8 ms·

The article doesn't mention Walmart's website, which has become very good and widely used, especially as a more trustworthy source for real products than Amazon

by Grakel 5y ago

The article doesn't mention Walmart's website, which has become very good and widely used, especially as a more trustworthy source for real products than Amazon.com. Also the article is worded as if Walmart is in decline- the future is bright for both of these companies, not that anyone is concerned.

silisili 5y ago
Walmart is getting better, but still way behind on the web front. They'll show you things in stock, then tell you it's out of stock upon checkout. Go back to product page, shows in stock again. They also use way, way too many captchas. Lastly, they divide walmart.com from walmart pickup and delivery for no reason. Some things you order on the .com side are only 'shippable' if your local store has it. So, it's pickup and delivery yet doesn't show up on that side. I laughed because when I ordered a fishing rod for my child, it was literally a fishing rod leaned against my house. No box, label, etc. I still try to use them as I trust their products more than Amazon. I love their new tool lineup, quality stuff at a decent price, with next day or 2 day delivery. I really like that for returns, they'll come pick it up. AMZ charges extra for that. Amazon has much better CS though, hands down.
- coding123 5y ago
  Oh, another example of that local vs distant store thing is that it's kinda up to the store. You may order a BROWN blanket, but your local store is somehow notified and they go, OH I HAVE THAT BLANKET! And then they switch you from it being delivered from far away to having some guy that's getting off work that lives near you drop it off. And then you open it up and it's that BLUE blanket you already saw locally and didn't want!!!!!
- ethbr0 5y ago
  > they divide walmart.com from walmart pickup and delivery for no reason I can hazard an informed guess as to why that is -- they built .com as an independent company, in order to get it off the ground faster and with less interference from the brick and mortar side. End result: quick iteration, but now two completely separate supply chains. You'd be amazing how complicated warehousing, inventory, shipping, etc. get when you've got 2 SKUs for every item + a bunch of hacks to duct tape everything together. And it's not trivial to reconverged them, when you're as optimized as Walmart logistics is.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    HomeDepot and Bestbuy are what I would hold up as the best websites. Target is decent too, except they started allowed resellers and I was not as easily able to find how to restrict to items sold only by Target.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      Home Depot is good, but their iOS app still lacks a lot of polish around selecting a store, payments, and list management.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        What I also like about Target and Hope Depot is I can put my phone number in when I am checking out at the store, and the purchases will show up in my account online so I can reference them later or not need to keep the physical receipt for returns.
        toomuchtodo 5y ago
        Definitely, although I wish Home Depot wouldn’t ask each time about the digital receipt. They should (imho) provide a setting to always receive the digital receipt copy (with the email address associated to a credit card number).
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        cpwright 5y ago
        Home Depot stores the receipts by credit card; so that if you use a card saved to your online account you automatically will see your in-store purchases show up.
        silisili 5y ago
        I know I'm starting to sound like a shill, but I'm just impressed with the progress they've made recently... but Walmart does this too. Any in store purchase made with a credit card saved in your account shows up in your purchase history. Don't even need to type in a phone number :). That's actually really new, they emailed about it sometime in the last month and I can confirm it works.
- nerfhammer 5y ago
  One thing I appreciate about home depot's web site: they'll tell you not only whether the item is in stock, but exactly where in a given store it's located
  - r00fus 5y ago
    Target does this as well. Super useful to get in and out, limiting my contact with potentially infectious people - though I usually use their curbside.
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    And most importantly they have only one listing for the same item. In Amazon and Walmart you have multiple listings of the same product by different sellers at different prices. In Amazon it's really annoying to see several pages of basically the same product.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      Amazon tries to coalesce these pages together in a single product-detail page with multiple offers. Sellers frequently try to avoid this coalescing (because otherwise, they're only competing on price). This could be as simple as pad printing a meaningless 5-6 character brand onto the product [making it technically different] or by making the description slightly different.
