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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

Amazon remains totally complacent of these issues which are now professionally hacked by China based providers day in and out. Tons of vitamins are now fake and downright harmful. A lot of books, even small scale ones, are also fake and very low quality.

I tried to move my purchases to Walmart and surprisingly, even after 25 years, they haven’t got act together. Walmart even haven’t recognized that they should jump on this problem by prominently showing authentic brand logo or something.

I also tried to move all my books purchasing to B&N and again, surprisingly, they haven’t learned any real lesson in past 25 years. Their website is clunky, they charge $7 delivery fee, they can’t even deliver to my nearest their own shop for free!

Amazon is definitely riding on this utterly deficient competitors and that’s why they get to be so complacent.

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> A lot of books, even small scale ones, are also fake and very low quality.

My sister works in manga and anime publishing and this is an existential threat to her company. Some of the issues they're grappling with:

1. For some of their titles, the genuine item doesn't even appear among search results on Amazon—only the counterfeits do.

2. The quality issues with the counterfeits can result in losing all future business from a customer. For example, download codes will be missing or non-functional. Irrational as it is, customers blame the publisher when this happens and stop buying further titles from them.

3. Amazon seems to be using some slapdash ML to determine how many of each title to order. They'll purchase 10k of vols. 5 and 7 of a series and only 1k of vol. 6. Guess how many of that 10k of vol. 7 end up selling when that happens?

Amazon is, needless to say, non-responsive to their concerns.

> They'll purchase 10k of vols. 5 and 7 of a series and only 1k of vol. 6. Guess how many of that 10k of vol. 7 end up selling when that happens?

I've noticed that too in manga. It's amazing they screw it up so bad, given their origin as a book seller.

My local library had books 1-3 and 5-6 of a series I was reading by an author who I own all of her later books. I even tried to find a copy at the local used shop, thinking I would read it and then donate it, but due to her rising star they had printed new editions in a completely different style, and size. I ended up pirating a copy of that book instead. Then bought the audio book for a book I already owned as penance.

I suspect when there are gaps that either the counterfeiters win or nobody wins.

What I'd like to know is: has anyone ever sued Amazon for this? There seems to be plenty of evidence for a massive class action suit. They are knowingly and intentionally screwing sellers and customers alike.

Check out the recalls from https://www.cpsc.gov/

Amazon lists thousands of junk products from China that violate US laws around product safety. Toys containing lead paint, crib bumpers that can suffocate babies, etc. The process seems to be that Amazon just needs to remove the product in violation but it really appears that this is a wholesale attempt on Amazon's part to circumvent legislation. It should not be this trivial for consumers to find products that are potentially dangerous.

Does Amazon also contact and reimburse the customers who bought the recalled products?

Anecdotal but Amazon tends to notify me when something is recalled. They do not, in my experience with battery packs and children's toys, replace it themselves (they defer to manufacturers).

That's because Amazon is, in large part, a front end over Alibaba with exactly zero enforcement of regulation. But they do manage to charge way more!

Indeed! Amazon, it seems, is just a hyperscale fulfillment plugin for Alibaba (etc). It's like a CDN layer for physical goods, moving them to the edge and delivering them at a speed few can even dream of touching due to the cost of having that many POPs.

I think if you were to ask them, being a "Marketplace" means they have little responsibility. "Retailers" have much more legal responsibility in terms of vetting manufacturers, supply chain concerns, product safety, etc

I'm especially annoyed at the electrical equipment category. 20 years ago it would be hard to find even a power strip or AC adapter for sale in America that wasn't UL listed. Even dollar store merchandise usually had the label.

Today, you can only buy two kinds of such products: The (I assume Alibaba-sourced) Amazon Marketplace, fulfilled by Amazon items which are never UL listed, and brand-name items from a brick and mortar store, which cost 8x the price of the equivalent 'Amazon special.'

I know "UL" is just a label and that not having it doesn't necessarily prove anything, but absent any form of certification, an device on Amazon Marketplace may come from a vendor that has literally never even submitted a sample for quality testing to anyone. BigClive on YouTube has shown some shocking (literally) teardowns.

I've heard that insurance companies will deny a claim if your house burns down due to a non-UL-listed device causing a fire. Terrifying.

"UL" is not just a label, it's one of the biggest nongovernmental product safety testing organization. I don't know where it stands relative to consumer reports.

> insurance companies

UL stands for underwriter's (aka insurers) laboratories

I don't think they mean "just a label" as in "not worth caring about", they just meant that the label is an indicator of quality, not the cause of quality, and as such products without the label aren't automatically bad products, they just have less evidence about their quality.

For that point, yes it is "just a label", even though the context behind the label / the label's meaning is very important.

ok, that makes sense.

While technically true. Companies are in the business of maximizing profits and they will cut corners if they can get away with it. A company interested in selling on the quality end of the spectrum will get the UL certification. A company interested in selling at the cheep end of the spectrum won't and likely cut corners to make the item as cheep as possible.

