491–500 of 628 posts
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You're not wrong. Because Amazon's system is insane unless you realize it's designed only for the benefit of the corporation, not for any kind of fairness or quality.
Has there been a study on the volume of counterfeit goods flowing through amazon's marketplace? Seems likely they are now the #1 seller of counterfeit goods globally, by a decent margin.
A perfect example of why I buy less and less from sites that support 3rd party sellers. The problem is even once reliable sites like newegg.com are now playing these games. If I wanted the Ebay/alibaba experience I can get that! Why large retailer sites dilute their brand and frustrate customers in the fruitless chase of "being like Amazon" in catering to 3rd party sellers amazes and annoys me. At least most other si…
I buy a lot from Walmart now, to drive business away from Amazon (I would never have typed these words a few years ago...). First thing I do is click Retailer = Walmart.com.
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I went cold turkey on Amazon a few months back; the only thing I've kept is the TV subscription. What I realised is that it was just a dependency because it was so easy to search for and buy stuff. Nowadays I'll buy from a smaller shop if I need something, but it's more likely that I think "do I actually need this?" and say "no."
For me their killer feature is ease and certainty of returns. If I am buying online I need to option to return items that are not as they appear, and Amazon offers that quite readily. So I think the major hurdle for other businesses is getting a reputation for prompt and free return acceptance if they want to sell things sight unseen.
Whereas Amazon basically doesn't care about the inventory it ships and your only choice, really, is to use the return policy to actually get what you want.
I'm in the UK so I enjoy some solid consumer rights (at least for the time being). Plenty of online retailers ship return labels and packaging with your order, should you need to send something back.
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You forgot one. Amazon uses seller data to target which products they will produce under their own Amazon brand. So creative entrepreneurs eventually find they are completing against Amazon directly. This is why Amazon will eventually be replaced by a company that can do things better, faster, and cheaper.
Walmart was correlating credit card information in the 80's. My mind still boggles at how poorly they have handled the Internet. If there is a company that can best Amazon and provide unique experiences with their tens of thousands of local warehouses (their retail stores!) it should be them. It's utterly mystifying that instead of leveraging their strengths they ran off and created a less functional clone of Amazon.…
Guess I'd better say a few things. First, I deeply appreciate that so many on Hacker News have come out for this. Enough to awaken me from a sound sleep on a Tuesday evening! I don't really care that much about selling Klein bottles over Amazon - it's mainly to reach parents over the holidays. But I do wish that Amazon would do something about this kind of thing. Finally, I"m very low on stocks of glass Klein bottles…
My reciprocal appreciation to Fury, Atlanta/n, and Meester (and my many other friends on Hacker News). I deeply appreciate the kindness and support of the hacker community - sends me back thirty five years to when I was fooling with a Unix workstation and stumbled on a small accounting error. Back then, I was surprised by the outpouring of help, suggestions, and collaboration from other computer folk. At this moment,…
A perfect example of why I buy less and less from sites that support 3rd party sellers. The problem is even once reliable sites like newegg.com are now playing these games. If I wanted the Ebay/alibaba experience I can get that! Why large retailer sites dilute their brand and frustrate customers in the fruitless chase of "being like Amazon" in catering to 3rd party sellers amazes and annoys me. At least most other si…
I buy a lot from Walmart now, to drive business away from Amazon (I would never have typed these words a few years ago...). First thing I do is click Retailer = Walmart.com.
Amazon seems both willfully and unintentionally incompetent. They have so many strikes against them.
Their prime dark patterns are hostile enough, and I avoided it for years. But I needed a cheap plastic item quickly so I did a free prime trial with the intention to cancel. So I canceled and got billed anyway because according to their rep, on the back end the check box for “auto renewal” was enabled which wasn’t an option my settings screens. Why would it have been? I’d already cancelled and had a cancel confirmation email so why would an auto renewal option still be activated and bill me? It’s willful incompetence.
And their hire to fire practices and practice of churning through warehouse workers is terrible.
This Klein bottle incident just shows again how little they care about legit users or how easy it is to abuse the system.
They made whole foods a bad experience by treating non-prime members as second class customers. I’ve cut back there and now only occasionally buy coffee beans there, and will be cutting back even more.
And now Amazon recruiters started reaching out to me for data science positions. No I am not interested in working for a hot mess that only cares about money.
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It's a shame that a small-time reseller like Cliff has to go to the trouble and expense to register a trademark to protect his listing (which I doubt Cliff will bother with). Until about 5-6 years ago the changes Amazon made almost universally made their service better and more pro-user convenience/efficiency. Since then it's really become a nightmare. I realize they are being abused by scammers who are scheming ever…
Amazon is filled to the brim with predominantly Chinese scammers that they have shown no interest in stopping. Scams I've seen: - 2 pack scammers that sell someone else's product as a bundle, but it costs more to buy the 2 pack than it does to buy the real item twice. - Listing swaps, where someone will take a commodity listing with lots of reviews and change the listing to sell overpriced broken garbage - Counterfei…
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Which is what the infringers hope - and the major engine driving much of Amazon's profits. Fraud. I remember when people used to (heck still do) get worked up about Walmart but those same people not only order from Amazon all the time, they even join B mans private club (Prime).
You sue Amazon for contributory infringement. Subpoena for the number of fraudulent copies they sold and then press for triple damages plus all of your fees. Even if that number is tiny you'll cost them much more in legal bills.
Honestly, all the stories in this thread make me very glad I canceled my Prime subscription. I still use Amazon occasionally, but now most of my purchases go direct. With the exception of books; there I order from my local bookstore.
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The one thing I don't get, and I worked for AMZN in logistics, is the co-mingling of inventory. It is so easy to solve, poses so many problems and yet the logistics benchmark company fails to do it right.
I always assumed they tracked co-mingled sourcing internally, but don't have a reason to make it public. At least that way they could trace the people who were seriously poisoning the co-mingled well, in circumstances where they wanted to.
https://sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/external/G2001414...
> Note: Amazon ensures that the initial source of the commingled units can be traced throughout the fulfilment process.
The linked FAQ goes into slightly more detail.
Guess I'd better say a few things. First, I deeply appreciate that so many on Hacker News have come out for this. Enough to awaken me from a sound sleep on a Tuesday evening! I don't really care that much about selling Klein bottles over Amazon - it's mainly to reach parents over the holidays. But I do wish that Amazon would do something about this kind of thing. Finally, I"m very low on stocks of glass Klein bottles…
Have you considered filing an FTC complaint? The new FTC commissioner actually seems to care about these things.