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I've canceled my Amazon Prime account for two reasons. Firstly the advertising on Amazon has gotten out of control, I want the best product in my price range,
by theossuary 8y ago
I've canceled my Amazon Prime account for two reasons. Firstly the advertising on Amazon has gotten out of control, I want the best product in my price range, not the one with the largest marketing budget. And secondly, I've found if I go to a more niche market (Cabela's for sporting goods, Lowes for tools, branded clothing stores, etc.) I always get something better, sometimes at a more reasonable price too.
Amazon has turned into a warehouse, you have to know what you want coming in. The only reason I kept using them was because I was lazy and didn't want to have to manage purchases across multiple different websites. But it just isn't worth it when I kept consistently getting inferior products.
- jib 8y agoI paid for a year, but what used to be an obvious benefit is no longer that. I order some stuff, but had the same experience you did so I use orders less. Twitch prime used to justify paying half of the cost on its own, but that no longer gives me the one benefit I care about (no ads). That leaves video, which is a good fringe benefit, but not a main need for me. Amazon music was not a replacement for Spotify (too much things gated behind another 9 usd a month paywall). To me, it feels like they decided to slowly weaken the benefits of the overall package and hope inertia kept people from opting out (not to mention the dark patterns like cancelling subscription removes the benefits of the current subscription).
- teh_klev 8y agoWhat's rather galling about the streaming part of the Prime subscription is that a good chunk of content is now hived off into "Prime Video Channels", where they expect you to shell out another GBP4.99/month or more to watch previously "included with subscription" stuff. There's even films where you might have paid a couple of quid to watch that are now in these silos with no other option but to pay for the channel sub to view them, i.e. there are no other payment options. And to add insult to injury many of these channels are full of absolute dross.
- goostavos 8y agoThe cable channel subscription is an absolutely annoying business model. The nice thing about Amazon for awhile, versus, say, Netflix, was that you can rent movies ale cart for a few bucks if it wasn't already streaming. I don't want a subscription to Starz just to finally see that Spiderman movie. I'll buy a YouTube subscription before I pay for a cable package on a streaming service.
- teh_klev 8y agoI agree, this bullshit behaviour is not why I signed up for a Prime (and Netflix) subscription and binned Sky. But I can't help feel it's just around the corner and there's no escape.
- StreamBright 8y agoThis is exactly the reason I was cancelling my Prime as well. And the new delivery service Amazon introduced which had a 50% successful delivery rate. Once I was waiting for the truck to come and asked the driver how he attempted to deliver my stuff and he was just laughing at me. He and his co-workers stole 500 USD+ worth of products from Amazon and I could not get this incident reported, even the manager ignored the details and just kept saying I should report it missing and re-order it.
- zdragnar 8y agoThat sounds like a job for the police, not an Amazon employee.
- billyggruff 8y agoSo his taxes have to subsidize Amazon's lack of reliable process?
- zdragnar 8y agoNo customer service rep or low level manager is going to have the authority to deal with hearsay customer reports of criminal activity. That's a job for the police, and Amazon may wait to report it until there's corroborating reports or evidence. It's just as likely that they handed the report off, and it will be handled by someone else entirely. However, none of that makes the situation with the customer right; the customer's problem is they don't have a product. Re-shipping it is just about the only thing they can do in this case.
- sriram_sun 8y agoA few disparate items I've ordered from Amazon recently like a ping pong table, 6ft. ladder, storage container all are resellers directly passing your order through to Walmart. I've started visiting the brick and mortar Walmart store more often. Shopping online (essentially Amazon) used to be cheap and convenient. Now the expectations on quality have gone down to "OK if this works great, but do I really have the time to print the return label, package it again and ship it back?" Basically my level of trust in stuff sold on Amazon is much lower than what it used to be a few years back. For. e.g. 10 yrs. back - Plasma TV on Amazon? No problem. Now its Costco all the way for expensive electronics stuff. On one level, Amazon is just fleecing the sellers on their platform - all sorts of charges for combinations of ad words. A lot of sellers have figured out how to game the system. It's just an awful mess. I have been considering cancelling my prime membership for a couple of years now... inertia keeps me from doing it. I've tried Ali express as well. It was an OK experience. Now I'm browsing Etsy. Haven't really bought anything, but it's looking more attractive for household stuff. In summary, like theossuary, I believe figuring out your niche stores will be beneficial. Watch out for those Asics warehouse sales for workout clothes and shoes etc.
