Hacker News Reader

Comment by ianmcgowan | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure Amazon has some smart people looking at the numbers on this, but as just one anecdata, my family has been buying a ton of stuff from Amazon since they were just books. Now we buy things that are repeat purchases or a couple of trusted brands (e.g. Amazon Basics or Anker). For bigger purchases (like a medium-basic coffee machine) we're either looking at Costco and Target, or researching a lot on Consumer Reports. Wirecutter used to be good, but hard to trust these days too.

We definitely spend less at Amazon because of lack of trust and counterfeit concerns, and it seems directionally true for the HN crowd. That's got to be a worry for anyone at Amazon - if the people who were early adopters are starting to leave your platform, that's got to be concerning...

View on HN

When it comes to Amazon reviews you never go by the average you go to scroll down to the actual reviews and read what the one and two star reviews are complaining about and decide if that is acceptable assuming it will happen with your purchase, IMHO.

Sort reviews by new. It’s amazing how many “5 star” items have an average of 2-3 stars when you look at the latest reviews.

I was looking for some L plates for my car. A lot of reviews called them “beautiful”... it is a white square with a letter L that sticks to your car... trying to find one which didn’t fall off or damage the car was far from trivial. Fortunately newer reviews mentioned damage or falling off or does the job which gave some steer.

I have been purposefully shopping elsewhere recently. Other sites are usually cheaper and there is less doubt about what is actually going to get received.

Sorting by new also usually exposes things like hijacked item or seller pages more easily

I love that Steam shows an average of recent reviews. I think it’s very telling that Amazon does not.

I thought the reason Steam had "recent reviews" was to account for patches/updates and so on?

Not sure why that wouldn't apply to other products. Product design/packaging/formulas change, as does a seller's customer service...

I change the sort URL parameter from &s=review-rank to &s=review-count-rank and tend to put more weight against products with thousands of decent reviews; if nothing in the category has hundreds of reviews, that's a sign to look elsewhere. Perhaps false optimism or a flawed heuristic, but seems to work out for certain categories of stuff.

A lot of reviews raise a red flag in my mind. Particularly, for products which are new. I’ve been burnt with counterfeit and low quality products with a large number of reviews.

Also just anecdata, but I’m the same way. I don’t mind buying commodity goods off of Amazon, but if I need to know that I’m truly getting product X of brand Y, I now typically go elsewhere, because I just cannot trust that I’m not going to get a counterfeit product. Over the years, I’ve received two counterfeit books and three counterfeit hardgoods from Amazon. That may not seem overwhelming, but it’s enough to break my confidence.

the question really is whether buying brand name goods vs consumables is a bigger market.

amazon might be OK with people going to a different place for brand name goods but continue to buy low cost, no-brand goods from amazon if that market is much larger.

> Over the years, I’ve received two counterfeit books and three counterfeit hardgoods from Amazon.

What I've been ALWAYS wondering when people say such things:

Did you seriously get them when buying from Amazon itself as vendor or are you conveniently leaving out the fact that you bought from some random company which uses the Amazon marketplace?

Because I really cannot believe that something as big as Amazon would be dumb enough to sell counterfeit goods under their own name, and people usually don't mention if they bought from Amazon or not when they say such things.

Amazon.com and marketplace inventory commingle. Pickers don’t care which box seemingly identical products come from.

> Did you seriously get them when buying from Amazon itself

Does it matter ? I go to amazon.com, I give my money to Amazon, I receive a package from Amazon, so for me (and the average user) the one selling me a counterfeit is Amazon.

I see it and treat more like a platform now, a marketplace. Like ebay. It just so happens that one of the biggest sellers there is Amazon itself. My usual process of buying - search for the product I need (generic term for simple items, or exact model), click on "prime only", this filters out a lot of shipments from China. Then either filter out, or carefully look at the seller of each product. Takes some time and getting used to, especially that UI isn't favouring this workflow.

Stock commingling means that you may buy a product that's sold and shipped by Amazon and still get some other seller's counterfeit. That seller simply claims to sell the same product as Amazon, with the same product code, and places it into an Amazon warehouse. Amazon will ship from the place closest to you so they might just ship what they think is the correct item from another seller's stock even if it's actually a counterfeit, and do the clearing later. They later assign one genuine item from the Amazon stock in another warehouse to the seller's stock.

As a buyer you have no control over this and Amazon does their best to be opaque and not allow buyers to publicly flag issues beyond a return and refund because it would reflect poorly on Amazon's image and make them look like peddlers of cheap knockoffs.

Yeah, this whole "marketplace" thing needs to die. I'm watching the exact same thing taking place in real time with a local shopping website that has started including external sellers and "facilitating" or "fulfilling" the order for them through their marketplace. One of the main things I'm noticing is that this "marketplace", as with Amazon, is being flooded with Chinese, unbranded knockoffs with fake pictures. Each actual product * every conceivable variation/renaming of product * every seller willing to sell it = huge explosion in products. (Okay, exaggerating a bit for effect there, but true to some extent).

