I became a seller on Amazon two months ago, because I'm developing new (unique) products and I thought it would be simpler to have them distributed by Amazon.

But making said products is taking much longer than anticipated, so in the meantime, and as a learning process, I started selling one product in "private label" mode (ie, a product that I buy "as is" from a Chinese factory, with my brand printed on it). It's kind of selling, although the competition makes it hard/impossible to turn any profit (since all products are virtually identical, competition is on price and maybe listing quality/exhaustivity).

But what is amazing to me is that a service called "Amazon coach" regularly sends emails to encourage me to sell more PL products. Today, Amazon coach recommends selling a meat tenderizer on amazon.de: there are already over 350 different listings for meat tenderizers on amazon.de, how many more do they need???

Some time ago I used to regard the "ships from Amazon" or "Prime" logo as markers for quality, because I figured, somehow, that Amazon did some kind of vetting before accepting a product for shipping. That's completely wrong. The sign only means that the product is stored in their warehouse (and will therefore probably be delivered on time); but it has no meaning whatsoever regarding the quality of the product. There is zero curation.

Selling on Amazon is teaching me to trust Amazon less.

And of course, the ocean of similar products makes shopping much harder; meat tenderizers are not the worst case by far: if you're looking for a corkscrew in the Home & Kitchen category, you're looking at 2,500+ options on amazon.de alone... and 16,000+ on amazon.com!! Crazy.

You need to look for (or limit your search to ) "Sold by Amazon". Not so say that Amazon doesn't sell some duff products, and they have some "private label" products of their own (Amazon Basics), but all of those will have had some degree of vetting.

https://9to5mac.com/2016/10/19/amazon-fake-apple-chargers-ca...

When I was looking at selling my creations on Amazon, they had an option to commingle stock with other sellers of the same item, but I don't know if that includes Amazon's own stock.

Link to my original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12832605

Another trick for the best price is to not always go with the buy box by default. Amazon doesn't give up the buy box unless the competitor's price is significantly lower than theirs. It's always worth taking a look at what else is listed in the 'Other sellers' box, especially on products where Amazon is the vendor. It's likely their the cheapest, but that's not always the case.

For a lot of other things, the price is so close or the exact same, I'll just buy it from the store. I do a lot of woodworking, so I buy a fair amount of stuff from a number of brands that people aren't really counterfeiting (yet)- for those I'll buy using prime, unless it's at one of the woodworking/hardware stores in the area. Then I'll just go get it myself, the prices are always within a small percentage of each other.

It feels like, for me, I do my window shopping at Amazon and execute my purchase locally, just because Amazon has gone downhill for me. I would be interested to know if other people are slowly coming to the behaviors I have.

Pretty much I get random small electronics components that don't need a great level of quality and just random other things that I don't care all that much about quality or origin. They've become my Alibaba in a way.

I still shop Amazon for many categories, but my guard is always up. But for some categories like apparel, the Amazon experience is so horrible that I don't even think to look there.

This discussion does highlight the issue though, we all had to go check, and check a number of different options, and are we still REALLY sure that we're getting an Anker product? Now, if you're my mom and you're not checking the right boxes and looking for the 8pt font of who it's being fulfilled by, what's your success rate with high counterfeit categories?

Bottom line, if I'm buying a brand, there should be NO DOUBT that's what I'm getting. Do you doubt the brand that you're buying when you walk in to Best Buy? I don't. When the prices are the exact same, I'm buying from Best Buy. If the price is significantly lower on Amazon, then I get super suspect about the authenticity.

Just bought a part for my Dyson vacuum cleaner and I found a number of suspect listings before I got the the one that seemed authentic- catalog shots, posting copy, lack of "Engrish". I was completely expecting to have to return it when I got it, but to my relief, it came in an "Authentic Dyson" labeled box and the fit, finish, color, and production seemed exactly the same as what came off my vacuum.

That's too much doubt for my liking.

edit: here is some discussion. FBA vendors appear to have control:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hel...

But I still don't think the amazon customer can see if an fba vendor allows commingling.

But, no, we can't tell if a vendor commingles, we can only infer it in special cases like Anker as manyxcxi noted, or pick out vendors with high ratings and otherwise cross our fingers.

