I wish I could say I stopped buying things off Amazon for ethical reasons, but the truth is, I stopped buying because if you look closely at the reviews, you realize that almost everything for sale there is now a scam or a knock-off. This was a slow creep for awhile, but now the problem has grown exponentially. Amazon is what Canal Street was in the 90s - somewhere to buy fakes, stolen goods, and electronics that might catch fire.
Amazon has no interest in fixing this problem, because they know that well over half their "inventory" is now from knockoffs, IP theft and/or bait-and-switch scams. it's almost impossible to find items there anymore that are not fake, whether it's re-packaged hard drives or "pyrex" bowls that explode in the microwave.
One way to look at this, and the way I think Amazon must look at it, is that it's not any worse than a third world night market. The attitude of vendors in, e.g. Phnom Penh or Mexico City markets is that the very fact that stupid Americans think they're going to get "real" goods just proves how much they deserve to be scammed. Amazon is actually helping baffled Americans to finally understand what the third world has always known - unboxing is going to be disappointing. Everything you think is affordable is probably fake, and you can't trust the packaging. Only the rich get actual brand products. As America degrades, people will start to get more savvy and more cynical about this, but right now it's still a newish phenomenon and people are shocked, shocked! to find out the kids toys they bought are full of toxic chemicals that we ourselves shipped overseas for burial or "recycling".
What start to really annoy me is how it as become almost impossible to buy quality product anymore. And the issue is not even limited to Amazon.
Recently, at work, we had to make a bunch of RJ45 cables. So we bought some cable, terminals and a crimper and a tester. The crimper was so horrible, we add to cut and re-crimp new terminals 2-4 times before having a working cable. So we said fuck it, lets go buy another one. Turn out, all the shop around us had only cheap ones in store (<30€), we tried a few and had the same issue. To find a crimper that wasn't complete shit, we had to find a specialist store on the internet and it was retailing for more than a hundred euros.
And I keep stumbling upon the same issue when I want to buy tools, electronics and sports equipments: You only have a choice between very cheap stuff that will clearly not do the job or won't do it for long, or very expensive (sometimes overpriced) high-end equipment. There is almost no middle ground, no places for product who are not top notch quality with the latest technology, but will do a solid job if you don't need the latest and greatest. There is the second hand market, but it is a hit a miss, and not a reliable supplier either.
And if there is those "middle-ground" product, you often only find them in limited quantity in specialized store, often only on the internet.
Our economy seems really good at producing cheap garbage that's hardly worth even their low prices, expensive shit that actually works (expensive in part because the cheap garbage eats into its economy of scale by taking market share), and, for some product categories, super expensive shit that exists for the sake of being expensive (as in, conspicuous consumption).
Absent is any ground between cheap garbage and expensive shit that actually works. Some products are in that middle-ground price range, but they're actually cheap garbage that's been marked up to rip you off.
This seems to have increased over time, especially as factories became better able to produce goods that use barely enough material to work at all, without a too-high defect rate. I wonder sometimes how much inflation this is masking—goods stay the same price or even get somewhat cheaper, but are significantly worse than before.
> I wonder sometimes how much inflation this is masking
I've wondered this too. So many electronics or appliances from the 1970s are still working (I own some). Good luck finding that quality today. In effect, companies were smart enough to realize they don't have to bring costs down, they can just screw you on longevity and you'll have to come crawling back in a year or two. In effect, things are "cheaper" on the surface but more expensive over time. Not to mention the effect this has on landfills and pollution. It takes just as much gas to ship a 1970s stove as a 2020 one, but the 1970s one is still working and the 2020 one is replaced in three years.
IMO, this is driven by the middle class learning to optimize their spending. No more spending middle prices on mid-tier products when you can buy cheap garbage for things you don't care about in order to save up for the top shelf on the things you do. Suddenly, mid-price mid-quality items are unavailable at any price.
That's interesting, I've been renovating my home for the past two years and have had the exact opposite experience: I've been quite happy with my cheap pipe bender, cheap angle grinder, cheap hex crimper, cheap multipipe pliers as well as store brand consumables like hybrid glue, tape, drill bits and whatnot. For electrical work I do buy Knipex most of the time and for tools that get used heavily it's usually Bosch, plus I'm never going near cheap paint again, so I do see the advantage of trustworthy brands, but it's nice to know that for things that'll only see occasional use, you can get something okay-ish for a great price. Or for something completely different, I used to dabble in brewing, and all of the small commercial brewers I know are really happy with their bottom price Chinese fermentation tanks.
For some time now, for buying home improvement tools, I have followed the heuristic “buy the cheap one, then once it breaks, buy the expensive high-quality one.” I find that this helps make sure I don’t waste money on something I will only use once or twice.
There is likely a difference depending on the tool. My track saw is going to be Makita or similar, but my abrasive cutoff saw can be a Harbor Freight special.
I do the exact same thing (buy the cheaper versions most of the time).
My dad was in the trades and he bought "good stuff" for his actual trade, but also bought 'affordable' stuff he needed around the house.
The idea is that if you are using a tool every day, and they break on the job it is time, money, embarrassment. How do you tell a customer the cheap saw just broke and you need to get a new one?
The "pro" stuff costs a LOT more, it will outlast if used on a regular basis, but most home owners will not reach those limits.
Tools/electronics can easily be bought from reputable providers: eu.mouser.com,
tme.eu, uk.farnell.com, digikey.com, etc.. You can get a decent ratchet rj-45 crimp tool at around 40€ - like "Knipex 975110".
I suspect "middle ground" had a race to the bottom on price. I'm thinking for example of Sears "Craftsman" brand. Now that there are all these other big-box stores like Blowe's, Home Despot, they each have to have their own "house brand" that should have been the "middle ground" as well but, as I see it, have moved to lower and lower priced Chinese products.
I think what we're seeing is a nice metaphor for manufacturing in the 1st world in general.
Given the infamous bathtub curve and my personal desire to fix and maintain my tools, getting a cheaper one might be proper annoying. Saying that off-shore T15 soldering irons were a top notch quality often times.
