[HN Gopher] Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
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Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
Author : boplicity
Score : 611 points
Date : 2022-11-24 14:00 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| butMebbe wrote:
| The path to success now is still the Walmart model but you have
| to take longer to get there subtlety. The other Walmarts are out
| there monitoring for threats and will litigate!
|
| So you have to appear novel to early adopters, and grow into
| being a landfills cash cow in a politically correct way.
| weba11y wrote:
| over the years Amazon is getting harder and harder to find
| products on. I'm sure 10 years ago the quality of products was
| much better (even if it was a smaller amount of different
| products available).
| rsaxvc wrote:
| Alexa is powered by the forges of mount doom, which burn only
| cash.
| [deleted]
| wayeq wrote:
| behind a paywall.. oh, the ironing
| z9znz wrote:
| This comedy skit illustrates the same in humor:
| https://youtu.be/nQpxAvjD_30
| stewx wrote:
| Kudos to the Bezos-owned Post for openly criticizing Amazon.
| heisenbit wrote:
| Emperors have a great need for honest feedback on their lack of
| clothing. The biggest risk to them is being surrounded by all
| yes people as Putin is learning painfully.
| Razengan wrote:
| _Everything_ _everywhere_ is become a f 'ing ad. Even the damn
| posts and comments on social networks like Reddit and sometimes
| even HN masked as genuine opinion.
|
| Ads are pollution, cancer, and pandemic.
|
| When will the masses buckle under this incessant accursed FATIGUE
| and demand enough be enough?
| etothet wrote:
| And it's not just Amazon. This is now the way the web works. In
| fact, on mobile most of the linked article becomes hidden beneath
| a WaPo Black Friday ad and a Google ad.
| nottorp wrote:
| That's funny. I was scrolling down and after a while the article
| got covered by a popup ad with something about black friday!
| subscribe now!
|
| And back to Amazon, i just don't search for generic products name
| on there. I just go to check if they have a specific product.
|
| Same for the iOS app store etc. You just can't trust them.
| akkartik wrote:
| I saw the popup and literally kept scrolling. Because it
| appeared perfectly centered on the amazon screenshot and I
| thought it was part of the screenshot. And as I scrolled more
| stuff got added to the screenshot.
|
| It's a Poe's law world we live in.
| tempestn wrote:
| Anybody else remember the days when you'd be looking at a product
| in a physical store, and check the Amazon reviews on your phone
| before buying it, because that was the easiest way to get
| reliable feedback? How things have changed since then!
| fatneckbeardz wrote:
| I agree this is horrible.
|
| (this comment is sponsored by Honey, the best way to save money
| online)
| mk89 wrote:
| Search engines have overall become terrible due to ads. Amazon is
| finally a search engine with the extra step of selling a material
| good.
|
| I have to admit that it has become difficult also for me to find
| a simple item without too much bias on Amazon. Last search I did
| a few days ago was for some beard balms and things like that.
| Finally, for some items I bought a known "safe" brand, while for
| other things I couldn't decide on I chose a local shop nearby.
| Yes, this exclusively because of the issue described in the
| article.
|
| So it seems: if you don't know ahead what to buy, Amazon is not a
| good place to search for things. On the other hand, it's
| convenient for subscriptions to items you know you want and need
| (pampers, toilet paper, etc.)
|
| ...and don't get me started on "let's search for products made in
| XYZ" to narrow down the search. It's just impossible.
| Arubis wrote:
| Amazon-the-store is mostly near-shored AliExpress + 7-Eleven at
| this point. That's got its uses--it's awfully convenient!--but it
| leaves them open to niched-down competitors that I would love to
| give my money.
|
| AWS, on the other hand, feels pretty sustainable.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Iunno, Amazon has last-mile delivery down to a science
| relatively inaccessible to small sellers.
|
| Maybe with enough time, non-Amazon services will pop up more
| and more with the same kind of reach.
|
| I think postal shipping is still within reach in USA, but in
| Canada, the post sees parcels as a profit-centre and are
| shouting themselves in the foot as their volumes drop.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| I have uBlock and fakespoter installed on my browser. I had to
| open another browser where I wasn't logged in and had no
| extensions to reproduce the results.
|
| I don't know if the filtered results are that much better. But it
| is free from blatant ads.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| This statement generalizes to: Almost everything on (ads-
| monetized tech product) is becoming an ad. The ads business model
| is just too powerful.
| maxnevermind wrote:
| I find a general web and pictures Google search for shopping on
| Amazon more effective, native Amazon one is a dumpster fire.
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| It has become impossible to find certain products on Amazon
| unless I know the _exact_ name of it already, instead it will
| show me multiple pages of garbage that does not even belong to
| the same category. Often times Amazon will _refuse_ to show me
| the product I am looking for, going as far as not even list it in
| the 3-4 pages of results, as if it did not exist. Then I go and
| enter the exact name and suddenly it shows up, but even then it
| is often not even among the first results...
| strenholme wrote:
| That's why I use uBlock origin: It hides all of those Amazon ads.
| Also hides Twitter ads, even YouTube video ads, pretty much
| everything except Facebook ads (Facebook plays cat and mouse
| games with ad blockers).
|
| While I don't mind YouTube ads -- I have disabled ad blockers on
| that domain because I'm an electronic musician myself so strongly
| feel it's important to support artists and musicians -- these
| Amazon ads are in my book unethical, since they look like
| legitimate results with only a light grey "sponsored" in small
| text underneath them.
|
| Don't get me started with how Amazon pesters me to join Prime
| every time I order with them.
| nicbou wrote:
| This is the internet as I know it since a few years. Going
| without it is unbearable after just one or two pages. The
| cookie notices alone are unbelievable. It's wild to think that
| some people live with the unfiltered Internet.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| FBPurity does a pretty good job on blocking FB ads. Not
| perfect, still cat and mouse, but that's the only site it works
| on, so the devs spend more effort on only that.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| It's refreshing to see this in the Washington Post, owned by
| Bezos. Tiny beacon of hope going out into the darkness.
|
| Search ads on shopping websites are just capitalism taken to the
| natural end. Hopefully degradation of user experience will curb
| it somewhat. Our only other option is some sort of new Internet
| Bill of Rights being passed and I'm not optimistic lobbyists
| would ever allow it. We need some sort of fund for humanity that
| hires lobbyists with greater funds. We need voters that vote for
| candidates that would support the human right to freedom from
| manipulation from corporations.
| sgustard wrote:
| If you walk into a store and say "I need a cat bed," and the
| store directs you to the most profitable cat bed ... is that a
| violation of your proposed law? How do you legislate around
| that? There are a thousand cat beds! They are all the same! The
| store that doesn't take bribes to hype certain brands goes out
| of business! And all we have left is Amazon! I mean, I guess
| that's already happened, so ... what more do they want? Does
| Amazon have no shame? What if they used their monopoly to sell
| stuff honestly? Would their whole business collapse?
| moolcool wrote:
| > Hopefully degradation of user experience will curb it
| somewhat.
|
| Sometimes the ads even betray themselves. Like I, as a rule,
| hate ads. I block them where I can, and where I can't, I do my
| best to ignore them. But then you get instances where the ad
| _is_ what you're actually looking for. Like if you search
| Amazon for "iPhone", you get official first party iPhone stuff
| from Apple, but they're sponsored listings. My proclivity to
| skip ads would make me scroll right past the only quality
| products on the whole page, into a slew of AliExpress level
| garbage.
| monetus wrote:
| They have to buy their own keywords so that others aren't
| first in the listings right? They don't want Samsung to be
| the first thing you see. Hilarious and sad at the same time.
| moolcool wrote:
| Yeah, it's one of the things I hate most about the ad
| ecosystem. The pro-ad argument is "they give the little guy
| a kick at the can", but that's tremendous bullshit. Try an
| example: Turn off adblock and search "Lejiled Wallet" (a
| very small French company which makes nice leather
| wallets). You'll get ads for much bigger companies (Fossil
| and Belroy) in the sidebar, and those ads will follow you
| all around the internet for months.
| https://i.imgur.com/lAaAdGM.png
| pohuing wrote:
| The future is booking ads for other brands so they catch
| the ire of the customer.
| kyleplum wrote:
| IMO the only thing that separates this from racketeering is
| that it's technically legal.
| z3c0 wrote:
| I generally look at aggressive ads as a detractor to the
| product. Money spent trying to bait me into making the
| purchase is money not spent on improving the product. I'll
| always pick the non-sponsored product with the highest
| (written) reviews. I agree that we'll need to be even more
| aggressive than advertisers, as their boundaries are pretty
| much nonexistent.
|
| For example, I'm an avid Sonic fan, but no amount of fan
| service could get me to sit through the constant advertising
| woven into the script. I'm going to just skip this franchise
| entirely. Whatever happened to just slipping a sign in the
| background?
| imiric wrote:
| Those are noble goals, but have close to zero chance of
| happening, and they won't address the root of the problem.
|
| > Search ads on shopping websites are just capitalism taken to
| the natural end.
|
| The issue is not just with search ads or shopping websites, but
| advertising in general. It's the primary business model of the
| modern web, and the main revenue stream for most Big Tech
| corporations. Considering their symbiotic relationship with
| governments, neither side has much incentive to change the
| status quo. Some change is slowly happening, but I suspect it
| will become _much_ worse until it gets better.
|
| We're lucky that ads are still somewhat blockable. Wait until
| browsers become WebAssembly interpreters, so that this isn't
| possible anymore, or for XR to become mainstream, allowing
| adtech to do much more invasive tracking and advertisers to buy
| a chance to deliver ads straight to your eyeballs. Label me a
| pessimist, but I don't see how any of this will be unavoidable
| in the near future, other than by becoming a luddite.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _We need voters that vote for candidates that would support
| the human right to freedom from manipulation from
| corporations._
|
| Donate $3 to the Presidential Election Fund every year on your
| US taxes. It costs you nothing, is a single checkbox, and
| redirects $3 of your taxes into the fund.
|
| Candidates that take money from the fund have additional
| (mostly good) limits placed on their spending.
|
| It's not perfect, but it's free to do and creates an
| alternative to lobbyist funding.
|
| https://www.thoughtco.com/presidential-election-campaign-fun...
| id wrote:
| We don't see what they are not reporting.
| macintux wrote:
| Thankfully there are many other news organizations who aren't
| owned by Bezos.
| agentcoops wrote:
| I'm part of the I'm sure infinitesimal and ever-shrinking portion
| of Amazon's userbase who actually try to use the site to buy rare
| and used books. Most annoying for my experience is that they
| recently replaced what was in fact a best-in-class recommendation
| engine, which lead to a lot of my purchases, with a totally
| useless ad bar that displays universally terrible "related"
| books. There's a world where after effectively cornering the
| world book market they subsequently destroy it (and they of
| course own and have effectively feature frozen competitors such
| as abebooks and bookdespository).
| iamacyborg wrote:
| It seems buying rare and used books has mostly migrated to
| Facebook groups and ebay, at least for the sorts of stuff I
| collect.
| protastus wrote:
| I stopped ordering books from Amazon after twice receiving
| books shipped loose in oversized boxes, with obviously
| inadequate padding, leading to corners damaged in transit.
|
| This would've been unthinkable in the old days (Amazon customer
| since 1995).
|
| I'm assuming you order from Amazon marketplace retailers who
| you trust, and do their own shipping.
| yalogin wrote:
| Over the last few years Amazon has been overwhelmed by Chinese
| goods and over time the search results has become similar to
| aliexpress. I would have never heard the manufacturer's name and
| will never remember them either. All of them have close to 5 star
| rating and there is no way to even judge if they are any good.
| You buy if you accept that. Feels like it's time for this to be
| disrupted.
| fmajid wrote:
| I buy my electronics from B&H Photo, or cut out the Amazon
| middleman and get the Chinese stuff from AliExpress if it's not
| time-critical. AliExpress customer service is also slow, but
| fair in my experience.
| russdill wrote:
| And 8 other identical looking products listed under a different
| manufacturer.
| Beaver117 wrote:
| Aliexpress products aren't bad. And although they're very cheap
| at the source, I'm willing to pay a gigantic markup to get it
| in 2 days with free refunds rather than 2 months.
| fmajid wrote:
| I've had recourse to AliExpress customer service in cases
| where what was sent didn't match the product description or
| was lost in transit. It was also slow because they have this
| weirdly procedural arbitration process that feels like the
| judiciary, but they reimbursed me.
| shellfishgene wrote:
| At least to Europe shipping times from Aliexpress continue to
| get better, I often get stuff after a week now, mostly within
| 3.
| noncoml wrote:
| When it came to shopping I used to blindly trust Amazon.
| Wouldn't even check prices anywhere else.
|
| Now, it's always the choice of last resort. I really don't like
| it when I have to shop on Amazon.
|
| It feels like a combination of AliExpress and eBay. Delivery
| times are getting worse by the day too.
| silisili wrote:
| Came to say this. Some locations must still have it good, but
| where I live in the US, delivery dates are 7 to 8 days.
| Almost every retailer is way faster than Amazon.
| avitous wrote:
| I used to trust them a whole lot more, too. But of late it
| seems Amazon is leaning toward a cesspool of price gouging,
| and I've noticed a lot more of the presented results are
| "Sponsored".
|
| Along with that, I stream movies on my TV, running clients,
| usually Netflix or Prime Video, on my xbox. Increasingly the
| Amazon prime video client wants to present me with options to
| "Rent or Buy" instead of free offerings (I am a Prime
| subscriber after all, and seek to take advantage of the free
| streaming offerings), sometimes a page of results will
| contain nothing but pay-to-play offers.
| fmajid wrote:
| The iPad or browser version offer a "free to me" option.
| Unfortunately they also count their ad-infested service as
| "free to me".
|
| In my experience Amazon has the best streaming service now.
| There's nothing on Netflix I want to see and I'd have
| cancelled the service a long time ago if it were not for my
| wife and 10 year old daughter.
| UltraViolence wrote:
| The article speaks of a tipping point and has aided in pulling it
| forward.
|
| Unlimited greed is what eventually sinks a company. We saw it
| with AltaVista in the '90's (when the search results were all
| ads) and Google is slowly repeating this opening a space for a
| competitor to jump into.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > Unlimited greed is what eventually sinks a company. We saw it
| with AltaVista in the '90's (when the search results were all
| ads) and Google is slowly repeating this opening a space for a
| competitor to jump into.
|
| I'm not sure this is a helpful characterization. Greed is also
| what helped the same companies get where they were before they
| went to shit.
|
| The problem is that you can only grow so far in a market before
| the only way to keep the appearance of growth is to make your
| product worse, either by producing it cheaper (like Toblerone)
| or by monetizing it harder (e.g. ads in paid video
| subscriptions).
| ilyt wrote:
| Well, the difference would be "we find a niche and make a
| bank on it by being best at it" vs "we make a ton of money on
| the niche, how we can make even more?". I.e. being happy that
| you "made it" and continue to make the as good product vs
| trying to squeeze everything out of it to deliver investor
| returns.
|
| _Theoretically_ being too greedy like that should open niche
| for competition with better product that 's less exploitative
| but that is really hard if the near-monopolist on market is
| big enough or the product is hard enough.
| UltraViolence wrote:
| Sure, greed is good. But unlimited greed will eventually
| drive away customers as Amazon is illustrating very
| conveniently (and AltaVista before it).
|
| Google too needs to be vigilant that it's decreasing utility
| isn't driving away users to a competitor.
| danaris wrote:
| There's been a shift in our culture over the past century or
| so (though mainly, I think, since the 1980s) in how we look
| at the purpose of a company.
|
| It used to be that a fairly normal, mainstream company's
| purpose and goals were along the lines of "We make a product
| or provide a service, and doing that well enough/better than
| our competition makes us decent money."
