While I agree this is a problem - one which I have been the victim of as well - Amazon accepts the return with no questions and/or charges. This, of course, is not a great consolidation, especially for a novice who doesn't understand or encounters it too late. But I strongly disagree with "Amazon runs little to no risk selling the fraudulent products, but still makes money off of them." In the next paragraph the author outlines how they've lost trust in Amazon and will not be buying electronics. Erosion of trust is absolutely a massive risk, and one that eBay is also arguably pretty publicly recovering from. I suspect Amazon would prefer not to have fake drives and the costs associated with returns and erosion of trust for the infinitesimal rounding error that makes up the extra revenue they get from fake $20 thumb drives.
I'm far from an Amazon fanboy, but I think the problem is more complex than Amazon turning a blind eye because they're making $10k extra profit a year from phony thumb drives. As an outsider, it seems like a difficult tradeoff of not creating incredible hurdles to list products, versus counterfeits getting through.
In my case, the phony thumb drive I bought was delisted before I got home from the walk to the mailbox, literally.
It's hard to say they don't like it when they're not doing _anything_ visible to combat it.
Filter by country of seller? No. Filter by history/longevity of brand? No. Sort by recency of good reviews, or reviews since the last product change? No. Brand reputation, or per-brand reviews? No. Actual brand/seller contact information in the country you reside? No. Do they even require brands have company registration in the country, or are these total phantom stores?
So "it's difficult" for them but at the same time they've done nothing...
Amazon does SKU aggregation in their warehouses for all the sellers that use Amazon fulfillment. Every delivery of that SKU, by whomever, gets thrown into the same pile from witch they pick whenever someone orders said SKU through whoever is selling that stuff on Amazon.
This means that the product you receive from seller X was probably not delivered to the warehouse by seller X, but would be part of a batch delivered by any other seller that uses Amazon fulfillment for that SKU.
This makes it impossible for them to punish the seller whenever a fake or defective product turns up for you if they had no detected it before it got into the pool.
It wasn't always that way; it was a conscious change they made to save money, which they decided was more important than being able to do better quality control when counterfeit products are discovered from a certain seller.
I just think it's important to point out it's how they chose to do it, presumably knowing the potential downsides, rather than some impossibility of warehouse operations.
And precisely why they are losing my business. It’s hilarious isn’t it. Unless it’s deeply discounted, I prefer reputable sites like Costco, Apple direct and B&H for my expensive purchases.
Sure they have a good return policy but who wants to deal with it or assume they’ll always honor it.
> I just think it's important to point out it's how they chose to do it
IMO the current way of pooling things together is one way of spreading the loss (due to returns or A-to-z claims) across the entire pool. Other members of the pool bear the cost of such maleficence. Amazon's motto probably: Screw all sellers f**k if I care.
How does Amazon do this SKU aggregation? It must use some kind of product identifier (barcode / QR code / RFID tag etc.)? Why not include vendor information with it? Please stop using this tired excuse. It is not a difficult problem to solve if you have the intent.
I don't think it's a tired excuse, I think it's a withering indictment of Amazon's complicity in selling counterfeit merchandise.
It's not a difficult problem to solve at all, Amazon simply chooses not to solve it because the upside is profit and the downside is mostly reputational which is hard to convert to a number on a spreadsheet, so for business purposes it might as well not exist.
This comment seems too critical. As a practical matter, Amazon has made it extremely easy to avoid these scams.
Restrict your search to USB drives that not only "Ship from" Amazon but that are "sold by" Amazon. In doing so, you will be weeding out all of the fraudulent devices that the article describes.
> Restrict your search to USB drives that not only "Ship from" Amazon but that are "sold by" Amazon. In doing so, you will be weeding out all of the fraudulent devices that the article describes.
> Comingling means your strategy is not guaranteed to ensure you actually get what was described.
Commingling may be a problem in other contexts. But the article is about super-cheap "1TB" USB drives that don't really have 1TB capacity. If you restrict your search to "sold by Amazon" USB drives, you aren't at risk for buying these drives---because Amazon simply doesn't sell super-cheap 1TB USB drives. That's why commingling isn't a problem in this particular context.
The reason these drives bother with firmware that makes them look larger to the operating system is so that people buy them and don't notice it was a scam until after the return ratio.
Also I don't know what the internal politics are like at Amazon but it is inexplicable that these listings are present and top of the results for probably a year by my reckoning - fake drives are easily spotted by anyone who knows what current drive sizes and form factors are and in theory it there should be some friction to making a selling account so that you can't just keep re-listing the same fake products under infinite new names. Though that seems to be exactly what's happening.
Also bonus points, if it's a third party seller in my recent experience Amazon literally does not let me report a product as fake, only request refunds and replacements from said seller. When I finally used a LinkedIn contact to reach out to Amazon they told me to create a marketplace seller account to report copyright infringement - but that's only if I own the copyright lol.
I would bet there's a series of seller-facing teams focused on making sure there's as little friction as possible to on-boarding and selling on Amazon.
> Amazon accepts the return with no questions and/or charges
But remember that Amazon keeps what's basically a social credit score on you that drops every time you return something, and then they permanently ban you (including from non-retail things like AWS and Prime Video) if it ever gets too low.
Amazon tracks your returns, but if you're within their model, which is not particularly tight, you don't have anything to worry about.
It's mostly targeted toward people who are egregious, and more importantly, lose Amazon money.