However, for certain types of tools/devices - e.g. multimeter, SMPS (even wall charges) I'd not touch totally no brand. An example of middle ground multimeters: brymen - they are more expensive than UNI-T, better than Fluke price/feature wise and very solidly built. SMPS - meanwell: proper capacitors, creep distance, real copper transformers. Hand tools - (screwdrivers, spanners) - Wera.
It gets harder with heavier duty tools that have to do the metal (like really) - that leaves prosumer+ stuff only - Makita, DeWalt - or straight to the pro: Hilti, Fein.
No one seems to care about quality. It's all about price. In the "Cheap, fast, quality triangle - pick 2" society has moved hard towards cheap, fast. Companies don't even want to cater to anything else.
Perhaps that’s because quality is hard to measure in terms of numbers.
What gets measured gets optimized. And price is the easiest to measure.
Everything else is murky to measure, and often delayed as well (like how long a tool lasts, or what that food will do to your health, or what the company will do with your data once you’ve used their app for a year or two).
And on Amazon, what gets measured is impressions and ratings. Hence, as a seller, you get wiped out of you do not invest time and money into gaming the ratings. Honesty and quality not only does not pay, it also gets proactively penalized.
The “evil” here truly is Amazon, for they, in their walled garden, really do control what gets measured. They could prevent or penalize fake reviews. But they chose not to do so.
Actually, I wonder if Amazon could be sued by the FTC precisely because of this behavior. They are profiting from false advertising, namely false testimonials. If you did this on your own web shop, you’d certainly get sued.
You should try one of these P-38 can openers they use in the army [1]. A bit challenging to get the hang of, but they'll last the rest of your life and inexpensive to boot.
I noticed this too. I searched for a couple of xiaomi products on amazon but all it threw up were dubious knock offs.
Bizarrely if you search by price from highest to lowest looking for quality all you get is cheap looking products with no reviews that cost 150x the price of products with actual reviews for no discernible reason.
You need to use professional tools to get a professional result when precision counts. My last coax prep tool cost over a hundred bucks. It works only with one type of coax. Yet every time with professional tools the cable comes out perfect with as much waterproofing as one can get.
The Amazon bullshit tools I bought just made a mess.
Now, all the cheap Amazon wrenches and stuff? I leave em all over!
Check out Raptor Supplies. In general, look at B2B MRO distribution-scope suppliers. Be prepared to pay commensurately, or go low-tier and apply the heuristic already mentioned in this discussion: first time around, buy low-tier; when it breaks in an unfixable way, go B2B tier.
I personally go straight to B2B for anything safety-related like my PPE.
Last summer I bought a new Nikon DSLR from Amazon. Not the type of item where I thought they'd substitute scam items!
But when the box arrived, it was an opened box with an old used and abused Nikon DSLR, parts even missing! Wow.
At least the return was painless so I guess there's that.
I try hard to avoid Amazon now. I prioritize a locally owned store if possible, second option is a reputable specialty web store that specializes in the kind of item I want. Third option is the local big box chain stores, at least I can see what I'm getting.
Mostly I use Amazon only for books these days since I figure it'll be difficult to substitute a scam item for those. I hope.
> I use Amazon only for books these days since I figure it'll be difficult to substitute a scam item for those
Unfortunately you're wrong, it's a huge problem for books as well. No Starch Press already left Amazon because it was the only way to prevent fakes being sent out to customers buying the genuine book. Fakes including ones where the back cover wasn't printed or everything was printed black & white, low-quality paper etc.
As Amazon just mixes fake & genuine products because they say the same thing on the package it's impossible for both sellers and buyers to know what they'll get. You get what the person handling the package will draw next from the pile.
Sorry, books too. Last time I bought a book from amazon I ordered Milan Kundera’s Identity. On Amazon it looked like a Harper Perennial paperback, the same style, publisher and cover art as all his other books I have. What I received in the mail looked like a print-on-demand cheapo from Kinkos. The text was blurry and looked like it was from a dot matrix, the cover looked nothing the same. I couldn’t believe it. Of course I sent it back, and then I called a real book store and asked them to order it for me. To think, I used to dismissively say ‘no thanks’ when a shop didn’t have something I want in stock but offered to order it.
> I prioritize a locally owned store if possible, second option is a reputable specialty web store that specializes in the kind of item I want.
Serious question, how do you find reputable specialty web stores nowadays? (for items which are not your professional specialty, i.e. when you don't have direct knowledge of the market or trusted contacts that can recommend those for you). Trying to google for items of medium quality, you only get shady reseller shops that are as bad as Amazon third-party market, or worse.
Your local bougie salon - high-quality body products (bodywash, hairspray, etc)
Bed Bath and Beyond - bedding and bath products
Design within Reach - furniture
Ubiquiti - wireless APs, PoE switches, and the nicest Ethernet cables I've ever used
ProtectLi - firewalls
Crowdsupply - miscellaneous gadgets for supernerds
--
Best way to find a good quality product is to go to the hobbyist subreddit/community for said product and see what vendor people use. Also, r/BuyItForLife.
> What sort of issues? Security ones? That basically came down to a malicious engineer compromising their own infrastructure and then whistleblowing.
I don't know exactly. I believe they were trying to force cloud-signon for even locally managed devices, and since then I think I've picked up "used to be great" complaints that their quality and support is slipping (like they off-shored their engineering teams or something).
They're kinda pushing for that (like every other tech business, sadly - and I get it, everyone wants to have that sweet subscription model cash flows), but you still have an option to run a local controller without any cloud nonsense, just have to click some small link beneath some form.
If you get their Payboo card you don't have to pay tax. Took me like 2 minutes to sign up. They just closed the program but are re-opening it in January.
Opening a line of revolving credit, with a 29.99% interest rate, and a promise of cash back rewards that match the tax you pay (rewards which you technically are supposed to pay income tax on) isn't exactly the same as no sales tax. As as for "re-opening" the program, we'll see what they actually have for a new program when it is announced.
