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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

Amazon has become an extremely unpleasant place to shop in the past two years. The proliferation of garbage sellers makes it hard to find anything.

It used to be that you could avoid most of them by just ignoring anything with less than 10 reviews, but with Amazon's latest change to factor in number of reviews for their "sort by average review" list has let the genie out of the bottle. Now you'll see literally THOUSANDS of 5-star reviews on their garbage, completely drowning out the real stuff :/

It's to the point now where I'll only purchase known brand-name items from the manufacturer, and hope to god it's not a scammer using their name, or some typosquatter, or their supply chain hasn't been polluted by counterfeits.

And it's only getting worse. Now I try to buy direct from individual websites like it's 1999.

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This is exactly why I no longer buy from Amazon unless it's something that's pretty much already junk.

I was shopping for a Hario coffee grinder on Amazon and noticed about 10% of the reviews were 1-star as opposed to the usual 5-star reviews. Turns out about 10% of people who bought this item on Amazon received a counterfeit even though it was apparently the manufacturer's own page and listing (if it wasn't I couldn't tell nor figure out how to determine that).

So after researching on Amazon I went to the manufacturer's site, found their list of authorized resellers, and bought it from Williams-Sonoma. I've since bought more items from WS. They should send a thank you card to Jeff Bezos.

I'm a new father now too. Guess where we don't buy any baby stuff from.

The problem with Amazon listings is that any seller (official reseller or not) can put a product up for sale. Amazon defaults to the cheapest seller listed as new (if you have Prime, sellers that offer Prime shipping will chosen over a cheaper seller that charges separately for shipping).

The problem here is that when you buy from Amazon, you expect that you're buying it from Amazon. But with they way they have it set up, it's also very likely that you'll buy from another seller that's a few pennies cheaper than Amazon, with Amazon facilitating the sale.

From what I understand, Amazon also commingles its own "Sold by Amazon" inventory with other sellers who use the Fulfilled By Amazon programme, without checking for counterfeits. [1][2][3][4]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16003872

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15944675

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15774793

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15589274

Right. It's this commingling that makes the whole exercise futile. I can check and double check that I am buying from Amazon directly, but if fake goods are mixed in the same bin as real ones it becomes a game of roulette to see what I'll actually receive.

Yep. I note that the LifeHacker article here gives tips on avoiding fakes, but none of those tips apply to the very guy in the article!

I'm plenty willing to be a diligent buyer, it's not much different than avoiding phishing attacks, but at this point any item with Amazon as the seller may be compromised, and there's no way to tell in advance.

This is so obviously problematic and yet Amazon fails to correct it -- leaves me feeling very suspicious of their motivations and erodes the goodwill i had for them.

If someone really didn’t like amazon (Walmart) they would spend a lot of money testing products for dangerous materials and chemicals. Anyone want to bet counterfeit products and food from China has no lead or other contaminants in them? I don’t.

I went into a Decathlon for the first time the other day, after long assuming Amazon would always be cheaper for outdoor+active wear...so wrong. Totally surprised at a high street store having a huge range of better quality merchandise, at lower prices, and no need to shop around amongst all the clones with very similar appearance, but varying quality. My faith in the bricks-and-mortar stores has been partially restored.

And for safety-critical purchases...no way am I risking buying something like angle grinder discs or fire extinguishers off Amazon. Fake headphones mean a bit of distortion, fake discs might mean a lost eye.

So now its just low-cost, low-risk purchases where I don't care too much if the item is junk.

On that note, where do people buy electronic hardware if not Amazon/PC World? E.g. for SD cards - Amazon carries the risk of counterfeits, and PC World carries the high street premium.

> And for safety-critical purchases

Yep, I avoid anything that's going to need a wall-wart power supply, I really don't need to wake up in the middle of the night to find out it's burned the house down. Some of the PSU's Big Clive[0] has dismantled and studied are downright scary.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/user/bigclivedotcom/videos

There's an interesting middle ground forming, though: First-Quality Third-Party.

