The thing I don't get about Amazon is they've allowed entire categories of products to become unbuyable from their site. Batteries? Every review seems to indicate what's sold is some substandard knock-off. Medical products like thermometers? They're all reviews from people who got the product for free in exchange for writing a review. Their brand is rapidly being tarnished in my view.
It's really an awful process buying a lot of items nowadays. It seems like the exact same item will be sold under 30 different brands with different star levels, with many reviews full of the "free product" in for honest (usually 5 star) reviews.
There are approximately 5 actually different adapters sold under maybe 50+ brands, and all the reviews are so padded with 5* free reviews, it's tough to know which ones are crap and which are good.
Reviews aren't as important for retailers like Wal-Mart that curate their products. But for a marketplace like Amazon, reviews are absolutely critical to prevent scams. I hope Amazon realizes the enormity of this issue and is working on it.
I believe Amazon should:
1. Fix the reviews. Disallow giving items for free or reduced prices in exchange for reviews. This may have worked originally for books, but any benefit received now is far out shadowed by the negatives. Alternatively, just limit it to 5 total free / reduced reviews per product to limit the negative effect. Police this policy heavily.
2. For the duplicate products (where one identical product is sold under 10 different brands, like in the travel adapter example above): Group the products together, and choose the brand like you might choose the color or size on a t-shirt. I recognize that there isn't a UPC numbering system that makes this easy - but there are probably only a few thousand items required to group together to make the buying process a lot easier for a large percentage of purchases.
Sorry I don't understand your point about travel adapters.
1. I go to your link
2. "Oh cool, there's a lot of travel adapters"
3. Filter by free shipping
4 (optional). See the top 2 are Sponsored, which makes me less likely to trust them, so ignore them. [NOTE: This is similar behaviour to using ANY search engine]
6. Dismiss #2 because it's twice the cost of the other ones and has lower reviews
7A. Pick #3 because it's a "best seller" - which means it has been vetted by other customers
7B. Pick #1 because it looks the nicest
Both have mostly good reviews with some bad ones, but hey it's a 7 dollar piece of plastic that tries to work in 150 different countries, it's not going to be perfect.
What is so customer unfriendly about this process?
Oh and by the way, this is a POWER user process who really wants to get the best one. A layperson could have just as easily just went straight for the "Best seller" and been satisfied.
About a year ago, I purchased one of the bestsellers on German Amazon (which basically look the same as the bestsellers on the US store). It is flimsy, the springs on one connector are likely to break after using them a few times. The worst thing: one of the connectors didn't retract fully when not in use and was connected to live AC. Yikes! It had tons of great reviews both on the German and on the US store, including ones were you could see the bad construction in the customer photos. After looking closely at them, one of the three-star reviews casually mentioned sparks when used in one configuration...
I called customer support and wrote to the responsible regulatory body in Germany. This specific model is not available anymore. A dozen identical looking still are.
In the end I used one that is three times as expensive made by a reputable company.
1. Ask for referral from people your trust, like your friends.
2. Buy locally in a physical store with a good return policy.
3. Buy from brands you trust.
It used to be Walmart, now it's Amazon; people will impoverish their local economy to save 50 cents.
Things I bought recently:
1. A rake. I chose the 5$ more expensive one that looked more sturdy and was made in Canada (where I live) instead of China.
2. A old generation smartphone. I chose Motorola G because it's a well-known brand and it had good reviews when it launched, two years ago. It's also got one of the longest battery time.
3. Jeans. I bought Lois Jeans at a local store because it's the last barnd I know of that is still made in Quebec.
It's hard to know of something is more expensive for the sake of being more expensive or because it is actually higher quality.
I once bought a higher end item because I expected it to be good quality. Ended up being one of the poorest quality items I ever bought, replaced it with something that cost 1/4th the price and is better quality.
I have a $200 phone. $600 phones also exist but the $200 does everything l need it to do perfectly. The expensive option isn't better for my needs.
I don't know. Whenever I now see a few identical looking things sold by multiple brands nobody has ever heard of with a lot of positive reviews I close the tab and use some other store. It's just too much work to shift through all the potentially dangerous crap to find the one usable item they have listed. I can't be the only one.
If I actually want the cheap stuff I can go to Aliexpress on my own and pay half the price.
That 7 piece of plastic can destroy a 600$ phone. The risk might be a reasonable tradeoff, but you see vastly more junk at Amazon than say Best Buy.
This means Amazon is fine for brand name stuff (PS4), or low risk stuff (Travel Pillow, Book). But, for a huge range of things you really can't tell if something is low cost, or low quality.
Which can start a fire, destroy a phone or laptop, etc. I think we need to take these things a bit more seriously. I usually just buy something from an US brick and mortar, at least then I know the UL tag is real and someone vetted this somewhere.
Heck, this problem even extends to usb cables. There's a google engineer who reviews USB-C cables after people started complaining about them damaging Nexus phones. I think you're being flippant about a real problem here. Unregulated Chinese manufacturers gaming the system with junk is not something we should be ignoring.
> Which can start a fire, destroy a phone or laptop, etc.
And will the insurance company say when they find out that the fire started from the junk metal-and-plastic piece you shoved into the socket?
Even if they don't know or care right now, they will in the future if (or when) it becomes a problem.
> There's a google engineer who reviews USB-C cables
There's that. We clearly need some third party testing these products. UL and CE tags receive little or no verification. The results of said testing was that the majority of cables could possibly damage your phone, if I recall correctly.
Take a look at the best selling products in the "Laptop Chargers & Adapters" category. Many are obviously fakes and some fakes have better reviews than the real ones.
I work at Data Alchemy. We're an Amazon Merchant who runs our system on a search engine, built by search engineers who used to be at Looksmart and Loggly. Amazon does merge ASINs occasionally to help improve quality of listings (and merging comments), but we've found focusing the algos on the listings that both sell well and get a lot of good comments and support work really well. Our store on Amazon is the result of this search algorithm running on about 1.7 million listings: https://www.amazon.com/s?me=AZHZ102UTKBMA
I just bought that 100% standard in the US Stanley 25' tape measure (pretty much everyone uses it including tradesmen) for 9.71 straight from Amazon, it's 9.88 today, and DataAlchemy just happens to have it's own entry, which notes I bought the same item, but doesn't list all the other vendors who will sell it for, at the very most, 3/4ths of the cost including shipping.
