17 ms·

Amazon puts its own “brands” first above better-rated products

55 points by juokaz 5y ago

bsharitt 5y ago
And even if you do skip over the Amazon version and click on the product you want, there's a good chance there's going to be a "similar item" box right near the description with a link to a similar Amazon product.
vishnugupta 5y ago
A related article https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-india-rigging/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i... tl;dr "Amazon copied products and rigged search results to promote its own brands, documents show"
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  Same topic but it's a diff investigation of diff sources.
krosaen 5y ago
I like Benedict Evan's perspective on this https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/3/28/amazon-private-label https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/3/28/amazon-pri... > Retailers have sold private label products for a century or more. Is something different when Amazon does it?
- only_as_i_fall 5y ago
  What's different is that Amazon is also an extremely dominant platform for other stores. It'd be like if Walmart came to your small town and signed a deal with the local government that stores had to carry their brands in addition to their own or pay higher taxes. The problem isn't the mere existence of store brands, but the use of anticompetitive practices to promote those brands.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >It'd be like if Walmart came to your small town and signed a deal with the local government that stores had to carry their brands in addition to their own or pay higher taxes. Not really? You can get around amazon's "extremely dominant platform" by setting up a shopify store. I'm not sure how that can be compared to the government forcing you to amazon.
    - jaywalk 5y ago
      How is setting up your own store "getting around" Amazon's dominant position? Obviously anybody can sell their own shit on their own website, but that doesn't change the fact that buying something online defaults to checking Amazon for a very large portion of the online public.
    - only_as_i_fall 5y ago
      And then you get far less traffic than you would if your product was listed on Amazon. In the traditional brick and mortar situation you can open your own shop next to the Walmart or Target or whatever and have roughly the same visibility. In the online space though rolling your own shopify store is a massive handicap similar to if you weren't allowed to build within 5 miles of a large box store for fear of competition. A huge number of people literally only shop on Amazon or at least look at Amazon before other locations because they believe it to be representative of the marketplace at large. Maybe that's their loss, but when you also consider Amazon's huge logistics network that nobody else is allowed to use.
merricksb 5y ago
Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28851484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28851484 (548 points/1 day ago/230 comments)
- bookoisseur 5y ago
  This is a different investigation using scrapped data not internal documents?
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    Agreed. Can we axe the Dupe tag? The Reuters article and this one are two separate investigations, examining different sources. @dang (does this work? how does one summon dang?)
    - dang 5y ago
      You have to email hn@ycombinator.com. @dang doesn't work. Fortunately someone did, and I've taken the [dupe] tag off now.
elmerfud 5y ago
Maybe it's because Amazon's site is just trash, but it's the trash we've become accustomed to. When you search for a very specific product and then choose sort by price and all if a sudden hundreds of irrelevant cheap items are at the top of the list. That's total trash design from a user perspective. From a corporate perspective it's a great design because they have such a large market share. Now they just have all other sorting methods broken/useless except their default. Their default sort they can say "algorithms" while waving their hands, and we all just go, ok sounds good and we keep buying. Because as a consumer it's good enough for us. People used to complain about Walmarts requirements for selling in there stores. Amazon is just as bad.
- jjtheblunt 5y ago
  Nowadays I feel Amazon's main insight (originally) was to test feasibility of an online searchable/shoppable version of Walmart.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  What I don't get is why their search pigeonholes you into a certain category, and often the category isn't accurate. I find I get better results when I set it back to "all departments".
merpnderp 5y ago
I don't trust Amazon ratings even a little bit. But I do expect anything Amazon branded to at least not be complete garbage. Maybe this is Amazon just embracing the fact no one can trust their ratings, but can somewhat trust their product partnerships?
- jkestner 5y ago
  Products usurping partnerships, you mean? Less about trust, and more about just taking more of the profit. It’s a classic move to wedge yourself into the market at one level and then move up and down as you become a chokepoint. Cloudflare is doing it to Amazon. I only buy stuff on Amazon after running it through FakeSpot, because metareviews are what we’ve come to now. If that site could ever make itself as indispensable for everyone, it’d have a chokepoint to steer people away from Amazon, especially as better prices are often found elsewhere.
- dhimes 5y ago
  Do you mean, as in turning their broken rating system into a strategic advantage? Damn, that's pretty brilliant actually.
yhoneycomb 5y ago
