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I'm buying less from Amazon due to flood of garbage they allow. In some cases, there are hundreds of junk items before finding something acceptable. This is co
by pizza234 7y ago
I'm buying less from Amazon due to flood of garbage they allow.
In some cases, there are hundreds of junk items before finding something acceptable. This is complacently allowed Amazon, in several ways: 1. they don't calculate shipping costs in price sorting (allowing dishonest sellers to sell 0.01$ items, with high shipment prices), 2. they hide where the item comes from, 3. they don't police items which should be grouped together (I think I once saw an item replicated more than a thousand times).
This makes the buying experience really tedious, and I don't think I'm the only one who thinks this is a problem.
But of course, while this affects Amazon adversely, I think it's a stretch to qualify it as "the downfall".
- awa 7y agoAnother anecdote, My target.com spend during the holiday season has been +$500 across multiple items since I don't trust amazon for various items now. Also, the customer service is going downhill and I have been pleasantly surprised how much nicer target support is now.
- brewdad 7y agoI have done far more buying though the web sites of B&M retailers this season that I have in past years. I no longer trust Amazon for name brand electronics or anything to be ingested. It seems I'm adding new categories of distrust every week. Just today, I wanted a new flash drive but didn't need it urgently. I checked Amazon to get an idea of fair pricing then looked at Best Buy and found one that looked good on sale. I went to the manufacturer's site to verify the specs and found they had a price 33% lower than the next closest retailer. Win.
- chasedehan 7y agoSo lots of arbitragers were buying from Best Buy and then selling on amazon. I keep thinking about the front page article a few weeks back about the repackaging from other online sellers.
- zucked 7y agoThis same exact scenario has been playing out for me over and over again. I'm now using Amazon as a showroom - how quaint.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7y agoI remember once listing some item. I think it was an adapter for a USB-C dongle. The seller listed the dongle as one dongle per model it covered. Example: DONGLE for iPad Pro DONGLE for MacBook DONGLE for MacBook Pro 13-Inch DONGLE for MacBook Pro 15-Inch DONGLE for MacBook Pro 16-Inch DONGLE for Samsung Note 7 DONGLE for Samsung Note 7 (GTA Edition) and so on... The first four or five pages were flooded with THE SAME DAMN ITEM. It was not the one I wanted. It was one of those "$0.01" parts with a $7.99 S&H. This makes the "Sort by Price" worthless; and that's what I used to use to get myself into the ballpark of where I wanted to be.
- robryan 7y agoThere are lots of duplicate products with slight naming style variations. No one seems to have solved grouping products together where the same UPC hasn’t been provided from each seller. Would require building a parser/ some AI that understands aspects of the title: brand, line, size etc
- dawnerd 7y agoUPC wont do much. There's somewhat of a scam where sellers will reuse old discontinued products or buy upc codes from ebay in order to get around any filtering Amazon has. Ideally Amazon should require the UPC to be fully registered and verified instead of just taking whatever a seller enters at face value.
- robryan 7y agoeBay have been trying to enforce UPC/EAN for some years now but don't seem to be making a lot of progress either. Amazon have also made the burden of proof for getting changes to a listing made so high that it isn't really worth the time to point out the issues to them unless it is a product that sells well, so the long tail is a mess.
- pizza234 7y agoI think this isn't a technical problem. Ebay has the same challenge, and similar solution (Ebay uses dropdowns, while Amazon uses small clickable boxes), but I see the problem much less on Ebay, so I think Ebay is simply policing sales more than Amazon does.