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Best Buy Is Thriving in the Age of Amazon

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Re: Best Buy Is Thriving in the Age of Amazon

#381

Post by therein »

elialbert wrote: post #290
therein wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been meaning to get into the FBA business and I downloaded the Helium10 extension for this. It allows you to see the inventory status of an item you are viewing on Amazon. It is shocking how many times something that says `sold by Sony` or `Amazon` yet I press `inventory` on the menu that the extension injects into the product page and surprise, surprise, most of the stock is coming from FBA sellers.

any idea where they get this info from? imagine a more consumer-oriented extension that could list whether a given amazon product was likely to have commingled inventory or not - do you think this is possible?

I imagine they get it from some Amazon API, however I don't have the specifics.

Take a look at the information it displays: https://i.imgur.com/ZbgfSlo.png

Ignore the price bit, it normally shows the price right but there must be a minor transient issue right now.

But as you can see, Amazon claims the product is sold by Sony. However most of the sellers are not Sony.

As you said, having a customer-oriented variant of this functionality would be an amazing feature for a browser extension.

Re: Best Buy Is Thriving in the Age of Amazon

#382

Post by michaelmrose »

mimimihaha wrote: post #230
superflyguy wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that you won't get the money back this time, but that they will refuse to sell you anything in future.

Oh yeah. When you get flagged in their system it’s pretty brutal. But you have to be extremely malicious to have it happen to you. Especially if you have a strong background with the company (member for many year + prime member for many years). Not only will they black list your address but every address on the account you own, meaning if you sent your friends a gift from amazon they will not longer be able to use am…

You make a very strong statement regarding a data point of one, that is to say yourself.

Immediately thereafter you list a way you can get flagged through no fault of your own because a friend who was flagged shipped things your your address as a gift.

I don't want to have to establish a strong background of years of membership in order not to get treated like trash. I'm not interviewing for a job or a date I just want to give you my money for goods that aren't counterfeit.

When you have a large minority of fakes and problem shipments you are going to have outliers. People whom you shipped 5 fakes/broken stuff in a row.

Banning these people means that not only can I not trust you to sell me a legit good I can't trust you not to turn your back on me afterwards.

Re: Best Buy Is Thriving in the Age of Amazon

#383

Post by michaelmrose »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #211
ceejayoz wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(and maybe yank your Kindle collection and AWS resources at the same time...)

Which is why you should have a separate account for AWS vs your Amazon.com account, and you should download and rip the DRM off your Kindle books.

You just shouldn't buy drm encumbered things nor trust anyone who might ban you for no reason with no recourse.

Re: Best Buy Is Thriving in the Age of Amazon

#384

Post by cosmie »

sah2ed wrote: post #344
patrickxie wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you believe your account is flagged, you can sell that account to people who are willing to purchase Aged Amazon accounts, they will buy out the remainder of your Amazon prime payments.

Is that even a thing? What exactly would they do with Aged Amazon accounts? Setup a FBA storefront?

Sell reviews, more than likely. A review left by a seasoned account with an established and long purchase history appears far more legitimate than from an obvious shill account, and is correspondingly more valuable.

The same sort of incentive can be found in a lot of places. There's a pretty niche but healthy market for aged companies, for example. So rather than winding down and dissolving your entity, you can make a few bucks by selling it. And rather than making a new company, you would just buy one of those dormant entities. With multiple incentives, one of the primary being that the established entity will have an aged enough paper trail to pass a lot of fraud checks and credit opportunities that a new entity couldn't.

Re: Best Buy Is Thriving in the Age of Amazon

#385

Post by dhimes »

sjg007 wrote: post #312
gnicholas wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason Best Buy is still alive is that they effectively price discriminate between online buyers and in-store buyers. I saw a deal for a 48” Vizio TV on bestbuy.com for $206 (in 2016, this was a screaming deal). I ordered for in-store pickup. When I went to the store, I saw the TV was listed for sale at $400 or so, with no indication of a better price online. So Best Buy makes tons of money off folks who wander i…

I think the line that they use is that bestbuy.com is a different business then best buy. something like that.

A lot of stores have that model- effectively putting online in competition with brick and mortar. I heard the founder of Staples (Stemberg) speak to this early in e-retail. Somebody asked how they were handling the upcoming online pressure, and he said they made it a separate unit with their own strategies, etc.

Re: Best Buy Is Thriving in the Age of Amazon

#386

Post by acdha »

AlexandrB wrote: post #363
maxsilver wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Best Buy doesn’t install anything on the PCs they sell. This isn't necessarily true. Some PCs are Best Buy specific models, with extra bloatware from Best Buy (in addition to the OEM bloatware from Dell / HP / Lenovo). This also affects physical components sometimes. I remember from laptop shopping a few months ago, that the MSI GS63 Stealth laptop ships with a crappier screen specifically for the Best Buy model ,…

Reading something like this I have two thoughts: 1. Why would PC manufacturers de-value their own brand like this!? 2. It almost makes sense why Apple can get away with charging a premium. No mystery meat hardware/crapware regardless of retailer.

