1 down, 90% of the remaining marketplace sellers to go? Marketplace quality is dollar store bargain bin gambling at this point.
It's easy to see why this is happening too. Internal voices in fraud are drowned out by voices in growth who exclaim about the hit to revenue and conversion rate.
It's similar to eBay where sellers try to jam as many keywords as possible into the title. Obviously working around massive limitations in discoverability.
I hate the keyword stuffing but also discovered that when you are shopping and only have a faint understanding of what keywords to search for, the stuffing often helps...
> sellers try to jam as many keywords as possible into the title
I've seen sellers try to match on more searches by mentioning what their product isn't, along the lines of Brand new replacement widgets (NOT original ACME widgets).
> Obviously working around massive limitations in discoverability.
That's the result of competition, rather than search-engine limitations, no?
> Marketplace quality is dollar store bargain bin gambling at this point.
I get to evaluate the product physically before I buy it at the dollar store. Some of the trash I get from Amazon I can tell is crap the second I open the box.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
I think I bought this Switch case from AliExpress that was listed on Amazon for like $18 but on AliExpress it was like $6. And if you went on a wholesale site, the same case was there for under $3 if you bought like 500+ units.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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).
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.
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).
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'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 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.
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.
Admittedly one could argue that this is the reason we have insurance. I don't know that my Apple X won't light my house on fire, as opposed to my knock off Snapple X.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I don't mean to nit pick, but it's seems like the only way to iron this out. "Theft is defined as stealing" isn't right. Rather: theft is defined as stealing property (or services). Property means real possessions in this context, not intangibles like IP.
A person can steal an idea (or market share) and it wouldn't make them a thief.
The fact that a victim of copyright infringement may end up disadvantaged to the exact same extent as if they were a victim of theft does not magically equate the two, even if the two involve stealing.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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 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
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…
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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...)
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.
It’s nearly impossible to buy a toaster or a water kettle from a reputable brand on amazon.de. Since I don’t want to burn my home I only buy books at amazon.
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.
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
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.
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?
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).
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!
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.
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).
> 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).
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I do investigate the store and usually don't even bother if it's not FBA (it's fine if it isn't but usually for more specialized stuff, not stuff that's blatantly OEM from China)
No, even items sold by Amazon are unsafe, due to their "stickerless commingled inventory" program, whereby 3rd-party inventory is mixed with Amazon's, and treated the same. Thus you could get a counterfeit product from a third party even if your order was listed as "sold by Amazon".
For Amazon Japan, there's a site called "Sakura Checker" (https://sakura-checker.jp") which based on the distribution of the reviews and ratings, the grammar and wording, store's reputation, etc., tells how much the chance of reviews being fake are. Interestingly I checked a few of Aukey products and they were reported as highly having fake reviews.
That site is blocked by Microsoft on my mobile connction sadly.
One obvious clue to the listing being Chinese is the length of the title. Chinese listings tend to include descriptions and usages of the product in addition to the product name itself. I guess it is the Chinese's way to SEO hacking because all products I see on Taobao or AliExpress have the same spammy title all the way to the length limit.
Unfortunately it appears to work well. Though it also has the side effect of cluttering up search results. I need a bunch of small drawstring pouches for a project. So all the resellers have stuffed their titles with "bag pouch sack" and the actual size of the item is irrelevant to the title.
If other companies are created and thriving specifically to fix systemic problems in your company's business model, how much more do you need a 2x4 upside your head to FIX YOUR BUSINESS!?
Why do it yourself when others are doing it for you? The effects of any change from Amazon directly has the potential to swing the bottom line drastically in a way not favorable to them. There's no way they are goibng to spend money to position them to make less money.
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.
It's not the third-party, that's for sure. Sellers on Amazon are almost entirely at the mercy of the honesty and good graces of the buyer. And, thanks to the rise of "drop shipping your way to riches!" "gurus" that have proliferated the web over the last few years, the Amazon marketplace has become a sewer of white-labeled identical (trash quality, usually) products all sourced from manufacturers on sites like Alibaba.
