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There was a 5+ year period in my life where I was receiving Amazon deliveries every week. Last year, I purchased a single item on Amazon. In the midst of movi

There was a 5+ year period in my life where I was receiving Amazon deliveries every week. Last year, I purchased a single item on Amazon. In the midst of moving apartments right now, and looking for basics + upgrades. I've noticed what made Amazon so great and dare I say addicting was trustworthy reviews and crowd-wisdom curation of good-enough products. This shopping cycle, that magic felt gone. The audacity of product search to be littered with ads. A few years into that Amazon habit, I started reaching for "fake amazon reviews" on Google to get an estimate of how authentic the reviews are. Even that step has been gamed and noisy now.

sauwan 4y ago
Agree 100%. And now the majority of the products are made by a 7 digit letter soup brand who just popped up out of no where and likely will be gone in 6 months as the product is shifted to some other brand to avoid bad reviews building up. I have very little faith in Amazon these days and specifically order from smaller specialty shops regularly again.
kps 4y ago
Amazon is now Aliexpress with (sometimes) local shipping. For years we've been told that the worker in Shenzhen is cheaper than the one in Seattle. Now I tell you, Jeff, that the entrepreneur in Shenzhen is cheaper than the one in Seattle.
- chollida1 4y ago
  You may be surprised to know that Jeff doesn’t run Amazon anymore.
- staringback 4y ago
  Have you ever tried to search for something on Aliexpress? It is the worst experience I have ever had. "Free Shipping" button (sometimes) shows things with free shipping, or the actual price of the item showing as $0.99 when that is for the optional plastic lid or whatever. Only about half the time I try to use Aliexpress it gives me the results I want. Furthermore, it is stupidly obvious when something is just being dropshipped vs coming from Amazon's warehouse, just look for the Prime logo on the items. At least with Amazon I get things relatively quickly even compared to other US based options such as Ebay or even going through the retailer directly
  - explodingwaffle 4y ago
    My _favourite_ part of searching on AliExpress is that, when you’re logged in, 90% of any search results have nothing to do with, you know, the search query, and are just (related to) products you’ve previously looked at. Why?!?
    - jtbayly 4y ago
      For the same reason that Amazon does that?
      - CamperBob2 4y ago
        To annoy me enough to send me to second-tier retailers I wouldn't otherwise use? It never makes sense to intentionally return inapplicable search results. Think about it: product search is the ultimate advertising opportunity. A customer with money to spend is proactively telling you exactly what they want to spend it on. And you're going to go out of your way to piss this customer off?! Bold strategy, Jeff, let's see how it works out for you.
        buffington 4y ago
        > inapplicable search results Inapplicable to whom? > product search is the ultimate advertising opportunity To me, this is what lends confidence to the idea that the results are hardly "inapplicable". The results may be quite applicable from Amazon's perspective. This is just a guess, but it seems unlikely that all Amazon cares about is returning the exact perfect set of results that lead you directly to what you're intending to purchase. They may know that showing seemingly random results increases impulse sales of high profit items they have in local "get it today" warehouses. Or they know that people who search for the thing you searched for are n times more likely to buy Product X impulsively, but only if they show it to you on the first Monday morning of the month. Or maybe they've lost their minds, and have tried to optimize and maximize profits from their recommendations that they're blind to much simpler approaches.
esskay 4y ago
I stopped buying after recieving one too many fake items. Not even listings that were for blatently fabricated products like the 16TB portable hard drives for $45. Just everyday items, being dispatched from Amazon that were clearly fakes. Amazon doesn't give a damn, so I don't give them my business anymore.
- vanilla_nut 4y ago
  Used to use Amazon as my go-to source for bulk gum. Silly, I know, but they stock the big 14-packs that you can only find at massive bulk stores like Costco, and even then, it's hard to find them reliably. After receiving a number of fakes and problematic items off Amazon a couple of years ago, I instated a new rule: you can order off Amazon as long as the a fake product won't seriously hurt you. Turns out, whether it's a set of bolts for my bicycle, a battery replacement for a phone, or a piece of gum I plan on chewing in my mouth, I'm really scared of the awful thing that could happen if I got an unsafe fake item. I would rather not chew gum tainted with microplastics, explode a battery in my pocket without warning, or shear a bolt from my bike in the middle of the wilderness miles away from help. On the other hand, Amazon is a great place to order bulk body soap. Haven't figured out a way for that to kill me yet.
