A few months back, I bought an AKASO Keychain camera to see if it's at least a 75%-decent knock-off of the Insta360 Go. I found that it was a truly terrible product and left a negative review detailing all my impressions and issues with it.

Not long afterwards, "Tara" from AKASO (using a gmail.com account with the name "Jessica") sent me multiple requests for the following:

>We sincerely appreciate your comment, which is helpful for improvement of our product and service in future. To bring you a better shopping experience, we would like to send you 30 USD gift card. Would you please help us to re-adjusting your comment rating or remove it?

Thanks to the Amazon review system, companies would much rather spend money suppressing bad reviews of their shit products instead of spending money to make good products in the first place.

I got an Instagram ad for a free device from a popular product seller on Amazon. I clicked out of curiosity, expecting it to be some sort of scam. Instead, it took me to a page hidden on the manufacturer’s official .com website.

The deal was that I had to go to Amazon.com, search for a specific keyword, scroll until I found their product, buy it, and then forward my receipt to the company. They would then PayPal me the entire cost and I got to keep the product.

They didn’t even ask for a review, although maybe that request would come after I bought it. Up front, they were simply vying for search ranking.

The margin on some of these products is so high that companies can buy their way in to high search rankings and reviews.

Is there a way to prevent gaming the system like this, perhaps other than whistleblower rewards? I imagine even with whistleblower rewards companies would just employ third-parties for plausible deniability claiming it's a simply the actions of a bad actor trying to get them penalized.

Edit to add: perhaps substantial whistleblower rewards for employees of companies doing the bad actions but the top one or two employees/founders might be the only ones in the know.

A whistleblower checkbox "seller had promised to compensate me for this review (this report won't be shown on the review or visible to the seller, and you won't be penalized for this)" may make an impact. Game the game. Collect those flags for a while without visibly affecting anything, if enough are collected - verify existence of those paid reviews (to avoid report abuse attempts to shut down legit sellers), and then take action.

Bad actors would probably start using it against competitors just like the fake 5 star review attacks. It's really interesting how seller competition evolves, anything that can be used to punish a bad seller ends up being used as a way to frame a competitor.

Yeah, it's why I ultimately think opt-in verified identity networks are how we counter that; not necessarily an easy task to educate people why, educate what's acceptable/unacceptable, and for them to trust the leadership/governance of that ecosystem to be willing to have a unique ID so a bad actor, even if simply.in a timeout for misbehaving, can't circumvent integrity systems by creating another account under fake or stolen identity; a cascading or hierarchical or decentralized-like system for different nodes of trust-identity verifiers may be useful or a good idea, or not, and then can have umbrella organizations that determine which subs or arguably smaller managed-curated networks are trustworthy with their processes/protocols - which can be "random spot tested" via umbrella organization's verification mechanisms to check for integrity; that's unnecessarily complex or it allows for different existing verification platforms to aggregate - but they may not be willing to integrate with such a system as attempt for competitive factor/leverage.

Sure, the very same day such feature would be available. That's why I explicitly mentioned need of independent verification. It's impossible to verify every seller out there, but individual sellers can be verified. Those tips must be merely signals to focus, never to penalize a seller solely based on the flags.

Also, the existence of the checkbox itself must have some chilling effects on the sellers by changing their risk perception. Those days it's just a common knowledge that those "leave us a review and we'll reward you with a $X gift card" is not penalized in practice. A checkbox with a PR campaign would send a contradicting signal, making this practice more scary.

A resourceful fraudulent sellers' cabal (if there are such things) could try to poison the well by paying users to tick this checkbox in random reviews (wasting marketplace's resources by muddying the waters), but this doesn't sound scalable and doesn't feel like a realistic scenario.

Anyone know how these sellers get your email address? I had a similar experience. The product met 90% of what I needed but the advertised 10% did not, and that 10% was critical for what I needed to do. I left a 2 or 3 star review (I forgot).

I kept getting spammed to my personal e-mail. I was not sure if they were sending through Amazon system or directly - my guess was directly. Later on I did modify my review. I reduced it by 1 more star.

There's third party services that performs reverse lookup of bad reviews to find the buyer identity and contact info. The whole purpose is to circumvent the Amazon customer contact process.

I left 1 star review for a product, and the seller tried continuously to solicit withdraw or revision of the review. I attempted to update the review calling out this behavior with screenshot of the email and Amazon wouldn't approve it. Ultimately, they replaced it with a product revision and immediately got another 20k reviews with near 5 star rating.

There's very little anonymity for buyers given all our digital crumbles. The entire digital economy's purpose is to track and identify you as a consumer. On top of this, how reviewers are paid via affiliates is the wrong incentive model. I'm not sure how this could be fixed, but I would be interested in a service that flipped the information asymmetry and gave me insight on the company selling the product and their trust worthiness. Company ownership would be icing on the cake since brands change hand so frequently (see example: https://toolguyd.com/tool-brands-corporate-affiliations/).

There's a tool called fakespot which would analyze the reviews and give the product a grade. It has the right idea but I think these professional sellers have circumvented them...

Just like you, I also updated my review when I downgraded my star review. My first attempt was rejected by Amazon and I made my update more brief in order to pass their review process.

I wouldn't say Amazon is turning a blind eye to it - but actually helping the cause in order to get turnover of products. If it hurt their bottom line (just like bad publicity like this would) they'd stop it.

I bought a USB hub on Amazon and in the box was a postcard offering me a $20 voucher for a review if I “enjoy the product”. I wrote a review mentioning this and Amazon rejected it. There’s no way they don’t know what’s going on.

I had purchased a set of 10 earbuds for $10 or something. They were horrible, like really bad with muffled sound. It had a card that if I post a review they’ll give me $15 gift card.

I wrote a review with how bad they were and also made a note of the $15 gift card offer. Last I checked my review was not deleted and it was available. I don’t think it made any difference though since the product is full of 5-star reviews claiming they are audiophile quality earbuds.

Just curious if you had also reviewed the hub or just that it had a gift card offer?

I had a similar situation (with a pair of $25 earbuds). Amazon took my review down for "promotion", presumably because I included a picture of the card with an email address to contact if you wanted to be compensated for your review. Probably 75% of my deleted review was about the item itself.

I had a similar experience with a USB-C hub I bought from a brand recommended by wirecutter (not the exact model as it was "replaced by a newer model". I plugged it into a brand new laptop and I got a warning about it drawing too much power, which persisted when I plugged several other devices. I returned the hub and have been getting spammed by these emails ever since. That has made me very wary of buying anything from Amazon now without a good recommendation from someone I personally know.

Recently I bought and returned to amazon around 5 different USB SD card reader.

Turns out they all used the exact same USB hub/combo card reader chip.

This chip burns enough power at idle to heat up almost 30°C above ambient.

After enough testing I found out that on many motherboards, you can turn on USB power saving per port. This effectively get the device to consume almost nothing at idle.

But this only works on those ports. Anything indirect; for example apple usb-c to USB + HDMI dongle; the device would be burning power and heating up.

Same behavior on all three major operating systems. What matters is the motherboard ability to control power to a single USB port as far as I can tell.

Are you saying that the hub drew more power when more devices were plugged in (expected)? Or that the hub broke the USB-C port on your laptop, such that when you unplugged it, any device you plugged in directly thereafter also reported drawing too much power?

Hubs drawing too much power was an issue with USB-A hubs as well -- to mitigate this you want a hub that is independently powered (that is, has its own DC barrel plug and wall wart).

You can also find hubs that charge laptops (Thunderbolt 3/4, or USB-C PD, assuming you have a compatible laptop) although you want to be very careful about the choice of charger and cable since a short can brick just about anything that's not properly protected on the USB-C port (basically most non-Macs).

> without a good recommendation from someone I personally know.

I’ve always thought there’s a big opportunity here for principle component analysis or other dimension reduction. The reviews you see could be filtered down to people who have reviewed other things similarly to you, like how Netflix gives different ratings for the same show depending on what else you’ve watched.

It’s almost like establishing trust. If someone has rated that USB hub 5 stars, you probably don’t want their opinion on a restaurant either. It would also give a real incentive to leave honest reviews, which would help collect data from the massive group that currently just doesn’t care.

I’m not familiar with this, but how does a hub draw “too much power”? Wouldn’t it be limited by whatever the max output of the USB port is and not be able to draw more than that?

My guess would be either (1) the device asks for more than can be provided or (2) the device just draws more than can be provided and the host detects the voltage sag.

> Thanks to the Amazon review system

Why are you blaming Amazon? What would you change?

You probably know before online stores had their own review systems, it was full of fake review sites (still is) and fake forum product endorsements.

This is not a problem that's here "thanks to the Amazon review system".

If sellers didn't receive purchasers email addresses through Amazon, they wouldn't be able to pull back channel crap like this.

I’ve purchased a lot of products where printed advertisements for schemes like this were included in the box. I haven’t noticed the solicitations in my email - maybe I don’t read those emails because they look like spam?