Not sure why this is a problem. They could ONLY sell Amazon-branded items on their website if they really wanted to. It's their store.
- dobin 5y ago
  The problem is that Amazon said that they dont do it (Copy successful products and then manipulate search results so they appear before the others). The available documents show that its an official Amazon strategy.
- nickpp 5y ago
  Moreover, this is common practice for any offline retailers since retailing started.
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    > this is common practice for any offline retailers This would apply better if retailers hid competing items on the back of shelves or in locations that can only be unlocked by 3rd parties (eg: using Google search to find product Amazon won't show you).
- funkymike 5y ago
  I think stories like this show up because there is a set of Amazon users that still want it to be a neutral marketplace where Amazon doesn't have a vested interest in one product selling over another. That hasn't been true for quite a while though.
LegitShady 5y ago
I completely stopped using Amazon about 8 months ago and I found I just end up spending less money overall. I skip impulse buying lots of junk I might have bought with a prime subscription and on many items I have ended up buying the cost of a local store is similar or better. The best days of Amazon are behind it.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  > The best days of Amazon are behind it. I use Prime (free via ISP) less because their search is (intentionally, I believe) utterly broken. My last Prime purchase used Google image search; item I bought never shows up on Amazon searches.
dirtyoldmick 5y ago
I don't mind. I need that free prime shipping.
dboreham 5y ago
Person discovers Amazon's business model. Writes about it.
mfer 5y ago
This is an element that's different from a typical store. In a typical store that has store branded items they will be on shelves side by side with the other brands of the same product. What Amazon does is the equivalent of putting their products up front and the alternatives (even those that are better rated) in a back room.
- gruez 5y ago
  >What Amazon does is the equivalent of putting their products up front and the alternatives (even those that are better rated) in a back room. Is amazon burying results on the second or third page of the results or something? If it's one row down on the results page, it's closer to being one shelf down (which stores are known to do[1]), than "in a back room". [1] https://traxretail.com/blog/eye-level-buy-level-importance-store-product-placement/ https://traxretail.com/blog/eye-level-buy-level-importance-s...
  - mfer 5y ago
    When I go to the grocery store, for example, the items are side by side on the same shelf. GIF peanut butter is next to the store brand at the same eye level. When I look for something on Amazon the higher rated item is often below the fold. Being below the fold makes a huge difference to buyers. Sometimes I see it on the second page. These are two very different ways of displaying things.
    - gruez 5y ago
      > When I go to the grocery store, for example, the items are side by side on the same shelf. GIF peanut butter is next to the store brand at the same eye level. That depends heavily on the type of product being sold. For small/low volume items, they'll be side by side as you mentioned, but for big/high volume items, they're definitely going to be placed on different levels. Overall, this behavior isn't because stores are fair or anything, but that they're subject to space constraints. Where space constraint isn't an issue (ie. for big/high volume items), brick and mortar retailers also engage in discrimination to make certain products more visible. I'm skeptical that placing products "below the fold" is any worse than what brick and mortar retailers engage in. Isn't "the fold" just a row that's slightly higher than the organic results? I'm not sure how having to scroll a few more inches is any way comparable to having to go to the backroom.
Kalanos 5y ago
It's their platform. Apple pre-installs its own apps. Every convenience and grocery store does the same thing with their store-brand products.
- diego_moita 5y ago
  As in: "yes, I am lying, but so does everyone else. What's the big deal?" If all you want is to be lied to or cheated then I guess it makes sense.
  - kova12 5y ago
    If I was to choose between Amazon and somewhat equal third party brand, I would pick Amazon brand every time. Reviews are manipulated all the time. When I buy amazon brand, I know that product has honest reviews and a seller that backs the quality guarantee. This is not a lie, that's the fact.
    - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
      > When I buy amazon brand, I know that product has honest reviews and a seller that backs the quality guarantee. This is not a lie, that's the fact. I accept as fact that you believe it. As recently as yesterday, I found Amazon items w/ 4.5 * rating and topped with 1 * reviews. I find insufficient reason to trust anything on Amazon by default.
      - kova12 5y ago
        By default I trust that amazon product selling on amazon website is very unlikely to be fake, which I can not trust about third-party product selling on amazon site.
        WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
        I think the primary concern with goods from Amazon is quality. We're far, far, far more likely to buy stuff that breaks prematurely than wind up with some sort of counterfeit. Authentic broken stuff doesn't bring a lot of comfort - and it's harder to avoid crap when 4.5 * review totals are actually dominated by 1 * reviews.
tryptophan 5y ago