That's what I meant -- it's a pretty important label in my opinion.

Consumer reports does reviews, whereas underwriter's laboratories (UL) performs failure testing. What UL does is a magnitude more in depth, even considering how much more in-depth Consumer Reports reviews are than most news sources.

Sure I just meant by volume and scope

I wanted to try out the tee-shirt hustle once.

There was a cool design (or at least I thought so) I came up with. Had about 100 of those printed.

Went to Amazon to get a seller account:

1) learned that if I had only 1 tee-shirt with a single design to sell, I couldn't get the account.

2) after researching the competition, discovered that many of the tee-shirt designs for sale were:

    a) clearly in copyright violation (e.g. Disney characters on some mom & pop store.
    
    b) their images on their store were just a photoshopped tee-shirt. I.e., not photos of the actual tee-shirt they had for sale. But the design photoshopped on to a photo of a blank tee-shirt.

Boggled my mind that Amazon was okay with this.

Copyright violation on t-shirts seems to be the norm, it's not just Amazon. Basically every t-shirt seller out there will allow user-submitted design that infringe on someone's IP.

I'm not complaining, cause I love my Mario/Banksy crossover t-shirt, but it's just how it is, Disney & co just don't bother going after them, they're happy to sell you their official™ stuff through other channels.

Copyright law only restricts commercial activity, so if you print a Nintendo character on your shirt, to wear yourself, there's no means for Nintendo to sue you over it. File sharing lawsuits are not over users downloading content, but over users seeding it, which is on by default in most file sharing clients.

If you hire someone to print it on the shirt for you, and then distribute the shirt, you would be liable for copyright infringement, not the printer, because the printer isn't supplying the artwork, you are. It's no different than placing phone calls to perform an illegal activity. The phone provider isn't guilty, but you are.

If you order a custom shirt, and provide unlicensed copyrighted artwork, but don't distribute it, then no one is in a position to get in trouble.

I once asked a laptop skin company to print a design that included the logo of the company I worked for, and they refused, unless I also provided a release from our Legal Department (which they would never do, so I gave it up).

So I assume that a lot of self-publishing type companies may refuse to do copyrighted stuff, even for one-off jobs.

This is something I've just never understood. Of course, I didn't drink the kool-aid either. I understand when working for a company that gives away their corporate branded swag to employees that free stuff is tempting. I know some people whose entire wardrobe is company swag, and they don't wear it just at work but during off time during the weekends. (I understand young employees fresh out of school that might be the cheapest way to survive with free corp branded stuff is tempting.) However, being willing to pay to have swag produced is even further beyond my ability at comprehension. I thought people that bought company swag was out there, but paying for one off items is just cray cray to me

It's nice to work for an organization that you're proud to be at; even as an older person. Pretty rare, but can happen. The mercenary approach that so many low-level employees have, is a bit depressing. When we spend the majority of our time somewhere, it's kinda nice to feel good about it (BTW: The company would have paid for it. It was for company gear, to help build the brand, when working with outside entities. I didn't use the laptop for personal stuff -I actually had a much better one, for my own work).

But it's entirely possible that I'm crazy, anyway. You're probably quite perceptive.

The mercenary approach is a direct consequence of companies treating employees as replaceable cogs so I don't think its fair to blame the "low-level" employees for this.

No blame intended. I’m quite aware that the first move to fix the situation, is incumbent upon the C-suite.

It’s still discouraging, though, as the attitude actually hurts the lower-level folks, much more than the bosses, who have learned to “game the system.”

I have a large sarcastic hilarious unique sticker on my company laptop for the last 7 years (transferred) it was worth the $40. Given wfh it was kinda like Pokemon the % of coworkers who noticed it. Basically creating company lore.

I don't like company-branded swag either but the reason that gifts for employees are usually company-branded is due to tax reasons - the company logo allows it to count as advertisement which is a business expense rather than employee compensation.

As a general rule of thumb, I don’t wear branded stuff; regardless of the brand.

In some cases, though, like at trade shows and tech conferences, we were required to wear it.

That would be trademark not copyright violation.

You are correct.

> Copyright law only restricts commercial activity

So torrenting movies is legal?

No, you are still reproducing a copyrighted work. It is a violation for torrents and t shirts. Commercial copyright holders tend to go after those that distribute or enable large scale infringement in some way. It most certainly restricts individuals from reproducing copyrighted works on a one off basis.

Torrenting is risky because of seeding. You get in trouble for distribution more than possession.

Why torrent at all? Just find a friend that torrents, and bring a USB stick to their place. Remember kids, fly low and avoid the radar

VPN is helpful, though I learned recently you've got to pick a VPN that allows you to open a port, or you're stuck behind NAT.

> Copyright law only restricts commercial activity

That is just not true. A copyright gives the owner thereof exclusive rights to make a copy of his work. Neither the creator nor the copier have to sell anything.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106

Noncommercial use is a factor to be considered for fair use if the copier is doing it for a protected purpose. (Creating a t-shirt for your personal use is not a protected purpose and can therefore never be fair use on its own though.)

