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I know how some can see it as shady or misleading, but I still prefer it. That is, I prefer having the price baked in, right in front of me...no surprises. Ve

by axaxs 5y ago

I know how some can see it as shady or misleading, but I still prefer it. That is, I prefer having the price baked in, right in front of me...no surprises. Versus some indy site I'll think 'oh only six bucks? sure I'll try it' only to be shown it's actually closer to 20 after shipping and tax. That just wastes both our time. Further, even if it's a hair more expensive, I'll still pay it for the no hassle returns. I recently purchased a knife I saw on Amazon, but decided to go through the seller's official site to save a couple dollars. It was not worth it, and not something I'll do again.

mrkurt 5y ago
Yes, people like it (for a while). This is why it works. But it gives Amazon more tools to abuse their market power. The cost is high though. Amazon is already much lower quality than they were 10 years ago.
- sweezyjeezy 5y ago
  > Amazon is already much lower quality than they were 10 years ago Could you expand on 'lower quality'? I personally have not noticed this.
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    > Could you expand on 'lower quality'? The review/rating system has become untrustworthy. It's extremely common (>50%) for me to see a 4+ star rating that turns out to be dominated by 1 star reviews and tons of complaints. It's not unusual to find that what positive reviews there are, are for a wholly different product. Even more frequent is that reviews for several different products are all bundled together.
    - cronix 5y ago
      > Even more frequent is that reviews for several different products are all bundled together. I can't stand that. This doesn't matter if the product comes in various colors or something that would not change the product at all from one to the next, but then you also have things with computers with different options like video cards, memory configurations, cpu type, etc. That makes it VERY hard to find a review for the specific machine you ordered because it shows the reviews for all possible configurations. It should show reviews only for the specific configuration chosen.
      - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
        > It should show reviews only for the specific configuration chosen. Amen brother. Other review issues could be attributed to Amazon playing catch-up but this crappery is clearly by design.
      - randallsquared 5y ago
        I stopped paying any attention to reviews on Amazon when I noticed that the item being described in some reviews had nothing at all to do with the one currently in the listing (something more like trash can vs curtain rod, not different sizes, configurations, or colors). Once I noticed this, it seemed really common, which means only a review which explicitly describes the item entirely could possibly be relevant, and then I have to worry if the seller laundered the item to enter "verified purchase" reviews... so reviews on Amazon are now a worthless waste of space.
        kortex 5y ago
        I've started adding to my reviews "I purchased the N-pack of color frobbing widget with feature ..." for exactly this reason. It's gotten really bad. Recently saw one which was a water filter assembly that was formerly a totally different kind of plumbing fitting (single part, nothing to screw up).
      - Stratoscope 5y ago
        > It should show reviews only for the specific configuration chosen. Here is how to do that. First, make sure you've selected the product variation you want. Then: 1. Click the "nnn ratings" link at the top of the product page to go to the "Customer reviews" section. 2. On the left is a list of the percentages of each star number. Click any of them. 3. Now you have a page with a row of drop-down lists at the top. One of them will be something like "All formats". Change it to "Show only reviews for Style:" listing the product variation you selected at the beginning. You can also change the "n star only" back to "All stars", or "All positive" or "All critical". They could make this easier to find! But once you know how to get there it's pretty useful.
  - fooker 5y ago
    Books printed on demand are essentially garbage. Amazon basics items are the worst of the crop.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      What’s wrong with books printed on demand?
      - formerly_proven 5y ago
        I only bought one (by mistake, not knowing), which had pretty bad print quality compared to a proper four-color offset or high-end digital print. Also bad paper quality. This seems to be common.
      - mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
        I think it’s that they’re often of lower quality and less durable.
      - shagie 5y ago
        Paper and ink quality. Quality of the binding. This isn't so much a "all print on demand suffers from quality issues" but rather "the quality of the print on demand services is often an exercise in cost cutting." I am certain that there are POD material that are as good as the traditional book print (and there are certainly non POD that employ similar cost cutting), but rather that in general, there is more investment in quality on the larger runs of a paperback book.
        chrisseaton 5y ago
        If you’re buying the book for the content not as an art item or for archiving I’m sure it’s fine.
        handrous 5y ago
