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The counterfeit and review manipulation issues have rendered Amazon unpleasant enough for me that buying local is something I've started to enjoy again. I trus

The counterfeit and review manipulation issues have rendered Amazon unpleasant enough for me that buying local is something I've started to enjoy again. I trust the merchant to have performed some kind of vetting for merchandise sold on premise, and the price is often good or (interestingly enough) even better than on Amazon. Often enough local is still more expensive, but it beats browsing Amazon for an hour, sifting through reviews that can no longer be trusted.

crowbahr 8y ago
I purchased some wire cutters a year or two ago from Amazon and they were fine for the speaker wire I was cutting... Until this year when I tried to cut a guitar string with them and found a perfect guitar gauged hole in my snips every time I tried to cut. I was irate, having paid $10 for these. So I go online to leave a review and warn people off... only to find that the seller "no longer existed". They absolutely did, and were selling their awful snips but had changed their name and paid for a bunch of 5 star reviews again. I've been far more aware as of late that whenever I search for something (say the staple gun I recently got my wife) all I get are offbrand or knockoff results showing for often several pages. I have to go, figure out which brands are reputable and then come back to actually make my purchase. I'd rather just go to a brick and mortar at this point. I'm definitely not renewing my amazon prime.
- paulgb 8y ago
  I had a similar experience with a cookbook I was gifted that turned out to be fake: the author had impressive credentials (top culinary schools, etc.) but when I went to find more information about her I couldn't - all I could find was the same "author photo" for sale on a stock photo site. The book was a cobbled-together collection of recipes, some incomplete, apparently collected haphazardly from around the web. I left a review saying this on the book, and Amazon deleted it because they thought my review was fraudulent. Of course, the book at the time had a 5-star rating from fake accounts.
- jahewson 8y ago
  Ha ha, I had the exact same experience cutting guitar string with wire cutters from my local dollar store.
  - lxhws 8y ago
    This will be your experience 99% of the time using cheap wire cutters on strings. They’re meant for soft copper wire, and strings have steel cores! The $5 guitar string tool will work every time, though.
- joshu 8y ago
  inexpensive wire snips are usually only good for cutting copper wire, though. they aren't made of hardened steel, which is necessary for cutting the steel guitar strings.
  - crowbahr 8y ago
    $10 is not inexpensive for wire snips though. Which is my complaint.
    - lostapathy 8y ago
      $10 is nothing compared to the cost of high end, quality hand tools that will last. In the case of a expecting to cut hardened wire, the cutter needs to be of a good alloy and hardened adequately to hold an edge. $10 doesn’t buy anything from the knipex catalog, for instance.
      - crowbahr 8y ago
        Guitar wire should be perfectly fine to cut with $10 snips. The $5 Stanley brand snips that I got to replace my terrible ones work like a charm. I recognize I don't have the heaviest duty cut-through-anything shears that I could have with more money, but where I'm mainly doing light jobs like speaker wire and guitar strings it's not a problem... unless the snips themselves are terrible. I don't expect to have to replace the Stanley set unless they become rusty from disuse.
    - DanBC 8y ago
      I worked in electronic sub-contract manufacturing for over ten years. We built products for coal mining, and test equipment for aerospace, and products for a variety of domestic and commercial uses. All of this involved use of a wide range of hand tools. A few people have told you that wire cutters come in two forms: hardened and not hardened, and that if you wish to cut steel you should buy cutters that are rated for steel. The price does not tell you this information. The data sheet for the tool does. Here's a pair of snips that cost over £50. I'd be displeased if you borrowed mine and used them to cut guitar wire. https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/cable-cutters/0614766/ https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/cable-cutters/0614766/ One thing you can't see in the images is that these cutters tell you what wire you can cut on them: https://imgur.com/a/Zk3LBCE https://imgur.com/a/Zk3LBCE If you want to cut steel you need snips that specifically say they can cut steel. These don't have to be expensive: Here are some for £7. https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/cable-cutters/0732820/ https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/cable-cutters/0732820/
