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Comment by hairofadog | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, the buzz I hear around Amazon has changed from

* 2010: this is amazing! You can get anything right away! And I don’t buy anything without checking Amazon reviews first

* 2015: it seems like Amazon is an unstoppable behemoth that might be doing harm in the world, but it’s just so easy to order stuff, so… sorry, world!

* today: the Amazon shopping experience is so filled with bullshit that it’s actually easier to buy from the producer’s website and pay shipping

I’m sure Amazon will be just fine but it seems like they’ll need to do something at some point.

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This becomes especially true as the price for something goes up. The manufacturer is sometimes much cheaper.

Random example I bought a few weeks ago, a dive light:

Amazon, $80: https://smile.amazon.com/DL07-Flashlight-Underwater-Recharge...

Manufacturer, $55 (free shipping too): https://wurkkos.com/products/wurkkos-dl07-mulit-color-led-fl...

I still buy a lot of items from Amazon, but at this point I always check other sources for products >$50.

I have noticed a massive uptick in sponsored listings, which are rarely what I want. The utility of basic search is dramatically worse than it was a few years ago. Can anyone recommend an adblocking browser extension that kills off sponsored listings?

Nice example! A recent HN discussion centered on the "Marketplace Fair Pricing Policy" [0], which seems to oppose such situations. I'm not saying that "365 Outdoor Product" (the vendor listed at your Amazon link) is actually operated by Wurkkos, but why wouldn't manufacturers do something like this?

[0] https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/G5TUVJKZHU...

I've heard that Amazon penalizes vendors who sell their own product cheaper on their own site. So instead, they advertise the same price but offer "discount codes" that work on their own site.

Amazon can DIAF as far as I'm concerned. I've made an "Anywhere but Amazon" pledge to myself, and order elsewhere even if it's somewhat more expensive.

> Can anyone recommend an adblocking browser extension that kills off sponsored listings?

uBlock Origin works well.

Dive light? Gotta support your local dive shops buddy! The big ones I check are DiveGearExpress, LeisurePro and your local dive shops. The dive shops usually don't carry a lot of different dive light brands unfortunately so I get it.

I moved to "the country" and no longer have local dive shops.

Also, I looked at the name brand dive lights. They're 3-5X more expensive and don't spec the LEDs. To a flashlight geek, these seem to be wholly inferior to the reputable chinese brands like wurkkos or sofirn.

Also also, I just threw out a set of expensive UK halogen lights. I expect to replace these new ones in a few years as LEDs continue to get more efficient. Going cheap seems to be the right choice for this kind of technology product.

One thing to note is: I can't find any mention of returns/refunds on the wurkkos website, while Amazon has their standard (very liberal) return policy.

From the manufacturer's standpoint, they pay 15% referal fee to Amazon for getting them the sale. They also have a 5% coupon. Taking both of those things into account, their revenue on the sale is ~$64 compared to the ~$54 on their site. But I'd wager they're not getting very many sales on their website.

Loss leading the mom and pops into the ground is so Walmart.

I also find that I'm more confident in the manufacturer to actually ship the item properly. On several occasions I've ordered something expensive from Amazon only to have it arrived beat up and damaged. When I've returned it to Amazon and ordered again from the manufacturer it usually arrives in much better condition.

I used to go to Amazon to find a larger variety and higher quality goods than my local stores stocked.

Now it feels like wal-mart where price is all that matters and quality isn’t even a consideration.

So much stuff that is $2 cheaper but just garbage…

And the more expensive stuff just is priced more but still garbage.

Sometimes I feel like I have to buy two or three things from Amazon before I find one that isn’t terrible or counterfeit.

And with the Chinese word salad manufacturers, it's impossible to tell if something is good, bad, or relabelled from a name-brand first shift manufacturer.

(Tries to think of an example...can't remember any because they don't stick in your memory, searches for Cellphone car holder in Amazon)

Like VICSEED, OQTIQ, HUMIXX, Loncaster, Lisen, Torras...They'll all be different after the first of the year.

Edited to add honorable mention: President Randy Handheld Mobile radio.

i don't bother at this point. my wife loves prime and uses it for small things we need right away, but i would never make a major purchase through amazon these days. there's no guarantee of who you're buying from and the supply chain is not trustworthy IME

I was looking for gel filters on Amazon (company name: SAKOLLA) and realized what I was getting into from this image: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51oD8lgOFOL._AC_SL1300_....

I've bought multiple products in a category on Amazon, from different Chinese brands, using separate resellers, and received items that were identical aside from the labels even when the product descriptions and price points were wildly different. It's like AliExpress without the low prices.