If you return a few too many DSLRs, Apple laptops or other high end gear you'll quickly find yourself on the rocks, or decide you're going to start a drop-shipping business from your Prime account or maybe you regularly put bricks in your returns instead of the actual products.
By comparison there is my friend. She shops a lot on Amazon but not a huge amount, maybe 15 items or so a month on average. She returns a lot of items, at least 20%, sometimes 50% or 100%. Far from banning her she routinely gets courtesy credits and outside policy refunds to keep her happy.
This is after she had actually been banned by Amazon, but not by retail. Instead, she spent 2+ years returning every since book she purchased for her Kindle, well over 100, when she realized she could buy a book and immediately return it, but turn off the Kindle internet connection while she finished reading it, before it was removed. They banned her from ever doing another Kindle return but she otherwise uses her Kindle normally.
I mean, she could just download pirated books at this point. It doesn't matter if she got it through the store or not if she's going to exploit the system to read it without paying. The author won't see any money either way, so she can drop the pretense.
> Instead, she spent 2+ years returning every since book she purchased for her Kindle, well over 100, when she realized she could buy a book and immediately return it, but turn off the Kindle internet connection while she finished reading it, before it was removed. They banned her from ever doing another Kindle return but she otherwise uses her Kindle normally.
Out of curiosity what goes through someones mind to think this is remotely acceptable?
Obviously by sharing this with you she sees nothing wrong/feels no remorse for what she does?
Blatant theft like this costs everyone money, why not just go to the library or something?
Lots of things are fraud. Most of them are not theft.
The greatest ThinkSpeak the media industry pulled was to redefine copyright, contract, and license violations as "theft" and "piracy."
Saying something is not theft/harassment/abuse/murder/etc. isn't the same as saying it's okay. Precise language matters.
It's not possible for someone to steal my chair or my wallet without harming me. Actual theft usually is not a victimless crime, by definition. In contrast, most of the people I've seen engage in copyright violation are too poor to buy what they're copying. Virtually everyone I know starts paying when they get real jobs. How do I feel about a broke high school student breaking my license? It's complicated, but much less bad than about someone stealing my phone.
She could have just gotten those Kindle books from the library.
I recently dug into my property taxes and found I’m paying over $200/year (!) for the library. A lot more than the cost of Amazon Prime. Since I found this out, I’ve been using the library a lot more ..
As for our Amazon “customer score”, wish we could see it. I bet they have merchant scores too - would be interesting to see the number of returns per product displayed on each product page/merchant page.
I pay over $400 a year in property taxes to support our library system, but I'd be happy to pay twice that, partly because I get a huge amount of use out of the system (including ebooks, though honestly I prefer paper unless there a ton more holds), but also because it's one of the most tangible contributions to the quality of life in my city I fell I can make. Obviously roads without potholes and firefighters are great too...
Don't forget the online portion of your local library system, mine uses the mobile app Libby but other methods are available for ebooks/videos/audiobooks to loan, though the selection through each method is slightly different.
For my DIY hobby I buy a ton of stuff off Amazon - usually small parts under $15 dollars. I just checked and this year I've made 602 total purchases and, after checking the return e-mails they send, I've made 287 returns this year. I just click "bought by mistake each time".
If there is a social credit score based on number of returned items I still haven't hit it.
I mean, if you returned 287/602=48% of the items you ordered, either there is something wrong in what you order or - more likely - your supplier (Amazon) is not reliable.
On the other side, if 48% of items (particularly if low value ones) are returned, the costs of shipping/returning/handling must be enormous.
I do not believe this is normal consumer behavior. The previous commenter claimed Amazon had a social score system that penalized people for concerns and you should be worried about making returns on things like USB drives.
My point is that if someone like me can return almost half their items and Amazon doesn't care at all - then it's extremely unlikely the people are being banned from Amazon services for returning a USB drive.
Yep, I understood your point, and it is good to know that this presumed social score system is not particularly strict, but I asked out of curiosity on the reasons why you have such a high (IMHO) return rate.
As well another question is what is actually doing (or not doing) Amazon about the USB sticks/drives issues, the return rate of that should be something like 90% assuming that 5% of buyers fail to realize that the size is much smaller and - still say - another 5% buys them "for later use" and do not test them on arrival.
In a traditional brick and mortar store there would be someone monitoring the return rate for defects on any item for sale as - besides the loss of perceived reliability - there would be objectives costs for handling the returns.
The reason I return a lot is predicated on their being no penalty and the fact I live a couple blocks from a UPS return location which is easy.
Say its Wednesday night and I'm starting to design a project I'm doing over the weekend but I'm not done yet - and realize I will need 8mm shafts but not sure the length of my design. I just buy 3 or 4 versions of the product with the approximate length I may need and then end up just using the one my final design calls for and returning the others.
You can return items (after going through the online return process to get a label) at any Kohls. When you do, Kohls will give you a $5 coupon for their store.
> I mean, if you returned 287/602=48% of the items you ordered, either there is something wrong in what you order or - more likely - your supplier (Amazon) is not reliable.
In a case like this, there is a problem with the customer, that's it.
I have 300ish orders per year, and not even 5% returns.
They have never said what I am doing is wrong or bad. I would think best case scenario from them I don't return that many items, but realistically if I wasn't allowed to return that many items I simply wouldn't buy from them as much. Lowe's, which I buy from a lot too, has a similar no questions asked return policy.
In what way is there a problem? He hasn't been penalized, so it seems like he's profitable enough to let it go. Why are you trying to police his behavior for Amazon?
