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Comment by diceduckmonk | Hacker News Reader

There was a 5+ year period in my life where I was receiving Amazon deliveries every week.

Last year, I purchased a single item on Amazon.

In the midst of moving apartments right now, and looking for basics + upgrades. I've noticed what made Amazon so great and dare I say addicting was trustworthy reviews and crowd-wisdom curation of good-enough products. This shopping cycle, that magic felt gone. The audacity of product search to be littered with ads. A few years into that Amazon habit, I started reaching for "fake amazon reviews" on Google to get an estimate of how authentic the reviews are. Even that step has been gamed and noisy now.

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I stopped after getting fake items. Yes, getting my money in return was fairly easy. But then I still needed to buy it from somewhere else and had wasted a few days.

And it's quite scary, as some of these items go on/into my body. Like cosmetics, toothpaste, whatever. Or are electronics that can catch fire, like a charger.

Add to that, I don't want to figure out which of 5000 different USB chargers is the best or the cheapest or not a scam. Just give me one I can trust. When I have to do that for every search, the mental load is too high and I just grab it from somewhere else.

Yeah, this. All but the most trivial of items I’ve bought this year I was disappointed with. I don’t want my money back, I want the item to be what I expected.

I was scammed hundreds of dollars buying counterfeit microphones on amazon[0]. Amazon did not provide any way to handle this other than a generic form. The sellers refused to send my money unless I removed my reviews, which I was not going to do at all. I followed the seller's page around, and after a few weeks they renamed themselves to "Sally's Cosmetics"[1] or something, and I posted more reviews on their page. Eventually they disappeared with one of the Amazon counterfeit seller purges. How convenient for Amazon and the seller.

Amazon is like eBay to me. I value my time and cash too much to get involved.

[0] I know, I hadn't been on amazon in a while. I forgot not to buy music equipment (or anything not disposable) from Amazon.

[1] So counterfeit sellers have sold cosmetics on Amazon, and that should be obvious from the state of the store, I guess..

Amazon wouldn’t accept a return? I don’t return a lot, but when I have it’s been really easy - no questions asked, just fill in the form then take it to the nearest Whole Foods.

Not that I could find from looking at my past orders on amazon.com and trying to go through support.

I didn't think of the Whole Foods angle, I'll look into that, thanks. At least I'll have someone to talk to about it.

You do need to fill in a (very simple) form first - but at least for my recent orders it's fairly straightforward: in the "My Orders" list, there's a "Return or replace items" button on the right hand side, (_below_ the yellow "Get product support one). It does disappear after a while - looking at my account a month maybe?

I've spent more than $20k on Amazon over the years total, and the one and only time I had to return something (for a low-dollar item), they totally screwed me on it.

That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

I'm not sure I want to know how much I've spent on Amazon, but I'm sure it's a lot. I too went years with nearly weekly purchases with no issues at all. Maybe a delivery that was later than the estimated date here and there, but that's it.

In the last few months though things have become measurably worse for me. In the last three months I've had to send nearly every order back. Orders have been incomplete, or wrong (like, children's Shrek t-shirts instead of reams of copier paper). They've sent incomplete orders, or obviously not-new "new" items (with finger prints, food crumbs, wads of newspaper), or the products advertised were not even remotely what was described.

It's not that surprising to see Amazon posting poor numbers. I've stopped purchasing from Amazon, buying direct from the people making the things I buy if possible. It costs more, and takes longer to arrive, but now I'm not burning time fixing Amazon's stupid problems.

They've gone downhill enough I've started returning a fair bit of things and it's almost always effortless.

Only time it was a hassle was when a price dropped the day after my order, and they don't have price matching, so customer service suggest re-buying and returning and promised me free return shipping.

That promise turned out to be worthless, and I had a helluva time trying to get them to pay for return shipping across the country for a squat rack.

Thankfully, I did succeed in the end (phone support person was much better, chat people ran me around in circles). I didn't get the at-home pickup I was originally promised, but fortunately I owned a spare old pickup truck.

Depending on whom you actually bought the product from (Amazon is a seller of only a decreasing fraction of the items on Amazon) returns might range from trivial to miserable.