The reason someone making a personal shirt doesn't get sued is because suing people is expensive, that harms goodwill, and Disney isn't getting any money from such a person anyway.

I should clarify that noncommercial use something different: an exemption for commercial activity. What copyright enforcement can't recover is income from activity that couldn't have generated revenue, in the first place. If I draw a Nintendo character on my own T-shirt, and never sell that T-shirt, that's not a copyright violation, because there's no way I could have made money from it. Whereas, if I draw a character on a T-shirt, then give it away for free, it's noncommercial activity, but it could be subject to copyright, because I could have charged for it.

Ordering your own prints really should not be a copyright issue anyway even if the law currently might disagree.

> I tried to move my purchases to Walmart

Walmart does (or at least did) something similar.

* About 7 years ago, I purchased a toy drone online from Walmart for one of my sons for Christmas.

* I purchased it before Thanksgiving because the Walmart website urged me to purchase in time for Christmas delivery.

* My son opened the gift on Christmas and the drone was broken (out of the box).

* I tried to return the drone to a brick-and-mortar Walmart store and they told me that they couldn't issue a refund because I bought it on their website, but it was through a 3rd party seller. I had to take it up with the 3rd party.

* Remember the part where I said I bought the drone before Thanksgiving?? Well, I contacted the 3rd party and was told they had a strict 30 day return policy and they could not issue a refund.

It was a cheap gift, but the whole ordeal bothers me to this day.

Yes I buy household stuff on Walmart's website quite often, but only stuff sold and shipped by Walmart. They have a lot of third party listings on the site also, which many people may not realize, or if they do, they don't understand that Walmart only facilitates the transaction for these, you cannot do returns or get support at a Walmart store.

Walmart does accept returns for third-party products in-store but only for the 30 days after their delivery date.

Yeah, I always check the Sold by Walmart box, and I need a good reason to go outside that list. It's just just about returns. Walmart does supply chain quality control that does not seem to happen as reliably on the 3rd party listings. (edited because I'm sure some 3rd party sellers are legit. target for example offers a selectable but short list of sellers, I imagine you could check them for reputation)

This isn't just Walmart though. Most non-Amazon websites have a similar option. Lowes, Target, NewEgg...

ocd reply to myself... s/just just/not just/

This is an issue with many retailers surrounding holiday and 30 day policies.

You'd think they could use some exception for defective items versus just normal return/exchange, but they rarely do

I just saw a Walmart commercial where they were proudly pronouncing they had half-billion items.

I couldn’t help to think that I wanted anything but that. I want a lot of items, but I prefer quality items over random crap.

For books, your local independent bookstore can order pretty much any book for you if you walk in and ask (if they don't already have what you want). They won't charge shipping, it'll just come with their next shipment from the publisher and then you can come pick it up. Or if you have to do things online, try https://bookshop.org

That can very much depend on your local independent store. I have had mixed results over the years.

And they will charge me $50 for making an online order.

Why are we romanizing middle-men between you and a web form?

Bro, just email the bookstore. Going through a middle man designed/optimized to rip both you and the bookstore off (some SAAS bookstore site solution) of course jacks the price up.

At this point, if it's online, it's worse/crap/designed to screw you and whoever you are dealing with as much as it can get away with.

> if it's online, it's worse/crap/designed to screw you

This doesn’t follow.

In my experience, gavinsyancey is correct. If the situation arises, you should give it a try. You'll probably be pleasantly surprised.

Having to physically go to a store just to you can at some point physically go to a store to buy something is quite a large amount of friction compared to pressing a button and having something show up at your door.

The "incompetent competitors" is a big point for me. I prefer to buy from a more trusted local (in Japan) store. But it is so cumbersome! Buying something on Amazon is fast and smooth, and they have a huuge selection. Regarding price, many stores here price fit, so Amazon is not actually cheaper.

> and they have a huuge selection

That's the big thing for me. I don't live close to a big city, so local selection is pretty limited. For some things there isn't even a local store available.

Anymore.

For obscure items, all it takes is once from Amazon to kill you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU

I was having a conversation earlier today with an acquaitance who bought rubbing alcohol off of Amazon because according to him none of the pharmacies in his city have it.

He lives in Seattle.

It really feels like people's behaviors have been permanently changed for the worst, even if a "proper" competitor comes in.

I no longer have prime shipping, and seeing "shipping: $5" next to anything on Amazon definitely helps me to do at least cursory searches in local stores... would probably be a net benefit to society to outlaw Prime

Here in Germany, you used to be able to buy chemicals at pharmacies. Then, the EU plus the usual German compliance-by-the-letter came along... the EU imposed serious controls on chemicals because many can be used to make bombs (e.g. acetone plus hydrogen peroxide yields APEX/TATP) or various illicit drugs. That legislation now not just requires a bullshit amount of paperwork for each transaction but also requires pharmacy staff to pass and renew a certification for dealing with chemicals. No, the actual doctor in pharmaceuticals that one needs to pass to open a pharmacy is not enough.