I almost never return, but there are domains with business models build upon massive numbers of returns.
This includes some parts of fashion. You buy online. If it doesn't fit, you return and buy another. There are hobbies which are similar. You buy extra parts, and return what you don't use.
The price factors in the 50+% return rate. If they didn't allow returns, no one would buy.
I don't know if that's what OP is doing, but I'm not ready to judge unless I know it's not.
Well for that matter, I have known people who buy fashion items online (that fit perfectly) use them on a dinner out and then return them because they don't fit or are not the expected colour, etc.
Still, since as you say these online sellers must calculate the prices of these goods to cover these return expenses, the other "normal" clients pay more and BTW there are thousands, millions packets going and returning (it is time, money, traffic, etc.).
It's a little different. For some of the fashion domains I'm thinking of don't have "normal" consumers, and most goods cost about the same as half of my entire wardrobe. For others, shopping is more like entertainment, and it's about the experience.
The credit doesn't just go by the number of returns - it also considers the total value of the returns and the value of purchase to value of returns ratio.
The commenter above was suggesting that returning a USB drive could hurt your social credit and I am saying that is overblown.
In my personal experience a large volume of returns won't even get you banned. A USB drive is also low value so assuming you are correct then again the fear of returning a USB drive should be zero.
I have always wondered about this. I buy and return a lot from Amazon. Do you have any further information? I've always looked to see but have never found anything myself.
Anecdotally, twice after periods of large purchases and high dollar amount of returns (because I was buying a lot of equipment and sometimes had to buy several of the same due to them coming faulty), I noticed same-day and next day shipping would disappear for a few months. I was never able to conclusively determine what the reason was though.
Also, it's extra work involved in returning something that shouldn't have been delivered in the first place. Just a waste of time, resources, and what not.
It has become quite awful. I was looking for gloves the other week and I ended up buying them at Decathlon because the selection at Amazon was so terrible and untrustworthy.
- If I buy medicine, and it's fake, that's a serious problem.
- If I buy a bottle of vanilla, and it's tainted, that's a serious problem.
- If I buy a piece of electronics, and it's a piece which was returned for working intermittently, that's a problem too.
- If I buy clothing from brands I trust, and I get a knock-off which falls apart in 6 months, that's a problem.
Unless Amazon can get supply chain issues under control, it's too risky to buy most of the stuff I used to buy there. I find eBay and Aliexpress to be more reliable, probably due to reviews sticking to sellers.
I think it's a matter of time before someone starts selling ransomware on Amazon. You plug in a device, and your computer is compromised. The device is a buck cheaper.
Because of all these reasons I have stopped purchasing almost anything at all on amazon. Also, it's been like this for YEARS, they clearly don't have any interest at all in fixing it. They make more money the way it is. Nowadays, I try mostly just to buy direct from the company selling the product. Usually the cost is the same. It's slower, yes, and returns are more difficult, yes, but at least I know I'm getting the actual product and not a cheap ripoff that'll either fall apart or poison me.
And the great thing about an Amazon ransomware attack is that if your implant waits long enough to trigger, you can probably get the customer to return the device to Amazon where they'll dutifully stock it back in their warehouse ready for another victim. So efficient.
This is true for obvious scams (e.g. a blender that breaks in a week). However, for subtle scams people often don't realize the scam. For instance, many people won't hit the actual size limit of the USB and won't realize it's not 1TB. In these cases, Amazon does not take a reputation hit for these individuals due to them being unaware of the scam. Only the technically inclined or those who research before buying will realize the scam and think less of Amazon.
No one is arguing the scam isn't insidious and inherently difficult to detect for possibly even most customers. The argument is that Amazon is complicit because they're banking off those sweet counterfeit thumb drive profits, and that there's little risk to Amazon.
I'm suggesting there is a significant risk, and anyone reasonable at Amazon would account for it. There's enough users (tech savvy, or heavy researchers as you point out, and ultimately some portion of casual customers) who will have a negative experience and potentially be skeptical of all purchases - major or minor. Amazon will certainly incur reputational and real return/handling costs.
It seems fairly implausible to me that Amazon would make the decision to say "Yeah, while tech savvy and discerning customers, and some portion of casual users will discover the scam, we just make so much money from fake thumb drives that it's worth it to destroy our reputation with that subset since a significant portion may not notice or ultimately associate Amazon with selling low quality products." All while we see the listings for these items get removed nearly as quickly as the pop up. Doesn't add up.
A fake (say) Gucci handbag is made with less premium materials, but only savvy consumers would notice once it arrived. You would not necessarily know from the product details on Amazon, but may have a clue based on price.
Whereas 1tb thumb drives have been sold for years now on Amazon and Wish and what-have-you but only recently did real 1TB thumb drives come into existence. Real Gucci bags have been around for decades.
Any 1tb drive which costs less than hundreds of dollars is fake. Full stop.
Yep. I was aware there were drives sub-$200. To be perfectly technical, 1.3 hundred dollars is still "hundreds" of dollars in English. And the fake drives aren't generally more than 40 dollars.
A typical user might not recognize the nature of the scam. But they very easily could realize that the drive they bought from Amazon is defective. 8GB is not that much space (particularly when the OS thinks it has 1TB to play with). When the firmware runs out of real space to play with, it needs to start dropping data, and that is very visible.