      - silisili 5y ago
        Yeah, it's a tough problem to solve. But I understand their complaint, it's often an identical product with a different name painted on it, pages and pages. My favorite was a handheld coffee grinder. The item was unbranded, and the manual had some brand name manually scratched out with an inkpen everywhere it was mentioned. It's actually a nice coffee grinder, believe it or not.
  - silisili 5y ago
    Walmart app does this too actually. The main problem is that their inventory tracker is wildly inaccurate. I went looking for an item they claimed to have 4 of, and they in fact had none. I think for a store as busy and understaffed as Walmart, real inventory gets to be a big guessing game.
- OJFord 5y ago
  > I really like that for returns, they'll come pick it up. AMZ charges extra for that. Oof, not in the UK. (At least not with Prime.) Perhaps not quite as easy (for small enough items) as when I mostly commuted, and could print a label and leave it in an outgoing mail pile, but certainly from home I way prefer that than going to a post office (even in the absence of coronavirus restrictions). I actually bought a printer for that purpose. A direct thermal label printer, because that's all I needed it for (and it was cheaper, has no ink to run out/dry out during a period of no use, etc.).
  - silisili 5y ago
    It actually depends on who their partner is. In my last city, it was USPS, so I could in fact put it with the mail. Where I live now, Amazon delivers but uses UPS for returns. I can either drop it off at a Kohl's location, a UPS store, or pay for them to come pick it up. Normally it's not a huge hassle, but it's a really nice gesture to me, especially for heavy items. I almost kept a TV stand, new in box, that I didn't need because I didn't feel like carrying it back into the store. Luckily, that's when I noticed they'll do free pickup on returns.
    - OJFord 5y ago
      Oh interesting. We tend not to really have variations like that across the UK (not having different states in the same way), so beyond remote islands etc. (by post code) and things like Uber/Deliveroo rolling out city by city/town by town, it's all just the same. Amazon uses various couriers to deliver and return here (even me being in one location, in London, but also the same in the country) but when you select a return only Hermes offer pick-up. (Otherwise there's Amazon locker, Royal Mail print label, Royal Mail drop-off, various other drop-off places of the kind that are a sort of 'side gig' for a grocer or newsagent, etc.)
- tangoed 5y ago
  The Walmart.com and pickup/delivery division on their website is not a thing anymore. They seem to be testing a new beta version of the website, and I got to try it yesterday. I have Walmart plus and this is how it went: One seamless search option, no pickup/delivery and Walmart.com options. I added everything, including groceries and other non groceries to my cart. I selected delivery. Some items were not available in my local store but it didn't matter. Walmart automatically divided my order into two parts, where it decided to ship me some of the things I ordered (chips and club soda) that weren't available at my local store. It was definitely great experience and the UI was clean. I didn't get any out of stock errors at checkout too. Can't wait to use it full time. The only reason I use Walmart is that I don't trust the products from Amazon anymore, even when they are sold by Amazon. I once ordered shampoo sold my Amazon that was obviously fake, and then I searched around and realized Amazon has a program where they gather the products from different sellers and put it in one huge bin and call all of them sold by Amazon.com
  - silisili 5y ago
    That's great to hear - thanks for sharing. I'm also a plus member, but I guess not in the beta. The app and website both still segregate the two. How you describe it working is exactly how I've always wished it would work. Glad to hear it.
  - gurchik 5y ago
    > I once ordered shampoo sold my Amazon that was obviously fake, and then I searched around and realized Amazon has a program where they gather the products from different sellers and put it in one huge bin and call all of them sold by Amazon.com This is a common scam. Third party sellers will send a fake product to Amazon to be FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon). When someone buys this product from the seller on the product's webpage, the seller is hoping the buyer will actually receive a genuine Amazon product instead that happens to already be in the warehouse. The buyer will be happy and will not complain, so the seller receives their money. However that fake product is still sitting in the warehouse, and when some unlucky buyer receives the fake product, they'll demand a refund. Some unlucky third party seller will have to foot the bill for that refund. Youtuber "chaseontwowheels" ordered a $6000 camera Sold and Shipped by Amazon.com. He instead received a box of rocks. He got a refund from a suspicious Amazon and shipped him another camera. While filming a video about the incident, he opened the box and it was rocks again. He ended up buying the camera from B&H and finally got the legitimate product. https://www.diyphotography.net/buyer-orders-6000-camera-amazon-receives-box-rocks-twice/ https://www.diyphotography.net/buyer-orders-6000-camera-amaz... I've run into a similar problem. I ordered an electric beard trimmer and the box looked new but there was hair inside so it was obviously used. There were a lot of recent reviews about this from different sellers. I'm assuming some third party seller sent a bunch of returned stuff to Amazon and they threw it all into the same bin.