As a result, nearly all pharmacies here dropped the entire lines of making medication on-site and selling chemicals, because only the latter kept the former financially viable.

So, your only options left are either: a) buy from Amazon or eBay sellers that outright don't care about the German peculiarities or b) if you manage to qualify, buy from the usual selection of lab supply wholesalers. But something like "start a German NileRed channel", that's completely out of the question. The kind of stuff he buys, no way to get that without a commercial entity, and good luck getting that in place without at least a bachelor's degree in chemistry.

I hear your pain about the legislation. It sounds like it sucks.

> The kind of stuff he buys, no way to get that without a commercial entity, and good luck getting that in place without at least a bachelor's degree in chemistry.

NileRed has a Bachelor of Science degree in biochemistry with a minor in pharmacology.

Nile has even a masters in chemistry I think, and very likely at least a business entity. So might work. And even for him some things are hard to get, a Canada has similar restrictions.

If you want to order from a supplier typically the minimum bar is going to be a commercial entity and commercial warehouse space in an area zoned for light industrial where you have someone physically present during business hours to sign for deliveries. And that's just the minimum; you'll still run into other hurdles depending on the details.

He does but IIRC he started the channel when he was still a student and did his early videos in his parents' garage. Something like that is unachievable today.

I agree with your general sentiment of regulatory dysfunction. But I'd like to point out that it's not so straightforward to purchase a lot of that stuff in the US either. Perhaps not quite as legally involved as the EU but still not simple.

You can also just make most things yourself. It isn't cost effective for a commercial entity (due to wages for highly educated professionals) but for a hobbyist, who cares? That of course calls into question the bulk of the regulatory approach. When I can pull up a youtube video of someone making solid rocket fuel with a plastic jug and a phone charger what was the point of requiring all the paperwork?

If you're lucky the recommended videos will even have footage of someone getting arrested for misusing something substantially similar.

> e.g. acetone plus hydrogen peroxide yields APEX/TATP

TIL, didn't know that. Acetone is right next to peroxide in the local household items store (in the Netherlands) over here. But a few aisles over you can also find CBD oil and melatonin, heavy duty painkillers like diclofenac, etc.

These are available here as well, but the concentrations (especially of the hydrogen peroxide) are far too low to be useful in bombmaking or most classic experiments involving it, and on top of that dilution from the factory, it's likely a bunch of the peroxide dissociated since it was manufactured. You need to concentrate the hydrogen peroxide up to be useful for more than cleaning blood stains, and that's pretty dangerous.

Ok but my friend lives in Seattle and like every walgreens reported having it in stock on their website. Maybe some of them are wrong but I don’t believe it.

The concentrations in the household cleaner section are way too low to be usable for anything but small scale household cleanups.

There's a reason why you can't get industrial strength cleaners in a Walmart - too many people would either seriously injure themselves because they don't know they actually need PPE or otherwise this stuff will break down their skin, because they mix it and make enough mustard gas to actually kill them, or because they break down their homes because guess what, a highly acidic cleaning agent and most kinds of stone don't mix.

Of course, yes, one can try to concentrate H2O2 but there's easier and less messy ways to off oneself than this.

Yeah I didn't really challenge my friend on this that much so it could have been that they couldn't find the thing they wanted.

his thing was mostly "pharmacies don't have _anything_" which just feels like a pretty spurious claim.

Rubbing alcohol is also cheap enough that the 'free shipping' is really just being included in the price.

Still better than sellers that only show a tiny price up front but then hit you with unreasonably high shipping costs once you are already invested in making a purchase. And often it's only free with large enough orders in which case the purchase price can still be reasonable - not any worse than what brick and mortar stores add to the price to pay for the physical shelf space the product takes up anyway.

I tried to find replacement shoelaces locally and none of the shoe stores in a 20-mile radius had any at all. Not the big chains, not the independent places, nothing. My only option was to buy them online.

Is there nothing like Timpsons [1] in the US? Small units in arcades and indoor markets or near railway stations in most UK towns of any size. They do key copying, watch batteries and straps, shoe repairs (where feasible) and, yes, shoe laces.

Stoll's site, the Klein bottle hats and Mobius scarves! "Two manifolds for one low price". I'm after those for autumn.

[1] https://www.timpson.co.uk/

> It really feels like people's behaviors have been permanently changed for the worst

I recently spent a year in Shanghai, and when I would ask a friend where to go to buy something I needed, the response was always a confused "buy it online and have it delivered".

I don't care for that. I'd like to have things available in stores.

Is this a J Rockefeller move, Amazon selling for below market prices to degrade the performance of competitors in a specific market?

It's easy to sneeze at "deficient competitors" as well, but the whole massive spend on infrastructure - warehouses, delivery vans, etc. is hard to replicate. In one sense, it's worth an antitrust look if that whole system essentially stiles competition

I don't find their prices are below market or the competition though. If you shop brand-for-brand and the same items they are identical or more. Example: I bought a new edging trimmer. Amazon appeared $60 cheaper but it didn't come with a battery. People love the one-stop, one-click everyhting delivered quick more than the prices or actual product. It's today's air travel experience for everything.