When a company stops caring about customers, it’s either because their management is stupid (and the company is doomed), or because the company is immune to competitive forces.
I was pleasantly surprised by their removal of Aukey et al, given their past record of willful negligence and attempts to deflect liability for all sorts of horrors. This article confirms it was not actually a change of heart by Amazon.
I'm not entirely sure if Amazon's fake-review enforcement is a deliberate sham (i.e. whether it is malice or incompetence), but this new information does raise the likelihood that it is deliberate policy.
Posting fake reviews on Amazon is a prisoner’s dilemma at this point. I’m not surprised to see even top brands getting caught up in it, because if you don’t do it your competitors most certainly will.
It's more devious than that. You have companies posting obviously fake 5-star reviews of competitors' products to get them banned for review manipulation. I doubt that was the case with Aukey.
It doesn't matter, any crowdsourced review system can and will be gamed, just as any communications service can and will be spammed.
What is unsaid is that it's not just unscrupulous companies (including Amazon) that are involved. There are also ordinary consumers who deliberately post the fake 5-star reviews in exchange for compensation. I've seen people make excuses for them, but I can't see how any of them can be under the impression they are not doing wrong.
Now if Amazon were forced to disclose statistics about return rates or complaints on products, that would in fact be valuable information. It could still be gamed due to other shoddy Amazon practices like allowing a merchant to start a listing for a cheap but genuinely good product, collect good reviews, then switch the product description to something completely unrelated.
The gaming will be different though. It's easy to adulterate a numerical average of a low-effort star rating, and harder to fake a review written in English with pictures and details.
> harder to fake a review written in English with pictures and details.
It's also a lot harder to get a legitimate review like that. Instead of 100 reviews where 80 were fake, there will be 3 reviews where 2 are fake and the other was disputed by the seller (or paid off by the seller) and deleted.
Amazon is under no obligation to delete negative reviews that are "disputed," and I for one have written reviews of horrible products that I would never change nor delete, even for money.
There is a weird defeatist mentality in this thread of "why try anything because sellers are just going to game it," but that's the wrong way to think when you're designing a human system. It's like writing a Constitution, insofar as you have to predict and hedge against the gamesmanship beforehand. If the review mills are in China or other non-Anglophone places, then removing stars and forcing them to be substantive makes it much harder because they would literally have to actually review the product. A reader can't differentiate between five fake stars and five real stars, but would probably be able to differentiate between an empty positive review and a well-presented negative review.
I guess they'll never go for this but they could do something like select 1% of buyers at random and pay them (or refund product cost) to write a meaningful review with pictures with updates at fixed intervals so the product is evaluated throughout its intended lifespan. Perhaps with some pre-filtering to improve the likelihood that reviews will be useful and accurate (eg "spent more than $10k on amazon", "billing address is shipping address", "previous reviews were voted as useful" etc)
It almost makes you wonder if we shouldn't just go back to brick-and-mortar stores, where the "rating system" is implied by the "curation" of the store itself. Physical shelf space being limited, they're only going to carry the stuff that sells well (on the longer timeline of word-of-mouth through actual conversations), and that doesn't get returned very often.
That is not unique to brick and mortar. Amazon could stop commingling its inventory with third part inventory, and Amazon has the ability to curate the products it sells. But Amazon chooses not to do that. Similarly, when I buy a product from Walmart for delivery to my house, it's curated despite brick and mortar being zero percent of the equation.
You say it's not unique, but this is exactly what used to make Amazon great, and they stopped. They couldn't help themselves from carrying everything under the sun from anyone willing to give them a couple of bucks, and they will never go back. Even NewEgg, which has traditionally been the counterpoint to Amazon, is now doing much the same thing. So, to be pedantic, it IS unique to brick and mortar, at this point. That's the point.
No, it's the other way around: these guys, and many others, were pioneers in these fields of breaking Amazon TOS without any consequences.
They knew they could get away with it, became part of their modus operandi, like a playbook for every new product launched.
