It takes a minute, they often have the best price, and vetting a new vendor -- with their own unknown challenges -- is non-trivial.

B&H and Adorama are increasingly my go-tos for anything with microchips. They've both branched out from photography to A/V gear to tech goods generally.

B&H might be closed half the year for holidays, but I never worry they'll send a fake.

Personally I have a list I go down the more critical a component is. Amazon if it doesn’t really matter. Then newegg/Best Buy. Then b+h.

I run my list in the opposite order. Prices are generally just as good and I prefer to support those I trust first. Actually before I get to amazon I will search for small specialized vendors that might be more expensive but the staff actually knows something about their product, and so the web recommendations are good (they will of course recommend what they sell over an equally good brand they don't, but they are selling the good brands)

Problem is return policy. Amazon I feel comfortable ordering anything because if it’s not great I return it. Small vendors not so much.

Alot of people outside of news/tech circles do trust Amazon. They're literally the most popular retailer, of course people trust them. Anecdotes are everywhere about inventory co-mingling being such a mega problem, but I think opinions are getting repeated and amplified by a vocal minority.

Beyond that, trust is irrelevant when returns/refunds are dead simple. It's wasteful, for sure, but I guess that's capitalism.

I have a split-brain on the matter.

I trust Amazon to the extent that I am okay with them storing my card information. Their security practices in that regard are pretty damn good. (I do not trust Google with my payment card info. I do not want them to have anything on file they could trigger charges against, either by accident or through their many dark patterns.)

I do not trust Amazon when it comes to vendor or marketplace management. They have an enormous fake review problem, and the probability for counterfeits is, in some categories, unacceptably high.

Meaning: I don't buy any big ticket items from them. I'm still happily doing mostly recurring purchases from Amazon, for product categories where the chance of getting mislabelled junk is practically zero.

Not sure it's that wasteful? Amazon pays for the returns/refunds, so they have an obvious incentive to keep them to a small number of cases.

Free shipping

tinstaafl... tinstaafs?

Correct, cobber.

Well, I think people do trust amazon, they don't trust all the other companies on amazon. But unless I'm misunderstanding, this move means that people can't buy from amazon any longer. They have to buy everything from all the other vendors on amazon. The problem being, of course, that these other sellers may or may not scam you. (I'm not 100% about that interpretation of this move, but that's what it sounds like? Lawyers may want to chime in.)

So under these conditions, I would strongly urge people not to purchase from amazon's site, because it's gonna be essentially 100% potential scams. They should move to target or walmart. At least until those stores are also obliged to do the same thing. (Since they have the same fulfillment business models I'm assuming they'd be next? But they should be safe for now.) After the law gets to them too, people may want to limit online shopping only to small ticket items that won't cause too much disappointment if you get scammed. Because online shopping will become the wild west with every transaction being backed only by caveat emptor.

Oh Amazon has been selling garbage for years, but only for “commodity” items that the average user can’t test for quality.

Example: All coin cells (regardless of brand/seller) on Amazon are fake. These cells last 2-4 months (long enough that most people won’t bother to contact support) when the same model from an electronics distributor like Mouser lasts ~8 years as advertised.

> people may want to limit online shopping only to small ticket items

Oddly enough, I’ve had much better luck with big ticket items on Amazon since they’re much harder to fake and because they get special treatment (brand registration) from Amazon. But for small stuff Amazon is just AliExpress with faster shipping.

I would guess that carries to other batteries as they are easy to fake and hard to detect.

A decent proportion of all the memory cards, flash drives and SSDs are fake on Amazon.

Agreed on both batteries and SD cards. I would add Ethernet cables are crap off Amazon also. The specs offered are useless.

Thanks for the heads-up. I've always accepted that Ethernet cables do what they say on the wire, but now that you mention it, it seems ruthlessly easy to print whatever on the cable and give you something that will only transfer at a fraction of the bandwidth.

I'm slowly collecting a list of things that I need to buy only from genuine suppliers.

"this move means that people can't buy from amazon any longer. They have to buy everything from all the other vendors on amazon."

You did not read the article.