Buyer beware - my wife hates Amazon and goes out of her way to not purchase from them. She has encountered several vendors on Walmart marketplace that simply place orders with Amazon at 100% markup - the packages arrive in Amazon boxes w/ a receipt showing the actual cost paid at Amazon. Total rip-off.
When ordering electronics from Walmart Marketplace, particularly TVs, I’ve found that the marketplace sellers freely substitute makes and models. Maybe nobody notices if you are shipping a gift to someone else, but since I need specific models from specific manufacturers for development it gets noticed when I order LG model XYZ and get a no-name tv instead. I stopped ordering from Walmart altogether after the second time (out of two, consecutive) that happened.
So my advice is anything you buy online at Walmart, make sure it is not a marketplace seller, just save yourself the trouble.
In all cases Wal-Mart refunded my money after waiting for a week for the vendor to respond, though I had to lug the stuff to the UPS store to return it. Amazon usually suggests I donate stuff rather then return it.
I’ve not had any issues with the items sold by Wal-mart actual, those you can buy with confidence.
About 5 years ago, one of my sons wanted a drone for xmas.
In mid-November, Walmart.com warned me to "Order soon to guarantee that you'll get <x> for Christmas."
So, I did the "responsible" thing and ordered the drone before Thanksgiving and it arrived around Nov 25.
Wrap it up. Son opens it on Christmas, aaaaand it's broken out of the box. One of the rotors was bent and wouldn't rotate.
Brought it to Walmart probably on the 27th of December and Walmart tells me, "This was sold by one of our 3rd party vendors. You have to take it up with them."
3rd party vendor tells me to pound sand because there's a 30 day return policy. Remember how I was responsible and got the drone a month ahead of time?
In retrospect, I should have disputed the charge, but it didn't occur to me at the time.
One thing I have never understood is why parents do not inspect, open, etc the products before wrapping them?
I am mean this is a decades old problem from not having the correct batteries, to missing parts, etc etc. Alot of Christmas day disappointments could be avoided by just inspecting the toys before wrapping them.....
Not a parent, but for me when gift giving and receiving - there is a lot of joy in opening the completely 100% unopened thing.
And opening many children toys is usually pretty difficult without scissors and or destroying the packaging. The amount of time consuming precision tape peeling without removing the graphic layer of cardboard may be a little untenable around Christmas.
I can't tell you precisely what I was thinking 5 years ago, but your explanation (joy of opening something that clearly has not been opened) is probably closest to my motivations.
Well as a child I dont think I would have even noticed if the box was opened, or if it even came in a box, if my Sega Genesis or my new Bike, or what ever was completely out of the box I would not have cared (and pretty sure I got more than a few presents completely pre-assembled), hell if the Genesis already hooked up to the TV ready to play I probably would have preferred that...
Of course now as an adult I hate gifts, I buy what I need/want when I need/want it. I do not want other people to spend money on me at all.. Most holidays have become soo commercialized that the consumerism of it all puts me off
Re-learning to love gifts, particularly the giving aspect has brought a lot of joy to my life recently. But I am not talking about buying someone something at Walmart, something they can just buy themselves.
The gifts tend to skew more towards art, fabrics, jewelry, house items. Things that are uniquely found in a particular place, not exactly expensive but mostly hard to acquire / stumble upon.
But yes I agree, the commercialized consumerism is quite off putting. I am grateful for it though, as I am now coming full circle and rediscovering the joy from a very human and primordial action.
I dislike a lot of gift giving, but I do not dislike gifts. Most people who know me well knows I really don't care for pointless tchotchkes, but I do value actually useful gifts. When I use those gifts, I remember the person who gave it to me and get a reminder of their friendship or love. A perfect example is a pocket knife I usually have on me which my wife gave me as a gift; I always think about her every time I use it.
Yeah, sure, maybe one day I'll have time during the holidays not allocated to "family" and "unplugging from the stress of dealing with family" and can do things like "inspect everything I'm about to give away as a gift"...
I pretty clearly did not say inspect everything... I limited clearly to children toys, and it could even be limited to the "main" present like this clearly was.
Every kid has the "one thing" they really want that year, I always see posts by parents that they "one thing" was missing a part, or did not have batteries, or like this case was damaged.
There's a stupid negative stigma around regifting and getting used things, so there's desirability in the gift being presented being brand new, never taken out of the box. Which means you spend Xmas day waiting for your Xbox to download the latest firmware instead and hoping Xbox live doesn't go down instead of being able to play it.
Because the quality control rot is not something that most people are prepared to accept. Most people are unwilling to accept that things have gotten worse.
This goes both ways. Numerous people (companies?) have setup arbitrage businesses. They post products on Amazon at a markup over Walmart and vice-versa. They leverage the APIs to dynamically adjust their prices based on how the prices move on each store. It technically isn't a rip-off, when you think about it. They are taking advantage of people not searching for the best deal. You get what you ordered, they make money from scouting prices and putting at a price you are willing to pay for said product (I assume otherwise you wouldn't order).
Don't get me wrong, when this happens, I get that feeling of rip off, but the reality is, I didn't price shop. And someone did some work to get it to show up for me where I was looking.
When I was an undergrad, me and buddy had what amounted to an arbitrage scheme (I didn't realize that was the name for it back then)selling laptops on campus. We would buy them from ebay, and sell them to local students with posters on physical bulletin boards around campus. At some point, the market flipped, and we could no longer turn a profit this way. So we started buying student's laptops on campus and selling them on ebay.
It's fine if you think markets are intended to be hostile to consumers instead of bettering people's lives. I don't think incentivizing deceptive middlemen is really a net benefit to society.
Perhaps not everyone can research cures for cancer, but that's not a good reason to then become the "cancer". Just because it's how it is now, doesn't mean that's how it has to be. Ideally Amazon, Walmart, Google, etc.. should manage their marketplaces better to provide a optimal consumer experience, but it seems so long as they get their cut, they couldn't care less. The continued consolidation of competition leaves fewer options for consumers to even "vote with their wallets".
Not if you're trying to avoid Amazon for moral boycott reasons (as the OP was). In that case, people are willing to knowingly pay an additional fee to avoid Amazon, but that money is just being pocketed and the rest of the money is being turned over to Amazon on their behalf.
It really is, I remember when my wife hated Wal-Mart for doing the same things she doesn't like Amazon doing. But apparently she now feels that Wal-Mart is the lesser of two evils so she doesn't mind shopping there.
In my mind Wal-Mart is actually the evil one, I watched them destroy entire towns in the 80s. Everyone ended up working there, full time if they were lucky, and they gave all their money back every week because there was nowhere else in town left to spend it.