        They're also not edited to fit the page well, nor with much care for typography or anything else. "Rivers" all over the place, weird page breaks, various formatting errors commonly creeping in. Page numbers in e.g. an index may not match the page numbers in the book. All kinds of problems, at least with public-domain print-on-demand, which books are surely purchased more often by accident (i.e. not realizing you're buying POD junk) than on purpose, since they're usually not meaningfully cheaper than Dover or Modern Library or whatever, and even Dover puts out a much better product. They exist to trick unwary shoppers and gift-buyers. They're basically scams, in that they're relying on buyers' mistakes to make money.
  - drzaiusapelord 5y ago
    For me, Amazon used to be a bit like going to a mid-tier department store. Items were curated and higher-quality than, say, dollar store or clearance items and there was a certain level of trust with them as a retailer. I would buy something from a known brand and enjoy it, and rarely do a return. Customer service reps were a phone call away and I could google the model number and see other people's experiences with it as well. Now I'm seeing so many sponsored results to brands I've never heard of and seemingly only exist for drop-shipping or rebranding some OEM product. Worse, the non-sponsored results would also be no name brands, where I'd gravitate towards the ones with high reviews. Then I buy the product and see a little gift card I could monetize if I was to review the product with 5 stars, so seemingly most of those reviews are fraudulent. Worse again, the quality on this product is below, sometimes even way below, a normal brand I could get retail locally but priced about the same. I must return 1/4 of the products I buy because of poor QC or later breakage from normal, if not, light use. Support or customer service for these brands is almost non-existent too and this brand will disappear in a year anyway, so why bother trying to build any sort of reputation. Amazon is always happy to do a return so it solves that problem, but its a still a big hassle and I'm sure the carbon footprint of all these returns is scary. Then I'm playing random OEM roulette again with a similar product that will also have fraud reviews and 5 star review coupons inside of it. I also dislike the dark pattern format of the site, which shows sponosered results in very small text and puts it in between related items. I'm not sure what Amazon's Choice really is, but its almost never a product or brand that I would consider trustworthy and I imagine is just a product that is giving Amazon good margins. In a curated department store model, recommended items would be actually recommended by staff and taste-makers at the cost or benefit of the reputation of the store. If Macy's is recommending a Braun coffeemaker, then its probably going to be a good coffeemaker as Macy's wants to please me as a Macy's customer. If Amazon recommends one, its just going to be some in-house rebrand or random OEM brand with lots of suspicious reviews (tons of 5 stars but also tons of 1 stars, with not much in the middle) and with positive reviews being either "amazing i love it!!!" or referring to an entirely different product (bots?) and negative reviews being in competent English and verbose and detailed about all the things wrong with this product. I think like with any capitalist endeavor, without proper oversight and regulation, it naturally falls into a race to the bottom and "low road" capitalist outcomes. Amazon has been left more or less alone by legislators and its, of course, gone as bad as it can and I imagine will only get worse over time. Amazon moving from the department store model to the random street bazaar model is good for the bottom line but every year it gets harder to shop there as no-name brands with no support and fake reviews dominate its marketplace.
  - cm2187 5y ago
    Zero trust in their supply chain, counterfeits have become the norm.
  - shados 5y ago
    Amazon is no longer trustworthy. You can't buy something and feel confident you'll get what you ordered. Sure, MOST of the time you will, but it only takes 1-2 fakes to really shake the trust. Just looking for an item and finding 15 of the same one at wildly different price with different description really makes you scratch your head. What's the difference, is there one? Then the killer for me is how they mix inventory from sellers. It doesn't matter how much I trust a certain vendor, what I buy may not be their inventory anyway, so a single bad apple can mess it up for everyone.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    I think it has become easier to buy bottom barrel stuff on Amazon for sure, but with a little price comparison with known good brands, fake spotter, and common sense, I'm pleased with about 95% of my purchases there and if not it goes right back and I get my money back.
    - ArtDev 5y ago
      I noticed that smaller cheaper items tend to have more inflated prices. It actually makes sense, from a business perspective. A lot of things I used to buy on Amazon are much cheaper at local discount stores (Bi-mart, dollar store, etc.)
  - dv_dt 5y ago
    The shipping timelines from Amazon have become increasingly unreliable and non transparent. If it’s going to take a little longer that’s fine if I know about it ahead of time, but about 10% of my orders get unanticipa mid ship time delays now.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    Ultra small anecdote, but funny to see how stupid it can go. Bought some windex, didn't pay much attention to price, 10$, because it was amazon, I assumed the price was for a concentrated solution. Turns out it was the normal kind (3$) but the seller put this price and it landed in the search results quite high. The benefits of lower prices online can also mean you spending more time checking things.
  - deleted 5y ago
