My shock here is that someone would order something that costs $7k from amazon! Buy that from BH, newegg, some specialty retailer, etc. Not American alibaba.
I'd argue the opposite -- why not order from Amazon?
Lots of folks have come to trust Amazon's reliability and customer service over the years, so it does make sense for customers to order expensive things from Amazon or any other online store, especially with a pandemic going around.
This incident in particular does seem to be an outlier, and we'll have to see how Amazon resolves it.
Because Amazon has allowed their store to be filled with buyer-beware scams. Much of their electronics are knockoffs - good luck buying legit batteries, chargers, etc. You're shopping, with inventory commingling, from who knows who. Is the device actually new, or is it a refurb or return? Etc.
For any substantially expensive device, they can also void the warranty by not being an authorized dealer. Or at least create a hassle for the person attempting to use that warranty.
Don't use Amazon all that much but from the comments here and in other articles that seem to pop up more often recently I figure now time has come for Amazon to finally milk that sweet sweet trust relationship.
I've recently used newly opened Amazon.pl, first purchase and I had to wait +5 weeks for a small item. I'm not used to navigating the labyrinth of checking whether something is fulfilled by someone or whatever. I just had the displeasure of buying something from a dropshipper.
Because Amazon co-mingles inventory from sellers by UPC. So if one crook ships in empty boxes and you buy from someone else you still can get shafted and the honest seller eats the costs.
The one thing Amazon provides is trust and this is their main asset. All of their wares you can buy anywhere, buy on Amazon you have reviews and a third party (Amazon) who mediates.
Now the big BUT. Amazon integrates every step and thus loses the mediation ability and they are losing the trust with fake reviews.
Nowadays I research items on Amazon and search specialized shops to get them from and maybe get someone to chat with about the stuff I am going to buy. Because I can't trust the reviews on Amazon
It's not an outlier. I've ordered things from Amazon and gotten completely wrong things- like 1 latex glove in the box instead of the makeup I ordered.
Irony is the bird feeder story originally came out before we knew amazon was using their market insight to steal and knockoff their own sellers products. Likely amazon was the one making the knockoffs.
> before we knew amazon was using their market insight to steal and knockoff their own sellers products. Likely amazon was the one making the knockoffs.
I have not heard that, but holy cow. Just so incredibly shady.
For what it's worth, I bought that same birdfeeder directly from the manufacturer's own storefront on ebay (I've found ebay to be easier to find real sellers than Amazon and don't have to deal with figuring out who is doing the shipping etc) and it's awesome.
I stopped trusting amazon when they removed the ability to report product issues, like knockoffs or scams.
Removing the links just affirmed they don't care whats in their marketplace, and they just backed that attitude up with their recent lawsuit claiming they're not responsible.
I've even reported people who include the "$5 for a review", but they don't ever do anything about it. What trust have they earned except from a few people not complaining?
A specialty retailer is more likely to know exactly how to package the item to avoid damage. They are likely to have experience with delivery errors that are specific to that specialty product, and thus will be better able to rectify those errors. They may have better customer service, as is the case with B&H. Lastly, a dispute with a specialty retailer is unlikely to affect other services, like Prime Video or grocery delivery.
I ordered via newegg, a NZXT case for my computer which was S$180, it seemed to be less than retail, and in Singapore it was $350 at the time. What was strange tho was other cases were listed for: S$2##.## Shipping...
This 1 case was listed as free shipping. So I ordered it, was charged S$180, and 2 weeks later received a brand new, unopened, case, with glass panel all intact no issues.
I do not trust Amazon to ship anything safely and securely anymore. Almost everything I receive is damaged, late, or mis-delivered. Books are especially abused somewhere in Amazon’s fulfillment. (They’re always bent, creased, or dirty.) Items that are supposed to be 1-day shipping typically take >=3, and Amazon’s tracking mostly says “oops! it’ll come trust us”. (Not verbatim, obviously.)
Amazon’s return process is becoming incrementally more obtuse as time goes on. While they’re still decently good, it’s getting harder to do easy, no-nonsense returns. Typically—if they don’t just tell me to dispose of the item myself—they demand I drive to Amazon lockers or Whole Foods or Kohl’s to drop stuff off at no charge, and pressure me into just getting Amazon credit.
I would never buy a $7,000 item on Amazon under any circumstance.
It's genuinely astonishing how bad Amazon is at shipping books now. It used to be their Thing, and now basically any book you buy from them arrives damaged. You can complain and get them to send a replacement and the replacement is damaged too.
In my experience Amazon Japan still knows how to pack books correctly, but I haven't ordered from them since the start of COVID... they properly secure books to a bit of backing cardboard (with shrink-wrap and/or rubber bands, usually) and then mount the backing cardboard inside of the packing box so that the books don't slide around and get damaged. I'm sure it costs like an extra 50 cents per package to do this, but presumably their customers demand quality in other countries where Amazon doesn't have a de-facto monopoly.
Let me emphasize something here: Amazon Japan ships globally. Not just books -- bags too. And that's big because the Japanese bag selection is truly something else. Alas, many are very expensive. However, since I didn't travel for more than a year now (guess why) I have shuffled the travel budget over to the bag budget and bought a bag from Amazon Japan. Here's the most important part, watch just thirty seconds: https://youtu.be/g6uSpuN2uT8?t=346 ideal size for me, incredible flexibility. I combine it with https://youtu.be/oaRyVuLuWOw?t=160 because I like flexibility :)
Previously I was buying electronics and I needed to use proxies which are added cost and hassle.
Provided the items are fulfilled locally (as in Japan) the packaging and delivery tends to be pretty much flawless. I'm honestly surprised by the number of English books they stock locally.
I find it especially galling when for a document title search, I’ll see public domain reports (NASA NTRS PDFs for instance) ranking higher in Google results for buying a print on demand copy via Amazon at significantly inflated prices, or honestly just what is plain disgustingly greedy, the many charlatans selling them as kindle ebooks, sometimes as multiple skus with different prices, trying to profit from people that don’t know any better.
I order lots of printed musical scores. The higher quality scores are $45+ a pop. Amazon frequently renders them completely useless as a work you’re supposed to be able to sight-read with your instrument. After all the folding, bending, and creasing, the books don’t even stay open properly, and the bent pages make for terrible and distracted reading. It’s depressing and an absolute shame.
> they properly secure books to a bit of backing cardboard (with shrink-wrap and/or rubber bands, usually) and then mount the backing cardboard inside of the packing box so that the books don't slide around and get damaged.
That's how they used to do in France when they started (15-20 years ago): a base cardboard plate at the right size for the box, the stuff stacked on the cardboard, and both united by a shrink wrap. That was both simple and extremely effective, or otherwise said: great.
I don't know why they stopped. And I don't know why nobody else copied that system.
(I used to order from 2000 miles away, now I don't order books from Amazon no more, except second hand foreign language books I couldn't get otherwise.)
Here in California, I used to get books from Amazon that came in a box with appropriate bubble padding added. This worked.
If I try to order a book on Amazon today, it gets shipped in a manila envelope (with bubble padding built into the envelope). The tightness of the envelope damages the book.
I have no idea who thought this was a good idea, or even an acceptable idea.
I think the competition from local retailers is important in this. I’ve bought books from other Japanese stores, like CDJapan, and the packaging is excellent. In the UK all retailers seem to ship books poorly now. Waterstones is no better than Amazon sadly.
Anything over a few hundred bucks is playing with fire. I bought an iphone through them (Amazon sold, not 3rd party) last year and had to do the same thing the couple did: chargeback on credit card. They refused to investigate and flat out accused me of fraud. Gee, maybe it's the low paid disgruntled employees from warehouse worker to contracted out Prime delivery guy stealing shit? Nah, it's the guy who spent tens of thousands at your business and you never had a problem with!
In Europe at least the dedicated electronics retailers are clearly cheaper than Amazon, and of course do not commingle. Returns may be a bit more cumbersome, but honestly who returns electronics anyway? Usually you know pretty well what you're getting.
Europe also has laws that require a mandatory "No questions asked" minimum 14 day return period after delivery date. Doesn't mandate free return shipping, but for a € 500 piece of electronics paying a € 4.95 shipping fee in the rare case that you return it isn't so bad.
I wonder actually where this stuff happens typically. Clearly some seems to happen before things even get to Amazon, that whole counterfeit commingling thing you hear about, where the 3rd-party stock gets used even if you buy from Amazon directly. (How this could be worth it to do at all vs. the reputational damage is unclear but I guess they're always chasing the small efficiencies... still you'd think it would be easy for Amazon to track the actual source of fake/nonexistent items even when they're mingled like that.)
I'd have to think theft by the warehouse workers is pretty rare, it feels like the kind of thing they'd surveil and police quite zealously.
You can tell they're increasing the scrutiny on drivers as well with them having to take photos of the delivered item, and they've clearly always been closely tracked on time and location.
> I wonder actually where this stuff happens typically. Clearly some seems to happen before things even get to Amazon, that whole counterfeit commingling thing you hear about, where the 3rd-party stock gets used even if you buy from Amazon directly.
This is actually largely Amazon's fault, as far as I understand it. People buy obviously counterfeit items, then buy the real thing on Amazon, and return the counterfeit item. Amazon does ~zero verification of the return and puts the counterfeit item back on the shelf/bin with the official SKU.
Amazon has no concept of "open box" vs "new," and they don't want to be the arbitrator of returns.
Yes they do. There is a large section of the website ("Amazon Warehouse deals") devoted to open-box items. I've used this a few times and got great prices on perfect items, just with opened or damaged packaging.
This is true. I've had Amazon send me clearly used and damaged items although I ordered new. They also always block my negative review pointing this out, claiming that reviews are about the product and not about my experience of ordering it from Amazon.
> You can tell they're increasing the scrutiny on drivers as well with them having to take photos of the delivered item, and they've clearly always been closely tracked on time and location.
Some time ago, my wife ordered something from Amazon, and it was reported as “delivered,” but the photo was of someone else’s doorstep.
She had no problem getting them to ship a replacement, but it added a few days to the process.
The “last mile” stuff is crazy. I sometimes see two Amazon Prime Sprinters on the same street, at the same time.
It was much worse, when it was done by independent contractors. We would see these folks driving around, with so many boxes in the cab of their vans, they had to make a hole to see through.
Looked like an episode of Hoarders.
I’m not surprised they have issues. The system is basically strained to the max. It’s a miracle that it works as well as it does.
>Some time ago, my wife ordered something from Amazon, and it was reported as “delivered,” but the photo was of someone else’s doorstep.
This happens to me about every third time I get something from Amazon. Fortunately, the wrong house they keep delivering to is in my neighborhood and I recognized it in the picture.
I report this every time, but I don't expect it to do any good.
>You can tell they're increasing the scrutiny on drivers as well with them having to take photos of the delivered item, and they've clearly always been closely tracked on time and location.
Not really, I'm currently living out of an apartment with a mailroom and it seems like half of the orders are correctly marked as "Left in mailroom" with a picture, less than half the time they actually put it in the parcel locker, most of the time it's just dumped on the floor even when it would obviously fit, and when it's not marked as "Left in mailroom" it seems that delivery drivers are exploiting the fact that they don't have to take a photo if they select "Left with receptionist". We don't have a receptionist, so every time they select that not only do I have to try and figure out where in the mailroom my package is, I have to do it immediately because now I have no clue if they correctly put it in the parcel locker where it's safe or if it's just lying in a stack of boxes out in the open.
Not to even mention all the times packages are marked as delivered the day before, presumably to hit some delivery quota. Currently if you open up a case with Amazon for a package marked delivered that you haven't received they make you wait at least 2 days because odds are it's still in transit.
I’m in Europe. Earlier this year, I ordered from Amazon Japan, the package arrived quicker than things I had ordered earlier on a European Amazon and it was insanely well packaged.
Amazon Japan even in 2013 was amazing. My host family ordered an out of print trail guide to the hiking trail between Osaka and Tokyo after I had failed to find it in every major book shop in Osaka. If memory serves it was delivered in about 6 hours.
I guess a lot depends on who and how they pay to deliver. I got an internal x260 battery (that can't configure properly in Linux, if anyone knows about it) a few days ago and has been a disaster.
In the case of Spain their customer support is fine, but it falls flat because delivery is a shitshow.
Even more so in the Canaries where we need to pay a lot of handling fees to receive the packages unless you want to do the customs process yourself. On a 200€ headphones I needed to pay 44€ of taxes and handling fees that was shipped from Valencia.
Amazon Japan is incredible. I ordered a Japanese book from them and it arrived the next afternoon (to the UK!) Another time I was in Japan and I needed a specific bluetooth keyboard for the tablet I was using, delivered to a convenience store pick-up point in the deep north of the country in the middle of winter, ordered with my UK credit card, and no problem, it was there the next day. I can't imagine the amount of organisation both of these things take.
Amazon Japan used to be in a league of their own, but a mix of their home-rolled delivery service being objectively bad and them allowing their platform to be dominated by scalpers (転売ヤー) means that they've lost a lot of the trust I had in them.
I ordered from Amazon Japan for the first time last week and the delivery speed was excellent. I would say the packaging was sub-par compared to other Japanese retailers though. CDJapan is just as fast and ships me books in better condition than any UK store, and proxy shipping from Buyee.jp redefined what packaging means to me. Seriously, it’s almost worth using them just to get some top quality cardboard!
The winning strategy for Amazon is to segregate by loyalty: Have an absolutely stunning experience until you are addicted, then let you have bad products and focus on newer clients.
In fact, nothing tells us we all see the same prices either. I suspect they only show me more expensive items, because I can find my A4 paper at 6€ elsewhere instead of 10€ on Amazon. And same goes for most other stuff. Maybe after a few years, Amazon profits off us with a hefty margin. Price segmentation by (reverse) customer loyalty.
Maybe we need a service were we can all upload our online merchants screenshots of products and prices, that can then tell us if particular customers have been segmented into the pay more forever bin.
never thought of this but this is has been my experience exactly, lot of past bought cheap version of item disappear from the amazon own search and I either have to get them from the reorder interface or straight up use google to search the amazon's item page and buy it coming from the direct link.
Definitely has not been my experience. I've been an Amazon customer since 1999, and I got Prime pretty much as soon as it started (I think they had a promo for students back then). I've spent tens of thousands of dollars with them, easily. I continue to have very few problems with orders or deliveries, and on the rare occasion when I do, it's resolved quickly and easily.
I bought a new 32" monitor about 2 years ago that when I unpacked it, it was clearly an open box item. The way it had been packed was extremely unprofessional, tape was haphazardly wrapped and twisted around the stand and cords and things that normally come in plastic bags weren't bagged.
