Racing to the bottom has never been so steep. I was trying to buy an android auto wired to wireless dongle and all I see are temporary garbage re-skins of the same products from half a dozen suppliers that likely won't exist next year. I've never felt so apathetic about using Amazon. I've definitely moved away from them as much as possible alas. It's starting to stink like eBay.
I've been skeptical of Amazon ever since I learned that they bin inventory from all sellers together at the warehouse, so you could pay extra to buy from the manufacturer's official store and still be sent a cheap knockoff.
Amazon does not universally comingle. There are many exempt product categories in addition to the seller's ability to opt in/out. If you buy a product from a specific seller which arrives with a stuck-on barcode in addition to the UPC, that product probably wasn't commingled.
(The fact that this information is so important and hidden is of course inexcusable)
The ASIN is the product identifier, 10 characters, and it's what the buyer usually sees. Amazon would use something else behind the scenes to ensure things aren't comingled, probably FNSKU.
If the ASIN was different it wouldn't be comingled, but I don't think Amazon wants sellers all creating their own ASINs and thus new product pages when one already exists for the product.
Anybody who has used Amazon enough has witnessed when there's multiple separate listings for the same product and how annoying it is to compare.
When a video game (Persona 5 Royal edition) came out, I purchased a brand new copy (this is important) from Amazon. I received the case of Persona 5 Royal Edition, but with the normal Person 5 game (for people unfamiliar, the royal edition was sort of greatest hits re-release a couple years after the initial release). So something was wrong that I receive a game not in the shrink rap and with the wrong game. This really soured me on Amazon.
When the very hyped Magic the Gathering Lord of the Rings sets came out, there was an expensive pack of all of the 'commander decks'. Apparently almost every person who ordered it ended up just getting one of the four decks instead. Amazon didn't proactively refund or... do anything.
> temporary garbage re-skins of the same products from half a dozen suppliers that likely won't exist next year.
This has been my experience with Amazon too. Better to let direct sellers like Temu and Shein sell these products at much lower prices, and Amazon can stick to branded/expensive goods that might need to be returned.
The problem with that idea is that most brands don’t want to be on Amazon. It’s bad for their margins and their brand equity. They rather push their own ecom sites.
Amazon has a hard time getting brands on the platform. Amazon has a problem with cheap unbranded stuff. What’s left in the future?
And yet few brands are going to build or run the entire distribution infrastructure themselves. You can buy from NameBrand, allegedly shipped from NameBrand, etc - and it's still distributed through some separate maze of businesses. Amazon is just very visible in being such an intermediary.
I'd like to point out that this has to be conscious decision of sorts by Amazon. Amazon UK is pretty much what Amazon US used to be 10 years ago - there's a complete absence of the aliexpress/temu grade 'SHTORY' 'FNARGL' branded products, the search shows you what you searched for instead of random junk and Amazon JP is of a different order entirely, that site is a gleaming spire.
This is clearly a choice that's being made by Amazon US to turn the platform into this... whatever it is...
Reasons? Well, I guess they make sense to somebody.
Yeah, the main difference between Amazon UK and eBay UK is that Amazon's unbranded Alibaba shit is more painful to search through and costs 30-50% more...
This is utterly false for Amazon UK and disprovable by 2 minutes of searching. It’s somewhat incredible to me this claim has been made with a straight face to be honest.
USB Foot Pedal is just one random search that’ll show this.
Mens fleece hoodie, audio recorder, iphone case and electric blanket are full of random named crap.
The problem also extends past these random products and into the seller market too. Even if you search with brand names for a product you want it’ll often be sold by some random new seller preferentially selected due to price undercutting.
The whole platform is rotting from the inside out.
Amazon JP is not a "gleaming spire", but I do agree it's not nearly as bad as the horror stories of counterfeiting I keep reading about Amazon US. However, there is still lots and lots of cheap Chinese junk here, but that's pretty easy to discern by just looking at the brand name. As the other poster here said about the UK version, "I get all the 1000 variations on the same shit product with ridiculous brand names on Amazon [JP]."
