I was with you on walmart for awhile but now they're doing the same marketplace bullshit that amazon is doing and all expectations of quality and authenticity are lost again. If I want something used I'll go to ebay and if I want something drop-shipped from china I can go to aliexpress myself. So now I'm using Target.com whenever possible. It's often cheaper than amazon anyway.

I actually started using walmart.com over amazon a number of years ago when two things I ordered on Amazon arrived in walmart.com boxes. The resellers were just doing arbitrage and sure enough my $20 orders were an average of $6 cheaper at walmart.

The marketplace is the reason I don’t use Walmart. The marketplace and commingled stock is Amazon’s biggest problem and Walmart appears to be playing catch-up rather than forging their own path. We don’t need another Amazon. I’ve been using Target, eBay, Best Buy and random sites lately. The Target experience is great even if they don’t have the same selection Amazon does.

Yeah, I have noticed that as well. Newegg is another one that went down the "Market place" approach and is why I didn't list them. I just use Micro center now. A little bit less selection, but not much and they will order almost anything for you and get it quickly.

TigerDirect[1] is a solid alternative to Newegg, that doesn't appear to have succumbed to the easy buck of the marketplace model.

[1] http://www.tigerdirect.com/

Funny that TigerDirect is now the solid alternative to Newegg. Ten years ago it was the complete opposite. Sad to see how Newegg have destroyed themselves.

TigerDirect has a terrible interface for trying to find the product you want. For instance, if you are looking for a laptop you can filter by price and by brand--that's it.

MicroCenter has sophisticated filtering ala Newegg, but in laptops for example, there is exactly 1 model that sports any AMD processor at all.

After more than 20 years of ecommerce growth, it is discouraging how bad things are.

Agreed on Newegg. I am currently dealing with two separate issues for items sold by 3rd party. Thankfully, both items were low cost so even if it ends up being a loss, it is not the end of the world, but I used to swear by Newegg. By comparison, Ebay is all third parties, but they have some way to discourage bad actors. Newegg and Amazon are a disappointment lately.

I never thought I would not say it these days, but Ebay has gotten better ( comparatively speaking; maybe others just gotten worse ).

And BestBuy. It’s shocking how they’re falling all over themselves to destroy their brands with cheap third party trash.

Best Buy doesn't have a 3rd party marketplace.

I think the US site doesn't, but the Canadian one does. If you follow the link below, you'll see there's a Best Buy Only toggle. That being said, it's nice that the let you quickly hide third party items.

https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/brand/Samsung

I really lament Newegg. It was very awesome for a long time in a way that Amazon couldn't match.

Lately, the 3rd-party market has really turned me off of them.

marketplace is fine unless they start fulfillment service, isn't it? Just only buy from the shop, not from thirdparty shop.

> The Target experience is great even if they don’t have the same selection Amazon does.

Sometimes this is nice. If I'm buying paper towels, I don't need to be overwhelmed with 800 options.

You can filter out non-Walmart sellers from the left side filter on search results.

I agree the marketplace stuff sucks. FWIW you can pretty reliably filter the retailer to 'Walmart.com' and only see first-party stuff.

Walmart has a quick option to filter out marketplace items. On the desktop site, on the left hand site, just select retailer = Walmart and it will only show Walmart items .

> I want actual single source suppliers that vet their suppliers and supplies.

I bought a beard trimmer, at a local Walmart store, in an unopened package. And found hairs and grime on the blade. Bought new DJI goggles from B&H Photo. Which turned out to be a DJI factory refurb. But it also turned out there were then only refurbs in the supply chain for that being-phased-out model.

So no-surprises supply is perhaps more nuanced and difficult than 'avoid Amazon'.

With my own taste in tech becoming more esoteric, less Amazon or AliExpress and more Alibaba, I've been feeling that personal supply chain quality management is becoming my new normal. Hmm, perhaps, just as we should be teaching personal financial management in school, we should also be teaching supply chain management? :)

B&H shipped me used Anton Bauer 90Wh batteries when I bought new ones at the tail end of that particular model. So I imagine thats what they end up doing.

The real fun was when I ranted about it on Twitter, their director of social media tried to shame me by saying I was being "too picky" or something.

Because I really don't like the idea of a 90Wh+ battery having some unknown issue that happened before I owned it and catching fire in the most gloriously explosive way.

The whole lithium ion battery industry kinda drives me up the wall. I'd love to just order some cells from Digikey, but no can do.

I do agree, but the prevalence of Amazon's practices are very well known. Returned products being put back on a shelf or back into supply will obviously happen, but I have seen it happen almost zero with the retailers I mentioned (We have also been using target.com, costco.com, etc.). It definitely takes some effort and a little more shopping around, but it has mostly been working for us (in my household).

I ordered two items from Amazon recently.