They've been shipping the wrong items lately too, twice in the last year when I order something that has multiple selections like color, scent or flavor etc I'll sometimes get the wrong item sent. I've done more Amazon returns in the last 2 years than my previous 15 combined.
The open box thing is a huge issue. I bought probably 5 things last year >$100 sold as “new” that just weren’t. Returns have always been easy, I live near an Amazon Go and they even have an attendant that helps. But not being able to trust that a new item is actually new is…shitty. I would never buy electronics from Amazon, just get it for the same price at Best Buy and wait a couple more days (plus they often have same-day pickup available, which Amazon can’t compete with). Target is another good option for the same reason. Always keep in mind that everyone will price-match Amazon.
They do still occasionally have flash sales that I’ve gotten brick-and-mortars to match. But yeah, their business model has shifted away from undercutting everyone; makes sense but it’s disappointing.
Is open box always a return for you then? I got a coffee scale with obvious usage stains on it from Amazon, but honestly it works fine and a quick cleanup was much easier than a return.
It is for me. I am quite conscientious and I expect others to do their jobs at least as per the prescription, if not scrupulously. "New" means "new" to me, no exceptions.
As a matter of fact, I would go to great lengths in order to return or replace the coffee scale if that happened to me. It places my mind at peace to have things exactly as I expect them to be.
I’ve just kept a couple things, yeah; but usually I could have gotten a better deal if I purposely bought used or “renewed”, so the return is more about the price than the principle. For some things, I’d return anyway because the practice feels scammy and user-hostile.
It’s generally the same price that anyone else has, with the exception of small items like cabling or accessories. It can be hard to get a price-match on that type of thing, because the brands are more niche/whitelabel.
I think Best Buy is the absolute best ;) place to buy a TV; good prices, huge selection, always handled carefully. YMMV!
I don't return that much stuff to Amazon, but I've generally found their setup for returns to be about the best and easiest around: typically I have the option to drop off several places or to print a shipping label.
I'm genuinely surprised that people have such vastly different experiences with Amazon. I made 231 orders with them last year(lockdown....) And haven't had a problem with a single one. Couple times I wanted to return something they just refunded me without asking to send the item back. Everything arrives next day, always(here in UK anyway), and the customer support is stellar compared to literally anywhere else. Anyone who has ever had to contact Currys customer support should know what I'm talking about.
Like, I see all of these comments on HN all the time but I have the exact opposite experience - they just have no competition over here. I'm at a point where even if something is slightly more expensive on Amazon I'd rather buy from them as I know their CS Support won't try to screw me over.
The same for me. I had one damaged product, a pack of pork rinds that opened up because it was too tightly packed next to 5L of olive oil. Because of my experience with their customer service (and delivery service which is second only to DHL for me), other merchants need to be substantially cheaper.
You must have a very secure delivery location, and I'm willing to bet that you probably live in a more affluent community, if what you're saying is even true. That and/or you're having stuff delivered to Amazon locations.
Not to mention not everything is shipped from seller / manufacturer to you via Amazon.
Uhm.....I don't see how living in an affluent community has anything to do with that - few years ago I lived in the dodgiest part of town and never had any issues with Amazon either. I'm guessing you have that view because Amazon in US leaves parcels on your doorstep? Literally never heard of that happening in the UK. If you're not in it goes back to the depot, maybe they'll leave it with your neighbour if you're lucky. So....if you count my own front door as a "secure delivery location" then...yeah? Where else would it be delivered? I guess you could have it delivered to a locker, but if it goes back to the depot I just have it redelivered on Saturday or Sunday when I'm definitely at home.
I would find that horrible. In normal times, I'm most definitely often not at home on Saturday and Sunday. As it happens, I live in a relatively rural area but I absolutely expect deliveries to be left at my front door without me signing for them except for the very odd high value item. If I had to deal with drop-off/pickup arrangements for every order, I'd use Amazon a whole lot less.
Same with roughly the same package volume annually over 8+ years. Literally the only thing lost was due to a historic weather event and Amazon still took care of it.
Maybe with commodity household goods it’s different than with higher value items or with electronics.
Electronics is certainly more of an issue - Nobody is shipping empty boxes of toilet paper.
The main issues you get are when returns are put back into stock but haven’t been sufficiently checked.
I used to work for an online retailer who sold things like games consoles and the amount of return scams we got was absolutely shocking. If you sold a games console with a free game (usually a code inside the console) people would take the game code out, or copy it, and then return the console and have the game. Other times they would take an iPad out, put a brick in the box and then shrink wrap it. Or buy counterfeit AirPod pro’s and swap them for the real ones and return the fakes.
The problem is compounded because people want to buy “new” items with shrink wrap around them, so it’s harder to check returns aren’t scams when the scammers have shrink-wrap machines.
The issue here is people returning it in a state where it is still sealed - as if an item is sealed it will go back into stock straight away and the retailer can’t open it up to check that it is in there.
If it’s opened you can still return it, but once that happens usually electronics have to be sent back to the manufacturer to refurbish/reset.
It’s not about stopping people returning items, it’s about making sure the correct returns channel is used and detecting fraud (which happens when people return the item pretending it’s unopened so it goes back into stock unchecked, but the item has been replaced with a brick).
I can’t answer the first question, other than to say “often enough to have a process to handle it”.
As for the second one, with bin/lot tracking you can identify if the item had previously been returned. Employee theft doesn’t usually involve putting bricks in it within a DC - it’s usually easier and less risk to take the whole box (and maybe get rid of the packaging in the toilet, at a warehouse I used to work at someone was found to be stealing iPods because a lot of packaging was found behind a toilet ceiling tile). If the item hadn’t previously been returned, this would usually infer that the customer was lying about receiving it with a brick in it (although obviously there is the possibility that it came in that state from the supplier).
The usual assumption is that the supplier didn’t send it in with a brick, because otherwise customer fraud is too easy - but occasionally that assumption is wrong, which is probably what happened in this case.
They probably checked there was no return in the history, made the assumption it wouldn’t have come empty from Canon, and figured it was the customer that lied.
You are right - there are definitely things that can be done (what you are describing used to be done on Xbox games for example).
The main thing is making sure that these things are ubiquitous, that there isn’t a workaround and that systems are in place to do the specific checks which are different for each item at every return point.
In the example with the Xbox games, not all games had the seal, or the same game SKU might sometimes have the seal and sometimes have a standard case. Then there was the workaround where people could lever the case open at the top and still take the game out.
The danger of seals is sometimes they can provide a false sense of security, but they probably do help when implemented well.
> Off topic but I have seen interesting labels that break destructively.
I don't know if it has been invented yet, however here's the idea: a RFID tag that normally returns a valid code, but any removal attempt would not simply destroy it, but rather change the code (for example through bit changes by peeling conductive parts of it) into one that would return a tamper warning at next readings. That would also make possible to track when the box was opened (therefore potentially also finding by whom) since all boxes must be scanned at every step. The tag however should be put in a place where the user would not stick a cutter blade; it should peel off for example as the result of pulling a string to open the box, removing a piece of cardboard, etc.
Same here, i have been ordering with Amazon (Uk & occationally Us) for 21 years and can count on 1 hand the number the number of times i've had delivery issues.
ALL other delivery outfits are horrible in comparison, and i actually dred using any other service.
The UK has many horrible delivery services. DPD and Amazon are two that are acceptable. I dread trying to receive a delivery from any other service. Incredibly there are more than a few that are actually worse than Royal Mail.
UPS is 100% solid for me too. Been shipping with them within the UK and I know they can be trusted. DPD provides much better delivery tracking though, not only they provide an accurate 1 hour slot, they also take a picture of the parcel being delivered so there's no doubt where it went.
Also depends on your reputation as a buyer on Amazon I think. If you order lots of high value items and one goes missing they treat you differently than if you made one high value purchase.
I’ve run a huge pile of apple kit through them in the last two years and when a Mac mini disappeared from my doorstep they refunded without question.
The Mac mini did make a reappearance a week later as it was dumped in someone’s porch down the road and they brought it back round. Spoke to customer services and they sent me a return label to send it back.
yea I’ve spent an absurd amount on Amazon and now they don’t bat an eye on returns. I reported that my expensive ultra wide monitor hadn’t arrived, they sent another and then the first arrived. I had to contact support and tell them I got two because they had already refunded me. They won’t risk losing their whales.
I’m in the same boat as you. I’ve had a couple of misorders, but they were 3rd party sellers.
And I love the ability to take items back to our local Amazon depot without having to box the item. Just give it back to them and they handle all the shipping.
Chiming in here as well; I always trust Amazon to refund me if something is missing or broken without any hassle. A lot of other retailers always gives you a hard time even though they are at fault.
They have a huge problem with counterfeit but again always easy to get your money back.
I never had a problem with counterfeit goods until I received a fake board game - took me a while to realise it was fake (horrible quality) - when I did they refunded and I got another one that was real - fine.
Since then though I won’t use Amazon for anything remotely safety related, think child car seat - nope, some equipment for rewiring house, nope.
This also makes me think about higher end purchases, whereas before I was like 100% Amazon, they have lost the trust I had for them and doubt they will get that back.
My main issue is that by the time I realised it was fake the game had been stopped and seller removed so they probably knew the game they sent me was fake (because of other complaints) but they made zero attempt to put it right. It seems if customers report fakes, customers who potentially also received fakes are not alerted and that is a real problem for me.
This is the most bad thing I’ll say about amazon is that the counterfeits are becoming an issue. I saw one person who, perhaps wisely, said they won’t buy anything to eat or drink on amazon because one bad counterfeit could be catastrophic. Your point about safety equipment is a similarly good point.
> It seems if customers report fakes, customers who potentially also received fakes are not alerted and that is a real problem for me.
Amazon doesn't even bother to collect that data. If you want to make a return because you received a counterfeit, you need to lie about the reason for your return, because "I received/believe I received a counterfeit product" isn't a choice they let you choose from when filing a return.
That doesn't distinguish between "I ordered a book and got a plant mister" and "I ordered a book and got a stapled photocopy with greasy fingerprints."
At best, this sounds like a euphemism to me, and at worst, it seems like Amazon doesn't want to log such information. If Amazon cared to keep track of counterfeit returns, they'd make it an explicit option.
Honestly, it feels like Amazon is intentionally not keeping explicit records of the counterfeits they sell because of their potential liability and the fact that such records would make Amazon look bad in depositions.
I think it vastly depends on what you are ordering.
We passed a ton of orders for valuable goods that were processed by small companies who used amazon as an alternative storefront to boost their sales. Communication was finnicky but everything went fine.
Then we also order a ton of cheap, little convenient stuff that we could have ordered on aliexpress but went to amazon for faster delivery. It was a lot more hit or miss, with pure junk coming in from tjmes to times.
We never hit the level of scam described in the article, but we'd also pay a lot more attention on where it’s coming from before forking 7k.
I mostly get what I order, but I don't order much in the way of electronics or things where scams are common, though I did have to be careful when ordering a simple micro SD card as there were many incredibly cheap, off-brand products that were likely to be scams.
I have also seen a few deliveries with pictures that went to what was clearly the wrong address, had a box of chocolates arrive totally melted where the ice pack exploded and left me with a wet, melted box of chocolates, and during early Covid, I did end up getting scam toilet paper rolls shipped in from China. Oh, it was actually toilet paper, but the rolls were incredibly tiny and nothing at all like the pictures.
So... definitely hit or miss and it depends a lot on what you order.
Yeah, but I can hardly blame non-technical people who don't know the prices of things and who haven't heard about the cheats that off-brand memory cards can pull. I mean, many of them advertise to the computer that they are the listed size. But... when you fill them up, it becomes clear that's a lie.
I wish Amazon could randomly test and delist some of those products or whatever. Or maybe do some random testing before listing them for sale, it's not some obscure scam after all.
Oh, I definitely look for those as well, but I'm just saying this is often difficult because people don't know what brands are trustworthy or what a "too good to be true" price is in the first place.
What’s changed is that they don’t care about packaging books anymore. Previously they would ship books inside of an airgap in a box, or at least inside of a tight box that would prevent damage. Now they will just throw it into a Mylar envelope that offers no protection against bending.
Agreed. Bubble envelopes can work okay if they are the correct size, but I often get normal-sized books shipped to me in XXXL size Amazon envelopes. These mailer envelopes are big enough for the book to rotate freely in amy direction inside of the packaging. So it’s inevitable that it arrives with creased or torn pages and jacket. I even had one where the cover separated from the pages. Horrible.
My preferred approach now is to use niche-retailers for things I care about arriving intact on the assumption that if your entire business is about that product category then you should be knowledgeable about how to ship those items safely. Barnes & Noble for books, B&H for camera, BestBuy for consumer electronics and video games, etc.
Yeah, Amazon loves those bubble bags and even just the mylar ones. They aren't careful enough about what sort of items go in them. Many items are fine that way but more than once I've gotten completely destroyed packaging around an intact item. Fine if I was simply going to use the item anyway, not so good if I was ordering it for someone else. I've also had a couple of cases where I was surprised it survived.
I suspect they are playing the odds, accepting that they will have to refund a few items that got smashed from inadequate protection.
I wonder if there are regions (or countries) which are worse? Amazon in Germany is also great, so far.
I’m like you - I’ve ordered so many things from Amazon this last year or so (new circumstances plus pandemic lockdown) and literally not one problem of the sort described. I can think of two items out of hundreds which weren’t on time (one, Amazons’s logistics made it a whole day late, and one was the seller’s issue). And the (very rare) returns were dealt with without a hitch.
For other reasons, I actually want to not be so reliant on Amazon, but their combination of Prime delivery, reliability, and customer service is unbeatable for many/most non-specialist items.
Amazon in Germany can also go very wrong. This is why I stopped ordering there:
I ordered a bunch of small electronics stuff, about 100€. In the order process Amazon selected an expired credit card (which I'm sure I had replaced in the settings already). They then split the order in parts and for each order part demanded an additional late pay fee, because the card was expired. This is despite me calling them to stop the order or to correct the payment method, before the package had arrived.
They couldn't help, I was promised a call back, never arrived. The chat support deleted the expired credit card from their system, only to cut the connection as soon as I asked for a solution for the fees and to know why the wrong card was selected. Later, that expired credit card turned up in my settings again.
In the electronics stuff that arrived, a converter I bought was evidently fake. It was also a converter, but it had different markings than the one on the product photo (including a missing CE symbol). I sent that back. A short while later, Amazon accused me of not having sent it back and wanted me to pay again! I still had the proof of having sent a package, which made them shut up.
Valid question. I was switching bank accounts at that time, so it's possible the card was not expired but linked to an account that did not exist anymore. Might also have been the account itself and not the card that was listed (Lastschriftverfahren, where they take money directly from the account). I'm fuzzy about the details, not really because it was particularly long ago (~2 years), but because it was confusing back then.
