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Comment by Loughla | Hacker News Reader

>their website is almost nothing more than Ebay in some sense

I would argue that it's even worse. At least, IME, the ratings at E-bay for both sellers and products mean something. With Amazon, neither mean a damned thing anymore. It's just a crap shoot, unless you know exactly what you're already looking for.

Amazon used to be nice, because you could actually do product research. The worst thing, again in my opinion, they've done is ruin the ability to actually compare products due to sketchy reviews.

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> unless you know exactly what you're already looking for.

I know what I'm looking for, but most of the products are impossible to evaluate, because there is just not enough info/data. Low res bad stock photos, terse description, no full technical specs, etc.

And many Amazon sellers don't sell anywhere else, they don't even have a real website, so ... good luck deciding based on that.

And since Amazon become so big, they set the bar for quality. So now the same shit is everywhere. (Plus there's the high-end overpriced but also not perfect segment too.)

I feel like you just entirely explained the situation. There is still a "high-end overpriced" segment for all kinds of industries. Sometimes luxury goods, but sometimes just mid-tier goods sold by companies that still follow the high-margin traditional retail model. With an MSRP price that leaves enough room for inefficient, high-touch stores to take a hefty margin as a middleman.

But even someone who actively dislikes Amazon such as yourself would still rather get the lowest price and access to the largest selection, even if it means begrudgingly putting up with a worse experience.

I try to simply don't buy things. Eg I want a new laptop for some time, but none seem like a good fit. The whole USB3 ecosystem is crazy, there are bad, ugly, expensive or all of the above ones only.

I don't know why Amazon has a "lowest price" reputation on HN. Everything on Amazon is overpriced. The only reason why I still use it is that people give me Amazon gift cards instead of cash. I use geizhals.de to find products and Amazon is rarely shown as the cheapest seller. The price difference isn't insignificant. Depending on the product you can expect to pay 15% more on Amazon and that's what I tell people giving me those amazon cards.

In Spain and I just ordered a small sofa. I wanted to not use Amazon, but going to the company directly did cost a reasonable amount more.

So don't buy from shit listings just on price and always check if you can buy it direct from the lister on their own web site.

That's what I used to do, but the problem is that alternative sources are simply getting harder to find. So I just defer purchases nowadays until gadgets get better, polished, more reviews pile up, etc.

> no full technical specs

Blows my mind that this is an actual issue. It just doesn't make sense that _this_ would be an issue, yet it totally is. Oftentimes you don't even know for sure what's included with a product and you have to sift thru the comments (reviews & Q&As) to figure out if what you think is included is indeed included as there is no clear indication in the listing. Very low quality in this regard. eBay, OTOH, is very specific because sellers vying for your attention want to make sure you know exactly what you're buying.

If eBay offered something which tightly integrated 2-Day Delivery, they could become a legit competitor on the non-media services side.

Exactly. On eBay contacting the seller to ask for more specs is completely okay. I don't even know if it's possible on Amazon. And I don't even care, the listings are so bad, scammy looking, it just discourages asking, after all why wouldn't they just send back a nonsense answer.

> It's just a crap shoot, unless you know exactly what you're already looking for.

Even if you do, inventory co-mingling means that sometimes the seller you think is the seller isn't even the seller!

"A++++++++++++++++++ AMAZING SELLR" means something?

It isn't unheard of for people to complain if a review does not have enough plusses, so maybe.

The content of the positive reviews is usually noise, but the percentage of negatives is generally meaningful, as are the contents of some of the negative ones.

On Amazon, you can still get some value from the 1-3 star review contents, but the average star count (which is similar to eBay's % positive ratings) is almost meaningless since any number of negatives can be outweighed by near infinite fake 5-stars. That doesn't seem to happen as much on eBay (although I'm sure it does still happen).

When I know vaguely what a product should do, I use Amazon to find the specific brand, product, and models. Then I try to buy it directly from the manufacturer whenever possible.

What's the search engine equivalent of "showrooming"?

Funny, I heard of Best Buy (a major US electronics chain of stores) being called the "Amazon showroom" more than a few years ago. I never would've thought the situation would've flipped like that.

Yep, anything of real value where I worry about quality I order from Best Buy. I don’t want to deal with amazon for a tv or freezer.

I did this a couple weeks ago. I shopped around, found a handful on Amazon that would be good, then went to Best Buy to buy one. The best part was that Amazon said they'd ship in May (almost 3 weeks later) while I could pick up from Best Buy the next morning.

Best Buy is actually pretty amazing. Their protection plan is a great deal too because it basically lets you pay a premium to return your item for a full refund in store credit for 2 years.

Over a decade ago, I thought why would I ever need Best Buy and its overpriced HDMI cables. How can a business with all the liabilities of brick and mortar compete with new lean, online only business offering the best prices?

Turns out, all Best Buy had to do was not turn their inventory into a lottery of real/counterfeit/broken/returned stuff.

Perhaps Amazon Prime will be the exquisite pinch. It will have trained all of us to expect immediate gratification (ruling out other online retailers) but Amazon itself cannot be trusted to deliver what you order. So we return to the Best Buy, which offers immediate delivery and authentic products!

EBay is a terrible website.

It has an abysmal user interface that seems to have been built by 100 team with an intense hatred for each other.

The feedback system is broken. You can't leave feedback if you opened a case against a seller. Many sellers I had serious problems with had stellar reviews.

The resolution system is also pretty bad. If you open a case that gets automatically closed without being solved, you better hope it all happens within 60 days. Thankfully, PayPal is better run.

I'm not saying this excuses amazon, but reviewmeta.com helps a lot to extract truth from reviews.

> the ratings at E-bay for both sellers and products mean something.

they don't. when you buy something from a top seller, they get an automatic 5 star rating for that purchase. you have to wait many days (5 i think) after you receive the item, to lodge a less than 5 star rating. the rating is across a few categories, with unknown weighting, so even if you successfully put in a 1 star rating (which you have to justify), the weighted rating is still above 3.

"top seller" status doesn't have anything to do with quality, just as "amazon's choice" has nothing to do with quality.

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