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Comment by jsf01 | Hacker News Reader

Their lack of success might not be entirely pandemic economy driven as the article suggests. I was part of that cohort that discovered and ordered from Wayfair around the start of the pandemic. In 3/3 cases, what I ordered turned out to be of poor quality and slightly different from what was pictured on their website. I’ve had this experience with Amazon and other platforms from time to time, too, but never so consistently. So I decided not to order from there again. I have to wonder if their declining popularity is just a result of other customers like myself having been burned too many times.

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Same experience. Poor quality items, confusing dupes with different prices, not particularly cheap compared to other retailers. That said, their customer service was great, likely at great expense to them. Often they would replace an incorrect item without requesting the original be returned, and in one case they shipped a family member the wrong item 3 times before finally sending the correct item. They were told to keep all 4 items.

Damage and returns are a huge cost for the company, on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Same here. First time order, and it was poor quality so I requested a return. They refunded and didn’t even want it back. It was $200 but I guess they knew it was junk and not worth the shipping.

I ordered from the once and was pleased enough with the result, although it was literally months between order and delivery. At a certain point I thought I was being scammed. The main reason I did not order from them again though, was because although they have a huge inventory, most of it seems...cheap. Lots of assembly-required manufactured wood Scandinavian-lite options, not much that looked permanent. I literally couldn't find anything that looked both durable and in a style I didn't mind. I really wanted to like them because for me buying furniture is still an unsolved problem.

Expensive IKEA without the meatballs and shopping experience.

While I've browsed around Wayfair in the past, I was mostly put off by the way that there usually seem to be a lot of identical items from different manufacturers - which always gave it a somewhat unscrupulous feel.

Yeah, same situation here. I was looking for furniture after a recent move and ended up sticking to Ikea and a local furniture discounter where I could see/touch it in person, even though I strongly preference online shopping, simply because Wayfair and other sites like it felt like "Wish" for furniture. Lots of obvious shell company names producing identical designs, all manufactured on the fourth-shift as counterfeits/knock-offs of well known products, or just low-cost/low-quality designs sold at significantly above cost.

So I got lucky. I was using wayfair early on and the quality was always great and exactly what I wanted. I think my average order must be have been between 1-2k with them, a couple of times a year. Haven't used them since 2016(?) though.

I was very skeptical of them early on, I do think they are a drop shipper of sorts.

But I have several desks and a shed and even an AC unit that were the best price, higher than ikea quality, and good support. They have good return policy too.

Maybe it depends on what you buy?

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