  - barbariangrunge 4y ago
    Heavy metal/other contamination? There were a lot of stories about lead contamination years ago in products that made it to store shelves. It stopped happening as often (I think?) but small seller products on amazon, eBay etc face dramatically less scrutiny than those bigger suppliers ever did Eg, with toys: https://www.insider.com/amazon-selling-toxic-toys-lead-poisoning-2019-8?amp https://www.insider.com/amazon-selling-toxic-toys-lead-poiso... Non Amazon example, with clothing https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6193385 https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6193385
  - specialist 4y ago
    You might have a restaurant supplier near you. I dimly recall mine has boxes of candy. https://www.usfoods.com/why-us-foods/chef-store.html https://www.usfoods.com/why-us-foods/chef-store.html I now buy all my bulk stuff this way. Rice, beans, spices, flour... Way cheaper than Amazon, much better selection than Costco, all authentic.
jerpint 4y ago
This is a great point. For years, Amazon had good quality and prices. Now, shopping on Amazon you have to actively look out for scammy items and search for the good deals. Very easy to get fooled. “Verified purchases” don’t mean much either
rlawson 4y ago
Same, switched to Walmart+ and can get as good shipping and also local groceries
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  Also switched to Walmart+, and will never look back. After Amazon decided that the way the webstore would make money is not by selling things, but instead by selling ads - the quality of search and overall usability of the webstore has become terrible. You need to use it longer (thus see more ads) to find what you want. This is part of the plan.
- genericone 4y ago
  And you can search for items by the "In-store" filter, which has guaranteed supply logistics sold and shipped by Walmart to avoid danger and fakery. At least I don't think Walmart comingles "their own" inventory with marketplace inventory items of the same SKU.
  - rlawson 4y ago
    Yep - I always choose "Walmart" as the retailer or I am doing in-store shopping with delivery. Never had a problem with fake merchandise like on Amazon.
simplotek 4y ago
Each customer feels differently, but to me what makes Amazon the go-to solution for most consumerist problems is it's logistics network, and how fast and reliable it became. There were a couple of times where the time I had to wait between clicking "buy" and receiving the package on my doorstep was not measured in days but hours. Amazon's logistics network has improved constantly. The shopping experience is getting better, not worse. Sure, sometimes I can't spot the difference between Amazon and AliExpress. So many cheap, shady products with autogenerated brand names and obviously all from the same factory. Low quality stuff whose seller is eager to bribe you to not get a bad review after you return the item. Yes, that's a problem. But if you stick with Amazon-managed products you always get refunds. And you know what? You also can decide to not go for the cheap stuff and buy things from reputable sellers. So knock-offs are a problem but you can actually avoid those, and the ones you didn't you can always return them. And with Amazon's logistics, things get resolved in a few days. It's a shame about exploiting every single worker though.
- OJFord 4y ago
  > So knock-offs are a problem but you can actually avoid those I do wish that was easier though. Sometimes I add 'but not crap from nonsense brand' to my search, hoping someone will notice. Some ideas: verified list for the brands filter (often it's some bizarre subset anyway, and there are clearly genuine respected names missing?), search that respects literal quotes and not/-, price sort/filter that isn't comically wrong and that operates on Amazon price only or else includes shipping. Ideally (I know Amazon would never do this, seller-hostile) just roll up all the duplicates into one, so the 'from' price is the cheapest seller from all sellers of the supposedly different products, and the results list is much cleaner. I suppose an extension could fairly easily have some heuristics (all-caps 4-6 letter brand name) to hide these results. Sometimes I do want them, and then could just toggle the extension off. Is there anything like that?
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  > So knock-offs are a problem but you can actually avoid those, How? They commingle inventory, and there might not be a perceivable difference based on appearance, so who knows if the internals or quality of materials is the same until it fails?