Ah, same pattern for the Dewalt DW2166 45-Piece Screwdriving Set, your price $37 shipped, not than anyone's likely to wait a month for the earliest estimated delivery date, vs. 14.45 Prime from Amazon.
Klein Tools NCVT-2 Dual Range Non-Contact Voltage Tester
DEWALT DCB205-2 20V MAX XR 5.0Ah Lithium Ion Battery, 2-Pack (679 plus generious free shipping, vs. 150 Amazon)
DEWALT DCS387B 20-volt MAX Compact Reciprocating Saw with Tool
I just happened to have bought a house built in 1910 6 weeks ago, so I have a general sense of what these sorts of items go for, as well as this item I might get later after I move in:
Hakko 599B-02 Solder Tip Cleaning Wire and Holder
I'm finding it impossible to come up with innocent explanations for the combined set of facts listed above, when your entry eliminates comparison shopping.
A couple of things to keep in mind: If you browse other listings on Amazon, there are merchants who sell on item listings for a variety of prices. Most listings are owned by manufacturers, not merchants. All of the listings you mention here are NOT owned by us, but we do list against them.
Clicking on https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B0045PQ762/ref=dp_ol... results in a view of all merchants selling on this listing. We're on the second page of 3 pages (last page is empty). At $25.57 we are not the most expensive, nor the least expensive. The lowest listed price is $14.99 by Amazon themselves. They probably got a good deal on them.
As you note, there is little reason for someone to order that particular item from us, on that listing. The same can be said of "Home Plus Hardware" which is selling it for $33.71.
I would note that your final blaming statement appears to demand an explanation for something I said incorrectly. I'm not providing a blow by blow "explanation" here for our pricing, but I would point out that I didn't say we always had the best prices on all items. We don't.
I did, however, indicate that we tend to be able to find good listings using our algorithms. That's not to say we can always get good prices on the items we're selling. That's another problem to solve entirely!
Well, all I can say is that I paged through quite a few of your storefront's pages and every single item I knew the rough market price of was way too high. There are too many examples, in two categories, for that to be a sign of anything good about your company.
But let's check several items at semi-random (I avoided things in the same Dewalt tools category area, and every single one was significantly more expensive; first is your listing, second is the general one:
Sorry, but this is just too many coincidences for me to swallow. How are you even still in business??? Any idea how can you convince me, bald assertions just aren't making it against hard data.
However, your explanation for why only the listing on your store are limited to you is correct, I should have checked another storefront, I withdraw that objection and apologize for not doing my homework.
People who are in dissonance ask questions that have no answer. I would respectfully ask that you refrain from making blaming statements and asking questions with no answers.
I actually wrote out a whole reply for you which put a double bind on your argument, but then I said "fuck it". I'd rather eat dinner with my wife.
In my experience, most pricing "errors" come from the listing owner/creator changing the SKU or quantity set on the listing. When this happens, it takes us a few days to catch up with the listing or remove it entirely if we think it's low quality (meaning we think it's a pack of 100 and it's really a pack of 10). This can become even further complicated when a listing changes right as velocity comes on for it as well. We basically have to forget what the listing did before so we can price it accordingly moving forward.
Pricing can also be a direct result of a velocity + stock calculation. If we are running low on FBA stock and don't have a good supply for the item ATM, the system may use a not-so-great source price on the item to calculate what it will cost us to refill stock. Sometimes items move around, or we lose suppliers for items, which cause the system to adjust the price accordingly.
If you are searching from Amazon proper (not our store) for those items in question, it is very likely Amazon won't show you our listings on them because of the price delta.
I would note we definitely utilize customer feedback to constantly improve our system's accuracy.
That's very cool! How do you get the inventory? Do you buy from the original sellers and re-sell on Amazon? I notice your listings have "sold by DataAlchemy, fulfilled by Amazon."
Our software allows us to order, track and pack high velocity items which are then sent to Amazon fulfillment centers. We also do a fair amount of direct shipping to customers. Inventory comes in via a variety of ways, including API feeds, FTP uploads, etc. We buy from manufacturers and distributors and are adding new ones all the time!
The brand thing - Amazon/Alibaba combo makes it very trivial for the average Joe to sell their own private label product with only a few hundred dollar startup costs. That leads to a ton of market saturation and the paradox of choice when grown unchecked. I guess they really love saying that they have however million products or whatever.
Yes, exactly. And combined with the review padding this has grown out of control - and makes buying simple products endlessly complex. I hope that Amazon recognizes this, but yet I have yet to see them address the issue in any way.
Would it be too costly for Amazon to just employ people to review most or all of their products, and maybe even rebrand the best products under its own brand where the seller agrees?
It would dramatically increase the quality of their store and brand, and it benefits from economies of scale.
Assuming they pay $100 for an high quality review, then a $10 item would increase by only 1 cent if at least 10000 are sold, which seem reasonable conditions.
For categories with many very similar items, reviews should be cheaper since a standard review procedure could be designed and applied quickly, offsetting the lower sales per items.
They do. Sort of. Amazon Vine is the system you're looking for, I don't believe the reviewer gets paid directly but they do get the thing they've reviewed for free (presumably they could then go on to sell on Ebay or indeed Amazon itself). Amazon also points out it was a Vine review when you're scrolling through which is great as it means you can more easily ignore the biased reviews.
Oh, I always assumed those were funded by the seller. It's good to know they're a third party to the whole exchange. I'll pay attention to these next time.
> any benefit received now is far out shadowed by the negatives.
Is it backed up by numbers? As a customer, I agree with you, but our annoyance could be less important than all the customers that quickly pick some product they neeed as long as it got enough stars, without going much into the reviews.
2 doesn't work because the sellers work to stop it. They add logos and ad ons and all kinds of things. Like it or not white label is a large part of Amazon.
I'm proposing that Amazon merges the products, and for new products the sellers would be forced to tie it to the existing product. Amazon can enforce this without too much work, I'd think. Just do some image comparisons, have a "report duplicate" button, and a small team of people monitoring.
Yep, this is why I get lots of stuff from Anker. They originally seemed to be selling white label Chinese commodity stuff where it's not worth it to buy a 10x priced version from BigBox down the street, but I actually found that they have good versions of whatever cable or USB hub or backup battery I need. I found this basically by accident, and now I swear by their products, but it was tough to find on Amazon with the hundreds of look-a likes which don't function the same.