Why are the Chinese so terrible at marketing? How hard is to hire a western marketer to do a good job ?

Because there's no need when your model is "set up the store, sell as much low end crap as you can in 3 months, shut down store, rinse, repeat." They aren't playing long games, they're moving cheap unbranded surplus quickly. They're using excess and part discards (or parts that fell off a truck) from branded products. China has essentially no protection of patents or ip, so factories follow the product leaders, copying whatever is currently in demand.

> They're using excess and part discards (or parts that fell off a truck) from branded products.

Some maybe, but a lot of products from these chinese sellers seem to be designed to be cheap, not just badly made.

Randy Handheld...that sounds comfy somehow.

/me giggles

This actually highlights how genius the AWS pivot was. Even though Amazon might lose retail clout, other retailers _are still paying oodles to Amazon_ - but for servers.

It boggles my mind how short sighted the move to the cloud is. The outages are almost quarterly at this point, too!

A lot of items I used to buy on Amazon have become so spammed with ads and non-purchasable products that I've given up. The big ones I've noticed:

- bulk gum

- my favorite brand of cheese snack cracker

- bulk mints

- bar soap

- toilet paper

The other day I noticed that the search order wouldn't even change when I used the dropdown to change it from "featured" to "low to high". Someone actually broke the sort order of search results in a change, and didn't even notice it. Or maybe there's so many ads at the top of the result that the search order doesn't have an impact any more. But I literally could not find any instances of the item I was looking for that were purchasable at all.

I have always found low to high sorting to be nearly useless because all you end up with is 100s of pages of random cheap unrelated shit.

https://smile.amazon.com/s?k=kitchen+island&s=price-asc-rank...

Also sad, newegg use to not do this.

I have completely given up shopping for anything of any importance due to the counterfeit or stolen items. I ordered a wireless charging dock from Anker, a fully sealed box came full of C batteries. I ordered some drill bits after my old ones wore out after about a decade, the new ones lasted less than a month. Clearly counterfeit despite looking EXACTLY the same. It's just impossible now, so I just avoid them entirely and go straight to the manufacturer.

> today: the Amazon shopping experience is so filled with bullshit that it’s actually easier to buy from the producer’s website and pay shipping

This is where I'm at. I only order products from Amazon that are sold by Amazon. Pretty much any legit third party seller will have their own website I can order from.

I still read reviews on Amazon before ordering elsewhere, although they've banned me from leaving reviews and wiped all my past ones for no discernible reason. I guess I left a review on some product that had a lot of fake reviews and I got caught in the crossfire.

>I still read reviews on Amazon before ordering elsewhere

Why? I'm only adding more so it's not a one word response, but seriously, why are you still putting any credence whatsoever to Amazon reviews which is like scientifically proven to be gamed?

If you filter out reviews without picture and only 2-4 star reviews you can often find legitimate reviews on more popular items. The total star rating is of course totally useless but individual reviews still offer value.

Yeah, there's still value in Amazon reviews despite the noise. If you take the time to just sit there and read through them one by one, you can definitely learn things about the product. Obviously you skip over the trash "ya this product great, exactly what I needed" stuff. If you just read the long, multi-paragraph ones you effectively eliminate the fake stuff, because fake reviews don't get paid more for being longer. Long ones tend to have detailed discussion of actually product function and/or appearance, and THAT'S where you find the the product's potential shortcomings.

I've read some of these multi-paragraph reviews, and I'm not impressed there either. Some of them read as if they are a frustrated author that could never get published and now spends their time practicing prose searching for likes (similar to yelp). Some sound like GPT3 drivel. Some sound even worse.

Two and four star reviews are worth focusing on too. Vendors don't, for the most part, pay for four star reviews, and review-bombing idiots or people upset the delivery was late don't tend to offer two star reviews

Just because reviews are gamed on Amazon doesn't mean that there are no real reviews on there. For many purchases, there are no other sites with useful reviews. It's the best bad system we have...

Mainly for the negative ones, to see if there are many similar complaints indicating something is wrong with the product.

I've left bad reviews on manufacturer websites and often times they just never publish them so I don't really trust reviews anywhere more or less than Amazon reviews.

If we're talking about products with a large number of reviews:

- The fake reviews are commonly very low-effort: "best I've found, gift for grandma".

- A seller looking to do review spam doesn't want to keep pumping fake reviews forever. It costs money, and it's a risk.

Taking these two things into account, I sort for recent reviews, and only consider <5 star reviews OR reviews with some meat on them.