Both got in this weird state where the tracking showed they were shipped. Great, then they both hit this location where they were "delayed". I got a notice about that.

Then Amazon has this weird status where Amazon says "You can request a replacement or refund in X days." then it says something about "It might be lost." And it stays in that state for days ... But only if you check app do you see any of this additional status do you know any of this.

Otherwise for all I know this stuff would just sit in that state forever, they keep my money, and just roll on...

I had yet another shipment that entered the same state but obviously had NEVER been shipped, there was no tracking, the tracking number was generated but it was never picked up. It also entered the same limbo state where Amazon doesn't tell me anything, but hey they took my money so I guess they don't care.

Having said all that I'm less interested in Amazon BECAUSE their site seems more like Walmart every day. Pushing items that are a dollar cheaper but clearly garbage quality.

At this point I'm just hitting up Target and other random online retailers to compare / use more often.

With Amazon this exact chain of events happened to me. And also confirmed that they don't really give you that status unless you click through the app. In the end, it took five days to get something I ordered as same day delivery.

This should be Walmart's lane: no third-party sellers, just the best place to buy branded, verified products.

There has to be _someone_ who wants to be the high-quality seller. Even Newegg went down the eBay path. I understand it's profitable, but surely being a very successful #2 is OK too?

I think this might be Shopify's play, at least it would be what I would do if I was them.

Enable high quality sellers to have their own branded website to sell their own product directly.

Then make it easy to find the Shopify sites via some general search or directory.

You're able to slowly build up power this way without it being too obvious, and you provide an immediately valuable service to sellers that aligns incentives from the beginning.

Shopify has Shop app now. And some sites have integrated Shopify pay as an option to pay. I assume it’s Stripe white labeled.

Unless they're hiding it well (always a possibility...) Target is that retailer for me. Of course they don't have anywhere near the selection of Amazon, but for the regular essentials I need their free two day delivery does a fantastic job.

IKEA.

I could name a hundred niche sellers too, but the allure of Walmart and Amazon is that they sell basically everything. I can buy a Macbook and Gatorade plus some brand name AA batteries for my RC car that I bought all in the same shopping trip.

IKEA has good products but they don't come close to general merchandise stores like Amazon or Walmart.

What about Costco?

Costco is the opposite of Walmart; they're more like Trader Joe's. They sell hardly anything. The idea of Costco is "if you find it here, it's a decent product", not "if you want it, you can find it here".

Target?

But they do have 3rd party sellers which is the main reason I won't use them.

It’s simply a toggle on the we page to hide all of them.

The same is true of Amazon, but in Amazon's case it doesn't make a difference because of inventory commingling. It looks like Walmart just launched its third-party fulfillment service a few months ago [0], but if they don't explicitly commit to not commingling inventory with third-party sellers, they'll have all the same issues as Amazon.

[0] https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/walmart-ecommerce-fulfi...

Amazon's current solution also includes shutting down your account, even if it's prime, and telling you to fuck off because you returned too many of its fake or garbage products.

It’s their loss. Eventually the momentum will build up and Amazon will loose a big chunk of their customers, and these door slammed customers will never go back no matter what Amazon will be trying to do. It seems to me Amazon is on its path to self destruction and will rip of a lot of their customers on the way, because it still so large and the numbers are still good to them. That is bound to change sooner or later. I personally avoid them at all costs.

So what happens when you've basically stored your digital life on Amazon's accounts, many times with purchases from their own site?

I've got tons of music - mp3 songs and albums, hundreds of both purchased Kindle books and uploaded personal ones, Audible audio books, years worth of pictures that was part of some hardware deal, etc?

Its even worse than the problem of Google just shutting down your account since most of these victims weren't paying for anything.

I think the kindle books are still available if you login at the right url. They were for a bit, long enough for me to download them. It's difficult though. You're just fucked. I have like four kindles though and they work fine without an Amazon account. Never even need to turn the wifi on. Getting books on there with a USB cable is slightly annoying but not really. I don't know about any other product. I recommend avoiding all drm content for this reason. Luckily kindle books can have their drm easily removed. Not that I'd ever do that cause it's illegal. Lol.

“Doctor, it hurts when I do this!”

> I want actual single source suppliers that vet their suppliers and supplies.

This is particularly ironic given that Jet's original premise was to be _entirely_ a marketplace which did not complete with the merchants on it. That plan was soon abandoned however and the warehouse network and first-party products introduced.

I have a very hard time believing that. Walmart has always been an awful company and Jet has always been junk.

I switched to Walmart after Amazon’s recent knuckle headed moves.

Unfortunately, the Walmart app is not as good. Even worse, it connects to the following trackers: doubleclick.net, app-measurement.com, braze.com, googlesyndication.com, google tag services.com. This is shocking and super scary and Walmart needs to get some decent tech talent to fix their junk.

All of those except Braze are just one company: Google.

You mostly named Google