Amazon must receive a ton of reports of stores doing shady things like this. I know I've sent some. They seemingly spend very little attention to these reports, because it's not like they have to care at all.

This thread is literally about them caring, tho.

I had a similar experience after writing a poor review for a down comforter. They offered to refund about 40% of the purchase price if I adjusted my review. With purchased items I've also gotten cards offering a freebie if you send them an email with your order # - some vendors are honest and just send the free item, but others want a (good) review before they send the bribe err gift.

Beside having your email, do they have your address or is that only amazon?

Else, and I know that its not worth your time, but couldn't you accept their request, change your review, receive the gift card, redeem it, and change review back with a short statement of what happened. I mean, as I understand it, what are they gonna do? (I they do have your address though, I would not play games either)

Yes. I got harassed by a seller for months both via emails and post for a 1 star review on amazon. It's actually pretty logical that they have your postal address since they need it for shipping.

> change review back with a short statement of what happened. I mean, as I understand it, what are they gonna do?

Your review will simply not pass amazon's moderation - they actively censor this stuff.

Talking about it in the review is annoyingly likely to get the review removed for being "off topic". You're supposed to report the merchant to amazon directly and only review the product.

> Beside having your email, do they have your address or is that only amazon?

Well, Amazon does not give out buyer e-mail addresses either, so the seller must've figured it out some other way (or via an Amazon bug).

Unless the item was fulfilled by Amazon, the seller gets your physical address (so they can ship out the item).

Like I said in other comment: this is all Amazon doing, and their inactivity towards reports of what clearly was, and is, bad practices.

Amazon basically became a rigged marketplace where those who thrive are the ones who can get away with a lot of things. From completely disregarding guidelines, TOS, targeted attacks to destroy competitors listings, you name it.

It's just like prisons, people go in and come out worst because that's the game that has to be played in order to survive.

The only one to blame is Amazon that promoted these practices by giving leverage to those who did it. With more revenue, more exposure, privileged access to Amazon account managers (yes, talking to a human is a privilege for an Amazon Seller).

Games without rules and referees degenerate into brawls.

Similarly, open markets require regulations, enforcement, fair and impartial judiciary (tort), and property rights.

Fraud and counterfeits spoil markets. Lowering trust. Increasing transaction costs. Poorly regulated Freedom Markets™ like eBay and Amazon are net negatives, even while a few thrive on the chaos.

Buying from Amazon used to be just as legit as buying from Best Buy, Circuit City or Walmart. They sold the same types of products, but Amazon with its no-sales-tax advantage usually offered better prices and more selection.

Then they got greedy and decided to turn the site into Aliexppress US.

> Then they got greedy and decided to turn the site into Aliexppress US.

Because physical retail is a single digit profit margin business. It might not even be worth their time anymore now that they have AWS and Prime Video.

Walmart’s market cap is $400B and they have to do a ton more work managing a customer facing business on top of all their warehouses and logistics and website.

Amazon has a 1.75T market cap, without even having to deal with physical stores and customer interactions liabilities that come with it. They already have to deal with all the negative PR of paying warehouse workers less than their other employees…even though they pay more than other companies for warehouse work.

I would be surprised if Amazon would bother entering retail if they had already had AWS and Prime Video. It might be worth the 15% commission as a platform though, but I suspect that’s why I see less and less “shipped and sold by Amazon.com” and more obfuscation of what is and is not coming directly from Amazon.

I disagree, Amazon has been pushing and growing Amazon Basics brand, among many others, leveraged by data from all the other sellers.

Remember that retail gives you a lot of cashflow, and Amazon only allows you to transfer part of your funds, and transfers are made every 2-3 weeks. They probably have more money sitting around then many banks.

Walmart has even more cash flow. It’s not worth much, compared to other business lines, according to the market.

At the end of the day, a sub 5% profit margin is still a sub 5% profit margin.

I don't know what you are talking about :-)

If you know exactly what you want and can find that from sellers on Aliexpress who actually know what they are selling,

and put that in clear english language on there, everything is fine. If there is any vagueness, which is not resolvable by

messaging/mail/chat, then I don't order.

When I ordered with the above conditions met, I never had any trouble. Also fast delivery by air to *.de.

edit: That was for electronic parts, boards, development kits, measuring equipment, and some tools so far.

Don't know about the other stuff on offer there, but I'd guess it would be the same.

The problem is the knowing and the sometimes horribly translated descriptions there,

which make it look like alien gibberish.

Apart from that I'm thinking it's mostly the same stuff, not even 'bootlegged', just directly from the source/ODM/OEM,

while the usual 'high-quality' stuff just has a different label on it, and it is the greed for that label/brand which enables

countless middlemen/upsellers/marketeers and their shady schemes.

This is even more so with taobao/jd. You need a proxy like superbuy but sometimes I'll find a product which costs X at the "root" on taobao/jd costs say 1.3X on aliexpress, 1.8X on eBay and 2*X on Amazon. Numbers can be even worse, of course.

For the cases i bothered to look up, i was looking at a 6x increase going from Alibaba to Amazon.

(been looking at automatic soap dispensers, fwiw - after hours of research however i gathered that all are trash and didn't bother to find out if was going to get lucky)

Getting stuff from Alibaba in single quantities though is very very difficult.

The joke used to be that Best Buy was just a showroom for Amazon. That is definitely no longer the case.

I'm genuinely grateful that Amazon has at least pulled those and other even smaller stores into an age of much easier online ordering and delivery.

Definitely. At the time, though, I was 100% convinced Amazon would just put them all out of business. Our choices would become Amazon or Walmart, depending on whether we wanted to have something right now. I'm glad I was wrong.

It's funny though, we were talking about this at dinner the other night. Both my wife and I are still a bit surprised that we'd trust Walmart quality over Amazon at this point. We don't buy anything from Amazon with the expectation that it'll last, or that it's even real - just things that we'll use lightly and nothing we'd eat (minus Prime Now for Whole Foods delivery now and then). Amazon feels like some weird amalgamation of online Walmart + Harbor Freight.

I mean... Aliexpress is Aliexpress US - Amazon is worse since you don't expect the product to be counterfeit, a knockoff or completely gamed reviews.

At least with aliexpress that's exactly what you expect, and exactly what you're paying for.

> Amazon doing, and their inactivity towards reports of what clearly was, and is, bad practices

Search for 1TB USB drive, look at the results with obviously scam products. This has been there for years. They do nothing for even the most blatant offenses.

Name an online marketplace that had good quality honest factual reviews before or after Amazon.

At their scale it is absolutely impossible to moderate and keep the problems away. The stacks are against them. Each seller has the incentive to try to game their own product reviews, while AMazon has to attempt to stay on top of the whole marketplace.

Then maybe regulators should put a stop to it, since we're figuring out that after a certain scale customer support, fraud, counterfeiting, abuse, etc just goes to shit.

No matter how much they paddle that AI will take over that part of the business, well it won't for a long, long time and we're not the ones that should be training them.

Maybe the concept "too big" should be brought to the table, to at least make them pay for the bad service.

OK, I generally agree with you about subjects like this. But let's take this one step further. What will the actual outcome of this be if we have deemed that Amazon is too big to be consumer-friendly.

1) Amazon drastically ramps up the burden of proof of real actual reviews, and rather than erring on the side of posting it ends up false-positively identifying customer reviews. HackerNews headline next week: "Amazon is censoring real customer reviews for products! Company no longer customer obsessed!"

2) Amazon dramatically cracks down on sellers, reducing overall inventory, and sucking up some real genuine sellers in the process. CNN headline: "Amazon destroying small family business sellers - hundreds reporting going out of business as they're being driven out of the market". Hackernews headline: "Amazon inventory down x%. I no longer go to Amazon anymore to find what I need because it's not available any more".

I could keep going.

My point is I don't think it's in any consumer's interest for Amazon to decrease their inventory, or crack down on reviews. And any increase in quality or human review of the products or reviews will only raise prices, which again, people don't want.

Remember - Amazon's stock price isn't based on their profits. Their profit margins are razor thin because they actually generally do pass on most cost savings down to customers.

It's incredible how people take completely for granted that there is a website with 1) Infinite selection, 2) Low prices (yes yes no longer the lowest but still fairly low), 3) Free shipping, in many cases same day or next day or 2-day.

And on top of that there is a completely hassle-free non-questions-asked return policy.

The cost of all this is this marketplace is incredibly attractive to unscrupulous sellers who will abuse it to list counterfit goods and spam fake reviews. And no matter how hard Amazon works on these the sellers can be just one step ahead.

Government regulation can't help here, it can only kill Amazon and make it ultimately less beneficial for consumers.

Costco reviews generally seem more legit.

Anything I can buy at Costco instead of Amazon, I do.

Costco has a minuscule inventory smaller than most corner stores.

If Costco is selling a blender, it's probably only selling a single one. The fact that it's in Costco's inventory in the first place is the review.