The interest rate doesn’t matter if you use the card as cash/debit by paying it off every month. And credit card rewards are not taxable because they are considered rebates by the IRS.
Yeah the prices are absolutely insane lmao. I've had good luck with CB2 and West Elm for more affordable but still decent furniture. But I'd get a flagship lounge chair from DWR
I agree the name is pretty terrible for a mass-market company because everybody associates it with price, but I believe the origin was due to the fact that they offered direct sales of products that were previously only available "to the trade" (aka professional designers/decorators).
Honestly, reddit. I moved to Berlin last year and wanted to buy some coffee making equipment. This was still the height of the pandemic, before vaccines were readily available here. So I hit up the local subreddits. And now I have a small list of sites where I can buy both good equipment as well as some great coffee. Of course now I can also go in person if I want to.
Biblio.com is what Amazon originally was — a database of books for sale by marketplace sellers — but specializes in human support of booksellers in exchange for a sales commission on proceeds from buyers, rather than in "become the Walmart of flea markets" like Amazon retail.
This has had a significant impact on my buying habits as well. For luxury items, I tend to order them from a large department store chain, which is pricey, but more predictable quality, and for cheap knock offs, I just go to the source and get them from AliExpress for 1/3 the price they are on Amazon. Nowadays, you see almost the exact same stuff there without some rando brand I've never heard of attached to it.
I intentionally bought a higher end, brand name, cable modem from Best Buy. It stopped working within 48h. Sadly the quality drop isn't limited to counterfeits, or big box retailers are selling them too.
Yeah, I don't mean that being name-brand ensures quality, but buying from a big-box or department store at least ensures that you're getting the thing you order. The whole point of brands from a consumer perspective is that they build a reputation on that brand, and you can choose to purchase things in the future based on past experience with the brand. Amazon breaks that because of the counterfeit and no-name-brand stuff.
I haven't had any scams, and I've done maybe 100 orders from there. I've had some things that are crap, and not worth the effort of returning, but that's significantly true with Amazon too. I originally started using them for ordering electronic parts, and eventually also started getting household goods there. Things do often take a few weeks to arrive though.
> Amazon has no interest in fixing this problem, because they know that well over half their "inventory" is now from knockoffs, IP theft and/or bait-and-switch scams.
That sounds very much like they'd have an interest in fixing the problem. Short-sightedness does not appear to be one of Amazons issues.
In the olden days, the seller was prominently listed in every Amazon listing, and you could click on a seller and browse their entire inventory along with reviews. AFAIK you can't do that anymore. They make it intentionally opaque who is actually selling or shipping.
Seller reviews are manipulated anyway. I once left a bad review of a seller regularly spamming me about my purchase months after I made it, and within a couple days (maybe faster) it was removed, replaced with someone else's review praising them for what I was complaining about. I have no trust in any ratings on Amazon, products or sellers.
I'd like to believe that all these bad practices will eventually result in their reputation going down and then losing significant market share.
However, I'm afraid our discussion here is far removed from the average consumer. I bet that the merchant info was made harder to find because so few people ever clicked it.
For most products I now prefer other sources where possible. However, the convenience still drives me there for many purchases. At the same time it anecdotally feels like I see more Amazon trucks come by my neighborhood. I'm sure most people fall into a spaces where they don't care enough and it's just too convenient to so in Amazon. Their great shipping and return logistics also make up for a lot. Their deliveries are so much faster and reliable than most competitors. I can order from a great vendor, but if they ship via FedEx it will take forever to get here and frequently the delivery date just changes to "pending" for weeks. This had never hairnet with Amazon. It might be fake, but I know when I get it and when it's ten stops away. If it's crap, I can drop it off without envelope or box next time I buy my groceries at Jeff's/Whole Foods.
It's shitty and maybe even offensive but so convenient.
Any company that is sufficiently large can (and should) be scrutinized, but at Amazon scale, arguments can easily be cherry picked to make whatever outcome you decided to be the truth look like the truth.
I could for example bring forth the times some merchant attempted to talk me out of filing a complaint, because, apparently those have very real implications very quickly, with fines and restrictions being imposed by Amazon, which makes a lot of sense to me, considering Amazon is basically letting those vendors play with their "credit score" of trust.
But alas, pretending that I know this to be more than anecdotal evidence, I will not.
I think the things I raised are problems independent of scale. Amazon deemphasizes the merchant and wants to own the shopper relationship, then turned around and tried to claim that they're not liable for the goods they sell.
Amazon's own retail operations ("sold and shipped by Amazon.com") are simply a mechanism to keep people paying for recurring Amazon Prime subscriptions. Retail profit margins are 2% to 4%, and Amazon has expanded beyond it to businesses with much higher profit margins such as AWS, media (music/tv/movies), logistics, and as a platform for other sellers.
Amazon's market cap is $1.7T, and Walmart's is $391B. And Walmart's retail business is much larger than Amazon's. Compared to Amazon's non retail businesses, Amazon's retail business is worth only as much as it keeps people subscribed to Amazon prime.
Amazon chose to get deep into bed with China. This is part and parcel of favoring the Chinese vendors that sell on your platform. Just be glad there haven't been any reports of toys painted with lead (yet).
I had predicted a while ago that the end goal for Amazon's retail division will be to sell only Amazon's own goods and services, and I still stand by it. We may not see it for a long time, but let's face it Amazon isn't what it is today because it sells cheap Chinese knockoffs. The real money is in grocery delivery, pharmacy, Prime Video, Kindle, Audible, Fire Tablets, the Echo ecosystem, Ring. They could even start a courier service on the back of their global logistics empire and compete with FedEx/UPS.
This is an interesting and possibly prescient take. They could announce a crackdown tomorrow on all fake sellers and basically sell 2/3rds of the appliances in America themselves overnight. OTOH then they'd be on the hook for the reliability of their products. And that's not been their methodology so far (excluding acquisitions like Whole Foods and Ring). But it's interesting..