I get anxiety shopping on amazon now. I just can't deal with 50 pages of options, all from "different" brands, selling the same mass produced chineese shit. Will not be renewing prime. There is a real opportunity for focused web stores out there. Selling only 1 type of product, filtering out crap, having good search, etc...
- deelowe 5y ago
  100% agree. I used to avoid walmart or lowes for things that fit into the category of "I need something to do x, but don't have the time to research it properly" and instead use amazon as I would generally end up with a better product in the end. These days it's the opposite. Fakes, clones, and outright scams have taken over. For the products I do have intimate knowledge of (e.g. hand tools or cables) amazon routinely buries the quality products and presents crap. And this isn't a price thing. Even affordable, quality options get buried despite being less expensive than the clones and fakes. It's even worse when amazon has their own competing product.
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    > amazon routinely buries the quality products and presents crap. Not just crap, crap w/ 4.5 star ratings - that when you check find it's 1 star after 1 star after 1 star.
    - deelowe 5y ago
      Right. I used to think that Amazon was just supremely incompetent, but my opinions have shifted in recent years. I truly believe Amazon is intentionally causing brand dilution to strengthen their value of their on in house brands. It makes sense as the next logical step in terms of growth. Own the marketplace, then own the supply chain, and now they want to own product development. Manufacturing would be next.
- satysin 5y ago
  Not anxiety but I do get incredibly frustrated by the experience. Even when you search for a specific model number of something you get other similar items returned above the item you specifically searched for. Wtaf? And God help you if you search for something generic. You will see an endless list of the same item from 2000+ rebranding outfits. If you search through a bunch you can see they all use the same product shots just edited slightly. A green star added on a flipped image or the tint adjusted so the colour is different, etc. Maybe their editor was more creative so they photoshopped in a different stock background. Another thing I have noticed is many resellers on Amazon will use the correct product item in the search result but when you click through it is clear a different, albeit very similar, version of the product. You have to be so so careful to read the product description to ensure you buy the right product. USB items are notorious for this sort of thing with USB-C to C cables shown with two C connectors in the search result image but the actual item is a C to A??! It is infuriating.
helen___keller 5y ago
Amazon branded items don't bother me much, personally. I've found they're always reasonable quality at good prices. I've had an amazon backpack that I used for years before the pandemic, an Amazon mouse that I've been using for years, and so on. No, what really irks me about Amazon is when I search for something and find a thousand products of different brands that are essentially the same, none of which are what I'm looking for. Usually this happens when you want something really specific. One example, I was looking for a moss pole to train my tropical houseplants on. A requirement for me is a pole with real moss: coco coir doesn't hold enough moisture to build aerial roots on a tropical plant. I search "moss pole" on amazon and for pages and pages I only see coco coir poles of the exact same design (I tried this again right now and I see there's exactly one pole with real moss on the first page, an improvement for now) This phenomenon has happened to me multiple times, where my search results in dozens of brands of seemingly identical products that aren't in the least what I want. Combined the usual quality problems of these nameless brands, it gets very difficult to buy anything on Amazon unless I already know the exact brand to buy from.
- potatosalad1 5y ago
  When you see that, and it's something you do want to buy, go to AliExpress and buy it directly from China for half off.
luke2m 5y ago
How is this different from generic products being promoted at stores?
tristor 5y ago
My biggest issue with Amazon is that most of the products listed are garbage. I went from spending an average of $20k/yr on Amazon to spending less than $500/yr. I now refuse to buy on Amazon unless it's a product /from/ Amazon, which is mostly digital books because I have a Kindle and a I read a lot. Once my local grocery store started offering same-day delivery of groceries and other sundries, almost all my expected Prime purchases can just go to the local grocery. Everything else, I am more concerned about quality than almost anything else, and Amazon just fails for every product category to offer discoverable high quality options. I am sure Amazon executives don't care, because most consumers are price-motivated, not quality motivated, but I basically only buy things online directly from the manufacturer now or an authorized brick and mortar retailer I can call on the phone and get confirmation of the product before receiving it. Amazon is just full of garbage, mostly "brands" that are all the same Chinese junk off Alibaba, and if it is a major brand, it ends up often being counterfeit. Completely untrustworthy, and it makes me sad, because historically as a consumer I liked the experience of buying on Amazon. What's more shocking is unprompted, my parents and siblings are also now avoiding Amazon. In many cases they've been buying through Walmart with in-store pickup, because that fits into their day-to-day life and has a much higher quality bar. Yes, Walmart quality is higher than Amazon quality in basically every product category.