I would not want to buy a first-party charger because I think they're way too expensive. However, I'm also not going to just buy the least expensive one, because as Clive has shown, they're unreliable at best and downright dangerous at worst.

But I've bought dozens of items from Monoprice and Anker. They have made a brand for themselves as being high quality and low cost.

Of course, the whole house of cards comes tumbling right down once the counterfeiters stop bothering to make 'App1e' chargers and start making 'Ankeer' and 'Moonprice' models.

> Of course, the whole house of cards comes tumbling right down once the counterfeiters stop bothering to make 'App1e' chargers and start making 'Ankeer' and 'Moonprice' models.

Reminded model servos Tower Pro, who were sort of knock off Blue Birds (copy of their distinct blue colour). Cue few years later someone started making Toward Pro...

I've consolidated most of the 12V gadgets in my office to run off my PC's power supply, through a PCIe power to barrel connector cable that was made for bitcoin mining rigs. I've replaced several wall warts with a $10 cable that can be visually inspected for safety, and I'm probably saving a few watts in the process.

And what's worrysome for Amazon is that in this case it is just a small step to go a bit further: If you don't care too much whether the item is junk, you can just buy it on AliExpress. Most likely it will be cheaper than Amazon and at least you know that you have opted for the "cheap and often junk" route.

In my experience, AliExpress is usually better than expected. Unless you go for the absolute cheapest the general quality is actually very high.

I bought some socks for example: for the price of cheap socks in a brick-and-mortar store I got some of the best socks I have ever owned.

I think AliExpress could do some really good bussiness if they were to add a QA person in the loop and would start selling 'premium' products under a different name. So far the median price/quality ratio of the things I bought has been very good (with a few duds, all gimicky electronic crap).

> for the price of cheap socks in a brick-and-mortar store I got some of the best socks I have ever owned.

Link? :-)

They do, it's called Tmall: http://www.webretailer.com/lean-commerce/tmall-global/

I shop microcenter in person (massachusetts USA but they have other locations) for sd cards/ external hard drives etc. They seem to have good selection of computer hardware and decent prices, and have a lot of embedded stuff (pi/ arduino/ some ada fruit kits). Kits for kids (of various quality).

Monoprice/ newegg for the other stuff.

Surprisingly, the CPU+mobo combo I just bought for a new build was cheaper from a local Microcenter than Amazon. Plus, I could get it the same day (ordering it on Saturday night, I'd get the mobo Sunday and CPU Tuesday if I did Amazon -- went next day and got both from Microcenter for about $50-60 less).

This has typically been the case for probably close to a decade now. At some point around the P4 extreme days (iirc) they made a business decision to stop getting utterly killed by Newegg and Tigerdirect. There was a lot of talking on the various enthusiast boards about it at the time whether or not it was going to be a good long-term move.

The loss-leader strategy appears to have worked! I typically try to buy from Microcenter now when possible, and I almost always give back that $50 cpu/mobo combo savings in margin on the rest of the build (and then some) simply due to convenience.

> always be cheaper for outdoor+active wear

This is interesting - my experience is that outdoor gear is one of Amazon's absolute weakest markets. I can't remember the last time they beat out my alternatives for backpacks, tents, etc.

There seem to be a bunch of factors in that. One is that buying offbrand is rarely a good idea (since you end up stress-testing everything), so people go for less-famous branded stuff instead. Two is that close equivalents aren't - I can buy any charger with the right voltage and plugs, but not any equal-size backpack. Three is that outdoor gear already has a lot of tiny-margin sellers; between REI, Campmor, MooseJaw, and ActiveJunky rebates there's very little room to undercut.

I still buy on Amazon, but only what they sell directly. Nothing 3rd party.

Isn't there still a danger of co-mingling fake stuff with what looks like a genuine item sold by Amazon?

Yes, my understanding is, at least in some cases, the fulfillment centers mingle items from different sellers. So, if you're buying "Band X Widget Y", and there are multiple "Fulfilled by Amazon" sellers, and one of those sellers introduces counterfeits, then the whole pool of Widgets is now suspect.