10 to 5 years ago a bought a lot from Amazon, I had packages in flight most of the time. Today it is close to nil.
It has been replaced by specialized domestic shops: electronics, t-shirts, pants, lamps, carpets, bike parts, health items, food, etc. Many shops are small and located "in the sticks".
5 years ago I thought Amazon would kill them. Today it's Amazon that's gone from my shopping.
Also at least in germany, they teamed up with scam comparison sites (they present their "winners" on amazon.de and get a reduced affiliate fee). The kind of sites claiming to do tests and reviews but in the end just comparing the stats the chinese manufacturer puts into the description. Its really frustating to find anything of value, and the search engine gets dumber and dumber every week it seems as well.
I was recently looking for some Goodyear welt boots and a amazon suggestion popped up in the search feed. I did click it to see what they looked like but right away though no way I would buy a nice boot from Amazon I doubt they would actually be Goodyear welt boots. This should concern amazon. If I am afraid to buy something then they are losing money. You would think they would want to bolster public trust in them.
I love Goodyear welt boots. I tend to only buy at Nordstrom anniversary sales, where boots such as 1000 Mile Wolverine or Redwing are often 30%+ off. I’m sure there’s cheaper deals for same brands, but the return policy makes it worth it in rare event of a defect. Now I just need to find a new cobbler—-mine closed shop during pandemic.
I’d add the word “yet” to the end of this statement. Many people I know have started to buy from online places like Target, Walmart, Best Buy, Newegg, and B&H Photo when possible, and only use Amazon in a time crunch or when the product can’t be found in stock.
I would encourage everyone who is frustrated by this Amazon problem to not only do the same, but also to encourage your friends to do so as well..
>I wish I could say I stopped buying things off Amazon for ethical reasons, but the truth is, I stopped buying because if you look closely at the reviews, you realize that almost everything for sale there is now a scam or a knock-off.
It's more out of inconvenience than ethics. You don't stop buying off of Amazon because scammers are selling on it, you stop buying off Amazon because you become the victim of knockoff scams.
As in, the scammers could be scamming everyone but you but you'd still use it.
I haven't given up on Amazon by any stretch, but I have started checking manufacturer's web sites for things I had previously purchased on Amazon. I've gone so far as to start ordering some of the cheaper stuff from Walmart. Figure if it's going to be cheap stuff, it might as well be curated cheap stuff.
Funny enough, ebooks is probably where I've stayed the most solidly on Amazon.
I gave up on Amazon some time ago and just use aliexpress now. Might as well remove some of the middle men and amazon is basically "everything made in china" anyhow.
I've been burned a few times with amazon sending me made in china knockoffs, or sending me things via "prime" that take as long as aliexpress.
I bought fake Scotch-Brite sponges, fake Brawny paper towels and Gildan t-shirts that bled like crazy and faded after one wash. I now refuse shop at Amazon.
Scamazon, Wak-Mart, and Turget likely facilitate the sale of shoddy goods because consumers need to repurchase them when they break and overall that makes them higher profits. I've had to buy room fans almost every year because that's really the only local option I have now at big box stores near me, The smaller shops are all closed now.
This is why we can't allow the concept of mom-and-pop shops to die off... Quality of consumer goods should always outrank price in terms of importance, that's also possibly why many of the largest outlets are resorting to enabling fake and misleading reviews.
Yeah, the problem is Mom-and-pop shops just can't survive on the customers who are willing to spend extra to make sure they get a quality product. It's not just that there aren't enough people in this country who're willing to pay extra... it's that you can't even get those quality products anymore. Stuff made ten years ago in every category from mattresses to washing machines is more durable and will last longer than stuff made today. A mom & pop shop has to find and source stuff that's not garbage, and hope people are willing to shell out extra for it, but where can they even get the inventory? Most of the quality manufacturers have been put out of business by the tidal wave of Chinese-made garbage, and the few that haven't still source most of their parts from China, which makes them less reliable than they were even a few years ago.
What mom and pop shops are you going to? Seriously, if you peruse Aliexpress for a bit you will see that every “local” store has all the same junk. It’s not like John Mitchell from Wilmington Wisconsin is doing anything other than sourcing from the same wholesalers.
I mean, that's kind of what I'm saying. It's hard for local stores to find consumer goods that aren't junk quality. Portland, Oregon where I live does have one of the better local economies for well sourced / locally produced stuff, e.g. we still have glass manufacturers, make a lot of shoes, and anything made out of wood, pretty much all your furnishings and most of your food you can buy from local makers and growers. And there are small shops that are still sort of affordable where you can get quality stuff. But if you want to buy a can opener, yeah, you can either go spend $100 at William Sonoma for one made out of titanium, or go buy one at Kroger that'll break in a day. Shit outta luck.
[Edit] I feel like here's a good place to sing the praises of my made-in-America, wool and cotton non-offgassing mattress. https://joybeds.com ...I think I was order #700 or something, and I feel like they're not getting the love they deserve. I'm in no way associated with this company but talking about finding quality goods and buying locally, it was really hard to even find this company, and felt like I was taking a big risk buying it online from a manufacturer with so few sales. We need more of this.
Regarding your last remark, and circling back to the main article: now the review market and culture is broken as well. Even when legitimate companies come on line, it's difficult to know about them because they don't get reviewed, and if they do, you never know if there's some financial conflict of interest, or if the reviews are legitimate, or what. If they do get reviewed, there's no follow-through to see if quality has improved or declined, etc.
It's remarkable how, when information is so much more accessible, it's become useless by deception and fraud.
It's especially sad in that it affects companies trying to establish a foothold by providing good business.
This, exactly. The massive flood of fake online reviews, not to mention the broken weighting systems that enhance the effect by grading products on a curve, has created a situation that's stacked against legitimate businesses. Not only are scammers filling their own products with fake positive reviews, they're also spamming real businesses with negative ones.