Edit: Had a look at my writeup in my blog [0], Lastschrift it was. Amazon picked a bank account that did not exist anymore to pay for the order. When that bounced came the fees - and while one fee for that would have been normal if I had given the wrong bank account (which I'm pretty sure I only did, if I did, because their system did not save when I changed the bank account before), to take multiple fees for one order was in no way okay.
That actually could have been a problem. If the bank had accepted the charge, the fee for that would have been high, as far as I read when closing the account. This way - by Amazon just getting a bounce - my annoyment was just about the unreasonableness of the fee (to pay 3x3€ instead of 1x3€ just because Amazon decided to split the order), if the bank would have charged me instead it could have become a money problem.
That added to my concern with Amazon just using the wrong bank account, and that old account occuring again and again in my profile. Even if I wanted to order something at Amazon it would be too risky now.
Fulfilled by Amazon.de screwed up my last micro-order. I ordered an 8-pack of something and got a 5-pack.
Trivial for small items, but doesn't bode well for high value orders.
It's a confidence issue. Amazon has become a logistics giant but is steadily losing customer confidence.
A combination of fake reviews, fake items, high-friction or just plain missing consumer support on high-value items, and a hopelessly confused mess of a shop front all add up to a mediocre and untrustworthy experience.
It's enough that they screw up 0.01 - 0.1% of orders. They are big enough, those people will be loud and not those without issues.
On HN I put comment below because I had some issue - if I had not, such comment would have too little value to post.
I did receive many things without issues and have also received books that looked way worse than if you gave them to a toddler. It's bizarre - they started with books and books are items that are trivial to pack securely.
3 out of 5 books I ordered there were what a regular bookstore would have called a "Mängelexemplar": folded in pages, accidentally cut corners, missing pages
Those are books damaged in printing that the printer is supposed to destroy, some enterprising employee grabs them from the scrap to be recycled and Amazon stands ready.
Publishers and authors lose the entire amount.
I have seen books like this at weekend swap meets (flea markets) near major printing ecyclers where the recycler employee does the diversion when they see good books(to their eyes) in the scrap.
I cannot remember when I have last received a pristine book from Amazon in Germany. There is always at least one minor damage that I wouldn't get from a store book.
For cameras in the UK I usually buy from WEX instead, who have excellent customer service and specifically sell camera equipment. I quite like Scan for computer components too. But for general “stuff” or tech, Amazon are so much better than places like Currys, it’s not even funny any more.
I have had issues with Amazon in the past, but if you do have a poor support experience you just need to persevere until you get someone more flexible. Which is somehow still better than most of our other stores here in the UK.
Hedonic adaptation. I love amazon. I probably place 200+ orders a year, and I have plenty of issues. But that doesn’t make it vastly superior to the alternative.
For example, I bought a projector on BestBuy. They had the dimensions wrong and it wouldn’t fit where I needed it. With amazon, that would be a simple return. With BestBuy, a simple return and a 15% restocking fee. Good luck reaching someone at BestBuy to explain why that fee should be waived. With amazon, it would be a simple chat.
Amazon is infinitely better than most other retailers. People just forget how good we have it.
Yeah, I’m in the U.K. and I don’t think I’ve ever had a real issue with Amazon. Deliveries are on time 99% of the time and returns are simple (they even covered a £60 Post Office return of a heavy product I decided to return, because their only option required a printer and this was mid-pandemic so I had no way to access one).
Based off this thread I might think twice before ordering expensive stuff from them though - however I usually find other places are better value for expensive electronics etc. anyway
In the US, I tend to favor one or the other of the big US NYC "camera stores" for electronics. (Or a local Best Buy.) The prices are usually the same and I feel they're probably a bit safer if there's some sort of problem.
I don't know if I'm lucky and some other people are just unlucky. But I also sometimes suspect that some people buy things at prices that are "too good to be true" or that always go for the lowest price. (I admittedly also tend to go elsewhere for certain types of items. For example, I always buy my Apple stuff directly from Apple.)
It really is location dependent, since most of the problems are caused by the shipper. Amazon will use multiple shippers, and in some areas will use what ends up being people driving around in their personal cars to deliver packages. If you have unreliable shippers in your area, it’s hard to deal with Amazon when things go wrong. In one place I lived, Amazon would use the US Postal Service, UPS, and Fedex. I had no control over which. The local FedEx team was horrible, they never figured out how to deliver packages to my building. So they would pretend to deliver, say customer wasn’t home and no secure place to leave the package for 2-3 days, then stick a notice on the outside of the building somewhere that I could use to drive to the FedEx warehouse in the next town over to pick it up. Maybe it’s different now, but there was just no way to do anything about this.
Another location and I’d get these local people delivering packages in their personal cars and that was really hit or miss. Seems like anytime they were busy they just report that they tried to deliver but no one was home. They could steal whatever they wanted, it’s a matter of trust. How does Amazon know who is lying? Maybe I’m scamming them, maybe the shippers, maybe someone else is stealing packages off my doorstep.
There was just no way to choose a shipper or report problems with one. Don’t have any problems where I am now, so I don’t know if they’ve fixed that. They should be able to tell, statistically, if packages have more problems with one shipper over the other, but smart shippers who want to steal could probably game the system.
I don't get FedEx much but had a terrible experience with them on a few orders. One package left way out by my mailbox on a busy road. Another tossed to the side of my long driveway (????). Then things were fine again. Assume there was some driver who was, shall we say, not good at their job.
Periodically I do have shipper issues (including USPS on occasion). I have a long gravel/dirt driveway and some shippers obviously don't like to come down it. (I also have a neighbor with a large dog that likes to bark and that sometimes scares off drivers too. Oh yeah, that was FedEx too. Saw their truck and they claimed online not to have been able to deliver due to local regulations.)
FedEx is bimodal: they have "real" FedEx like Tom Hanks in that movie, and then they have contract drivers who bid for delivery routes on a short term basis and are not FedEx employees.
I don't get why Amazon doesn't allow the customer to chose between multiple available shipping carriers. They do for returns, which is fantastic and one of the reasons I love buying on Amazon, because I can always chose to pick the carrier that has the office 1 minute walk away from my home that is never busy, instead of being forced to drive to some remote store and stand in line.
If Amazon gave these choices to customers for shipping, it would apply pressure to shipping carriers to improve their service, as people would experiment and pick the best ones and stop picking bad ones. Eventually a bad carrier is forced to improve to not lose revenue. And Amazon would get way happier customers, who can pick what is best in their region, and they would have a massive advantage over smaller shops.
> I don't get why Amazon doesn't allow the customer to chose between multiple available shipping carriers. They do for returns...
I assume because the volume of returns is much lower than the volume of sales, plus Amazon isn't responsible for coordinating the return.
In essence, my suspicion is that at Amazon's scale they literally can't afford to let customers pick their own shipper. That's one variable too many to manage for their massive logistics problem, and the expense of building out the support for that would never be recouped.
> In essence, my suspicion is that at Amazon's scale they literally can't afford to let customers pick their own shipper. That's one variable too many to manage for their massive logistics problem, and the expense of building out the support for that would never be recouped.
I don't get it. All the alternative carriers are obviously in their system already, since deliveries obviously get routed via all of them, and (presumably) some algorithm selects which one that is in each case. All it takes is to put one more selection field on the order (and I guess in the customer profile, for a personal default value) and then use that if provided and the algorithm only if not provided. What's so hugely complicated about that?
Again, without any real knowledge, this is all speculation on my part, but: I’m assuming multiple shipments for different customers are combined at different points en route, so Amazon is optimizing for cost by choosing the shipper that makes the most sense (for them) for all of those customers.
Maybe it’s in fact trivial, but at Amazon’s scale I find it hard to imagine that any changes to their shipping algorithms are that easy, at least compared to the increased revenue that goes along with it, which in this case presumably is zero.
If you’re willing to put up with all of Amazon’s other crap in exchange for convenience, you’re unlikely to drop them because they won’t allow you to pick the shipper, at least until someone else starts taking business away from them.
I suspect the wield this lack of choice as a weapon against the carriers. They go to each carrier and say, "that a healthy looking Amazon contract you've got there. Shame if we suddenly stopped sending packages your way", then squeeze them for price. Harder to do that if Amazon let their customer pick the carrier.
I've certainly been part of something very similar, where a company has multiple suppliers providing the same service. Near contract renewal time we would move our volume on their competitors to remind them that they needed us more than we needed them. It was a very effective way to get them to keep lowering their prices as the years went on.
There is also probably also a logistics piece as well. Amazon will be shipping products to carriers last mile hubs or similar themselves, rather than having a carrier handle the entire distance. Which makes it cheaper for Amazon. So carrier will also be picked based on which hub is nearest to one of Amazons warehouses, how full the Amazon truck going there is, which warehouse has the product etc
People keep mentioning the price, the real problem is never buy camera equipment on Amazon. Use Adorama or B&H. I've bought tons of stuff on Amazon over the years, and have only had issues with camera equipment. After the last issue I had a few years ago, I realized it's just a waste of time to deal with camera equipment on Amazon.
Why camera equipment? IDK. Even before Amazon was a thing, buying camera equipment online was always a bit shady. I assume those same people just move to Amazon.
I should add that I've never had a problem sending back or replacing the item even when it was over 1k.
I was in urgent need of a spare part a couple of years ago and paid Amazon UK a lot extra to get it the next day. It was a heavy and bulky thing so I got really surprised when I got a simple envelope in the mail the next day.
It contained a simple SD-card adapter worth less than a dollar.
When calling Amazon about it they said I needed to ship the adapter back before they would send me the part I ordered. I told them it was totally unreasonable for me to have to wait many more days to get the thing I paid for when they obviously made the mistake and adapter wasn't worth anything compared to what I ordered. They could easily see that the weight of what they shipped was less than 1/1000th of what I ordered too but they refused to handle my case before they got their adapter back and they ended up hanging up on me.
Migrated my company off AWS after that and haven't used Amazon since. I value other things higher than saving an occasional dollar here or there.
The commingled inventory problem is seriously a United States thing, from what I have heard. It is a frustrating situation here in the US where lots of spoilable goods are available on Amazon but if you purchase them, they are spoiled. Deodorant, cereal, protein bars, tape, everyone has stories.
A Japanese friend said he could Amazon order a particular variety of candy and it would arrive next-day in good condition and I felt jealous. In America there really is no such service for ordering food or spoilable items online.
Yup, my track record with them is excellent, also.
I have received one wrong item (refunded, told to keep) and one item I didn't order. The only hassle I've ever had was a damaged item they were trying to talk me into accepting a discount rather than returning (a very heavy item, I'm sure shipping was an issue.)
There very definitely is an issue with counterfeits and their comingled inventory system needs to be nuked from orbit. I have once seen a product where it was pretty apparent *every* offering was garbage or counterfeit. I even reported one of the counterfeits to Amazon as the image revealed it was one of the garbage things, not the name brand it purported to be.
Someone here half joked about the LTV calculation determining how easily they accept returns. Amazon would be incredibly incompetent not to have an A-list who get priority treatment. If they don’t put people like you who make 200+ orders on it, that would be odd.
Amazon arrived in force kinda recently in my country. My parents are amazed by it and started making expensive purchases...
And now are surprised at how shitty their delivery is.
The worst case was when they bought some medicine for their dog and a expensive screen to use in their business.
The dog medicine arrived on a friday, I was present and heard a car horn, went to check, and it was a random normal car, a lady climbed out, said it was a delivery. when I said I was son of the person that made the purchase, she just shoved the package through the gate opening and drove away, didn't even said hi or bye or whatever, didn't check my identity properly, didn't take a signature, didn't even tried to deliver the package safely, she almost threw it at me.
Then saturday my parents had a meeting with someone, and left, but on that day the city hall sent some workers to do some work on the sidewalk.
Seemly Amazon deliverd it to these workers, Amazon claims they delivered, and claims some dude we never heard of accepted the delivery, we believe the dude in question is some random city hall employee that was doing sidewalk maintenance.
Likely to be Amazon Flex (https://flex.amazon.co.uk/). Anyone can download the phone app, go to the Amazon warehouse, and start delivering packages.
As you can imagine, quality of delivery is pretty variable. I had an Amazon Flex worker steal a phone that I'd ordered - Amazon refunded with no questions asked and as far as I know didn't bother to investigate the theft.
Amazon delivery is outrageously atrocious in my (poor) country. As an instance, this was the condition of an assorted pack of fruit juices that got delivered to me just yesterday: https://imgur.com/a/sSMmgot
To top it off, (rather poorly trained) Amazon support encouraged me to consume the contents of the pack with no understanding of what a health hazard means; at which point I hung up and cancelled my Prime membership.
I would never buy anything expensive from Amazon, the customer service is not adequate when things go wrong. I even stopped buying CD's from them as they would almost always arrived with cracked/broken cases. Specialist sellers, e.g. Prestomusic, actually wrap and pack them properly (and often have much better websites for buying music).
Yes I still do and I FLAC them. I've been collecting CD's for 35 years, so it's difficult to stop. I am sometimes envious of the high-res downloads, but whenever I hear digital clipping in the 16-bit CD version, the clipping has always been present in the 24-bit version too.
> Books are especially abused somewhere in Amazon’s fulfillment. (They’re always bent, creased, or dirty.)
Interesting that you bring this up- I have noticed over the past year and a half that all my Amazon books have been showing up with damaged corners and smudge marks all over the covers.
I buy directly from the publisher and have never had any issues. They might take a little longer to arrive, but they're always in perfect condition. Sometimes they even throw a free e-book my way, which I appreciate the hell out of.
I understand purchasing from other categories on Amazon, but with books it's so easy to avoid Amazon all together. Plus you know you won't receive a counterfeit (https://twitter.com/nostarch/status/1183095004258099202) if you order directly from the publisher.
Soooo many counterfeit books on Amazon, especially textbooks. Nothing quite like dropping > $150 on a big book only to get an obvious inkjet job in the box.
This might not be foul play - lots of textbooks are formally out of print and printed on demand by the publisher. The quality is lower for that reason.
Amazon used to be my #1 shopping place (save for groceries), years ago but I rarely use them anymore.
Last hard drive I ordered from them came wrapped in factory issued static plastic bag, and NO padding inside the Amazon issued cardboard box. I of course returned it after confirming it was broken.
That's not the only reason I gave up on them. Searching is getting really hard, reviews are meaningless due to fake ones, counterfeit products, ...
To me it looks like they've decided to run the business to the ground and cash in a monumental amount of money.
Ironically I do not buy books from Amazon due to the atrocious quality of their 'print on demand' titles. These look like they are printed with a 5 year old heavily abused inkjet.