Buy the time Amazon came around the destruction was over. What Amazon did was raise the bar on customer service so high that everybody else had to follow. That is a net positive I believe.
It hardly matters if what your wife wants to do was correct. The point is, she's trying to pay money (and is in fact spending the money) to try to cut Amazon out. And she's not getting what she's paying for.
Amazon is the biggest eCommerce retailer, so trying to prevent a monopoly is a moral reason.
Amazon also has a lot of famous worker safety/treatment issues for their delivery drivers and warehouse workers. I doubt they are unique in the fulfillment space, but they are extremely well publicized. Walmart has issues as well, but their publicized issues were in stores. Walmart online avoids the worst publicized worker treatment issues.
I was going to say "arbitrage." I thought of the pizza place guy who discovered that DoorDash or GrubHub was charging customers less than they paid him. Promoting the delivery business, you know.
So he'd just order pizzas for himself, and pocket the difference.
I remember this also being a thing with eBay as well. Not sure why someone would go to eBay first and not check Amazon, but then again some people still pay for AOL.
I buy a lot of stuff from newegg and when they made the shift from newegg(the store) to newegg(the marketplace) it was the same, the experience started to suck. Thankfully newegg has as a filter option, "only show items from newegg(the store)"
In fact that is one of my biggest beefs with amazon, the way they have it set up it is very hard, if not impossible to figure out who you are buying stuff from.
The good thing about the old brick an mortar system was that there were experienced buyers between the manufacturer and the brick and mortar store. Suppliers had to submit production samples to the buyers to evaluate. So everything you bought was vetted.
Bricks and mortar retailers have long been prosecuted for fraud by law enforcement, local or federal. But “marketplace” e-resellers circumvent enforcement because their e-tail hosts (Amazon, Walmart, Alibaba…) don't hold them responsible and are not held responsible themselves for abuse of their service by others, no matter that the level of fraud has risen to become the norm. The cause for this is, of course, we, the willing victims. And it won't change until we insist that government NOT be just another reality show.
I've been making a point to order electronics from Best Buy whenever possible. I can trust that Beat Buy doesn't have third party sellers, at least for now.
I had been doing the same, but Best Buy (US) reduced its return period to 14 days unless you shell out $200/year for their Totaltech membership. I should do a better job about inspecting orders as they arrive, but I think 14 days just isn't enough. I've been burned by it a couple of times now due to work travel.
So, now I'm back to trying to find a reputable retailer that sells authentic products.
Best Buy will be gone soon. The only thing keeping it alive is legacy competitors (Circuit City, Sears) dying first and handing over rotting corpses of business.
When I bought a Motorola cable modem from Best Buy it stopped working within 24 hours. At least I could return it and only lose time. Name brands and branded stores aren't safe either, though one would hope they're better on average.
The "marketplace" concept seems to be a recipe for disaster. It's basically leasing out your legitimacy and goodwill as a vendor to businesses that wouldn't be able to pull off their own ecommerce experience.
As others have said, when something goes wrong, they're not going to remember "Oh, marketplace seller biteme42069 was a rip-off, avoid them", they'll just blame Walmart.
It's funny-- Amazon has managed to so squander their reputation that Walmart-- once the epitome of schlocky retail-- had managed to look decent by comparison. They had a strong enough nationwide logistics network that they could challenge the "but-but Prime 7-minute delivery" argument, and the direct nanufacturer connections to ensure they had authentic, controlled inventory. They could have been a more trustworthy choice.
Genuinely interested, because I hate Amazon also but spend much of my online shopping dollars with them, what makes Walmart preferable to Amazon for your family?
I know people who believe that giving dollars to Amazon will cement their monopoly like control over ecommerce, leading to worse behavior in the future. Others object to the well-publicized (although I doubt unique) poor conditions for their drivers and warehouse employees in their fulfillment system.
I think the OP was specifically asking why “Walmart vs Amazon” not “why anywhere else vs Amazon”. The case against shopping at Amazon is clear but why take your dollars to Walmart who is arguably just as bad in every regard.
>Buyer beware - my wife hates Amazon and goes out of her way to not purchase from them. She has encountered several vendors on Walmart marketplace that simply place orders with Amazon at 100% markup - the packages arrive in Amazon boxes w/ a receipt showing the actual cost paid at Amazon. Total rip-off.
I sell on both Walmart and Amazon. As somethingwitty1 said, this works in multiple directions; people dropshipping ittems from Amazon directly to Walmart customers, from Walmart to Amazon customers, and from both to eBay customers.
It's also forbidden. Both Walmart and Amazon explicitly warn against shipping items to customers in competitors' boxes; Walmart even explicitly bans tracking numbers starting with "TBA". If your wife reports that this is happening to Walmart buyer support, the sellers won't be there for long; recent anecdotes say that both companies are really cracking down on dropshipping.
>When ordering electronics from Walmart Marketplace, particularly TVs, I’ve found that the marketplace sellers freely substitute makes and models.
Ugh. All I can say that I've also had less-than-positive experiences when buying from other sellers on both platforms. Amazon is notorious for allowing anyone to open a seller account. Walmart is in theory supposed to be much stricter in examining applicants' qualifications, with many waiting for weeks or months. While this is great from my perspective (both in terms of improving the overall quality of third-party sellers, and minimizing my competition), the incompetent and crooked are still getting through; Walmart recently allowing non US-domiciled sellers (i.e., Chinese) doesn't help.
>I’ve not had any issues with the items sold by Wal-mart actual, those you can buy with confidence.
Agreed. Amazon commingles its own inventory and that of third-party sellers that Amazon handles storage and shipping for (FBA); as a result, my own confidence in the genuineness of, say, household staples from Amazon has plummeted. I think Walmart does not do so with WFS, its FBA equivalent. In any case WFS much less used than FBA, because there is little advantage for sellers to do so over fulfilling items themselves.
>>I stopped ordering from Walmart altogether after the second time (out of two, consecutive) that happened.
or stop ordering from the marketplace sellers. I like ordering directly from websites for vendors i do business with. This is why I do not shop on ebay.
From Amazon I rarely order anything that is not "shipped and sold by amazon", on walmart I only order Walmart Stock, on newegg I only order newegg stock, etc etc
Personally I am not sure what the appeal is of all these bigger sites adding "marketplace" sellers.
> Personally I am not sure what the appeal is of all these bigger sites adding "marketplace" sellers.
It’s the long tail. Need an unbranded under-desk treadmill manufactured by Xiaomi? Amazon marketplace has ever color of the rainbow at prices only reasonable for dropshippers.
