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Amazon has caused this to itself in order to maximize its own short-term profits. In the past 1-3 years their goal has been to reduce their own inventory by sh
by destitude 7y ago
Amazon has caused this to itself in order to maximize its own short-term profits. In the past 1-3 years their goal has been to reduce their own inventory by shifting it to 3rd party sellers and let them deal with the overhead of inventory. This is why counterfeits and crappy products have been proliferating on Amazon and why I have started to avoid purchasing from Amazon all-together. I wonder if they realize how much damage this is costing them in reputation or if they don't care because it still results in more profit for themselves.
- amelius 7y agoIn a few years, Alibaba will have a better reputation than Amazon.
- azinman2 7y agoBased on what? No name brands, just loads and loads of direct from factory crapware and knock offs in all shapes and sizes.
- meesles 7y agoUnless you only buy hand-crafted goods (do hand-crafted laptops exist?), most of what we consume is direct from factory crapware anyway. I'd rather get it straight from the factory...
- marcosdumay 7y agoWell, for a start, you can choose your supplier (yes, just like Ebay).
- heavyset_go 7y agoWhen it comes to electronics and plastic wares, most of the stuff on Amazon is just white label products from Alibaba suppliers. Most of the time the same stock photos are used in both the Amazon and AliExpress listings.
- billti 7y agoThe stock photos are a major clue for me. As soon as I see a picture of the product badly photoshopped into some stock images, with poor copy pasted over it, then I close the tab. I don’t care how many stars or reviews it has.
- bsder 7y ago> No name brands, just loads and loads of direct from factory crapware and knock offs in all shapes and sizes. But Alibaba at least doesn't pretend to be anything else. And, to be fair, if you know what you want, a cheap Chinese piece of crap may be just fine. A lot of my electronics lab is from Alibaba--the rest is from people like Metcal/Oki, Agilent, etc. that I paid a premium for once I knew that I would use it enough to warrant spending the money. The problem occurs in that I used to go to Amazon when I didn't quite know exactly what I want and could browse, read some reviews, etc. I no longer do that anymore.
- 6nf 7y agoIt already does for me at least
- taurath 7y agoThey’re too being being customer obsessed to fix these sorts of problems, now that businesses are the customer.
- sergiotapia 7y agoI do 99% of my shopping in person. Curious where you do your online shopping now.
- underwater 7y agoI don't know a whole lot about Amazon internals, but from what I've heard teams tend to be independent and, in a sense, in competition with one another. It seems like this would create the classic tragedy of the commons situation we are seing where increased sales are chalked up as a win for some teams, but the whole company pays in negative sentiment.
- dd36 7y agoCold medicine as art?
- PuffinBlue 7y agoIt's gotten to the point where you have to put a brand name into a search if you ever want to see traditional 'quality' manufacturers. Put a search term in now for something like 'waterproof gloves' and have a laugh at all the auto-generated names that pop up. Likewise, the search results are optimised for sales and not discovery. Most of what you'll see is cheaper brands, lower prices and consequently worse quality. In many ways I'm thankful for this as it's pushed me to many independant sellers own welsites that I otherwise would have been too lazy to seek out and buy from.