Hacker News Reader

Comment by theossuary | Hacker News Reader

I've canceled my Amazon Prime account for two reasons. Firstly the advertising on Amazon has gotten out of control, I want the best product in my price range, not the one with the largest marketing budget. And secondly, I've found if I go to a more niche market (Cabela's for sporting goods, Lowes for tools, branded clothing stores, etc.) I always get something better, sometimes at a more reasonable price too.

Amazon has turned into a warehouse, you have to know what you want coming in. The only reason I kept using them was because I was lazy and didn't want to have to manage purchases across multiple different websites. But it just isn't worth it when I kept consistently getting inferior products.

View on HN

A few disparate items I've ordered from Amazon recently like a ping pong table, 6ft. ladder, storage container all are resellers directly passing your order through to Walmart. I've started visiting the brick and mortar Walmart store more often. Shopping online (essentially Amazon) used to be cheap and convenient.

Now the expectations on quality have gone down to "OK if this works great, but do I really have the time to print the return label, package it again and ship it back?" Basically my level of trust in stuff sold on Amazon is much lower than what it used to be a few years back. For. e.g. 10 yrs. back - Plasma TV on Amazon? No problem. Now its Costco all the way for expensive electronics stuff.

On one level, Amazon is just fleecing the sellers on their platform - all sorts of charges for combinations of ad words. A lot of sellers have figured out how to game the system. It's just an awful mess. I have been considering cancelling my prime membership for a couple of years now... inertia keeps me from doing it. I've tried Ali express as well. It was an OK experience. Now I'm browsing Etsy. Haven't really bought anything, but it's looking more attractive for household stuff.

In summary, like theossuary, I believe figuring out your niche stores will be beneficial. Watch out for those Asics warehouse sales for workout clothes and shoes etc.

I haven't had a box from walmart yet from amazon, but know a guy who clears 6 figures a year doing this walmart arbitrage. I don't know how long he has in that business model before amazon starts price matching walmart.

His problem won't be Amazon price matching. It will be the drove of other arbitrage drones moving in on his products.

Or walmart bans him. He already got banned from Target.

Then you hire employees to do the shopping. It doesn't take too many sales to get to the point where you need employees to do the shopping and packaging if you're in eCommerce arbitrage.

How does this work exactly?

Walmart sells something for $8, you list it for $12.

You sell item on amazon for $300

When one sells, you go place an order on Walmart.com for $150 and ship directly to the amazon buyer.

No risk of holding inventory. Pretty easy profit if your competition is low.

> all are resellers directly passing your order through to Walmart.

Can you explain how that works?

Can't believe I'm seeing Ali Express compared to Amazon, and apparently in a favorable way.

Ali Express is overrun with sellers with identical listings, but the quality may vary greatly between them. You will only know when you receive the item. It's not uncommon to receive something that looks totally different than the listing images.

Shipping something back on Ali Express is basically a total no-go. They get killer discounts on shipping to the US. Shipping something back to China is probably going to be more expensive than the product. With Amazon it is cheap or free to return things.

Sorting by price on Ali Express is totally broken, because sellers can list a variation with the lowest price that is never available. This impossible-to-get lowest price is taken into consideration by the sort.

People complain that sometimes Prime is 3 or 4 day shipping instead of actually 2 days. Ali Express is 2 weeks minimum. Probably 50% of the things I've ordered have taken 1+ month. Some things take 2 months. Some things never arrive at all.

All that said, I still use Ali Express. It's great for small, cheap and generic items. I know what I'm getting into, and I accept the risks. There is no way it could replace Amazon.

If you knew nothing about Amazon and only learned about it from HN comments you would think it was basically the Mos Eisley Cantina. The real eCommerce Mos Eisley Cantina is Ali Express.

Shopping on Amazon is still cheap and convenient. Maybe not if you consistently buy things that are exorbitant to ship like ping pong tables or 6 foot ladders, but most people buy items that could fit in a shoe box.

> Shipping something back on Ali Express is basically a total no-go.

My returns with AliExpress have all been full refunds without having to reship the items back to the supplier.

One of my refunds was for a $100+ item, as well.

> Ali Express is 2 weeks minimum.

I've received items in a week or less.

> Shopping on Amazon is still cheap and convenient.

As of late, this hasn't been true. AliExpress, Walmart and even Best Buy have had better deals than Amazon.

Admittedly it's probably not perfect to compare Amazon returns to Ali Express returns, because I too have received refunds without having to ship the product back. I have had significantly fewer products I've had to dispute through Amazon than Ali Express though.