- wisemanwillhear 5y ago
  > Walmart is getting better, but still way behind on the web front. They'll show you things in stock, then tell you it's out of stock upon checkout. Go back to product page, shows in stock again. 2 weeks ago I added a Logitech mouse to my cart which Amazon claimed would arrive in 2 days per the product page. Upon checkout I was informed that it was unavailable to ship and I would get an e-mail when they knew it would ship. Going back to the product page and refreshing the 2 day promised arrival date was still there. It arrived 6 days later. Seems like Amazon has similar problems.
  - slownews45 5y ago
    This can be depending on a delivery address - sometimes Amazon will have local delivery delays (some oregon areas had delivery partner issues a while back). Not sure if that might be part of it.
- castlecrasher2 5y ago
  >Lastly, they divide walmart.com from walmart pickup and delivery for no reason. This is actually changing very soon, and both results will be on the same site.
- TMWNN 5y ago
  >Walmart is getting better, but still way behind on the web front. They'll show you things in stock, then tell you it's out of stock upon checkout. Anyone who's tried to buy a video card or other in high-demand item from Amazon knows that the same thing happens there.
tyingq 5y ago
WalMart does also have 3rd party sellers where you have to watch what you buy. I suppose Walmart has a broader variety of in-house sold than Amazon though.
- handrous 5y ago
  So does Target, I think. Becoming a shady online flea-market must be incredibly lucrative, since everyone who can seems to choose that over just being, like, a normal store, but online.
  - dawnerd 5y ago
    Target at least isn’t quite as bad and they do seem to vet their partner sellers a lot better than the other marketplaces. They also make it very clear it’s a partner instead of hiding it like Amazon does.
    - handrous 5y ago
      You're right that they're not all equivalently terrible, and Target's better about it than Amazon and Wal Mart.
  - jjeaff 5y ago
    I don't think it's about the profitability, at least for non-amazon stores, none have the volume to make it worth their while. But what they are going for is trying to get somewhere close to the wide selection that amazon has. If you need something specialized like say, upholstery glue, Walmart may have 5-6 different options, one or two of which might be sold by Walmart themselves, if you are lucky. Which means likely long shipping times for all the others as they won't qualify for Walmart plus or whatever they call it. If you search that on Amazon, you will find probably 30-40 different brands and types of upholstery glue available in all difference sizes, in a jug, in a spray bottle, bulk sized, etc. Most of which is available for Prime 1-2 day shipping and will show up next day. Walmart and other retailers need to be working with some warehouse logistics companies that basically do what amazon FBA. Because as it is, most of the 3rd party listings on other retail sites are just drop shippers trying to arbitrage off Amazon or ebay products. If you buy from them, the seller will just purchase it from Amazon or ebay and have it shipped to you. The rest are sellers that already sell on Amazon and ebay and just check the Walmart box in their listing management software to add a few more sales here and there. But without amazon and ebay, they wouldn't be able to maintain their business on Walmart, target, and probably about every other retail platform combined. And I'm not even sure if ebay amounts to much any more. When I was in the business a few years ago, ebay did still account for maybe 20% of sales. I assume that has gone down, but likely varies depending on category.
bitcuration 5y ago
Trustworth? not sure sure. Walmart 3rd party seller is hard to contact for a return in case of problem. Walmart seems set up a way encouraging shop from Walmart own source than 3rd party on Walmart web site, which I don't blame them as that's where most of Amazon's problem came from. However, Amazon does have one key appealing, regardless who's the seller Amazon almost guarantees the free return, where in Walmart you'd better take it back to Walmart store even it's sold by Walmart themselves. The return policy is the one single reason Amazon trumped all other online e-commerce which is not hard to see but difficult to clone.