Part of the appeal of reading deadtree is the paper feel, smell and type quality. Majority of paper backs from amazon are nigh unreadable.
Don't forget expired, misleading, or a knock-off. There's so many pitfalls to Amazon orders it reminds me of EBay back in the day.
Lots of brick and mortar stores improved their curbside flows during the pandemic, and this is the sweet spot for me. Same day pickup of items you could have grabbed yourself off the shelf, and humans around to dispute problems with.
Yup, ironically, books coming from Amazon are far more likely to arrive damaged - two decades later, and they still can't get it through their heads that they can't just toss a book in a box and expect it to be not crunch the corners every time. I don't think that it is even smart enough to be a scheme to encourage Kindle and Audible sales...
For returns, I was surprised to see only drop-off options, but I found that they actually just bury the pick up option on another page. I usually find it now under a small faint "more options" link. Good luck.
(And yes, despite being a multi-decade Prime customer, I now avoid Amazon for many categories, including books, & especially batteries)
My experience is that books are mostly still OK (US based) but the frequency of getting a new book that is slightly damaged has increased significantly. Even books that are shrink wrapped by the publisher sometimes come with corner or other damage (which may or may not have happened once in Amazon's hands, but I should not have to tolerate).
What I can say with certainty is that the attention to shipping the books has plummeted compared to the early years of Amazon. Back then they would put the book(s) on a piece of cardboard and shrink wrap that and then put some of the bubble stuff in the box.
Now you are lucky if they even put any filler in the box and best hope its not a rainy day and delivery leaves the package outside your door as boxes are flimsier and not always sealed tightly.
> Almost everything I receive is damaged, late, or mis-delivered. Books are especially abused somewhere in Amazon’s fulfillment. (They’re always bent, creased, or dirty.)
Strangely enough, a company whose employees have to piss in bottles and use crying booths may have staff that are not especially engaged in the highest quality work.
I always seem to get a boot prints on the books I buy on Amazon. I don’t really buy from Amazon any more but the amount of boot prints I’ve received over the years is a lot!
The latest book I ordered came unbelievably spotless. It was about $4 AUD including shipping for a book that would usually cost me $50+ shipping from USA (it was sheet music) so I was very happy. The original delivery date they gave me was delusional so I paid it no mind when it passed. Two days after it, I get an email saying they’re refunding me $3 for the inconvenience, and my spotless book arrived the next day. Three days late is a rounding error in postage delivery timelines where I live. I’m still bewildered by the whole experience to be honest, but hey, almost free expensive sheet music book. Definitely low risk for that purchase.
Haven't had any problems with Amazon shipping, but I'm thinking I might need to record every unboxing just to make sure I can prove what happened the first time it DOES hit me.
It's good news for them that the box was empty instead of filled with sand - that way the weight in the USPS shipping data made it obvious they weren't shipped the camera. I wonder if this was a Fulfilled By Amazon purchase or whether Amazon directly bought this empty box from a wholesaler to stock in their warehouse?
To be fair to the person above, the article is really confusing by always referring to the product as a "Sony A1" as if it was completely obvious to everyone what it is.
I thought it's a weird super expensive smartphone until I read the author's bio.
Count me too, I've thought it to be a TV for a minute if I didn't know the sites and their citation (PetaPixels) are for photo(video)graphy. But then item weighs just 1.4kg is no way a TV.
The thing that confirmed for me that this was a camera was the domain of the article, which relates to photography. As others have noted, Sony’s naming scheme is confusing.
I imagine they do some type of internal checks to see if it is a residential address and if there have been similar issues in the area. If they feel like the buyer may be lying then I'm sure they have some way to turn the matter over to investigators who may monitor their financial records and may even send police or FBI to surveil them.
So if my neighbour is abusing their Amazon account, if I get an empty box instead of a $7000 camera I get FBI to surveil me? What a fantastic idea, and it absolutely won't lead to any sort of discrimination whatsoever. I can already see the house listings "in a good neighbourhood, Amazon parcels arrive without a police surveillance van".
I don't see anywhere that says the item was shipped and sold by Amazon.com. If it was, then I can see how Amazon.com bears responsibility, but if not then it seems more like an issue with a third-party seller.
Most users don't know it's a marketplace. And Amazon tries to hide that. If they want to own the shopping experience, they also have to own the returns, fraud, bad reputation etc.
That's not true for every item. Items can be shipped and sold by a third party even if bought on Amazon.com. It's up to the buyer to check this when purchasing. The easiest way to tell is to check if the item is 'Prime' or not, but even then it's better to check who is selling and shipping.
Edit: I am describing the process as it is now. I am not saying that it should be this way.
No, if you buy an item on Amazon.com then it's on Amazon.com to make sure you have a good experience. As a customer I literally don't care who is fulfilling the purchase, I'm making the purchase on Amazon.com and my money is clearly going to Amazon.com according to my bank statements. If they decide to work with unscrupulous 3rd parties then that's on them, not on me.
There's obviously a misunderstanding with my statement. I am not talking about what should or shouldn't be happening, or what is morally right, or what the ideal experience is. I'm warning people that unfortunately Amazon does not operate the way many people think. Of course I do agree that Amazon should be the sole seller and that if you buy something from Amazon you should expect to receive it from Amazon.
I am simply stating facts as to how the website operates today. Right now, it's possible to order an item on the Amazon.com website that does not come from Amazon.com at all. It can be "shipped and sold" by a complete third party. Most items are shipped by Amazon, but it's not difficult to find items that are just listed on Amazon but the entire sale/shipping process is done by the third party.
The parent comment:
> If you buy on the Amazon.com website it’s on Amazon to deliver your order and provide a good shipping experience.
is simply false, because that's not how Amazon operates today. It is literally wrong because it does not apply to all items on Amazon. That statement is only true if something is fulfilled by Amazon, which includes items "Shipped and sold by Amazon.com" and "Sold by <some_third_party>, fulfilled by Amazon". Fulfilled by Amazon means it's located at one of its many warehouses and Amazon ships it in their Amazon boxes.
At 1:42 mark of the news broadcast[1], a snapshot of order details shows Sold by: Amazon.com Services LLC for both a $398 memory card and $6,498 camera.
> This was despite the fact that when boxed the Sony a1 weighs 3.22 lb (1.46 kg), and the Chiles’ package was listed by UPS as weighing only 2 lb (900 g).
Not sure why Amazon was still arguing at this point. If UPS confirms the package was basically empty, then Amazon has no reason to believe the customer was lying.
Probably like in "The Rainmaker". Automatically deny every claim above $X. If there's a complaint on the denial, automatically approve or deny based on a new number $Y. Most people give up before you finally get a real human to actually check the case.
If I was a god I would never send anyone to hell to burn forever in fiery torment. For this situation I would be very very tempted to make an exception. Anyone who sets up an automated system designed specifically to hassle people for seeking recourse for being wronged, deserves every form of torture they get.
Hell would be full before you got very far. Intentionally or unintentionally, this is how most such systems work... even ostensibly noncommercial ones... at least to some extent.
Business systems are a chain of events. Every event has x% chance of happening and leading to the next one. If the next event makes money, it's optimized up. If it costs money, it's optimised down. Efforts to pay unclaimed rebates are never as enthusiastic as efforts to claim unpaid receivables. Thus is life.
No, such is full-blown neoliberal capitalism, where the only thing that is considered worth optimizing for is profit.
Once you accept that there are other variables that deserve consideration and cannot just be abstracted by price and profit alone (most prominently customer and workforce satisfaction), other optimizations will come into play, which will reduce the amount of crap people have to deal with, and will ultimately lead for a better experience for everyone involved - except for the very few at the top, which are currently reaping all the profits.
I really wish the term capitalism hadn't been invented. Maybe it was useful in the 1840s, but in my lifetime it always seems to yield a thin hand wavy way of looking at things... whether your pro or con. The mental equivalent of shouting to win an argument.
Whatever your definition of capitalism, I'm sure you can find examples outside of it. There are an infinite number of variables besides profit. Profit isn't the only possible motive for such systems, and it only takes one.
A system of people is a system of people, whether it is a church, company, municipality, whatever.
> A system of people is a system of people, whether it is a church, company, municipality, whatever.
Different systems of people behave very differently with different kinds of motivations, stimuli and sanctions, on the individual and collective level.
And while there are many variables besides profit, it is money (and capital in particular) which enables most activities of a commercial corporation - not voluntary willingness to work or serve for some purpose; and it is Amazon's profit which the organization is designed to promote and maximize, over anything and everything else.
True, though I don't see the contradiction. There are similarities and differences, also within such categories.
In almost all cases though, they're not going to be as motivated to pay as they are to receive payment. Take subscription antipatterns for example. Charities do this too. They both also create similar self deceptions to justify the more onerous examples. It's not even just about money, convenience is a pretty big motivator.
Again, I'm not saying that everything is the same, or being reductive. Quite the opposite. I'm saying that reducing everything to "capitalism," "greed" or whatever is meaningless. It's just normally the case, that people and groups are more cognizant of their own goals and wants than they are of others'. Altruism exists, but it's not uniformly distributed across everything an altruist does.
The main thing to watch out for is monopolies. If customers always have enough choice then the customer and workforce satisfaction will get sorted out eventually, as those organizations will be selected for and companies won’t be able to exist without doing that right. It works really well, and is actually a strength of our free markets. Governments and committees stepping in and trying to fix the system tends to make it worse because the people who fall through the cracks have no recourse, and they also inadvertently create monopolies by making the system more complicated and expensive for new entrants. For all the complaining, “neoliberal capitalism” has made it the best time to be alive there has ever been, and the remaining problems tend to be around choke points where there is some kind of monopoly power and proper competition is missing. Amazon is getting there. But even so, reading through these comments, there’s plenty of discussion of how Amazon is so much better than the previous experience of many people. Amazon got to where it is today because overall the customer experience is so much better. It has raised the standard to a new level, which we will happily now complain about until someone else figures out how to do it better.
> For all the complaining, “neoliberal capitalism” has made it the best time to be alive there has ever been
That really depends on your point of view. For the average person on HN, upper middle class income or above? Sure thing, 100% agreed. Especially in the US however, if you're not part of that group, it would have been better to live 40-something years ago. Yes, you did not have all those fancy devices and cool tools that we have nowadays, but neither did anyone else, irrelevant of income.
> the remaining problems tend to be around choke points where there is some kind of monopoly power and proper competition is missing
Irrelevant of whether this might be true for Amazon - what about health care? Telco? Public transport? Basic utilities like water, electricity?
The US is a prime example on why "neoliberal capitalism" (at least if we're speaking about it in the Reagan/Clinton sense) is a complete and utter failure - it is the only developed country with a declining life expectancy, the richest country on earth with a sizeable amount of the population having multiple jobs and still living from paycheck to paycheck.
Don't get me wrong, I get your point. But it is really important to try to take the perspective of those who are the losers of the system, and for those people the current time is _for sure_ not the best to be alive. They are so desperate, so disassociated from the current state of affairs that they're willing to listen to snake oil peddlers like Trump, that they're willing to storm the Capitol or at least look the other way when others do, to disparage Science in the face of a pandemic because the class of the educated has left them behind earlier already, so why not this time?
> Amazon got to where it is today because overall the customer experience is so much better.
Relative to what? Compared to the "old experience" of having to go to a physical store - sure. But that's a damn low bar; everyone who can write a webpage can beat that these days. Amazon got where it is today because they straight-up ate the market, but not by being the best, but by being the ones who had the capital to sink everyone else before they went belly-up themselves (for how long is Amazon actually turning a profit? Not that far back, I reckon). In short, they played the market instead of letting the market play. And that's exactly my main gripe with what I'm calling 'neoliberal capitalism' here: The way Amazon played is not a bug of the system, it's a feature. It will continue to happen, until regulators kick in and set boundaries that go beyond anything what we can call neoliberal capitalism. It might still be a 'free market', it still allows for competition, but most definitely not in the barely-regulated sense that the neoliberal capitalism envisions.
> They are so desperate, so disassociated from the current state of affairs that they're willing to listen to snake oil peddlers like Trump, that they're willing to storm the Capitol or at least look the other way when others do, to disparage Science in the face of a pandemic because the class of the educated has left them behind earlier already, so why not this time
The majority of people making over $100k a year voted for Trump, and those numbers jump even higher if we look at race and income, where white people making over $100k were much more likely to vote for Trump.
Similarly, look at the economic demographics of the people who were able to afford to travel to DC on or before January 6th, and the people who attacked the Capitol. I saw a lot of relatively wealthy business owners break into the Capitol, even some IT company owners.
How do you think any other system would work. At least we get to vote with our wallets about which companies should live or die, it’s been working pretty well. At least greedy people will treat us well to get our money. Other systems select for people who love power, and they tend to not be kind once they get it. Fear is a pretty effective way of keeping people in line.
Agree that "burn in fiery torment" might be going a bit too far. Instead I'd suggest "listen to their own on-hold muzak for the rest of eternity" as a more appropriate punishment.
This is what Tesla is doing with their solar roof product. They raised prices by 50% even though people already had signed contracts. All their communication is incredibly insidious, telling people that they need to sign the new contract, when in fact that’s false, in hopes of convincing customers to cancel their order. I can’t wait until a class action lawsuit rips them a new asshole at this point.
>Anything of value promised by one party to the other when making a contract can be treated as "consideration": for example, if A signs a contract to buy a car from B for $5,000, A's consideration is the $5,000, and B's consideration is the car.
A failure of a contract for lack of consideration would be if there’s no exchange of value contemplated, ever. For example if I made a promise to provide you a valuable service for nothing in return.
In this situation both sides agreed to exchange something of value so there’s obviously consideration.
They could make an argument that no damages have occurred and claim you have no credible allegation of being harmed, but that’s a different thing and far from automatic.
I realize I phrased that incorrectly, I meant that a contract is only worth something if you can sue over it, and with $0 in damages (maybe not given the homeowner might be able to be comp’d for time or for money spent getting the permits) it wouldn’t make sense to sue Tesla over it.
This isn't true. Any promise is sufficient for consideration. Cash doesn't actually have to change hands for a contract to be in effect.
If this wasn't the case then every single financial futures contract or swap would be null and void. These contracts incur no cash flow on day one. They're merely a promise by one part to pay another based on some event in the future. If your legal theory was true, then one party could simply cancel any losses by voiding the contract as soon as the position moves against them.
then you would only be able to sue over damages, and with a roof maybe your only damages are the time spent planning and getting the permits to get the roof done, but if TSLA hadn’t even started ripping off the roof then I don’t see what damages you could claim against them (TSLA’s legal team surely weighed the possibility of a class action lawsuit).
The damage is one had a deal to pay X for a roof. If they can't fulfill their end of the deal, the damage is the difference between X and what have to be paid to get what was promised (either from them or a different provider).
