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Comment by aceazzameen | Hacker News Reader

Yep. I've been ordering from Target, Best Buy, and Walmart much more often these days. I just assume the product descriptions and reviews on Amazon are all lies.

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Target and Wal-Mart also sell third party shit. It's easier for me to just buy directly from brands I like, or to shop for them on a couple outlet sites I trust (so far) to sell legit (overstocked or lightly damaged) top-quality stuff and not lower-quality second- or third-tier versions (as some outlet stores do), than figure out how to avoid or disable displaying third party sellers on a bunch of different sites.

By the time you factor in the time and frustration for that, any savings (which isn't even guaranteed) doesn't look like great ROI anyway. Plus, even Amazon often won't carry the full range of a brand's products, so I get more options shopping this way.

Best buy is filled with 3rd party sellers too but it's at least very easy to filter them out. If I could do the same on Amazon I wouldn't have any problem with 3rd party sellers, but they instead make it almost impossible to know even if you check manually.

That and Amazon commingles their inventory with 3rd party inventory, which can sometimes be counterfeit. And Amazon doesn't care if the counterfeit products are mixed in with the genuine products in their warehouses. As far as I know, Best Buy/Target/Walmart don't commingle their inventory with 3rd parties because they have physical stores that they can pull from.

True. But stores like Target also let you see inventory in physical stores, so it's easier to purchase an item you know is coming from a Target store/warehouse than a 3rd party.

God I wish walmart’s site was better, it is like punishment shopping there, why does home depot outclass them in every way?

I thought Jet.com acquisition would solve this. What a waste.

It is pretty bad. They're my last resort.

As someone who has contributed legitimate reviews on Amazon, I think "all lies" is a bit of an exaggeration.

Do they still allow listing different products on the same page, with the same reviews?

You can read reviews for a whole different model of headphones or kettle, for example, but what you get is another, (usually) cheaper model/revision. Which is insane!

Negative reviews are silenced. I ordered a machine with missing parts such that it couldn't be assembled. I gave a 1-star review and it never appeared on the seller's page.

Interesting. I would have lumped them all together. Why do you trust reviews on Target but not Amazon?

Target and Walmart take online returns at their stores, which no one in the supply chain likes. They will take bad suppliers to the woodshed if too many returns of an item. Hence they have skin in the game to carry quality products

I didn't say I trust reviews on Target. Paid reviews exist everywhere. But if I have to choose, I'd trust Target's first. Amazon's extensive 3rd party marketplace is set up in a way that encourages vendors to game their system. Amazon does nothing about it because it's good for business.

And I trust Target's products are genuine and what you receive is what's in the product description, because they sell them in stores.

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