|
| Nowadays, it seems to be almost expected that the way a
| company operates is closer to "We are here to make as much
| money as we possibly can. If that means we have to make a
| product or provide a service, OK, but that's a necessary evil
| to the process of making absolutely ungodly amounts of
| money."
|
| Google didn't get where it was before it went to shit because
| of _greed_. They got there because of genuine technical
| prowess, and a willingness to _sacrifice possible revenue_ to
| provide an improved experience, with things like the bare-
| bones main Google page (as compared to things like Yahoo!,
| Altavista, and Infoseek when Google first appeared, which
| were laden down with all kinds of crap).
|
| When greed took over, they shifted from the former mindset to
| the latter, and that's when things really started to go
| downhill.
| edgyquant wrote:
| No innovation got them where they were
| navane wrote:
| There are always people working in these companies that are
| trying to get a good product to a customer. These are slowly
| replaced or overruled by A/B testers who want to maximize
| profit. I think that process shifts the company from actually
| doing a service, to greed.
| t0suj4 wrote:
| I would describe it as the company has changed its priority
| from customer acquisition to customer monetization. When
| the company starts tuning by touching only its monetization
| knob, it slowly starts descending into death spiral.
| Depending on the competition it can take weeks or decades.
| numpad0 wrote:
| And the problem is that the the snake has now reached its
| tail.
|
| Maybe there are specific conditions, like it might help
| laundering or help deter competitors from entering their
| website, whatever that this scheme has a net positive gain
| for them, but this is insanity.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I dont think this is the whole picture. It is generally
| true that selling products and making a profit is the goal
| for both.
|
| Optimizing the best result for each query can result in a
| terrible result for the minority of shoppers for that
| query. More importantly, it can lead to a terrible result
| for the _majority_ of shoppers across many queries.
|
| The problem is other considerations that A/B testing
| metrics often leave out (Satisfaction in the long term, in
| searches that dont lead to sale, and across multiple
| changes)
|
| That is to say, on average most shoppers might want cheap
| shit for a given search. but sometimes, they might want a
| different/better product and get frustrated.
|
| If you over optimize for the typical use case, you might
| still lose the typically user because they not typical in
| every way and every day.
| Rury wrote:
| Not sure about A/B testers, but that is essentially the
| issue. Steve Jobs even talked about it back in the 1990s,
| about tech companies and markets of the 70s and 80s:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Yeah, it's like if you sell a multi-tool and realize that
| 90% of the time people just use the screwdriver. AB
| testing would tell you that you should make all the tools
| a screwdriver, but then you would have a shit multi-tool
| and no one would buy it except people that need a
| screwdriver.
|
| This is what Amazon has done. They took their Marketplace
| and turned it into a search engine for the cheapest drop
| shipped product
| treis wrote:
| At some point it crosses the line into fraud. Like look
| at this listing:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-49-inch-Odyssey-FreeSync-
| LC49...
|
| There's a little box that says:
|
| >Protect your purchase
|
| >Coverage for drops, spills and breakdowns (plans vary)
|
| If you click through you'll see that the plan
| specifically excludes drops and spills. Two of the three
| things they advertise for.
|
| Like that's just fraud and someone at Amazon green-lit
| this knowing that it's just fraud. It's not optimization
| gone haywire. It's discovering that you can make money
| scamming people and not having any qualms about scamming
| your customers.
| technovader wrote:
| Greed = Capitalism
| tomxor wrote:
| How are they identifying these as ads?
|
| I really can't see any differences (which I suppose is the point
| the article is making)... but if so, how are they confident what
| the highlighted listings are ads?
| stef25 wrote:
| Bad:
|
| - Fake products, including outrageously a Delonghi coffee machine
| (paint came off the buttons after a few days and then the machine
| just broke). - Chinese crap with brand names that sound computer
| generated - Here in EU you'll get some product descriptions in
| the wrong languages (Polish, Italian ... on the .fr domain), or
| images that have Chinese text on them.
|
| Good
|
| - The refurbished / Amazon warehouse stuff is great. Just bought
| 2x 27" computer screens at a price far, far lower than what any
| other shop was offering. Same for a PS4 a couple years back.
| Looking at doing the same for a television. Who cares it the
| remote doesn't have batteries or some cable is missing. No other
| store here in EU comes close to the prices Amazon has.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| Wait just a minute! Are you telling me that Amazon is showing
| products that they are selling on their e-commerce website?
| CosmicShadow wrote:
| Scamazon just sucks now. It was once good, but every time I go to
| use it I waste time and get frustrated. I now only seem to buy
| stuff where the trade off on research vs going to store is not
| worth it and buy their probably crappy prime brand batteries.
|
| I've been floating like $100+ of amazon credits for months
| because I keep getting damn gift cards and more credit from
| returns. Sure there is things I kind of want, but I end up saving
| it for things I need, and then when I waste time researching what
| to buy on Amazon, I end up not buying it on Amazon because of
| their awful fake reviews and cloned YGGFSS named brand items.
|
| It's a real shame that brick-and-mortar stores don't realize
| their advantage is that I'd rather pay more and drive to pick
| something up TODAY than waste time waiting and risking garbage on
| prime, yet they flood their own stores with "online seller
| marketplace items" or nothing is ever in stock.
| chrisbaker98 wrote:
| > YGGFSS
|
| What does this mean?
| chihuahua wrote:
| It was probably meant to be an example of the millions of
| machine-generated nonsensical names that a certain kind of
| 3rd party seller uses. Typically these names are a bit more
| pronounceable - the algorithms that generate them usually
| include some vowels.
|
| Examples from a search for bike fenders: TAGVO, XINBOUS,
| MEGHNA, NICEDACK, RBRL BRL, ENLEE, FETESNICE, JIVMEE
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| And sometimes the machine generated product descriptions
| seem to have gone live seemingly without someone that
| speaks English giving them a once-over:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/kvvO7dM
| aendruk wrote:
| Nonsense all-caps throwaway brand name?
| nicwolff wrote:
| Wow this thread is the only Google result for "YGGFSS" that
| isn't a catalog site.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I used to like Best Buy but increasingly I am frustrated with
| their wide but shallow product line. They stock grills and
| washing machines and even stock one entry level mirrorless
| camera but no lenses or quality accessories. Out of 10 parts I
| need to build a PC they stock maybe 2. I think they kid
| themselves into thinking I will drive there just to buy the 2
| parts and then buy the rest online with somebody else but it
| doesn't work that way. I was happy to be able to spend a credit
| I had on a DVD of _The World of Susie Wong_ because I can't
| count on them having particular movies.
|
| AMZN is killing them based on the strength of their product
| line but killing themselves because the product listings are
| flooded with bogus results that you just don't get with
| reputable but failing retailers.
| cratermoon wrote:
| What Shopping On Amazon Feels Like:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQpxAvjD_30
| Hackbraten wrote:
| Not only hilarious but also extremely relevant. It's
| essentially TFA in comedy form.
| ozzythecat wrote:
| Ads = revenue = promotions.
|
| I was at Amazon for over a decade. Show YoY growth in terms of
| revenue, you'll get a bigger empire. Sr. Managers become
| Directors. Directors become VPs. The senior engineers who worked
| on the low latency performance optimization becomes principals.
| The tech program managers become principals as well.
|
| All the other cogs in the chain either get burned out, managed
| out, or they bounce to AWS, maybe Alexa.
|
| All the analysis and commentary in this thread is interesting,
| but there's nothing complex here. It's basic incentive structures
| incentivizing undesirable outcomes.
| nytesky wrote:
| Have to say this is impressive commentary coming from Bezos owned
| WP.
| nblgbg wrote:
| I really miss "customers who also brought" features. I used to
| discover a ton of good books with that. Now it's all advertising.
| The whole search results are advertising and recently they are
| not relevant also any more.
| [deleted]
| zug_zug wrote:
| Time for somebody to make an alternative interface, like
| teddit.com. I imagine this could be done with front-end code
| only.
| verdverm wrote:
| CORS, unless it is run locally, plus you'll have to reverse
| engineer the APIs. Might be easier to write a browser plugin
| that improves the current UI
| aenis wrote:
| Interesting in how it resembles the situation in traditional
| retail.
|
| FMCG companies typically pay a lot of money in so called trade
| funds to the likes of Walmart, Tesco, and others. One company I
| worked for spent Approx 20pct of its topline a year on that -
| double digit billions. Ostensibly, this is to place the product
| on the right shelves, run promos and have the products featured
| in the chains' newsletters.
|
| The real reason is, however, efficient taxation. The "trade
| funds" make all the profit for legacy retailers. Branded products
| are sold at near zero, or sometimes - if allowed - negative
| margins. The operating companies make near-zero taxable profits.
| The marketing spend is typically channeled to different legal
| entities than actual sales and taxed "efficiently". I think it
| might be the same with Amazon.
| notamy wrote:
| https://archive.ph/YMyrH
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20221124034213/https://www.washi...
|
| Note: Some parts of the archive don't render correctly? Unsure
| why. You will get better results clearing cookies + localstorage
| for washingtonpost.com.
| Ruq wrote:
| I find it ironic the Washington Post has this article.
| donaldbough wrote:
| After starting up at Amazon ( biased opinion), it really is
| impressive to see the relentless customer focus. Even at the cost
| of short term profit or wall street gains, they have historical
| proof of putting the customer first.
|
| Lots of Amazon ads? Sure. But they're generally useful, and the
| teams building the "not as profitable e-commerce" will be making
| something people love.
| swayvil wrote:
| >Let me be clear: Advertising isn't necessarily bad...
|
| Sure it is. It's legalized production of mass-insanity.
|
| When communication isn't intended to fuck your mind we call it
| "news" or "conversation" or something like that.
|
| Advertising is most definitely 100% evil. The only reason anybody
| says otherwise is because that implies all kinds of scary stuff
| about our society and nobody wants to go there. Also, because
| such statements offend our sponsors. And also, if you are in the
| advertising business, talk like that makes you look like a real
| Morlock.
|
| I think that's crystal clear.
| moolcool wrote:
| It runs deeper than just everything being an ad. It's also
| completely flooded with rebadged junk from dropshippers. A few
| weeks ago, I was looking for a new whetstone, and this is what I
| got when I searched Amazon
|
| https://i.imgur.com/1Utp2dF.png
|
| The results keep going like that. You see constant repetition of
| the exact same units with slightly different branding, often with
| the same stock photography, repeated for page after page. It used
| to be that you could count on Amazon to give you pretty solid
| results when you wanted something. It was great, it really took
| the fuss out of shopping when you didn't have to do 10 google
| searches when you needed to buy a USB cable or something. Now
| Amazon is nothing more than AliExpress with faster shipping.
| Shame.
| treis wrote:
| Interestingly enough that's cheaper on Amazon than AliExpress:
|
| https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256802919678760.html
|
| ^ You have to click on the 1000/6000 grit to see the price of
| $26.53.
|
| Pretty much everything people buy is cheap Chinese crap anyhow.
| arein3 wrote:
| It's 12.33$ for me https://i.imgur.com/hWyQ466.png
| treis wrote:
| You're not looking at the full kit ones.
|
| Interestingly enough though it shows me $16.70 for just the
| stone. Maybe they're doing some price discrimination or
| you're shipping to a cheaper place.
| kennend3 wrote:
| > Now Amazon is nothing more than AliExpress with faster
| shipping. Shame.
|
| This.
|
| Once i realized what was taking place on amazon I simply moved
| to AliExpress. I mean if i am going to get something from there
| anyhow i might as well save the middleman fees and take the hit
| on shipping.
|
| I canceled my prime membership a while ago as well. I don't see
| how amazon can continue to simply be a front end for AliExpress
| for long. Wont most simply avoid the added fees and go to Ali
| directly?
| boppo1 wrote:
| If you shop at Whole Foods Prime pays for itself.
| jrs235 wrote:
| But even their shipping (with Prime too!) is getting slower
| and slower. Prime's selling point used to be free 2 day
| shipping. Shipping is still "free" but many items take 4 days
| (or more now).
| thefourthchime wrote:
| That might depend on where you live. I nearly always get
| next-day or 2-day shipping. There are exceptions, but for
| central Austin, it's pretty good.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >even their shipping (with Prime too!) is getting slower
|
| Not only that. Try searching while in Incognito Mode and
| you'll see the same products, sold by Amazon.com, without
| Prime, for a few bucks cheaper than when you're logged in
| and seeing them with "free" Prime shipping.
| takoid wrote:
| Does this only happen with an active Prime membership? I
| tested a few search queries and didn't see the
| inconsistencies you're describing.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| I assume so, since I have a Prime membership and it knows
| this when I'm logged in.
| piva00 wrote:
| Thanks for validating my assumption, I encountered this
| twice and thought I was taking crazy pills. I don't even
| shop on Amazon much, like once or twice a year...
| zip1234 wrote:
| Do you live in a city?
| kennend3 wrote:
| There are times i still use amazon and i actually bought
| a few items on Tuesday.
|
| Amazon's delivery date is friday? Want to guess where
| amazon's distribution warehouse is? A few blocks away
| from me.
|
| The point you are attempting to make is unclear. If the
| distribution hub is within walking distance from me, why
| does it take days to ship?
| mbreese wrote:
| You're assuming that the product you ordered is at that
| warehouse. It probably isn't. They can't store all
| products at all locations. Even if that distribution
| center ends up being the shipment origination site, the
| product still probably had to move within the Amazon
| network. Some of those things will move within the Amazon
| network, some with external (trackable) carriers
| (UPS/FedEx). And some things has restrictions on the
| method of transport. If there is a lithium battery
| anywhere in the device, it travels by ground.
|
| Also -- if you're in the US, today is a holiday and
| nothing will move. So today and yesterday had/has limited
| movement between distribution centers. And as we get
| closer to Christmas, the entire network will start to
| approach saturation.
|
| There are many reasons why things don't always ship as
| fast as you'd like them to.
| kennend3 wrote:
| Speaking of assumptions lets review yours for a moment.
|
| 1) I am not assuming the products are from different
| warehouses. I know this for a fact. Look at my other post
| and i stated one item is being shipped from a warehouse
| ~120 KM away. I will guess the rest is from the local
| warehouse? Once amazon updates the shipping details
| (probably friday AM) it will show me where it came from..
|
| 2) I'm in Canada and it is not a holiday here so it is
| unclear why "today and yesterday had/has limited movement
| between distribution centers."
|
| 3) Amazon Canada rarely uses other carriers anymore. I
| cant tell you when the last time anyone i know received
| something that didnt use their own in-house shipping
| service so you cant really blame "UPS/Fedex"
| 13of40 wrote:
| A few months ago I ordered a dongle from Amazon to attach
| a floppy drive to a modern computer via USB. For some
| reason this weird, niche little thing was eligible for
| Amazon Essentials same day delivery. Apparently every
| Amazon warehouse has a dusty box of these things in the
| corner that they're still trying to unload?
| [deleted]
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I am sure your congressman gets same day or next day
| shipping in DC, though.
| bombcar wrote:
| Amazon quotes delivery times up to two weeks for me for
| prime now.
|
| And it doesn't even ship (UPS) until a few days before
| the delivery date. And they _still_ don't do a good job
| combining orders.
| anifru wrote:
| > Shipping is still "free" but many items take 4 days (or
| more now).
|
| I've had the opposite experience. Everything comes within 1
| day. Some items even come within 12 hours (overnight
| shipping delivering at 7am)
| MikePlacid wrote:
| Where I live (a summerhouse in a small county seat in
| mountains) - Walmart, Bestbuy, Homedepot and others ship
| faster and usually for free even for small orders.
|
| Walmart also provides all-paper packaging (they seem to
| have worked hard on developing it) - so you can burn /
| recycle packaging without say peeling off stuck plastic
| tape first.
| chrisbaker98 wrote:
| Anecdotal, but I haven't noticed this in the UK. Pretty
| much everything I order from Amazon still arrives within 24
| hours, and I live in the countryside (albeit in the
| southeast so still not far from London.)
