Shopping on amazon is really an awful experience nowdays. I really do not want to search through 40 pages of water kettles of really dubious brands. It is so anxiety inducing and unpleasant.
There is no practical way to buy a reputable/brand name on amazon.
Some brand names are "available", but it seems not officially and people are buying them at a store and shipping them to customers.
Other brand names are available, but the search results are paid (and manipulated) so they get crowded off the page by sponsored and "5 star (2)" results.
and so amazon as a brand is associated with junk.
The only reason I could quickly tell it was fake is because ThermalGrizzly provides an online serial number verification system, which isn't very common among most products. I'm not sure I'd trust Amazon for anything.
this does not seem to be worthwhile for someone wanting to purchase something, my estimates as to if something is worth counterfeiting requires me to have a rather deep understanding of the brand's importance in the world that I would not have for any but the most notable brands, aside from that I have to know something about how easy/costly it is to counterfeit and get things on Amazon to make a model in my mind if the brand was important enough for someone to fake it.
So, for example, if it becomes significantly cheaper to counterfeit things the importance of brands counterfeited (in consumer reach etc.) should drop.
That's a lot of variables. Think I'll just go to the store.
There was no way I'd do that on Amazon.
I got them from Costco, instead.
I’d only order very specific things from Amazon and as a result haven’t actually ordered in a couple years.
Amazon has become a truly awful storefront, and this has accelerated markedly, in just the last couple of years.
If the people who were supposed to be keeping them in line actually went after them aggressively, then it might be possible to start a competitor.
The fake is still up for sale.
Amazon today is less about selling things to consumers and more about selling consumers to anonymous Chinese suppliers.
Every other store ships with DHL, which after several days pretends that they ring you, when they don’t, and then u can go pick it up at the DHL store a day later.
That’s their moat.
PostNL is the most reisje local carrier here. Ups is the best but almost never used, so far only by Apple. Dpd, GLs, etc, are all rubbish.
Maybe it depends on the location...
This is not just rural areas, either: even in major cities items can be delivered faster than the time it would take to find a store that carried the item, go to the store, get it, and come home again. It's really only suburban areas with a high density of big-box retail that even have the option to "go out and get something" immediately.
Amusingly, it's also only in these suburban areas where next day delivery even exists to compete. As an anecdote, living in the downtown of a major American city (population > 1million), the average Amazon delivery time is roughly 3 days, and last mile deliveries are all delegated to the USPS which adds significant time.
I wanted a new card shuffler.
All I got was pages of the same 3 models of shuffler from every nonsense name brand you could think of.
But really just 3 choices…
How can I get more information about the seller!? I scrolled through the listing twice and couldn’t see any way to get more information!
I wanted some weight sensors for an arduino project, Arrow had them but Amazon also listed them but in bags of 4 for about the price 2 would have cost from Arrow, plus they'd arrive faster. They ended up being varying weight sensors ripped directly out of various electronic scales and 3/4 didn't work. Had to order from Arrow anyway.
My wife wanted one of those percussive massage guns for post workout, Amazon had the best price but then I saw in some of the reviews people showing that the items they received from Amazon weren't legit and the company (hypervolt iirc) wouldn't honor any warranty from one purchased from Amazon. I was pretty much done at that point. We ended up picking a different model but when we did we went straight through the manufacturer.
Shopping on Amazon sucks.
Sadly enough, at this point Amazon.nl is overshadowing this by giving insane discounts and refunds to customers, so I hope they do not win over Bol.com, but I am anxious about it.
And at least with Bol.com you only need to deal with (sometimes dodgy) companies in the Netherlands, whereas with amazon you haven't got a clue where it's coming from, and a lot of it just seems to be stuff from alibaba at a big markup.
I would never buy something from Amazon that touched my food.
Electronics more complicated than a cable require some review, figuring out if there's a reputable brand underneath, etc.
Only true for what are, now, low-end HDMI cables. Really difficult to get a good one that's actually within spec for high-bandwidth applications.
Their cables were the only ones that consistently delivered full promised bandwidth and stable connection even at long cable lengths. Plus, their email support has been very helpful, and had the same “quality cables, no bullshit” attitude as the rest of the website.
No affiliation, just a happy customer of 5+ years.
I've found Monoprice's higher-end HDMI cables to be reliable.
I don't think it's improved with age, but the links aren't any good, anymore.