Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Top USB Drives on Amazon are a Scam

kurtisknodel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 250 posts

Re: Top USB Drives on Amazon are a Scam

#61

Post by up2isomorphism »

imwillofficial wrote: post #46
up2isomorphism wrote: post #41

You know that price is too slow for 1TB drive and you are willing to take the chance and at the end you can still return it get the refund and give a bad review. I didn’t know how much better Amazon can do as a platform in this case.

But not selling fraudulent products. Are you saying nothing more can be done?

It can try to reduce the chance, but absolutely no fraudulent products? No, I don’t think so and I don’t think any platform can do that without significantly increasing the cost. I have using a dozen of e commerce websites and no one is doing remotely comparable to Amazon.

Just return the product and write a review to help others rather than whining about something unrealistic didn’t happen.

Re: Top USB Drives on Amazon are a Scam

#62

Post by NavinF »

esses wrote: post #31

I think there's one thing that should be clarified from the article. "Sponsored" does not mean that the product is "sponsored by Amazon" as italicized in the article. It means the seller paid money to be at the top of the search query. Perhaps it is a healthy dose of old aged jadedness, but I have a habit of trying to avoid Sponsored items.

uBlock Origin blocks sponsored search results by default because like you said they're just ads.

(Amazon will still return a duplicate result for the same product in the correct place further down the list so you're not missing out on anything by blocking sponsored search results)

Re: Top USB Drives on Amazon are a Scam

#63

Post by andreapmd »

I noticed this as well recently while I was shopping for an SSD drive. A majority of listings are obvious frauds with no reviews. What I also found out is that there is no way to report a listing for obvious fraud, probably to avoid deliberately flagging competitors’ products, but which could easily done by taking into account an individual customer’s credibility score/reputation/history.

Re: Top USB Drives on Amazon are a Scam

#64

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

josephcsible wrote: post #33
RobertRies wrote: post #32

While I agree this is a problem - one which I have been the victim of as well - Amazon accepts the return with no questions and/or charges. This, of course, is not a great consolidation, especially for a novice who doesn't understand or encounters it too late. But I strongly disagree with "Amazon runs little to no risk selling the fraudulent products, but still makes money off of them." In the next paragraph the auth…

> Amazon accepts the return with no questions and/or charges But remember that Amazon keeps what's basically a social credit score on you that drops every time you return something, and then they permanently ban you (including from non-retail things like AWS and Prime Video) if it ever gets too low.

Amazon tracks your returns, but if you're within their model, which is not particularly tight, you don't have anything to worry about.

It's mostly targeted toward people who are egregious, and more importantly, lose Amazon money.

If you return a few too many DSLRs, Apple laptops or other high end gear you'll quickly find yourself on the rocks, or decide you're going to start a drop-shipping business from your Prime account or maybe you regularly put bricks in your returns instead of the actual products.

By comparison there is my friend. She shops a lot on Amazon but not a huge amount, maybe 15 items or so a month on average. She returns a lot of items, at least 20%, sometimes 50% or 100%. Far from banning her she routinely gets courtesy credits and outside policy refunds to keep her happy.

This is after she had actually been banned by Amazon, but not by retail. Instead, she spent 2+ years returning every since book she purchased for her Kindle, well over 100, when she realized she could buy a book and immediately return it, but turn off the Kindle internet connection while she finished reading it, before it was removed. They banned her from ever doing another Kindle return but she otherwise uses her Kindle normally.

Re: Top USB Drives on Amazon are a Scam

#65

Post by noncoml »

neilv wrote: post #39
noncoml wrote: post #20

In the future if you want to avoid counterfeit/scams try: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/

When I was learning photojournalism, I loved B&H service and prices so much. I've recently started adding B&H to where I shop for electronics, alongside Amazon and a local brick&mortar (Microcenter). I no longer check Newegg much, though recently they did have the best price on a particular 1U chassis that I wanted. I'd welcome more direct-to-consumer sales from the brands themselves. I hate buying USB or SD flash de…

Probably you know that already but you can buy Sandisk SDs straight from the Western Digital website (they bought Sandisk sometime back).

Tried them a couple of times and delivery was prompt and free! Highly recommend it.

Re: Top USB Drives on Amazon are a Scam

#66

Post by neilv »

noncoml wrote: post #65
neilv wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was learning photojournalism, I loved B&H service and prices so much. I've recently started adding B&H to where I shop for electronics, alongside Amazon and a local brick&mortar (Microcenter). I no longer check Newegg much, though recently they did have the best price on a particular 1U chassis that I wanted. I'd welcome more direct-to-consumer sales from the brands themselves. I hate buying USB or SD flash de…

Probably you know that already but you can buy Sandisk SDs straight from the Western Digital website (they bought Sandisk sometime back). Tried them a couple of times and delivery was prompt and free! Highly recommend it.

Thanks! I will absolutely try this!

I did have a poor experience recently with what I thought was D2C with another quality brand name. I thought I was buying server RAM from Micron (not marketplace), but shipping info looked like it might've been "some random guy's kitchen table moonlighting business", and they actually shipped non-ECC initially, even though the order was for ECC compatible with a particular mobo model. I hope Sandisk/WD does D2C better.

Re: Top USB Drives on Amazon are a Scam

#67

Post by LeoPanthera »

logifail wrote: post #53
LeoPanthera wrote: post #7

If you still want to buy from Amazon, I often use diskprices.com (no affiliation, just a user) to sort disks on Amazon by price-per-GB. For example, here are USB flash drives sorted by price-per-GB: https://diskprices.com/?locale=us&condition=new&disk_types=u...

While it's a mildly useful site, all diskprices' links are affiliate links, and I've not found an opt-out. I don't think we should share that stuff here on HN, it's a cancer on the web.

Affiliate links cost me nothing and if it keeps the site in business I am more than happy for them to take a few cents from Amazon.

Re: Top USB Drives on Amazon are a Scam

#68

Post by dpacmittal »

logifail wrote: post #53
LeoPanthera wrote: post #7

If you still want to buy from Amazon, I often use diskprices.com (no affiliation, just a user) to sort disks on Amazon by price-per-GB. For example, here are USB flash drives sorted by price-per-GB: https://diskprices.com/?locale=us&condition=new&disk_types=u...

While it's a mildly useful site, all diskprices' links are affiliate links, and I've not found an opt-out. I don't think we should share that stuff here on HN, it's a cancer on the web.

Why is it cancer? I don't see them spamming their affiliate links anywhere. They're providing a useful service and in return they get a commission from Amazon, it's not like I'm paying the extra from my own pocket

Re: Top USB Drives on Amazon are a Scam

#69

Post by gizmo686 »

Ephil012 wrote: post #43
RobertRies wrote: post #32

While I agree this is a problem - one which I have been the victim of as well - Amazon accepts the return with no questions and/or charges. This, of course, is not a great consolidation, especially for a novice who doesn't understand or encounters it too late. But I strongly disagree with "Amazon runs little to no risk selling the fraudulent products, but still makes money off of them." In the next paragraph the auth…

This is true for obvious scams (e.g. a blender that breaks in a week). However, for subtle scams people often don't realize the scam. For instance, many people won't hit the actual size limit of the USB and won't realize it's not 1TB. In these cases, Amazon does not take a reputation hit for these individuals due to them being unaware of the scam. Only the technically inclined or those who research before buying will…

A typical user might not recognize the nature of the scam. But they very easily could realize that the drive they bought from Amazon is defective. 8GB is not that much space (particularly when the OS thinks it has 1TB to play with). When the firmware runs out of real space to play with, it needs to start dropping data, and that is very visible.
Post reply on HN