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Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

thewirecutter.com

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Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#191

Post by amdelamar »

Timothycquinn wrote: post #180

I just watched a CBC Marketplace spot on this topic. What scared me the most was the danger of toxic materials in fake products and especially makeup. Some lipsticks from brand name knock offs had had mercury levels hundreds of times higher than the maximum levels recommended by industry standards.

Netflix has a short documentary on this very thing. It was really eye-opening that counterfeit makeup and cosmetics are not only bad for businesses but they can be physically harmful to the body/face, resulting in some people being rushed to the hospital.

The series is called Broken and the episode on cosmetics is "Makeup Mayhem" https://www.netflix.com/title/81002391

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#192

Post by jschwartzi »

101008 wrote: post #34

Sorry if this is offtopic, I was planning to buy a Google Pixel 3A from Amazon in a week (It's cheaper than from Google Store). Are mobile phones also forgered on Amazon? or they don't aim to forger stuff like that? Thank you. (I am from a 3rd world country and travelling to USA next week)

No, but they're extremely likely to be refurbished but sold as new. Every phone I've bought off Amazon that was sold as "new" this was the case.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#193

Post by FalconSensei »

101404 wrote: post #190
jay_kyburz wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Amazon should employ a hundreds of everyday people to review products full time. When you list a product on Amazon, you have to pay 10-20 of those Amazon Employees to review the product at arms length. Say each reviewer is given 2 hours for each product, before you can list a product on Amazon you have to pay $2 x 20 x hourly rate. These should be the only reviews. Or you can sell your product with no reviews…

Too expensive for most products. Simply limit "review rights" to users who have made a certain amount of purchases, are already subscribed for a certain amount of time, etc.

Also limit review to be written X time after the product arrives. So many useless reviews that just said they received it and they are going to try it later...

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#194

Post by smileysteve »

quickthrowman wrote: post #9
empath75 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you solve it by making amazon directly liable for fraud on their platform. They’d clean up the problem pretty quickly after losing a few billion dollars in lawsuits.

How do you convince Congress to pass that legislation when there’s lots of money on the other side lobbying for the status quo?

There is already legislation that should give the FTC teeth to fine or shutdown Amazon based on counterfeit goods, especially if the branding is illegitimate.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#195

Post by eddieplan9 »

andrewfromx wrote: post #124
ThePhysicist wrote: post #88

It's funny: I always thought the Internet and platforms like Amazon with the collaborative reviewing system would make brands more and more obsolete, because you could just pick high-quality products from smaller manufacturers by looking at user reviews. Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy, because I simply cannot trust user reviews in most of the cases. Recently there are more…

i think from the director of engineering at amazon charged with making sure reviews are not fake, they would say "we can only make it so difficult to create a new account and prove you are human before it literally becomes impossible for new people to make real accounts." You say amazon has to police this more. I say amazon has tried and there is so much money to be made in jumping through the hoops to prove you are…

If you cannot get everyone to review for all purchases, then the next best thing is to do random sampling by randomly choose buyers and purchases to get reviewed, and possibly pay them so that selected reviews are collected. I have fond memory of winning the moderation lottery at Slashdot [1]. The current system of free for all will only amplify the voice of the abusers.

[1] https://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#196

Post by sk5t »

hrktb wrote: post #173
ThePhysicist wrote: post #88

It's funny: I always thought the Internet and platforms like Amazon with the collaborative reviewing system would make brands more and more obsolete, because you could just pick high-quality products from smaller manufacturers by looking at user reviews. Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy, because I simply cannot trust user reviews in most of the cases. Recently there are more…

I think we are going in the expected direction, but we’re not at the end yet. About brands, we’ve seen the rise of comparison sites and review videos that allows unknown products to raise to the top. I’d say that’s pretty in line with your expectations towards user reviews. We just have more experienced, less influencable/buyable reviewers (in general). For instance the top vacuum cleaner on wirecutter doesn’t need t…

After reading about the Wirecutter's attempts to extract a commission from a maker of standing desks[0] and observing their general high churn in product picks, it seems hard to argue that WC isn't buyable.

[0] https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#197

Post by FalconSensei »

QuinnWilton wrote: post #156
int_19h wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google search results have been deteriorating in the past couple of years. It feels like the algorithm has been deliberately tweaked to produce larger quantities of less relevant results - it will often substitute words for "synonyms" that are much broader in scope, to the point of rendering the query pointless. I can't help but think that the purpose is to then show more "relevant" ads.

Even so, the deteriorated results I get from Google tend to be better than what I get anywhere else. I have DDG set as my default engine, and frequently need to fallback on Google. I wish I could say DDG was as good or better, but outside of the privacy perspective, that unfortunately hasn't been my experience.

Unfortunately, there's no way DDG could compete with Google without any tracking/history as google has.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#198

Post by pmart123 »

lsc wrote: post #159
andrewfromx wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think from the director of engineering at amazon charged with making sure reviews are not fake, they would say "we can only make it so difficult to create a new account and prove you are human before it literally becomes impossible for new people to make real accounts." You say amazon has to police this more. I say amazon has tried and there is so much money to be made in jumping through the hoops to prove you are…

eh, but if this problem gets bad enough, it will kill amazon. If I order a certain brand of stuff off of amazon and I get something I can't use often enough, I'm going to order from another store. Right now, I'm paying a premium for the convenience of amazon. I'm willing to pay a reasonably large premium for convenience; taking that premium is a sustainable business, but if I'm paying a premium, I expect the product…

I won’t buy anything I would ingest on Amazon anymore outside of Wholefoods. I’ll go to Target for things like Advil or toothpaste.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#199

Post by californical »

ng12 wrote: post #21

This happened to me the first time this Christmas. Bought a $25 electric doodad that was "sold by Amazon" for a family member and it was obviously a fake. It came in a very generic white box with the company logo stamped on it, inside was a product that looked completely different and was non-functional. Not only that, but the product was difficult to return (I had to contact support) which makes me suspect Amazon kn…

I bought a monitor once on amazon a couple of years ago. It seemed legit -- packaging looked authentic. Monitor looked authentic. But the power cable was really weird and clunky. It had no branding on it, and everything was written in Chinese. It barely fit into the monitor, and the monitor would only turn on if the cable was in exactly the right position. This was an LG monitor, and not a cheap one, so I contacted amazon and they accepted the return and sent a replacement. Well, the replacement was even worse. Same thing where the power cable seemed incredibly cheap, but the monitor itself seemed fine, but I couldn't even get it to turn on unless I was actively holding the power cable into the monitor.

Ended up just returning it again, but thought it was a fluke. I still used amazon for a while, but this type of thing has become so common that I don't use them anymore at all.

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