Amazon bans the sale of rogue USB-C cables
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Try to buy replacement printer ink for a HP 8600 printer. This is a super common machine sold on special in Costco and Best Buy, possibly the most popular general purpose printer out there.
Seriously, go to Amazon's site and try to just buy some replacement cartridges for it. The first result looks great, tons of reviews average almost five stars, appears to be sold by Amazon and made by HP: http://www.amazon.com/HP-Magenta-Original-Cartridges-CR314FN...
Now scroll down and look at the top customer reviews. Something is going on here. Are these real or refilled? Who exactly is selling them? OK go back to search results and look again. But there isn't any entry that stands out as obviously just made by HP and sold by Amazon, they all have similar problems.
Ugh. This of course happened to me the other day. I spent 10 minutes trying to just figure out how to buy real OEM printer ink, gave up, and navigated over to HP.com where aside from typing in all my info again, it was painless and next day shipping was free.
This has become a constant problem that Amazon has to fix.
The next exercise for the reader is to try to find a pair of genuine Apple OEM headphones, the kind that come with the iPhone, that can be bought with actual confidence. That should be the easiest online shopping task imaginable, but it's literally impossible at this point on Amazon. Not slightly frustrating, impossible.
And don't get me started on the switch to USPS shipping.
Despite their seeming chokehold on online shopping, Amazon is vulnerable to competition that can solve these kinds of problems.
If you're selling printer ink and it's fake and doesn't work, and you're selling replacement headphones that sound nothing like the real ones, and charging cables that can destroy your devices, and etc etc then you may have a problem.
This issue is rampant across tons of Amazon product categories, they are losing control of their own offerings and their customers can't trust that what they order actually is what it's supposed to be.
That's basically the most fundamental problem a retailer can have.
If Amazon says they're selling me an X but sends me a fake X I'm going to blame Amazon, this isn't a hard thing to reason about.
Other retailers don't have these problems. I can buy printer ink at CVS or Staples or Best Buy and it isn't a refill or grey market and it always works. In fact, Amazon itself didn't used to have this problem.
I'll stand by my assertion that Amazon has a real issue here that they should address.
Greymarket products part OEM products that subvert import/export controls, they're not non-standard complaint produces.
As for the vendors you listed (which I might note intential avoid the vendor I requested a response on) sell OEM or private-label parts, they do not offer a market place for parts; as if Amazon only sold OEM or (Amazon)-private- products, which is
I'll stand by my position that the issue is the east of standards compliance; both implementation and enforcement. Also, stand by my position that OEM parts are over priced, and often product-complaint, not standard complaint; when's the last time you where able to use a ink cartridge for all types of a given prints, that is all color inkjet printers.
You seriously believe most people (that is 100% of
people) still own a printer?
What did they use before and why is the change bad?
(European curiosity)
On amazon.co.uk (ordering from outside the UK) the 'standard' shipping is always through each country's post office (similar to USPS, I think).
Only expedited shipping brings the luxuries of UPS/DHL.
I wonder if it is because USPS Weekend delivery isn't the normal "route" person, and they just don't try to get into multi-unit mailrooms?
I'm pretty sure they don't try to deliver anything at all. Every time I've had a Sunday order and everyone else that I know, it gets marked as either "Delivery Attempted" or sometimes "Delivered" without the package arriving. I've NEVER heard of anyone actually receiving a Sunday USPS delivery for an Amazon order on Sunday. Literally never!
I think the Amazon/USPS deal has the latter paying a penalty for late/undelivered packages. It's possible that they don't have the resources to actually deliver the packages and lying (either from corporate or from the actual mail carriers) is the only way to cover their asses.
There's also variance between post office regions and quality. In some areas in NYC, historically they had lots of issues. Some outlying areas on rural delivery are a struggle as well, as they use contract drivers that are paid and scheduled based on how long the USPS thinks the routes should take. Parcels gum up the works and create a lot of problems.
