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Comment by cstejerean | Hacker News Reader

Fakes I’m not too worried about, I can usually spot those. The problem is that many categories are flooded with garbage products with inflated reviews. Try to find a bathroom scale. Tons of choices with 4.5 stars and above, but most of the reviews are fake, so it would take hours to sort through the choices and find a decent product.

Same for most things I’ve wanted to buy recently (hiking poles and a daypack are two other examples from this past weekend).

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The deluge of low quality, rebranded, foreign built junk is a real problem for Amazon. A search for food scale[0] for example gives you a whole page of similar (many exactly identical with different brand names) pieces of garbage - they have massive, consistent weight drift and drain batteries like it's their job, and yet they're rocking thousands of 5 star reviews.

[0]https://www.amazon.com/s?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywor...

This exact issue caused me to use Amazon a lot less.

these days, I check Consumer Reports for a review and usually buy their recommendations. Most of the time, still on Amazon - their delivery is still top notch.

But - not all the time, as there are now viable alternatives that do 2-day delivery well enough. For example, I started ordering some stuff on Walmart.com. A lot of things that are “prime pantry only” on Amazon are available for the same price on Walmart.com, without any restrictions.

> But - not all the time, as there are now viable alternatives that do 2-day delivery well enough. For example, I started ordering some stuff on Walmart.com. A lot of things that are “prime pantry only” on Amazon are available for the same price on Walmart.com, without any restrictions.

There's also local retail. If you don't mind a trip to a store, you can size up the product in person and go home with it the same day. I'm my experience, the prices are often competitive with Amazon, too.

Consumer Reports, Sweethome, Wirecutter. Usually ignore customer reviews and go with Amazon Prime picks for the rest.

Just wait untill these Chinese firms master naming their brands with English sounding names.

That and the thousands of "very good product!" fake reviews, you will not be able to find a non-plasticy, built-to-last product on Amazon at all.

And the fun will continue when you discover the warranty requires you shipping items to PRC, if it's honored at all.

> drain batteries

I'll stick with my ancient one that uses a spring.

> it would take hours to sort through the choices and find a decent [bathroom scale]

Maybe it's different in the USA, but when I needed a bathroom scale for our new apartment I went over to the store and bought the first one they had. If I would have come home and it wouldn't have worked, I'd have gone back and had either gotten repair under warranty or cash back (if they don't want to repair it, you can rescind the purchase). Took maybe 20 minutes. Ordering online would be quicker in terms of buying, but I would have to stay home to receive the package, and if something is wrong, I have to ship it back and get the money back for shipping, plus wait for them shipping a new one... Wouldn't buying from a physical store be easier than looking through hundreds of reviews, both in terms of time as well as in terms of mental effort?

I understand it's just an example and this doesn't apply to everything, but I do hear that in the USA, people order everything from Amazon instead of walking over to the store. I just can't imagine staying home for packages all the time, let alone trying to spot fake reviews for simple things like scales (of any kind), microwaves, etc. They are simple things with simple features (e.g. microwave: power, size, and whether it revolves) that I don't need reviews for. If it doesn't work as expected, also if it breaks after three years of light and correct usage, I'd get warranty (assuming the expectation that a microwave lasts a decade is not wildly off).

> I just can't imagine staying home for packages all the time

I'm not sure why you think people in the USA do that. You certainly don't have to stay home to get package. Nobody does that.

If it's a valuable package, there are ways to make sure it's not stolen, including using an Amazon Locker.

In Germany DHL has lockers that you can use as an address. The next one is closer to me than any store.

Although I agree I have a certain reluctance to return stuff, because now I need to wrap the package, get it to the post office (which is far away) and pay shipping.

In the US, you can just put the package in an Amazon Locker with the return label printed on it. You don't have to pay for shipping.

I don't know if Amazon Lockers exist in Germany, but I'm sure they would reimburse your for the shipping cost if you ask.

It's called living in the suburbs. I don't order everything on Amazon, but if I need some basic item (hangers, laundry detergent, vent cover, bathroom scale etc) it's a huge time saver! It would easily take me 45 minutes round-trip to drive to the nearest, say hardware store, locate what I need (assuming it's in stock) and drive home. On Amazon, I find the item, swipe right and wait two days. No need to stay at home waiting for the package, I live in a safe area.

Honestly I've had zero issues with counterfeits, but then again I don't have any kids yet, so I'm not buying many toys. I also typically pay more for name brands due to quality concerns in general, so that probably insulates me to a degree. I'm not denying people's experiences, but honestly Amazon's reputation is still fine to me. They're a marketplace like any other and they never really marketed themselves as premium. Curation and trust was never part of the deal IMO. I don't trust Walmart or Best Buy either.