Exactly... Anker is generally pretty good, I've had a couple issues. After the report of a Google employeee reviewing various USB3 cables, I actually tested (just via an app on my phone at the time) all the cables/chargers I had... Amazing how much difference a cable can make... wound up getting a bunch of new cables, and replacing half my chargers.
To this day I'm amazed at how relatively badly the "Amazon Basics" usb cables worked.
It's tricky, though. How big do the changes need to be before you accept them as separate?
In the UK store at least, a good portion of the ice machines sold appears to be the same design, but there are subtle and not so subtle differences, but many of the not-so-subtle differences are tweaks of the exterior plastic.
About 2/3 of them appears to have internals of the same broken design (plastic cam on the ice tray coupled with lack of a sensor to determine when it has rotated all the way back, causes it to twist and eventually crack), but it's not clear if all of the nearly identical versions are even from the same manufacturer.
Some of the non-broken ones are still clearly based on the same design too, but changing the plastic cam for metal and adding extra sensors.
(I learned this after my second one broke, and I dismantled it and looked through drawings and pictures before ordering my next one).
Any reason to think this isn't the intended function by the manufacturers. In my experience lots of products have really simply low cost changes that would make them last much longer (eg fill this 1cm^3 area of the injection mould instead of hollowing it) such that the product will fail after a year or so. Even my IKEA armchair has a beam where a 1 or 2cm extension on either end would give the chair much more strength - before seeing that I thought IKEA was good-but-cheap, now I see them as much closer to just cheap.
Some of these travel adapters are outright deadly. As in "pop out a second set of plugs while plugged in" deadly.
They are even shipped by Amazon. These products should never enter any western market. If a kid electrocutes himself thats going to be very bad news for Amazon.
My friend's wife told him to order a cheap barbell from Amazon. I pointed out that reviews said it have broken in half during use. They bought it, and it broke in half on the first use.
Based on the kind of crazy dangerous shit that ends up on Amazon and stays on Amazon, I wonder what kinds of things they are catching and blocking from being sold?
The number of verticals of items I won't buy off Amazon has increased. Between spending a lot of time looking at the search results, ordering something that sucks, sometimes its easier, faster, and cheaper to go to Target.
I say this because I heard through someone that works there that Jeff does read complains and will often forward it to a department head with "?" body content. At that point that manager drops everything to come up with an explanation for what happened. Can't confirm this, but the source was pretty solid.
Yep. Small products from Apple like chargers and cables, HP inkjet cartridges, and other things where I'd prefer to have the original product for safety or performance reasons, are impossible to buy from Amazon.
Every seller insists it's "Genuine HP" in factory sealed cartons and...it's not. The same thing happens with pens. Cheap knock-offs, every time. Reading the reviews on Amazon is unhelpful, because the reviews are polluted with apparently deliberate misinformation. It's got to the point where I either order Apple chargers from Apple directly or go to one of their retail stores in person, and I always buy inkjet cartridges in person. (I don't like fires and I don't like clogged inkjet nozzles.)
Amazon is great for lots of things, but not small, easily counterfeited, safety critical items.
Another anecdote: I tried to buy Apple EarPods on Amazon. The first search result, ranked #13 in the best sellers claims "Apple EarPods Genuine OEM" for $9.99 when all reviews say "do not buy, not genuine!". How can Amazon let these products be listed???
I ended up buying them for $30 in person at my local electronics store.
Off topic but why do you like those enough to pay $30? They're horrible at noise reduction (for you and those around you) and have shit for low frequencies. You can get a much better pair from Sony at that price . Always curious why people use them
Personally have never liked the sealed ear buds as the seals usually do not fit correctly. More importantly though, most of the time I need the ability to listen to the ambient noise around me to catch other people talking to me or hearing announcements like train stops.
The sealed off from the world feeling is usually only useful when concentrating on a task and that is pretty rare.
I like them because they are the only headphones I can sleep on my side while they are still in and not hurt. I've got expensive headphones for listening, the ear pods are good enough for listening while laying down.
Unless you're buying a specific product Amazon has become a worse mess than eBay. Shill reviews and shoddy, awful products. I'll never understand why they made the marketplace choices they did - they've ruined their brand in my eyes.
If you're searching for batteries or some such, the search is terrible. Far too many items that don't meet search criteria included, far too much reliance on their worthless star rating.
They're ok to buy a book, CD or a known brand item. For anything else it's too much of a lottery now, I spend my money elsewhere.
But you can tell by the reviewers if they are verified no?
I have a problem with the independent kindle books, I like to support independent publishing but so many of them are unreadable due to poor formatting and spelling errors. I realize these are low margin but its still the Amazon/Kindle brand.
Even that is minimally helpful. You can't exclude non-verified reviews in search or overall rating. You can't believe that they're in any way helpfully independent - it would be the easiest thing in the world to seed your shoddy product's life on Amazon with verified reviews from employees and friends. I've seen reviews on some products that seems to indicate this is happening at least sometimes.
Having lost trust it is going to be near impossible to regain it. You mention the Amazon/Kindle brand - they don;t, from the way they are managing it, appear to care very much about it. I used to believe the bad ebook formatting was an early days teething issue, but years later it is still relatively common.
As someone who really likes Amazon, I really hope someone at Amazon read this and brings it to Jeff Bezos. The fake reviews are absolutely killing Amazon's usefulness to me. This, and the practice of grouping reviews for unrelated items (notorious for things like phone cases).
I am guessing that this is probably the result of doing data analytics and finding that sales increase by allowing these shady practices. But eroding your brand and making the site less useful to loyal customers will eventually catch up to you when dedicated customers leave and evangelize other services.
What's funny, is it's really upset me that Newegg has headed in this direction as well... It's better than most things when you're looking for very specific products, but the generic items on Amazon are horrible.
I'd like the compensated-for-review bit to be a checkbox, and then to be able to set a profile setting that excludes them from reviews and ratings. As it is today, I have to scan reviews for the telltale text, then mentally recalculate the rating from whatever's left.
I doubt Amazon would do this, because they probably consider these reviews to be barely on the good side of the line between fake and real, and higher ratings undoubtedly lead to more sales. Moreover, before the FCC rule change, this probably happened all the time but nobody disclosed it at all.
