There's a somewhat pervasive idea that advertising and brand recognition are coercive tools that will ultimately die out, replaced by better objective information about products. I'm kind of partial to this idea myself.
But increasingly we seem a long way from achieving this. Amazon reviews have become such garbage, I've fallen back to pretty much relying on name brands as my placeholder for product quality.
There's still a lot to be said for established brands. Brands can afford widespread advertising because they have thriving businesses that generate lots of cash. Brands can get stocked in major retailers because you need decent products to make it through Walmart's buying process.
These are signals that are harder to fake, and they're kind of the best we've got right now.
I know my comment will be lost in a sea of voices, but I need to share my experience _somewhere_ else other than amazon reviews. I got my fiancé two Christmas presents this year - both bought off Amazon. One was an electronic keyboard that was dead on arrival, the other was a snuggie type blanket that started falling apart yesterday. Both items had thousands of 5 star reviews.
I usually go somewhere (anywhere) else besides Amazon because I have had bad experiences in the past, but this was the only place I could find the niche keyboard because it's an older model. I now have a firm rule that I will never order from Amazon again.
I've completely stopped ordering from Amazon, for three reasons: they have too much market power, they have serious ethics problems, and their 3rd party seller program has made the buying experience garbage. Welcome to the club.
Even for non-counterfeit books, I’ve often got shit quality print-on-demand versions with plates that look like an inkjet printer running low on ink and with the letters having fuzzy boundaries.
I purchased a book this year which included encoding errors. Original greek text which amounted to a couple of quotes was replaced with garbage output. Tables were printed but unformatted. Furthermore, it only included the first 1/2 of the text. The entire second half of the book was missing. I could look past many of these except for the last. Selling half a book is fraud.
For books I've gone from buying on a Kindle to Kobo+OverDrive which I use to check out e-books from the library. But I'm one of those freaks who actually prefers e-ink devices over dead tree books.
B & H photos has done right by me so far. CDW seems okay. Newegg appears to have vendors reselling stuff from Amazon with markup. And while you can filter third party out, you quickly discover Newegg doesn’t have much inventory.
Last year I ordered a high-priced item from Newegg, received a different model from a reseller, and returned it – then ordered it from Walmart and got the same different model from the same reseller! Finally CDW sent me the correct product.
Has any retail company ever gotten better after being bought out (thinking NewEgg, Toys R Us, Guitar Center...)? Some incentive is fucked up if decent businesses are being run into the ground.
Toys R Us and Guitar Center are among the retailers bought by private equity firms explicitly so the investors could wring the value out of the company and throw the remains in the dumpster. G.I. Joes was another. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/toys-r-...
By the way the remnants of Toys R Us are now owned by Tru Toys and they are looking to make a comeback.
Can you give an example? I don't disbelieve you, but it's not something I've come across. What do they do, take an accounting liability completely unrelated to the company, "sell" it to the company, thus putting it on the books there and off the books of the investors?
Buy the company with loans, strip the tangible assets for cash, burden the company with the loan repayments and bail out.
Basically use the company as leverage to buy it, and then make it pay for having been bought out. It will seldom be able to do so, and eventually will stagger into bankruptcy. Both the company and the creditors lose, but not the 'investors'.
This is the best 3x5 card/elevator pitch version of the private equity playbook that I've seen. The part about making the company pay the 'investors' for buying the company is especially poignant.
If anyone never quite "got" the rancor directed at Mitt Romney for his association with Bain Capital, this should clear it up.
Low expected long term business value due to predicted market shifts. Compress all dwindling future value into an immediately extractable source of income at the cost of the existence of the business itself. Basically, squeeze the brand name dry until the brand name itself means nothing.
tl;dr: I expect to get something with shoddy build quality from Newegg, but at least the reviews seem non-gamed.
After a few months of lackadaisically making sporadic attempts to order an RTX 3080, I finally threw in the towel and ordered a prebuilt machine which will come with whatever brand 3080 card is in stock at the time from Newegg. I could really use the CPU upgrade anyway, and the markup on the parts isn't at all bad compared to the markup from scalpers, who I refuse to do business with on principle.
The reviews on Newegg at least seem not-gamed. They're largely, "Quality parts slapped together and shipped unprotected, so I received the box with cards and RAM modules unseated and case parts bent due to being thrown around during shipping." I'm going to end up merging parts from two systems to produce a watercooled variant anyway, so all I really care about is just getting the parts, in particular the 3080, at this point.
>I'm going to end up merging parts from two systems to produce a watercooled variant anyway, so all I really care about is just getting the parts, in particular the 3080, at this point.
Fwiw you still run a risk that the CPU heatsink or something similar will come dislodged during shipping, and tumble around inside like a wrecking ball, smashing up the CPU, 3080 and the other parts you want to keep.
I learned this the hard way. There's a difference between how computers like Dells that are designed for mail order are made, vs modular DIY ones. The interior parts of the former are more strongly locked down inside. They're more likely to be non-standard and difficult or impossible to upgrade, but that's the cost of making them UPS-proof (United Package Smashers).
I know a couple of people who've done the same thing -- order a prebuilt machine just to get one of the new CPUs or GPUs. Hopefully it remains unviable for scalpers and thus viable for users who actually want to use what they buy.
Many Chinese sellers will list items on Amazon for a multiple of the price listed on AliExpress. You're essentially paying a multiple of the price for faster shipping.
And a middleman that will give you your money back more or less no questions asked if the product doesn’t match its description.
Getting something in two days instead of two months and being able to get a refund if it was completely misrepresented is easily worth, say (as an example from today), paying $50 for an IP cam instead of $40 from Aliexpress for something with firmware so butchered from upstream it doesn’t even fulfill basic requirements or provide listed functionality anymore. And being stuck with it.
At least the firmware is so full of security holes I can probably find some use for the device one day when I feel like spending another evening with it.
I would love to use Target or Walmart, but the killer feature that Amazon PrimeNow and Fresh still have for me over all the rivals is that they will not allow me to put something in my cart that they do not have.
That's it. Instacart, Shipt, Seamless (yes, I've bought groceries through Seamless in NYC...), this is all I want from you: let me know what I'm getting.
It is really good to diversify your purchasing. Walmart is often a great alternative to Amazon: Newegg or Bestbuy for consumer electronics; Jensen for bikes; Adafruit or Robotshop for hobby electronics; Apogee for rockets.
I can relate to this experience, but the thing is, similar things have happened to me with other retailers, that I think have especially high markups and used to be in my mind decent brands.
I got a shirt from Macy's with sewn in stripes that started to unravel before long, this was many years ago, but I never bought clothes from there again.
And more recently, I got pillow cases from bed bath & beyond, that were very expensive, but otherwise exactly what I wanted, and the seams started coming undone.
Amazon is not a reliable brand, but on the other hand, one can justify trying it again and again, because it is not a single (tainted) brand.
I've said before and will say it again, I read the reviews starting with the worst, as if all the five star reviews were always all fake. I don't know what they might have been for your products, but usually I see no connection between the best reviews and the useful information in the worst.
One extra problem with Amazon is that a lot of products are sold by third party merchants and their site UX seems to deliberately obscure the fact. Same goes for Walmart, though I have less experience using them.
If I order from Amazon, from Amazon, I tend to have good experiences. If I order third party from Amazon it’s a crap shoot.
Don’t you think it could be argued that proudly displaying something is sold by amazon but displaying nothing for 3rd parties would be an antitrust problem?
Also there is text on the page showing you who the item is sold by, and who it ships from.
walmart used to be better about this but now I notice they, and other major retailers are trying to adopt the amazon platform concept.
Sometimes it's easier to just make a list and physically go to a store so I don't need to question whether or not what I'm buying is legit and deal with that stuff.
I bought this exact drone for my nephew and was sorely disappointed by it. I agree with the earlier comments saying that we need to go back to buying from manufacturers in legitimate countries and relying on strong brand names like Sony and the like.
Both Amazon and Walmart are not reliable vendors. Costco does still vet all it's products, I will probably just use them from now on.
Best Buy is my secret weapon. For the last couple of years I’ve gotten gifts for people last minute with same day pickup - as small and simple as new earbuds and as large as a color laser printer.
This Christmas I even got an echo show from them when Amazon itself was back ordered past the holidays.
Best Buy has done a pretty admirable job digging out from what seemed like a surefire death sentence. Target and Walmart weren't dead, but Amazon was eating their lunch.
What they are doing much better at now is the hybrid e-commerce/brick and mortar that Amazon is struggling with. Whole Foods helped give them a platform, but Whole Foods are nowhere near as prolific as Target/Walmart/Best Buy.
For all the reasons mentioned throughout this post, Amazon has gone from my first stop to far down on the list when looking to buy something.
I have been doing the same, Best Buy/Target/Walmart any big box retailer I know does some quality control. I have purchase way too many products from Amazon that broke immediately, just shockingly terrible quality. And the worst part is Amazon isn't cheap anymore, I have found that they have a 20-30% markup over their competitors and the cheap things just third party fake goods.
IMO buying the cheapest products on Amazon is like using disposable plates and utensils, sure the one time purchase is cheaper than buying dishes and real utensils, but over time it's way more expensive.
Honestly, opening a package from Amazon for a 5 star recommended item that you had high hopes for only to find a cheap piece of garbage is infuriating.
> And the worst part is Amazon isn't cheap anymore, I have found that they have a 20-30% markup over their competitors and the cheap things just third party fake goods.
I’ve noticed this too, except it’s mostly with health and skin care brands that are trying to use Amazon for free advert / discovery and then push users to their site with lower prices and no Amazon take. I view this as a scumbag move by the vendor myself and find a new product from a vendor not doing this.
Any time I put a less than 5 star review, i get contacted by the seller, who many times offer to send me a free replacement, a newer model, or another product I may be interested in, if I change my review. I have refused, but I imagine many others did that.
Ha! I got a shitty appletv stick on holder that dropped off the TV the other day after a couple months, I put up a 1 star review hoping that would happen but it hasn't as yet!
I'm pretty convinced there are a lot of sellers on these third party marketplaces that arrive with a truckload of Widget A - once Widget A sells out, they're gone... on to the next thing or rebranded and selling Widget C. Especially when you're selling a low-margin plastic commodity item.
If you don't get support while they're still actively selling YOUR widget, good luck.
I use Fakespot, and I wonder about its accuracy. Seeing a 5-star product given a `D` rating is shocking. If Fakespot is reasonably accurate, then Amazon is inexcusably bad at removing fake reviews. Amazon has orders of magnitude more developer talent and user information than Fakespot to tackle accurate ratings. But I suppose that's the reality of differing incentives...
I also question them. It seems a lot easier to accuse Amazon ratings of being poor especially if it feeds into an already existing confirmation bias against Amazon. For all we know Fakespot could just be making all of it up right? How are Fakespots ratings verified? Do I need a Fakespot for Fakespot too? Maybe rating systemes like these are fundamentally flawed.
Costco and Targets selection is basically nothing compared to Amazon though. Can I buy an eGPU enclosure, a GPU, and some paper plates from Target or Costco? Then if I have a problem or decide I don’t want them after opening how hard will the return be with Target and Costco?
The minimum quality of the items Target and Costco tends to be better. Also, neither allows arbitrary third party items onto their platform. Their buyers choose the items they sell.
In essence, I don't care that much about the reviews. There are fewer of them, and they usually talk more about factual aspects of the item. There are very few "1 star, this is total garbage" type reviews because the retailer has filtered much more of the crap out.
I do think that Amazon is inexcusably bad at removing fake reviews.
However, I think there are some instances where Amazon probably rearranged large numbers of reviews because they found out the reviews were for a different item. It's likely that Fakespot can't tell the difference between mass censorship and legitimate removal. So you do have to take the results with a grain of salt and read recent reviews.
Amazon does have the disadvantage of being more worth circumventing. I.e. if amazon cracks down on some method of cheating the system, to a large extent the cheaters are going to find some other method of cheating.
