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Comment by handmodel | Hacker News Reader

I truly dont understand the Amazon hate. I spent 8k from it last year (about 500 items) because I have a very intensive hobby and have virtually none of the issues people complain about. I got the wrong item once (not sure if it was fraud or a mishap in packaging) and Amazon refunded me and told me not to ship it back. Of the 500 items I bought I probably return 20% of them and have never had an issue with a refund.

Perhaps my needs are different than others but I personally find it truly amazing. The one time I tried ordering something off Wal-Mart it came three days late and returning it was a nightmare.

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Exactly.

When I see these threads I'm always lost. What Amazon are these people running into? If you're in the US, this isn't a common experience from my circle of friends / family. I only order things from Amazon. I go out of my way to order from Amazon because I don't want to deal with bad customer service. I once ordered ~1-2K worth of home good items and sent it to my old address mistakenly. They sent every item to my new address and told me not to worry about it.

They're STILL one of the most trusted brands. If these issues are as widespread ... ya know the market works? People will go elsewhere.

I get fairly decent results, but something extra… literally.

There's some old account I used, with a slight variation on my name. Must've been years ago. Any credit card associated with it is long dead. I don't get billed for this account… but I get STUFF from this account. Not as much as some folks: I've heard stories of people really getting buried.

Just the occasional weird garbage. Crappy things of various sorts. 'Free' in the mail. Because if the address has had a real thing sent to it, it can be used for a verified review. Someone's got control of that account and is spending their own money to send me things like an LED seasonal affective disorder light, sent in its own clearly recognizable box so I could see what it was. I knew I hadn't bought one of those, but there it was.

Why?

When I went to look the product up on Amazon, it was #1 in its category. That's why.

There are plenty of things that I'll get through Amazon, including 'off-brand' stuff like color-changing LED light bulbs from severely off brands where I know it might be sketchy but it's priced accordingly, or guitar strings, or funny little adapters and HDMI cables.

I just know not to trust them. That's the Amazon I came to know.

>I only order things from Amazon.

So because it hasn't happened to you, yet, you assume everyone else is making it up?

>People will go elsewhere.

Where is the disconnect? You are complaining about people telling you they are leaving because it differs from your experience, yet you then say you don't think people are going elsewhere.

I think the charitable interpretation it to just assume people are bewildered by reports of bad experiences when they themselves have none. I don't think anyone is suggesting that people with bad experiences are lying about them.

I, too, have had very few bad experiences with Amazon, and the few I've had were resolved easily and quickly. I'm not surprised, though, that some people have had a rash of bad experiences that were not resolved well.

I’ve had only very very few bad experiences and I’ve been an active customer since the beginning. I wonder if their system is setup so the whale customers are treated better.

I'm not discounting their experiences. I just can't explain it, both anecdotally and terms of Amazon's business performance and perceived image.

If this is widespread we should see it show up elsewhere vs. only here (for me), where it's a known thing that Amazon co-mingles inventory, and hey, ya know that can lead to counterfeits! Which may explain it. HN's population may be more careful and examine items received more closely?

HN often doesn't match reality (see often cited Dropbox initial criticisms), so it's not too strange.

I have a fairly similar spend pattern on amazon and I’ve had tons of issues.

The most egregious example in the last few months was I bought an $800 Warn winch, “new”, shipped and sold by amazon, and they send me a not only clearly used, but used in such a way that it was extremely dangerous in a way that was only apparent to a trained eye.

Amazon’s dishonest practices like labeling used returns as new if they think they can get away with it is not only unsafe, but leads to a ton of returned-item fraud where people buy equipment, replace it with a superficially sort of similar knockoff, return it to amazon, and amazon sells the fake item as new. This happens a lot with things like optics (scopes, binoculars, etc) where there’s a robust market for fakes in China.

I don't really buy large or expensive things on Amazon, pretty much for that reason, and then maybe getting stuck with the bad equipment because Amazon won't return it.

This was a recent article about a couple buying a $7k camera and getting an empty box. https://petapixel.com/2021/05/26/couple-buys-7000-camera-fro...