The other problem with Amazon JP is that returns are not usually free, unless there's a real problem; it's not nearly as easy and free to return stuff as Amazon US.
There are categories that I'll generally try to avoid buying on Aliexpress (stuff that has a higher risk of being harmful if bad/toxic, e.g. anything in contact with hot food or extended contact with skin), but for small gadgets or tools, there doesn't seem to be a viable alternative.
I can buy the same crap resold at 3x the price (sometimes even with the same slow shipping) with almost zero additional quality control, but that's just buying from Aliexpress with extra steps (and cost).
I can try to get something from a local seller (not necessarily locally made), but I'll have 1/10th of the selection with the price often being 5-10x plus local shipping that costs more than the Aliexpress product with shipping included.
Sure, it's cheaply made, and sure, some of it breaks within a month. But most of the stuff is actually engineered correctly: It's exactly good enough. Just very very barely good enough, but good enough.
Do they? I tend to see 15 vendors of the same item - all claiming to have sold between zero (!) and NN items and having 5999 available ready to ship. With the added complication of using a crappy package delivery company.
Sort by number of orders and look out for items marked with express shipping. My packages are always delivered by the national mail service and if you order items from multiple sellers at the same time aliexpress usually bundles them together so it's only one shipment. I usually get my packages within a couple weeks.
> all I see are temporary garbage re-skins of the same products from half a dozen suppliers that likely won't exist next year
The answer is to only buy stuff on Amazon that is sold by Amazon.
If a product is only FBA (Fulfilled By Amazon) or just a plain third-party listing, then go buy elsewhere. Those listings are where the garbage is.
Sadly Amazon have made it more difficult to search for these. It used to be the case that you could tick a box to filter by seller and accordingly tick the Amazon box. They have now taken that filter away.
I'm not going to post on here how to do it (because they'll probably kill it off pronto), but if you spend a few minutes with Mr Google, you will find one or two work-arounds still exist which are not difficult if you are technically inclined, although admittedly could be tricky to teach a granny to use consistently.
This is just an opportunity for a company that wants to build a brand of high quality items for a higher price to enter. it remains to be seen if people care about quality tho.
There's no lack of high quality brands out there if you look for them. One place I like to find such brands across Europe is the avocado store. There are all small manufacturers, mostly made in Europe with good quality, fair labor, etc.
Agreed the quality has gotten bad. Regarding AA Wireless, there is a github repo where someone has implimemted a bridge with a raspberry Pi Zero - we've been using it in our Chevy truck for the past month with zero issues.
Depending on where you live that might no longer be an option, AAWireless is fighting a copyright infringements claim and have halted sales to North America. I hear some people complain the updates bricking their device - has that affected you in anyway?
They've recently relisted the dongle back up on Amazon in the past day, and they were selling it through their website as well. But yeah, trademark dispute. I personally bought the MA1 when it was first available and it's been great.
Sorry for the slight offtopic but is there an equivalent trusted brand for CarPlay? Amazon CP offering is exactly as described by OP, endless reskins of the same crappy products, stuffed to the gills with hundreds of fake reviews (many via review hijacking) in the few weeks that they live on the platform. Then a wave of bad reviews from actual customers who got a lemon.
Review sites are just as bad, they get a product for free, give it a stellar review after 1 day of playing with it, and move on to create the next SEO spam article.
If AA Wireless is really good, maybe someone has a recommendation for the "other garden".
Sorry, I don't have any experience with Carplay, but I'd probably search the r/CarPlay subreddit and look at people's experiences and reviews. I found this thread[0] that suggests you may have luck with the Carlinkit and CPlay2Air. Good luck
Both Shein and TEMU are taking advantage of two changes to customs rules that have been made in the last 5 years.
First, the de minimis threshold was increased to $800. Second, CBP has introduced a new entry (Type 86) that makes it a lot easier to clear de minimis shipments.
This enables foreign retailers to easily import single shipments to US customers. Because they no longer need to deal with more complicated customs filings, they can instead use air freight and get shipments to customers quickly. They trade customs expense for premium air freight.