ulfw 4y ago
100% this. I would add that it's also hard to find an item being unique. When I search for let's say "Braun Alarm clock", I get the same item (so I guess? because it looks the same) 8 times. So which one should I buy? What's the difference? I just can't be bothered to figure out the different sellers/prices/terms/delivery times etc for such a simple thing. How do I know if one of the 8 Braun clocks that look the same has some 'extra feature'? So I got to read all descriptions which can be vastly different and hard to compare. This isn't easy and reliable ecommerce anymore. It's messy and frankly if I have to do all this research WITHIN Amazon I might as well extend the scope and do it OUTSIDE of Amazon as well.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
Interesting. It is possible I was lucky on items 9 times out of 10. What I seem to be having issue with is timely delivery on items since Covid despite having Prime. I was more strict about it before, but I made a dispensation for Covid since I didn't order that much anymore. FWIW, I am in Chicagoland, which has a hub that is close enough to me so I will admit that the whole situation baffles me sometimes, but I don't know what is really happening behind the scenes..
matsemann 4y ago
I stopped after getting fake items. Yes, getting my money in return was fairly easy. But then I still needed to buy it from somewhere else and had wasted a few days. And it's quite scary, as some of these items go on/into my body. Like cosmetics, toothpaste, whatever. Or are electronics that can catch fire, like a charger. Add to that, I don't want to figure out which of 5000 different USB chargers is the best or the cheapest or not a scam. Just give me one I can trust. When I have to do that for every search, the mental load is too high and I just grab it from somewhere else.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Yeah, this. All but the most trivial of items I’ve bought this year I was disappointed with. I don’t want my money back, I want the item to be what I expected.
- amdolan 4y ago
  I was scammed hundreds of dollars buying counterfeit microphones on amazon[0]. Amazon did not provide any way to handle this other than a generic form. The sellers refused to send my money unless I removed my reviews, which I was not going to do at all. I followed the seller's page around, and after a few weeks they renamed themselves to "Sally's Cosmetics"[1] or something, and I posted more reviews on their page. Eventually they disappeared with one of the Amazon counterfeit seller purges. How convenient for Amazon and the seller. Amazon is like eBay to me. I value my time and cash too much to get involved. [0] I know, I hadn't been on amazon in a while. I forgot not to buy music equipment (or anything not disposable) from Amazon. [1] So counterfeit sellers have sold cosmetics on Amazon, and that should be obvious from the state of the store, I guess..
  - jrmg 4y ago
    Amazon wouldn’t accept a return? I don’t return a lot, but when I have it’s been really easy - no questions asked, just fill in the form then take it to the nearest Whole Foods.
    - amdolan 4y ago
boringg 4y ago
To be fair I don't think that's the fault of Amazon I think that's the same thing with all new tech adoption - especially over the last couple of decades. As new tech enabled new capabilities people were honest and scammers didn't know how to manipulate the system. Nowadays its a lot of work and money to block to fake reviews/fake products. This goes for all tech --> social media, financial processing etc. I agree it really does ruin it but I think it's pervasive in tech 20-30 years into the internet/tech adoption into our lives. And now when new tech pops up scammers hop aboard immediately.
- Retric 4y ago
  Amazon has actively supported selling counterfeit items for years. Allowing companies to take over product pages with lots of positive reviews is actively misleading. If they actually cared then new product = remove all old review. Mixing inventory between different sellers actively drives away reputable business. You can ship a box of legit items to Amazon and they send a counterfeit item to your customer who then dings your reputation. That’s crazy.
  - boringg 4y ago
    I should be clear here - I'm not saying Amazon has done a good job. My point is the scammers are going to scam. I've been offered money in exchange for an implicitly good review. I didn't take it but that came with the order of something I bought. That kind of thing is tough to regulate for any company - and there are millions of other ways to do it. If theres a way to game a system humans will find it.
    - Retric 4y ago
      Sure, but my point is Amazon is acting like an accomplice not a victim.
      - boringg 4y ago