The issue is that Amazon is not incurring the costs that other retailers do to try to prevent these issues, so they can keep prices low and seemingly sustain their fast shipping model while their competitors who are trying to do something about it lose out on business. Eventually those competitors are forced out of business, or have to reduce themselves to the same lack of controls and everybody loses.
Viewed on that way, there’s actually consumer harm, and maybe there’s an opening for an anti-trust case (which in the US requires proof of consumer harm).
The real Amazon and other nature is who pays the real bill of this in the costs to nature in terms of transportation impact and pure waste of this crap being created and thrown away.
So yes, you might get your $20 back, but who will restore the cost to nature?
Nope. Most of the times, they're going to tell you to return it at your own costs to <random city in China>, so pay 50€ for your product that's worth 50€. The sellers lie on where they're located, pretend they're in Germany, you receive the wrong product, and you're shit out of luck. They close their account, reopen one and keep dropshipping.
All the while Amazon happily deletes bad reviews and pockets money.
They need to stop commingling FBA goods. Full stop. It’s a smart, efficient idea in a world of good-faith actors. Not in a world of scammers and knock offs
> they've lost trust in Amazon and will not be buying electronics. Erosion of trust is absolutely a massive risk
They should do something about it if they care. They’re turning into a flea market and it seems their business plan (which doesn’t matter because AWS makes all the money) is to run out the clock and hope they put everyone out of business first.
They should stop allowing listing changes that completely change the product. They should allow specific vendors (probably at some cost) evade the SKU binning that co-mingles counterfeits with genuine products.
Fuck, they should issue a statement acknowledging the problem and tell us they’re trying to fix it before we abandon them.
That said, I had to buy an SD card recently and with all these scam products I went with the Amazon basics version since they’re the only seller of AB. Funny how that works…
> . I suspect Amazon would prefer not to have fake drives and the costs associated with returns
I am not so sure about that. I think it’s a calculated risk, how many people will actually put in the time and effort to return the product and how many will just not care enough to go through the return process and just eat the cost.
I think there's one thing that should be clarified from the article. "Sponsored" does not mean that the product is "sponsored by Amazon" as italicized in the article. It means the seller paid money to be at the top of the search query.
Perhaps it is a healthy dose of old aged jadedness, but I have a habit of trying to avoid Sponsored items.
uBlock Origin blocks sponsored search results by default because like you said they're just ads.
(Amazon will still return a duplicate result for the same product in the correct place further down the list so you're not missing out on anything by blocking sponsored search results)
It absolutely implies some amount of endorsement. It’s the same as seeing the endcap of a supermarket aisle. They decide to co-market the product and they decide to promote each other in the process. If anything, it’s advertisers on Amazon who have little choice in the arrangement because there are so few alternatives to market themselves in.
Fun fact: Amazon is the 3rd largest ad company after Google and Meta/Facebook, $32B a year in revenues that are near pure profit. I suspect the market cap of their advertising business would eclipse that of thei e-commerce side if it were reported separately.
I once followed a sponsored ad for some Samsung headphones. After having problems with that Samsung product support informed me I have no warranty because the product I had was a European model and I’d have to ship them from the US to a European support center to get them fixed.
Amazon took the return/refund almost a year after the sale. Ideal? No, but they took care of it.
I have refused to give Amazon any business of my own for several years because their directly-operated logistics business is morally disgusting to me. Realistically they run many businesses, that’s one of them. Their retail business is little more than branding. Their real business is private infrastructure.
The retail business overall is a scam. Example: I’ve been trying to find a comforter for a while, and I haven’t been happy with some of the options I found because a lot of other ecommerce sites have not great search experiences. I thought, well I can search Amazon for my preferences and buy it elsewhere. Nope, not even a single filter I applied was true for any search results I looked at. Amazon didn’t even try to serve me cotton comforters, much less any other refinements they offered.
They’re in the business of selling business. Whether that’s their logistics connecting suppliers and shipping with sales, or it’s their tech services connecting startups with time shares on a server.
I wouldn’t buy a USB drive or a blanket from IBM either. It’s the same thing.
> I have refused to give Amazon any business of my own for several years because their directly-operated logistics business is morally disgusting to me. Realistically they run many businesses
So where do you buy your electronics from? Guess how the people who are making those are treated? Or is that okay since they are in another country?
Nope, it’s not okay and I’ll readily admit I’m a hypocrite. Because, as you imply, there’s no ethical alternative. And I could go on about the ways I try to minimize my impact with electronics too, but that isn’t and wasn’t the point.
I’m not sure what your point is. That I should buy from Amazon because factory workers in other countries are treated poorly? What would that do for those workers?
That you’re clutching your pearls because Amazon has factory workers who make $20/hour while your ethical standards don’t extend to people in developing countries who are making a subsistence living manufacturing your electronics.
You could be forgiven for misunderstanding the intent of my first comment, and it could probably have been more artfully phrased to help avoid that misunderstanding. But I’m struggling to see how you’re not now intentionally misrepresenting my second comment.
I’m not “clutching my pearls”, about anything. The first sentence of my first comment was meant—and only meant—as context for why my observations in the rest of that paragraph were a recent surprise rather than expecting my search would be fruitless. The rest of the paragraph, and the rest of the comment, could well stand on its own without that first sentence, apart from likely confusing readers about why I was window shopping on Amazon with the intent to buy products elsewhere.
The point of my comment was that Amazon’s interest in its consumer retail business is mostly in service of its other business pursuits, not a primary pursuit in itself.