However, you would probably avoid what happened to this guy in the story since it would be coming from their fulfillment centers. You more than likely wouldn't be tagged as importing counterfeit goods.

True. You avoid being labelled a counterfeiter (or importer thereof).

But, you still run the risk of being shipped widgets that will [combust|impale|disintegrate|other calamity]

Thanks, that's what I thought. Because there's no way Amazon are going to have separate bins for SKU's they sell, and those in the co-mingled "seller" bins; it'd be a huge waste of space, and they'd have a much less wider range of SKU's to punt.

You're assuming they need a bin per SKU. They don't. Multiple SKUs can share a bin. Google 'Amazon random stow'

Thanks!....I had no idea about the "random stow" thing.

It's not a matter of it being a waste of space, even, but a waste of time. The first person in a FC to even see an item after the boxes get offloaded from the trucks is probably a stower who is being paid as little as possible to do nothing but scan whatever ASINs are in front of them and shove things into the bins as fast as possible.

Any random bin can contain books, food, electronics, jewelry, anything from anywhere as it gets picked from, restowed into, counted and recounted, etc. There's little room for quality control before items are available for purchase, because the system is optimized to get as many things listed on the site as quickly as possible. There are many ways in which the process could be made more robust, but it won't be because doing so would cost precious seconds.

If you inspect the account/brand listed as the seller, it is much harder to get fooled by a counterfeit. Amazon-brand items sold by Amazon are pretty hard to mistake, in my experience.

Co-mingling breaks that. What happens is even though you buy from seller 1, they will send you seller 2s item if its in a warehouse closer to you.

The only way to avoid this is to by things only sold by 1 seller.

Ziess lens cleaner being Sold under the Ziess account is sometimes counterfeit. The thing with that is the counterfeit destroys lens coatings.

Pretty sure this has to do with the co-mingling people are mentioning which means you can’t be sure even if it’s coming from the brand.

That's starting to be a lot of work when I can buy from another site where inspecting the seller isn't a necessary step.

I wanted to buy something yesterday, but their direct non-3rd-party offer was "This offer is reserved exclusively for Prime members." It looks like I'll buy somewhere else then...

Even than you can find counterfeit in your purchase or get ripped off another way. I got tired of them when 30% of my packages got lost and finally I could identify that it was their own delivery service that stole the packages. I called the manager about it, nothing changed.

I tried to but couldn't figure out what was actually third party or not. Even reviews on items that looked to be first party listings warned of fakes. Then I decided to stop wasting my time and wait for Amazon to figure their shit out.

I find that B&H Photo has great prices and fast shipping!

And incredible (in-store) after sales customer experience, in my experience. If you're visiting NYC, anyone interested in technology, photography or just wants to see an incredible retail/sales operation in action should visit.

NB - As they observe religious calendar/holidays both in store and online, make sure they're open before you visit.

I still buy from NewEgg. Their marketplace has the same problems as Amazon's, but the stuff they sell themselves is generally legit as far as I can tell.

> where do people buy electronic hardware if not Amazon/PC World?

B&H and Monoprice have been getting more and more business from me lately.

For electronics try B&H

Every time I see a comment like this I think to myself we must either be using a different Amazon or just buying totally different categories of items. I buy lots of things from Amazon. I probably get a package from them at least twice a week (I hate going to stores). In all that time I've never gotten something that was straight up garbage. So how is it so many vocal people are getting a significantly different experience?

I have the same experience. I tend to try to buy stuff that Amazon sells directly and I regularly pay a bit more for items that seem to have better reviews or, at least, less reviews that give me pause. And I do buy a fair bit of electronics and so forth. I wonder how many of the people who seem to have such bad experiences buy solely on price even when the price seems too good to be true.

Case in point. I just bought a couple of Samsung Qi wireless chargers. There were certainly cheaper ones listed but this one won Wirecutter recommendation so it's what I got. Are there counterfeits? Probably. But they probably aren't packaged like the legit item.