Whereas since Fakespot etc are less popular, there's less reason to evade their detection algorithms.
That said, yeah, it sure seems like amazon's doing an awful job for consumers in this area.
It's likely Amazon. Of course, there are instances where (e.g. mason jars) where fakes may be acceptable as they're commodity products.
It's tiring using Fakespot just to find dozens of D and Fs. For the most part, I use other retailers or just don't buy the item (surprisingly it's a zen option to not buy stuff you don't pressingly need).
This experience is alien to me. I order from Amazon all the time and everything I get is generally fine. Occasionally something breaks after a while or is missing a part but that can happen anywhere and Amazon has extremely generous return policies. If anything I've come to trust AmazonBasics as a reliable brand if I'm deciding between products.
Same. I really feel like this is one of those things where 99+% of people have zero issues and don't comment on stuff like this. Myself and just about everyone I know order from amazon all the time and have very very few issues. And when we do, the return/replace/refund/whatever process is smooth as butter.
Confirmation bias combined with the fact that unhappy people are more likely to leave “reviews”[a] (like here). I’ve never had an issue with Amazon that they haven’t resolved, and it may seem like I’m a minority, but Amazon is the size they are today because, for ever 1 fsck-up, there’s 99 others who didn’t have problems.[b]
[a]: Complaints. Reviews. Etc.
[b]: Not excusing their bad behavior. Just stating the reality.
Maybe this is a longer game by Amazon. Let bogus reviews and bad experiences pile up for third party sellers, slowly driving people to only trust "Amazon Basics." They have nearly perfect knowledge of the profitability of any item, so they know what items they should have under the "Amazon Basics" umbrella. Over time they could expand this into other Amazon "Brands" at varying quality/price points.
I’m surprised there aren’t counterfeit AmazonBasics products by now. Or are those the only listings that disallow third-party / commingled-inventory sellers?
If you're still every looking for instruments, Sweetwater has excellent stuff, and really stellar customer service.
They answered questions by phone before we purchased. I received a keyboard for my daughter, then we had a change of heart and decided we had gotten the wrong one, they handled everything for shipping it back and sending a new one, and called a week later to see if we were happy.
And they will call you once every few months for the rest of your natural life (and then some). Sweetwater is notorious for being a company whose contact list you can never, ever escape from. Change your phone number, move across the country... Sweetwater will find you.
This hasn't been my experience. I have been called by them before, but it's been at least a year. And less than a half a dozen times in my life. And most of those were sometime after a large purchase where they were (claiming) to ask if the thing was working ok.
I personally prefer zZounds to Sweetwater, because they're honest about their financing plans instead of making it difficult to realize you're signing up for a credit card until you're halfway through typing in your social.
I cancelled my Prime last year because the "2 day" shipping was consistently taking 4+ days. The final straw was my Halloween mask not arriving by Halloween lol.
Between late deliveries, bait & switch 5-star reviews, and being able to find cheaper prices elsewhere, I now only use Amazon if I can't find a product anywhere else.
Agreed. Shipping quality on Amazon has declined massively (before corona), and since marketplace and comingling, products have often become unreliable and even dangerous. On top, there was a forced price raise to sell me videos I didn't want. I did the math and am now prime-free.
I was thinking about creating a site (allreviews.com or something) where you could write a review about anything, purchase, service, etc. Not sure about the legal background. Could I face legal challenges having such site in the US?
Review sites are legal, but you’d almost certainly be at risk of defamation lawsuits from unhappy businesses. You’d most likely be in the clear, but it won’t stop them from trying.
Amusingly enough if you trace the history of brand names ... this is why they started!
And this is the strength that the major retailers have against Amazon - if Amazon won't police (and they have problems with commingling counterfeit brands, too) then Walmart and Target will jump ahead.
I was of a similar mind this year, but when I went to Walmart's website, they had 3rd party sellers on there too. It is really annoying, especially with the pandemic, trying to sift through all the trash online.
I ended up buying we webcam from BestBuy.com, because a webcam I got from Amazon was pay-for-review and was utter garbage.
Just more evidence, to me, that the era of internet business models being "get everything online" (Amazon, Spotify, Steam) is closing, and the era of online aggregation as a product is just beginning.
I've also found myself buying a lot of things from Best Buy, something I would have scoffed at 5-7 years ago. These days, I just want to know that I'm getting a genuine (vs replica) product and most of the time I can go pick-up my purchase same day, solving the "fast shipping" problem.
Since NewEgg started up their 3rd party seller program, I've also switched to Best Buy. Running out of places to buy from that aren't flooded with trash.
One 3rd party seller on NewEgg has been ripping off customers for years. (You order something from them -- say, a mouse -- and they find some shitty used product on Ebay or someplace and ship that to you. Getting a refund can be a challenge).
Multiple complaints (including contacting the CEO of NewEgg) haven't removed this bad actor. So I just assume that this practice of retaining terrible 3rd parties reflects NewEgg's true* extent of their caring for customers, and I don't buy stuff from them anymore.
This is the trend because the existence of the brand's website as a multi-seller marketplace is considered more valuable/higher ROI than the actual direct selling of items. And that's a reasonable view considering most of what is being sold is commodity and prices, thus margin, having downward pressure.
The e-commerce website gets a positive reputation and a brand is built for being a good place to buy things, so it expands into being a hosting platform other sellers, with the intent of drawing more customers based on the brand reputation.
Yes, but the brand, being non-tangible, has stronger staying power as the platform marketplace expands to encompass more sellers. The brand then becomes more powerful as it eats up the reputation of the individual sellers.
Additionally, no one gives a crap about long-term anymore. Scorched earth, grab what you can, screw everyone else and all that.
Seems to not be on the US site, for now, but that's very discouraging to see. I don't know where to turn for electronics if Best Buy goes to crap, too.
(I smell a market opportunity for a retailer that sells only quality products...)
Adding third party sellers is not a problem. Removing the ability to filter for items sold by the retailer, and commingling inventory with random resellers is the problem.
> Since NewEgg started up their 3rd party seller program, I've also switched to Best Buy. Running out of places to buy from that aren't flooded with trash.
I still buy from NewEgg, but the first thing I do when I hit the search results is to click the Sold by Newegg button. Might be a few bucks more, but at least I'm getting the real deal ... at least so far.
NewEgg screwed me out of a monitor. I wouldn't trust them as as retailer anymore. That's from someone who used to buy all their computer stuff through them.
I've shifted a lot of purchases to Best Buy as well. I also ordered far more products directly from the manufacturer's web site this year. Many offer the same free shipping if you are buying anything of value.
I figure if Netgear sends me a fake switch when ordering directly from them it's time to give up on capitalism.
Searching out the manufacturer (assuming there is a brand behind the product and not just an Amazon shop) has made my recent efforts, too. A surprising number of times, the item is cheaper from the manufacturer, and they offer free shipping or a coupon for further discount. I imagine that works out for the buyer and seller - I get a genuine product at their chosen price, and they get to keep fees that would have otherwise gone to Amazon.
> if Amazon won't police (and they have problems with commingling counterfeit brands, too) then Walmart and Target will jump ahead.
I think they are solving this differently. Amazon introduced their own brands for almost all daily necessities. Amazon basic, amazon pharmacy, amazon fashion, amazon elements, amazon pantry, amazon echo and few more. They generally have average or above average products at an affordable price and good support.
You can buy AC, fridge, vacuum cleaner, clothes, baby food, dog food, dog bed, multi-vitamin, ramen, TWS, carpet, blanket, swiss army knife, solder machine, and a lot more from amazon itself now.
Yeah, tried that. Amazon Basics are as hit-or-miss as the rest of the garbage.
I'm frankly surprised they want to put their name on what appears to be dollar store crap that might be fine, might not, who knows. You can almost see the flickering neon and smell the cleaning fluid.
The last time I bought a "new" phone "Sold by: Amazon.com Services LLC" it arrived several weeks late, with a burned in screen, scuff marks, and randomly rebooting.
My impression is they did not have the item they were selling, and were relying on some presumably "trusted" reseller to provide it.
I ended up purchasing a used one in much better condition on eBay for several hundred dollars less where the condition at least matched the sale entry.
Be careful using eBay, a rather scary number of listings on there are people just relisting items from Amazon at a higher price and reshipping (or just ordering with your shipping address, I had one eBay purchase come directly from Amazon).
There are plenty of terrible sellers on ebay, too, but it is much easier to sort out the garbage sellers. Seller feedback is right there in the search results, and though you can't filter by feedback any more, it is easy enough to just skip over any listings with a low number or less than 99.9% positive.
Actually, I think it's D2C that will jump ahead. The problem with Walmart and Target is they either (a) have limited brand selection (target) or (b) they dilute themselves so much to compete with Amazon that they eventually become Amazon (Walmart).
Limited brand selection is actually a benefit. I don't want to spend an hour flipping through shitty USB-C cables to find the one that won't nuke my device. I want to pay the buyer at the retailer a few cents to do that for me.
Well, yes. The difference is that once you find a trusted retailer, you don't need to put in the same effort every time you need to buy something. You just trust them to have vetted their products for you.
That's okay. I use retailers way more often than I buy cables. Find a good retailer and you can buy several products from them over time, not just one.
I dunno. I don't think anyone actually wants D2C, for rare-purchase (ie the mass majority of goods).
It's one thing if the brand has an ongoing relationship with its customers, but nobody wants the burden of dealing with 1,000 slightly different processes for ordering toilet paper.
That's the inherent value of Paypal et al. -- abstracting diversity on one side into a standard interface on the customer side.
> It's one thing if the brand has an ongoing relationship with its customers, but nobody wants the burden of dealing with 1,000 slightly different processes for ordering toilet paper. That's the inherent value of Paypal et al. -- abstracting diversity on one side into a standard interface on the customer side.
I guess you've never ordered something from a Shopify based store then?
What on earth does their payment processor and tech choice have to do with a direct to consumer model? I'm talking about the features for the consumer when they shop on a shopify based store.
Trust doesn't scale naturally. That's the point that the GP comment was making. What we saw with Amazon is that bundling[0] works and can scale, but once it reaches that point and trust erodes, then unbundling becomes more appealing to the consumer.
Shopify has struck an interesting middle ground. Lots of the features that make the bundle attractive (one login, saved CC/details, etc.) are baked into Shopify stores. It'll be interesting to see if Shopify rolls out some sort of "Fulfilled by Shopify" and then a "Prime" because then the consumer can ensure quick/free delivery without dealing with the bazaar that is Amazon.
The Shopify features you outlined are the "how", but not the "why". As in, why would I buy from a Shopify store, if an equivalent product were offered by a bundler?
1,000,000 stores using Shopify are effectively the same as 1,000,000 products on Amazon, only less convenient.
I think the overall takeaway is that trust doesn't scale to Amazon-now-size: i.e. one of the biggest retail companies on the planet.
What it did scale to (and very well) was Amazon-1995-2010-size (eg Etsy or eBay), and there's a lot of size between D2C and those variants of Amazon.
I'm open for convincing, but I don't see a path to "D2C eats the world," when for relatively modest amounts of capital one could create a smaller, right-size Amazon that could bundle and dominate.
I was under the impression Shopify didn't promise anything about genuine goods to their customers, and were having to deal (haphazardly) with the same fake problems as their larger competitors. [0]
From reading back through their statements over the years it seemed to have shifted from (initial) 'we're a store platform, and take no responsibility for the content of the store' to (now) 'we have [unspecified] teams dedicated to IP infringement and fraudulent stores.'
Unfortunately Walmart seems to be doing their best to be just as bad as Amazon. I had good luck ordering from them for the past few years but more recently it's gotten almost as bad. They now have a lot of fake/junk products being sold by random parties, plus I had a really awful experience with their customer service recently.
The product page for one item that my partner was looking to buy for her Mom's birthday said something like "Free 2-day shipping, receive it by the 4th". Well when she went to check out the only option to get it by that date cost $30+ dollars. I ended up getting on the phone with a support person who fully acknowledged that the shipping info was wrong but to my shock completely dismissed it as not being a problem.
