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Amazon is filled with cheap junk nowadays. I don't trust them for anything important. Case in point: I recently purchased an air purifier but was worried that I

by calebh 5y ago

Amazon is filled with cheap junk nowadays. I don't trust them for anything important. Case in point: I recently purchased an air purifier but was worried that I would get a fake product since they are notorious for co-mingling. I ended up buying one from Target online which also has free two day shipping now. For anyone who is looking for an alternative to Amazon, it seems like the big retailers (Walmart, Target, Best Buy) have finally caught up with their online offerings. I don't think I'll ever buy anything important from Amazon again until they fix their trash problem.

xvector 5y ago
Amazon definitely isn't the place to go if you want any semblance of quality. You pay new prices for returned, used, or counterfeit goods. It's a disaster
- dheera 5y ago
  If the product quality doesn't match its price or it's used, just write an honest bad review. The seller will chase you by e-mail and give you back 50% or even 100% to edit the review. At that point you just temporarily edit it, get the gift card, and then edit the review back to the honest review. And then you have yourself a good deal on a used product. All we need is some AI to automate the above process and make a one-click interface to get discounted used stuff for 0%-50% of the price.
  - manuelmagic 5y ago
    I personally don't think that's fair and more importantly it doesn't solve the problem. You will pay less, true, but you still get a used or poor object. At least to me, that's not appealing at all.
- echelon 5y ago
  Why haven't consumers stopped buying?
  - lugged 5y ago
    Who said they haven't?
    - shukantpal 5y ago
      Amazon's revenue.
      - lugged 5y ago
        Revenue is a laggard metric. Amazon's sideways share price should be more eye opening.
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  Surprisingly, I’ve actually seen that for many items in home improvement, Amazon is much higher quality than Home Depot. That may say more about Home Depot than Amazon.
caturopath 5y ago
I've had better luck than most with Amazon, I think. Walmart.com is just as open as Amazon and eBay -- there are all manner of sketchy listings.
- bombcar 5y ago
  The question is whether they commingle- Amazon does, Walmart and target (for now) do not.
- handmodel 5y ago
  I truly dont understand the Amazon hate. I spent 8k from it last year (about 500 items) because I have a very intensive hobby and have virtually none of the issues people complain about. I got the wrong item once (not sure if it was fraud or a mishap in packaging) and Amazon refunded me and told me not to ship it back. Of the 500 items I bought I probably return 20% of them and have never had an issue with a refund. Perhaps my needs are different than others but I personally find it truly amazing. The one time I tried ordering something off Wal-Mart it came three days late and returning it was a nightmare.
  - tkgally 5y ago
    My experience with Amazon has been positive, too. I’ve ordered hundreds of items from Amazon over the past year and a half—books, toys, tools, food, office supplies, exercise equipment, guitar strings—and haven’t had any problems. I live in Japan and most of my orders have been through Amazon Japan, but items I ordered from Amazon US have been fine as well.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    There were some failed unionization attempts that generated a lot of anti-amazon agitprop on various websites that cater to that audience -- e.g. verge, huffpost, etc. The slew of anti-amazon hitpieces was so brazen it was pretty laughable for a while. I think most of that has died down, but there is still a chunk of the click-heavy demographic that thinks they are consuming edgy media or displaying correct opinons when they read some "expose" about Amazon. Honestly Amazon is a pretty boring company. They have done some cool stuff with AWS, of course, and but their retail arm is fairly vanilla and you need to really stretch to paint a picture of big box retailers like Walmart being the good guys when it comes to a debate as to whether you should go with Amazon or a rival. Point being, there is no rival that is materially better than Amazon in any meaningful sense. I use Amazon as well as others like Walmart and Costco and have had a fairly positive experience with all of these. Yes, the current global supply chain is a mess with lots of sketchy producers. That is not really the fault of retailers so much as producers outsourcing everything to cheap Chinese (and other third world) manufacturers that then steal the designs and create knock-off versions that flood the US market. Outsourcing is not really something Amazon can stop, and as long as there is outsourcing, there will be a market for cheap clones that are virtually identical to the "official" versions but with less QC and inferior materials, resulting in a lot of confusion for end purchasers who end up scammed. This is a tough problem and is worthy of real discussion - even real investigative reporting! -- but an honest look at this problem will show that Amazon's bottom line is hurt by this stuff and that Amazon is in fact taking steps to try to reign it in, so it won't be the kind of superficial Amazon hit piece that so many seem to crave.
tomnipotent 5y ago
Walmart has the same marketplace concept and shares many of the same vendors as Amazon. Best Buy and B&H have most of my business now. Other than Prime shipping, everyone has caught up on price.
- gruez 5y ago
  You do realize best buy also has a "marketplace"?
