I liked it better when they sold things themselves, now they're just an eBay clone selling cheap knockoffs trying to hide the fact.
When you do find the item, you'll find in amongst the "customers also looked at/bought" 4 or 5 other pages containing the exact same item. At different prices and stock levels. None of which showed up in the search you just did for that item.
It's completely broken and absurd.
I've moved almost all of my online purchases BACK to ebay actually because of this. At least ebay's trust system is easy to understand and harder to game than what amazon has in terms of reviews.
I'm interested to see if this is a trend, or if my circle of friends is an outlier.
Helen Oster Adorama Camera helen@adorama.com
Any tips for buying on eBay?
Also, the "daily deals" page is hand-filtered by eBay staff to guarantee no shady sellers.
Yes, I still have and use the binoculars.
I avoid Amazon as much as possible now since it's no longer possible to rely on their reviews and there are way too many results to be able to find one that's not fake or of extremely poor quality.
I'm starting to appreciate going to brick-and-mortar shops again and having the choice between only a dozen of good quality products, instead of thousands cheap barely usable ones.
Want a phone? Here's 300 phone cases, which have the word 'phone' and are much cheaper! Want a left-angle USB to straight microUSB cord? Here's straight USB to left-turn micro, because those words are the same. And here are some right-angle options because most of the words are the same!
I understand that Amazon isn't indexing 100% of their items by hand, but the combination of no support for sophisticated search features and the failure to index even very popular product classes makes certain products essentially hopeless to buy.
And that's the trick: I'd buy from NewEgg based on their reputation, not the reputation of some company I've never heard of. Back in the day, if I bought from Amazon I assumed (probably incorrectly) that it was somewhat curated. With 3rd-parties, NewEgg is no longer a trusted vendor, they're just a big ol' barrel of random shit that I have to try and fish through to find what I want. Amazon is just a big ol' barrel of random shit where I hope to not get tricked. Is that really the reputation you want, Amazon? That I wander down your virtual aisles constantly looking over my shoulder?
I "prefer" a vendor because they have demonstrated that they "carry good stuff". These days, hell, even they don't know what they carry.
In frustration I simply walked to an Apple store and learned they price-match Best Buy and Walmart (not Amazon) with up to a 10% discount - I found the Amazon price on walmart.com from my phone and successfully gave myself free same-hour delivery.
Apple MMEF2AM/A AirPods Wireless Bluetooth Headset for iPhones with iOS 10 or Later White by Apple
can't get any more legit than that.
"Apple airpods": 1st non-sponsored result: Apple MMEF2AM/A AirPods Wireless Bluetooth Headset for iPhones with iOS 10 or Later White by Apple
wait wut?
So if you are wanting to purchase, say, a 10ga extension cord, and UL listing is important to you, searching for '10 Gauge Extension Cord UL' will return many non-UL listed cords with customers asking 'Is this UL Listed?'. It makes for a very frustrating shopping experience.
Amazons just seems like an intentional labyrinth to keep you wandering. These days it seems like even the most specific queries just dump a ton of unrelated randomness and nothing of any use.
I'll search for a thing, I know what it is called, and the results are an absolute mess. I'll search something skewed but close to the other terms.... find thing. It's very odd.
Let alone the mass amounts of totally categorized wrong stuff. No socks with one word in common aren't the same as some PC parts...
No, that's false. Ads are only a way of exchanging money for the eyeballs of potential customers, and both scrupulous and unscrupulous merchants use them. They make no reliable statement about what's really "better for you." And especially when the ads are targeted (an therefore relatively cheap), you can't trust anything.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-s...
> It all started with an Instagram ad for a coat, the West Louis (TM) Business-Man Windproof Long Coat to be specific. It looked like a decent camel coat, not fancy but fine. And I’d been looking for one just that color, so when the ad touting the coat popped up and the price was in the double-digits, I figured: hey, a deal!
> ....
> Several weeks later, the coat showed up in a black plastic bag emblazoned with the markings of China Post, that nation’s postal service. I tore it open and pulled out the coat. The material has the softness of a Las Vegas carpet and the rich sheen of a velour jumpsuit. The fabric is so synthetic, it could probably be refined into bunker fuel for a ship. It was, technically, the item I ordered, only shabbier than I expected in every aspect.
[citation needed]
The mechanism for the first is quite intuitive. An add can make someone buy something once. If that thing is good, there is a chance they will buy again, and so give you more money. If it is not good, they will at most buy it once.
So the EV of an add on a good product is by definition higher than one on a bad product; and so a company with a good product should be willing to spend more on an ad.
The latter. Basically, it boils down to the intuition that a company with an inferior product is likely to spend more on advertising to make up for its products deficiencies. The best products often don't need paid advertising at all because they can be successful with only word of mouth advertising from happy customers.
I've recently had some personal experience with this from an expensive home improvement product. One company advertises heavily, has a high-touch sales force, and engages in extensive SEO online. However, once I dug in deeper I came to believe the whole category of products probably doesn't work effectively over the long haul (their advertising and guarantees use some tricky wording), and is certainly not worth the expense. Their advertising was a poor proxy for quality.