15 ms·

Walmart Sells Fake 30TB Hard Drive That's Two Small SD Cards

279 points by danso 4y ago

insane_dreamer 4y ago
Don't shop at Walmart, kids.
wfleming 4y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628381
jonnycomputer 4y ago
There was a time that I turned to buying from walmart.com as alternative to amazon, precisely because it wasn't taking the 3rd-party seller approach; but then they decided they had to imitate Amazon. Well, no thanks.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  Just what I was about to say. Guess I'll cross Walmart.com off my online retailer list. Sorry Walmart, if you let your brand get polluted with 3rd parties selling garbage you will quickly start to lose whatever brand loyalty you have. I never expected top end merchandise from Walmart. They are a discount retailer and that's fine. But I do expect to get genuine merchandise that is as advertised, not counterfeit or fradulent crap.
  - AlwaysRock 4y ago
    They have hosted third party sellers for... at least 3-5 years. If you didnt know this already you wernt a customer. They lost 0 in revenue from when they opened their site up to third party sellers and gained lots of revenue from those third party sellers. I dont like third party sellers either but obviously it makes financial sense for these companies to do this.
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      I did know they had 3rd parties but thought they were somewhat better vetted than Amazon. And regardless, I'm on walmart.com so it reflects on them when some third party seller sends me shit. It is true that I am not a frequent shopper there.
- Someone1234 4y ago
  I agree. One positive remains though: If you buy from Walmart you get it from Walmart and their supply chain. With Amazon because they "mingle" inventory from third parties, you can order shipped & sold by Amazon.com and still get a counterfeit product, because a third party slipped it in. And, yes, that has happened to me personally by the way.
  - jghn 4y ago
    It has happened to me a few times that I order from Walmart, see a shipment notification, that shipment "arrives" but definitely did not. However that day or the next I receive an Amazon package which I did not order containing my product. So no, ordering from Walmart does not guarantee anything is going through their supply chain.
    - rascul 4y ago
      Was that from Walmart the retailer or someone else selling on Walmart's marketplace? I would be very surprised if Walmart itself resold you something from Amazon, but that does happen with third party retailers on their marketplace.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        This happens in more than just Walmart - there are arbitrage experts that list product on eBay, Walmart, etc and just order it for you from Amazon. I’m not exactly sure how they make money as the prices are often nearly identical.
        hattmall 4y ago
        I use to do this successfully for many years. I could sell for a few cents less than Amazon. Due to buying gift cards at Kroger with a 5% Cashback card. In addition I would also get 1000 fuel points per $250 that I could sell for $20 easily. So each $1000 in sales would net minimum $130 margin. Accounting for selling fees of around 10%, I could clear around $30 per $1000 even at breakeven or below Amazon prices. I would also be able to sell many items for more than the Amazon cost. It worked well for several years with millions in sales, all automated. It became untenable though as Cryptocurrency facilitated people buying Amazon gift cards with stolen credit cards and cashing them out at 30-50% of face value. So the market became saturated with scammers selling considerably cheaper than Amazon. For a time maybe 6-4 years ago you could get pretty much anything from Amazon on eBay for around 20% less and shipped direct from Amazon via prime. Amazon eventually shut it down though and if you meet some very strict gift card threshold they will just steal your balance. People still do it, but large scale automation isn't really worth it any longer.
- zht 4y ago
  Sorry I am confused can’t you filter by Walmart sold vs third party?
  - geraldwhen 4y ago
    You can, but they do hide it. And if the product you’re looking for isn’t currently in stock, you won’t see the filter at all.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The trick I do is “pickup today or ship to store” as that gets Walmart only items as far as I can tell.
    - jkeddo 4y ago
      Me too! I've been doing this with the Walmart+ delivery service for $100 a year. I even applied for their 5% cash back credit card. It saves me a good amount of time and money, and I am overall very happy with it. If Walmart ever starts mixing 3rd party reseller crap with their "in-store" inventories, they will ruin a fantastic product and lose me as a customer.
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  I've never actually been able to order anything off Walmart. They always cancel my order after a day due to 'fraud' alerts on the seller. I guess that's good?
- lxchase 4y ago
  For others that are trying to avoid 3rd party sellers: look for Sold and shipped by Walmart.com As far as I'm aware they don't comingle 3rd party inventory like "Sold and shipped by Amazon.com" does.
- wmeredith 4y ago
  Target does this crap as well. When I search on these sites now I always check the box on items only fulfilled by the retailer. If there's no box like that, I won't shop there.
bearjaws 4y ago
This is a scam as old as time, set it to 'tape drive mode' and let it pretend to be any size you want. There used to be hard drives on ebay that were simply SD cards with scrap metal glued down for weight back in 2012ish.
- immibis 4y ago
  What's not old as time is being able to buy it from Walmart.
  - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
    But their competitor Amazon has been doing since forever and they've not really been hit with any lawsuit or any repercussion whatsoever for the matter, so ... why not ?
kbos87 4y ago
The marketplace-ization (is there a word for that?) of every retailer feels so short sighted. I’ll throw out an example I’ve noticed lately - furniture manufacturers. Search for any item on Crate & Barrel or West Elm’s website and you’ll first see a handful of exclusive pieces that are clearly built for the brand. Keep scrolling and the search results gradually become a bunch of generic third party items that you can find in a dozen different places, often for lower prices elsewhere. I get it, Crate & Barrel sees this as an opportunity to monetize their brand without having to do all that much. Unfortunately it leaves me with a lot less trust for a brand that used to represent a quality and reputation.
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  I think the marketplace approach will prove less successful in the longer term. I can no longer trust any products or reviews on Amazon, for example, so I prefer not to shop there. Did they make some short term gains in profitability? Probably. Not sure it will be worth it in the end
- madaxe_again 4y ago
