The Best Thing About Amazon Was Never Going to Last

Which is actually great! I'm not even joking. There has been an explosion of helpful products that simply didn't exist before, because these Chinese manufacturers are so willing to experiment.

Consumer-friendly shelves of every type and dimension. Massage balls/tools of a wide variety of textures and hardnesses. Highly specific niche costumes. And a million other things.

I used to think "I really need this exact thing in this exact size but it doesn't exist", and 10 years it never did. These days, I look on Amazon, and -- son of a gun, there are 5 different versions of it all from the past year. You can see that the newest model from last month fixes problems that reviewers of the previous model were complaining about.

No recognizable American brand has bothered to satisfy the market, but 5 different random Chinese "brands" have. And that's an amazing thing.

> Good deals on name brands are harder to come by.

Citation needed. All my Under Armour workout gear, for example, is usually 30-50% cheaper on Amazon that it is on the Under Armour site itself, or from somewhere like Macy's. Apple laptops and iPads are regularly 10-20% cheaper than from Apple. Name brand merchandise sold on Amazon is more consistently cheaper than from anywhere else in my experience. (It is highly dependent on the specific brand though, so I'm talking about in aggregate -- some brands just aren't discounted on Amazon or anywhere else at all.)

This the problem. The actual worthwhile products being buried in a sea of garbo. Along with the reviews being gamed, it's essentially the online equivalent of a flea market.

It just means consumers have to be more careful and do a lot more research before they buy. While this isn't a new thing for anyone here, this will be a necessary behavior shift for everyone in order to avoid these dark patterns, and to get safe and quality products. This isn't just an amazon problem.

Essentially: avoid impulse shopping.

Perhaps I'm getting better results since I'm using an adblocker, but is this not what the author was after? [1] I see lots of wigs in lots of different styles, all purple, all around $20. If I went to a costume store it'd be a little cheaper, but that's the idea of Amazon, is it not? They're concerned they've never heard of the brands (do you know any wig brands?), but remember this is for a kid's halloween costume.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=purple+wig

Look, at the end of the day, the consumer is still largely coming out on top here. They get what they want, shipped free, tomorrow. If you pitched that system to someone in 1999 they'd laugh you out of the boardroom, it's only due to Amazon's gargantuan scale that it's become possible. Of all the annoyances online these days, sponsored Amazon listings have never struck me as the ones to be distressed over.

Amazon used to be a department store, now its a bazaar + department store. You can still find the old trusted brand stuff if you want, but now you can also get a much larger diversity of products.

People in the department store model just assume that any weirdly named brand they haven't heard of is just automatically a shitty product but that hasn't been true for a long time. Actually pretty often the well known brand is selling the same thing at a 2x markup.

The department stores have their own websites if you prefer that curated experience though.

The example used in the article is confusing, too. A single-use purple wig? That's a great case for a generic, cheap product.

“around every corner lies a brand you’ve never heard of, selling a product you’re not sure about”

Enshittified