Amazon is now a huge heaping pile and has been for years. Glad people are catching on. I have almost never had an issue with eBay, Etsy, random websites.

Yep, I just ordered from them again for the first time in a while... Big mistake.

My order was very simple, just a pack of head bands since when I go for runs I sweat way too much.

After my run I took the head band off and my forehead was DYED the color of the band and later broke out in hives...

Grimly reminded me Victorian Era arsenic-based green dyes, which leached from fabrics into people's skin and made them very sick.

Amazon desperately needs content curation somehow, the experience of figuring out which headband to buy was so awful... And after all that, it caused a mild injury from god-knows-what chemicals.

The solution is simple but the shareholders won’t like it: remove third party sellers.

They don't even have to remove them. Just move them to a separate marketplace under the Amazon umbrella.

If Amazon had a "Prime Plus" or something that would allow me to find and order non-third-party-seller, accurately described, quality products with a robust no bullshit "whatever the cost, will go above and beyond fixing any problems in the rare event they occur" attitude, I'd be very interested.

I also wouldn't mind a marketplace that is well known to be hit or miss. When I place an order on alibaba or bangood, I know exactly the risks I'm taking. That risk, weirdly, almost makes it entertaining. "Is it going to be the ball bearings I ordered, or a pair of Crocs shoe knockoffs, or a beef jerky? Place your bets!"

I have to assume that such an option exists. There is no way in hell that Amazon execs are limited to the same search options and overall UX as ordinary users. We just don't have access to the VIP entrance.

Making such a subscription publicly available is a blatant admittance that the platform has gone to such shit that one needs to pay for a filter so you don't break out in to colorful hives.

I doubt Amazon execs use Amazon.

If they did that they would be highly unprofitable though.

3rd party sellers pay them for ads. Then they pay them if a product is sold. And then they pay them for packing and shipping the product. And then they pay them if the product is returned and they don’t even get any of the money they pay Amazon back if the product is returned.

It’s no wonder Amazon is filled with sellers of fake products because any seller of legitimate products could barely survive on their marketplace with all the fees Amazon showers them with.

The product you describe has ABSOLUTELY ZERO USE CASE IN THE WORLD. It is purely a scam. Amazon is now the biggest mall where half the shit will make you break out into rainbow hives. I'm glad people are finally catching on. F that company, mostly.

I went through this exact thought process. Maybe I could find the perfect one and get it delivered quick at a the best price. It wasn't worth the downside risk. Instead I went to a brick-and-mortar store, got the most appropriate GaN compact charger they had in stock and couldn't be happier.

And there’s no recourse if there’s a serious problem. When people found melamine in the toothpaste at Walmart, lawsuits were filed and things were recalled. If that happens from EBANEZCR, NKAM, or PLCEM, who are real sellers I just looked up, they disappear and Amazon isn’t held liable. Then the same contaminated fake product continues to be sold under a dozen other sellers.

Amazon is now Aliexpress with (sometimes) local shipping.

For years we've been told that the worker in Shenzhen is cheaper than the one in Seattle. Now I tell you, Jeff, that the entrepreneur in Shenzhen is cheaper than the one in Seattle.

You may be surprised to know that Jeff doesn’t run Amazon anymore.

Have you ever tried to search for something on Aliexpress? It is the worst experience I have ever had. "Free Shipping" button (sometimes) shows things with free shipping, or the actual price of the item showing as $0.99 when that is for the optional plastic lid or whatever. Only about half the time I try to use Aliexpress it gives me the results I want.

Furthermore, it is stupidly obvious when something is just being dropshipped vs coming from Amazon's warehouse, just look for the Prime logo on the items. At least with Amazon I get things relatively quickly even compared to other US based options such as Ebay or even going through the retailer directly

My _favourite_ part of searching on AliExpress is that, when you’re logged in, 90% of any search results have nothing to do with, you know, the search query, and are just (related to) products you’ve previously looked at. Why?!?

For the same reason that Amazon does that?

To annoy me enough to send me to second-tier retailers I wouldn't otherwise use?

