Comment by norea-armozel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by norea-armozel | Hacker News Reader

All I can say about Amazon is the quality of the item selection has gone down so much that most times I take my time digging through reviews to ensure the padded 4 star rating isn't done by bots because I've bought some items that were 4 star rated only to find they were utter crap later. And this is only in the last two years for Amazon. I'm not sure what's happening but I can say that I'm looking closer to home for stuff I need. Frankly, I think Bezos and company got too comfy with their dominant position and now they're being lax on the quality. I would happily load up an order 60+ USD easily from Amazon but now I have to double check to see what I'm getting isn't from a crap third party (that's the biggest thing I'd pay to remove is the third party sellers). If they want more customers they need to get back to basics by improving selection, kicking out crap third party sellers, and stop shuffling items between addon status or Prime only. Otherwise, I can see them going under in a hurry.

Ran into this myself very recently. Ordered a 5-star posture brace for my back, and what I got was nothing as described in the picture or description.

For the first time - ever - in using Amazon, I went back to the reviews to verify where the communication breakdown was. Indeed, every review was succeeded by "I was given this product at a small discount to review it with an honest opinion" -- which of course was a 99% discount. The process is technically legal by way of FTC, so long as the reviewers add the disclaimer.

Infuriated, I asked for a refund and was denied by the supplier. Escalated to Amazon and got the refund two weeks later.

I then opened several tickets, one after the other, trying to get Amazon to remove these fake reviews. Each one had the response of "We take your concern seriously. We cannot share any action taken by this ticket" -- and months later, nothing was done about the reviews.

So for the first time in years, I try to buy elsewhere before Amazon.

Their site is unbearably bloated with scripts and whatnot, I don't know why more people don't complain about that. The site is also filled with dishonest merchants peddling their misrepresented wares on it. I've had more issues with merchants on Amazon than on ebay.

> Their site is unbearably bloated with scripts and whatnot

I don't think most people (outside of HN for sure and still a lot within HN) actually run NoScript or something that makes them aware of the number of scripts on a page. And frankly, 99.9% of the time, I don't care about that.

I wasn't talking about the number of scripts (even though it does have a lot) but about how unresponsive the site is at times because of said scripts.

I noticed that as well when trying to run their full site even on the Kindle Fire HDX. Luckily, it seems less of a problem since it seems to fall back to some less intensive setup, but if I go on Firefox or Chrome then it behaves oddly at times. I think Bezos needs to issue another edict against the "new hotness" when it comes to JS and UI libs for websites. IMO, less is more when it comes to making a website. But maybe I just have some weird extensions that don't play nice with some of those libs, who knows.

> The site is also filled with dishonest merchants peddling their misrepresented wares on it.

After purchasing fake makeup on Amazon TWICE, I checked on reddit and saw that they are notorious for selling knockoff fake makeup. So I've completely stopped shopping on there and gone back to going to Sephora. It's actually really sad that I can't trust amazon sellers to sell me a real product.

My suggestion is to sort reviews by verified purchasers. You'll get closer to the truth that way.

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