That won't help you, Amazon comingles their "sold by amazon" stock with "fulfilled by amazon" stock.

I don't doubt it happens but I've never had a problem.

Do you have proof of that?

My household probably gets 4-5 packages from Amazon a week. Over the past half decade, I've received maybe 2 obviously counterfeit products.

If I've gotten anything else that was counterfeit, it was a good enough reproduction for me not to notice.

But some people might be buying items exclusively in categories where the rate is higher? I don't know. I buy a lot of electronics and electronic accessories off of Amazon, and that seems to be what others complain about being bad.

You are just buying different products.

I was looking for a Mophie battery case for the iPhone SE. Go there now and look. You’ll find a bunch of cases “by Mophie”, which are all counterfeits, no exceptions. Mophie doesn’t sell on Amazon.

There are Amazon (Not FBA) listings for Morphie products.

Are you saying that Amazon themselves bought and stocked counterfeit Morphie products?

Amazon is great for common household items that I don't want to make a trip to the store for (cleaning supplies, loofahs, notebooks, pens and paper, etc.). If I want to buy, for example, a Samsung or Apple phone charger, I'm going to buy it from the manufacturer's website.

Something I’ve learned recently is that Target price matches amazon (and a number of other sites). It’s basically turned Target into a same day pickup Amazon warehouse for me. Yes, I’ve got to get to Target; but sometimes I want something the same day anyway, and even more crucial, I have a lot more confidence stuff isn’t counterfeit. (In this case though I’m sure they don’t sell this luggage brand :/)

Same as BestBuy. Actually, they price match plus 10% of the price difference. Which is awesome because I get to go pick it up, but don't have to fear the amazon knock-offs.

Do you request the price-match online at time of purchase, or after pickup?

There have been a lot of rumors about Amazon buying Target and although I do like Amazon, I hope it never happens. IMHO Target was the only online/b&m business that was competitive with Amazon prices and deals over the holidays.

How does that actually work? Do you just tell the cashier during checkout that Amazon offers a better price and they give you the discount no questions asked? Or is it more involved than that?

Target's website is awful to the point of painful, unfortunately.

I don't get why they don't fix it. It's a huge problem and it's eroding confidence in Amazon.

It's not even hard: just require anyone selling on Amazon to wire a large enough deposit before they are allowed to sell (magnitude depending on the price, volume of their items and possibly their assumed trustworthiness); then, if they are found selling counterfeits or otherwise misrepresenting their products or their company, Amazon pockets a third of it, rewards another third to the person reporting it to Amazon and distributes the remaining third to affected shoppers.

It seems to me that the gains would far outweigh any possible reduction in the number of legitimate sellers and products.

They have started to implement a prototype form of this. You can only be labeled as a verified sale, if they have received at least $50 from you in the past. Though that's still not enough to weed out all of the paid reviews written by professional reviewers.

And another questionable thing that is starting to happen more and more is that you get something for free from the seller if you leave a review. It's very difficult for Amazon to guard against this, because the offer is made in the parcel you receive.

> And another questionable thing that is starting to happen more and more is that you get something for free from the seller if you leave a review.

This doesn't seem to be that hard to guard against. Amazon could offer a large bounty to report sellers that do this, and since Amazon has direct access to seller funds they could debit their account to pay for the bounty.

This is actually a great idea and somewhat obvious come to think of it. Having outsized penalties to compensate for the probability of getting caught and deterring others considering partaking in the same type of fraud would be much like what many regulatory bodies have found to be a very effective way of curbing unwanted market behaviour.

> It's a huge problem and it's eroding confidence in Amazon.

Personal opinion: They have consumer confidence to burn, and selling these products is almost pure profit. Amazon doesn't have to source or pay up front for these materials, and only has to pay a minimal storage/shipping fee on them (where they even store the items themselves).

It's hard to turn that kind of profit down, or to slim down the profit by adding more checks and balances.

If they revoked Bezos' trusted traveler privileges each time Amazon brokered a counterfeit import, you can bet the problem would be fixed in a month.