- johnvanommen 8y ago
  > I purchased some wire cutters a year or two ago from Amazon and they were fine for the speaker wire I was cutting... Until this year when I tried to cut a guitar string with them and found a perfect guitar gauged hole in my snips every time I tried to cut. This is normal. For instance, when I work on my bicycle, I have to use a $40 Park Tool to cut brake lines and shifter cables. The $40 tool delivers far better results than you could ever get from a conventional wire cutter.
  - crowbahr 8y ago
    $10 snips should be better than that! I replaced them with $5 Stanley wire cutters that had 0 issue dealing with guitar strings. So what happened is I was given a 10c piece of junk and paid $10 for the privilege of being ripped off.
- joemi 8y ago
  > So I go online to leave a review and warn people off... only to find that the seller "no longer existed". They absolutely did, and were selling their awful snips but had changed their name and paid for a bunch of 5 star reviews again. I wouldn't be so certain about that. I've found that there are a lot of sellers selling the same things, but they're not the same sellers under different names, they're just getting stuff from the same places. Often, for cheap things, the source is AliExpress (or Alibaba), or potentially cutting out that middleman and just getting them direct from the companies that sell on aliexpress/alibaba. It's also been my experience that pretty much _anything_ that isn't a big name brand item being sold on Amazon can be found for much much cheaper on Aliexpress. The exact same product, just without the 1000%-2000% markup.
- CamperBob2 8y ago
  A good pair of dikes starts at about $80 and goes up from there. Don't use them to cut anything but copper wire. :)
- yellowapple 8y ago
  Guitar strings (or at least the ones I usually buy) tend to be a lot harder/tougher than your typical electrical wire (electrical wire usually ain't designed to be stretched to high tension and strummed/plucked repeatedly). Not that surprising that a $10 tool would have issues with them.
  - crowbahr 8y ago
    The $5 Stanley snips I bought later have no problem. It was just me getting ripped off.
alexforster 8y ago
My last two Amazon purchases ended up being counterfit, even after spending a ton of time trying to avoid counterfits. I'm still going to use my fake electric toothbrush heads and fake Apple 5W USB charger, but I'm not using Amazon anymore.
- pault 8y ago
  Careful with those fake chargers. They're known to catch fire.
  - behringer 8y ago
    There was a kid in the news recently who was electrocuted to death because of their fake charger. https://www.health.com/home/cell-phone-electrocution https://www.health.com/home/cell-phone-electrocution
    - wyldfire 8y ago
      That story looks bogus. Snopes [1] says: > Neither Sinar Harian nor its English-language peer the New Strait Times asserted that the youngster was electrocuted by the earphones he was wearing, but that was the conclusion reached by a number of international publications, including widely-read U.S.-based Vice and Teen Vogue, both of whom aggregated the story. ... > As an emergency room doctor, Uren& stopped short of calling the notion impossible because “I have seen some strange things in my career thus far,” but he added the story that the teen died from being electrocuted by earbuds “strains credibility.” [1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/electrocuted-by-earphones/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/electrocuted-by-earphones/
      - behringer 8y ago
        There's been multiple reports of people dying through headphones. Maybe they're all bogus, but considering an ER doctor presumably knows nothing about electronics, I'll disregard his opinion. Instead I'll listen to what an electronics engineer thinks about counterfeit chargers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi-b9k-0KfE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi-b9k-0KfE
thearn4 8y ago
I've noticed that it's all come full-circle for me again too, when it comes to purchasing from Amazon. It seems that I can't even trust the "verified purchase" reviews anymore.
- nkingsy 8y ago
  The practice of shipping empty boxes to shill reviewers is fairly widespread https://www.geekwire.com/2015/amazon-files-first-ever-suit-over-fake-reviews-alleging-calif-man-sold-fraudulent-praise-for-products/ https://www.geekwire.com/2015/amazon-files-first-ever-suit-o... "According to the suit, the site operated by Gentile offers to provide fake “verified reviews” for a premium, telling the sellers that they can ship empty boxes to reviewers involved in the scheme, to trick Amazon into thinking that the product had actually been purchased."
  - benologist 8y ago
