I met a shady guy recently, who has personally paid for tons of take reviews on kindle books. After hearing how easy it is from him, I really lost trust.
My assumption for most products these days is that if Amazon is cheaper than a retailer, it's grey market.
IMO, they did a Walmart -- at some point the mission shifted from serving the customer to total domination at any cost.
EBay is much worse in this regard as there is nobody I can trust to have properly sourced their inventory.
Back in the late 90's, early 2000's before Amazon was as big as they are now, I worked in the commercial music distribution arm of Sony/BMG. We were the ONLY people that were manufacturing (In our own facilities) CD's for bands on our music labels and yet bootleg copies of CD's were going out Amazon's doors to customers. How? Amazon doesn't keep an abundance of stock on hand. If they run to low, they would buy product for One Stops (at a higher price than we sold to them) because the One Stops could get several thousand CD's in a few hours while an order from our warehouse might take 36 hours to get there. It was a stop gap for them to not go Out Of Stock. Those One Stops should only have been getting their product directly from us also, but no one watched their inventory as closely, and they would at times buy product from unofficial manufacturers. Those One Stops were trying to scam people. (Mostly Mom and Pop CD retailers)
Again, I have not had any problem returning product to Amazon.
Have you got any source for this being a real problem ? Because it seems such things are easily detected at the packing station, by barcode. And if an employee does so often, he'll probably won't stay long.
I bought a Macbook Pro charger from Amazon, sold by Amazon. I got a clearly counterfeit charger that came in, I kid you not, two Ziplock bags (one for the cord, one for the unit).
(I dropped prime when they blacklisted competitors' products: Chromecast and Apple TV.)
1) Amazon itself is the seller 2) The manufacturer is the seller 3) It's a sufficiently uncommon item that the odds of getting a counterfeit is low
Following these rules, I generally haven't had any problems with Amazon purchases.
I'm sure I've had something that wasn't what I had hoped, but I truly don't remember. On the other hand, I can think of dozens of things that were great. Electronics, tools, consumables, toys.
Not to mention, Amazon pretty much always will refund you.
You guys sound a little worked up over next-to nothing, honestly.
I have come to trust that if an item has tens of thousands of reviews, few 1-star reviews, and some useful critique/criticism in the reviews, that while it may not be the best [vacuum|pot|canoe] I'll probably do just fine with it. Much like with Android vs iOS, there are real differences but both have a very high quality level and the non-professional vacuum user is really fine with either choice.
If I really, really, really care about the exact details (e.g. digital cameras, computers) I'll go elsewhere, simply because storefront reviews are never a good source of side-by-side tests & sophisticated, in-depth analysis.
Those are usually people who have given some thought to the good and bad about a product.
Honest question: where do you go instead? YouTube? Review blogs? What makes you trust those reviews more than the in-depth reviews you find on storefronts?
"Professional" reviewers in particular fill a gap- some of them have had their hands on just about every <vacuum> ever made, so they can provide something frequently lacking on storefront reviews, an opinion well informed by experience with many alternatives.
I also like sites like DxOMark, which provide raw test data that you can review yourself.
The main theme though is just, many sources. Any one person can be bought, but not the whole internet.