Re:Amazon as experiment
by BeetleB on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @04:10PM
(#20577956)
I keep hearing that Amazon is "customer obsessed", and I wonder who these happy customers are.
Their web site design leaves much to be desired. And it's heavy. Before I upgraded my PC, I dreaded opening a few Amazon tabs - it would bring my PC to a crawl. No other retailer had this problem. In the old days, with a single click, I could go to the Reviews page. Now the product page has no immediate click to the Reviews - I have to scroll down and click on it. Clicking the link on the top just takes me to the shorter review at the end of the page (and I have to scroll again to get to See All Reviews).
When I write a review, I have no way (that I know of) to get notified of comments to my review. If there's an option for it, do let me know. I just checked and I can't even find a link to see my own reviews in my profile's page. Anyone know where it is?
I've also sold by FBA. Their web site for sellers looks like it was made in the 90's, and discoverability is atrocious. I have to keep trying different links to see if it will take me to the report/inventory view I'm looking for. And I've dealt with several bugs on those pages (e.g. updating a price would not work sometimes).
Then there's their policy of comingling, so that when you buy a brand new item that is "Shipped and sold by Amazon.com", there is no guarantee you're not getting the item that an FBA seller put into their warehouse. Hence, no way to guarantee you didn't get a fake product.
Then when you check out sites like fakespot.com, you'll find how many products have incredibly gamed reviews. Amazon's reviews was what set them apart, and is now horribly unreliable. And then add to that mix the fact that many reviewers are actually reviewing the fake product that was shipped to them instead of the bona fide on. How do I know if the product is bad from the reviews? I can't.
And then to top it all off, when looking at one product, it's actually a combination of several ones that you have to pick. In some cases this makes sense - say I'm buying a particular brand of slippers, and they have different colors, that's fine - as long as the "model" is the same. But when I'm looking at a whiteboard, and the other option is a set of markers, that's ridiculous. The overall rating of the whiteboard has ratings of the markers mixed in. Now if I want to know the rating of just the whiteboard, I have to go through extra steps (click on Format, etc).
Their web site design leaves much to be desired. And it's heavy. Before I upgraded my PC, I dreaded opening a few Amazon tabs - it would bring my PC to a crawl. No other retailer had this problem. In the old days, with a single click, I could go to the Reviews page. Now the product page has no immediate click to the Reviews - I have to scroll down and click on it. Clicking the link on the top just takes me to the shorter review at the end of the page (and I have to scroll again to get to See All Reviews).
When I write a review, I have no way (that I know of) to get notified of comments to my review. If there's an option for it, do let me know. I just checked and I can't even find a link to see my own reviews in my profile's page. Anyone know where it is?
I've also sold by FBA. Their web site for sellers looks like it was made in the 90's, and discoverability is atrocious. I have to keep trying different links to see if it will take me to the report/inventory view I'm looking for. And I've dealt with several bugs on those pages (e.g. updating a price would not work sometimes).
Then there's their policy of comingling, so that when you buy a brand new item that is "Shipped and sold by Amazon.com", there is no guarantee you're not getting the item that an FBA seller put into their warehouse. Hence, no way to guarantee you didn't get a fake product.
Then when you check out sites like fakespot.com, you'll find how many products have incredibly gamed reviews. Amazon's reviews was what set them apart, and is now horribly unreliable. And then add to that mix the fact that many reviewers are actually reviewing the fake product that was shipped to them instead of the bona fide on. How do I know if the product is bad from the reviews? I can't.
And then to top it all off, when looking at one product, it's actually a combination of several ones that you have to pick. In some cases this makes sense - say I'm buying a particular brand of slippers, and they have different colors, that's fine - as long as the "model" is the same. But when I'm looking at a whiteboard, and the other option is a set of markers, that's ridiculous. The overall rating of the whiteboard has ratings of the markers mixed in. Now if I want to know the rating of just the whiteboard, I have to go through extra steps (click on Format, etc).