  Those “exclusive pieces” are typically not designed for a given brand, but are designed on spec by various ID houses, perhaps with a brand or set of brands in mind as target, and are then pitched and sold, or pulled in by buyers. This has been the way for at least the past several decades, and fashion and furnishings have lead the trend which is now ubiquitous. Crate & Barrel I know do this, as I’ve worked with Otto on some of their other brands, and they consolidated much of their buying years ago - big part of their efficiency. There are still some retailers who retain some in-house design talent, but they’re few and far between, as it provides little differentiation in the eye of the consumer, who typically can’t tell an in-house from an acquired design - so in-house design is typically an idiosyncratic choice now, as it doesn’t provide a competitive edge over those who claim in-house design.
  - pmezard 4y ago
    Does it achieve the same outcome, at least on the quality side of things? Instead of a brand sending specs aligned to what their brand should represent, the seller creates spec to match what it expects target brands to look for.
RegnisGnaw 4y ago
It reminds me of this, like 10 years ago http://blog.gsmarena.com/how-do-you-spot-fake-chinese-usb-hard-drives-well-you-take-them-apart/ http://blog.gsmarena.com/how-do-you-spot-fake-chinese-usb-ha...
pupppet 4y ago
I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the meeting when reputable businesses decided it was in their best interests to sell random garbage they couldn't vouch for.
- dimitrios1 4y ago
  did Walmart ever have a reputation for quality?
  - deathanatos 4y ago
    … there's a difference between "cheap and low quality" and fraud.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    There was a baseline expecting of quality, because Walmart would not be expected to buy from counterfeiters. For example, if I buy 3 mule team borax from Walmart, I expect it to come via official sources. If I buy 3 mule team borax from a Walmart reseller, I have no idea where it is sourced from or how much those entities care about reputation. It could be from 3 mule team, it could be counterfeit.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      Branded borax? It's a mineral, coming out of the same mines no matter what brand you buy.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        I do not have the equipment or expertise required to confirm it. So I rely on a combination of a reputable businesses who would care to verify it is whatever percent and quality borax it should be because they (presumably) have something to lose if it comes out that it is not.
      - cogman10 4y ago
        You'd think. But really the issue is that you can't trust that you are actually getting borax and not something completely different (and cheaper).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Covzire 4y ago
There's something wrong with Walmart's review system too. I've tried leaving a 1 star review on a product recently and after well over a month it's still not posted on the product page.
- lostgame 4y ago
  Very good to know. Thanks for making us aware of this. Review scams are insane.
rascul 4y ago
There was a discussion about this 2 days ago, with 282 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628381
strifey 4y ago
Is there an online store for generic "stuff" that doesn't allow 3rd party sellers at this point? Genuinely looking for recommendations.
- Tarragon 4y ago
  Target I believe.
- heartbreak 4y ago
  McMaster Carr
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Grainger.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Home Depot does well and has a decently large selection.
- haunter 4y ago
  http://monoprice.com/ http://monoprice.com/
- ridiculous_fish 4y ago
  Seconding Monoprice, also Ikea and Costco.
magundu 4y ago
In India, I see lot of fake websites in Google Ads. Their offer is also too good and the images in the ads are so nice and attractive. Interestingly ads are appear even before big websites like Amazon and Flipkart. After you made the payment, you will realize that you have been cheated. I guess lot of the people got cheated by this method.
paxys 4y ago
Walmart is a retailer. Do people really think they (or Amazon, or anyone else) test every single one of the hundreds of millions of products sold on their site? If people choose to trust a hard drive made by "XGeek", well, that's on them. This is exactly why branding is a thing. Just stick to Seagate or WD next time.
- smegsicle 4y ago
  seagate drives have been timebombs since around 2006 maybe good fodder for raid with capital R and I ofcourse nowadays you've got to dodge those shingled drives...
- dghlsakjg 4y ago
  You and I know how the marketplace system works. My 70 year old uncle might just -reasonably- assume that buying from walmart.com is the same as walking into the store, and comes with the same return and quality guarantees. Stuff in the store is very much vetted, and individually chosen. Shelf space is an incredibly valuable commodity and any retailer knows not to just give it away. I don't know why e-store search results aren't seen as equally valuable. That same uncle might not care, or even know, about the brands that make commodity computer hardware. I built my own gaming PC, and, beyond the processor I would have to double check the brand names on the other components (AMD GPU, but I don't know who made the card off the top of my head).
  - kevin_b_er 4y ago
    > My 70 year old uncle might just -reasonably- assume that buying from walmart.com is the same as walking into the store, and comes with the same return and quality guarantees. And that is exactly the deception the Walton family wants out of this.
    - dghlsakjg 4y ago
      Maybe, but I kind of doubt it. They might make a $6 commission on a sale like this. After you get done dealing with the labor cost of handling an angry customer, return shipping, and the loss of future business you start start losing money that even the most short sighted of execs can understand… er… should understand
hedora 4y ago
According to Duck Duck Go, Amazon was selling a similar drive for $36.15 until recently. Sadly, the link is a 404 now: https://www.amazon.com/Portable-External-high-Speed-Interface-Expansion/dp/B0B5LLLWWJ https://www.amazon.com/Portable-External-high-Speed-Interfac... > SSD Mobile Solid State Drive Mini Portable External Hard Drive high-Speed USB3.1 Type-C Interface Notebook PC Expansion Upgrade Hard Drive (Color : Red, Size : 30TB) Brand: Generic. $36.15 $ 36. 15. Coupon: Save an extra 10% when you apply this coupon. Terms. Capacity: 30TB . 1GB. 500GB. 1TB. 2TB. 4TB. 6TB. 8TB. 10TB. 12TB. 14TB. 16TB. Even with the 10% off coupon, it was more than Walmart was charging. Gotta give Walmart credit where credit is due!
nope96 4y ago
A third party seller did, not Walmart.. However, Walmart itself did recently sell me an OEM 'not for resale' labeled hard drive, so there is some strangeness going on in their warehouse just like at Amazon
- noasaservice 4y ago