One of the weirdest things that happened to me this year: I received a book from Amazon I hadn't ordered. It was addressed to me at my house, apparently printed off an Amazon press in Poland, but listed by a "company" in Vietnam. It was called "Daily Business Plan" or something, with a generic stock photo on the cover. Inside, every page was the same - blank except for lined horizontal rules and the days of the week, Monday through Sunday. There were no dates, no year, no page numbers. No bibliographic page. I let Amazon know about it. I can only assume that the seller was trying some kind of scam to write "verified buyer" reviews for themselves...
I shop at Target online regularly. I don’t see very many products being sold by 3rd party sellers. If I did start seeing them, I would slowly move on to another online merchant like I did with Amazon.
This is a reason I invested heavily in Target. They seem to have a much better formula for vetting and regulating third party sellers, and they've invested a lot in building up a marketplace that's somewhat more trustworthy.
It is unfortunate that Target even got into the 3rd party retailer game, as customers are now at risk of Target starting to commingle inventory like Amazon.
But at least Target and Walmart allow you to filter search results for items sold only by Target and Walmart, hopefully restricting to items sourced directly by Target and Walmart.
It would not matter, but Amazon used to advertise that they commingle, so I know they do, whereas I do not know for sure if Walmart and Target do or do not.
Lasko fans are the way to go. I have one of their utility fans that is good for continuous duty, it's lasted 10 years and shows no signs of quitting. I got mine on amazon but I've seen them in hardware stores too.
I don't understand what Amazon thinks it's doing with its legions of data scientists, analysts, product managers and engineers that they consider so much more important than solving this problem, which will destroy their reputation long-term and create space for a competitor.
At this rate, Amazon will be on its way to becoming Yelp -- untrusted, irrelevant, ultimately deserted.
Ensuring a competitor can’t arise in other ways? Unlike Yelp, Amazon has oodles of expensive and difficult-to-replicate physical infrastructure, hordes of low-level staff, exclusive supply contracts aplenty, enough cash reserves to price-dump anybody into oblivion, and probably many other things I don’t even know I don’t know about.
Competition only works when barriers to entry are absent, small, or at least surmountable. “Disruption” is one way to circumvent that, but it isn’t magic, either.
I’m sure the brick and mortar stores felt similar before Amazon came and ate their lunch. Expensive and difficult to replicate infrastructure is a protective measure until it suddenly becomes a millstone around your neck due to its cost and inertia.
On the other hand customer trust is also a great moat to protect you from being usurped, and no company will ever come to rue having too much consumer trust. Amazon is foolish to spend this consumer trust down for increased profits.
They don't even have to spend cash to price-dump. Wallyworld and the membership warehouses get cheap prices by dangling huge purchase orders in front of companies. "We can always go to your competitor" is the unspoken threat.
> Amazon has oodles of expensive and difficult-to-replicate physical infrastructure, hordes of low-level staff, exclusive supply contracts aplenty, enough cash reserves to price-dump anybody into oblivion, and probably many other things I don’t even know I don’t know about.
The playbook to disrupt this was made clear when AirBNB disrupted, or at least bit a good chunk out of, the hotel industry, which could have been described in very similar terms. And they didn't have to replicate any of their physical infrastructure to do it.
Shopify, BigCommerce, and similar players are already doing it to Amazon. I predict this trend will continue.
Same for YouTube. they allow blatant crypto scam videos to run (such as videos impersonating famous people like Michael Saylor) yet none of their hundreds of highly paid engineers are able to do anything even though it is such a blatant fraud and people are losing a lot of money. It's like "who cares if users are being ripped off. sucks for them. not our responsibility." Unless a law is passed holding these companies accountable, little will change.
> yet none of their hundreds of highly paid engineers are able to do anything
Moderation doesn't scale well, so hundreds of engineers don't go very far even if you put them all on moderation. Google doesn't like to put money on anything that can't be automated (even when it's the appropriate, like customer service), hence you see only ML filters that of course can't tell the difference.
Also, careful what you wish for. As we've seen, one man's moderation is another man's 1A violation. I'd much more prefer comments, downvotes and user defined filters to do the accountability, than a guaranteed-shitty DOA moderation/truth keeper team. I worry much more about YT's slow creep towards a fully auto-play, advertiser friendly TV equivalent.
Yes it does when it comes to free speech. What gives you the impression that it doesn't? I mean it might not be good for your stocks, but companies have most of the same free speech rights that a regular person has.
I get unusually annoyed by fake movie trailers. The type that edit together random scenes from previous movies and get 17M views.
Like… wtf. If an actual content creator uploads something they filmed in their own garage but there’s a sliver of a poster in the background with Mickey Mouse in it, it’s instantly flagged as a copyright violation.
Straight up reposting of 5 minutes of a movie pretending I be a new one? Fine, go ahead…
Lots of ad dollars to be made on 17M views so I'm not surprised they really take their time to carefully consider and weigh up the opposing arguments of removal, free speech and what not /s
Meanwhile the one with 200 views gets their channel banned along with their Google account.
Assuming this is the person's first viral video and they have no affiliate contract yet, do they get something in retrospective?
And if someone is a partner, how much money would they make just by the views? Let's exclude followers etc.
Do they get something for just the views or do they have to have ads in the video?
Thank god I am not the only one experiencing this.
I am generally interested in space related subjects, but my feed is constantly full of fake 'live' SpaceX and Elon Musk videos. These are just old SpaceX streams overlayed with crypto scams.
No matter how often I report these videos as misleading, the keep being recommended to me. At the beginning, reporting a video would make it disappear from my feed instantly, but now, even after reporting the video stays in my feed. My guess is that the report/view ratio of my account is probably so bad now that Youtube is no longer processing my reports as trustworthy.
Those hundreds of fake reviews are a feature, not a bug for Amazon. They drive sales. And when the chickens come home to roost, as you say, Amazon will probably figure out a completely different trick to juice sales.
In the short term Amazon may benefit from this. But the fake reviews, throw-away brands, and counterfeit items are gradually corroding Amazon's credibility and brand identity among customers. This is the first year I've heard family members (who are frequent Amazon customers) complaining about these kinds of issues.
