I've pretty much learned to buy nothing of value from Amazon any more. Got burned too many times. Read the reviews! This problem is endemic! People are buying new items and either getting used or wrong items. The site has gone to shit since they moved to rely heavily on affiliates. I now buy direct from manufacturer or brick and mortar.
Is this really necessary though? Lots of manufacturers don't sell directly to the public anyway, and more importantly, Amazon is not the only internet retailer out there. There's tons of them. It seems like it's really better, in fact, if Amazon goes belly-up and we get more competition and more strong internet retailers to choose from, instead of having one giant one dominating everything.
Just one anecdote: my (now-ex) wife really liked some kind of sea salt from Sardinia. (Yeah, I know, how different is sea salt from Sardinia from sea salt from any place else?) Anyway, she uses a lot of salt, relatively, and we had moved so she couldn't buy it from her regular little Italian market, so I looked online. Amazon had it, but it was rather expensive per jar, and that was from some 3rd party seller. (This was probably around 3 years ago, before Amazon really went down the tubes.) So I did some Googling and Froogling, and found a website that sold nothing but imported Italian foods, and a lot of it. I bought a couple cases of this salt (both fine and coarse grain) for dirt-cheap prices, less than half the price on Amazon, and much cheaper than she used to get it for locally. She also added in a bunch of other items that were also very cheap because this retailer was the importer and was cutting out middlemen and not having to pay for an expensive storefront. To me, this exemplifies what internet shopping should be like: specialty retailers that cut out unnecessary middlemen, have excellent selection, and don't have all the problems that B&M stores have (location, limited hours, having to travel there, high rents, etc.), and are able to pass these savings to end-users. Amazon, by contrast, seems to exemplify the worst of capitalism: one single company able to take advantage of efficiencies of scale and brand-name recognition in order to capture the majority of the market, not specializing in anything, and providing a mediocre-to-bad experience overall, but no one else being able to compete because the barrier to entry is too high.