Now the expectations on quality have gone down to "OK if this works great, but do I really have the time to print the return label, package it again and ship it back?" Basically my level of trust in stuff sold on Amazon is much lower than what it used to be a few years back. For. e.g. 10 yrs. back - Plasma TV on Amazon? No problem. Now its Costco all the way for expensive electronics stuff.
On one level, Amazon is just fleecing the sellers on their platform - all sorts of charges for combinations of ad words. A lot of sellers have figured out how to game the system. It's just an awful mess. I have been considering cancelling my prime membership for a couple of years now... inertia keeps me from doing it. I've tried Ali express as well. It was an OK experience. Now I'm browsing Etsy. Haven't really bought anything, but it's looking more attractive for household stuff.
In summary, like theossuary, I believe figuring out your niche stores will be beneficial. Watch out for those Asics warehouse sales for workout clothes and shoes etc.
Ali Express is overrun with sellers with identical listings, but the quality may vary greatly between them. You will only know when you receive the item. It's not uncommon to receive something that looks totally different than the listing images.
Shipping something back on Ali Express is basically a total no-go. They get killer discounts on shipping to the US. Shipping something back to China is probably going to be more expensive than the product. With Amazon it is cheap or free to return things.
Sorting by price on Ali Express is totally broken, because sellers can list a variation with the lowest price that is never available. This impossible-to-get lowest price is taken into consideration by the sort.
People complain that sometimes Prime is 3 or 4 day shipping instead of actually 2 days. Ali Express is 2 weeks minimum. Probably 50% of the things I've ordered have taken 1+ month. Some things take 2 months. Some things never arrive at all.
All that said, I still use Ali Express. It's great for small, cheap and generic items. I know what I'm getting into, and I accept the risks. There is no way it could replace Amazon.
If you knew nothing about Amazon and only learned about it from HN comments you would think it was basically the Mos Eisley Cantina. The real eCommerce Mos Eisley Cantina is Ali Express.
Shopping on Amazon is still cheap and convenient. Maybe not if you consistently buy things that are exorbitant to ship like ping pong tables or 6 foot ladders, but most people buy items that could fit in a shoe box.
I see comments complaining about this and similar all the time on Amazon, and on products with very high ratings. The strategy seems to be, sell good quality cheap stuff for a while to get a good rating, the change the listing completely to a low-quality expensive product. The high ratings stick around, resulting in more sales than it otherwise would have, and more resilience to new low ratings.
They have a huge warehouse infrastructure in my city. They could drop a box in the mail at their warehouse and have it to me in a day or two. They could probably strap it to a stray dog, point it in my direction, and get it here in three.
Yet, somehow, if I collect up a $25 order of in stock items, they can't get it to my door in less than about two weeks, unless I pay a premium for upgraded shipping. This makes it useless for time-sensitive orders.
Now, I know there's QoS and framing as a marketing thing, but this just comes off as a tease.
My returns with AliExpress have all been full refunds without having to reship the items back to the supplier.
One of my refunds was for a $100+ item, as well.
> Ali Express is 2 weeks minimum.
I've received items in a week or less.
> Shopping on Amazon is still cheap and convenient.
As of late, this hasn't been true. AliExpress, Walmart and even Best Buy have had better deals than Amazon.
I don't know where you live, but I don't think receiving an item from Ali Express in 1 week or less is normal, unless maybe you live in mainland China. I'm in the US and I really think I've never received something quicker than 2 weeks.
You said you have received things in a week or less. What do you think the average is though?
I just don't believe that Amazon does not generally provide cheap products conveniently. There are outliers, as with everything, but I think it's the norm that the prices for the majority of products are competitive, and the user experience is convenient.
Shipping options and delivery estimates are displayed in both search results and each item's page.
A good percentage of items do have delivery estimates that exceed two weeks, however either faster paid shipping options are available or other suppliers will offer the same item with a shorter delivery estimate.