It's a colossal mess, and nowadays, if I'm not buying used books (where I go with < 95% rating and Very Good quality), I find a BS detector honed for decades, literally about 4 and half, is the single most useful tool in navigating their swamps. Which for me confirms they indeed have big problems, and that's not even counting their search engine, which as others have noted is bad; for me, by far the worst I regularly use, and like others I often use Google's instead.

All this implies to me that if AWS wasn't such a money machine, Amazon's stock holders ought to be very nervous. The company really need to get serious about these problems.

At the root, the problem is that Amazon's stock is not discoverable. Their search engine is terrible, I've had situations where I knew the exact listing I wanted and wanted to see if anyone else was listing it cheaper, I searched a few keywords and had the listing I knew about plus a sea of other listings, then I added more words from the listing's title and suddenly the listing no longer appeared in the search results. What in the actual fuck is going on there?

To be honest nowadays I just google search "[item] amazon" because the Amazon search is such utter trash. If it doesn't pop up in the best sellers list and you can't manage to filter down by "prime" and "ratings" it might as well not be there according to Amazon's search, it's just lost in a sea of junk listings. The terrible search is one of the major reasons why nobody buys low-rating items, and that's why people bought ratings in the first place, so really it all comes back to the terrible search.

For starters the results need to be weighted by number of items sold though that listing. The brand new listing from a brand new seller yesterday gets the same weight as the item that's been a #1 bestseller for years. But other stuff, like items going away when you try to narrow down to them... I don't even know what's going on there.

It's pretty bad that some third party startups are offering products to determine if Amazon reviews are likely fake and Amazon with all of their resources doesn't seem to be doing it themselves.

This feels like MySpace all over again. It's clearly possible to build a superior product, in contrast to something like Google who have constantly reinvented themselves to stay on the top of the curve... it doesn't look good..

Perhaps it's a bad thing they started with books, where counterfeits certainly exist, but aren't quite at the same level of problem, shouldn't be any problem when they were sourcing from that big wholesaler of boos, and ... how long did it take them to enter the used book market with third parties? And, again, that was a well developed market before they entered....

Went to look at the seller's reviews .. and they were all 1/5 negative saying the product was never delivered. The A-Z guarantee got me my money back but I wasn't impressed the seller was allowed to continue doing this for so long.

After I complained, the seller appeared to have all their items removed from Amazon.

As an aside, you can generally trust the FBA items from 3rd party sellers.

Bought some clothes from UK. Never arrived. Amazon refunded.

Amazon is great. But any vendor can be as dodgy as any eBay seller.

Consider, the story is just as powerful with "I ordered from a vendor who had a ton of negative reviews for not delivering products." Even better, that instructs to start paying attention to reviews, and not origin of vendor. :)

If the original comment had mentioned how the purchase was from a black vendor, or a gay vendor, people would be up in arms about what that unjustly implies, and how without any sort of data to back that it's just stereotyping (at best). Do it for China, where people already have a strong preconception of the types of vendors present, and all that rational separation of anecdote and data and needing to justify your statements goes right out the window.

This isn't to say you can't call out vendors from China if you suspect they are a problem in higher proportions than other vendors. The original comment could have included "I suspect this may be a problem exhibited more often from vendors from China, but don't have data to back that up" or more strong statements with some data, but did not. Instead we have a statement that only adds to the comment when combined with your own preconceptions, since it adds nothing to the circumstances of the described situation without your own preconceptions.

> rational separation of anecdote and data and needing to justify your statements

No statement was made though. An anecdote simply provided additional data, and you objected on the basis of what people might assume.

> but don't have data to back that up

You might also assume that from no data being provided, and indeed, no claim being made.

> we have a statement that only adds to the comment when combined with your own preconceptions

or allows another thread on the topic to emerge, in this case if it's relevant that China was involved, causing someone with knowledge on the topic to comment.

If you manufacture in China you find huge legal and social issues with maintaining quality. It's still possible just far from the default.

I've read, without adequate if any sourcing, that this is a pattern that's at least centuries old, specifically, building things to the required specs, then backing off on quality until the buyer complains....

If so, it's interesting it survived the harshest decades of Communism and the attempts to do away with the old ways, then again, it could well be aligned with the incentives that were force back then. Although I'd hate to be issued a weapon or ammo that was from a factory running along those quality lines. Although back when we were allowed to buy ammo from the PRC, that sort of thing was not apparent from what I remember, but I'm not sure I would have noticed since I was never in the market for those particularly types.