It never makes sense to intentionally return inapplicable search results. Think about it: product search is the ultimate advertising opportunity. A customer with money to spend is proactively telling you exactly what they want to spend it on. And you're going to go out of your way to piss this customer off?!

Bold strategy, Jeff, let's see how it works out for you.

> inapplicable search results

Inapplicable to whom?

> product search is the ultimate advertising opportunity

To me, this is what lends confidence to the idea that the results are hardly "inapplicable". The results may be quite applicable from Amazon's perspective.

This is just a guess, but it seems unlikely that all Amazon cares about is returning the exact perfect set of results that lead you directly to what you're intending to purchase. They may know that showing seemingly random results increases impulse sales of high profit items they have in local "get it today" warehouses. Or they know that people who search for the thing you searched for are n times more likely to buy Product X impulsively, but only if they show it to you on the first Monday morning of the month.

Or maybe they've lost their minds, and have tried to optimize and maximize profits from their recommendations that they're blind to much simpler approaches.

(Shrug) Well, their "applicable" search results cost them a four-figure order yesterday, when I was shopping for parts for a new PC build. It's not the first time I've given up in frustration when looking for something on Amazon.

Then there's the business of repeating the same search in a private browsing window and getting substantially different results. Another great way to flush business down the drain.

Just bought bunch of humidity meters from AliExpress. At 1/3 of Amazon price. I don’t care they will be delivered on day in February. Amazon’s price was just ridiculous.

How much should things cost? Is price the only thing that matters?

I would encourage you to check out electronic component suppliers like digikey.com and others.

I started doing this for my components and won't be going back to Amazon. I switched after getting some counterfeit components, and others so poorly soldered they didn't work.

It will be more expensive than AliExpress, but much less than Amazon and you'll actually get what you order...

DigiKey ... much less than Amazon

You might want to check your DNS settings. I think they may have been hijacked.

Lol, fair enough... But if you're actually interested, I'll provide some examples to show you I'm not just bullshitting.

This is using canadian Amazon and canadian Digikey, since that's where I'm from. We will compare single unit prices, since getting into bulk deals complicates things quite a bit, and is not what most inventors/hobbyists will need.

Since OP was talking about humidity sensors, the only one I'm familar with is DHT11.

On Amazon.ca this comes up as $11.30 CAD. [1] On Digikey this is discontinued but comes up as $7.67.[2] Yet even the Grove branded BOARD is cheaper at $9.37. [3]

Anyways, maybe not the best example since it's ancient and discontinued, was just off the top of my head. Lets look at something more recent like the SHT31-D:

Amazon: $14.69 [4] Digikey: $12.82 [5]

Also you can buy the sensor without the board for like 9$ on digikey. The selection is just way larger.

Out of curiosity though, have you personally used chinese boards on Amazon that are cheaper and generally reliable? If so is there a brand I can search for?

I'm down for cheap reliable chinese stuff (that you don't have to buy for like $50 in packs of 5 - 10 to get a discount...) off Amazon, just haven't been able to find any at all.

[1]: https://www.amazon.ca/Robojax-Temperature-Relative-Humidity-...

[2]: https://www.digikey.ca/en/products/detail/adafruit-industrie...

[3]: https://www.digikey.ca/en/products/detail/seeed-technology-c...

[4]: https://www.amazon.ca/DAOKI-Temperature-Humidity-Interface-G...

[5]: https://www.digikey.ca/en/products/detail/dfrobot/SEN0331/12...

I've purchased a bunch of cheap sensors from AliExpress also. Half of them had serious issues. Firmware issues that would knock them off my gateway, or drain their battery completely so I'd have to go change them. And not so fatal issues like the battery that came with them was total junk and couldn't sustain a device for more than a week.

When I spent 2x as much from a US vendor from Amazon, they worked. No messing around. Probably they are built in the same regions, but US designs by US vendors I've had much much better luck with.

I don't buy lots of things from Amazon for fear of fakes. When you're on niche products that nobody cares to duplicate it's much safer.

It's almost comical the supply chain understanding you have to have to make sure you get the right thing.