I once ordered a DSLR camera kit from Amazon for around $750. It had a bunch of lenses but the lens adapter it was suppose to come with was missing. The adapter cost about $15 so I reported it was missing the adapter and asked if they could either send me one or refund me $15 so I could buy one off Amazon. They gave me 2 choices instead of reading my request, return it or accept a partial refund of 30%. I accepted the partial refund because I didn't want to return/re-order the camera kit and hope that it doesn't happen again. I felt kind of bad accepting such a large refund for a small problem.
That doesn't seem to prove anything at all? It's a 1.6 lb camera. Weighing in at 1.2 lbs short is either a bad scale or a lot of accessories missing, but it definitely does not corroborate a missing camera.
Scales used for commercial purposes in the US are required to meet accuracy standards and to be calibrated by law. While it’s not impossible for them to break, they’re a heck of a lot more rigorous in design and regulation than Amazon’s notoriously problematic inventory management.
Your comparison to Amazon's inventory implies that this is a weights vs Amazon issue, but what I'm trying to point out is that there are three sides, and none of them agree. If the weights are accurate, that means that the customer lied about getting an empty box (a 2-pound empty box? c'mon) despite actually not getting what they ordered, which is just really weird and hard to explain.
Yes, 2 lbs of packaging. It’s a $7000 camera. It’s well packaged. Even my $300 Canon was double boxed. (As are the customer’s photos of the packaging in the article)
The spec sheet of the a1 lists it as weighing 1.6 lbs. it lists the boxed weight as 3.22 lbs. This means the Sony packaging is 1.62 lbs.
The remaining 0.38 lbs is the packaging that Amazon put the Sony box in.
As a rule I don't order from Amazon beyond a certain price point. I purchase from a physical retail store. First couple of years of Amazon in India was really good. Good collection, low prices and good customer experience. But as their orders and catalog has shot everything about them has become a shitshow, at least from what I've observed. Also they have significantly ramped up 3rd party sellers and given extremely high density of retail stores in India I might as well go visit those stores and cut out Amazon. If I run into problems I can "physically" visit a store and talk to someone; with Amazon I might as well have better chances of talking to God.
I literally had an Amazon delivery person (err..1099 contactor?) throw a package over the fence at my apartment complex last year and hit my window. They do not care, add to this the piles of amazon boxes the differently-housed are grabbing off of porches and it's a real mess.
This is certainly one of those instances where I'd raise hell, but I actually avoid trying to file lost item claims with Amazon for smaller ticket items. I know they have automated systems in place to prevent fraud, and I'm terrified that reporting for smaller ticket items will get my Amazon account banned. I've had a friend have this happen with his Doordash account; the sushi place he orders from a lot was pretty bad at sending everything he ordered, and after reporting this to Doordash every time, they eventually disabled his account. To this day, the restaurant is still on Doordash.
That's perverse. You shouldn't have to self-censor out of fear. The fact that Amazon (Doordash, Google, ...) can get away with just cancelling people's accounts willy nilly and they'd have no recourse is a gaping hole in regulations.
BTW, it's off-topic, but this right here is the among best arguments we can make for strong privacy, and against mass surveillance. If people are willing to swallow monetary damage out of fear to upset an algorithm that may cut back their privileges, imagine what happens to political free speech when you have to fear govt surveillance and black vans.
It's a cost of doing business, not really a fear. I can't recall this happening to me, but if Amazon did make an error or damage a minor thing or whatever I wouldn't object because I would object if it were a major thing and I want to maintain a good record to make it more likely I automatically win any major objections in future. The cost of this strategy is accepting any minor loss from Amazon and the benefit is an increased likelihood of good service for major items.
The only error I can recall from Amazon is they once included an exacto knife I didn't order in a package to me.
Why companies should not have right to cancel their relationship with person for non-discriminatory reasons? And constant complaints and errors on aggregate sounds entirely reasonable reason.
If same thing kept happening inside non-online business I think we would find it pretty okay...
If you keep buying mouldy food maybe there is need to change your habits... Or stop buying from that store in first place.
On other side, let's say customer violently attacks other customers or staff. Or causes substantial property damage intentionally, maybe attempts arson. Would you still disagree with them banning such customer?
That doesn't sound like a good strategy. If they are bad at fulfilling their orders, why would you care if they are also stupid and cancel your account instead of fixing their problems? They are not the only merchant online.
While I get the frustration, I also don't understand the logic of continuing to order from a restaurant when you have frequent bad experiences with them. Is it really surprising that after a while Doordash just doesn't want to be in the middle of that relationship?
Given that they banned the customer, not the restaurant, they obviously do want to be in the middle of that relationship, but only with the customers who won't rightly complain about it.
I once got banned from a pizza place for this. I had some fussy eating friends and would order pizza, but they would frequently screw up orders like “no cheese”, sometimes even multiple times in succession, as in I’d order it, tell them they screwed up, they would send a replacement and it too would be screwed up… eventually I “wasn’t allowed to register any more complaints”.
This is what chargebacks are for and even if you get banned over it for this much money I’d say it’s worth it, heck for 7k I’d take it to court. Would be an easy judgement based on the label weights alone.
I've placed approx. 15k orders with Amazon Germany in 20 years and have probably had less than 100 issues, mostly with FBA sellers. I get an answer from CS within 10 minutes and 1-day shipments are on time ~98%. Refunds are issued as soon as I drop the package in the return box. Call me a fan.
The best experience is still Amazon JP but returns are a little more complicated (Even within Japan) — Obviously b/c you more or less do not return stuff in JP [Hansei (反省].
Amazon JP got a little worse ever since they started having their own delivery, which is not great compared to Yamato or Sagawa, which they were using before (and are still using sometimes, it's not clear under what conditions). But the difference is almost at the level of nitpicking. When you're used to top-notch service, and you suddenly get a subpar experience, that's kind of disappointing.
I think it was a year or two ago? It was a pretty big deal and in the news for a while.
I get a combination now of Amazon's own service or one of the big third-parties. All of them are great I think. I might prefer Amazon's since they're willing to just leave the package in front of your door.
This is pretty much the same as the US; except our postmaster just obliterated our mail service to try to rig an election so Amazon is actually better than them now.
Privately or as a business? If privately, I'm very curious what kind of things you order.
Even if I'd replace all my store visits (grocery store, hardware store, electronics store are the main ones) with online orders, I'd probably still not oder more than once every five days (or maybe once every 10 days during covid, now that I go to the grocery store less often).
Or are you talking individual items, like you buy groceries from Amazon and every item is a separate order because they all ship from different sellers?
90% private, 10% business. Literally anything from iPhones to a single duct tape. Food only for shelf-stable stuff since I live next to a grocery store.
> Literally anything from iPhones to a single duct tape.
I think this explains it. Cheapest ducktape on Amazon is like $3.48 with free shipping for Prime users. Ordering one such tape every other day only costs $52.20. At some point you stop caring how much externalities it might be causing by clicking "Order Now" in Tuesday 3:40 AM just for a single M4x20 screw you forgot to add earlier in the day.
Maybe the reason for this is more consumer friendly laws? In the EU you can return any* online/telephone ordered purchase within 14 days (among other laws).
More a matter of business practice in general — The fact that Amazon makes it easier than any other shop is just one reason why I prefer peace of mind over the cheapest price. And yes, the law is in place but most shops make it way too difficult (Acknowledging the reason, time to refund, "Lost" returns, Direct vs. Marketplace, etc.).
You're right. That doesn't mean that some shops won't ask and expect an answer though. So even though you're legally not required to do so, you'll have to go through an argument about that with the shop, which is annoying and time consuming.
This is not a thing. At least in Germany I never once had anyone ask me why I want to return before I could. 90% of the time you already have a return label in the package. Worse case you don’t and you cannot even request one through the website, you send an email and get the label.
I was only ever asked about my return _after_ it was issued by Charles Tyrwhitt after I ordered and returned a good number of items (due to their fit being all over the place). That was fair IMO.
On the other hand Amazon has numerous times shown that if you return too much (or don’t behave due to some other opaque metric) your account can get suspended. Even my account was suspended once, though I am only a moderate shopper and have returned less than 10 items over my 18 years membership.
I raised the issue with support and asked why (there weren’t even any returns around that time) and they could not tell me but reinstated my account.
Good demonstration of power and a reminder to move away from using kindles.
Amazon returns may be easy until you cross some threshold and end up on their bad side.
I did not mean that EU laws make returning on Amazon easy in general but that these laws may make Amazon less likely to behave the same in a way they do e.g. in the US.
It's not mandated anywhere in US law, but the vast majority of reputable retailers (e.g. Walmart, Amazon, Target etc.) have very generous return policies. They're usually far more generous than 14 days. As you might expect, there are of course reasonable limitations (e.g. customized products, digital products, etc.).
Yet very often they charge restocking fees which is unheard of here. And also these policies are up to their discretion. As you can see in e.g. Walmart’s policy they reserve the right to decline the refund. Better to have a guarantee by having it in the law. Again as stated before, Amazon is known to shut down accounts for returning too often.
Amazon is an easy target. Plus, I think many are referring to Marketplace and non-Amazon shipped orders where buyers lacked some basic common-sense. (E.g. 50% off cameras from a seller who just signed up...)
I think some of us are just cursed. I have trouble with at least 1/3 of all online orders. It's not my address: These problems have persisted in 5+ countries with different companies.
It'd never occur to me to make online ordering an integral part of my personal logistics and avoid it as much as I can.
It also surprises me how triple platinum status customers are in disbelief that some people who don’t make hundred or thousands of orders don’t get the kid-glove experience and are treated less well.
Amazon can both treat a large number of people well and treat other customers badly, there’s enough customers to do both to millions.
He appears to reference a Japanese cultural principle called 反省 which means something like "self-reflection". I believe he means that in Japan people do not return things often, they take the blame and learn from their mistake.
Bought a 55” tv from Amazon. The UPS driver came a knocked on my door saying, “it’s very large, please help me bring it in.” I went out with them to the truck where the tv was sitting on the pavement. Helped carry it to my house. Driver left. I opened it up, took it out of the packaging, pealed the plastic off the front, plug it in and turned it on. LCD panel was cracked internally. Went to the website and requested a replacement. It arrived the next morning. Was fine. I packed up the broken unit, stuck the UPS label on it, scheduled a pick up. UPS came by and grabbed it. Took a month but eventually the website acknowledge receipt of the return. Zero issues with the return.
Once preordered a Blu-ray from Amazon JP. It arrived on release day. My only complaint is they won’t ship Blu-ray’s from adult video producers even if the title isn’t hardcore porn.
I've done hundreds of orders on Amazon JP. I rarely return products but there are two cases:
Panasonic's microwave is dead on arrival, then Amazon shipped replacement one soon before I sent broken one.
Sony's headphone's bone is broken after a few month, so I sent it to Sony's service center but the shit support said that it's broken due to me, not product's fault even though it never taken out. They tried to charged me repair cost before repairing, so I tried to return the product to Amazon JP because it's faulty product. They accepted refunding with exactly same argument wrote here. I believe it won't happen on other Japanese shops.
From this experience, I sometimes buy from Amazon for products that possibly fragile and manufacturer's support is not reliable. (Or add extended warranty that covers my fault)
My friend often buy Chinese cheap electronics from Amazon JP (a.k.a. AliExpress Japan branch) and often return crap. He said it work flawlessly.
I've never lost my package, thanks to high quality delivery company and secure place.
At the end of the day most big companies have found its a better strategy to trust/not dispute customers in these situations. If they wanted to I don't think that would hold up, it's not as though you are opening it in a controlled supervised environment.
> At the end of the day most big companies have found its a better strategy to trust/not dispute customers in these situations.
The article we're responding to, not to mention the comments, is evidence that that is at minimum an unreliable assumption.
Re your second point, the seemingly standard way of resolving these issues after the company refuses to comply is to make it a PR problem for the company. Videos are going to help for that.
> The article we're responding to... is evidence that that is at minimum an unreliable assumption.
They were already refunded before the story was even published. Yes, Amazon didn't refund them 7K in their first customer support call, that ruffled their feathers but it is not at all surprising. At that $ obviously they need to be be escalated.
I am not a fan of Amazon. They sold (Amazon Choice, so they bought and then resold) me a chair that had a staple sticking out of one of the feet, that caused significant damage to my hardwood floors. Fuck them.
At the same time, I think it is naive to expect a customer support rep in the Philippines to handle this sort of situation. They do not make 7K in a month. If they bought the empty box at a brick and motor store, I wouldn't expect a cashier to be trained in dealing with a 7K fraud issue, and the general manager may not be able to resolve it on the spot either.
My guess is they eventually did a google search, and thats how they found advice telling them to email jeff@amazon.com. They have a large team of people managing that email and advertise it for situations exactly like this. Its hard to interface with a 2 Trillion Dollar entity but I think it's fair to say they do a ok job.
I agree with you about the frontline rep, that's not the person I have a problem with. I don't expect a low-level customer support rep to be able to approve such a thing. I expect Amazon to, in the event that a rep can't handle a complaint, proactively solve it in a different way, not try to fob the claimant off.
It would be just as easy to, say, bump any refund claim over 1k to someone who is paid enough to make such a decision. Amazon have decided they don't want to. And I don't really think that's acceptable. Just look at the comments in this thread of people self-censoring to avoid getting on the wrong side of the algorithm.
This is a situation Amazon has engineered, because it's cheaper to run these things through automated systems, or only frontline workers. I'm not inclined to accept what I think is pretty bare minimum as good enough on account of their size. If anything, I think their size allows them to afford and amortize better systems than a small company.
> people self-censoring to avoid getting on the wrong side of the algorithm
Not sure what you mean by this.
> This is a situation Amazon has engineered
I agree but I disagree with you as to why. I see two distinct issues.
1. Amazon marketplace reliability/integrity.
2. Customer support escalation process.
_________________________
1. I think Amazon does an abhorrent job, it's the wild west with regards to quality, fraud. & counterfeits. I personally don't trust it.
2. Unfortunately almost everywhere cuts costs and uses automation & frontline works but I think Amazon has a significantly above average process for a large company. The jeff@amazon.com is a very publicized escalation option/safety valve, which worked in this case & I am not aware of for other large brands. It's unfortunate they had a bad call the first time, but that happens. If this sort of thing happened with another retailer (although it's less likely to), I doubt they would have handled it until they went to twitter or was generating press with the story.
Yup, me too. It's so incredibly easy to do if you have an iPad with a kickstand, just hit record and unpack. If all is fine, delete. If not, then you are covered.