|
| OTOH I still notice the problem that other people have
| mentioned - that practically everything on Amazon these
| days is the same repackaged Chinese dropshipped garbage.
| Which is one reason I shop on Amazon far less than I used
| to.
| martinald wrote:
| It's just the distances involved. Amazon UK can get
| everything from any warehouse in the UK to your local
| depot for last mile delivery overnight, if not faster.
|
| In the US unless you air freight ($$$) it you cannot rely
| on getting stock from warehouse A (say in NY) to
| warehouse K (say near LA) overnight. This then means you
| have to keep a lot more "duplicate" inventory sitting
| around various places as you cannot just in time move it,
| which is also extremely expensive.
|
| I imagine the reports of shipping delays in the US are
| caused by Amazon intentionally trying to reduce the
| amount of inventory on hand and/or using less air
| freight.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| This is also happening in Europe now on an EU scale.
| Often something takes a couple days because it goes from
| Germany to Spain or something. They don't say that's the
| reason but you can tell from the stickers on the
| products. I guess they don't do this anymore for the UK
| though because of all the customs hassles since Brexit.
| vidarh wrote:
| I've not noticed a major difference in the UK from before
| Brexit. Some products would come from elsewhere in Europe
| but most would be local then too. London alone has
| several Amazon depots, so lots of things are same day
| delivery here.
|
| Maybe it's down to competition - for lots of products I'd
| go elsewhere if they didn't offer at least next day
| delivery.
| iso1631 wrote:
| I've never managed to connect with America tales of the
| length of shipping. Almost (99%) everything I order from
| amazon arrives when it says, most of which is next day. I
| live in the country, but like most UK citizens fairly
| close to a major trunk road (10 miles or so).
|
| Of course I'm sure things are different if you live on
| Mull or Fair Isle, but for the vast majority of us it
| seems reliable
|
| The _quality_ of what you get from amazon is of course
| somewhat different.
| 13of40 wrote:
| I live in the Seattle area, so Amazon shipping is pretty
| fast and accurate, but there have been a few times when
| things were shipped but they apparently just disappeared
| in transit. One time it was a car part and it got close
| enough that it was on a truck from the city 20 miles
| north of here, then it just dropped off the radar and
| they refunded my money.
|
| Then every once in a while you get something that takes a
| month to deliver, comes in a package covered with customs
| stamps, and is roughly the size and shape of what was
| ordered but wrong. I ordered a titanium tube one time -
| think the dimensions of a reusable drinking straw - and
| after a month got a solid titanium rod. "Mail it back and
| we'll give you a refund." There's a bit of unfair
| asymmetry there, friend, since you're mailing stuff to
| the US all day and I wouldn't have the faintest clue how
| to send something to China, and I'm guessing it's going
| to cost far more than the thing I'm returning.
|
| But I'm an addict and I don't see myself cancelling Prime
| any time soon.
| cratermoon wrote:
| The difference between the US and the UK is size and the
| sheer remoteness of some places, even small cities.
| Unless you've been there, it's hard to grasp.
|
| I've driven around large parts of the western US and
| there's a LOT of empty space. I don't know how many
| shipping centers Amazon has in the UK, but I am about
| 99.999% sure that there's areas of the US larger than all
| of the British Isle that are served by a single warehouse
| and shipping center.
|
| So the variability in the US is going to be very high.
| Some places that happen to be near a shipping center, or
| two, will have consistent on-time delivery. Other places
| that are distant from one, and may have a high mountain
| pass that's dicey in winter or closed because of
| wildfires in the summer between them and that single
| center, are going to have problems.
| arcticfox wrote:
| I took a week off work once and walked from one side of
| England to the other, it was awesome. That would get me
| almost to the neighboring city where I'm from in the
| western US.
| jsmith99 wrote:
| Hadrian's wall?
| martinald wrote:
| According to this about 50 in the UK: https://en.wikipedi
| a.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon_locations#Unite...
| vidarh wrote:
| There's a high degree of bias in who we hear from too, I
| think. Most European countries have a grand total of zero
| Amazon depots, so there are plenty of European countries
| where the delivery is not fast either, but I rarely see
| people from those countries talking about it for whatever
| reason. I'm guessing in large part because those
| countries also does not have a local Amazon site, so it
| feels less surprising because if you order from Amazon
| you're unambiguously ordering from abroad, with different
| expectations.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Sure, but given that the majority of people in America,
| especially the ones I see complaining about amazon, are
| going to be living within an hour or so of a major city
| -- San Francisco, Seatle, Austin, New York, LA, I'm not
| sure how the difficulties of delivering to Hyder, AK or
| Las Vegas, NM factor in.
| kennend3 wrote:
| I think what many people outside North America fail to
| grasp is the size of north America.
|
| To give you an idea:
|
| I live just outside Toronto (Ontario, Canada) and if i
| want to drive east to the next province (Quebec) it will
| take me 4 hours to cover the 450 KM. If i want to go to
| the next province to the west (Manitoba) It will take me
| 20 hours to cover the 2,000 KM. So to cut across Ontario
| you are looking at something like 2,450 KM
|
| This is just my province of Ontario. The other provinces
| are not as large, but the country is vast when looking at
| Europe.
|
| Using google maps, i can drive from the south
| (footbridge) to the north (ChargePlace,Scotland) and this
| ~ 1,200 KM?
|
| In the case of my very simple order, one item is being
| shipped from 120KM away?
|
| How often do you order something simple and one of the
| distribution hubs is 120KM away from you? There is a
| massive 1 million square foot hub a few blocks away but i
| guess it isnt big enough to hold what i wanted?
|
| I hope this provides some context for you.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| HaH, exactly.
|
| 25 years ago, I lived in a city of Rijeka. You could
| start from Croatia; enter & drive through _entire country
| of Slovenia_ ; enter into Italy and go shopping into
| Trieste, two countries over - in 75km.
|
| Now I'm in the Greater Toronto Area, and my best friend
| lives about the same distance, officially in the same
| city or metro.
|
| There's just over two thousand kilometers between the
| capitals of two neighbouring _provinces_ in Canada
| (Winnipeg & Toronto). Or you could go through dozen
| countries, with all of their states and provinces in
| Europe for same distance (e.g. Geneva to Istanbul or
| similar).
|
| Distances are vastly different and people's attitude
| toward them as well - what is daily commute in GTA used
| to be a yearly vacation pilgrimage in my childhood :)
| kennend3 wrote:
| > what is daily commute in GTA used to be a yearly
| vacation pilgrimage in my childhood :)
|
| This is something Europeans also overlook.
|
| I use to commute to Toronto every day. 100KM return trip
| daily, 500KM a week...
|
| I think Most Europeans would be surprised to know we have
| a train system which basically travels back and forth
| from Hamilton to Oshawa all day long.. 127KM one way.
| Basically the Width of England at the more narrow part
| and yet we consider this a "greater Toronto area" train
| system.
|
| People in Toronto dont think about how there are
| countries which would fit in this distance, Europeans
| dont think about how a daily passenger train service
| would cross the country dozens and dozens of times each
| day.
| iso1631 wrote:
| 100km return, or 30 miles each way, that's not far at
| all. I used to drive 50 miles/80km each way into London 4
| days a week when I worked in an office. My wife still
| does a 100km return trip to work. I have colleagues that
| commute 7 days in 14 on a 250km round trip into West
| London.
|
| Your 127km one way train is about the same as the new
| Reading-Shenfield Cross London service which runs 6 times
| an hour 18 hours a day (well will do from next year), and
| less than the 160km Bedford-Brighton Thameslink service.
| It's pretty much the "Greater London Area", although that
| term is of course steeped in politics. The Paris RER D
| line is 190km and runs 466 trains a day, and is a
| "greater Paris area" train system
|
| The Greater Toronto Area has broadly the same population
| as the Frankfurt Rhine-Main area, but is only half the
| area.
|
| The "Slovenia is only 75km wide" claim is meaningless.
| Greenwich, CT to Oakland NJ is 75km and crosses the
| _entire state of New York_ , a state with 10 times the
| population of Slovenia.
|
| Indeed talking about New Jersey and Slovenia, they're a
| similar size, but NJ has about 5 times the population of
| Slovenia.
|
| If something works for Slovenia, why doesn't it work for
| New Jersey?
|
| So why is Toronto so small compared with Europe?
|
| It's not a Geography problem, the challenges of serving
| the tiny number of people that like in rural North Dakota
| are a cruch to hide America's other infrastructure
| failings.
| manicennui wrote:
| This is heavily dependent on location. I receive almost
| everything in two days or less. It is extremely common to
| get things the next day or even the same day. I'm in the
| Chicago suburbs.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| Delivery has never been faster for me. Most things arrive
| in less than a day now.
|
| But some things do take longer. I guess it depends on stock
| levels.
| kennend3 wrote:
| The issue isnt just stock levels, it is stock levels at a
| specific distribution hub.
|
| As i posted i ordered a few items on tuesday and delivery
| will be friday.
|
| One of the items tracking details shows me that it is
| being shipped from a city ~ 120KM away yet there is a
| massive 1,000,000 square foot hub within waking distance
| from me??
|
| Tracking hasn't updated to show me where the rest of the
| stuff is being shipped from so i can speak to the entire
| order.
|
| This gets to the CORE issue with amazon. Because i no
| longer have prime my stuff is almost intentionally held
| back to encourage me to get prime?
|
| It will not surprise me at all to see that when shipping
| is finally updated the other items on my list come from
| the local hub.
|
| Not all hubs hold all items and because of this your
| shipping times can fluctuate.
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| Agreed - live in London, and often receive things within
| 12 hours of purchase.
| [deleted]
| agumonkey wrote:
| And even that is not guaranteed. Lost of secondary sellers on
| their 'marketplace'. I order lipton tea a week ago and it's
| still not shipped.
|
| I don't remember how this is called, something like a
| honeymoon period. Most of the web love bombed us with
| unsustainable (loss leaders like) offers until they got
| everybody hooked and now they rely on habit, laziness and
| reduced competition. It's somehow quite a shame.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > I don't remember how this is called, something like a
| honeymoon period.
|
| I think you mean "blatant worldwide market manipulation"?
|
| Dumping products until the competition is bankrupt and then
| using your monopoly to crush the consumers is a practice as
| old as commerce.
| Animats wrote:
| > Now Amazon is nothing more than AliExpress with faster
| shipping. Shame.
|
| On Alibaba, you get business background info, whether it's a
| manufacturer or a reseller, a picture of the factory, info
| about whether someone checked out the factory, what
| certifications the product has, and how long it takes them to
| respond to inquiries. Amazon doesn't have any of that.
|
| On Alibaba, search for "outlet strip". You can check
| "Verified supplier", "trade assurance" and "UL certified" to
| filter out the junk. Some good low-priced outlet strips show
| up. Amazon doesn't have any of that.
|
| Alibaba is supposed to be B2B, but many items have a minimum
| order size of 1 or 2. If Alibaba had a "who retails this"
| link for products sold only in large quantities, they'd be
| more useful than Amazon. Often you can look on Aliexpress for
| the matching item.
| burntwater wrote:
| I'm curious, do you actually trust those certifications?
| I'm wary of the validity of them, but don't know how to
| verify if they're authentic. Thinking mostly of UL
| certification.
| Animats wrote:
| You can check the UL number on a product and get the
| certification info and company info. This is harder than
| it used to be on the UL site. You have to register for a
| free account.
| otikik wrote:
| Unless there's some kind of third-party checking process,
| that only means that their seller forms have those extra
| fields.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| And you can get a long-term relationship with a seller,
| because you know that the product you got was actually
| delivered by them.
| lm28469 wrote:
| The only pro of amazon is that you can contact them months
| after the purchase and still get a free replacement/refund.
| With aliexpress I doubt they'd refund you even if you
| received a bag of dirt instead of your product
| fvold wrote:
| In my experience, Ali Express is absolutely 100% a buyers
| market, in every single way. I've bought random junk with a
| somewhat long fulfillment time, and contacted the seller
| just to politely ask about a time frame without in any way
| indicating dissatisfaction, and received groveling
| responses begging me to not open a dispute with Ali.
| russelg wrote:
| AliExpress also has strong buyer protections, which you
| would have seen had you ever ordered from there. You have
| to confirm delivery for every order else the seller doesn't
| get the money.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Half the time I order something from AliExpress, it's
| worthless junk that isn't what I wanted or way out of
| spec, and the confirmation thing you're talking about was
| a lot more limited than you're implying
|
| To be fair, though, said worthless junk was like 1/5th
| the price it'd be in the USA, so it was still worth the
| gamble
|
| the only major issue I have with AliExpress is how hard
| they make it to log in
| aceazzameen wrote:
| AliExpress hasn't fully replaced Amazon for me yet. But I
| definitely shop at AliExpress more often now. I don't care if
| shipping takes longer. It's pennies compared to Amazon, which
| makes a difference when the quality of the items are a
| mystery. And for name brand items, I just use Costco, Target,
| and Best Buy unless Amazon has a better sale.
| lightedman wrote:
| I had roughly the same experience looking for diamond pads for
| my block on amazon.
|
| I ended up giving up and went and built my own two-wheel wet
| diamond grinding machine.
|
| Bonus: I can cut rocks as well as sharpen my knives down to 1/8
| micron.
| paulcole wrote:
| I don't see why you wouldn't just spend the $21.99 and get the
| Amazon's Choice one and be done with it? It's like you're
| looking to be annoyed in a situation that you could be done
| with in 5 minutes.
| dspillett wrote:
| You used to be able to filter for just things sold by Amazon,
| but that vanished some time ago. Not that a "fulfilled by
| amazon" filter would do much these days because of how much of
| other sellers stock there is commingled in their warehouses.
| Same for the "prime" filter that is present if you subscribe to
| that, it filters out a lot of junk but far from all of it.
| losteric wrote:
| Filter by seller is still available
| dspillett wrote:
| I see options to filter by brand including a separate "out
| brands" option, but that isn't the same unless I'm looking
| for a specific brand rather than "just not cheap & grotty
| drop-shipped crap thankyouverymuch".
|
| The usefulness of the brand filter seems to vary greatly by
| product. For instance when searching for SATA SSDs it only
| offers "Seagate, Crucial, Western Digital, Samsung".
| morsch wrote:
| I "just" had to select a few random other filters like
| "New" and the product category and suddenly the seller
| filter magically appeared.
|
| The search function was always capricious like that, from
| the get-go. Presumably there's method to that madness.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Here in Spain it definitely isn't.
| rescbr wrote:
| It's usually hidden, so much that I've captured the query
| string parameter that represents its filter for my
| country's Amazon.
|
| Fortunately there are few marketplace sellers, so it
| doesn't annoy me so much compared to Amazon US.
| Cloudef wrote:
| There's lots of these scams where they sell some non-branded
| goods with lots of reviews (with videos) from paid SNS
| influencers. Sometimes they may sell something completely else
| but change the listing completely (becomes obvious from the
| reviews again). When you see a lot of similar listing for the
| same product or from same store, it's giant red flag to not buy
| it.
|
| Sometimes these goods may be good, but often or not they are
| low quality, have obvious defects or break down after few weeks
| / months of use.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Did you know you can get an 11 Terabyte hard drive for $90 on
| Amazon? Wow:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/External-Portable-11000GB-
| Compatible-...
|
| (Um, yeah. And look at the reviews.)
| Cloudef wrote:
| Some more examples, I recently needed new hair dryer as my
| old one started throwing spars This "SALONIA" hair dryer is
| being pushed by paid influencers in japan, however based on
| the few critical reviews and their pictures, it does not
| look like the quality is good
| https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/SALONIA-Speedy-Negative-
| Lightw...