RS and Farnell in the UK use parcel force and UPS respectively. The success rate for me is higher on stuff shipped from China.

I've had some stuff from Leeds to London end up in Belgium for two days.

It's great for competition and price pressure, but completely fails when dealing with generic items and vendors aren't held to account for outright fraud.

https://services.amazon.com/selling/pricing.htm

Luckily we have the prices from other merchants to compare the amazon prices to, and could implement a filter for unreasonable prices (way over uvp or way below what other merchants ask for).

Amazon is full of scammers.

- What is the likelihood this description matches the product being sold?

- Are the reviews real?

- Is this item safe?

- Is the price double what it is from other retailers?

Perhaps Amazon is having a similar moment Google did when Demand Media just obliterated the quality of their search results. It really is going to take a multi-pronged approach to clean things up. Depending on where their cashflow is coming from, this could be a very punishing task.

All my recent purchases have been disappointing, from futons of 'odd' sizes or misleading descriptions, "no assembly required", or products which just aren't good quality with 4-5 star reviews.

I've got to the point where I'm going back to only buying direct from amazon (if I can even still tell, it's not as easy as it used to be). Even sticking to "known" brands is difficult since brand licenses are often re-sold cheaply to different qualities of third party manufacturers in an era of globalization and cost-cutting driving down margins.

What can be a completely "buy it for life" quality item one year can in as short a time of 5 years have "sold out" their name and the products a shell of their former quality.

I suppose that's an issue when you sell tens of thousands of art items and try to do categorize automatically. It just makes me trust them less.

This is even worse in Canada. There appear to be tons of listings which consist solely of people finding things on Amazon.com that aren't on Amazon.ca and listing them for absurd prices. Example: a 4-pack of Kraft Dinner for $20 ($5/box), or a 12-pack for $48 ($4/box, a discount!).

Likewise, lots of people seem to take advantage of absurd shipping rates from American companies. I wanted to get my wife an iShower for her birthday, and while it was about a hundred bucks in the US (from them or Amazon.com), I was looking at $170+ Canadian from Amazon.ca (and this was when our currencies were almost at par). Tried to get it shipped from the US and the shipping was FedEx only, and it was something like $50-60 to get it shipped.

Now I order from Canadian retailers whenever I can, and I just get junk from Amazon when it's on sale.

How does physically going to Target help with this?

I tried to buy some dishwasher detergent on Amazon recently because my local store is almost always out of the brand I like. It was $16/12oz on Amazon, versus $3.99/12oz at my local store. I assume that's what he's talking about.

Couple years ago. I was looking to buy a couple staples on Amazon once to spend enough for free shipping. I love Kraft Mac and cheese and it's a commodity item. Amazon was selling them for 3x the cost of the grocery store. Decided to check Walmart.com out of curiosity. They were normal grocery store price at Walmart.com, if you needed to order it online. I wonder if people actually think Kraft Mac and cheese actually costs that much.

I also noticed that the price of many toys skyrockets during December.

As an aside I've ordered Kraft Mac and cheese from jet.com at normal price since. Their prices and inventory change a lot though so you can't always get the same stuff and the same price.

http://www.npr.org/2015/06/04/412046900/retailer-arbitrage-h...

COHEN: So this is interesting. This is a Babies R Us 800 baby wipes.

GOLDSTEIN: The wipes are in one of those displays out in the middle of the aisle. They're selling for $16.99. As the father of two young kids, I feel like I have some insight here.

Baby stuff - I know how much baby stuff costs.

COHEN: OK. Is this a good price?

GOLDSTEIN: Not great. It's not great.

COHEN: Seventeen bucks for 800 wipes? It's a value box.

GOLDSTEIN: I mean, buy it if you want. I don't think there's a lot of margin in it for you.

COHEN: I think you're wrong.

GOLDSTEIN: Sam has brought along one of his employees, a guy named Jay Freiday, to help him with the shopping. Freiday pulls out his phone and looks up how much this $17 box of wipes is selling for on Amazon.

JAY FREIDAY: This is currently selling for $46.

GOLDSTEIN: Wait a minute. People are paying - what did you say?