But don't take me wrong: I blame all of this on Amazon, they nurtured this for years, by trimming away honest sellers and giving wealth to shady ones.
My example: few weeks after I launched my product in an under developed market on Amazon, a new guy came in. For every ~80 sales I'd get one review, while the guy was getting 7-10 reviews for the same amount of sales (mostly 5 stars). How can you compete with a review velocity that's no where close the organic one?
I also like the way they choose not to offer an easy way to report fake reviews. If you get offers to review someone’s products, Amazon will reliably and quickly delete a review saying that the company solicits fake/paid reviews but if you try to report it any other way you’ll never hear back or see any signs of a change in behavior.
You also have companies creating fake Amazon accounts using stolen personal data, then purchasing their products and leaving verified reviews.
I have many times received products I didn't order from Amazon and they don't seem to be doing anything about this.
This year I bought so many things on Amazon that turned out to be substandard or even unsafe and then you can't even depend on reviews. One time I left negative feedback on a product that almost got me seriously hurt, the seller somehow got my personal email and was demanding I take review down. I did, because who knows who those people are.
I think regulator should crack down. Comb their inventory and tax books.
It seems like they are working on sellers who are offering free gift cards, etc from 3rd party websites for positive reviews. The new one I noticed that is starting, are letters telling me about how hard their lives are, and how they need me to buy their products to feed their kids. Whats next?
Whats a good online webstore from where to buy equipment for our personnel in the USA, mostly computer monitors, laptop desk stands, usb hubs and so on?
Amazon has been quite bad so far - takes lots of time to find the correct item and then begins the game of "is this thing the real thing or not?".
Employees are spread out in the USA, especially in these covid times. Delivery time is not critical compared to the item's authenticity, pricing and support.
I don't know which kind of answer satisfies you, so I'm gonna answer in many different ways:
1. It's a "frontend" for warehouses
2. It's a webstore for buying stuff
3. It's a middleware between a company buying stuff and warehouse selling stuff
It's usually used by businesses who need to buy gear. It gives you overview of different warehouses selling the same thing, the difference between them is usually delivery time, pricing, amount of stock. So you can decide that hey, I want this from warehouse Y and this from warehouse X. They also do autooptimization based on pricing or amount of shipments if you want to.
The reason why I like them is because it's simple, adfree, easy payment, easy tracking.... it's just easy. For example here's a random product: https://www.markit.eu/us/en/kingston-datatraveler-70-usb-fla...
On the left you can see the whole catalogue of things.
The only caveat I'm aware of is that it's for companies only.
But, as said before, I have only used them in Europe where it's the default option and in a rare occasion where they don't offer something, I need to use an alternative. By and large they have 99% of our cases covered. Usually they might not have the cheapest price, but it's okay because the ease of use pays it back in a blink of an eye.
Love BH! I buy most of my Apple products from them since I’m not charged sales tax in my state (the legality/merits of this can be discussed at a later time).
To piggyback on this, any good online store in Canada too? Preferably with free or cheap shipping. The retail market here in Canada is dreadful and even the big players like Newegg aren't really focused on speed or shipping costs
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
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.
even if it is FBA, there’s still no inherent way for them to know. some stuff is shipped straight to them from China or wherever, but a lot of stuff goes via a third party
If the third party seller is buying the product, and paying to have it labeled and shipped directly to Amazon, I would not consider that drop shipping. Drop shipping implies the product is never really in-stock with the seller, but if the seller paid for it and it's sitting in an Amazon warehouse then that's in-stock by any normal definition.
Wasn't the original concept of drop-shipping shipping it directly from manufacturer to consumer? If you're gonna use Amazon as a middle-man, then surely that's not really drop-shipping either
I would consider it drop shipping if neither Amazon nor the 3rd party seller ever had possession of the product. The scenario is: Joe Consumer goes to Amazon and orders a widget for sale from a 3rd party seller. The 3rd party seller then goes to the widget manufacturer and asks them to ship a widget to Joe (or more likely has a computer program do this automatically).
