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About 5 years ago, one of my sons wanted a drone for xmas.

In mid-November, Walmart.com warned me to "Order soon to guarantee that you'll get <x> for Christmas."

So, I did the "responsible" thing and ordered the drone before Thanksgiving and it arrived around Nov 25.

Wrap it up. Son opens it on Christmas, aaaaand it's broken out of the box. One of the rotors was bent and wouldn't rotate.

Brought it to Walmart probably on the 27th of December and Walmart tells me, "This was sold by one of our 3rd party vendors. You have to take it up with them."

3rd party vendor tells me to pound sand because there's a 30 day return policy. Remember how I was responsible and got the drone a month ahead of time?

In retrospect, I should have disputed the charge, but it didn't occur to me at the time.

Still makes me angry.

One thing I have never understood is why parents do not inspect, open, etc the products before wrapping them?

I am mean this is a decades old problem from not having the correct batteries, to missing parts, etc etc. Alot of Christmas day disappointments could be avoided by just inspecting the toys before wrapping them.....

Yeah, sure, maybe one day I'll have time during the holidays not allocated to "family" and "unplugging from the stress of dealing with family" and can do things like "inspect everything I'm about to give away as a gift"...

I pretty clearly did not say inspect everything... I limited clearly to children toys, and it could even be limited to the "main" present like this clearly was.

Every kid has the "one thing" they really want that year, I always see posts by parents that they "one thing" was missing a part, or did not have batteries, or like this case was damaged.

Not a parent, but for me when gift giving and receiving - there is a lot of joy in opening the completely 100% unopened thing.

And opening many children toys is usually pretty difficult without scissors and or destroying the packaging. The amount of time consuming precision tape peeling without removing the graphic layer of cardboard may be a little untenable around Christmas.

I can't tell you precisely what I was thinking 5 years ago, but your explanation (joy of opening something that clearly has not been opened) is probably closest to my motivations.

Well as a child I dont think I would have even noticed if the box was opened, or if it even came in a box, if my Sega Genesis or my new Bike, or what ever was completely out of the box I would not have cared (and pretty sure I got more than a few presents completely pre-assembled), hell if the Genesis already hooked up to the TV ready to play I probably would have preferred that...

Of course now as an adult I hate gifts, I buy what I need/want when I need/want it. I do not want other people to spend money on me at all.. Most holidays have become soo commercialized that the consumerism of it all puts me off

Re-learning to love gifts, particularly the giving aspect has brought a lot of joy to my life recently. But I am not talking about buying someone something at Walmart, something they can just buy themselves.

The gifts tend to skew more towards art, fabrics, jewelry, house items. Things that are uniquely found in a particular place, not exactly expensive but mostly hard to acquire / stumble upon.

But yes I agree, the commercialized consumerism is quite off putting. I am grateful for it though, as I am now coming full circle and rediscovering the joy from a very human and primordial action.

> Of course now as an adult I hate gifts

I dislike a lot of gift giving, but I do not dislike gifts. Most people who know me well knows I really don't care for pointless tchotchkes, but I do value actually useful gifts. When I use those gifts, I remember the person who gave it to me and get a reminder of their friendship or love. A perfect example is a pocket knife I usually have on me which my wife gave me as a gift; I always think about her every time I use it.

There's a stupid negative stigma around regifting and getting used things, so there's desirability in the gift being presented being brand new, never taken out of the box. Which means you spend Xmas day waiting for your Xbox to download the latest firmware instead and hoping Xbox live doesn't go down instead of being able to play it.

> There's a stupid negative stigma around regifting

Which, we should stress, is toxic nonsensical shit.

Consumerist crap which promotes an always-buying culture of throwing away things instead of reduce+reuse.

Because the quality control rot is not something that most people are prepared to accept. Most people are unwilling to accept that things have gotten worse.

Some stores will allow anything purchased during the holiday season to be returned up to a certain point in January

This goes both ways. Numerous people (companies?) have setup arbitrage businesses. They post products on Amazon at a markup over Walmart and vice-versa. They leverage the APIs to dynamically adjust their prices based on how the prices move on each store. It technically isn't a rip-off, when you think about it. They are taking advantage of people not searching for the best deal. You get what you ordered, they make money from scouting prices and putting at a price you are willing to pay for said product (I assume otherwise you wouldn't order).