Now, yes, but they've already killed off much of the competition by now.

I don't really think so. You can find pretty much everything they sell on either the manufacturer's own website, or another big retail site such as ebay or walmart.com, or on a specialist website. It's more work though, to find and browse those sites than to just pull up Amazon and be done with it, and then getting back to see what you missed on TikTok.

Strange in a way how saving 2 minutes is a differentiator online. Back in the brick-and-mortar days you'd spend 2 minutes at a stoplight on the way to the store without even thinking about it.

And ordering from catalogs? If I got the item in two weeks that seemed pretty fast.

> You can find pretty much everything they sell on either the manufacturer's own website…

Increasingly, I find these just linking to the corresponding Amazon listing.

> or another big retail site such as ebay or walmart.com…

Same strategy/problem there, IMO.

Not too long ago I bought rubbing alcohol on amazon because it wasn't available in a few places I checked locally. I was looking for a less diluted solution, everywhere around me had, what seemed to be, the standard (I think it was 70%?) solution.

Perhaps that acquaintance was in a similar situation.

I think a lot of it is even less, closer to 50%. Costco has the good stuff, but it's not cheap.

Side note that 70% is supposedly the best concentration for disinfection, but if you want it for cleaning parts or something, you'd want a more concentrated solution of course. Some drug stores will carry 99% but you can get more concentrated alcohols from scientific supply stores.

That's exactly what I was looking to do with it, cleaning. I wasn't too surprised I couldn't find it at a drug store but I was surprised I couldn't find it at a hardware store either.

Most of the pharmacy chains (Bartell, Rite Aid, Walgreens) in Seattle are bankrupt. Last time I was in a Bartell the shelves were nearly empty. He might be right.

>none of the pharmacies in his city have it. >He lives in Seattle.

Stores may have it, but have it locked up or behind the counter (or just not carry it at all) my (seattle) grocery store carries hand sanitizer, but not on the shelf. You have to find an employee (good luck...) and ask them to go get it from the back/wherever. Or order the same product on Amazon for same-day delivery for the same price or cheaper :-/

I don't have Prime either (and never did except for the free student trial year) but shipping is still "free"* when you just bunch up your orders so they are above the minimum for that.

(*) Of course you pay for shipping via the purchase price but you do that even if you order individual items and also with Prime.

I often think how great it would be to have a site where I could see all the shops nearby that have stock of X at Y price even if they don’t do online shopping. For example I am certain there are multiple places near me that have some 5m 10t tie-down straps, I’d happily drive to one to collect, but I won’t drive or ring 10-20 shops to find them so just order on Amazon.

It’s a tough problem I guess with so many stock systems out there and inevitably whoever creates the site will want to monetise it, then slowly enshitify it.

I bet most companies wouldn’t want to share that information, as they would end up directly competing for every item with every other store in the radius. Most stores have cost leaders on some items and then make up for that lost revenue with higher margins on others. With the new system, every store would have their high margin items next to the same item, but sold as a cost leader, at other stores

I agree with you, and this backwards mentality is handing even more business over from smaller local shops to the big online stores!

People are going to discover your prices anyway. Hiding them just means it will take longer. I remember my grandpa used to go to five different grocery stores weekly, just to do grocery shopping, because he knew store A had the cheapest eggs, store B had the cheapest vegetables, store C had the cheapest milk, and so on.

And the same stores will then complain that Amazon is taking their business. Also, loss leaders don't make sense unless that price is widely known to the point where it draws people into your store.

This is basically what Google Shopping does, although it's mostly limited to major chains.

Here's an example:

https://www.google.com/search?q=rubbing+alcohol+nearby&udm=2...

The lesson they have learned is that people who care, can tell the difference and shop with them are such a small minority that it isn't worth it to their bottom line to address this. The government doesn't seem to care either. The market isn't going to fix this.

Maybe you can round up enough people for a common cause as discussed in the article, but that doesn't scale. Take notice that for all its talk about America first policy & general sinophobia, the current admin in Washington hasn't done anything about this either. They don't care about American small businesses or consumers. They only care about people like Jeff Bezos, the Waltons, etc.

The other half of this is that the degraded marketplace rewards ad spending, and ad spending is now a significant amount of revenue for Amazon (IIRC, it's behind AWS but doesn't need nearly as many people)

I used to buy a certain book series on fictionwise, because it was the only site selling those books in my country.

B&N bought Fictionwise, and first thing they did was determine that you need to be physically inside USA to download stuff.

Now only way for me to get those books is pirated. :( Maybe I should just download them pirated and donate the price of the books directly to the author account or something. I really don't understand what is the problem of B&N or how they still exist, they are literally anti-business.

How did they determine if you were physically within the US? How would using a VPN not provide the same ability?