They’re air freighting the goods but doing so in bulk, so it ends up being far less than what the customs fees would be. If they were shipping them in bulk to a US warehouse without a designated customer, they’d have to pay customs. But rather, they arrive at a repackager which manages to skirt these regulations - at the expense of the taxpayer and competition who follow the rules.
In other words, they’ve found a loophole to avoid customs on goods with otherwise high tariffs, pocketing some of the money for themselves and using the rest of the savings (and arguably difficult to return lower quality merchandise, we are talking about fast fashion) to undercut competition. I’d think that SV would worship this type of “disruption”.
Right. They even print the UPS/FedEx/USPS label in the distribution center in China. They throw the individual boxes in a Gaylord and inject the Gaylords into the domestic distribution network at the destination air terminal.
Please consider easing up on the itchy trigger finger. Even without knowing the meaning, there is no way any word used in the context above could ever be construed as offensive.
As well as a ventilation equipment manufacturer in Oregon [0]. You can imagine how it was driving by every day on the middle school bus. (About as well as Bonar Plastics, which the bus also passed every day).
Would taxpayer dollars be better spent collecting $5 worth of duties from a shipment? Or would the customer (who are taxpayers) be better served by having to pay CBP fees for their $20 shipment from china? Would both the customer and the manufacturer (ie. "competition") be better served if the goods had to go through an intermediary in the US to reach the customer?
> Or would the customer (who are taxpayers) be better served by having to pay CBP fees for their $20 shipment from china?
Sorry, this libertarian logic falls short because there are taxpayers who are not customers of bottom-of-the-barrel Chinese doodads, and thus are being hurt by this laxness. Why should I subsidize someone else’s “seen on social media” gadget addiction?
Why should the rest of us subsidize your tax addiction? This reasoning goes both ways. And I'm not even arguing whether some tax is useful or not - in most cases buying from a foreign vendor means a far far higher overall tax rate - simply arguing whether to favor a path with more expensive middlemen or not.
I think it’s also about keeping the wealth/supporting the relevant skills in your own community. Saving a dollar here and there helps an individual a little but the community gets damaged in the long run. And the individual suffers in the long run too.
It’s not about paying more, it’s about paying the same. The local brand can not avoid the duties on products less than $X, just like you are charged sales tax at the supermarket on a $5 purchase.
Thankfully computers exist now so it is really not onerous at all to charge the correct duties and massive fees if you want to make the customs people do work (this is basically now the EU approach, and AliExpress had no problem adjusting).
I’m convinced this is a big part of Amazon’s rise to prominence. While they often had competitive pricing, they also had a built-in discount by not collecting sales tax that brick and mortar stores with nexus could not avoid. And they fought hard against any changes to the status quo as it pertains to sales tax (at least until it became advantageous to do otherwise).
I’m fairly certain Amazon knew these consumers weren’t paying use tax instead. Local stores took a beating by having to play by rules that Amazon didn’t.
Heavily discounted shipping (media mail) also supported Amazon's initial rise. Funny how cheap shipping is coming full circle.
By starting with books (and then CDs/DVDs), Jeff picked a good target: inventory that doesn't depreciate too fast, subsidized shipping, not needing to collect sales taxes up-front, high costs at b&m level, high value per weight/volume, popularity of carrying large inventory (books aren't too fungible)
Much better than pets.com selling cat and dog food.
It didn’t, it just made it way easier to order from. And Amazon carried more inventory than most mail order catalogs. Subsidizing shipping helped a lot as well.
Some products are too niche to be sold locally. If no local brands exist for a product I have to buy it from someone oversees and import it myself. Even if it is sold locally it may be overly marked up compared to buying it from the original seller because there is no local competition to keep the price in check.
Okay, and what part of that means normal duties should not be paid on that specialty product?
Seriously people, we have computers now. Every SaaS in Europe needs to pay correct VAT on every subscription sold based on the customer origin, it is not at all unreasonable to have online sellers pay duties for products shipped to US.
So you would like taxpayers to provide a subsidy for your fidget spinner from China? I would much rather that dollar go to healthcare or higher education.