Don't get me wrong, when this happens, I get that feeling of rip off, but the reality is, I didn't price shop. And someone did some work to get it to show up for me where I was looking.

It's fine if you think markets are intended to be hostile to consumers instead of bettering people's lives. I don't think incentivizing deceptive middlemen is really a net benefit to society.

Personally I don't think it is either, but people need money to exist in this world, and we can't all be researching the cure for cancer.

Just noting that’s a very profitable business.

Perhaps not everyone can research cures for cancer, but that's not a good reason to then become the "cancer". Just because it's how it is now, doesn't mean that's how it has to be. Ideally Amazon, Walmart, Google, etc.. should manage their marketplaces better to provide a optimal consumer experience, but it seems so long as they get their cut, they couldn't care less. The continued consolidation of competition leaves fewer options for consumers to even "vote with their wallets".

Welcome to capitalism, where everyone is trying to rip off everyone else and everyone has to defend themselves against everyone else.

Definitely don’t recommend.

I remember this also being a thing with eBay as well. Not sure why someone would go to eBay first and not check Amazon, but then again some people still pay for AOL.

I have noticed a number of inexpensive small items (say < ~$7) being cheaper including shipping on eBay compared to Amazon.

So they don't have to pay for prime

ebay's cheaper than Amazon, that's why.

When I was an undergrad, me and buddy had what amounted to an arbitrage scheme (I didn't realize that was the name for it back then)selling laptops on campus. We would buy them from ebay, and sell them to local students with posters on physical bulletin boards around campus. At some point, the market flipped, and we could no longer turn a profit this way. So we started buying student's laptops on campus and selling them on ebay.

I was going to say "arbitrage." I thought of the pizza place guy who discovered that DoorDash or GrubHub was charging customers less than they paid him. Promoting the delivery business, you know.

So he'd just order pizzas for himself, and pocket the difference.

> You get what you ordered

Not if you're trying to avoid Amazon for moral boycott reasons (as the OP was). In that case, people are willing to knowingly pay an additional fee to avoid Amazon, but that money is just being pocketed and the rest of the money is being turned over to Amazon on their behalf.

Boycotting Amazon and buying at Walmart seems strange. The moral reasons are there in both cases.

Amazon is the biggest eCommerce retailer, so trying to prevent a monopoly is a moral reason.

Amazon also has a lot of famous worker safety/treatment issues for their delivery drivers and warehouse workers. I doubt they are unique in the fulfillment space, but they are extremely well publicized. Walmart has issues as well, but their publicized issues were in stores. Walmart online avoids the worst publicized worker treatment issues.

It really is, I remember when my wife hated Wal-Mart for doing the same things she doesn't like Amazon doing. But apparently she now feels that Wal-Mart is the lesser of two evils so she doesn't mind shopping there.

In my mind Wal-Mart is actually the evil one, I watched them destroy entire towns in the 80s. Everyone ended up working there, full time if they were lucky, and they gave all their money back every week because there was nowhere else in town left to spend it.

Buy the time Amazon came around the destruction was over. What Amazon did was raise the bar on customer service so high that everybody else had to follow. That is a net positive I believe.

It hardly matters if what your wife wants to do was correct. The point is, she's trying to pay money (and is in fact spending the money) to try to cut Amazon out. And she's not getting what she's paying for.

I buy a lot of stuff from newegg and when they made the shift from newegg(the store) to newegg(the marketplace) it was the same, the experience started to suck. Thankfully newegg has as a filter option, "only show items from newegg(the store)"

In fact that is one of my biggest beefs with amazon, the way they have it set up it is very hard, if not impossible to figure out who you are buying stuff from.

The good thing about the old brick an mortar system was that there were experienced buyers between the manufacturer and the brick and mortar store. Suppliers had to submit production samples to the buyers to evaluate. So everything you bought was vetted.

It's staggering how the web is devolving into long forgotten shittiest practice. All that 'compute power' only to end up like this.

Computers only empower human nature, so it goes.

That's all empowerment. Time, money, even self-improvement meditationy stuff.

It's invariably no taste and petty power struggles, magnified. Like one of those 1950s giant insect monster movies.

Power needs to be coupled to cultivation or something.