There’s ofc downsides to that, but certain consumers don’t mind.
> Personally I am not sure what the appeal is of all these bigger sites adding "marketplace" sellers.
Digi-Key, an electronic parts distributor which used to have a good reputation for supply chain quality, added "marketplace" sellers. Before this, when you ordered from Digi-Key, you were assured that the product went directly from the manufacturer to Digi-Key in Minnesota and then to you. You got exactly what you ordered. Now, it's much iffier.
I ordered a few things last fall from Wal Mart. Each time, they charged once but delivered multiples of the same item. One other time, they shipped it to some store who said they never got it.
There is no real reason why they have it so wrong.
Also, I buy expensive things direct from the manufacturer if I buy online. No chance for counterfeit items that way.
Wal Mart and Amazon are nothing more than digital flea markets at this point.
I’ve had this happen with an Amazon vendor drop shipping another Amazon product. They were able to do this because the original product wasn’t listed in the correct department and couldn’t be found easily.
I sometimes intentionally do that here as the IKEA online store has very high shipping costs (They probably want people to come to the store and pick up a bunch of other things on the way). There's sellers that sell IKEA things on Amazon with a markup but it's still cheaper than IKEA's shipping. I'm assuming it's just people buying a cart full of the same product and re-selling it on Amazon.
Everytime I buy anything from Walmart I check the "Walmart.com" retailer box. I wish there was a way to make it permanent.
Having said that there was one time I had this same issue...I bought from Walmart's marketplace and the product wasn't what I ordered. I had no issue with returning it.
I had that issue. I ordered something from Walmart (a vacuum cleaner) and it arrived in a new box from amazon. I called their customer service and the claimed they never shipped anything from amazon. I guess that was a lie.
>Buyer beware - my wife hates Amazon and goes out of her way to not purchase from them. She has encountered several vendors on Walmart marketplace that simply place orders with Amazon at 100% markup
ebay sellers do the same. I pay using paypal on ebay, just to get a gift package from amazon prime. Stopped using ebay and every scammer like that got negatives from me. They are still cheaper than non-amazon sellers
It’s horrible and they won’t do anything about it despite contacting them via help requests and Twitter.
3 of the top 5 listings are total scams.
And Amazon’s choice for 1TB flash drive is a scam: USB Flash Drive 1TB, Flash Memory Stick for PC/Laptop, Ultra Large Storage USB Drive, Portable Thumb Drives (Black) https://a.co/d/cTi7XqZ
Amazon is on a gradual decline and what is shocking is that people dont see it.
I stopped using amazon around 2 years ago. If i want to buy "Chinesium" i use aliexpress and save a lot of middlemen in return for a long shipping time.
I've been burned by fake products a few times and learned my lesson long ago. Sure, amazon does make it easy to return them, but going to a real store avoids it all-together.
If you shop around for prices, it is rare that amazon's prices are even competitive vs an actual physical store these days.
this makes little sense, the store has employees and high rents, what are amazon's reasons?
That just excuses their poor behavior on their own marketplace. Where they're making untold amounts of money. No, just like Comcast's customer support isn't worth spending more of Comcast's money on, so, too Amazon doesn't have the incentives to improve on the status quo. and why shouldn't they? they're making money hand over fist
> Sure, amazon does make it easy to return them, but going to a real store avoids it all-together.
Genuine question, what store is this that:
1) has inventory in store of items like this
2) doesn’t also ever have fake merchandise on their shelves
The problem isn’t just Amazon, Walmart, or other large online retailers, it’s issues throughout the supply chain because of the lack of enforcement by all actors (retailers, distributors, shippers, manufacturers, customs agents, government agencies, etc).
There are a LOT of old-school computer shops which trade on their reputation.
I'm Canadian so "Canada computers" comes to mind. They are almost always price-competitive with Amazon, and you can check their stock online before you go (they do ship as well)
They have been around for a long time and built a reputation of not selling crap.
You can go there and know that what you buy will be a decent product. Maybe not as wide a selection as "amazon" but they carry the top of almost any category.
Newegg has been great for at least a decade as well?
The fake stuff isn't amazon or walmart, it is almost always "third party sellers" which many stores dont offer for obvious reasons (reputation damaging fraud).
The article cites Target Australia. My understanding is that because Target doesn't allow 3rd-party sellers like Amazon or Walmart, they have much better control over their supply chains.
> I've been burned by fake products a few times and learned my lesson long ago. Sure, amazon does make it easy to return them, but going to a real store avoids it all-together.
What makes you trust a brick and mortar store's supply chain more than an online store? There are counterfeit items everywhere.
Number of fake/counterfeit items i have gotten from a bricks and morter store : 0
Number of fake/counterfeit items i have gotten off amazon prior to giving up on it : 6
Dig into this counterfeit items issue more deeply, it is almost always "third party sellers" and amazon's commingling that is causing these problems. Don't allow third party sellers, don't commingle your inventory and it is a LOT harder to introduce counterfeit items into your stock.
Sounds like it's a semi-legit area for blockchain applicability- a website/app which stores all reviews on blockchain so that people are 100% certain no one has tampered with them.
Step 2: Spam the blockchain with marketing, false stories, and smears against your competitors products. If the blockchain requires a fee to write to (most do), you win because you have a marketing budget and the average consumer does not.
The "Amazon's Choice" label seems to be almost as gameable as reviews - sellers somehow have a way of creating categories it would take very little work to be #1 in, such as "Amazon's Choice for <company name> flash drive"
Amazon’s Choice seems like a dynamic labeling to me. The impression of it that there must be a list of Choice products is likely just a deliberate impression.
> I don’t think Amazon’s choice is the same for every one.
I believe it is the same for all users for a given keyword search, but it is also dynamically changing.
From [1], the algorithm itself is a black box though:
> One innovation the company devised is “Amazon’s Choice,” a distinctive black badge typically bestowed on a single product per search term. The company says the award is given to “highly rated, well-priced products available to ship immediately.” But for many categories, dozens of options fit that description. How does Amazon choose its choices? Do humans have a hand in the decisions, or are they governed by an algorithm?
> The company won’t say. “Amazon’s Choice is just our recommendation, and customers can always ask for specific brands or products if they choose,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.
Because if the problem is bad enough, people will start looking for alternative places to buy things. It's like how people will avoid the bad neighborhoods in a city.
Yeah, SanDisk seem fine. It's the $19.99 for 1TB or $39.99 for 2TB ones that aren't. I originally got alerted to this when I was boasting about how cheap flash disks had gotten and some person here pointed out I was linking to something totally scammy, which I had no idea about.
