I buy from third-party sellers all the time for hobby equipment/parts. Yes, they mostly resell bulk container-ship-specials from East Asia. But that's fine for hobbying around - sometimes you don't want to pay a lot for a bunch of M3 screws/nuts and you don't mind a poor shear strength and heads that easily strip. You know what you're getting, and the two-day shipping is very nice when you don't want to wait for an agent to collect your RMB orders, chuck as much extra weight as they can, and drop it in the international post. Things like:
- Small screwdrivers/hex keys
- Breadboards
- Hookup/jumper wires
- Perfboards and copper-clad FR4.
- Bulk discretes like resistors/capacitors/buttons/potentiometers/LEDs. Especially buttons.
- Springs
- Bolts, nuts, spacers, etc.
- Common microchips (a bit risky, but these days at the IC level, knock-offs are often sold as their own similarly-named brand at a steep discount. You're usually fine if you pay the prevailing price and don't scrounge for a suspiciously-good price. Issues like the famous FTDI bricks are rare, so again, okay for hobby work.)
- Active elements (ceramic heating elements, piezos, peltier modules, small DC/stepper motors, pumps, etc.)
These are fairly specialty items, but there is still enough of a demand for several players to take advantage of arbitrage with shipping and bulk discounts. The quality is bland and rarely outstanding, but it is fairly consistent. While I wouldn't use most of the stuff in a critical product, I still have a lot of hobbying to do and frankly I can't afford high-quality parts/equipment for all of my projects.
If Amazon banned third-party sellers, they would not bother stocking most of these niche items. I would have to go somewhere else; ebay, or making strategically-timed Taobao orders to minimize international shipping costs and the weeks of waiting. Companies like Adafruit, Seeed, Shapeways, Tindie, Etsy, and Sparkfun would probably step in with their own centralized 'hobby marketplace' offerings that Amazon's current customers would hop to.
That said, I do agree that they should at least make a search option to filter them out.
- Small screwdrivers/hex keys
- Breadboards
- Hookup/jumper wires
- Perfboards and copper-clad FR4.
- Bulk discretes like resistors/capacitors/buttons/potentiometers/LEDs. Especially buttons.
- Springs
- Bolts, nuts, spacers, etc.
- Common microchips (a bit risky, but these days at the IC level, knock-offs are often sold as their own similarly-named brand at a steep discount. You're usually fine if you pay the prevailing price and don't scrounge for a suspiciously-good price. Issues like the famous FTDI bricks are rare, so again, okay for hobby work.)
- Active elements (ceramic heating elements, piezos, peltier modules, small DC/stepper motors, pumps, etc.)
These are fairly specialty items, but there is still enough of a demand for several players to take advantage of arbitrage with shipping and bulk discounts. The quality is bland and rarely outstanding, but it is fairly consistent. While I wouldn't use most of the stuff in a critical product, I still have a lot of hobbying to do and frankly I can't afford high-quality parts/equipment for all of my projects.
If Amazon banned third-party sellers, they would not bother stocking most of these niche items. I would have to go somewhere else; ebay, or making strategically-timed Taobao orders to minimize international shipping costs and the weeks of waiting. Companies like Adafruit, Seeed, Shapeways, Tindie, Etsy, and Sparkfun would probably step in with their own centralized 'hobby marketplace' offerings that Amazon's current customers would hop to.
That said, I do agree that they should at least make a search option to filter them out.