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Comment by savanaly | Hacker News Reader

I only need to buy something online every couple months, maybe once a month at most. I hate shopping so I'll be damned if I will spend 1 more second thinking about the process than I have to. Amazon always has the thing, ships it in 2 days, I can be relatively sure I'm not getting ripped off by more than +/- 25% and that's good enough for me. I've never had any issues with fakes that HN complains about all the time.

I think Amazon lives off the backs of folks like me, or maybe people that shop slightly more than me but not much. If I was the type of person shopping for things everyday I'd imagine I would branch out. But for the vast majority of folks consistency is king.

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> I can be relatively sure I'm not getting ripped off by more than +/- 25%

I think this is the only thing keeping them afloat. How are you so sure you’re not getting ripped off? Did you know counterfeits can be sold under the “sold by anazon.com” branding because of co-mingling?

I used to have the same view as you until I started getting shoddy products consistently from brands that were otherwise high quality if I purchased in store. Then I realized I had no way to tell if what I was purchasing was real, and I started questioning why the lack of toothpaste I bought tasted different than normal and had off-color printing.

I’m just increasingly finding it not worth the worry, especially for things I put I my body.

> How are you so sure you’re not getting ripped off?

If you do not _feel_ you've been ripped off, does it matter?

Yes, as it is preying on the clueless

Just because you don’t realize something gave you cancer doesn’t mean you can safely ignore the cancer.

Feeling like you got ripped off is one thing, having your house burn down from faulty electronics is much worse etc etc.

bought an apple charger, nearly set my house on fire. I opened up the one I bought from amazon, and the old one I had at home. weight, number of components, etc clearly told me it was a differnt product. Yeah I was done buying anything electronic from amazon.

Yes. I bought a ladle from Amazon. I noticed from some of the comments that a lot of people were getting a knock off ladle.

When I arrived, I checked to see if it was legitimate, and… it was not. It was a knock-off.

It was fine as a ladle. It ladled things. I never would’ve noticed or complained if I hadn’t seen the rules. No harm, no foul, right?

Absolutely not. That day I made a rule that I do not buy anything that goes on your skin, in your body, or health and safety kit from Amazon. If I can’t trust their ladles are authentic, I can’t trust their sunscreen or thermometers are authentic.

So, while the ladle didn’t harm me directly, it did pretty significant change my purchase habits.

Well, you don't know that the ladle didn't harm you directly. If it's made of substandard materials that leech carcinogens into your food, the effects might take years to appear.

Or anything that involves electricity.

> Did you know counterfeits can be sold under the “sold by anazon.com” branding because of co-mingling?

I have also had a bad experience with "Sold by Amazon.com" so I'm not questioning the veracity of what you are saying. But how does this work? How can someone get a counterfeit product under this umbrella?

"Sold by Amazon" comingles identical SKUs from different sellers in their warehouses.

Seller A sells real Product Z on Amazon. Seller B sells fake Product Z on Amazon. When you order Product Z that is "Sold on Amazon" you might get a real one provided by Seller A, or you might get a fake one sold by Seller B

I believe what you are saying is possible for “Shipped by Amazon” not “sold by Amazon”.

I believe your description was accurate before ca. 2015, but at some point they reportedly started making commingling the default even for "Sold by Amazon" items. Commingling isn't the only issue, either; there's still the problem of products for which Amazon was never an authorized retailer and so their listing/SKU may have been created to sell counterfeits in the first place. In any case, there have been multiple lawsuits specifically alleging that counterfeit items were "Sold by Amazon" [1] [2] [3].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201125141347/https://www.forbe...

[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4495986/1/apple-inc-v-m...

[3] https://www.geekwire.com/2016/daimler-ag-sues-amazon-knockof...

My understanding is, if I sell an item with a SKU[1] 123456, and use "fulfillment by Amazon" it goes in an Amazon warehouse in a bucket with all the other items of the same SKU using Amazon's shipping. Then my inventory becomes just a number in a database.

People selling DVDs on Amazon were complaining about bad reviews because someone bought from them, but got a counterfeit sold by someone else.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_keeping_unit

I mean literally the next sentence after your quote says "I've never had any issues with fakes that HN complains about all the time" so I'm pretty positive they do know about it.

>" I hate shopping so I'll be damned if I will spend 1 more second thinking about the process than I have to. Amazon always has the thing, ships it in 2 days, I can be relatively sure I'm not getting ripped off by more than +/- 25% and that's good enough for me."

My experience before I got rid of Amazon years ago started out similar but then I found that the process of shopping took longer and longer - trying to compare 50+ versions of the same thing, filtering out dubious looking sellers and brands etc. I actually started to feel like the experience was worse than just going to a store and carrying the the thing home. I also started to think the prices weren't really all that great because they became the same or or often slightly more expensive that what I could find in a brick and mortar store. Couple this with a general decline in Amazon's last mile delivery which seemed to be a whole other shit show where the contracting parcel service would mark them as delivered even though they hadn't actually been deliver yet and it just became a really miserable experience. Should you need to contact customer service and speak to someone you can pretty much dispense with another half hour of your time.

>"But for the vast majority of folks consistency is king."

For me there was very little consistency in the Amazon experience. It was hit and miss. From reading this article though it sounds like the thing that is consistent is an increasingly worse experience.

For me it's the fact that they have literally _everything_ on their store.

I'm not going to go out and make 3 different accounts on sites that aren't Amazon, when I could save time and buy anything ranging from auto parts to PC parts to groceries on the same website.

Yes, a lot of it is rebadged Ali junk, but guess what, sometimes that junk actually does the work it's supposed to. If I'm buying a plastic towel hook for the bathroom, I really don't care where it comes from or if it's 50c cheaper on another website.

>I can be relatively sure I'm not getting ripped off by more than +/- 25% and that's good enough for me.

Look at Keepa for historic prices

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