off charger off of eBay (the price was low so I bought it). I can't believe that they could make such an exact copy (externally). From the outside it's indistinguishable from my original Apple charger.