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Comment by adra | Hacker News Reader

Racing to the bottom has never been so steep. I was trying to buy an android auto wired to wireless dongle and all I see are temporary garbage re-skins of the same products from half a dozen suppliers that likely won't exist next year. I've never felt so apathetic about using Amazon. I've definitely moved away from them as much as possible alas. It's starting to stink like eBay.

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I've been skeptical of Amazon ever since I learned that they bin inventory from all sellers together at the warehouse, so you could pay extra to buy from the manufacturer's official store and still be sent a cheap knockoff.

Amazon does not universally comingle. There are many exempt product categories in addition to the seller's ability to opt in/out. If you buy a product from a specific seller which arrives with a stuck-on barcode in addition to the UPC, that product probably wasn't commingled.

(The fact that this information is so important and hidden is of course inexcusable)

Is the barcode sticker a way of changing the identifier so that it specifically cannot be co-binned?

The ASIN is the product identifier, 10 characters, and it's what the buyer usually sees. Amazon would use something else behind the scenes to ensure things aren't comingled, probably FNSKU.

If the ASIN was different it wouldn't be comingled, but I don't think Amazon wants sellers all creating their own ASINs and thus new product pages when one already exists for the product.

Anybody who has used Amazon enough has witnessed when there's multiple separate listings for the same product and how annoying it is to compare.

Honestly I don't care about the minutia of commingling. The past few orders I've gotten through Amazon have been counterfeit and/or used.

When a video game (Persona 5 Royal edition) came out, I purchased a brand new copy (this is important) from Amazon. I received the case of Persona 5 Royal Edition, but with the normal Person 5 game (for people unfamiliar, the royal edition was sort of greatest hits re-release a couple years after the initial release). So something was wrong that I receive a game not in the shrink rap and with the wrong game. This really soured me on Amazon.

When the very hyped Magic the Gathering Lord of the Rings sets came out, there was an expensive pack of all of the 'commander decks'. Apparently almost every person who ordered it ended up just getting one of the four decks instead. Amazon didn't proactively refund or... do anything.

Is it useful to even consider whether shrink wrapped? How hard it is for a scammer to re-shrink wrap something? Not too hard it seems.

> temporary garbage re-skins of the same products from half a dozen suppliers that likely won't exist next year.

This has been my experience with Amazon too. Better to let direct sellers like Temu and Shein sell these products at much lower prices, and Amazon can stick to branded/expensive goods that might need to be returned.

The problem with that idea is that most brands don’t want to be on Amazon. It’s bad for their margins and their brand equity. They rather push their own ecom sites.

Amazon has a hard time getting brands on the platform. Amazon has a problem with cheap unbranded stuff. What’s left in the future?

I'd like to point out that this has to be conscious decision of sorts by Amazon. Amazon UK is pretty much what Amazon US used to be 10 years ago - there's a complete absence of the aliexpress/temu grade 'SHTORY' 'FNARGL' branded products, the search shows you what you searched for instead of random junk and Amazon JP is of a different order entirely, that site is a gleaming spire.

This is clearly a choice that's being made by Amazon US to turn the platform into this... whatever it is...

Reasons? Well, I guess they make sense to somebody.

I get all the 1000 variations on the same shit product with ridiculous brand names on Amazon UK

I guess the rot is creeping in slowly, I haven't used it for a while

A while = a few years?

Yeah, the main difference between Amazon UK and eBay UK is that Amazon's unbranded Alibaba shit is more painful to search through and costs 30-50% more...

This is utterly false for Amazon UK and disprovable by 2 minutes of searching. It’s somewhat incredible to me this claim has been made with a straight face to be honest.

USB Foot Pedal is just one random search that’ll show this.

Mens fleece hoodie, audio recorder, iphone case and electric blanket are full of random named crap.

The problem also extends past these random products and into the seller market too. Even if you search with brand names for a product you want it’ll often be sold by some random new seller preferentially selected due to price undercutting.

The whole platform is rotting from the inside out.

Yeah I live in the UK and was absolutely confused by the comment, Amazon UK is like 98% Chinese no-name brand garbage

For example if I search for 'projector', I get the following brands: XUANPAD, MAGCCUBIC, LQWELL, VOPLLS, CLOKOWE

In retrospect it has been multiple years since I last tried, my bad.

I have to say this really is weird, because there are reputable and high quality Chinese brands that just aren't participating here.

Why is it all crap? Where's the Xiaomi & Hasee tier of products?

Amazon JP is not a "gleaming spire", but I do agree it's not nearly as bad as the horror stories of counterfeiting I keep reading about Amazon US. However, there is still lots and lots of cheap Chinese junk here, but that's pretty easy to discern by just looking at the brand name. As the other poster here said about the UK version, "I get all the 1000 variations on the same shit product with ridiculous brand names on Amazon [JP]."

