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Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews

arstechnica.com

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Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews

#141

Post by ethbr0 »

coldpie wrote: post #133
hanklazard wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also found myself buying a lot of things from Best Buy, something I would have scoffed at 5-7 years ago. These days, I just want to know that I'm getting a genuine (vs replica) product and most of the time I can go pick-up my purchase same day, solving the "fast shipping" problem.

Since NewEgg started up their 3rd party seller program, I've also switched to Best Buy. Running out of places to buy from that aren't flooded with trash.

Aka "the Etsy effect" (lowering the bar for new sellers results in a flood of bad-faith sellers)

Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews

#142

Post by sergiotapia »

cambalache wrote: post #29

I was a heavy Amazon customer 8-10 years ago. I only bought stuff sold directly by Amazon, and that was not hard to do, since +90% of the products had that option. The other day I was just checking the price of an article for my mom and I was shocked how different is now, the proportion has totally changed, +90% of the articles are not sold by Amazon and by the "stores" name it looks they are barely better than rando…

Where do you purchase things from now? I've been using Zappos for clothing and shoes, their filters are dead simple and allow laser-targeting.

Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews

#143

Post by baq »

rendall wrote: post #75
dopylitty wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brands aren't perfect either. For example Volvo had a reputation for making great safe cars. The brand is now owned by a company with a reputation for making cars that disintegrate and obliterate the occupants in crash tests. The same is true of Arc'teryx, Jaguar, and many other well known brands that have been sold off to companies with terrible reputations for quality. Ultimately the only way to guarantee quality w…

> Ultimately the only way to guarantee quality would be to vote for politicians who support strong regulations and a strong regulatory apparatus. Speaking as a socialist-leaning libertarian, I'mma have to take a hard disagree on this. Let the companies have a mix of terrible quality and great quality as they wish, and let the market itself decide which products and companies succeed or fail Let a private company, say…

yeah it'd make sense if you disregard externalities.

i sure don't want the usb charger market to sort itself out by the metric of which products burn my house down faster.

Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews

#144

Post by coldpie »

ethbr0 wrote: post #139
coldpie wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've completely stopped ordering from Amazon, for three reasons: they have too much market power, they have serious ethics problems, and their 3rd party seller program has made the buying experience garbage. Welcome to the club.

I've come full circle and only order books (usually used) or things I don't care if they're Chinese bargain-version off Amazon anymore. Target, or occasionally Walmart, gets what used to be Amazon's business from me.

Even books aren't safe. Support your local booksellers! https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/amazo...

Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews

#145

Post by ethbr0 »

_jal wrote: post #110
searchableguy wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if Amazon won't police (and they have problems with commingling counterfeit brands, too) then Walmart and Target will jump ahead. I think they are solving this differently. Amazon introduced their own brands for almost all daily necessities. Amazon basic, amazon pharmacy, amazon fashion, amazon elements, amazon pantry, amazon echo and few more. They generally have average or above average products at an affordable…

Yeah, tried that. Amazon Basics are as hit-or-miss as the rest of the garbage. I'm frankly surprised they want to put their name on what appears to be dollar store crap that might be fine, might not, who knows. You can almost see the flickering neon and smell the cleaning fluid.

> smell the cleaning fluid

2020 brick and mortar's new motto

Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews

#146

Post by bittercynic »

pr0zac wrote: post #121
capitainenemo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last time I bought a "new" phone "Sold by: Amazon.com Services LLC" it arrived several weeks late, with a burned in screen, scuff marks, and randomly rebooting. My impression is they did not have the item they were selling, and were relying on some presumably "trusted" reseller to provide it. I ended up purchasing a used one in much better condition on eBay for several hundred dollars less where the condition at…

Be careful using eBay, a rather scary number of listings on there are people just relisting items from Amazon at a higher price and reshipping (or just ordering with your shipping address, I had one eBay purchase come directly from Amazon).

There are plenty of terrible sellers on ebay, too, but it is much easier to sort out the garbage sellers. Seller feedback is right there in the search results, and though you can't filter by feedback any more, it is easy enough to just skip over any listings with a low number or less than 99.9% positive.

Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews

#147

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

jmeister wrote: post #33
alkonaut wrote: post #11

Amazon reviews are about as useful as Youtube comments. You can read them for entertainment but don't expect anything useful about the product, and don't base a purchase decision on them.

Hyperbole. I’ve been reading book reviews on Amazon before buying, on-site or somewhere else, for ~15 years. I’ve almost never seen an item with unhelpful reviews.

I think book reviews (and presumably music, movie reviews) are going to be quite a bit different from other sorts of product reviews, for obvious reasons.

Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews

#148

Post by dan-robertson »

SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #128

Here's one solution: don't buy cheap garbage. Yes, someone makes a $23 drone. It is cheap plastic shit from China. Do you really need to buy it, and then throw it in landfill a week (or two days) later after it breaks? Did OP reeeeeally expect a $23 drone to be on the up-and-up and NOT end up as landfill? OP is a bit oblivious to his impact on the environment. This race to the bottom for the cheapest crap is what ins…

... Except that Amazon also has a problem with counterfeiting, especially for known brands.

Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews

#149

Post by cbanek »

Somewhat related due to comments / reviews being for a product, but sometimes on Amazon one page has a set of different options (with the little boxes). So you can pick like a color or model. But then they group all the reviews together despite what buttons you've picked. This is so frustrating! At least they've added a little thing that says which SKU the review is for. But I wish they would just separate out the reviews for different models / colors. It just seems another way to get increased review counts and make it look like a clear obvious quality winner from the search results box.

Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews

#150

Post by ethbr0 »

TravisLS wrote: post #18

There's a somewhat pervasive idea that advertising and brand recognition are coercive tools that will ultimately die out, replaced by better objective information about products. I'm kind of partial to this idea myself. But increasingly we seem a long way from achieving this. Amazon reviews have become such garbage, I've fallen back to pretty much relying on name brands as my placeholder for product quality. There's…

> There's still a lot to be said for established brands. Brands can afford widespread advertising...

Established brands can do one other thing -- enforce on-ground quality assurance in China / manufacturing outsourcer

Chinese factories are amazing. But they produce what you let them produce. 1000-units-of-X, only QA'd when they hit receiving port, are going to trend to crap.

On the other hand, established brands have the financial and relationship muscle to actually inspect and cut things out earlier, and therefore can maintain a higher quality level on shelves

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