The issue isn't who's doing the shipping. The issue is that Amazon is, for most product categories, 90% a front for Alibaba resellers. Nothing against Alibaba/Aliexpress, I get stuff from them all the time, but there are times when I specifically don't want those products.

If you're willing to wait a month Aliexpress is all the same stuff for 1/10 the price.

> Furthermore, it is stupidly obvious when something is just being dropshipped vs coming from Amazon's warehouse

The issue isn't so much that you buy something and then the process of shipping from China starts. The issue is that it's often the exact same crap being sold on AliExpress, but has been filtered into the Amazon Warehouse for those SKUs.

Have you ever tried to search for something on Aliexpress? It is the worst experience I have ever had.

Can't possibly be worse than Amazon's search experience.

Agree 100%. And now the majority of the products are made by a 7 digit letter soup brand who just popped up out of no where and likely will be gone in 6 months as the product is shifted to some other brand to avoid bad reviews building up.

I have very little faith in Amazon these days and specifically order from smaller specialty shops regularly again.

For kicks, I just did a search for a fairly generic item on Amazon, "bookshelf". The "brands" in the top results are:

MOYIPIN, Furrino, Hoctieon, Sauder, Rolanstar, Vasagle, Amazon Basics, Homidec, JIUYOTREE, NUMENN, IOTXY, Topfurny, RIIPOO, Homykic, IRONCK.

RIIPOO is definitely my favorite name here.

Amazon Marketplace is inundated with garbage. It gets harder and harder to find a product that I'm willing to actually buy and assume will work. At some point, Amazon's chickens are going to come home to roost and they'll have to deal with this.

OTOH I’ve bought from plenty of random name brands and never had a problem with the products.

Looking at these bookshelves a number are particle/pressboard products. Would you trust unknown quality/untested inputs (industrial glues) used to make a product known to outgas into your sealed living environment? For example particle board takes five to 10 years to completely outgas itself of all formaldehyde.

Is there any study showing similar products at the same price point are any better in this regard when bought from in-person stores? IKEA, walmart, Costco, target, etc?

I stopped buying after recieving one too many fake items. Not even listings that were for blatently fabricated products like the 16TB portable hard drives for $45. Just everyday items, being dispatched from Amazon that were clearly fakes.

Amazon doesn't give a damn, so I don't give them my business anymore.

Used to use Amazon as my go-to source for bulk gum. Silly, I know, but they stock the big 14-packs that you can only find at massive bulk stores like Costco, and even then, it's hard to find them reliably.

After receiving a number of fakes and problematic items off Amazon a couple of years ago, I instated a new rule: you can order off Amazon as long as the a fake product won't seriously hurt you.

Turns out, whether it's a set of bolts for my bicycle, a battery replacement for a phone, or a piece of gum I plan on chewing in my mouth, I'm really scared of the awful thing that could happen if I got an unsafe fake item. I would rather not chew gum tainted with microplastics, explode a battery in my pocket without warning, or shear a bolt from my bike in the middle of the wilderness miles away from help.

On the other hand, Amazon is a great place to order bulk body soap. Haven't figured out a way for that to kill me yet.

Heavy metal/other contamination? There were a lot of stories about lead contamination years ago in products that made it to store shelves. It stopped happening as often (I think?) but small seller products on amazon, eBay etc face dramatically less scrutiny than those bigger suppliers ever did

Eg, with toys: https://www.insider.com/amazon-selling-toxic-toys-lead-poiso...

Non Amazon example, with clothing https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6193385

You might have a restaurant supplier near you. I dimly recall mine has boxes of candy.

https://www.usfoods.com/why-us-foods/chef-store.html

I now buy all my bulk stuff this way. Rice, beans, spices, flour...

Way cheaper than Amazon, much better selection than Costco, all authentic.

https://sanquentinnews.com/tainted-soap-recalled/

https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2023/The-Laundress-Recalls-Laun...

I've been purchasing a lot less from Amazon the past couple of years. But my rule has always been don't buy it from Amazon if it goes in or on your body, clothing excepted.