    They're not really tricking Amazon when Amazon is giving a conscienscious zero fucks about any of these things. This is all happening at a rate they must find acceptable or they'd be acting to reduce these problems to a level they do find acceptable.
coldpie 8y ago
The third party seller stuff has really killed my faith in Amazon. If I wanted to have to read reviews for the entity selling the good and have some expectation of getting a counterfeit/broken good, I would go to eBay. I used to go to Amazon because I could trust them, but that trust is lonnng gone. These days I'm shopping more and more locally, because I can actually see the thing I'm buying. Side note: I'm sad to see NewEgg headed in this same eBay-clone direction.
- behringer 8y ago
  Actually I find ebay to be much better than Amazon for buying. I can read the seller reviews and I know they're generally legitimate. Particularly the negative reviews, which is all I need to see if I want to know what the seller does wrong, if anything. I can look up a seller to make sure he's sourced an item properly, for example, newegg sells SD cards on ebay so I know newegg is sourcing SD cards properly and I'm good to go. Or I look up a seller and they claim to be a licensed Nikon supplier I know I'm probably ok or I could even call up Nikon to verify they're a licensed supplier. If I want something fake/cloned I know I can just buy cheap from the chinese supplier and I don't have to pay a markup to a middle man. But if I want it right away, I can order from someone in the same state as me and pay a couple extra bucks, and I know it's the clone cuz the picture is the exact same. You get a lot of information on ebay that you don't get on Amazon.
  - zanny 8y ago
    The best part about Ebay is that if you do get a fraud item and can prove it Ebay simply refunds you and you can keep whatever you got since it wasn't what was advertised. Amazon to the best of my knowledge does make you return items for refunds even when they are frauds.
    - wolfi1 8y ago
      in some jurisdictions it is required to destroy these frauds
- Kevguy 8y ago
gdulli 8y ago
Browsing physical books is a lot more fun, too. Just looking at a shelf and picking something up and flipping through it. That's an experience you could never get on Amazon. Both in the sense of interacting with objects and also the discomfort of knowing that whatever the browse/search interface, the items you see are the results of "optimization".
cascom 8y ago
Agree - except for things that are <~$20 and don’t have a super high confidence of being in stock (random calculator battery or special kitchen utensil etc)
ericnyamu 8y ago
If you buy best sellers you cannot buy fakes. The first page full of bestsellers gives you enough choices. So do amazon search like bestselling <item>
RileyJames 8y ago
I’m in the US at the moment, road tripping around, never quite sure where I’ll be, even a few days out. Hence why It’s easier to buy local, than via any online store. But searching for products in the local area / at local stores is nearly impossible. Using google is useless, everything is e-commerce listings. And even if you search many local stores directly they make it nearly impossible to determine if the products are actually in stock/in store vs part of their ecommerce offering / available in store in 3-5 days. Does anyone know any decent options?
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  Walmart's website will tell you if it's available in their local store. You can also order online and pick up at the store without a delivery fee. You can also return or exchange items at a different Walmart if you keep your receipt.
  - RileyJames 8y ago
    Actually that’s cool, in the US they have these features. The Canadian Wal-Mart website was impossible in this regard, but in the US you can search only in store, today and within xx miles. Appreciate it.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      Home Depot and Target support this as well (Home Depot will even tell you the aisle and bin the item is in from their mobile app). Target inventory can be delayed up to 24 hours, so call ahead in case the quantity shown in store is low single digits.
- anitil 8y ago
  I suppose people just don't want you to know, so you're forced to browse? At one point I considered doing this as a business - paying people to walk through the store recording video that's then used to fill out a catalogue. Maybe offer it as a service to businesses.
yellowapple 8y ago
Unfortunately, there's a lot of stuff that simply can't be bought local (even in major cities, let alone small towns). The Internet is necessary in these cases. The good news is that there are plenty of smaller online stores that tend to be a bit more specialized, and as long as they accept something reasonably secure like PayPal or Bitcoin, I'm a lot less nervous about shopping on those sites instead.

