Amazon Ruined Online Shopping

The lack of filtering options is really something that penalizes Amazon as a customer experience for me as well.

But I'm starting to think they might be making it bad on purpose to give more visibility to their ranking schemes.

It's a matter of trust as well.

My parents generation, now in the 70's, has this implicit trust in salespeople. They know "in principle" that there are "bad apples", but if a salesperson shakes their hand, looks them in the eye, and says "Of course Mr. , we'll take care of you", they buy it wholesale. Which is how my dad bought $600 tires for $1800 at a dealership, a $1200 "DSLR camera" which was actually a superzoom point and shoot, a wired phone headset which was actually wireless headphones with no boom, etc.

I have basically zero trust in the "specialized retail stores with specialized sales people". Any time I geek out a little bit about any retail area, I learn the 101 ways they have and do scam you, and my trust erodes further. A specialized expensive shoe store swore my shoes I bought specifically for air travel don't have metal shims in them; of course they do. The electronic stores are never staffed with people who know more than I do, or frequently anything at all other than to push extended warranty. Small car maintenance store I've dealt with regularly for 15 years have turned out to be skimming and scamming once I learned more about their product and service, all the while greeting me warmly by name and "taking care of me". And yes, my dad and his friends still go to them.

So yes, bring on the faceless online warehouse. I feel safer there - or at least, am better equipped to determine fake/counterfeit/exploitative than I am in person. For all the decades that Amazon and the like had to develop methods to scam us, in-person salespeople had centuries, and I ain't winning that game.

I was never a Prime member, but I have bought stuff from Amazon in the past. As of about 2 years ago, I've basically quit Amazon for all the reasons listed in the article: confusing selection of products that I might want to buy (are those widgets the same as those other widgets or not?), the decreasing reliability of reviews, and the co-mingling of stock from different sellers.

Admittedly, I'm buying "weird" stuff online: principally woodworking tools and hardware for furniture. Tools are a high-value item that lends itself counterfeiting. Somebody I knew bought a 3' (90 cm) Starrett blade for their combination square (MSRP ~$340) from Amazon, and got one that wasn't straight. Was it counterfeit? Was it a second that slipped out the back door of the factory? Was it a genuine one that slipped past quality control at Starrett? Who knows.

He returned it and got a straight one, but there are other tools that are less obviously "wrong". Chisels with lower-grade steel, knock-off planes with poor quality castings or machining, counterfeit clamps (at $20-$30 a pair for basic handscrews you could probably make a tidy profit making sub-par ones and passing them off as the real thing).

For my money, I'll buy from somebody who only sells tools, and stakes their reputation on delivering the tool I ordered, and a genuine one to boot.

It turns out that dedicated retailers still exist for this stuff; beyond the US chains of Rockler and Woodcraft, there are a whole slew of independent vendors (Among others: Little Machine Shop, Infinity Cutting Tools, Lee Valley, Highland Woodworking).

And they take far better care of their customers. On the hardware front, I ordered a lock and an escutcheon from (I think) Whitechapel, and when they picked the order, they determined that the key wouldn't fit through the hole in the escutcheon. /They called me/ to make sure I ended up with an escutcheon that would fit the key.

To be sure, you pay for this level of service. Horton Brasses, Whitechapel, Brusso, etc all charge a handsome price. But at the end of the day, you know what you're getting, you can reach an actual human being if you need help picking something for your application, and they stand behind their products.

I'm going to extrapolate from my area of interest here. Amazon only makes sense for stuff that's essentially fungible (e.g. USB cables), or you're just muggling around and don't mind exchanging a bit of your time to make something that isn't quite right work for you once.

If you're doing anything in volume, predictability and repeatability matter a lot. Knowing that the X you order this year is going to work the same as the X you ordered 2 years ago counts for a lot.

> sell it piecemeal with a social media profile

Isn't eBay basically a social media profile? Facebook selling groups are also scam hotbeds, I don't see how that works any better.

I've had a pretty terrible experience trying to buy non stick skillets over the years on Amazon with most of even the top rated items coming with huge issues like warping on the first use, not being very non stick, flaking etc. I almost wonder if its counterfeit or if manufacturers just cutting corners on what used to be a good product? Either way reviews become almost useless when you don't know which version you will be getting. I've found Amazon works much better for items without potential latent quality issues like DVDs, books, or products that are just binary work/don't work.