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Amazon used to be awesome and Prime felt so worth it, you could just get stuff sent to you and skip a trip to the store. Now we call it Scamazon and you spend

Amazon used to be awesome and Prime felt so worth it, you could just get stuff sent to you and skip a trip to the store. Now we call it Scamazon and you spend like 30 minutes weeding through crap, scammy duplicate looking listings and fake reviews for any signs that a single item is worth buying before you give up and go to Walmart. It's so sad that it's gotten to the point where I think Walmart has better quality and prices than Amazon. We see dollar store stuff on Amazon for like $27 all the time. It's like they let their brand erode to pure garbage.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rossjudson 5y ago
Sigh. So true. Curation is an important part of any retail experience. I don't need a thousand "brands" for a product. I need to know what the top few are, so I can choose well. I hate the fact that there are a relatively small number of actual manufacturers of some classes of product, and then a massive fragmentation of "brands" that are just the same things, repackaged. On Amazon, the brand is Amazon -- because there's a small (and getting smaller) chance you've ever heard of the brand before. So when it comes to trust, our trust relationship is with Amazon. The main thing Amazon has going for it is the liberal return policies -- those transform the lack of trust in the general buying experience into a two-way door.
- xvector 5y ago
  Honestly, you could probably make a business out of a store that sells only high quality gear. Like headphones.com but for more than just headphones. I'm sick of spending hours researching shit just to find something decent, whether it's screwdrivers or thermostats or lightbulbs.
  - ghshephard 5y ago
    I've often wondered if Monoprice (my source for cables for 15+ years) will ever go down the Amazon path of descent into scammers.
    - the_snooze 5y ago
      If they get bought out, absolutely. That's what happened to Newegg.
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    It's interesting that I'm not the only one thinking along these lines. It's a recurring theme throughout history that products or services there were once only available to the wealthiest elite of society eventually trickle down to everyone, often due to improvements in technology. Think of a product, and it was once unavailable to the masses: refined sugar, spices, cars, etc... A significant luxury that the rich enjoy is having personal shoppers that eliminate the hassle of having to wade through this crap themselves, deal with deliveries, and return things if they don't work out. I can imagine a web site that works like that, but utilising efficiencies of scale to bring the cost of this service down to mass-market levels. Affordable by the upper middle class, instead of just the multi-millionaires.
    - foerbert 5y ago
      I'm not sure that would work quite the same. The personal shopper has very different abilities and incentives. They can actually be at your house to manage the delivery and potential returns, they will get to know your preferences in a way you probably wouldn't or couldn't express even on an open-ended form. And most importantly, their only incentive is you. There is no additional cost for them in rejecting an item and starting over. I'm not sure what common payment structures are, but it's even possible they are incentivized to be as picky as possible as long as they can do so quickly enough to not bother you. The problem is that kind of incentive is really difficult, or maybe impossible, to do cheaply. How do you scale anything in a way that doesn't turn extra pickiness for a specific customer into a cost?
      - jiggawatts 5y ago
        Oh, I don't mean a personal personal shopper! As you rightly pointed out, that wouldn't be cost effective, which is why currently only the rich can afford this. I mean what the parent-to-my-post suggested: a curated shopping site, where all products are guaranteed to be high quality, end of story. No fakes. No drop-shipping from untrustworthy suppliers. No bargain basement products. You could do this for basically anything! As a random example, my building was constructed using the cheapest supplier for electrical outlets and switches. Fully half are broken in just a couple of years, and one of them shorted so badly it nearly set the apartment on fire. That's absurdly dangerous, yet they did it to save something like $2 per outlet. I went online and tried to do some research to find a reputable vendor, but I got lost in the sea of options. There is no review that is trustworthy. There's no site I can judge to be reliable by myself. Steve Jobs told his team that all of the Apple products should fit on a table. There shouldn't be fifty models with varying levels of quality. There should just be one of each, the best, end of story. Customers shouldn't have to do research, or figure out which one has flaws that they can tolerate at a preferred price point. Sure, this flies in the face of economic theory, but Apple become the world's biggest company under Jobs' leadership, and their brand is basically magic. Maybe he has a point.