Agree. I've cancelled prime. I'm lucky to live in London, so local UK retailers are actually pretty good in terms of delivery and click and collect options - I tend to find it easier to buy something online on Argos, then just walk down the road and collect it straight away. I don't really miss prime that much tbh. It certainly is easier sometimes, but the variability of the merch is just not worth it.

I don't use Prime and have noticed Amazon keep increasing the time taken for 'free delivery' to a point where i'll just buy it from eBay now, or direct from the retailer.

I cancelled my Prime subscription, but the last time I ordered from Amazon, I chose the free option which was estimated to take 5 days, and it got to me overnight, which was nice.

My current complaint about Amazon is that when I order a grocery item, it's because I can't find it in a local store and Amazon charges double or triple the normal price.

Oddly enough, I ordered something once in bulk for an exorbitant price, and immediately it appeared in my local grocery store for the normal price (50% less). I'm not sure what's going on, but it feels like algorithms run amuck.

Some companies sell directly on eBay, usually at a discount.

I buy plenty of content from Amazon (video, kindle, audible) but I'm increasingly reluctant to use Amazon for physical products - I rarely buy paper books and when I do its usually from an actual bookshop (maybe 4 physical books last year compared to about 30 from audible and maybe 20 on kindle). I certainly wouldn't use them for anything over £50 or so - I'd go straight to a dedicated retailer that I have more confidence in.

I have great success getting second hand books through amazon. My wish list is up on camelcamelcamel and then every so often someone comes along and puts up a book I want for dirt cheap. I get a notification and if I am quick enough get the book ordered straight away. I've managed to get some books that normally go for £40 for £5 + postage before.

I used to use Amazon for second hand books, and then I noticed some sellers were not accurate in their description ("like new" had food stuck in the pages). Amazon was great at refunds, but I'd prefer to avoid the need to refund things. I noticed I was buying all my books from Wordery via Amazon, so I just went direct to Wordery.

UK based here as well and I'm not renewing Prime this year.

Apropos fake stuff and fake reviews, I won't buy anything of value from Amazon now, I can't be sure any more that I'm not going to receive a counterfeit. I'm in the market right now for a couple of new electronic gadgets, but I'll just get them from Halfords and PC World, their prices aren't that different from Amazon's.

My other annoyances...

Over the past few months I've noticed their so called "Next Day" delivery randomly isn't really that. For example this week I ordered a thing that was eligible for Prime next day. It was on Tuesday and I was well within the cut off time (by 7 hours or so). Oddly that item then showed as "Get it by Thursday" which is not Next Day. I thought it was specifically that seller or product that perhaps had ran out of stock. But no, every Prime eligible SKU was showing as "Get it by Thursday".

Upon querying this with Amazon they said: "One day delivery starts as soon as the item is marked as dispatched. We will aim to have your item with you in One day."I didn't have the energy to point out that the previous Tuesday all their Prime eligible SKU's were showing as "Get it by Wednesday" i.e actually and really next day.

They seem to vary this throughout the year to suit themselves. I did order the product though and on Wednesday I got notification that the item was dispatched and out for delivery. Sadly it didn't turn up and when I checked the parcel tracking sure enough it'd been bounced back to an expected delivery of Thursday again.

Another annoyance are these "Add On" SKU's (for example cleaning products) where there is simply no way to order these products without spending say a minimum of 20 quid on other stuff. Some marketplace resellers seem to game this by stocking these SKU's but the delivery price is almost as much as the SKU itself. No thanks, I'll just get these from the supermarket next week when I drive into town (I live in a rural area so having stuff delivered makes sense to me).

I also have an ethical problem with the seemingly ridiculous workloads, hours and low pay their delivery drivers have put upon them, I'd rather not fund these abuses. I know for a fact the that the usual fella that delivers to me is doing at least a 10-11 hour day, and that's screwed up.

So anyway, I don't really order enough "new" stuff to make the Prime next day worthwhile, and tbh I can easily wait a couple of days for an order to arrive. I also tend to only order books these days, and will hold out until I can get a decent used copy at a fraction of the new price.

