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Comment by defo_nonconvex | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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

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.

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...

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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 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 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

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