A lot of it is such JUNK, too. Amazon has no qualms whatsoever about selling stuff that, frankly, belongs in the garbage. I've cooled off on Amazon a lot since earlier years because shopping on there is an experience fraught with angst thanks to trying to find the best trade-off between price and utility. Oftentimes the cheapest items for any given category (e.g. snorkel masks and touchscreen gloves, two recent things I purchased) are pure junk that aren't fit for their stated purpose.

Whereas if I'm in a brick-and-mortar store, I can at least evaluate the quality of something hands-on, and then have a better idea of if the cheapest is good enough. This is exacerbated by item descriptions that are frequently inaccurate, even showing the wrong photos. The third party sellers especially don't seem to be held accountable for much, and processing returns through them is often a disaster.

I fear that Amazon is creating damage to their brand by not establishing some minimum floor for product quality. Right now they rank somewhere between a dollar store and a Walmart in my mind.

There are a lot of (POS) counterfeit goods as well. It is very difficult to be certain you're purchasing the genuine article. At least this has been my experience purchasing electronics from merchants on Amazon in recent years.

I know - its like revenge of the show room.. I look for reviews on Amazon and then get it somewhere else..

I always make sure I check off the "Prime Eligible" checkbox when searching Amazon. It sucks to find an item, go to buy it, and finding out it's going to take 4 weeks and $25 to ship from the UK or something.

I go a step beyond that, and will often also check Amazon as the seller. I've had too many mis-labelled products show up... Sometimes I forget, and that's usually when there is a problem.

I'm almost inclined to go prefer local stores again, as Amazon's pricing advantages seem to have slipped, and if they raise the cost of Prime again, I'm definitely out. I've been a pretty loyal customer to Amazon, but honestly, they're slipping a bit.

They should probably spend just a little more time on their core products.

I ordered something from Amazon, with Amazon as the seller, and with the Prime filter checked. It was marked as having low remaining inventory. After I purchased, and the item failed to arrive with the rest of my order, I saw that it had been moved to a separate order, from a different seller, with an additional $10 shipping charge and an additional week of delay.

Look, Amazon, you have a real problem with sorting and filtering. What I really want is a way to order goods by the final, bottom-line price, including all taxes and shipping costs. If something costs $20 plus $10 in shipping, it should rank after a similar thing that is $25 plus $0 shipping.

The Prime filter is the only way I can even approach that problem from my end. It forces the cost of shipping to be included in the price of all items, at the expense of not seeing potentially cheaper items. But even then, Amazon can't even manage to sort correctly by price. Nor does it handle quantities in a package very well.

A lot of stuff is fine though and you will probably get it in similar time to Amazon standard shipping.

It would be hard if they let you search by say < 3 business days, < 5 business days in the same way they let you search prime only.

I was going on a trip and needed some random stuff delivered the next day and was happy to pay delivery for it. It was a nightmare tryng to elimate marketplace sellers with longer delivery times and finding out that Amazon don't actually sell a lot of things I wanted.

Same here, unless it's the only option and I really need the product, I'll only buy Prime-enabled products.

I really don't want Amazon to turn into eBay or Alibaba, but for many categories it already is if you scroll/paginate far enough.

A friend of mine who does online arbitrage takes advantage of this. She'll take the lowest non-prime eligible price, mark it up 5% then set it to be 'fulfilled by amazon'. She knows that people will prefer Prime, even if a lower total cost item is available via free shipping.

How does she get the items back to Amazon to let them fulfill them?

Maybe I wasn't clear. She finds items in other places, ships them to the amazon warehouse, then sets the price +5%.

Same. Especially with items like Apple accessories, this is really starting to hurt Amazon's reputation. Most of the reviewers for those products complain about receiving knock-off products and have no clue that they need to select the ones sold directly by Amazon to get the original one.

Heck, I do most of my buying on Amazon and am a technical person, and still find myself struggling to get it right.

What do you mean turn into ebay or Alibaba?

A few months ago I was trying to buy some bright LED bulbs, and I tried Ebay and Aliexpress. I ordered some 7 watt bulbs, but (repeatedly and by different vendors) I was shipped bulbs that were closer to 4 watts.

Given that it happened several times with several vendors, I suspect there's a systematic problem due to incentives - higher power bulbs command higher prices, and most buyers don't have the test equipment needed to detect the fraud; and even when someone does detect the fraud you just have to refund them and claim it was an accident.

Needless to say, if the conditions of the market mean that fraudsters out-compete honest sellers, all the honest sellers have to quit or resort to fraud, and the market becomes useless to consumers.

I've noticed this with makeup. Amazon sellers have twice shipped me fake makeup "dupes" (not real products by the real manufacturer) instead of what I actually ordered. Now I go to sephora and buy makeup because I'm too worried about purchasing more fakes.

As the other commenter suggested, I mean offering an endless stream of low quality products, not necessarily knockoffs, but simply bad products. Another commenter mentioned Apple accessoires, which is a good example - I think it would be in Amazon's interest to at least mildly curate these and other categories. Currently Amazon is close to useless when you don't exactly know what you want, which results in me researching elsewhere and buying on Amazon when I made a decision.

a guess: full of shoddy and/or unsafe knockoffs

Agreed. Not that I ever expect them to do it, but if they had a global filter to block anything not being fulfilled by Amazon from ever being see on their site, I would set it and never look back.

100% of the reason I use Amazon is fast and consistent shipping. That is the entire value for me.