But the fake reviews, throw-away brands, and counterfeit items are gradually corroding Amazon's credibility and brand identity among customers.
Amazon are very good at making money. This is not a problem for them; it's an opportunity.
Before Amazon lose all their credibility they'll introduce something like "Amazon Assured" that sells customers a guaranteed real item. They'll charge sellers for the privilege of having the "assured" status on the product page, and make filtering by assured status something that's only accessible to Amazon Prime users.
Users will believe Amazon are doing this to protect them.
I don't get the implied scorn. Isn't reliable information valuable? Worth paying for?
It sounds like you think this information should be priced in. I'm accustomed to that as well, since it has mostly been the commercial default for most of my life, but maybe unbundling it is worth a shot.
After all, "Consumer Reports" isn't free either, and caveat emptor has forever been the law of the market.
By the time the negative long term effects are felt, the executives responsible for the short term juicing will have extracted massive personal wealth.
And they enable the competition - Aliexpress has the exact same stuff as Amazon now, but at cheaper prices. And they are working very much on the long shipping times with warehouses around the world. Sure, the service and support is far removed from Amazon, but then prices for the same crap are often 50% less. Also to me it seems they are much harder on cheating sellers.
And Aliexpress also just refund you money if target delivery time of NN days run out. And then you get your afforable chinese crap for free with no requirement to ship it back to Aliexpress.
Indeed. As much as few I know trust Yelp, there really isn't anything close to an effective alternative, except for maybe the Uber Eats ratings.
This is why this is not a problem for Amazon. Removing Amazon from my life would require substantially restructuring it and losing a lot more time procuring goods. Have I been burned a few times by shoddy goods? Yes, the alternative is spending time in stores or spending days waiting for packages. I can order something in the morning and have it delivered by the evening.
FWIW, I've dropped Amazon and it was mostly just a change of habit. After becoming familiar with other options, it has been just as easy to order (and better in other ways).
It depends on what I'm looking for. People I know, local news, objective data, just trying different places until I find one I like. There are no great answers.
I think it's a question of incentives. For scammers, 100% of their success is dependent on beating the review system. For Amazon, losing the battle will cost them much less than 100% of their profits.
I'm no genius but it would seem like with some human trainers and some smart AI algorithms this could all be fixed fairly rapidly. Maybe I just don't understand machine learning well enough :)
Personally experienced this. I bookmarked a keyboard I was interested in purchasing in a month or so. When I went back it was a completely different item with the same reviews. Just today in fact, I was looking for an office chair seat cushion and found a very telling reddit comment from 3 years ago[1].
I know Amazon has a bulletproof return policy for the most part but I don't want to be hassled with returning everything. This just results in me just not using Amazon. You may be able to justify it for large purchases because of Amazon's return policy but for something as mundane as a can opener or seat cushion? Just shop elsewhere.
I received a different bike light than I ordered on Amazon (a literal Chinese knockoff) and submitted it for a replacement because it worked poorly. What I got back was another Chinese not-what-I-ordered knockoff, but it worked well... So I kept it.
Even though I came out happy it further inched me to my current position of "never buy from Amazon".
No, because some minimum wage worker has to unpack it. You don't tskr revenge on the people responsible, but on a poor sob that just wanted to earn a living.
> Machine learning algorithms are getting sophisticated enough to figure out whether a batch of 100 reviews is mostly talking about can openers or garlic.
This barely needs ML. Amazon knows, a priori, what product the reviews were for. The fact that garlic reviews can be repurposed for can openers, regardless of their actual text, is the problem.
The real underlying problem is wrong incentives. Amazon makes money when you buy that crappy can opener.
how do you clarify a valid product update? Aeropress changed the plastic used at some point in ~2013 but didn't publicize it widely. Should the Amazon listing start over from scratch for that type of change?
Apple reviews start over unless you explicitly ask for all versions. This is mildly obnoxious but works okay. Amazon could easily show reviews for the current product and a nice display of predecessor products and their reviews.
This would only work with the assumption that the owners of the product listing would update the version of the product in good faith. It would only be in their interest to do so if the current version of the project would get better reviews than the older version, and what I would imagine normally happens is the old version is made better to get better reviews and is then modified to be cheaper and worse later on.
Huh? If someone acquires a garlic listing and uses it to sell can openers without updating the listing, it won’t work, because everyone placing orders will think they’re buying garlic, not can openers. The scam only works because the listing matches (approximately, anyway) the sold product. If you start sending can openers labeled as garlic to customers, your return rate will be very high and there won’t be any profit.
Big-name companies have been caught putting out top-performing SSDs and then after the reviews are out, silently shipping drives with worse flash chips, worse controllers, no DRAM cache, etc. Review sites know it happens but don't call it out because then they won't get pre-embargo access to hardware or the company will demand the hardware back. Review sites only really work because they're able to amass a substantial amount of hardware; if everything has to be returned, they can't run comparison tests and the like.
And then you have organizations like the Wirecutter who review vacuum cleaners and include a vacuum one of their staff bought 6 years ago alongside currently sold models.
....and if they'd done the slightest bit of homework they'd know that the company had moved production of that specific model to a different country and cheapened all the materials.
It's like buying a ~2001MY Mercedes because your 1985 E-class was well built. The early 2000's, Mercedes was cranking out cheaply designed/built crap.
Yeah, it's a pity. It use to be a no-brainer shopping at Amazon. But now, I waste more time sifting through a bunch of cheaply made home goods that I'm just more inclined to look for sturdy, well-made products elsewhere.
Also, it seems like they mix the inventory from different vendors, so it ends up being a crap shoot whether you get the original, or a knock-off, and the reviews reflect that.
>Also, it seems like they mix the inventory from different vendors, so it ends up being a crap shoot whether you get the original, or a knock-off, and the reviews reflect that.
