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Amazon isn't an online retailer. It's something else. They don't have inventory, not in the sense that anyone can understand it. They do represent sellers (incl
by euroclydon 9y ago
Amazon isn't an online retailer. It's something else. They don't have inventory, not in the sense that anyone can understand it. They do represent sellers (including themselves) of items, ostensibly categorized, but the search results are infuriating.
I was trying to buy school supplies, of which they had prominently linked categories, since it's that time of year. But when I searched for some package of paper, binders, or pencils, if I sorted by price, it included so many wrong products, then I never knew how to just find the best price for a given SKU. Combine that with downright scary results, I'm only left with scanning for reassuring logo's like Prime X and Prime Y.
It's a bazar full of hucksters.
[Edit] Also, I'm a Prime member, and buy everything I can there. Just the other day, I needed ink for by Brother printer. The brother ink was three times as much as the knock off. I really like Brother the company, and I wanted to buy their ink, but the budget that month was tight. So I went with the knock off. It's working fine.
- swiley 9y agoI feel like it only exists because of how awful online payments are, at the end of the day they're just the new paypal.
- DigitalBison 9y agoCan you go into more detail on what you mean by "they don't have inventory"?
- euroclydon 9y agoI mean they don't have "inventory" in the dictionary definition of the word. I search for items, and they will sell or fulfill an order that I click on, but the results are a confusing list of pseudo-similar things. It's just like searching the internet for a product, not like buying from a store. It would be like if I went into Target, and rather than an organized collection of products, it was a flea market with real and knock-off items lumped together in big piles all around the floor. And then a bunch of helpful employees to get me checked out real fast when I made a decision.
- brudgers 9y agoI'm an eBay member and it doesn't require a subscription and it seems competitive with Amazon for knockoff ink...I'm also a fan of Brother, but mostly for their cheap laser printers. I'm kinda' meh on their inkjets (I've owned three Brother lasers and three Brother inkjets over the years). Then again, I am pretty much meh on inkjets in general due to the high maintenance and modern habit of refusing to print black when the cyan cartridges is empty. Anyway, I think (perhaps naively) that eBay's economic incentives are less misaligned with mine than Amazon's. I certainly feel that its platform is designed to provide a sense of greater transactional transparency.
- ikeboy 9y agoYou find the product first, then go to the list of all sellers which will be sorted by price.
- eridius 9y agoJust so you know, using the wrong ink in your printer can lead to clogging up the nozzles. I wouldn't trust knock-off printer ink to be correct. Maybe you'll be lucky and everything will work fine, or maybe you're knocking years off of the lifetime of your printer.