  - tomnipotent 5y ago
    I'm unable to find any evidence of this on the U.S. website, and nothing but a few links to Canadian resources otherwise.
    - gruez 5y ago
      You're right, it seems to be specific to the .ca website.
      - tomnipotent 5y ago
        I was really panicked for a second. Complete denial, skipped straight to the anger phase. Best Buy has honestly been such a refreshing experience the last few years, now that Newegg is less and less an option. It's one of the few stores I still physically visit just to browse, with no specific purchasing goal in mind. It's how I ended up with a Philips Hues light setup and I'm actually very happy with it.
        bserge 5y ago
        What happened to Newegg?
        gruez 5y ago
        they turned into a marketplace.
yuy910616 5y ago
If you're worried about quality, you should really look into Costco. Their business model incentivize them to have top notch quality. I've also worked with some of their buyers / purchasers - best in the business for sure. Very QA focus company
- darkerside 5y ago
  I've found Costco to offer products that have premium "specs" at affordable prices, but I'm often underwhelmed by the product itself.
- xmprt 5y ago
  I've never had to deal with it but I've also heard they have great customer service too so if that's something that you're worried you'll miss out on by switching, then don't be.
  - yuy910616 5y ago
    I had a funny one - I was returning a bunch of unopened wine and I told the guy, there is one that was opened, indicating that when you see the open one please give it back to me. He was kinda rude and I was like wtf. And then he proceeds to return all of the wine, I asked him "dude wheres the open bottle?" And he said "I thought you were returning that one too?" Turns out in some states - they allow you to return opened bottle of wine. We laughed it off
    - dylan604 5y ago
      How much do you have to return? That could be the most rewarding bottle recycling plan I've heard of. Screw your 10 cents, I want a refill.
      - yuy910616 5y ago
        haha, by his attitude, I'm assuming that people have abuse this policy before. I'm thinking if you return the empty bottle, they'll still take it, albeit a bit gruntled. Mine was about 2/3 gone. Definitely beyond of the point of "hm..this wine taste funny" Over the years I've had so many little moments like this with Costco, whether it is a friendly exchange with a gas station attendee, a door person stopping me and pointing out that I was over-charged, a service rep who couldn't find an off-brand pedialyte I purchased so they gave me a pedialyte and told me "eh yeah just don't tell anyone", it really started to make sense to me why when you mention Costco - some people would light up and say "man I LOVE Costco", when it's just a store.
sundvor 5y ago
I've mainly had good experiences recently, but I'm in Australia. I try to only buy from the stores that are associated with the Prime offering, as I figured it'll help filter bad things? My items have included a number of different signal cables, coffee bean storage canister, knife sharpener, microfibre cloths - all top notch quality. I had one shipment get lost in the AusPost system which was frustrating (the tracking was active, but it ended up in a truly weird place), but received a refund as soon as I escalated it. And I do recall needing to vet the knife sharpener as there were a bunch of fakes; the one I ended up with was top notch. I wonder if the Australian branch performs some vetting, or if I've just been lucky.
- sen 5y ago
  Yeah I’m in AU too and generally buy 1-2 things a week from Amazon for the last couple years (thanks to lockdown etc), and I’ve never had a single fake/returned item. I only buy from local Amazon and never the international ones, and only things with Prime. Might be because we’re too small of a market for it to be an issue yet? Not sure.
silisili 5y ago
Hit the nail on the head. Walmart Plus is my goto these days. Always two day shipping, and if they have it in the store, you can have it brought to you same day. And sometimes even if you say you want it shipped, they'll still just drive it over if it's in the store. They do have third party sellers, I ignore them completely. I basically use Amazon for things Walmart doesn't carry, and things I don't like WM quality on. Hint to anyone like me that had previously avoided WM for years: they've recently started carrying higher quality, and higher priced things. It's not all bottom barrel custom garbage anymore, but that still exists and the price reflects it.
- m-p-3 5y ago
  > Walmart Plus Is that US-only?
  - silisili 5y ago
    For the time being, it seems.
- tzs 5y ago
  Walmart+ has been great for pandemic shopping. It has two features that help. 1. Free delivery on grocery orders. 2. "Scan and Go". When shopping in-store you scan items using the Walmart app on your phone. At check out, you scan a QR code on the self checkout terminal, tell it how many bags you are using, hit the pay button, and you are done. It takes under 10 seconds. With Scan and Go I can do my in-store shopping at a time when the store does not have many customers (such as 9 AM on a weekday) so it is easy to avoid coming anywhere near other shoppers as I grab items, scan them, and dump them in my cart. Then it is 10 seconds through the self checkout (and the terminals are far enough apart in the self checkout area that I don't have to be close to anyone else) and I'm heading out the door. I don't bag my groceries there--I just keep them loose in the shopping cart until I reach my car. I then transfer them to my cloth bags there. It's a little slower if you have items sold by weight. When you scan those it tells you you will have to weigh them at checkout. At checkout it prompts you to put them on the scale, weighs them, and adds them to your order.