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- cpuguy83 5y ago
  Also have to factor that Amazon's customer service is fantastic. That's the hidden cost in using something else: How is their customer service? How much hassle are they going to give me to return an item? How much does it cost me to return an item?
  - te_chris 5y ago
    And they can absorb the higher cost of this customer service via monopoly behaviour, where their competitors can’t.
    - katbyte 5y ago
      monopoly? walmart costco canadian tyre london drugs ikea are all huge retailers with billions that are trying to provide online platforms like and none of them come close. bestbuy and wayfair are the only comparable one imho and they still kinda suck compared to amazon
      - bbarnett 5y ago
        I still don't get Walmart. So much fiscal might, so much capability to expand into full, well thought out, competitive online experience, yet they're barely competitive. It's almost like the Walmart family thinks this online thing is a fad, and growth/sales spiraling downward will turn around any day now, just you wait and see! I don't get it.
        axaxs 5y ago
        I don't want to say too much specifically...but I think whoever is responsible managing their entire 'online thing' is doing a poor job. No offense meant to anyone who works there. I spoke a while informally to someone who worked there. Sounded like a really smart person, and they were describing in detail how their team was writing this 'thing' from scratch, where thing is something numerous rock solid, fast, open source alternatives exist. Didn't seem like a good use of resources -at all- considering the sorry state of their web experience.
- jelling 5y ago
  The main reason Amazon has kicked the crap out of their competitors is that they built a multi-billion dollar fulfillment platform that is better than anything out there. Whatever degree of effect that building shipping costs into pricing has given them is negligible in comparison. And it is dead simple for even small retailers to do this with most e-Commerce tools including Shopify.
- meh99 5y ago
  But would somebody please think of the billionaires? I mean if we took away their ability to manipulate the labor, finance, insurance, food, healthcare, manufacturing, housing, technology markets extreme personal gain, we risk having the government tear down our own private global hegemony some day!
lenkite 5y ago
You have proposed a strawman. What does this have to with Amazon forcing sellers to use Amazon's warehousing and logistics service and ensuring that sellers can’t sell through a different store or even through their own site with a lower price.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  That’s an accusation the author just kinda throws in at the end without explanation. It’s a big problem if true, but what’s the evidence for it?
  - hbuzi 5y ago
    The evidence is in the linked NY Times article, in the section titled "Price Control." They also cite a paywalled Bloomberg article.
- axaxs 5y ago
  I certainly didn't intend to do that. It's hard to write a comment addressing an entire article, but perhaps I should have quoted the tagline specifically. I was only rambling on about the 'trick of free shipping', not so much the bad practices mentioned. As far as using AMZ logistics, that makes complete sense. I've come to expect a high standard from items I buy from them regarding when I'll get the item. If that starts varying wildly...well what's the point of Prime? Fast delivery is AMZ's entire schtick. The price fixing I can't defend or make an argument about.
- slownews45 5y ago
  There were a lot of basically scams for a while where because people trust amazon so much, they buy amazon. So sellers would take something that sells for $99, and sell it on amazon for $199 or sometimes for even more ($299 etc). In the short run amazon makes more money (commission on the sale) but in the long run this hurts Amazon's brand. I manage an amazon business account where this is a particularly bad issue because buyers are not spending their own money. They will literally spend $500 on something that is $50, because they like Amazon's reliability around delivery, the purchasing is very smooth, returns are smooth etc. I feel like they cracked down on this maybe 4-5 years ago? But still stuff slips through. So yes, I very much like that they don't allow sellers to mark up crazily on Amazon's site.
thathndude 5y ago
The number of times I’ve gone through the dance of adding to cart, inputting all my information, and then bailing when I see $57 2-day shipping ($97 for next day) and $40 for 5-7 days— it’s ridiculous. Amazon simplifies my life. To be blunt, I don’t care about the “cost” (fiscal or otherwise).
- caturopath 5y ago
  They put shipping quotes four screens in -- after requiring an email address -- in hopes of getting you committed and having chances to harass you to buy stuff after.
  - reedjosh 5y ago
    I think this is the case. Otherwise, you could just input your zip and see quotes. Also, if this were hurting prices overall, then I should be able to routinely just click on `Other Sellers` and find price+shipping to be less than prime. Usually, if it is cheaper at all, it's for a week plus delivery and only a few percent cheaper in total. Most of the time though, it's actually still more expensive. I've also bought from sellers off of Amazon as they offered coupon codes and paypal purchases. It's not ideal, but it seems possible to get around this. I think it's easier for manufactures that sell direct than resellers though.
    - deleted 5y ago
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  - xmprt 5y ago