The other thing that's deeply annoying are these add-on channels where you need to pay a monthly subscription for, on top of Prime. Films/TV that you could previously pay for are being silo'd into these channels with no option to just pay for the film itself. Sure I could run with the 10-14 day free trial, but that soon gets old.

Finally there simply isn't enough compelling "included with prime" video that interests me.

In the UK the maximum average hours for a driver under the GB rules is 48 hours (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/drivers-hours-goods-vehicles/ann...; 5.6 weeks leave too).

IIUC the maximum driving time in 24 hours is 10 hours, and the maximum duty time is 11 hours. (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/drivers-hours-goods-vehicles/2-g...)

Nobody is checking. They're in private cars and small vans, so they aren't on a tachograph. They're technically self-employed subcontractors, so Amazon has no statutory duty to monitor driving hours. IIRC they're paid per drop rather than per hour. I have no doubt that a significant proportion of couriers are habitually working unsafe hours. In my neck of the woods at least, couriers working for Amazon or Hermes are overwhelmingly a) Eastern Europeans who look chronically sleep deprived or b) semi-retired Brits doing it for a bit of extra cash.

This seems like something, in the EU, that will come back and bite Amazon. They surely know the length of work hours and whether "adequate breaks" are being provided - or don't they manage the final mile logistics? Also the legislation about claiming people aren't working for you seems much tighter now.

There are no EU level regulations on drivers hours for vans, bikes etc, only for lorries (and those have enforcement problems in parts of Eastern Europe which means rogue operators are effectively free to operate across the EU with individual countries unable to take action).

There are GB regulations (which stipulate among other things max 10 hrs per day) but these are not practically enforcable on self employed drivers as there are no tachograph requirements etc.

Oh sure, but it's the wage earned for those hours worked after expenses I have a problem with. And aren't there penalties if the drivers simply cannot complete their delivery runs?

> Now I try to buy direct from individual websites like it's 1999.

Oddly, Amazon has reversed roles with the brick and mortars for me. Instead of using a physical store as a showroom and then buying online, I use Amazon's user reviews and algorithms* to see what to buy and then I go to a physical store to get it. I buy from the physical store with confidence I have a reasonable product and price and can return/exchange it easily if I'm still not happy with it.

* the "Frequently bought together" and "Customers also bought" sections.

There's a site I use to sift through counterfeit items and fake reviews on Amazon (and other sites I believe). [0] It's made the headache of finding legitimate products on Amazon a lot easier to manage for me.If you actually look at a lot of the fake 5-star products and analyse the reviews, the majority are really obviously fake. They're chock-full-of buzzwords and they almost always come from verified purchasers with absolutely nonsensical names. I agree - it's gotten really difficult to find real things. However, I haven't found it to be very difficult to spot the fakes in the markets current form. You would think Amazon could internally flag the name patterns for review, but I guess that would take moderating human-power.

[0] https://www.fakespot.com/

> but I guess that would take moderating human-power.

Maybe they could use mturk?

Or maybe give you a button to set up an mturk job on a product to weed out the fake reviews for you, then you could pay only a few cents to get a 'real' review...

Unpleasant indeed!

I'm actively wondering whether it would be possible to build an external ranking-by-review system, since Amazon's <Sort By Best Avg Review> system has been fully gamed, and I use a completely different algorithm.

Meanwhile entire categories are completely full of fraudulent junk -- start with LiPo 18650 batteries. One seller was even using Tesla's brand and logo claiming to sell their batteries. It disappeared a few days after I reported them, so Amazon does appear to be doing something, but it's completely inadequate.

I've had good luck with Amazon personally, but I do avoid entire categories of stuff (anything with an Apple logo, to start with) and largely stick to single-seller things anyway by the nature of what I buy there.

If they did start sending me junk I'd return it, and complain loudly. So far I've only had to engage their customer service about a few delivery-related screwups, but they've been extremely helpful for that stuff, so I'm curious what their threshold is for actually addressing stuff like this.

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