crowbahr 8y ago

I purchased some wire cutters a year or two ago from Amazon and they were fine for the speaker wire I was cutting... Until this year when I tried to cut a guitar string with them and found a perfect guitar gauged hole in my snips every time I tried to cut. I was irate, having paid $10 for these. So I go online to leave a review and warn people off... only to find that the seller "no longer existed". They absolutely did, and were selling their awful snips but had changed their name and paid for a bunch of 5 star reviews again. I've been far more aware as of late that whenever I search for something (say the staple gun I recently got my wife) all I get are offbrand or knockoff results showing for often several pages. I have to go, figure out which brands are reputable and then come back to actually make my purchase. I'd rather just go to a brick and mortar at this point. I'm definitely not renewing my amazon prime.

paulgb 8y ago
I had a similar experience with a cookbook I was gifted that turned out to be fake: the author had impressive credentials (top culinary schools, etc.) but when I went to find more information about her I couldn't - all I could find was the same "author photo" for sale on a stock photo site. The book was a cobbled-together collection of recipes, some incomplete, apparently collected haphazardly from around the web. I left a review saying this on the book, and Amazon deleted it because they thought my review was fraudulent. Of course, the book at the time had a 5-star rating from fake accounts.
jahewson 8y ago
Ha ha, I had the exact same experience cutting guitar string with wire cutters from my local dollar store.
- lxhws 8y ago
  This will be your experience 99% of the time using cheap wire cutters on strings. They’re meant for soft copper wire, and strings have steel cores! The $5 guitar string tool will work every time, though.
joshu 8y ago
inexpensive wire snips are usually only good for cutting copper wire, though. they aren't made of hardened steel, which is necessary for cutting the steel guitar strings.
- crowbahr 8y ago
  $10 is not inexpensive for wire snips though. Which is my complaint.
  - lostapathy 8y ago
    $10 is nothing compared to the cost of high end, quality hand tools that will last. In the case of a expecting to cut hardened wire, the cutter needs to be of a good alloy and hardened adequately to hold an edge. $10 doesn’t buy anything from the knipex catalog, for instance.
    - crowbahr 8y ago
      Guitar wire should be perfectly fine to cut with $10 snips. The $5 Stanley brand snips that I got to replace my terrible ones work like a charm. I recognize I don't have the heaviest duty cut-through-anything shears that I could have with more money, but where I'm mainly doing light jobs like speaker wire and guitar strings it's not a problem... unless the snips themselves are terrible. I don't expect to have to replace the Stanley set unless they become rusty from disuse.
  - DanBC 8y ago
    I worked in electronic sub-contract manufacturing for over ten years. We built products for coal mining, and test equipment for aerospace, and products for a variety of domestic and commercial uses. All of this involved use of a wide range of hand tools. A few people have told you that wire cutters come in two forms: hardened and not hardened, and that if you wish to cut steel you should buy cutters that are rated for steel. The price does not tell you this information. The data sheet for the tool does. Here's a pair of snips that cost over £50. I'd be displeased if you borrowed mine and used them to cut guitar wire. https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/cable-cutters/0614766/ https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/cable-cutters/0614766/ One thing you can't see in the images is that these cutters tell you what wire you can cut on them: https://imgur.com/a/Zk3LBCE https://imgur.com/a/Zk3LBCE If you want to cut steel you need snips that specifically say they can cut steel. These don't have to be expensive: Here are some for £7. https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/cable-cutters/0732820/ https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/cable-cutters/0732820/
johnvanommen 8y ago
> I purchased some wire cutters a year or two ago from Amazon and they were fine for the speaker wire I was cutting... Until this year when I tried to cut a guitar string with them and found a perfect guitar gauged hole in my snips every time I tried to cut. This is normal. For instance, when I work on my bicycle, I have to use a $40 Park Tool to cut brake lines and shifter cables. The $40 tool delivers far better results than you could ever get from a conventional wire cutter.
- crowbahr 8y ago
  $10 snips should be better than that! I replaced them with $5 Stanley wire cutters that had 0 issue dealing with guitar strings. So what happened is I was given a 10c piece of junk and paid $10 for the privilege of being ripped off.
joemi 8y ago
> So I go online to leave a review and warn people off... only to find that the seller "no longer existed". They absolutely did, and were selling their awful snips but had changed their name and paid for a bunch of 5 star reviews again. I wouldn't be so certain about that. I've found that there are a lot of sellers selling the same things, but they're not the same sellers under different names, they're just getting stuff from the same places. Often, for cheap things, the source is AliExpress (or Alibaba), or potentially cutting out that middleman and just getting them direct from the companies that sell on aliexpress/alibaba. It's also been my experience that pretty much _anything_ that isn't a big name brand item being sold on Amazon can be found for much much cheaper on Aliexpress. The exact same product, just without the 1000%-2000% markup.
CamperBob2 8y ago
A good pair of dikes starts at about $80 and goes up from there. Don't use them to cut anything but copper wire. :)
yellowapple 8y ago
Guitar strings (or at least the ones I usually buy) tend to be a lot harder/tougher than your typical electrical wire (electrical wire usually ain't designed to be stretched to high tension and strummed/plucked repeatedly). Not that surprising that a $10 tool would have issues with them.
- crowbahr 8y ago
  The $5 Stanley snips I bought later have no problem. It was just me getting ripped off.

