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Comment by dc3k | Hacker News Reader

The majority of listings are cheap rebranded junk from brands with random six letter all caps names. Or in this case, cheap fake junk.

Amazon doesn't care.

They don't care about the flood of fake reviews They don't care that sellers get a pile of 5-star reviews, then re-use the same listing to sell something completely different

They also don't seem to care what the words "free", "two-day", and "guaranteed" mean either, because I am constantly given the option of "FREE two-day shipping" that 1) I am paying for and 2) has a delivery date 9 days in the future. The "guaranteed delivery date" changes between when I order and when the thing ships _every time_ and I complain to support chat and get $5 off my order _every time_

It's garbage all the way down.

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AliExpress recently introduced 15 day shipping. You instantly get your money back shouldn't it arrive. Support and mediation being way faster and more customer oriented anyway.

No idea why people use Amazon to buy china trash, when they could buy the trash themself at at least half the price.

>No idea why people use Amazon to buy china trash

No idea why people buy trash at all. Also I've no idea how are people unable to browse, filter products and read "sold by" information. I personally don't buy anything that's not "sold by Amazon" or at least "fulfilled by Amazon". If such product doesn't exist there I go elsewhere. Simple

Sold by Amazon just means that someone is warehousing his china trash with Amazon. This just increases the minimal markup (so the price) but not the average product quality.

Even some Amazon branded products are just obvious rebranded China trash.

No "fulfilled by Amazon" means that someone is warehousing his china trash with Amazon. Sold by Amazon is both warehoused and fulfilled by Amazon

On top of that they have a horrendous site and shopping experience. That people choose to go to amazon is beyond me. Don't you have other options?

Not to mention the bizarrely bad search engine which is so utterly useless it can only be deliberately bad. This is an example of the consequences of monopoly you've nowhere else to go so they can ignore your dissatisfaction.

I don't have horrendous site and shopping experience using Amazon, to be honest.

The search result is average but I mostly just buy branded items, so not a big deal.

Shipping experience is getting worse and worse (in term of speed), but still ahead of others.

Amazon shipping is free after $25 even if you're not a prime member, which already better than most. And if you're prime you got free 2-day shipping (which nowadays often goes to 3 or 4 days, but this isn't my biggest concern). The only online shop I've used that has better shipping is Apple.

Not to mention, their return policy is very generous.

In 20 years of me being a customer with Amazon, I have never once had a problem with them. Returns are quick and easy. Payment systems work.

I can't say the same for other stores. And thus, other stores successively lost my business (with the exception of some seriously fringe stuff, like speciality tea, electronics components ... and computer parts)

The same for me, and the interface is actually better than many websites, including pretty much all larger warehouse-style stores.

Same experience here. Only explanation I can think of is that people are buying the things that are obviously scams.

Yes, this is the problem. They are convenient for the customer. It does not mean that their business model is close to what man can call «evil»

To be fair, that's the problem with OTHER vendors, not with them. They would have been free to put the customer first as well, but chose not to. Why should I as the customer accept subpar service just because the only place I get decent one is morally ambiguous to some people?

I have absolutely nothing but positive things to say about amazon, frankly. Maybe their service in the UK is better than elsewhere, but at this point they are 10x better than any competition. The selection is great, nearly everything can be delivered the next day(or the same day for some items), and the support and returns process is absolutely fantastic. Try returning an item to Currys or Argos or even a high end store like John Lewis and compare with Amazon - amazon is just better, full stop. I've had 220 orders with them last year and the worst thing that happened was that one order was a day late - they just added a month of prime to my account when I complained. No fakes, no issues.

Like seriously, what other options would you even consider at this point? Overpriced high street stores? Other tech giants who have awful return policies and/or customer support? I really don't see any alternative.

That's basically how it is here in Japan too, with the added bonus that the site supports English really well, and auto-translates stuff that isn't in English. Prices are almost always lower than elsewhere, shipping is free for anything over 2000 yen, and while the return process isn't fantastic (you have to physically take it to the post office), it's free and it exists, which is more than I can say for the competition. The free returns alone is a big reason to shop on Amazon here. Most Japanese retailers will not accept returns without a very good reason (e.g. product defect). The site design is much better and easier to use too; Japanese companies are notorious for having truly awful UIs and web design.

What sites have a significantly better shopping experience?

AliExpress: - better search - delivery time suggestions usually match - way better customer support - No questions asked money back if the item is poor or delivery to slow - Not believing you buy a eco brand product when you actually just buy a rebrand from China anyway.

