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Comment by darpa_escapee | Hacker News Reader

I get free shipping from Walmart.com and AliExpress, the latter of which 90% of electronics on Amazon are sourced from. Walmart offers free 2 day shipping and in-store pickup. AliExpress offers the same items on Amazon without having to give middleman their expensive cut.

I don't trust Amazon not to send me fake items or cheap Chinese knockoffs. There is absolutely no quality control on Amazon's end. Amazon has the resources to fight fake reviews, yet fake reviews are still rampant. As a result, I cannot trust Amazon's rating system at all.

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> Amazon has the resources to fight fake reviews, yet fake reviews are still rampant. As a result, I cannot trust Amazon's rating system at all.

While this is true, at least the part about fake reviews being pervasive, the fact is that I don't trust any reviews on a retailer's website anymore, especially those that aren't verified purchases, and the only retail site where I trust verified purchase reviews at all (and not all of those either) is Amazon.

> I get free shipping from Walmart.com

Yes! walmart.ca is great, very prompt and simple to work with them.

> AliExpress, which 90% of electronics on Amazon are sourced from.

More like 90% of obscure commodity electronic bits and bobs. But yes, some of these rinky-dink sellers and unrecognized brands do mess up the experience a bit, but imagine ordering directly from their individual weird off the shelf fulfillment sites and hoping your credit cards don't get burned. It's not any better of an experience, and at least with Amazon you generally have recourse outside the seller.

> I don't trust Amazon not to send me fake items or cheap Chinese knockoffs

I don't trust AliExpress not to send me fake items or cheap knockoffs either, but that doesn't stop me from trying sometimes. At least with Amazon you have recourse in my experience.

>More like 90% of obscure commodity electronic bits and bobs.

I feel like this is a dramatic market development. In the era of brick-and-mortar shops, a lot of those products were only available as branded versions. Think when you had to go in to a store and get a printer cable in 2001, and you were paying $25 for a Belkin cable in a fancy box because it's all they sell.

Branding from a consumer perspective is about building a message of "we're the quality one you know and trust" or "we're the cool/desirable one you recognize." It isn't necessary for a lot of these products: they're not sexy and the bar of competence is so low that you're unlikely to be burned.

AliExpress and friends have completely reinvented that market by tapping into that sentiment. Their products are unbranded (or as-good-as-unbranded, with a name with no meaning to the buyer) but trade on cheap and good enough. I'm sure a lot of the bits-and-bobs industry is up all night sweating.

For things like electronics components, I used to see a lot more sellers located in China who were presumably effectively drop shipping from AliExpress. Now it's almost all pre-imported goods with fulfillment by Amazon. The difference is paying an extra $2-3 bucks (basically doubling the price for something like an Arduino Nano clone) for a much faster shipping time. Sometimes that's worth it and sometimes not.

Unfortunately as a non-Prime customer, Amazon's shipping has been getting so slow that the gap is closing and it's getting harder to see their value.

> While this is true, at least the part about fake reviews being pervasive, the fact is that I don't trust any reviews on a retailer's website anymore, especially those that aren't verified purchases, and the only retail site where I trust verified purchase reviews at all (and not all of those either) is Amazon.

Only on Amazon do you find listings for headphones with 400 positive reviews for some BluRay version of Harry Potter, where those 400 positive reviews are displayed as if they're for the headphones themselves.

> I don't trust AliExpress not to send me fake items or cheap knockoffs either, but that doesn't stop me from trying sometimes. At least with Amazon you have recourse in my experience.

AliExpress has never given me a reason to distrust them, while Amazon has. I once received a defective item from a seller on AliExpress and I was refunded my money without having to ship the item back. I'm okay with that recourse.

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