I said that people were putting items into their cart based on false information and the response was basically a dismissive shrug. We went back and forth a few times to make sure I really understood his response and there's no doubt that he did not care that they were displaying false shipping info.
Since then I've been wary of buying anything else from Walmart.
> I ended up getting on the phone with a support person who fully acknowledged that the shipping info was wrong but to my shock completely dismissed it as not being a problem ...We went back and forth a few times to make sure I really understood his response and there's no doubt that he did not care that they were displaying false shipping info.
You have as much agency and incentive to fix the problem as the support person. Most arguments for why the support person should spend their time and energy trying to fix a problem outside their authority, and their reasons for not doing so, could equally be applied to you.
I agree. I've had about 400 Amazon orders over the past 20 years, and as far as I can remember, with every single one the item was as described and with good quality. I think I've had 3 problems over the years (item didn't arrive; missing part; container of spices opened during shipping) that were accidental in nature, and they were easy to resolve (refund or replacement)
It does help to be a bit sceptical about some listings. For example, a webcam by "GREETBUAY" for $25 is probably not going to be of high quality. So I don't buy those kinds of things. But in cases where the nature of the item is that it's a single piece of plastic that just needs to be the right shape, I've bought them from sellers with bizarre machine-generated names and received exactly what I wanted.
Completely agree. Unless I'm familiar with the seller on Amazon (a known brand like Anker) I try to stick to Walmart, Target, Staples. Bonus, often times the identical item can be found at a lower price. Downside is the shipping may take a few days more.
For something like an SD card or a battery your chance of getting a counterfeit or unreliable product is pretty high. I prefer not to think too much about how that maps to food.
There was an article (I think here on HN) a few years ago where a bookseller who was forced to buy Amazon ads for his own book just so the counterfeits wouldn't outrank him on Amazon.
I myself am convinced that brand recognition is on borrowed time - that is, recognition of old brands may still work as useful filter, but new quality brands will be near-impossible to establish.
The reason for that: we're being DDoSed with brands on e-commerce sites. For an increasing amount of product categories, you're going to find 10+ "brands" on Amazon that are selling the same white-label garbage class product, just with a different sticker and box/ad art. I've seen that in electronics, clothing, consumables. And while multiple brands under one company was a thing for a long time now (see e.g. how many stuff you eat is made by Nestlé or Unilever), there seems to be a qualitative difference here: white label goods meet e-commerce. "Brands" proliferate at the speed of computing.
What you’re describing is exactly how brands work. The garbage brands will continue to cycle because there’s no reason to keep the brand name (in fact it’s better to change it so that people who got burned don’t know it’s the same). But the good brands are investing in the brand name and so they will stick around and you’ll start to recognize them.
Look at a company like Anker. They operate in spaces filled with garbage but they have managed to become trustworthy.
I love Anker. I remember when I discovered them around 2013 and started making purchasing decisions on Amazon by just looking for their brand name, it almost felt like cheating, since I knew I wouldn't need to do an hour of research to make sure, "ok is this charger going to be the kind that explodes." So I just buy Anker and it works like a dream.
The million dollar question is, how do we know which brands are the good ones?
Is there a community which tackles this sort of problem alone? The best I have found so far is to find the community surrounding a type of product, especially on Reddit - there is a community around almost every interest imaginable - and figure out which brands they recommend, via search or just asking.
Often they even have advice in a stickied thread or wiki article.
There was a website here the other day that planned to build a community of people that review products as they age. A review after the first 2 weeks, 2 years then 10 years etc. "Buy for Life" or something like that.
They operate in the most trashed-up market on earth: cheap internet-connected widgets. But I will buy from them every single time because all their products run a modified OpenWRT and all of them let you replace it with vanilla upstream OpenWRT. And all of their recent products have a physical "unbrick this device" button you hold down to boot to a slick reflash-the-firmware-over-the-network ROM.
I will not hesitate to pay twice as much for a gl.inet widget because of this.
An example for not producing anything themselves (afaik) but only putting their name on actually decent products is Blitzwolf. A brand like that can be built on the most basic due diligence (and thus not significantly higher prices). A bonus would be actually delivering some technical detail on a product, but even "manufacturers" like TaoTronics seem to be having a really hard time doing that.
I'd say Aliexpress is probably a better way to find somewhat established (or trying, which is what matters) brands than Amazon.
This is on point. When I first ordered something from Anker (a USB-C dongle IIRC), I was worried it'd be knock-off trash. Their brand hadn't been established long enough for me to evaluate their reputation. But the quality was high and now I trust it. I was happy to pick up one of their MacBook Pro USB-C hubs on Prime Day, and would happily buy more Anker supplies in the future.
There’s a cycle with these brands. Monster started out not insane and then quickly just became bad stuff with a brand. I also remember when Belkin used to be consistently good and now it varies by product.
I’m afraid for when monoprice stops being an awesome brand and starts coasting.
> recognition of old brands may still work as useful filter
Not for long. How many dependable long-lived brands have been mopped up by hedge funds and private equity and subsequently slapped on the cheapest crap you can make? Remember when Craftsman tools used to be top notch?
Right. Also the regular "optimization" (i.e. of costs, not value). For example, Miele was a decent brand of white-label goods, but I've read numerous commenters here claiming that they're succumbing to plasticpartisis and their products aren't as reliable as before. I also vaguely recall hearing that Anker isn't what it used to be.
(Then there are brands spanning great many product categories - like Phillips. I'm having trouble keeping track which product categories they do well, and which they don't.)
I mean, once you get brand recognition and a market foothold, that's when you start optimizing on the cost quality tradeoffs. That seems to be the normal course of business in the US. Smart brands recognize there's a limit to gaming the margins before they lose trustworthiness and cut quality slowly and only to a certain point so as not to eliminate brand loyalty and recognition.
If that margin gaming process gets too greedy, the cycle kicks back and people start looking for other brands. The real strategy is to ride just above the stable point of adoption and keep an eye out for competitors that are offering better value, then gobble them up before they unseat your nice comfortable market position.
The end result is you get a bunch of medicore products and services in the marketplace as well as terrible products/services. The high quality stuff tends to die quickly, undercut by those dominant in the market through anticompetitive forces while the poor quality stuff survives because their brand will be short-lived anyways. Few seem to be able to hold onto the ideals of putting and maintaining high quality first over increasing profit margins, that just isn't the goal.
I disagree on Miele. They still produce their products in Germany. That's not something you do if you want to sell plastic knockoffs. Sure, quality may vary, but this is literally their brand identity. So I seriously doubt there is a calculated attempt to be less reliable.
It gets more difficult. Tefal produces great pans in France, and really terrible pans in China and they are almost the same product and have the same price.
What I try to do is to buy D2C if possible, from brands where I know what is produced where. That's only a small subset of needed things, and its expensive, but it usually works out for me.
I now know household, electronics and clothing brands that genuinely produce here in this country, for example, and the quality is simply better. I also know that no child labour was involved. So, I feel good about supporting such efforts.
Any brand I see on Amazon I assume to be one more variation of the same rebranded product. If I buy it, I buy it under the assumption that it could break the next day.
I also check whether the established brand name has been bought up, which happens a lot. Most of the eminent electronic brands are merely licensed labels nowadays.
Miele still produces in Germany, but quality has gone way down nonetheless. Repairability is also getting poorer, you no longer get parts you one used to get for 20 years after the sale.
For washing appliances there is Miele Professional. But entry was about 5000 to 6000EUR when I last looked. It may depend. From time to time I use them in washing saloons when I have larger batches of dirty (sports) clothing or blankets, bed linen(other "sports", don't ask).
Anyways, very easy to use, fast, and looking indestructible, while the washing drums look space age from the inside(materials wise, and the shape/structuring of it).
GE used to be a marker for reasonable quality but over the past couple of decades they've licensed their name for all kinds of crappy consumer products.
The GE consumer product business was sold to a Chinese company quite a while ago, and I believe the brand was put on a lot of poor quality and poorly designed products, but I have the impression they have substantially turned around the quality, based on consumer reports and other hearsay. I got a GE washer and dryer based on this belief (and they were the only ones that would fit) and so far, so good, after about a year.
The popularity of drop shopping has probably played some part in the spread of low quality no-name products on Amazon.
YouTube is stuffed with videos on drop shipping. Many drop-shippers have no interest in the product they are selling or it's quality. They're only interested in whether they have picked a profitable niche. When that niche gets too crowded, they move to another product space before the wider drop shopping crowd swarm to the same product. And so the cycle continues. Rinse and repeat.
That may be true. Between brand DDoS and dropshipper spam, I no longer buy anything of consequence on any e-commerce platform - I only order from the sites of local chain stores (electroncis, pharmacies, comestics) or directly from manufacturer. I probably pay slightly more because of it, but I avoid dealing with fraudlent sellers and fraudlent products.
> For an increasing amount of product categories, you're going to find 10+ "brands" on Amazon that are selling the same white-label garbage class product, just with a different sticker and box/ad art.
But you could still build up a brand the old-fashioned way, by buying advertising (including forms that can't be targeted, like billboards) to create broad name recognition. It's hard to do and it takes lots of capital, but that's the same as it has always been.
And then any white-label product you sell is a reflection of the brand you've built up, so it's in your interest to only sell high-quality stuff.
Brands still arise out of that. I buy Spigen cases. Anker cables. If I want a low-cost but workable set of headphones for the kids, "MPOW" devices fit the bill. I know that Amazon Basics keyboards and mice will be satisfactory given the price.
Yeah, that. My son has an MPow fightstick and it's a solid product. MPow is doing a good job establishing themselves as a reputable new brand for electronics.
Similarly, Anker, Choetech, and a few others to a certain extent.
Some of them come from the ashes of Alibaba rebrands, but a few start making decent products and are at least at what I'd consider "Belkin-level" but at a better price point.
What you describe is a digital version of white van speaker scam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_van_speaker_scam while person you are replying to means old established brands, like Sony or Philips. You can pick up cheapest Philips hair trimmer and be sure of decent quality, but picking even something looking upmarket, but coming from one of the made up Amazon brands is almost a guarantee in chinesium shock. $300 Panasonic/$400 Moulinex bread maker might look identical to Silvercrest(lidl)/Medion/Sencor/Hamilton Beach $50 branded one, but difference in manufacturing quality and used materials are quite dramatic.
What makes you think the old, established brands are what they once were? Many of them are just a label put onto something entirely different, meanwhile being bought by another entity, produced in less quality/durability.
Maybe not as extreme as the "Chinesium Shockers" which I learned about in this thread, but the tendency is there.
It used to be borosilicate glass, and now it's soda-lime glass. Apparently the latter has higher thermal expansion and therefore more likely to shatter when subjected to very rapid temperature changes.
There are some conspiracy theories that the material was changed to make it less suitable for meth labs. It seems more likely that it was changed because it's slightly cheaper.
EDIT: I just found out that one of the ways to distinguish the earlier, borosilicate Pyrex is that the earlier versions are labeled in all-caps: PYREX.
Unfortunately Amazon's UI is actually pretty hostile to this, too.
I was trying to buy simple USB cables... After a pair of tablets were destroyed by a bad USB cable, I'm picky about usb micro cables. So I tried to search on Amazon for usb a to micro cables...
And the brand filter didn't list many of the brands I was seeing in the resultset. Like, I know you have Monoprice and Belkin cables, I'm looking right at them! Why can I only filter to Chinese no-name brands and Amazonbasics?
This comment caught my attention are bad cables really destroying your tablets? I ask because I literally power all my phones and tablets with cords I bought at the dollar store. Never had any problems. Have I just been lucky?
Not sure about Micro, but a few years back a Google employee posted a bunch of info about bad USB C cables. Sadly I think it was on Google+ and gone now, but his reviews are still on Amazon [1]. There were certainly some really bad ones, missing resistors and things, so its quite possible on C at least.
