Amazon isn't an online retailer. It's something else. They don't have inventory, not in the sense that anyone can understand it. They do represent sellers (including themselves) of items, ostensibly categorized, but the search results are infuriating.

I was trying to buy school supplies, of which they had prominently linked categories, since it's that time of year. But when I searched for some package of paper, binders, or pencils, if I sorted by price, it included so many wrong products, then I never knew how to just find the best price for a given SKU. Combine that with downright scary results, I'm only left with scanning for reassuring logo's like Prime X and Prime Y.

It's a bazar full of hucksters.

[Edit] Also, I'm a Prime member, and buy everything I can there. Just the other day, I needed ink for by Brother printer. The brother ink was three times as much as the knock off. I really like Brother the company, and I wanted to buy their ink, but the budget that month was tight. So I went with the knock off. It's working fine.

I'm an eBay member and it doesn't require a subscription and it seems competitive with Amazon for knockoff ink...I'm also a fan of Brother, but mostly for their cheap laser printers. I'm kinda' meh on their inkjets (I've owned three Brother lasers and three Brother inkjets over the years). Then again, I am pretty much meh on inkjets in general due to the high maintenance and modern habit of refusing to print black when the cyan cartridges is empty.

Anyway, I think (perhaps naively) that eBay's economic incentives are less misaligned with mine than Amazon's. I certainly feel that its platform is designed to provide a sense of greater transactional transparency.

I feel like it only exists because of how awful online payments are, at the end of the day they're just the new paypal.

Just so you know, using the wrong ink in your printer can lead to clogging up the nozzles. I wouldn't trust knock-off printer ink to be correct. Maybe you'll be lucky and everything will work fine, or maybe you're knocking years off of the lifetime of your printer.

You find the product first, then go to the list of all sellers which will be sorted by price.

Can you go into more detail on what you mean by "they don't have inventory"?

I mean they don't have "inventory" in the dictionary definition of the word. I search for items, and they will sell or fulfill an order that I click on, but the results are a confusing list of pseudo-similar things.

It's just like searching the internet for a product, not like buying from a store.

It would be like if I went into Target, and rather than an organized collection of products, it was a flea market with real and knock-off items lumped together in big piles all around the floor. And then a bunch of helpful employees to get me checked out real fast when I made a decision.

>It's that Amazon is buying up goods at full retail and then marking them up and counting on my ignorance and impulse to turn a profit.

The fact that Amazon fooled you for so long is telling.

Amazon's goals NEVER been to be the lowest price on everything. They want to provide the best value (convenience, trust, etc.) to the customer. And they do!

I don't even comparison shop because I know Amazon will get my order here in 2 days and it won't be a hassle if I have to return it. Who cares if I'm paying an extra couple of bucks here and there?

Pretty much this, yeah. I buy all my tech stuff at Amazon because I know if breaks down within 2 years, they will refund or replace it within a simple 5 minute livechat.

Another experience: my (second-hand) Kindle Paperwhite suddenly started to displaying ads. It had never done this and I had specifically bought an ad-less version. Go to Amazon, open livechat - fixed within a few minutes. Another company would have probably told me tough luck and to buy the ad-removal.

Amazon did not fool me. There was a brief period, nearly a decade ago, when the there was a recession and Amazon was expanding beyond books when Amazon was great for long tail items both due to availability and price. I used it to purchase a twenty-two foot pressure washer wand and a heater coil for the dryer and replacement GE water filter cartridges and ink cartridges for the Designjet 750C and a sun roof seal for the Montero Sport. I used Amazon as an alternative to buying retail or from an SEO optimized website. I always comparison shopped.

These days, the only time I don't comparison shop agianst Amazon is when I know that there isn't likely to be a better deal...and the sum total of that is pretty much going to Amazon for my a digital download of TurboTax every April. I don't have Prime but it still ships immediately. Generally, if I am making a long tail purchase, I start with eBay due to its better transparency, straight forward search, and less misalignment between its economic interests and mine. For electronics, I'll probably just buy from NewEgg because of how bad Amazon's search sucks and because it's free shipping is freer as in "beer" than Prime's $99...which of course applies to Prime items but not not-Prime items and to me, it's not worth the brain cells personally and the five minutes economically to figure out which is the best value SSD...and if I want it fast, there's a Best Buy up the road...and a Walmart.

In fairness, I find returning anything to be a hassle but since I have a brother in law who returns annuals to Home Depot at the end of spring, I know some people arrange their lives around it. Anyway, if something really sucks, I can chargeback.

That's funny because eBay is horrible for comparison shopping, and imho just as hard to determine knock-off products vs genuine.

Though I do also use NewEgg, which irks me nearly as much as Amazon, in that I always reduce down to the products sold by amazon, same on newegg... I don't want to deal with all the reseller. If Amazon stocks the product, odds are at least the product line is okay. The only place I get bit is misc adapters, some are great, others have a weird fit. That includes Amazon Basics products which are often hit or miss.

At one level, I agree that there isn't much difference betwee Amazon and Ebay in regard to knockoffs. On a different level, I find it easier to evaluate offers on Ebay because of the information it provides regarding sellers. Knowing that the item ships from China is a datapoint. Knowing that the particular seller has sold 247 from the listing is a data point that relates to the seller's rating.

The experience you describe regarding Amazon Basics pretty much sums it up. Amazon puts its name on products that are crap because it is in their interest and despite their interest clearly not aligning with mine. Ebay avoids the temptation by not putting their name on products. If it's crap, it's because of the seller not Ebay.

Considering the hassle I had when getting a laptop repaired that was not bought on Amazon (Lenovo refused to repair a display that no longer turned on because the plastic guide of one USB-slot fell out as well, and the vendor tried to to fuck us over by not taking it back/exchanging it; until I made a stink on social media), my next laptop will almost certainly be bought from Amazon exactly because of the service I saw them provide in similar cases (and it will certainly not be a Lenovo laptop. Never again). Only not if it is a special model bought from the producer, like System76 or something like that.

But that is also because counterfeit goods are less of a problem with Laptops. For many other things Amazon has a real problem there. It's okay to be a bit more expensive if the service is good, it is not okay when I have to be one the lookout for fakes when buying there.

And for the site I have that links to Amazon offers, all the scam offers that are or at the very least were active there ("send a mail to [email protected] before buying") were a real problem as well.