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Their introducing non-Amazon sellers on Amazon.com has really put me off. When I'm ordering from Amazon, I know I'm going to get what I paid for, shipped quickly, with an easy returns process. If I wanted to compare seller ratings, decide on trustworthiness vs price, etc etc I'd go to eBay. I really wish there was some option to just turn the marketplace completely off when I know I just want to buy from Amazon.

> I really wish there was some option to just turn the marketplace completely off when I know I just want to buy from Amazon.

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.

Not sure, but I think checking "Prime Only" essentially accomplishes this because you can only get Prime shipping on items sold or fulfilled by Amazon. Obviously is only relevant to Prime users, but at least it's something.

To be fair, it's not only relevant to Prime users if you just want to make sure you are getting product fulfilled by Amazon (which definitely cuts down on the risk). I am not a Prime user and I occasionally do this to filter results.

That's not it. There's a lot of marketplace sellers that use fulfilled by Amazon and offer prime shipping.

Using Amazon is more risky for them, though, for example, if Amazon kicks them to the curb, which happens frequently with e.g. DVD sales, they have to pay hefty money to either get their inventory back or have Amazon destroy it.

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.

> if I stick to sellers of enough age, quantity of sales, and a 96% or better rating

This is exactly the calculus that I don't want to bother with.

It's a simple enough algorithm that I find it worthwhile, given the value of my time vs. dollars.

That said, I do all the Amazon purchasing for my ~80 year old parents.

I think fulfilled by Amazon is about as good.

Amazon gives a good return or exchange service when they fulfill stuff for marketplace sellers, as I recall from a couple or more experiences.

It also makes it harder to use one-merchant credit cards with Amazon. My bank [1] has a free service that lets me generate virtual credit cards. Only the first merchant that a given virtual card is used with can subsequently charge that card.

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.

The same is true of replacement cell phone batteries. I imagine the OEM is somewhat at fault for not producing enough, but you either have to risk a fake or settle with a third party option where you at least know the brand.

The OEM could produce all they want, they can't police Amazon, it's not their website after all. The problem is with older stuff where the OEM simply doesn't sell the product any more and the difference between 'hard to get new old stock' and 'outright fake sold as genuine product' is almost impossible to tell before you have the product in your hands.

I have had a similar experience trying to buy laptop power adapters on Amazon. Always lots of well rated options and the appearance of being original parts but never quite that. I've given up recently and only buy them direct from the manufacturers.

You're dead on about fake products. It's the sort of problem that seems small but erodes trust.

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.

Fake products is one thing, sellers listing stuff they don't even have or have no intention of shipping is another. This sort of thing totally turned me off from Amazon. Yes you get your money back (eventually), but it bugs me no end that the people that engage in scams like this either simply continue to operate as Amazon sellers or will re-appear within a few hours or days of getting booted out with the exact same inventory. Amazon could learn a thing or two from Ebay in this respect (and that's saying something with the number of scams and fake products on Ebay).

> And don't get me started on the switch to USPS shipping.

What did they use before and why is the change bad?

(European curiosity)

FedEx and UPS. Maybe also DHL sometimes? I've had much better experiences with these than USPS. Package tracking with USPS is a fiction, and they have claimed to have attempted to deliver a package that they never attempted to deliver on multiple occasions.

Ah, I see.

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.

Weekend delivery by USPS is the worst. Every damn time, it seems like they'll mark a package as "delivery attempted, business closed" even though I live in an apartment building with a separate mailroom USPS totally has access to.

Just happened to us this weekend, exact same situation.

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?

My suspicion lately has been that the guy with the truck full of boxes drives around the corner out of sight, takes a long nap, and drives back to the post office with a truck full of boxes and says yeah sorry nobody was home. But I'm cynical like that.

> 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.

I get some all the time, but I live in a house in the suburbs. Honestly, I prefer USPS over Lasership.

That's exactly it. The weekend delivery is optimized for traditional homes and is weak on multi-unit and many commercial environments. Your postman knows every nook and cranny -- the guy in the van doesn't.

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.

It is absolutely not the normal mail carrier (at least in my city -- I asked the carrier one time). Weekend delivery works great around here, too.

Here in the burbs I'm thrilled w/USPS delivery. Weekends or weekdays, I get good results. And Sunday deliveries!

Yeah, this is really an "it depends"; where I'm at, at the edge of a medium sized city (Joplin, MO), the service is very good, tracking is good, although neither as good as UPS or FedEx, and I'm happy, especially with the weekend deliveries.

But I believe those who are saying it's not working well, and more importantly, it's not what they signed up for.

Living in the UK, there's no courier I've had worse experience with than UPS, both for domestic and [inbound] international deliveries.