55 points by juokaz 5y ago

And even if you do skip over the Amazon version and click on the product you want, there's a good chance there's going to be a "similar item" box right near the description with a link to a similar Amazon product.

vishnugupta 5y ago

A related article https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-india-rigging/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i... tl;dr "Amazon copied products and rigged search results to promote its own brands, documents show"

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
Same topic but it's a diff investigation of diff sources.

krosaen 5y ago

I like Benedict Evan's perspective on this https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/3/28/amazon-private-label https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/3/28/amazon-pri... > Retailers have sold private label products for a century or more. Is something different when Amazon does it?

only_as_i_fall 5y ago
What's different is that Amazon is also an extremely dominant platform for other stores. It'd be like if Walmart came to your small town and signed a deal with the local government that stores had to carry their brands in addition to their own or pay higher taxes. The problem isn't the mere existence of store brands, but the use of anticompetitive practices to promote those brands.
- gruez 5y ago
  >It'd be like if Walmart came to your small town and signed a deal with the local government that stores had to carry their brands in addition to their own or pay higher taxes. Not really? You can get around amazon's "extremely dominant platform" by setting up a shopify store. I'm not sure how that can be compared to the government forcing you to amazon.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    How is setting up your own store "getting around" Amazon's dominant position? Obviously anybody can sell their own shit on their own website, but that doesn't change the fact that buying something online defaults to checking Amazon for a very large portion of the online public.
  - only_as_i_fall 5y ago
    And then you get far less traffic than you would if your product was listed on Amazon. In the traditional brick and mortar situation you can open your own shop next to the Walmart or Target or whatever and have roughly the same visibility. In the online space though rolling your own shopify store is a massive handicap similar to if you weren't allowed to build within 5 miles of a large box store for fear of competition. A huge number of people literally only shop on Amazon or at least look at Amazon before other locations because they believe it to be representative of the marketplace at large. Maybe that's their loss, but when you also consider Amazon's huge logistics network that nobody else is allowed to use.

merricksb 5y ago

Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28851484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28851484 (548 points/1 day ago/230 comments)

bookoisseur 5y ago
This is a different investigation using scrapped data not internal documents?
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  Agreed. Can we axe the Dupe tag? The Reuters article and this one are two separate investigations, examining different sources. @dang (does this work? how does one summon dang?)
  - dang 5y ago
    You have to email hn@ycombinator.com. @dang doesn't work. Fortunately someone did, and I've taken the [dupe] tag off now.

elmerfud 5y ago

Maybe it's because Amazon's site is just trash, but it's the trash we've become accustomed to. When you search for a very specific product and then choose sort by price and all if a sudden hundreds of irrelevant cheap items are at the top of the list. That's total trash design from a user perspective. From a corporate perspective it's a great design because they have such a large market share. Now they just have all other sorting methods broken/useless except their default. Their default sort they can say "algorithms" while waving their hands, and we all just go, ok sounds good and we keep buying. Because as a consumer it's good enough for us. People used to complain about Walmarts requirements for selling in there stores. Amazon is just as bad.

jjtheblunt 5y ago
Nowadays I feel Amazon's main insight (originally) was to test feasibility of an online searchable/shoppable version of Walmart.
ravenstine 5y ago
What I don't get is why their search pigeonholes you into a certain category, and often the category isn't accurate. I find I get better results when I set it back to "all departments".

merpnderp 5y ago

I don't trust Amazon ratings even a little bit. But I do expect anything Amazon branded to at least not be complete garbage. Maybe this is Amazon just embracing the fact no one can trust their ratings, but can somewhat trust their product partnerships?

jkestner 5y ago
Products usurping partnerships, you mean? Less about trust, and more about just taking more of the profit. It’s a classic move to wedge yourself into the market at one level and then move up and down as you become a chokepoint. Cloudflare is doing it to Amazon. I only buy stuff on Amazon after running it through FakeSpot, because metareviews are what we’ve come to now. If that site could ever make itself as indispensable for everyone, it’d have a chokepoint to steer people away from Amazon, especially as better prices are often found elsewhere.
dhimes 5y ago
Do you mean, as in turning their broken rating system into a strategic advantage? Damn, that's pretty brilliant actually.

yhoneycomb 5y ago

Not sure why this is a problem. They could ONLY sell Amazon-branded items on their website if they really wanted to. It's their store.

dobin 5y ago
The problem is that Amazon said that they dont do it (Copy successful products and then manipulate search results so they appear before the others). The available documents show that its an official Amazon strategy.
nickpp 5y ago
Moreover, this is common practice for any offline retailers since retailing started.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  > this is common practice for any offline retailers This would apply better if retailers hid competing items on the back of shelves or in locations that can only be unlocked by 3rd parties (eg: using Google search to find product Amazon won't show you).
funkymike 5y ago
I think stories like this show up because there is a set of Amazon users that still want it to be a neutral marketplace where Amazon doesn't have a vested interest in one product selling over another. That hasn't been true for quite a while though.