Such situations can be avoided if Amazon keeps updating us with weights & x-ray images of good from the very first step until delivery/package opening being done on camera
Happened to me with a phone. Lego can check the completeness of packages by weighting grams, Amazon can't check the weight of a package with a phone ? Only could solve the problem with the help of the police. Then they would not cancel the attached carrier contract (which does not make sense without the subsidized phone) because they said Amazon's systems can create contracts but not cancel them. Again only the police helped.
In the past I've got sent sometimes used electronics sold as new - recently I got 3 times used electronics as new in a row. Isnt that fraud?
Sadly I have a me-too experience in ordering English books from Amazon UK for shipment to Romania. Packages don't arrive & surprisingly, Amazon seem to have no idea as to the carrier responsible. On two occasions, books arrived and Amazon had marked them down as 'lost' until I told them otherwise. Time to look for another UK bookseller but finding one who's learnt from the positive side of the Amazon phenomenon is difficult.
I feel there is something universal about the phase in which the company enters and it is interesting to learn what moves companies in different phases.
Growing market, good press around, apologists for your brand, regulation and anti-monopoly scrutiny seems far away. Then the company is risk-taking, 7k$ that somebody occasionally may cheat is nothing in comparison to a possible blog post saying how awesome the company is. I think miraculously Apple is still here now, Google and Amazon were here 10 years ago, now AWS is here, Microsoft came here again recently, etc.
Then times come that bad press is there regardless of what you do, regulators watch you carefully. Then the user support becomes some scripts to follow, revenue over the next months (or launch before the next promotion cycle) is all you care about. Here I think how Verizon were super greedy and tried to milk the Droid brand within the 1st year, essentially killing it. I think the problem is once you enter this phase, it self-reinforces to stay here.
I have a theory why Google moved from one to the other and I have no view on the others, but at least here I think it was majority external factors not withing the company.
I order electronics from Newegg (which is starting to feel Amazon-like with third parties).
I generally use Amazon as a search engine to see what exists, look at reviews, then buy locally and physically if at all possible. Especially books, after they folded, spindled and mutilated too many books and their replacements.
This is kinda funny. About 5 years ago or so, the prevailing comment was the opposite of yours. ("I go to Best Buy to compare widgets, then order the one I want on Amazon.")
But I'm in the same boat. A lot more often I'll find myself looking at things on Amazon's site, then seeking out the manufacturer's own site, or another retailer, to make the actual purchase.
I just don't trust Amazon anymore. So much rebranded Alibaba shit on there, or counterfeit hazards.
Me too but reviews on Amazon are starting to get very untrustworthy. Not because of fake reviews, but because of products that unexpectedly come with a "Give us a review and we'll refund £5!" card in the box.
The latest one I got specifically stated they didn't need a positive review (presumably to get around Amazon's rules?) but it's still a bribe even if it is via an implicit debt.
A bit tangential, but can anyone in the know of UPS inner workings explain why the applicable tracking number[1] would reflect a "Shipped" status 3 minutes before "Label Created"?
I have had problems. I use this thing called keepa.com and it tells me when the prices of hard disks fall.
So over the past year I had tried 4 times to buy and three times I didnt even get the order.
So I was told "well because you didnt get it,we cant send a replacement so get a refund "
the last time I bought a 5tb external disk and I got, I kid you not, a 500 GB internal hard drive that was patched with tape. When I complained, I was told to get a refund because, again, cannot send you a replacement.
They really do not honor their prices if you get a good deal or a slip up.
This this a clear cut case and amazon should process the refund, however, in general refunding is a hard problem for Amazon to solve due to the sheer volume fraud that occurs.
For anyone unaware, go to telegram and do a public search for 'refunding'. There are hundreds of channels where you can pay someone to refund >£10,000 of stuff for you for a 10% fee. Afaik, the main method that 'refunders' use to defraud amazon is to (1) initiate a return (2) modify the return label so UPS accepts it into their system but (3) deliver it to the wrong address. So it looks to amazon as being successfully delivered to the return warehouse, but what actually got delivered was a brick, to some random house.
I wouldn't be surprised if >1% of macbook and iPhone refunds are fraudulent in this way. Someone in a cybercrime lab they should write a paper about this whole ecosystem because it is a huge black market.
> So it looks to amazon as being successfully delivered to the return warehouse, but what actually got delivered was a brick, to some random house
but how amazon does not check the quality of the return?
I mean, even if UPS confirms that the package arrived to right address, wouldn't someone from amazon warehouse check if the package is valid?
Well there is nothing for them to check. From what I've read, they wait two weeks then mark the package as 'lost in transit'.
I think for the last-mile of delivery, couriers rely on the actual address written on the package, not the address that the barcode scans to. I might be wrong though.
For returns you have to print a barcode and put it in the box. You don't get your refund until they physically scan the code in the box. Maybe it's not standard everywhere, but this process has been around for some years now. If the package never gets to the return center, no refund would be processed…
Hmm, maybe I'm wrong then. Though I could imagine that if this happened to you legitimately that you would have some legal recourse to get your money back; you fulfilled your end of the return by posting it, its not your fault the courier screwed up.
Amazon UK usually refund you as soon as the package is scanned into the shipper's tracking system. I've dropped off a return at a Hermes point and received a refund notification while walking back to my car.
There is the caveat that they will recharge you if the item isn't in good condition, but if they never receive it, I guess they can only assume the shipper lost it.
That's interesting, maybe it's different per country or perhaps even city/region? The two times I've ever returned something, I had to put a little printed barcode thing into the box with the returned item. Just did this a couple months ago.
What you described is not a hard problem, it is an expensive problem because Amazon does not want to hire human labor to deal with returns. Almost all other retailers do it, and they all have 3% profit margins.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 315 ms ] threadLots of folks have come to trust Amazon's reliability and customer service over the years, so it does make sense for customers to order expensive things from Amazon or any other online store, especially with a pandemic going around.
This incident in particular does seem to be an outlier, and we'll have to see how Amazon resolves it.
For any substantially expensive device, they can also void the warranty by not being an authorized dealer. Or at least create a hassle for the person attempting to use that warranty.
I do NOT trust the million other people selling things on amazon storefront hoping that you don't notice they're not actually amazon
I've recently used newly opened Amazon.pl, first purchase and I had to wait +5 weeks for a small item. I'm not used to navigating the labyrinth of checking whether something is fulfilled by someone or whatever. I just had the displeasure of buying something from a dropshipper.
Nowadays I research items on Amazon and search specialized shops to get them from and maybe get someone to chat with about the stuff I am going to buy. Because I can't trust the reviews on Amazon
There are a lot of knockoff products on there, even benign things like birdfeeders are getting faked and sold: https://www.marketplace.org/2019/11/18/how-amazons-counterfe...
I have not heard that, but holy cow. Just so incredibly shady.
For what it's worth, I bought that same birdfeeder directly from the manufacturer's own storefront on ebay (I've found ebay to be easier to find real sellers than Amazon and don't have to deal with figuring out who is doing the shipping etc) and it's awesome.
Removing the links just affirmed they don't care whats in their marketplace, and they just backed that attitude up with their recent lawsuit claiming they're not responsible.
I've even reported people who include the "$5 for a review", but they don't ever do anything about it. What trust have they earned except from a few people not complaining?
This 1 case was listed as free shipping. So I ordered it, was charged S$180, and 2 weeks later received a brand new, unopened, case, with glass panel all intact no issues.
Amazon’s return process is becoming incrementally more obtuse as time goes on. While they’re still decently good, it’s getting harder to do easy, no-nonsense returns. Typically—if they don’t just tell me to dispose of the item myself—they demand I drive to Amazon lockers or Whole Foods or Kohl’s to drop stuff off at no charge, and pressure me into just getting Amazon credit.
I would never buy a $7,000 item on Amazon under any circumstance.
In my experience Amazon Japan still knows how to pack books correctly, but I haven't ordered from them since the start of COVID... they properly secure books to a bit of backing cardboard (with shrink-wrap and/or rubber bands, usually) and then mount the backing cardboard inside of the packing box so that the books don't slide around and get damaged. I'm sure it costs like an extra 50 cents per package to do this, but presumably their customers demand quality in other countries where Amazon doesn't have a de-facto monopoly.
Previously I was buying electronics and I needed to use proxies which are added cost and hassle.
Got any tips?
As for Amazon Japan, their packaging is most often top-notch although that’s more related to Japanese mentality than to Amazon‘s policy.
But you end up with smudgy pages from a bad printer, pages missing, and a book binding not lasting more than a day.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Amazon-Print-on-Demand-Guide/b?ie=U...
That's how they used to do in France when they started (15-20 years ago): a base cardboard plate at the right size for the box, the stuff stacked on the cardboard, and both united by a shrink wrap. That was both simple and extremely effective, or otherwise said: great.
I don't know why they stopped. And I don't know why nobody else copied that system.
(I used to order from 2000 miles away, now I don't order books from Amazon no more, except second hand foreign language books I couldn't get otherwise.)
If I try to order a book on Amazon today, it gets shipped in a manila envelope (with bubble padding built into the envelope). The tightness of the envelope damages the book.
I have no idea who thought this was a good idea, or even an acceptable idea.
I'd have to think theft by the warehouse workers is pretty rare, it feels like the kind of thing they'd surveil and police quite zealously.
You can tell they're increasing the scrutiny on drivers as well with them having to take photos of the delivered item, and they've clearly always been closely tracked on time and location.
This is actually largely Amazon's fault, as far as I understand it. People buy obviously counterfeit items, then buy the real thing on Amazon, and return the counterfeit item. Amazon does ~zero verification of the return and puts the counterfeit item back on the shelf/bin with the official SKU.
Amazon has no concept of "open box" vs "new," and they don't want to be the arbitrator of returns.
Yes they do. There is a large section of the website ("Amazon Warehouse deals") devoted to open-box items. I've used this a few times and got great prices on perfect items, just with opened or damaged packaging.
Some time ago, my wife ordered something from Amazon, and it was reported as “delivered,” but the photo was of someone else’s doorstep.
She had no problem getting them to ship a replacement, but it added a few days to the process.
The “last mile” stuff is crazy. I sometimes see two Amazon Prime Sprinters on the same street, at the same time.
It was much worse, when it was done by independent contractors. We would see these folks driving around, with so many boxes in the cab of their vans, they had to make a hole to see through.
Looked like an episode of Hoarders.
I’m not surprised they have issues. The system is basically strained to the max. It’s a miracle that it works as well as it does.
This happens to me about every third time I get something from Amazon. Fortunately, the wrong house they keep delivering to is in my neighborhood and I recognized it in the picture.
I report this every time, but I don't expect it to do any good.
Not really, I'm currently living out of an apartment with a mailroom and it seems like half of the orders are correctly marked as "Left in mailroom" with a picture, less than half the time they actually put it in the parcel locker, most of the time it's just dumped on the floor even when it would obviously fit, and when it's not marked as "Left in mailroom" it seems that delivery drivers are exploiting the fact that they don't have to take a photo if they select "Left with receptionist". We don't have a receptionist, so every time they select that not only do I have to try and figure out where in the mailroom my package is, I have to do it immediately because now I have no clue if they correctly put it in the parcel locker where it's safe or if it's just lying in a stack of boxes out in the open.
Not to even mention all the times packages are marked as delivered the day before, presumably to hit some delivery quota. Currently if you open up a case with Amazon for a package marked delivered that you haven't received they make you wait at least 2 days because odds are it's still in transit.
In the case of Spain their customer support is fine, but it falls flat because delivery is a shitshow.
In fact, nothing tells us we all see the same prices either. I suspect they only show me more expensive items, because I can find my A4 paper at 6€ elsewhere instead of 10€ on Amazon. And same goes for most other stuff. Maybe after a few years, Amazon profits off us with a hefty margin. Price segmentation by (reverse) customer loyalty.
They've been shipping the wrong items lately too, twice in the last year when I order something that has multiple selections like color, scent or flavor etc I'll sometimes get the wrong item sent. I've done more Amazon returns in the last 2 years than my previous 15 combined.
The other side of that coin is that Amazon used to have relatively low prices. Not anymore.
As a matter of fact, I would go to great lengths in order to return or replace the coffee scale if that happened to me. It places my mind at peace to have things exactly as I expect them to be.
I think Best Buy is the absolute best ;) place to buy a TV; good prices, huge selection, always handled carefully. YMMV!
Like, I see all of these comments on HN all the time but I have the exact opposite experience - they just have no competition over here. I'm at a point where even if something is slightly more expensive on Amazon I'd rather buy from them as I know their CS Support won't try to screw me over.
Not to mention not everything is shipped from seller / manufacturer to you via Amazon.
Maybe with commodity household goods it’s different than with higher value items or with electronics.
The main issues you get are when returns are put back into stock but haven’t been sufficiently checked.
I used to work for an online retailer who sold things like games consoles and the amount of return scams we got was absolutely shocking. If you sold a games console with a free game (usually a code inside the console) people would take the game code out, or copy it, and then return the console and have the game. Other times they would take an iPad out, put a brick in the box and then shrink wrap it. Or buy counterfeit AirPod pro’s and swap them for the real ones and return the fakes.
The problem is compounded because people want to buy “new” items with shrink wrap around them, so it’s harder to check returns aren’t scams when the scammers have shrink-wrap machines.
If you could turn that into a ribbon, then any box could be wrapped in such a way any tampering is evident.
If you could also print a QR code on top, then you have a per shipment tamper proof
I suspect it exists but i am sure there is a long way between that and cost effective useage
The issue here is people returning it in a state where it is still sealed - as if an item is sealed it will go back into stock straight away and the retailer can’t open it up to check that it is in there.
If it’s opened you can still return it, but once that happens usually electronics have to be sent back to the manufacturer to refurbish/reset.
It’s not about stopping people returning items, it’s about making sure the correct returns channel is used and detecting fraud (which happens when people return the item pretending it’s unopened so it goes back into stock unchecked, but the item has been replaced with a brick).
Also, how does Amazon prove that the brick they received came from the customer and not some employee?
As for the second one, with bin/lot tracking you can identify if the item had previously been returned. Employee theft doesn’t usually involve putting bricks in it within a DC - it’s usually easier and less risk to take the whole box (and maybe get rid of the packaging in the toilet, at a warehouse I used to work at someone was found to be stealing iPods because a lot of packaging was found behind a toilet ceiling tile). If the item hadn’t previously been returned, this would usually infer that the customer was lying about receiving it with a brick in it (although obviously there is the possibility that it came in that state from the supplier).
The usual assumption is that the supplier didn’t send it in with a brick, because otherwise customer fraud is too easy - but occasionally that assumption is wrong, which is probably what happened in this case.
They probably checked there was no return in the history, made the assumption it wouldn’t have come empty from Canon, and figured it was the customer that lied.
