If online shopping were truly such a terribly scammy UX in 100% of cases people would stop using it or shift to shopping from trusted sellers who recognize the tremendous amount of value they can capture by not scamming people.
That slide has already started. I can't buy stuff on Amazon anymore, because I don't trust the quality or that I'm not scammed. Unless I trust the author I'd question buying self published books. There's a number of Chinese website, like Wish, that I don't understand. Why bother shipping an item to a customer if you're running a scam? People order dress and get a plastic Christmas tree... Why even bother sending the tree? Why produce shitty products that break after first use, why not just straight up rob people, seem more genuine and with less environmental impact.
There are whole categories of products that can not longer be bought online and an even larger category that can only be purchased from trusted companies.
The level of scams have reached new heights in the past year and unless we do something to address "A.I." generated content the internet will drown in useless nonsense.
Could be the same reasons Scam Contractors do "some work" if you hire someone to redo your bathroom, and they take the money and run, that is clear criminal fraud. If they take the money, so some amount of work, then run it becomes a civil contract dispute.
Plausible deniability.
"There seems to have been some..." looks up excuse for the day "... unfortunate mix-up with your order."
Lots of people will just not react, because it's not worth their money and at least they received something.
All you need is a system to authenticate reputable sellers. Instead of looking at the stars on a product and clicking “buy now,” folks just need so ask: do I know this seller? Is this the ACTUAL publisher selling me this book?
I’d rather go into a real shop anyway. Unless it’s buying some hard-to-find item there’s no excuse.
You’re assuming that scams don’t make their way into regular distributors as they try to cut corners and maintain competitiveness.
You already see established brands lower the quality of their products after the first round of reviews online. If found out, they just blame manufacturing. Sorry.
In most ways, buying from a brick-and-mortar establishment is a better choice than buying online.
In my mind we’re talking about what is a better solution to the problem, and it’s that companies WILL protect their IP. If someone buys fake Patagonia, Patagonia loses out on a sale.
Amazon doesn’t own much of anything IP-Wise on their marketplace in the grand scheme. And they don’t care who buys what as long as products are moving. It’s easier for them to just pay out returns than handle the actual problem.
And when you have a dispute with a seller that came through a marketplace, your dispute should be with the marketplace and it is then up to the marketplace to recover the value of the goods from the seller.
Costco bucks this trend though
Because they have a warehouse full of ugly misprinted clothes and need to get rid of them. and those clothes still cost (some) money to make or acquire.
and as others have said, not sending anything is wire fraud, and outright scams will catch criminal charges; one more line on an Interpol indictment. Crappy or underperforming goods are a civil issue, and no one is launching an international lawsuit over a $100 item
"How to verify any claim" has to become a formal subject like math and reading to be taught in stages over several years. It has to have real homework problems to practice different strategies. But in the end, do we come up with different ratings or logic categories to say this particular question is fifth degree hard to get right? Can we identify the elements that build trust? Does it help in poker if you know another player's family? Does it help in voting for student body president if they previously served as class president? Is it better to buy a blender from the same company that made your favorite dishwasher? Can you take a chance on a newcomer if they don't speak your language or have your accent? What if some claim hasn't been published in a peer-reviewed journal I recognize?
Scams are high, but not so high that you won't usually get what you asked for.
Obviously in a world where every online retailer is nearly useless, a guy who creates an online retailer that is not useless would immediately have anyone he personally tells about it as customers, and anyone they tell about it, and so on (since in this hypothetical, everyone is desperate for a good retailer).
Plus they send you candy
I mean you get scammed maybe twice by a company, then buy somewhere else. You quickly realize that it is better spending 3-4 times the amount of money for something that will last 10 years than buying stuff that do not work or keep breaking after a few months/years.
I am too poor to be able to afford buying cheap stuff.
Most people still just buy the cheapest version of an item they are looking for.
Also, I am not trying to hyper optimize my use of time, but rather I find the experience of huge selection, fake reviews mixed with sponsored listings to be very unpleasant. I have slightly more faith in quality control at a department store, or even a dedicated housewares store.
One of the depots used by DHL when they "can't find" my building (even though the place predates the formation of the Soviet Union, let alone its collapse) is about a mile away and I don't have a car. This is fine unless it rains, but it's not even conveniently on my way to anything interesting.