I've noticed this so many times. I've stopped buying any sort of health products like supplements or even electric toothbrush heads from Amazon. It scares me seeing reviews about fake products in stuff like that
Yeah, recently I wanted a second charger for my thinkpad. I ended up just buying it on lenovo.com, because I had 0 faith in actually getting a real product from amazon, especially in that category
It feels like Amazon is at a place where eBay was about, what, a decade ago? At least from a shopper point of view. In other words it feels like you're overwhelmed by choice but much of that choice makes you feel uneasy.
It seems to be full of dodgy sellers using questionable practices like those described in the post, the feedback (review) system is utterly broken, getting in touch with a real person is near impossible, sellers are using bots to game prices and the search system.
And (AFAIA) Amazon still doesn't use 3d Secure / Verified by Visa? Perhaps this is a sweetheart deal from the card schemes, given they're so big, or do the issuers not want to take the liability shift? There's something not quite right here.
Anyway, I don't know if eBay actually solved any of the problems or if most of the dodgy sellers just moved to Amazon.
Amazon is completely and utterly flooded with companies that sound like they fell right out of a random string generator. If you'd like a bedside alarm clock for example, you have to sift through pages and pages of nonsense "brands" like Tisaika, Keniy, Noklead, Yissvic, Anjank, Coulax, Famicozy, Noklead, Liorque, Jiemei, Paladone, Yzzseason, Tokincen, Hopsem, Mosuo and Moxtoy.
It is now incredibly difficult to find products by reputable brands that you stand a chance of recognising, and if you do, they are probably knock-offs too.
I suspect they don't do 3-D Secure because they're storing the cards on the first transaction.
Subsequent sales are marked "card on file" which is priced in its own way and often doesn't require the same info (for example, no CVV, but often also no 3-D Secure) I wonder if they're willing to eat the higher cost of a non-3-D Secure initial transaction for the appearance of frictionlessness? Or that their volume is so huge they can demand concessions for rates?
We had a power strip catch fire. I left a review with a photo of the scorched strip and started getting bombarded with off-Amazon contact requests to "make it right" if I'd take the photo down.
I haven’t personally had any of these problems with Amazon, other than prices being higher for any name brand household items than if you just get them at a local supermarket or retail store. But from people online who do experience these issues with Amazon, I’ve heard some sentiment that eBay is actually better now in this regard.
It's been a while since I've used sort by average customer review. Only useful sorts are "featured" or possibly price if you put in some filter parameters on the side. Anything else is just asking for hot garbage.
There are few things that I buy from amazon now that aren't shipped and sold by amazon. I just don't trust third party sellers unless it's a 'direct' seller aka the company making the product. Almost would prefer if amazon would just remove all third party sellers but I guess they need to maintain their reputation of being the everything store.
This depends on the item. Items that just use a UPC do get comingled, products that use an Amazon-specific barcode like an X00 do not, and this is required for some types of products (eg food or anything with an expiration date)
As I understand it, anything used or returned will also get an LPN barcode, which tracks that specific unit.
I have been fighting with Amazon on a review for a product I bought and returned for weeks now.
The manufacture is trying to bribe me to remove my review (offering me multiple times what I paid for it at this point). I have been trying to update my review to reflect that but it keeps being denied but I am not being told why.
It is very frustrating that these companies are able to deceive customers through reviews.
I bought a gaming mouse where the middle button could never be pressed in combinaison with another. It turns out there was a firmware update to fix that. And of course it only runs on MS Windows.
My review stating this was blocked. I made appeal multiple times and Amazon simply ignored me.
Last time I checked the listing had a perfect 5 star rating...
I had the same experience when I received a gift card with my item imploring me to leave a good review. Mentioning this "incentive" in the review got it blocked by Amazon.
Anything related to the seller is not accepted as part of the product review (which makes some sense in most cases, since one product can be offered by multiple sellers).
in cases of review fraud that rule doesn't make sense though IMO, since no matter who's selling it, it's directly related to the rating of the article presented
There are certain things you're not allowed to mention. For example, anything related to shipping speed or delivery issues. Even if the item was shipped direct by the seller.
Or they just remove it silently (no notification) and then you try to post and it says "not accepting reviews from this account".
In my case I was pissed off about these fake battery capacities and I posted evidence (current draws with images) and yeah...
Similarly I bought the same replacement battery for a Lenovo laptop and all 3 times (from different companies including Amazon) I got fake ones (fake capacity).
It is unfortunate how convenient Amazon is though. The lockers and 1 day shipping.
I'm sure! I have thought about this when reading reviews for products. Often they have very similar language used... Pointing out how specific things about the item are really great etc.
This reminds me of multiple websites. websites that sells specialized items in their niche.
their products, all different companies have stellar reviews left in their website via third party software.
but you can easily tell that those reviews have to be fake. even though they are verified.
you can easily tell fake reviews, its like theyre not even trying to write a fake review.
even more hilarious is they sometimes accidentally write a review for the wrong product for the wrong company
the thing that worries me is this makes me question if the product that i am buying is actually legit. like is this product actually safe as they say it is and is actually non-toxic to a human’s body
It gets worse. Amazon mixes products from different third party vendors in its marketplace for the same product listing. So even if you find a listing for a brand item with clean reviews which actually pertain to the item in question, you could still very well end up with a cheap low quality knock off when you order it.
They use blended inventory to ship the item faster (cheaper). And yes, this means that the "Sold and Shipped from Amazon" badge doesn't mean shit. You're actually better off buying from someone who ships it themselves, because its their reputation on the line.
I don’t get why we need to have good ratings and reviews at all.
Why not only allow bad ratings (eg a simple thumbs down) and reviews, then run some ML to detect and normalize semantic patterns (“short battery life”), and then word-cloud or summarize those.
Users could then sort ratings ascendingly from least number of bad ratings and scan the semantic patterns.
Adversarial reviews. The problem isn't just fake positive reviews. The other problem is fake negative reviews left by competitors, which is already a problem on Amazon. Most 1-star reviews are either stupid & irrelevant (it arrived a day late, ONE STAR! and so forth), or fake.
