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Comment by addicted | Hacker News Reader

I’ve received crap from Amazon. I’ve stopped buying from there entirely.

The good thing was I noticed it. My worry is when I don’t.

I can usually find something cheaper on a different site (best buy, B&H, Microcenter, Newegg...although Newegg has been really bad for me lately, monoprice, Walmart). And the rare couple of times I don’t, I’m willing to pay the $1-$2 more (I’m much better off in the long run anyways).

Honestly, it’s really really hard to find something that is also available elsewhere, cheaper on Amazon than anywhere else for me. So I’m not willing to take the counterfeit risk, for basically no benefit.

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It seems Newegg & Walmart have started selling a lot of 3rd party items. I do not like this trend at all. I've bought from Newegg & been a huge fan for decades. Sad to see them ruin their image.

On both Walmart and Newegg, you can filter for products sold only by Walmart/Newegg. It's a slightly annoying step, and I agree with you, it damages their image.

If I'm not mistaken, Newegg was sold to some Chinese company in 2017 or so.

Even so, I haven't had any trouble with products bought directly from them since then (though the introduction of a captcha just to log into the damn site was rather annoying). Their third party marketplace appears to be a total cesspool, however. I bought some "new" hard drives from two separate vendors... both batches arrived beat to shit, with 35-50k hours of runtime and some with significant error counts.

Only after the fact did I bother looking into it, and notice that ALL vendors in the hard drive category have ratings less than 80%, and plenty of reviews accusing them of selling used as new. Newegg obviously doesn't care. Sad, indeed.

I just bought a car battery jump starter, and two years ago, when I was blissfully ignorant of the severity of the counterfeiting problem, I would’ve bought it from Amazon. Instead, I ordered from Home Depot.

I’m still willing to buy from Amazon items that aren’t potential fire hazards.

Home Depot is good for brand name items. But I started noticing a few years back that a substantial number of the cheap crappy tools I saw at Harbor Freight were showing up Home Depot under another random name, but otherwise identical. Totally fine as long as you know what you're getting into, but many people know to expect that when they shop at HF but not at HD.

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