  - jfrunyon 5y ago
    > Honestly, you could probably make a business out of a store that sells only high quality gear. Those businesses (they used to just be called "stores" or "retailers") are being driven either to transform or out of business by models like Amazon.
  - CosmicShadow 5y ago
    The problem is every single site like that turns into an affiliate garbage-fest where you are paying for the "top-rated" item based on the biggest affiliate fee it pays. Sure it looks legit because they only pick what appear to be all high quality items that still pay good affiliate money. Hard to make money otherwise as someone will always see your traffic and make it really worth your while for you to cross the line on recommendations, and hey, since you never meet or see the people who use your site and they'll probably only buy once, why not? You can't really trust any site or article about quality or ratings, because they all exist solely to do this, or it's some random dude's blog that you'll never actually find or believe in anyway. If he does get traffic he decides he wants to make a go at making money, and whoops, there we go again! Of course you could run a real store with inventory and such, but man that's too much work when the other way is so easy.
    - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      This is perfect. Thank you.
  - tornato7 5y ago
    https://www.buyforlife.com/ https://www.buyforlife.com/ is one place that's trying to do this, and while their product selection is pretty limited it seems like they're sticking to their principles.
- clusterfish 5y ago
  Those "free" returns are then packaged onto palettes resold to the highest bidder who extracts a few valuable products, trashing everything else. And none of this is free, it's just included in the price you pay when you buy what would be a $1 item on AliExpress for $10 on Amazon.
mancerayder 5y ago
As someone who's been a customer since it sold books, it's disappointing these past couple of years that I have to shop at other sites for trusted items. The whole point of reviews is to provide insight and lessen risk. Now it's a whole exercise in avoiding getting scammed. I had an experience recently where I wrote a review (which I rarely do) that was 2 or 3 stars for a product (jars) that had glass which cracked in the fridge. They flagged and removed my review. The same thing happens on sites like Airbnb, where it's trivial to delete bad reviews. With a system like this, you can skirt ethics by showing only positive reviews, and then you can't exactly be accused of fraud or fake reviews.
- B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
  > since it sold books, I feel for you. I telneted to books.com, before there was a "million book river" amazon ... Sic transit gloria mundi, etc.
- ncphil 5y ago
  Had a low star review pulled the same way recently. In a pique, I went in and deleted all my reviews. If AMZN isn't interested in preserving honest, critical reviews I'm not going to lend my name to legitimating them. Best Buy, B&H, Sweetwater are reliable sources of quality products. EBay will even do in a pinch, although ordering from them always seems a bit like a game of roulette. The paid ad scam corps have almost totally destroyed my reliance on reviews, as the insanely overhyped copy coming out of the Middle Kingdom has wrecked my trust in online product descriptions. Good work guys, you killed the goose: much luck staying afloat as the majority of shoppers are getting wise to you.
  - mmerlin 5y ago
    This is the perfect response. Thanks for the excellent suggestion! They deleted my last one star review too for a fraudulent fake product that wasted my time and money. Scamazon no longer deserves the SEO juice of previously entered legitimate reviews. Logging in to delete my past reviews now...
  - mancerayder 5y ago
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
I let my Prime lapse years ago and I've been boycotting them ever since. Prime is a scam anyway. If I need something immediately then I goto the store. If I can wait then a week is fine (everywhere else has 2 day shipping now anyway). 2 days is a weird timeframe. It's fake convenience, an uncanny valley.
- ghshephard 5y ago
  Well - one of the nice things about Prime (at least here in Ann Arbor) - is there is a ton of same day stuff that is available as well for free shipping. Also - Expanse justified a bit of expanse. And, if you have "Family" sharing your Prime account, that also offsets the cost.