Costco.com’s inventory is larger than what is in store.

But yes, agree. Now we call it “curated”, but with Costco’s return policy, there’s an actual risk to them for stocking outright garbage, which is a huge value, even if I never return things.

If the cheating competitors don't do you in, Amazon will just copy your product anyway. No way to win.

blaming the game's owner for allowing the game to be gamed.

They designed it for themselves, and some rules are even worse for small successful businesses.

Amazon.de is sub-eBay in terms of bargain bin junk store vibe. It's mostly stuff direct from Alibaba with an own brand name slapped on it to get around having to compete for the buy box. I've actually started going back to eBay, Google Shopping and some independent web shops I know are good just to cut through the noise.

You should see the state of Amazon.se. It launched earlier this year in absolute shambles: product descriptions were whacked; many listed products couldn't even be purchased; the product reviews were imported from other Amazon sites which made them look suspicious; the pricing wasn't even competitive when factoring in shipping to Sweden, etc, etc. They have made some improvements but still haven't taken off and it's crazy they don't value quality that much on a new market. The bargain bin junk store feel is all over the place.

While I agree that Amazon.se looks like a clown shoes dumpster fire, all of Amazon’s properties have more and more devolved into looking like a Dollar Store website (or Wish re-skin if you prefer that).

I still quite like amazon.co.uk. It has pretty much everything, I've never had a fake product and I get same or next day delivery on most things.

Sadly, on contrary, I avoid amazon in UK as much as possible. I just had too many adventures. This includes being sent e.g. a fake product in a box of dimensions resembling the ordered expensive one (at least the refund is instant). Or long discussions turns-out-scamming sellers who "dispatch" products not giving any tracking information (finally getting a refund after weeks). The last straw were pretty often just bad quality products sold by sellers who are advertised as Amazon's "Top Choice", etc. Amazon has just became a cheap quality bazaar for me and if I need to spend time to cherry pick a possibly fine quality product, then, no, thank you.

I just try to search and order from local UK websites or stores. These often offer comparable or even better prices (esp. books), plus good contact with the seller and very often a better quality. Amazon just being either my last resort if I cannot buy a product in a local mom and pop store. With possibility of not even receiving a genuine product I prefer to buy, especially electronics, just directly in normal shops.

I use fakespot, plus I avoid anything not fulfilled by Amazon. Had no issues really with the UK business.

Amazon commingles all their merch when they're fulfilling a purchase, even when they're the seller.

Best to avoid buying any items sold both by Amazon and a FBA seller; they're nearly guaranteed to be commingled, running you the risk of getting a third party's FBA counterfeit. But that'll probably get rid of a large chunk of your shopping list.

>>Amazon commingles all their merch when they're fulfilling a purchase, even when they're the seller.

I've seen proof this happens in the US, I'm yet to find any that this happens in the UK as well.

Right, ok, that's pretty definitive then, thank you.

I have no idea why some people have such vastly different experiences shopping at Amazon UK. I've made 242 orders with them last year(pandemic, locked up in the house, don't judge), didn't have a single problem with any of those 242 orders. Few times I wanted to return something they just refunded me and I didn't even have to send it back. Compared to buying from anywhere else like Currys which is a shit show, I'd purchase from Amazon over anyone else.

> I've never had a fake product

I've accidentally bought a fake board game. We didn't know until we reached out to the manufacturer because the cardboard cutouts for coins / tokens / markers were all offset randomly. On one sheet white, unprinted cardboard was visible when we punched them out.

When we contacted the manufacturer, they plainly knew it was a fake, said we should return it to Amazon, and we did so. When we bought another from elsewhere, we did a side-by-side comparison before sending the fake back:

1. The box was slightly different in size. Not enough that you'd notice, but the box top on the fake was just a little harder to remove.

2. the token/marker printing was of poor quality. It was like they'd taken the misprints from a real run and were selling those.

3. The instruction manual was printed on different paper. It felt real enough, but was obviously different from the "real" one.

4. Some extra flyers and adverts were missing from the box vs the real one

MicroSD cards are a gamble too. Even buying from Amazon because they pool all their stock together so if one seller provides fakes you can randomly get a fake. I got a fake SanDisk 32GB card that was actually an 8GB card. I was really surprised that someone bothered to fake a 32GB card at the time because there was maybe a $20 price difference between 8 and 32GB at the time.

Flashback to 2010:

On MicroSD-Problems - https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022

From the samy guy, 30c3 - The Exploration and Exploitation of an SD Memory Card - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuX_ElPhWHs

Same video from source - https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5294_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201312291...

The worst thing about amazon.co.uk now days is that the search results are so polluted by knock-off and irrelevant products.

Even when Amazon has exactly the product you're searching for, they'll often bury it under a dozen vaguely related junk items (which sometimes don't match your search term at all). Presumably because those vendors have paid for elevated search placement?

> I've never had a fake product

Are you really certain about that? The fakes are so good sometimes I don't notice for a year or two. There are so many ways of faking different products, and the fakers are getting really really really good at making the product seem real.

Have you done a few hours of searching and testing for everything you've bought? This is what it takes, IMO, to feel some level of confidence in an Amazon (US) product being 'real'. The levels of suspicion never really go away either - since I've been duped by probably a dozen products at least, that have turned out to be fake, I'm highly suspicious of any Amazon purchase.

It's been a couple years since I bought anything from there. Too much stress worrying about authenticity to make it worth it.

As certain as I can be of any store purchase. Nothing I've bought from Amazon has been substandard quality and it's pretty much all lasted as well as I'd expect. I've had much better luck with Amazon than with local stores. If the fakes are literally indistinguishable, it's possible I've had some, but then I guess it makes little difference to me.

As far as research goes, if it's expensive, I put some research in if it's a product or brand I've never used before, but I never specifically look to see if it's a fake product on Amazon.

For reference, I spend about £5k a year at Amazon UK. Nearly all my experiences have been positive apart from the occasional damage in transit.

I use Amazon UK and have had very mixed experiences with finding and purchasing goods.

The site is increasingly swamped with low-quality goods sourced from AliBaba or AliExpress. This is easily verified by searching for a item and seeing the same product sold under a different "brand name" (with the same generic product photos). These "drop-shipping" businesses dominate many product categories.

Even with books, Amazon's print-on-demand service means that search results are swamped with "low-content or no content" titles (essentially notebooks, diaries, planners etc). These "no content" titles often slap an unrelated title on the cover for what is simply a empty notebook (e.g. "JavaScript notebook"). The keyword in the title is there to gain a higher position in Amazon's broken search.

The things described above are easily discovered online. YouTube has hundreds of "drop-shipping" videos and videos of publishing "no content" books. These videos are full of advice on how to manipulate Amazon listings using various techniques.

Quite simply, Amazon is now an untamed mess of an online store. But with enough customers (and growing) it is unlikely anything will change.

I'm with you on never having had a fake (at least, echo your 'sure as I could ever be') - closest was a Marantz microphone that curiously identifies as a Blue Snowball, but I suspect they're probably just both farmed out to the same place and got mixed up or it always says Blue, or they're exactly the same underneath the shell. They're in the same price bracket anyway so not really my loss or any reason to fake that.

What I have found though is that the quality of search results, the experience of using the site, has seriously deteriorated in the last two or three years. It's like AliExpress or eBay now.

I used to read other countries' Amazon users (e.g. .com) complain about this and think what are you talking about it's great, but yeah, now... I still get as good stuff from Amazon because that's what I buy, I just have to wade through a lot of crap to get it.

> Marantz microphone that curiously identifies as a Blue Snowball

If you don’t consider that a sign of a fake product, I don’t think you’re being objective. Fake products put significant effort into looking like real products, many times you need to take them apart to find the differences.

Some people just aren't concerned with brand names. If it looks and works like it's supposed to, and it didn't cost any more money, then what's the problem?

Certainly if it's 'really' a Blue Snowball rather than a Marantz MPM-1000U, I don't care, they're in the same price bracket from two respected brands. (I only chose between them on the basis that the Snowball was slightly more expensive at the time I ordered and aesthetically I preferred the Marantz. So really, if it were internally a Snowball and that was different, it would be a win?)

To be fair though it's not as clear as I was expecting, but I'm no expert so not really set up to do any proper testing, the room its in is probably acoustically awful anyway, etc. It's certainly not awful even if it isn't what it says it is, it's several steps up from the dirt cheap 'Tonor' branded and unashemedly 'Chinesium' thing I used before it.

The great thing about Amazon though is that after this thread I contacted support (way out of return period) and they've shipped a replacement. I'll see if it's the same; if it is, of course that doesn't prove anything, but I'll be very interested if it does seem (more - still wouldn't know for sure of course) real to see what the differences are in packaging/construction/printing etc.