My second comment clarifies that my ethical standards do apply to workers in developing countries, acknowledging that my available options as an individual electronics consumer are more limited, and that my choices are hypocritical nonetheless. I also alluded to other efforts I take to minimize my impact on those workers, but unless you’re one of those workers I don’t owe you an explanation of those efforts.
It’s possible I’ve misjudged your response, but my impression is that you’ve intentionally misinterpreted my clarification to bolster an argument that applying one’s personal values inconsistently is invalid. And there are several philosophical perspectives which would agree with that point or would at least raise the question. My philosophical perspective as applies to this thread is much more utilitarian: it’s better that I exercise my values incompletely thank not at all.
The reality is that the hypocrisy rebuttal to individual consumer choice tends to be used not to prompt more consistently good behavior, nor even to engage in thoughtful discussion about what a more moral framework of behavior would be. It’s used as a bludgeon to stifle discussion of one wrong by inserting it into a hierarchy of wrongs. In some of my past political circles, this was referred to as Oppression Olympics.
In those same circles, there’s another pertinent phrase: there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism. The point of the phrase isn’t to excuse avoidable unethical behavior, but to acknowledge that some ethical behaviors are systemically unavailable to individual consumers.
The hypocrisy rebuttal demands, at least implicitly, either total asceticism or total nihilism. And it tends to encourage the latter because they’re equally ineffective and asceticism is more detrimental to any future prospects of becoming effective.
But like I said, it’s possible I’ve misunderstood your intent. If you’d like to recommend more ethical ways for me to buy electronics, I’m happy to engage further. Otherwise I’m done here.
Every place that Amazon has a distribution center, wages go up for unskilled labor as other people are forced to compete. There are plenty of reports of fast food places, retail stores and even child care services not being able to hire because they can’t afford to compete with Amazon wages.
In other words, even though many factory workers have alternatives, they are choosing the trade off to make $20/hour. They aren’t making the low wages that the factory workers where your electronics are made are. They are making more than many of the restaurants you probably go to. More than the retail stores you shop at and they made the choice using their own free will. Amazon distribution centers didn’t drive out local mom and pop stores.
It’s just seems strange of all the hills you die on standing in solidarity with factory workers who make more than the median income in the US is the one you choose.
While also affiliate, I prefer https://usb.userbenchmark.com, where you can also see ratings for performance and durability and a VALUE (price/quality)
I hate having a cheap, big usb drive that is slow as hell and breaks after 6 months.
Unfortunately, even the good rated ones are not always the same product. Recently I bought 2 Sandisk Ultra Flair USB3 (best price point / quality by far) and they both broke after 3 days of use - after looking it up it was revision 3.2 or something. Older revisions in my pocket still work very fast and reliable.
I would pay for a service that does HONEST reviews without affiliation :-)
This is what LTT Labs from Linus Tech Tips is trying to do, they're in initial set up stages but moving impressively fast, and I'm super excited for it.
You don't think someone providing a free service should receive compensation? I would gladly give them their cut for a useful service. This isn't some shady website writing bogus blogposts or best of listicles.
Absolutely not! That would be an oxymoron. Someone providing a service is entitled to seek compensation; the amount and means of compensation should be listed clearly next to the service. But it ain't free.
Why is it cancer? I don't see them spamming their affiliate links anywhere. They're providing a useful service and in return they get a commission from Amazon, it's not like I'm paying the extra from my own pocket
Disagreed. diskprices.com is a well known and invaluable resource in direct contrast to the "Best hard drives of 2022" affiliate spam that'll show up if you search for a website that does what they do.
Affiliate links are indeed cancer, but that battle was lost years ago. Even reputable reviewers use affiliate links today.
Affiliate programs are one of the few win-win monetization strategies online. Sure, it gets abused by blogspam. I don't want to minimize that abuse because it does suck. But when you look at the good affiliates, someone who truly offers valuable advice that can help you find what you need to buy, and gets a few pennies for it... is that not exactly the type of paid content that we want from the internet?
I used to buy on Amazon when I wanted branded products with insurance. Opposite to buy on AliExpress, ebay, ... For some items.
But there are 2 very big problems:.
Amazon mixing the stock of all the sellers selling the same thing. So, when you want something like a USB key or SSD, sdcards, even if the listing and the seller you are looking at looks legit, you don't know where the item will come from, it can easily be fake as it will not necessarily come from the stock of this seller.
Having to send back, be reimbursed, and reorder is not a solution. You loose a lot of time, and energy with stress. Maybe you needed that for a time sensitive usage.
Also, the second issue I noticed is that it is now very hard to find good branded products with Amazon search. It looks like that they are mostly Amazon owned brands or a few sponsored products that show up. But there is not anymore the large choice of products that you would expect. I noticed that when looking for a vacuum cleaner for example!
> Also, the second issue I noticed is that it is now very hard to find good branded products with Amazon search.
This. It seems well known brands have almost abandoned Amazon and low end consumer electronics altogether in some categories. A couple weeks ago I wanted to get a mains extension cable (power strip) with USB-C power connector for my phone. There wasn't a single brand I recognised apart from Belkin, who seemed not to sell any with USB-C (only USB3). The brand I opted for ended up being garbage (USB socket loose, general chintzy feel to something that will handle mains voltages and stay powered-on under my bed for years - no thanks).
> Amazon mixing the stock of all the sellers selling the same thing. So, when you want something like a USB key or SSD, sdcards, even if the listing and the seller you are looking at looks legit, you don't know where the item will come from, it can easily be fake as it will not necessarily come from the stock of this seller.
