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Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad

#51

Post by wpietri »

aslilac wrote: post #2

Amazon is unusable at this point, and I don’t get how they have so many customers. Free and fast shipping is no longer exclusive to them, and there are others out there with far nicer websites and no shitty ad listings.

Yeah, I've been weaning myself off Amazon for a while. Now if I'm shopping for something my general approach is to a) look for neutral reviews (e.g. Wirecutter and Consumer Reports), b) see if I can buy it from whoever makes it, and c) search on shopping.google.com to look for reasonable prices from some other vendor.

This is undeniably a little more work that just searching on Amazon and buying the first option. But it's about the same amount of work as using Amazon properly (skipping the sponsored listings, filtering out the dubious non-Amazon sellers, figuring out which reviews are fake, trying to tell whether the nominal maker is a real company versus some weird algorithm cloner or re-reseller, worrying over whether Amazon's inventory-mixing means I'll get a fake, etc).

I still end up buying some things from Amazon, but it's fewer and fewer, and I'm usually happier with the total outcome now.

Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad

#52

Post by 10729287 »

socialismisok wrote: post #5
aslilac wrote: post #2

Amazon is unusable at this point, and I don’t get how they have so many customers. Free and fast shipping is no longer exclusive to them, and there are others out there with far nicer websites and no shitty ad listings.

It's easy. It's easier to buy there than elsewhere because it's habit. I stopped prime a couple years ago, I buy from other stores when I can, but sometimes you just need protein powder, spray bottles, stove gaskets, a 300 piece puzzle, and a cello stand. Amazon makes it possible to just buy one spot.

I quit Amazon one year ago and this also made my buying habits healthier. No more impulse buying. Eveything's connected.

Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad

#53

Post by jabo »

I recently had to buy something mundane - a light bulb, with a specific lumen and color temperature spec. Weeding out all the junk listings, ads and clearly fake reviews, I ended up spending an hour trying to get to the one I wanted to buy.

Had a very similar experience for another product as well.

At this point, I hesitate to look up stuff on Amazon just considering the time it takes to find stuff. I much rather prefer a curated list of products so someone else has done the weeding out.

It seems like Amazon’s philosophy of having the widest set of options for every product is actually not that useful in practice, at least for me.

The only reason I still keep going back is that they deliver many products on the same day to the neighborhood I live in.

Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad

#54

Post by navane »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #49
UltraViolence wrote: post #35

The article speaks of a tipping point and has aided in pulling it forward. Unlimited greed is what eventually sinks a company. We saw it with AltaVista in the '90's (when the search results were all ads) and Google is slowly repeating this opening a space for a competitor to jump into.

> Unlimited greed is what eventually sinks a company. We saw it with AltaVista in the '90's (when the search results were all ads) and Google is slowly repeating this opening a space for a competitor to jump into. I'm not sure this is a helpful characterization. Greed is also what helped the same companies get where they were before they went to shit. The problem is that you can only grow so far in a market before th…

There are always people working in these companies that are trying to get a good product to a customer. These are slowly replaced or overruled by A/B testers who want to maximize profit. I think that process shifts the company from actually doing a service, to greed.

Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad

#55

Post by bombcar »

xadhominemx wrote: post #4
aslilac wrote: post #2

Amazon is unusable at this point, and I don’t get how they have so many customers. Free and fast shipping is no longer exclusive to them, and there are others out there with far nicer websites and no shitty ad listings.

What are your preferred alternatives?

Target

Home Depot

Best Buy

Walmart (this is getting polluted with "vendors")

Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad

#56

Post by i_am_jl »

nequo wrote: post #39
d23 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can be relatively sure I'm not getting ripped off by more than +/- 25% I think this is the only thing keeping them afloat. How are you so sure you’re not getting ripped off? Did you know counterfeits can be sold under the “sold by anazon.com” branding because of co-mingling? I used to have the same view as you until I started getting shoddy products consistently from brands that were otherwise high quality if I p…

> Did you know counterfeits can be sold under the “sold by anazon.com” branding because of co-mingling? I have also had a bad experience with "Sold by Amazon.com" so I'm not questioning the veracity of what you are saying. But how does this work? How can someone get a counterfeit product under this umbrella?

"Sold by Amazon" comingles identical SKUs from different sellers in their warehouses.

Seller A sells real Product Z on Amazon. Seller B sells fake Product Z on Amazon. When you order Product Z that is "Sold on Amazon" you might get a real one provided by Seller A, or you might get a fake one sold by Seller B

Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad

#57

Post by dimitrios1 »

moolcool wrote: post #42

It runs deeper than just everything being an ad. It's also completely flooded with rebadged junk from dropshippers. A few weeks ago, I was looking for a new whetstone, and this is what I got when I searched Amazon https://i.imgur.com/1Utp2dF.png The results keep going like that. You see constant repetition of the exact same units with slightly different branding, often with the same stock photography, repeated for pa…

That King whetstone is good, I have it and use it.

Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad

#58

Post by fhd2 »

wpietri wrote: post #51
aslilac wrote: post #2

Amazon is unusable at this point, and I don’t get how they have so many customers. Free and fast shipping is no longer exclusive to them, and there are others out there with far nicer websites and no shitty ad listings.

Yeah, I've been weaning myself off Amazon for a while. Now if I'm shopping for something my general approach is to a) look for neutral reviews (e.g. Wirecutter and Consumer Reports), b) see if I can buy it from whoever makes it, and c) search on shopping.google.com to look for reasonable prices from some other vendor. This is undeniably a little more work that just searching on Amazon and buying the first option. But…

I started doing the same 1-2 years ago! Felt bad about giving Jeff Bezos so much money.

At first I thought it was gonna be an impossible effort, but since I'd take Google over Amazon any day (although also not super happily), I do a lot of the last mile (finding a good/non-shady offer for a specific product I've already decided to buy through reviews) there. And usually I find it cheaper with equally fast shipping. For stuff I commonly buy, there are really strong competitors (at least in Germany) that I buy from by going directly to their website.

Had to first realise that a lot of the stuff Amazon was at first unique for, is now pretty much a commodity. And their offering certainly hasn't improved in the last years in my eyes.

Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad

#59

Post by tomohawk »

jabo wrote: post #53

I recently had to buy something mundane - a light bulb, with a specific lumen and color temperature spec. Weeding out all the junk listings, ads and clearly fake reviews, I ended up spending an hour trying to get to the one I wanted to buy. Had a very similar experience for another product as well. At this point, I hesitate to look up stuff on Amazon just considering the time it takes to find stuff. I much rather pre…

Try bulbs.com

Even when I have to resort to amazon, I usually end up using that info to find non amazon sites to purchase from. Why support a fake goods laundry service?

Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad

#60

Post by Zufriedenheit »

I do my online shopping almost exclusively through comparison sites (idealo and geizhals). They have much better filter options. This also overcomes the problem with dynamic pricing where in some cases shops show me >25% higher price if I navigate to them directly as they show me when coming through a price comparison site.
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