> * today: the Amazon shopping experience is so filled with bullshit that it’s actually easier to buy from the producer’s website and pay shipping

I hear this all the time but it’s rarely true for me.

I’ve always searched for alternate stores, promo codes, and other discounts before ordering from Amazon. Many manufacturers have their own web stores, but it’s really rare to find a total price (including shipping) that is actually cheaper than Amazon in my experience.

Many hot products have Minimum Advertised Pricing contracts that mean the sale price is identical across every website anyway, at which point it becomes a game of finding some place with a coupon code that is enough to offset the extra shipping costs of not using Amazon. Most of the time, it just doesn’t work out as cheaper than Amazon.

I think people underestimate just how expensive warehousing, handling orders, and shipping can be. Amazon has optimized logistics to the point that they can charge people a lot for it and still be cheaper than doing it yourself (up to a certain scale which few companies reach)

The best thing for me (which is terrible for the environment) is the ease of returns. Free returns on just about everything and i don't have to pack it, just drop it off at the Whole Foods down the street.

I'd guess that if you bought quality products from a reputable retailer* that didn't suck, you would probably not be need to use the return option nearly as much.

*I no longer consider Amazon a reputable retailer

I mostly pick quality stuff, it has more to do with sizing, colors, etc.

I believe the OP was saying buying direct is easier (more likely to get the item you want), not necessarily cheaper.

I know, but I haven’t found that to be true either.

By the time I know what I want to buy, it’s not hard to find it on Amazon. Amazon already has my payment info so it’s a few clicks and I’m done. I don’t understand the argument that it’s easier to find the manufacturer’s website, navigate their web store, and then enter all of my payment and shipping information.

This just sounds like sheer laziness to me, which of course it is.

What you're saying is that you're willing to trade any sense of assured quality for the convenience of not having to do anything other than do the simplest of processes. Granted, this describes the majority of people, but let's at least be willing to admit what it is.

> What you're saying is that you're willing to trade any sense of assured quality for the convenience of not having to do anything other than do the simplest of processes.

I think you missed my parent comment where I said I devoutly check manufacturer's websites for alternative prices with almost every Amazon purchase I make.

And no, I'm not trading "any sense of assured quality" away. I've had more troubles with random 3rd-party vendors than I have with Amazon. I think people are greatly exaggerating the fault rate from Amazon simply because they order so many packages from Amazon. When it comes to things like lost or stolen shipments, I'd much rather deal with Amazon's liberal policies than go to battle with a random web store.

Several times now I've ordered something from Amazon and the item delivered wasn't what was ordered. Not even a cheap knock-off, just garbage in a box. For that reason alone, I'm hesitant to use Amazon. I've never had this happen with an order direct from manufacturer, or other retailers like REI or Best Buy.

> then enter all of my payment and shipping information.

I rarely have to do this anymore as more and more stores are on Shopify.

It's also better to know what you're getting is the real deal and from a legit manufacturer. A lot of times I can't even find a legit brand on amazon even when i include the name.

I'm at the point where I don't buy anything from Amazon without checking the _producer's_ website first. It seems like 90% of the stuff on Amazon is just dropshippers who add $50 to the retail price and arbitrage from people too lazy to do anything but order from one website.

And it seems to be getting easier for companies to sell their own stuff. Most places seem to be using "Shopify" now? Fine with me. The integration is usually seamless and it has worked well every time I've used it.

Yeah, the inflation of price is really noticeable these days. I used to buy things like screws on Amazon, but vendors are starting to charge prices like $13 for an assortment of 200 of the shittiest made-in-china-out-of-string screws and it's just so ridiculous. McMaster is cheaper and the quality of the product is so much higher. And that's crazy because McMaster is not trying to compete on price. (Also have you guys ever used McMaster's website? If those software engineers worked on Amazon's website, Amazon would have taken over the world in its entirety ten years ago.)

I'm worried about Amazon over the next five years. Premium prices for counterfeit or subpar goods, and the data says Amazon is making more on sellers fees than AWS now, so it's going to be difficult for them to meaningfully fix it. Too many meetings like "we'll be ruined if we stop taking money from counterfeiters".

> Also have you guys ever used McMaster's website?

McMasters website is the best kept secret in the ecommerce world. I always find what I need via search and the drill down options are always relevant. Plus they have an amazing variety of things making them a first stop when I'm fabricating something.

I'm so impressed every time I use their search. It understands my query and then checks all the checkboxes on the side that apply. So you can refine by checking or unchecking them. It's absolutely flawless.

