6 ms·

Can someone make a website that sells stuff to me and has good selection, pricing, and customer service, and doesn't welcome the absolute dregs of the internet

• whitepoplar 8y ago
  Shopping on Amazon these days feels like walking through a back alley in Shanghai trying to find a pair of authentic Nike Air Jordans.
  • thrower123 8y ago
    I am mystified as to what people are buying that they have such problems with fakes and knock-offs on Amazon. I've had Prime for around a decade, and I can remember exactly once where they screwed up and sent me a wrong package.
    • whitepoplar 8y ago
      Can you tell whether or not this is authentic?: https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Lightning-Cable-iPhone-6S/dp/B07K9K7QFY https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Lightning-Cable-iPhone-6S/dp/B0... It's the first seemingly non-third-party listing on Amazon.com for the search term, "iPhone lightning cable." It's the 4th search result. If you hover over the first of "Other sellers" you'll see a store which has a 67% satisfaction rating. If you click through and read the negative reviews, almost all of them list getting a fake product. Amazon lists the brand of the cable as "Apple." The item description says that it comes in "non-retail packaging."
      • holtalanm 8y ago
        looks authentic to me, but if it gets the job done, do I really care if it is authentic? no. the answer is no.
        • whitepoplar 8y ago
          You're okay with paying a premium for what turns out to be a fake product? What if it ends up burning your house down?
        • paulrpotts 8y ago
          Because a cheap knockoff device that plugs into AC current could kill you. http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and-why-you.html http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and...
          • jaggederest 8y ago
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Hdn0MuCK_0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Hdn0MuCK_0 is another interesting example.
            • paulrpotts 8y ago
              Hooo boy, that is scary!
          • holtalanm 8y ago
            well, then, it wouldn't be getting the job done, now would it?
            • acct1771 8y ago
              .............
        • chenster 8y ago
          You can get a 6-feet lightning cable from Five Below b&m.
      • switch007 8y ago
        [not the parent] Apple.com's cheapest lightning cable is $19.99, and I don't recall ever seeing a 3rd party discount a genuine product by so much, and it says "Non-Retail Packaging" which is a bit strange, so I'd assume it's a knock-off. But you make a good point — it says "Apple" and it is the first result that looks exactly like the original: my family members would probably buy it. On a related note, is this an AmazonBasics knock-off? https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Lightning-USB-Cable-Certified/dp/B010S9N6OO https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Lightning-USB-Cable-Cert... or are they really selling a product that bad (looking at the reviews/photos)?
        • whitepoplar 8y ago
          Right? It's ridiculous. Why does Amazon let random, unvetted third parties list products under the Apple brand? I can't even find the authentic cable on Amazon. Here's another: https://www.amazon.com/Apple-MD819AM-Meter-Lightning-Cable/dp/B014LFT8H0 https://www.amazon.com/Apple-MD819AM-Meter-Lightning-Cable/d... Same $19.99 price as an Apple original. Amazon lists "Apple" as the brand. But read the reviews--2.5 stars over 379 reviewers. First review: "Fake Apple cable. Doesn't work." Under "Other sellers," Amazon.com is listed as an alternative, albeit for $5 more. That one is surely authentic, right? But what if the inventory is co-mingled with that of the other sellers for the same product?
          • dahdum 8y ago
            Amazon will sell the counterfeits just as willingly as through a third party, from my experience at least.
        • everdrive 8y ago
          I'd suspect the problem might actually be the NUMBER of reviews --- 26,000 is a lot, and I suspect many of the reviews are bots meant to tip the score.
      • friedman23 8y ago
        This is insane, I actually believed I was buying from Apple when I saw their name listed under the product.
      • hrktb 8y ago
        The interesting part to me is the reviews are half one stars. For a lot of things I buy on amazon, being authentic or not is irrelevant, being of good quality or not is my only concern. Of course for a lot of brands 'authenticity' and good quality go together, but that's only a signal to me, authentic products can also be crap. Perhaps that's also why I don't buy most brand stuff on amazon, as it gives me nothing more than the official retailer's site, prices should be the same, and customer service will be on par or better. To be clear I don't condone selling fakes, I just think it's a fool's errand to look for 'good deals' on amazon or any third party site when it comes products where brand matters over all.
      • MR4D 8y ago
        It’s fake. It’s sold by a company named “BREED”.
      • tjoener 8y ago
        For all small electronic phone/charger stuff I buy Anker. Hasn't let me down once.
      • overcast 8y ago
        Yes, it's not sold directly by Amazon but by a 3rd party named "BREED". That should be your red flag.
    • everdrive 8y ago
      I generally agree with you, but I have definitely seen some sketchy listings, and also bought really bad knockoff 9-Volt batteries. It's bad out there for some products.
    • skgoa 8y ago
      Uhm, how about trying to buy a genuine new battery for a MacBook? Buying the "Apple" product has resulted in 2/3 of the batteries I received being fakes. One of those fakes I got even when the site claimed I was buying and got fullfiled by Amazon. In the end I switched to going with obvious copies (where the seller did not make any attemot to mislead) whenever I needed a new battery.
    • saul_goodman 8y ago
      All depends on what you are buying. A lot things I could care less about, usually knock-offs are decent enough quality. But when you go out of your way to buy the genuine product and you get a fake that's a problem. I buy photography components off Amazon, buying a B&W UV filter has become impossible on Amazon. The fakes are actually a lot better than bottom-end UV lenses which is fine, but I didn't spend $45 for a knock-off. I spent that money for the real thing. If I could get the fake at a knock-off price I'd even consider it, but the fakes are being sold as the real thing at full price. After I found out how how to spot the fakes I found that half of the UV lenses I already had were fake. The real ones are made of brass and have better glass coatings. The fakes are made of aluminum and the threads are not as good which is important for lens filters, you don't want one getting jammed on a $1200 lens. They are painted black so the main way to tell them apart is to weigh them. The amazon review comments for B&W filters have extensive coverage of how to spot the fakes: https://www.amazon.com/77mm-XS-Pro-Clear-Multi-Resistant-Coating/product-reviews/B004OVE188/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_show_all_top?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews https://www.amazon.com/77mm-XS-Pro-Clear-Multi-Resistant-Coa...
