That's probably the worst shape item I've received, but I've also heard and got counterfeit baby items, which could be extremely unsafe. I'm being extremely careful with Amazon moving forward.
This is a big reason I have the rule "Never buy from Amazon anything that goes in or on a living thing."
No food. No pet food. No personal products. Amazon simply can't be trusted.
I know the violation of trust is from Amazon's "partners" but Amazon allows this to happen, and makes a profit off of it.
This feels like a non-issue, no more than knowing that the book I ordered was next to a rat at one point, which could happen in the storage area of any book shop anywhere.
I really couldn't care less.
You have a larger chance of getting rat piss off the top of a soda can.
Nobody's counterfeiting my bulk name-brand orders of flavored almonds. Or my hair products.
Counterfeiting tends to happen with high-value electronics, or occasionally expensive textbooks. I've never heard of it happening with food or personal hygiene. I mean, I just don't think the profit margins are there.
How would you know?
Or my hair products.
Maybe not yours, but there have been plenty of stories in the press and on the internet about fake personal care products being sold on Amazon.
Needless to say, I totally agree with not buying anything that goes on or in a living thing.
I'm not buying from random 3rd party vendor. I said buy on amazon.com . My credit card charge says AMAZON.
If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck.....
Usually, canned cat food comes in a cardboard box with the manufacturers branding and some important labels, along with X number of cans inside arranged and kept tight in some fashion.
This one was literally a bunch of cans inside a sealed, transparent plastic cover (and then inside the regular amazon box). When I checked the product page from which I purchased, it had only a handful of reviews (versus the usual 1000s of reviews on the real thing), but it had the correct supplier brand name. After reading a bunch about the colocation of products, this was fairly scary.
Nowadays I just buy from Chewy / Petco / Petsmart etc. It's just not worth the risk.
Edit: don't mean to add some FUD or anything with Amazon, I was just expanding parents comments about baby supplies with pets as well. Still buy a lot of stuff from Amazon, but not anything where I stand to lose more than money.
Is it worthwhile to 'counterfeit' cat food?
The only problem I had is in one Amazon shipment a few cans got smashed in. Chewy does packaging better!
Could be. You could get away with a lot lower product safety and quality for cat food than you could for human food. That means you could make it for a lot cheaper and sell it as a higher quality brand. It's easier to get away with killing or sickening a few cats than it is people.
Let me direct you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal.
If people are willing to poison milk with melanine to make a dollar, why wouldn't someone do the same to cat food? In fact, it's already happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_pet_food_recalls
On a different shipment from Amazon I received a small bathroom rug. The weave of the design was off by over an inch on two of the sides. I've never had such bad experiences in the past from Amazon than the last couple months.
Everything was as advertised. Was about 25% off for what amounted to having to download a PDF of the Manual/instructions.
This part can be really annoying. I have been trying to collect all different boxed/DVD/etc releases of an old game and the Amazon listing just shows promotional cover art that I now suspect was never used for retail copies of the game (the publisher on the cover was bought out by another one before the game released). Definitely none of the copies that I got from that listing matched the image shown. On eBay you might need to sift through many listings to find the best price but at least you can usually see which version you are buying.
It's pretty easy to tell when you are, for example, buying Panasonic batteries from Panasonic as opposed to buying no-name lithium cells from a seller with a name like, 'krazedeals'. And sellers with a brand to maintain are unlikely to opt in to the 'comingling' program.
I guess that Amazon could highlight the seller information a bit more, but it's already pretty prominent.
I'm also a little bit confused reading all of these comments - do people think that Amazon sells everything on their website? It's rare to see an ecommerce business run that way these days - new-ish entries like Walmart also have third-party sellers, and old mainstays like Newegg have switched to that style of selling too. Personally I'm not a huge fan, but things have been like this for awhile now across the web. Do people not use other major online retailers? Or does Amazon get more flack because they are the service that almost everyone uses?
I would think most folks here would be savvy enough to know the difference and pay attention to whom they are buying from on Amazon.
If anything, rather than going out of your way to make sure the item is shipped by Amazon.com, if you want to avoid fakes, you probably should prefer items that are shipped direct by the manufacturer. And once you are doing that, the question arises why you are shopping on Amazon in the first place. Personally, I tend to agree with the approach of buying only items shipped by Amazon. While the chance of getting a fake might be higher, the return process if I have a problem is easier. But I can see why others might want to avoid Amazon altogether.
It is a Shenzhen company, though.
People gripe about "Chinese" companies, but everything is made by some Chinese company. Chinese companies who build a reputation for their brand are good.
No, but people hold Amazon responsible for everything on their site -- which I think is totally fair.
I ended up giving up because it was impossible to tell the quality and materials of anything I was ordering.
eBay has very little reservations about giving you your money back -- they just pull the money out of the sellers account anyway, they're not themselves taking a financial hit.
And they have way fewer exceptions than Amazon does.
My experience with Amazon's return policy has been consistently bad. My experience with eBay's has been consistently great.
I personally haven’t used Amazon much in the last 2-3 years which for me is because I find it so difficult to wade through all the noise in the search results.