For certain products, the pricing + shipping is not at all competitive (toiletries, for example).
In many other categories, there might be a product with a nominal price of, say, $10 offered by dozens of different merchants, at more or less every combination of price + shipping from $0.50 + $9.50 up to $10 + $0 imaginable. It's a huge waste of the consumer's time, you'd think they'd be better off either providing sensible pricing for a category, or not carrying it at all. Needless to say, it's nowhere near as much a go-to provider as it was 4-5 years ago.
I'd settle for knowing if and when the real UK version of a DVD/Blu-ray/box set is coming out and then finding it without numerous clones when it does. Apart from books, this used to be the one thing Amazon clearly did better than almost anyone else.
Today, particularly for US TV shows, there are usually lots of alternatives available from non-Amazon-but-kinda-from-Amazon sources long before anything official is released here. However, prices and availability shown vary almost by the minute and sometimes rather sharply, and even whether the discs will actually play in a UK region player often seems like a random result.
I've really been going off Amazon in recent years, particularly since they started trying to be all things to all people, using highly volatile pricing algorithms, and spamming upsell promotions all over their previously straightforward checkout process. Sadly, since they had also successfully killed off just about everyone selling physical media from bricks and mortar stores first, and since I prefer to actually own my media instead of renting it from some streaming service, there are few other suppliers left.
Competition has utterly failed in the movie and TV show market now, and I fear this will only get worse as more films and TV shows are locked into one proprietary library/streaming service or another as the only (legal) source and even the likes of Amazon can't supply real permanent copies.
Yeah, I'll usually check those user's other reviews, when the top reviews are all 5-star... if they don't have any other reviews at 3 or less, I'll generally move on to another product.
The worst ones is when there's 4-5 unrelated products, and the same reviewers on all 5 of them all 5-star reviews.
It's getting pretty bad... I think they should remove the weight of all ratings for users that have spent less than $1k on Amazon, and those that haven't continued to spend at least $100 a year... there's enough people that do spend that much regularly to count those reviews as a higher weighting..
I'm super aggravated that you cannot easily check negative reviews. Most of the time positive ones are so vague (even if not shilled), meanwhile the negative ones will say "flimsy switch that will break", "500000 lumen standby diode", "leaks", etc etc
Yeah, but plenty of the 1-star reviews are because of shipping issues with the seller... I'd love to see the 2-4 star reviews... I also avoid most things that are all 1 or 5 star... if there aren't a few 2-4 and there's more than a dozen reviews, it's obviously got issues... It sucks that I have to think about though.
Totally agree. I would also add that I can't buy anything from Amazon. Why? because they don't care about Switzerland. We have 3 language and should be able to switch from DE/FR/IT, but no, if we want in FR we need to go the amazon.fr because amazon.ch redirect to amazon.de why? I don't talk German and then we can't buy anything.
This is a mess because you see the product, seem everything fine until you want click the buy button and see after that you can't buy this items. Thanks Amazon, I'm using now only Ebay & AliExpress for crap Chinese things.
One pair didn't work, another only one of the two speakers worked, the other was mostly noise and almost no sound, and the third had a really bad background hum.
Note these were all on sound card(s) where other speakers had worked fine... so one good experience, and three bad ones. They were pretty cheap, in that I didn't return them, but left an appropriate review in the end.
They were mainly gifted out (and later thrown in the trash) to friends at work, etc. I got mine so I could have a set of speakers to hear the occasional audio at work at the time... which worked great.. I got some of the same for a couple coworkers, and another set passed along when I'd upgraded my computer at one point.
I have M-Audio AV-40's speakers on my desktop at home, and Mackie CR3's on my spare... both are great sets of speakers I can't say good enough things about. Given it's a $10=15 pair vs over $100 ... I wasn't expecting huge sound from the Amazon speakers, that said, I've seen other speakers in that price range that worked far better.
After my huge stash of AA I got from woot (before they were owned by amazon and had pretty good daily deals) ran out, I bought some of these Amazon batteries.
I only use them for remotes, controllers, and the occasional flashlight, but they've worked very well.
This is exactly why I slowly shifted my amazon purchases to their prime-now app.
With that service, Amazon seems to only offer the most successful, products in each category, significantly reducing the burden of choice it puts on me.
It also does not include products of third party sellers, which decreases the risk of accidentally buying knock offs.
The experience of buying e.g. Apple accessories on Amazon's main website is horrible, on prime now it is effortless and safe.
>decreases the risk of accidentally buying knock offs...now it is... safe.
I'm not sure it really decreases the risk that much, maybe some. With stickerless commingled inventory a third party seller can easily mix their fakes in with the real products and those fakes can end up "sold and shipped by Amazon."
>German knife maker Wüsthof recently told its authorized distributors that come June 30, they can no longer store its products in Amazon's warehouses, because the manufacturer doesn't want the merchandise commingled with items from unauthorized third-party sellers, said Todd Myers, vice president of sales at Wüsthof-Trident of America Inc.
>Authorized Wüsthof distributors may still sell through Amazon, they just can't use its fulfillment service, meaning they have to ship purchases themselves to customers. Wüsthof itself stopped selling its knives directly to Amazon around two years ago, according to Mr. Myers.
Is there anything more stupid that they do than pool merchandise? I've heard a horror story about a DVD reseller who was foolish enough to do that, an "equivalent" pirated unit was shipped to a customer, which prompted Amazon to cancel his account and force him to pay money he couldn't afford to either ship the inventory back or destroy it (Amazon is very sensitive to media piracy, I've gathered, with their video service I guess they have to be, which suggests to me they should have stayed more focused).
>I sent in 14. 14 were received, 1 was lost and 1 was found. How many should have? 14. How many does Amazon say I should have? 11. How many units do I actually have? 9
> Now, to Amazon's credit, the first screenshot was taken a couple of days ago. The newest reconciliation correctly shows that I have 9 units but once again does not accurately reflect how they got to 9 when I sent in 14. Of course, I have no reimbursement for these units because they aren't lost according to the system.
Commingling items is actually optional for sellers. I commingle some select items in my inventory. Commingled inventory allows Amazon to ship faster (ship from the closest warehouse) so they benefit from it in a way but its pretty bad that there's no accountability when inventory is commingled, that doesn't seem to bother Amazon. I wonder how many people who get a counterfeit recognize it as such and complain? I would probably assume many people would just think it's just a crappy product.