Well I guess I will consider myself lucky. I learned my lesson with an amazon power cord for my Lenovo laptop. It charges fine but the casing around the electronics melted due to it getting so hot. It is my kids laptop and could have literally started a fire on him. I bought a new one from Staples and now won’t buy any electronics like that from amazon.
They physically mangled the connector itself, so the tablets could no longer charge. They were 4-year-old Galaxy Tab 7" so not worth repairing.
Basically I had a usb cable where the metal of the connector bent in just the right way that it scraped off the contacts inside the tablets' female port.
That mechanical connection is definitely prone to failure. I've had phones where the charging port was physically worn enough that I could plug them in and charge them OK but bump it just a bit and it would disconnect. Wireless charging isn't quite there yet but I'd be happy to get rid of all cables.
I used an off-brand USB cable for my Garmin watch once, and it wouldn't power on for a week afterwords. I have no idea what strange software/hardware fault could explain that, but it spontaneously recovered after a week of being dead. I'm not willing to risk using off-brand cables since then.
If anything, the last few years of politics have convinced me that objective information is more likely to die out, replaced by advertising, brand recognition, and coercive tools.
An older friend of mine made the observation that really before the few large news networks and papers in the last 40-50 years objective information that everyone roughly agreed upon was not the norm. Yellow journalism, hearsay and rumors dominated common conversation.
He observed that with the internet we're returning to what was this "normal" state with anybody being able to post something and gain widespread recognition, the difference of course being the rate at which this non-objective information travels and the better ability to weaponize it.
I think, after looking into it a bit more, I agree with him and that our period of fairly objective news and political information and the general consensus that brought was the anomaly. This raises the question then how do we as society re-learn to cope with that and filter out non objective information because clearly we're not doing so well with it now.
So, I don't think so much as it will die out as much as I think we need to develop abilities to separate wheat from chaff, stronger societal bullshit filters because truth will have a weaker signal.
> I think, after looking into it a bit more, I agree with him and that our period of fairly objective news and political information and the general consensus that brought was the anomaly. This raises the question then how do we as society re-learn to cope with that and filter out non objective information because clearly we're not doing so well with it now.
I don't know the answer, but my opinion is that we need to stop optimizing for views. I.e. kill the online advertising market. You can do your part by installing an ad blocker and paying for services you like with real money.
How much of that was the American propaganda machine doing its job to keep the western world united against communism? The change we are seeing could just be the end of the cold war leading to slow return to normal and not due to technology at all.
I mean united news cycles predated the cold war and wasn't an isolated American phenomenon and I'm not talking about America but the world so I don't see how your opinion is relevant to the topic other than to stir the pot.
It's remarkable how people have taken the NYT and others reporting what they were told over the Iraq war, where finding contradictory evidence was extremely hard, as a reason to go to far less reliable news sources.
The manufactured consensus of the mass media had some terrible failure modes. Perhaps it wasn't worth it.
But it had a nice positive externality in creating a shared reality for people who otherwise didn't have much in common.
We can all watch the landscape shatter into pocket, subcultural realities, and the fear of the other and general distrust is palpable.
People are falling back on the old stalwarts: common ancestry and/or religious conviction. That, too, has advantages, but it comes with severe downsides.
I just made a pretty big purchase decision in a field (cameras) where there is a lot of competition and reviews carry a lot of weight.
In the end, the information that helped me make up my mind was from video reviews by mostly well-known photography vloggers on YouTube.
This is also something that could be messed with by unscrupulous marketers, but there is a strong counterbalance to those anti-patterns: the vloggers themselves are trying to build reputations, because "top photography vlogger" presumably pays better than 99% of all other work that involves photography.
I'm not sure how much this counts as "better objective information" -- other than seeing an object move around in someone's hands you're mostly getting an opinion -- but I found it super helpful and could easily imagine this being the "future of purchase-decision influence" or something like it.
For example here are three channels I used, with radically different styles:
> because "top photography vlogger" presumably pays better than 99% of all other work that involves photography.
Just to be clear though (I work in a field that relies heavily on niche-specifc YouTubers for marketing) - the reason that being a "top niche blogger" pays so well is because companies pay them a lot to encourage favorable opinions of their product lines.
I've seen amounts that are several multiples of my annual salary for fairly small market segment channels - and it's not explicit like "We are hiring you to post positive reviews of our products" because that would need to be disclosed. It's more along the lines of "We are nominally hiring you as a brand ambassador, you will visit our HQ and make a collaboration video". But of course, YouTubers aren't stupid, they're not going to post negative content about brands that are paying them even if it's theoretically for something else.
This is the same problem that PC hardware review magazines had back in the day - companies that purchased a lot of advertising from the parent company just happened to never get negative coverage in review articles. You can't bite the hand that feeds you.
Yeah but aren't these contradictory goals for the "influencer?" At least for the ones who start to catch on?
Canon says "make us look better than Sony" and Sony says "make us look better than Canon" but at least in the stuff I watched, for photography, the really successful people were quite obviously prickly opinionated photo nerds who were not likely to risk their ever-increasing reputation and influence for a bit of payola.
I guess it probably varies a lot based on subject. Travel vloggers are pretty openly corrupt in that sense. And I have long dreamed of being a corrupt restaurant critic...
Brand outreach in photography is so endemic that I just can't trust any reviews for the first three months or so after a release.
It's only when working photographers get their hands on the product and use it that the real story emerges, but it requires someone to take that risk for the benefit of others.
People believe (speaking of photography / video YouTubers) that Apple generally doesn't give pre-release or demo units to users (except the "inner circle", shall we say - Daring Fireball, etc.).
Odd, then, how a whole bunch of photography vloggers, the vast majority of whom made absolutely no mention of loaner / demo units, promotional consideration, etc, all got launch day Mac Pros.
"Much anticipated", people might argue, so of course they pre-ordered.
Odd. They must have all got together and talked. Because on my YT subscriptions list I counted no less than eight photography vloggers who somehow, coincidentally, managed to get the EXACT same configuration:
The 24 core, 384GB, 4TB, Vega Pro II Duo, with a Pro Display XDR, nano coated.
Now, not only is this an overkill for ANY photography editing, even 100mp medium format, it's also a $25,000 (33 when you count the display).
I'm willing to guarantee that these were all Apple loaner units and that at some point they bought their own with the specs they really wanted, and "subbed it in" to their setup, later.
As long as they were actually loaners and not just given to the vloggers I honestly don’t see much of a problem. The vast majority of magazines, for example, would do reviews based on products loaned from the manufacturer (with Consumer Reports being a notable exception). While all else equal a review from someone who shelled out their own money seems more trustworthy, I wouldn’t write off a review just because the product was loaned.
Brands aren't perfect either. For example Volvo had a reputation for making great safe cars. The brand is now owned by a company with a reputation for making cars that disintegrate and obliterate the occupants in crash tests.
The same is true of Arc'teryx, Jaguar, and many other well known brands that have been sold off to companies with terrible reputations for quality.
Ultimately the only way to guarantee quality would be to vote for politicians who support strong regulations and a strong regulatory apparatus.
Can you expound on this? The same parent company (Amer Sports) also owns Salomon/Atomic and several other well regarded brands. I wasn't aware that something had changed recently. Are you talking about the Anta Sports buyout? People use these brands for life-critical applications in the backcountry, so this is certainly concerning to hear.
I bought two Delta Lt Zip microfleeces from them in 2018. They were expensive (over $100 each) but incredibly high quality, fit me like a glove, still wearable today after umpteen washes.
In early 2020 I ordered another one -- exact same product name, exact same brand, same size, shipped-from-and-sold-by "Arc'Teryx". It was like wearing a garbage bag; the proportions were all wrong, like it was tailored for an obese person my height. Lower quality material and all sorts of silly zippers and patches tacked onto it in weird unnecessary places.
Something went seriously down the drain in terms of quality with them in the interim. I'd probably bought over $1,000 worth of clothes from them up through 2018, all of it was first rate. Since 2020 I haven't bought anything else from them.
> The brand is now owned by a company with a reputation for making cars that disintegrate and obliterate the occupants in crash tests.
In China. From what I've heard the products are also still completely on the same level because it's not like Geely just started selling their cars with the Volvo brand, but they keep the company doing what it's good at.
A counter-example is the German car brand Opel that was recently sold from GM to french PSA. Because the car manufacturer attached to the brand was already largely dismantled all Opel cars are now PSA models - which is rather well known by people who care and also affects the brand.
I am not sure but volvo's cars are still pretty well rated and relied upon - https://www.caranddriver.com/volvo/xc90 . Jaguar is now owned by a Indian company and Volvo is owned by a chinese company but I haven't heard anyone claim drop in their quality.
Can you point out specific examples of how changing ownership has affected quality of their cars?
> Ultimately the only way to guarantee quality would be to vote for politicians who support strong regulations and a strong regulatory apparatus.
Speaking as a socialist-leaning libertarian, I'mma have to take a hard disagree on this. Let the companies have a mix of terrible quality and great quality as they wish, and let the market itself decide which products and companies succeed or fail
Let a private company, say, Consumer Reports or Vegan International, give their imprimatures to quality.
A government, in this specific case of toy drones, is a bit heavy-handed, in my opinion. Would "quality specs" work? Would they be subject to political whims? Would a connected company be able to overwhelm the governmental department dedicated to the quality control of toy drones?
Edit: I promise, despite the proximity of "socialist" to "libertarian" in my preamble, this is not an ideological stance. If you have a better idea, I will change my mind! I'm fine with a downvote, but don't just smash it because you disagree. Tell us why :)
There is a reason you aren't afraid of getting poisoned when you eat at restaurants, and it isn't because every restaurant owner cares about poisoning you but because the government have made the common practices which led to food poisoning illegal.
> Kind of a non-sequitur, no? I was talking about toy drones.
Batteries are regulated, as is the type of paint used in kids toys.
Even with regulation companies still try to sneak in lead paint(!) and batteries occasionally burst into flame.
No regulation would mean parents would have to carry around lead paint test kits...
Review sites cannot keep up with the deluge of brands, and some aspects of product quality, such as longevity, are impossible for reviewers to adequately test in a reasonable amount of time. (A review that certifies a dish washer model last sold 10 years ago will indeed last 10 years isn't of much use!)
And in regards to a comment below, those toy drones likely charge with USB!
The original assertion was "Ultimately the only way to guarantee quality would be to vote for politicians who support strong regulations and a strong regulatory apparatus". I disagreed this is the only way to ensure quality. Now people are talking about batteries and restaurants. The original assertion was about quality, not safety
Now append some eco to your leanings and see that this sort of free market experimentation isn't sustainable, if you don't want to end under the great garbage avalanche like in the movie "Idiocracy". Or be filled with microplastics, which contain endocrine disruptors, which are not good for anyone/thing.
The assertion I responded to was that the only way to ensure "quality" was to support government regulation. I disagreed. Using the heavy hand of government to be sure that these toys don't break within a day is overkill. I suggested an alternative
Rather than argue against that specific point, people began arguing against another easier point: that government regulation protects us from dangerous things
While true, it's a distracting non-sequitur. Argue against what I said, not against a stupider argument that I did not say
Given the counterfeit problem on Amazon, I have been using the retailer as a proxy instead. I feel much more comfortable buying things from a known retailer like Target or Walmart, since I can rely on them to at least do some kind of due diligence on the products they carry. I think this will be the way forward for these companies to stay in business as Amazon becomes overrun with junk.
Even though Walmart also has a marketplace full of mystery sellers, at least they still offer a simple filter at the outset to limit your results to only things they sell directly. At Amazon, you have to have already put another filter on your search results to see that option.
> There's still a lot to be said for established brands.
Thus the loop comes full circle.
Originally the idea of a brand ("burned" -- burned into the hide of an animal or a piece of wood) was a way to label the provider in the hope that people would learn which providers were trustworthy and had high quality. This extended into manufactured products once printed packaging become popular (logos and labels, starting with low-input goods like tea).