        Fair take - my original comment deflects blame of Amazon which isn't appropriate. It is responsible - however it isn't wholly responsible for all the scamming nature on it's platform. Maybe the VC playbook obsession about growth>profit>quality that they sold to wall st in the 2010s has a fair bit to drive the internal engine at Amazon.
afavour 4y ago
I'm the exact same way. We now order a lot from Target. It's not like it's a world-beating service but the site is good, the app is good, deliveries and on time and I have the ability to place a pickup order from a location near me. We even decided to splash out on the $100 a year same-day delivery service. We get more value from that than our Prime membership. Even as a family that watches plenty of TV there's really one only show or so a year we watch on Prime.
- Philadelphia 4y ago
  Target is starting to become scammy itself. The top search results for a lot of things I’ve shopped for lately have been questionable-looking products from their third-party sellers.
  - TingPing 4y ago
    I've cross shopped Amazon, Target, and Walmart from time to time. It's literally the same products from the same third-party sellers for the same prices.
geraldwhen 4y ago
I’ve gotten upwards of $50 to leave fake reviews. For a while every Chinese product had a card in it you could email to make some serious cash.
- jrd259 4y ago
  I hope you mean you were offered money for fake reviews, but declined.
munificent 4y ago
For kicks, I just did a search for a fairly generic item on Amazon, "bookshelf". The "brands" in the top results are: MOYIPIN, Furrino, Hoctieon, Sauder, Rolanstar, Vasagle, Amazon Basics, Homidec, JIUYOTREE, NUMENN, IOTXY, Topfurny, RIIPOO, Homykic, IRONCK. RIIPOO is definitely my favorite name here. Amazon Marketplace is inundated with garbage. It gets harder and harder to find a product that I'm willing to actually buy and assume will work. At some point, Amazon's chickens are going to come home to roost and they'll have to deal with this.
- therealdrag0 4y ago
  OTOH I’ve bought from plenty of random name brands and never had a problem with the products.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    Looking at these bookshelves a number are particle/pressboard products. Would you trust unknown quality/untested inputs (industrial glues) used to make a product known to outgas into your sealed living environment? For example particle board takes five to 10 years to completely outgas itself of all formaldehyde.
    - therealdrag0 4y ago
      Is there any study showing similar products at the same price point are any better in this regard when bought from in-person stores? IKEA, walmart, Costco, target, etc?
ranting-moth 4y ago
I once got a note with the product that I'd get could get it refunded if I left a 5 star review. I mentioned that in the review, and guess what? It got rejected, as "that fact wasn't about the item" or something like that. It's not only that they don't care, they seem to know and and take action in protecting the fake reviews.
- jjav 4y ago
  Couple years ago I bought a camera from Amazon. What arrived what a beat up, very used camera in a box that was falling apart with parts missing. I returned it (thankfully that part was easy, but what a waste of time). Left a review saying they are shipping used stuff in place of new and that review was also blocked. So yes, the reviews don't mean anything since they remove everything they don't like people to know.
nunez 4y ago
Agreed. It is increasingly difficult to find items on Amazon that aren't from drop-shippers. Items from companies with call signs will rank higher than legit products, and it's annoying as hell. Additionally, it is becoming easier to buy from retailers directly and return things when they don't work out. Example. I like barefoot shoes. I only buy Vivobarefoot. In the past, searching for Vivobarefoots or even Merrell Vapor Gloves while logged into my Prime account would return crap from WHITIN as a cheaper alternative. Even though I tried Whitin and returned them because cheap shoes are cheap for a reason. Same thing with merino wool stuff. Meriwool and call sign dropshipper bullshit will rank higher even if I look for stuff from Woolly (and definitely if I look for stuff from a supplier that doesn't partner with Amazon, like Wool and Prince).
urthor 4y ago
Amazon is excellent for books. A category it maintains a genuine, unique advantage in (Amazon prints books and generally speaking does many different extra operations in that market.) One notable part of Amazon's success story: book readers are rich. Paper books are a significant indicator of genuine wealth. What's unique about books however, is that you never discover what to buy on Amazon. You get the title recommended to you off-Amazon. Then go straight to Amazon and find the title, in a commoditised print on demand operation. For just about every other product under the sun, not the same.