by Grakel 5y ago

silisili 5y ago

Walmart is getting better, but still way behind on the web front. They'll show you things in stock, then tell you it's out of stock upon checkout. Go back to product page, shows in stock again. They also use way, way too many captchas. Lastly, they divide walmart.com from walmart pickup and delivery for no reason. Some things you order on the .com side are only 'shippable' if your local store has it. So, it's pickup and delivery yet doesn't show up on that side. I laughed because when I ordered a fishing rod for my child, it was literally a fishing rod leaned against my house. No box, label, etc. I still try to use them as I trust their products more than Amazon. I love their new tool lineup, quality stuff at a decent price, with next day or 2 day delivery. I really like that for returns, they'll come pick it up. AMZ charges extra for that. Amazon has much better CS though, hands down.

coding123 5y ago
Oh, another example of that local vs distant store thing is that it's kinda up to the store. You may order a BROWN blanket, but your local store is somehow notified and they go, OH I HAVE THAT BLANKET! And then they switch you from it being delivered from far away to having some guy that's getting off work that lives near you drop it off. And then you open it up and it's that BLUE blanket you already saw locally and didn't want!!!!!
ethbr0 5y ago
> they divide walmart.com from walmart pickup and delivery for no reason I can hazard an informed guess as to why that is -- they built .com as an independent company, in order to get it off the ground faster and with less interference from the brick and mortar side. End result: quick iteration, but now two completely separate supply chains. You'd be amazing how complicated warehousing, inventory, shipping, etc. get when you've got 2 SKUs for every item + a bunch of hacks to duct tape everything together. And it's not trivial to reconverged them, when you're as optimized as Walmart logistics is.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  HomeDepot and Bestbuy are what I would hold up as the best websites. Target is decent too, except they started allowed resellers and I was not as easily able to find how to restrict to items sold only by Target.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Home Depot is good, but their iOS app still lacks a lot of polish around selecting a store, payments, and list management.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      What I also like about Target and Hope Depot is I can put my phone number in when I am checking out at the store, and the purchases will show up in my account online so I can reference them later or not need to keep the physical receipt for returns.
      - toomuchtodo 5y ago
        Definitely, although I wish Home Depot wouldn’t ask each time about the digital receipt. They should (imho) provide a setting to always receive the digital receipt copy (with the email address associated to a credit card number).
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - cpwright 5y ago
        Home Depot stores the receipts by credit card; so that if you use a card saved to your online account you automatically will see your in-store purchases show up.
      - silisili 5y ago
        I know I'm starting to sound like a shill, but I'm just impressed with the progress they've made recently... but Walmart does this too. Any in store purchase made with a credit card saved in your account shows up in your purchase history. Don't even need to type in a phone number :). That's actually really new, they emailed about it sometime in the last month and I can confirm it works.
nerfhammer 5y ago
One thing I appreciate about home depot's web site: they'll tell you not only whether the item is in stock, but exactly where in a given store it's located
- r00fus 5y ago
  Target does this as well. Super useful to get in and out, limiting my contact with potentially infectious people - though I usually use their curbside.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  And most importantly they have only one listing for the same item. In Amazon and Walmart you have multiple listings of the same product by different sellers at different prices. In Amazon it's really annoying to see several pages of basically the same product.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Amazon tries to coalesce these pages together in a single product-detail page with multiple offers. Sellers frequently try to avoid this coalescing (because otherwise, they're only competing on price). This could be as simple as pad printing a meaningless 5-6 character brand onto the product [making it technically different] or by making the description slightly different.
    - silisili 5y ago
      Yeah, it's a tough problem to solve. But I understand their complaint, it's often an identical product with a different name painted on it, pages and pages. My favorite was a handheld coffee grinder. The item was unbranded, and the manual had some brand name manually scratched out with an inkpen everywhere it was mentioned. It's actually a nice coffee grinder, believe it or not.
- silisili 5y ago
  Walmart app does this too actually. The main problem is that their inventory tracker is wildly inaccurate. I went looking for an item they claimed to have 4 of, and they in fact had none. I think for a store as busy and understaffed as Walmart, real inventory gets to be a big guessing game.
OJFord 5y ago
> I really like that for returns, they'll come pick it up. AMZ charges extra for that. Oof, not in the UK. (At least not with Prime.) Perhaps not quite as easy (for small enough items) as when I mostly commuted, and could print a label and leave it in an outgoing mail pile, but certainly from home I way prefer that than going to a post office (even in the absence of coronavirus restrictions). I actually bought a printer for that purpose. A direct thermal label printer, because that's all I needed it for (and it was cheaper, has no ink to run out/dry out during a period of no use, etc.).