Then sometime in the 20th century people figured out that they could use mass advertising to build the brand (by then just a label) itself, sometimes even rendering the product itself almost irrelevant. I remember articles in the paper (80s I think) expressing shock and/or bemusement that someone would wear a shirt with "Tommy Hilfinger" printed boldly across the front. At that point such brands become an expression of stance rather than product quality, or perhaps the product was merely a way to broadcast the brand. For example Diesel jeans which can only be worn a small number of times, compared to levis which last much longer.
And now it's come back to the starting point: seeking the brand, but for some level of quality assurance rather than lifestyle adherence.
>I've fallen back to pretty much relying on name brands as my placeholder for product quality
I've fallen back on a combination of brand, country of manufacture, price, and to some extent if the company has its own retail presence outside of Amazon and other online or meatspace big box stores. For example...
If the brand is good, the item is expensive, but it's made in China and sold on Amazon, I try to avoid. There's some risk it will be money wasted on something that will last just 3-6 months.
Conversely if all of the above are true but the item is cheap, I'll buy it from Amazon, enjoy their fast delivery, and simply build into my expectations and budget that it will need to be replaced in 3-6months. This is what I've come to with headphones, for example.
On the other hand, if the item is made in (not just designed in, but made in) the US, Japan, Korea, Germany, or some other Western European countries, then it matters less what the brand or retail venue is. For example, buying a room fan, power tool, or similar, I'll look for one with a motor made in US/Japan/Germany/etc.
These are the best signals I've found to be available atm.
> There's a somewhat pervasive idea that advertising and brand recognition are coercive tools that will ultimately die out, replaced by better objective information about products. I'm kind of partial to this idea myself.
Based on what? Are people investing less in marketing than before?
My personal experience is that many brands had a high markup on brand recognition and I used to be able to find better quality and value through no name brands that made good products. The internet is supposed to spread information well and with perfect information I should be able to differentiate true quality vs just a known brand signaling quality.
I think the problem is that places like Amazon distort information (eg, tolerate crappy reviews) because it makes them more money. The bazaar model is supposed to have some positive feedback loops to incentivize positive events, but that’s drifting away.
So I used to think that effective marketplaces would replace brands with disintermediation and perfect info. But not so much now.
This is sort of a tl;dr for why I buy Apple. They have a huge markup for brand name, but it’s exhausting to me to try to evaluate what’s the best laptop this year and I can trust Apple to probably be pretty good.
Yes, and even if the product seems like its legit - the manufacturers often won't honor warranties on products bought from Amazon if they don't have a formal relationship with them.
100% agree. I’d also add that people love to trash brands that produce substandard producers. Negative word of mouth spreads easier for more recognizable brands, and the company’s need to protect their reputation provides a level of assurance that doesn’t exist for anonymous producers.
I disagree partially. Depending on the size of the corporation holding the brand, and thus available capital, it may be chump change for white/greenwashing via advertisement campaigns, cross media product placement, lawsuits, and employing whole armies of "reputation management* trolls...err professionals flooding any site with positive comments, burying anything else.
> There's still a lot to be said for established brands. Brands can afford widespread advertising...
Established brands can do one other thing -- enforce on-ground quality assurance in China / manufacturing outsourcer
Chinese factories are amazing. But they produce what you let them produce. 1000-units-of-X, only QA'd when they hit receiving port, are going to trend to crap.
On the other hand, established brands have the financial and relationship muscle to actually inspect and cut things out earlier, and therefore can maintain a higher quality level on shelves
> Brands can get stocked in major retailers because you need decent products to make it through Walmart's buying process.
Not only this - brands that get stocked at Walmart need to have considerable production capacity. I was involved in a manufacturing business that did great as long as we stayed b2c - but when we started doing b2b sales, even in small local shops, we got swamped rather quickly because we didn't have enough capacity.
It's not much use finding a quality product if you can't buy it.
Branding is an emergent phenomenon in nature as well, e.g. flowers of particular shapes to attract bees. The book "Alchemy" by Rory Sutherland goes into this.
This is effectively being debated by proxy is most apple threads - i.e. It's easy to forget that we're debating this on HN, where even the least informed still have some idea what's going on whereas most consumers only information about a product is from very few sources and mostly advertising.
The problem is consumers are unorganized and people wanting to sell things can easily induce distortions in whatever recommender system by buying labor, companies, or products. You can only temporarily solve the problem before wealth demolishes objective feedback systems.
Skip the Amazon resellers and order direct from China on Alibaba. Their reputation system is less spammy than Amazon's.
One of my areas to watch: solid state relays.
Here we have yet another fake Fotek solid state relay on Amazon.[1] Note the "Made in China".
Here's the real thing.[2] Note the "Taiwan made" from the real Fotek. Costs a lot more.
That's because it will actually handle the rated current. The fakes are notorious for overheating and burning out. The real thing has overheat and surge protection, will shut off if it overheats, and can stand a big short term overload for motor starting or when a short is in the process of tripping the circuit breaker upstream.
Here's a similar solid state relay from China, from the actual manufacturer.
They actually provide a table which shows how much they
exaggerate the ratings. They're over-rated by 2X for
a resistive load, and 6x for an inductive load.
"For a motor with rated current of 15A and the motor
is inductive load, the formula is 15A x 6 = 90A, so
you should choose to buy 100A solid state relay".
For a little extra, you can have your own fake label. Minimum order 200 pcs.
Here's a fake Fotek.[4] What's amusing is that this is the actual manufacturer in China selling the fakes. They're in Guangdong, and they're selling under their own name, but with a fake label. No shame.
There are legit manufacturers in China selling solid state relays.[5] They put their own name on the product, show pictures of the inside their rather grubby factory, and have realistic numbers on their data sheets, along with pictures of UL certification documents. About 4x more expensive than the fakes. If you're in China and are building industrial equipment which needs these components, you need ones that won't fail and shut down a manufacturing line.
Here's a teardown of a fake. [6] The fakes are just solid state switches with power ratings way beyond what their components are good for. UL warning notice about fake Fotek solid state relays.[7] UL issued that notice six years ago, and they're still on Amazon and eBay.
There are many times where I get going on a project and need to get some part (nobody in a 50mi radius supplies electronics unfortunately). I like to keep my momentum going, so I order from amazon because some of those resellers stock locally, and thus I get the product in 1-2 days.
Contrast to China/AliExpress, where it may take them 3-4 weeks for the product to reach me. At that point, my interest may have fizzled out or I get busy with real life.
I've found that DigiKey works well. Yes it's $5 shipping, but you can actually buy low quantities at good prices instead of being forced to buy 50 packs of small components for a high $/unit to cover for the free shipping. Because shipping cost is per order instead of built into every item. And they ship within 24 hours, plus everything is good quality, no fakes. I still order stuff like microcontrollers and wire from amazon though.
The disadvantage is since you're paying for shipping you need to do planning and get your final BOM established. If you make a mistake it's $0.20 for the right part and $5 shipping... Which isn't bad, but feels bad.
Uhm, many sellers on Aliexpress offer Airmail too, you know? Not even exorbitantly expensive, per batch, not per part. Pre-Covid I ordered some light things, during my late night, and the day after tomorrow it arrived at my door via DHL. That was unexpected. Was about 35EUR for the premium. Didn't really matter, because equivalent parts from elsewhere would have been about 300EUR more.
Surely you mean Aliexpress, unless your product is super cheap or you’d already be ordering 100x or more of that product (since most alibaba shipments are for bulk ordering and have a minimum quantity).
Many products listed on Alibaba has MOQ of 10/100pcs. However if you contact them and ask for a sample, most will happily deliver a few pieces at 2-10x the volume cost + delivery fees.
Perhaps I'm in the minority of frequent amazon users, but I don't buy anything from 3rd party sellers anymore. There is simply too much fraud. In practice, this means that I often need to skip past amazon entirely and go straight to the product manufacturer, sometimes paying more, just to be sure I'm not being screwed.
I have been the victim of multiple instances of fraudulent product, sold directly by Amazon. One was a salt grinder that had a plastic replacement where it should have been metal and was lacking the lettering but was sold on Amazon from the official page. Somewhere in their system Amazon is accepting product that isn't official and happily selling it under than companies brand. If it was a one off I might agree it was a mistake but that has happened three times this year and while Amazon replaces them it is clearly happening commonly now.
Amazon has lost my trust this year, when my prime runs out I wont be renewing.
Are you sure there aren't multiple variations of the same product?
I made an online purchase for some oral-b toothbrush heads from Target. The item that arrived did not resemble what was on their website. I figure since it's a big retailer, it's probably legit. I checked the official manufacturer's website and the product was also different. Digging a bit deeper into the product images, I finally found one that looked like the version I had.
Quite certain, it was actually a Chinese knock off of a Salters product. Salters never sold a version with a plastic adjustment bar on the bottom for the reason I saw, it breaks almost immediately.
Amazon is really muddying the waters by combining products too. They seem to be merging comments and products that shouldn't be merged and are different SKUs and that is definitely a problem, but its also participating in the fraudulent sale of knock off products and passing them off as the real thing.
I've fallen victim to scammer merchants who use Amazon in their name. Before I would just check "Ships from / Sold by" under the Add to Cart button but it's not obvious if it's Amazon official. For example which one of these "Ships from / Sold by" is legit?
Two frequent Ship from/Sold by I got is Amazon and Amazon.com, and these items are non-link instead of 3rd-party which has clickable link to their front store.
Has this changed? My understanding is that Amazon only comingles 3rd parties and keeps their stuff completely separate. Of course my only source for that appears to be here / reddit so not sure how true it is.
I have seen it three times this year and the last time was November so I would say no its not been fixed and its still happening. If they aren't commingling third party product then they are directly sourcing counterfeit products and that is so much worse and clearly illegal.
In many of the cases where I've done this, I've had a worse experience. With one company, I wanted to return the product because it was defective but was never able to actually contact anyone. With another, it arrived broken and I was never able to get the company to replace it. In either scenario, Amazon makes it easy to correct the problem.
I want to support manufacturers more directly, but their customer service has continued to be lacking.
> In practice, this means that I often need to skip past amazon entirely and go straight to the product manufacturer, sometimes paying more, just to be sure I'm not being screwed.
You're not the only one. Depending on the item and it's use I would probably pay upwards of a 20% premium just so I know there's a far less chance of the received item being fraudulent.
Pandemic aside, these issues also have made me much more likely in the last 4 to 5 years to purposefully go shopping in-person at stores since they seem to have a higher chance of having a proper supply chain established.
Adding fuel to the fire; I remember reading an article last year which appeared on HN, it was about how sellers create groups on facebook which offer to send people free products in they agree to give 5 star reviews. Apparently this is also a massive problem with thousands of people doing this
So not only will the reviews be for the wrong product, there is also a good chance that the reviews were bought and are fake.
Many crappy products I've bought literally have a business card inside the package where they offer you a $5 giftcard for leaving them a 5 star review. You have to send them a screenshot of the 5 star review.
If Amazon wanted to they could stop this tomorrow. All they have to do is post on their website "If any vendor offers you money to leave a good review, send us a photo of the offer. We'll check it out, and if it's real we'll pay you double what the vendor offered and then ban that vendor from Amazon."
I was looking at webcams and the Amazon recommended one is 1000+ five star reviews some of which say that you only get a lifetime warranty if you leave a five star review
I've been using ReviewMeta to assist identifying the "real" reviews and learning the unadulterated score. I don't know if it handles "bait-and-switch" as mentioned in TFA, but it's steered me away from a lot of products that seemed reasonable based solely on reviews. I especially like that it can recognize false bad reviews which are often left by competitors.
I also use ReviewMeta and it does handle review hijacking. It's not a great experience as a customer, but if I combine ReviewMeta and Amazon reviews and search I still get pretty good products. My basic guidelines are that it needs at least 4 stars (preferably closer to 4.2-4.7) and the product can't be a "fail" on ReviewMeta. I also am wary if ReviewMeta is a "warn".
I don't trust Amazon reviews without a review checker anymore, they used to be much better. The highest reviewed products are often some of the worst. Any product with a 4.8 or better is immediately suspect (though some are fine, especially if they don't have as many reviews).