The other problem with Amazon JP is that returns are not usually free, unless there's a real problem; it's not nearly as easy and free to return stuff as Amazon US.

I am starting to see a lot of brands driving social media traffic directly to Amazon as of recently.

There is definitely a problem with the cheap stuff but I wonder if they're concertedly trying to turn that around somewhat and attract proper brands.

And yet few brands are going to build or run the entire distribution infrastructure themselves. You can buy from NameBrand, allegedly shipped from NameBrand, etc - and it's still distributed through some separate maze of businesses. Amazon is just very visible in being such an intermediary.

Skip the middleman and just get it direct from aliexpress. Sellers there actually care about their seller rating.

There are categories that I'll generally try to avoid buying on Aliexpress (stuff that has a higher risk of being harmful if bad/toxic, e.g. anything in contact with hot food or extended contact with skin), but for small gadgets or tools, there doesn't seem to be a viable alternative.

I can buy the same crap resold at 3x the price (sometimes even with the same slow shipping) with almost zero additional quality control, but that's just buying from Aliexpress with extra steps (and cost).

I can try to get something from a local seller (not necessarily locally made), but I'll have 1/10th of the selection with the price often being 5-10x plus local shipping that costs more than the Aliexpress product with shipping included.

Sure, it's cheaply made, and sure, some of it breaks within a month. But most of the stuff is actually engineered correctly: It's exactly good enough. Just very very barely good enough, but good enough.

Do they? I tend to see 15 vendors of the same item - all claiming to have sold between zero (!) and NN items and having 5999 available ready to ship. With the added complication of using a crappy package delivery company.

Sort by number of orders and look out for items marked with express shipping. My packages are always delivered by the national mail service and if you order items from multiple sellers at the same time aliexpress usually bundles them together so it's only one shipment. I usually get my packages within a couple weeks.

> all I see are temporary garbage re-skins of the same products from half a dozen suppliers that likely won't exist next year

The answer is to only buy stuff on Amazon that is sold by Amazon.

If a product is only FBA (Fulfilled By Amazon) or just a plain third-party listing, then go buy elsewhere. Those listings are where the garbage is.

Sadly Amazon have made it more difficult to search for these. It used to be the case that you could tick a box to filter by seller and accordingly tick the Amazon box. They have now taken that filter away.

I'm not going to post on here how to do it (because they'll probably kill it off pronto), but if you spend a few minutes with Mr Google, you will find one or two work-arounds still exist which are not difficult if you are technically inclined, although admittedly could be tricky to teach a granny to use consistently.

This is just an opportunity for a company that wants to build a brand of high quality items for a higher price to enter. it remains to be seen if people care about quality tho.

There's no lack of high quality brands out there if you look for them. One place I like to find such brands across Europe is the avocado store. There are all small manufacturers, mostly made in Europe with good quality, fair labor, etc.

. https://www.avocadostore.de

The real problem is the missing middle. Reasonable quality at a reasonable price. Its gone for most things now.

Absolutely. If you don't target high quality, you'll be competing for price at the late stage race to the bottom.

Agreed the quality has gotten bad. Regarding AA Wireless, there is a github repo where someone has implimemted a bridge with a raspberry Pi Zero - we've been using it in our Chevy truck for the past month with zero issues.

I bought AA wireless for this; I think it was the original product.

Depending on where you live that might no longer be an option, AAWireless is fighting a copyright infringements claim and have halted sales to North America. I hear some people complain the updates bricking their device - has that affected you in anyway?

They've recently relisted the dongle back up on Amazon in the past day, and they were selling it through their website as well. But yeah, trademark dispute. I personally bought the MA1 when it was first available and it's been great.

https://9to5google.com/2023/12/22/aawireless-android-auto-ad...

Sorry for the slight offtopic but is there an equivalent trusted brand for CarPlay? Amazon CP offering is exactly as described by OP, endless reskins of the same crappy products, stuffed to the gills with hundreds of fake reviews (many via review hijacking) in the few weeks that they live on the platform. Then a wave of bad reviews from actual customers who got a lemon.

Review sites are just as bad, they get a product for free, give it a stellar review after 1 day of playing with it, and move on to create the next SEO spam article.

If AA Wireless is really good, maybe someone has a recommendation for the "other garden".

Sorry, I don't have any experience with Carplay, but I'd probably search the r/CarPlay subreddit and look at people's experiences and reviews. I found this thread[0] that suggests you may have luck with the Carlinkit and CPlay2Air. Good luck

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/CarPlay/comments/10eb6kg/does_wirel...

I picked up a name brand motorola one that arrived 11 hours later last night. Works great. Was the first result.

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