The main thing is making sure that these things are ubiquitous, that there isn’t a workaround and that systems are in place to do the specific checks which are different for each item at every return point.
In the example with the Xbox games, not all games had the seal, or the same game SKU might sometimes have the seal and sometimes have a standard case. Then there was the workaround where people could lever the case open at the top and still take the game out.
The danger of seals is sometimes they can provide a false sense of security, but they probably do help when implemented well.
I don't know if it has been invented yet, however here's the idea: a RFID tag that normally returns a valid code, but any removal attempt would not simply destroy it, but rather change the code (for example through bit changes by peeling conductive parts of it) into one that would return a tamper warning at next readings. That would also make possible to track when the box was opened (therefore potentially also finding by whom) since all boxes must be scanned at every step. The tag however should be put in a place where the user would not stick a cutter blade; it should peel off for example as the result of pulling a string to open the box, removing a piece of cardboard, etc.
ALL other delivery outfits are horrible in comparison, and i actually dred using any other service.
I’ve run a huge pile of apple kit through them in the last two years and when a Mac mini disappeared from my doorstep they refunded without question.
The Mac mini did make a reappearance a week later as it was dumped in someone’s porch down the road and they brought it back round. Spoke to customer services and they sent me a return label to send it back.
Probably. There’ll be some people who can rely on their reputation with their CC company too to do a chargeback.
https://old.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/nm1mm1/i_got...
If the chance of a problem worthy of complaining on reddit or a blog was a million to one that world be 4 problems a week.
[0] https://tamebay.com/2018/09/amazon-established-as-3rd-larges...
And I love the ability to take items back to our local Amazon depot without having to box the item. Just give it back to them and they handle all the shipping.
Since then though I won’t use Amazon for anything remotely safety related, think child car seat - nope, some equipment for rewiring house, nope.
This also makes me think about higher end purchases, whereas before I was like 100% Amazon, they have lost the trust I had for them and doubt they will get that back.
My main issue is that by the time I realised it was fake the game had been stopped and seller removed so they probably knew the game they sent me was fake (because of other complaints) but they made zero attempt to put it right. It seems if customers report fakes, customers who potentially also received fakes are not alerted and that is a real problem for me.
Amazon doesn't even bother to collect that data. If you want to make a return because you received a counterfeit, you need to lie about the reason for your return, because "I received/believe I received a counterfeit product" isn't a choice they let you choose from when filing a return.
I mean, I am not sure, if anybody ever reads those, but you I would not have to lie this way.
Honestly, it feels like Amazon is intentionally not keeping explicit records of the counterfeits they sell because of their potential liability and the fact that such records would make Amazon look bad in depositions.
We passed a ton of orders for valuable goods that were processed by small companies who used amazon as an alternative storefront to boost their sales. Communication was finnicky but everything went fine.
Then we also order a ton of cheap, little convenient stuff that we could have ordered on aliexpress but went to amazon for faster delivery. It was a lot more hit or miss, with pure junk coming in from tjmes to times.
We never hit the level of scam described in the article, but we'd also pay a lot more attention on where it’s coming from before forking 7k.
I have also seen a few deliveries with pictures that went to what was clearly the wrong address, had a box of chocolates arrive totally melted where the ice pack exploded and left me with a wet, melted box of chocolates, and during early Covid, I did end up getting scam toilet paper rolls shipped in from China. Oh, it was actually toilet paper, but the rolls were incredibly tiny and nothing at all like the pictures.
So... definitely hit or miss and it depends a lot on what you order.
I buy about everything from Amazon, since the beginning, and have had nearly zero issues. A screw-up now and then is forgivable.
I wish Amazon could randomly test and delist some of those products or whatever. Or maybe do some random testing before listing them for sale, it's not some obscure scam after all.
My preferred approach now is to use niche-retailers for things I care about arriving intact on the assumption that if your entire business is about that product category then you should be knowledgeable about how to ship those items safely. Barnes & Noble for books, B&H for camera, BestBuy for consumer electronics and video games, etc.
I suspect they are playing the odds, accepting that they will have to refund a few items that got smashed from inadequate protection.
I’m like you - I’ve ordered so many things from Amazon this last year or so (new circumstances plus pandemic lockdown) and literally not one problem of the sort described. I can think of two items out of hundreds which weren’t on time (one, Amazons’s logistics made it a whole day late, and one was the seller’s issue). And the (very rare) returns were dealt with without a hitch.
For other reasons, I actually want to not be so reliant on Amazon, but their combination of Prime delivery, reliability, and customer service is unbeatable for many/most non-specialist items.
I ordered a bunch of small electronics stuff, about 100€. In the order process Amazon selected an expired credit card (which I'm sure I had replaced in the settings already). They then split the order in parts and for each order part demanded an additional late pay fee, because the card was expired. This is despite me calling them to stop the order or to correct the payment method, before the package had arrived.
They couldn't help, I was promised a call back, never arrived. The chat support deleted the expired credit card from their system, only to cut the connection as soon as I asked for a solution for the fees and to know why the wrong card was selected. Later, that expired credit card turned up in my settings again.
In the electronics stuff that arrived, a converter I bought was evidently fake. It was also a converter, but it had different markings than the one on the product photo (including a missing CE symbol). I sent that back. A short while later, Amazon accused me of not having sent it back and wanted me to pay again! I still had the proof of having sent a package, which made them shut up.
Never again.
Edit: Had a look at my writeup in my blog [0], Lastschrift it was. Amazon picked a bank account that did not exist anymore to pay for the order. When that bounced came the fees - and while one fee for that would have been normal if I had given the wrong bank account (which I'm pretty sure I only did, if I did, because their system did not save when I changed the bank account before), to take multiple fees for one order was in no way okay.
[0]: https://www.onli-blogging.de/1832/Meine-richtig-schlechte-Su... (in german)
You'll have to ask the banks why. In my case it wasn't a problem, but technically it shouldn't happen and it's strange that it did.
That added to my concern with Amazon just using the wrong bank account, and that old account occuring again and again in my profile. Even if I wanted to order something at Amazon it would be too risky now.
Trivial for small items, but doesn't bode well for high value orders.
It's a confidence issue. Amazon has become a logistics giant but is steadily losing customer confidence.
A combination of fake reviews, fake items, high-friction or just plain missing consumer support on high-value items, and a hopelessly confused mess of a shop front all add up to a mediocre and untrustworthy experience.
On HN I put comment below because I had some issue - if I had not, such comment would have too little value to post.
I did receive many things without issues and have also received books that looked way worse than if you gave them to a toddler. It's bizarre - they started with books and books are items that are trivial to pack securely.
I have had issues with Amazon in the past, but if you do have a poor support experience you just need to persevere until you get someone more flexible. Which is somehow still better than most of our other stores here in the UK.
For example, I bought a projector on BestBuy. They had the dimensions wrong and it wouldn’t fit where I needed it. With amazon, that would be a simple return. With BestBuy, a simple return and a 15% restocking fee. Good luck reaching someone at BestBuy to explain why that fee should be waived. With amazon, it would be a simple chat.
Amazon is infinitely better than most other retailers. People just forget how good we have it.
Based off this thread I might think twice before ordering expensive stuff from them though - however I usually find other places are better value for expensive electronics etc. anyway
Another location and I’d get these local people delivering packages in their personal cars and that was really hit or miss. Seems like anytime they were busy they just report that they tried to deliver but no one was home. They could steal whatever they wanted, it’s a matter of trust. How does Amazon know who is lying? Maybe I’m scamming them, maybe the shippers, maybe someone else is stealing packages off my doorstep.
There was just no way to choose a shipper or report problems with one. Don’t have any problems where I am now, so I don’t know if they’ve fixed that. They should be able to tell, statistically, if packages have more problems with one shipper over the other, but smart shippers who want to steal could probably game the system.
Periodically I do have shipper issues (including USPS on occasion). I have a long gravel/dirt driveway and some shippers obviously don't like to come down it. (I also have a neighbor with a large dog that likes to bark and that sometimes scares off drivers too. Oh yeah, that was FedEx too. Saw their truck and they claimed online not to have been able to deliver due to local regulations.)
If Amazon gave these choices to customers for shipping, it would apply pressure to shipping carriers to improve their service, as people would experiment and pick the best ones and stop picking bad ones. Eventually a bad carrier is forced to improve to not lose revenue. And Amazon would get way happier customers, who can pick what is best in their region, and they would have a massive advantage over smaller shops.
I assume because the volume of returns is much lower than the volume of sales, plus Amazon isn't responsible for coordinating the return.
In essence, my suspicion is that at Amazon's scale they literally can't afford to let customers pick their own shipper. That's one variable too many to manage for their massive logistics problem, and the expense of building out the support for that would never be recouped.
I don't get it. All the alternative carriers are obviously in their system already, since deliveries obviously get routed via all of them, and (presumably) some algorithm selects which one that is in each case. All it takes is to put one more selection field on the order (and I guess in the customer profile, for a personal default value) and then use that if provided and the algorithm only if not provided. What's so hugely complicated about that?
Maybe it’s in fact trivial, but at Amazon’s scale I find it hard to imagine that any changes to their shipping algorithms are that easy, at least compared to the increased revenue that goes along with it, which in this case presumably is zero.
If you’re willing to put up with all of Amazon’s other crap in exchange for convenience, you’re unlikely to drop them because they won’t allow you to pick the shipper, at least until someone else starts taking business away from them.
I've certainly been part of something very similar, where a company has multiple suppliers providing the same service. Near contract renewal time we would move our volume on their competitors to remind them that they needed us more than we needed them. It was a very effective way to get them to keep lowering their prices as the years went on.
There is also probably also a logistics piece as well. Amazon will be shipping products to carriers last mile hubs or similar themselves, rather than having a carrier handle the entire distance. Which makes it cheaper for Amazon. So carrier will also be picked based on which hub is nearest to one of Amazons warehouses, how full the Amazon truck going there is, which warehouse has the product etc
Why camera equipment? IDK. Even before Amazon was a thing, buying camera equipment online was always a bit shady. I assume those same people just move to Amazon.
I should add that I've never had a problem sending back or replacing the item even when it was over 1k.
When calling Amazon about it they said I needed to ship the adapter back before they would send me the part I ordered. I told them it was totally unreasonable for me to have to wait many more days to get the thing I paid for when they obviously made the mistake and adapter wasn't worth anything compared to what I ordered. They could easily see that the weight of what they shipped was less than 1/1000th of what I ordered too but they refused to handle my case before they got their adapter back and they ended up hanging up on me.
Migrated my company off AWS after that and haven't used Amazon since. I value other things higher than saving an occasional dollar here or there.
A Japanese friend said he could Amazon order a particular variety of candy and it would arrive next-day in good condition and I felt jealous. In America there really is no such service for ordering food or spoilable items online.
I have received one wrong item (refunded, told to keep) and one item I didn't order. The only hassle I've ever had was a damaged item they were trying to talk me into accepting a discount rather than returning (a very heavy item, I'm sure shipping was an issue.)
There very definitely is an issue with counterfeits and their comingled inventory system needs to be nuked from orbit. I have once seen a product where it was pretty apparent *every* offering was garbage or counterfeit. I even reported one of the counterfeits to Amazon as the image revealed it was one of the garbage things, not the name brand it purported to be.
And now are surprised at how shitty their delivery is.
The worst case was when they bought some medicine for their dog and a expensive screen to use in their business.
The dog medicine arrived on a friday, I was present and heard a car horn, went to check, and it was a random normal car, a lady climbed out, said it was a delivery. when I said I was son of the person that made the purchase, she just shoved the package through the gate opening and drove away, didn't even said hi or bye or whatever, didn't check my identity properly, didn't take a signature, didn't even tried to deliver the package safely, she almost threw it at me.
Then saturday my parents had a meeting with someone, and left, but on that day the city hall sent some workers to do some work on the sidewalk.
Seemly Amazon deliverd it to these workers, Amazon claims they delivered, and claims some dude we never heard of accepted the delivery, we believe the dude in question is some random city hall employee that was doing sidewalk maintenance.
As you can imagine, quality of delivery is pretty variable. I had an Amazon Flex worker steal a phone that I'd ordered - Amazon refunded with no questions asked and as far as I know didn't bother to investigate the theft.
I would definitely not buy dog medicine.
Amazon delivery is outrageously atrocious in my (poor) country. As an instance, this was the condition of an assorted pack of fruit juices that got delivered to me just yesterday: https://imgur.com/a/sSMmgot
To top it off, (rather poorly trained) Amazon support encouraged me to consume the contents of the pack with no understanding of what a health hazard means; at which point I hung up and cancelled my Prime membership.
Interesting that you bring this up- I have noticed over the past year and a half that all my Amazon books have been showing up with damaged corners and smudge marks all over the covers.
I understand purchasing from other categories on Amazon, but with books it's so easy to avoid Amazon all together. Plus you know you won't receive a counterfeit (https://twitter.com/nostarch/status/1183095004258099202) if you order directly from the publisher.
Last hard drive I ordered from them came wrapped in factory issued static plastic bag, and NO padding inside the Amazon issued cardboard box. I of course returned it after confirming it was broken.
That's not the only reason I gave up on them. Searching is getting really hard, reviews are meaningless due to fake ones, counterfeit products, ...
To me it looks like they've decided to run the business to the ground and cash in a monumental amount of money.
Part of the appeal of reading deadtree is the paper feel, smell and type quality. Majority of paper backs from amazon are nigh unreadable.
Lots of brick and mortar stores improved their curbside flows during the pandemic, and this is the sweet spot for me. Same day pickup of items you could have grabbed yourself off the shelf, and humans around to dispute problems with.
For returns, I was surprised to see only drop-off options, but I found that they actually just bury the pick up option on another page. I usually find it now under a small faint "more options" link. Good luck.
(And yes, despite being a multi-decade Prime customer, I now avoid Amazon for many categories, including books, & especially batteries)
What I can say with certainty is that the attention to shipping the books has plummeted compared to the early years of Amazon. Back then they would put the book(s) on a piece of cardboard and shrink wrap that and then put some of the bubble stuff in the box.
Now you are lucky if they even put any filler in the box and best hope its not a rainy day and delivery leaves the package outside your door as boxes are flimsier and not always sealed tightly.
Strangely enough, a company whose employees have to piss in bottles and use crying booths may have staff that are not especially engaged in the highest quality work.
The latest book I ordered came unbelievably spotless. It was about $4 AUD including shipping for a book that would usually cost me $50+ shipping from USA (it was sheet music) so I was very happy. The original delivery date they gave me was delusional so I paid it no mind when it passed. Two days after it, I get an email saying they’re refunding me $3 for the inconvenience, and my spotless book arrived the next day. Three days late is a rounding error in postage delivery timelines where I live. I’m still bewildered by the whole experience to be honest, but hey, almost free expensive sheet music book. Definitely low risk for that purchase.