But I believe those who are saying it's not working well, and more importantly, it's not what they signed up for.
When having goods shipped from America, I always prefer USPS.
It's interesting to see how sentiment varies.
Amazon shopping used to be amazing, like magic awesome customer service. Things are very different in 2016.
In contrast, the high margin fakes must look really appealing to feature.
I'm a heavy Amazon shopper (over $10k per year) who has started moving my spend away from Amazon to retailers with better curation, and higher reliability. They've opened the door for a competitor to slip in; only question is whether or not they realize what they've done.
Now, Amazon is in this weird coop-itition thing with the sellers, and quality sellers have a disincentive to operate. So you're left with the old EBay crowd -- people hustling cheap crap.
This actually would solve much of the problem. I've tried to figure out how to do this. My theory was that limiting the search to sold by Amazon.com would accomplish this, but it doesn't seem to actually work that way in practice.
It's possible also that the customer reviews are for all sellers of item X, so that the strange mix of 5-star "yes this is real in real box" reviews with 1-star "this is fake in a white envelope" reviews when looking at item X is due to some kind of aggregation of all sellers of item X, and not individualized.
Either way it's a UX disaster.
Me, I find that if I stick to sellers of enough age, quantity of sales, and a 96% or better rating, I'm very seldom disappointed.
This is exactly the calculus that I don't want to bother with.
That said, I do all the Amazon purchasing for my ~80 year old parents.
Things show up differently on a credit card statement depending on whether they were sold by Amazon or by someone selling via Amazon, and that makes them count as different merchants for purposes of the virtual credit cards. (And to add to the annoyance, Kindle subscriptions are also different. They incorporate the name of the periodical, and so I think each subscription would count as a separate merchant).
I could make one virtual card for Amazon itself, and one for Amazon Marketplace, but what happens when one order contains a mix of the two? I'm not sure how that shows up.
I've read that people have worked around this by using one virtual credit card to purchase Amazon gift cards and use those to pay for their purchases and fund their Kindle subscriptions.
[1] Bank of America. Any BofA credit card customers who have never heard of this, it's called "ShopSafe". You can find it in online banking on the page for your credit card account. Scroll down and look on the right side, just above where all the legal boilerplate resides.
I've found that it often works well to simply go to amazon.com, do one search for the kind of thing I'm interested in, click a handful of results to intrigue Amazon's algorithms, and then go do other things until Amazon starts mailing me suggestions.
Most specifically, the typical non-conformance was a wrong resistor value indicating that an A-to-C cable would be free to draw up to 3A from the A socket. This was in violation of maximum current allowed on an A connector, but I guess this is what many users appreciated, because it made the tablets charge faster.
So, who gets to decide if a USB-C cable is nonconforming? Remember, we are not talking about expensive industrial or laboratory equipment but $10 (or ceaper) cables.
Do I get to send it back to Amazon if it doesn't work with my USB-C device [which itself might be too picky, violating the standard] Or may I send it back when I can show a non-conformance using proper test equipment, even though the cable would work for most users? Does every vendor have to provide a certificate for successful passing of a testsuite/measurement? -- Also keep in mind that the specification doesn't only cover charge currents (which is pretty much exclusively what Benson Leungh had tested).
And when I have demonstratively proven that a cable is dangerous, will Amazon reimburse all buyers?
I'd assume that a USB-Type C recepticle embedded in a costly device, such as a smartphone or notebook, is more likely to be manufactured by someone who adheres to the specs, or at least strives to.
But of course you are right in general: A smartphone, notebook or tablet manufactured will likely be built to stricter standards than a random cable from a random Amazon seller. Nevertheless, "works with a good notebook" is generally not a replacement for a proper acceptance test. -- Typically it will be in favor of the marginally failing component, as standards always employ some safety margins, and properly built hardware will be forgiving for "slightly broken" cables. Such a cable may as well, and rightfully, fail with any number of other perfectly standards compliant computers.
Given that they have their logo on the items, they'd better be careful about policing it.