The reality is 90% of the shit on Amazon is straight out of China. There is no reason other than lazyness to not import it yourself.

I’m a big fan of Aliexpress and used to buy a fair amount from there after finding it on Amazon.

Now, if I see something on Aliexpress, I’ll check to see if it’s just as cheap or slightly cheaper on Amazon. Much of Aliexpress has inflated away the deep savings that were there in the 2014-2019 era.

Pretty much any site local to your country. Amazons search is broken, finding anything is a major hassle and many of the search results are in fact ads. Checkout is horrible, Amazon cannot, or will not, give you the actual price until the very last page on the checkout flow. Shipping costs are horrendous, often shipping 30 - 50% of the actual cost. Random items cannot be shipped, for some reason you might be able to have a shirt shipped if you pick "small" or "XL", but not not "Medium" or "Large". But you can't tell the site to ignore any items that you can't buy anyway, so filtering is a manual process. Which reminds me, why does Amazon even pretend to have filters, they don't work.

The only reason to shop at Amazon anymore is selection. There are a ton of products and books I cannot buy locally. Amazon is often the only company that will sell and ship to Denmark.

The annoying part is they're a necessary evil.

I was recently looking for a music book. I could have it delivered next day for included with Prime, and would cost me nothing.

Ordering from one of the UK's most popular music stores on the other hand was more expensive, charged £5 for delivery and said 3-5 days delivery.

Which sites do you prefer? At least as a Canadian, I find every non Amazon site pretty terrible. Amazon has the best shoe size searching interface of any site. It has the best kitchen tool search interface.

Amazon outperforms more niche retailers in search in their niches.

Newegg has really great product search feature for PC parts.

They got third party sellers listed for a few years now.

It is perfectly ok for buying simple and cheap things. I have cables, nightstand clock, extension lead, bike light, foldback clips and such nicknacks from Amazon. The same crap you'd get elsewhere, in relevant shops in your vicinity or webshops alike. One click and its there next day. Also the return experience is typically good if you run into something you don't like.

For important and quality stuff yes, people should go elsewhere.

(Ok, I had 2 pieces of important items from reliable brands from Amazon last year - e.g. Samsung SSD, not dozens of TBs though of course : ) -, but that is an exception to the rule)

I never buy there. There are several Dutch webshops that are vastly superior, and as a result, amazon.nl hasn't been able to get much traction here. I'm surprised other countries don't have superior competitors.

Switzerland here, we do. Ours even takes crypto as payment for like 6 years now and next day delivery is the standard.

They also have actual support. Something that Amazon missed the boat on long ago

> On top of that they have a horrendous site and shopping experience. That people choose to go to amazon is beyond me. Don't you have other options?

Oh boy, be glad you don't have to shop online in Japan. Compared to that Amazon is the pinnacle of user experience.

Recently I wanted to buy an 4090 from a Japanese shop, and I had to go through *six* online shops to buy one. And it's not because it was out of stock, oh no, but because of various bullshit reasons which prevented me from buying one.

Some of the issues that are common in Japanese e-commerce (I've experienced all of these myself, and I don't shop much):

- A lot of shops don't accept debit/credit cards.

- Shops that accept a debit/credit card often will accept your order, reserve the money (so it's not a technical limitation), but the very next day cancel your order with a message "sorry, your card was issued overseas; your order is now cancelled, try again with a Japanese issued card"

- Shops that require you to verify through your phone to make an account (which is required to buy anything). You give them your phone, and they *call* you. You then have to pick it up, the call disconnects, then they send you an SMS with a code, which you type into the website to register the account. If you miss the initial automated call you have to wait 15 minutes.

- You get automatically subscribed to a spammy newsletter (up to THREE EMAILS A DAY) once you register an account.

- There's no "unsubscibe" link in the spammy newsletter emails.

- You need to fill out a form to unsubscribe from it, and it's not automatic.

- Even if you fill out a form it might not unsubscribe you anyway. (It's possible they're doing the unsubscribing manually.)

- If you delete an account the spammy newsletter still keeps on coming, but now there's no way to unsubscribe from it.

- If the name on your account doesn't exactly match the name on your card they won't accept it (because the name on the card includes your middle name, and that's too long to even type it into the form on the site).

- Cancelling an order doesn't actually unreserve/unblock the money they reserved, so if you tried to buy something expensive (say, an 4090 for $2000) and your order got cancelled then you need to wait for a month before that money is automatically unblocked and you can actually use it again. (Although I'm sure you could probably call the CC company's support to get it fixed on your side.)

