Hacker News Reader

I'm finding similar things.

Also I'm coming across a lot more garbage brands on Amazon that I'm having trouble plowing through to find what I want.

It doesn't help that Amazon seems to be pushing me to buy a lot of garbage too with their suggestions, their own promoted sales, and etc. It feels like there is a very Wallmart type push for "hey this is 30 cents cheaper and look at all these reviews (fake, or by morons)!"

Prime Day seems more like a garage sale than anything else ...

I'm constantly seeing promotions for highly questionable health products / supplements...

Lots of wrong categorized products that seem like spam almost.

I feel like not just a lot of garbage but fewer quality products. I wanted a good HDMI switch, but all Amazon has are inexpensive (granted I have a couple and they're "ok") but not great switches and that is it. They really want me to buy these flimsy things that are all the same with these tiny annoying remotes.

Oddly enough for me Amazon was a route to find a variety of BETTER quality things than I might find in a store, it is becoming harder to do that now.

Yup. Something I learned too: e-commerce platforms do not work as product discovery tools, not anymore. They're all full of bottom-feeders selling various combinations of generic garbage-quality brands, fakes, and used items presented as new. If you want to buy something of quality, you need to explore the space elsewhere - e.g. via /r/$niche recommendations, Wirecutter, Consumer Reviews, etc., and then preferably buy directly from the vendor/official distributor.

Yeah I've found a few brands that I now just would rather deal with directly. Shipping and cost whatever ... Amazon is more of a hassle filtering sometimes.

Direct is the future of e-commerce. At the end of the day ordering directly is the only way to be 100% certain you're getting an authentic product.

This also affects crowdfunding platforms like Indiegogo - a lot of "new products" there is just rebranded junk from Alibaba, that's often already sold on Amazon for half of what they ask for it.

Ironically, there's also a reverse phenomenon happening on Kickstarter. Between start and end of a crowdfunding campaign you may discover the crowdfunded product has already been cloned by the Chinese and is sold cheaper on Aliexpress.

Yep, I've lost a lot of trust in Amazon over the past year. I used to go and buy things there by default, now I think twice and often go to a brick and mortar on my way home from work instead. There is a huge opening here for someone (probably either Wal-Mart or Target in the US) to take back the market with a "you know it won't be total junk" sales pitch.

I think Best Buy has already done this in the electronics segment- I now will often look at Amazon first then switch over to Best Buy to find the equivalent, buy it, and pick it up on the way home. Their willingness to match prices with Amazon has been key.

>Their willingness to match prices with Amazon has been key.

Heck, I've had Best Buy associates whip their phone out and price check something without me even asking. I was super surprised because "don't price match unless the customer asks" would be the easiest thing for management to push for.

I increased my loyalty a bit after seeing that.

I would consider price matching something before or during the same time with your own phone. As you have no idea of what algorithm is being used to show the price he is getting on his phone for the same item. Your's may be higher or lower than theirs.

If I remember right, Best Buy did get some heat years ago for setting their online prices higher if accessed through their intranet compared to their public website.

Shady to say the least.

This is an annoying behavior let me count the ways

People frequently mistake a similar but not identical product and ask for the better product for the price of the lessor. Ex foobar-a is 199 and foobar-b is 179 at both current store and amazon. Customer searches for foobar on amazon and demands the foobar-a in hand for 179, the price of foobar-b on both merchants.

People google search a vague search term like foobar. This completely avoids bothering to discriminate between new identical products, used junk, data wherein google is just wrong about the price, auctions, sales in which the price is theoretically better but the shipping is adjusted up instead of raising the price. Ex: $20 with $30 shipping. This is usually a great indication of a scam because the shipping is non refundable.

This is especially annoying when the customer is in line with a bunch of other customers staring daggers at their back. Especially fun when its an item from the current store that is obviously not identical and the customers phone informs them that this product is not sold in stores. One wonders how they think they came to have it in their hands.

Even in the case where the product is billed as a new in box item sold by random bob34343 its truly NOT an identical transaction.

Imagine you are buying foobar for $99. What you are receiving is a handy retail environment in which to come pick up the item immediately with staff with a minimum level of knowledge on hand to help you find and select your merchandise not to mention unload, order, clean, maintain and manage the environment needed for this to happen even if you prefer to select your own.

If the same product is available from Amazon for $89 with "free" (that you pay for monthly) 2 day shipping, that actually takes 3-4. You are paying slightly less for that item but you are receiving it days later from a less reputable seller that is MUCH more likely to screw you over wherein replacement if something is wrong will take at least another 4 day turn around before you have a working product in your hands.

If you are standing in the store with the product in your basket you are tacitly acknowledging that the above that the in store experience, ability to exchange or return in store, the trustworthiness of the merchant is actually worth $10 and indeed none of those things are free to the merchant.

You just want to have your cake and eat it too.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Usually I'm buying something like a Nintendo Switch a printer or a backup inexpensive phone- I search both Amazon and Best Buy. Best Buy is usually near the same or same price for NIB product. I buy at Best Buy since I have lessened trust for Amazon lately, and pick it up on the way home.

Whose cake am I eating exactly? Best Buy is being rewarded for value and trustworthiness and Amazon loses out even though I'm a Prime member due to their recent failings. Its the market doing its self-correcting market things.