LegitShady 5y ago

I completely stopped using Amazon about 8 months ago and I found I just end up spending less money overall. I skip impulse buying lots of junk I might have bought with a prime subscription and on many items I have ended up buying the cost of a local store is similar or better. The best days of Amazon are behind it.

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
> The best days of Amazon are behind it. I use Prime (free via ISP) less because their search is (intentionally, I believe) utterly broken. My last Prime purchase used Google image search; item I bought never shows up on Amazon searches.

dirtyoldmick 5y ago

I don't mind. I need that free prime shipping.

dboreham 5y ago

Person discovers Amazon's business model. Writes about it.

mfer 5y ago

This is an element that's different from a typical store. In a typical store that has store branded items they will be on shelves side by side with the other brands of the same product. What Amazon does is the equivalent of putting their products up front and the alternatives (even those that are better rated) in a back room.

gruez 5y ago
>What Amazon does is the equivalent of putting their products up front and the alternatives (even those that are better rated) in a back room. Is amazon burying results on the second or third page of the results or something? If it's one row down on the results page, it's closer to being one shelf down (which stores are known to do[1]), than "in a back room". [1] https://traxretail.com/blog/eye-level-buy-level-importance-store-product-placement/ https://traxretail.com/blog/eye-level-buy-level-importance-s...
- mfer 5y ago
  When I go to the grocery store, for example, the items are side by side on the same shelf. GIF peanut butter is next to the store brand at the same eye level. When I look for something on Amazon the higher rated item is often below the fold. Being below the fold makes a huge difference to buyers. Sometimes I see it on the second page. These are two very different ways of displaying things.
  - gruez 5y ago
    > When I go to the grocery store, for example, the items are side by side on the same shelf. GIF peanut butter is next to the store brand at the same eye level. That depends heavily on the type of product being sold. For small/low volume items, they'll be side by side as you mentioned, but for big/high volume items, they're definitely going to be placed on different levels. Overall, this behavior isn't because stores are fair or anything, but that they're subject to space constraints. Where space constraint isn't an issue (ie. for big/high volume items), brick and mortar retailers also engage in discrimination to make certain products more visible. I'm skeptical that placing products "below the fold" is any worse than what brick and mortar retailers engage in. Isn't "the fold" just a row that's slightly higher than the organic results? I'm not sure how having to scroll a few more inches is any way comparable to having to go to the backroom.

Kalanos 5y ago

It's their platform. Apple pre-installs its own apps. Every convenience and grocery store does the same thing with their store-brand products.

diego_moita 5y ago
As in: "yes, I am lying, but so does everyone else. What's the big deal?" If all you want is to be lied to or cheated then I guess it makes sense.
- kova12 5y ago
  If I was to choose between Amazon and somewhat equal third party brand, I would pick Amazon brand every time. Reviews are manipulated all the time. When I buy amazon brand, I know that product has honest reviews and a seller that backs the quality guarantee. This is not a lie, that's the fact.
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    > When I buy amazon brand, I know that product has honest reviews and a seller that backs the quality guarantee. This is not a lie, that's the fact. I accept as fact that you believe it. As recently as yesterday, I found Amazon items w/ 4.5 * rating and topped with 1 * reviews. I find insufficient reason to trust anything on Amazon by default.
    - kova12 5y ago
      By default I trust that amazon product selling on amazon website is very unlikely to be fake, which I can not trust about third-party product selling on amazon site.
      - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
        I think the primary concern with goods from Amazon is quality. We're far, far, far more likely to buy stuff that breaks prematurely than wind up with some sort of counterfeit. Authentic broken stuff doesn't bring a lot of comfort - and it's harder to avoid crap when 4.5 * review totals are actually dominated by 1 * reviews.

