Yes, people like it (for a while). This is why it works. But it gives Amazon more tools to abuse their market power.
The cost is high though. Amazon is already much lower quality than they were 10 years ago.
The cost is high though. Amazon is already much lower quality than they were 10 years ago.
Could you expand on 'lower quality'? I personally have not noticed this.
The review/rating system has become untrustworthy.
It's extremely common (>50%) for me to see a 4+ star rating that turns out to be dominated by 1 star reviews and tons of complaints.
It's not unusual to find that what positive reviews there are, are for a wholly different product.
Even more frequent is that reviews for several different products are all bundled together.
I can't stand that. This doesn't matter if the product comes in various colors or something that would not change the product at all from one to the next, but then you also have things with computers with different options like video cards, memory configurations, cpu type, etc. That makes it VERY hard to find a review for the specific machine you ordered because it shows the reviews for all possible configurations.
It should show reviews only for the specific configuration chosen.
Here is how to do that.
First, make sure you've selected the product variation you want. Then:
1. Click the "nnn ratings" link at the top of the product page to go to the "Customer reviews" section.
2. On the left is a list of the percentages of each star number. Click any of them.
3. Now you have a page with a row of drop-down lists at the top. One of them will be something like "All formats". Change it to "Show only reviews for Style:" listing the product variation you selected at the beginning. You can also change the "n star only" back to "All stars", or "All positive" or "All critical".
They could make this easier to find! But once you know how to get there it's pretty useful.
Amen brother. Other review issues could be attributed to Amazon playing catch-up but this crappery is clearly by design.
Just looking for an item and finding 15 of the same one at wildly different price with different description really makes you scratch your head. What's the difference, is there one?
Then the killer for me is how they mix inventory from sellers. It doesn't matter how much I trust a certain vendor, what I buy may not be their inventory anyway, so a single bad apple can mess it up for everyone.
Bought some windex, didn't pay much attention to price, 10$, because it was amazon, I assumed the price was for a concentrated solution. Turns out it was the normal kind (3$) but the seller put this price and it landed in the search results quite high.
The benefits of lower prices online can also mean you spending more time checking things.
I’m honestly not sure about the batteries or hdmi cables. But my appreciation for the brand makes me wonder about your own experience.
My partner and I used to argue over who gets to make the monthly Costco run but now we just make it into a big family outing (Friday evenings are an amazing time to shop there).
I have had good experiences with Amazon Basics and Amazon's clothing brands.
This isn't so much a "all print on demand suffers from quality issues" but rather "the quality of the print on demand services is often an exercise in cost cutting."
I am certain that there are POD material that are as good as the traditional book print (and there are certainly non POD that employ similar cost cutting), but rather that in general, there is more investment in quality on the larger runs of a paperback book.
The customer could find the book they wanted on Amazon, purchase it for the same price or less via the bookstore's POD service, go have a snack and drink at the bookstore's cafe, and their book would be ready when they are done with that.
The bookstore essentially turned Amazon into a free book research services for the bookstore's customers.
> We can print millions of titles (including Google Books) that are in the public domain, as well as thousand of publisher-permission titles right to order!
The selection isn't quite the "anything that Amazon has."
They also make note of the quality with some of them that are from Google Books https://www.harvard.com/ondemand/kiosk/
> Public domain Google Books are the scanned collections of a number of libraries, including the Harvard University Library, and they may contain notations, other marks, and scanning errors. Harvard Book Store makes no representation or warranty as to the content of Google Books, and Google Books are non-returnable.
What does any of this have to do with printing? Those are formatting and typesetting issues. For the same final PDF it shouldn't matter how it's printed.
Now I'm seeing so many sponsored results to brands I've never heard of and seemingly only exist for drop-shipping or rebranding some OEM product. Worse, the non-sponsored results would also be no name brands, where I'd gravitate towards the ones with high reviews. Then I buy the product and see a little gift card I could monetize if I was to review the product with 5 stars, so seemingly most of those reviews are fraudulent. Worse again, the quality on this product is below, sometimes even way below, a normal brand I could get retail locally but priced about the same. I must return 1/4 of the products I buy because of poor QC or later breakage from normal, if not, light use. Support or customer service for these brands is almost non-existent too and this brand will disappear in a year anyway, so why bother trying to build any sort of reputation. Amazon is always happy to do a return so it solves that problem, but its a still a big hassle and I'm sure the carbon footprint of all these returns is scary. Then I'm playing random OEM roulette again with a similar product that will also have fraud reviews and 5 star review coupons inside of it.