I don't know where you live, but I don't think receiving an item from Ali Express in 1 week or less is normal, unless maybe you live in mainland China. I'm in the US and I really think I've never received something quicker than 2 weeks.

You said you have received things in a week or less. What do you think the average is though?

I just don't believe that Amazon does not generally provide cheap products conveniently. There are outliers, as with everything, but I think it's the norm that the prices for the majority of products are competitive, and the user experience is convenient.

> I don't know where you live, but I don't think receiving an item from Ali Express in 1 week or less is normal, unless maybe you live in mainland China. I'm in the US and I really think I've never received something quicker than 2 weeks.

Shipping options and delivery estimates are displayed in both search results and each item's page.

A good percentage of items do have delivery estimates that exceed two weeks, however either faster paid shipping options are available or other suppliers will offer the same item with a shorter delivery estimate.

You can also sort by the country an item ships from. There are increasingly more distributors in North America than there were a couple of years ago.

> I just don't believe that Amazon does not generally provide cheap products conveniently. There are outliers, as with everything, but I think it's the norm that the prices for the majority of products are competitive, and the user experience is convenient.

That hasn't been my experience, unfortunately. I used to use Amazon for the majority of my online purchases because they consistently had lower prices. Eventually, they became my supplier even for goods I'd buy in person.

However, as of last month, Walmart will ship the last item I regularly bought in bulk from Amazon at a lower individual retail price.

Paying for faster shipping from Ali Express totally kills the price advantage, which I think is really the only advantage to buying things there.

Example of Raspberry Pi 3 Camera, product price $4.52, shipping to the US:

Shipping prices (no free option)

$0.34 - 20-39 days

$2.84 - 19-39 days

$38.16 - 12-21 days

$40.53 - 8-16 days

$46.03 - 6-13 days

Which one of those would you pay for?

> Ali Express is overrun with sellers with identical listings, but the quality may vary greatly between them. You will only know when you receive the item. It's not uncommon to receive something that looks totally different than the listing images.

I see comments complaining about this and similar all the time on Amazon, and on products with very high ratings. The strategy seems to be, sell good quality cheap stuff for a while to get a good rating, the change the listing completely to a low-quality expensive product. The high ratings stick around, resulting in more sales than it otherwise would have, and more resilience to new low ratings.

Yes, and on the flip side of that you have other sellers wholesale copying a popular listing. I look at every purchase as a gamble. In the marketplace's defense, Ali Express dispute arbitration has always led to a satisfactory result for me, so the gamble is just on what I'm going to get, not on whether I'm going to lose the entire cost of the item or not.

> Can't believe I'm seeing Ali Express compared to Amazon, and apparently in a favorable way.

I said Ali Express was OK. As in "meh" worth a look. True, stuff arrives a month to two months later. I bought the exact compression socks advertised on Amazon from Ali Express - Amazon price: $16 each. Ali Express: $3.75 each including shipping. Ali Express is catching up.

A lot of products on Amazon are essentially a branding function (name tag) applied to a functionally finished product. The Chinese manufactures probably knew that. With Ali Express, that equation is changing.

> Maybe not if you consistently buy things that are exorbitant to ship like ping pong tables or 6 foot ladders...

The point is Walmart would have shipped it to me for cheaper. Now I know better... Shop around first and then order.

Perhaps it's different with Prime, but Amazon has burnt a lot of my trust with their non-prime free shipping.

They have a huge warehouse infrastructure in my city. They could drop a box in the mail at their warehouse and have it to me in a day or two. They could probably strap it to a stray dog, point it in my direction, and get it here in three.

Yet, somehow, if I collect up a $25 order of in stock items, they can't get it to my door in less than about two weeks, unless I pay a premium for upgraded shipping. This makes it useless for time-sensitive orders.

Now, I know there's QoS and framing as a marketing thing, but this just comes off as a tease.

Yes, I noticed this too when I didn't have Prime. It seems like they would just sit on the order.

yup, you can only shop on ali express with the same attitude as someone offering up a tender - you know the product you want and you know the price you want AND you have enough knowledge of the product to discern shoddy work. browsing on aliexpress is a nightmare

"In summary, like theossuary, I believe figuring out your niche stores will be beneficial ..."

As we figure out our "niche stores", I hope designers and entrepreneurs will study McMaster-Carr[1] - a site I found through the garagejournal forum that is an absolute joy to use.

Just drill down into any product category and you'll get a very simple listing, with full descriptions and very helpful diagrams of every single part.

If you need pipe fittings or hose clamps or rivets or gas regulators, please vote with your dollars at this site.

[1] https://www.mcmaster.com/

Wow! Great site. Thanks!

A similar one for car parts is rockauto.com. UI from the 90s but simple and does the job.