I doubt that CBP spending 30+ minutes of bureaucracy and agent time to inspect, calculate the true value of, invoice and bill 100$ worth of items for 10$ worth of tariffs would be a net profit.
Anecdotally (there's probably the actual figure out there somewhere), less than 1% of all imported goods are flagged for a customs inspection. Duty is calculated and paid electronically by a licensed customs broker prior to the goods entering the country.
Type 86 filings are still necessary for di minimis shipments, so there isn't a material bureaucracy savings.
Yes, I agree. However, anecdotally again, I've never bought anything past the de minimis threshold from China that was actually labelled properly at the correct price - the likelihood of it getting flagged is low enough that it's worth just eating the loss in that case.
Given that, since it doesn't even make economic to inspect the packages even if you already knew they were mislabelled or misvalued, it's not clear to me that the taxpayer loses by increasing the de minimis threshold at least to a number where it would make sense. I'm thinking of the bureaucracy that the government incurs when they do decide to inspect and fine/confiscate, not the bureaucracy in the happy path, which as you've seen is very streamlined.
Which is fine reasoning but rarely enters into the law or regulation. A lot of inspection power has to do with other "concerns" such as mislabelling (per se), trademark protection, counterfeits, forbidden items (for example radio bands), etc etc. "Economic sense" is long lost by then.
A small shop I was part of sold imported items. We bought our inventory from wholesalers that paid the import fees, added their markup, where we would then add our retail markup for sale to customers. The final death knell in our little company was from a company based in Hong Kong with retail prices cheaper than the wholesale prices we had access to. By selling direct to customers, they were bypassing the customs duties/tariffs. They would place a note in the package stating that duties were owed. Never heard of anyone's package getting stopped and held for the buyer to pay the fees for it to be released. Yeah, I'm only a "little" bitter.
How is this the fault of gov’t? The rules are the same for everyone. In this case, not everyone was playing by the same rules. If you don’t understand the logic behind tariffs, that’s something you can look up on your own. To me, this is no different from the guy selling electronics out of a van in the parking lot of the electronics store. It’s not legal, but it’s not a large enough problem for anyone to do anything about. Maybe the items are stolen, maybe they’re counterfeit, or maybe they are real and just acquired by skirting the system. Either way, the person with the van is deliberately not playing by the rules everyone else does. In my situation, the van was a website and the parking lot just happened to be out of jurisdiction of any agency that could do anything about it. You can now say the same things about Ali* or other type websites.
If your government doesn't enforce that the tax/duty/whatever was paid, then someone will obviously take advantage of this. I pay taxes when I buy from Aliexpress etc.
When I buy directly from outside of my tax region, the company or person that I bought from has to prove that the tax was paid when the goods enter my country or they are stopped at the border until I pay the taxes + processing fee.
Your government did not protect your interests here in ensuring that the playing field is level.
I think we should those restrictions back. The products just being mass sold by wish.com, TEMU and Shein are dangerous. Amazon and Walmart deserve just as much flack for also selling dangerous goods. Radioactive wellness bracelets to sketch powersupplies. Not only that but the carbon footprint on shit shipped is massive!!!
It's all made in China anyway so I can't imagine the carbon footprint is much more when it's shipped direct to consumers instead of going via a middlemen.
Actually it is huge because the products are typically shipped are under regulation and controls. When you make a higher quality product it doesn't always mean it will last longer, but in comparison to the other product it does.
Now we are justifying the baseline by unregulated and uncontrolled goods as a standard for quality so people use weak USB cables from an unknown or non-FCC compliant manufacturer in China and their home burns. It isn't the consumers fault because the product was sold falsely and the general consumer can't keep everything straight.
Funny that the article mentions that Shein can’t match Amazon two to four day delivery, but at this point Amazon isn’t meeting that for Amazon. Amazon has messed up more orders this year for me than they have in a decade before of using them. I’m actively switching out subscription items just because I’m tired of dealing with it.
Same here. Between this and the numerous price hikes I cancelled Prime this past year having been a subscriber for over a decade. The only reason I paid for Prime was the shipping speed and Amazon consistently failed to deliver on that so why keep paying $150/yr for it? It was $50 when I first signed up and felt like it had only gotten worse over the years despite tripling in price. I don't miss it at all.