  Walmart is *endorsing* any subcontractor. I literally do not care what back-end contractor of theirs is doing. My transaction is conducted on walmart.com , my credit card transaction goes to a walmart account, and my credit card bill shows a walmart line-item. This "redirecting responsibility" to somewhere else is the fraudulent grift going on there. Walmart wants to put their name on transactions? Make them live with the repercussions dealing with fraud. (Same goes for any online retailer that has a primary presence, and intertwines back end contractors or 3rd party sellers.) Exceptions are for ebay and etsy, since it is blatantly clear that individuals open their own shop and ebay/etsy only provide a basic framework.
  - nope96 4y ago
    Oh, I agree, but I can't think of any major US retailer that does not do this 3rd-party stuff. Amazon, Walmart, Newegg all do. I guess Target doesn't (yet). It's frustrating to explain to older parents, "You have to pick, "Sold by [Walmart|Amazon]", or it could be anyone!" and not have them understand.
buscoquadnary 4y ago
You know it seems to me that we are going to eventually end up reinventing the idea of a brand. As these massive online marketplaces continue to allow third party sellers their reputation will continue to suffer, people will be less and less likely to get what they ordered, and eventually look for a way to identify good products. Eventually some sellers and marketplaces will end up being identified as only having good quality products and people will start to buy from them. Honestly a lot of the discussion around Amazon seems a lot like the arguments and discussions I heard around Wal-Mart in the early 20's like almost all the arguments are the exact same to a large degree, right down to the discussions of labor issues and the effect of their monopoly on smaller retailers. It seems eventually Amazon, Wal-Mart and online marketplaces that allow third party sellers will end up like the Aldi's, Dollar Tree, Wal-Mart, type stores, with a cheaper price and expected quality, and people will know there are other online marketplaces to go to when they need quality or something that lasts.
- hattmall 4y ago
  Interestingly Aldi and Dollar Tree almost exclusively sell their own house brands.
  - droopyEyelids 4y ago
    Well, a house brand isn't made by the company. The retail company has people called 'sourcers' who find other companies that sell a product, test those companies can handle the retailer's scale and the product meets quality standards, and then sets up a white label agreement.
dghughes 4y ago
Here in Canada Best Buy sells refurbished hardware but it's not Best Buy itself. You buy it on their site and it looks like Best Buy sells it but it's from a third party and most often it's junk. Not outright fraud like Walmart but close. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-best-buy-test-1.6201499 https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-best-buy-test-1...
zarriak 4y ago
Walmart has also fed into this a lot by making it so they are your one stop shop by making it ship stuff that isn’t in stock at your local store. They also by default will give you substitutions if you are doing an online store pickup or delivery order which only has more room for abuse or manipulation of substituting your items for things they need to get rid of etc. I only use it for a family member but they have intentionally continuously degraded the ui/ux to make it so you fall into these traps and have even basically made it so all of the filters reset every time you search.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The substitution thing has worked well for me - they now alert you in the app before and you can yes/no the substitution. You can also mark “ride or die” on items and if they can’t get it they don’t substitute. I don’t recall if they upcharge for more expensive substitution now - before it was free, which was a bit abuseable.
  - ok_dad 4y ago
    > You can also mark “ride or die” on items Is that what the mark is called, "ride or die"? That would be very un-corpo-like, but I would welcome it.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      It’d be nice but it’s called “allow substitutions” or something. Maybe the database column is r-or-d
  - zarriak 4y ago
    Yeah it worked for a while for me but the person I’m getting the stuff for has all the alerts on their device so I just turn most of the substitutions off. There were a few times where I had generous substitutions but I think they reigned those in.
    - jkeddo 4y ago
0x0 4y ago
Would have liked to see the devops team of walmart.com trying to use these for hosting walmart.com...
mch0lic1 4y ago
greed. there is simply no limit to greed.
- wppick 4y ago
  This is end stage capitalism greed. It's a full blown assault on the consumer. The trust that citizens have in their retails is being mortgaged for desperate profits. The quality of the products is dropping to possibly dangerous levels. There's no quality control. The products that you are buying could be full of toxic, carcinogenic, reproductive harm chemicals. The cast iron pan you buy has lead in it. The kids toys are using toxic paints. The cotton clothes you are buying are not cotton.
Animats 4y ago
Does WalMart accept that they're the seller, legally responsible for the item, or do they try to pass the buck to the source of the item?
neverrroot 4y ago
Plenty of these also available on eBay, reported them once, didn’t get to hear anything back from them (eBay). Examples: https://www.ebay.de/itm/374176058730 https://www.ebay.de/itm/374176058730 https://www.ebay.de/itm/234648959915 https://www.ebay.de/itm/234648959915
walrus01 4y ago
If you think 30TB fake hard drives are bad, the Amazon marketplace is now selling Taliban flags printed by 3rd party sellers in China. At least there's no ISIS flags yet. I assume whatever flag factory in china is cranking out $10 flags doesn't care about the content of what's printed on them.
- stronglikedan 4y ago
  Good. They should be able to sell any flags they want.
  - walrus01 4y ago
    sure, and people can draw their own conclusions about a "marketplace" allowing morally reprehensible products on it, and whether to purchase from them in the future.
    - nobody9999 4y ago
      >sure, and people can draw their own conclusions about a "marketplace" allowing morally reprehensible products on it, and whether to purchase from them in the future. How can a piece of dyed cloth be "morally reprehensible"? I don't think books should be banned, nor should flags. If that's how folks want to express themselves, then so be it. That doesn't mean I need to be chummy with people who hold views in accord with the misogynistic, hateful rhetoric of the Taliban. That said, I'd expect that folks elsewhere (e.g., Iraq or Iran) might find the US flag to be "morally reprehensible." As such, shouldn't you also deride folks who sell US flags too? Just because you don't agree with the ideas and ideology represented by a flag, it doesn't mean that making and selling such a piece of cloth is "morally reprehensible." Don't like it? Don't buy it. It's called "voting with your wallet." And if enough people do that, then folks will stop making/selling it.
      - walrus01 4y ago
        that's quite a screed you wrote there. you must feel very strongly about it. amazon has made the choice to exclude ISIS flags, and exact copies of nazi flags, so it's curious why one is allowed and not the other. your position seems to be from the free-market/libertarian angle that people can print and publish anything they want, sure, okay, whatever... the logical conclusion of this in the free market is that amazon as a private entity is also able to pick and choose what products they choose to sell and associate with their brand name.