    I once bought $99.80 worth of stuff on this website after seeing an advertisement for free shipping on orders $99+. It was only after getting to the final screen that I found out it was only $99.99+ so I needed to add another useless item to my cart to avoid the $10 shipping. It's not a huge deal but what's the recourse to false advertising like that? I still needed the bulk of that order so I wasn't about to cancel the order but it also wasn't nice spending more than I wanted. Is there a simple place to report violations like this?
manigandham 5y ago
Amazon stopped having the best pricing long ago, but their real advantage is convenience. Everything is fast, easy, and straightforward - and that's worth the premium (if any).
- katbyte 5y ago
  not to mention free and easy returns for anything which is trash or doesn't work out
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    Would be better if they weren't selling trash though
    - katbyte 5y ago
      so true, i hate how it takes so much effort these days to find quality anything and how much low quality trash ends up well in the trash
  - deleted 5y ago
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goodpoint 5y ago
It's still misleading: the cost of shipping is not linear per-item. > Versus some indy site This is a false dichotomy. Nothing prevents showing both the item price and the shipping-included price next to each item.
- FalconSensei 5y ago
  > Nothing prevents showing both the item price and the shipping-included price next to each item. Nothing prevents the sites from doing that, but most sites don't do give you an option to see total price on the product page.
  - ehsankia 5y ago
    I don't know why we're even comparing to other sites though, this issue is about Amazon without Prime vs with Prime. The same item, if you look at it logged out, will show 15$ + 8$ shipping, but when logged in will show 23$ free shipping with a nice big Prime logo next to it. That's the issue at play, not what some other sites do. This is plain misleading and deceptive.
    - axaxs 5y ago
      Can you post proof of that? It doesn't make sense, because they do free shipping over x dollars, I think 25. So you're claiming it would be cheaper to buy 2 if you weren't a prime member, which isn't the case. Editing to add: I didn't intend this to say your comment isn't true. Perhaps I'm looking at something else or understanding wrong, so asking in earnest.
      - ehsankia 5y ago
        Hmm, I can't seem to find these anymore, but I definitely remember seeing these. So I'm either losing my mind, or Amazon recently (in the past year) changed this. You are right though that it would be strange for purchasing more than 1. Thinking about it more, maybe it was duty fees (since I'm in Canada and some items from from the US). That would make more sense as those would scale with the items maybe? I specifically recall though seeing X + Y$ on non-Prime and then Z$ on Prime.
miked85 5y ago
I am not sure how this is really surprising to anyone. Consumers will pay for shipping one way or the other.
- FabHK 5y ago
  Indeed. And with “normal” shipping fees, customers have an incentive to make one big order rather than many small ones, which is more economical and more ecological, I’d think.
warmfuzzykitten 5y ago
I agree. When I buy through Amazon Prime, I can safely buy with one click because I can see the exact price I will be charged and, usually, the exact day it will arrive. For next day delivery, I can't recall they have ever missed the date. It's logical that they add the cost of shipping to the item price, but their cost must be much lower than alternative sellers, as it is hardly noticeable on low-cost items, and comparable to prices charged by Walmart, etc. who charge extra for shipping.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  > For next day delivery, I can't recall they have ever missed the date. This depends a lot on where you are (or at least, it did). I canceled Prime a couple of years ago, because among other things, I hardly ever got things on time, whether it was next day or two day. I don't really use Amazon much anymore. I go out of my way to find other retailers whenever I can.
notahacker 5y ago
I can rank items by price plus shipping (and filter out stuff I need to wait to arrive from China) for all eBay's inventory, not just some subset of it which they do the fulfilment for.
- Google234 5y ago
  Lots of Chinese sellers lie about their location on eBay.
randyrand 5y ago
that’s great and all until you need to buy 2 of the same thing and now you’re being extremely overcharged. I always try to look elsewhere .
thn-gap 5y ago
> That just wastes both our time. No. That just wastes your time, not the seller's. And some of these people will just buy the product anyway.
cerved 5y ago
That's great, for you. The suit isn't alleging that raising the price to pay for free shipping is illegal. The suit is about controlling the market and hiking up the price to pay for your free shipping across the market. Ie, it's fine that a retailer charges $15 + free shipping, instead of $10 + $5 shipping. It's not fine to them force the price on all other retailers to sell at a minimum of $15. Especially not since they probably have to charge shipping. The argument that this violates anti trust is because it raises the prices for everyone, not just the people who are fine with hasslefree free shipping
- Google234 5y ago
  I don’t want to be tricked by some sellers setting the price at 99 cents + 15$ shipping
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    That is reasonable but an entirely different problem.
micheljansen 5y ago
Wondering what the overlap is between people who share this opinion that having shipping price included is convenient, but do not want sales tax included in the price.