|
| Then there is this shady one with multiple amazon listings,
| similarly bait and switch, reviews are odd
| https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/dp/B0BJPWNZQQ
| https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/dp/B0BJDVZLYC
| https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/dp/B0BBB77M9C
| https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/dp/B0BJQ8MBMB
|
| The products may actually be somewhat decent, but based on
| the tactics involved and the shady reviews, I wouldn't put
| my money on something that can shock you or burn your house
| down, so I eventually just went with reputable panasonic
| one.
| TrueGeek wrote:
| And they don't care about the paid reviews either. I
| contacted them saying a seller mailed me offering $50 cash
| via PayPal for a 5 star review. The chat agent replied with
| the "contact seller" link since I was unhappy. They had no
| interest in the photo of the bribe sent to me. I don't even
| know why the seller has my contact info since the item was
| shipped by Amazon.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The other thing I noticed is that these thousands of identical
| products have seemingly randomly generated all-caps brand names
| like BHHSRE, VHYXZY, XIOU, DAUGHE, JXMOX, LANMU, IBERLS,
| GMJYC... (yes, these are all actual brands I've seen on
| Amazon). It's like someone is randomly generating millions of
| brand/product combinations to deliberately flood Amazon.
| EForEndeavour wrote:
| It may already exist, but I want to create a simple regex-
| based browser plugin that suppresses Amazon search results if
| the product name or seller contains 4-7 consecutive
| capitalized letters. Call it LESSAMZNSPAM or something.
| xvello wrote:
| It exists already, as a uBlockOrigin rules generator:
| https://letsblock.it/filters/amazon-products
|
| You just need to write the regexp.
| [deleted]
| vannevar wrote:
| Amazon's business model has shifted from selling goods to
| consumers to selling consumers to anonymous Chinese
| manufacturers.
| simonsarris wrote:
| Highly recommend Shapton stones and buying them from Lee Valley
|
| https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/tools/shapton-sharpening-sto...
| kolbe wrote:
| I have the shapton 12,000, and I'm actually pretty
| disappointed, but thise lee valley prices are better than
| what i paid at woodcraft.
| techas wrote:
| LoganDark wrote:
| There's a button for this.
| jonsen wrote:
| But we wouldn't know then.
| delijati wrote:
| +1 ;)
| moolcool wrote:
| I had a look at those, but I ended up going with the KDS
| 1000/6000. I'm still new to using it, but it works great!
| morsch wrote:
| For the record, so does the "KUNQUN" (ie. gibberish) brand
| whetstone I bought on Amazon a few years ago.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Not sure about the faster shipping.
|
| Maybe if you live in a town with a Cheesecake Factory (tracer
| for retail competition) you get two day shipping with Prime but
| if you live a little further out, two day shipping probably
| went out during the pandemic. This is not about the feasibility
| of AMZN offering it to you because it is frequently unavailable
| in the same zip code as their warehouse.
|
| Every other retailer seems to get me things in two days or less
| but I get packages from Japan faster than from the AMZN
| warehouse that is a 3 hour drive away. They must be spending
| the money they saving on shipping on Alexa or something.
| jason-phillips wrote:
| > I was looking for a new whetstone
|
| The King whetstone on the bottom right is legit if you want to
| freehand. However, I recommend something like an Edge Pro if
| you have quality chefs knives, etc.
| moolcool wrote:
| I actually had a Lansky kit, but I found it really fiddly and
| awkward to use. I practiced for a while on a crappy old
| knife, but after getting the hang of it, I'm much happier
| using a proper whetstone.
| gauddasa wrote:
| I was looking for earphones and same products were repeated on
| 900 pages, with 20 to 25 entries listed per page. The odds of
| finding a useful product in this ocean of repetition is then
| about 0.1%. I must have clicked for 30 minutes to see the
| extent of invasion. It was so exhausting and dispiriting that
| since then (8 months ago), I have not visited Amazon anymore.
| stavros wrote:
| I was about to say when I saw the end of your comment, that
| looks very much like the AliExpress experience. You get cheap
| stuff, but you gamble on them being a fake.
| moolcool wrote:
| This case isn't even fake-- it's stuff that's either
| unbranded, or with a new brand made up from whole cloth.
| moonchrome wrote:
| AliExpress isn't even cheap for what you're actually getting,
| but it is cheaper than Amazon if you're dumpster diving.
|
| The reason I say it isn't cheap is because when I ignore the
| fake labels and look at actual goods delivered equivalents
| can be bought locally for similar price (sometimes cheaper,
| sometimes more expensive) without insane wait time and with
| warrenty.
| akvadrako wrote:
| Depends what you are buying. You can often find things
| which are perfectly fine quality but too niche for
| westerners to sell near cost, like electrical and plastic
| components, basic tools, cables, etc.
| Cloudef wrote:
| For spare / repair parts aliexpress unfortunately is still
| the heaven. Sure you have to be really careful who you
| order from, but sadly the modern world hates selling spare
| parts and loves e-waste (especially for smartphones, it
| used to be different before ...).
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Or eBay. I'm offloading a bunch of random bike parts, and
| yeah, somebody out there needs a Shimano XYZ-123 that was
| last built in 1994 (and doesn't care to figure out the
| modern replacement).
| wirthjason wrote:
| Niche items are pretty much a miss on Amazon. I buy a lot of
| things on Amazon but as a hobbyist cook and knife collector
| something like whetstones are much better purchased at a
| specialty retailer. I trust a shop like
| japaneseknifeimports.com a lot more than Amazon. These shops
| cater to the community and the mutual success of the community
| and the businesses are important.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| And random components... you'll have better luck on eBay.
| Need a P key for you random laptop keyboard, 1000 5mm LEDs or
| usb-a cable, male on both ends, straight and right-angle?
| Gonna have better luck on eBay.
|
| And then the actually unique stuff. I'm buying odd lots of
| used postage stamps. I'm sure as a seller doing one-offs,
| even if it's a common item, eBay is the way to go.
|
| Amazon has improved a lot, but eBay still king on that.
| moolcool wrote:
| That's true, but the problem I mention persists with a lot of
| normal searches too. Like search for a 3.5mm cable, a USB C
| dock, or a power bank. You'll get a whole lot of cheap
| garbage from oddball brands.
| daveguy wrote:
| The ones that bother me the most are the re-purposed catalog
| entries. They will have 2,000 reviews, solid 4.7 score, but
| when you look at the reviews, half of the reviews are for a
| different item. If there are any out of place reviews I avoid
| it. Practically, it means sorting by highest reviews gives junk
| first. I don't know if it's a matter of not monitoring, not
| caring, or not being able to keep up. The fact that there isn't
| an easy and obvious way to report a listing and review /
| listing shift is apparently permitted means they aren't trying
| to keep up.
| namdnay wrote:
| When did you do the query for that screenshot? If it was today
| the delivery dates seem a bit short for dropshipping
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| That King whetstone is good, I have it and use it.
| Edd314159 wrote:
| This comment is why I still use Amazon, even though it has
| indeed become a catalogue where 90% of the listed products
| are junk. Because that other 10% are legit brands, and when
| you want the legit brand, it's still very convenient and
| often* cheaper than other retailers. You just have to wade
| through the crap to find the real stuff.
|
| (*I said _often_, meaning I concede that it is sometimes
| actually not cheaper: please resist the urge to provide
| counter-examples, I know of their pricing trickery!)
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| But Amazon commingles inventory, so how do you know you are
| receiving the branded item you want and not a counterfeit
| item that another seller sent to Amazon?
| [deleted]
| katbyte wrote:
| That's why I stopped buying things that matter from them,
| but Walmart Best Buy and home depot are chasing the same
| profits allowing "market place sellers" - we need to hold
| these stores liable and accountable for everything sold
| on the site.
|
| I usually check things when they arrive pretty throughly
| no matter who I buy from and I hate how I have to waste
| my time doing it
| Edd314159 wrote:
| I dunno, I've never had a problem with counterfeit
| products on Amazon. I avoid third party sellers though
| (even if "fulfilled by Amazon") so that's probably why.
| Buying direct from Amazon hasn't resulted in anything
| fishy for me yet.
| moolcool wrote:
| I ended up getting the KDS 1000/6000. I don't know enough
| about sharpening to have an informed opinion, but I can say
| that it works fantastic for me.
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| I trust this comment more than 100% of Amazon reviews. Go
| figure.
| Kubuxu wrote:
| Yeah, King for entry level is great, Suehiro Cerax is a mid
| level upgrade to it.
|
| IMO 6000 is too fine for majority of Western kitchen knifes
| and most non-expensive Japanese knifes. I would go with 1000
| and 3000-4000.
| YZF wrote:
| I was just going to say the same thing. IIRC it's Japanese.
| roflyear wrote:
| You would think that a third party could curate Amazon listings
| and make a lot of money on affiliate links.
|
| But part of me thinks the problem is not just digging it is that
| many vendors moved off Amazon in general.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Even if you curate listings you can't fix Amazon's inventory
| commingling. And, as with other review services, curation would
| hit conflicts of interest if it got popular as less scrupulous
| operators would be happy to pay more to have their product
| listed than consumers would pay for reliable curation.
| rzimmerman wrote:
| Watching my parents get duped by Amazon results is maddening.
| They're used to being able to trust a retailer or at least some
| consequences for scams and poor quality. People less scam-savvy
| than myself get understandably confused by "Amazon recommend" or
| a slightly lower price. But the minute I search for something on
| Amazon a dread comes over me of "here we go". My danger center
| kicks in and I have to keep your wits about me. It's a symptom of
| our (American at least) obsession with getting "the best deal" no
| matter what and it's just awful.
| Guest9081239812 wrote:
| I visited my family the other month and my mother was searching
| for a product. I told her it's likely available on Amazon and
| opened the website. When I started scrolling she started
| commenting on the prices and how she can buy some of the
| products for 10x less in the store. I then explained to her
| that unlike a store, Amazon prices are mostly meaningless, and
| the site will have the identical product selling at 10
| different price points.
|
| People don't have to worry about that problem when they walk
| into a Walmart. They know the pricing has been carefully
| reviewed before the product touches the shelves. They know
| they're not going to see two identical products at Walmart with
| different stamped logos selling for $5 and $30. There's a level
| of trust you can buy any item and it's a fair value.
| [deleted]
| pkrotich wrote:
| Ad and junk... I recently ordered speakers and I got broken ones
| that looked like it was rescued from a bin / dumpster.
| stankbear wrote:
| Always interesting when WaPo writes about Amazon.
| fefe23 wrote:
| That was my first reaction as well but then I realized I can't
| actually read the article as Wapo gave me a paywall nagscreen
| that had no X button.
|
| Might as well not have written the article in the first place.
|
| Media is eating itself. And then they are all STUNNED to find
| out that Fox News has more readers then them. You know who else
| doesn't bombard you with paywall nagscreen shit? Infowars!
| Breitbart.
| pydry wrote:
| It's a bit like that scene in Citizen Kane where he pens a
| scathing review of his wife's singing because he realizes that
| _everybody_ knows and any further pretense will only humiliate
| him further.
| Justsignedup wrote:
| I just tried using it with/without uBlock Origin. Holy shit is
| the experience different. Every single person on earth needs
| uBlock Origin.
| pupppet wrote:
| Gutsy article by WaPo considering its owner.
| lelandfe wrote:
| And they even provided a spokesperson to speak on record for
| it. Awfulness of the ads notwithstanding, I'm definitely
| impressed that Bezos let this run.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I worked IT at a Gannett-owned newspaper. Reporting negative
| news about Gannett was one of the reporters' joys.
| toofy wrote:
| about 6 months ago i just stopped ordering physical products
| online entirely.
|
| i noticed that i was needing to return way too much of the stuff
| i ordered.
|
| clothes sizes were completely wrong or the material was just
| cheap.
|
| cords and other accessories were cheap or just plain the wrong
| item.
|
| household items _really_ didn't match the pictures. scale was all
| wrong, etc...
|
| it's just so much easier to walk into a store, actually touch the
| product and literally walk away with it immediately knowing that
| it's what i wanted.
|
| it's also just nice to be out and about.
|
| i suppose im lucky that i live in a populated area and have
| physical stores i can go to tho. a lot of people don't have that
| option.
|
| it really is frustrating how low online shopping has sunk. but
| the amount of deception shops have turned to online is just an
| awful experience.
| coding123 wrote:
| These aren't the same thing as ads. It's paid placement, same
| thing happens in your local grocery store.
| alangibson wrote:
| It's the same problem on German Amazon too.
|
| Results are loaded up with so much junk that I've started to
| wonder if there is a good arbitrage opportunity here. Basically
| filter out the garbage and fake reviews in your own curated
| search and recommendation site. Get paid via Amazon affiliate
| program.
| syliconadder wrote:
| I think most comments here are America centric where Amazon
| might've peaked. Even without Prime, Amazon has been the best
| e-commerce site I've used in Europe or India. The customer
| support itself warrants the price they ask for and it's usually
| the cheapest in the market. It is possible that it will head the
| same direction with market saturation but for now the promise
| still lives up.
| chrisan wrote:
| I don't mind the ads, they are clearly labeled "sponsored".
|
| What I hate is all the fake reviews influencing my choice. You
| buy something highly reviewed then receive some giftcard/offer or
| something in the packaging saying to leave a review and get
| something in return.
|
| Now I have to "reddit productX" and read there before making a
| choice.
| hubraumhugo wrote:
| We're building a product research engine with Reddit's favorite
| products in one place: https://looria.com/reddit/overview
| Terretta wrote:
| Welp, there goes reddit product discussions. This is why we
| can't have nice things! (J/K)
|
| Love the idea, and I actually used your site when shopping
| for espresso machines recently.
|
| I just worry about social media agencies turning their
| tactics onto ranking in your algo. There are SEO kings
| reading this thread right now...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I have contacted AMZN support about obviously bogus and word
| salad product listings but they say they won't do anything unless
| you bought the product.
|
| I don't think they understand that when more than 50% of listings
| are obviously bogus you don't have much confidence in the ones
| that remain. For me AMZN went from the first place I looked to
| the last.
| pftburger wrote:
| Doesn't Bezos own the Washington Post?
| anticristi wrote:
| We look this awesome technology called the Internet and turned it
| into an ad pipeline.
| wkdneidbwf wrote:
| i'm not sure exactly when it happened, but i slowly lost
| confidence shipping on amazon. too much crap and too many fake
| reviews. at some point it began to make sense to just go to a
| store again--as it turns out also means i make a decision about
| how much i actually need something.
|
| amazon fucked up bad by chasing growth at all costs. sounds like
| a lot of tech companies these days.
| jbuzbee wrote:
| I just got done searching for an accessory for a specific model
| of car on Amazon. My results prominently included items (ads) for
| accessories for a different model of car that would not fit my
| car. How does that help anyone? Wasted money for the company
| buying ads. Wasted time for me trying to figure out what is
| really applicable. And if I wasn't careful, I'd have ordered the
| wrong thing and would have to return it wasting everyone's time
| and effort. I guess Amazon got their money for showing me the ad.
| Worth it? I wouldn't think so, but I'm not one of the richest
| person in the world like Bezos - My lack of vision?
| andrewyates2020 wrote:
| I worked on ad load optimization and founded a company that
| specializes in ad load optimization, here's an explainer video:
| https://www.promoted.ai/videos/unified-ads-search-and-feed-o...).
|
| The cynical comments here align with my experience: when
| leadership demands now revenue, there is an iterative game where
| the only correct answer is "increase revenue now." If you run
| enough A/B tests and ask this question enough times over a large
| enough organization, more ads and 3p always result.
|
| Most companies are trying hard to produce a great user
| experience. However, it's hard to measure subtle degradations to
| buyer experiences, especially when those degradations happen
| after the purchase or quality metrics corrupted by motivated
| sellers or advertisers. This is one reason obsession with A/B
| testing drives this poor user experience: it's hard to measure.
| Revenue now is easy to measure.
|
| Another aspect you may not see as a buyer is that when the market
| is down, sellers are SCREAMING at their platforms to fix the
| problem. Same iterated game: give boost (discount, ad credits
| etc.), less screaming (for that team right now). What you see as
| bad as a buyer may be trying to appease sellers.
| BetterGeiger wrote:
| I manufacture and sell one unique product. I started with direct
| sales, doing okay, but it was clear that Amazon is where the real
| action is, so I tried to sell there. Getting the listing up was a
| slow and painful experience due to horrible seller service (this
| is typical). Finally it's listed. Around 15% of revenue is fees.
| That's with me doing my own fulfillment! Hardly any sales at
| first, so I had no choice but to advertise. It looks like another
| 15% of revenue will end up going to amazon ads. Amazon will
| probably end up making more money than me, just for being the
| middle man. That's if I'm lucky, because sales are still just a
| trickle, and I'll probably have to up my ad spend to get any real
| traction. It seems like the system is designed to put comparable
| products competing against each other and the one that rises to
| the top is he one that Amazon can squeeze the most blood out of,
| unrelated to what the user might benefit from. It's
| www.bettergeiger.com if you're curious.
| fmajid wrote:
| Amazon will promote sellers who use their fulfilment service
| over those who DIY.
|
| https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/fulfillment-by-ama...
| dymk wrote:
| How is that not a violation of antitrust laws?