You can also sort by the country an item ships from. There are increasingly more distributors in North America than there were a couple of years ago.
> I just don't believe that Amazon does not generally provide cheap products conveniently. There are outliers, as with everything, but I think it's the norm that the prices for the majority of products are competitive, and the user experience is convenient.
That hasn't been my experience, unfortunately. I used to use Amazon for the majority of my online purchases because they consistently had lower prices. Eventually, they became my supplier even for goods I'd buy in person.
However, as of last month, Walmart will ship the last item I regularly bought in bulk from Amazon at a lower individual retail price.
Example of Raspberry Pi 3 Camera, product price $4.52, shipping to the US:
Shipping prices (no free option)
$0.34 - 20-39 days
$2.84 - 19-39 days
$38.16 - 12-21 days
$40.53 - 8-16 days
$46.03 - 6-13 days
Which one of those would you pay for?
I said Ali Express was OK. As in "meh" worth a look. True, stuff arrives a month to two months later. I bought the exact compression socks advertised on Amazon from Ali Express - Amazon price: $16 each. Ali Express: $3.75 each including shipping. Ali Express is catching up.
A lot of products on Amazon are essentially a branding function (name tag) applied to a functionally finished product. The Chinese manufactures probably knew that. With Ali Express, that equation is changing.
> Maybe not if you consistently buy things that are exorbitant to ship like ping pong tables or 6 foot ladders...
The point is Walmart would have shipped it to me for cheaper. Now I know better... Shop around first and then order.
As we figure out our "niche stores", I hope designers and entrepreneurs will study McMaster-Carr[1] - a site I found through the garagejournal forum that is an absolute joy to use.
Just drill down into any product category and you'll get a very simple listing, with full descriptions and very helpful diagrams of every single part.
If you need pipe fittings or hose clamps or rivets or gas regulators, please vote with your dollars at this site.
When one sells, you go place an order on Walmart.com for $150 and ship directly to the amazon buyer.
No risk of holding inventory. Pretty easy profit if your competition is low.
Can you explain how that works?
Over the summer I used Prime Video to watch Sneaky Pete, and every episode would start with a 30 second ad for a different Prime show. There was a skip button, but it was hidden, and I could only find it by long tapping.
So I cancelled Prime. I felt silly paying Amazon to display ads at me.
Newegg went the same path like Amazon and I have stopped using them. They used to be my favorite store.
Just today I'm returning something. I was trying to buy more of the sort of underwear I like. But I quickly end up in the junky end of Amazon where the same product is listed under slightly different names by different sellers and the interface gets all weird. It must have done that thing where you pick a size, then pick a color, but it automatically adjusts the size to whatever's available in that color. So I ended up with 3 2-packs of too-small underwear. And one of them came without the manufacturer's packaging, just two pairs of underwear in a baggie. Because that's not suspicious or anything. Now I have to package that stuff and haul it to the UPS store.
And I'm totally with you on the advertising. I get how they got there, with a bunch of teams optimizing short-term micro-metrics. But apparently nobody cares about the overall experience.
Three weeks later, suddenly the seller adds tracking to the Paypal claim, and a few days later the part that I no longer need shows up in a Newegg box. No invoice, packing sheet, etc. and it's still not listed on my Newegg account. My claim gets closed, and there's nobody I can even return this to.
What a stupid, stupid situation.
Newegg has not said anything about this to me, nor explained why after a Newegg transaction my card was cancelled defensively and reissued.
I haven't been able to trust Newegg in a very long time, which is sad. They used to be the gold standard, now it's a decrepit pit of dropshipping garbage.
Where do you go for computer stuff that you can trust these days? Every box in all the Fry's stores around me all seem to have already been opened and returned twice by the time i see them.
It is at least possible to filter it to items only sold by Newegg.
Counterfeits: yes of course, just as many if not more
Multiple listings for the same product with different prices: yes, it's by design!