by axaxs 5y ago

mrkurt 5y ago

Yes, people like it (for a while). This is why it works. But it gives Amazon more tools to abuse their market power. The cost is high though. Amazon is already much lower quality than they were 10 years ago.

sweezyjeezy 5y ago
> Amazon is already much lower quality than they were 10 years ago Could you expand on 'lower quality'? I personally have not noticed this.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  > Could you expand on 'lower quality'? The review/rating system has become untrustworthy. It's extremely common (>50%) for me to see a 4+ star rating that turns out to be dominated by 1 star reviews and tons of complaints. It's not unusual to find that what positive reviews there are, are for a wholly different product. Even more frequent is that reviews for several different products are all bundled together.
  - cronix 5y ago
    > Even more frequent is that reviews for several different products are all bundled together. I can't stand that. This doesn't matter if the product comes in various colors or something that would not change the product at all from one to the next, but then you also have things with computers with different options like video cards, memory configurations, cpu type, etc. That makes it VERY hard to find a review for the specific machine you ordered because it shows the reviews for all possible configurations. It should show reviews only for the specific configuration chosen.
    - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
      > It should show reviews only for the specific configuration chosen. Amen brother. Other review issues could be attributed to Amazon playing catch-up but this crappery is clearly by design.
    - randallsquared 5y ago
      I stopped paying any attention to reviews on Amazon when I noticed that the item being described in some reviews had nothing at all to do with the one currently in the listing (something more like trash can vs curtain rod, not different sizes, configurations, or colors). Once I noticed this, it seemed really common, which means only a review which explicitly describes the item entirely could possibly be relevant, and then I have to worry if the seller laundered the item to enter "verified purchase" reviews... so reviews on Amazon are now a worthless waste of space.
      - kortex 5y ago
        I've started adding to my reviews "I purchased the N-pack of color frobbing widget with feature ..." for exactly this reason. It's gotten really bad. Recently saw one which was a water filter assembly that was formerly a totally different kind of plumbing fitting (single part, nothing to screw up).
    - Stratoscope 5y ago
      > It should show reviews only for the specific configuration chosen. Here is how to do that. First, make sure you've selected the product variation you want. Then: 1. Click the "nnn ratings" link at the top of the product page to go to the "Customer reviews" section. 2. On the left is a list of the percentages of each star number. Click any of them. 3. Now you have a page with a row of drop-down lists at the top. One of them will be something like "All formats". Change it to "Show only reviews for Style:" listing the product variation you selected at the beginning. You can also change the "n star only" back to "All stars", or "All positive" or "All critical". They could make this easier to find! But once you know how to get there it's pretty useful.
- fooker 5y ago
  Books printed on demand are essentially garbage. Amazon basics items are the worst of the crop.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    What’s wrong with books printed on demand?
    - formerly_proven 5y ago
      I only bought one (by mistake, not knowing), which had pretty bad print quality compared to a proper four-color offset or high-end digital print. Also bad paper quality. This seems to be common.
    - mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
      I think it’s that they’re often of lower quality and less durable.
    - shagie 5y ago
      Paper and ink quality. Quality of the binding. This isn't so much a "all print on demand suffers from quality issues" but rather "the quality of the print on demand services is often an exercise in cost cutting." I am certain that there are POD material that are as good as the traditional book print (and there are certainly non POD that employ similar cost cutting), but rather that in general, there is more investment in quality on the larger runs of a paperback book.
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        If you’re buying the book for the content not as an art item or for archiving I’m sure it’s fine.
        handrous 5y ago
        They're also not edited to fit the page well, nor with much care for typography or anything else. "Rivers" all over the place, weird page breaks, various formatting errors commonly creeping in. Page numbers in e.g. an index may not match the page numbers in the book. All kinds of problems, at least with public-domain print-on-demand, which books are surely purchased more often by accident (i.e. not realizing you're buying POD junk) than on purpose, since they're usually not meaningfully cheaper than Dover or Modern Library or whatever, and even Dover puts out a much better product. They exist to trick unwary shoppers and gift-buyers. They're basically scams, in that they're relying on buyers' mistakes to make money.
- drzaiusapelord 5y ago
  For me, Amazon used to be a bit like going to a mid-tier department store. Items were curated and higher-quality than, say, dollar store or clearance items and there was a certain level of trust with them as a retailer. I would buy something from a known brand and enjoy it, and rarely do a return. Customer service reps were a phone call away and I could google the model number and see other people's experiences with it as well. Now I'm seeing so many sponsored results to brands I've never heard of and seemingly only exist for drop-shipping or rebranding some OEM product. Worse, the non-sponsored results would also be no name brands, where I'd gravitate towards the ones with high reviews. Then I buy the product and see a little gift card I could monetize if I was to review the product with 5 stars, so seemingly most of those reviews are fraudulent. Worse again, the quality on this product is below, sometimes even way below, a normal brand I could get retail locally but priced about the same. I must return 1/4 of the products I buy because of poor QC