Just to follow up on that, replacement arrived, ~this one identifies as 'USB Microphone'. Seems otherwise~ [edit: I mis-remembered which way around it was, they're both 'USB Microphone' on macOS, and both 'Blue Snowball' on Linux] identical, I think my assumption is still that both products are manufactured (genuinely) by the same factory, and the design even perhaps farmed out so they really are identical on the inside, but either way just flashed with the wrong ID.

Both of these two are identical inside too, same board revision even. (And not every penny pinched like you would if you were faking - gloss black solder mask, as well as on a second PCB whose only job is keeping wires tidy and displaying a silk screened revision number.)

[edit: Further to edit above, it's actually 'C-Media Electronics, Inc. Blue Snowball', and the main chip is this one: https://www.cmedia.com.tw/applications/microphone/CM6327A so presumably both microphones use it and the same assembly house (whether the same design or not) and the EEPROMs' manufacturer/product strings are either getting mixed up or all Blue, whether by mistake or assembler realised they could get paid double to flash once.]

Hm, is your thinking that it's unrelated to either and just clumsily faked by someone who fakes both?

That... yeah, good point. I don't know why that didn't occur to me before. (I was previously thinking they probably just genuninely use some same chips, or even both brands farm it out to the same shop, and both genuine microphones are the exactly same, just differently packaged.)

Just chiming in with basically the same experience: never had anything I could tell was fake, everything was pretty much what I expected for the price, and Amazon search is a complete and utter shitshow of uselessness.

For computer equipment, I shop NewEgg because their search rules. I wish there was a NewEgg for other stuff. I'm more than happy to pay more and wait a few days extra to have a search that doesn't suck.

Sadly, both NewEgg and BestBuy are "marketplaces" now, and amazon sellers have set up shop there too. They're smaller, so I hope there's a little better QA, but I'm not optimistic for their future

I just wanted to add to this --fakes can be near perfect in appearance. A number of years ago Black Diamond had to put out an advisory on one of their pieces of mountain climbing gear because someone was making an exact replica of their climbing hardware...but with substandard metal.

Everything matched, with laser cut serial numbers and everything. The only way they could ensure it was real was by material testing, or known purchase from an authorized dealer.

Years ago there was a decent chance amazon had the real thing, but now I'd avoid anything that can potentially kill you

Does it matter if it works for a year or two? While meanwhile in the age of planned obsolescence the originals don't work any longer, because of 'warranty period optimised design', or other artificial factors like no (security)-updates, for instance.

If the fake is almost real, does it really matter?

It definitely matters. Watch some of the teardowns of power adapters on YouTube: they look and work almost identically and you’d likely never tell the difference, but one is much more likely to set your house on fire if it malfunctions.

Yeah, I got some adapters from aliexpress seller that were basically re-passed burned down things with some major components obviously replaced (like the main high voltage capacitor) and everything essential from protection circuitry, to noise filtration stripped down and removed, fuse replaced by a wire, some components literally hanging by a thread (broken off part of PCB replaced just by non-isolated wires hanging in space).

Stuff my nightmares are made of now. Anyway, I always open all power adapters/supplies I buy from there, because my original education is EE, so I never used these. But the idea that some people are using such things is quite scary.

Not to poo poo on aliexpress itself. There are some exceptional quality sellers and products to be found there. You just have to know how to find them.

Mpow, mentioned as a culprit in the article, actually makes good chi-fi earbuds. They’re highly rated in terms of bang for your buck, and I’ve had good experience with them. But, if you’re not actively reading random chi-fi discord servers for recommendations, you’ll probably never see companies like that without them resorting to crazy amazon tactics.

Uch. That's pretty much why I never trust any other adapter than the one which came with my phone. It can burn your house down while really damaging your device.

Methinks if your house burned down, damage to some device is irrelevant.

If you care about getting the real deal instead of the cheap knock-off version, doesn't Amazon have marked official pages for those vendors?

Amazon Fulfillment can cause even that to go wrong.

https://www.redpoints.com/blog/amazon-commingled-inventory-m...

That's what the UL or CE mark is for

Unfortunately I can't comment below this point, in the thread I started.

You're making the point I'm making. While I don't (to the best of my knowledge) purchase counterfeit items, I don't pretend that certification is anything other than certification. Hopefully certification comes with standards, and aren't self-reporting... but that's not always the case.

Too bad so many of those marks are fake on Amazon.

Are you aware that at least CE is 'self certification' ?

Only when a case goes to court, it will be determined if the certification was rightful or not.

JFYI, there is CE and C E.

https://support.ce-check.eu/hc/en-us/articles/360008642600-H...

That's just a joke that arises from self-certifying 'CE', like 'QC passed' it's just a label that doesn't mean anything but makes some consumers feel good, just because you get used to seeing it and it looks like it must be good even if (or only if) you dont actually know what it means.

jaclaz, that's interesting, but Wikipedia alleges it to be somewhat of an urban legend:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_marking#%22China_Export%22

Disagree, because I've got a hand full of these from different brands in operation right now. One even from the major CPE-equipment manufacturer in Germany. I know because they looked 'fishy' to me when they arrived, and I researched into that.

I opend some of them non-destructively to check them out, and deemed them sufficient. They barely get warm at all.

Nonetheless I put them in some closed rack where they only could produce some stink, but no fire.

I'm too lazy to unplug them right now to upload photos to Imgur, or such, because it would disrupt some services.

Anyways, no urban legend. Just the usual bureaucratic disconnect from reality, saying otherwise.

Meanwhile another bureaucratic entity, the german customs really likes to hassle you because of exactly that sh..! :-)

edit: Some of them in continous operation for just over a decade, some others about 5 to 6 years, YMMV. (shrug)

First off it errodes the reputation of the real product. Fakes are never as good, and the real company will have to deal with people trying to return fakes as well as bad reviews.

I'd also say it absolutely matters depending on the class of product -since they are saving money somewhere; so by logic if the outside looks the same, they skimped on the insides.

Electronics can kill you, makeup can contain toxic chemicals, toys with lead, or parts that break too easy and hurt the user...

Not the least, fake books are just theft from the author, who probably isn't getting the best deal from their publisher in the first place. So only a shitty person would be cool knowing their book was just a really good fake.

Did it ever occur to you that some products are just generic, and the only thing the off-brands/off-labels skimped on is the marketing/advertisement, and maybe development costs? While meanwhile the brands themselves doing the same, because the marketing costs have to come from somewhere? Not to mention planned obsolescence...

Copyright infringement is not theft.

If you write a book, offer it for sale, I copy the book, offer it for sale, and someone buys the book from me who would otherwise have bought from you, that seems to me that I’ve stolen income from you in 3 steps instead of one.

If you design and sell a product without patenting it, and I copy the design and sell a competing product, have I stolen from you?

The only difference between the two scenarios is that one involves copyright infringement. Theft means a possession was taken. Potential income is not a possession. There are various ways to describe the harm ("damages" comes to mind) but "theft" isn't among them.

Well if you did patent it, it's stolen. The equivalent for books is copyright laws, so if the work is protected copyright then yes, you've stolen.

And theft is defined as stealing, which has "to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully" which applies fully here so...

You can nit pick definitions all day, but you'll find most people would consider this theft, as you're depriving the artist of the rights to their creation. I really feel people who want to argue the other way are a stain on this earth, because you're so happy to defend it...it's just mental gymnastics to a pathetic argument

Patents in their current incarnation are theft.

Lemme give an example of how I see this:

I have some idea to do something in a certain way, and because of that I declare it forbidden to everyone else to do it the same way, except they pay me something to be allowed to do it that way.

Wouldn't you think of something like F! How dare he/she/it/whatever?

It is almost as if the efforts by the RIAA et al ( framing copying as stealing, would you steal a car? ) have worked.

My comment is in the red.

> Theft means a possession was taken.

Usually, but not always, which is why theft of electricity is a thing.

Unlike ideas and other intangibles that are subject to trivial copying, electricity falls into the realm of the physical world. Also, theft of services is an established type of theft along with theft of property.

What's being stolen in theft of electricity? The electrons or the holes?

Service. This question "is a copy equivalent and trivial to create?" is a pretty good way to understand the line in the sand regarding what stuff is subject to copyright infringement versus theft. We have theft of property and theft of service. We do not have theft of trivially copyable stuff because we have copyright infringement instead for that case.

Paintings, manuscripts, etc. are subject to theft because they are nonfungible. The content itself is subject to copyright because the copies are fungible.

Words can be used as metaphor.

If you are buying for instance safety gear such as belay devices, then hell yeah it matters.

I haven't really had any issue in the USA either. I would say 99% of what I've bought was as described. I tend to not buy the first cheap thing I see though. Never got a bad drive, usb key, or kitchen gadget like these other comments are saying. I'm not saying it doesn't happen though. I have received some duds but I turned around and sent them back and left a bad review. I probably should be better about leaving good reviews though, that old human nature thing about being easier to complain than to congratulate is kind of true.

I ordered a pair of headsets three weeks ago, they still haven't shipped them. Been a long time since I got anything same day or even on the promised delivery date.

