It’s really nice for my 3D printing hobby since most of the brands I’m buying are based in China or Europe (mostly China). They send over a shipping container of printers and Amazon handles fulfillment so I get the stuff in a few days instead of waiting 45 days and pay $100 shipping to get a 20 pound device delivered. They also have all the replacement parts and stuff in their warehouses.

Also, their returns process is painless. I thought I’d support local workers and had been shopping at Hobby Lobby instead of using Amazon. For my trouble, when I tried to return an airbrush that didn’t suit my needs (I used it once) they treated me like a criminal, it was a whole production.

With Amazon I just head to the Whole Foods down the street (or Kohls sometimes?), return it, and get credited almost instantly.

I do think Walmart is putting a lot of effort into their online offerings and if you can return online purchases in store that’d be a huge win. We bought my wife’s MacBook Air off Walmart’s online store and it was super convenient.

> Also, their returns process is painless. I thought I’d support local workers and had been shopping at Hobby Lobby instead of using Amazon. For my trouble, when I tried to return an airbrush that didn’t suit my needs (I used it once) they treated me like a criminal, it was a whole production.

I had the same experience. I ordered a $70 worth of cleaning supplies directly from the manufacturer, thinking I'd support the brand and cut out the middle man. My package was stolen (box opened and left right there) so we contacted the seller and told them the situation and they said they can't do anything about it, even with a police report. Amazon would have refunded it immediately. Half the time when I return something they even let me keep the item and donate it rather than dealing with the return.

I want to support smaller online retailers but not so bad that I'm okay with getting ripped off with no recourse every once in a while.

The fact that they can afford to take a loss on many returns while their smaller competitors cannot kind of implies you're getting ripped off in some other way, doesn't it?

Where does the money to pay for your stolen cleaning supplies come from? Why would you even think to contact the manufacturer about this? Why not the shipping company? Or your building's management? I've fumbled a soda and broken it on the ground right after checking out and the grocer replaced it for free, but I recognized this as a generous act of kindness and not an expected baseline of customer service. I've also lost a soda in the parking lot and I can't even imagine feeling entitled enough to go back into the store to complain about it.

> Why not the shipping company?

Typically, the recipient can't make a claim with a shipping company as they're not the customer, only the shipper (seller) can

This may be true, but as an argument it kind of misses the forest, don't you think?

Hobby Lobby is owned by some of the biggest pieces of shit in the entire country, so I'm not shocked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_Lobby_smuggling_scandal

Hobby Lobby is also an awful company... and is by no means "buying local".

Never once in my history of ordering on Amazon have I received a fake, spam, or bait-and-switch product.

I have deliberately purchased non-name brand products, and sometimes I have received defective products, as one would shopping anywhere, but even then Amazon's customer services and return process is second to none. It shocks me that everyone on HN and other popular forums has very little success buying on Amazon.

5 of my last 7 items ordered from Amazon where either fake or defective.

I don’t care how easy Amazon’s returns are, it’s not worth the hassle of not having the item let alone doing anything above and beyond that.

Weird.

I've had a defect rate of less than 1% percent with a sample size of enough items to reduce the margin of error on that statistic to something rather negligible.

To get your configuration you need to have two items that aren't defective and five items that are.

P(!defect)^2P(defect)^5 = 0.99^20.01^5 = 9.801e-11

There are seven choose five ways you could have a particular configuration where you have five defects out of seven purchases.

7 Choose 5 = 21

So therefore the probability of what happened to you happening to me would seem to be:

9.801e-11 * 21 = 2.05821e-9

This written out in numbers is: 0.00000000205821 That number as a percentage is: 00.000000205821% For comparison the probability of being struck by lighting over the course of a person's life is 1-in-15,300 which is 0.00006535947. Many people struggle with reading really small numbers like that and so we often decide to round. If we do that the probability of what happened to you happening to me is roughly 0% if we choose to round at six decimal places. Seconding the OP claim that the general experience is shocking, because it is extremely divergent. It would be more shocking to be hearing everyone on Hacker News was regularly being hit by lightning bolts than that people are getting your defect rate.

When you see a result like that it’s a good idea to check your assumptions.

