241–250 of 403 posts
It's the same as Wish and all the other "third-party" online marketplaces. They don't give a shit because they're making so much money from the "unsuspecting consumer" segment.
My favorite Amazon scam is the Amazon Ship of Theseus[0]. You sell a product, normally a cheap electronic, and build up a decent corpus of positive reviews. A good example is a USB-C cable or something. Then you decide you want to sell a new product in a more competitive subcategory, like Bluetooth Headphones. You then take the _existing_ listing and change it piece by piece. First the pictures, then the title, then…
ASUS did this with their routers, and pooled reviews by making all of their routers different variants of each other, even if completely different. I was annoyed because I had an unbelievably shitty experience with one of their (very expensive prosumer) routers. The silver lining, for me, is that I was so fucking annoyed with ASUS support that I angrily shipped it back to Amazon, bought Ubiquiti equipment, and experi…
I once bought a router off of them specifically because it supported WPA2 Enterprise, but when I tried to tie it into my RADIUS server I kept running into weird issues. When I contacted support they said they only supported WPA2 Enterprise on the 2.4ghz band, not the 5ghz one. I pointed out that this wasn't said anywhere, but they claimed they were truthful because it does support the feature.
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Maybe you're right, but this is self-serving and not serving the goal of presenting the cheapest products to customers. There are so many low-quality products on Amazon. Often the packaging is outrageously wasteful as well. For a bottle of supplements, they often sent a box within a box, filled with so much plastic, paper, etc. The environmental impact on Amazon is huge!
Actually, I would make the case that this is best for customers. Amazon would be better served by optimizing for revenue (so higher prices would rank better), but customers are best served by what other customers like/bought (so number of orders would rank better). Also, products have plenty of opportunity to surface in search results. We have some top ranked items and Amazon constantly rotates products through all p…
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Amazon's active "solution" is customer service to address these problems. "Oh jeez, you ordered a GoPro and got a "YiGorProHD" knockoff. Here, we'll credit your Amazon account with a gift card or try to resend you the item again. Thanks so much for your patience, I'm so sorry for the error." Amazon doesn't give a shit about everything being sold on the marketplace. They aren't going to track down who put the rotten e…
So I hear, but my experience with Amazon on this front has not been so positive. I pretty much count them as not having a return policy at all anymore. If I get broken garbage from them, I just eat the loss and get more suspicious of Amazon. It beats having the hassle of talking to Amazon in order to end up just eating the loss anyway. This is in contrast to eBay, which has always done right by me when I've had a pro…
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It is the same. If the only folks who can sell products are ones who have a deal with the rightholder and can prove they have the rights to sell - obviously the big players will be the ones able to do the deals with Nike, Apple, etc and little guys will not. If the federal government actually cared they can ALREADY intercept and even destroy imported counterfeit products - they do not because it's a bit time consumin…
No it is not. Why would you socialize a problem by requiring the government to spend taxpayer resources and slowing down shipping with inspections in a stream of hundreds of millions of packages? It would be much easier to empower states to enforce existing concepts like the warranty of merchantability in interstate settings or have a regulatory framework that would allow predatory platforms like Amazon to be held ac…
My favorite Amazon scam is the Amazon Ship of Theseus[0]. You sell a product, normally a cheap electronic, and build up a decent corpus of positive reviews. A good example is a USB-C cable or something. Then you decide you want to sell a new product in a more competitive subcategory, like Bluetooth Headphones. You then take the _existing_ listing and change it piece by piece. First the pictures, then the title, then…
There's also a more subtle version of this, where the seller leaves the listing the same, but once enough positive reviews have accumulated they move production to a cheaper factory and use cheaper materials. So you might see older reviews for a pair of boots that say they're made from sturdy materials with good stitching, followed by later reviews saying that they didn't match the advertised sizing and pictures, or…
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>So many of the "brands" on Amazon are not even brands, it's just made up words next to a generic imported product. Like "iGoEnergeeFan" or something similarly stupid. Indeed, or the recent trend of naming your generic company with an ALL CAPS name, "VECTROMOX", as if that's somehow effective at differentiating your obviously fly-by-night operation. >Those good ole' "produce cheaply overseas and markup in our stores"…
> I loath America's rip-off economy. $25 for a t-shirt that cost $2 to make overseas, Buying a t-shirt in Europe isn't any cheaper.
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There's also a more subtle version of this, where the seller leaves the listing the same, but once enough positive reviews have accumulated they move production to a cheaper factory and use cheaper materials. So you might see older reviews for a pair of boots that say they're made from sturdy materials with good stitching, followed by later reviews saying that they didn't match the advertised sizing and pictures, or…
I've actually had this happen to stuff I bought, it's extremely shady and should be illegal.
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So I hear, but my experience with Amazon on this front has not been so positive. I pretty much count them as not having a return policy at all anymore. If I get broken garbage from them, I just eat the loss and get more suspicious of Amazon. It beats having the hassle of talking to Amazon in order to end up just eating the loss anyway. This is in contrast to eBay, which has always done right by me when I've had a pro…
That's the polar opposite of my experience, and really weird to read, I order from Amazon so much in large part because returns (when I need them) are so easy.
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No, it thinks it can get away with turning a blind eye to these problems.
There are literally several thousand people who work on marketplace fraud and quality issues. It's a huge concern.