- OJFord 5y ago
  2 days does seem weird, but in the UK it's next day; in London (and perhaps other cities) it's same day. (In both cases with a time cut-off.) It would cost me money and time to go I don't even know where to buy the item in person, it's a very non-trivial convenience to me. And then Prime aside, the no-nonsense support/returns is something I knowingly sometimes pay a premium for. A few quid extra at Amazon vs. unknown site, or especially say eBay is worth it IMO. Not to mention the convenience of already having payment details there and not suffering through Sage/WorldPay/Pal for some one-off guest checkout. (Aside: scummy PayPal created an account for me from such a checkout process, and refuse to close it without me first 'verifying' it by providing photo ID and other PII. Such nonsense.)
  - OJFord 5y ago
    I meant to say same day for some products, I assume it's just whatever happens to already be in a London 'fulfillment centre'. Plus groceries.
barney54 5y ago
What are you buying on Amazon? I have had really good success and I don’t feel like I have to wade through too much crap. I just want to understand how other people’s experience is so different from mine and part of it has to be the type of things we purchase.
- fspeech 5y ago
  Maybe different shopping habit? I only use Amazon when I am looking for a specific (type of) product. It takes a little work but the end result is usually satisfactory. I have not done much "browsing" on Amazon as one would in a regular physical store.
  - raydev 5y ago
    Yeah, when I go to Amazon, I usually know exactly what I want and I'm just comparing prices by that point. If the product I want is on Amazon but is only available through third party resellers, then I'm likely to look elsewhere unless the third party reseller's reviews look balanced. All my ahead-of-time product research happens through reddit and YouTube and if it's a purchase that's super important to me, I'll think on it for weeks.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  Maybe you just haven’t noticed? The counterfeits can be quite convincing. I’m reminded of this wire cutter post[1] from a year ago. I think the counterfeit Philips Toothbrush and Tweezerman packages look better than the real thing. The others seem a bit suspect when you look carefully and compare them to the real deal but I definitely don’t think I’d be suspicious if I saw them on their own. [1]https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/i-bought-these-things-from-amazon-prime-can-you-tell-which-ones-are-real/ https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/i-bought-these-thing...
  - raydev 5y ago
    Unless I missed one, every one of the counterfeits came from a third party reseller. I avoid most resellers by default unless the reviews look balanced or they are obviously based in the US or Canada. And if I want something and it only appears to be available through less trustworthy third party resellers, then I will just buy it elsewhere. To be clear, just because I've been able to avoid it doesn't make the situation good, but for me it's relatively easy to avoid being scammed. Be skeptical of third party resellers by default, and it will go a long way. And to avoid "intermingling of fulfillment", all you have to do is verify it says "Ships from and sold by Amazon" in the text under the price. Any mention of fulfillment in that text implies third party somewhere in the chain.
TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
I really wanted to buy a quality “splash pad” on Amazon. I was willing to pay triple the price of a normal priced pad. But it’s all junk. I ordered the most expensive one I could find, something like $110. It never worked well (the water didn’t spray from all jets), and just died after a month.
prometheus76 5y ago
And the free two-day shipping seems to be limited to only select items now. I know it was never universal, but free two-day shipping has turned into free 5-7 day shipping, but you're still paying for prime. I'm really re-evaluating whether prime is worth it anymore.
01100011 5y ago
> spend like 30 minutes weeding through crap, scammy duplicate looking listings I'm confused. What are you shopping for if this is your experience? I've run into a lot of fake reviews but otherwise I still goto Amazon by default for any purchase outside of groceries or bulky, cheap items.
chaostheory 5y ago
Yeah I always check whether Amazon is the seller and whether or not there are other 3rd parties selling the same product on the same page. If yes, I will go to another store instead. I definitely no longer mindlessly shop on Amazon anymore.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rossjudson 5y ago