sauwan 4y ago

Agree 100%. And now the majority of the products are made by a 7 digit letter soup brand who just popped up out of no where and likely will be gone in 6 months as the product is shifted to some other brand to avoid bad reviews building up. I have very little faith in Amazon these days and specifically order from smaller specialty shops regularly again.

kps 4y ago

Amazon is now Aliexpress with (sometimes) local shipping. For years we've been told that the worker in Shenzhen is cheaper than the one in Seattle. Now I tell you, Jeff, that the entrepreneur in Shenzhen is cheaper than the one in Seattle.

chollida1 4y ago
You may be surprised to know that Jeff doesn’t run Amazon anymore.
staringback 4y ago
Have you ever tried to search for something on Aliexpress? It is the worst experience I have ever had. "Free Shipping" button (sometimes) shows things with free shipping, or the actual price of the item showing as $0.99 when that is for the optional plastic lid or whatever. Only about half the time I try to use Aliexpress it gives me the results I want. Furthermore, it is stupidly obvious when something is just being dropshipped vs coming from Amazon's warehouse, just look for the Prime logo on the items. At least with Amazon I get things relatively quickly even compared to other US based options such as Ebay or even going through the retailer directly
- explodingwaffle 4y ago
  My _favourite_ part of searching on AliExpress is that, when you’re logged in, 90% of any search results have nothing to do with, you know, the search query, and are just (related to) products you’ve previously looked at. Why?!?
  - jtbayly 4y ago
    For the same reason that Amazon does that?
    - CamperBob2 4y ago
      To annoy me enough to send me to second-tier retailers I wouldn't otherwise use? It never makes sense to intentionally return inapplicable search results. Think about it: product search is the ultimate advertising opportunity. A customer with money to spend is proactively telling you exactly what they want to spend it on. And you're going to go out of your way to piss this customer off?! Bold strategy, Jeff, let's see how it works out for you.
      - buffington 4y ago
        > inapplicable search results Inapplicable to whom? > product search is the ultimate advertising opportunity To me, this is what lends confidence to the idea that the results are hardly "inapplicable". The results may be quite applicable from Amazon's perspective. This is just a guess, but it seems unlikely that all Amazon cares about is returning the exact perfect set of results that lead you directly to what you're intending to purchase. They may know that showing seemingly random results increases impulse sales of high profit items they have in local "get it today" warehouses. Or they know that people who search for the thing you searched for are n times more likely to buy Product X impulsively, but only if they show it to you on the first Monday morning of the month. Or maybe they've lost their minds, and have tried to optimize and maximize profits from their recommendations that they're blind to much simpler approaches.

esskay 4y ago

I stopped buying after recieving one too many fake items. Not even listings that were for blatently fabricated products like the 16TB portable hard drives for $45. Just everyday items, being dispatched from Amazon that were clearly fakes. Amazon doesn't give a damn, so I don't give them my business anymore.