Flash drives with hacked firmware to pretend to be bigger capacity than they were (along with other evildoing, like counterfeits targeting people paying a premium to get Sandisk quality) were already rampant on eBay IIRC 15+ years ago.
I was still seething over some of the storage ones when, a few years ago, I joined an anti-counterfeiting startup. (Sadly, our successful MVP launch integrated into a high-end factory production line happened just as Covid was breaking out, which spooked our flagship customer, and impacted followthrough we needed, then we ran out of runway while pivoting.)
As a consumer, I can imagine a lot of things that the marketplaces like Amazon.com and Walmart.com could do to improve trustworthiness. I don't know whether those make business sense. I'd love to see consumers reward a marketplace that conspicuously kept out the scammers.
Ideally, the solution would protect integrity of all brands, not only house brands.
I think a key thing is that a marketplace should be held liable if the actual seller cannot be held to account. They shouldn't be able to use "just a marketplace" as a shield to avoid liability when they're the only ones in a position to have vetted the real seller.
This is how it works with credit card companies where I live. The credit card company is jointly liable with the supplier. It works fine and the consumer is protected. "Marketplaces" are still in the relative wild west when it comes to liability here.
The flip side is then it becomes much harder for small companies to get their products approved on such marketplaces (to the benefit of larger competitors). There's a tradeoff and, like most things, some middle ground is probably best.
> There's a tradeoff and, like most things, some middle ground is probably best.
This is a question of whether there should be any real accountability at all. We're currently at one extreme and debating whether to take the smallest step away from that; a real middle ground is a long ways off.
> The flip side is then it becomes much harder for small companies to get their products approved on such marketplaces
So long as the marketplace can confirm that someone will take responsibility for product quality, I don’t see an issue. Smaller companies will be able to be more hands on with a marketplace. As in, actually having a person to communicate with customers and/or the marketplace.
The problem only is an issue for fly by night sellers that just generate new identities when a marketplace delists them. Having a little bit of due diligence added to the marketplace is a good thing for both buyers and sellers.
If the marketplace is jointly liable, it could be as simple as them then requiring sellers to have a typical $2m liability policy from a licensed insurance company naming the seller and marketplace and provide proof of insurance before selling. If anyone shows up to sue over the product, you just direct them to the insurance company.
If you’re not doing anything dumb and don’t have a history of doing anything dumb, getting some basic liability insurance should be cheap and trivial.
It completely outsources the costs and moderation and probably _saves_ the marketplace money versus the current arrangement.
The only way you continue to sell a bunch of fake / dangerous products is if the insurance companies are taking losses on this. And they’ve shown themselves pretty adept at avoiding losses.
Yesterday I read another analysis of what seems to be the same drive which tried to verify the real capacity, but the issue was that the drive was throttled to a low-speed connection so that validating it by writing and re-reading the full volume of data would take something like 250 days. So it's kind of obvious that it was bad, but you can't easily prove it in a reasonable time.
I suppose the issue is that the only real way of doing that is to write as much random garbage as the drive supports and then verify that you can read it all back again. That should probably be a thing, but it would be incredibly slow and waste your limited write cycles.
The combination of regulations and buying from reputable sellers should be enough IMO... though most people would probably view Walmart as a reputable seller, so that clearly doesn't work.
d = random_block()
for block in capacity:
block.write(d)
if block.read() != d:
fail("fake disk")
Since that would be fooled by a device mapping all reported blocks to the same actual storage. I guess you basically have to write unique data to all reported blocks first, then read them all back to verify.
Since storage devices are often bigger than RAM, the data is probably best to generate procedurally (but deterministically) from the block number.
Yes, that would be possible, but that would require effort on the counterfeiter's part. Any additional hardware in the drive controller is going to reduce the counterfeiter's profits. So why would they bother? H2testw, which f3's algorithm is based upon, is more than a decade old at this point with the same RNG generator and no one has made such a drive controller to trick it.
You could do that, but doesn't it seem easier to: 1) initialize a CSPRNG to a known seed; 2) generate random numbers and write them sequentially; 3) initialize a new RNG to the same seed and compare numbers you generate to numbers you read from the storage? That way, you even get to point at the exact byte where the first divergence happens, which might let you say, "this drive which claims to be 30TB seems to be 1GB".
Once you find the exact byte where you know the storage ends, you can actually format the drive it's completely usable. F3 can do this with f3probe and f3fix.
I've used it on a 2GB microSD that came with a 3d printer that turned out to be 100MB. I continued to use it to transport files to my 3d printer for a bit with this.
I think that would avoid the potential loophole I was worried about! I'd be careful with the periodicity of the RNG though.
I was on a machine with limited user space. I used OpenSSL, no new binaries, reading and writing at close-to-wire speeds. "Counting zeroes" would track down where they don't match, doesn't it?
The documentation does mention it is possible for more advanced fake firmware to bypass this, but I don't think anyone has bothered yet. It's labelled experimental because of that, but I believe that was at least 5 years ago.
In order to sell on those platforms companies should have to place $5 million in escrow and Amazon promises to test at random a certain percentage of your products and if failed you lose your money. I laughed at a client when he told me he bought a 1TB hard drive off of Wish. I told him well good luck with that hope you didn't just get scammed. Saw him a week later and he told me the drive wouldn't work on his new PS5. I told him I would bet him the cost of the drive it was a fake and probably couldn't hold even half of what it is reporting and told him to use the tools to see it's actual size. He didn't take the bet so I will never be sure but no way in hell I would be a $25 storage from Wish.
Nestle have no problem putting up $5M, but most good small companies just can't.
So the end effect is that you enable big monopolies.
You need to invent some kind of reputation system. Small towns (and communities) have this builtin as everybody knows almost everybody. Amazon is missing the ability to say "this is a new seller without solid reputation".
But I'm guessing this would be bad for short-term thinking, the wish for "the everything store".
You can't be quality store and "everything store". Everything is mostly junk (Sturgeon's law).
Like bonds for construction work. The usual way that small companies do that is insurance; the insurance companies look into how likely a company is to be able to perform and charge appropriately. The risk assessment function rides on them with commercial incentives instead of corruptible government. In theory.
HN likes to believe that any sort of monetary entry barrier automatically equals big player monopoly and that it will prevent the smaller guys from entering but as in your example this is just not true. In fact like you say has sprung up secondary markets like insurance companies.
> The hacked firmware writes new data on top of the old data and keeps the directory. It appears to be working, but when you try to access your files, there's nothing there.
