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Comment by kevin_b_er | Hacker News Reader

It is getting increasingly hard to use amazon. The risk of getting bogus goods is getting higher and higher.

Even when your order is "shipped and sold" by Amazon it can still be bogus because amazon mixes the 3rd party seller parts into the pool.

I got shipped a clearly inferior 3rd party generic version of what I ordered. Amazon took it back, but support could not guarantee I'd receive what was presented on the website. I ended up buying it for slightly more from a brick & mortar just to guarantee I at least got something branded correctly.

This is only going to get worse until Amazon is no different from ebay for garbage. With my recent experience, "shipped and sold by Amazon" is a meaningless distinguishing marker now if 3rd party sellers are involved in selling the product.

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I feel like Amazon has gotten harder to browse, lately.

I'm moving and need to buy things to replace what I used to share with roommates in the kitchen (various utensils and tools). It's become extremely difficult to answer a simple question like "what's the best cooking utensil set?", due to shitty third party products, unclear descriptions, incredibly polarized reviews, and sponsored items taking the "top" listings.

I needed maybe 5 different products, which I reflexively assumed would take maybe 15 minutes of clicking around, but instead it took almost 90. Ironically, I would have been better served popping over to the Target around the corner, where at least I can see the size / quality of what I'm buying.

>I feel like Amazon has gotten harder to browse, lately.

Amazon has a "problem" with private labels. It's so so so easy for Joe Blow in Kansas to create a private label product and get it shipped directly to Amazon's wearhouses. So Amazon is overrun by them, which makes it difficult to find anything in the mess. On top of that, since most listings are created by third party sellers, listings vary in quality and can be very inaccurate. All this makes it close to impossible to compare items. Top it off with Amazon's sorting feature being entirely broken, it can really be a mess to try to browse. eBay actually offers a better UI in that regard.

It was pretty short sighted on Amazon's part to let this happen, IMO.

Amazon actually CAN improve in this regard, all they have to do is require third party sellers to complete the listing and also have a human review the listing for quality and accuracy. Just that small step would improve the customer experience drastically.

With all that I don't really understand why people still use Amazon anymore other than out of habit.

Sort by rating you say? Sure, here's 3 pages of sketchy, out of production, third-party seller items with one 5-star review, followed by the 4.97 star item with 3,880 reviews that you actually should buy. Enjoy!

If only they'd bring back sort by number of ratings...

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