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Comment by gordon_freeman | Hacker News Reader

Nowadays when I want to buy anything on Amazon it takes so much effort to go through which listing is the Sponsored/ad-based listing vs organic in search. Once that hurdle is crossed, it comes to going through the reviews to see which reviews can be trusted and which can not be. And even after that hurdle, once I place order, I am not sure the item I received is counterfeit or genuine. Too much work and definitely not customer-focused experience!

I guess going to Target is much easier to get the necessary shopping done.

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I would add to that the final hurdle of sketchy third party sellers, it feels like very little now is sold by Amazon.

Salomon, Nike, and Garmin all got direct purchases from me recently because of what you describe.

Amazon became almost useless for many types of articles. For any type of item, there are 10-20 resellers selling the exact same cheap item, just with different color and branding. It's essentially become an expensive dollar store.

I've abandoned Amazon because of that, until they finally add a "no third party sellers" option. And also a "don't show items we don't actually send to your country" option.

I've not abandoned it yet, but I'm close. Also a "Don't show me things shipped from China that'll take 6 weeks to arrive".

I was trying to buy a Nintendo Switch yesterday here in the UK, and it said 'Sold by Amazon' and 'Dispatched by Amazon' for the one I chose. So then I clicked that item, went through to the checkout and it said "Sold by Mila AG".

I'm a technically proficient developer who's very careful about where I spend money online. If you're not very internet savvy, it'd have been really easy to miss that. In the end I've ordered from a national chain retailer which are doing click and collect nearby.

The upside, when purchasing directly from the brand, and this is valid for plane fares too, is that you get more options.

- Buy shoes from the Addidas website and you can have your name printed on your shoes for free,

- Buy from Quantas or Ibis instead of a price comparator and you’ll have free cancellations or rebooking for a period.

- Buy from LEGO.com and you get more LEGO as GWP (gift with purchase)

I too have recently surprised myself by shopping at Target.com after being unable to find a trustable product on Amazon (latex pillow). The experience was worse but I trust their merchandising more.

The most infuriating is that the search barely works. It will happily ignore keywords so you get hundreds or thousands results only 10 of which have all of the keywords that you mentioned (and they aren't the first 10). There is also no support for negative matches.

With a combo of AdBlock Plus and uBlock Origin and kill all the carousels (for many years now). Since then my shopping in Amazon is a breeze. They do make changes every now and then and I have to block 'this new carousel' that just appeared, but overall my eyes get polluted less.

Sadly uBlock cannot block the counterfeit products.

Check out FakeSpot[0]. They do meta analysis on reviews to try and remove/filter inorganic reviews. They have a browser extension which really helps, imo.

Doesn't exactly remove counterfeit products, but goes a decent way towards correcting the fake review problem. Once you've crossed that bridge, you can focus more on the top results without paid bias skewing them.

[0]: https://www.fakespot.com/

I actually refuse to use Amazon but I'll be sure to tell about this to friends :)

I hate that I have to even ask this question of what seems like a super helpful extension but how does this company make money? They are a business that's hiring right now with an office on Wall St in NYC but doesn't appear to have any products for sale. I'm hoping its just cynicism and paranoia speaking on my part here.

Presumably they use affiliate links.

ooof... well, thanks for asking, cause I hadn't stopped to think about it before.

Searched around online and found it mentioned a few places, but ultimately it looks like they collect sales and order info and resell it... Damn. I'd be happier to pay a small fee instead.

Details on the info they collect and how they use it is in their privacy policy: https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy

FYI. On a related note - I was downvoted a couple of days back for an almost similar comment on the ABP uBO combo. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26058260 It seems ABP is shady that they let some businesses bypass their blocker.

ABP is completely unnecessary and still shows ads for companies that pay them. Use uBlock Origin alone.

Maybe it depends on the Amazon ( i've never gotten a counterfeit or seen what appear to be counterfeit products on .fr). In any case, you know you can return and report if it's indeed a counterfeit.

> i've never gotten a counterfeit or seen what appear to be counterfeit products on .fr

That you know of. There's really no way to know. Counterfeit products could even be manufactured at the official facility, just with no (or even failed) quality control.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/count...

In the US you certainly can't for some items. We ordered a food product from amazon and what arrived was not what was described. Amazon said they won't take returns of food items. That finally convinced my wife to de-amazon our purchases (I'd been pushing in that direction for a while).

Except having to actually go to Target and the noisy offputting crowds and covid.

Yup, I'm increasingly straying away from Amazon. If I need a new set of cooking utensils, do I wade through the hundreds of Chinese no-name entries on Amazon with hundreds of questionable reviews all across the spectrum, or do I just pay a little extra and get the quality ones from Williams-Sonoma?

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