Do you have any source for this? This explanation is perfect to explain some friends about why they should be wary of buying electronics from Amazon
All inventory filled by Amazon (almost all prime goods are filled this way) is commingled by sku. This allows amazon to distribute the items across warehouses and give faster delivery times.
Problem comes when another seller claims to sell the same item. They send their fake items in marked as the real thing. They get mixed with all the real ones.
Now when an order is placed from legitimate seller it can be filled using fake inventory.
When I was learning photojournalism, I loved B&H service and prices so much.
I've recently started adding B&H to where I shop for electronics, alongside Amazon and a local brick&mortar (Microcenter). I no longer check Newegg much, though recently they did have the best price on a particular 1U chassis that I wanted. I'd welcome more direct-to-consumer sales from the brands themselves.
I hate buying USB or SD flash devices, because of all the counterfeits of brand names, and I'll never buy one of those spammy-semirandom-named products.
I did have a poor experience recently with what I thought was D2C with another quality brand name. I thought I was buying server RAM from Micron (not marketplace), but shipping info looked like it might've been "some random guy's kitchen table moonlighting business", and they actually shipped non-ECC initially, even though the order was for ECC compatible with a particular mobo model. I hope Sandisk/WD does D2C better.
I took a chance a couple of years ago and got a 500GB dual USB-A/C flash drive with the brand name "Thalar" from Amazon. It's not fast, but it has been utterly reliable. But you never know -- some brands just seem fishier than others.
Also their search doesn’t consider my search keywords as mere suggestions to be ignored (e.g. returning flash drives of all random sizes if you search for “usb flash drive 128gb”), and in many categories they have specific filtering dimensions, e.g. for flash drive they will have one filtering dimension that is USB-C vs USB-A vs Lightning. Amazon’s UI is complete garbage in comparison
Nowadays I only buy products from brands / companies I know (and I do visit my local electronic stores to buy them). It's really hard to find a brand on Amazon that doesn't sound like its name wasn't generated :).
Regarding these scam listings: I wouldn't buy a usb stick from a brand like "pullheart", "kiknin", "probuk", or "generic" (I'm not making these names up).
Also: the biggest capacity for a usb stick Verbatim or Intenso offer is 256GB (Verbatim) or 512GB (Intenso). These companies have websites with product information.
Amazon does what's in their own best interest. This year, it looks like scamming is it.
I wrote a 1 star review last month on a scam product (I fell for) with obviously fake reviews (the product was an earplug, the 3000 5-star reviews was totally generic or for womens beauty creams). The review was rejected because it was violating Amazons "policy". The scam product itself and the 3000 fake reviews was fine.
Amazon has not been reliable for a number of years. Even well reviewed products with thousands of reviews, products that are supposed to integrate well ("frequently bought together"), and basically anything not sold directly by Amazon is questionable. The sellers marketplace on Amazon has become unwieldy. I decided to reduce buying on Amazon as much as possible unless it's very low risk items sold by Amazon directly, and even then there might be a chance I'll send it back, because stuff like Amazon Basics has inconsistent quality.
I noticed this as well recently while I was shopping for an SSD drive. A majority of listings are obvious frauds with no reviews.
What I also found out is that there is no way to report a listing for obvious fraud, probably to avoid deliberately flagging competitors’ products, but which could easily done by taking into account an individual customer’s credibility score/reputation/history.
I also tried to report some of these obviously fake 1TB drives about 6 months ago and found it incredibly difficult. I found the fact it was so difficult to report them more frustrating that the fact there were fake listings. I tried going through the hassle of contacting Amazon customer services. There's not option to report bad listings and the Amazon agent doesn't seem to even know what to do about it. Then eventually they say they'll pass it on to the relevant department and weeks later the exact same fake listing is still there.
The quality of listings on Amazon has nose-dived. It used to be a reputable corner of the web. Today it's filled with scams and low-effort white label crap.
Pretty much any tech product top search results on Amazon is a fraud (and it can go VERY deep into the results). I have been burned so many times I finally learned: DO NOT BUY TECH from Amazon! PS: Forget the Amazon Choice as it is mostly just based on how many buy the product so it tends to be self reinforcing, even for a fraud product.
Sponsored by Amazon are literal ads, unless you’re referring to “Amazon’s Choice” which is more or less Amazon saying what the “highest rated” item is. Sounds like you clicked an ad.
Allowing someone to push products up the ranking is implicit support for those products, whether it’s an ad or not. Amazon know they’ll be bought more and are ok with that.
This is why advertising on the web, social media platforms, etc, has a bunch of stuff you can and can’t do. Scam products are harder to police there and definitely happen, but a product in a web page or next to a tweet is less risky than a product in a list of products where they user has intention to buy one.
Amazon need to tread really carefully here. I know so many people who avoid eBay because of scams, it pretty much destroyed their reputation in the late 2000s, and Amazon is headed that way.
I just had the pleasure of analyzing a "60 Tb SSD" that a friend bought without asking me.
048d:1234 Integrated Technology Express, Inc. Chipsbank CBM2199 Flash Drive
It's probably a 128 Gb usb stick chip. I didn't open it to see the chips but after copying like 150 Gb of movies to it they started to randomly not open.
It was directly off aliexpress so the proud owner said he'll keep it to copy movies to it for when he goes on holiday. I guess for him it doesn't matter which 8 of 10 movies he watches.