Yes, society rebase itself on any layer it can; I'm just surprised nobody saw it coming earlier.

Hard not to long for the days when the internet was only for geeks and porn eh.

Bricks and mortar retailers have long been prosecuted for fraud by law enforcement, local or federal. But “marketplace” e-resellers circumvent enforcement because their e-tail hosts (Amazon, Walmart, Alibaba…) don't hold them responsible and are not held responsible themselves for abuse of their service by others, no matter that the level of fraud has risen to become the norm. The cause for this is, of course, we, the willing victims. And it won't change until we insist that government NOT be just another reality show.

And the added benefit that Amazon is by large the heaviest player so masses are sucked into the habits of ordering there. It's a sad waste.

> government NOT be just another reality show.

You've really hit the mark with that comment.

Trust and reputation don't scale well. An uncurated global marketplace means the most underhanded players win out.

I've been making a point to order electronics from Best Buy whenever possible. I can trust that Beat Buy doesn't have third party sellers, at least for now.

When I bought a Motorola cable modem from Best Buy it stopped working within 24 hours. At least I could return it and only lose time. Name brands and branded stores aren't safe either, though one would hope they're better on average.

If you use best buy's website it has the same problem as Amazon et al since it is a "marketplace" it is just the same sellers listing on both sites.

I wonder if that is specific to a country? Because in the U.S. I have never seen a marketplace seller on the best buy website.

Looks like it might be a Canadian thing?

https://blog.bestbuy.ca/best-buy/what-is-best-buy-marketplac...

Huh, it never would have crossed my mind they would do it only in Canada.

Odd.

It used to be a US thing as well, but that was shut down several years ago (2016 based on a cursory search).

I had been doing the same, but Best Buy (US) reduced its return period to 14 days unless you shell out $200/year for their Totaltech membership. I should do a better job about inspecting orders as they arrive, but I think 14 days just isn't enough. I've been burned by it a couple of times now due to work travel.

So, now I'm back to trying to find a reputable retailer that sells authentic products.

Best Buy will be gone soon. The only thing keeping it alive is legacy competitors (Circuit City, Sears) dying first and handing over rotting corpses of business.

The "marketplace" concept seems to be a recipe for disaster. It's basically leasing out your legitimacy and goodwill as a vendor to businesses that wouldn't be able to pull off their own ecommerce experience.

As others have said, when something goes wrong, they're not going to remember "Oh, marketplace seller biteme42069 was a rip-off, avoid them", they'll just blame Walmart.

It's funny-- Amazon has managed to so squander their reputation that Walmart-- once the epitome of schlocky retail-- had managed to look decent by comparison. They had a strong enough nationwide logistics network that they could challenge the "but-but Prime 7-minute delivery" argument, and the direct nanufacturer connections to ensure they had authentic, controlled inventory. They could have been a more trustworthy choice.

Genuinely interested, because I hate Amazon also but spend much of my online shopping dollars with them, what makes Walmart preferable to Amazon for your family?

I know people who believe that giving dollars to Amazon will cement their monopoly like control over ecommerce, leading to worse behavior in the future. Others object to the well-publicized (although I doubt unique) poor conditions for their drivers and warehouse employees in their fulfillment system.

I think the OP was specifically asking why “Walmart vs Amazon” not “why anywhere else vs Amazon”. The case against shopping at Amazon is clear but why take your dollars to Walmart who is arguably just as bad in every regard.

>Buyer beware - my wife hates Amazon and goes out of her way to not purchase from them. She has encountered several vendors on Walmart marketplace that simply place orders with Amazon at 100% markup - the packages arrive in Amazon boxes w/ a receipt showing the actual cost paid at Amazon. Total rip-off.

I sell on both Walmart and Amazon. As somethingwitty1 said, this works in multiple directions; people dropshipping ittems from Amazon directly to Walmart customers, from Walmart to Amazon customers, and from both to eBay customers.

It's also forbidden. Both Walmart and Amazon explicitly warn against shipping items to customers in competitors' boxes; Walmart even explicitly bans tracking numbers starting with "TBA". If your wife reports that this is happening to Walmart buyer support, the sellers won't be there for long; recent anecdotes say that both companies are really cracking down on dropshipping.

