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Comment by esotericn | Hacker News Reader

I find online shopping far more frustrating than in-person because there's seemingly no minimum standard, or at least if there is, I'm not attuned to it.

There's just too much absolute codswallop out there. Amazon and eBay are the pound shop/dollar store for low value items.

I can go to a supermarket and buy an economy brand tin of beans and it's going to be.. a tin of beans. It might, if I'm not careful and don't check, have added salt or sugar or something.

By contrast if I go and buy a low value item on Amazon like, say, a USB cable, 3.5mm cable, whatever, there's a really good probability of it being utter bollocks. Either broken in some way or just terrible to begin with.

I really, really wish this sort of thing could somehow be eliminated. Reviews don't cut it because even if they're not fake, I don't want to read reviews. I want your store to not sell dogshit items.

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That's what name brands are for. Buy Anker or Apple or Samsung or Sony or Panasonic or whatever and you won't get crap.

It's not difficult to buy name brands.

"But name brand is charging $20 and generic is $8"

Yes, that's the price of wanting to avoid reading reviews.

"But there are counterfeits"

You can avoid 99% of counterfeits by buying only from sellers with good feedback. Just look if it's at least 95% and over say 100 feedback. Yes, some sellers that meet that will sell counterfeits and it's possible that commingling will mean it's a different seller's unit that gets sent but those are rare.

Imagine a world in which buying food at the supermarket were like this. You could only ever buy name brand anything, otherwise your cereal might be cardboard or your baked beans might taste like vinegar or whatever.

I'd much rather there were just a nonshit Amazon that didn't gouge.

Maybe it's that UK supermarkets' economy ranges are just really good.

Food isn't a valid comparison for many reasons. If you buy food from Amazon you'll be fine.

And if you go to your local flea market and buy random electronics you're likely to get just as bad a result as if you do that on Amazon.

If you want a curated selection go to a place that curates it.

>I'd much rather there were just a nonshit Amazon that didn't gouge.

Aren't most online retailers that control their supply like this? Amazon and Ebay are platforms, but walmart and target for example have actual warehouses full of every item they sell right?

I think Walmart’s online store works the same way amazon does. It’s full of third party crap too.

Just restrict yourself to "available in store" if that's what you want then.

Everything in a supermarket was selected by a buyer. It's not a two-sided marketplace that just connects random sellers and buyers, takes its cut, and disclaims all responsibility for whatever is being sold. Someone is responsible for every item on a shelf in a supermarket.

There are still plenty of stores that work this way for electronics. Buy a USB cable at Apple, Best Buy, Target, Walmart, heck, even Walgreens, and you're going to get a USB cable that some person sourced from a wholesaler. The retailer is going to stand by it and exchange it if it doesn't work.

The real shame of Amazon is that it started out that way and developed a great reputation as a result--and now they have thrown it away by letting anyone sell anything on their platform, even counterfeit crap. I don't understand it.

>The retailer is going to stand by it and exchange it if it doesn't work.

Amazon also accepts returns within 30 days. And most stores will reject returns after a certain amount of time even if it doesn't work.

I don't want to have to return things! What a waste of packaging and shipping and effort. Now fraud detection and product QA are added to the gig economy, and we're paying for the privilege.

Then, as above, buy name brand items. The cost of buying off-brand is that occasionally you need to return.

I do that but still care about the environmental impact of thousands of other people that don't have either the means to buy name brand or the awareness of the problem they are causing.

I'd really like for crap products to disappear but... I don't see this happening in this world anytime soon.

Have you considered that people are making a rational choice to get something cheaper yet lower quality?

Many electronic items under $10 can only be returned at an staffed Amazon pickup location. In urban areas (e.g. Bay Area), that's a BART ride or a toll charge.

The round-trip BART ride will be $6 or more. The toll charge maybe $5.00 or whatever FastPass costs (not factoring in gas, maintenance, parking).

Such items are essentially un-returnable, unless you want to pay more to return it than simply dispose of it.

I make it a point to return such items. Having done so a handful of times, I now buy most of my electronics gear from brick-and-mortar shops.

You should always be able to return with free shipping any item that's defective. That's amazon's stated policy. In what cases are you saying they don't follow their policy?

It's been a while, but if my memory serves me correctly, some items can only be returned at a staffed Amazon location.

That is: the return shipping is free but getting to the staffed Amazon location is not.

I'm pretty sure this has happened with some items I've picked up from an unstaffed Amazon drop-off location that can only be returned via a staffed Amazon location.

EDIT: add adjective "return" in second sentence.

FWIW, this is not the case in the UK. Most of the time, for a low-value item (<£5 or so), Amazon will say not to bother returning it, and just refund.

> Amazon.com does not accept returns for items fulfilled by third-party sellers. The seller determines the return policy.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8...

The concept of a "third party seller" does not exist in stores that use buyers to stock inventory, like supermarkets or Target.

3p sellers must have a return policy at least as good as amazon themselves. I.e. they must offer free return shipping on defective products. If not Amazon will step in and refund you.

It's not worth my time to return cheap items. It's a huge hassle, because I need to go somewhere with a printer to print the return receipt, attach that to the box, then go somewhere to ship it. Definitely not worth all that trouble to get a few bucks back.

Recently in the UK I can often return items at corner shops with their own printer. You just scan a QR code and hand over the box. The dropoff points are everywhere.

