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Amazon is awful when it comes to striking down accusatory customer reviews. Last year I (like a fool) purchased some chunky thru-hole MOSFETs on Amazon. Lo and
by colonial 1y ago
Amazon is awful when it comes to striking down accusatory customer reviews.
Last year I (like a fool) purchased some chunky thru-hole MOSFETs on Amazon. Lo and behold, despite the datasheets promising a few amps with 3.3V at the gate, I only got a few milliamps. Obviously counterfeit - but no matter how hard I tried or how much indirection I employed, Amazon always took down my review warning others of this verifiable fact.
- throaway920181 1y agoAmazon is not the place I'd go to for electronics parts. Mouser and Digikey are my go-tos.
- aussieguy1234 1y agoAmazon are becoming like AliExpress and Temu. They can always do it cheaper, but the quality is touch and go. Now with fake reviews it alot harder to tell what's good quality and what's not.
- nothercastle 1y agoI prefer eBay at least it’s cheaper and the sellers care about reputation
- consp 1y agoWith ebay the delivery time for small items is measured in months or >= 200% of the product cost, and you either have to deal with gsp and the shit delivery they use or with DHL's insanely costly customs clearance. Probably only worth it if you live in the US.
- Piosky 1y ago[dead]
- varjag 1y agoEbay is not the best for dropshipped Chinese crap. It's markedly better for about anything else.
- alexandre_m 1y agoIf you buy from china, it’s going to take weeks. If you buy from US and live in Canada, you’re going to pay a lot of customs. In 2007, I bought a used MacBook on Ebay for $870, with shipping it was about $900. That was back when the currency was on parity. It arrived with $300 custom fees. I could have bought a new one at that price.
- nothercastle 1y agoIf you pay about 5-10% more you can get it from a us based drop shipper. Obviously if you buy it from china you might as well get it from aliexpress
- Scoundreller 1y agoAt least for what I buy from aliexpress, it hasn’t been infiltrated by fake reviews. Lots of incomprehensible or useless human ones though. (And bad machine translations by aliexpress…)
- jorvi 1y agoThe problem with AliExpress is that you'll get a tip about time X, you click the link and the link is dead. You then search for thing X. You get about 1000 results of X from different sellers, most of them crap imitations and some of them even from stores that copy the name of former store of product X. All of the product pages look identical. One of these Results of X is still selling the actual quality product, but there is no way for you to ascertain it because you can't trust the reviews, nor the sold amount because they might as well just be good at tricking people.
- carterschonwald 1y agoAmusingly: when it comes to clones of very fancy western knives, all these problems go away because those duplicates are largely all from the same factory, and there’s even premium cloning brands which have duplicate store fronts
- mh- 1y agoThis is true of a lot of product types, but there is often a QC process that happens for the "premier" name brand that they were manufactured for. And these "duplicates" are frequently the irregulars that didn't make the cut. In the case of knives, they may be perfectly fine. Or QC's spot testing of that batch may have revealed defects in the metal, and a small number of them may shatter unexpectedly. This is why I'm fine buying some categories of items from AliExpress et al., and not others.
- jorvi 1y agoWhat kind of knives are we talking about? I have a Leatherman Skeletool and a Buck 110 knife, and both are such high quality for what feels like a reasonable price (especially considering the warranty), I just can't imagine chinesium beating it. Yes, I know Nextool exists, but I would just be too wary that there's gonna be a batch where the factory or QC skimped on quality. Snapping a multi-tool or even worse a knife can have serious consequences.
- mrweasel 1y agoI kinda dropped using Amazon, both on principle, but also because they can't compete anymore. Amazon isn't exactly cheaper anymore, certainly not when you factor in shipping, their shipping times are awful, typically a week or more and you can't trust the reviews. They do have the larger selection of stuff, so if you can bundle a whole bunch of things it might still make sense. The problem is that you can't really find anything anymore and a large percentage of the stuff that you can only get on Amazon does not ship to your country.
- Piosky 1y ago>typically a week or more I don't think there's a typical delivery speed at all as it depends massively on how close you live to one of their distribution centres. I can get most shit from Amazon next day where I live, some times same day if I pay extra (I don't) as I live only a few miles from one.
- throwaway173738 1y agoYeah my partner and I quit using them because we’d buy like 5-10 things and return them all because of issues like not matching the product listing or being garbage quality. The last straw was when they clawed back a return refund 4 times on the same return. Each time she would have to call them to get it reinstated.
- varispeed 1y agoIf something is not remotely up to standard, do a return. I know it's bad for the planet, but it is rather painful for them and probably only stick there is.
- throwaway_20357 1y agoIt is even worse for the planet when scammers keep flooding the market with low-quality products, a majority of people become accustomed to low quality and short replacement cycles, and the minority who cares about quality and product safety has to go through the returns process today but has no high quality options left anymore tomorrow as there is no longer a market for them.
- pkolaczk 1y agoThe stuff on aliexpress is not low quality. I mean, some for sure is if you look for the cheapest items, but there is plenty of solid quality stuff there as well.
- ajsnigrutin 1y agoAmazon is great for returns. Buy $50 something from aliexpress, doesn't work, you can't do anything. Seller wont refund directly, you need to send the item back... to china... and fill out export forms and pay more than $50 for registered mail. Amazon? Doesn't work? Doesn't matter why, here's the return label, we'll refund you the moment we get the return.