I sometimes buy Samsung storage from Samsung directly (they have an online store), and same for Western Digital, but when I'm not doing that I like Best Buy (for general consumer electronics).
For more specialist stuff (pro audio, etc) there's other stores.
Depends on what you are looking for. I've never had any problems with BH Photo Video for technology products. Everything else I mostly get directly from the manufacturer website.
To me, the distinguishing feature of Amazon, is that it's an online "everything store" with a yearly subscription that makes delivery of most products free. Any alternatives that try to "be Amazon" in this sense, while 1. only carrying first-party listings, and 2. not commingling stock? Or, in other words: any stores that attempt to be the Amazon of ~2010, rather than the Amazon of 2022?
> a yearly subscription that makes delivery of most products free
Which is great marketing trick, because you are of course paying for delivery through inflated unit prices. A lot of things on Amazon are a few Euros more expensive than in other stores because they just hide the delivery fee in the unit price. There is no such thing as "free delivery", you are paying for it one way or another.
The prices on Amazon might be "a few euros more", but where I live, the delivery fee for getting e.g. a 65" TV delivered from Best Buy or Costco, would be more like an extra $30-$50. (And I don't own a car, so I can't just go pick it up from the store, either.)
I was talking about cheap stuff, with pricier things the price difference is often a lot more.
What I'm trying to say is that often stores that don't offer free shipping are cheaper than Amazon and you should compare the total prices instead of just ordering from Amazon assuming that they are the cheapest. In my experience they sometimes are the cheapest, but in most cases they are not.
There are frequently items on sale though. Like Prime Day, or some items just seem to be low stock and they want to get rid of inventory. In Australia you can also get 1 month of Prime for less than the cost of normal delivery.
So you get a discount on the item you want, free shipping and Prime for a month for less than the normal cost of normal shipping, and it comes the next day. Free shipping without Prime only has a threshold of $39AUD too. It's pretty easy to game things in your favour to get a cheaper item and still get next day delivery.
A lot of stores online ship free now in order to compete with Amazon. Also if you're ordering more than $25 you get free, but slightly slower shipping. I see no reason to have Prime.
I don't think I've ever received free shipping from a web store. (I live in Canada.)
In fact, for some of the things my partner orders (e.g. books from Taiwanese book shops) not only is there a shipping cost, but there are often surprise $20-$50 COD import duties on top of that cost, doubling the final cost of the order. That, for some reason, they can't just build into the order invoice. And because of the duties, the logistics provider (usually FedEx) usually refuses to actually do the last-mile delivery of the thing until they're paid; so we have to go down to their depot to pay the duties, effectively forcing us to do the last-mile part ourselves.
Also, even if a store were to offer free shipping at some price threshold (I think maybe some stores do for $100 here), I find that because most online other than Amazon aren't an "everything store", it's pretty unlikely that I'll be ordering more than a single item from them; and so I'd never qualify for the free shipping anyway. If I find a nice t-shirt, and it's $20... ain't getting free shipping from that.
Hmm, I’m Canadian who’s currently living in the states. I can think of a bunch in Canada that offer free shipping off by memory: Amazon, Indigo/Chapters, EB Games, Footlocker, Walmart, etc.
The anecdote you mentioned would also apply in the States. Duty paid for purchases from abroad, like Taiwan. Also, much like Canada, you’d usually pay shipping for small mom-and-pop shop or boutique web stores too.
> The anecdote you mentioned would also apply in the States. Duty paid for purchases from abroad, like Taiwan.
Import duties are set by the government of the importing country; Canada’s are pretty high compared to most countries, making a lot of online shopping with international shipping less worth it here than elsewhere.
Also, a fun fact: the US negotiated a sweetheart deal with the International Postal Union, such that sending parcels to the US from most countries is subsidized by the sending country’s government. So every country other than the US pays more than the US does to order from e.g. AliExpress.
Yeah that's completely fair. For me, I looked around online for my needs and found that I actually didn't need Amazon as much as I thought. Your mileage may vary.
Every item arriving 1 day early is worth $140/yr for most people. I've paid a lot more for a lot less (looks at Digi-Key order history)
Also Amazon Fresh (free 6 hour shipping in my location) is extremely convenient. A lot of sites charge $60 per order for the same service (overnight delivery)
Sadly, there’s no Amazon Fresh in Canada. Even though, oddly, we do have Whole Foods here (where most Amazon Fresh products ship from)… but our Whole Foods don’t do delivery either. Whole Foods products don’t show up on Amazon.ca for sale; nor even does Whole Foods in Canada even have a website that you can online shop for pickup on. It’s weirdly backward given that it’s exactly the same store.
Exactly. Shipping is considerably slower than with Amazon, but customer service is no-nonsense, and there are never problems with commingled inventory. Even if you don't buy from official stores, you can take your chances with another store. If they scam you, get a refund. If the product is good, keep ordering from them.
Even the faster shipment argument is kinda invalid depending on where you life. I live in Switzerland so not only do most Amazon article not even ship to me, but those who do often take weeks as well.
Not get me started on how many small packages got lost because of the German postal system. I rarely have issues from China and shipping can be as fast as 10 days sometimes.
Like lotsofpulp said, Walmart makes it quite easy to filter out 3rd party sellers. But with Amazon this is sometimes impossible because of fulfilled by Amazon and commingling of skus.
I’ve also found it useful to limit to only what’s available in my local Walmart.
