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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]

5. Open the top 3 links (https://www.amazon.com/MX-UC1-Protector-Universal-Charger-Ad..., https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-Worldwide-Universal-Converter..., https://www.amazon.com/Grounded-Universal-Schuko-Adapter-Ger...)

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.

That is the problem.

Here's a list of possible solutions:

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.

Buying is also a political action.

The adage, "Buy a cheap car, get a cheap car," applies to everything. Or, in other words, "You get what you pay for."

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.

Interestingly enough, it applies less to cars than it does to everything.

Even the cheapest cars sold in the last decade are remarkably durable and reliable.

What do you actually want them to do? Should Amazon forbid inexpensive products from being sold?

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.

>but hey it's a 7 dollar piece of plastic

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 think something might not be working. The very first thing I noticed as a pack of 10 CR2032 batteries for $75 when there is also a pack of 5 for $5.

Along with other ridiculous prices, like $40 for a standard tape measure.

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.

Ditto:

DEWALT DPG82-11 Concealer Clear Anti-Fog Dual Mold Safety Goggle

DEWALT DW1354 14-Piece Titanium Drill Bit Set

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.

Picking one of your examples, we have the primary URL: https://www.amazon.com/DEWALT-DW1354-14-Piece-Titanium-Drill...

Then we have our store's URL: https://www.amazon.com/DEWALT-DW1354-14-Piece-Titanium-Drill...

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Woods-2001-Photocell-Weatherproof-Mec...

https://www.amazon.com/Lasko-2264QM-20-Inch-Performance-Velo...

https://www.amazon.com/GE12722-Z-Wave-Wireless-Lighting-Cont...

https://www.amazon.com/Moen-DN8408CH-Preston-Inspirations-Ho...

https://www.amazon.com/Akro-Mils-10164-Plastic-Storage-Hardw...

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.

> How are you even still in business???

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.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/vine/help

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.

Aukey is also very good. Whenever I need hubs/chargers/power packs/etc. I go to them or Amazon Basics.

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).

>the same broken design //

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.

Amazon has to have over a billion products in the catalog, with literally millions added every day. How do you propose this is done ;)

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.

have you tried emailing Jeff?

http://gizmodo.com/jeff-bezos-if-you-have-a-problem-with-ama...

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.

my first world anarchy is always voting 'no' for if a review helped if it's a vine voice or indicated that they got the product for free.