They also don't offer the option to intercept returns before placing them back in your inventory. Intercepting returns is important to make sure the item is still in sellable condition. They will in theory tell you if an item isn't sellable but that often doesn't work out from what I heard, Amazon will put returned items that have been used back in your inventory as new and then dock you when you sell the item again (and it is inevitably returned again).
I think you are making it out to be a lot worse than it is. Simply filtering your search to only products shipped from and sold by Amazon.com eliminates all the garbage.
There are some classes of product Amazon doesn't sell, or isn't in a large enough variety... I usually stick to Prime sellers though, and I do check the 5-star reviews and reviewers...
"Prime Sellers" (that's FBA sellers in Amazon logo) are not more trustworthy than merchant fulfilled sellers by any means. It's simply just a different way to fulfill orders.
Also its possible to get a knockoff product that is sold and shipped by Amazon because Amazon allows their inventory from their supply chains to commingle with third party seller inventory.
I too used to try to use that metric, but as you say, it frequently doesn't work. A highly tuned BS detector is your best tool ... and for better or worse, that's more and more true as time goes by in most venues.
Assume everything might be junk. Even some items from the best companies, i.e. I've been buying and will be buying more precision tools from Starrett lately, Made in the USA and all that jazz, and it shows. But when I went to buy a small metric open wrench set, the reviews indicated their's was anomalously subpar (so I went with another vendor with a good product, and then I got straight from Amazon Prime a mispacked Imperial set in a metric labeled baggie :-( Sometimes you can't win, although the return was painless (well, after I convert the image to a raster one, the normal shipping labels are the only thing that kills my heavy duty but old Brother printer, but not my father's much newer and cheaper one) since there's a UPS drop-off in walking distance.)
So, distrust and verify, and learn the particular patterns that signal relative trustworthiness, like 96% or better reputation for merchants (but if they don't do much business and are one of the few or only who sell the item, check the bad reviews because so many are self-evidently bogus), and of course shill reviews. And especially a fine tuned sense of "if it's too good to be true...."
Or take another example: pretty much all US market washing machines are shit, because the government pays the companies to make them worse and worse each year by using less energy (lower water temps, and I'll bet less agitation), Whirlpool, which only does appliances, paid no Federal corporate income taxes for at least 2 years because of this scam.
So when my 2007 not so bad GE washer had a $$$ expensive problem to fix (since to make it cheaper to manufacture, and a one level more reliable in the field, with a solenoid attached to a major part that you can't fix in the field without replacing everything), I checked out the competition, and Speed Queen's consumer line was highly spoken of.
Seems they bought an old Whirlpool? plant and rights to make an old model, which reading between the lines uses the old electro-mechanical cycle selectors/timers, which of course fail with some regularity.
But Amazon reviews saved me from a fatal flaw in their business model: if you need a major repair, e.g., due to a manufacturing defect (fairly rare) or shipping damage (it happens on big heavy items like this), you're SOL. They pay their network of third party repairmen a fixed rate by the incident, so if one of timers needs replacement they'll do it quickly and with a smile, if it's something serious they won't give you the time of day (so I spent maybe 1/3 of the cost of new Speed Queen on a repair by the local GE shop which my family has a 3 generation relationship with (my paternal grandparents actually sold them their first store front on Main Street, where they were selling newly hatched chickens and turkey, and it helped that the washing machine is of very good design and good build quality).
Which I can't blame them on, you don't make ends meet by working long hours at a loss, but let's just say that reviews like that make me a loyal Amazon customer, they've saved me enough money that I'm willing to pay them small premiums for the stuff I do buy from them, especially given how reliable that process is.
In the absence of name recognition, it's pretty much the only way small vendors have to differentiate themselves from any of the other vendors selling devices in the same space. The problem is that many of these reviewers end up just giving five stars and then re-selling unopened packages on ebay or craigslist, and many of the vendors expect high score reviews and will pressure reviewers if they don't get them. Blocking all incentivised reviews is one way of dealing with this, but it comes at the cost of it being more difficult to know whether a cheap equivalent from an unknown vendor is worth the savings or not. Some sort of reviewer trust weighting might be more useful here.
All I can tell you is that they aren't doing the whole 3rd party marketplace out of the goodness of their heart.
What better way to do market research than to pit tens of thousands of individual resellers and manufacturers against each other to determine demand and equilibrium prices of the end consumer?
Then you just private label it and cut out all the middlemen, and sell direct. There's no way they can now compete with you, because:
1. You're Amazon, so you have the brand behind your product
2. You're Amazon, so you have efficiencies of enormous scale (in both manufacturing and distribution)
3. You're Amazon, so you can actually kick them off the market and delete their listing for any bullshit reason you can put in your TOS
This is the worst problem on Amazon and it plagues many of the products I buy frequently. Particularly in the rather open world of 3D printers, it's difficult to discern the brand name from the clones (E3D v6 Extruder?). But it's awful for generic "parts" like bearings, where the quality parts can't even be sold on Amazon by third-parties because the fifteen pages of generics that cost 95% less make the likelihood of selling the higher-end one very low.
I guess the problem with the "everything store" is that you can't possibly get your arms around "everything" to make the purchasing experience consistent. As Amazon has moved to become "more like eBay", the quality of product listings has suffered immensely. The information needed to make an informed decision on a large chunk of their products is just missing and the wild-west of seller provided products leads to knock-offs and clone products that are difficult to discern quality versus junk. On many of these products, user reviews (if there are any) don't help because they require more than a hobbyist/amateur to provide a useful review. The usual defense is "returns are easy", but because of Prime, I use Amazon as a first choice when something breaks down. I need that part today, but there's no retail store that sells it, so tomorrow will do. If I could wait a few days, I'd use a trusted supplier who carries only the higher quality.