When having goods shipped from America, I always prefer USPS.

It's interesting to see how sentiment varies.

Who delivers USPS packages the last mile in the UK? I don't imagine there are US letter carriers walking beats over there, so some other entity must be taking responsibility of your packages once they get off the airplane.

Regular Royal Mail - similar to how Russiapost to the US will be delivered by the USPS

I have sat in my office or home and watched a package go from "out for delivery" to "delivery attempted" while I'm there, have been there the whole time, and nobody ever attempted anything. Then once that happens they don't try again, you have to go to the post office to get it. And given that I live in NYC, going to the post office is invariably more time consuming than going to an actual store nearby that sells the thing I ordered, thus completely destroying the rationale for using Amazon in the first place.

Amazon shopping used to be amazing, like magic awesome customer service. Things are very different in 2016.

What percentage of there customer base would make a purchase like the ones you're describing; that is, consumers that would by OEM products I the value and option of doing so was obvious and easy. Honestly don't see this as a threat to Amazon, though would agree it's potential a threat to your view of the world. For example, take another large consumer electronics retailer like Walmart. Does Walmart's in store or online offering solve your issues?

If Amazon has an online shopping entry for an new box of printer ink, and what shows up is a refilled cartridge in a white bag that your printer won't recognize and is useless, that's a class of problem relevant to 100% of their customer base, methinks.

You seriously believe most people (that is 100% of people) still own a printer? Most people I know stopped owning a printer a long time ago. Most people I know, when the need to replace a OEM cord need to do so same day offline; that is they need their device working, and without a cord, it'll run out of power. Most people buy the cheapest option that meets their needs; in fact, most OEM cords normally don't, due to them normally being too short. Again, is Walmart a solution to your issue?

You're missing the forest for the trees.

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.

It's a problem with easy of device and cable complaince, it's a know issue, and is in fact the OEMs issue due to having a flawed business model; that is, being unable to sell a device for it's real value and selling over priced supplies & parts that aren't even easy to validate as complaint to a given standard. Stop blaming Amazon, and see that the issue is Apple, HP, etc.

> Stop blaming Amazon, and see that the issue is Apple, HP, etc.

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.

(2nd reply) Given you the thread limit has been reached, I'm replying to the last response I'm able to reply too.

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?

I would say at least 95% of people purchasing printer ink on Amazon still own a printer. That seems like a pretty uncontroversial statement to me.

Amazon's customer base is not limited to people that still own a print and want to buy ink, and owned a printer that has issues with the cartridge purchased. My question how mean customers have this issue; no one I know does.

When Amazon started with third party sellers, it was like the best of EBay without the bullshit.

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.

I think the issue is the UI with how it handles stock out. When amazon as seller runs out of stock it rotates the next best option which sometimes is a marketplace seller. The ui does not make this clear so people think they're buying an oem part from Amazon but getting reseller garbage.

I suspect that this problem is exacerbated because the retailer's margins on the real products are so slim—or even negative. Amazon (really, its stocking algorithm) has no incentive to supply them directly.

In contrast, the high margin fakes must look really appealing to feature.

For me, for lots of categories but maybe not ones filled with fakes, Amazon routinely puts a marketplace seller before themselves if the price including shipping is cheaper. More than a few times I hunt down the Amazon offering for a dollar or so more so I'm assured of good service.

The other bizarre thing, to me, is that often searching Amazon won't turn up what I want but searching Amazon through Google will. I guess because you can pay to bump your stuff up inferior and more highly-priced items get listed higher up.

I think it's more because Amazon's search engine is really bad, it's the worst I routinely use, I think the worst I've routinely used in my life, which for the purposes of this goes back to AltaVista in the early days of the web.

Yes, I'm not sure what extent is distortion by paid promotion and what extent is a poor search algorithm, but either way.

Their search can be annoying, but I've found their recommendations are usually pretty good.

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.

as my parents found out, its easier and better to buy from ebay. sadly it can be safer too

Curious, why is it easier and safer on eBay?

Better fraud and anti-scam measures.

Agree, though while fraud a related issue, standards complaince might just be neglected or due in my opinion to standards that don't enforce complaince with parts or devices. For example, I've bought OEM parts that were non-standard, and in some cases, had quality issues; bought OEM headset once that out of the box would delivery and electric shock to my ears; they replaced the product, but point is being OEM does not equal high quality.

If a headset delivers an electrical shock to your ears I think you have other problems, unless you meant an electrostatic discharge. An actual shock means that the device you are connecting to is faulty, not the headset.

Right, the cord itself was collect a charge an wiring defect didn't ground it back into the device.