That calculation assumes these probabilities are independent when they aren’t. What was ordered, when it was ordered, and where it’s being shipped to are all likely to impact the odds. On top of that are ability to detect fakes and defective items are likely to be different.

Having said that, I have been hit by lighting. Or at least it stuck the car I was in and I felt some effects. I didn’t report it anywhere that records such strikes, which suggests non serious lightning strikes may be underestimated in those statistics.

> What was ordered, when it was ordered, and where it’s being shipped to are all likely to impact the odds.

given the wildly diverging experiences people report, this is my assumption also. at least to my knowledge, I've never received a counterfeit item from amazon, but there are also certain things I avoid buying. for example, I would probably not buy lipo cells, especially not from a third-party merchant. they are trivial to rewrap and poor QC can literally start fires.

would you mind sharing what kinds of things (or just categories of things) you are buying to see such a high rate of counterfeits?

Same. The only category of products where I've personally encountered a fake was SD cards, and that's a large problem everywhere online. That's the only thing i buy now directly from manufacturer-authorized retailers. Idk if that's even common, because I've only gotten a fake once out of many times i ordered sd cards.

Everything else? I've been buying all sorts of stuff from amazon, from electronics/hardware to clothing to furniture to almost anything you can think of, and not once was it fake. Before anyone asks how I know they weren't fake, most of them came with a "register on the manufacturer's website to get extended warranty/extra stuff" unique serial number, and i was able to do so just fine. Ofc that doesn't apply to everything I bought, because not every product allows registering itself on manufacturer's website. But for those that don't, I haven't noticed a single sign of fake/counterfeit items.

Ofc this is all just anecdata and isn't an evidence of anything. But i gotta say, as others have mentioned, their extremely easy and efficient return process definitely makes my decision-making efforts much easier.

I get plenty from Amazon but there are whole categories of products I won't buy there because of poor confidence that I'll receive a genuine product.

Are you sure you haven't received a fake product? How do you know? The fakes are so good much of the time that you may never know if you have received a fake.

I have received 5+ fake products and stopped ordering on Amazon a few years ago. Not worth it, too much risk. Would never, ever, order food from there, or anything you put on your body, or anything electronic, etc. Way too risky.

If it is a fake and you cannot tell the difference maybe it doesn't matter.

The (legitimate) manufacturer will be able to tell the difference and won't service or provide support for counterfeits. And warranty claims are obviously out of the question.

It matters when it catches fire because they saved a few cents skipping some failsafe in the power supply.

You are right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSE_Nm7pAw4 - this video from bigclivedotcom shows the unique failure of a usb-c power supply that also took out a MS Surface and associated monitor with it.

> Never once in my history of ordering on Amazon have I received a fake, spam, or bait-and-switch product

My wife and I both have. It's likely that there's a buying pattern you have that's been very lucky. If you want to assume that millions of people are lying, there's nothing more to talk about. I would suggest trying to buy parts for anything on amazon to see the inaccuracies + bait & switch behaviors.

It has a medium level of spam, but if you stick to name brands sold by amazon, you generally get what you pay for.

It's replaced the department store, and usually has better service / return policy than a department store (Target etc.).

Costco might be the exception but generally I don't go to costco to search for a specific product. They either have some general version of a product, and if I'm willing to buy that I will; swim goggles for example. Perhaps I want TYR swim goggles. Costco will have better pricing on Speedo goggles but won't sell the TYR mirrored version I'm looking for. Click, bought on amazon, arrives next day.

The flagship product is the logistical operation and it is pretty damn far from crappy. I can't speak for everywhere, but at least in most parts of the US, they can get you damn near anything on the same day. For products where you already know what you want in terms of brand, seller, and quantity, or regular recurring purchases of staple goods (cat litter, paper towels, dish soap, anything undifferentiated that you need to repeatedly purchase), even groceries now thanks to buying Whole Foods (provided you have the upscale price point that makes you willing to shop there to begin with), it's about as perfect an interface as you could hope for. Find and click in under a minute and you can probably have most goods in a few hours, at most next day.