or later breakage from normal, if not, light use. Support or customer service for these brands is almost non-existent too and this brand will disappear in a year anyway, so why bother trying to build any sort of reputation. Amazon is always happy to do a return so it solves that problem, but its a still a big hassle and I'm sure the carbon footprint of all these returns is scary. Then I'm playing random OEM roulette again with a similar product that will also have fraud reviews and 5 star review coupons inside of it. I also dislike the dark pattern format of the site, which shows sponosered results in very small text and puts it in between related items. I'm not sure what Amazon's Choice really is, but its almost never a product or brand that I would consider trustworthy and I imagine is just a product that is giving Amazon good margins. In a curated department store model, recommended items would be actually recommended by staff and taste-makers at the cost or benefit of the reputation of the store. If Macy's is recommending a Braun coffeemaker, then its probably going to be a good coffeemaker as Macy's wants to please me as a Macy's customer. If Amazon recommends one, its just going to be some in-house rebrand or random OEM brand with lots of suspicious reviews (tons of 5 stars but also tons of 1 stars, with not much in the middle) and with positive reviews being either "amazing i love it!!!" or referring to an entirely different product (bots?) and negative reviews being in competent English and verbose and detailed about all the things wrong with this product. I think like with any capitalist endeavor, without proper oversight and regulation, it naturally falls into a race to the bottom and "low road" capitalist outcomes. Amazon has been left more or less alone by legislators and its, of course, gone as bad as it can and I imagine will only get worse over time. Amazon moving from the department store model to the random street bazaar model is good for the bottom line but every year it gets harder to shop there as no-name brands with no support and fake reviews dominate its marketplace.
- cm2187 5y ago
  Zero trust in their supply chain, counterfeits have become the norm.
- shados 5y ago
  Amazon is no longer trustworthy. You can't buy something and feel confident you'll get what you ordered. Sure, MOST of the time you will, but it only takes 1-2 fakes to really shake the trust. Just looking for an item and finding 15 of the same one at wildly different price with different description really makes you scratch your head. What's the difference, is there one? Then the killer for me is how they mix inventory from sellers. It doesn't matter how much I trust a certain vendor, what I buy may not be their inventory anyway, so a single bad apple can mess it up for everyone.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  I think it has become easier to buy bottom barrel stuff on Amazon for sure, but with a little price comparison with known good brands, fake spotter, and common sense, I'm pleased with about 95% of my purchases there and if not it goes right back and I get my money back.
  - ArtDev 5y ago
    I noticed that smaller cheaper items tend to have more inflated prices. It actually makes sense, from a business perspective. A lot of things I used to buy on Amazon are much cheaper at local discount stores (Bi-mart, dollar store, etc.)
- dv_dt 5y ago
  The shipping timelines from Amazon have become increasingly unreliable and non transparent. If it’s going to take a little longer that’s fine if I know about it ahead of time, but about 10% of my orders get unanticipa mid ship time delays now.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Ultra small anecdote, but funny to see how stupid it can go. Bought some windex, didn't pay much attention to price, 10$, because it was amazon, I assumed the price was for a concentrated solution. Turns out it was the normal kind (3$) but the seller put this price and it landed in the search results quite high. The benefits of lower prices online can also mean you spending more time checking things.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
cpuguy83 5y ago
Also have to factor that Amazon's customer service is fantastic. That's the hidden cost in using something else: How is their customer service? How much hassle are they going to give me to return an item? How much does it cost me to return an item?
- te_chris 5y ago
  And they can absorb the higher cost of this customer service via monopoly behaviour, where their competitors can’t.
  - katbyte 5y ago
    monopoly? walmart costco canadian tyre london drugs ikea are all huge retailers with billions that are trying to provide online platforms like and none of them come close. bestbuy and wayfair are the only comparable one imho and they still kinda suck compared to amazon
    - bbarnett 5y ago
      I still don't get Walmart. So much fiscal might, so much capability to expand into full, well thought out, competitive online experience, yet they're barely competitive. It's almost like the Walmart family thinks this online thing is a fad, and growth/sales spiraling downward will turn around any day now, just you wait and see! I don't get it.
      - axaxs 5y ago
        I don't want to say too much specifically...but I think whoever is responsible managing their entire 'online thing' is doing a poor job. No offense meant to anyone who works there. I spoke a while informally to someone who worked there. Sounded like a really smart person, and they were describing in detail how their team was writing this 'thing' from scratch, where thing is something numerous rock solid, fast, open source alternatives exist. Didn't seem like a good use of resources -at all- considering the sorry state of their web experience.
jelling 5y ago
The main reason Amazon has kicked the crap out of their competitors is that they built a multi-billion dollar fulfillment platform that is better than anything out there. Whatever degree of effect that building shipping costs into pricing has given them is negligible in comparison. And it is dead simple for even small retailers to do this with most e-Commerce tools including Shopify.
meh99 5y ago
But would somebody please think of the billionaires? I mean if we took away their ability to manipulate the labor, finance, insurance, food, healthcare, manufacturing, housing, technology markets extreme personal gain, we risk having the government tear down our own private global hegemony some day!