My most recent horrible experience with this was looking for 608 bearings. 608s are the same bearings used in inline skates[0]. Searching for them, however, requires you to use a variety of terms since the inline skate bearings almost never indicate that they're 608s. The user reviews for the kind I need are worthless, as is the price (high-end bearings are often unsealed, but also overkill at sometimes upwards of $100 for a set of 16). 608s, thankfully, have a standard rating (ABEC) that many people know about (but few really understand how limited this rating is). ABEC ratings indicate the tolerances of the bearings, not the resistance, but it tends to equate that higher ABEC bearings have less resistance. That is, until you search for them on Amazon. The first time I purchased bearings, I went to the Industrial/Scientific category and grabbed a set of four ABEC9s that I supremely over-paid for. They rattled and vibrated when spinning ... these were not ABEC9 bearings despite the italicized labeling on the rim. I returned them and replaced them with a set of eight ABEC9 inline skate bearings that were priced at $3.00 shipped (I've not seen a price even close to that since)! These had a mess of reviews that had the pattern of "They spun fine when I installed them but then ceased up after a few uses", indicating that they were almost certainly not sealed bearings[1]. After testing the ones I received, I promptly purchased 15 more sets of 8 in hopes I'd never have to hunt down 608s again.
[0] I learned that the inline skate versions are a little easier to discern quality from since the reviewer can tell pretty quickly. Bad bearings ruin the experience very quickly.
[1] I usually avoid inline skate bearings. You can usually trust the reviews for bearings that are very well sealed. You can't trust any others (including ones that claim to be sealed but really aren't). Buyers of bearings for inline skates often don't know using unsealed bearings will last anywhere from minutes to hours of use on a city street with debris ripping through them. Using sealed bearings in 3D printers and similar devices is fine, but you need to make sure you buy very good bearings because adding lubrication is nearly impossible (taking them apart without launching parts everywhere or breaking some portion of the bearing is almost impossible).
My understanding of cheap off brand batteries (largely 20-30A cells like li-ion 18650s) is that they are generally produced by one of the big manufacturers but were b-grade (and below?) products that didn't quite make the grade but are still considered safe.
It probably doesn't make much difference if you're shopping for triple As for a remote control, but with larger cells I'm always slightly wary of rewraps.
I'll see if I can dig out an article about it if I remember when I'm off the train.
Specifically, 18650s are commonly used in vaping. A guy who goes by Mooch once tested a large number of 18650s he could find on the market - it turns out that almost all off-brand batteries (everything other than Samsung/LG/Sony) do not live up to their stated maximum continuous power draw specifications, never mind fake ones. Vaping often draws power at reasonably close to the stated limits, and the failure mode of these batteries is venting toxic gas and potentially exploding.
I assume there's similar issues with all large batteries.
In a nutshell... fake batteries on Amazon can harm people badly.
Far from it. If you're lucky, the 18650s will be re-badged recycled cells form failed laptop battery packs (usually one cell is completely dead but the rest still have a little life in them).
If you're not so lucky, it's from a back-alley micro-factory with no quality control and the cells can literally burst into flame (which has been the big issue with "hover boards" recently).
I don't consider AmazonBasics to be off-brand, personally. I've been using AA and AAA AmazonBasics rechargeables for about years, and they are easily the equal of the name brands I was buying (e.g., Panasonic and Sanyo, not Duracell).
Is that their goal? To ultimately outcompete all their suppliers with an inhouse brand? How utterly banal.
I remember a recent article about Rain, Inc (I had one of their beautiful 2006 iMac stands) and how Amazon essentially cut their price in half offering the same product with an Amazon logo instead.
How can you trust a retailer like Amazon though: they are not only an e-commerce saas, they are a retailer themselves so obviously for anything they see a market they will just offer themselves. They can use the data from 3rd party sellers as market research for free (actually they get paid for their research!).
I am not sure what other commenters had in mind but the Amazon house brand batteries I'm thinking of are AA and AAA rechargeables. They are low-self-discharge NiMH - the Sanyo brand is "Eneloop" which is the original member of this category and still well respected as far as I know.
What's even worse is that their prices aren't even competitive anymore!
It is cheaper for me to buy floss refills at my local supermarket than it is to buy on amazon. WTF!
The crazy part is when I see reviews last year of a window fan where they say "the fan is made of cheap plastic but decent for $19.99" and this year, the same exact fan is listed as $39.99.
It's sad how everything that was good about amazon is slowly getting whittled away. But hey, at least the stock is at all time highs and bezos is making a killing.
Agreed. My parents bought a hard drive from Amazon a couple of months ago - something I used to assume would have been absolutely fine. When it arrived, it became clear that the drive had been pulled out of a server, possibly relabelled and then sold as new.
Now I just buy PC components from Scan. As for Amazon - I stick to the stuff that comes directly from their warehouses. Even the items that they handle distribution for can't be trusted anymore.
Knock-offs abound on not only Amazon, but also on eBay. There was an article on HN recently about the difference between a knock-off Macbook charger and a real Apple one.
I'm one of those who unknowingly bought a knock-off charger off of eBay (the price was low so I bought it). I can't believe that they could make such an exact copy (externally). From the outside it's indistinguishable from my original Apple charger.
Not sure... I had really good luck with a pair of Amazon Basics speakers, in that I bought 3 more pairs... all three after the first set had issues. Beyond this, their USB cables are garbage for charging, okay for data transfer.
Given the poor experience, I'm unlikely to buy any more Amazon branded products.
I have actually come to the conclusion that Amazon has "trapped" me with service not price. I often buy stuff that's a little more expensive on Amazon just because I know I get a reliable shipment and know when it will arrive.
The "order until X and we grantee delivery on Y" is one of the key features for me. I always hate guesstimating when things will arrive if they ship in 2-5 days etc.
I usually bulk order so stuff arrives on Saturday if they'd have a "worker friendly" shipping service that delivers after 18h I'd be all over that.
I'm annoyed by a lot of stuff including the fact that pretty much everything is "reduced price" and that you have to wade through 5* reviews for every product but at the end of the day they are a brand I trust to deliver my stuff on time and do the right thing when there's a problem with some shipment.
I was like that also. For many years Amazon was the only shop I had my real name bound to.
That stopped when DHL started overloading their drivers or I don't know what happened there. I was unable to get my deliveries. Either they were left in the truck for the whole week or the guy send it back. Made up reasons why he couldn't deliver (even if he didn't try). The final event happened when I god a box that looked as if some animal chewed on it. There was a HD in there.
This as well as exclusives made me think. I started looking for good electronics shops in my city and found one. I went another way on my way home and visit a book store regularly now. Since there are still items I have to order online, I've found that other shops just waited for me to leave Amazon.
Since they are obviously on the way to slow destruction while the rest of the internet is moving on, I don't see a way back.