Not that it's the case for B&N, but many sites block VPN. Reddit for example.

There are always options that do work, some shadier than others though.

Does it matter? You can't expect people to set up a VPN just so they can give you money.

I would barely trust Amazon for authentic shampoo never mind vitamins. Are people so desperate to save single dollars they gamble with their health?

It's not about being cheaper, it's about convenience. And realistically what's the more trustworthy alternative? Even the reputable high street shops sell homeopathy and bags of random herbs that might be the thing on the label, never mind picking a no-name online store.

I think part of the problem is also that how prevalent it is varies wildly by where you are, and therefore which Amazon distribution centers you're hitting.

To elaborate - in NYC, I usually avoid ordering from Amazon for anything where it's cheap or something health-related, but even when I've sometimes given up finding it easily elsewhere and bought it there, it's not been, as far as I could tell, a counterfeit item.

That's not to say I can easily prove that or that I'm encouraging people to order from there, but I personally haven't encountered boxes full of things other than the intended item, or the like, and I would suspect the problem's prevalence varies heavily with volume (and thus, turnover) and location.

The issue w AMZ is the sku mixing. Two or more different batches of stuff get mixed. A lot of the bad stuff are rejects or seconds that get the same packaging, so w Amz it is always a small chance.

Even without the mixing Amazon will occasionally have a "fire sale" on things sold by themselves or 3rd party stores and every time this happens the recent reviews are that the product was expired, or used, or damaged, etc. Even for products where returns aren't accepted which just adds insult to injury. So it's just dumping of worthless stock. For example this seems to be the case with air friers (only because I had my eye on this) every Prime Day, they all get flooded with dozens of reviews that the product was damaged or used.

I don't trust Amazon offers because of this. So I either just buy the super cheap, disposable stuff where a trip to a shop isn't worth it, or things that have guaranteed free returns. Sometimes I'd rather order online because I have a guaranteed window to test and return if it's not what I want. For purchases in person the law here doesn't guarantee a return window for products that work but just aren't what I thought they'd be. Or I have to argue endlessly at the store for them to take it back.

In mass market stuff… Target. They sell stuff sourced through normal distributor channels and have a good shipping and pickup operation. Pricing is competitive.

Supplements are a scam industry, so you’re always going to have issues there, that’s a feature of the business.

Target has the distasteful feature that in-store prices differ from online prices. So if you go and browse you pay more than you would by ordering online and driving to the same store and picking it up. Maybe you could argue for the online price?

You can price match the website

Or you can just click purchase on Amazon and get the same product with less hassle.

Are you sure you have the right store selected? I like to get the aisle numbers and see if something is even in stock on the website before I go and I've never had a price mismatch.

Walmart's pricing is also accurate but their stock indicator isn't as good as target's.

100% Americans are complicit in making amazon the beheomoth they are. Convenience above all else. Ive shopped online for 20 years and never purchesed from Amazon. There are very few things that cant be bought form other e-vendors. Its just that they wont turn up next day.

Amazon perpetuates the stealing of IP to the point that they are the global leader. They use their market power to steal anything that makes money. Whether its directly, or indirectly as above.

Amazon isn't just successful in the US. Plenty other countries where the local stores simply refuse to compete on customer satisfaction too.

> And realistically what's the more trustworthy alternative?

This hints at a deeper problem; the fact that you can't trust e.g. the government to have an organization that tests and certifies anything sold, be it online or in shops. You should be able to trust things like vitamins when bought online.

Of course, if Amazon would only sell legit stuff, people would order stuff from abroad because like it or not, the general trend remains that people try to get the cheapest products. This is why legitimate products are pushed out of the market. This is why Amazon and Walmart pushed out local shops. Free rein capitalism.

> the fact that you can't trust e.g. the government to have an organization that tests and certifies anything sold, be it online or in shops

In the US, for things like supplements and vitamins, the regulations are extremely lax. There isn't really any enforcement of the labels being accurate. There isn't really enforcement until people are already being injured in the market.

The only way to actually know what's in that vitamin pill is for you to send it to a lab you trust. The next step down from there is only buy reputable brands from reputable stores but even then, it can be a crapshoot. With RFK at the helm, expect this to get worse and not better.

Gotta love Mel Gibson's fear mongering political ad about vitamins to really show how absurd the messaging was in '94.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6bv92W4YnE

The problem is also that when there is government regulation it is often more about restricting sale without prescription or similar bs rather than just enforcing that you get what it says on the label and there is no other attempt to deceive you.

Costco, thorne, etc

Aren’t vitamins a crapshoot anywhere? I thought there was basically no regulations on any of it.

Lately Wal-Mart has been going head-to-head with AMZN on its own turf. They've got their own version of Amazon Prime, and many of the same third party sellers of the same questionable supplements and other things. Next day shipping seems to operate pretty much the same between the two as well.

It’s the next day shopping. If you have something fairly unimportant, you can get it from Amazon next day regardless of your schedule. But yes. Buy local if possible!