100% this. I would add that it's also hard to find an item being unique. When I search for let's say "Braun Alarm clock", I get the same item (so I guess? because it looks the same) 8 times. So which one should I buy? What's the difference? I just can't be bothered to figure out the different sellers/prices/terms/delivery times etc for such a simple thing.

How do I know if one of the 8 Braun clocks that look the same has some 'extra feature'? So I got to read all descriptions which can be vastly different and hard to compare. This isn't easy and reliable ecommerce anymore. It's messy and frankly if I have to do all this research WITHIN Amazon I might as well extend the scope and do it OUTSIDE of Amazon as well.

This is a great point. For years, Amazon had good quality and prices. Now, shopping on Amazon you have to actively look out for scammy items and search for the good deals. Very easy to get fooled. “Verified purchases” don’t mean much either

Each customer feels differently, but to me what makes Amazon the go-to solution for most consumerist problems is it's logistics network, and how fast and reliable it became.

There were a couple of times where the time I had to wait between clicking "buy" and receiving the package on my doorstep was not measured in days but hours.

Amazon's logistics network has improved constantly. The shopping experience is getting better, not worse.

Sure, sometimes I can't spot the difference between Amazon and AliExpress. So many cheap, shady products with autogenerated brand names and obviously all from the same factory. Low quality stuff whose seller is eager to bribe you to not get a bad review after you return the item. Yes, that's a problem. But if you stick with Amazon-managed products you always get refunds.

And you know what? You also can decide to not go for the cheap stuff and buy things from reputable sellers.

So knock-offs are a problem but you can actually avoid those, and the ones you didn't you can always return them. And with Amazon's logistics, things get resolved in a few days.

It's a shame about exploiting every single worker though.

> So knock-offs are a problem but you can actually avoid those

I do wish that was easier though. Sometimes I add 'but not crap from nonsense brand' to my search, hoping someone will notice.

Some ideas: verified list for the brands filter (often it's some bizarre subset anyway, and there are clearly genuine respected names missing?), search that respects literal quotes and not/-, price sort/filter that isn't comically wrong and that operates on Amazon price only or else includes shipping.

Ideally (I know Amazon would never do this, seller-hostile) just roll up all the duplicates into one, so the 'from' price is the cheapest seller from all sellers of the supposedly different products, and the results list is much cleaner.

I suppose an extension could fairly easily have some heuristics (all-caps 4-6 letter brand name) to hide these results. Sometimes I do want them, and then could just toggle the extension off. Is there anything like that?

> So knock-offs are a problem but you can actually avoid those,

How? They commingle inventory, and there might not be a perceivable difference based on appearance, so who knows if the internals or quality of materials is the same until it fails?

> How?

Stick with official stores from reputable brands. Don't order shit from sellers like GoldenRandomBrand24723. Don't buy shit from shady stores with 10 reviews. Don't buy shit from stores whose pricing model is based on charging high shipping fees and low prices. Don't buy shit you can't return.

Basically, don't do deals where you know upfront the odds you'll be screwed without any recourse is high.

Online stores sell products, but you need to get your head sorted out and do the thinking.

What use is all that filtering if inventory is commingled?

Amazon makes it harder and harder to do this, de-emphasising the seller in listings. I used to be able to confidently "buy it now" from the search results page but I'd never do that now.

The fact that the answer is "look through all the reviews to see if they're shady, check the seller, check the sellers reviews" is an absolute product failure by Amazon. I shouldn't have to do scam research to buy a toothbrush.

> Amazon makes it harder and harder to do this, de-emphasising the seller in listings.

You make me suspect I might be using Amazon wrong. Amazon's search is notoriously bad, but if you know what you want them you can go there and buy it. Just don't do stupid things like buying a 20 dollar item whose cost is 1 dollar price with a 19 dollar shipping fee, or buying weird things from shady sellers who just dropped by out of nowhere.

But that's just me. Perhaps I'm using it wrong. Who knows.

An example, just because this is exactly what happened to me recently. Looking for Oral B replacement toothbrush heads. A bunch of bargain off brand alternatives pop up, yeah, I'm skipping right over them for something going inside my mouth. The second non-sponsored result is:

"Genuine Original Oral-B Braun Precision Clean Replacement Rechargeable Toothbrush Heads..."