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Laws are just words unless they are enforced.
| KyleBrandt wrote:
| "Amazon has turned shill results into its next big thing. After
| selling $31 billion in ads last year, Amazon became the third-
| largest online ad company in the United States, trailing only
| Google and Facebook".
|
| Got my attention more than than anything else. Seems to really be
| pushing antitrust to new heights?
| strathmeyer wrote:
| Amazon will also do something where certain drugs will be the top
| of searches for other drugs or sometimes for example drugs for
| cats will show up even if you search "for dogs" so if you aren't
| paying complete attention you might not realize your mistake.
| [deleted]
| hermannj314 wrote:
| This article was full of ads, many of which had no relationship
| to the article I was reading.
|
| In the early 2000s, I dont remember this being a problem.
|
| It is not your imagination, reading on WaPo has gotten worse.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| I think the point of the article is that the ads are incredibly
| deceptive, not that they just exist. Wapo ads aren't really
| trying to trick you, the Amazon ones absolutely are.
| xdavidliu wrote:
| Firefox with ublock origin solves this problem easily.
| seydor wrote:
| When you attract a lot of attention, inevitably ads will make
| more money for you than your initial product. You become a
| middleman, a hub, a celebrity, a politician, a higher up. This
| leaves the space below open to competitors and puts you in a more
| lucrative position.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| The article is not wrong.
|
| I find myself "shopping" by looking at my previous orders and
| selecting things that I liked before.
|
| Amazon Prime is now more of a $10/month source of streaming
| entertainment content.
|
| It does feel good to buy direct from manufacturers but I do a
| price comparison with Amazon first.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I agree with the article except for the criticism about Amazon
| promoting their own products. I don't mind that part. After all I
| go to Amazon to buy stuff from Amazon. In fact I _wish_ I could
| just select a box and filter out all the third-party sellers.
| There is too much completely unvalidated scammy stuff on there,
| even in the "shipped by Amazon" category.
|
| However they don't have this option probably because then none of
| these ads would be relevant.
|
| By the way, another thing I've noticed is that Amazon sometimes
| doesn't even come up with the right products if you _type the
| actual product name_. It just comes up with suggested crap that
| 's not what you're looking for. The actual thing I want does not
| come up, even on the further pages.
|
| Often I think Amazon doesn't have the thing I want, and then I
| google (or duckduckgo more often) it to find it somewhere else,
| and the first result is... A link to Amazon with the thing I
| wanted! In stock, first-party and for a good price.
|
| It's really ridiculous that I have to use a third-party search
| engine to find what I need when I specify exactly what I want!
| pigbearpig wrote:
| I thought there was a seller filter. I know I've used it before
| to only show Seller: Amazon.com.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| It doesn't come up for me on the left-hand side where all the
| filters are :( Just double-checked.
| mannschott wrote:
| I was shocked by how spammy Amazon.com's search results seemed
| compared to what I'm accustomed to from Amazon.de. I'm not a
| regular user of Amazon.com but have had occasion to do so since
| I'm visiting family in the US. Amazon.de is the "local" Amazon
| where I live.
|
| Is this an affect of differing laws in the EU versus the USA?
| Differences in leadership of Amazon.com versus Amazon.de?
| Differences in perceived market expectations? Perhaps the average
| American consumer is expected to be more tolerant of this kind of
| thing? (I wonder because I compare the robo-call-infested
| hellscape that we've made of our telephone system compared to the
| rarity of such abuse where I live in Europe and wonder if we, in
| the US, are just more prone to behave in a way that produces
| tragedies of the commons.)
| jabo wrote:
| I recently had to buy something mundane - a light bulb, with a
| specific lumen and color temperature spec. Weeding out all the
| junk listings, ads and clearly fake reviews, I ended up spending
| an hour trying to get to the one I wanted to buy.
|
| Had a very similar experience for another product as well.
|
| At this point, I hesitate to look up stuff on Amazon just
| considering the time it takes to find stuff. I much rather prefer
| a curated list of products so someone else has done the weeding
| out.
|
| It seems like Amazon's philosophy of having the widest set of
| options for every product is actually not that useful in
| practice, at least for me.
|
| The only reason I still keep going back is that they deliver many
| products on the same day to the neighborhood I live in.
| kennend3 wrote:
| > I ended up spending an hour trying to get to the one I wanted
| to buy.
|
| As someone who has been in the same situation I just go to my
| local Lowes/Home Depot now. The lighting section actually shows
| you what they look like turned on which is nice.
|
| After doing some competitive price shopping it is rare that
| amazon's prices are competitive. I guess not having to go to
| the store is convenient?
|
| > I much rather prefer a curated list of products so someone
| else has done the weeding out.
|
| With amazon's commingling of inventory this isn't a workable
| solution.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| The dreaded comingling of inventory is just the cherry on
| top. A curated list is there opposite of Amazon Marketplace.
| For years I wished that it was easier to just keep all the
| marketplace offerings hidden permanently since I want to buy
| from Amazon and not someone I've never heard of. At this
| point it's all such a blurred mess.
| noveltyaccount wrote:
| More is less. Decision fatigue, terrible comparison shopping
| experience, nearly indistinguishable products. I think about
| this at the grocery store every time I look at yogurt or
| toothpaste, by the way.
| VLM wrote:
| > a light bulb, with a specific lumen and color temperature
| spec
|
| Sponsored links are always useless and should only be scrolled
| past on Amazon.
|
| Typical disappointing Amazon experience:
|
| Search for LED 8W. First result, sponsored link to an 11W bulb.
| Then a sponsored link to a fake marketing 21 watt bulb with
| fake lumen marketing. Then a sponsored link to six pack of 14W
| bulbs. The 4th link returned is a sponsored link to a 8W
| designer clear glass thing which is at least not off topic.
|
| Not all searches are as toxic as LEDs. If you search for "oil
| 5w-30" only 10% or so of search results are totally wrong (like
| 10w-30, or 5w-40)
|
| Another hilarious search term "chocolate almond milk" most of
| the results are bulk almonds, some milk-product made of
| bananas, several oat milk results, chocolate almondmilk pudding
| (OK, close enough, but weird), protein bars made of almonds,
| some soy shake drink, starbucks frappuccino vanilla, pea-
| protein fake milk, admittedly at least 1/3 of results are on
| topic.
|
| I just searched for "4-40 SHCS" (a SHCS is a socket head cap
| screw, like to fix a car part). About 2/3 of the results are on
| topic, but then Amazon throws in "D'Moksha Small Short
| Thanksgiving Holiday Navy Table Runner Or Dresser Scarf (14 x
| 36 Inch)", what? Some of it is just bizarre. I specified 4-40
| size so I get a search result for 5/8-11 machine bolts. OK
| then.
|
| Its getting hard to buy stuff on Amazon, like they're actively
| trying not to sell what you ask for.
|
| I do EE type stuff at work and home and I am spoiled by
| professional sites like Digikey, if you search for a 1K
| resistor they present you with a parametric search result of 1K
| resistors, not random assortments of 74HCT logic chips or teddy
| bears or rolls of solder like Amazon would.
| hw wrote:
| Shopping on Amazon has been painful. Just takes so long when
| a few years ago it seemed as if I can trust what is sold on
| Amazon and search is a lot more relevant that I don't have to
| scroll a few pages to find what I want.
|
| Yet I still buy almost everything on Amazon, and I still go
| through the pains of navigating around the sponsored
| products. The checkout, shipping, and returns experience is
| why I still use Amazon - not sure how long that lasts
| cunidev wrote:
| For most products, at least in Europe you can get the same
| cheap junk of Amazon listings from eBay at 20-40% lower prices,
| and usually (slightly) higher quality one from brick and mortar
| stores at the Amazon price.
|
| I avoid Amazon in principle since many years (unless I _really_
| need a product there), but that has never been hard,
| considering that most smaller stores always offered me more
| convenient prices, less hassle in searching, and the relief of
| not giving money to such a controversial giant.
| walthamstow wrote:
| This + the eBay sellers in the UK use Royal Mail so goods are
| delivered by my postman, who already walks past my house
| every morning anyway
| mrweasel wrote:
| As someone who dislikes eBay and prefer to deal with
| companies, rather then individuals, the UKs preference for
| eBay is interesting. Working for an eCommerce site we
| noticed that customers would prefer to deal with a lady in
| Scotland over us, for certain types of products. She just
| posted our product on eBay, added a few PS to the price,
| ordered them from us, typed in her customers address in the
| shipping fields.
|
| Worked out for everyone, given that her customers would
| rather order on eBay and pay a little extra, compared to
| dealing with us. We got the price we wanted, plus we didn't
| have to deal with customer service.
| shellfishgene wrote:
| It's weird, one would expect eBay to be more of a wild
| west than Amazon marketplace, but in my experience the
| eBay sellers are fast and mostly trustworthy.
| shellfishgene wrote:
| I ordered something from Amazon a few weeks ago, and didn't
| check the shipping time. I turned out that the thing was sent
| directly from China and took 2 weeks. The tracking that
| Amazon provides did not even work properly. There is really
| almost no reason anymore not to order the stuff on Aliexpress
| for 20% lower prices.
| Guest9081239812 wrote:
| It's the same thing in Canada. It's easy to identify the mass
| produced Chinese products. You search for an item on Amazon
| and find 30 different "companies" with random names selling
| the identical product with different logos. The prices will
| range from $10-30. I know if I go to eBay I can buy the same
| product for $2 with free shipping from China. I only have to
| decide if I want the product delivered tomorrow through
| Amazon or in 1-2 months from China.
| pibechorro wrote:
| _amazon choice_ and _most popular_ tend to do a lot of the
| sifting you want.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Is _most popular_ actually legit or does that get gamed as
| well?
| jabo wrote:
| I've seen questionable reviews on Amazon Choice products as
| well. I vaguely remember reading that the labels are gameable
| since they are automated.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Amazon's Choice is bullshit.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/23/amazon-choice-badge-
| recommen...
|
| > The company applies the "Amazon's Choice" badge to some
| products that are unsafe, mislabeled and violate its own
| policies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found. The
| label appeared on dozens of products that were banned, didn't
| meet safety standards and featured fake safety
| certifications. It was also applied to controlled substances,
| like steroids and marijuana products, the Journal reported.
|
| > In other cases, "Amazon's Choice" listings were manipulated
| with specific keywords that would ensure they'd be included
| in the recommendation engine. The Journal discovered some
| third-party merchants have developed ways to game the
| algorithms that help determine which products are featured,
| by pushing consumers to buy an item, which artificially
| juiced sales and made it appear more popular.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| What I do sometimes is search the websites of the manufacturers
| of the product. Like for SD cards I'll search samsung.com, for
| hard drives westerndigital.com, for light bulbs maybe
| creelighting.com, etc.
| tomohawk wrote:
| Try bulbs.com
|
| Even when I have to resort to amazon, I usually end up using
| that info to find non amazon sites to purchase from. Why
| support a fake goods laundry service?
| fmajid wrote:
| Amazon is the third largest advertising company after Google and
| Meta. Its ad revenue is $32B (and growing fast, the run rate is
| $40B). That is half the revenue of AWS, which is worth 70% of
| Amazon's market cap. The inescapable conclusion is that Amazon's
| advertising is worth the remaining 30% of Amazon's market cap and
| _Amazon 's e-commerce arm is deemed worthless by Wall Street_,
| its only purpose being to support the advertising business, just
| what Google Search is to Alphabet.
|
| Think on that for a moment. The other inescapable conclusion is
| that whenever the quality of the shopping experience on Amazon
| and the needs of Amazon's advertising business clash, advertising
| will win (just as it has on Google). That's an even more foregone
| conclusion since Andy Jassy took on the top job, he's from AWS
| and owes no special allegiance to the historical e-commerce
| business.
| s17n wrote:
| > The other inescapable conclusion is that whenever the quality
| of the shopping experience on Amazon and the needs of Amazon's
| advertising business clash, advertising will win (just as it
| has on Google).
|
| Saying that the e-commerce arm is worthless isn't really the
| right way to think about it - the ads business only exists to
| due the e-commerce product. Both Amazon and Google are well
| aware that their ad revenues depend on their having users, who
| will ultimately leave if the product (ecommerce and search,
| respectively) isn't compelling. Both of them know that long-
| term success requires them to prioritize user experience.
|
| Do they make bad decisions, either due to misaligned incentives
| internally or due to simply making mistakes? Undoubtedly. But
| it's also worth considering that they probably get the tradeoff
| right a lot of the time and most people simply aren't bothered
| by ads nearly as much as you'd like them to be.
| fmajid wrote:
| Obviously Amazon's e-commerce division is not worthless, but
| it often happens that conglomerates are worth less than the
| sum of their parts. Many activist investors have been calling
| to split AWS from Amazon.com, but the ad business can't be
| split from the store that brings it eyeballs.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _Both of them know that long-term success requires them to
| prioritize user experience._
|
| Of course user experience is prioritized: below _advertiser_
| experience.
|
| Prioritization doesn't just mean things are on top, for
| everything but the top item it means things are below other
| things.
| csa wrote:
| > Of course user experience is prioritized: below
| advertiser experience.
|
| I'm not sure how much you're into the Google ads world, but
| they have screwed the pooch on that recently as well (e.g.,
| by gimping "exact match" keywords).
| robocat wrote:
| Hard to know what fmajid means - although mentioning revenue
| is a serious black flag. Google's search is a cost-centre and
| their advertising is a profit-centre. You could say Amazon is
| similar because in 2021 AWS made all the income and
| e-commerce made zero income[1].
|
| I would be interested to see an analysis of income per
| business sector*, including their advertising sector, for
| Amazon. fmajid would need that information to be able to make
| the conclusions they drew.
|
| From article: "After selling $31 billion in ads last year,
| Amazon became the third-largest online ad company in the
| United States"
|
| Hard to know what this means, since we can't know how much it
| "cost" Amazon for those ads (especially the cost of consumer
| dissatisfaction as the article mentions, and what is
| opportunity-cost?)
|
| * and ideally assets per sector as well, plus a metric for
| internal capital reinvestment (VC style).
|
| [1] https://www.investopedia.com/how-amazon-makes-
| money-4587523 Amazon unfortunately seems to only report on
| their segments: North America, International, and AWS.
| zwkrt wrote:
| This reminds me that as far as wall street is concerned, it is
| actually an afterthought that airlines operate airplanes, all
| the money is in the credit cards.
| blamazon wrote:
| Making and selling TVs is similarly an afterthought for TV
| manufacturers now that smart TVs have been commodified, the
| money is in the analytics platforms.