vanilla_nut 4y ago
Used to use Amazon as my go-to source for bulk gum. Silly, I know, but they stock the big 14-packs that you can only find at massive bulk stores like Costco, and even then, it's hard to find them reliably. After receiving a number of fakes and problematic items off Amazon a couple of years ago, I instated a new rule: you can order off Amazon as long as the a fake product won't seriously hurt you. Turns out, whether it's a set of bolts for my bicycle, a battery replacement for a phone, or a piece of gum I plan on chewing in my mouth, I'm really scared of the awful thing that could happen if I got an unsafe fake item. I would rather not chew gum tainted with microplastics, explode a battery in my pocket without warning, or shear a bolt from my bike in the middle of the wilderness miles away from help. On the other hand, Amazon is a great place to order bulk body soap. Haven't figured out a way for that to kill me yet.
- barbariangrunge 4y ago
  Heavy metal/other contamination? There were a lot of stories about lead contamination years ago in products that made it to store shelves. It stopped happening as often (I think?) but small seller products on amazon, eBay etc face dramatically less scrutiny than those bigger suppliers ever did Eg, with toys: https://www.insider.com/amazon-selling-toxic-toys-lead-poisoning-2019-8?amp https://www.insider.com/amazon-selling-toxic-toys-lead-poiso... Non Amazon example, with clothing https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6193385 https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6193385
- specialist 4y ago
  You might have a restaurant supplier near you. I dimly recall mine has boxes of candy. https://www.usfoods.com/why-us-foods/chef-store.html https://www.usfoods.com/why-us-foods/chef-store.html I now buy all my bulk stuff this way. Rice, beans, spices, flour... Way cheaper than Amazon, much better selection than Costco, all authentic.

jerpint 4y ago

This is a great point. For years, Amazon had good quality and prices. Now, shopping on Amazon you have to actively look out for scammy items and search for the good deals. Very easy to get fooled. “Verified purchases” don’t mean much either

rlawson 4y ago

Same, switched to Walmart+ and can get as good shipping and also local groceries

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
Also switched to Walmart+, and will never look back. After Amazon decided that the way the webstore would make money is not by selling things, but instead by selling ads - the quality of search and overall usability of the webstore has become terrible. You need to use it longer (thus see more ads) to find what you want. This is part of the plan.
genericone 4y ago
And you can search for items by the "In-store" filter, which has guaranteed supply logistics sold and shipped by Walmart to avoid danger and fakery. At least I don't think Walmart comingles "their own" inventory with marketplace inventory items of the same SKU.
- rlawson 4y ago
  Yep - I always choose "Walmart" as the retailer or I am doing in-store shopping with delivery. Never had a problem with fake merchandise like on Amazon.

simplotek 4y ago

Each customer feels differently, but to me what makes Amazon the go-to solution for most consumerist problems is it's logistics network, and how fast and reliable it became. There were a couple of times where the time I had to wait between clicking "buy" and receiving the package on my doorstep was not measured in days but hours. Amazon's logistics network has improved constantly. The shopping experience is getting better, not worse. Sure, sometimes I can't spot the difference between Amazon and AliExpress. So many cheap, shady products with autogenerated brand names and obviously all from the same factory. Low quality stuff whose seller is eager to bribe you to not get a bad review after you return the item. Yes, that's a problem. But if you stick with Amazon-managed products you always get refunds. And you know what? You also can decide to not go for the cheap stuff and buy things from reputable sellers. So knock-offs are a problem but you can actually avoid those, and the ones you didn't you can always return them. And with Amazon's logistics, things get resolved in a few days. It's a shame about exploiting every single worker though.

OJFord 4y ago
> So knock-offs are a problem but you can actually avoid those I do wish that was easier though. Sometimes I add 'but not crap from nonsense brand' to my search, hoping someone will notice. Some ideas: verified list for the brands filter (often it's some bizarre subset anyway, and there are clearly genuine respected names missing?), search that respects literal quotes and not/-, price sort/filter that isn't comically wrong and that operates on Amazon price only or else includes shipping. Ideally (I know Amazon would never do this, seller-hostile) just roll up all the duplicates into one, so the 'from' price is the cheapest seller from all sellers of the supposedly different products, and the results list is much cleaner. I suppose an extension could fairly easily have some heuristics (all-caps 4-6 letter brand name) to hide these results. Sometimes I do want them, and then could just toggle the extension off. Is there anything like that?
lotsofpulp 4y ago
> So knock-offs are a problem but you can actually avoid those, How? They commingle inventory, and there might not be a perceivable difference based on appearance, so who knows if the internals or quality of materials is the same until it fails?