If you demanded that best buy sell you a PS4 for the price of the game cube you saw on Craigslist that would be silly right?

The point is that its cheaper on average Amazon to ship a 1000 ps4s of which 100 are used and 50 are broken than it is for best buy to maintain a retail presence and sell 1000 actually new ps4s.

You are insisting on the superior product but only willing to pay the cost of the inferior one.

This is only sustainable in terms of throughput at checkout or monetarily because most people unlike you aren't willing to do this with everything they purchase.

It's like a person that finds something to complain about regarding their meal to get free food. If everyone did it then either the restaurant would go out of business or they would stop giving away free food.

Dude I never get used or broken stuff from Amazon, I don't know what items you are ordering.

Best Buy has been doing great recently and I'm buying from the vendor you seem so think I should be buying from. You're upset I may be shaving a point or two off their margin by cross-shopping? Unless you own stock in BB I really don't see where your angst is coming from...

I had the same thought/hope: that someone else will use this as an opportunity to step in and re-raise the bar, for trustworthiness and supply chain integrity. Competition is good.

In the meantime, I've recently been experimenting with buying from other vendors for things I normally buy though Amazon, and with which I'd had trouble: particular brands of clothing, computer parts, water filter cartridges.

I've also been trying brick&mortar, and anecdotal results so far are that it's so-so or bad for selection, good for assessing quality and expected item and condition, and good for lead time.

Separate from browsing store inventory in-person, in-store pickup of online orders is consistently poor-to-ridiculously-bad so far (5 out of 5 times). The anecdotally worst major retailer thus far is surprising.

(Incidentally, I also realized, given the distinctive look of the Walmart shipping box in the lobby of a condo building of about 100 people, that I'd never noticed any of my neighbors buying from Walmart before. I suppose there's some stigma and general objection to Walmart to overcome, though Amazon hasn't been doing so great on reputation either in the last couple years. My two Walmart orders thus far have been wholly positive experiences.)

Target is fantastic for home goods.

Clothes, shoes virtually all can be bought directly from the manufacturer (well the brand owner.)

E-commerce outside of Amazon has improved greatly. I can’t even think of the last time I had a problem ordering from another e-commerce site besides Amazon. I order food from lots of different sites and I wouldn’t dare do that from Amazon anymore.

I've shopped on Wal-Mart's online storefront hoping I could have faith it isn't total junk. But unfortunately it looks like it's just as bad as Amazon with all sorts of third party sketchy knock off shit.

>>>you know it won't be total junk" sales pitch.

Costco does this. Everything sold in costco is super high quality best of breed.

> - Ordered a brand product and gotten an obvious fake from China. Not good.

> - Ordered a brand product, got something that had obviously been opened and used before.

> - Searched for something, found only hundreds of mostly identical Chinese generic products. Ordered one, was complete and utter garbage.

> - Searched for something, found hundreds of mostly identical Chinese generics. Ordered one, and it was actually pretty decent! Sadly, this happens less often.

Well, that's a daily life experience in China. Globalisation works both ways...

You have to cultivate your intuition. I have no idea how one gets it, but it helps.

I'm shopping on Aliexpress since it opening in 2010, I see that for me Aliexpress is an "easy shopping experience," but for people from my college class shopping there unending frustration. Somehow, they got an almost natural talent getting into trouble with scam deals.

Actually, what I do is to just shop elsewhere, and buy from brands that I know either produce, assemble or do their QA checks outside of China. Luckily, such brands still exist for most products.

Amazon was, before it got flooded by Chinese goods, quite useful. But rarely can I not wait a few days for my product, if it is not available locally.

Case in point, when I did need something from Amazon per morning express, it did not arrive until one day later. I got a refund for the shipping, but I had to buy the thing elsewhere.

Amazon's use to me is declining more and more. I already did cancel my prime...

> Searched for something, found only hundreds of mostly identical Chinese generic products.

This is my biggest problem with Amazon now and why I use it less and less.

Same here. I used to love that I could browse a large selection of top quality choices in one place, from my home, rather than whatever the store happen to have in stock. Now it's mostly just the same item with different fake-seeming brands that mostly seem to compete on review count/quality.

Well, yes, variance is the big thing. Even ignoring obvious fakes, the common argument, that brand products and cheap clones are probably made in the same factory, doesn't really hold water. They might very well come from the same assembly line, but the difference is in QA. Because there's always some copy-to-copy variation, it makes total business sense to make one hundred copies of a part, sell the top 10 to a big brand name with stringent QA criteria, and the rest to progressively less scrupulous companies.

Edit: Oh, you mentioned this as well in your edit.

Amazon must have a good reason for tolerating the counterfeits for this long. My hunch is that they hope to use it as leverage to get brands to use them as their exclusive online sales channel. The brands know these counterfeit products are hurting their image. Most consumers think that the junk that they receive from Amazon is authentic (especially when sold by a 3rd-party with a similar name).

One long-term challenge for Amazon will be not becoming a flea market of low-grade, generic ‘stuff’. Brands want to cut the middle-man and sell direct. You see similar things happening with big media: studios don’t want to have someone else distribute their experience. Plus, they don’t want to lose having direct access to their customers. But, without the brands, what will Amazon sell?

How so you actually tell if a brick and mortar store sources from the producer?