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • gkanai 8y ago
    > in Shanghai trying to find a pair of authentic Nike Air Jordans. The fact of the matter is that today China is such an important market for Nike that it's probably easier to get a rare authentic Air Jordan in Shanghai than it is in your local American city. Greater metro Shanghai is larger than any single American city.
    • whitepoplar 8y ago
      You're 100% right and I simply wrote it as an ill-considered figure of speech. Too late to edit, but <facepalm>.
• burlesona 8y ago
  The problem is how hard it would be to create and scale an ethical Amazon competitor. Things like Etsy are the closest viable path I can think of, but I don't know how saintly they are either.
• ashrk 8y ago
  The difficulty is you have to achieve traction and scale to compete with a company that's making tons of money exploitatively and user-hostilely strip-mining their own system and running on low margins with high reinvestment due to their scale and (stock market) reputation. Good luck. See also: voice interfaces. Your nifty paid version that's entirely local? Good luck competing against free, cloudy, and data-stealing, especially when the data-stealing helps the competing services get better. There's a reason local voice-to-text seemed to be getting really good for a while then suddenly dropped into obscurity. See also also: any paid (or even free and volunteer-based!) website or service that might compete with ad-paid and/or information-harvesting and free. Uphill battle to gain user-share. You'll almost certainly fail, because information-harvesting is a possible business model and no matter how much people hate it they can't organize to stop it, realistically, because game theory (ahem, which is we have governments, in the short-short version)
  • snaky 8y ago
    OTOH OpenStreetMap is doing well, don't you think?
    • ashrk 8y ago
      I see it on here from time to time on here but have never heard a person in real life mention it, so... maybe? Incidentally, I'd pick map & navigation data as the one big Web thing that really ought to be handled by government. Up-to-date, freely (or very cheaply) available map data should be considered infrastructure, and government(s) ought to already be generating/collecting it. Let the private market get it to consumers, but governments ought to be providing good-enough data that there's no need for private collection of it, in the general case. Leave street view and business reviews and such to Google and friends, but enough data to build a pretty damn good navigation app should just exist for anyone to use. It's a huge waste of effort to have multiple organizations trying to put all that together and it's something governments should to already have the data to provide, given some coordination—great candidate for a government service, or at least one of those government-coordinated public-private shared-cost-shared-benefit projects, post-war Japan style.
• petra 8y ago
  1.buy Amazon brands or exclusives. 2.I'm not sure that this works: Amazon sellers can choose not to co-mingle. You got higher chances that brand's own Amazon store will prefer to be on the safe side.
  • snaky 8y ago
    'Maybe higher chances' is acute, while on Aliexpress (yes, Aliexpress) there are official brand stores with no co-mingling.
• rconti 8y ago
  No, because, in the end, you're looking for a perfect marketplace curated by perfect human beings that also scales to millions (billions?) of transactions. I hesitate to say it's impossible to scale this way, but all of the forms of editorial control we're looking for the Amazons and Facebooks of the world directly impact their ability to scale. You may say "that's fine", but of course they won't win on price against the thing that DOES scale, so there needs to be some outside force acting on it. Regulation, or every single consumer deciding they prefer X level of service over Y level of discount, or similar.
• retzkek 8y ago
  Costco (and costco.com) seems to be working on filling the niche of a trusted source for quality products at reasonable prices, with great customer service. All while treating their employees well (as I understand it).
  • paulddraper 8y ago
    The frequently quoted Costco (and costco.com) downside is the limited selection. But that's partly because they do a dang good job in selecting good stuff. You can walk into Costco, buy anything there and know that you got a pretty good thing for a pretty good price. (Not the best thing, or the best price, but pretty good.) And if you didn't, there's always the ridiculously good return/warranty policies.
  • CPLX 8y ago
    You know that's a good idea. I'm already a member. They're a little challenging for us New Yorkers though, all those massive sizes and so on. I've already moved basically all my electronics purchasing to B&H. Maybe I should just stop expecting Amazon to be something that it isn't.
    • kristo 8y ago
      The issue with B&H is how they support the chauvinist hasidic community not to mention their racism: https://hyperallergic.com/396180/bh-photo-settles-department-of-labor-lawsuit/ https://hyperallergic.com/396180/bh-photo-settles-department...
• rb808 8y ago
  target.com, bestbuy.com, macys.com, hd.com should cover everything you need without 3rd party stuff. They're working hard to stay relevant and actually pretty decent.
• maxxxxx 8y ago
  For electronics try B&H or Adorama.
  • kristo 8y ago
    I don't suggest B&H on account of how they support the hasidic community (cult) that treats women like shit not to mention their racism: https://hyperallergic.com/396180/bh-photo-settles-department-of-labor-lawsuit/ https://hyperallergic.com/396180/bh-photo-settles-department...
• JohnnyFortune 8y ago
  Absolutely. Amazon feels like a 3-rd part eCommerce site this days. And here is some help for everyone who wants to start small with online store: https://medium.com/@JohnBeardslee/woocommerce-guide-how-to-start-an-online-store-in-1-hour-3f8ae5e682d3 https://medium.com/@JohnBeardslee/woocommerce-guide-how-to-s...