tryptophan 5y ago

I get anxiety shopping on amazon now. I just can't deal with 50 pages of options, all from "different" brands, selling the same mass produced chineese shit. Will not be renewing prime. There is a real opportunity for focused web stores out there. Selling only 1 type of product, filtering out crap, having good search, etc...

deelowe 5y ago
100% agree. I used to avoid walmart or lowes for things that fit into the category of "I need something to do x, but don't have the time to research it properly" and instead use amazon as I would generally end up with a better product in the end. These days it's the opposite. Fakes, clones, and outright scams have taken over. For the products I do have intimate knowledge of (e.g. hand tools or cables) amazon routinely buries the quality products and presents crap. And this isn't a price thing. Even affordable, quality options get buried despite being less expensive than the clones and fakes. It's even worse when amazon has their own competing product.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  > amazon routinely buries the quality products and presents crap. Not just crap, crap w/ 4.5 star ratings - that when you check find it's 1 star after 1 star after 1 star.
  - deelowe 5y ago
    Right. I used to think that Amazon was just supremely incompetent, but my opinions have shifted in recent years. I truly believe Amazon is intentionally causing brand dilution to strengthen their value of their on in house brands. It makes sense as the next logical step in terms of growth. Own the marketplace, then own the supply chain, and now they want to own product development. Manufacturing would be next.
satysin 5y ago
Not anxiety but I do get incredibly frustrated by the experience. Even when you search for a specific model number of something you get other similar items returned above the item you specifically searched for. Wtaf? And God help you if you search for something generic. You will see an endless list of the same item from 2000+ rebranding outfits. If you search through a bunch you can see they all use the same product shots just edited slightly. A green star added on a flipped image or the tint adjusted so the colour is different, etc. Maybe their editor was more creative so they photoshopped in a different stock background. Another thing I have noticed is many resellers on Amazon will use the correct product item in the search result but when you click through it is clear a different, albeit very similar, version of the product. You have to be so so careful to read the product description to ensure you buy the right product. USB items are notorious for this sort of thing with USB-C to C cables shown with two C connectors in the search result image but the actual item is a C to A??! It is infuriating.

helen___keller 5y ago

Amazon branded items don't bother me much, personally. I've found they're always reasonable quality at good prices. I've had an amazon backpack that I used for years before the pandemic, an Amazon mouse that I've been using for years, and so on. No, what really irks me about Amazon is when I search for something and find a thousand products of different brands that are essentially the same, none of which are what I'm looking for. Usually this happens when you want something really specific. One example, I was looking for a moss pole to train my tropical houseplants on. A requirement for me is a pole with real moss: coco coir doesn't hold enough moisture to build aerial roots on a tropical plant. I search "moss pole" on amazon and for pages and pages I only see coco coir poles of the exact same design (I tried this again right now and I see there's exactly one pole with real moss on the first page, an improvement for now) This phenomenon has happened to me multiple times, where my search results in dozens of brands of seemingly identical products that aren't in the least what I want. Combined the usual quality problems of these nameless brands, it gets very difficult to buy anything on Amazon unless I already know the exact brand to buy from.

potatosalad1 5y ago
When you see that, and it's something you do want to buy, go to AliExpress and buy it directly from China for half off.

luke2m 5y ago

How is this different from generic products being promoted at stores?

tristor 5y ago

My biggest issue with Amazon is that most of the products listed are garbage. I went from spending an average of $20k/yr on Amazon to spending less than $500/yr. I now refuse to buy on Amazon unless it's a product /from/ Amazon, which is mostly digital books because I have a Kindle and a I read a lot. Once my local grocery store started offering same-day delivery of groceries and other sundries, almost all my expected Prime purchases can just go to the local grocery. Everything else, I am more concerned about quality than almost anything else, and Amazon just fails for every product category to offer discoverable high quality options. I am sure Amazon executives don't care, because most consumers are price-motivated, not quality motivated, but I basically only buy things online directly from the manufacturer now or an authorized brick and mortar retailer I can call on the phone and get confirmation of the product before receiving it. Amazon is just full of garbage, mostly "brands" that are all the same Chinese junk off Alibaba, and if it is a major brand, it ends up often being counterfeit. Completely untrustworthy, and it makes me sad, because historically as a consumer I liked the experience of buying on Amazon. What's more shocking is unprompted, my parents and siblings are also now avoiding Amazon. In many cases they've been buying through Walmart with in-store pickup, because that fits into their day-to-day life and has a much higher quality bar. Yes, Walmart quality is higher than Amazon quality in basically every product category.