arenaninja 5y ago
I reviewed my purchase history and I stopped heavily buying from Amazon on 2017. Today I went to find an item I bought 5 years ago from them but their price has 30% markup from HomeDepot/Target/Walmart. Guess who's not getting my business again today! For years Amazon pricing has been getting worse, and they don't care
- Railsify 5y ago
  They don't care because they don't set the prices except when it's an amazon branded product.
  - arenaninja 5y ago
    Oh I don't disagree, I'm only pointing out that this has been going on for years. On any year I purchase ~$200 at most from Amazon now, and usually only items I can't find somewhere else "Amazon Branded"/"Fulfilled by Amazon" and whatever other tier exists isn't a distinction I care to make
truetraveller 5y ago
Actually, fixing Amazon is very simple, but I believe Amazon does NOT want to do this. You see, the trick is to only buy when the seller is "Amazon". These products almost always have high-quality, and are authentic. You see, Amazon makes it very difficult to filter "Amazon" as the seller. There is no "default" and I believe it reverts to "All sellers" on every search. I believe this is deliberate. The "seller" problem applies to Walmart, Bestbuy, etc. But for some reason, it's much easier to filter the seller on these sites.
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  The Amazon brands are some of the worst offenders. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/consumer-groups-issue-warning-holiday-shoppers-beware-of-dangerous-and-fake-products-sold-on-amazon-301191372.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/consumer-groups-iss... https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/29/20837359/amazon-basics-fake-sellers-imposters-third-party-marketplace https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/29/20837359/amazon-basics-fa... https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/business/amazonbasics-electronics-fire-safety-invs/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/business/amazonbasics-electro...
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  I do this when I have to buy something from Amazon, but it does not really solve the problem. Amazon commingles product so what you get shipped may not be the product that Amazon actually sourced from their distributor, it may be third-party after all.
tdeck 5y ago
One interesting thing about air filters is that many of the ones on Amazon can't be shipped to California. CA has strict standards for air filters apparently, so I always viewed this as a red flag. But it turns out those certification standards don't actually include filter effectiveness: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/list-carb-certified-air-cleaning-devices https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/list-carb-certified-air-cleaning-devi...
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > I always viewed this as a red flag. But it turns out those certification standards don't actually include filter effectiveness Not too long ago I looked up the legal standards for (US) butter grading. Turns out they are exclusively based on a taster's professional opinion of the butter's flavor. This seems like a piece of regulatory apparatus we could do without.
TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
You can also buy air purifiers directly from the manufactures for a few bucks more than Amazon. I’ve done that for both Austin Air and Coway. Other products can also be bought that way, but of course not all.
- callahad 5y ago
  That's the damnedest thing, though. Review fraud has me manually curating a mental list of trusted brands which I'll preferentially by from, rather than using a marketplace for discovery. Seems totally backwards.
  - Applejinx 5y ago
    Marketplaces are terrible for discovery: nobody trying to sell stuff are interested in acting as a trusted impartial observer, or giving anybody accurate information. Marketplaces are about balancing out competing sources of stuff by roughly their quality value without oversight, provided the underlying 'rules' aren't too egregiously ignored (no committing actual crimes, no stealing things to sell them at prices below their worth, no lying or pressuring people to lie on your behalf or stealing their identities to lie with). When you enforce a lack of crimes, marketplaces work to allocate resources without top-down control, and scale as big as you like without losing that quality. THAT is the point. It has nothing to do with discovery and in fact they're not at all great for discovery. The person who allocates more money and energy to being discovered by you is always going to come out ahead of the one who worked to deliver you a better product and didn't put as many resources into, quite literally, marketing. All expenditures in marketing are literally you paying to be sold on a thing, literally you paying to distort the marketplace in the product's favor (regardless of its value, could be garbage or a Veblen good that is otherwise of unimpeachable quality) The LAST thing you want is a marketplace for discovery. You want discovery to do an end run around the market and give you the realities of what's being sold. The market then allocates resources based on your hopefully enlightened input.
gentleman11 5y ago