Jeez, this last detail elevates it from scam to plain malicious... Overwriting files isn't likely to conceal the scam much longer for a drive that already missreports it's size and is limited to 60MB/s - but it is likely to lose data for someone who actually manages to reach that capacity.
[edit]
Not speculation, reality... following the link to similar drives on amazon by a sibling comment, first 1 start review shows story of data loss [0]:
> They have figured out a way for it to tell the computer that it's a hard drive with 1 or 2TB, where it really is 128GB, according to the engineers who looked at it [...] I spent several hundred dollars to retrieve a few documents that were critical to me [...]
These drives are costing non technical people data loss, not just money.
Anytime I buy a "new" storage device, it gets runs through F3[0] first. Several storage devices I've got off Amazon have been fake, even when buying from known name brands.
This has always been a thing, but I think it's insane that a retailer is carrying a scam product like this. Amazon has the excuse that third-party sellers are usually the ones selling them (which is of course still bullshit). What's Walmart's excuse?
Walmart isn't carrying it. It's being sold by a third party on Walmart.com. Walmart allows third parties to sell on Walmart.com just as Amazon allows third parties to sell on their website.
If I'm going to Walmart.com, giving my credit card information to Walmart, on a page with Walmart's logo prominently displayed, then it feels more like a business relation with Walmart that they subcontract out. Like if I buy a t-shirt from a dropseller, and it's defective, I can take it up with the dropseller and don't need to argue with the manufacturer.
Granted, a similar argument could be made about eBay, so I think history plays a huge role. When Walmart puts up a marketplace for 3rd-parties without clearly disclaiming it as being from not-Walmart, Walmart's history and reputation as a direct seller customers lets a reasonable customer conclude that they are buying it directly from Walmart. eBay was never a seller themselves, and doesn't have Walmart's reputation, so products listed on eBay don't cause the same customer confusion.
I don't disagree, but Amazon and other sites are operating the same model. Walmart and Amazon provide similar prominence about whether a product is being sold by them or by a third party. I agree that eBay doesn't cause that confusion because they were never a first party seller.
I think the issue is that we'd need a regulation and one that clearly stipulates what the situation is. For example, one could propose that when a retailer that sells goods as a first party also provides a marketplace for third party goods, 10% of the page's size above the fold must be the third party's branding and that branding must be larger than the branding of the retailer. That would make it very obvious.
One of the issues that we're facing is that our regulations often don't specify enough of how something must be implemented. For example, sites must label their ads. Google used to make the ads have a different color background that made it easy to visually filter ads from organic results. Now they just write "Ad" in light grey (#aaadb2) against a gray background (#202124) with much less prominence and contrast than the title of the link. Twitter puts "Promoted" below the tweet rather than at the top of the tweet so that when you're scrolling you'll read the tweet before seeing that it's an ad (and it's rgb(113, 118, 123) (light gray) on black while the regular text is rgb(231, 233, 234) (nearly white) on black). The FTC does require that ads and sponsored content be clearly labeled, but doesn't really specify or enforce standards. I think if I labeled something as "Ad" as #aaadb2 on a #aaadb1 background, that clearly wouldn't pass muster. There'd be almost zero contrast. How much contrast is needed? How prominent should we require messages that clarify important things like this?
As you note, you're going to Walmart.com and giving your information to Walmart on a page where Walmart's logo and branding is basically all that you see - except for a tiny "Sold by XYZ" note. I don't know what the solution is entirely, but it's going to take regulatory action if we want to deal with this. If Amazon is doing it, Walmart will do it. If Google is limiting the contrast on how it marks ads, Twitter will also limit the contrast.
I definitely agree, this is an industry-wide issue. As much as it explains Walmart's actions, I don't think it absolves any of the actors.
So many of our regulations and laws are designed under the assumption that time and attention are unlimited. Under such an assumption, misrepresenting the seller for 95% of the page is fine, because you'll notice the 5% that gives accurate information. Advertising designed to give false impressions are fine, because of course you'll notice that nothing was specifically claimed about a product. Terms of service and privacy policies are binding no matter how unnecessarily long they are, because you have unlimited time to sift through them.
But those assumptions are all clearly and blatantly untrue.
It annoys me to no end that Walmart.com defaults to mostly 3rd party junk when you search. Every single time I have to adjust search settings to ‘in-store’ only, which isn’t a 1 second fix when you’re on mobile just due to network latency.
The only reason I ever buy from Walmart is when I want the product the same day and am willing to drive 10 min to my local store. If that isn’t the case, I have the entire internet of sellers to choose from and it surely isn’t going to be Walmart that I pick.
Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined people would be upset about not having access to what wal-mart stocks in-store vs. its web site. The shelves are largely stocked with cheaply made chinesium junk as it is!
Try buy a can opener that doesn't bend on first use or a wooden spoon in your local wal-mart, I dare you. It's just one step above DOLLAR GENERAL from where I'm sitting.
Walmart does indeed sell a lot of dollar store quality items like you’re describing. But for most items they have a higher quality (not high quality- just higher) sitting right next to the cheapest one on the shelf.
The kitchen equipment aisle is what comes to mind here - you can buy the cheap spoon for $.99 or you can buy the better one that doesn’t have the issues you describe for a few dollars more. Which one you buy is up to you.
We just bought a midrange quality ice cream scoop from Target locally, the thought process being that Target usually has higher quality items. Then later that same day we went to Walmart for some low quality disposable items and saw that exact ice cream scoop for a dollar less than Target. Oops.
I generally go out of my way to avoid Walmart, but the one recent datapoint I have was a flour sifter bought there. It didn't work even when brand new. The design was physically flawed, not a one-off defective item.[1] It was essentially a film prop. It looked like a flour sifter, and AFAICT it was really made from stainless steel, but one couldn't use it to sift more than maybe a handful of flour before it became permanently useless. Didn't do anything to change my opinion about buying things from them, and seems like "outright fraud", just not at the level of a fake 30TB SSD.
I'd rather buy crap from a namebrand that has an address I can send a complaint to, than some anonymous dropshipper that's just going to fold and reopen within a week.
…and after that can opener bends on first use, I can take it straight to the same Walmart and get a replacement or refund. No wait, no mailing stuff back and forth. This is on top of the immediate gratification (for lack of a better term when it comes to can openers) of getting the opener immediately in the first place, as should I ever find myself in need of a new can opener, it will almost certainly be because my current one broke or got lost and I have a can I need to open right now.
I don't find buying stuff online instead of in person nearly as attractive a proposition as I used to. Whether that's just because of the negative experiences or just because of priority rebalancing after growing older, I have no way of knowing, but whenever I need to buy something I almost always look for it at several local stores first, either in-person or via the "pick up in store" option on their sites.