>When ordering electronics from Walmart Marketplace, particularly TVs, I’ve found that the marketplace sellers freely substitute makes and models.

Ugh. All I can say that I've also had less-than-positive experiences when buying from other sellers on both platforms. Amazon is notorious for allowing anyone to open a seller account. Walmart is in theory supposed to be much stricter in examining applicants' qualifications, with many waiting for weeks or months. While this is great from my perspective (both in terms of improving the overall quality of third-party sellers, and minimizing my competition), the incompetent and crooked are still getting through; Walmart recently allowing non US-domiciled sellers (i.e., Chinese) doesn't help.

>I’ve not had any issues with the items sold by Wal-mart actual, those you can buy with confidence.

Agreed. Amazon commingles its own inventory and that of third-party sellers that Amazon handles storage and shipping for (FBA); as a result, my own confidence in the genuineness of, say, household staples from Amazon has plummeted. I think Walmart does not do so with WFS, its FBA equivalent. In any case WFS much less used than FBA, because there is little advantage for sellers to do so over fulfilling items themselves.

>>I stopped ordering from Walmart altogether after the second time (out of two, consecutive) that happened.

or stop ordering from the marketplace sellers. I like ordering directly from websites for vendors i do business with. This is why I do not shop on ebay.

From Amazon I rarely order anything that is not "shipped and sold by amazon", on walmart I only order Walmart Stock, on newegg I only order newegg stock, etc etc

Personally I am not sure what the appeal is of all these bigger sites adding "marketplace" sellers.

> Personally I am not sure what the appeal is of all these bigger sites adding "marketplace" sellers.

It’s the long tail. Need an unbranded under-desk treadmill manufactured by Xiaomi? Amazon marketplace has ever color of the rainbow at prices only reasonable for dropshippers.

There’s ofc downsides to that, but certain consumers don’t mind.

> Personally I am not sure what the appeal is of all these bigger sites adding "marketplace" sellers.

Digi-Key, an electronic parts distributor which used to have a good reputation for supply chain quality, added "marketplace" sellers. Before this, when you ordered from Digi-Key, you were assured that the product went directly from the manufacturer to Digi-Key in Minnesota and then to you. You got exactly what you ordered. Now, it's much iffier.

> Personally I am not sure what the appeal is of all these bigger sites adding "marketplace" sellers.

Money. No inventory (i.e. capital), no COGS, no returns (depending on the model), no assortment optimization. Just a share of what someone else does.

I ordered a few things last fall from Wal Mart. Each time, they charged once but delivered multiples of the same item. One other time, they shipped it to some store who said they never got it.

There is no real reason why they have it so wrong.

Also, I buy expensive things direct from the manufacturer if I buy online. No chance for counterfeit items that way.

Wal Mart and Amazon are nothing more than digital flea markets at this point.

I’ve had this happen with an Amazon vendor drop shipping another Amazon product. They were able to do this because the original product wasn’t listed in the correct department and couldn’t be found easily.

I sometimes intentionally do that here as the IKEA online store has very high shipping costs (They probably want people to come to the store and pick up a bunch of other things on the way). There's sellers that sell IKEA things on Amazon with a markup but it's still cheaper than IKEA's shipping. I'm assuming it's just people buying a cart full of the same product and re-selling it on Amazon.

Everytime I buy anything from Walmart I check the "Walmart.com" retailer box. I wish there was a way to make it permanent.

Having said that there was one time I had this same issue...I bought from Walmart's marketplace and the product wasn't what I ordered. I had no issue with returning it.

Awesome, Walmart managed to copy Amazon's total lack of control over their inventory.

I had that issue. I ordered something from Walmart (a vacuum cleaner) and it arrived in a new box from amazon. I called their customer service and the claimed they never shipped anything from amazon. I guess that was a lie.

This happens on Newegg market place as well.

>Buyer beware - my wife hates Amazon and goes out of her way to not purchase from them. She has encountered several vendors on Walmart marketplace that simply place orders with Amazon at 100% markup

ebay sellers do the same. I pay using paypal on ebay, just to get a gift package from amazon prime. Stopped using ebay and every scammer like that got negatives from me. They are still cheaper than non-amazon sellers

How is it a scam though? Seems just like regular business, i.e. selling something for more than you bought it for.