Sellers can get de-listed from Amazon with enough poor reviews. For low-ish value items, they may offer a free replacement to avoid bad seller feedback. Leave feedback and wait a few days for them to contact you.

I don't want a free replacement if it's just going to be the same crap. The problem is that the product itself is crap, not necessarily that any given one is defective. Replacements won't be any better.

And this is still way more hassle than I want to deal with.

> I'd much rather there were just a nonshit Amazon that didn't gouge.

It is with no small uneasiness that I wonder if Walmart (or Target) might or will fill those shoes.

“...a nonshit Amazon that didn't gouge.”

It's disruption time!

There's a guy on Youtube called Mike Jeavons who has a week on series, where he will eat only a particular UK supermarkets economy range for a week, it's pretty good.

> You can avoid 99% of counterfeits by buying only from sellers with good feedback.

I doubt that very much. Many sellers never see their products, their suppliers can scam them whenever they like. That's why Amazon themselves have sold fake CPUs repeatedly over the years: https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Amazon-verkauft-manipulierte... (German), https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3014009/amazon-is-... ...

> Yes, that's the price of wanting to avoid reading reviews.

> You can avoid 99% of counterfeits by buying only from sellers with good feedback. Just look if it's at least 95% and over say 100 feedback.

Reviews and feedback are all thoroughly gamed. Can't speak for Amazon, but my wife worked for couple e-commerce companies selling on Allegro, our local Amazon/eBay equivalent, and from her I know (and seen it myself) that the following are common practices:

- When someone leaves a negative review, the company will do its best to bribe the customer - free gifts, rebates for next purchase, whatever, just so that they cancel the negative review.

- In order to boost its positive/negative ratio and keep it around ~99% positive, the company would routinely order its employees to make orders from home, choosing "payment on delivery" as an option. After couple of days they were to mark the orders as completed and give stellar feedback with some realistic-sounding review texts. The orders of course went to /dev/null themselves, so the only cost to anyone was the sales percentage Allegro took.

i see no difference between 8$ and 20$ branded item. They all manufactured in China, probably at the same plant.

That's a false equivalency. The USB cables I buy in random shops off the street are usually much worse, and more expensive, than any I've gotten from Amazon. And I'd wager that if you got a can of beans on Amazon it would taste perfectly fine. Maybe there is lower quality on Amazon, but comparing such different products is essentially meaningless.

A random "junk shop" perhaps, but I'm to the point where I'd much rather go down the street to Target and pick up some slightly higher priced piece of electronics because I know it is quality controlled, than wade through Amazon.

If I'm shopping for a particular brand, okay Amazon, if it's just needing something in particular that's guaranteed to have hundreds of Chinese knockoffs with no way of differentiating between reviews (like a bike headlight, or LEDs, or a USB adapter), I go to a B&M that stocks those things.

Or order it from Target.com?

Right, exactly.

I don't buy, well, basically anything, from random corner shops because it's likely to be crap.

Does Amazon actually want to be like that? They don't have to be Waitrose, they just have to be even like, Lidl.

So in this analogy, Amazon is basically a junk shop. Yet they have a much better reputation than that, somehow.

Note that I don't buy things at junk shops in real life.

It would be nice if there was a website like Amazon, but that had some sort of editorially vetted product line. I just want a cheese grater that works well and isn't counterfeit. I'm willing to pay a few dollars more for the work that goes into verifying the products. It really seems like there would be a market opportunity here...

isn't that a website like williamssonoma.com?

Yeah, I normally use Sur la Table for cookware. But I meant more of a "general purpose" site like Amazon, rather than niche sites for each category of product.

Wirecutter seems to be good

Search for review sites for the product you're looking for. There are a shocking number of such sites all chasing Amazon's affiliate cash for sending traffic there.

Right but they tend to phone it in! 9/10 if you pick a review site off google, they never looked at the product.

I can’t say how many times I’ve been looking at product comparison sites where it’s clear the content is written by a farm writer comparing box specs, who has never used or even held in their hand the type of product they are reviewing let alone the actual items.

So what we need is a review site for review sites, I guess...(?)

Look for real photos of the product. Any legitimate review will have at least one.

Good idea, yes, it is possible with some digging, just frustrating to dig through a layer of meta-trash.

Curation lists help. There are people who specialize in finding the good stuff. If you trust them, then it is vetted.

Target, Costco, and Best Buy fill that void for me.

B&H generally has generally pretty good quality items.

Wirecutter seems to be the closest to what you're looking for. Here's their "best grater", for example: https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-grater/

For larger purchases, a $30/year Consumer Reports subscription is absolutely worth it.

Wirecutter is great, can recommend. They don't always have reviews for particular things I want, but when they do, I end up going with one of their picks and I never had a single problem with these purchases. For instance, the first thing I bought off their recommendation was a Bluetooth earpiece, some 3+ years ago, and unlike my previous attempts at buying one, this one not once had a problem with any of my devices, and works perfectly to this very day.

I heard good things about Consumer Reports, and I wish there was something like this for the EU market. I found Wirecutter useful because the things they tend to review are available both in the US and EU (read: electronics), but if I wanted to buy regular life items off recommendations, I'm not sure what to follow locally.

In the UK the Consumer Association product the Which? magazine and website. which.com

Any brick and mortal retailer’s online stores are basically like this. Jet is too (also owned by WalMart IIRC).

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