The only time I shop in a physical Walmart store is when I need something I can't wait for, on which case I check In-Store on the website first and it is indeed clunky.
There are plenty of such stores selling quality goods, brick-and-mortar is too general.
But in terms of big-box retailers it has indeed become a depressing reality in the USA, ever since Sears closed down.
FWIW the last few times I abandoned hope in the kitchenware aisles of Wal-Mart I found something reasonable at Bed Bath & Beyond, a brick-and-mortar store. But it did admittedly require still splurging on basically top-of-the-line variants at BB&B. Such options were nowhere to be found in Wal-Mart though, not even close.
My impression is that the big-box retailers just don't go deep on the quality axis, they instead go wide on the quantity axis in terms of kinds of products. Within the ~quality axis they often just have cosmetically different looking dolled-up variants of more or less the same garbage with a higher price tag.
But if you go somewhere with a narrower scope like BB&B, you can at least find tangible differences along the quality axis. And they sure demand top-of-the-line prices for quality levels we once took for granted before China turned up the wick on this race to zero :(
Not only that, I've also been bitten by cheaply made junk stamped "made in the USA." As another commenter said, at least with going in the store, there is usually some company attached to the product I can contact if really needed. Regardless of the cheaply made stuff's origin. Third party online retailers, much of the time end up ghosted or someone trying to play off as being incompetent.
Never heard of Best Buy selling fake stuff, at least not yet. For spoons and such, there are dedicated stores like Sur La Table, which of course cost a lot more.
Where do you see that it's a third-party seller? I'm not seeing it.
edit: Reading through the text and looking at the pictures, it's obvious that it's a third-party, but nothing on the site explicitly says "this is a seller not associated with Walmart".
I think it's not obvious because it is out of stock, so no one is selling it. If you find an in-stock item from a third party, it's pretty straightforward.
It's pretty straightforward once you know what to look for, but I don't think I'd call it straightforward overall. It's halfway down the page, sandwiched between shipping and return policy, and doesn't show up at all on the search results.
Walmart recently started doing the whole "sold by x, fulfulled by Walmart" thing that amazon does. So they're taking inventory from random sellers and selling it just as Amazon does. Which is kind of annoying. I think Target still doesn't do this. Lately though I'm finding BestBuy to be a good option for when I am trying to avoid counterfeits or rinky dink random brands. They usually ship free too.
They do. Search target.com for some suitably generic thing like 'portable hard drive' and you'll see some are labeled like this: "Sold and shipped by Mega Retail Store
a Target Plus™ partner"
Amazon claims the excuse that their third-party sellers they rely on and contract with to provide goods to attract customers, but I'm not convinced it's valid (as you can probably surmise). Amazon ought to be required to verify the authenticity of products on their site, if only in the first batch.
I'd like that. But I know Amazon commingles inventory with third-party sellers. I'd like to be able to shop just Amazon-sold items, and Amazon-only inventory. Without that, I find the whole experience devalued significantly.
On an Amazon search results or category page, look in the options in the left column for a "Seller" section, and select "Amazon Warehouse."
That option is actually not always available for some reason (maybe if all of the options on the current page will be shipped from Amazon anyway)… but I always check it when it is and I don't want any shady sellers to be included.
The tactic is always the same: hack the firmware. I remember 15 years ago when I got one of these “Portable MP4 Players” (exactly like an iPod, but for 10% of the price), and it would say “8 GB” on it. When trying to upload my music into it, at some point it’d return an random storage error.
I didn’t understand, so I decided to format it. What was my surprise when the 8 GB disk turned into 1 GB? I researched like crazy, and then found out in some forum that they would tweak the firmware to tell the OS about its fake size, though I’m not sure how formatting it would ‘fix’ this. After formatting it, it worked normally and for many years.
In the end, it is the same stupid technique, 15 years later. I’m not sure why wouldn’t they just sell it with proper specifications and profit over the okay quality of the device..
They probably changed the partition table to say that the partition is 8GB. No complex firmware shenanigans needed. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record. Tools like fdisk will allow you to “hack” it in 10 seconds.
When you reparationed your OS probably read the true disk size (correctly reported by firmware) and made a brand new partition table, partition and file system on top of it.
You can check spot prices for NAND chips (Gigabits not GB) which explains the margins for end-user products. (This one is <2% of the TLC chip cost, obviously fake.)
Wow, I have to be impressed though with the lengths they go to to keep up the charade. Hacking the firmware and creating fake files if you go over the real limit. Many people might never find out it's a fake (how many people who don't immediately know this is a scam are actually going to fill up that much space and find out?)
That's the standard way of making fake memory cards. The "innovation" of this scam is the nice enclosure.
The firmware is actually not much of a hack, but quite in line with how flash memory operates. Flash memory can't be modified, but rather needs to be bulk erased and then written. Thus an address doesn't indicate a physical place but rather goes through some indirection data structure. The hacked firmware just reports a larger capacity, and silently discards older blocks it's supposed to be hanging onto.
Presumably it'll fail quickly if you use full disk encryption. Or any filesystem other than NTFS, if it somehow interprets that in order to not overwrite directory blocks.
The firmware hacking to fake the size isn't new in the whole fake USB drive scene, the new part of it is that it's being sold on Walmart.com . Some commenters have said it's a marketplace product, but I visited the page and I can't even spot an indicator to say so.
Apparently the indicator only appears when it is in stock. Which kind of makes sense but is still annoying.
It’s getting harder and harder to find non marketplace sellers at both Amazon and Walmart. Starting to default to target and Home Depot and Best Buy for now.
The writing is strange in general - "The drive is far from being one of the best SSDs, but it deserves a spot on everyone's blocklist." is an odd one to parse too.
I think that one's mostly just to put in that link to their(?) list of best SSDs, probably full of referral links and paraphrased Amazon descriptions...
It's incorrect. The correct phrase would be "If something seems too good to be true, it usually is." which can be extrapolated to "If something seems too good to be true, it usually is too good to be true."
That is the intended reading, but it just seems wrong. The sentence parses to me to the components "[if] [something] [seems] [too good to be true], [it] [isn't]", so [isn't] has to apply to [too good to be true].
It doesn't sound right indeed because it should read "it is," not "it isn't." Regardless, "something sounding too good to be true" is how you determine that tech innovation has happened. The Retina screen sounded too good to be true back in 2012; the M1 sounded too good to be true; etc.