I’ve received a Walmart originated box when I ordered some poster frames. It was a surprise.

The advertising is ridiculous. It used to be that the ads were one or two listings at the top or the bottom of the search results. Now they are top, bottom, side, and mixed in some of my search results and look more similar to non-sponsored listings.

Over the summer I used Prime Video to watch Sneaky Pete, and every episode would start with a 30 second ad for a different Prime show. There was a skip button, but it was hidden, and I could only find it by long tapping.

So I cancelled Prime. I felt silly paying Amazon to display ads at me.

Searched for "Avengers" on the Apple TV Amazon Prime Video app. Scroll to right through results, after the movies it turns into user videos from amazon product reviews for Avenger merch.

Completely agree. Amazon has grown to be a monopoly that doesn't value customer experience anymore.

Same here. Amazon used to be convenient but it slowly has turned into a stressful experience. Counterfeits, 20 listings of the same product with totally different prices, advertising, fake reviews and so on. Now I prefer eBay where at least the search function works or specialized stores with one listing per product.

Newegg went the same path like Amazon and I have stopped using them. They used to be my favorite store.

+1 on Newegg. I built a PC last year, and unknowingly bought something from newegg.com that was in their Marketplace. Paid with Paypal, got charged by Newegg, but never got a confirmation email. I called Newegg, who had no record of the transaction, so I filed a claim on Paypal. Bought the part off Amazon, built my PC, waited for the claim to resolve.

Three weeks later, suddenly the seller adds tracking to the Paypal claim, and a few days later the part that I no longer need shows up in a Newegg box. No invoice, packing sheet, etc. and it's still not listed on my Newegg account. My claim gets closed, and there's nobody I can even return this to.

What a stupid, stupid situation.

It's really sad. I don't know what Newegg's financials are but for me they went from being the gold standard for online stores to "don't use".

I was under the impression that you could filter out their marketplace sellers and that they didn't commingle their own inventory with anyone else's. Is that not the case?

Where do you go for computer stuff that you can trust these days? Every box in all the Fry's stores around me all seem to have already been opened and returned twice by the time i see them.

That is surprisingly crappy I heard that their marketplace had substantial counterfeit issues much like Amazon.

It is at least possible to filter it to items only sold by Newegg.

Re: https://www.riskiq.com/blog/labs/magecart-newegg/

Newegg has not said anything about this to me, nor explained why after a Newegg transaction my card was cancelled defensively and reissued.

I haven't been able to trust Newegg in a very long time, which is sad. They used to be the gold standard, now it's a decrepit pit of dropshipping garbage.

Instead of Newegg, for PC parts I exclusively use Microcenter now. When I was in Atlanta, there were brick-and-mortar stores on the north side. Now I just use their web site. My last PC build ended up being around $40 cheaper through Microcenter than through Newegg.

I've done my last two builds primarily through Microcenter. Their prices are similar to or better than other places and both times I've gotten $50 off by buying the motherboard and processor through them.

You're complaints about Amazon seem to almost all apply to eBay as well though:

Counterfeits: yes of course, just as many if not more

Multiple listings for the same product with different prices: yes, it's by design!

Advertising: not as much, but it is present

Fake reviews: the product reviews on eBay are mostly useless. The only thing you can rely on is the seller reviews

Amazon has all of eBay's problems but with a site that is product focused vs. seller focused. So you have all these categories of problems avoided on eBay like multiple items on the same page(), mixed reviews and the unknown of which seller is more likely to ship a good product.
eBay has some newer product-focused pages and features, but they don't create the kind of problems you see on Amazon.
It also seems somewhat harder to keep creating new seller accounts on eBay. I've been ripped off several times by highly rated sellers on Amazon that disappeared after a several weeks long case pending against them. Amazon resolved it satisfactorily, but it meant that I would have gotten the item faster from China.
All my personal experience, of course.

Of course ebay listings have multiple products, but not in the same super confusing way you see on Amazon.

"multiple items on the same page" - This is usually a positive, since it allows the user to easily look at color or size variations, there is a way to look at only reviews of certain variations

"mixed reviews and the unknown of which seller is more likely to ship a good product" - Being unsure of which seller is best also exists on eBay

I don't think Amazon's listings are confusing. You usually have size and color variations, and sometimes things like multi-packs. I guess that is subjective.

Wow, "stressful" is exactly right. It crept up on me, but it's now rarely a pleasant experience.