lenkite 5y ago

You have proposed a strawman. What does this have to with Amazon forcing sellers to use Amazon's warehousing and logistics service and ensuring that sellers can’t sell through a different store or even through their own site with a lower price.

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
That’s an accusation the author just kinda throws in at the end without explanation. It’s a big problem if true, but what’s the evidence for it?
- hbuzi 5y ago
  The evidence is in the linked NY Times article, in the section titled "Price Control." They also cite a paywalled Bloomberg article.
axaxs 5y ago
I certainly didn't intend to do that. It's hard to write a comment addressing an entire article, but perhaps I should have quoted the tagline specifically. I was only rambling on about the 'trick of free shipping', not so much the bad practices mentioned. As far as using AMZ logistics, that makes complete sense. I've come to expect a high standard from items I buy from them regarding when I'll get the item. If that starts varying wildly...well what's the point of Prime? Fast delivery is AMZ's entire schtick. The price fixing I can't defend or make an argument about.
slownews45 5y ago
There were a lot of basically scams for a while where because people trust amazon so much, they buy amazon. So sellers would take something that sells for $99, and sell it on amazon for $199 or sometimes for even more ($299 etc). In the short run amazon makes more money (commission on the sale) but in the long run this hurts Amazon's brand. I manage an amazon business account where this is a particularly bad issue because buyers are not spending their own money. They will literally spend $500 on something that is $50, because they like Amazon's reliability around delivery, the purchasing is very smooth, returns are smooth etc. I feel like they cracked down on this maybe 4-5 years ago? But still stuff slips through. So yes, I very much like that they don't allow sellers to mark up crazily on Amazon's site.

thathndude 5y ago

The number of times I’ve gone through the dance of adding to cart, inputting all my information, and then bailing when I see $57 2-day shipping ($97 for next day) and $40 for 5-7 days— it’s ridiculous. Amazon simplifies my life. To be blunt, I don’t care about the “cost” (fiscal or otherwise).

caturopath 5y ago
They put shipping quotes four screens in -- after requiring an email address -- in hopes of getting you committed and having chances to harass you to buy stuff after.
- reedjosh 5y ago
  I think this is the case. Otherwise, you could just input your zip and see quotes. Also, if this were hurting prices overall, then I should be able to routinely just click on `Other Sellers` and find price+shipping to be less than prime. Usually, if it is cheaper at all, it's for a week plus delivery and only a few percent cheaper in total. Most of the time though, it's actually still more expensive. I've also bought from sellers off of Amazon as they offered coupon codes and paypal purchases. It's not ideal, but it seems possible to get around this. I think it's easier for manufactures that sell direct than resellers though.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- xmprt 5y ago
  I once bought $99.80 worth of stuff on this website after seeing an advertisement for free shipping on orders $99+. It was only after getting to the final screen that I found out it was only $99.99+ so I needed to add another useless item to my cart to avoid the $10 shipping. It's not a huge deal but what's the recourse to false advertising like that? I still needed the bulk of that order so I wasn't about to cancel the order but it also wasn't nice spending more than I wanted. Is there a simple place to report violations like this?