This has been going on for awhile. But my question for the crowd here: I actually need a bunch more storage soon, and can't afford to spend much. So while this is an obvious scam, what isn't? Got any links to the best price for the most space?
Not sure on exact products but I'd probably trust B&H [1] over Amazon and Newegg for something like this - if you're worried about getting fake products etc.
In my experience they run a great store. I also don't think they have the kind of third-party seller BS that Amazon and Walmart do.
B&H are great. I've had good luck with them. My main supplier these days is Best Buy. No 3rd party sellers. Never heard of any scam or inauthentic products from them. They ship from the local store or warehouse so I get things faster than Prime. And maybe they treat their workers better than Amazon? I guess that's a low bar to clear but I haven't heard any complaints.
It's a little funny to me because as recently as the early 2010s, Best Buy felt like a joke. I don't know that they've changed much from then to now, but Amazon and Newegg are shadows of what they used to be. Best Buy seems like a paragon of reliability in comparison.
This mirrors my journey exactly. BB was pretty much a joke for most of the last decade+, however in the last few years it's been a bastion of reliability in a sea of fakes from its competitors.
If shopping on Amazon, the trick is to view only products sold by Amazon, not 3rd party sellers. Sometimes this is a little tricky to do. When you search for "1TB USB Flash Drive", you won't see a filter for seller. But if you click "USB Flash Drives" under the department filter, you'll now be able to show only items sold by "amazon.com". Results are the legit brands: SanDisk, Kingston, HP, PNY.
> If shopping on Amazon, the trick is to view only products sold by Amazon, not 3rd party sellers.
My understanding is that "ships from and sold by Amazon.com" is not safe, since those items are often commingled into the general FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) stock.
I've seen reports of that but never had an issue myself. If there is a problem you can return it, and I find Amazon's "drop item at UPS store without packaging it" very convenient. If you still want to avoid the chance, B&H is probably best for electronic items.
You need to be more specific about your requirements. What size is a bunch? Internal or external? Flash or spinning rust?
In general stick to well known brands of whatever you're looking at. If you want to save money, then expand your knowledge of the lesser tier brands based on what people are talking about (eg r/buildapc r/buildapcsales). Make a spreadsheet of models across vendors, rather than trusting an individual vendor's search functionality. That's just a good idea anyway, to make sure you're not getting gouged by a vendor.
The scam listing under discussion doesn't even purport to have a brand name, not even a GENSYM brand. The only way you're going to get there is to search for capacity and sort by price. Don't do that.
Sadly no, they have the "marketplace" problem that Amazon does where you never know who actually provided the widget you are buying, and they have a an even worse problem where they scam people out of returns.
newegg is extremely shady. back when GPUs were still hard to find they were bundling them with defective gigabyte power supplies (as revealed by gamer's nexus), reselling returned defective items and blaming the customer (as revealed by gamer's nexus, etc.
I wouldn't give them my money, personally. Their willingness to sell garbage to customers and blame the customers is not the mark of a good business.
What I always wonder about fake SD cards and USB drives is, if they could “run DOOM” - can a microSD card be used as an extremely cost effective, low endurance general purpose computers with single level storage?
Bottom of the barrel microSD is about $2.50, I don’t smoke but a pack of cigarette is over twice as that. So microSD-based devices should be able to be distributed in a similar affordability and scale, with computing resource of perhaps late 80s PC. What could it do, for the good or for fun?
After a quick search, looking at one such controller [0], it has a 24mhz CPU w/ 16KB RAM and another I came across that has 32mhz CPU and per doom minimum requirements @ 66mhz CPU and 8MB RAM[1], good luck on that. It's been ported to some pretty weak embedded systems before but maybe someone will eventually prove me wrong.
> While SD cards are admittedly I/O-limited, some clever hacking of the microcontroller in an SD card could make for a very economical and compact data logging solution for I2C or SPI-based sensors.
Thanks for the link - that was in my mind but didn’t realize I was almost lifting sentences from that page :p
I think that the parent post means to use the onboard controller as a CPU and the flash memory as virtual memory (with no ram) and mass storage. I don't think this is actually viable with sd cards but it might work with different memory formats.
Despite being solid state, SD cards have horrible random read and write speeds, worse even than HDDs. They're made for storing media from cameras, so it doesn't matter.
Maybe RPis do OK cause they just load the system once, maybe even sequentially. I also keep a card in my MBP. It takes forever to write directories, but it's good enough to store Xcode etc only cause the RAM caches things. Torrenting Ubuntu onto it was unusably slow. I expect it'd be unusable as single-level storage.
Well, near as I can tell Newegg isn’t much better.
It’s the ‘trying to be the curated next gen shopping experience’ but really being a digital flea market. Which, don’t ever buy furniture at those, they got the name for a reason.
A great way of describing it. You can't trust any large online retailer these days. Every top result on Amazon is from a brand with random letters that has no accountability. Even Etsy is filled with tons of "Verified handmade" items that are obviously mass produced products from Alibaba/AliExpress (they don't even bother to use different pictures than the original listing). I ordered something off Wayfair this week and what I got was totally lower quality than the pictures.
Not familiar with walmart's store front...but looks pretty direct to me. I don't see a 3rd party seller listed or any indication that I'm in "marketplace" territory here:
Not familiar with walmart's store front...but looks pretty direct to me. I don't see a 3rd party seller listed or any indication that I'm in "marketplace" territory here:
If I buy something from walmart.com and it happens to be a 3rd party seller, MY MONEY STILL GOES THROUGH WALMART. Or at least that's what my credit card statement says.
No matter how much contortions Walmart/Scamazon/Newegg want to distance away from 3rd party sellers, they are endorsing the 3rd parties when they allow them on the site.
Calm down. I’m not endorsing the third party listings. I’m pointing out that’s what this was to explain how Walmart made no purchasing decision at all here.
2. Allow this scammer controlled access to Walmart finances
3. Allow the scammer to access the list of buyers of this scam coming from Walmart
Just because the actual item is a data-gobbling scam from another company, does not exonerate Walmart from enabling and furthering this fraud. And Walmart materially benefits from fraud, given their cut.
There are hundreds of these on Amazon. Amazon could have some person spend a few hours a day nuking the clearly fraudulent products, but they dgaf and do not.
They won't care unless there are regulations making it possible to cost them money if they don't act. E.g. if they were required to pay a reasonably small statutory fee on top of the refund when refunding a fraudulent product they'd need to start addressing it, or lists of products would quickly spread online and cause them massive losses.
Although a lot of people want smaller government and less regulation. Enforcement would require more bureaucracy in spending. Feels like an uphill battle.