ulfw 4y ago

100% this. I would add that it's also hard to find an item being unique. When I search for let's say "Braun Alarm clock", I get the same item (so I guess? because it looks the same) 8 times. So which one should I buy? What's the difference? I just can't be bothered to figure out the different sellers/prices/terms/delivery times etc for such a simple thing. How do I know if one of the 8 Braun clocks that look the same has some 'extra feature'? So I got to read all descriptions which can be vastly different and hard to compare. This isn't easy and reliable ecommerce anymore. It's messy and frankly if I have to do all this research WITHIN Amazon I might as well extend the scope and do it OUTSIDE of Amazon as well.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

Interesting. It is possible I was lucky on items 9 times out of 10. What I seem to be having issue with is timely delivery on items since Covid despite having Prime. I was more strict about it before, but I made a dispensation for Covid since I didn't order that much anymore. FWIW, I am in Chicagoland, which has a hub that is close enough to me so I will admit that the whole situation baffles me sometimes, but I don't know what is really happening behind the scenes..

matsemann 4y ago

I stopped after getting fake items. Yes, getting my money in return was fairly easy. But then I still needed to buy it from somewhere else and had wasted a few days. And it's quite scary, as some of these items go on/into my body. Like cosmetics, toothpaste, whatever. Or are electronics that can catch fire, like a charger. Add to that, I don't want to figure out which of 5000 different USB chargers is the best or the cheapest or not a scam. Just give me one I can trust. When I have to do that for every search, the mental load is too high and I just grab it from somewhere else.

edgyquant 4y ago
Yeah, this. All but the most trivial of items I’ve bought this year I was disappointed with. I don’t want my money back, I want the item to be what I expected.
amdolan 4y ago
I was scammed hundreds of dollars buying counterfeit microphones on amazon[0]. Amazon did not provide any way to handle this other than a generic form. The sellers refused to send my money unless I removed my reviews, which I was not going to do at all. I followed the seller's page around, and after a few weeks they renamed themselves to "Sally's Cosmetics"[1] or something, and I posted more reviews on their page. Eventually they disappeared with one of the Amazon counterfeit seller purges. How convenient for Amazon and the seller. Amazon is like eBay to me. I value my time and cash too much to get involved. [0] I know, I hadn't been on amazon in a while. I forgot not to buy music equipment (or anything not disposable) from Amazon. [1] So counterfeit sellers have sold cosmetics on Amazon, and that should be obvious from the state of the store, I guess..
- jrmg 4y ago
  Amazon wouldn’t accept a return? I don’t return a lot, but when I have it’s been really easy - no questions asked, just fill in the form then take it to the nearest Whole Foods.
  - amdolan 4y ago

boringg 4y ago

To be fair I don't think that's the fault of Amazon I think that's the same thing with all new tech adoption - especially over the last couple of decades. As new tech enabled new capabilities people were honest and scammers didn't know how to manipulate the system. Nowadays its a lot of work and money to block to fake reviews/fake products. This goes for all tech --> social media, financial processing etc. I agree it really does ruin it but I think it's pervasive in tech 20-30 years into the internet/tech adoption into our lives. And now when new tech pops up scammers hop aboard immediately.

Retric 4y ago
Amazon has actively supported selling counterfeit items for years. Allowing companies to take over product pages with lots of positive reviews is actively misleading. If they actually cared then new product = remove all old review. Mixing inventory between different sellers actively drives away reputable business. You can ship a box of legit items to Amazon and they send a counterfeit item to your customer who then dings your reputation. That’s crazy.
- boringg 4y ago
  I should be clear here - I'm not saying Amazon has done a good job. My point is the scammers are going to scam. I've been offered money in exchange for an implicitly good review. I didn't take it but that came with the order of something I bought. That kind of thing is tough to regulate for any company - and there are millions of other ways to do it. If theres a way to game a system humans will find it.
  - Retric 4y ago
    Sure, but my point is Amazon is acting like an accomplice not a victim.
    - boringg 4y ago
      Fair take - my original comment deflects blame of Amazon which isn't appropriate. It is responsible - however it isn't wholly responsible for all the scamming nature on it's platform. Maybe the VC playbook obsession about growth>profit>quality that they sold to wall st in the 2010s has a fair bit to drive the internal engine at Amazon.

afavour 4y ago

I'm the exact same way. We now order a lot from Target. It's not like it's a world-beating service but the site is good, the app is good, deliveries and on time and I have the ability to place a pickup order from a location near me. We even decided to splash out on the $100 a year same-day delivery service. We get more value from that than our Prime membership. Even as a family that watches plenty of TV there's really one only show or so a year we watch on Prime.

