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Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

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Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#361

Post by KozmoNau7 »

mns wrote: post #306
jahnu wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only allow reviews from verified purchasers

I have a friend in Germany that is in a Facebook group for "testing" products from Amazon. They need to purchase all kind of weird and low quality stuff from unknown Chinese brands, they keep the product, get a refund through Paypal and leave a 5 star review. I told him it's kind of a bad thing to do, but hey, free 29 Euro earbuds. :) I knew this was a problem mostly in the US, but just like one of the initial commen…

The stuff they get from doing this is basically junk, a complete waste of resources. But the allure of "free stuff!" is just to great, even if they just end up throwing it in the trash.

It's sickening.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#362

Post by Nasrudith »

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…

Personally I would phrase it more cynically - the brand is fundamentally a lie even in a magical no counterfeiting world. It had a purpose once as an "index" once but it hasn't been that way for a while.

Essentially all a Brand says is that they got money for it. It how it was made or that they won't decide to cut corners for their next quarterly earnings no matter how many years it was good.

In practice given how often the "counterfeits" are made in the same factory by the same workers with materials from the same supplier the money going there is no guarantee of either product quality or righteousness.

Trying to use brand for delegating quality control is doomed to failure in the real world.

I suspect the better approach towards product identification would be going by verifiable specifications like manufacturers and doing both shopping and any enforcement based upon that. It would be hard as hell to transition society towards that as a norm though with marketer saturation, time investment, and every manufacturer having a financial incentive to try to decommoditize themselves to improve yields and protect themselves from competition.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#363

Post by sn4pp »

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…

Just got scammed on one of those smaller sites, f it, I'll buy on amazon so I atleast get anything shipped to me.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#364

Post by aerique »

x0x0 wrote: post #144
stilley2 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for fastmail

also +1 for fastmail. (I say this as a longtime user, and this is not meant to be damning with faint praise). Their email is best of class outside of gmail. It even beats in certain ways: It syncs faster. It's not made by a surveillance company. As a paying user, I've gotten very competent tech support. They have very good privacy controls re: image loading. They seem to permanently grandfather rates, which is nice.…

In the case of Fastmail I don't know what you mean with "their preferred sync app" but I've used CalDAV-Sync in the past and now DAVx5 (because it's easier to use (used to be DAVdroid)) and I've never had these problems you mention.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#365

Post by sn4pp »

aguyfromnb wrote: post #355
mixmastamyk wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your logic. However, MS continues to do wrong, forced telemetry and upgrades, ads in the OS, are but a few examples. Only now drowned out.

> MS continues to do wrong, forced telemetry and upgrades, ads in the OS These things might be unpreferable to you, but none of them are "wrong".

"forced telemetry" is very wrong.

Let's see how long it takes until that is illegal in your country.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#366

Post by thaumasiotes »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #305
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…

Unfortunate, brand loyalty doesn't mean anything anymore: - a lot of companies don't manufacture the product themself - they don't even manufacture two products from the same subcontractor - sometime, the same product, between two batches, is not produce by the same sub-contractor - big players just don't care. Cisco is not going to lose business because you chose to not buy, and most people won't follow you to allow…

> Unfortunate, brand loyalty doesn't mean anything anymore

> sometimes, the same product, between two batches, is not produce by the same sub-contractor

This is how branding has always been. Gomorrah details the manufacturing process for high-end fashion brands: any number of clothing factories simultaneously accept a contract to deliver X items of clothing in Y time at Z unit price, the brand gives free materials to everyone who accepts, and the first factory to deliver the X items gets paid. Every other factory who accepted is stuck with a bunch of clothing rejected not for quality reasons, but because they turned it in slower than the first factory.

A lot of that clothing is then sold by organized crime using unauthorized brand labels. But is a shirt with a fake Calvin Klein label -- manufactured for Calvin Klein exactly to their specifications -- really "counterfeit"?

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#367

Post by overcast »

gowld wrote: post #240
overcast wrote: post #114

How do fake reviews get past order verification? Or is that tag complete bullshit?

Do the math: product price times number of reviews equals cost of fake reviews.

Makes sense for cheap stuff, but I've seen fairly valuable items get rated horribly on fake spot.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#368

Post by j-c-hewitt »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #276
j-c-hewitt wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do very frequently ask sellers to provide supplier documents. Amazon does very frequently do their own independent investigations into suppliers. There are probably hundreds if not thousands of Amazon employees and contractors requesting supplier documents and following up with investigations all day every day. However, Amazon also permits sellers to operate from countries that ignore US court orders. It is also…

> However, Amazon also permits sellers to operate from countries that ignore US court orders. Something that would help here is if Amazon would display the seller's country more prominently (or at all). It's a lot more problematic if you're not even aware that you're buying something from a seller in country without a functioning legal system.

Sure. The tricky thing about this is that there isn't much stopping anyone from starting a US shell or paying an associate to do it and then logging in to the account from anywhere. There are plenty of super functional countries that disobey court orders.

China for example does have a functioning court system. Like many countries, they don't cooperate with US court orders as a matter of sovereignty. Not even when Nike is trying to collect a couple billion dollars from counterfeiters: https://www.thefashionlaw.com/home/in-18-billion-case-over-c...

As you note though it's actually an important distinction about the retailer, because the retailer carries most of the product liability. Amazon makes people fill in a check box stating that they have liability insurance once the seller gets to a certain size, but they do not really check this at least to my knowledge. I encounter a lot of people who should have liability insurance, certified to Amazon that they did, but do not. There's not much wrong with a seller located in a country that cooperates with the US selling into the US because they can be held liable for any bad stuff that they do. They at least have a stake and can be held accountable. Not so when they are retailing from a safe haven.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#369

Post by j-c-hewitt »

luckylion wrote: post #317
j-c-hewitt wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do, but it's not a job nor is it compensated except by delivery of the products. It's called the Amazon Vine program. There is also something called the Early Reviewer Program which is different. Sellers opt in to the ERP for new products. People who participate in the reviews sometimes get a tiny incentive from Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/gp/vine/help https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?node…

... and for some reason, Vine pretty much means "all the stars, all the time", so that's not "testing", that's just buying a 5 star review from a "verified" account. It's essentially an ad, not a review.

I don't think most people who aren't Vine reviewers are happy with how it works ('cause they get free stuff). I have seen Vine reviewers leave bad reviews, and I know because I've been yelled at over it.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#370

Post by habanany »

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…

It’s probable PS4 and Nitendo users are too busy playing so they have no time to write a review I’m just saying.
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