I don’t know why they waited so long to try and fix this. Their reputation online, 5 years ago, was golden. People were obsessed with the company. Now, nobody will buy anything important without going to a fake review detector site first and then they might still chicken out because they worry it will be an illegitimate item (Eg, fake windows licenses were a big problem 2 years ago last I checked)
- irrational 5y ago
  Wait, are fake review detector sites a real thing? What is an example of one?
  - sam345 5y ago
    https://reviewmeta.com/ https://reviewmeta.com/
  - function_seven 5y ago
    The couple that I know of are https://reviewmeta.com https://reviewmeta.com and https://www.fakespot.com/analyzer https://www.fakespot.com/analyzer Looks like ReviewMeta's creator has left the project, but the site still seems to work. Fakespot really wants you to use their app or browser extension, but the link I pasted allows you to ad-hoc check item URLs.
    - Farfromthehood 5y ago
      FakeSpot has purposefully limited prior functionality from their site and only allows those features via installing their browser plugin. They really want that browsing history. So perhaps use a private tab.
01100011 5y ago
> Amazon is filled with cheap junk nowadays This makes it sound like there isn't a reason to shop at Amazon anymore. While it's true that there are a lot of fake reviews, fake products, and generally poor quality merchandise, I haven't personally had a big problem with it. I spend thousands on there every year and almost always get exactly what I'm after for a great price. Now I don't buy a lot of cheap Chinese junk there, but I have(phone accessories, bluetooth devices, LEDs and lights, etc) and it's generally worked out great. If I want something Chinese I generally try to buy it for less on Aliexpress or another site, but that said, Amazon, for me, is still well worth the prime membership.
- doktorhladnjak 5y ago
  I was like you. Prime member. Several purchases a month. Never had a problem with Amazon. Until I had a series of bad experiences. The first one was a wireless phone charging pad I bought. Skimmed through a gazillion options in the search listing. Found one with hundreds of good reviews. When it came, it looked much cheaper built than what I'd ordered and didn't work very well. I didn't seem to be able to place the phone anywhere that would consistently charge. Could have been a counterfeit. Returned it, which was a minor hassle (rebox it, get shipping tag, etc.). Then I went to look at the reviews, and now all the recent reviews were *BAD*. Like they had gone from 4.5 stars to 1 star. And the product was no longer for sale. I read more closely and realized all the old good reviews were for a completely different charging pad. When I searched for the item by name, I found a new listing with more great reviews. Yep, review fraud! The second issue was a power strip I bought. Plugs would not go into it! I opened it up and one of the parts was in backward. The sodering was extremely shoddy. At this point, I canceled Prime and walked away. I'm not going to be electrocuted or have my house burn down because Amazon is unable to stand behind the products they sell. I complained, but only got an offer to return the product for a refund. Never again. If I want to buy cheap shit, there's always eBay. It at least doesn't pretend to be something it's not.
  - kelnos 5y ago
    > I read more closely and realized all the old good reviews were for a completely different charging pad. It completely boggles my mind that Amazon lets sellers completely change the product title, description, photos, and even product category on an existing listing and keep all the reviews and everything. I've seen weird things where the reviews for a product were talking about something completely different... like the listing being for a pet toy, but the reviews were talking about kitchen knives. It's just so obviously fraudulent.
chaostheory 5y ago
I hate to break this to you but Walmart and Target are now doing co-mingling as well now, though Target is on a much more limited scale. I wouldn’t trust Walmart either now.
blub 5y ago
The part about fakes may be specific to the US. Amazon Germany’s also filled with cheap junk to the point one must search for specific products, but they are not mixing inventory (yet).
croutonwagon 5y ago
Amazon has also made some of interesting decisions in my zip code. When the pandemic started deliveries went from 2 days to about 5. Normally they shipped from the next city over. They argued this was to prioritize health products. Then a very large distribution center started being in panned/submitted to the county, under an alias. There’s been som pushback. Suddenly my zip code is having deliveries stretch out to 7-14 days. It’s pretty predictable. To the point I can have them shipped to the office and get back to 2 days but to my home, that mouse I ordered last weekend still hasn’t shown up. Rather than putting pressure on my coonty board members to approve the warehouse I wrote a letter to the opposite. Canceled prime and moved to other services to find gear. I bought something on Newegg for the first time in years partially because of this issue and partially because of the fraud rife with Amazon and I didn’t want the “new” hard drive I ordered turn out to be a refurb in new “clothing”
babesh 5y ago
I have mostly good experiences with respect to the quality of products that I buy from Amazon. However, I think this is because I don't take recommendations at face value. Instead, I look at multiple products, research them, and evaluate reviews. I don't weigh reviews equally. Instead, I look for thoughtful reviews. In today's information manipulation landscape, you either do your own research or outsource it.
- Decker87 5y ago
  It's not just the reviews - It's that they mix inventory of the "same" item from multiple manufacturers.