It's not just that. I use a fairly obscure dietary supplement. It's a crap shoot whether or not my local pharmacy has it in stock on any given day, and the only way to find out is to physically go there. If I factor in the cost of my time, buying local is orders of magnitude more expensive than Amazon, where I can place an order in under a minute.

I am astonished that brick-and-mortar merchants haven't banded together to get someone to build a decent e-commerce front end for their local stock. That would be a killer app.

"obscure dietary supplement. " What is it?

Lutein. Why?

Just curious. https://purebulk.com/ does not carry it. Why do you take it if I may ask?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9553319/

I disagree. Delivery time is rarely ever a consideration for me. Convenience, large selection and the knowledge that I will be made whole in case issues arise without have to expend significant effort are the main reasons.

AMZN is my last choice for buying anything. An attempt to buy this stuff

https://www.amazon.com/stores/RIVALZ/page/5690A202-6DDB-42BA...

because my wife found one flavor, slightly expired, at the Amish market and liked it fell through when I tried to buy it straight from the vendor because they charged my credit card with a scammy-looking name neither I nor American Express had ever heard of. Can't get it at Walmart.com, so... (For that matter, Walmart had the first five books of Bocchi the Rock and #7 but not #6)

Ever since the time I saw a product listing though which made no sense at all and reported it and got a reply that they don't care if I didn't buy it I started losing trust. Didn't help that 2 day delivery became 5 days suddenly and the fact that I live in a rural area is no excuse because I used to see an AMZN delivery truck driving around in my neighborhood every Sunday. After I quit Prime they started giving me free trials or a week for $2 whenever I bought something and... now I get the 2 day delivery everyone else gets.

Why are you writing 'AMZN' instead of 'Amazon'?

(Not OP) it's a shorthand to use a company's stock symbol instead of the name, especially if you're worked in the financial industry, where everyone knows what you're talking about or can look it up very quickly.

> Walmart had the first five books of Bocchi the Rock and #7 but not #6

Wonder if it's similar to what this comment mentions about Amazon (even down to the example being 5 and 7 but no 6): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44354938 Maybe Walmart is trying to match Amazon's stock to avoid spending too much to compete with them.

There was that time I needed three digits from my mailbox and K-Mart had the 4, the 7 but not the 2 so I didn't buy any of them.

Amazon feels a lot more customer-centric than other retailers. It's a perennial complaint of mine that we still get frickin' cold days in April in upstate NY but all the home improvement and rural things retailers in my town are based in the deep South so they just can't get it that you might need a space heater or your chickens might die but Amazon does. (Well, there was a day that the rest of the country complained everything was run out of New York...)

Walmart.com is a rebranded Jet.com. They've only owned it for 9 years.

And they have the same problems because they allow third party sellers. So far, Target seems it hasn't gone done this rode yet.

As long as they don't commingle inventory it's relatively easy to avoid (not sure if that's the case or not, but seems like most of the 3rd party sellers do their own shipping)

FWIW my main annoyance with Walmarts website is that it's not clear if you package is coming via shipping service like FedEx, who has access to my apartment complex, or just some dude in his car who needs to call me while I'm at work to be buzzed in

Walmart is Walmart. They hire the cheapest people possible and treat them like shit.

I get stuff from Walmart all of the time from their delivery drivers. The catch: I’ve never ordered anything from Walmart.

Target does allow third-party sellers on Target.com (and the app), but they allow in-store returns on anything — even third-party items. When I worked as a receiver, there were random items to process out that would normally/likely be salvage, but went to the returns processing center because they were from online orders. There also seems to be curation.

It’s surprising they’re not trying to take Amazon market share by eliminating scammy third party vendors and counterfeit products. I think people would be interested in an Amazon like service without the dropshipped and fake junk.

In many ways it's actually worse.

I don't remember the item now, but something I'd bought semi regularly from Walmart. It was boosted in my search/you may like results, which makes sense. Except the product was 10x the price, and not sold by Walmart. There's no clear indication of that until you actually click into it, though. So you can add it to your cart and buy it easily without knowing any of that, by design I guess.

It seems 3rd party sellers know how it works, and probably make a ton of money sniping out of stock items. I almost fell for it as I rarely scrutinize prices, I can't imagine how many people go through with it not knowing any better.

You can filter searches so you only see stuff sold and shipped by Walmart but it does seem that the filters reset frequently/randomly so you always need to double check.

Most of my use is actually local pickup or delivery, so I often use the 'In Store' filter often. It lasts only as long as that session, unfortunately.

It's not surprising at all. Keep in mind that Walmart is a multi-billion dollar business, so its certain they did an analysis on this.

Convenience > Quality as dictated by the Median Consumer.

They did the exact opposite and immediately copied the marketplace schema.

I have no clue if it’s still true, but Wal-Mart back in the day used to go to the manufacturers of some products and request that same product at a lower price. The idea was “get it to us at that cost, no matter what you have to do” - so you would see name brand products meant to be very similar to ones you would see, but with inferior build quality, and the only distinguishing mark is that it has a different product ID from the manufacturer.