I now try to buy direct or from mom & pop stores whenever possible and I find that the shipping speeds with UPS and USPS are more consistent and regularly faster than Amazon to boot. For the odd item that I need to buy from Amazon and need it quickly it's much cheaper to pay for one-off fast shipping instead of the yearly Prime fee.
We canceled our prime membership several months ago and have experienced zero difference in the delivery times or the benefits from Amazon. It makes me wonder what we were paying for before.
You’re paying for all the bundled crap like Prime Video, Music, Twitch, etc. You can actually be charged more for certain items as a Prime member as well, I guess they don’t need to attract you when you’re already a loyal Amazon customer.
Btw I had to cancel my Prime three times because it kept getting mysteriously reactivated with no action on my part.
Ditto in Portland, except delivered to my door. It's interesting when these threads come up reading all these complaints, I buy stuff from Amazon on average a couple times per week and never have problems with counterfeits, used goods, not shipping speeds.
Here in Tokyo, it's almost always 2 days for me, and I don't have Prime membership. Sometimes it's even next-day.
It seems like it's only the Americans complaining about shipping speeds: probably a byproduct of the transportation network there being so bad and everything being so spread out. Their other problem is likely bad labor relations and a labor shortage.
> Bay Area Amazon is still consistently hitting its one day and two day delivery targets.
Maybe San Francisco is. The Bay Area in general does not get prime delivery speed, despite Amazon's assurances to the contrary. They don't even try.
Not only that, but Amazon long ago stopped packaging the stuff they ship out to prevent damage to it. Whatever comes from Amazon will come with shipping damage. If you return it, Amazon will ship you a replacement in equally inadequate packaging with similar resultant shipping damage.
If you're hoping to receive an item that meets the absolute bare minimum standard of arriving when the vendor says it will, without obvious damage from shipping, it's necessary to avoid Amazon.
Their distribution network is heterogenous. Not all facilities ship orders to customers. Not all facilities that do ship orders to customers stock all product types and sizes.
Last I checked they were optimized for 2-day delivery. I imagine their 1-day delivery logistics are not quite as robust. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that next day is run by a completely different team.
We used to fairly often get 2 or 3 day delivery out here in the sticks (rural central Kansas). Nowadays I get stuff faster if I order it from eBay. Weird thing is, regularly Amazon doesn't ship my order for several days and then when it actually ships it only takes 2 days to get here.
My guess is that before the order shows as “shipped” in their website, the product is moving through Amazon’s internal logistics network. When to show as “shipped” is a somewhat arbitrary decision when the company runs a sprawling network that delivers to your door.
That depends entirely on location. I've maybe had one item delivered late in the last two years, and most of what I bought recently has been free overnight shipping.
Yeah, it must depend on location. But I'm in Seattle—Amazon central—and overnight has recently come to mean 3 days or more. Not always, but regularly. This is the year when I started keeping a spreadsheet of the stated delivery dates vs. the actual delivery dates, because they sort of silently update them and I want some sort of evidence that I'm being gaslit. It's not even that I urgently need the packages, it's more that I need a predictable schedule so that I can plan on being home to pick them up.
Also in Seattle - I've never had that experience. Literally ordered something last night with next-day shipping, and it arrived in the early morning. Once in a blue moon something outright disappears, but so it goes with 20+ orders per month...
It’s not just location or lateness - though I’ve had lateness on almost every order. I don’t even care if it takes longer it’s if the delivery is estimated for three days, don’t tell me there is a five day delay the day of the delivery.
Last month I had every single subscription switch addresses and had to fix multiple items I didn’t catch - in part because they’ve been coming to my address for a while. And then fixing required that the wrong items arrive before they would be willing to take any action on the problem.
This month I had another regular order and one subscription order get spontaneously canceled and refunded.
It really varies, out here a few dozen miles outside NYC, best I get is 2 day delivery. I used to have next day pickup a few years ago when Amazon had their own lockerbox nearby.
However, last time I ordered something to a relative in NYC, I was surprised to find that they even have same day delivery for many items.