by calebh 5y ago

xvector 5y ago

Amazon definitely isn't the place to go if you want any semblance of quality. You pay new prices for returned, used, or counterfeit goods. It's a disaster

dheera 5y ago
If the product quality doesn't match its price or it's used, just write an honest bad review. The seller will chase you by e-mail and give you back 50% or even 100% to edit the review. At that point you just temporarily edit it, get the gift card, and then edit the review back to the honest review. And then you have yourself a good deal on a used product. All we need is some AI to automate the above process and make a one-click interface to get discounted used stuff for 0%-50% of the price.
- manuelmagic 5y ago
  I personally don't think that's fair and more importantly it doesn't solve the problem. You will pay less, true, but you still get a used or poor object. At least to me, that's not appealing at all.
echelon 5y ago
Why haven't consumers stopped buying?
- lugged 5y ago
  Who said they haven't?
  - shukantpal 5y ago
    Amazon's revenue.
    - lugged 5y ago
      Revenue is a laggard metric. Amazon's sideways share price should be more eye opening.
twobitshifter 5y ago
Surprisingly, I’ve actually seen that for many items in home improvement, Amazon is much higher quality than Home Depot. That may say more about Home Depot than Amazon.

caturopath 5y ago

I've had better luck than most with Amazon, I think. Walmart.com is just as open as Amazon and eBay -- there are all manner of sketchy listings.

bombcar 5y ago
The question is whether they commingle- Amazon does, Walmart and target (for now) do not.
handmodel 5y ago
I truly dont understand the Amazon hate. I spent 8k from it last year (about 500 items) because I have a very intensive hobby and have virtually none of the issues people complain about. I got the wrong item once (not sure if it was fraud or a mishap in packaging) and Amazon refunded me and told me not to ship it back. Of the 500 items I bought I probably return 20% of them and have never had an issue with a refund. Perhaps my needs are different than others but I personally find it truly amazing. The one time I tried ordering something off Wal-Mart it came three days late and returning it was a nightmare.
- tkgally 5y ago
  My experience with Amazon has been positive, too. I’ve ordered hundreds of items from Amazon over the past year and a half—books, toys, tools, food, office supplies, exercise equipment, guitar strings—and haven’t had any problems. I live in Japan and most of my orders have been through Amazon Japan, but items I ordered from Amazon US have been fine as well.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  There were some failed unionization attempts that generated a lot of anti-amazon agitprop on various websites that cater to that audience -- e.g. verge, huffpost, etc. The slew of anti-amazon hitpieces was so brazen it was pretty laughable for a while. I think most of that has died down, but there is still a chunk of the click-heavy demographic that thinks they are consuming edgy media or displaying correct opinons when they read some "expose" about Amazon. Honestly Amazon is a pretty boring company. They have done some cool stuff with AWS, of course, and but their retail arm is fairly vanilla and you need to really stretch to paint a picture of big box retailers like Walmart being the good guys when it comes to a debate as to whether you should go with Amazon or a rival. Point being, there is no rival that is materially better than Amazon in any meaningful sense. I use Amazon as well as others like Walmart and Costco and have had a fairly positive experience with all of these. Yes, the current global supply chain is a mess with lots of sketchy producers. That is not really the fault of retailers so much as producers outsourcing everything to cheap Chinese (and other third world) manufacturers that then steal the designs and create knock-off versions that flood the US market. Outsourcing is not really something Amazon can stop, and as long as there is outsourcing, there will be a market for cheap clones that are virtually identical to the "official" versions but with less QC and inferior materials, resulting in a lot of confusion for end purchasers who end up scammed. This is a tough problem and is worthy of real discussion - even real investigative reporting! -- but an honest look at this problem will show that Amazon's bottom line is hurt by this stuff and that Amazon is in fact taking steps to try to reign it in, so it won't be the kind of superficial Amazon hit piece that so many seem to crave.

tomnipotent 5y ago

Walmart has the same marketplace concept and shares many of the same vendors as Amazon. Best Buy and B&H have most of my business now. Other than Prime shipping, everyone has caught up on price.