Sigh. So true. Curation is an important part of any retail experience. I don't need a thousand "brands" for a product. I need to know what the top few are, so I can choose well. I hate the fact that there are a relatively small number of actual manufacturers of some classes of product, and then a massive fragmentation of "brands" that are just the same things, repackaged. On Amazon, the brand is Amazon -- because there's a small (and getting smaller) chance you've ever heard of the brand before. So when it comes to trust, our trust relationship is with Amazon. The main thing Amazon has going for it is the liberal return policies -- those transform the lack of trust in the general buying experience into a two-way door.

xvector 5y ago
Honestly, you could probably make a business out of a store that sells only high quality gear. Like headphones.com but for more than just headphones. I'm sick of spending hours researching shit just to find something decent, whether it's screwdrivers or thermostats or lightbulbs.
- ghshephard 5y ago
  I've often wondered if Monoprice (my source for cables for 15+ years) will ever go down the Amazon path of descent into scammers.
  - the_snooze 5y ago
    If they get bought out, absolutely. That's what happened to Newegg.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  It's interesting that I'm not the only one thinking along these lines. It's a recurring theme throughout history that products or services there were once only available to the wealthiest elite of society eventually trickle down to everyone, often due to improvements in technology. Think of a product, and it was once unavailable to the masses: refined sugar, spices, cars, etc... A significant luxury that the rich enjoy is having personal shoppers that eliminate the hassle of having to wade through this crap themselves, deal with deliveries, and return things if they don't work out. I can imagine a web site that works like that, but utilising efficiencies of scale to bring the cost of this service down to mass-market levels. Affordable by the upper middle class, instead of just the multi-millionaires.
  - foerbert 5y ago
    I'm not sure that would work quite the same. The personal shopper has very different abilities and incentives. They can actually be at your house to manage the delivery and potential returns, they will get to know your preferences in a way you probably wouldn't or couldn't express even on an open-ended form. And most importantly, their only incentive is you. There is no additional cost for them in rejecting an item and starting over. I'm not sure what common payment structures are, but it's even possible they are incentivized to be as picky as possible as long as they can do so quickly enough to not bother you. The problem is that kind of incentive is really difficult, or maybe impossible, to do cheaply. How do you scale anything in a way that doesn't turn extra pickiness for a specific customer into a cost?
    - jiggawatts 5y ago
      Oh, I don't mean a personal personal shopper! As you rightly pointed out, that wouldn't be cost effective, which is why currently only the rich can afford this. I mean what the parent-to-my-post suggested: a curated shopping site, where all products are guaranteed to be high quality, end of story. No fakes. No drop-shipping from untrustworthy suppliers. No bargain basement products. You could do this for basically anything! As a random example, my building was constructed using the cheapest supplier for electrical outlets and switches. Fully half are broken in just a couple of years, and one of them shorted so badly it nearly set the apartment on fire. That's absurdly dangerous, yet they did it to save something like $2 per outlet. I went online and tried to do some research to find a reputable vendor, but I got lost in the sea of options. There is no review that is trustworthy. There's no site I can judge to be reliable by myself. Steve Jobs told his team that all of the Apple products should fit on a table. There shouldn't be fifty models with varying levels of quality. There should just be one of each, the best, end of story. Customers shouldn't have to do research, or figure out which one has flaws that they can tolerate at a preferred price point. Sure, this flies in the face of economic theory, but Apple become the world's biggest company under Jobs' leadership, and their brand is basically magic. Maybe he has a point.
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  > Honestly, you could probably make a business out of a store that sells only high quality gear. Those businesses (they used to just be called "stores" or "retailers") are being driven either to transform or out of business by models like Amazon.
- CosmicShadow 5y ago
  The problem is every single site like that turns into an affiliate garbage-fest where you are paying for the "top-rated" item based on the biggest affiliate fee it pays. Sure it looks legit because they only pick what appear to be all high quality items that still pay good affiliate money. Hard to make money otherwise as someone will always see your traffic and make it really worth your while for you to cross the line on recommendations, and hey, since you never meet or see the people who use your site and they'll probably only buy once, why not? You can't really trust any site or article about quality or ratings, because they all exist solely to do this, or it's some random dude's blog that you'll never actually find or believe in anyway. If he does get traffic he decides he wants to make a go at making money, and whoops, there we go again! Of course you could run a real store with inventory and such, but man that's too much work when the other way is so easy.
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    This is perfect. Thank you.
- tornato7 5y ago
  https://www.buyforlife.com/ https://www.buyforlife.com/ is one place that's trying to do this, and while their product selection is pretty limited it seems like they're sticking to their principles.
clusterfish 5y ago
Those "free" returns are then packaged onto palettes resold to the highest bidder who extracts a few valuable products, trashing everything else. And none of this is free, it's just included in the price you pay when you buy what would be a $1 item on AliExpress for $10 on Amazon.

mancerayder 5y ago

As someone who's been a customer since it sold books, it's disappointing these past couple of years that I have to shop at other sites for trusted items. The whole point of reviews is to provide insight and lessen risk. Now it's a whole exercise in avoiding getting scammed. I had an experience recently where I wrote a review (which I rarely do) that was 2 or 3 stars for a product (jars) that had glass which cracked in the fridge. They flagged and removed my review. The same thing happens on sites like Airbnb, where it's trivial to delete bad reviews. With a system like this, you can skirt ethics by showing only positive reviews, and then you can't exactly be accused of fraud or fake reviews.

B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
> since it sold books, I feel for you. I telneted to books.com, before there was a "million book river" amazon ... Sic transit gloria mundi, etc.
ncphil 5y ago
Had a low star review pulled the same way recently. In a pique, I went in and deleted all my reviews. If AMZN isn't interested in preserving honest, critical reviews I'm not going to lend my name to legitimating them. Best Buy, B&H, Sweetwater are reliable sources of quality products. EBay will even do in a pinch, although ordering from them always seems a bit like a game of roulette. The paid ad scam corps have almost totally destroyed my reliance on reviews, as the insanely overhyped copy coming out of the Middle Kingdom has wrecked my trust in online product descriptions. Good work guys, you killed the goose: much luck staying afloat as the majority of shoppers are getting wise to you.
- mmerlin 5y ago
  This is the perfect response. Thanks for the excellent suggestion! They deleted my last one star review too for a fraudulent fake product that wasted my time and money. Scamazon no longer deserves the SEO juice of previously entered legitimate reviews. Logging in to delete my past reviews now...
- mancerayder 5y ago

