For me, Amazon's main purpose is to get them to price match Best Buy. Why wait 3 days when I can just go to Best Buy, show them the same item for $30 cheaper on Amazon and get it immediately?
Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers
41–50 of 339 posts
Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers
#42I wonder if Amazon won't somehow kill itself with poor quality. I needed a bunch of LED bulbs recently and I knew exactly what I was looking for - about a dozen 40W eq, two 60w eq and two 100w eq, all in 2700K and two 100w in 3000K. Amazon was a mess - prices were all over the place, exact products were hard to find, etc. Dollarama had them all for $2.50, $3.50 and $4.00 a piece, usually in all three flavours (2700,…
They’re increasingly like that regardless of whatever I’m looking to purchase. I waste enough time looking for an actual, legitimate item that going out to the stores may be quicker and is definitely more assured. Maybe they want this to happen and focus on the rest of their business?
Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
When was Amazon ever a 'stamp of quality'? You can still buy a brand-name cable from Best Buy or other retailers that people used to use before everyone was trying to save a few pennies.
> You can still buy a brand-name cable from Best Buy or other retailers that people used to use before everyone was trying to save a few pennies. It seems in the last year or two Best-Buy has wised up with their Insignia brand, but it used to be all you could find was $40 Monster Cable and the like in their stores. Using Amazon was saving quite a bit more than a few pennies.
With their price matching of Amazon, I think Best Buy just realized that they were about to be the next B&M retailer to be put out of business by them. If they thought they still had a captive audience I bet they'd still be offering only Monster crap.
Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers
#44its infuriating that amazon likes to play innocent and claim they are not the seller of these products but at the same time do their best to project a unified front and to hide that certain products come from different sellers. At best you get a little link that might go to everything else that seller has listed but without knowledge from articles like this one of how amazon handles things I would never know the different between seemingly identical products.
Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the same issue I've had with walmart. For a long time now it's been obvious they have brands make "special versions" of many products for walmart which are lower quality and cheaper. Now they are offering free one and 2 day delivery on their site, but I just don't want to go there for fear that I'll end up getting what looks like a "good deal" but what I'll actually get is a worse more cheaply made product. A…
At least with Walmart you know their value engineered products are actually made by who they say they are and actually work enough of the time to pass whatever QC standards were set. With Amazon you have no idea whether you're getting a counterfeit.
[deleted]
Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers
#46That and they've gone the wall-mart route of actually PUSHING anything / the lowest price possible.
I get stuff that's like 5% cheaper but quality looks to be about 50% the quality pushed on me all the time on Amazon now.
I went to Amazon originally to find QUALITY products that my local stores didn't carry because of price pressures. Now Amazon seems to be switching to just being ... wall-mart and that's already near me...
It has gotten so bad that I've searched for good products on Amazon that I know were there, and they're gone. Like if you don't want a crappy HDMI switch that looks like every other cheap HDMI switch, your options seem to be fewer and fewer.
And that doesn't account for the questionable health products that they push on me for no apparent reason (i've never surfed for or bought such products form them...or anyone).
Increasingly Amazon wants to tell me what to buy, and what they tell me is they want me to buy garbage.
Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers
#47A few thoughts:
* Amazon is a total mess right now, and this is great investigative reporting. I think Amazon is going to go through a rough year or two in PR terms. They need to get this under control quickly.
* Amazon can pretend that it's just a platform, but in practice they benefit from consumers assuming that everything on the site has some stamp of approval (even if it's not as full a stamp as, say, buying the item from Costco.) Right now, they're abusing that consumer trust by doing a lousy job of monitoring product listings on their site. Over the long term, they risk losing that trust altogether. That's a huge risk to them, and it's a little short-sighted to take no ownership of product listings on their site as the basis for legal defense.
* This reminds me of the recent reporting about AirBnb dealing with scammy listings in Canada [0]. I think that both AirBnb and Amazon are capable of getting these problems under control, but they haven't proven it as of yet. When the solution comes, it will be expensive and involve a lot of human labor. That is true no matter how many times they wave their magics wands and yell "Machine Learning!"
* Some of the violations pointed out here are pretty dumb. How much does not labeling balloons as choking hazards actually threaten safety? Of course, that reflects a tolerance of rule-breaking and law-breaking that reflects poorly on Amazon.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/airbnb-montreal-aj-h...
Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers
#48Been saying for a long time Amazon is a flee market. Many times it's my last choice now when shopping online.
We bought some Brother labeling tape last week. They came in what looks like Brother packaging but it's named 'Better', P-touch is swapped out with B-touch... The labels are inferior, the ink comes off, the labels unstick after a few days...how does Amazon even let this trash on their site?
That should really be something to take them to court over, bit it’s not worth it for the dollar price.
Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers
#49I never had a problem (that I know of) with fakes on Amazon. I did cancel my prime membership and switched to Walmart. I feel like prices went up and quality went down. I wish I could move stuff away at work, we spend millions each month on AWS.
Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers
#50I wonder if Amazon won't somehow kill itself with poor quality. I needed a bunch of LED bulbs recently and I knew exactly what I was looking for - about a dozen 40W eq, two 60w eq and two 100w eq, all in 2700K and two 100w in 3000K. Amazon was a mess - prices were all over the place, exact products were hard to find, etc. Dollarama had them all for $2.50, $3.50 and $4.00 a piece, usually in all three flavours (2700,…
Waveform Lighting and Hyperikon are my go-to for quality, high-CRI LED bulbs in just about whatever color temperature and base you desire.