gruez 5y ago
You do realize best buy also has a "marketplace"?
- tomnipotent 5y ago
  I'm unable to find any evidence of this on the U.S. website, and nothing but a few links to Canadian resources otherwise.
  - gruez 5y ago
    You're right, it seems to be specific to the .ca website.
    - tomnipotent 5y ago
      I was really panicked for a second. Complete denial, skipped straight to the anger phase. Best Buy has honestly been such a refreshing experience the last few years, now that Newegg is less and less an option. It's one of the few stores I still physically visit just to browse, with no specific purchasing goal in mind. It's how I ended up with a Philips Hues light setup and I'm actually very happy with it.
      - bserge 5y ago
        What happened to Newegg?
        gruez 5y ago
        they turned into a marketplace.

yuy910616 5y ago

If you're worried about quality, you should really look into Costco. Their business model incentivize them to have top notch quality. I've also worked with some of their buyers / purchasers - best in the business for sure. Very QA focus company

darkerside 5y ago
I've found Costco to offer products that have premium "specs" at affordable prices, but I'm often underwhelmed by the product itself.
xmprt 5y ago
I've never had to deal with it but I've also heard they have great customer service too so if that's something that you're worried you'll miss out on by switching, then don't be.
- yuy910616 5y ago
  I had a funny one - I was returning a bunch of unopened wine and I told the guy, there is one that was opened, indicating that when you see the open one please give it back to me. He was kinda rude and I was like wtf. And then he proceeds to return all of the wine, I asked him "dude wheres the open bottle?" And he said "I thought you were returning that one too?" Turns out in some states - they allow you to return opened bottle of wine. We laughed it off
  - dylan604 5y ago
    How much do you have to return? That could be the most rewarding bottle recycling plan I've heard of. Screw your 10 cents, I want a refill.
    - yuy910616 5y ago
      haha, by his attitude, I'm assuming that people have abuse this policy before. I'm thinking if you return the empty bottle, they'll still take it, albeit a bit gruntled. Mine was about 2/3 gone. Definitely beyond of the point of "hm..this wine taste funny" Over the years I've had so many little moments like this with Costco, whether it is a friendly exchange with a gas station attendee, a door person stopping me and pointing out that I was over-charged, a service rep who couldn't find an off-brand pedialyte I purchased so they gave me a pedialyte and told me "eh yeah just don't tell anyone", it really started to make sense to me why when you mention Costco - some people would light up and say "man I LOVE Costco", when it's just a store.

sundvor 5y ago

I've mainly had good experiences recently, but I'm in Australia. I try to only buy from the stores that are associated with the Prime offering, as I figured it'll help filter bad things? My items have included a number of different signal cables, coffee bean storage canister, knife sharpener, microfibre cloths - all top notch quality. I had one shipment get lost in the AusPost system which was frustrating (the tracking was active, but it ended up in a truly weird place), but received a refund as soon as I escalated it. And I do recall needing to vet the knife sharpener as there were a bunch of fakes; the one I ended up with was top notch. I wonder if the Australian branch performs some vetting, or if I've just been lucky.

sen 5y ago
Yeah I’m in AU too and generally buy 1-2 things a week from Amazon for the last couple years (thanks to lockdown etc), and I’ve never had a single fake/returned item. I only buy from local Amazon and never the international ones, and only things with Prime. Might be because we’re too small of a market for it to be an issue yet? Not sure.

silisili 5y ago

Hit the nail on the head. Walmart Plus is my goto these days. Always two day shipping, and if they have it in the store, you can have it brought to you same day. And sometimes even if you say you want it shipped, they'll still just drive it over if it's in the store. They do have third party sellers, I ignore them completely. I basically use Amazon for things Walmart doesn't carry, and things I don't like WM quality on. Hint to anyone like me that had previously avoided WM for years: they've recently started carrying higher quality, and higher priced things. It's not all bottom barrel custom garbage anymore, but that still exists and the price reflects it.

m-p-3 5y ago
> Walmart Plus Is that US-only?
- silisili 5y ago
  For the time being, it seems.
tzs 5y ago
Walmart+ has been great for pandemic shopping. It has two features that help. 1. Free delivery on grocery orders. 2. "Scan and Go". When shopping in-store you scan items using the Walmart app on your phone. At check out, you scan a QR code on the self checkout terminal, tell it how many bags you are using, hit the pay button, and you are done. It takes under 10 seconds. With Scan and Go I can do my in-store shopping at a time when the store does not have many customers (such as 9 AM on a weekday) so it is easy to avoid coming anywhere near other shoppers as I grab items, scan them, and dump them in my cart. Then it is 10 seconds through the self checkout (and the terminals are far enough apart in the self checkout area that I don't have to be close to anyone else) and I'm heading out the door. I don't bag my groceries there--I just keep them loose in the shopping cart until I reach my car. I then transfer them to my cloth bags there. It's a little slower if you have items sold by weight. When you scan those it tells you you will have to weigh them at checkout. At checkout it prompts you to put them on the scale, weighs them, and adds them to your order.