| fmajid wrote:
| I think it was the CEO of American Airlines, which owned the
| Sabre computer reservation system at the time, that if he had
| to choose between keeping the airline or the CRS, he'd go for
| the latter. In any event. Sabre was spun out in 2000.
| Archipelagia wrote:
| Sorry, but can you share some source for that?
|
| Like, on first page I've found in Google
| (https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/amazon-revenue/)
| it says: AWS - ~17B Ads - ~9B Online stores - ~66B
|
| I actually wouldn't be surprised if I'm misunderstanding
| something and you're right, but can I ask where you got these
| numbers?
|
| Edit: On second read I realized the source I sent was
| misleading - the title talks about annual revenue, but hidden
| in the text there's a note saying that sub-headings actually
| show quarterly revenue. I'm still not sure about AWS-to-sales
| ratio, but my apologies for earlier confusion.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Yea no I'm also left scratching my head. I've never heard of
| a methodology to attribute market cap portions to business
| units; eager to hear some clarification too.
| spoonjim wrote:
| This is done all the time when pieces of businesses are
| bought and sold. It gets a little complex when the
| businesses are related (like Amazon Advertising and
| e-commerce, as opposed to Amazon e-commerce and AWS which
| are more fully independent of each other).
| arcturus17 wrote:
| I understand approximating present value by discounting
| cash flows but not how you would come to the conclusion
| that the eCommerce business is valued at zero because the
| sum of AWS and ads make the total of the market cap.
| fmajid wrote:
| When Amazon had a market cap of $1.7T, $1T of that was from
| AWS. I don't remember what the source was for the estimate.
| a123b456c wrote:
| LMGTFY: https://www.google.com/amp/s/247wallst.com/techno
| logy-3/2022...
|
| Not an authoritative source. No rationale given.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| It is a well-established concept called https://www.investo
| pedia.com/terms/s/sumofpartsvaluation.asp. A company's
| value is estimated on net present value (npv) of its
| projected, discounted future cash flows. If a company has a
| large, stable subsidiary that is growing slowly but is cash
| flow positive and a very fast growing but money losing
| subsidiary, it makes more sense to value parent company as
| if both subsidiaries were separate companies than the
| average of the two. A famous example was AWS within Amazon
| before it became noticeable in the bottom and top lines.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| Further, it's often applied backwards. Some financial
| engineering self proclaimed wizard will claim "x+y+z=a
| and the stock is trading at b, and a>>b, therefore the
| conglomerate discount is too large so we can earn risk
| free profit (aka arbitrage) by breaking this company up
| and publicly listing x,y, and z as independent units".
| See: Xerox, for example.
|
| Typically in mergers, you see accretion due to the
| removal of duplicate functions on the cost side (you
| don't need two HR departments for example), but sometimes
| you get negative credit if you're a too big / too opaque
| / too confusing.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Yes I understand NPV and DCF but not OPs point. The
| eCommerce arm makes a lot of money so I don't understand
| how you could come to the conclusion that its present
| value is zero.
| diogofranco wrote:
| It made less than no money recently. You might be
| thinking of revenue.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Where are you getting this from? I cannot for the life of
| me find profits by business unit. I have glanced over the
| 2021 Annual Report but don't have to analyze it. If you
| have a source I would appreciate it.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| I see what you're saying. The logic to the OP's point is
| "If AWS were to be spun out, on its own it should be
| worth 12x revenue, or $750B. If the Amazon web business
| were to be spun out on its own, it should be worth 6x
| revenue or $250B. Since those add up to $1T and the
| market cap of AMZN is $950B, the market assigns a -50B
| valuation to the rest of the company." I agree it's
| flawed logic. The market may just disagree with someone's
| sum-of-parts. It maybe conglomerate discount. It may be
| that the market is undervaluing AMZN, too. I don't think
| that many people would disagree AMZN's ecommerce division
| is valuable.
| fmajid wrote:
| For AWS, 3rd quarter revenues alone were $20B, so $80B
| annual. I don't know where that other source of yours finds
| $17B, unless they are talking profit.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/27/aws-earnings-q3-2022.html
|
| For the ads business, from The Information, but it's
| paywalled.
|
| https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-s-pain-is-
| ama...
|
| the info is in the second paragraph. The conlusions are
| entirely mine.
|
| The WaPo article does mention $31B for last year.
| manmal wrote:
| What rationale is behind comparing revenue with market cap? I
| thought price is rather judged against earnings, eg by looking
| at the P/E ratio.
| oliwary wrote:
| The same can be said for airlines, which are often worth less
| in total than their loyalty programs:
| https://thehustle.co/10052020-airline-loyalty-programs/
|
| Of course, these loyalty programs would be worthless without
| the airline itself as rewards.
| m463 wrote:
| Similar to how vizio makes more money spying through their tvs
| than selling them in the first place.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Context: https://www.howtogeek.com/767919/tv-manufacturers-
| make-more-...
| greatpostman wrote:
| It's an accounting trick. Retail is profitable via ads and
| more. Retail also pays huge infrastructure sums to aws. It's
| all a trick to make amazon stock pump
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Its apparently not enough for a business this size to just sell
| products with good customer service any more. The customer
| service is long gone replaced by the computer saying no. The
| product listings are just ads and the reviews are all fake.
| lightbendover wrote:
| One Day Shipping and aggressive FC expansion led to a
| completely inordinate logistics cost. Pretty good reason Wilke
| is gone and Jassy had the chance to step up to me, but I can't
| speak to that with authority.
| chaostheory wrote:
| As shown by this and countless of other articles, including
| comments here and places like Reddit; Amazon has gotten to Day 2
| years ago on Jeff's watch
|
| Just to ensure that you don't buy a fake product, it's now normal
| to check if there are any 3rd parties using Amazon warehouses in
| the Other Sellers section
| eljimmy wrote:
| My spending on Amazon has diminished significantly due to the
| flood of Chinese copycat brands and products on there.
|
| Wish there was a way to filter out products by their country of
| origin. Is there any alternative out there?
| fmajid wrote:
| Amazon has actually been requiring vendors to supply this info
| for a few years now. They have it in their database, but refuse
| to expose it. The Indian government forced them to, mostly
| because they are in a cold war with China and want to wean
| themselves off from Chinese goods.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| >But now that I'm aware Amazon is playing games, I start my
| shopping on Google and trusted reviews sites, and then head over
| to Amazon only once I've identified what I want.
|
| So the author has stockholm syndrome. What I do is go to the
| company website and see where I can order besides amazon. Though
| some sellers only do sell on amazon.
|
| This is basically an echo of the Ticketmaster post a week or two
| ago. I hate them and they abuse me as a customer but I still keep
| giving them money.
| syntaxing wrote:
| It has absolutely gotten out of hand lately. 2 sponsored product,
| 3 regular listed, 2 sponsored product, continued perpetually.
| Walmart has been pulling the same stuff lately and it's
| infuriating.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| At a certain 'sponsored product' density, the 'sponsoring'
| effectively just becomes an additional mandatory listing fee.
| aeharding wrote:
| Amazon prime isn't even two days anymore in Madison. It's more
| like four or five days. I don't understand what people value in
| prime anymore.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| My process for getting usable results on Amazon (.co.uk,
| presumably the others too):
|
| 1. Search for thing
|
| 2. Filter by department (necessary for 3)
|
| 3. Filter by Seller: only Amazon
|
| 4: Filter by reviews: 4 stars+
|
| 5: Sort by price, Low > High
|
| 6: (Further filters as appropriate)
|
| 7: Look at only products with a high number of reviews
|
| 8: For every product, "See all reviews" and filter on "Verified
| purchase only" and "Show only reviews for {the product variant
| you're actually looking at}". Closely scrutinise 1 and 2 star
| reviews.
|
| But sometimes even this _still_ doesn't get me quite what I want,
| because when an item is sold both by Amazon and a 3rd-party it
| can be sorted based on the non-Amazon price.
|
| It does feel _just a little_ like Amazon 's goals might not be
| perfectly aligned with those of the customer.
| [deleted]
| FeistySkink wrote:
| I'm skeptical of #8. I sometimes leave detailed reviews for
| items that I purchased or used elsewhere and have a deep
| understanding of to dissuade other people from buying.
| Especially for new products that are being overhyped on YT or
| through Amazon Vine (how is that even a thing), even though
| they are of dubious quality. I have quite a few non-verified
| reviews that are voted most helpful, but Amazon obviously
| prioritized Vine reviews, even when they don't have any votes.
| tomrod wrote:
| Ads are infective. This is why folks are worried about Apple
| jumping into that revenue stream.
| russdill wrote:
| It's very frustrating the number of clicks that are necessary
| to get a list of reviews most recent first, and not just the
| first few.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| I tend to check 3-star reviews; you (hopefully) find out what's
| wrong with a product, but not from someone who hates it and may
| focus on trivialities just to trash it.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Are other sites so bad in the US? I can count the number of
| times I've been tempted to buy with Amazon in Europe on one
| hand. I mean pretty much every other webshop has a search
| experience that is orders of magnitude better then add Geizhals
| to the mix and you're almost guaranteed to find the cheapest
| offer, in much less clicks than even trying to find something
| that is legit and matches the search criteria on amazon. Why do
| people still use it?
| Drew_ wrote:
| The search experience on Amazon is not actually that bad.
| It's only bad if you're paranoid or picky. I don't use Amazon
| to discover anything that I'm actually passionate/picky about
| so I personally never have this problem.
| fmajid wrote:
| Amazon used to emply Udi Manber, who literally wrote the
| book on search. Yet it still doesn't offer basic search
| features every search engine has had for years, like using
| quotes for phrases, the plus sign to require a phrase to be
| present in the search result, or the minus sign to exclude
| keywords or phrases from search results. That's by design.
|
| Amazon search is so useless that about half the time I use
| DuckDuckGo to search Amazon itself.
| robryan wrote:
| In Australia a lot of their delivery is Uber style drivers
| and is usually faster than other options.
| manmal wrote:
| The only reason I still buy at Amazon (even though I live in
| Geizhals territory) is the knowledge that returns and
| moneyback is a nonissue, even for consumables or when things
| break after a year. Most retailers are ok-ish at that (some
| do have a really bad Geizhals rating), but Amazon is pretty
| much zero risk there.
|
| For example: I recently ordered a EUR600 printer at a local
| retailer. The printer shipped in an unusable state (it
| refused to print and one of the paper feeds spit out a metal
| spring at me, not a good sign), so I sent it back. It took 6
| weeks and an angry email from me for them to ship the
| replacement unit. With Amazon this just doesn't happen, or at
| least, has never happened to me.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I applaud anyone who leaves a non 5 star review, gets contacted
| by the company with bribes to make it 5 stars, and updates
| their review to report the company doing that.
| low_key wrote:
| I've left negative reviews and they tend to get removed.
|
| I was once even warned by Amazon that my account could be
| deactivated for violation of the ToS after posting a review
| that pointed out all of the other fake reviews on a
| particular product. Apparently the ToS allow fake reviews and
| disallow shining a light on it.
| FeistySkink wrote:
| Amazon Vine is a thing, so of course they encourage fake
| reviews of free products.
| hgsgm wrote:
| bombela wrote:
| Yep, same experience here. Everytime I reported, my updated
| review was deleted.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| I'm sure people do it, the bribes are probably not very good.
| Sadly the company can probably get Amazon to take down the
| review in that case.
|
| Reviews for sellers themselves are a joke too, I was looking
| at some earlier today, via black friday deals. The number of
| reviews with a line through them and "Amazon takes
| responsibility for this fulfillment-related experience" was
| hilarious, when those reviews were things like "the motor
| doesn't work". I guess those then aren't included in the "90%
| positive" statistic.
| robryan wrote:
| The seller could argue that it was damaged in transit. The
| whole thing would probably be luck of the draw in how their
| first level support in India chooses to apply guidelines.
| webignition wrote:
| I left a non 5 star review of an inexpensive Pixel 4 case.
| The case was too close around the flash resulting in the
| flash reflecting off the case resulting in absolutely awful
| pictures.
|
| I was offered a refund and replacement of a newer version of
| the case in return for a better review.
|
| The phone case was simply not fit for purpose as it was and
| the review fairly (I hope) highlighted this.
|
| I accepted the replacement newer version and agreed to a more
| flattering review once the improved case was seen to indeed
| be improved. If the flaw had been fixed then it would be fair
| to reflect this in my review.
|
| The improved case was no different and my review remained
| unchanged, except for an update reflecting the bribe.
| mancerayder wrote:
| They don't need to bribe anymore. Negative reviews get
| removed pretty easily. It's happened to me.
|
| It's the new normal. Airbnb is even worse, they used to (and
| still might) actually have customer service edit reviews.
| Your review will get removed with no notice, Amazon will let
| you know.
|
| If you remove some or most negative reviews but leave
| positive ones, what do you get.
| bombela wrote:
| I have noticed this for negative review on products from
| big and well known companies. About technical flaws. Like a
| gaming computer mouse where pressing left and right click
| together wouldn't work. Until you update the firmware of
| the mouse (yep... yep you wouldn't think a mouse should be
| buggy nor firmware updateable).
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Apparently Airbnb will delete any review that criticizes a
| property for something the property owner can't fix. Loud
| traintracks with trains blasting by at 3am every morning?
| That's not the property owner's fault, so that's a bad
| review.
|
| As if reviews exist _only_ to give constructive feedback to
| property owners, rather than to warn other renters away
| from a bad experience!
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| "Apartment is great for early risers!" = it's on a city
| bus route that rattles the windows
|
| "Interesting locals in the area!" = homeless people on
| your doorstep
| syrrim wrote:
| "Property owner has not done enough to soundproof the
| unit against nearby train noise"
| Heyso wrote:
| I've bought and seen crap with good reviews. On Amazon.
|
| You have a good chance to end with some chinese crap if you
| rely only on Amazon.
|
| On some product, I prefer finding a specialized seller (that
| isn't dropshipping). Or find a real blog (tends to be hard with
| all those fakes websites listing top 100 products, but they
| nmask hemselves when all products are chinese crap on Amazon).
| Reddit also work to get advice from peoples.
|
| What's more. I make research on the compagny producing the
| thing. LinkedIn helps with that. Only commercials on a tech
| product ? Get out.
| hattmall wrote:
| eBay is actually legit a good source for quality items. You
| can see actual seller ratings, how much the seller sells and
| specific item feedback. The returns / refund process is dead
| simple and flawless as well. The only issue is that none of
| the processes are as quick as Amazon. Shipping is slower and
| if you need to do a return it can take like 3 days to get the
| label.
| entropie wrote:
| > I've bought and seen crap with good reviews. On Amazon.
|
| Have you heard of https://reviewmeta.com/ ?, If not, give it
| a try, I use it regularly and it does as advertised.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Fair and balanced. My last several purchases with amazon have
| been a breeze, and i will continue (especially as local shops
| are taking full advantage to up their prices for seemingly no
| good reason except 'there'sa crisis') I regularly kill cookies.
| Perhaps it's a .com thing as I'll take the healthcare route and
| search through .nl, .it, .de, .co.uk for the same item. And
| then pay from where i have my account.
| ljm wrote:
| I had to buy a replacement USB cable in a pinch the other week.
| Probably the first time since pre-COVID where I could justify
| next day delivery (where I would normally be happy to just wait
| however long it takes from a more local retailer).
|
| I knew exactly the kind to look for but I couldn't just search
| for that and pick the first item on the list. I could have
| easily bought the wrong thing in one click and not known it.
|
| Instead I had to spend about 30 minutes tweaking my search
| query, scrolling through SEO-spam listings ("NEW iPhone 14
| Galaxy S21 MacBook Pro Windows 95 SE USB 2.1A cable 6cm!") and
| other listings which were all just the same listing but with a
| different no-name logo laser printed on the casing. Was on
| Google cross-referencing some of them to see if they'd actually
| be legit, since I'd trust a post in a niche forum over a review
| on a marketplace.