If you're trying to discover new products of unknown quality and reputation, then it's not so good. For whatever reason, that seems to be the use case people focus on when criticizing Amazon on Hacker News, but I don't see how that can possibly be the dominant use case. Most of what people ever buy is not something brand new to them that they know nothing about.

I'm looking through my last several months of purchases here, and I'm seeing a bunch of automotive cleaning fluids, mostly from Adam's, polishing compounds and a respirator from 3M, a bunch of power tools from DeWalt, a Bose speaker. Known brands from reputable sellers, every item what I wanted and it got here quickly. In some cases, I either tried to or had to purchase elsewhere. For instance, Amazon had most of the DeWalt power tools I wanted, but was out of stock on rotary polishers, so I had to get it from some place called Acme Tools, and it took a week and a half. Amazon got me everything the next day. (I had a bunch of stuff stolen from my garage is why I needed all this at around the same time.) I tried to purchase the Bose speaker from Best Buy since I have one a five minute drive from me, and their website claimed it was in stock and I could pick it up the same day, but then right before the pick up window, they texted me to inform me they didn't actually have it and wouldn't for another week. So I canceled the order, went on Amazon, and they had free same day delivery.

It should be obvious that anything that goes from not existing 25 years ago to top five market cap company in the world is probably offering value somehow.

> If you're trying to discover new products of unknown quality and reputation, then it's not so good. For whatever reason, that seems to be the use case people focus on when criticizing Amazon on Hacker News, but I don't see how that can possibly be the dominant use case. Most of what people ever buy is not something brand new to them that they know nothing about.

First of all, HN is full of entrepreneurs and wannabe entrepreneurs. A storefront that can't sell anything that doesn't have a good reputation outside the storefront is bad for small businesses, because nobody is willing to try anything new. A major part of the value proposition of a storefront is that the owners will vet the products they sell for a minimum standard of quality: it's not necessarily great, because greatness is subjective, but the food shouldn't poison you[1] and the AC/DC power converters shouldn't catch fire.

The second problem is that sellers will pass off counterfeit goods as being from major manufacturers when they aren't. I know I'm falling for selection bias, since I've probably bought counterfeit goods without knowing it, but that's not even really the point. The point is that I've bought stuff on Amazon that just didn't work, sold in packaging that's identical to stuff I've bought before that did work. I knew they were counterfeit and not just duds because the actual product didn't have the branding on it that genuine ones always have.

[1]: Well, okay, it might poison you if you have a special allergy. But anything with the common allergens like gluten or lactose will have labels.

> It should be obvious that anything that goes from not existing 25 years ago to top five market cap company in the world is probably offering value somehow.

That is very true, I think probably from the outside looking in it was hard to see what value they were offering. But from the responses here I think I got a better picture of what people get out of it that makes it the best choice for them most of the time.

Amazon has stunning logistics. I’ve almost never received anything late over the last 10 years and if there’s anything wrong with the product they just refund my money. There is some spam that’s unavoidable with opening up the platform to third party sellers but I think it works very well overall.

Amazon is one of the most trusted brands in America. It is almost as trusted as USPS (the top trusted brand) and is, in general, considered by most Americans to be a reliable, safe, and high-performance source of goods.

I hate Amazon as much as the next guy but IME international Amazon and US Amazon are completely different things and aren't really comparable, they just have a similar GUI. US Amazon has nearly any consumer product you'll buy (from most food up to really expensive stuff like small boats and sheds) and almost all of it shows up in 1-2 days with minimal shipping cost.

I know people in Canada and it's nothing like that. What you can find is crazy expensive and it it takes weeks to ship.

I'm an American, but I did my graduate degree in Canada, and the difference was so extreme I (and others) would just get stuff shipped to the border and go pick it up.

I have had friends receive items like candles already used or paint brushes already used.

I've been duped into buying travel size bottles of mouthwash, toothpaste, soap, etc because the seller prices them at or around the same as full sized items.

I guess that's on me for not paying attention to the weight though...

Up until the mid-2000's Amazon was mainly a bookstore with a very good catalog and recommendation system. Then it became the pile of spam that it is today, a marketplace of sellers worse then Mos Eisley.

But they did get their foothold selling books.