And this is the strength that the major retailers have against Amazon - if Amazon won't police (and they have problems with commingling counterfeit brands, too) then Walmart and Target will jump ahead.
I ended up buying we webcam from BestBuy.com, because a webcam I got from Amazon was pay-for-review and was utter garbage.
Just more evidence, to me, that the era of internet business models being "get everything online" (Amazon, Spotify, Steam) is closing, and the era of online aggregation as a product is just beginning.
Though they don’t seem to have many yet, I did run across it recently. In-store pickup items are still seemingly safe though.
(I smell a market opportunity for a retailer that sells only quality products...)
Additionally, no one gives a crap about long-term anymore. Scorched earth, grab what you can, screw everyone else and all that.
I still buy from NewEgg, but the first thing I do when I hit the search results is to click the Sold by Newegg button. Might be a few bucks more, but at least I'm getting the real deal ... at least so far.
Multiple complaints (including contacting the CEO of NewEgg) haven't removed this bad actor. So I just assume that this practice of retaining terrible 3rd parties reflects NewEgg's true* extent of their caring for customers, and I don't buy stuff from them anymore.
I figure if Netgear sends me a fake switch when ordering directly from them it's time to give up on capitalism.
I think they are solving this differently. Amazon introduced their own brands for almost all daily necessities. Amazon basic, amazon pharmacy, amazon fashion, amazon elements, amazon pantry, amazon echo and few more. They generally have average or above average products at an affordable price and good support.
You can buy AC, fridge, vacuum cleaner, clothes, baby food, dog food, dog bed, multi-vitamin, ramen, TWS, carpet, blanket, swiss army knife, solder machine, and a lot more from amazon itself now.
I remember buying a charger for my phone, only for the plastic shell of the charger to break in half a few months later
My impression is they did not have the item they were selling, and were relying on some presumably "trusted" reseller to provide it.
I ended up purchasing a used one in much better condition on eBay for several hundred dollars less where the condition at least matched the sale entry.
I'm frankly surprised they want to put their name on what appears to be dollar store crap that might be fine, might not, who knows. You can almost see the flickering neon and smell the cleaning fluid.
2020 brick and mortar's new motto
https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-ancient-writings/4...
Actually, I think it's D2C that will jump ahead. The problem with Walmart and Target is they either (a) have limited brand selection (target) or (b) they dilute themselves so much to compete with Amazon that they eventually become Amazon (Walmart).
It's one thing if the brand has an ongoing relationship with its customers, but nobody wants the burden of dealing with 1,000 slightly different processes for ordering toilet paper.
That's the inherent value of Paypal et al. -- abstracting diversity on one side into a standard interface on the customer side.
I guess you've never ordered something from a Shopify based store then?
Point being: D2C doesn't solve the trust problem in a scaleable way, except for repeat purchases
What on earth does their payment processor and tech choice have to do with a direct to consumer model? I'm talking about the features for the consumer when they shop on a shopify based store.
Trust doesn't scale naturally. That's the point that the GP comment was making. What we saw with Amazon is that bundling[0] works and can scale, but once it reaches that point and trust erodes, then unbundling becomes more appealing to the consumer.
Shopify has struck an interesting middle ground. Lots of the features that make the bundle attractive (one login, saved CC/details, etc.) are baked into Shopify stores. It'll be interesting to see if Shopify rolls out some sort of "Fulfilled by Shopify" and then a "Prime" because then the consumer can ensure quick/free delivery without dealing with the bazaar that is Amazon.
[0] - https://a16z.com/2014/08/15/a16z-podcast-the-topic-thats-las...
1,000,000 stores using Shopify are effectively the same as 1,000,000 products on Amazon, only less convenient.
I think the overall takeaway is that trust doesn't scale to Amazon-now-size: i.e. one of the biggest retail companies on the planet.
What it did scale to (and very well) was Amazon-1995-2010-size (eg Etsy or eBay), and there's a lot of size between D2C and those variants of Amazon.
I'm open for convincing, but I don't see a path to "D2C eats the world," when for relatively modest amounts of capital one could create a smaller, right-size Amazon that could bundle and dominate.
Simple. I know I'm going to get a genuine product. That's the problem with Amazon, people regularly get cheap imitations.
From reading back through their statements over the years it seemed to have shifted from (initial) 'we're a store platform, and take no responsibility for the content of the store' to (now) 'we have [unspecified] teams dedicated to IP infringement and fraudulent stores.'
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/24/i-feel-ch...
The product page for one item that my partner was looking to buy for her Mom's birthday said something like "Free 2-day shipping, receive it by the 4th". Well when she went to check out the only option to get it by that date cost $30+ dollars. I ended up getting on the phone with a support person who fully acknowledged that the shipping info was wrong but to my shock completely dismissed it as not being a problem.
I said that people were putting items into their cart based on false information and the response was basically a dismissive shrug. We went back and forth a few times to make sure I really understood his response and there's no doubt that he did not care that they were displaying false shipping info.
Since then I've been wary of buying anything else from Walmart.
You have as much agency and incentive to fix the problem as the support person. Most arguments for why the support person should spend their time and energy trying to fix a problem outside their authority, and their reasons for not doing so, could equally be applied to you.
It does help to be a bit sceptical about some listings. For example, a webcam by "GREETBUAY" for $25 is probably not going to be of high quality. So I don't buy those kinds of things. But in cases where the nature of the item is that it's a single piece of plastic that just needs to be the right shape, I've bought them from sellers with bizarre machine-generated names and received exactly what I wanted.
Batteries, for example.
Amazon is throwing away money.
For something like an SD card or a battery your chance of getting a counterfeit or unreliable product is pretty high. I prefer not to think too much about how that maps to food. There was an article (I think here on HN) a few years ago where a bookseller who was forced to buy Amazon ads for his own book just so the counterfeits wouldn't outrank him on Amazon.
That sounds like an interesting history. Do you have any recommendations for reading on it?