Philadelphia 4y ago
Target is starting to become scammy itself. The top search results for a lot of things I’ve shopped for lately have been questionable-looking products from their third-party sellers.
- TingPing 4y ago
  I've cross shopped Amazon, Target, and Walmart from time to time. It's literally the same products from the same third-party sellers for the same prices.

geraldwhen 4y ago

I’ve gotten upwards of $50 to leave fake reviews. For a while every Chinese product had a card in it you could email to make some serious cash.

jrd259 4y ago
I hope you mean you were offered money for fake reviews, but declined.

munificent 4y ago

For kicks, I just did a search for a fairly generic item on Amazon, "bookshelf". The "brands" in the top results are: MOYIPIN, Furrino, Hoctieon, Sauder, Rolanstar, Vasagle, Amazon Basics, Homidec, JIUYOTREE, NUMENN, IOTXY, Topfurny, RIIPOO, Homykic, IRONCK. RIIPOO is definitely my favorite name here. Amazon Marketplace is inundated with garbage. It gets harder and harder to find a product that I'm willing to actually buy and assume will work. At some point, Amazon's chickens are going to come home to roost and they'll have to deal with this.

therealdrag0 4y ago
OTOH I’ve bought from plenty of random name brands and never had a problem with the products.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  Looking at these bookshelves a number are particle/pressboard products. Would you trust unknown quality/untested inputs (industrial glues) used to make a product known to outgas into your sealed living environment? For example particle board takes five to 10 years to completely outgas itself of all formaldehyde.
  - therealdrag0 4y ago
    Is there any study showing similar products at the same price point are any better in this regard when bought from in-person stores? IKEA, walmart, Costco, target, etc?

ranting-moth 4y ago

I once got a note with the product that I'd get could get it refunded if I left a 5 star review. I mentioned that in the review, and guess what? It got rejected, as "that fact wasn't about the item" or something like that. It's not only that they don't care, they seem to know and and take action in protecting the fake reviews.

jjav 4y ago
Couple years ago I bought a camera from Amazon. What arrived what a beat up, very used camera in a box that was falling apart with parts missing. I returned it (thankfully that part was easy, but what a waste of time). Left a review saying they are shipping used stuff in place of new and that review was also blocked. So yes, the reviews don't mean anything since they remove everything they don't like people to know.

nunez 4y ago

Agreed. It is increasingly difficult to find items on Amazon that aren't from drop-shippers. Items from companies with call signs will rank higher than legit products, and it's annoying as hell. Additionally, it is becoming easier to buy from retailers directly and return things when they don't work out. Example. I like barefoot shoes. I only buy Vivobarefoot. In the past, searching for Vivobarefoots or even Merrell Vapor Gloves while logged into my Prime account would return crap from WHITIN as a cheaper alternative. Even though I tried Whitin and returned them because cheap shoes are cheap for a reason. Same thing with merino wool stuff. Meriwool and call sign dropshipper bullshit will rank higher even if I look for stuff from Woolly (and definitely if I look for stuff from a supplier that doesn't partner with Amazon, like Wool and Prince).

urthor 4y ago

Amazon is excellent for books. A category it maintains a genuine, unique advantage in (Amazon prints books and generally speaking does many different extra operations in that market.) One notable part of Amazon's success story: book readers are rich. Paper books are a significant indicator of genuine wealth. What's unique about books however, is that you never discover what to buy on Amazon. You get the title recommended to you off-Amazon. Then go straight to Amazon and find the title, in a commoditised print on demand operation. For just about every other product under the sun, not the same.