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Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish?

theguardian.com

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Re: Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish?

#221

Post by mgh2 »

Why does the author need to inject his political viewpoints into the article?

> Cory Doctorow is an activist, science fiction author and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing.

If you have not dealt with digital marketing, this article is structured as an advertorial, present a pain (Amazon practices), then offer a solution/product, with a subtle call to action (CTA) at the end - "subscribe to the left ideology to get rid of the problem"

I am tired of political propaganda masqueraded as information. Ironically, the author doesn't know that he is a product of "enshittification"; but instead of physical products, left ideologies, heavily advertised through social media.

https://www.allsides.com/news-source/guardian

Re: Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish?

#222

Post by Macha »

400thecat wrote: post #211
regularfry wrote: post #197

Has anyone else ordered a pair of shoes only to open the box and find... one shoe? Best I can guess someone's ordered two pairs, split one of the pairs across the two boxes, and sent both boxes back for two refunds and they've gone straight back on the shelf.

how would that help? either they check the returned boxes or they don't. sending back 1 shoe does not fools the inspection

An empty shoebox is so much lighter than a full shoebox that the odds of triggering someones sense of this being fishy are way higher I guess.

Re: Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish?

#223

Post by blagie »

rkomorn wrote: post #44
blagie wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's double-return-fraud. Amazon shouldn't sell returned products as "new," but as "open box." The other way it happens is co-mingling. Some vendor sends an "open box" product to Amazon as new, or a fake product, and Amazon ships it out when sold by Amazon since it considers goods to be fungible. I stopped buying anything which goes in my body from eBay, Amazon, and similar after receiving a premium food product with…

Man, I don't think this co-mingling thing was big or existed when I moved to a country that Amazon doesn't ship to directly almost 6 years ago. Reading about it on HN makes me feel fortunate. I can't recall ever running into something like this back then.

Amazon broke in 2020, when most shopping went online. It never recovered.

I doubt it ever will. Trust takes a long time to earn, and a little bit of time to break. I had four or five incidents on Amazon, cancelled Prime, and I doubt it will ever make business sense for Amazon to get me back.

I do think there's a place for a competitor to Amazon right now which looks more like the old Amazon.

Starting one would be super-capital-intensive. It's not a lean startup. There's only a handful of organizations with the capital to do that, and I doubt any of them will, in fact, do it.

Re: Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish?

#224

Post by taffronaut »

Hendrikto wrote: post #160
onli wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.de promised to call me, never called. Split an order in three, used a bank account I had already removed from the system, then made me pay a fee three times when the money naturally could not be retrieved. One item in the order was a fake, when I returned it they claimed I kept it - thankfully I still had the receipt that I returned something, together with some stern words that was enough to end that. Never buy fro…

> Germany has a bunch of alternative online shops that are better. Such as? I never ran into such problems with Amazon, but I would like to know the alternatives.

Thomann - for musical instrument stuff

Re: Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish?

#225

Post by wtmt »

sometimes_all wrote: post #90

In India, Amazon has been quite good IFF you have Prime. Deliveries are quite quick, returns and refund rules are clear, and always get processed if eligible. If you're a frequent user, it's well worth the subscription cost. If you don't have Prime though, it's a different place altogether. But you don't have much of a choice - Flipkart (the other alternative) is worse in every way.

I was looking through the comments here for something like this. Additional context for others here: Amazon in India is legally allowed only to operate a marketplace. It is not allowed to stock and sell products by itself (it does FBA, i.e., Fulfilled by Amazon for warehousing and delivering products by third party sellers).

Amazon in India has been close to perfect on customer service. I have had issues, but it’s still easier to contact customer service on chat or have them call me (both modes have become a little more difficult to access with the stupid chat bot responding and not helping). Anytime there’s a defective item that needs to be returned for refund or replaced, it’s been very quick.

Lately though, I’ve made it a habit of shooting unboxing videos and photos of the delivered package so that I have clear evidence on any wrongdoing by anyone in Amazon. For larger appliances and such, I’d still prefer a local brick and mortar store.

On the other hand, Flipkart, which is Amazon’s primary competitor, has worse prices on many items of interest to me, does not really offer fast shipping like Amazon does, has only a phone number to contact customer service (and that’s pretty useless), doesn’t have a simple way to get returns or replacements done, has a really stupid and useless “SuperCoins” rewards scheme, and more. It’s a wonder that Walmart is still an investor and owner in Flipkart and hasn’t sold it off and salvaged itself.

I do believe that Amazon’s service in India has deteriorated over the last couple of years or so. Don’t know if management doesn’t care as much or what’s happening within.

Re: Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish?

#226

Post by grafmax »

Essentially the enshittified internet is a rent-extracting one. It locks users in, often taking a loss leader, then once it has built this moat, it degrades user experience by extracting rent. Rent extraction is a form of profit that allows the wealthy owners of these platforms to parasitize money from the working class by relying on lock-in instead of offering something of value in return. It’s in society’s interest that businesses like this are expropriated and socialized and handed over to the workers to run. This would lower prices by eliminating lock-in based profiteering, restore the internet from its state of enshittification, and decentralize power by reducing wealth concentration.

However power is so centralized in the hands of these oligarchs this wont happen on its own. They are currently turning our country into a white Christian nationalist ethno-state to try to preserve their tenuous hold on power.

In the medium term, their adversarial approach to society’s welfare is likely to backfire as we continue to find ourselves increasingly squeezed by the enshittified world these oligarchs have created - and turn to the only real effective tool that we have left: mass strikes. The longer we wait the harder it’s going to be.

Re: Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish?

#227

Post by YokoZar »

qurashee wrote: post #148
dwedge wrote: post #64

I bought a $120 book from Amazon a couple of months ago, internationally, and they sent the wrong book. I told them, and they said they'd refund it, don't need to send it back, and they'd even add $15 credit. The refund never arrived so a few weeks later I got in touch again and they said I need to send it back if I want a refund. They told me the previous CSR had lied to improve ratings. I asked who I can complain t…

I recently had a similar experience with Amazon. I bought a pair of AirPods but didn’t like them, so I returned them the next day. Amazon confirmed they’d received the package, but when the estimated refund date passed, I got a message saying they needed more information. When I contacted customer service, they told me I had to send them a copy of my ID to process the refund. I was really frustrated; I’ve had this ac…

> I’ve had this account for over 20 years and never had any issues before.

"Aged" accounts are a thing you can buy on the black market, as well as hacked accounts of users with long chains of legitimate activity. It's not as strong of an anti-fraud signal as you might think.

Re: Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish?

#229

Post by onli »

taffronaut wrote: post #224
Hendrikto wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Germany has a bunch of alternative online shops that are better. Such as? I never ran into such problems with Amazon, but I would like to know the alternatives.

Thomann - for musical instrument stuff

Plus microphones and headphones :)

Re: Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish?

#230

Post by Ezhik »

ekianjo wrote: post #80

in Japan I experience none of the problems that people in HN seem to have with Amazon in other countries. Never encountered fake products, return has always worked, and stuff that never arrived was also reimbursed. Maybe I'm an exception.

Japanese Amazon shipped me a fake copy of a book once, with terrible print quality to the point of having overlapping text. They did refund me, but my review calling it out as fake was removed.
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