Bleah. I see from your comments that you live in Germany; in the US, DNS used to do deliveries etc., but starting about when the Great Recession hit, they've pulled out of just about every business line they had here, except for delivering stuff from companies to our government US Postal Service ... which they do worse than UPS or Fedex, Amazon doesn't in fact use them for this, I just directly notice this from some Amazon merchant booksellers.
A "box that looked as if some animal chewed on it" ... I think we have a higher population of animals who can do this, clearly no excuse for Germany ^_^. Seriously, after carefully considering various alternative vendors for a wall air-conditioner I new for my new home given my various constraints, I ordered one from Amazon, and UPS wasn't gentle on the box, even lost on of the 4 packing straps I'm pretty sure. But no damage except to a small section of the heating exchange fins, which never make it 100% anyway however you procure them, and can be tediously combed out. I've never regretted a big ticket item purchase from Amazon like that.
Back to DHL: does not give an impression of a well run company given the USA and German datapoints; can anyone else fill in the gap in over there? I'd expect UPS to try.
There are plenty of alternative parcel delivery companies in Germany (UPS, DPD, GLS, Hermes), and they're all generally OK.
The worst experience I've had was indeed with DHL, where they apparently loaded my parcel on to the truck every day for about two weeks, but never attempted delivery. Eventually I worked it out with the sender, and DHL returned the original parcel to them.
Otherwise, I get dozens of parcels from DHL per year without incident. Every company has horror stories, and I doubt they differ too much percentage-wise in terms of loss and damage.
The really frustrating thing about all this is that DHL used to be the good company. The one where you could rely on the delivery. It changed abruptly for me. There was one good delivery and then the problems started and never ended. I even considered getting one of those Pack Station accounts. Good that I didn't. The experience colleagues had from this was shocking. Wrong packages, missing packages, messy support and recently that hack. Horrible.
I live in a big Germany city, so I hope that drone delivery hype becomes a thing one day.
I've found Amazon to be less reliable the sooner it is promised in the last year or so. Amazon's next day delivery will generally either go missing for a couple days or not be delivered at all about 1/2 the time here in NYC (confirmed by a couple other Queens residents). Then you have to wait 48 hours before you can report it missing (despite it saying "delivered" but not being here), then place the lost complaint with service, then wait for the next order which doesn't ship next day. So, about 4 to 5 days for a "next day" delivery. And the last time this happened, 2 out of the 5 items were supposed to reship and I would get a refund and have to re-order 3 of them from said missing package. Except 3 reshipped. So I wound up being charged for and receiving two of one thing I ordered one of. Queue having to get on customer service chat again, package up the duplicate item, walk it over to a shipping location, wait for a refund.
For a company that's supposed to be all about logistics, Amazon kind of sucks at logistics.
Echoing mafro, this is a regional thing. Here in my corner of SW Missouri, Prime 2nd day delivery through the USPS is rock solid, and next day delivery, which I seldom use, is often through FedEx or UPS, who also don't screw up. From everything I've heard, you generally don't get good delivery service in big cities, although for Amazon I've heard they've been using some sketchy companies that only operate in such cities for that.
And I get the impression that bad Prime service through the USPS has more widespread problems. Amazon sure looks like it need to put more work on making this level of their logistics work much more uniformly, but I suspect they already are.
Thought I'd tag my opposing anecdotal data point onto your comment.. I live in London. I've had maybe 50 next day Prime deliveries in the last year - none of which have been late, lost or other.
Here in Tampa, the "standard" next day delivery services (where there usually is a surcharge) is fine (using the standard Fed Ex or UPS option), and I've never had a problem with the standard 2 day Prime service delivered via USPS or the like.
However, for some products, Amazon offers a "free next day delivery" service option. These services tend to be offloaded on sketchy "courier service" companies with names like A1 Courier Services, Lasership, Ontrac, Dynamex, etc. These carriers get generally awful reviews (as seen here: http://www.amazon.com/forum/amazon%20carrier%20feedback/) and you hear a lot of reports of missing packages, late deliveries, etc. I've only used this option once, the item did arrive, but it was at quite a late hour (10PM). Based on the reviews, I would not use this service again.
I still use Amazon a lot, but they have become way sketchier over time. Knockoff batteries are but one symptom of this.
It was indeed one of these sketchy courier services. They dumped my package by the front door of our apartment building at 10pm on a Saturday night in NYC. Or they claim to have. An hour later when I got home it was nowhere to be seen. I waited home most of the day for it until I had to go out to a previous engagement, too. The previous time I had a next day delivery, they claimed to have attempted delivery mid-evening while I was at home but never even rang the bell.
You know a lot of other retailers are starting to build out networks to accomplish the same thing? Wayfair, for example, has an extremely extensive Free 2-Day shipping program (and you don't even need to pay a fee for it).
While a benefit this inertia also creates a risk. It allows Amazon management to do the usual quarterly focused changes to push profit with no measurable loss to sales. Each one of these building cumulatively towards that tipping point for a flood of customers to head to the next 'good service' competitor. End of the day its a good problem and amazing they haven't challenged this further given years of people complaining about these false reviews.
I _think_ you can get away with not selling ever at full price if your comparison price is the manufactures RRP.
You can't do this for "bespoke" products which is where the UK law seems to most hit businesses - things like furniture which are specific to the retailer.
Of course the $1200 candy bar price is never the RRP :)
oh man ... furniture stores. The one down my street has been going out of business since the day it opened 20 years ago. Every few months they replace the "We've lost our lease!" sign when it gets too disheveled.
I took some pictures in Portland once of the most extraordinary version of this I had ever seen[1][2]. I thought they had taken it up as a high art, but a few months later, they genuinely went out of business.
> Wasn't the list price being nonsense marketing widely acknowledged?
Most certainly. The insidiousness of these disingenuous marketing tactics is that that work if if you're wise to them. It's manipulative and annoying. This sort of pervasive disrespect for user/customers/clients/etc... is what has rotted the advertising/marketing industry from the inside out.
I've learned over the years to completely ignore the 'list price' and simply check camelcamelcamel.com, a website that tracks the prices for most items on the site. If it's within 10% of the lowest price from the past year, I bite. Else: I shop around.
I think consumers are getting savvier over all, and the list price is losing its effect.
Interesting. Amazon has rules on their affiliate program against storing price information. They have recently kicked out a big player in the space for this reason. Any info on why camelcamelcamel has been allowed to stay?