A simple test for quality - if the clam shell/body is made of ABS (instead of polycarbonate or nylon), it's very likely bad. The dashcam appears ABS, judging from the pics.
You can return stuff back when bought online in 14days, I think this part remains after the 1st of Jan.
ABS is not a low quality material. It is a tough polymer which maintains its toughness over a wide range of environmental conditions. That is why it is widely used in applications like automotive interior and exterior panels. It's probably a good choice for a product like a dashcam which will be exposed to a wide temperature range.
I guess the most famous part "low quality" ABS is that UV unstable along with low resistance to organic chemicals like gasoline[0] (and acetone, which is ABS glue). Compare that to nylon[1]. Flip note ABS becomes brittle at lower temperatures (say -20C).
As for why I thought it was ABS. It's glossy and if it was nylon or polycarbonate (esp. glass/carbon fiber composite, or even PC+ABS), it'd be written a major pro in the marketing materials.
How can you tell the difference? It seems like you're making a judgement based on just the product pictures, what specific things make it looks like ABS to you? What would a polycarbonate or nylon plastic look like?
Nylon won't be glossy for sure. PC can be glossy, though. However China goods are very often glossy ABS and it'd be mentioned if they'd use PC (or some PC composite)
But they might have an interest in not having a lot of products which don't sell at all because of mostly bad reviews (they are the Nr1 platforms for cheap "Chinese" products, they would lose a lot of sellers if they are no longer suited for selling low quality products) .
They also might have some interest into a erosion of trust into non "sold by Amazon", "shipped by Amazone" and "Amazone Choice" products. But that supper speculative.
I bought a plant growing light a few days ago on amazon. It was the #1 seller in the category, and had nearly 15,000 reviews and sat at 4.5 stars. It was cheap. Mine didn't work. The box said it was 80 watts, but the included adaptor could only do 40 watts.
In the box was an offer for a $15 amazon gift card to give them a 5 star rating. I wrote a review on amazon, stating this. I got an email from amazon that my review had not been accepted this morning. I called amazon the previous night and the first person told me to "contact the seller". It took a second person to tell me that blatantly bribing customers for reviews was against their policy. Clearly nothing will happen.
All I can think of is that the end user is no longer the customer for Amazon. They're a platform for sellers, so the sellers are the new customers. Shame they never told the end users.
This is a great encapsulation of the Amazon experience these days. Spot on. You buy the top selling, thousands of five star reviews, Aliexpress piece of junk that doesn't match the description. The seller tries to bribe you to leave them another 5 star review and Amazon customer service tells you to leave them alone and stop messing with their business model.
I very much fail to see how this is supposed to fit in with their "customer obsession".
From the article listed (a toy drone) [1], reviews range from talking about car oil, stickers for kids, a plaque for finishing a race, honey, something about horses (?)..
What is this mess !? And how is this not Amazon's top priority?
I worked for a startup that sold a food product direct, with a significant part of sales on Amazon. We decided to switch our standard size from 12 packs to 8 packs to better fit our customers consumption habits.
But on Amazon that meant creating new listings for new SKUs, abandoning hundreds of positive comments/ratings on each 12 pack flavor SKU, which would crush sales for a while.
So instead we let inventory run out for each 12 pack SKU, then shipped replacement 8 pack SKUs, and renamed the SKUs from 12 packs to eight packs.
They still had some reviews praising them for having a dozen packs, which was weird but the ratings were still there.
Maybe there is and that is why the listing took the path it did. "Horses and cars are both modes of transportation, so I guess this change is ok." then "Horses and drones are both hobby activities in this day and age, so I guess this change is ok." I lean towards change in package size ok, but just about anything else is not. Otherwise you can anneal the product page to fit your needs.
A "diff" view for the product description like in version control systems, and the revievs sorted according to the time the change in product description happened, and not some commingled ratings which have nothing to do anymore with the product.
That's crazy. Can't you add two variants to the same product? Like how a single t-shirt item can have different sizes and colors? Or maybe Amazon only allows that for certain listings, or only if they're set up that way from the start?
We couldn’t. It’s been a year and Amazon wasn’t my primary responsibility so I can’t remember the details out Amazon manager laid out, but we were forced to go through this time consuming and painful process.
This reminded me of shopping for an SSD. I found Western Digital and Sandisk versions of the same drive). All the stats were the same, and they were most likely the same hardware with a different label (WD owns Sandisk). One had a higher review. What's interesting is different people will purchase each, so you're actually getting a different set of reviewers, so the ratings could be genuinely different.
ReviewMeta identifies it as untrustworthy, unable to give an adjusted star rating because it eliminates the only review: https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B08P14T1Z2
Though, looks like there's only 1 review now, so I dunno what it would've done earlier.
Because they take a percent off the top as the payment processor. And even if you return an item, they're not going to return that fee. When the seller fulfills the order it's even better ,amazon has almost no cost for the entire transaction. They won't care until people start ditching them in large numbers, not the trickle the dissatisfied in these comments (myself included) represent.
I'm assuming through their (in)famous hiring process, that they have smart/competent people around. They for sure know that this kind of thing will turn people off the platform long term.
Devil advocate: Could it be that the problem is actually quite complex due to whatever reason?
Their hiring process works well for a very limited number of people, especially in core IT positions. I am working with Amazon (they are my supplier in an IT project) and I have friends who work for Amazon, core IT people are very good, project managers are a mixed bag, the "business oriented" people are hit or miss, some are good and some are plain incompetent. This is because they are probably too large and hire too many people and they cannot always be too picky (a friend is a hiring manager and he is complaining how hard is to find competent people).
That being said, the problem is not very complex to solve, but the motivation is fairly low: they get a percentage of everything is sold, at some point that income can be a lot larger than the damage a few news articles usually do.
Kodak hired smart people too and they all worked towards its demise.
If everybody's incentives are geared towards quarterly results no way in hell they're going to be the ones to fix the fraud in their area if it's actually making their division $$$.
There's almost certainly a tragedy of the commons effect going on here (where the commons is trust in Amazon).
Will it really turn people off the platform though? I’m part of the very small minority who hates Amazon right now simply because of how easy it is for shops to game the review system. But I am more than willing to bet most consumers are ever so happy to see prices on products continue to drop in exchange for any brand recognizability or quality.
I was a heavy Amazon customer 8-10 years ago. I only bought stuff sold directly by Amazon, and that was not hard to do, since +90% of the products had that option. The other day I was just checking the price of an article for my mom and I was shocked how different is now, the proportion has totally changed, +90% of the articles are not sold by Amazon and by the "stores" name it looks they are barely better than random dropshippers. So if you buy 3-4 articles instead of dealing with a single established company you are dealing with many unknown vendors. The probability of getting lemons rises up dramatically.
Amazon has gotten complacent due to its quasi-monopoly. I think now it is the time for a serious competition to take business out from them. One of those brick-and-mortar ex-giants, the ones who were displaced could make a comeback. If I buy online I want to deal with recognized companies who have a track record of shipping real products and honoring the warranties, not with some randoms hidden behind not recognizable names.
The same thing happened to Ebay and Etsy - once they reached a certain level of popularity based on the original premise it turned into a outlet for cheap junk.
I've taken to finding as much as I can at places that DO NOT have a "marketplace" such as Target or Home Depot.
Ebay has lots of junk (the worst being the people who drop ship items from Amazon marked up or just outright scams) but its also a source of really good deals that you really can't find elsewhere. Refurbished PCs, obscure electronics, mechanical and pneumatic fittings, lots of stuff I order for work to test/prototype which can save $100s-$1000s.
I also use ebay for various antique/vintage stuff (only <$100). Seems like overall a positive experience and the few times I've had issues I've always got my money back and the scammers account was closed, although I'm sure they just pop up again under a new name.
Quick counter: eBay is legit and has so much non-junk that its one of my top 10 visited sites. I've only once received a counterfeit item and it was a Sandisk branded sd card, but everything else in my three-hundred-and-counting auction history has arrived as described by the seller.
> I think now it is the time for a serious competition to take business out from them.
I think this is Walmart nowadays. They bought Jet in 2016 and seem to have scaled Jet up and everywhere. Jet was the last company I know of to go up against Amazon.
I think it’s a real opportunity for a Chinese or Korean brand. Or if Aldi/IKEA want to go into retail space.
I dont buy much stuff these days but my last cell phone for example, I bough it from my regular supermarket!, same price as Amazon (just a Blu phone, nothing fancy), 1 year warranty, and I could check it first for a while so I had a better idea on what I was getting.
I liked Newegg too for PC parts and other stuff so I am dismayed to see they are going Amazon's way too.
Somewhat related due to comments / reviews being for a product, but sometimes on Amazon one page has a set of different options (with the little boxes). So you can pick like a color or model. But then they group all the reviews together despite what buttons you've picked. This is so frustrating! At least they've added a little thing that says which SKU the review is for. But I wish they would just separate out the reviews for different models / colors. It just seems another way to get increased review counts and make it look like a clear obvious quality winner from the search results box.
I agree it's frustrating, but there is a way to do what you want.
After you've selected the color/model, go to the reviews section, and click to see all reviews, which brings you to a new page. There, you can filter to select reviews that are only for the single color/model.
It's annoying, and it's even dumber that the filter dropdown only lets you toggle between all reviews and reviews for the single color/model (when I'd like to compare reviews easily for different colors/models), but at least it is there if you hunt for it.
I despise this practice. I ran into it recently with the LOTR 4K Bluray set. I was going to leave a 3 or 4 star review, since while it's fantastic, the image detail is hardly an improvement over the standard bluray version, with some claiming the 4K wasn't even a full rescan from the originals. Side by side shots show very minor at best improvements to detail, with most of the actual benefits coming from HDR.
Since a 3 or 4 star review was pointless given their SKU grouping, I left a 1 star review. If 10% of users started punishing companies and Amazon with 1 star reviews they would change pretty quickly.
This is especially a problem for things with different flavours. I have run into multiple problems with Protein shakes where the vanilla is amazing and everything else tastes awful. The comments being merged mean you might have to pick through 1000 review comments to work out which flavours are good and which are bad.
Exactly, same for Amazon pages that decide to sell the "new model" on the same page as the old model to harvest reviews. And then when I'm trying to figure out if it has better support or problems, I'm trying to pick through the reviews to figure out which one is talking about which version.
(Mostly a problem when also trying to figure out linux support!)
I saw that around Black Friday where electric toothbrushes were on sale and they had merged the product pages a bunch of SKUs with just one of them being on sale. Of course the one on sale previously had a bunch of bad reviews, but merged with the reliable SKUs it appeared to have a good average and had a nice star rating. The comments showed an inconsistent story all about that one SKU.
What Amazon is doing is just outright dishonest and ought to be against the law. They are certainly intentionally utilising this to sell products with dishonest reviews and star ratings.
I don't know, it kinda makes sense to have the reviews for phone (blue) in the phone (red) page. It's not like the colour is a major part of the product (in the sense that most reviews won't be about the colour, not that it is not important). Same with cable x1 or x2. Though it certainly is an issue if it changes the product in a major way (say, taste of a yogurt).
Other bait-and-switch problems on Amazon are manufacturers and "brands" launching a product with high production standards, then switching them out with cheap, low-grade junk made with inferior components or materials later on. This is often coupled with rampant paid review scams, as discussed on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25459434)
A twist on bait and switch is another manufacturer or reseller taking over the "buy box". This is how pirated items or used items sold as new get dumped on customers, with Amazon's full encouragement (lower prices for customers!) and non-enforcement/honor system for sellers. Legitimate manufacturers and brands can scream to the high heavens that they and customers are being ripped off, but Amazon does next to nothing to stop the bad guys let alone compensate customers and brands who were cheated.
Originally the reason I liked Amazon was that I grew up in an area that didn't have access to stores with higher quality goods. Wal-Mart's price sensitive nature and similar stores meant that most of what was offered was 10% less in price, but 30% less in quality / how long it might last.