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

I let my Prime lapse years ago and I've been boycotting them ever since. Prime is a scam anyway. If I need something immediately then I goto the store. If I can wait then a week is fine (everywhere else has 2 day shipping now anyway). 2 days is a weird timeframe. It's fake convenience, an uncanny valley.

ghshephard 5y ago
Well - one of the nice things about Prime (at least here in Ann Arbor) - is there is a ton of same day stuff that is available as well for free shipping. Also - Expanse justified a bit of expanse. And, if you have "Family" sharing your Prime account, that also offsets the cost.
OJFord 5y ago
2 days does seem weird, but in the UK it's next day; in London (and perhaps other cities) it's same day. (In both cases with a time cut-off.) It would cost me money and time to go I don't even know where to buy the item in person, it's a very non-trivial convenience to me. And then Prime aside, the no-nonsense support/returns is something I knowingly sometimes pay a premium for. A few quid extra at Amazon vs. unknown site, or especially say eBay is worth it IMO. Not to mention the convenience of already having payment details there and not suffering through Sage/WorldPay/Pal for some one-off guest checkout. (Aside: scummy PayPal created an account for me from such a checkout process, and refuse to close it without me first 'verifying' it by providing photo ID and other PII. Such nonsense.)
- OJFord 5y ago
  I meant to say same day for some products, I assume it's just whatever happens to already be in a London 'fulfillment centre'. Plus groceries.

barney54 5y ago

What are you buying on Amazon? I have had really good success and I don’t feel like I have to wade through too much crap. I just want to understand how other people’s experience is so different from mine and part of it has to be the type of things we purchase.

fspeech 5y ago
Maybe different shopping habit? I only use Amazon when I am looking for a specific (type of) product. It takes a little work but the end result is usually satisfactory. I have not done much "browsing" on Amazon as one would in a regular physical store.
- raydev 5y ago
  Yeah, when I go to Amazon, I usually know exactly what I want and I'm just comparing prices by that point. If the product I want is on Amazon but is only available through third party resellers, then I'm likely to look elsewhere unless the third party reseller's reviews look balanced. All my ahead-of-time product research happens through reddit and YouTube and if it's a purchase that's super important to me, I'll think on it for weeks.
elliekelly 5y ago
Maybe you just haven’t noticed? The counterfeits can be quite convincing. I’m reminded of this wire cutter post[1] from a year ago. I think the counterfeit Philips Toothbrush and Tweezerman packages look better than the real thing. The others seem a bit suspect when you look carefully and compare them to the real deal but I definitely don’t think I’d be suspicious if I saw them on their own. [1]https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/i-bought-these-things-from-amazon-prime-can-you-tell-which-ones-are-real/ https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/i-bought-these-thing...
- raydev 5y ago
  Unless I missed one, every one of the counterfeits came from a third party reseller. I avoid most resellers by default unless the reviews look balanced or they are obviously based in the US or Canada. And if I want something and it only appears to be available through less trustworthy third party resellers, then I will just buy it elsewhere. To be clear, just because I've been able to avoid it doesn't make the situation good, but for me it's relatively easy to avoid being scammed. Be skeptical of third party resellers by default, and it will go a long way. And to avoid "intermingling of fulfillment", all you have to do is verify it says "Ships from and sold by Amazon" in the text under the price. Any mention of fulfillment in that text implies third party somewhere in the chain.

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago

I really wanted to buy a quality “splash pad” on Amazon. I was willing to pay triple the price of a normal priced pad. But it’s all junk. I ordered the most expensive one I could find, something like $110. It never worked well (the water didn’t spray from all jets), and just died after a month.

prometheus76 5y ago

And the free two-day shipping seems to be limited to only select items now. I know it was never universal, but free two-day shipping has turned into free 5-7 day shipping, but you're still paying for prime. I'm really re-evaluating whether prime is worth it anymore.

01100011 5y ago

> spend like 30 minutes weeding through crap, scammy duplicate looking listings I'm confused. What are you shopping for if this is your experience? I've run into a lot of fake reviews but otherwise I still goto Amazon by default for any purchase outside of groceries or bulky, cheap items.

chaostheory 5y ago

Yeah I always check whether Amazon is the seller and whether or not there are other 3rd parties selling the same product on the same page. If yes, I will go to another store instead. I definitely no longer mindlessly shop on Amazon anymore.