The marketplace thing only kinda works if you have "dedicated" or "focused" or "themed" sellers that functioning within clearly defined niches/segments. Instead, you get a seller that randomly sells 15 kitchen towels, 3 garden ceramics, 50 woodwork jigs (really only 5, 50 variations), and 1 food product. Next thing you know, I'm searching through 50 pages of "school supplies".

> Does it matter ?

If you can't do the due diligence of even reading the one word that declares from whom you're buying then yes, it matters, it is your fault to be that careless.

What I hear you saying is that Amazon can't be trusted to police their own marketplace, their brand is worse than worthless in that it is an active signal of distrust, and I might as well go to eBay - actually I might better go to eBay, who have much more experience with this same problem and are much more likely to address it effectively. Duly noted.

> If you can't do the due diligence of even reading the one word that declares from whom you're buying

I'm buying from Amazon. From my point of view the other company is not more than a supplier.

If I am the one at fault is not really the point. I will learn my lesson and shop elsewhere, in the end it is Amazon that suffers: if I shop from a big brand's website I expect them to be the ones to do the job of filtering out the crap, not me.

(And this is not even taking into account the issues of amazon commingling the inventory and not fighting properly the fake reviews)

If I use "marketplace", the company that appears on the credit card bill is Amazon. So they're the one with the contractual relationship and who should be held responsible.

Amazon stock is commingled with marketplace sellers, so even buying directly from Amazon isn't a guarantee that you're not getting fakes nowadays https://sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/external/G2001414...

Maybe if Amazon made it easier for buyers to filter out marketplace vendors, or didn't automatically co-mingle inventory between themselves and Fulled by Amazon vendors, it would be a lot easier to cut them some slack?

Same. I thought if you bought directly from Amazon instead of a third party seller, then you'd be safe from counterfeits. But it turns out they just mix all the third party stock in with the first party https://sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/external/G2001414...

So now it's not safe to buy SD cards and USB sticks directly from Amazon either now

Get SD cards from B&H or Adorama. They serve the pro photographer community, who are ferocious about storage quality largely thanks to war stories from 20 years ago when flash memory really was a crapshoot - also why any new camera body released with only one card slot provokes a million old dudes to fuss about that one wedding shoot they lost in 2003 or whatever. But in this case it's to your benefit, since the media you get from those sellers will be what they say it is.

(I get mine from Micro Center. Kinda feel bad about not going to my local camera store, but the guy who owns the place doesn't really seem at home with technology. I don't even know if they carry UHS-II cards, but I get all my used gear there, and with the margin on that stuff it's not like I'm hurting them by getting a $80 SD card elsewhere...)

Definitely, if it's food or health/medical, I'll skip Amazon & buy it from Target or Walmart directly (not a 3rd party seller on their platforms). Other categories like memory cards, kids products, I'll also avoid Amazon (especially since Amazon reviews of those products often claim they received a fake).

The online version of Walmart now sources from a range of suppliers like Amazon does. I was tracking down the supplier of a used laptop and discovered an eBay posting with exactly the same text and photos.

This might also be helping their Amazon brands. Easy to stand above the crowd in terms of quality this way. Also, they have all the data they need to target the most profitable / fragmented segments.

I buy a lot of stuff on Amazon, some of it I know is a cheap knockoff, but at least I’m paying cheap knockoff prices.

But things I won’t buy on Amazon are SD cards or water filters for my fridge. You end up paying full price for a cheap knockoff. I’m sure there are others, but these two stand out in my mind.

Amazon is basically my last resort these days. Unfortunately, the ongoing pandemic means there are times where I can’t justifying going out to buy something. But I wonder if they’ll be taking a bigger than expected hit once things clear up.

Maybe there is a big difference between the US and Europe, but here the only things I can't find anywhere but amazon are typically the cheap Chinese knockoff things (e.g. new cushions for my bose headphones), for everything else there always is a cheaper solution by going with one of the smaller online retailer.

That way I don't have to go through the horrendous amazon interface, which I have the impression tries to actively prevent you from finding what you want. Similar to the strategy of large supermarkets that rearrange goods to maximize customer time at the shop.

Even here in Europe, Amazon still has the monster competitive advantage of Prime. If not for that, I would probably be buying all my gear from Saturn, Mediamarkt, etc.

It's also worth nothing that European Amazon has waaaay less stuff available in general than US Amazon.

What happened to Wirecutter?

I just discovered Wirecutter and have been happy with it so far (just bought a new toaster oven!). I'm also curious why they're throwing shade

Reply on news.ycombinator.com