$31 for a ten pack. Seems probably about right? But when I click through the full title is:

"Genuine Original Oral-B Braun Precision Clean Replacement Rechargeable Toothbrush Heads (10 Count) - International Version, German Packaging"

and it's sold by "Wiki Deals". The photos show a package with English labelling, for what it's worth. So I guess these have been imported somehow? Are they legit? What does that mean for FDA approval, I wonder? I don't want to have to consider these things.

By contrast when I search Target, the first result (including any promoted stuff):

Oral-B Sensitive Gum Care Electric Toothbrush Replacement Brush Head

It's a three pack, $21, sold by Target themselves. More and more I'm just going to Target in the first instance and skipping Amazon entirely.

That doesn't work when they comingle inventory. I got a counterfeit SanDisk microSD card from Amazon as the seller. They did refund obviously but it's still a hassle. Now I ironically only buy smaller brands that ONLY have themselves as seller and have had better luck getting real cards.

I have bought from official stores, only for Amazon to say my package is conveniently "Now arriving early" from a totally different seller.

That is not supposed to happen! You need to contact customer support, it's a bug.

You say that like it's easy. It's not. It's a lot of effort. It's much easier to simply not use Amazon.

> Amazon's logistics network has improved constantly.

So you can get crap delivered faster?

> The shopping experience is getting better, not worse.

My experience is exactly the opposite. Amazon is one of the worst online shopping experiences I've encountered. It wasn't always that way -- I happily shopped with them for almost two decades before I finally had to give them up.

I honestly can't think of a single advantage Amazon has over just ordering directly from the companies whose products I want to buy.

> I honestly can't think of a single advantage Amazon has over just ordering directly from the companies whose products I want to buy.

This is what I do when I can, and for the same reasons you described.

However, doing so has made the most significant difference between buying from Amazon compared to buying direct crystal clear: it's rare that Amazon can't get it to me overnight for a cheaper price than buying direct.

But, like you said, all that means is that they can ship me the wrong thing, or a counterfeit thing, or a lead-laden craptastic-thing, just as fast as the correct thing.

I look at it this way - while it takes longer to get here, and shipping is rarely free, it still saves me time and money in the long term to buy direct when I can. It also helps directly support the people I'm buying direct from, and that matters to me more than the time and money savings Amazon makes you think they provide.

> So you can get crap delivered faster?

I don't know what your personal tastes are, but personally I prefer buying good things. If instead you prefer to look for crap and order crap then why are you complaining you search for and ordered and bought crap?

I mean, you have a say in what things you pick for yourself, don't you? Why are you complaining you buy crap when you intended to buy crap?

It boggles the mind how some people try to pin on a store their personal responsibility of deciding what stuff they purchase.

The point is that on Amazon, it's incredibly easy to order crap without knowing it's crap. If I order something that I know is going to be crap (it's obviously so from the listing, or is too inexpensive, etc.), I'm doing that knowing what I'm getting. That's not what I'm talking about here.

In order to avoid getting junk from Amazon, you have to be extremely cautious and do a lot of extra work. If I have to do that anyway, there's no reason to use Amazon.

"Amazon's logistics network has improved constantly. The shopping experience is getting better, not worse."

WHAT???? Prime no longer delivers in 2-3 days. The reviews are junk, the search words are gamed, the production information metadata is junk, the quality is terrible, the search results are all placed/gamed.

Things I have to do on Amazon's site that I didn't have to once upon a time:

1) immediately go to the second or third page of results to eliminate paid placement

2) immediately filter reviews by 4 star reviews to eliminate fake ads

3) cross-search the product on other sites to get a sense of legitimacy of the source

4) very carefully examine the photos of it and similar products from the company to gauge a sense of how legitimate their engineering is overall

It's exhausting. I only use Amazon for weirdo products now, but Walmart and NewEgg are steadily eating into their selection advantage. For any tech product I 100% prefer to order from NewEgg over Amazon, even if it is slower and slightly cheaper.

