It's still frustrating the lengths I have to go to to get a fair deal on Amazon. there's so much anticompetitive behavior (showing their own products first on searches, defaulting to products sold by amazon, hiding competitor listings [search for chromecast]) and they show little interest at changing behavior to make the customer experience better (even on glaring issues like fake reviews / counterfeit products) because there is no competition. I have contributed, been suckered in to the 'Prime' bandwagon, rarely shopping around on price, and often buying 'Amazon's Choice' products, which are almost certainly a sham.
Refreshing to see people on here bucking that trend. I'm trying to commit to the same, hopefully Amazon one day feels pressure to change.
I ended up buying the item in a brick-and-mortar store -- same price, instant pick-up, and easier to return in case it didn't meet my needs (plus no fear of blacklisting or whatever, which I'm not sure is a thing Amazon does, but I don't really want to find out, either).
- Are they taking me for a ride on price? I don't optimize this enough and do overpay because I'm lazy, but there have been multiple times lately that they gave me a price that was just stupidly high.
- Is this the kind of product that will cause their screwed-up warehousing system to stiff me with counterfeit goods/seconds? No way in hell am I going to put up with that kind of shitty bait-and-switch, and this cuts out a huge swath of categories I'll consider from them.
- Did I find all the places on the page where they hide alternate (cheaper) sellers in their own store?
And this is also after I mostly stopped using their incredibly loosely-matching search and just use DDG, which works much better.
At a certain point, I find the friction of keeping them honest is not worth it. Last renewal time, Prime was still worth it. When it is up for renewal I'm cancelling to see if I miss it.