So, no, even though I really don't want to give any extra money to Bezos the thing is that shopping through Amazon just works. I click on the item I want, I click order, and that's it. I get charged and a day or two later it comes to my doorstep. No bullshit.

To be fair, it's not that bad if you live in Japan (by that I mean you have a Japanese credit card and phone number).

I've encountered all the things you said (for "don't accept cards" though, I haven't seen one since forever. Could you name one?), but it's in the minority.

I have like 90% success rate even when I was buying from the US using a US credit card. And I buy from Japan a lot. I don't blame them for not allowing oversea cards, either: credit card fraud is really rampant.

> for "don't accept cards" though, I haven't seen one since forever. Could you name one?

I don't really remember, but basically I just went on Kakaku, searched for the 4090, and just went through the list trying to order an 4090 going through each shop and moving on to the next when it proved impossible to actually make an order.

A nice hack for some of the shops from which it's normally impossible to buy from but which support Amazon Pay is to just use Amazon Pay; if you pay through that none of the usual card-related bullshit applies (suddenly you can use a card that was issued overseas, the name doesn't have to match exactly, etc.).

It's sorry that Japan society isn't good for foreigners, but Japanese online shops are fine for me (native Japanese), except annoying newsletters you point out.

Also cheapest kakaku shops may be nervous about avoiding cc fraud, and 4090 is very expensive and easy to exchange to cash, so it would be worst experience. I've never had received phone calls from shop, but it looks reasonable to verify 300kJPY bought from newcomer.

The big thing you left out here was Amazon's relatively-easy returns process and policy. Japanese retailers are not known for easy returns at all.

The credit-card thing though makes some sense as others have said. If you live in Japan, you really should have a Japanese-issued credit card. It makes life a lot easier.

Try dospara, although I have had my account for over 10 years, I don't remember any issues like that with them.

Obligatory mention of McMaster-Carr. I'd accept both a price premium and a limited selection of goods, if I could use a website like MMC's for generic shopping.

That's the point, no

Their seller systems are complete garbage too - a real jumbled mess of options scattered through various pages that have been upgraded by different parties over the years!

It's funny to end up in interfaces/UIs of previous generations. Like today I wanted to stop part of an order I just made and ended up in some old legacy view to select which item order I wanted to revoke.

It would probably be little work to renew this page, at least adapt it visually to the current design. But they just don't care. That wouldn't create value I suppose.

While you may be right, I can tell you from experience that what seems simple can sometimes be embarrassingly complicated at Amazon. I previously worked there and my team once spent 2 months adding a new option in a dropdown box. This was on one of the seller-facing pages.

There are parts of Amazon that have a ton of legacy code and ownership between those systems can be a real mess.

I've switched away from Amazon. Used it since maybe 2006, and loved it back then, but as you say, garbage.

In contrast, most other online stores (the ones I use, selling their own good quality products, not wish/ali) are now a pleasure to use, with fast and very cheap shipping.

I would like to...but when I want to buy some random product and the first thing I need to do is find a store that sells it, and then I add the product to my cart on that store and check out, and then it shows me a shipping price that's MORE than the product I'm buying, and takes 10 days to deliver...I end up heading back to Amazon. :(

Same here, been a user from the beginning, but switched away as I was only getting used hardware (in Germany) when ordering and being sold new Amazon hardware.

It isn’t that Amazon don’t care - it’s that this is what consumers demand and are most happy with.

Most people will never realise they’ve em been defrauded - they'll just be happy with the deal they got on their 16TB SSD. Heck, if you opened it up and showed them that they had been defrauded, they would likely be angry with you, not Amazon.

I mean, if this isn’t the case, explain politics to me.

> It isn’t that Amazon don’t care - it’s that this is what consumers demand and are most happy with.

No, it's not. Customers don't have a say in this; they choose out of what's available, accepting what they can get, because they're not able to communicate their preferences, and are easily duped by the vendors who understand the space better than them.

> I mean, if this isn’t the case, explain politics to me.

People don't have a say in this; they choose out of what's available, accepting what they can get, because they're not able to communicate their preferences, and are easily duped by the politicians who understand the space better than them.

The general population has very little agency on the mass market and in the political process.

It’s minmax - at what point do you hit optimal balance between consumer contentment and cheapness of goods, and thereby maximise your revenue?