They don’t see it as devaluing — the people who buy the cheapest thing have very little loyalty, and everyone else isn’t buying the cheap, adware-subsidized models anyway.

This explains the second part: it’s less that Apple charges a premium than that they don’t enter low-end segments. If you compare them to equivalent quality PCs (Surface, Signature edition, etc.) there’s not much of a difference.

Most business buyers understand this so I think the managers making those calls think of the consumer and business lines as almost separate brands, with the latter being both more profitable and longer term, and thus less likely to get nickel and dimed.

Re: Best Buy Is Thriving in the Age of Amazon

#387

Post by inferiorhuman »

j79 wrote: post #335
inferiorhuman wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which carrier was being problematic?

Honestly, the worst was DHL. I got so frustrated with them, I contacted Amazon's customer service and offered to pay extra to NOT have DHL deliver my items. The agent offered her apologies and noted they couldn't offer that (did refund me delivery costs), but would note the preference. Not sure if that "note" actually did anything, however I started getting substantially less DHL deliveries, which was a plus. These d…

Interesting. I've had problems with all of the carriers (and some that are no longer around), but for the most part I'd be willing to "forgive" Amazon for the transgressions of a third party that's going to screw everyone equally. I've less sympathy for Amazon's own logistics company though.

Timing of residential deliveries are pretty unpredictable with FedEx and UPS in my experience. One of the nice things about having a PO box is that packages are available for retrieval by 10 AM.

Re: Best Buy Is Thriving in the Age of Amazon

#388

Post by 3rdAccount »

twothamendment wrote: post #355
3rdAccount wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I politely say no to everything. Boy, do they have a lot of questions though.

I love the puzzled looks of clerks when they ask for my phone number or address and I decline. I've only once had to resort to "I can make up a phone number if you really want one".

Haha, or when they tell me the data will be kept confidential. I can't help but laugh at that.

Re: Best Buy Is Thriving in the Age of Amazon

#389

Post by acdha »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #239
dropfrog wrote: post #172

But that call-in "customer support" is a deal killer. I made an online purchase, a cheap antenna (thank goodness). It arrived in a box with my address taped on it but with customized shirts inside. Boxes were damaged during shipping and when put back together, someone got my stuff and I got theirs. UPS - "it's not on us, contact Best Buy". So I decided to use this to test Best Buy's customer support. I call. Foreign…

I've had similar issues with Verizon support reps. What I've started doing is if I get the feeling they're not helping, I just hang up and call again. At least with Verizon I'd say 50% of agents know what they're talking about, so usually that works. I know this is a shitty solution (and to be honest, I've never had to do the same with Amazon) but it does help.

Call the executive office instead. I had to do that when they tried to charge an early termination fee a couple of years after the contract expired and while guy on the phone was quickly fixing that he casually mentioned that when the customer service rep seems like they don’t understand it’s usually that they aren’t allowed to do something AND can’t tell you this.

It sounded like the worst job in the world and it was unnerving how casually he described it as the natural order of things.

Re: Best Buy Is Thriving in the Age of Amazon

#390

Post by taeric »

emodendroket wrote: post #377
taeric wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be curious to know if they actually tailored their recommendation to you. It is entirely possible that you saw benefits just from getting attention and spending a bit more. Simply stated, I've seen studies showing that paying more does increase the effectiveness of things. Even if there is no difference in the thing. (Sadly, I have not followed up on those claims, so I don't know if that replicated.)

I have gone back several times and seen different people and they shared the same observations about my gait and recommended the same kind of shoes, and what they told me seemed to be corroborated by things I read (though I would not have known what to look for before). More than one person told me that they noticed wearing the sneakers corrected my gait. Also my knees really hurt (as Abe Kobo writes in the Ark Sakur…

The question I have is essentially if the shoes you are wearing are better for most everyone. Most shoes are bought for fashion, not any sort of fit. As such, if someone is complaining about knees or any other walking pain, it is not impossible that the same shoe would help.

That make sense? It could be that you just finally got ergonomic shoes. Consider people that have RSI and similar pains move to ergonomic keyboards. It isn't that those would not be ergonomic keyboards for everyone. They would. Just not everyone has pains and so not everyone needs them. However, an astonishingly high number of people will suffer wrist pains and not do anything about it until someone recommends they get an ergonomic keyboard.

With shoes, I grant there is something about knowing these exist. There could even be different kinds of ergonomic shoes. I'm just a little skeptical there. I'm guessing there are more marketed types of ergonomic shoes than there are actually beneficial types. (If that makes sense.)

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