smm11 4y ago
Seems like I read something like this long ago NOT being a bad thing. Walmart was selling an external USB 5g drive or something, when 5g was gigantic, cheaper than 5g drives were selling for. So we'd buy the external, take the IDE drive out, and have a cheap 5g IDE drive. And we liked it.
assttoasstmgr 4y ago
How many times is this going to be posted to the front page in 3 days? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32611021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32611021
- wrycoder 4y ago
  Depends on how many upvote it. You didn't need to click or comment.
matrix_overload 4y ago
Well, this is a direct consequence of allowing the marketplaces to "vertically integrate" with their own brands. Imagine you poured a year of work into finding product/market fit and creating a truly great product. You put it for sale on Walmart/Amazon, and what happens next? Amazon's algorithms find you among 100s of less successful sellers, your product gets knocked off as "Amazon basics", produced at scale you cannot afford, so you end up taking all the risks, and Amazon takes all the profit. So the only business models that not vulnerable under these rules of the game are small-time grift, semi-automated Aliexpress resellers, very niche products and huge established brands that can compete with the platform owners in terms of scale.
nobody9999 4y ago
I try to keep abreast of SSD prices, as I've been looking to swap out the spinning rust on my ESXi server with SSDs, but the prices are still a bit too high for my taste, and that hasn't changed much over the past few years. Which is why I was really surprised to see this both on Vice and ArsTechnica[0]. A quick web search for "4TB external SSD" shows prices in the USD$400-600 range. So 30TB for ~USD$40 seems too good to be true. Actually, it strains credulity well past the breaking point. And as the old saw goes, "if it seems to good to be true, it probably is." Then again, I guess a lot of folks haven't been paying attention (as I have) to storage prices. But even so, 16TB spinning rust drives are an order of magnitude more expensive than the price quoted by Walmart for this "30TB SSD". It just goes to show that Joe Bessemer (and/or someone else) was right[1]. [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/walmart-lists-a-30tb-portable-ssd-for-39-it-is-naturally-a-scam/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/walmart-lists-a-30tb... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_a_sucker_born_every_minute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_a_sucker_born_every_mi...
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  Yet despite the scam being obvious, Walmart still listed it.
  - nobody9999 4y ago
    >Yet despite the scam being obvious, Walmart still listed it. And so they did. How does that old saw go? "It is useless to argue with a man whose opinion is based upon a personal or pecuniary interest;"[0], and/or something similar. [0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
- wppick 4y ago
  No, you see 30TB is just the company name, not the actual size /s
  - droopyEyelids 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haddocks'_Eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haddocks'_Eyes Please enjoy an early example of mastery of this technique
Datsundere 4y ago
that's hilarious
tlhunter 4y ago
Now that Walmart has become amazon, what is the best online store for curated products?
ralmidani 4y ago
This is extreme libertarianism (of which Jeff Bezos - Founder of Walmart’s competitor and probable source of inspiration for the idea to open a “marketplace” - is a proponent) taken to its logical conclusion. On a practical level, caveat emptor is a good principle for buyers to live by, especially in this era of pervasive cheating. But pushing to enshrine it as an acceptable norm is morally bankrupt, and in the long run, it will lead to the collapse of society.
akoumjian 4y ago
The only purchase I've made on Wish was a similarly "too good to be true" set of flash drives. When I received them I tested them out on a linux live image and sure enough they were simply programmed to report having much more storage than they did. I did get a refund, but you can bet the products are still there.
_ea1k 4y ago
I'm shocked that the response to this is that people want curation of products, old retail style. Sure lets go back to the days when an HDMI cable cost $30 and things like phone chargers were overpriced. The better answer is that marketplaces should have to have reasonably consistent return policies. Push the risk back onto them so that it stops the fraudulent products. Keep the part that lets basically anyone start up a business and attach themselves to the marketplace at what should be the market price. There are plenty of good things coming from these marketplaces.
- ilikepi 4y ago
  > The better answer is that marketplaces should have to have reasonably consistent return policies. Push the risk back onto them so that it stops the fraudulent products. A good return policy is insufficient. Amazon is very good about accepting returns. Amazon also co-mingles their own inventory with that of their marketplace sellers. In the past, I have ordered items from Amazon, being careful to choose "Shipped and Sold by Amazon", and have received items that are obviously provided by a marketplace seller. It's great that I was able to contact Amazon and have them issue me a refund. They didn't even want me to bother shipping the item back. But that process still incurred a cost to me, namely: * extra time not having the item I wanted and could trust * time and effort to acquire a replacement item from a different retailer * physical waste, since I discarded the item I received from Amazon because I couldn't trust it * frustration Personally, I think the better answer is a system that doesn't put this (minor but non-zero) cost, and its alternative of accepting an inferior and/or less trusted item, onto many, many consumers. EDIT: formatting
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  The current situation is hardly better. The same HDMI cable that used to be $10 and worked well is now still $10 but will likely fail to work because it's actually $1.50 from Aliexpress. It's not like people are complaining about a new super-cheap tier of products but rather about being ripped off by paying about the same for less quality. And that's before you consider knock offs that have the potential to kill your or burn your house down. For me, nothing that goes into my body or into a 120v mains comes from Amazon. The risk is just too high.
- 4y ago
tomrod 4y ago
The march towards all sales being flea markets continue :(
shultays 4y ago
Why two sd cards? Wouldnt one also do the trick and cost less?
- cabirum 4y ago
  Combined into raid array for faster writes haha?
nfriedly 4y ago
I've had very good experience buying from B&H Photo, Costco, and most manufacturer's own websites.