I'm not sure there's anything Amazon can really do. AFAIK, it's a script that just scrapes the information on a timer, like Internet Archive does. It's no different from checking it yourself and making a spreadsheet, right?
Depends. Amazon's terms and conditions for participation in their affiliate program explicitly states that doing that is breach. What they can do, and like I mentioned do do, is they close down your account and keep your money, and now you're out of business.
I read this article, puzzled, thinking ... Amazon provides the list price? How haven't I noticed? I had to do an image search to remind me of an example of that. Of course, once I saw the page, I understood what they were referring to but apparently my brain has been filtering that part of the page due to years of conditioning.
For all practical purposes, the list price on American e-commerce sites is a worthless bit of information on a product page. I don't think in somewhere around 20 years of purchasing things online and from catalogs I've ever paid anything close to list price and I've never felt like I got a "good deal" simply because the gap between list and actual was large. In fact, I'd probably be disinclined to purchase a product with too large a gap between list and actual, making the assumption that something must be horribly wrong if they're trying to get rid of the thing at such a steep discount.
Though I'm very glad this deceptive practice is being targeted, if only from the perspective of eliminating one more useless bit of noise from product pages (can we also filter out the two word reviews?), I'd imagine very few people[0] actually believe that price represents a realistic product price for 99% of products[1].
[0] In the US this is a ridiculously common practice with the worst offenders being auto dealers. They'll list MSRP along-side a nearly impossible to qualify-for manufacturer incentives (unless you're active military, employee of the brand, have the brand's credit card points maxed out, are a previous owner of the brand ... in one case I discovered the discounts couldn't actually be combined making the deal truly impossible)
[1] About the only time this is true is when the product provider has a minimum advertised price requiring an extra step to see the price only once the item is in your cart (somehow, that's a loop hole?). Or Apple products...
> Interesting development considering Nordstrom's failure with the same experiment.
Not really. I think the customer bases are different enough that it's an apples and oranges comparison. Not only do you have a different type of customer on Amazon (people shopping for groceries, or carpentry tools or even computer parts and hygiene products. While on Nordstrom, you have people shopping for not clothing, but high-end clothing.) but the scale itself is on an entirely different level. Amazon has millions of people buying stuff from them every single day. The volume of traffic and orders on Amazon is like comparing the entire economy of the United States with that of Kobe, Japan.
I've noticed on the Amazon UK site that books are discounted far less than they were in the past. Now, only major titles and bestsellers are offered at a discount, anything outside that category has no discount or minimal discount.
This is interesting but I think based on a false assumption. Speaking only for myself I currently buy a lot from Amazon, but it's based entirely on whether a given product is a good deal or not. I have no particular loyalty to Amazon (even though I'm a long time Prime member.) Anything that isn't a good deal, I don't and won't buy from Amazon.
Honestly, what is and isn't a good deal is up to the buyer. If I see something I need on Amazon, and the price seems like a good value, I buy it. I don't worry too much about shopping around because my time is worth something and I have a ballpark idea of what a "good value" is for anything I would buy online.
That's a silly response. Amazon is an online retailer, they are the absolute most vulnerable to cross shopping. If I'm at a local grocery store or farmer's market and see something I like I'm much more likely to buy it there since I'm already there.
If I'm shopping for something on Amazon it takes basically zero time to look at what the price is on Costco, PC Part Picker, my local stores, etc. and be sure I'm getting the best deal. I'm not a compulsive shopper who just buys things instantly when I see them.
Amazon is an online retailer, they are the absolute most vulnerable to cross shopping...
The 60 million+ of us that have bought into Amazon Prime are very unlikely to cross shop very often; we've happily locked ourselves into the Amazon ecosystem.
"Happily" may be an overstatement. I'm a Prime member, but some of the more recent changes have felt like they're designed to cheat me out of what I payed for. From "add-on items" (designed to avoid having to pay the cost of shipping them to Prime members for free) to wildly deceptive definitions of "two-day shipping", Amazon is more unpleasant to use than it's ever been for me.
This is largely why I quit Prime. I liked it when I paid $69/yr and Amazon had competitive pricing. All these programs they're rolled out ("free" Apps, "free" Netflix clone, "free" iTunes Radio/Google Music All Access clone, "free" "unlimited" photo storage) that I have no interest in, and don't want, plus the whole add-on item thing you mentioned, plus most items being unable to Subscribe & Save to, plus the intersection of Subscribe & Save and Prime Pantry being absolutely retarded (can't S&S PP-able items, can't PP S&S-able items).
Walmart is eating Amazon's lunch now, and I'm laughing my ass off. Good job, Jeff Bezos, you just destroyed your company.
Please see above where I point out that I'm also a long time Prime member. That doesn't mean I only buy from Amazon or buy from Amazon even when it's not a good deal.
Prime pays for itself even without compulsively buying everything from Amazon right now. If they stop offering good deals as the original article suggests, that won't be true and my Prime subscription will be canceled.
The average Prime user doesn't shop around or comparison shop. If you really do you are an exception and not the typical prime shopper. Prime users feel compelled to "get their money worth" by using the service more and they think of their shipping as free where it is actually prepaid. Getting someone to prepay for shipping for a whole year is a great way to create loyalty.
Honestly, I, personally, don't understand Prime but I also don't buy very much stuff and don't find getting my stuff in two days compelling 99% of the time so I wouldn't spend even close to $100 on shipping. I very, very often buy my basics online (TP, paper towels, pet food, soap, etc.) but I just wait for a sale from any retailer to buy. Other than basics I rarely buy much else.
That's a little silly when you can find 10+ other retailers and sites that monitor price histories for just about any product to ballpark its actual market value.
If Amazon relaxes on pricing, most likely Walmart, Target, BestBuy and similar large retailers will benefit first and foremost. The cost to build out a large selection online retailer is so vast, and the profit margin so mediocre, we're unlikely to see another Amazon-like company in the next 20 years. Amazon's survival was practically a fluke to begin with, the dotcom bubble and the capital it afforded them was the only reason they made it out alive and were able to scale as they did to get out in front of old-line competitors. Had the bubble ended maybe just six months earlier, Amazon goes bankrupt.
Horrible for the book lovers who like to do price comparison with discount book sellers like Half-Price Books. looks like I'll have to use Barnes-and-Noble or Half.com to get sale prices now.
