Amazon Makes You Pay More for Everything (2023) | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Makes You Pay More for Everything (2023)

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31 pointsijidak17 comments

Misleading title?

Amazon is the only big tech firm I like. They're the only one that I feel I get my money's worth, and that says a lot considering most of the other ones offer free services. They make my life better. I can find things for half the price than at a brick and mortar, it comes fast, and it's almost always about what I expect. I have never gotten the wrong item.

And that's just their product marketplace and logistics services. I don't use any of their other services, I don't use AWS or prime video or any of that stuff. I just use their store.

I have some gripes with them. The big one is their return policy requires me to pay for shipping back or drive an hour to a specific location. I don't like how they're becoming more like eBay by the day. I think the antitrust lawsuit by the FTC has merit. They should not be charging a cut from merchants and then disallowing them from discounting their products on their own websites, it's predatory. But out of all the big online service companies out there, they're the only one I'm happy to allow a little spot in my life. My life is better because I use amazon.

>I can find things for half the price than at a brick and mortar, it comes fast, and it's almost always about what I expect. I have never gotten the wrong item.

Half the price, not sure, but for me the main appeal is I can find the things in the first place. If you need something specific, it's just impossible to find it in the city. There are 10 places that may have it, you go there, nobody knows where what is.

If there was a search engine for brick and mortar I might be inclined to buy there again. But I just can't find anything.

That's my main use as well. On many (most even?) occasions I would gladly pay a small-to-modest premium just to have the thing in my hands today and without worrying about delivery delays, theft, or just the wasteful feeling I get from ordering some smallish item to be boxed up and delivered to my home.

But then I can't find the thing I want. Amazon seems to be doing their level best to make searching a pain in the ass, but it's still leagues ahead of using Maps to hunt down the type of store that may have an item, then going to the website of the store (if they even have one), then looking for the item if they have a shopping/product-list section on their website, then hoping it's even accurate and I don't drive out there just to find they don't actually have the item.

So instead I go on Amazon and deal with scrolling through pages of not-the-thing-I-actually-want and hopefully find the item available for delivery sometime in the next 1-5 days.

What planet are you living on?

The reviews are fake, the no-name brands are hallucinations, and no one should ever buy supplements, food, or safety equipment like climbing rope or fuses from a disreputable platform that sells electrocution hazard USB chargers and does nothing about them. Watch a video or 3 from Louis Rossmann and BigClive.

I have a similar experience to big-green-man. I suspect it massively varies by country. I live in the UK, and as far as I know most people complaining about fake products etc. are in the US.

The biggest issue with reviews in the UK are the Vine reviews, and occasionally sellers aggregating reviews for unrelated products. Fake products seem to be almost nonexistent (maybe because of stronger market regulation?).

Same/next day delivery is hard to compete with anyway.

I've gotten some cheap crap on a few occasions, sure. That happens when I go to a store too, the difference being most stores don't have a decent alternative to a cheap piece of junk at a reasonable price.

I buy all my supplements on Amazon. I buy paracord and carabiniers on amazon, I've hung more than my body weight from them no problem.

The supply chain at stores is usually more sane, versus intentionally being the wild west.

Carabiners break when they break. You'll only notice if you get unlucky. I think there's carabiners you wouldn't want to use that can hang weight "no problem" for a while.

Problems with supplements are even more undetectable.

Yeah I saw that. They were sus in the past but could not navigate deep into the comments to make a full analysis.

I'm very thrown by the "hidden Buy box" argument. I thought Amazon did that on purpose to hide overpriced items from the wild west that is Amazon's marketplace/sellers. So a t-shirt for $100 gets no Buy box because it's overpriced.

The video argues that this creates a monopoly.

Unfortunately the logic behind the buy box isn't quite that clear.

They could also prefer a listing for a higher price from an established seller over a listing from a new seller, even if they're the brand owner.

They "could" do anything you can posit. This doesn't seem unfortunate - their incentives are well aligned with customer preference.

The argument is that a) is very important for sellers to get a bit button, and that b) Amazon uses that as threat of relaliation to get sellers to behave the way it wants. The latter point is almost the definition of monopoly.

Note that crucially this isn't a matter of interpretation. Amazon either IS doing this, or ISNT. The only question mark is can this be proven in court.

Amazon customer for 25 years. The amount of time and gas I have saved over that time is enormous.

Today I went to physical Walart to buy some butane canisters. I remembered that I also needed a fridge water filter. Of course it was 20% more expensive in Wallmart than Amazon.

I ordered something from walmart.com when the same item became expensive on amazon. The item arrived, a fan, and it was used. Not only that it was dirty to the point it had massive amounts of dust buildup. It had to be in use for months. Sold as new. I start the return process and was told to drop it off at customer service at any store. Get there and they tell me I can’t return it there. Go home, start the process via website. They tell me the vendor will contact me. Days layer they say it was a new item and I must be wrong. Show them pics and they send me a shipping label.

I wasted so much time with this. Never again. Paying $20 for the one on amazon would have saved me a lot of time, which to me was worth more than the $20.

love amazon. next day delivery. no hassle refunds. and usually 10% cheaper than retail.

of course every monopoly eventually becomes enshittified. but so far still OK for me.

I still buy a lot from Amazon but they're definitely on the downswing now. Their app is highly infested with unblockable ads to the point that I will only use their website on a browser with a good ad blocker. I've found that I sometimes get items near the end of their lifetime, or even items that have clearly been used before. Prices are not always competitive.

I've started shifting some of my purchases away from Amazon. Anything that I can get at Costco I will go there instead. The inventory is always fresh and the prices are sometimes significantly cheaper. For example, a "Timber Ridge Zero Gravity Chair" is on Amazon for $135, selling from the official company store. I bought one at Costco for $70. Costco does a pretty good job sourcing higher quality items, so I don't have to heavily rely on (potentially gamed) reviews the way that I do on Amazon.

Harder to find, small items are still worthwhile to look for on Amazon.

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