I bought a VOIP phone from the media store recently. When I was there looking at them, and feeling them etc, I was thinking how there is no way I could have picked the right one from an online shop. I might have never known there was something better, I guess. But being able to hold them helped me pick one I thought I would like.
Roost Stand
Accessories4less
Svsound
Maybe Amazon brands will at least be predictable, but the non-Amazon brands on Amazon will be increasingly counterfeits and noise.
(A contributor to the current problem of eroding non-Amazon brands with counterfeits seems to be Amazon's commingling from different marketplace sellers of the "same ASIN". And the current mass-spam search DoS of random-name brands and near-identical products from overseas sellers is also a problem. Amazon can not only shield their own brands from both of those problems, but can also exercise more supply chain integrity control for its brands than is possible for the non-Amazon brands if Amazon doesn't cooperate.)
They identify widely ordered products and source their own version to sell. Why is that a negative? Costco does the same. As long as they vet the quality (my experience with AmazonBasic products has been fine), seems like a win-win?
Of course, because that helps sell the Amazon brand goods.
You’d have to duplicate this to take them on.
Very difficult to get a hold of someone when they lose a package even when they explicitly tell you “contact us”.
But if you stick to inconsequential items, it’s great. I needed a few USBC cables and charging cables the other day and got them next day at half the price. I checked the local stores and none had what I was after.
But yeah, I agree with your point
I realize that it’s apparently way worse in the US, but there supposedly are issues here as well, I just never encountered them (or the products are so well-faked that it’s a distinction without a difference).
Fast delivery, a lot of choices, both "Aliexpress but faster delivery for a price", but also EU products, and a customer service that does pretty much anything asked.
I don't know if we can say that a store with unlabeled aisles can be a source of curation.
Natural foods stores have much more stringent standards on things like artificial colors, animal treatment, and use of chemicals.
For example, Tide Original is banned in New York for having too much of a cancer-causing chemical. Costco sells it. Costco sells products with artificial colors linked to ADHD in children. Costco’s best organic eggs are visibly and nutritionally inferior to eggs from pasture-raised chickens.
The fact that Costco doesn’t sell low quality private label and discount brand items has more to do with customer demographic than trust and curation.
This is also the store that allows third-party companies’ representatives to harass customers about solar panels and DirecTV in the store. “Trustworthy.”
They’re really no different on “trust” than Walmart or Target, and I think people need to stop being a part of its retail cult and take it for what it is: a store with good prices on staple goods.
What they said is that Costco is upfront about what they're selling, rarely sells defective products, and offers a very generous return policy in the (rare) case you are dissatisfied with a purchase.
Those aren't that far off from Walmart or Target, because those are also generally reasonable retailers. I would say Costco offers better value on their products overall.
If you ask more of that from any retailer, good luck finding anyplace to purchase anything.
And speaking of convenience, it would be a big shame if we had to go back to physical stores for non-trivial purchases because we can't trust anything online.
In short, the store that serves what I want is usually the huge sell-everything store.
This already happens over and over, and with AI it’s only going to be worse. Company makes a decent product, gains reputation, and then strip mines their good will for quick cash while quality plummets. After a while, you just distrust the whole online shopping experience. Even if someone is selling a good product, the lemons are ruining the whole market.
I’m surprised that places like Walmart or Target haven’t gotten burned by cross listings. They could drop the program and advertise as alternative to Amazon. If Amazon had “sold by Amazon” filter, it would be a lot more usable.
Some people have. This is one of the main reasons why I stopped using Amazon years ago.
But lots of people won't. If people were that rational, then the thousands of straight-up obvious and traditional scams perpetrated every day wouldn't still work.
at some point technology is going to stop being something that we interact with through a screen and a keyboard. Google maps will be there, where ever you go, all the time. No more getting lost or wondering where anything is located. You will just know. or at least, be told.
Something else to consider is the fallibility of human memory. As we generate more information we're gonna have to start abstracting and delegating some of those storage and retrieval tasks to the computer, trusting it completely. Today maybe you can remember things but what about your parents?
You don't need to be able to generate correct regexes to create a blogspam article about regexes that will go to the top of the search results.
I think this puts the blame in the wrong place; LLMs are too dumb to be useful, but it's the users who are too dumb to realise that, or too unethical to care.
I buy board games on sites that only sell board games.
I buy electronics/computer parts on sites that only sell that.