279 points by danso 4y ago

insane_dreamer 4y ago

Don't shop at Walmart, kids.

wfleming 4y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628381

jonnycomputer 4y ago

There was a time that I turned to buying from walmart.com as alternative to amazon, precisely because it wasn't taking the 3rd-party seller approach; but then they decided they had to imitate Amazon. Well, no thanks.

SoftTalker 4y ago
Just what I was about to say. Guess I'll cross Walmart.com off my online retailer list. Sorry Walmart, if you let your brand get polluted with 3rd parties selling garbage you will quickly start to lose whatever brand loyalty you have. I never expected top end merchandise from Walmart. They are a discount retailer and that's fine. But I do expect to get genuine merchandise that is as advertised, not counterfeit or fradulent crap.
- AlwaysRock 4y ago
  They have hosted third party sellers for... at least 3-5 years. If you didnt know this already you wernt a customer. They lost 0 in revenue from when they opened their site up to third party sellers and gained lots of revenue from those third party sellers. I dont like third party sellers either but obviously it makes financial sense for these companies to do this.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    I did know they had 3rd parties but thought they were somewhat better vetted than Amazon. And regardless, I'm on walmart.com so it reflects on them when some third party seller sends me shit. It is true that I am not a frequent shopper there.
Someone1234 4y ago
I agree. One positive remains though: If you buy from Walmart you get it from Walmart and their supply chain. With Amazon because they "mingle" inventory from third parties, you can order shipped & sold by Amazon.com and still get a counterfeit product, because a third party slipped it in. And, yes, that has happened to me personally by the way.
- jghn 4y ago
  It has happened to me a few times that I order from Walmart, see a shipment notification, that shipment "arrives" but definitely did not. However that day or the next I receive an Amazon package which I did not order containing my product. So no, ordering from Walmart does not guarantee anything is going through their supply chain.
  - rascul 4y ago
    Was that from Walmart the retailer or someone else selling on Walmart's marketplace? I would be very surprised if Walmart itself resold you something from Amazon, but that does happen with third party retailers on their marketplace.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      This happens in more than just Walmart - there are arbitrage experts that list product on eBay, Walmart, etc and just order it for you from Amazon. I’m not exactly sure how they make money as the prices are often nearly identical.
      - hattmall 4y ago
        I use to do this successfully for many years. I could sell for a few cents less than Amazon. Due to buying gift cards at Kroger with a 5% Cashback card. In addition I would also get 1000 fuel points per $250 that I could sell for $20 easily. So each $1000 in sales would net minimum $130 margin. Accounting for selling fees of around 10%, I could clear around $30 per $1000 even at breakeven or below Amazon prices. I would also be able to sell many items for more than the Amazon cost. It worked well for several years with millions in sales, all automated. It became untenable though as Cryptocurrency facilitated people buying Amazon gift cards with stolen credit cards and cashing them out at 30-50% of face value. So the market became saturated with scammers selling considerably cheaper than Amazon. For a time maybe 6-4 years ago you could get pretty much anything from Amazon on eBay for around 20% less and shipped direct from Amazon via prime. Amazon eventually shut it down though and if you meet some very strict gift card threshold they will just steal your balance. People still do it, but large scale automation isn't really worth it any longer.
zht 4y ago
Sorry I am confused can’t you filter by Walmart sold vs third party?
- geraldwhen 4y ago
  You can, but they do hide it. And if the product you’re looking for isn’t currently in stock, you won’t see the filter at all.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The trick I do is “pickup today or ship to store” as that gets Walmart only items as far as I can tell.
  - jkeddo 4y ago
    Me too! I've been doing this with the Walmart+ delivery service for $100 a year. I even applied for their 5% cash back credit card. It saves me a good amount of time and money, and I am overall very happy with it. If Walmart ever starts mixing 3rd party reseller crap with their "in-store" inventories, they will ruin a fantastic product and lose me as a customer.
jvanderbot 4y ago
I've never actually been able to order anything off Walmart. They always cancel my order after a day due to 'fraud' alerts on the seller. I guess that's good?
lxchase 4y ago
For others that are trying to avoid 3rd party sellers: look for Sold and shipped by Walmart.com As far as I'm aware they don't comingle 3rd party inventory like "Sold and shipped by Amazon.com" does.
wmeredith 4y ago
Target does this crap as well. When I search on these sites now I always check the box on items only fulfilled by the retailer. If there's no box like that, I won't shop there.

bearjaws 4y ago

This is a scam as old as time, set it to 'tape drive mode' and let it pretend to be any size you want. There used to be hard drives on ebay that were simply SD cards with scrap metal glued down for weight back in 2012ish.

immibis 4y ago
What's not old as time is being able to buy it from Walmart.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  But their competitor Amazon has been doing since forever and they've not really been hit with any lawsuit or any repercussion whatsoever for the matter, so ... why not ?

kbos87 4y ago

The marketplace-ization (is there a word for that?) of every retailer feels so short sighted. I’ll throw out an example I’ve noticed lately - furniture manufacturers. Search for any item on Crate & Barrel or West Elm’s website and you’ll first see a handful of exclusive pieces that are clearly built for the brand. Keep scrolling and the search results gradually become a bunch of generic third party items that you can find in a dozen different places, often for lower prices elsewhere. I get it, Crate & Barrel sees this as an opportunity to monetize their brand without having to do all that much. Unfortunately it leaves me with a lot less trust for a brand that used to represent a quality and reputation.

adam_arthur 4y ago
I think the marketplace approach will prove less successful in the longer term. I can no longer trust any products or reviews on Amazon, for example, so I prefer not to shop there. Did they make some short term gains in profitability? Probably. Not sure it will be worth it in the end
madaxe_again 4y ago
Those “exclusive pieces” are typically not designed for a given brand, but are designed on spec by various ID houses, perhaps with a brand or set of brands in mind as target, and are then pitched and sold, or pulled in by buyers. This has been the way for at least the past several decades, and fashion and furnishings have lead the trend which is now ubiquitous. Crate & Barrel I know do this, as I’ve worked with Otto on some of their other brands, and they consolidated much of their buying years ago - big part of their efficiency. There are still some retailers who retain some in-house design talent, but they’re few and far between, as it provides little differentiation in the eye of the consumer, who typically can’t tell an in-house from an acquired design - so in-house design is typically an idiosyncratic choice now, as it doesn’t provide a competitive edge over those who claim in-house design.
- pmezard 4y ago
  Does it achieve the same outcome, at least on the quality side of things? Instead of a brand sending specs aligned to what their brand should represent, the seller creates spec to match what it expects target brands to look for.