Just today I'm returning something. I was trying to buy more of the sort of underwear I like. But I quickly end up in the junky end of Amazon where the same product is listed under slightly different names by different sellers and the interface gets all weird. It must have done that thing where you pick a size, then pick a color, but it automatically adjusts the size to whatever's available in that color. So I ended up with 3 2-packs of too-small underwear. And one of them came without the manufacturer's packaging, just two pairs of underwear in a baggie. Because that's not suspicious or anything. Now I have to package that stuff and haul it to the UPS store.

And I'm totally with you on the advertising. I get how they got there, with a bunch of teams optimizing short-term micro-metrics. But apparently nobody cares about the overall experience.

Locally, Amazon is absolutely atrocious for clothes and shoes. I just get page after page of trashy, unrecognizable brands.

They've been goofing up their delivery a lot lately too. Delivering items late or delivering the wrong items.

I cancelled mine a few months ago. Tomorrow is my last day. They've been harassing me on their site constantly with popups and notifications on every single page since I cancelled. It's gotten to the point where the harassment has firmly cemented my distaste for their user experience and I actively search for alternative sites first now.

This thread just got me to finally cancel mine. I had to click 4 times to get through the cancellation flow and was presented with three distinct screens that moved around the 'end membership' button and try to get you to click on buttons that keep you on as a member. This is probably the darkest pattern cancellation flow I've gone through in recent memory.

> This is probably the darkest pattern cancellation flow I've gone through in recent memory.

Can't be worse than e.g. NyTimes, Zipcar, Stamps.com (many others I'm sure) that force you to call a human to cancel

Yes, that's true

They always try to sign me up for Prime for Students although I am not a student. There is no button to say "I am not in school. Really!"

They do that for me because I have still have a university address on record associated with a .edu email from 20 years ago. Presumably deleting it would eliminate the nag.

I don't even have that.

Ha, the same thing happens to me. No idea why they think I'm a student, like you I don't have an edu email address on my account.

> I cancelled mine a few months ago. Tomorrow is my last day. They've been harassing me on their site constantly with popups and notifications on every single page since I cancelled. It's gotten to the point where the harassment has firmly cemented my distaste for their user experience and I actively search for alternative sites first now.

I've switched to sharing Prime with my fiancee through "Amazon Household," and they're even nagging me as I let my now-redundant Prime membership lapse.

One thing you can do is if you plan to buy on amazon, you can input the order and then before you pay, send a copy of the order to the actual company and ask if they can give a discount if you place the order directly through the company. Most will do the deal outside of amazon because they save money on the amazon fees.

Interesting how this demonstrates that showrooming can affect online retailers too. Popular retail websites that introduce consumers to products can lose out on the sale if a discount is available by buying directly from a merchant, just as physical stores can be bypassed if a discount is available from an online seller.

Most people probably won't take the initiative to make an enquiry with the merchant for an Amazon marketplace order, and it'd be too inconvenient to do this consistently for small purchases, but maybe part of the motivation for promoting merchants tied exclusively to Amazon is an awareness of the threat that online showrooming might pose to some of their business in the future.

I've almost entirely stopped using amazon because the search is so goofy. For anyone is wondering. Try searching for clothing. The more specific you get, the more goofy the search results. For example, if you sort by "lowest to highest" price it doesn't even give you lowest price....lol the only way you find lowest price is if you literally dig through all the listings. I should be able to put in my clothing dimensions and then find all shirts/pants that fit those dimensions. I should also add in parameters like color type or style and get more refinement. Then I should be able to sort by price and see lowest price for all the shirts/pants that fit me....but that is not what happens.

Boggles my mind how Amazon, one of the top tech companies and leader in e-commerce, can have a terrible search engine.

My theory is that they're stuck between (cost of fixing it plus the cost to their pageview metrics if we suddenly didn't have to dig so much) and (cost of slowly simmering customer resentment from terrible UI).

I imagine there's just no manager willing to charge the hill of better search when they'd have to die on the sword of plummeting pageview metrics for succeeding.

I have to agree - the search function is, and always has been, shockingly bad - ypu have to be too specific, and there just doesn't seem to be any reasoning to how it orders results.

And then you have to be really careful before you push the button to buy, because it may turn out that the item doesn't really match your search terms after all.

It's become the walmart of the web. Lower quality or knock off products and a sometimes lower price. I canceled my prime because most the stuff I was looking to buy was never prime eligible for shipping. And Amazon steaming or music isnt worth the price either.

This has been my experience as well. 20 years ago, you could go to Walmart and buy good quality brands at good prices. E.g. you buy a Dewalt drill, it is actually a high quality drill. What happened over time is that because of the extreme price pressure Walmart was putting on suppliers, they began to build special Walmart-only products. So, the Dewalt drill you buy has a great price but is also a piece of crap. I don't enjoy shopping at Walmart at all anymore, you are much better off to find a specially store. E.g. buy your drill the same place the professional carpenters shop.