- Washuu 1y agoI just returned something on AliExpress last week.(Wrong items sent.) Sagawa showed up at my door to collect the package, I paid nothing, and AliExpress refunded me before it even left the country once Sagawa notified them that the package was collected. So it really depends where you live.
- ljf 1y agoI've never had to return to AliExpress - if I've had an issue they (AliExpress) have just instantly refunded me without having to go through the seller(admittedly this is maybe 2 items in nearly 10 years). Similar with Temu - my wife ordered some homeware that was awful and looked nothing like the pictures - Temu provided a pre-paid returns label for some of it, and the rest just refunded and said 'please donate locally'. I forget the clothing company (wasn't Shein but similar) again same - she kept some, but most of it needed retuning - within minutes she had a refund and 'please keep or donate the unwanted clothing' - simpler than many UK companies returns policies.
- pkolaczk 1y agoThe thing is, you paid for that in the price which is often 3x more for the same thing you could get on Aliexpress. I bought plenty of stuff on Aliexpress and I had issue only once when I got something different than I ordered. Overall even if I lost on that one purchase a bit, I saved plenty of money on other purchases. And they have a lot of stuff that's simply unavailable elsewhere. Even if they sold me some counterfeit transistors, those must be really good counterfeits, because they measure fine.
- driverdan 1y agoMost of the Chinese crap sold on Amazon is identical to what you find on AliExpress and Temu marked up 50-200%.
- OJFord 1y agoYeah but honestly unless it's a repeat purchase, I'll pay it for the customer service (and ordering experience frankly) being similarly up 5,000-20,000%.
- grogenaut 1y agoyou're supposed to report this to amazon customer service not via a review. just send em a photo of the bribe and they'll verify it. yes it's not as satisfying but they can't validate your review unless you also posted a photo.
- fn-mote 1y agoAmazing BS policy, even people on Hacker Hews don’t know this approach.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoAn "Every Wrong Door" Policy
- DragonStrength 1y agoWell, last week Amazon customer support flow routed me to an LLM chat bot which hallucinated a 1-800 number to call which was most definitely not Amazon on the other end. That's the real usefulness of LLMs: blackhole any dissent now that your monopoly is fully operational.
- malfist 1y agoInternally we brag about how our LLM black hole "delights our customers"
- willis936 1y agoIt was always free to ignore customers. A thin layer of AI slop doesn't change the behavior. Competition should close the loop here, but free markets don't exist and power has marketshare has been consolidated.
- the__alchemist 1y agoDo you believe this?
- like_any_other 1y agoSo Amazon is complicit in fraud.
- bsenftner 1y agoWhat I don't understand is why some law firm, heavy with Ivy league predators, does not eye Amazon's fraud engine as a pot of generational gold to be taken? Sure, it will take some effort, but that's a huge pot of gold just sitting in the open with this blatant fraud in broad daylight.
- soderfoo 1y agoThere’s an old law school adage that A students become professors, B students go to work for C students. It's similar for "shark attorneys," who will typically hail from tier 2 and 3 schools. They're the aggressive hustlers.
- hattar 1y ago> There’s an old law school adage that A students become professors If I were a law school professor, I’d probably also say that.
- csa 1y ago> If I were a law school professor, I’d probably also say that. Or more likely a jaded B-student who has been around the block a few times. The reason this works is that the C-students include students who have always known that their social network would facilitate them being rainmakers, while B-students are often middle-class try-hards who don’t have the right social network and don’t have the social skills to develop the right one.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- brookst 1y agoIt’s fun to be outraged but a more nuanced read is that Amazon is stuck battling all kinds of fraud and it can be hard to differentiate. They also have a massive problem with fake bad reviews where a competitor spams competing products to try to increase sales of their own. They have so many flavors of fraud that it’s very hard to get it right consistently at scale. Not am Amazon fan, and please let’s not do the Reddit “understanding something is the same as excusing it” thing.
- crazygringo 1y agoYou can't use the word "counterfeit" or suggest that. But you can absolutely give 1 star and explain you only got milliamps. I have a bunch of 1 star reviews. I've never had anything taken down except when I used the word "counterfeit". Also, I get it -- how do you know if it's actually counterfeit, or genuine but low-quality? There are a bunch of things I've bought that I suspected were counterfeit, then went to my local store and discovered no, the authentic item is just crap.
- cogman10 1y agoSilk is particularly bad. Order anything "silk" from amazon and you are almost certainly getting satin. Put up a review "hey, this is satin, not silk" and amazon will take it down. Amazon should be busted for false advertising. Millions of products filled with lies and amazon does absolutely nothing to curate (other than removing comments warning others that a product is fake).
- crazygringo 1y ago> Put up a review "hey, this is satin, not silk" and amazon will take it down. Do they? I have seen tons of reviews complaining that it's the wrong material -- that a tablecloth is polyester rather than advertised cotton, that something is chrome-plated plastic rather than stainless steel. And I've left my fair share myself, and never had one taken down. I've avoided buying many products precisely based on other people's reviews pointing out the wrong material, the wrong size, etc. So what you're describing does not match my experience at all. In fact, that's one of the main reasons I use Amazon, that there are enough reviews to find out what's real and what's fake. Other sites don't have enough reviews, and of course a site run by the brand itself can delete whatever bad reviews it wants.
- cogman10 1y agoIt's happened to my reviews. The seller contested it and got Amazon to remove my review. I have no way to get the review back up or to contest the action.
- 1y ago