I live in NYC and I'm definitely not taking the subway three stops just to get to a place to buy a bathroom scale, I would just order that from Amazon. Getting to certain varieties of stores in urban locales is pretty annoying and time consuming just like in the suburbs.

In my old neighborhood there was one place to buy bathroom scales , however, they were not sold with warranties and were basically getting what you receive from Amazon at a higher price.

Yeah, and the cheap bathroom scale would have been just as awful as the middling ones on Amazon. And that would have probably been just fine.

One of the weird things about Amazon is that its turned us into people that think we need a crowd-sourced review for every $20 common household item.

  I do hear that in the USA, people order everything from
  Amazon instead of walking over to the store. I just can't
  imagine staying home for packages all the time

It depends on your life situation.

Personally, it's hard for me to get to stores on work days - whereas my workplace will accept my personal parcels.

On the other hand, I know people whose workplaces won't accept parcels for them, but who walk past loads of stores on their way to work.

So for me, ordering online is a convenience - but for them, it's an inconvenience.

> Maybe it's different in the USA ... I went over to the store

Disclaimer: I don't live in the USA

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that many cities in the US have residential neighborhoods separated and far from commercial ones? If I had to grab the car and make a 20min drive, and find parking, just to buy a 10$ scale, no thanks, better to order online

They need to give customers a way to sort by review counts in a time-weighted fashion. In other words, a product with 1,000 reviews and a 4.5 average that had been sold for five years would rank higher than a product with 1,500 reviews and a 4.8 average that had been sold for three months. This would help identify the quality products from stable manufacturers.

> They need to give customers a way to sort by review counts in a time-weighted fashion. In other words, a product with 1,000 reviews and a 4.5 average that had been sold for five years would rank higher than a product with 1,500 reviews and a 4.8 average that had been sold for three months. This would help identify the quality products from stable manufacturers.

Major improvements have been needed in Amazon's search ranking for years. The fact that it's little better than it was in 2002 tells me they don't really care to fix any of the issues with their shopping experience.

Dear anyone at Amazon: please read this and implement the suggestions: http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....

Any ranking system you can suggest can and will be gamed and exploited. The problem is that Amazon is trying to rank products at all, not whatever opaque algorithm they are using to do the ranking. They need to turn off all the ranking and rating, and start actually vetting their suppliers, but that’s hard and expensive so they will never do it.

> They need to...start actually vetting their suppliers, but that’s hard and expensive so they will never do it.

I agree they need to start actually vetting their suppliers. But I disagree with you about the ranking. "Sort by average ranking" is broken obviously brain dead ways. They need a transparent ranking system that correctly balances number of reviews with average rating. I don't want to user their actually opaque "relevance" ranking.

I find that it's usually pretty clear from the bizarre language, excess enthusiasm, and lack of detail which reviews are fake or paid for, without need to refer to any 3rd-party websites. For many products with fewer than 100 ratings, it's clear that all or almost all of the ratings are fake. This often happens when there are several versions of essentially the same product, presumably all from the same factory in China. It's usually best to stick to the one or two variants with the most reviews.

Bear in mind that the existence of obviously fake reviews doesn't imply that all fake reviews are obvious. Maybe it would be prohibitively expensive to do a really good job of producing fake reviews at scale, I don't know -- but surely some companies manage to avoid the obvious tells.

Recently it became clear to me that my Amazon shopping has been limited to stuff I don't really care about that much.

These are product categories (and european sources) I frequently buy from, yet Amazon hardly serves any of them competently:

- studio equipment (Thomann)

- audio equipment (countless niche, yet competent HIFI shops)

- computer hardware / technology (Really, where to start? Alternate, Mindfactory, Apple)

- bike components (Rose, Mantel, ...)

- tea (Teekontor Kiel)

- clothing (Rapha, Uniqlo, Zara)

For most of these categories Amazon is completely useless. Discovery is abysmal. Selection is mediocre. Product data / listings are a mess and show repeated results with slightly different, often incomplete variations from multiple sellers. Alternatively you get one single product page that features countless, sometimes unrelated product variations that may or may not be Prime-eligible. Maybe Amazon is fine with me buying cheap stuff from them and I still value their Prime-powered, reliable next-day delivery, but for important, expensive stuff I expect some degree of curation and will use other stores. At this point Amazon is slightly better than eBay.

For something like hiking poles, I really recommend REI. It may cost a bit more but you get higher quality materials and great customer support.

Faced with hundreds of junk offerings, sometimes a high-to-low price sort gets the quality product onto the first few pages. Doesn't work if there are many "packs of 50" though.

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