Advertising: not as much, but it is present
Fake reviews: the product reviews on eBay are mostly useless. The only thing you can rely on is the seller reviews
eBay has some newer product-focused pages and features, but they don't create the kind of problems you see on Amazon.
It also seems somewhat harder to keep creating new seller accounts on eBay. I've been ripped off several times by highly rated sellers on Amazon that disappeared after a several weeks long case pending against them. Amazon resolved it satisfactorily, but it meant that I would have gotten the item faster from China.
All my personal experience, of course.
Of course ebay listings have multiple products, but not in the same super confusing way you see on Amazon.
"mixed reviews and the unknown of which seller is more likely to ship a good product" - Being unsure of which seller is best also exists on eBay
I don't think Amazon's listings are confusing. You usually have size and color variations, and sometimes things like multi-packs. I guess that is subjective.
They've been goofing up their delivery a lot lately too. Delivering items late or delivering the wrong items.
Can't be worse than e.g. NyTimes, Zipcar, Stamps.com (many others I'm sure) that force you to call a human to cancel
Most people probably won't take the initiative to make an enquiry with the merchant for an Amazon marketplace order, and it'd be too inconvenient to do this consistently for small purchases, but maybe part of the motivation for promoting merchants tied exclusively to Amazon is an awareness of the threat that online showrooming might pose to some of their business in the future.
I've switched to sharing Prime with my fiancee through "Amazon Household," and they're even nagging me as I let my now-redundant Prime membership lapse.
I imagine there's just no manager willing to charge the hill of better search when they'd have to die on the sword of plummeting pageview metrics for succeeding.
Amazon has seen a similar decline. Years ago, if you saw a product on Amazon, you could be confident it was as it was labelled, you would get it in a reasonable time and the price was about as good as buying anywhere else. Amazon quality now is total garbage. The store is littered with counterfit goods. If the price looks good, that's probably because the quality is absolutely terrible. I don't enjoy shopping there at all anymore.
It's just as likely that they handed the report off, and it will be handled by someone else entirely. However, none of that makes the situation with the customer right; the customer's problem is they don't have a product. Re-shipping it is just about the only thing they can do in this case.
In that sense I think Amazon falls in-between. Personally I'll use sites like thewirecutter or other review sites to get an idea of what's on the market and what I should be looking for. It's only from there that I'll hit an online merchant to see what they sell and at what price.
I get why it doesn't fit you style, it's a different approach.
I apologize for the vagueness / uncertainty, I'm having trouble finding a link to the story.
they came so close to convincing me and then they had to trot out the platitudes. no business cares ONLY about the consumer
Twitch prime used to justify paying half of the cost on its own, but that no longer gives me the one benefit I care about (no ads). That leaves video, which is a good fringe benefit, but not a main need for me. Amazon music was not a replacement for Spotify (too much things gated behind another 9 usd a month paywall).
To me, it feels like they decided to slowly weaken the benefits of the overall package and hope inertia kept people from opting out (not to mention the dark patterns like cancelling subscription removes the benefits of the current subscription).
I'll buy a YouTube subscription before I pay for a cable package on a streaming service.
I first do research on what specific model I gonna buy and than check who has it the cheapest with a minimum good Shoprating. Often enough I can buy it from or through Amazon.
How do you use Amazon that you will get different quality of a product in comparison to shopping somewhere else?
Granted I’ve never received a counterfeit.
The problem is you may not know. I have received several items from known brands that turned out to be low quality. I don't know if these brands just have started to make low quality items (very possible) or maybe the item was fake.
Why on earth would you buy a Gucci purse from anywhere but Gucci? Caveat Emptor.
Right now, there's an intersection of lower quality goods intended to be discounted with counterfeit goods flooding the market.
Amazon has turned into a warehouse, you have to know what you want coming in. The only reason I kept using them was because I was lazy and didn't want to have to manage purchases across multiple different websites. But it just isn't worth it when I kept consistently getting inferior products.