4 ms·

> 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]

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]