manigandham 5y ago

Amazon stopped having the best pricing long ago, but their real advantage is convenience. Everything is fast, easy, and straightforward - and that's worth the premium (if any).

katbyte 5y ago
not to mention free and easy returns for anything which is trash or doesn't work out
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  Would be better if they weren't selling trash though
  - katbyte 5y ago
    so true, i hate how it takes so much effort these days to find quality anything and how much low quality trash ends up well in the trash
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

goodpoint 5y ago

It's still misleading: the cost of shipping is not linear per-item. > Versus some indy site This is a false dichotomy. Nothing prevents showing both the item price and the shipping-included price next to each item.

FalconSensei 5y ago
> Nothing prevents showing both the item price and the shipping-included price next to each item. Nothing prevents the sites from doing that, but most sites don't do give you an option to see total price on the product page.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  I don't know why we're even comparing to other sites though, this issue is about Amazon without Prime vs with Prime. The same item, if you look at it logged out, will show 15$ + 8$ shipping, but when logged in will show 23$ free shipping with a nice big Prime logo next to it. That's the issue at play, not what some other sites do. This is plain misleading and deceptive.
  - axaxs 5y ago
    Can you post proof of that? It doesn't make sense, because they do free shipping over x dollars, I think 25. So you're claiming it would be cheaper to buy 2 if you weren't a prime member, which isn't the case. Editing to add: I didn't intend this to say your comment isn't true. Perhaps I'm looking at something else or understanding wrong, so asking in earnest.
    - ehsankia 5y ago
      Hmm, I can't seem to find these anymore, but I definitely remember seeing these. So I'm either losing my mind, or Amazon recently (in the past year) changed this. You are right though that it would be strange for purchasing more than 1. Thinking about it more, maybe it was duty fees (since I'm in Canada and some items from from the US). That would make more sense as those would scale with the items maybe? I specifically recall though seeing X + Y$ on non-Prime and then Z$ on Prime.

miked85 5y ago

I am not sure how this is really surprising to anyone. Consumers will pay for shipping one way or the other.

FabHK 5y ago
Indeed. And with “normal” shipping fees, customers have an incentive to make one big order rather than many small ones, which is more economical and more ecological, I’d think.

warmfuzzykitten 5y ago

I agree. When I buy through Amazon Prime, I can safely buy with one click because I can see the exact price I will be charged and, usually, the exact day it will arrive. For next day delivery, I can't recall they have ever missed the date. It's logical that they add the cost of shipping to the item price, but their cost must be much lower than alternative sellers, as it is hardly noticeable on low-cost items, and comparable to prices charged by Walmart, etc. who charge extra for shipping.

throwawayboise 5y ago
> For next day delivery, I can't recall they have ever missed the date. This depends a lot on where you are (or at least, it did). I canceled Prime a couple of years ago, because among other things, I hardly ever got things on time, whether it was next day or two day. I don't really use Amazon much anymore. I go out of my way to find other retailers whenever I can.

notahacker 5y ago

I can rank items by price plus shipping (and filter out stuff I need to wait to arrive from China) for all eBay's inventory, not just some subset of it which they do the fulfilment for.

Google234 5y ago
Lots of Chinese sellers lie about their location on eBay.

randyrand 5y ago

that’s great and all until you need to buy 2 of the same thing and now you’re being extremely overcharged. I always try to look elsewhere .

thn-gap 5y ago

> That just wastes both our time. No. That just wastes your time, not the seller's. And some of these people will just buy the product anyway.

cerved 5y ago

That's great, for you. The suit isn't alleging that raising the price to pay for free shipping is illegal. The suit is about controlling the market and hiking up the price to pay for your free shipping across the market. Ie, it's fine that a retailer charges $15 + free shipping, instead of $10 + $5 shipping. It's not fine to them force the price on all other retailers to sell at a minimum of $15. Especially not since they probably have to charge shipping. The argument that this violates anti trust is because it raises the prices for everyone, not just the people who are fine with hasslefree free shipping

Google234 5y ago
I don’t want to be tricked by some sellers setting the price at 99 cents + 15$ shipping
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  That is reasonable but an entirely different problem.

micheljansen 5y ago

Wondering what the overlap is between people who share this opinion that having shipping price included is convenient, but do not want sales tax included in the price.