I've seen some categories of products with lots of obviously fake reviews claiming safety issues. These were on every single product I could find, so clearly all the manufacturers were targeting each other.
The 2-4 star range has historically been the most reliable, but fake review factories got wise to that a few years ago and will now often intentionally leave a minor gripe in their fake positive reviews to make them seem more authentic.
A better solution is to publish the % return rates for products and forget about reviews. You can even normalise that into a 5-star rating by product category, e.g., "Here are the top 5 products similar to this one, with average return rate of 1%. The product you are viewing has a return rate of 15%".
With low-friction return reason categories you could even classify high return rates for things like "doesn't look like the photos", "poor quality", "smaller than expected", etc. Unfortunately Amazon's return reasons are variable-friction, so their data on this will be biased, although it might be consistently biased across product groups.
I do like the word cloud idea - but pulled from optional free-text return reasons instead of reviews.
This doesn't solve the "it broke after 2 years" problem, but neither does the current review system.
With the amount of money at play, I think return based ranking will pretty quickly result in adversarial return.
The problem is people will do anything for money. Both on the seller side, and on the (fake) buyer/reviewer side.
I recently came across site that's sort of "mechanical turk for scalping", and it was eye opening. IIRC helping to scalp a PS5 would earn 200 in commission.
A vendor with bad ratings in that system could just keep creating new product pages to clean their reputation. There's no incentive to have long-lived product pages.
This is a separate problem Amazon needs to sort out. Far too many duplicate products with a different ASIN. They could easily fix that with manual inventory checking, but they don't. The same process would fix the bait-and-switch problem.
I was in the market for a wood filing cabinet. The picture was something I wanted and it had good reviews. When you read the reviews in detail they start talking about using it as a kitchen island. Hmm
...OK. then you look at customer pictures and it's a metal rack.
Anyways. I buy online from Walmart or Target first if I can. Walmart seems to automatically price match Amazon, and 0 chance of fakes due to comingling or expired products due to comingling (sellers buy soon to expire products on the cheap, send it to Amazon and it gets mixed with everything else)
Internet companies and their defenders sometimes insist that this kind of problem is impossible to solve—that the scale of the web makes a certain amount of bad behavior impossible to stop.
Impossible? Which Internet companies have made such a claim?
And who is their “defenders” that feels so compelled to step for the likes of Amazon?
All of them? Not in those words, because "impossible" is a term a corporate PR machine will not want to throw around, but you will see the phrase "a very hard problem" quite often. And for a good reason.
Add the facts that norms vary across cultures, and that laws vary across jurisdictions. But this only relates to user-generated content. Amazon is allowing bait-and-switch across the board, with physical products and their categories. That's not a problem with content moderation, Amazon has a problem with accountability.
Why would they? The average consumer doesn’t even know what they are and assumes if they have a bad experience with a highly rated product it’s a one-off. I’ve told several friends and family I’ll only use Amazon as a last resort at this point. When they ask why and I explain the bait and switch thing (among many other questionable business practices) they are always shocked to hear that’s a thing.
Yep. I’ve completely stopped using Amazon and I plan on cancelling Prime soon. The only thing I still sometimes buy on Amazon is books.
At this point I only buy things directly from the manufacturer or a listed authorized specialist retailer, and only from brands I have strong evidence are BIFL quality. So much of the stuff in the world is garbage.
The one thing I’ve yet to find BIFL quality options is daily wear clothing. At least some clothing articles do have options though.
Amazon is just a dumping ground for the worst of Chinese garbage. Almost nothing on the site is of even acceptable quality. It’s really unfortunate, I used to love using Amazon as a customer.
Amazon makes it very hard to flag listings that have this problem and they often take no action when you do report it.
I recently complained to Amazon about some flagrantly irrelevant 5-star reviews on wireless headphones that were actually reviews for backpacks or CDs. It took about a month and numerous, numerous emails to different places to get them to deal with it.
For most categories and products, if they just disallowed the seller from changing the GTIN, and showed the GTIN descriptive wording in the listing, this would be solved.
That would be very nice to have. However, in case you are unaware you can sort by most recent reviews although that is not a perfect solution by any means.
I try to only buy things with recognizable brand names on Amazon. The premium you pay to an American intermediary for crap that was ultimately produced in China anyway is the cost of quality control.
I agree it's a huge problem. However, I don't think the solution is censorship by tech oligarchs. A fake review is still speech, and if you believe in free speech and free expression as a social (not legal) principle, I don't see how you can support Jeff Bezos deciding which speech you are and are not allowed to see. The solution to harmful speech (which fake reviews are) is more speech, not censorship.
"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to my death your right to mislead people with fake reviews"
Amazon has now removed the reviews from the first link, but I found one where the reviews are for glassware. Every review has a 'report abuse' button, but there is nowhere for me to report the product on the page.
I use ReviewMeta but unfortunately it doesn't appear to be working for these.
I think 4 star reviews are generally helpful as well, because these cheating companies only want and pay for 5 star reviews. Knowing that, basically everything other than 5 is generally pretty honest.
A bad sign is when a product has only 1 star and 5 star reviews.
Amazon has no interest in fixing this problem, because they know that well over half their "inventory" is now from knockoffs, IP theft and/or bait-and-switch scams. it's almost impossible to find items there anymore that are not fake, whether it's re-packaged hard drives or "pyrex" bowls that explode in the microwave.
One way to look at this, and the way I think Amazon must look at it, is that it's not any worse than a third world night market. The attitude of vendors in, e.g. Phnom Penh or Mexico City markets is that the very fact that stupid Americans think they're going to get "real" goods just proves how much they deserve to be scammed. Amazon is actually helping baffled Americans to finally understand what the third world has always known - unboxing is going to be disappointing. Everything you think is affordable is probably fake, and you can't trust the packaging. Only the rich get actual brand products. As America degrades, people will start to get more savvy and more cynical about this, but right now it's still a newish phenomenon and people are shocked, shocked! to find out the kids toys they bought are full of toxic chemicals that we ourselves shipped overseas for burial or "recycling".