In case you missed the other subthreads… This isn't being sold by Walmart themselves; they're just acting as the storefront for a third-party seller, as Amazon and NewEgg do.
I’m curious why they bothered to add two microSD cards, but I wonder if that somehow actually makes the hack easier? Like maybe the firmware only needs to be patched in one spot to report a fake size when running in “RAID” mode?
Because they count on the fact that transfer rate is so slow people will really realize this too late. I guess this kind of business create an account on amazon, aliexpress and others, scam thousands of users for a month or two, close their accounts, create a new one before they get annoyed by disputes and everything.
I browsed the twitter comments and appears the FW is hacked to report this incredible amount but when it writes then it's overwriting multiple times. It's also USB 2.0.
So if NewEgg has gone the way of garbage as well, where do people go for trustworthy parts these days? I haven't built my own machine in about a decade, but thinking about building a new one soon...
> The hacked firmware writes new data on top of the old data and keeps the directory. It appears to be working, but when you try to access your files, there's nothing there.
I don't understand why someone would release fake products like this. If you're going to sell a fake product, wouldn't you be better off sending like a functioning 0.5TB HDD, or sending a literal brick? Why would you send a fake product that causes data loss?
Because it increases the length of time between your fake product being sold and the return claims/consumers calling shenanigans get you kicked off of the platform. If they opened the box and see a brick, or plug it in and only see half a terabyte of capacity, they will immediately start a return.
Unless you are the rare type who thoroughly tests all storage you buy before you use it, it is likely you would be backing up data to this and be blissfully unaware of what it is doing until much later, and even then it's likely you'll think of the drive as defective, rather than intentionally sold as fraudulent.
This type of devices are supposed to be sold in cash to tourists, not online where victims could issue chargebacks.
But I suppose the sellers has their scheme to avoid repayment anyway so it works anyway. It’s also a calculated and managed risk, so the marketplace don’t care anyway, either. It’s a cash wheelbarrow of moral.
It keeps overwriting the file data but keeps the folder structure. So it may take months to find out it was fake and by that point too late to return or get a refund.
So the answer to “why?” then is to make money with their scam and get as few refunds and returns as possible.
Because as the scammer once you have the payment from the purchaser, you don't care. And a 0.5TB disk would cut into your 'margins' on something like this.
You have to minimize the customer returns in the first 30 days. Sending a brick gets lots of immediate returns and probably the device pulled from the shop.
Making it look like it mostly works, enough to pass a 5-minute “is this a scam?” test probably even gets some legitimate users to write a 5-star “I can’t believe it’s true, but it is!” review.
The goal is to increase the amount of time before the customer notices what they got is not what you claimed. If the drive's capacity immediately shows something different they will start whatever refund process within the window where that is allowed.
> More people buy 30TB fake disks than 0.5TB real ones.
I wasn't suggesting "sell a 0.5TB device honestly as a 0.5TB device", I was suggesting "sell a 0.5TB device claiming it is a 30TB device".
> You also automatically filter out the people that’d be smart enough to notice something was off.
You won't find a single "smart" person in the world that will buy a "30TB" disk for $30. So the smart people have already been filtered out in any case.
I bought a 512 GB SanDisk SD card in Shenzhen several years ago that was similarly fake. I think what happened here is they just incorporated these off-the-shelf fake SD cards into their product, rather than hacking the firmware of the SD cards themselves.
> If something sounds too good to be true, then it isn't.
Is this an American version of the idiom? I've always heard it as "then it is", referring to the predicate... which I think sounds natural but now I'm wondering if that was just cultural.
This is almost impossible to control. The amount of staffing and expertise needed to do this at scale across all product styles and segments is just impossible to maintain. There are no laws or any repercussions at all to allowing fake items on their stores, so Amazon and Walmart will not do anything about them. Problem is if someone does the right thing and weeds out all the scams from their site they will not have enough products and because of economies of scale they can’t offer the price Amazon or Walmart can offer. So essentially these scam items are giving them market pricing power. It’s almost impossible to beat, and I am sure that is why Walmart jumped into the game themselves.
> This is almost impossible to control. The amount of staffing and expertise needed to do this at scale across all product styles and segments is just impossible to maintain.
I’ll try this excuse next time I break a law, and see how far it gets me. “Your honor, keeping track of so many laws is just impossible to maintain!”
Items have to do what they’re supposed to. So for example you can’t sell a “TV” that doesn’t do ‘TV stuff.’ Here’s one description of that law, from Investopedia:
> The law automatically provides the second type of warranty, the implied warranty. Implied warranties are a part of all retail sales of new and used consumer goods. The retailer of an item implies that the item will work properly and be of average grade and quality, as long as it is used for the purpose it was sold. For example, a refrigerator will keep stuff cool as long as you are not trying to cool the entire room, and a blender will blend as long as you are not blending rocks.
If you’re selling a “30 TB Portable SSD” it has to store 30 TB of data, be portable, actually be an SSD, etc.
Judging from the fact that the scams persist, you seem to be right.
But anyone with sense can immediately spot the patterns that show these to be scams (e.g. prices that are too good to be true and recent reviews that say these are scams). Therefore, it seems like automated scanning could eventually be tuned to catch and ban these sellers.
I think they also get away with this (and receive some good reviews) because the drives are too slow to ever fill up.
> The amount of staffing and expertise needed to do this at scale across all product styles and segments is just impossible to maintain.
Stopping all comingling would be a good start. Known good products from known good sellers with known good supplier lines would allow buyers to drastically reduce the chance of getting a fake product.
Even Apple's walled garden does a so-so job of stopping scams. Given their app review process, they've got rather less of an excuse -- you'd really think they'd give close scrutiny to any app charging above-the-norm subscription prices, but apparently not...
this doesnt just scam you for capacity, it will overwrite files to maintain the illusion of large capacity so you will lose data until you catch on that they are going into a bit bucket.
When ordering electronics from Walmart Marketplace, particularly TVs, I’ve found that the marketplace sellers freely substitute makes and models. Maybe nobody notices if you are shipping a gift to someone else, but since I need specific models from specific manufacturers for development it gets noticed when I order LG model XYZ and get a no-name tv instead. I stopped ordering from Walmart altogether after the second time (out of two, consecutive) that happened.
So my advice is anything you buy online at Walmart, make sure it is not a marketplace seller, just save yourself the trouble.
In all cases Wal-Mart refunded my money after waiting for a week for the vendor to respond, though I had to lug the stuff to the UPS store to return it. Amazon usually suggests I donate stuff rather then return it.
I’ve not had any issues with the items sold by Wal-mart actual, those you can buy with confidence.