The checkout experience is also wonderful (they remember your login cookie / session forever, and the process itself is more seamless than 1-Click), the order confirmation and shipping emails are informative and visually pleasing, and when the order arrives each item is annotated with the order line number and your internal identification code.

I also love their no-branding and black-and-white drawings aesthetic. It's like they're saying "we'll find you the best brand, just pick what you actually need".

They're doing amazing. I feel like a dope when I pay twice as much as Aliexpress or whatever, but I feel even better when some screw doesn't fail a year down the road and kill me.

I just spent a few minutes browsing around the McMaster site. Never used it before as I'm not into that sort of thing.

It's really fast! Doing some digging, it appears they are using a flavor of HTML over the wire, ala Rails Turbo/Laravel Livewire/Phoenix Liveview. Maybe Blazor? I'm not sure of the file extensions for C#, so maybe they can use the aspx extension?

Cool to see some folks still actively working towards making fast ecommerce sites!

When buying ebooks, I find one can get drm free ones in epub/pdf with watermarking from the publishers often enough and not locked into kindle. the prices are sometimes higher/lower/same but the product is better.

This mirrors my sentiments exactly. Peak Amazon for me was about 3 or 4 years ago - I would order from Amazon without even thinking about it. Now, you can’t use it unless you know exactly what you want, because their search is unusable, and with the prevalence of counterfeit goods mixed in with all the legitimate stock… It’s become less of a hassle to just order from the manufacturer, if it’s anything I really care about.

That’s what I been thinking too. Around 2017-18 the no name Chinese brands started massively flooding the site.

I suspect a lot of no-name chinese brands are actually amazon. (except with randomized-word brand name)

That doesn't seem to fit with them mostly not using FBA and instead shipping directly from China.

same here - used to buy everything I could from amazon, without really checking the price (they were always generally lowest price or close to it especially if you factor in the free and quick shipping and previously not having to pay sales tax).

Now I search on amazon, then do my best to find it somewhere else for cheaper or about the same price - just the same way I do when I search for hotels on expedia or kayak, but always book direct.

Not helping AMZN either is the fact that it seems like they have pretty much given up on rapid shipping - especially where I live - two days (with prime) used to be standard - now It is more like 5-6 days for most things - even with prime. Seems a bit bait-and-switch on the supposed promise of two day shipping.

Only here on HN.

In the real-world, people love the product just as much. The only complaints I hear are about the working conditions.

Only a single anecdote but my wife falls into the category of “I won’t buy from Amazon anymore because it’s probably crap or counterfeit”.

Starting to see the sentiment seeping from the early adopters to the early majority

Yeah, I agree there’s a spectrum but (like you) I’m definitely hearing it from the mouths of actual friends and neighbors, not just here. I think the split is “people who can afford to be choosy” vs “people who only make decisions based on price”.

The love hasn’t changed but the buying strategies have. Amazon is still the hands down best place to actually buy things on the internet. But their dominance in product discovery is slipping.

If you figure out what to buy somewhere else and then buy it on Amazon then the product is better than ever. If you vaguely search for what you want and buy the top few results you probably think the quality has gone downhill.

obviously any counterpoint to this will also be anecdotes, but to add another: I have heard from extended family and friends unrelated to the tech industry that they have growing discontent with Amazon, and have said they order much less stuff off there. For my wife, it has become a running joke on how poor her service has been with Amazon; It's more surprising when it _works_ for her nowadays. Our current record is 2.5 months for a "next day delivery", and it was the wrong item.

I'm not in the tech industry, and I agree. Usually, when I go on about why Amazon sucks to people, they're thrilled somebody is articulating what they've found to be true. For a lot of people, when Amazon/Google don't get them what they want, they blame THEMSELVES, not Amazon or Google. They know they aren't getting what they want, but consider the problem as "I'm not good enough at using Amazon."

It's a relief to them when I lay out the bad decisions Amazon is making and how they're tanking the customer experience.

Exactly. Try buying something like an SD card or external SSD drive. 99% of the listings are fake. Even if you stick to legit branded products you might have to spend 30 minutes to find the listing with the lowest price because somehow it hides from the search and you can only find it by click through related items on other products.

> easier to buy from the producer’s website and pay shipping

You shouldn't even have to do that and pay shipping. For the last 5 years at least I've had luck going to a more trusted vendor like Best Buy or Target which have comparable free shipping options. And a bonus is that I can go to the store and pick up the item same day if I want. Also Best Buy price matches Amazon, though it's rarely necessary because they all converge on the same prices now anyway.