arenaninja 5y ago

I reviewed my purchase history and I stopped heavily buying from Amazon on 2017. Today I went to find an item I bought 5 years ago from them but their price has 30% markup from HomeDepot/Target/Walmart. Guess who's not getting my business again today! For years Amazon pricing has been getting worse, and they don't care

Railsify 5y ago
They don't care because they don't set the prices except when it's an amazon branded product.
- arenaninja 5y ago
  Oh I don't disagree, I'm only pointing out that this has been going on for years. On any year I purchase ~$200 at most from Amazon now, and usually only items I can't find somewhere else "Amazon Branded"/"Fulfilled by Amazon" and whatever other tier exists isn't a distinction I care to make

truetraveller 5y ago

Actually, fixing Amazon is very simple, but I believe Amazon does NOT want to do this. You see, the trick is to only buy when the seller is "Amazon". These products almost always have high-quality, and are authentic. You see, Amazon makes it very difficult to filter "Amazon" as the seller. There is no "default" and I believe it reverts to "All sellers" on every search. I believe this is deliberate. The "seller" problem applies to Walmart, Bestbuy, etc. But for some reason, it's much easier to filter the seller on these sites.

jfrunyon 5y ago
The Amazon brands are some of the worst offenders. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/consumer-groups-issue-warning-holiday-shoppers-beware-of-dangerous-and-fake-products-sold-on-amazon-301191372.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/consumer-groups-iss... https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/29/20837359/amazon-basics-fake-sellers-imposters-third-party-marketplace https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/29/20837359/amazon-basics-fa... https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/business/amazonbasics-electronics-fire-safety-invs/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/business/amazonbasics-electro...
rootusrootus 5y ago
I do this when I have to buy something from Amazon, but it does not really solve the problem. Amazon commingles product so what you get shipped may not be the product that Amazon actually sourced from their distributor, it may be third-party after all.

tdeck 5y ago

One interesting thing about air filters is that many of the ones on Amazon can't be shipped to California. CA has strict standards for air filters apparently, so I always viewed this as a red flag. But it turns out those certification standards don't actually include filter effectiveness: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/list-carb-certified-air-cleaning-devices https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/list-carb-certified-air-cleaning-devi...

thaumasiotes 5y ago
> I always viewed this as a red flag. But it turns out those certification standards don't actually include filter effectiveness Not too long ago I looked up the legal standards for (US) butter grading. Turns out they are exclusively based on a taster's professional opinion of the butter's flavor. This seems like a piece of regulatory apparatus we could do without.

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago

You can also buy air purifiers directly from the manufactures for a few bucks more than Amazon. I’ve done that for both Austin Air and Coway. Other products can also be bought that way, but of course not all.

callahad 5y ago
That's the damnedest thing, though. Review fraud has me manually curating a mental list of trusted brands which I'll preferentially by from, rather than using a marketplace for discovery. Seems totally backwards.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  Marketplaces are terrible for discovery: nobody trying to sell stuff are interested in acting as a trusted impartial observer, or giving anybody accurate information. Marketplaces are about balancing out competing sources of stuff by roughly their quality value without oversight, provided the underlying 'rules' aren't too egregiously ignored (no committing actual crimes, no stealing things to sell them at prices below their worth, no lying or pressuring people to lie on your behalf or stealing their identities to lie with). When you enforce a lack of crimes, marketplaces work to allocate resources without top-down control, and scale as big as you like without losing that quality. THAT is the point. It has nothing to do with discovery and in fact they're not at all great for discovery. The person who allocates more money and energy to being discovered by you is always going to come out ahead of the one who worked to deliver you a better product and didn't put as many resources into, quite literally, marketing. All expenditures in marketing are literally you paying to be sold on a thing, literally you paying to distort the marketplace in the product's favor (regardless of its value, could be garbage or a Veblen good that is otherwise of unimpeachable quality) The LAST thing you want is a marketplace for discovery. You want discovery to do an end run around the market and give you the realities of what's being sold. The market then allocates resources based on your hopefully enlightened input.