- silisili 5y ago
  It actually depends on who their partner is. In my last city, it was USPS, so I could in fact put it with the mail. Where I live now, Amazon delivers but uses UPS for returns. I can either drop it off at a Kohl's location, a UPS store, or pay for them to come pick it up. Normally it's not a huge hassle, but it's a really nice gesture to me, especially for heavy items. I almost kept a TV stand, new in box, that I didn't need because I didn't feel like carrying it back into the store. Luckily, that's when I noticed they'll do free pickup on returns.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Oh interesting. We tend not to really have variations like that across the UK (not having different states in the same way), so beyond remote islands etc. (by post code) and things like Uber/Deliveroo rolling out city by city/town by town, it's all just the same. Amazon uses various couriers to deliver and return here (even me being in one location, in London, but also the same in the country) but when you select a return only Hermes offer pick-up. (Otherwise there's Amazon locker, Royal Mail print label, Royal Mail drop-off, various other drop-off places of the kind that are a sort of 'side gig' for a grocer or newsagent, etc.)
tangoed 5y ago
The Walmart.com and pickup/delivery division on their website is not a thing anymore. They seem to be testing a new beta version of the website, and I got to try it yesterday. I have Walmart plus and this is how it went: One seamless search option, no pickup/delivery and Walmart.com options. I added everything, including groceries and other non groceries to my cart. I selected delivery. Some items were not available in my local store but it didn't matter. Walmart automatically divided my order into two parts, where it decided to ship me some of the things I ordered (chips and club soda) that weren't available at my local store. It was definitely great experience and the UI was clean. I didn't get any out of stock errors at checkout too. Can't wait to use it full time. The only reason I use Walmart is that I don't trust the products from Amazon anymore, even when they are sold by Amazon. I once ordered shampoo sold my Amazon that was obviously fake, and then I searched around and realized Amazon has a program where they gather the products from different sellers and put it in one huge bin and call all of them sold by Amazon.com
- silisili 5y ago
  That's great to hear - thanks for sharing. I'm also a plus member, but I guess not in the beta. The app and website both still segregate the two. How you describe it working is exactly how I've always wished it would work. Glad to hear it.
- gurchik 5y ago
  > I once ordered shampoo sold my Amazon that was obviously fake, and then I searched around and realized Amazon has a program where they gather the products from different sellers and put it in one huge bin and call all of them sold by Amazon.com This is a common scam. Third party sellers will send a fake product to Amazon to be FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon). When someone buys this product from the seller on the product's webpage, the seller is hoping the buyer will actually receive a genuine Amazon product instead that happens to already be in the warehouse. The buyer will be happy and will not complain, so the seller receives their money. However that fake product is still sitting in the warehouse, and when some unlucky buyer receives the fake product, they'll demand a refund. Some unlucky third party seller will have to foot the bill for that refund. Youtuber "chaseontwowheels" ordered a $6000 camera Sold and Shipped by Amazon.com. He instead received a box of rocks. He got a refund from a suspicious Amazon and shipped him another camera. While filming a video about the incident, he opened the box and it was rocks again. He ended up buying the camera from B&H and finally got the legitimate product. https://www.diyphotography.net/buyer-orders-6000-camera-amazon-receives-box-rocks-twice/ https://www.diyphotography.net/buyer-orders-6000-camera-amaz... I've run into a similar problem. I ordered an electric beard trimmer and the box looked new but there was hair inside so it was obviously used. There were a lot of recent reviews about this from different sellers. I'm assuming some third party seller sent a bunch of returned stuff to Amazon and they threw it all into the same bin.
wisemanwillhear 5y ago
> Walmart is getting better, but still way behind on the web front. They'll show you things in stock, then tell you it's out of stock upon checkout. Go back to product page, shows in stock again. 2 weeks ago I added a Logitech mouse to my cart which Amazon claimed would arrive in 2 days per the product page. Upon checkout I was informed that it was unavailable to ship and I would get an e-mail when they knew it would ship. Going back to the product page and refreshing the 2 day promised arrival date was still there. It arrived 6 days later. Seems like Amazon has similar problems.
- slownews45 5y ago
  This can be depending on a delivery address - sometimes Amazon will have local delivery delays (some oregon areas had delivery partner issues a while back). Not sure if that might be part of it.
castlecrasher2 5y ago
>Lastly, they divide walmart.com from walmart pickup and delivery for no reason. This is actually changing very soon, and both results will be on the same site.
TMWNN 5y ago
>Walmart is getting better, but still way behind on the web front. They'll show you things in stock, then tell you it's out of stock upon checkout. Anyone who's tried to buy a video card or other in high-demand item from Amazon knows that the same thing happens there.