RegnisGnaw 4y ago

It reminds me of this, like 10 years ago http://blog.gsmarena.com/how-do-you-spot-fake-chinese-usb-hard-drives-well-you-take-them-apart/ http://blog.gsmarena.com/how-do-you-spot-fake-chinese-usb-ha...

pupppet 4y ago

I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the meeting when reputable businesses decided it was in their best interests to sell random garbage they couldn't vouch for.

dimitrios1 4y ago
did Walmart ever have a reputation for quality?
- deathanatos 4y ago
  … there's a difference between "cheap and low quality" and fraud.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  There was a baseline expecting of quality, because Walmart would not be expected to buy from counterfeiters. For example, if I buy 3 mule team borax from Walmart, I expect it to come via official sources. If I buy 3 mule team borax from a Walmart reseller, I have no idea where it is sourced from or how much those entities care about reputation. It could be from 3 mule team, it could be counterfeit.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    Branded borax? It's a mineral, coming out of the same mines no matter what brand you buy.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      I do not have the equipment or expertise required to confirm it. So I rely on a combination of a reputable businesses who would care to verify it is whatever percent and quality borax it should be because they (presumably) have something to lose if it comes out that it is not.
    - cogman10 4y ago
      You'd think. But really the issue is that you can't trust that you are actually getting borax and not something completely different (and cheaper).

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Covzire 4y ago

There's something wrong with Walmart's review system too. I've tried leaving a 1 star review on a product recently and after well over a month it's still not posted on the product page.

lostgame 4y ago
Very good to know. Thanks for making us aware of this. Review scams are insane.

rascul 4y ago

There was a discussion about this 2 days ago, with 282 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628381

strifey 4y ago

Is there an online store for generic "stuff" that doesn't allow 3rd party sellers at this point? Genuinely looking for recommendations.

Tarragon 4y ago
Target I believe.
heartbreak 4y ago
McMaster Carr
- bombcar 4y ago
  Grainger.
bombcar 4y ago
Home Depot does well and has a decently large selection.
haunter 4y ago
http://monoprice.com/ http://monoprice.com/
ridiculous_fish 4y ago
Seconding Monoprice, also Ikea and Costco.

magundu 4y ago

In India, I see lot of fake websites in Google Ads. Their offer is also too good and the images in the ads are so nice and attractive. Interestingly ads are appear even before big websites like Amazon and Flipkart. After you made the payment, you will realize that you have been cheated. I guess lot of the people got cheated by this method.

paxys 4y ago

Walmart is a retailer. Do people really think they (or Amazon, or anyone else) test every single one of the hundreds of millions of products sold on their site? If people choose to trust a hard drive made by "XGeek", well, that's on them. This is exactly why branding is a thing. Just stick to Seagate or WD next time.

smegsicle 4y ago
seagate drives have been timebombs since around 2006 maybe good fodder for raid with capital R and I ofcourse nowadays you've got to dodge those shingled drives...
dghlsakjg 4y ago
You and I know how the marketplace system works. My 70 year old uncle might just -reasonably- assume that buying from walmart.com is the same as walking into the store, and comes with the same return and quality guarantees. Stuff in the store is very much vetted, and individually chosen. Shelf space is an incredibly valuable commodity and any retailer knows not to just give it away. I don't know why e-store search results aren't seen as equally valuable. That same uncle might not care, or even know, about the brands that make commodity computer hardware. I built my own gaming PC, and, beyond the processor I would have to double check the brand names on the other components (AMD GPU, but I don't know who made the card off the top of my head).
- kevin_b_er 4y ago
  > My 70 year old uncle might just -reasonably- assume that buying from walmart.com is the same as walking into the store, and comes with the same return and quality guarantees. And that is exactly the deception the Walton family wants out of this.
  - dghlsakjg 4y ago
    Maybe, but I kind of doubt it. They might make a $6 commission on a sale like this. After you get done dealing with the labor cost of handling an angry customer, return shipping, and the loss of future business you start start losing money that even the most short sighted of execs can understand… er… should understand

hedora 4y ago

According to Duck Duck Go, Amazon was selling a similar drive for $36.15 until recently. Sadly, the link is a 404 now: https://www.amazon.com/Portable-External-high-Speed-Interface-Expansion/dp/B0B5LLLWWJ https://www.amazon.com/Portable-External-high-Speed-Interfac... > SSD Mobile Solid State Drive Mini Portable External Hard Drive high-Speed USB3.1 Type-C Interface Notebook PC Expansion Upgrade Hard Drive (Color : Red, Size : 30TB) Brand: Generic. $36.15 $ 36. 15. Coupon: Save an extra 10% when you apply this coupon. Terms. Capacity: 30TB . 1GB. 500GB. 1TB. 2TB. 4TB. 6TB. 8TB. 10TB. 12TB. 14TB. 16TB. Even with the 10% off coupon, it was more than Walmart was charging. Gotta give Walmart credit where credit is due!