FREIDAY: $46.

GOLDSTEIN: For 800 baby wipes?

FREIDAY: Yeah. It's a lot?

GOLDSTEIN: It's a lot.

It's probably just because the locals don't want to be seen as "rednecks" for shopping at Walmart. (Of course there are plenty who don't mind, and I guess, better deal for them)

There are plenty of good, large sellers, and they didn't get that way by skimping on quality. You don't need to take a chance on smaller sellers if you don't want to.

(Also, many sellers use FBA which avoids most of the issues, the only concern there is really product quality, which again is something you don't need to worry too much about if it's an experienced seller. Commingling can cause problems, but it's very rare, if Amazon saw a significant number of problems from it they'd have stopped the program.)

Personally, I avoid buying any electronics or valuables from Amazon due to counterfeit risk. They have the ability to curtail this activity but they choose not to. Also, the fake reviews damage the integrity of the marketplace. It really shows how much they care for their customers.

I still use Amazon, I just don't pay them $99 a year for the privilege or treat them as the first store I go to

Note of warning: You'll discover a lot of random items are now "Prime exclusive" for no reason other than spite. No special discount, they just will refuse to sell you odd and end items unless you buy Prime.

What amazes me, is given Jeff Bezos' general attitude towards providing excellent customer service, is that Amazon has said nothing about this practice, and it's decidedly anti-consumer. If it was just a Prime discount or something, it wouldn't bother people nearly as much, but Amazon will outright refuse to sell without Prime for a lot of these items, unless it's also being sold by a third party seller you can buy from instead.

You'll pay local sales tax since they have stores everywhere. Wish I'd started using them when I recently bought a case of Sapporo Ichiban Miso Ramen, Amazon, which I think had a slightly lower price, was out, so I went with a 3rd party which a high rating, which had the brilliant idea of unpacking the case and stuffing it into a Medium size Priority Mail box, which can comfortably only hold half as many. As long as none of the soup base packets were punctured by this stunt I'll come out OK, but....

... of course, you still have to carry the stuff in and find space in the fridge yourself ...

Recent Real Life developments have resulted in logistics limiting me to cold stuff I can put in an insulated backpack with a ice pack, but, yeah, I could use this to get cold and frozen stuff without much hassle. Thanks!

Also had to give up on Vanicream soap when I assume the company they contract with to make their stuff massively dosed two quite separated in time batches with perfume. Which also taught me to try 1 of every new batch of stuff I buy (I tend to buy stuff like that in April and October when the weather is mild, and increase my inventory to ~12 months so I have plenty of time to find a new brand or solution if the old one goes bad or is discontinued).

Hay, save the nose of the allergy sufferers in your life, get the perfume free stuff by default! At least if it doesn't cost any more to speak of....

And, yeah, I gather the whole shtick of Amazon Pantry is that you buy enough stuff to fill up one big box, no doubt by weight as well as size, which I assume they've worked out deals to ship cheaply. Haven't tried it yet since I've found WalMart.com to be so much cheaper, while there's some Pantry exclusive items, or, say, they're available in quantity 1 that way, I just haven't been able to come close to filling up a box. WalMart doesn't care, except in giving you a strong incentive to buy at least $50.01 of stuff at a time, which isn't hard.

This. Amazon makes it very easy with it's "frictionless" 1-click buying functionality to buy loads of crap that you don't really need. I make it very hard on myself, and put barriers to buying. Sometimes I will add something to the cart (since they force you to do it to show price for some items) and then let it sit there for days. Many times, I've come back and wondered why I even added something to the cart in the 1st place.

Amazon packs, warehouses, and delivers your package acting as payment manager, and customer service while hosting your IT infrastructure.

They want to sell pickaxes and do laundry for gold miners.

The part where Amazon isn't packing and shipping your product is a weak link – killing fake reviews helps this though.

Of course, no filters to what does ship to me. One year ago that somehow wasn't even an issue. It seems that Amazon is turning into same crappy service as Ebay :(

[1] www.fakespot.com

Edit: Answered my own question. You can find a place to restrict seller to "amazon.com". It's not 100% useful for all searches though, as you filter out sellers like "Apple", or "Bose". Would be nice if you could filter seller down to "Manufacturer or Amazon.com" in some easy way.