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.
Anyways, the point still stands - for a company that also has/operates a search engine, the results one gets when entering a search-term on Amazon.com are comically bad - to the point i really wonder if they even try.
The results could only be worse if they won't return any results at all.
But, i suppose, it'd be bad for their bottomline if they'd only show you what you've searched for and not return hundreds of products which supposed brand-names oftentimes is alike to $BARELYRECOGNIZABLEENGLISHWORDS
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.
Did they do this to make a one time example out of a big seller and appease critics or is the consensus here that they’re clamping down on fake reviews?
The same goes for Ökotest. It's just another form of marketing because potential customer looks for some red-white label to feel safe. So everybody who can afford it, tries to get some red-white label. It's as worthless as "DLG prämiert" on some sausages from ALDI. Sometimes I've thought "Tickt ihr noch richtig?", because I had the devices they recommended, while I've considered them trash. Especially funny when you have a few decades of them as *.pdf
In other words, they manage to make something like a horoscope look like a thoroughly systematic and scientific test, while it isn't, at all.
edit: I'd excempt testing of mechanical/electrical safety of devices/appliances, things like energy efficiency and maybe loudness. Anything else I can think of right now is just subjective for comparable items. That's for Warentest.
For Ökotest I can only think of obvious proof of toxicity as an exemption. Otherwise even more subjective.
edit: Einen hab ich noch! Haus&Garten Test, noch lächerlicher!
I know you're joking, but I agree with the parent comment. I have a number of AUKEY products and actually have had zero issues. I've also never been bothered by them to give a review (though I suspect if I had given a negative one they might have contacted me).
Yeah, I have to say I've had good experiences. Im literally plugged into a battery right now that was unlike other options I could find in terms of form factor and capacity: 3 usb a, usb c, lightning, power delivery, micro usb, and super flat (to better fit in a bag). I suppose it's in the good experience that I was blind to the other "review-stuffing" activities.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
Amazon has been increasing its reliance on 3P sellers (60% of total revenue now compared to <50% a couple of years ago) as they bring in more profit than 1P. Such problems are likely to increase. As others pointed out, plenty of fake reviews out there.
I live in UK & do buy electronics from Amazon mainly because its the only reliable (fast delivery + refunds w/o questions) place to buy cheap Chinese stuff.
If you’re like me, after a while, your home gets filled with cheap Chinese stuff. Some go into the trash and some go to the ‘Free Stuff’ pile outside.
Unwinding my life without products is a daily/monthly/yearly occurrence and I greatly appreciate quality and thoughtfulness that goes into a product over simple function. I’ve also shifted focus to software and cloud which helps a bit to declutter. I no longer run a lab full of hardware at home.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 268 ms ] threadhttps://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/amazon-removing-popular...
https://www.reviewgeek.com/81928/aukey-is-in-trouble-with-am...
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/10/22428858/amazon-aukey-mpo...
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/aukey-kicked-off-amazon-follo...
It's easy to see why this is happening too. Internal voices in fraud are drowned out by voices in growth who exclaim about the hit to revenue and conversion rate.
I've seen sellers try to match on more searches by mentioning what their product isn't, along the lines of Brand new replacement widgets (NOT original ACME widgets).
> Obviously working around massive limitations in discoverability.
That's the result of competition, rather than search-engine limitations, no?
I get to evaluate the product physically before I buy it at the dollar store. Some of the trash I get from Amazon I can tell is crap the second I open the box.
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…
Otherwise, they are not that different from most other big retailers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.]
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.)
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.
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.
Only when a case goes to court, it will be determined if the certification was rightful or not.
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.
https://support.ce-check.eu/hc/en-us/articles/360008642600-H...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_marking#%22China_Export%22
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)
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.
https://www.redpoints.com/blog/amazon-commingled-inventory-m...
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.
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.
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
A person can steal an idea (or market share) and it wouldn't make them a thief.