I live in Sweden and I really don’t get the hype for Amazon. Around here there are so many other web shops for electronics, books, clothes, etc, and many of them also offer free shipping. When I buy stuff from other countries I vastly prefer Ebay to Amazon.

Yup, the Swedish ecom market is too sophisticated for there to be any low hanging fruit for Amazon to pick. There are actors like Apotea.se (pharmacy) that have very low prices with next day delivery for free. And their UI is second to none.

That's interesting, because Sweden is a pretty small market, so it could really make sense to see some regional marketplaces pop up in America and be pretty successful. FB marketplace is good for big items locally already.

While lots of places offer free shipping, it's harder to find sites that offer free next day shipping (or offer same-day shipping). And harder still to find a site where you can by a cooking pan and a computer motherboard in the same purchase as well as buy your weekly groceries and have them delivered later today. Amazon wins through convenience.

This isn't Amazon.se specific, but I absolutely can't understand what Amazon has done to product descriptions. On June 21st they will start striping all HTML from descriptions. The only way to get a descent description will be to enter the Brand Registry then use the A+ Content system. Imagine how unreadable a huge number of descriptions are about to become. And that's if you can find it among all the recommendations and upsells.

They had a gameboy ripoff that with an English description would say something like "Can withstand a childs abuse" but the Swedish translation was "kan motstå barns våldtäkter" which translates into "can withstand being raped by children". Amazon.se is a joke

For all you out there that build websites targeting Europe: please allow us to disable machine translation. In germanic language speaking countries nearly all are fluent in English. Maybe not all of the elderly but if you want to do businesses with them, machine translation will not be good enough.

While I concur with that, I sometimes wonder which machine translations they used? Googles got better, Deepl even more so.

Maybe they should embed the latter as option for the languages it understands.

So they just ran their descriptions through an auto translator not even tuned for Swedish then published it without review. Classic.

Yes. There was a lot of rape. Rapeseed is an example where rape has a different meaning but in Sweden the words are most definite distinct and it littered the site by making the wrong pick… Looked extremely amateur. There were other examples too of course, as is the norm with machine translations.

I’m not even sure the initial launch looked as good as that Chinese site Wish…

Many descriptions on amazon.ca would cause the best spell check software to blow up. It's like they're not even trying. At least that way no one is hiding that it's all junk at this point anyway.

Sounds very similar to recently launched amazon.pl

Not to mention the UX of Amazon is straight from the 90s. Very difficult to navigate, Allegro (local equivalent of Amazon) is a LOT easier to use.

problem is they use bing translate /s

It's absolutely shocking India where startup competition is huge has no eBay.

Basically there's no way to buy anything in secondary market, yes OLX or Quikr etc... exist but they are limited to only people around you (in same city) and do not facilitate payments or logistics or even reviews.

Now someone can make their own website but product discovery is pain and buyers can't trust reviews on website owned by the single seller, neither can trust the refund will be honoured as you need Escrow to deal with the unknown sellers.

India has people who are interested in saving money and buying second hand tools/machines is an option yet it has no eBay or alternative as if startups in India have a blindspot.

For example, I live a town with population of 500K (200km away from Delhi) and while repairing my car, the mechanic told me he will go to Delhi and try getting the spare part from Junkyard owners.

Maybe guys from Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore don't have this problem but majority of Indian population still lives in small towns and villages where finding 1 used part at affordable price can save a business or medical equipment (life). What are the technical people in small towns are supposed to do? Run to Delhi and Mumbai each time you need a spare part?

Such a waste of human efforts, my mechanic could have instead bought it on eBay from a junkyard owner who is also a seller on ebay through courier if eBay like website existed.

Lemme give you another example, sometime back I was interested in a product from Mobil which only comes in 230L barrel packaging, I need only 2liters of this stuff and there were many sellers on eBay selling it in used Coke/Soda bottles, but I couldn't buy it because I am from India.

Similarly, our junkyards are filled with useful servos, PLCs etc..., linear rails, valves but it's hard to find buyers for the junkyard owners because there's no online marketplace for this

India imports millions of tons of waste from foreign countries yet the stuff that's harvested from it has very inefficient market.

This is holding back innovation as you can build lots of cool things from the used machinery/tools which cost wayyy less than the new stuff.

As you briefly hinted - this primarily because of shipping logistics. Flipkart and Amazon are successful because of solving for that.

For eBay kind of model where the seller has to pack and ship items themselves, it would be a nightmare. The govt postal service is highly inefficient and the private players are not organized for door to door logistics.

Try shipping few metal parts weighing 1Kg+ yourself to any random address to understand perhaps that is the most difficult part of the problem.

Even if we ignore the high shipping charges for relatively low value products, scammers, fraudulent sellers, the returns if receiver not available etc.

> For eBay kind of model where the seller has to pack and ship items themselves, it would be a nightmare. The govt postal service is highly inefficient and the private players are not organized for door to door logistics.

Amazon doesn't package and ship your items if it weighs over 30kg, you've to fulfill orders on your own if it's larger than 30kg.

>Try shipping few metal parts weighing 1Kg+ yourself to any random address to understand perhaps that is the most difficult part of the problem.

Not true! India has changed. I've shipped over 300kg per shipment no problem. I've a business of shipping industrial parts and we regularly ship median weight of 50kg

I am not sure how old was your experience, leave the government services. We ship with delhivery and safe express

Who are you shipping with? And when did you try? Today you can easily get the shipping rates we are getting by signing up for Delhivery's business account the more you ship the cheaper it becomes but man we are no longer living in dark ages of IndiaPost parcel times anymore

> I've a business of shipping industrial parts and we regularly ship median weight of 50kg

There's the crux. Ebay is not about regular e-commerce retailer, but it is about avg next door Joe selling surplus items that they have. That's the scenario you painted.

These avg Joe will not have 'Delhivery accounts' to ship. EBay is for infrequent non traditional online sellers.

I have friends who have their own e-commerce shopify storefronts, and you are absolutely right they have a hassel free shipping experience (more or less), but I know that they in their dreams will not use eBay if it was there in India.

>These avg Joe will not have 'Delhivery accounts' to ship. EBay is for infrequent non traditional online sellers.

Did you ever try? A lot of web shops are being run in India by average Joe now, sometimes take a look at Google shopping tab.

Signing up for delivery business account is not smth you need much for, anyone can sign-up and start today.

Okay so you don't want to sign up for Delhivery account, sign up for ShipRocket (it's just an account sign-up like any website). Upload your shipment dimension and they'll arrange pickup and deliver your goods.

>but I know that they in their dreams will not use eBay if it was there in India.

They'll depending on what they are selling if they are selling consumer goods, they can sign up with Amazon but if they are selling smth more niche, they'll benefit greatly from product discovery that comes with a website like eBay, unless they've a recognizable brand and enough money to spend on advertisement and marketing a guy with an eBay account can get a lot of sales.

Honestly most guys will will not be shipping 50kg item from get go. To ship small 1 or 2 kg item they can approach nearest courier service and if they've a few of these Packets, courier offers pickup from your premise.

For small packets, price variation among different courier providers isn't much to fuss about. Only at higher weight levels, the delhivery/safe express standout from the competition.

So here's the process:

1. Sign up for ShipRocket

2. Pack your goods and wait for it to be picked up and delivered

How can we make it easier than this? Next step is only that a courier company reads your mind and picksup unpacked goods, pack it and deliver it to customers using teleportation. There isn't room for making it easier than this, just saying.

A person who can't be bothered to do is, has any place in business? What he deserves to make money for if he can't given do this.

I am a guy from a small city near Delhi with not much resources and I still manage to ship goods and make good money that I left my job, if I can do it, anyone can.

Thanks for this detailed reply. Much appreciated because I learned a thing or two.

> Did you ever try?

No, not Delhivery kind of specialised courier. But in USA I was eBay user. I was an ordinary bloke with 9-5 job, and used to sell excess stuff (old gadget which I want to upgrade from), shipping charges were major part of the transaction and my endeavour was to minimize it - ended up using US postal service quite a few times.

>Delhivery kind of specialised courier.

Here I am talking about the domestic courier service not shipping to US for international shipping I agree we are still behind.

I also have export import business where I sell Chinese goods into US and India.

Many times in small towns Amazon routes its fullfiled by Amazon shipments to Delhivery.

Hardly any ecomerce service is using India Post now, most small packets are through XpressBees and Delhivery. Rest are through Amazon and Flipkarts own logistics like ATS and Ekart respectively

> For example, I live a town with population of 500K (200km away from Delhi) and while repairing my car, the mechanic told me he will go to Delhi and try getting the spare part from Junkyard owners.

> Maybe guys from Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore don't have this problem but majority of Indian population still lives in small towns and villages where finding 1 used part at affordable price can save a business or medical equipment (life). What are the technical people in small towns are supposed to do? Run to Delhi and Mumbai each time you need a spare part?