|
| It took me longer to verify what I was buying than it did to go
| through checkout. Reminded me why Amazon stopped being my go-
| to.
| hgsgm wrote:
| what's wrong with getting the Amazon Basics version of
| whatever commodity?
| chronogram wrote:
| I got a bunch of AmazonBasics cables last Christmas, but
| this year they don't seem to be available anymore. Don't
| know what the point of Amazon is in my local economy if
| they don't have those products anymore, since there's at
| least some market economics alive here.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| _2. Filter by department (necessary for 3)
|
| 3. Filter by Seller: only Amazon_
|
| This is harder and harder to do, especially on the app. I've
| started to use walmart instead. They also have this third party
| seller garbage but at least they make easier to filter out.
| fleddr wrote:
| Yep, and then when you finally have your sights on a product,
| there will always be that one review:
|
| "Cable didn't work, instead it shortcircuited my TV".
| jamiek88 wrote:
| I do similar but actually prefer the product with the _lower_
| amount of reviews as IMO a product with 200 reviews is more
| likely to have real reviews than one with 20k reviews, they
| just look fake to me.
| prmoustache wrote:
| My process for getting usable results on Amazon is to simply
| not use it. For any item you can think of there is an online
| shop dedicated to the specialty that is:
|
| - cheaper
|
| - easiest to search
|
| - do not sell knockoffs, counterfeits and fake products
|
| I know some people will raise the "you need to create another
| account for it annoyance" but it is not that annoying when you
| are using a password manager and the additionnal time spent
| could even be considered a feature to avoid compulsive buying.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I thought thus was the way to go into I ran into bad shipping
| schedule and bad return policies, esp the latter. Now I never
| order anywhere except Amazon. I learn this lesson every time
| I try to follow your pitch.
| Marsymars wrote:
| > "We are dedicated to providing customers with a world-class
| shopping experience, including working hard every day to ensure
| the ads they see are useful, informative, and help make shopping
| a little bit easier," said spokesman Patrick Graham.
|
| If they were actually confident in this, they could give every
| user the option to toggle ads on or off. Maybe even limit that
| option to Amazon Prime subscribers.
| layer8 wrote:
| This skit represents the experience quite well:
| https://youtu.be/nQpxAvjD_30?t=4s
| thefourthchime wrote:
| I was thinking the same!
| chrisbaker98 wrote:
| Haha this was amazing.
| Oras wrote:
| 5 stars video haha
| Terretta wrote:
| I got this for my husband and he loves it.
| gumby wrote:
| For the mixer example, it seems the way to do it is to go to the
| brand's "store".
|
| Perhaps there is a way to get there directly but the only way I
| know is to search for the brand name, scroll down until one of
| the brand's products appears (even if the offered example isn't
| what you want), click on that, and then on the product page
| you'll see "visit the <brand> store", if there is one. I assume
| it's something the company has to pay for as well.
|
| Actually I just tried searching for "kitchenaid store" and
| _mirable dictu_ the first page of results was all kitchenaid
| products.
|
| I would give up on Amazon but some smaller brands (e.g. Anker)
| sell only through Amazon.
| proee wrote:
| Would it be possible to create an Amazon "Ad blocker" of sorts
| that hides all the sponsored products and store promotions?
| [deleted]
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Is it just me or does it feel like the major tech companies have
| completely lost the war against bots/spam? Search results are
| regressing across multiple online services[1] - Google, Amazon,
| and app stores are all filled with junk and scams. Reviews for
| products are generally filled to the brim with bots or paid
| reviews.
|
| [1] I've noticed the re-emergence of Experts Exchange style sites
| on Google recently. For technical questions Stack Overflow or
| official docs are often near the bottom of the first page, while
| sites like w3schools or geeksforgeeks are at the top with much
| less useful content.
| Terretta wrote:
| Try https://kagi.com and the Programming Lens
|
| (Kagi is worth the subscription even w/o that: user is paying
| for search, not advertisers paying for eyeballs.)
| pliuchkin wrote:
| Is it time for a browser extension to ad block Amazon internals?
| unnouinceput wrote:
| I can die peacefully now. I lived to see a negative article in
| Washington Post about Amazon. Did I missed something? Is WP no
| longer Jeff's vomit (like the flurry of articles about how bad
| Amazon's worker doing a union would be for them, that flooded WP
| not even a year ago)?
| aslilac wrote:
| Amazon is unusable at this point, and I don't get how they have
| so many customers. Free and fast shipping is no longer exclusive
| to them, and there are others out there with far nicer websites
| and no shitty ad listings.
| verdverm wrote:
| tbh, just used Newegg this week...
|
| 2 day shipping costs more, they didn't even get it here in 2
| days, they split my order into 8 orders, each tracked and
| emailed separately. I've been boycotting Amazon almost 5 years,
| but their competition really sucks to the point I'm thinking of
| going back. At least I've been able to avoid a lot of frivolous
| purchases for a while...
| CPLX wrote:
| Newegg has cloned the Amazon strategy. They also do
| marketplace stuff. It's really just another example of the
| same thing.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I look down on Newegg _more_ for its marketplace strategy
| because it distracted from a niche it served well. By the
| time Amazon was doing its marketplace, it was already
| selling everything, so I didn 't notice.
| treis wrote:
| NewEgg rather infamously scammed Linus Tech tips and
| thousands of stories of them doing similar came out (myself
| included). I don't know why anyone buys from them. They will
| commit outright fraud and steal money from you.
|
| Amazon at least maintains the fig leaf of plausible
| deniability and part of that is no questions asked returns.
| thewebcount wrote:
| Likewise. I ordered 2 sets of batteries for our cordless
| landline phone from NewEgg. They sent me one set. I emailed
| customer service and they charged me for 2 more sets and
| sent nothing. Never doing business with them again.
| epage wrote:
| Not like I always get two day shipping anyways. They now
| shuffle things between warehouses so they can say it shipped
| in two days (from the closest warehouse) but the effective
| shipping time can be longer.
| anon7725 wrote:
| Try B&H next time. AFAIK they still ship everything
| themselves and don't have marketplace sellers like Newegg or
| Amazon.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| And they have the Payboo credit card that gives you back
| the sales tax.That's significant especially for higher
| priced items like laptops or cameras,
| xadhominemx wrote:
| What are your preferred alternatives?
| imglorp wrote:
| Yes.
|
| The alternative is track down the original, individual vendor
| and deal with their custom sign up, shopping cart, shipping,
| and support on their site. Repeat with each different vendor
| for next purchase.
|
| As much as Amazon hates its customers and vendors, it's got a
| consistent experience.
| astura wrote:
| What's wrong with target.com?
| imglorp wrote:
| I try to patronize the original vendors. The large
| markets like Walmart and Target squeeze their suppliers
| hard to widen their margins. So if everything's about
| equal, I'd rather go to the source, especially if it's a
| mom and pop so they get a larger cut of the same money.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The alternative is track down the original, individual
| vendor and deal with their custom sign up
|
| Where are these vendors that require you to sign up before
| you can buy their stuff? If you don't want to sign up...
| don't.
| thewebcount wrote:
| While actually doing the signup is a pain, I just use a
| "hide-my-email" address and cut it off after I receive the
| item. And I'd personally prefer to enter my credit card
| info every time. I once accidentally clicked on the "Yes,
| sign me up for Amazon Prime today, even though I've turned
| it down literally hundreds of times," button and they
| immediately charged my credit card without even an "Are you
| sure?" Alert. Luckily I was able to cancel and get it
| refunded relatively easily (after 5 screens of "are you
| sure?" And "do you want to just pause it for a few
| months?").
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| Almost everyone, in the UK at least, has a largely seamless
| experience with PayPal, Google Pay or Apple Pay these days.
| The shipping address gets auto-completed by interfacing
| with the payment processor and there's no account sign-up.
|
| And since most of them actually outsource their websites to
| shopify or whoever, the user experience is basically as
| consistent as Amazon.
| bombcar wrote:
| Target
|
| Home Depot
|
| Best Buy
|
| Walmart (this is getting polluted with "vendors")
| mancerayder wrote:
| Walmart doesn't seem to ship almost anything in my area, it
| seems to show In Store Pickup only for just about all the
| items.
| carlivar wrote:
| Best Buy uses Ontrac shipping in my area and they are
| awful.
| anon7725 wrote:
| Cannot say enough bad things about OnTrac. They routinely
| throw packages at the end of our driveway instead of
| leaving at the porch like everyone else does.
|
| The end of the (long) driveway is treed so sometimes we
| are literally hunting in the woods for our package after
| an OnTrac delivery.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah I'm lucky in that everyone uses UPS or FedEx to
| reach me.
| socialismisok wrote:
| It's easy. It's easier to buy there than elsewhere because it's
| habit.
|
| I stopped prime a couple years ago, I buy from other stores
| when I can, but sometimes you just need protein powder, spray
| bottles, stove gaskets, a 300 piece puzzle, and a cello stand.
| Amazon makes it possible to just buy one spot.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Anything I ingest would not come from Amazon, or rather one
| of its numerous anonymous, unvetted sellers.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Agreed. Anything health or pet related is a dangerous
| gamble with amazon.
| 10729287 wrote:
| I quit Amazon one year ago and this also made my buying
| habits healthier. No more impulse buying. Eveything's
| connected.
| r0fl wrote:
| Nothing comes close to matching the ease of using amazon. In
| Canada if I need Kleenex I search kleenex, click buy now and it
| arrives to my house the same day! Sometimes I have to wait
| until the next day. The total time spent on the purchase is way
| under 1 minute.
|
| To use costco I have to buy at least $75 or shipping is not
| free. Walmart I have to fill out all my personal info and
| credit card info, and it's never same day shipping and
| sometimes there is a minimum amount I need to spend.
|
| Driving to a store to pick up an item like this is just a giant
| waste of my time, gas, increases the chance of someone denting
| my side door in a parking lot from 0% to more than 0%.
|
| There is no alternative that even comes close for simple items.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Don't you consider how wasteful this is? Packaging and
| transport for a box of tissues, then the packaging to dispose
| of.
|
| Write yourself a note if necessary (post-it, phone app,
| whatever) and buy Kleenex the next time you're at the
| supermarket.
| bumby wrote:
| My shipping has deteriorated massively in the last couple of
| years. What used to be 2 day shipping as a prime member is now
| often as much as 10 days. That, plus all the knock-offs and bad
| product quality, has made me stop using Amazon for much.
| chrsig wrote:
| anecdotally, it seems really bimodal for me. Either I can get
| something same day/overnight, or it'll take a week or more
| ceejayoz wrote:
| They've built out small, local distribution centers that
| stock the more commonly ordered items. When you're in an
| area with one and pick the right item, it comes same or
| next day.
| marcinzm wrote:
| - I get items in 1-2 days including fairly niche items. Some
| items take longer but it's clear which ones and those are just
| as slow elsewhere.
|
| - I see reviews for the items and some of them aren't fake. The
| negative reviews with specific issues are particularly
| important (weak hinge, plastic parts, noisy, difficult warranty
| support, etc.). I know some other marketplaces either don't
| have reviews (ebay) or can trivially remove negative reviews
| (shopify sites).
|
| - I can return items without too much hassle.
| chrsig wrote:
| one account to buy anything, quickly. having to sign up at a
| million independent stores sucks
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Shopify and Apple Pay make it a lot easier than it used to
| be.
| rednerrus wrote:
| How do you find the products that you need?
| poooogles wrote:
| I tend to find `site:reddit.com $product` is often worth
| a shot.
| edgyquant wrote:
| This is no longer reliable as companies know people are
| searching Reddit so account for it in marketting
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Free and fast shipping is no longer exclusive to them
|
| It's much worse than that. They no longer offer fast shipping;
| you're not allowed to pay for it even if you want it.
| savanaly wrote:
| I only need to buy something online every couple months, maybe
| once a month at most. I hate shopping so I'll be damned if I
| will spend 1 more second thinking about the process than I have
| to. Amazon always has the thing, ships it in 2 days, I can be
| relatively sure I'm not getting ripped off by more than +/- 25%
| and that's good enough for me. I've never had any issues with
| fakes that HN complains about all the time.
|
| I think Amazon lives off the backs of folks like me, or maybe
| people that shop slightly more than me but not much. If I was
| the type of person shopping for things everyday I'd imagine I
| would branch out. But for the vast majority of folks
| consistency is king.
| angelbar wrote:
| >I can be relatively sure I'm not getting ripped off by more
| than +/- 25% and that's good enough for me.
|
| Look at Keepa for historic prices
| bogomipz wrote:
| >" I hate shopping so I'll be damned if I will spend 1 more
| second thinking about the process than I have to. Amazon
| always has the thing, ships it in 2 days, I can be relatively
| sure I'm not getting ripped off by more than +/- 25% and
| that's good enough for me."
|
| My experience before I got rid of Amazon years ago started
| out similar but then I found that the process of shopping
| took longer and longer - trying to compare 50+ versions of
| the same thing, filtering out dubious looking sellers and
| brands etc. I actually started to feel like the experience
| was worse than just going to a store and carrying the the
| thing home. I also started to think the prices weren't really
| all that great because they became the same or or often
| slightly more expensive that what I could find in a brick and
| mortar store. Couple this with a general decline in Amazon's
| last mile delivery which seemed to be a whole other shit show
| where the contracting parcel service would mark them as
| delivered even though they hadn't actually been deliver yet
| and it just became a really miserable experience. Should you
| need to contact customer service and speak to someone you can
| pretty much dispense with another half hour of your time.
|
| >"But for the vast majority of folks consistency is king."
|
| For me there was very little consistency in the Amazon
| experience. It was hit and miss. From reading this article
| though it sounds like the thing that is consistent is an
| increasingly worse experience.
| antisthenes wrote:
| For me it's the fact that they have literally _everything_ on
| their store.
|
| I'm not going to go out and make 3 different accounts on
| sites that aren't Amazon, when I could save time and buy
| anything ranging from auto parts to PC parts to groceries on
| the same website.
|
| Yes, a lot of it is rebadged Ali junk, but guess what,
| sometimes that junk actually does the work it's supposed to.
| If I'm buying a plastic towel hook for the bathroom, I really
| don't care where it comes from or if it's 50c cheaper on
| another website.
| d23 wrote:
| > I can be relatively sure I'm not getting ripped off by more
| than +/- 25%
|
| I think this is the only thing keeping them afloat. How are
| you so sure you're not getting ripped off? Did you know
| counterfeits can be sold under the "sold by anazon.com"
| branding because of co-mingling?
|
| I used to have the same view as you until I started getting
| shoddy products consistently from brands that were otherwise
| high quality if I purchased in store. Then I realized I had
| no way to tell if what I was purchasing was real, and I
| started questioning why the lack of toothpaste I bought
| tasted different than normal and had off-color printing.
|
| I'm just increasingly finding it not worth the worry,
| especially for things I put I my body.
| groestl wrote:
| > How are you so sure you're not getting ripped off?
|
| If you do not _feel_ you've been ripped off, does it
| matter?
| ncallaway wrote:
| Yes. I bought a ladle from Amazon. I noticed from some of
| the comments that a lot of people were getting a knock
| off ladle.
|
| When I arrived, I checked to see if it was legitimate,
| and... it was not. It was a knock-off.
|
| It was fine as a ladle. It ladled things. I never
| would've noticed or complained if I hadn't seen the
| rules. No harm, no foul, right?
|
| Absolutely not. That day I made a rule that I do not buy
| anything that goes on your skin, in your body, or health
| and safety kit from Amazon. If I can't trust their ladles
| are authentic, I can't trust their sunscreen or
| thermometers are authentic.
|
| So, while the ladle didn't harm me directly, it did
| pretty significant change my purchase habits.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| Well, you don't know that the ladle didn't harm you
| directly. If it's made of substandard materials that
| leech carcinogens into your food, the effects might take
| years to appear.
| fmajid wrote:
| Or anything that involves electricity.
| ilyt wrote:
| Yes, as it is preying on the clueless
| Retric wrote:
| Just because you don't realize something gave you cancer
| doesn't mean you can safely ignore the cancer.
|
| Feeling like you got ripped off is one thing, having your
| house burn down from faulty electronics is much worse etc
| etc.
| naijaboiler wrote:
| bought an apple charger, nearly set my house on fire. I
| opened up the one I bought from amazon, and the old one I
| had at home. weight, number of components, etc clearly
| told me it was a differnt product. Yeah I was done buying
| anything electronic from amazon.
| nequo wrote:
| > Did you know counterfeits can be sold under the "sold by
| anazon.com" branding because of co-mingling?
|
| I have also had a bad experience with "Sold by Amazon.com"
| so I'm not questioning the veracity of what you are saying.
| But how does this work? How can someone get a counterfeit
| product under this umbrella?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| My understanding is, if I sell an item with a SKU[1]
| 123456, and use "fulfillment by Amazon" it goes in an
| Amazon warehouse in a bucket with all the other items of
| the same SKU using Amazon's shipping. Then my inventory
| becomes just a number in a database.
|
| People selling DVDs on Amazon were complaining about bad
| reviews because someone bought from them, but got a
| counterfeit sold by someone else.
|
| 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_keeping_unit
| i_am_jl wrote:
| "Sold by Amazon" comingles identical SKUs from different
| sellers in their warehouses.
|
| Seller A sells real Product Z on Amazon. Seller B sells
| fake Product Z on Amazon. When you order Product Z that
| is "Sold on Amazon" you might get a real one provided by
| Seller A, or you might get a fake one sold by Seller B
| maineldc wrote:
| I believe what you are saying is possible for "Shipped by
| Amazon" not "sold by Amazon".