The fact that a victim of copyright infringement may end up disadvantaged to the exact same extent as if they were a victim of theft does not magically equate the two, even if the two involve stealing.
My comment is in the red.
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?
Usually, but not always, which is why theft of electricity is a thing.
Paintings, manuscripts, etc. are subject to theft because they are nonfungible. The content itself is subject to copyright because the copies are fungible.
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
Or whomever setup their plant setup an extra plant on the side.
Though I increasingly suspect any bad batch gets labelled as a counterfeit to avoid liability.
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.
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.
I've seen proof this happens in the US, I'm yet to find any that this happens in the UK as well.
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
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...
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’m not even sure the initial launch looked as good as that Chinese site Wish…
Maybe they should embed the latter as option for the languages it understands.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Flipkart has a history of buying and shutting down businesses.
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
Okay I am only guessing, the historic reason is listed in another subcomment on my original post.
Their service with mostly wholly owned logistic was considered superior.
I place order before 2pm and my orders arrive at my desk next day before 11am, arrives in my town at 7am.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
If I don't have a smartphone i'm screwed. https://postimg.cc/LJ6KVgZr
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)
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
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).
https://d2bvhe78se1grn.cloudfront.net/optimized/2X/a/a0a8385...
Germany has so many other good online shops that it's for most products really easy to cut Amazon out and avoid that problem.
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.
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?
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).
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.
"Quality means doing it right when no one is looking." -Henry Ford
In China, it's usually outsourced to specialist Amazon wizards, people who are kind of in rank with "SEO consultants."
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.
well, except for the consultant! And the business which made some sales. So it's only the customer losing...
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.
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.
I think, after everybody started pointing a finger on Amazon tolerating them, they had to act.
I do investigate the store and usually don't even bother if it's not FBA (it's fine if it isn't but usually for more specialized stuff, not stuff that's blatantly OEM from China)
One obvious clue to the listing being Chinese is the length of the title. Chinese listings tend to include descriptions and usages of the product in addition to the product name itself. I guess it is the Chinese's way to SEO hacking because all products I see on Taobao or AliExpress have the same spammy title all the way to the length limit.
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.
I'm not entirely sure if Amazon's fake-review enforcement is a deliberate sham (i.e. whether it is malice or incompetence), but this new information does raise the likelihood that it is deliberate policy.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18140799/amazon-marketpl...
What is unsaid is that it's not just unscrupulous companies (including Amazon) that are involved. There are also ordinary consumers who deliberately post the fake 5-star reviews in exchange for compensation. I've seen people make excuses for them, but I can't see how any of them can be under the impression they are not doing wrong.
Now if Amazon were forced to disclose statistics about return rates or complaints on products, that would in fact be valuable information. It could still be gamed due to other shoddy Amazon practices like allowing a merchant to start a listing for a cheap but genuinely good product, collect good reviews, then switch the product description to something completely unrelated.
It's also a lot harder to get a legitimate review like that. Instead of 100 reviews where 80 were fake, there will be 3 reviews where 2 are fake and the other was disputed by the seller (or paid off by the seller) and deleted.
There is a weird defeatist mentality in this thread of "why try anything because sellers are just going to game it," but that's the wrong way to think when you're designing a human system. It's like writing a Constitution, insofar as you have to predict and hedge against the gamesmanship beforehand. If the review mills are in China or other non-Anglophone places, then removing stars and forcing them to be substantive makes it much harder because they would literally have to actually review the product. A reader can't differentiate between five fake stars and five real stars, but would probably be able to differentiate between an empty positive review and a well-presented negative review.
They knew they could get away with it, became part of their modus operandi, like a playbook for every new product launched.
But don't take me wrong: I blame all of this on Amazon, they nurtured this for years, by trimming away honest sellers and giving wealth to shady ones.
My example: few weeks after I launched my product in an under developed market on Amazon, a new guy came in. For every ~80 sales I'd get one review, while the guy was getting 7-10 reviews for the same amount of sales (mostly 5 stars). How can you compete with a review velocity that's no where close the organic one?
