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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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!

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