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| I believe your description was accurate before ca. 2015,
| but at some point they reportedly started making
| commingling the default even for "Sold by Amazon" items.
| Commingling isn't the only issue, either; there's still
| the problem of products for which Amazon was never an
| authorized retailer and so their listing/SKU may have
| been created to sell counterfeits in the first place. In
| any case, there have been multiple lawsuits specifically
| alleging that counterfeit items were "Sold by Amazon" [1]
| [2] [3].
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201125141347/https://ww
| w.forbe...
|
| [2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4495986/1/apple-
| inc-v-m...
|
| [3] https://www.geekwire.com/2016/daimler-ag-sues-amazon-
| knockof...
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| I mean literally the next sentence after your quote says
| "I've never had any issues with fakes that HN complains
| about all the time" so I'm pretty positive they do know
| about it.
| Finnucane wrote:
| I haven't ordered anything from Amazon in several years and
| don't miss it. Have stopped going to Whole Foods too.
| Fortunately I live in an area where I don't need to buy
| everything online, I can still get most of the things I need
| locally, and if I don't there's a reputable specialty dealer,
| or ordering directly from the maker may be possible.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Yes, the proliferation of stuff being sold by six letter
| Chinese sellers is incredible. It's basically Ali Express but
| with faster shipping.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Why is that a problem if the items work for their intended
| purpose?
| astura wrote:
| Poor quality and potentially unsafe.
| smolder wrote:
| They often don't, like the extension cord I bought that
| flips my breaker when I plug it in. I don't want garbage
| products that were sourced from the dumpster next to a
| Chinese factory after they make a defective batch.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| "Six letter Chinese sellers" does not automatically mean
| cheap shitty defective rejects. If anything, that's just
| stereotyping and xenophobia.
|
| For every one of you, I'm sure there's a dozen who have
| had no issues with the product. And I'm sure there's been
| plenty of people who have had the same issue with a name
| brand product that was made in the same factory by the
| same process and people.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| Admitting that there's around a 1/13 chance of these
| products being garbage isn't really a defence. Those are
| really bad odds.
| smolder wrote:
| I'm not bagging on Chinese manufacturing in general, they
| build the worlds stuff, including super high
| quality+value items. Yet throwaway brands peddling junk
| that wouldn't have realistically made it onto the shelves
| of a big box store is a _real problem_ on Amazon 's
| marketplace, and other similar ones.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| > I don't want garbage products that were sourced from
| the dumpster next to a Chinese factory after they make a
| defective batch.
|
| > Yet throwaway brands peddling junk that wouldn't have
| realistically made it onto the shelves of a big box store
| is a real problem on Amazon's marketplace, and other
| similar ones.
|
| Either it's a defective batch of products that would have
| been sold under a brand name or its junk that would have
| never been sold at all. Both of these can't be true of
| the same product.
|
| I'd also argue that being sold at a big box store is not
| really indicative of much in the 21st century.
| kyleplum wrote:
| > I'd also argue that being sold at a big box store is
| not really indicative of much in the 21st century.
|
| If you haven't already, I'd recommend spending some time
| reading about what it takes to get a product on the shelf
| at Wal-Mart/Target/Costco. When a companies reputation
| relies on what it is selling, the bar becomes a lot
| higher.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > "Six letter Chinese sellers" does not automatically
| mean cheap shitty defective rejects. If anything, that's
| just stereotyping and xenophobia.
|
| I've seen people complain that the vendor contact info is
| obfuscated and untraceable when it's obviously the
| business owner's personal home address. People will say
| anything about Chinese vendors.
| shellfishgene wrote:
| As I mentioned above, Amazon now also lists products that are
| shipped directly from China and take weeks. They have the
| tracking info from Yanwen shipping on the site, so this must
| be officially supported.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| what sites?
| wpietri wrote:
| Yeah, I've been weaning myself off Amazon for a while. Now if
| I'm shopping for something my general approach is to a) look
| for neutral reviews (e.g. Wirecutter and Consumer Reports), b)
| see if I can buy it from whoever makes it, and c) search on
| shopping.google.com to look for reasonable prices from some
| other vendor.
|
| This is undeniably a little more work that just searching on
| Amazon and buying the first option. But it's about the same
| amount of work as using Amazon properly (skipping the sponsored
| listings, filtering out the dubious non-Amazon sellers,
| figuring out which reviews are fake, trying to tell whether the
| nominal maker is a real company versus some weird algorithm
| cloner or re-reseller, worrying over whether Amazon's
| inventory-mixing means I'll get a fake, etc).
|
| I still end up buying some things from Amazon, but it's fewer
| and fewer, and I'm usually happier with the total outcome now.
| fhd2 wrote:
| I started doing the same 1-2 years ago! Felt bad about giving
| Jeff Bezos so much money.
|
| At first I thought it was gonna be an impossible effort, but
| since I'd take Google over Amazon any day (although also not
| super happily), I do a lot of the last mile (finding a
| good/non-shady offer for a specific product I've already
| decided to buy through reviews) there. And usually I find it
| cheaper with equally fast shipping. For stuff I commonly buy,
| there are really strong competitors (at least in Germany)
| that I buy from by going directly to their website.
|
| Had to first realise that a lot of the stuff Amazon was at
| first unique for, is now pretty much a commodity. And their
| offering certainly hasn't improved in the last years in my
| eyes.
| wpietri wrote:
| For sure. Other places have gotten better, and Amazon has
| gotten worse for me. The way I interpret it is that Amazon
| started out with a really strong customer focus, but
| they've shifted more and more toward revenue maximization
| at my expense.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Amazon is unusable at this point, and I don't get how they
| have so many customers. Free and fast shipping is no longer
| exclusive to them, and there are others out there with far
| nicer websites and no shitty ad listings.
|
| I only started using them in 2017 and I still do use them
| sparingly. But typically only for stuff I buy directly from the
| brand's store on Amazon.
|
| There are a few brands I still trust. They may all be going
| downhill at some point and the "official store" may actually be
| some front for cheap copies that stole the brand name, I don't
| know... But so far it looks okay to me.
|
| Anker, Osram, Makita, S.T. Dupont (for refills), etc.
|
| Last thing I bought from Amazon from some random brand was a
| box of 200 firelighters, supposedly ecological. I don't know if
| the brand is "true" or not, I don't know if they're actually
| ecological or not (they look like but it may all be a scam)
| but... They were cheap and they do actually help greatly
| lighting the fireplace.
|
| So far Anker stuff looks like it's actually Anker stuff. Makita
| tools do look and feels like Makita tools, etc.
|
| That's why I keep using them.
|
| Now I do find the experience painful and I'm 100% sure that all
| these identical products but branded different when I search on
| Amazon for, say, 316L stainless steel are stuff that are going
| to rust in six months.
|
| So I'd say that people using it because even if Amazon broken,
| it's still convenient to find all your usual brands in one
| place.
| thewebcount wrote:
| > I only started using them in 2017 and I still do use them
| sparingly. But typically only for stuff I buy directly from
| the brand's store on Amazon.
|
| Does this work? My spouse recently purchased some 3M N-95
| masks directly from 3M's Amazon store. They're supposed to
| arrive in a box that has a code on it which you can enter
| into 3M's website to verify it's real and not a counterfeit.
| Instead they arrived in a clear plastic bag with no printing
| on it. There's no code so I can only assume they're either
| fakes or were pull from a larger box (which means potentially
| handled inappropriately). Given my spouse's immune condition,
| that's not a chance we really want to take so we're going to
| throw them out.
| pm215 wrote:
| If you have the time/effort (which I appreciate you may
| well not -- there's a limit to how much it feels worth
| trying to tilt against megacorp windmills) it would be
| better to return them to Amazon, because otherwise it looks
| to Amazon like a successful purchase. Amazon do at least
| make returns less hassle than some other e-commerce places
| I've used.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| And contact your country's customs agency as they monitor
| ports and try to watch for counterfeits. Assuming they
| came from outside the country.
|
| Here's where you can report this fraud in the US:
| https://www.cbp.gov/trade/e-allegations/violations
| up2isomorphism wrote:
| Are you sure? I tried at least 4 other online shopping
| recently, the experience is horrible compared to amazon. There
| are bunch issues about return that eventually easily cost me
| more than what prime cost me for one year.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| Are you sure? I tried at least 7 other online shops recently,
| the experience is amazing compared to amazon.
|
| Returns are as easy as scanning a barcode at the post office.
| Product reviews are meaningful and don't have bi-modal
| distributions. Spam and knocks offs are non-existing.
|
| The only downside is that I pay slightly more for shipping
| but arguably I am biased to believe that logistics couriers
| should have a living wage.
| q-big wrote:
| > Amazon is unusable at this point, and I don't get how they
| have so many customers.
|
| At least in Germany, using Amazon is often the easiest way to
| buy copies of foreign-language (often, but not always English)
| textbooks about scientific topics.
| justapassenger wrote:
| Main reason I still use them is 100% hassle free return policy.
| I don't stress about buying something crappy, as I know I can
| return it, in very convenient ways.
| d23 wrote:
| For some reason that changed for me lately and they no longer
| do free UPS pickup for returns. I have to go mail them
| myself, which tips the balance of the return convenience
| scale for me.
| justapassenger wrote:
| I have Whole Foods, UPS drop off points, Amazon locker and
| Kohls all on the routes I frequent. And TBH, I prefer those
| over UPS pickup as making sure I'm home and running to the
| door when they arrive is not convenient for me. YMMV.
| markbnj wrote:
| I rarely have to return things, but when I do have to
| return something purchased on Amazon it's basically: couple
| of clicks, get a QR in email, walk into the local UPS store
| with the item and hand it over, quick scan of the QR and
| done. Yeah it would be nice if they just sent someone to
| the house to get the item, but it doesn't surprise me that
| the economics of that don't work out.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's annoying because they used to give you a UPS label
| you could use, now they make me drive 30 miles to a UPS
| store.
|
| I _was_ able to get a label for one item and shove all
| the others in the same box and it worked. For now.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| Will their return policy rebuild your house when a faulty
| power adapter burns it down?
| justapassenger wrote:
| And that's relevant how?
|
| I don't buy unknown Chinese brands for stuff like that. And
| that's getting harder. But that's a separate issue.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| "Stuff like that" being what, anything mains-powered,
| anything with a lithium-ion battery, anything that
| touches your skin, anything that might get very hot as
| part of its operation, anything whose continued
| functionality manages the safe temperature or pressure of
| anything else, anything that connects to the Internet,
| anything that stores data, anything that touches food,
| anything you might ingest or inhale, anything load-
| bearing, anything that is costly or difficult to remove
| once installed, any components that fail in a way that
| damage other components in the same device, anything
| whose failure would block an ongoing project, anything
| that seals containers or conduits for liquids or gases,
| et cetera, et cetera? It turns out that the category of
| products who can fail in a way that wouldn't be covered
| by a full refund is actually "most products".
|
| EDIT: Also collectables and randomised products such as
| trading cards.
| account42 wrote:
| Similarly, if the parcel service marks it as "attempted
| delivery not home" (even though I or someone else was home
| all day) and drops it of at a pickup on the other side of
| town (even though they have a branch around the corner) I can
| just order it again and count on amazon to refund the first
| order (and perhaps demand the delivery service be less shit).
| For a smaller seller a) I probably need to contact them to
| get a refund at all, b) more than likely they want me to eat
| the delivery fee for sending it again and c) even if they
| cover it they don't have any leverage with the delivery
| service to be less shit.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| I heard that if you return too many items, they threaten to
| prevent future purchases. Has anyone hit this? What is the
| return/purchase ratio?
| GingerMidas wrote:
| I suspect it's more about value of returned items than the
| quantity. I have returned ~half of the items I purchased in
| the last year
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Still worth it to me to avoid the spam of a hundred small
| companies giving my personal data to SEO and marketing experts
| to spam me, and despite the improvement in time and cost for
| individual merchant shipping, I have not seen the reliability
| of that speed approach anywhere near Amazon or Walmart level.
| Returns and fraud resolution are also extremely streamlined.
| samhickmann wrote:
| Tepix wrote:
| Amazon is awful to shop at. I accidentally bought the wrong
| article twice already because i was searching for something and
| it showed me something else and i wasn't paying super close
| attention. It must be contributing to a lot of returns.
|
| These days when i buy something at Amazon it's because i found
| out _elsewhere_ that one particular product is being offered at a
| good price there.
| akomtu wrote:
| Amazon is certainly getting more scummy. Last time I made an
| order, it sneakily turned one item into a subscription (in a tiny
| font it said "the next arrival scheduled on...") and stopped
| showing cost of the faster delivery option it selected without
| asking me, i.e. it selected the 2nd option which is 3 days
| earlier, and that option had no price tag on it, only when I
| chose the slower option, it showed that the faster ootion is 10
| bucks (on a 30 bucks item).
|
| We are seeing how capitalism is advancing to its next phase:
| false advertising. Shorty after will follow another phase:
| extortion (uncancellable subscriptions, automatically signed
| legal agreements, etc.)
| SoftAnnaLee wrote:
| > Here's a modest proposal: No more than half of any screen we
| see at any given time -- be it on desktop web or a smartphone --
| should contain ads.
|
| I have to say, we have gotten extremely complacent if "half" your
| page being filled with ads is considered acceptable. I can
| understand the unfortunate reality that online services need ads
| to survive, but surely half of a screen is still far from
| acceptable.
| charcircuit wrote:
| What's wrong with full screen ads? I honestly don't mind tiktok
| and reels ads at all despite them taking a full screen.
| Zufriedenheit wrote:
| I do my online shopping almost exclusively through comparison
| sites (idealo and geizhals). They have much better filter
| options. This also overcomes the problem with dynamic pricing
| where in some cases shops show me >25% higher price if I navigate
| to them directly as they show me when coming through a price
| comparison site.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > idealo
|
| That's a name I haven't heard for a long time. I decade ago, I
| worked for a company in that space. It was dying back then,
| getting killed by Google product ads and Amazon.
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