alexforster 8y ago

My last two Amazon purchases ended up being counterfit, even after spending a ton of time trying to avoid counterfits. I'm still going to use my fake electric toothbrush heads and fake Apple 5W USB charger, but I'm not using Amazon anymore.

pault 8y ago
Careful with those fake chargers. They're known to catch fire.
- behringer 8y ago
  There was a kid in the news recently who was electrocuted to death because of their fake charger. https://www.health.com/home/cell-phone-electrocution https://www.health.com/home/cell-phone-electrocution
  - wyldfire 8y ago
    That story looks bogus. Snopes [1] says: > Neither Sinar Harian nor its English-language peer the New Strait Times asserted that the youngster was electrocuted by the earphones he was wearing, but that was the conclusion reached by a number of international publications, including widely-read U.S.-based Vice and Teen Vogue, both of whom aggregated the story. ... > As an emergency room doctor, Uren& stopped short of calling the notion impossible because “I have seen some strange things in my career thus far,” but he added the story that the teen died from being electrocuted by earbuds “strains credibility.” [1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/electrocuted-by-earphones/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/electrocuted-by-earphones/
    - behringer 8y ago
      There's been multiple reports of people dying through headphones. Maybe they're all bogus, but considering an ER doctor presumably knows nothing about electronics, I'll disregard his opinion. Instead I'll listen to what an electronics engineer thinks about counterfeit chargers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi-b9k-0KfE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi-b9k-0KfE

thearn4 8y ago

I've noticed that it's all come full-circle for me again too, when it comes to purchasing from Amazon. It seems that I can't even trust the "verified purchase" reviews anymore.

nkingsy 8y ago
The practice of shipping empty boxes to shill reviewers is fairly widespread https://www.geekwire.com/2015/amazon-files-first-ever-suit-over-fake-reviews-alleging-calif-man-sold-fraudulent-praise-for-products/ https://www.geekwire.com/2015/amazon-files-first-ever-suit-o... "According to the suit, the site operated by Gentile offers to provide fake “verified reviews” for a premium, telling the sellers that they can ship empty boxes to reviewers involved in the scheme, to trick Amazon into thinking that the product had actually been purchased."
- benologist 8y ago
  They're not really tricking Amazon when Amazon is giving a conscienscious zero fucks about any of these things. This is all happening at a rate they must find acceptable or they'd be acting to reduce these problems to a level they do find acceptable.