nope96 4y ago

A third party seller did, not Walmart.. However, Walmart itself did recently sell me an OEM 'not for resale' labeled hard drive, so there is some strangeness going on in their warehouse just like at Amazon

noasaservice 4y ago
Walmart is *endorsing* any subcontractor. I literally do not care what back-end contractor of theirs is doing. My transaction is conducted on walmart.com , my credit card transaction goes to a walmart account, and my credit card bill shows a walmart line-item. This "redirecting responsibility" to somewhere else is the fraudulent grift going on there. Walmart wants to put their name on transactions? Make them live with the repercussions dealing with fraud. (Same goes for any online retailer that has a primary presence, and intertwines back end contractors or 3rd party sellers.) Exceptions are for ebay and etsy, since it is blatantly clear that individuals open their own shop and ebay/etsy only provide a basic framework.
- nope96 4y ago
  Oh, I agree, but I can't think of any major US retailer that does not do this 3rd-party stuff. Amazon, Walmart, Newegg all do. I guess Target doesn't (yet). It's frustrating to explain to older parents, "You have to pick, "Sold by [Walmart|Amazon]", or it could be anyone!" and not have them understand.

buscoquadnary 4y ago

You know it seems to me that we are going to eventually end up reinventing the idea of a brand. As these massive online marketplaces continue to allow third party sellers their reputation will continue to suffer, people will be less and less likely to get what they ordered, and eventually look for a way to identify good products. Eventually some sellers and marketplaces will end up being identified as only having good quality products and people will start to buy from them. Honestly a lot of the discussion around Amazon seems a lot like the arguments and discussions I heard around Wal-Mart in the early 20's like almost all the arguments are the exact same to a large degree, right down to the discussions of labor issues and the effect of their monopoly on smaller retailers. It seems eventually Amazon, Wal-Mart and online marketplaces that allow third party sellers will end up like the Aldi's, Dollar Tree, Wal-Mart, type stores, with a cheaper price and expected quality, and people will know there are other online marketplaces to go to when they need quality or something that lasts.

hattmall 4y ago
Interestingly Aldi and Dollar Tree almost exclusively sell their own house brands.
- droopyEyelids 4y ago
  Well, a house brand isn't made by the company. The retail company has people called 'sourcers' who find other companies that sell a product, test those companies can handle the retailer's scale and the product meets quality standards, and then sets up a white label agreement.

dghughes 4y ago

Here in Canada Best Buy sells refurbished hardware but it's not Best Buy itself. You buy it on their site and it looks like Best Buy sells it but it's from a third party and most often it's junk. Not outright fraud like Walmart but close. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-best-buy-test-1.6201499 https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-best-buy-test-1...

zarriak 4y ago

Walmart has also fed into this a lot by making it so they are your one stop shop by making it ship stuff that isn’t in stock at your local store. They also by default will give you substitutions if you are doing an online store pickup or delivery order which only has more room for abuse or manipulation of substituting your items for things they need to get rid of etc. I only use it for a family member but they have intentionally continuously degraded the ui/ux to make it so you fall into these traps and have even basically made it so all of the filters reset every time you search.

bombcar 4y ago
The substitution thing has worked well for me - they now alert you in the app before and you can yes/no the substitution. You can also mark “ride or die” on items and if they can’t get it they don’t substitute. I don’t recall if they upcharge for more expensive substitution now - before it was free, which was a bit abuseable.
- ok_dad 4y ago
  > You can also mark “ride or die” on items Is that what the mark is called, "ride or die"? That would be very un-corpo-like, but I would welcome it.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    It’d be nice but it’s called “allow substitutions” or something. Maybe the database column is r-or-d
- zarriak 4y ago
  Yeah it worked for a while for me but the person I’m getting the stuff for has all the alerts on their device so I just turn most of the substitutions off. There were a few times where I had generous substitutions but I think they reigned those in.
  - jkeddo 4y ago

0x0 4y ago

Would have liked to see the devops team of walmart.com trying to use these for hosting walmart.com...

mch0lic1 4y ago

greed. there is simply no limit to greed.

wppick 4y ago
This is end stage capitalism greed. It's a full blown assault on the consumer. The trust that citizens have in their retails is being mortgaged for desperate profits. The quality of the products is dropping to possibly dangerous levels. There's no quality control. The products that you are buying could be full of toxic, carcinogenic, reproductive harm chemicals. The cast iron pan you buy has lead in it. The kids toys are using toxic paints. The cotton clothes you are buying are not cotton.

Animats 4y ago

Does WalMart accept that they're the seller, legally responsible for the item, or do they try to pass the buck to the source of the item?

neverrroot 4y ago

Plenty of these also available on eBay, reported them once, didn’t get to hear anything back from them (eBay). Examples: https://www.ebay.de/itm/374176058730 https://www.ebay.de/itm/374176058730 https://www.ebay.de/itm/234648959915 https://www.ebay.de/itm/234648959915

walrus01 4y ago

If you think 30TB fake hard drives are bad, the Amazon marketplace is now selling Taliban flags printed by 3rd party sellers in China. At least there's no ISIS flags yet. I assume whatever flag factory in china is cranking out $10 flags doesn't care about the content of what's printed on them.

stronglikedan 4y ago
Good. They should be able to sell any flags they want.
- walrus01 4y ago
  sure, and people can draw their own conclusions about a "marketplace" allowing morally reprehensible products on it, and whether to purchase from them in the future.
  - nobody9999 4y ago
    >sure, and people can draw their own conclusions about a "marketplace" allowing morally reprehensible products on it, and whether to purchase from them in the future. How can a piece of dyed cloth be "morally reprehensible"? I don't think books should be banned, nor should flags. If that's how folks want to express themselves, then so be it. That doesn't mean I need to be chummy with people who hold views in accord with the misogynistic, hateful rhetoric of the Taliban. That said, I'd expect that folks elsewhere (e.g., Iraq or Iran) might find the US flag to be "morally reprehensible." As such, shouldn't you also deride folks who sell US flags too? Just because you don't agree with the ideas and ideology represented by a flag, it doesn't mean that making and selling such a piece of cloth is "morally reprehensible." Don't like it? Don't buy it. It's called "voting with your wallet." And if enough people do that, then folks will stop making/selling it.
    - walrus01 4y ago
      that's quite a screed you wrote there. you must feel very strongly about it. amazon has made the choice to exclude ISIS flags, and exact copies of nazi flags, so it's curious why one is allowed and not the other. your position seems to be from the free-market/libertarian angle that people can print and publish anything they want, sure, okay, whatever... the logical conclusion of this in the free market is that amazon as a private entity is also able to pick and choose what products they choose to sell and associate with their brand name.

