Wow, "stressful" is exactly right. It crept up on me, but it's now rarely a pleasant experience.

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.

+1 on Newegg. I built a PC last year, and unknowingly bought something from newegg.com that was in their Marketplace. Paid with Paypal, got charged by Newegg, but never got a confirmation email. I called Newegg, who had no record of the transaction, so I filed a claim on Paypal. Bought the part off Amazon, built my PC, waited for the claim to resolve.

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.

Re: https://www.riskiq.com/blog/labs/magecart-newegg/

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.

It's really sad. I don't know what Newegg's financials are but for me they went from being the gold standard for online stores to "don't use".

I was under the impression that you could filter out their marketplace sellers and that they didn't commingle their own inventory with anyone else's. Is that not the case?

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.

That is surprisingly crappy I heard that their marketplace had substantial counterfeit issues much like Amazon.

It is at least possible to filter it to items only sold by Newegg.

Instead of Newegg, for PC parts I exclusively use Microcenter now. When I was in Atlanta, there were brick-and-mortar stores on the north side. Now I just use their web site. My last PC build ended up being around $40 cheaper through Microcenter than through Newegg.

I've done my last two builds primarily through Microcenter. Their prices are similar to or better than other places and both times I've gotten $50 off by buying the motherboard and processor through them.

You're complaints about Amazon seem to almost all apply to eBay as well though:

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

Amazon has all of eBay's problems but with a site that is product focused vs. seller focused. So you have all these categories of problems avoided on eBay like multiple items on the same page(), mixed reviews and the unknown of which seller is more likely to ship a good product.

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.

"multiple items on the same page" - This is usually a positive, since it allows the user to easily look at color or size variations, there is a way to look at only reviews of certain variations

"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.