> Such a waste of human efforts, my mechanic could have instead bought it on eBay from a junkyard owner who is also a seller on ebay through courier if eBay like website existed.

Ebay doesn't handle this well in the US either. I would love to use ebay as a junkyard metasearch engine.

>Ebay doesn't handle this well in the US either. I would love to use ebay as a junkyard metasearch engine.

But you can find people who scavenge junkyards and are listed as sellers on eBay who do sell used bench grinder (maybe after restoring them!?), Induction motors, industrial brushless motors etc... In India even that is also not easy to find.

I am still puzzled at Amazon's decision to quit China, they did so well exactly in those small town markets, where Taobao, and Jingdong did not venture.

Their service with mostly wholly owned logistic was considered superior.

Yeaa Amazon here is best in small towns of India. In my town they've bought a warehouse at Industrial area and their trucks arrive before 7am.

I place order before 2pm and my orders arrive at my desk next day before 11am, arrives in my town at 7am.

What's stopping someone from building ebay for India? Why hasn't ebay done that?

We can say startups didn't bother with it because eBay India was already operating in market before startup culture was even here in India.

Back in time eBay was operating in Indian market and eBay was successful as the payment service used on eBay was PayPal, buyers had protection in India which they couldn't get with any other local website as online payment infrastructure was in dark ages in India at that time.

After that India rapidly grew in e-commerce and payment platforms rapidly developed (now they are at par with western ones or we can say even better and payment regulations also improved a lot). Now logistics has also improved a lot, so we can receive goods in just 1 or 2 days in any part of the country. We've new expressways, freight corridors, capacity expanding rapidly so now even more businesses is possible in India yet we are leaving the obvious one out. Where are all my Indian executives, investors, guys from IITs are doing? Why they aren't working on this?

Then Flipkart buys eBay India and shuts it down.

And now there exists market vaccum. Everyone is looking at each other, no startup founder doing anything about it. Existence of eBay alternative will add great efficiency to India market, reduce its CO2 footprint as well when used products find buyer instead of destroying and remelting them.

What is Flipkart and why would it shut eBay India down if it's (as it certainly sounds and I would expect) such a massive, ripe, profitable market?

Also one key thing is that Flipkart only saw eBay as a threat that could be bought by competition and eBay was a known brand and nearly every online person in India knew about it.

Just to remove this possibility of being used as a weapon in competition's hand, they killed it.

They certainly didn't understand the whole use case of eBay like website but killed it because it was possible to use it for competition in consumer goods space considering it had many things that were being sold on Flipkart too

Flipkart is an Indian e-commerce VC funded giant like Amazon, it's nearly same just that it operates only in india.

Flipkart has a history of buying and shutting down businesses.

flipkart is actually walmart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipkart ( Owner Walmart (77%), )

so why is nobody starting a new one?

Thats indeed interesting. Do you know why this is the case?

Yes, I think it's simply because those who have ability to make it happen have never needed anything to buy used (considering all startups founders in India are from software field and rich enough to buy everything new or they live in a big city where they don't have this problem, they can drive to near junkyard or market and find nearly everything)

Okay I am only guessing, the historic reason is listed in another subcomment on my original post.

It happened so fast too. I'm in Finland but used to buy from a.de on a regular basis because there was no VAT, shipping was sensible, and often the prices were much better than local markup (which is infamously bad in Finland), especially on stuff like video games.

Sometime in the past few years something changed though. Shipping prices went up. Prices on name brand goods started climbing up too, sometimes higher than I pay locally even. Savings basically disappeared so I stopped bothering 90% of the time.

Then the flood came. IG without the international competition, the knockoff and counterfeit and aliexpress sellers saw an opportunity and absolutely flooded the site. Now you can't find a name brand fucking anything unless you explicitly search for it, and more often than not it's out of stock. It will sell you a million suspiciously cheap knockoffs with obviously fake brand names, often the same knockoff under dozens of different names and prices.

It really is basically just a shit overpriced Wish now, and it is baffling to me that Amazon have seemingly just allowed this to happen.

Amazon Canada is turning into a Wish/Aliexpress clone too. If you get commonly branded items like detergent, soap, chips etc, you will be okay. But if you order stuff like weight lifting equipment, bedsheets, socks etc, the product descriptions have lots of false info which you will realize when you receive the item. Bedsheets with Egyptian cotton in description turn out to be 100% polyester, merino wool socks turn out to ordinary wool and so on.

Yeah it's crazy how QUICKLY amazon.ca turned into a flea market. It was getting bad for a few years now but until recentlu you could at rely on it for some essential/basic electronics.

But I had a hard time getting a "reputable" USB-C Cable a few weeks ago, & all of them were basically obviously "too good to be true" clone cables from generic brands that you know won't actually work. Getting good cables/electronics for a lot cheaper was what got me into Amazon in the first place but now I'd rather buy everything from best buy or Walmart and avoid a huge headache. Everything from good brands has been perpetually out of stock or outright unavailable anymore.

Appliances are somehow even worse, like the last few things I've bought there were outright unsafe and almost always had misleading listings/pictures. I mean at least on Aliexpress you pretty much know what you will get, and (good) stores are usually honest about their products.

(I'm not sure if it's still the case but for almost the entirety of 2020 Amazon support was only available through emails that could take 48h to get a reply to, apparently because of coronavirus (?? Isn't chat pretty much perfect for remote work) so good luck even getting a refund especially for less expensive items that aren't worth a few days of back and forth)

I've used their live chat a bunch of times in 2020... They just hide it behind a bunch of hurdles in their support centre since they want to promote self-help.

I go to AliExpress. No point in me paying for some middleman to order crap from China for me.

The point is you can get it the next day on Prime. You're paying for availability (between 1.8x, 2.2x markup), and ease of sending a product back should it not match your expectations.

Edit: also, big brands like Aukey have stock available next to you, so there's only one middle-man (Amazon), and it handles the logistics, so it's not like it's doing nothing…

I recently moved to Spain from Canada, and have pretty much bought everything on AliExpress. They’re making a big push into Spain and most things are available with 10 day delivery. It’s not Amazon prime quick, but it’s worth it for the savings. AliExpress would take 2-3 months to get to Canada.

And you also have some products located in EU and ES warehouses that arrive very quickly. They have this "AliExpress Plaza" which is products located in Spain .

You know? I don't get your obsession with same/next-day delivery. Besides that, my first shopping on Aliexpress involved some microcontroller boards which I've ordered between 3 and 4AM in my local german time, after long searching. Clicked on some fast delivery option for a dozen EURos more, because it didn't matter, compared to what they would have cost elsewhere. Went to bed, next day passed with no thought about delivery, because I expected it to be about 3 days at best, probably a week. Then the next noon the postman rang my bell. That was unexepected. Shenzen->Hamburg in about 30hrs. And no, wasn't local fulfilment. Got all the stamps from customs, and whatnot else. I'd say that is fast enough, even EXCELLENT!

I have a surprise for you if you think AliExpress sellers are not middlemen. Even the local Taobao, JD, and Pinduoduo are mostly professional sellers. D2C is on the rise, but still relatively rare in China. Ecommerce is extremely competitive and specialized here.

Can you expand in how the middlemen work in China in regards to factories and the platforms?

You go to a company saying "we sell your wares on Amazon.com," and sign a contract. Your goods come in from one end, cash comes out on another.

Usually that's all

If the guy sucks, you go to another one.

You can see a company called Ugreen, which ended up with multiple "official stores" on online marketplaces this way.

Contract enforcement in China is of course non-existent. It's good if you manage to get a prominent handle for your own brand, in worst case somebody else can do it for you!

I know a man who regularly have to smack pretender "official stores" of his brand few times a year.

This also works the other way around, somebody with a vicious lawyer can coerce Alibaba, or JD into handing your (likely well doing) online store to them on a claim that you don't own your own brand name.

Factories aren't on Ali. English speaking businesses that but from factories are.

Then it's at least one middleman less.

But if you go to the manufacturer directly, you will have to buy in bulk.

And in the case of Alibaba, be registered as a business, not an individual.

What I'm paying for with Amazon (compared to Aliexpress) is easier return/refunds.

The only reason I don't is Prime. When I need something, it's usually in an ASAP timeframe. I'm fairly convinced that Prime is actually what keeps Amazon in business.

AWS and other digital offerings’ profit margins are what Amazon’s valuations are based on.

Otherwise, they are not that different from most other big retailers.

Yeah. The thing is some people think they can buy non- crap from china there. And it is getting really difficult even if you're ready to pay extra.

Having moved to Spain from UK I have noticed amazon.es worse than amazon.co.uk in numerous ways. Continually nags me on checkout to sign up for 'student prime' for which I would not be eligible anyway. Continually tries to offer its own exchange rate to GBP on checkout. The range is significantly less and most categories are dominated by bear identical products under throwaway brands. Definite bargain basement feels.

I always used to get 'student prime' nags on UK amazon, until I got prime a few months back.