You know what Amazon is good for? Find the bare minimum engineering on products, and then try to find the slightly better engineered ones elsewhere for comparison. Amazon has the scrape-the-barrel quality, then you can see why the products at Walmart or Target are worth it or not.

Even then, I know they are a horrible company to their employees, predatory, arrogant, etc.

If anyone thinks Amazon represents some vanguard of good online retail, they are astroturfing or have no real historical basis of understanding.

Any logistics improvements of the last 5 years have been to expand their monopoly and "shareholder value". Delivery is worse now. Their abuse of delivery workers means you can't get a package reliably delivered in an urban area, they don't have time for delivery instructions.

"The missing chair is for the Customer". Yeah uh no.

It's not unusual at all to find something on the shelves of Target for $40 that Amazon wants $70 for.

Some neighborhoods (where opinion-makers live) are getting fast shipping, for the rest of us Amazon seems to have the worst logistics network

https://www.rather-be-shopping.com/blog/amazon-no-longer-off...

In the same time frame every other retailer thinks they can win me over through service, AMZN increasingly thinks I will keep subscribing to Prime since I've subscribed to Prime since 2006.

As it is you'll hear Jim Cramer and David Brooks talk about how fast Amazon shipping is and you'll never see it be a joke on a sitcom that Amazon deliveries are late, but for the rest of us it is quicker to wait to the weekend and drive to the store. I wonder if my Congressman thinks I get shipping from AMZN as fast as he gets in D.C.

I've lived in 3 cities recently. 2 day shipping every time for years.

> Some neighborhoods (where opinion-makers live) are getting fast shipping, for the rest of us Amazon seems to have the worst logistics network

I'm not sure that's a reasonable take, and it reads like a gratuitous putdown.

Where you live matters, and an urban center next to a local distribution center will always have better service than a rural area where barely anyone lives. It is absurd to use areas with bad coverage to complain that the whole service is bad, specially when you add the regrettably conspiratorial excuse that only influencers get a reasonable service.

The truth of the matter, that even your comment with an axe to grind admits, is that Amazon does indeed provide fast shipping services in some areas. These areas are naturally urban centers where a lot of people live per square meter, which means large numbers of people in that area benefit from fast delivery services. It's like economies of scale apply. In some other regions with small markets and residual demand, Amazon even falls back to standard postal service. Is this supposed to mean that the company provides a poor service. Well, no.

The truth of the matter is that Amazon has been growing it's distribution network, and it shows in it's quality of service. Those of us who live in urban centers that benefitted from these investments are privileged to have access to overnight delivery and some times even same-day delivery. Others who might be stuck living in an area with poor coverage don't. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the service got worse.

Free shipping is a tax on people who live in densely populated areas, much like the more obvious tax such people pay to provide those living in sparsely populated areas USPS services.

If there’s anything Congress needs to look into, it should be the massive transfer of wealth from densely populated areas to sparsely populated ones thanks to “free” shipping.

I'm the exact same way. We now order a lot from Target. It's not like it's a world-beating service but the site is good, the app is good, deliveries and on time and I have the ability to place a pickup order from a location near me.

We even decided to splash out on the $100 a year same-day delivery service. We get more value from that than our Prime membership. Even as a family that watches plenty of TV there's really one only show or so a year we watch on Prime.

Target is starting to become scammy itself. The top search results for a lot of things I’ve shopped for lately have been questionable-looking products from their third-party sellers.

I've cross shopped Amazon, Target, and Walmart from time to time. It's literally the same products from the same third-party sellers for the same prices.

Same, switched to Walmart+ and can get as good shipping and also local groceries

Also switched to Walmart+, and will never look back.

After Amazon decided that the way the webstore would make money is not by selling things, but instead by selling ads - the quality of search and overall usability of the webstore has become terrible.

You need to use it longer (thus see more ads) to find what you want.

This is part of the plan.

And you can search for items by the "In-store" filter, which has guaranteed supply logistics sold and shipped by Walmart to avoid danger and fakery. At least I don't think Walmart comingles "their own" inventory with marketplace inventory items of the same SKU.