Now on Amazon everything is a race to the bottom on price and quality and, it is really hard to find something that is good quality and if you do ... someone is probably willing to sell you a fake.
I've gotten a few items I thought were fakes, and when I post a less than glowing review (not even mentioning my fake suspicions) I'm often contacted and offered a free product for removing my review.... I refuse to take these offers, but I wonder how many people do.
Rather than what I sort of expected, Wal-Mart trying to be Amazon... Amazon seems desperate to BE Wal-Mart...
Amazon reviews are about as useful as Youtube comments. You can read them for entertainment but don't expect anything useful about the product, and don't base a purchase decision on them.
I always look at negative reviews. From those you can tell if there's a consistent concern, if someone got a fake, or if there was just a preference mismatch for someone.
This also used to be my strategy, but now I am concerned that competing brands are sabotaging each other by just leaving poor 1-star reviews. I say this as I have read some low reviews that just made no sense, or didn't reference aspects of the product that existed.
I still trust 1-star reviews more than 5-star, but I don't take them as gospel. As you said, if there is a consistent message across all the negative reviews from a mix of reviewer types, then it strengthens the signal quality.
I find the 3-4 star reviews the most helpful. I feel like the positive fake reviews are all 5 stars (based on what the little notes I get in my Amazon packages, the vendors will only reward you for 5 star reviews) and I'm guessing the negative fake reviews are all 1 star. So that leaves those reviews in the middle as the only ones worth paying attention to.
I came up with this as well. My strategy for products was often to read 1-star reviews, and there were often two cases:
1) The reviews are low-quality and not indicative of much, so there are few legitimate complaints, or
2) The reviews showcase a significant problem with the product alongside proof, and/or are often made by intelligent consumers
After enough time doing this with success, I've started to see many more 1-star reviews on products that get highly upvoted until they're the 'top review(s)', which don't really contain anything useful at all. They try to appear like they are an instance of 2), but often offer little evidence or quality argumentation.
I imagine it's easy to upvote 1/-star reviews on competitors' products to drive a lot of their traffic elsewhere instead. At this point I would love having a review system that is curated to only be from people I like/trust, but that is another whole story and ecosystem of course.
You implictly assume that you'll receive a similar product to the one people reviewed or photographed. Without that assumption, a lot is lost. Under that assumption, I agree. If you trust the seller, then you can probably also trust the reviews of the kind you mention (e.g. product photos). The problem occurs when you want to use the reviews to determine whether to trust the seller, not the product.
I think book reviews (and presumably music, movie reviews) are going to be quite a bit different from other sorts of product reviews, for obvious reasons.
What I like, are the companies that create a separate listing for every variant of a product, within a price range, so searches get overwhelmed.
A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for a Mag-Safe stand for my new iPhone 12 Mini. When I searched for it on Amazon, look at what the search returned[0]. Now, scroll down, until you get to the "Cheetah" pop stand.
Keep scrolling.
But don't touch that dial! It goes on for 400 pages![1]
Note they raise the price slightly, so they "sort."
I ended up giving up, and getting one straight from the manufacturer.
Oh...BTW. Those stands have this little gem in their description:
> (Not compatible with Apple MagSafe wireless charger or MagSafe wallet.)
Great that they overwhelm a search that is, explicitly:
That is certainly a suboptimal shopping experience. One page with variants wouldn't seem to work very well for this either, with nearly 10,000 variations.
Interestingly, they are all sold by amazon directly and are printed on demand so it doesn't seem to be a case of a 3rd party trying to game the site.
> Interestingly, they are all sold by amazon directly and are printed on demand so it doesn't seem to be a case of a 3rd party trying to game the site.
I don't know about you folks, but I've received so many "new" items from Amazon that were clearly used that I have largely stopped shopping there for expensive items. I think it's still fine for small gifts, plastic utensils, etc. But anything over 100 bucks I try to buy directly off the manufacturer's website.
I think Amazon needs to get a handle on their sellers and reviews ASAP because I am rapidly losing faith in the store.
Same here. I wonder if Amazon employees stopped eating their own dog food, and would be interesting to be a fly on the wall for how they are trying to solve this problem.
I fear that they’ve done the math and decided that they make more money this way than a quality way.
This is how the seller can do it, atleast on Amazon India.
Swapping the details completely triggers AI based flags and often causes the change to be manually reviewed.
But the seller can add a variant of the product (like size or color). But the seller instead adds a completely different product he intends to swap the original product with. Now the listing will show two completely different products as variants on a single product listing. Then the seller removes the old variant. Nothing gets flagged. No manual review.
This has been around for long and a very popular trick with shady sellers on Amazon in India. I don't think Amazon never figured it out. For whatever reason, Amazon turns a blind eye to this practice.
I was just seeing something like this the other day on US Amazon. I was looking at 'nano tape' to stick some stuff in place. And came across the top reviewed one, with 11k reviews [1] but all of the reviews are for a guitar wall mount. I was very confused as to how they achieved it.
This feels like the kind of tricks Amazon should actively be defending against, with red teams trying to come up with angles of attacks, people looking for forums discussing possible approaches to game the system, etc.
> As a result of Amazon's action, the top-ranking drone, which previously had more than 6,000 reviews, now has only about 50 reviews and its star rating has dropped to three and a half stars. But the other two listings I mentioned above—both of which I also mentioned in a Monday email to Amazon—still have thousands of positive reviews, including a bunch of obviously bogus ones.
The result of blatant fraud and manipulation is simply removing the fraud? Why is Amazon continuing business with this shady company as if nothing happened?
I consider their "corrective" action far worse and damming than their inaction on other pages. Inaction could be from an inability to police everything. But merely covering up fraud when it happens is nearly as bad as taking no action.
The worst of it is that if you report an obviously fraudulent product listing nobody at AMZN cares if you didn't buy it.
Years ago I quit buying things at staples and started buying at AMZN because staples only stocked crap brands like vtech. Now the crap product listings on AMZN really stink.
They don’t care even if you DID buy it. I once reordered some toothbrush heads that I liked only to find a completely different, inferior product. It turned out that the product page had been completely redone since my initial order, but it kept all the old reviews. I reported it to Amazon and they did nothing for months. I think the page changed yet again and was no longer even selling toothbrush heads while still keeping the old reviews. After I reported it a few ore times Amazon finally removed the old reviews.
Amazon uses this tactic themselves! They did it with the high capacity Amazon Basics AA batteries. The community pretty much verified they were rebranded Panasonic batteries manufactured in Japan. Then, after a few years and thousands of 5 star reviews they switched the batteries out for Chinese manufactured batteries. Check for yourself: https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-High-Capacity-Rechargeab...
It's not consistent. It only seems to trigger after a few site visits. (So I don't see it if using a private mode browser, Safari, or temporary containers in Firefox.) Obnoxiously, if you're configured to visit in a fresh browser/container, you have to click away the dickbars on every visit. (And they use similar html obfuscation as facebook, so the dickbar element can't be blocked with uBlock.)
Other sites like Outdoorgearlab do this as well, although, I could be wrong, it seems like they strongly favor items that can use affiliate links to make them money, which makes sense.
Yes, someone makes a $23 drone. It is cheap plastic shit from China. Do you really need to buy it, and then throw it in landfill a week (or two days) later after it breaks?
Did OP reeeeeally expect a $23 drone to be on the up-and-up and NOT end up as landfill? OP is a bit oblivious to his impact on the environment.
This race to the bottom for the cheapest crap is what inspires these tactics.
A few years ago my New Year's resolution was to stop buying cheap crap, and to consciously save up for nice things. This had a few unexpected consequences:
1. I accumulate less junk and produce less waste.
2. I buy less stuff and end up spending less money in the long run, since there's only so much you can save up for at once.
3. My purchases bring me much more pleasure; the anticipation and research heightens the joy of actually getting the thing.
Number 3 was the most surprising to me, most likely because I have a rather strong anti-materialism streak. I'm not the kind of person who "goes shopping", but even I must admit that deliberately saving up for something makes its purchase a bit more meaningful, and loads more satisfying.
Oh, and I basically don't experience buyer's remorse anymore, which is nice.
> the anticipation and research heightens the joy of actually getting the thing
I've found that the research and thinking process is often the most fun part, and that I can replace that little dopamine hit from buying a bunch of cheap crap by window shopping for nicer, more expensive things for the future.
Then when I am finally ready to buy something nice, I've already done most of the research to know exactly what I want/need.
It also helps filter out stuff I don't really need or care about, since I tend to forget about that junk if I don't impulse buy it. Put junk in your cart but don't buy it until you sleep on it, and 9 times out of 10 you realize you don't really need it or even care about it once the novelty is gone.
I end up buying less throwaway crap, and I end up mostly very pleased with the nicer things I do buy.
The problem is that we don't have a great indicator of quality other than price. Why do I think the $30 or $50 will be better? It probably is, but I have no way to tell if I am getting a better quality product or basically the same just sold at a higher price. It is hard to decide to take this "risk" when you don't know.
Trusted reviews and recommendations can solve this but they are hard to come by.
It has become increasing difficult to find good reviews too. The use of affiliate links means there are a lot of affiliate link farm sites now that do top 10 product listings and sometimes they make really hard to determine if they know what they are talking about or not. You can waste a lot of time trying to find real roundup reviews that aren't just affiliate link scam sites on search engines.
Absolutely agreed. It's a different topic though. Amazon even steals top sellers, copies them, and pushes out the originator! (I think there was a radiolab about a guy who invented a bunch of grill tools that Amazon duplicated, and bottom-listed him).
There are lots of problems with Amazon, but in hindsight, perhaps my original comment was a bit offtopic...
I think externalities should be priced into that $23. Lots of things can be cheap and still account for externalities.
A wacky wall walker [0] is less than a dollar? Does that amaze you? Should it cost more? Should it not exist?
Same with a spinning top. Or a book. Or colored pencils.
I’m certainly concerned with externalities and make my children’s toy purchases accordingly. I am curious and would like to know why you think a $23 plastic drone isn’t very good.
I had this problem literally half an hour ago. Looking for power strips, and the top rated one (average > 4.5 stars) thankfully has customer pictures showing extremely flimsy connections and soldering, a huge fire hazard.
I had a power strip catch fire. Posted photos and the seller tried desperately to get me to take them down. Monetary offers transitioned to creepy comments about my social media activity to try and freak me out.
Brennenstuhl? Da brennt der Stuhl! (There the chair is catching fire!) Had this many years ago, but not via Amazon, may have been a case of fake product, though. OTOH I came across reviews of this brand many years later, also on Amazon, stating similar. So either they are faked much, or their brand name is program.
Ugh, I had this problem looking for power strips on Amazon too. I wanted something with lots of reviews (to verify quality), but every product with a high number of reviews had at least one scary customer picture.
I ended up relying on brand trust: I looked up reputable brands and bought some Tripp Lite power strips.
Looking for smart Christmas tree light for next year and the listing go from sketchy Chinese stuff with clearly manufactured reviews to outright fraudulent products that use images straight off name brand advertisement for their knock-off lights
>Clicking on the names of these "brands" takes you to a search result with no additional information on who made these products.
This in particular bugs me quite a bit on Amazon. The link for the 'brand' appears as if you can click it and then see information about who you are buying from, but instead it just performs a search for the word and you often get zero useful results.
Instead I'd like to see basic information about the seller: what items do they sell, how many have they sold, what country are they based in, what is their average review, and so on.
Even when Amazon reviews are legitimate, keep in mind that the reviewer may have been looking for something different than you are. Plenty of times I've bought stuff expecting one level of quality based on review scores, but got something less--all because I had a higher standard of what should be a 5 than most of the people who bought that.
one of the reasons why reading negative reviews is often helpful: there you often can figure out if the complaints about quality are from people with your standards or from people with higher ones. (after you filter out all the people who don't understand the difference between a product review and a review of their local postal service of course...)