Even though I am not a citizen of Germany I buy a lot of stuff from German e-shops, because they are of high quality, faster and often cheaper than our own (Slovakia). Amazon.de though is a horrible mess, one time sending us an order twice, another time not telling the truth in description... we don't shop there anymore.

I never had any bad experiences with Amazon.de, actually. Though I do watch out to only buy genuine stuff and try to avoid off-brand. I buy stuff quite regularly too.

That's impossible, to only buy genuine stuff there. Thanks to inventory mingling you get the fake products even for legitimate listings of genuine products.

Germany has so many other good online shops that it's for most products really easy to cut Amazon out and avoid that problem.

How is FBAs co-mingling even legal?

It is legally not much different from just-in-time sourcing, I think.

Customer orders X from seller A, A buys X1 from seller B, then A gives X1 to customer. Meanwhile B buys X2 from A.

Sellers can of course opt out of this scheme.

It's quite different. At least with JIT sourcing, you know that a vendor has a given approved source(s) given an effective date. Everything is traceable.

With FBA, you could have gotten counterfeit goods or a return from another customer where they've sent only the box and something that weighs the same (or a broken item). Amazon throws away the receipts (it'd be a nightmare to handle so they just... don't).

Why is Amazon not on the hook for this?

> Amazon throws away the receipts (it'd be a nightmare to handle so they just... don't).

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Amazon does keep track on where a given unit came from so that it is traceable to the original source, and at least in Europe invoices are issued for the inventory supplies between the sellers (these are documented at https://sellercentral-europe.amazon.com/gp/help/help-page.ht... - may not be public).

My experience with Amazon Australia is the same, literally identical products on eBay for 25-75% less, cheaper shipping, faster delivery.

An example from pricing something up earlier this week, identical leveling casters, made in china and sold under different brand names, but with the same specs and product code

Aliexpress: $41, Free postage, Est delivery 17/6

Ebay: $62, Free postage, Est delivery 2/6 - 7/6

Amazon.com.au: $125, $35 Delivery, Est delivery 10/6

Maybe it’s just me but .de also feels like bigger brands are abandoning Amazon. This is also why all the junk is placed even more prominent.

I have some points to use, so I tried to find an espresso dosing funnel on Amazon. This is a metal ring that sits onto of the espresso basket to make grind less messy.

It's shifting through loads of absolute trash.

* Many with "product tolerances may be 1cm to 3cm off". This is a device that's about 2inch (58mm). 3cm is half the width. Perhaps they mean millimeter....

* Magnetic and non-magnetic ones mixed together. Seller even communicates they have mixed stock and will not guarantee which one you get. I want the magnetic one.

* Misleading claims on nearly every description to suggest the product has features of much more expensive funnels.

I'm only willing to tolerate it because I don't actually need this item and I can get it for free from Amazon. But...it's getting to the point where I might as well pay more and wait to get it from a reputable seller.

My main gripe with Amazon right now: There should be a big red sign saying that a product ships all the way from from China. I only learn about that fact after I've paid for the order. It can take 5-6 weeks waiting for something to circumnavigate the globe to reach my house!

In every order I've ever placed there has been an estimated delivery date and, in my experience, they're accurate. How does your experience differ? Is the date missing? Does it change after checkout?

> there has been an estimated delivery date

I didn't even know there is an estimation. I just assume it will ship within 7 days. The vast bulk of my orders all arrived in 7 days (sometimes even shorter). But I got caught out with some orders where it shipped all the way from China, and I only learned about that after buying them (by visiting the 'track package' page).

I'm curious if you're seeing a different page than I am... perhaps you order on mobile a lot or something? It is very prominent:

https://d2bvhe78se1grn.cloudfront.net/optimized/2X/a/a0a8385...

Oh thanks for pointing that out. To be honest, I never pay attention to that. But I will give it plenty of attention from now on, because I'm very impatient and hate waiting 4-5 weeks for something!

It's interesting how it varies across countries. In the UK Amazon is great - good options, decent quality, fast delivery (next day with Prime, sometimes even same day). It's much better than the alternatives in my experience.

Lots of fake items too.

About a few months ago, most guitar items in Amazon.de were straight up forgeries at a smaller price, unless the Amazon Seller was a famous German music store. Those items also were on top of search.

I have some internal contacts at Amazon and passed it to someone internally, and it seems to have been solved, but there is still lots of forgery in others areas.

It's the same at Amazon Canada. If you want name brands, particularly for electronics, you have to go elsewhere. The Amazon selection is straight out of Wish or Aliexpress or DealExtreme (does that site still exist?)

Yeah, it's mostly just aliexpress but with a 100 to 200% price mark-up.

Be careful, even their books are flammable (/s)

Not sure why your comment is hidden I appreciate it

Not sure why people hate on eBay, it's a better platform for buying (and selling) if you're at least a little careful.

Amazon's first choices are always garbage, have to sort through a lot of it, make sure you're buying from the right seller (and even then you could get a fake) and actually read the reviews (1 star, 2-3 stars and 5 stars, preferably) so you know what you're buying. But overall, it's alright.

While I go to eBay for items I can't find on Amazon, Amazon is my go to place because they will precalculate and precharge "import fees deposit", which covers both customs tax and VAT, and will not double charge VAT on me (I am in a non-EU European country). This also helps avoid "customs processing" fee some couriers charge locally (at 30€ for DHL or 40€ for FedEx, fast shipping smaller, cheaper items balloons quite quickly: UPS has at least stopped charging this lately).

I've really been converted back to eBay. I mostly buy stuff for doing product prototyping, and it's way easier to get materials and light industrial type stuff off of eBay.

Ebay is pretty good. But I wish their filtering options where even more sophisticated. For example, as in living in the EU it would be helpful to see listings only from the EU (no need to worry about customs clearance then).

I think that option does exist, showing only items located in country, eu or world

The option I see says Europe, which would include European countries that are not part of the EU (e.g. UK), so customs clearance would still be needed. It helps, but it's not granular enough for this particular case.

eBay.de now got that. They took a while (e.g. temporarily the adjusted it to "EU & UK", instead of taking UK out of the filter), but now it has a filter for European Union. But the various country-variants of eBay are somewhat separate, so in other countries you might see different UI.

I don't have this option. I have to select all EU countries if I want to filter. Helps with my geography knowledge, though.

I wish Ebay had the same interface as https://reverb.com/ , which is nice, but is for music-instruments only and the prices are a bit too high.

The best filtering system I know of is https://www.prisjakt.nu/ (only in Swedish though)

I also think eBay's better for the cheap AliExpress stuff. Simple geographical filter gives me UK-based stock that won't take long to arrive (which AliExpresss often doesn't have), and what's left is cheaper than Amazon as well as quicker to sort through, with reliable sellers.

eBay cleaned up its act and cracked down on shady sellers. Amazon did the exact opposite, and is now worse than eBay was as it worst.

The Amazon model makes a lot more sense to me: compare products, and then either just buy it or narrow in on a seller.

eBay forces me to simultaneously compare different products across different sellers. It's a nightmare to keep track of the differences and pros/cons of each listing.

eBay's product search is also miles better than Amazon's.

I really don't know what happened to Amazon's product search, but it's almost entirely useless unless you search something super specific, and even then Google will actually give you better results.

I just tried to login into amazon.co.uk to buy some stuff. I can't get 2FA notification on my phone and in order to see the recovery page for "I don't have access to my Two-Step verification" I need 2FA........

a) usually, when you set up 2fa you get a set of 'recovery codes' for this exact situation - do you not have those? b) usually, there's an option to authenticate via SMS or reset your 2FA via email - does Amazon not offer any alternative? Ultimately, though, you need to exercise care when setting up 2fa - make sure the device you use is one that you're going to have around for a while, or you have a decent way of migrating to a newer device if necessary.

I didn't not set up 2FA, it was forced on me. The problem is that Amazon wants to send a notification, not a SMS or something else. I can't pick an alternative.

If I don't have a smartphone i'm screwed. https://postimg.cc/LJ6KVgZr

Never use 2FA alone. You always need a 3rd factor in case you lose one of the others which is more likely than losing a single password. I don't know why websites don't enforce this.

In case of TOTP one way of doing that is to scan the QR code on two devices. Many services only allow 1 MFA hardware/virtual device (I'm looking at you, AWS...)

Pulled from amazon.com, because amazon.de still sells their products.

There's no reason not to assume that AUKEY isn't using the same tactics on international sites

Many of the reviews are taken directly from amazon.com ---- Danielle Schenk Great product highly recommend 5.0 von 5 Rezension aus den Vereinigten Staaten vom 4. April 2019 Verifizierter Kauf These headphones last all day for my husband who works at an oil plant. There noise cancelling is amazing so he can listen to music while protecting his ears. Plus they look like earplugs so he doesn't get fussed at! Great product ----

So it's safe to assume that Amazon has absolutely no issue with this, unless there's a lawsuit threatening them.

They show up on Amazon.com too, for me.