gentleman11 5y ago

I don’t know why they waited so long to try and fix this. Their reputation online, 5 years ago, was golden. People were obsessed with the company. Now, nobody will buy anything important without going to a fake review detector site first and then they might still chicken out because they worry it will be an illegitimate item (Eg, fake windows licenses were a big problem 2 years ago last I checked)

irrational 5y ago
Wait, are fake review detector sites a real thing? What is an example of one?
- sam345 5y ago
  https://reviewmeta.com/ https://reviewmeta.com/
- function_seven 5y ago
  The couple that I know of are https://reviewmeta.com https://reviewmeta.com and https://www.fakespot.com/analyzer https://www.fakespot.com/analyzer Looks like ReviewMeta's creator has left the project, but the site still seems to work. Fakespot really wants you to use their app or browser extension, but the link I pasted allows you to ad-hoc check item URLs.
  - Farfromthehood 5y ago
    FakeSpot has purposefully limited prior functionality from their site and only allows those features via installing their browser plugin. They really want that browsing history. So perhaps use a private tab.

01100011 5y ago

> Amazon is filled with cheap junk nowadays This makes it sound like there isn't a reason to shop at Amazon anymore. While it's true that there are a lot of fake reviews, fake products, and generally poor quality merchandise, I haven't personally had a big problem with it. I spend thousands on there every year and almost always get exactly what I'm after for a great price. Now I don't buy a lot of cheap Chinese junk there, but I have(phone accessories, bluetooth devices, LEDs and lights, etc) and it's generally worked out great. If I want something Chinese I generally try to buy it for less on Aliexpress or another site, but that said, Amazon, for me, is still well worth the prime membership.

doktorhladnjak 5y ago
I was like you. Prime member. Several purchases a month. Never had a problem with Amazon. Until I had a series of bad experiences. The first one was a wireless phone charging pad I bought. Skimmed through a gazillion options in the search listing. Found one with hundreds of good reviews. When it came, it looked much cheaper built than what I'd ordered and didn't work very well. I didn't seem to be able to place the phone anywhere that would consistently charge. Could have been a counterfeit. Returned it, which was a minor hassle (rebox it, get shipping tag, etc.). Then I went to look at the reviews, and now all the recent reviews were *BAD*. Like they had gone from 4.5 stars to 1 star. And the product was no longer for sale. I read more closely and realized all the old good reviews were for a completely different charging pad. When I searched for the item by name, I found a new listing with more great reviews. Yep, review fraud! The second issue was a power strip I bought. Plugs would not go into it! I opened it up and one of the parts was in backward. The sodering was extremely shoddy. At this point, I canceled Prime and walked away. I'm not going to be electrocuted or have my house burn down because Amazon is unable to stand behind the products they sell. I complained, but only got an offer to return the product for a refund. Never again. If I want to buy cheap shit, there's always eBay. It at least doesn't pretend to be something it's not.
- kelnos 5y ago
  > I read more closely and realized all the old good reviews were for a completely different charging pad. It completely boggles my mind that Amazon lets sellers completely change the product title, description, photos, and even product category on an existing listing and keep all the reviews and everything. I've seen weird things where the reviews for a product were talking about something completely different... like the listing being for a pet toy, but the reviews were talking about kitchen knives. It's just so obviously fraudulent.

chaostheory 5y ago

I hate to break this to you but Walmart and Target are now doing co-mingling as well now, though Target is on a much more limited scale. I wouldn’t trust Walmart either now.

blub 5y ago

The part about fakes may be specific to the US. Amazon Germany’s also filled with cheap junk to the point one must search for specific products, but they are not mixing inventory (yet).

croutonwagon 5y ago

Amazon has also made some of interesting decisions in my zip code. When the pandemic started deliveries went from 2 days to about 5. Normally they shipped from the next city over. They argued this was to prioritize health products. Then a very large distribution center started being in panned/submitted to the county, under an alias. There’s been som pushback. Suddenly my zip code is having deliveries stretch out to 7-14 days. It’s pretty predictable. To the point I can have them shipped to the office and get back to 2 days but to my home, that mouse I ordered last weekend still hasn’t shown up. Rather than putting pressure on my coonty board members to approve the warehouse I wrote a letter to the opposite. Canceled prime and moved to other services to find gear. I bought something on Newegg for the first time in years partially because of this issue and partially because of the fraud rife with Amazon and I didn’t want the “new” hard drive I ordered turn out to be a refurb in new “clothing”

babesh 5y ago

I have mostly good experiences with respect to the quality of products that I buy from Amazon. However, I think this is because I don't take recommendations at face value. Instead, I look at multiple products, research them, and evaluate reviews. I don't weigh reviews equally. Instead, I look for thoughtful reviews. In today's information manipulation landscape, you either do your own research or outsource it.

Decker87 5y ago
It's not just the reviews - It's that they mix inventory of the "same" item from multiple manufacturers.