This guy bought an expensive camera from Amazon, got rocks, returned it and then got bricks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXPnOq-XJg8&t=0s

I have no problem buying $5/$10/$100 items. But for a $3k camera, no, not Amazon.

> This was a recent article about a couple buying a $7k camera and getting an empty box.

> This guy bought an expensive camera from Amazon, got rocks, returned it and then got bricks.

There's apparently a whole genre of "ordered iPhone, received iPhone box with Play-Doh inside instead of the iPhone" complaints.

The theory I've seen is that this is a scam by the purchaser against Amazon's return policy, not a scam by vendors on Amazon against customers. That second option doesn't work, because the customer just gets refunded.

There were some failed unionization attempts that generated a lot of anti-amazon agitprop on various websites that cater to that audience -- e.g. verge, huffpost, etc. The slew of anti-amazon hitpieces was so brazen it was pretty laughable for a while.

I think most of that has died down, but there is still a chunk of the click-heavy demographic that thinks they are consuming edgy media or displaying correct opinons when they read some "expose" about Amazon.

Honestly Amazon is a pretty boring company. They have done some cool stuff with AWS, of course, and but their retail arm is fairly vanilla and you need to really stretch to paint a picture of big box retailers like Walmart being the good guys when it comes to a debate as to whether you should go with Amazon or a rival. Point being, there is no rival that is materially better than Amazon in any meaningful sense. I use Amazon as well as others like Walmart and Costco and have had a fairly positive experience with all of these. Yes, the current global supply chain is a mess with lots of sketchy producers. That is not really the fault of retailers so much as producers outsourcing everything to cheap Chinese (and other third world) manufacturers that then steal the designs and create knock-off versions that flood the US market. Outsourcing is not really something Amazon can stop, and as long as there is outsourcing, there will be a market for cheap clones that are virtually identical to the "official" versions but with less QC and inferior materials, resulting in a lot of confusion for end purchasers who end up scammed.

This is a tough problem and is worthy of real discussion - even real investigative reporting! -- but an honest look at this problem will show that Amazon's bottom line is hurt by this stuff and that Amazon is in fact taking steps to try to reign it in, so it won't be the kind of superficial Amazon hit piece that so many seem to crave.

My experiences:

Bought a charger with a UL mark so my house wouldn't burn down. The UL mark was fake. Tons of complaints on the site about the fake UL mark. Amazon did a refund (great), but kept selling the bad charger (ayfkm). Also, I had no charger that I felt safe using.

Partner has gotten fake cosmetics. Which go on your face and lips and are ingested.

I tried 3 times to buy a new battery for my car keyfob. All of them died within 2-6 weeks. Gave up and bought one from my local hardware store; it lasted 2+ years just like the original.

Amazon is great if it's a book, and the failure mode of a bad book is the pages rip or something. I wouldn't buy anything you need to trust -- food, cosmetics, etc.

My experience with Amazon has been positive, too. I’ve ordered hundreds of items from Amazon over the past year and a half—books, toys, tools, food, office supplies, exercise equipment, guitar strings—and haven’t had any problems. I live in Japan and most of my orders have been through Amazon Japan, but items I ordered from Amazon US have been fine as well.

Your Amazon experience depends on how savvy of a consumer you are, just like eBay. Lots of scams and lots of people with legitimate items to sell, sometimes at a discount.

Even if you only order from Amazon, your experience also depends a lot on how Amazon have handled returns. I’ve had Amazon ship out returns they’ve processed where the item was supposed to weigh about 10kg, because it was a pack of 60, but weighed little more than the box because somebody kept 59 and returned just one. If they’d done a simple weight check on shipping then the whole thing could have been prevented.

This is a problem that bricks and mortar stores are also faced with – especially when the box has been resealed in a way that makes it look like it was never opened.

You returned 100 items in a year?! Were they broken or something?

I do a lot of DIY electronics stuff so if I need a part I've never worked with and not 100% sure what size will fit best/look best I just order several variations and keep the one that works best. Sometimes I may need something and not sure of the exact quantity so I just order many and then return the ones I didnt have to open.

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