I stopped purchasing from Amazon years ago. I used to have a phase where I was a really good customer, back in the 2005-2012. It felt trashy back then as well, but in a good sense. These days, Amazon is full of faked reviews, duplicate products with vast prize difference, very bad product description quality, and all the things you dont want from a reseller. Granted, for a while, we were willing to accept a certain sloppy style in exchange for the pricing, but this treshold has been crossed long ago. Me perceiving Amazon as complete trash has even spilled over into other offerings. I will not touch Alexa (for various reasons), and I am definitely not going to use their video stuff. I dont want to be customer of a company that has so little standards.

A close relative once had a pretty good business hosted on eBay. (I occasionally helped with computer stuff.) Robust enough for a large garage full of inventory and my aunt and uncle to quit their day jobs.

eBay's stewardship of the marketplace started bad and then steadily got worse.

Just fighting the search results, where legit products were buried under SEO and copycats, became a full time job. A little bit of jostling, that's just healthy competition, same as it ever was.

But when legit business has to cheat just to stay afloat, the market's broken.

Eventually, it just wasn't worth the bother.

I just canceled my Ebay account a couple days ago (and rarely buy anything from Amazon any more). Ebay and Amazon are victims of their own "success." Everyone understands what they're doing wrong, and exactly when they went astray, but they don't seem to be doing anything about it. Ebay and Amazon continue to strive to be all things to all people selling and buying online, and won't fix the problems we can all plainly see. I note that other apps/services like Etsy or Shopify or Reverb are filling in the gaps left behind from this mentality. I hope these second-tier apps continue to attract more disillusioned people from the first tier, but stay focused on what has made them successful so far.

I mostly agree with your comment. However, dont get me started on Etsy. This is probably likely due to my location/language, but the first and last time I looked at Etsy, every product description was autotranslated with Google Translate into my native tung, and there was no obvious option to disable this behaviour. In a sense, Etsy gave me a glimpse into the grim future of internationalisation. That experience was even worse then some Amazon product descriptions. I really wondered what sort of customer would be willing to strike a deal based on that presentation. But I gather people are mostly looking at photos these days. In a world of icons and pictures, proper text is probably on the way out.

Same here, I used to get multiple Amazon packages per week, now I try to avoid them. The only reason I buy from them now is to take advantage of their ultra lax return policies.

It wasn’t just Amazon that changed though. The proliferation of easier payment options (Apple/Google Pay, PayPal) and availability of one-touch credit card autofill on other websites eroded their moat, at least in my case.

I think your problem is arising from your approach to it. It sounds like you see it as a less regulated version of shop, rather than a more regulated version of eBay.

In a shop, you might buy the cheapest option, and be fairly confident it will work.

You wouldn’t, or at least shouldn’t do that on ebay.

It’s the same on amazon

Nah. Where I live, eBay is a synonym for buying used stuff. I know thats not quite true, but this is how eBay was conceived, and is still perceived around here. We have a more local service for that, which is fine for finding something which doesnt need to be new... But at least a few years ago, there was a clear difference between amazon.de and say willhaben.at :-) Maybe that has changed even more, I wouldn't know. I basically gave up on looking up stuff on amazon.

I think the point is that it didn’t used to be like this, but at some point it changed. Probably due to the addition of the “Marketplace”.

There is a certain level of confidence to be gained from handling a product that lose with online products.

Surprised that they had to resort to fake reviews considering the quality of products they sold. What a rat race.

"Quality means doing it right when no one is looking." -Henry Ford

I very much doubt they did marketing by themselves.

In China, it's usually outsourced to specialist Amazon wizards, people who are kind of in rank with "SEO consultants."

I think you comment is underrated.

It's not just China, everywhere I look I see companies partnering with shoddy marketing/SEO 'consultants'. They are rarely transparent about their tactics, and often resort to click farms, fake reviews, keyword stuffing etc. The company doesn't understand the risk to their brand, because they don't understand what the consultant is doing in the first place.

The problem here is, I guess, that these tactics do actually work on the short term. So the consultant gets paid, the team reaches their targets and the manager gets promoted.

By the time eBay, or any other platform supplier, implies sanctions (and rightfully so, imo) the 'consultant' is long gone, and everybody loses.

> The problem here is, I guess, that these tactics do actually work on the short term.

Let's be honest: these tactics work over the long term. When they blow up, you just start again with a new name. Use the same consultant if the last one was good, a better one if a friend of yours did better than you did.

> everybody loses

well, except for the consultant! And the business which made some sales. So it's only the customer losing...

And their competitors who decided to play fair.

Of course the company knew about the fraud. The fact they outsourced the actual work to a third party just means they can claim plausible deniability.

If they knew, they're guilty of fraud. If they didn't, they're guilty of incompetence.

Either way they should be judged/policed by their actions rather than their intent, because intent is too hard to prove or disprove.

Agreed, Aukey is actually a good quality brand I like to buy since they appeared on amazon.fr, along with Ugreen and a few others. I don't know why they let their image be damaged like that, that's so not needed.

Maybe because your opinion was shaped by their efforts. Perhaps maybe you would’ve bought from Anker instead? Perhaps they were able to charge you $30.99 instead of $10.99 after they faked the reviews.

Aukey is usually cheaper than Anker in my experience. That's why people buy from them, it's Anker-like quality at a cheaper price.

I was recently shopping for a USB hub, and Anker and Aukey had what appeared to be the exact same offering with different branding. It made me believe that they use the same OEM, but I'm not sure whether that's actually the case since I'm not familiar with their engineering and manufacturing processes.

I have only ever heard good things about Anker but their premium price has kept me from purchasing them. I bought Aukey several times because they were considerably cheaper than Anker.

I was and still am impressed with their quality and with their support so I have continued to buy their products.

I really like their now outdated PA-U32 USB power supply, it was a great value for the money and I probably have a half dozen or more.

I think all of my USB powerbanks are Aukey and I have been happy with each.

Probably because everybody else was doing it and they were losing out

Rampow, one of their main competitors does exactly the same thing (giving out gift cards for goods reviews) so maybe it’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.

My biggest gripe with Amazon is its search.

For a company that initially was a searchengine (A9 if i recall right, still being used for the site) the search and filter options aren't worthily described if you use the word bad.

I mean, what else besides being able to filter for brands and maybe price is there?

Cue every purchase being research into the fundamentals of the thing you need, together with not being able to trust reviews.

Regarding the reviews, i've turned to only looking at "most critical" reviews - at least with those i'm kinda quickly able to differ between "logistics service dun f'up" and "this thing has so many issues it's not even funny anymore".

Edit to add: my purchases on AMZN are down by like 90% - replacing my online shopping by going to local (hardware) stores mostly

I've ranted about this in the past. What makes me a little crazy is how freaking obvious this problem is, yet Amazon won't fix it. It must be what they want, otherwise they'd change it. Right? Am I taking crazy pills here? I just wrap my head around how they think that their god-awful search and filtering is helping them. I am also buying everything I can from brick-and-mortar these days.

It’s not you, it is shit. My assumption is that they want it that way so they can control what you see more easily. I reckon Google is the same

I think they have marginally improved though. I could be wrong about this, but I think that you couldn’t filter by specific price until a few years ago.

> I mean, what else besides being able to filter for brands and maybe price is there?

So many things. Take a look at NewEgg's search. Even when I search for specific model numbers on Amazon I have to wade through irrelevant results.

Just to clarify, we're on the same page here - with "there" i meant "on Amazon"...

My biggest gripe is related: filtering doesn't work. I was just looking for a small video projector today. I had specified a maximum price and some specs. The results were full of items that were up to 3x the maximum price, clearly didn't meet the specs, or weren't even video projectors (usually accessories). This seems so incredibly central to the shopping experience that they'd try to get it right, but apparently they feel it's much more important to get products from their favorite vendors in front of many eyeballs as possible. Somebody should really investigate how one becomes a favorite vendor, because it seems shady AF. My best guess for what happened to Aukey and Mpow is that they stopped paying the protection money.

They should add a country of origin filter (or be mandated by law to do this), so customers can easily filter out all crap from unethical countries.

edit: also drop shipping filter would be helpful.

If the product isn't Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA), there is probably no way to know if it is drop shipped or not. Some of them state the country it will be shipped from, but I'm not sure that is a requirement, and it could still be drop shipped from inside the country.

I think this is a great regulatory omission. Companies like Amazon should be required to publish country of origin information and give consumer tools to help make ethical choices. So far I only saw this on clothes, perhaps because of the sweatshop outrage, but it should be shown on all products.

If we also cannot ban trade with countries that allow slave labour, then we should at least require producers to include information about what kind of environment their workers are coming from.

I suspect if this law would come in, Amazon would make it a mandatory box for sellers to fill, and 9/10 they’d just lie and Amazon probably wouldn’t chase it up.

My cynical view is that most people don't care about country of origin, and in many cases if they do their desire for the product will override their ethical stance most of the time.