coldpie 8y ago

The third party seller stuff has really killed my faith in Amazon. If I wanted to have to read reviews for the entity selling the good and have some expectation of getting a counterfeit/broken good, I would go to eBay. I used to go to Amazon because I could trust them, but that trust is lonnng gone. These days I'm shopping more and more locally, because I can actually see the thing I'm buying. Side note: I'm sad to see NewEgg headed in this same eBay-clone direction.

behringer 8y ago
Actually I find ebay to be much better than Amazon for buying. I can read the seller reviews and I know they're generally legitimate. Particularly the negative reviews, which is all I need to see if I want to know what the seller does wrong, if anything. I can look up a seller to make sure he's sourced an item properly, for example, newegg sells SD cards on ebay so I know newegg is sourcing SD cards properly and I'm good to go. Or I look up a seller and they claim to be a licensed Nikon supplier I know I'm probably ok or I could even call up Nikon to verify they're a licensed supplier. If I want something fake/cloned I know I can just buy cheap from the chinese supplier and I don't have to pay a markup to a middle man. But if I want it right away, I can order from someone in the same state as me and pay a couple extra bucks, and I know it's the clone cuz the picture is the exact same. You get a lot of information on ebay that you don't get on Amazon.
- zanny 8y ago
  The best part about Ebay is that if you do get a fraud item and can prove it Ebay simply refunds you and you can keep whatever you got since it wasn't what was advertised. Amazon to the best of my knowledge does make you return items for refunds even when they are frauds.
  - wolfi1 8y ago
    in some jurisdictions it is required to destroy these frauds
Kevguy 8y ago

gdulli 8y ago

Browsing physical books is a lot more fun, too. Just looking at a shelf and picking something up and flipping through it. That's an experience you could never get on Amazon. Both in the sense of interacting with objects and also the discomfort of knowing that whatever the browse/search interface, the items you see are the results of "optimization".

cascom 8y ago

Agree - except for things that are <~$20 and don’t have a super high confidence of being in stock (random calculator battery or special kitchen utensil etc)

ericnyamu 8y ago

If you buy best sellers you cannot buy fakes. The first page full of bestsellers gives you enough choices. So do amazon search like bestselling <item>

RileyJames 8y ago

I’m in the US at the moment, road tripping around, never quite sure where I’ll be, even a few days out. Hence why It’s easier to buy local, than via any online store. But searching for products in the local area / at local stores is nearly impossible. Using google is useless, everything is e-commerce listings. And even if you search many local stores directly they make it nearly impossible to determine if the products are actually in stock/in store vs part of their ecommerce offering / available in store in 3-5 days. Does anyone know any decent options?

DoreenMichele 8y ago
Walmart's website will tell you if it's available in their local store. You can also order online and pick up at the store without a delivery fee. You can also return or exchange items at a different Walmart if you keep your receipt.
- RileyJames 8y ago
  Actually that’s cool, in the US they have these features. The Canadian Wal-Mart website was impossible in this regard, but in the US you can search only in store, today and within xx miles. Appreciate it.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Home Depot and Target support this as well (Home Depot will even tell you the aisle and bin the item is in from their mobile app). Target inventory can be delayed up to 24 hours, so call ahead in case the quantity shown in store is low single digits.
anitil 8y ago
I suppose people just don't want you to know, so you're forced to browse? At one point I considered doing this as a business - paying people to walk through the store recording video that's then used to fill out a catalogue. Maybe offer it as a service to businesses.

yellowapple 8y ago

Unfortunately, there's a lot of stuff that simply can't be bought local (even in major cities, let alone small towns). The Internet is necessary in these cases. The good news is that there are plenty of smaller online stores that tend to be a bit more specialized, and as long as they accept something reasonably secure like PayPal or Bitcoin, I'm a lot less nervous about shopping on those sites instead.