Yep - I always choose "Walmart" as the retailer or I am doing in-store shopping with delivery. Never had a problem with fake merchandise like on Amazon.

I once got a note with the product that I'd get could get it refunded if I left a 5 star review. I mentioned that in the review, and guess what? It got rejected, as "that fact wasn't about the item" or something like that.

It's not only that they don't care, they seem to know and and take action in protecting the fake reviews.

Couple years ago I bought a camera from Amazon. What arrived what a beat up, very used camera in a box that was falling apart with parts missing. I returned it (thankfully that part was easy, but what a waste of time). Left a review saying they are shipping used stuff in place of new and that review was also blocked.

So yes, the reviews don't mean anything since they remove everything they don't like people to know.

Agreed.

It is increasingly difficult to find items on Amazon that aren't from drop-shippers. Items from companies with call signs will rank higher than legit products, and it's annoying as hell.

Additionally, it is becoming easier to buy from retailers directly and return things when they don't work out.

Example. I like barefoot shoes. I only buy Vivobarefoot. In the past, searching for Vivobarefoots or even Merrell Vapor Gloves while logged into my Prime account would return crap from WHITIN as a cheaper alternative. Even though I tried Whitin and returned them because cheap shoes are cheap for a reason.

Same thing with merino wool stuff. Meriwool and call sign dropshipper bullshit will rank higher even if I look for stuff from Woolly (and definitely if I look for stuff from a supplier that doesn't partner with Amazon, like Wool and Prince).

Amazon is excellent for books. A category it maintains a genuine, unique advantage in (Amazon prints books and generally speaking does many different extra operations in that market.)

One notable part of Amazon's success story: book readers are rich. Paper books are a significant indicator of genuine wealth.

What's unique about books however, is that you never discover what to buy on Amazon.

You get the title recommended to you off-Amazon. Then go straight to Amazon and find the title, in a commoditised print on demand operation.

For just about every other product under the sun, not the same.

Interesting. It is possible I was lucky on items 9 times out of 10. What I seem to be having issue with is timely delivery on items since Covid despite having Prime. I was more strict about it before, but I made a dispensation for Covid since I didn't order that much anymore. FWIW, I am in Chicagoland, which has a hub that is close enough to me so I will admit that the whole situation baffles me sometimes, but I don't know what is really happening behind the scenes..

I’ve gotten upwards of $50 to leave fake reviews. For a while every Chinese product had a card in it you could email to make some serious cash.

I hope you mean you were offered money for fake reviews, but declined.

To be fair I don't think that's the fault of Amazon I think that's the same thing with all new tech adoption - especially over the last couple of decades. As new tech enabled new capabilities people were honest and scammers didn't know how to manipulate the system. Nowadays its a lot of work and money to block to fake reviews/fake products.

This goes for all tech --> social media, financial processing etc.

I agree it really does ruin it but I think it's pervasive in tech 20-30 years into the internet/tech adoption into our lives. And now when new tech pops up scammers hop aboard immediately.

Amazon has actively supported selling counterfeit items for years.

Allowing companies to take over product pages with lots of positive reviews is actively misleading. If they actually cared then new product = remove all old review.

Mixing inventory between different sellers actively drives away reputable business. You can ship a box of legit items to Amazon and they send a counterfeit item to your customer who then dings your reputation. That’s crazy.

I should be clear here - I'm not saying Amazon has done a good job. My point is the scammers are going to scam. I've been offered money in exchange for an implicitly good review. I didn't take it but that came with the order of something I bought. That kind of thing is tough to regulate for any company - and there are millions of other ways to do it.

If theres a way to game a system humans will find it.

Sure, but my point is Amazon is acting like an accomplice not a victim.

Fair take - my original comment deflects blame of Amazon which isn't appropriate. It is responsible - however it isn't wholly responsible for all the scamming nature on it's platform.

Maybe the VC playbook obsession about growth>profit>quality that they sold to wall st in the 2010s has a fair bit to drive the internal engine at Amazon.

From my point of view, I don't care if Amazon is responsible or not. It remains true that Amazon provides a terrible service. The "why" is their problem, not mine.

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