I'm in London, and next day delivery is the norm, with same day delivery increasingly common. Two day delivery is in the "why am I even bothering with Amazon" territory.
Our Amazon delivery people regularly drop off 4-5 orders with neighbours before they get back in their car...
For me 2 day delivery is still pretty good since the alternative tends to be either waiting a week or two, or putting in a lot more time and effort to go get the thing in person (most likely by taking the entire day to go to and come back from NYC).
Shein is bad for the planet and bad for humanity. They profit through exploitation; mostly of their workers (breaking even Chinese labour law), ripping off designs, dodgy marketing practices, skirting local tax laws and employing dark UI patterns. Their clothes are so low in price and quality that they are often worn once and thrown away. At $40B GMV they are bigger than most of their competitors combined; fast fashion on steroids, flying under the radar. Their mere existence is accelerating the destruction of the planet and feels like a distopian hell hole that won't be stopped.
It works something like this;
1. Somebody uploads a design they found (probably stole) and creates a piece of clothing
2. Somebody else with just a shred of desire clicks on a couple of buttons and pays $3.78
3. A Chinese sweat shop worker immediately picks up the order and creates the piece of clothing and gets paid $0.03 for the trouble (whilst working 18 hour days in leui of any breaks, weekends or holiday)
4. The clothes get air shipped across the world and delivered to the customer, skipping customs and taxes
5. The customer, who basically forgot they bought the clothes (it was after all purchased in a tiktok haze and didn't affect them much financially) trys on the item, takes a photo, and throws it in the closet
6. A year later it gets donated to charity, who assesses the quality and redirects it to landfill
(most of my information here has come from a documentary, "Inside the Shein Machine)
> Shein says it’s able to make affordable apparel by monitoring user behavior to predict customer demand and producing items in small quantities. The Chinese e-commerce company known for its $5 T-shirts and $20 cocktail dresses controls 40% of the fast-fashion market share in the U.S., with an estimated $8 billion in sales in the country last year. Shein’s inventory turnover rate is twice as fast as other competitor retailers such as H&M and Zara.
(the video also mentions "De minimis tax loophole" which I think another commentator here on HN mentioned)
$5 is not actually that cheap for a T-shirt. A branded Jack and Jones one costs 10€ here. Cheap crappy ones less than 5 and that's in the store. Though I never buy those because they're thin, always have a different fit and sometimes they give off colour in the wash. The J&Js don't even shrink at 90 degrees Celsius.
How can T-shirts be "current"? :) The design has not changed for 50 years or so.
Perhaps the colour but they are available in a super wide range anwyay (luckily, because Jack & Jones did only white, black and navy for a couple years).
You must not have any women in your life :) Every woman I know has been ordering tons of stuff from here for the last couple of years. Now I see many of them moving to Temu, and I would expect TikTok to overtake all of them within 12-24 months.
> Items stored in domestic Amazon warehouses will always be more costly than Shein’s direct shipments to consumers from China, which also skip inspection and taxation by U.S. Customs
Everyone likes cheap things, but these policies are quite insane.
The U.S. is effectively subsidizing Chinese companies and penalizing its own companies and citizens.
This is the move that has turned the world against globalism. We have increased economic inequality in trade for cheaper items. But those items are made elsewhere, and slowly you erode those who would make and then buy items. Now with less and less money they can only buy the items from cheap places. A Faustian bargain.
Big fan of Temu for low-cost unbranded items that I previously bought at Amazon. Exact same products, but without a dropshipper and Amazon adding extra margin for little extra value (better return policy).
The race to the bottom has always been the end state for Amazon. The Amazon as we knew it will be displaced by Shein and Temu. Without action they will be displaced.
Soon they will have to add value like target or Walmart. I guess in some sense that’s why they bought Whole Foods.
This is the smoking gun that Amazon has been operating as a monopoly. As soon as a competitor comes along from another part of the world they’re able to lower their fees by hundreds of percent.
I'm wondering if this is de facto evidence of distorted market and so fuels regulatory intervention into Amazon's practices: Shein is huge. Amazon are only doing this because they have to.