Amazon has seen a similar decline. Years ago, if you saw a product on Amazon, you could be confident it was as it was labelled, you would get it in a reasonable time and the price was about as good as buying anywhere else. Amazon quality now is total garbage. The store is littered with counterfit goods. If the price looks good, that's probably because the quality is absolutely terrible. I don't enjoy shopping there at all anymore.

This is exactly the reason I was cancelling my Prime as well. And the new delivery service Amazon introduced which had a 50% successful delivery rate. Once I was waiting for the truck to come and asked the driver how he attempted to deliver my stuff and he was just laughing at me. He and his co-workers stole 500 USD+ worth of products from Amazon and I could not get this incident reported, even the manager ignored the details and just kept saying I should report it missing and re-order it.

That sounds like a job for the police, not an Amazon employee.

So his taxes have to subsidize Amazon's lack of reliable process?

No customer service rep or low level manager is going to have the authority to deal with hearsay customer reports of criminal activity. That's a job for the police, and Amazon may wait to report it until there's corroborating reports or evidence.

It's just as likely that they handed the report off, and it will be handled by someone else entirely. However, none of that makes the situation with the customer right; the customer's problem is they don't have a product. Re-shipping it is just about the only thing they can do in this case.

It seems you mainly have two level of expectations, one where you wish to find the best ever product for a specific niche you are ready to research and invest time into. And the other where you need to get recommendations and find 'the best product'.

In that sense I think Amazon falls in-between. Personally I'll use sites like thewirecutter or other review sites to get an idea of what's on the market and what I should be looking for. It's only from there that I'll hit an online merchant to see what they sell and at what price.

I get why it doesn't fit you style, it's a different approach.

I think it was thewirecutter.com that had some controversy regarding editors appearing to extort a standing-desk manufacturer for a good review.

I apologize for the vagueness / uncertainty, I'm having trouble finding a link to the story.

https://thewirecutter.com/our-response-to-nextdesk/

> We care about only one thing: helping our readers easily find and buy the best products for them

they came so close to convincing me and then they had to trot out the platitudes. no business cares ONLY about the consumer

I paid for a year, but what used to be an obvious benefit is no longer that. I order some stuff, but had the same experience you did so I use orders less.

Twitch prime used to justify paying half of the cost on its own, but that no longer gives me the one benefit I care about (no ads). That leaves video, which is a good fringe benefit, but not a main need for me. Amazon music was not a replacement for Spotify (too much things gated behind another 9 usd a month paywall).

To me, it feels like they decided to slowly weaken the benefits of the overall package and hope inertia kept people from opting out (not to mention the dark patterns like cancelling subscription removes the benefits of the current subscription).

What's rather galling about the streaming part of the Prime subscription is that a good chunk of content is now hived off into "Prime Video Channels", where they expect you to shell out another GBP4.99/month or more to watch previously "included with subscription" stuff. There's even films where you might have paid a couple of quid to watch that are now in these silos with no other option but to pay for the channel sub to view them, i.e. there are no other payment options. And to add insult to injury many of these channels are full of absolute dross.

The cable channel subscription is an absolutely annoying business model. The nice thing about Amazon for awhile, versus, say, Netflix, was that you can rent movies ale cart for a few bucks if it wasn't already streaming. I don't want a subscription to Starz just to finally see that Spiderman movie.

I'll buy a YouTube subscription before I pay for a cable package on a streaming service.

I agree, this bullshit behaviour is not why I signed up for a Prime (and Netflix) subscription and binned Sky. But I can't help feel it's just around the corner and there's no escape.

What?

I first do research on what specific model I gonna buy and than check who has it the cheapest with a minimum good Shoprating. Often enough I can buy it from or through Amazon.

How do you use Amazon that you will get different quality of a product in comparison to shopping somewhere else?

What you are describing has always been true, though. I’m not sure what change you are seeing that causes you to sour on amazon.

Granted I’ve never received a counterfeit.

"Granted I’ve never received a counterfeit."

The problem is you may not know. I have received several items from known brands that turned out to be low quality. I don't know if these brands just have started to make low quality items (very possible) or maybe the item was fake.

I just buy high value items in person. The local economy can use the money anyway. The rest I don’t really care if they’re counterfeit so long as they function.

Why on earth would you buy a Gucci purse from anywhere but Gucci? Caveat Emptor.

Some brands sell lower quality goods with the same branding/packaging.

Right now, there's an intersection of lower quality goods intended to be discounted with counterfeit goods flooding the market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com