- brianbreslin 8y agoI haven't had a box from walmart yet from amazon, but know a guy who clears 6 figures a year doing this walmart arbitrage. I don't know how long he has in that business model before amazon starts price matching walmart.
- jjeaff 8y agoHis problem won't be Amazon price matching. It will be the drove of other arbitrage drones moving in on his products.
- brianbreslin 8y agoOr walmart bans him. He already got banned from Target.
- hrktb 8y agoIt seems you mainly have two level of expectations, one where you wish to find the best ever product for a specific niche you are ready to research and invest time into. And the other where you need to get recommendations and find 'the best product'. In that sense I think Amazon falls in-between. Personally I'll use sites like thewirecutter or other review sites to get an idea of what's on the market and what I should be looking for. It's only from there that I'll hit an online merchant to see what they sell and at what price. I get why it doesn't fit you style, it's a different approach.
- DoofusOfDeath 8y agoI think it was thewirecutter.com that had some controversy regarding editors appearing to extort a standing-desk manufacturer for a good review. I apologize for the vagueness / uncertainty, I'm having trouble finding a link to the story.
- chrisbolt 8y agohttps://thewirecutter.com/our-response-to-nextdesk/ https://thewirecutter.com/our-response-to-nextdesk/
- kkarakk 8y ago> We care about only one thing: helping our readers easily find and buy the best products for them they came so close to convincing me and then they had to trot out the platitudes. no business cares ONLY about the consumer
- eel 8y agoThe advertising is ridiculous. It used to be that the ads were one or two listings at the top or the bottom of the search results. Now they are top, bottom, side, and mixed in some of my search results and look more similar to non-sponsored listings. Over the summer I used Prime Video to watch Sneaky Pete, and every episode would start with a 30 second ad for a different Prime show. There was a skip button, but it was hidden, and I could only find it by long tapping. So I cancelled Prime. I felt silly paying Amazon to display ads at me.
- tokyodude 8y agoSearched for "Avengers" on the Apple TV Amazon Prime Video app. Scroll to right through results, after the movies it turns into user videos from amazon product reviews for Avenger merch.
- anonymous5133 8y agoCompletely agree. Amazon has grown to be a monopoly that doesn't value customer experience anymore.
- maxxxxx 8y agoSame here. Amazon used to be convenient but it slowly has turned into a stressful experience. Counterfeits, 20 listings of the same product with totally different prices, advertising, fake reviews and so on. Now I prefer eBay where at least the search function works or specialized stores with one listing per product. Newegg went the same path like Amazon and I have stopped using them. They used to be my favorite store.
- ukyrgf 8y ago+1 on Newegg. I built a PC last year, and unknowingly bought something from newegg.com that was in their Marketplace. Paid with Paypal, got charged by Newegg, but never got a confirmation email. I called Newegg, who had no record of the transaction, so I filed a claim on Paypal. Bought the part off Amazon, built my PC, waited for the claim to resolve. Three weeks later, suddenly the seller adds tracking to the Paypal claim, and a few days later the part that I no longer need shows up in a Newegg box. No invoice, packing sheet, etc. and it's still not listed on my Newegg account. My claim gets closed, and there's nobody I can even return this to. What a stupid, stupid situation.
- dylz 8y agoRe: https://www.riskiq.com/blog/labs/magecart-newegg/ https://www.riskiq.com/blog/labs/magecart-newegg/ Newegg has not said anything about this to me, nor explained why after a Newegg transaction my card was cancelled defensively and reissued. I haven't been able to trust Newegg in a very long time, which is sad. They used to be the gold standard, now it's a decrepit pit of dropshipping garbage.
- maxxxxx 8y agoIt's really sad. I don't know what Newegg's financials are but for me they went from being the gold standard for online stores to "don't use".
- lozaning 8y agoI was under the impression that you could filter out their marketplace sellers and that they didn't commingle their own inventory with anyone else's. Is that not the case? Where do you go for computer stuff that you can trust these days? Every box in all the Fry's stores around me all seem to have already been opened and returned twice by the time i see them.
- cheschire 8y agoI cancelled mine a few months ago. Tomorrow is my last day. They've been harassing me on their site constantly with popups and notifications on every single page since I cancelled. It's gotten to the point where the harassment has firmly cemented my distaste for their user experience and I actively search for alternative sites first now.