I also dislike the dark pattern format of the site, which shows sponosered results in very small text and puts it in between related items. I'm not sure what Amazon's Choice really is, but its almost never a product or brand that I would consider trustworthy and I imagine is just a product that is giving Amazon good margins. In a curated department store model, recommended items would be actually recommended by staff and taste-makers at the cost or benefit of the reputation of the store. If Macy's is recommending a Braun coffeemaker, then its probably going to be a good coffeemaker as Macy's wants to please me as a Macy's customer. If Amazon recommends one, its just going to be some in-house rebrand or random OEM brand with lots of suspicious reviews (tons of 5 stars but also tons of 1 stars, with not much in the middle) and with positive reviews being either "amazing i love it!!!" or referring to an entirely different product (bots?) and negative reviews being in competent English and verbose and detailed about all the things wrong with this product.
I think like with any capitalist endeavor, without proper oversight and regulation, it naturally falls into a race to the bottom and "low road" capitalist outcomes. Amazon has been left more or less alone by legislators and its, of course, gone as bad as it can and I imagine will only get worse over time. Amazon moving from the department store model to the random street bazaar model is good for the bottom line but every year it gets harder to shop there as no-name brands with no support and fake reviews dominate its marketplace.
The regulation you mention will probably only make it much worse. It is being advocated for by the third party sellers that are making in a bad experience in the first place. I don't want to see them at all, much less give them more prominence.
I'm absolutely in love with a A$70 pair of wireless bluetooth headphones, that are more comfortable, have longer battery life, and sound just as good as my A$300 Bose QCs.
It's so good I've started giving them as gifts.
I only need their great customer service because of the poor quality products they are shipping. With other retailers, I don't know how good their customer service is because I almost never need to utilize them.
- Delivery time was like a week longer than they claimed.
- When it arrived it had a dead (red) pixel.
- Their customer support told me that dead pixels below a ridiculous amount (8 or so) do not qualify for a refund/replacement and told me to reach out to the manufacturer (overseas) for warranty replacement on a brand new item.
- Eventually I was able to return it under the regular "I no longer want this item" policy, but I had to pay a substantial restocking/returns fee (~20% of the price).
A quick search confirmed that this was very common with monitors and other items like GPUs have even more dissatisfaction/delayed shipping/shady practices.
Sure, I've had a couple of issues with late deliveries or broken products with Prime, but they've always corrected their error eventually. Returns and product issues are highly asymmetrical, where mostly you don't need it but when you do it's really important.
For expensive items, Amazon is 100% worth the peace of mind in case something goes wrong. For anything cheaper, I'm assuming I won't get help and I'll just have to eat the cost (which is ok, but of course not ideal). Not saying this could never happen with Amazon, but the risk seems a lot lower to me.
(I buy only from Newegg, not 3rd party folks selling on the Newegg platform).
If you get junk from Amazon, just send it back. No support needed.
When I compare this with all major retailers, this is true for everyone else. This isn't "fantastic" - it's standard.
Walmart was the one exception, where the employee didn't know Walmart's return policy.
Not long ago I ordered 4 pair of sunglasses from a small outfit online. Only 2 arrived. Support took a few days to get back to me, then asking for pics of what I got, the box, etc. I don't think that was unfair of them to ask and I provided all that, but it's a stark contrast to 'yeah here's your money back' in 5 minutes, no questions asked.
The matter was resolved with a refund when I forwarded the email threat they sent me to a couple relevant blogs/reviewers.
We've had groceries accidentally shipped to the wrong address (our shipping address is different from where we live b/c the building contracts a 3rd party to deal with packages). They either refund the order or send out a new delivery (mind you the other products are already delivered elsewhere and will eventually even make it to us... just with dead cold items), no questions asked.
It's things like this that make it much more comfortable to buy from Amazon than other places, as much as I would like to buy direct or from a smaller shop, etc.
Amazon delivers stuff to my place for "free" and very fast. They also make returning things as painless as possible since I don't even need to re-package my item when dropping off at UPS. It's easy to underestimate the hassle (from other merchants) of re-packaging your items and possibly paying for return shipping.
It's almost like the Walmart family thinks this online thing is a fad, and growth/sales spiraling downward will turn around any day now, just you wait and see!
I don't get it.
I spoke a while informally to someone who worked there. Sounded like a really smart person, and they were describing in detail how their team was writing this 'thing' from scratch, where thing is something numerous rock solid, fast, open source alternatives exist. Didn't seem like a good use of resources -at all- considering the sorry state of their web experience.
Lowes' website is a trainwreck, just Inspect Page it... for starters there's "todo" comments.
Home depot's experience is fantastic.
But if you wanna see the reigning champ of "online thing," www.mcmaster.com
It lets you put things in your cart that sell out. Putting things in your cart means nothing at all, apparently.
Not sure if the last line was meant in jest, but I -really- dig that site. All info and pics, clear pricing. Perfect.
It's also been this way for years. They were ahead of the game even back then.
Whatever degree of effect that building shipping costs into pricing has given them is negligible in comparison. And it is dead simple for even small retailers to do this with most e-Commerce tools including Shopify.