Point being: it doesn’t matter if Walmart does this, because it’s already an empty promise from them, too.

Just stop shopping at these behemoths.

That is pretty sketchy behavior. But… it still doesn’t seem quite as bad as letting some third party steal an established listing.

At least users will correctly blame some well-known brand for their shoddy craftsmanship.

Fast Company did a famous article about this back in 2003, with the example of a gallon jar of pickles priced at $2.97:

https://www.fastcompany.com/47593/wal-mart-you-dont-know-2

https://archive.is/e25nB

This was a great read, but one part in particular made me laugh a bit:

>Wal-Mart is not just the world’s largest retailer. It’s the world’s largest company–bigger than ExxonMobil, General Motors, and General Electric. The scale can be hard to absorb. Wal-Mart sold $244.5 billion worth of goods last year. It sells in three months what number-two retailer Home Depot sells in a year.

Ah, the innocence of 2003.

Bookshop.org if you want your books local local. Best Buy for electronics (or B&H if it's near you). General home goods I've gone back to just using the grocery store. Amazon just outright can't be trusted as a marketplace any more.

It doesn't hurt that Amazon can leverage economies of scale which are orders of magnitude greater than their utterly deficient competitors

In these cases, it does hurt.

They only got to those scales by offering a better service than the previous entrenched competition.

My client sells on Amazon in Europe and is constantly harassed for presumed IP infringement, safety issues etc. usually due to somebody else either incorrectly renaming item or item name containing some trigger like "life", "battery" or some other brand's name. I always wonder how are examples like yours possible there at all.

Sheer volume mostly. Lots of scammy companies create new accounts to sell products until someone complains, then the abandon the account and start a new one. Basically the same as most spam operations

I also noticed lots of dubious companies selling hot tub/pool chemicals. I assume there is a more stringent approval process for this as legitimate companies sell them, but knockoffs use accents like "Chlóriñē" to get around whatever filter Amazon has.

Seeing evasions like that are a really strong 'code smell' to me that the 'regulator' in question is in on the scam.

Imagine if you were standing in front of a narcotics officer on the street, and you say to your friend "Hey, I have some Cane-Coke available. wink. Want to buy it?" He's standing right there, and doesn't bat an eye.

That's Amazon. They care about following laws, regulations, etc. exactly enough to have plausible deniability and no further. Oh gee, Sarge, that guy was speaking in code and I had no idea he was selling drugs.

If they cared, they'd ban sellers immediately for evading a filter, and raise barriers to entry until it was painful to start a new account. Like requiring every seller to have a US entity with a real business license and an identity-verified named agent, and ban the agent and anyone else they represent for violations. This is just one quick idea but by no means the only way. But you can bet Amazon would never even try to police their marketplace better because they'd rather just skim their cut of both legitimate and fraudulent or illegal activity.

The regulator in on (or at least indifferent to) the scam also includes the government here though. The whole market place excuse is incredibly weak and even if it currently would hold up then the legislative can fix that. After all, no buyer ever says they bought something from OMEJINE or whatever fake names Amazon shows you - they say they bought something on Amazon.

Amazon also has their own book printing service that they sell books from under several marques, I assume to make it more difficult to tell it’s from them.

The books are very low quality with poor typesetting that makes them unpleasant to read.

Yes it's really sad how with how much Amazon have been getting shittier they are still the best around. Refunds is another thing that is almost always a pain with other stores but Amazon makes it smooth (but sadly also more and more necessary).

Another pain point is shipping costs. With Amazon I can just filter for free shipping with whatever the current minimum-purchase price for that is whereas elsewhere I am too often surprised by unreasonably high shipping charges designed to make the purchase price look better on comparison sites.

Why Sears Roebuck missed the boat on this I will never understand. There could have been a call to return to their past by embracing the future the moment Amazon proved it was default alive.

What the fuck, guys.

In Canada (and I assume everywhere) it's a race to the bottom. Both WalMart and BestBuy are dominated by 3rd party products in their online stores, and you never know what you will get. Some are perfectly fine and sell legit products; others as bad as Amazon.I've found books from Indigo are pretty close to Amazon in selection, price and delivery but that's such as small part of what people buy online now.

Maybe we should do a curated shopping portal of US based mom & pop shops?

I actually made pretty good experiences with eBay.

> I also tried to move all my books purchasing to B&N and again, surprisingly, they haven’t learned any real lesson in past 25 years. Their website is clunky, they charge $7 delivery fee, they can’t even deliver to my nearest their own shop for free!

I went to barnesandnoble.com to check this out.

There's a banner at the top of the page:

> Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date.

> For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now.

The words "upgrade now" link to http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/internet-explorer/downloa... .

It does look like you're right that they won't ship books to your local B&N:

> Other reasons that an item may not be available for Buy Online, Pick Up in Store include:

> The item is out of stock in your selected store

This is very odd, because they will do that if you go into the store and order from there.

Try Target.com

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