Walmart isn’t perfect but their quality control is much higher. Oddly, their customer support is much better too. The last few times with Amazon the rep was like pulling teeth. They once asked me to mail back a $10 item so they could review its quality. It’s just a hassle that Id like to avoid by working with higher quality retailers.
I don’t think it’s a consumer cost issue either as Amazon isn’t cheapest. I think it’s just where they are choosing to make their money and they’ve shifted from innovation and market capture to rent seeking.
I refused to buy an SD card for my phone off Amazon, instead paying 1.5X from Best Buy from a non-marketplace seller there. I can't risk buying easily-faked stuff from AMZN any more.
I have to assume that Best Buy isn't commingling marketplace/first-party, however.
Agreed. The title of this article could have been, "Top EVERYTHING on Amazon are a Scam." I started buying a lot from Amazon way back when they mostly sold books and CDs. Was a Prime Member for years after that became a thing. But I canceled about a year ago. It's basically AliExpress, which is fine for certain things, but most of my shopping is now done elsewhere. Especially electronics of any sort.
A related problem I’ve encountered on Amazon is wrong quantity of items; ex, order three 8 packs and instead get three singles. Their return policy doesn’t have the ability to correct for this as far as I’ve been able to find.
I've encountered this problem with superglue. I thought I'd be clever and setup a monthly subscribe and save and I ended up having to send back a single tube twice - the first time a single replacement tube was sent back to me, and the second time I received a credit and they cancelled the subscribe and save. It's basically impossible to get through their automated returns system to get the desired result - that is, receiving what you've already paid for.
Years ago, a similar situation would result in a "keep the item we sent by mistake, and we'll dispatch the quantity you paid for." This behavior seemed to rely on human support personnel.
When there is a mismatch like that you can only send it back for refund, sadly. They can’t understand the issue.
I ordered one of something and got a ten pack and it took me about an hour on the chat to get them to understand I wanted to send nine back. It was pretty expensive stuff so I’d’ve felt bad keeping the other nine but man it was getting tempting.
I also bought some toothpaste on Amazon recently and it was the wrong kind. Their return page wouldn’t let me return it for any reason - I needed to get on chat support to get a refund. You’d think “you literally sent me the wrong item” would always be a good reason but apparently not.
Not paying obviously scam prices somewhat mitigates this, although not completely. I still managed to find out the hard way my 1 year old Amazon-bought micro sd card did not have 1tb of storage, despite costing around ~$150-200 which was the market price at the time.
Now I run a full suite of tests on every storage device I get from Amazon (or anywhere else, for that matter).
Like I describe in https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/01/the-ultimate-boot-stick/, I tend no longer buying USB drives but mini USB single card readers for micro SD. Although not as fast and a bit more expensive, they are reliable, bootable and pretty cheap to "upgrade", as soon as micro SD cards (e.g. Samsung Evo Select - made for amazon and highest probability of "no fake" cards) have sale prices.
I also use the software h2testw to check, if the drive / card is a fake or not as soon as I bought one.
Not questioning the post or it's conclusions, but how does Kurtis 'know' that the drives are fake? Is it just the price point? Are there reliable lists to check? Curious as to how to spot fakes.
If you sort the reviews on these items by lowest to highest, you'll usually find somebody who actually purchased and tested the item confirming it's a scam.
> Not only was it top result, it was sponsored by Amazon. (I don't actually know what this means, but it adds some legitimacy to the item and implies that Amazon endorses it).
Maybe the author is not a native English speaker? I saw “sponsored” and immediately knew it was an ad.
This was “Amazon’s Choice”
SanDisk 1TB Extreme PRO USB 3.2 Solid State Flash Drive - SDCZ880-1T00-GAM46 https://a.co/d/2hSvRQx
A terabyte of flash for 20$ ?? The number one song on the charts today is horrible. That "best in class" car is in a class of one. Fools and thier money.
I just get a blank white page, viewing from UK. This might have something to do with the fact that the web page doesn't actually have any content in the HTML file, and even if it did, the CSS file has "display: block" so one wouldn't be able to see it.
Can anyone tell me if there is a program to verify usb drive size on Mac? F3 requires linux or windows (has instructions for mac but those require running linux in virtualbox).
Who would buy a no-name USB drive from Amazon? Or even from a third-party seller? Stick to a brand like SanDisk and buy directly from Amazon (Prime) and you should be fine.
> You're using the laptop wrong if you take it outside ;)
Same-ish with the USB drives, i.e. "You're using the usb drive wrong if you fill it to the max.". Both devices work for casual use, both look like they could handle more heavy use, both break sooner than expected.
And sure, it's not a serious comparison, but I still see a surprising amount of similarities.
You know that price is too slow for 1TB drive and you are willing to take the chance and at the end you can still return it get the refund and give a bad review. I didn’t know how much better Amazon can do as a platform in this case.
It can try to reduce the chance, but absolutely no fraudulent products? No, I don’t think so and I don’t think any platform can do that without significantly increasing the cost. I have using a dozen of e commerce websites and no one is doing remotely comparable to Amazon.
Just return the product and write a review to help others rather than whining about something unrealistic didn’t happen.
Most electronics resellers do not sell fraudulent products. Here in the EU, if you buy from Reichelt or Alternate then there is close to zero chance you'll receive a fraudulent USB drive.
Amazon makes a lot of money from selling sketchy products without QA, it's an explicit decision they have made. Other stores just don't sell that crap.
In my case, the phony thumb drive I bought was delisted before I got home from the walk to the mailbox, literally.