Disagree. Amazon's reviews were the reason I would buy online, wait several days, vs. driving home from Best Buy with a new TV.

I remember even walking into a brick and mortar store, confused because I had no way to judge, for example, one rice cooker against another.

As the reliability of Amazon's reviews has waned, so has my loyalty.

If I'm just rolling the dice now, I might as well roll the dice on eBay or aliexpress.....

I have to agree with this sentiment. In general, I look for long term use reviews, any sign that a product will fail both beyond the return period and warranty period.

If my trust in long term reviews erode, I'm inclined to buy less.

Word of mount is a powerful tool that amazon has harnessed with reviews, and has seemingly replaced the need to see a product in person before a purchase.

I keep thinking I need to subscribe to consumer reports. They seem to be the only reviewers these days that I can be sure are not bought. They might or might not know what they are talking about, but at least they are not bought.

I spent years worrying about misleading descriptions and fake reviews. I then bought a subscription to which.co.uk and have been a happy customer since. They review a wide variety of products and they are a non-profit registered as a charity in the UK. They are mainly funded by consumer subscriptions so conflicts of interest are avoided.

How do you justify the £100/year?

Which's primary benefit seems to be for White goods, but how often do you buy a new fridge/oven/etc?

CR are not as unbiased as they claim to be. They love Honda cars for example, and my experience with Hondas has been uniformly disastrous. Or may I just got two lemons.

single reviews are fine for product features but not really about all the ways a product can fail. This becomes statistical in nature and a single reviewer wont necessarily find those issues.

I find amazon reviews are still fine. Read the worst reviews read 3* reviews to find all the worst things. Use 5* reviews to get an idea.

They do have some basic algorithm that weighs each review/reviewer. The average shown isn't a raw one. Some reviews count more than others. Then add in fakespot.com..

When you roll the dice on amazon, you can return it if you don't like it. Its harder to do that on ebay, and impossible to do on aliexpress.

Yup, easy returns are a big benefit, and keep me from completely abandoning Amazon, for now.

However, for some categories, such as batteries or electronics, even after examining all the negative reviews and rates, I've found it impossible to get non-counterfeit products. I'm happy to go to a regional specialist in such items or even to a big-box store just to get greater confidence in a genuine item.

(&yes, don't even think about getting 18650s on Amazon. I saw someone selling boxes with a Tesla logo & brand - obvious BS. I reported it and at least did see them disappear in a week, but another popped up.)

Ilumn has been my go to for 18650s for years

I've made many returns on AliExpress. I haven't even needed to ship the items back to get a refund.

Amazon will eventually drop you as a customer if you make it a regular thing to file returns.

I have regularly purchased multiple items on Amazon with the intent of sending back my least preferred option for about 3 years now. I had the occasional return before that as well.

A lot of stuff on aliexpress is 2x, 3x or 4x times cheaper than amazon, so the tradeoffs are complex...

Keep pumping that well if you want but it is going to dry up.

You are a money losing customer, as you’ll return stuff you don’t like. They would rather have you cost BestBuy money.

There’s weird psychological aspects with this. People want to buy 5 star product.

I worked in a big box retailer a couple decades ago. They had metrics that showed them every time a customer entered the store it was worth $50. This created a huge incentive to handle returns, since just being in the store “made them money” even if they walked out of the store without buying anything.

I don’t know how well this translates to best buy, since they probably don’t have the same really large purchases skewing the average up, but I’m positive returns are a net positive for them using similar metrics.

Absolutely.

I paid for college working at a big box store 20 hours a week in the 90s, about 50% of commissions were trolling the return line and selling to those folks.

For Amazon, I don’t think it’s that way… you mail them a return and they don’t cross-sell, many times they scrap and sell by the pound.

A product that has lots of reviews shows customer engagement and Amazon knows this. I'm certain those products get tons more sales because people naturally gravitate to what's popular. I just bought a small storage cabinet that had no reviews and no customer data on it. I hate to say it, but I'd probably be a bit more comfortable if there were tons of fake reviews as illogical as that sounds, but this particular one was the exact size I needed.

I'm also the kind of person that goes straight to the 2-3 star reviews. I want to know the issues and determine if it's just sour grapes (damaged on delivery) or something I should be concerned about. When I was browsing step up converters, I found some amazing reviews at the 2* levels... like engineers that picked the product apart and determined they were wired wrong and might be a fire hazard. Sadly these types of reviews get buried and often ignored by the worthless deluge of 5* reviews.

Yes this. Even worse I've noticed these new business entities are getting even better at pretending to be real businesses with websites, contact forms, pictures of buildings, and "about us" pages written in pretty poor english. I just searched for hose the other day and the first few pages of brands were: amayrose, JOOIKOS, Zalotte, Amazon Basics, Hooshing, FOXEASE, HAUEA, Knoikos, TUNHUI, POYINRO, HIYUTOY.

The second one gets caught for fake reviews, just put the name through another random generator and back up.

Trust is eroding, but every time we try and use an Amazon competitor we come crawling back. When do viable alternatives emerge?

> Trust is eroding, but every time we try and use an Amazon competitor we come crawling back. When do viable alternatives emerge?

Out of curiosity, why do you come back to Amazon? Is it the delivery speed, price, or something else?

Amazon has billions of dollars in profits. That they don't spend a small portion of this on curating their seller base tells me they see the fraud as something that helps them.

Or that Amazon can't move beyond their startup mentality of growth uber alles. Perhaps the best move at this point is not to continue their existing approach, and redefine their storefront to something other than a nicer Aliexpress.