71–80 of 124 posts
Amazon has a piracy/counterfeit problem. And has for a very long time. I have basically stopped buying there as much as possible. My current trend is to use them as a search engine then got to the companies site. At this point you might as well shop alibaba as thats where half the crap is from anyway.
Amazon has a piracy/counterfeit problem. And has for a very long time. I have basically stopped buying there as much as possible. My current trend is to use them as a search engine then got to the companies site. At this point you might as well shop alibaba as thats where half the crap is from anyway.
What amazes me is that the FTC doesn't address the problem. You'd think they'd care. This has been going on for years; you really can't tell whether you're buying genuine products or not on Amazon anymore. I've stopped buying anything where I actually care about the provenance (like power tools and anything personal hygiene related) on Amazon.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon kind of gave up on discovery, at least for books, when they realized they could make more money running ads. I sell books on Amazon. Years ago, their book pages had two carousels of "similar titles" on each book detail page. Similar titles were selected by some pretty helpful algorithms based on what purchasers of the current title had also purchased, as well as some other secret sauce. At the time, ads weren'…
This is somewhat of an aside about Target, but I've noticed that their inventory has moved significantly upmarket in the last 10 years or so. Their long-term strategy appears to be distinguishing themselves from the "bottom-of-the-barrel low-cost stuff" market and settling in a "low-cost but still decent stuff" niche.
Of course, the counterfeit seller can just create a new account, and then it becomes a game of whack-a-mole, but perhaps that could be grounds for a lawsuit against Amazon directly, for failing to rein in all the copyright infringement occurring on their platform. (Maybe even a class action, since this problem seems widespread.)
Again, I'm sure this isn't easy or fun (or cheap) to do, but tweeting at people to not buy your book from Amazon seems to be... not all that useful a response?
If they got rid of marketplace sellers and actually got control over their supply chain then they might actually go up in people's opinion. However Amazon and AWS isn't about doing a good job, it's about doing a mediocre job and making everyone happy though apologies. And that's why I'm still using them. They are a good balance.
Not sure why enabling piracy is a good balance. Care to expound on that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With books, Amazon has become the opposite of a search engine for me. I have to use external resources to actually find the right titles, to enter them 1:1 into Amazon search to get to the books. Context based discovery has become next to impossible (which I used it before a lot for). Something must have changed in their indexing algorithm a while ago. Also many results are flooded with garbage, like some ridiculous…
Amazon kind of gave up on discovery, at least for books, when they realized they could make more money running ads. I sell books on Amazon. Years ago, their book pages had two carousels of "similar titles" on each book detail page. Similar titles were selected by some pretty helpful algorithms based on what purchasers of the current title had also purchased, as well as some other secret sauce. At the time, ads weren'…
Amazon is currently recommending me shower heads and bathroom hardware from when I remodeled a month ago because I bought that stuff then. Pointless.
Amazon has a piracy/counterfeit problem. And has for a very long time. I have basically stopped buying there as much as possible. My current trend is to use them as a search engine then got to the companies site. At this point you might as well shop alibaba as thats where half the crap is from anyway.
With books, Amazon has become the opposite of a search engine for me. I have to use external resources to actually find the right titles, to enter them 1:1 into Amazon search to get to the books. Context based discovery has become next to impossible (which I used it before a lot for). Something must have changed in their indexing algorithm a while ago. Also many results are flooded with garbage, like some ridiculous…