> I’m sure Amazon will be just fine but it seems like they’ll need to do something at some point

Their e-commerce arm has a lot of competition on the horizon from Costco, Walmart, Bestbuy, Home Depot, and the 2 million shopify stores being run by mom and pops. All of those, aside from Walmart, you can mostly be sure you’re not getting ripped off and know what you’re buying up front.

Bezos based his business model on long term customer trust, and he’s not really there anymore. You see these magazine articles of him hanging out at pool parties with celebrities in his beach shorts and it makes you wonder where the priorities of the company are now.

Bezos has been transitioning out of day-to-day operations at Amazon through the year. Andy Jassy is the new CEO.

I wonder if the metrics for CEO are OKR not "is what we are creating good"

Think of Amazon as a plane with Bezos as the pilot. The nosedive of the plane started while Bezos was still in control. Bezos realized the dive was unrecoverable (or at least decided the effort was too much for him and just didn't want to go down with it), so he started looking for his parachute. He also found a co-pilot to start training, but the co-pilot didn't seem to be concerned about the diving trajectory. Bezos is now totally safe no longer being on the plane as he's safely used his parachute. Jassy now gets the blame when the plane ultimately goes down. Jassy would have to simply be an amazing pilot to pull the plane out of the dive.

Are we just completely forgetting about AWS here?

Is there a way to refer to amazon retail site only? You say the word Amazon, and >99% of people think of the retail website.

My original point was that it's not just about brand perception, but that was largely on based on my incorrect belief that AWS is a much larger portion of Amazon's revenue than it is in reality. I thought it was like 40-50%, but it's actually only 14.5%. Interestingly, I found this quote from the source[0]:

> AWS’ revenue makes up 14.5% of Amazon’s total revenue of $110.8 billion. And for the first time ever, revenue from AWS, advertising, third-party seller services and Prime subscriptions ($55.9 million) surpassed revenue from Amazon’s retail and product sales ($54.9 billion).

This certainly reinforces your point! It sure sounds like Amazon retail is a sort of loss leader.

[0]: https://www.fiercetelecom.com/platforms/aws-to-rescue-3q-rev...

>This certainly reinforces your point! It sure sounds like Amazon retail is a sort of loss leader.

"Your margin is my opportunity" --Jeff Bezos

Jeff's ethos seems to be undercut everybody at any chance. That seems to include people using his platform in the form of plainly labeled Amazon branded products or Amazon owned brands of other names. Open a platform to sell things. Open that platform to allow 3rd parties to sell things while taking a cut. Aggregate all of that sales data to find what items are worthy of selling those items directly screwing the 3rd parties.

Can you point out on this graph where you think the plane started nose diving: https://www.statista.com/chart/4298/amazons-long-term-growth...

EDIT: OK, you're talking about customer experience and maybe that's a long term risk, but as long as that graph continues it's trend not many people at the top of Amazon are going to share our frustration as customers. There are plenty of customers out there throwing money at them.

The only thing I pay Amazon for now is for the TV streaming service, since they have a better back catalogue than Netflix.

For books I'll use bookshop.org, and for anything else I'll shop around for anywhere that isn't Amazon. I really don't care about next day or same day delivery; rarely do I require something so urgently that I can't wait a few days or a week or two.

Amazon itself is total trash these days, and it's getting steadily worse.

I figure it'll take another year or two before laymen realize how broken things are. Untill then amazon is still safe.

That's the mainstream narrative, which lags the actual reality (cutting through socialthink) by a good 5 years. Amazon needed to do something about this 7+ years ago, like introduce trusted supply chains and distill the gensym brands into useful singular results. At this point these problems have become embedded in their operations, and the incentives are such to keep them going while papering over ill effects.

But every large business ultimately relies on cognitive dissonance and reality distortion fields to maintain their relevance. Amazon has been seemingly successful at keeping people buying into their sunk cost fallacy ("Prime"), so momentum wise I'm sure they'll be fine.

It's very funny to me when I talk to Americans who bang on about the convenience of Amazon and almost can't imagine life without it. From a country where Amazon never existed... life is just fine.

* today: the Amazon shopping experience is so filled with bullshit that it’s actually easier to buy from the producer’s website and pay shipping*

True - After Amazon search doesn't find what I want (it found it yesterday) I've recently taken to using DuckDuckGo site search to bypass Amazon's search issues. Then I bought the TV locally, not even in a big box store. Support your local electronics dealer.

Such is the life cycle of capitalism.

A newcomer penetrates the market with a superior offer. Once it rises to power, it naturally must defend and fortify its position. No longer must the offer be superior, destroying and suffocating new newcomers is simply more effective and profitable.

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