The answer is by deceiving the consumer. The only variable is by what degree, and in some categories, the degree can be egregious. In others, it’s smaller (“100% juice!”, “full self driving”, “unlimited data!”).

This is why I say it’s what consumers want - as the market demonstrates it to be so, otherwise this would not exist.

It’s the same in politics. How much can you get away with before they squeak? Turns out, an awful lot.

You switched from "what consumers want" to "get away with" in the last paragraph. But those two phrases are not synonymous.

Consumers "getting what they want" implies their actual preferences are being fulfilled. But they're not. Instead of getting what they want, the consumers get worst possible things the sellers can get away with ("what the market can bear", I guess) - and they can get away with quite a lot, thanks to deception you mention.

My objection is with saying consumers "get what they want", because it has opposite connotations to what really happens.

Oh, don't be absurd. Customers obviously don't actually want this. Amazon is a monopoly—not in the sense of "is literally the only vendor", but "is considered the default by at least a plurality of Americans"—and has the money and the clout to just keep doing what they're doing even if it's creating friction, frustration, and money loss to some customers.

You seem to be mistaking the theory of an ideal free market with the messy reality of markets with incomplete and asymmetric information, high price sensitivity, and a lack of time and mental energy to shop around and otherwise gain more information and other options.

So… stop using it?

I do now get books from a local bookshop, cables direct from Anker, electronics from a UK high street chain, etc. But sometimes, due to Amazon's monopolistic behaviour, there are times when Amazon is the only choice.

I think the problem is harder than you make out. How do you expect them to combat this while still allowing new sellers to have vast reach.

If I opened a shop on the high street selling fake hard drives I’d be shut down. Why does Amazon get a pass simply because they’re doing it at scale?

Where I live in the US there are flea markets with stalls selling fake electronics like they have on Amazon. Neither the stalls nor the flea markets get shut down.

But is Amazon a flea market or a mall?

> If I opened a shop on the high street selling fake hard drives I’d be shut down

so who's doing the shutting down?

The law, which applies to everyone except companies like Amazon for some reason.

What law?

I would really hope the US has some consumer protection laws. If it doesn't, they should address that.

Are these fake items also accessible from the EU? I'd expect the EU wouldn't take kindly to these sort of scams.

Well, they do show up in UK Amazon, page 2 of results after searching for "portable SSD"

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mobile-External-Portable-Storage-La...

I routinely see reviews on German Amazon complaining about products lacking legally required certification or safety features. Those products continue being sold on Amazon. My guess is that for every product that gets shut down another pops up and Amazon drags its heels when confronted.

Yes. I searched for 16TB SSD drive” on UK Amazon, and quite a few £90 models matching the description were there.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/truth-advertising

IANAL but it's fraud, which is a federal crime in the USA.

Trademark, FCC and other safety regulations etc

It looks like our best hope is market forces, as people stop buying from Amazon after seeing this constant drip-feed of Amazon's poor quality control.

I never stumbled across one of those offerings, but are those fake SSDs sold by Amazon or by a marketplace vendor? Because Amazon's management of its marketplace can only be described as hands-off at best, but legally they are not the seller.

How many people say "Oh no, I didn't buy this from Amazon, I bought it from Amazon _Marketplace_"? I've never heard anyone say it, so perhaps it's a rather technical distinction.

Amazon is paid to list it (they're "sponsored listings"), store it, deliver it, and profits from the sale. I think we can hold them accountable for the sale. It's somewhat akin to how "handling stolen goods" is just as much a crime as stealing them in the first place. If Amazon can't guarantee what they're selling, they shouldn't be selling it.

> allowing new sellers to have vast reach

Right now new sellers do not stand a chance unless they work in a niche (and even then you can't find anything on Amazon anymore unless you already know brand name + model name).

These fake/spam sellers are clogging up everything.

Amazon could easily combat this, maybe not 100%, but 1-2 quality well trained human moderators (nothing outsourced, only focused on this single job, no other support roles) would probably be enough to signicantly improve the situation.

I am going to make the claim that I could clean up a product category by myself in a few hours.

The long tail can be hard to deal with, but let's not talk about the problem being hard until they start dealing with at least the trivial stuff: obvious scams and item swaps. Right now they just ignore the issues.

It’s the fish John West rejects that makes them the best.

I expect Amazon to control quality so that new sellers will have vast reach instead of Amazon becoming a toxic swamp that nobody goes near.

The same way every other site on the internet does: a report button.

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