It has become the same with game reviews on Steam as well. I think most people just aren't very discerning or critical with their reviews. Those with negative reviews however have at least one complaint about the product and determining those as a combination matter to you is a big part of finding the right product.
It marks the death of high quality reviews however because professional reviews can be done in context weighing things up better, where as most customers just don't have the experience with alternatives to say if its a good example or not.
This is why I use tools like fakespot and reviewmeta to make sure Amazons reviews are somewhat accurate. Sure, it's not fool proof, but these tools attempt to filter the obvious bad reviews.
I bought magnetic tiles for my kids for christmas, and in the box was a card promising me money if I left a 5 star review and forwarded proof that I left a 5 star review to the company's email.
A friend of mine got a no-name brand spotting telescope as a Christmas present, and it had one of those cards in the box. Not the shipping box, the actual package. Someone had to have unsealed the box, put the card in, and closed it back up.
It's an OK scope, nothing special, and I have no idea how much the giver paid.
Apple and Google require developers to have some info and a persistent profile to publish an app. Every app has a publisher and I can see what else they publish, how long they’ve been around, etc. nothing extensive just letting me know that they exist and at least a mailbox or url for support.
Amazon doesn’t do this. Many of the seller pages are bogus or hard to see what they sell. I assume that since it sucks so much Amazon doesn’t care or they specifically don’t want me associating sellers with their own brands.
The amount of time I've spent lately just looking for one simple thing - honesty - when looking to buy something, is embarrassing to say out loud.
One of many, many examples. I wanted to buy a 10k lux light to see whether it improves my winter health. I spent well over an hour on Amazon going through reviews and products. When I found something I liked, on several occasions, Fakespot rated the product a C or D and noted it saw tons of reviews being removed and other heuristics. Then I personally noticed some products from different brands looked almost identical. And sometimes I noticed the same product from the same brand with separate entries. Also, when I wanted to read 3 or lower star reviews, I was told there were some, but I'd click the filter and it'd find no reviews lower than 4 or 5.
The other month I posted a review on Amazon for six canning jars where 5 spontaneously cracked in the fridge by themselves, unmolested. My review got removed and Amazon said it failed some guideline. This never used to happen.
Look, I'm happy to pay a little more here and there, I rarely look for the cheapest thing or budget item. But why is lying and deception so commonplace and lackadaisically accepted? It's grating.
Someone should invent an Honest Amazon competition. Honestly, Ebay vendors are often more trustworthy.
This problem exposes an aspect of the AI difficulty chasm between Amazon’s dream of assigning a unique barcode (ASIN) to every object under the sun that has been or ever will be sold, and Amazon’s dream of doing so without spending a single dollar on expensive human curators. Amazon is trying to solve a well-known library science problem using AI, and it’s been a miserable failure.
Their AI systems can’t detect when sellers bait and switch because there’s no way to detect this that doesn’t have a massive false positive rate, and they aren’t willing to spend a single dollar on ‘app store’ reviewing product changes by third parties.
Another demonstration of this chasm can be found by searching for ‘claritin’. There are pages of duplicates, terrible and missing product photos, and a wide array of metadata errors due to human inconsistency by the sellers listing the product on the marketplace. Fixing this would require human curation, since their AI curation is incapable of doing it, and so Amazon simply allows the rot to spread unchecked.
I keep getting items I have not ordered, I presume sellers use fake accounts to be able to review their products. I reported that to Amazon but they only say "they are working on it" in a dismissive way. They even assumed I wanted to ask if I can keep the products and only seemed to take more seriously when I mentioned reporting it to the police. But nothing has changed.
Not mentioned in the article, but Amazon also hasn't fixed its problem with fake reviews at Audible either. Thousands of 5-star ratings are similarly worded blurbs by accounts with 1 or 2 book reviews.
This would be pretty simple to solve if Amazon appended a couple new fields to each review logging the string of text in the main headline at the time the review was posted, and the sales category.
Using this field could then at least provide a control for us poor customers to filter only reviews for the current version/category of the product
And if they really wanted to do it right, they'd scan headlines/categories and reviews for substantial changes. Just a bit of good logic or AI pattern recognition should be able to sift this down to a manageable set of changes for human review and appropriate action, such as demanding a re-listing as a new product, weeding out repeat offenders, etc.
The article's point about Amazon failing to show a focus on "customer obsession" in this area is key - Amazon used to be a great place to search for products, and it is now a miserable, long slog to find anything good in the sea of crap with bogus listings & reviews.
> Amazon could easily require sellers to provide some basic transparency about these listings—disclosing where these manufacturers are located, how long they've been in business, and which other brands they own. This might make it easier for Amazon to punish companies that try to mislead customers with fake reviews.
In my experience they go out of their way to hide info on who the company really is and especially where it is located. Including deleting reviews that point this out. I suspect they make the most money selling in a position of maximum information asymmetry. If you built up any loyalty to the brand they could sell to you outside amazon.
Yep. I found Amazon pretty useless these days and rarely use it. I buy household essentials from Target their service and delivery is good and I have an option of in-store pickup within a day or delivery within a couple of days. At least they have a stable set of brands that they sell it's not the highest quality but it's good enough for most things. The things I care about quality I will buy directly from the seller.
I've actually found, to my surprise, Walmart to be somewhat comparable to Target in the sense of feeling like I'm getting what I ordered instead of a knockoff like with Amazon. I had avoided them for years because of the terrible customer service I have received in their stores in the past but their online service is noticeably better. Their grocery Pick Up system is far superior to the competitor grocery stores in my area.
Note that I am not for Section 230's removal (mostly because it makes sense to me that platforms should be able to host negative content). However, if it were removed, would that mean bogus reviews become a liability for Amazon?
I would argue that reviews aren't content. a review is implicitly understood as an opinion of someone without ties to the company and of someone who actually owns or have 'reviewed' the product. In the case of amazon I think ownership of a product should be mandatory to leave a review.
While this can help the seller can so radically change the listing that it doesn't always stop review hijacking. As I understand it they sell something simple and cheap then repurpose the listing for something else entirely.
Strange that something like this is possible, I've always believed that the likes of amazon/ebay had better fraud detection. changing listings seems like an obvious door to fraudulent behaviour. Being able to track packets around the world nowadays should also help detect fake customers for the sake of reviews. (Since the quantity of legit adresses is better known than the quantity of shady adresses.
Now you know why Section 230 has to go. Comcast, TWC & so on is just a series of pipes, but Facebook & co has editorial control or at least should have.
Facebook already has armies of moderators for child porn and gore, which shows that they have control over what's on their site. The bigger question is of course: are we safe with Facebook?
9th best selling flash disk is totally fake: USB Flash Drive 1TB - Thumb Drive, High Speed USB Drive, Portable Ultra Large Storage USB Memory Stick, Jump Drive Pen Drive Come with Keychain https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08N16XZNR/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glc_...
Reviews are for Soda and the storage capacity is much less than 1TB so you will lose data if you film it.
The thing that really annoys me is that when you go to report problems with a listing, none of the options you're given really match this. "Problem with item description" is the closest. Considering that this is one of the top three problems turning Amazon shopping into a garbage-fest, you'd think they'd have a clearer way to report it. That they don't shows that they just don't care.
Does anyone know of an alternative to Amazon that addresses quality and environmental issues (ideally something that isn't trying to sell me the latest hot garbage from whatever country is willing to trash the environment and enslave its citizens for a quick buck)?
The real site is manufactum.de nowadays
a daughter of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_GmbH , the last remaining general catalog/online retailer, like Sears once was in the US.
FYI a drone like the one pictured can easily be found for under $6 in China (retail price, including shipping within China).
Amazon in the US sells similar things for under $20, which seems reasonable given the local logistics costs.
I wouldn't recommend a toy like that for anyone under 6 years old. You're meant to hold it steady on your outstretched palm, then pull your hand away swiftly. Younger kids can find this too hard, which causes them to resort to tossing it up in the air. The resulting collisions (which are much harder than the collisions during flight) could easily cause the type of damage described.
I think the review system is good for generalities as long as you toss out the hyperbole. Very few products are hyperbolically good. Once you weed that out you can find trends so long as the company is not engaging in fraud or other deception. I also try not to buy anything on impulse so that I can spend enough time researching my purchase. So far I’ve been pretty lucky in that I have not gotten a fraudulent product or something that is not as advertised. How often is the fakery happening? What types of products are commonly fake/bootleg? It may just be that I don’t ever buy the de sorts of things.
I was hoping they would explain how exactly this is happening? What about the amazon seller ecosystem allows this to happen in the first place. Why aren't reviews linked to the SKUs?
I refuse to believe that Amazon, Google/Youtube, Facebook,... have actually "solved scale" unless they can deal with problems like this reliably and automatically.
> When I sorted the reviews by date ... most recent reviewers actually had bought a drone ... But the older reviews were for honey.
I'm definitely going to use this sort-by-date trick for future product research adventures.
I do miss the good old days when Amazon reviews were an amazing product research tool.
Aside: I have no idea why they bury the "search reviews" feature. It's essential for discovering, say, real-world Linux compatibility for random pieces of hardware.
This is one of those areas where "breaking up the tech giants" might actually work - Amazon is basically an e-commerce platform, a global post office, a seller in its own right, and a discovery engine.
There really is little reason they all need to be together.
Putting a discovery engine in place that won't make a profit unless the right and decent thing arrives surely suggests they will have incentives aligned with the customers?
My Christmas Amazon experience was helping my young daughter search for a doll to buy with a gift card and finding mixed into the results a large number of graphically illustrated sex toys. (She typoed "dolll" as the search term.) The convenience of an everything e-commerce site is not worth the nonsense.
And unicode. There are many bütt plugs for sale on Amazon too.
Oh, you can also buy suppressors and silencers for guns there too. Except they're usually branded as "lawn mower mufflers". Reviews are ... amusing ... "Makes my 9mm mower sound just like a pop gun".
I 100% agree with this article. And yet, I still do most of my shopping on Amazon. Unfortunately, when it comes to general merchandise, they're still the best at inventory, discovery, quality, fulfillment, and price. Which is a scathing indictment of the state of the rest of the e-commerce world.
There’s really no way around this except avoiding third party sellers, except if it’s the producer themselves selling directly on Amazon. Unless you want the eBay experience, don’t buy in the Amazon marketplace.
Used to be a brief period a few years back when you could order quality items on amazon.co.jp. All with free Prime shipping to US. Now it’s equally full of poorly designed and manufactured Chinese products.
If Amazon wasn't directly competing against their sellers, and doing exactly what you said, while lying to Congress about it [1], then maybe journalists wouldn't be writing about Amazon stealing secrets from sellers.
Clearly you have to be a megacorp to get it both ways. Amazon shouldn't be able to evade liability for products sold on their website if they compete against their "sellers" as well.
Right now it doesn't seem to have a competitor. I think the market is now primed for an ethical competitor to come along and steal its business however, a lot of people are getting irritated with Amazon and would happily chose an alternative.
Is it? I regularly look elsewhere because I can't be confident that I am getting what I want.
I guess if they expect that the products are worse than they appear then making reviews useless would be helpful. But if they have some good products and good reviews I would be more inclined to buy.
It seems that there is the a low area what bad quality reviews help more purchases but for the middle quality and good quality products I would expect low review quality to drive sales elsewhere.
Oh its extremely user hostile, but Amazon makes money either way. Counterfeit, bait and switch, commingling inventory, all of that doesn't matter because the transaction volume going out is still greater than the refunds and unhappy users. Way past the point of return for that to hurt business. I agree with you though, I only shop amazon for simple stupid things I cant find local, I don't even buy name brand there anymore.
But increasingly we seem a long way from achieving this. Amazon reviews have become such garbage, I've fallen back to pretty much relying on name brands as my placeholder for product quality.
There's still a lot to be said for established brands. Brands can afford widespread advertising because they have thriving businesses that generate lots of cash. Brands can get stocked in major retailers because you need decent products to make it through Walmart's buying process.
These are signals that are harder to fake, and they're kind of the best we've got right now.