- alonmower 8y agoThis thread just got me to finally cancel mine. I had to click 4 times to get through the cancellation flow and was presented with three distinct screens that moved around the 'end membership' button and try to get you to click on buttons that keep you on as a member. This is probably the darkest pattern cancellation flow I've gone through in recent memory.
- maxxxxx 8y agoThey always try to sign me up for Prime for Students although I am not a student. There is no button to say "I am not in school. Really!"
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoThey do that for me because I have still have a university address on record associated with a .edu email from 20 years ago. Presumably deleting it would eliminate the nag.
- drb91 8y agoWhat you are describing has always been true, though. I’m not sure what change you are seeing that causes you to sour on amazon. Granted I’ve never received a counterfeit.
- maxxxxx 8y ago"Granted I’ve never received a counterfeit." The problem is you may not know. I have received several items from known brands that turned out to be low quality. I don't know if these brands just have started to make low quality items (very possible) or maybe the item was fake.
- drb91 8y agoI just buy high value items in person. The local economy can use the money anyway. The rest I don’t really care if they’re counterfeit so long as they function. Why on earth would you buy a Gucci purse from anywhere but Gucci? Caveat Emptor.
- darpa_escapee 8y agoSome brands sell lower quality goods with the same branding/packaging. Right now, there's an intersection of lower quality goods intended to be discounted with counterfeit goods flooding the market.
- ProAm 8y agoIt's become the walmart of the web. Lower quality or knock off products and a sometimes lower price. I canceled my prime because most the stuff I was looking to buy was never prime eligible for shipping. And Amazon steaming or music isnt worth the price either.
- nas 8y agoThis has been my experience as well. 20 years ago, you could go to Walmart and buy good quality brands at good prices. E.g. you buy a Dewalt drill, it is actually a high quality drill. What happened over time is that because of the extreme price pressure Walmart was putting on suppliers, they began to build special Walmart-only products. So, the Dewalt drill you buy has a great price but is also a piece of crap. I don't enjoy shopping at Walmart at all anymore, you are much better off to find a specially store. E.g. buy your drill the same place the professional carpenters shop. Amazon has seen a similar decline. Years ago, if you saw a product on Amazon, you could be confident it was as it was labelled, you would get it in a reasonable time and the price was about as good as buying anywhere else. Amazon quality now is total garbage. The store is littered with counterfit goods. If the price looks good, that's probably because the quality is absolutely terrible. I don't enjoy shopping there at all anymore.
- puranjay 8y agoLocally, Amazon is absolutely atrocious for clothes and shoes. I just get page after page of trashy, unrecognizable brands. They've been goofing up their delivery a lot lately too. Delivering items late or delivering the wrong items.
- anonymous5133 8y agoI've almost entirely stopped using amazon because the search is so goofy. For anyone is wondering. Try searching for clothing. The more specific you get, the more goofy the search results. For example, if you sort by "lowest to highest" price it doesn't even give you lowest price....lol the only way you find lowest price is if you literally dig through all the listings. I should be able to put in my clothing dimensions and then find all shirts/pants that fit those dimensions. I should also add in parameters like color type or style and get more refinement. Then I should be able to sort by price and see lowest price for all the shirts/pants that fit me....but that is not what happens.
- remir 8y agoBoggles my mind how Amazon, one of the top tech companies and leader in e-commerce, can have a terrible search engine.
- CptFribble 8y agoMy theory is that they're stuck between (cost of fixing it plus the cost to their pageview metrics if we suddenly didn't have to dig so much) and (cost of slowly simmering customer resentment from terrible UI). I imagine there's just no manager willing to charge the hill of better search when they'd have to die on the sword of plummeting pageview metrics for succeeding.
- GordonS 8y agoI have to agree - the search function is, and always has been, shockingly bad - ypu have to be too specific, and there just doesn't seem to be any reasoning to how it orders results.
- amanaplanacanal 8y agoAnd then you have to be really careful before you push the button to buy, because it may turn out that the item doesn't really match your search terms after all.
- sigi45 8y agoWhat? I first do research on what specific model I gonna buy and than check who has it the cheapest with a minimum good Shoprating. Often enough I can buy it from or through Amazon. How do you use Amazon that you will get different quality of a product in comparison to shopping somewhere else?