smm11 4y ago

Seems like I read something like this long ago NOT being a bad thing. Walmart was selling an external USB 5g drive or something, when 5g was gigantic, cheaper than 5g drives were selling for. So we'd buy the external, take the IDE drive out, and have a cheap 5g IDE drive. And we liked it.

assttoasstmgr 4y ago

How many times is this going to be posted to the front page in 3 days? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32611021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32611021

wrycoder 4y ago
Depends on how many upvote it. You didn't need to click or comment.

matrix_overload 4y ago

Well, this is a direct consequence of allowing the marketplaces to "vertically integrate" with their own brands. Imagine you poured a year of work into finding product/market fit and creating a truly great product. You put it for sale on Walmart/Amazon, and what happens next? Amazon's algorithms find you among 100s of less successful sellers, your product gets knocked off as "Amazon basics", produced at scale you cannot afford, so you end up taking all the risks, and Amazon takes all the profit. So the only business models that not vulnerable under these rules of the game are small-time grift, semi-automated Aliexpress resellers, very niche products and huge established brands that can compete with the platform owners in terms of scale.

nobody9999 4y ago

I try to keep abreast of SSD prices, as I've been looking to swap out the spinning rust on my ESXi server with SSDs, but the prices are still a bit too high for my taste, and that hasn't changed much over the past few years. Which is why I was really surprised to see this both on Vice and ArsTechnica[0]. A quick web search for "4TB external SSD" shows prices in the USD$400-600 range. So 30TB for ~USD$40 seems too good to be true. Actually, it strains credulity well past the breaking point. And as the old saw goes, "if it seems to good to be true, it probably is." Then again, I guess a lot of folks haven't been paying attention (as I have) to storage prices. But even so, 16TB spinning rust drives are an order of magnitude more expensive than the price quoted by Walmart for this "30TB SSD". It just goes to show that Joe Bessemer (and/or someone else) was right[1]. [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/walmart-lists-a-30tb-portable-ssd-for-39-it-is-naturally-a-scam/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/walmart-lists-a-30tb... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_a_sucker_born_every_minute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_a_sucker_born_every_mi...

vorpalhex 4y ago
Yet despite the scam being obvious, Walmart still listed it.
- nobody9999 4y ago
  >Yet despite the scam being obvious, Walmart still listed it. And so they did. How does that old saw go? "It is useless to argue with a man whose opinion is based upon a personal or pecuniary interest;"[0], and/or something similar. [0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
wppick 4y ago
No, you see 30TB is just the company name, not the actual size /s
- droopyEyelids 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haddocks'_Eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haddocks'_Eyes Please enjoy an early example of mastery of this technique

Datsundere 4y ago

that's hilarious

tlhunter 4y ago

Now that Walmart has become amazon, what is the best online store for curated products?

ralmidani 4y ago

This is extreme libertarianism (of which Jeff Bezos - Founder of Walmart’s competitor and probable source of inspiration for the idea to open a “marketplace” - is a proponent) taken to its logical conclusion. On a practical level, caveat emptor is a good principle for buyers to live by, especially in this era of pervasive cheating. But pushing to enshrine it as an acceptable norm is morally bankrupt, and in the long run, it will lead to the collapse of society.

akoumjian 4y ago

The only purchase I've made on Wish was a similarly "too good to be true" set of flash drives. When I received them I tested them out on a linux live image and sure enough they were simply programmed to report having much more storage than they did. I did get a refund, but you can bet the products are still there.

_ea1k 4y ago

I'm shocked that the response to this is that people want curation of products, old retail style. Sure lets go back to the days when an HDMI cable cost $30 and things like phone chargers were overpriced. The better answer is that marketplaces should have to have reasonably consistent return policies. Push the risk back onto them so that it stops the fraudulent products. Keep the part that lets basically anyone start up a business and attach themselves to the marketplace at what should be the market price. There are plenty of good things coming from these marketplaces.

ilikepi 4y ago
> The better answer is that marketplaces should have to have reasonably consistent return policies. Push the risk back onto them so that it stops the fraudulent products. A good return policy is insufficient. Amazon is very good about accepting returns. Amazon also co-mingles their own inventory with that of their marketplace sellers. In the past, I have ordered items from Amazon, being careful to choose "Shipped and Sold by Amazon", and have received items that are obviously provided by a marketplace seller. It's great that I was able to contact Amazon and have them issue me a refund. They didn't even want me to bother shipping the item back. But that process still incurred a cost to me, namely: * extra time not having the item I wanted and could trust * time and effort to acquire a replacement item from a different retailer * physical waste, since I discarded the item I received from Amazon because I couldn't trust it * frustration Personally, I think the better answer is a system that doesn't put this (minor but non-zero) cost, and its alternative of accepting an inferior and/or less trusted item, onto many, many consumers. EDIT: formatting
AlexandrB 4y ago
The current situation is hardly better. The same HDMI cable that used to be $10 and worked well is now still $10 but will likely fail to work because it's actually $1.50 from Aliexpress. It's not like people are complaining about a new super-cheap tier of products but rather about being ripped off by paying about the same for less quality. And that's before you consider knock offs that have the potential to kill your or burn your house down. For me, nothing that goes into my body or into a 120v mains comes from Amazon. The risk is just too high.
4y ago

tomrod 4y ago

The march towards all sales being flea markets continue :(

shultays 4y ago

Why two sd cards? Wouldnt one also do the trick and cost less?

cabirum 4y ago
Combined into raid array for faster writes haha?

nfriedly 4y ago

I've had very good experience buying from B&H Photo, Costco, and most manufacturer's own websites.