tyingq 5y ago

WalMart does also have 3rd party sellers where you have to watch what you buy. I suppose Walmart has a broader variety of in-house sold than Amazon though.

handrous 5y ago
So does Target, I think. Becoming a shady online flea-market must be incredibly lucrative, since everyone who can seems to choose that over just being, like, a normal store, but online.
- dawnerd 5y ago
  Target at least isn’t quite as bad and they do seem to vet their partner sellers a lot better than the other marketplaces. They also make it very clear it’s a partner instead of hiding it like Amazon does.
  - handrous 5y ago
    You're right that they're not all equivalently terrible, and Target's better about it than Amazon and Wal Mart.
- jjeaff 5y ago
  I don't think it's about the profitability, at least for non-amazon stores, none have the volume to make it worth their while. But what they are going for is trying to get somewhere close to the wide selection that amazon has. If you need something specialized like say, upholstery glue, Walmart may have 5-6 different options, one or two of which might be sold by Walmart themselves, if you are lucky. Which means likely long shipping times for all the others as they won't qualify for Walmart plus or whatever they call it. If you search that on Amazon, you will find probably 30-40 different brands and types of upholstery glue available in all difference sizes, in a jug, in a spray bottle, bulk sized, etc. Most of which is available for Prime 1-2 day shipping and will show up next day. Walmart and other retailers need to be working with some warehouse logistics companies that basically do what amazon FBA. Because as it is, most of the 3rd party listings on other retail sites are just drop shippers trying to arbitrage off Amazon or ebay products. If you buy from them, the seller will just purchase it from Amazon or ebay and have it shipped to you. The rest are sellers that already sell on Amazon and ebay and just check the Walmart box in their listing management software to add a few more sales here and there. But without amazon and ebay, they wouldn't be able to maintain their business on Walmart, target, and probably about every other retail platform combined. And I'm not even sure if ebay amounts to much any more. When I was in the business a few years ago, ebay did still account for maybe 20% of sales. I assume that has gone down, but likely varies depending on category.

bitcuration 5y ago

Trustworth? not sure sure. Walmart 3rd party seller is hard to contact for a return in case of problem. Walmart seems set up a way encouraging shop from Walmart own source than 3rd party on Walmart web site, which I don't blame them as that's where most of Amazon's problem came from. However, Amazon does have one key appealing, regardless who's the seller Amazon almost guarantees the free return, where in Walmart you'd better take it back to Walmart store even it's sold by Walmart themselves. The return policy is the one single reason Amazon trumped all other online e-commerce which is not hard to see but difficult to clone.