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/28/21080720/amazon-product-l...
What's more, even their own-brand AmazonBasics has many defective and dangerous products:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/10/business/amazonbasics-ele...
Ford Pinto - Ford knew people would die, but sold it anyhow.
General Motor's flawed ignition switch, one of the deadliest auto recalls in history, killed 124 people.
Amazon has been quite bad so far - takes lots of time to find the correct item and then begins the game of "is this thing the real thing or not?".
Employees are spread out in the USA, especially in these covid times. Delivery time is not critical compared to the item's authenticity, pricing and support.
It's usually used by businesses who need to buy gear. It gives you overview of different warehouses selling the same thing, the difference between them is usually delivery time, pricing, amount of stock. So you can decide that hey, I want this from warehouse Y and this from warehouse X. They also do autooptimization based on pricing or amount of shipments if you want to.
The reason why I like them is because it's simple, adfree, easy payment, easy tracking.... it's just easy. For example here's a random product: https://www.markit.eu/us/en/kingston-datatraveler-70-usb-fla... On the left you can see the whole catalogue of things.
The only caveat I'm aware of is that it's for companies only.
But, as said before, I have only used them in Europe where it's the default option and in a rare occasion where they don't offer something, I need to use an alternative. By and large they have 99% of our cases covered. Usually they might not have the cheapest price, but it's okay because the ease of use pays it back in a blink of an eye.
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
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.
edit: also drop shipping filter would be helpful.
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 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.
Amazon wasn't initially a search engine. A9 was created in 2004, by Amazon.
Anyways, the point still stands - for a company that also has/operates a search engine, the results one gets when entering a search-term on Amazon.com are comically bad - to the point i really wonder if they even try.
The results could only be worse if they won't return any results at all.
But, i suppose, it'd be bad for their bottomline if they'd only show you what you've searched for and not return hundreds of products which supposed brand-names oftentimes is alike to $BARELYRECOGNIZABLEENGLISHWORDS
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com#A9.com_search_portal
Or maybe your goals are misaligned with Amazon's, wrt/ product search.
More detailed info here: https://lifehacker.com/what-the-hell-happened-to-aukeys-prod...
But again so many small & big seller do the same!
A good way to cut all the crap.
https://www.test.de/unternehmen/about-us-5017053-0/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
The same goes for Ökotest. It's just another form of marketing because potential customer looks for some red-white label to feel safe. So everybody who can afford it, tries to get some red-white label. It's as worthless as "DLG prämiert" on some sausages from ALDI. Sometimes I've thought "Tickt ihr noch richtig?", because I had the devices they recommended, while I've considered them trash. Especially funny when you have a few decades of them as *.pdf
In other words, they manage to make something like a horoscope look like a thoroughly systematic and scientific test, while it isn't, at all.
edit: I'd excempt testing of mechanical/electrical safety of devices/appliances, things like energy efficiency and maybe loudness. Anything else I can think of right now is just subjective for comparable items. That's for Warentest.
For Ökotest I can only think of obvious proof of toxicity as an exemption. Otherwise even more subjective.
edit: Einen hab ich noch! Haus&Garten Test, noch lächerlicher!
:-)
https://www.consumerreports.org/
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).
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.
Then they got greedy and decided to turn the site into Aliexppress US.
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.
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.
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.
At the end of the day, a sub 5% profit margin is still a sub 5% profit margin.
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.
(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)
At least with aliexpress that's exactly what you expect, and exactly what you're paying for.
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.
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.
Anything I can buy at Costco instead of Amazon, I do.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I live in UK & do buy electronics from Amazon mainly because its the only reliable (fast delivery + refunds w/o questions) place to buy cheap Chinese stuff.
Unwinding my life without products is a daily/monthly/yearly occurrence and I greatly appreciate quality and thoughtfulness that goes into a product over simple function. I’ve also shifted focus to software and cloud which helps a bit to declutter. I no longer run a lab full of hardware at home.