Because it most certainly will, sooner or later.
Then any claims of missing/wrong/damaged goods go through smoothly.
Most security cameras don't have autofocus, so showing closeups of scratches doesn't work...
Data sent over neighbors wifi via another amazon device
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/22-year-old-mud-filled-boxes...
I thought it's a weird super expensive smartphone until I read the author's bio.
The TV you speak of belongs to a literal latin A line of products.
The thing that confirmed for me that this was a camera was the domain of the article, which relates to photography. As others have noted, Sony’s naming scheme is confusing.
Their regulars are bound to know what Sony A1 is, but it sure can be confusing for new readers.
It's such a common scam to buy stuff and return an empty box. If they've deemed it not worth the cost to check returns it's again on them.
But now those returning empty boxes will probably add rocks to match the weight or so.
Edit: I am describing the process as it is now. I am not saying that it should be this way.
I am simply stating facts as to how the website operates today. Right now, it's possible to order an item on the Amazon.com website that does not come from Amazon.com at all. It can be "shipped and sold" by a complete third party. Most items are shipped by Amazon, but it's not difficult to find items that are just listed on Amazon but the entire sale/shipping process is done by the third party.
The parent comment:
> If you buy on the Amazon.com website it’s on Amazon to deliver your order and provide a good shipping experience.
is simply false, because that's not how Amazon operates today. It is literally wrong because it does not apply to all items on Amazon. That statement is only true if something is fulfilled by Amazon, which includes items "Shipped and sold by Amazon.com" and "Sold by <some_third_party>, fulfilled by Amazon". Fulfilled by Amazon means it's located at one of its many warehouses and Amazon ships it in their Amazon boxes.
If I misinterpreted the comment, then my mistake.
I state what I as a consumer expect when shopping.
You state what is actually happening today.
I think we both agree with both points.
[1] https://youtu.be/N-boHgrQ6QQ?t=102
Not sure why Amazon was still arguing at this point. If UPS confirms the package was basically empty, then Amazon has no reason to believe the customer was lying.
Business systems are a chain of events. Every event has x% chance of happening and leading to the next one. If the next event makes money, it's optimized up. If it costs money, it's optimised down. Efforts to pay unclaimed rebates are never as enthusiastic as efforts to claim unpaid receivables. Thus is life.
No, such is full-blown neoliberal capitalism, where the only thing that is considered worth optimizing for is profit.
Once you accept that there are other variables that deserve consideration and cannot just be abstracted by price and profit alone (most prominently customer and workforce satisfaction), other optimizations will come into play, which will reduce the amount of crap people have to deal with, and will ultimately lead for a better experience for everyone involved - except for the very few at the top, which are currently reaping all the profits.
Whatever your definition of capitalism, I'm sure you can find examples outside of it. There are an infinite number of variables besides profit. Profit isn't the only possible motive for such systems, and it only takes one.
A system of people is a system of people, whether it is a church, company, municipality, whatever.
Different systems of people behave very differently with different kinds of motivations, stimuli and sanctions, on the individual and collective level.
And while there are many variables besides profit, it is money (and capital in particular) which enables most activities of a commercial corporation - not voluntary willingness to work or serve for some purpose; and it is Amazon's profit which the organization is designed to promote and maximize, over anything and everything else.
In almost all cases though, they're not going to be as motivated to pay as they are to receive payment. Take subscription antipatterns for example. Charities do this too. They both also create similar self deceptions to justify the more onerous examples. It's not even just about money, convenience is a pretty big motivator.
Again, I'm not saying that everything is the same, or being reductive. Quite the opposite. I'm saying that reducing everything to "capitalism," "greed" or whatever is meaningless. It's just normally the case, that people and groups are more cognizant of their own goals and wants than they are of others'. Altruism exists, but it's not uniformly distributed across everything an altruist does.
That really depends on your point of view. For the average person on HN, upper middle class income or above? Sure thing, 100% agreed. Especially in the US however, if you're not part of that group, it would have been better to live 40-something years ago. Yes, you did not have all those fancy devices and cool tools that we have nowadays, but neither did anyone else, irrelevant of income.
> the remaining problems tend to be around choke points where there is some kind of monopoly power and proper competition is missing
Irrelevant of whether this might be true for Amazon - what about health care? Telco? Public transport? Basic utilities like water, electricity?
The US is a prime example on why "neoliberal capitalism" (at least if we're speaking about it in the Reagan/Clinton sense) is a complete and utter failure - it is the only developed country with a declining life expectancy, the richest country on earth with a sizeable amount of the population having multiple jobs and still living from paycheck to paycheck.
Don't get me wrong, I get your point. But it is really important to try to take the perspective of those who are the losers of the system, and for those people the current time is _for sure_ not the best to be alive. They are so desperate, so disassociated from the current state of affairs that they're willing to listen to snake oil peddlers like Trump, that they're willing to storm the Capitol or at least look the other way when others do, to disparage Science in the face of a pandemic because the class of the educated has left them behind earlier already, so why not this time?
> Amazon got to where it is today because overall the customer experience is so much better.
Relative to what? Compared to the "old experience" of having to go to a physical store - sure. But that's a damn low bar; everyone who can write a webpage can beat that these days. Amazon got where it is today because they straight-up ate the market, but not by being the best, but by being the ones who had the capital to sink everyone else before they went belly-up themselves (for how long is Amazon actually turning a profit? Not that far back, I reckon). In short, they played the market instead of letting the market play. And that's exactly my main gripe with what I'm calling 'neoliberal capitalism' here: The way Amazon played is not a bug of the system, it's a feature. It will continue to happen, until regulators kick in and set boundaries that go beyond anything what we can call neoliberal capitalism. It might still be a 'free market', it still allows for competition, but most definitely not in the barely-regulated sense that the neoliberal capitalism envisions.
The majority of people making over $100k a year voted for Trump, and those numbers jump even higher if we look at race and income, where white people making over $100k were much more likely to vote for Trump.
Similarly, look at the economic demographics of the people who were able to afford to travel to DC on or before January 6th, and the people who attacked the Capitol. I saw a lot of relatively wealthy business owners break into the Capitol, even some IT company owners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract#Consideration
>Anything of value promised by one party to the other when making a contract can be treated as "consideration": for example, if A signs a contract to buy a car from B for $5,000, A's consideration is the $5,000, and B's consideration is the car.
A failure of a contract for lack of consideration would be if there’s no exchange of value contemplated, ever. For example if I made a promise to provide you a valuable service for nothing in return.
In this situation both sides agreed to exchange something of value so there’s obviously consideration.
They could make an argument that no damages have occurred and claim you have no credible allegation of being harmed, but that’s a different thing and far from automatic.
If this wasn't the case then every single financial futures contract or swap would be null and void. These contracts incur no cash flow on day one. They're merely a promise by one part to pay another based on some event in the future. If your legal theory was true, then one party could simply cancel any losses by voiding the contract as soon as the position moves against them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_(law)
Yes, 2 lbs of packaging. It’s a $7000 camera. It’s well packaged. Even my $300 Canon was double boxed. (As are the customer’s photos of the packaging in the article)
The spec sheet of the a1 lists it as weighing 1.6 lbs. it lists the boxed weight as 3.22 lbs. This means the Sony packaging is 1.62 lbs.
The remaining 0.38 lbs is the packaging that Amazon put the Sony box in.
The math checks out.
Can you explain what you mean?
BTW, it's off-topic, but this right here is the among best arguments we can make for strong privacy, and against mass surveillance. If people are willing to swallow monetary damage out of fear to upset an algorithm that may cut back their privileges, imagine what happens to political free speech when you have to fear govt surveillance and black vans.
The only error I can recall from Amazon is they once included an exacto knife I didn't order in a package to me.
If same thing kept happening inside non-online business I think we would find it pretty okay...
You keep finding the food you're buying is mouldy so you complain/return it.
They ban you.
So, now you need to spend significantly more money and time on petrol and driving in order to do you weekly shop.
That's OK?
On other side, let's say customer violently attacks other customers or staff. Or causes substantial property damage intentionally, maybe attempts arson. Would you still disagree with them banning such customer?
The best experience is still Amazon JP but returns are a little more complicated (Even within Japan) — Obviously b/c you more or less do not return stuff in JP [Hansei (反省].
I get a combination now of Amazon's own service or one of the big third-parties. All of them are great I think. I might prefer Amazon's since they're willing to just leave the package in front of your door.
Even if I'd replace all my store visits (grocery store, hardware store, electronics store are the main ones) with online orders, I'd probably still not oder more than once every five days (or maybe once every 10 days during covid, now that I go to the grocery store less often).
Or are you talking individual items, like you buy groceries from Amazon and every item is a separate order because they all ship from different sellers?
I think this explains it. Cheapest ducktape on Amazon is like $3.48 with free shipping for Prime users. Ordering one such tape every other day only costs $52.20. At some point you stop caring how much externalities it might be causing by clicking "Order Now" in Tuesday 3:40 AM just for a single M4x20 screw you forgot to add earlier in the day.
*Exceptions are software, digital products, etc.
I was only ever asked about my return _after_ it was issued by Charles Tyrwhitt after I ordered and returned a good number of items (due to their fit being all over the place). That was fair IMO.
On the other hand Amazon has numerous times shown that if you return too much (or don’t behave due to some other opaque metric) your account can get suspended. Even my account was suspended once, though I am only a moderate shopper and have returned less than 10 items over my 18 years membership. I raised the issue with support and asked why (there weren’t even any returns around that time) and they could not tell me but reinstated my account. Good demonstration of power and a reminder to move away from using kindles.
Amazon returns may be easy until you cross some threshold and end up on their bad side.
Amazon: 30 days https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
Walmart: 90 days https://www.walmart.com/cp/returns/1231920
Target: 90 days: https://help.target.com/help/subcategoryarticle?childcat=Ret...
E.g.: https://www.wsj.com/articles/banned-from-amazon-the-shoppers...
It'd never occur to me to make online ordering an integral part of my personal logistics and avoid it as much as I can.
Amazon can both treat a large number of people well and treat other customers badly, there’s enough customers to do both to millions.
Not so obvious to me. Could you elaborate on what you mean here, sounds intriguing.
Once preordered a Blu-ray from Amazon JP. It arrived on release day. My only complaint is they won’t ship Blu-ray’s from adult video producers even if the title isn’t hardcore porn.
Panasonic's microwave is dead on arrival, then Amazon shipped replacement one soon before I sent broken one.
Sony's headphone's bone is broken after a few month, so I sent it to Sony's service center but the shit support said that it's broken due to me, not product's fault even though it never taken out. They tried to charged me repair cost before repairing, so I tried to return the product to Amazon JP because it's faulty product. They accepted refunding with exactly same argument wrote here. I believe it won't happen on other Japanese shops.
From this experience, I sometimes buy from Amazon for products that possibly fragile and manufacturer's support is not reliable. (Or add extended warranty that covers my fault)
My friend often buy Chinese cheap electronics from Amazon JP (a.k.a. AliExpress Japan branch) and often return crap. He said it work flawlessly.
I've never lost my package, thanks to high quality delivery company and secure place.
The article we're responding to, not to mention the comments, is evidence that that is at minimum an unreliable assumption.
Re your second point, the seemingly standard way of resolving these issues after the company refuses to comply is to make it a PR problem for the company. Videos are going to help for that.
They were already refunded before the story was even published. Yes, Amazon didn't refund them 7K in their first customer support call, that ruffled their feathers but it is not at all surprising. At that $ obviously they need to be be escalated.
I don't know about you, but I've never filed a police report because someone made me call twice to resolve something.
At the same time, I think it is naive to expect a customer support rep in the Philippines to handle this sort of situation. They do not make 7K in a month. If they bought the empty box at a brick and motor store, I wouldn't expect a cashier to be trained in dealing with a 7K fraud issue, and the general manager may not be able to resolve it on the spot either.
My guess is they eventually did a google search, and thats how they found advice telling them to email jeff@amazon.com. They have a large team of people managing that email and advertise it for situations exactly like this. Its hard to interface with a 2 Trillion Dollar entity but I think it's fair to say they do a ok job.
I agree with you about the frontline rep, that's not the person I have a problem with. I don't expect a low-level customer support rep to be able to approve such a thing. I expect Amazon to, in the event that a rep can't handle a complaint, proactively solve it in a different way, not try to fob the claimant off.
It would be just as easy to, say, bump any refund claim over 1k to someone who is paid enough to make such a decision. Amazon have decided they don't want to. And I don't really think that's acceptable. Just look at the comments in this thread of people self-censoring to avoid getting on the wrong side of the algorithm.
This is a situation Amazon has engineered, because it's cheaper to run these things through automated systems, or only frontline workers. I'm not inclined to accept what I think is pretty bare minimum as good enough on account of their size. If anything, I think their size allows them to afford and amortize better systems than a small company.
Edit: cooled it a little
> This is a situation Amazon has engineered
I agree but I disagree with you as to why. I see two distinct issues.
1. Amazon marketplace reliability/integrity.
2. Customer support escalation process.
_________________________
1. I think Amazon does an abhorrent job, it's the wild west with regards to quality, fraud. & counterfeits. I personally don't trust it.
2. Unfortunately almost everywhere cuts costs and uses automation & frontline works but I think Amazon has a significantly above average process for a large company. The jeff@amazon.com is a very publicized escalation option/safety valve, which worked in this case & I am not aware of for other large brands. It's unfortunate they had a bad call the first time, but that happens. If this sort of thing happened with another retailer (although it's less likely to), I doubt they would have handled it until they went to twitter or was generating press with the story.
In the past I've got sent sometimes used electronics sold as new - recently I got 3 times used electronics as new in a row. Isnt that fraud?
Growing market, good press around, apologists for your brand, regulation and anti-monopoly scrutiny seems far away. Then the company is risk-taking, 7k$ that somebody occasionally may cheat is nothing in comparison to a possible blog post saying how awesome the company is. I think miraculously Apple is still here now, Google and Amazon were here 10 years ago, now AWS is here, Microsoft came here again recently, etc.
Then times come that bad press is there regardless of what you do, regulators watch you carefully. Then the user support becomes some scripts to follow, revenue over the next months (or launch before the next promotion cycle) is all you care about. Here I think how Verizon were super greedy and tried to milk the Droid brand within the 1st year, essentially killing it. I think the problem is once you enter this phase, it self-reinforces to stay here.
I have a theory why Google moved from one to the other and I have no view on the others, but at least here I think it was majority external factors not withing the company.
I generally use Amazon as a search engine to see what exists, look at reviews, then buy locally and physically if at all possible. Especially books, after they folded, spindled and mutilated too many books and their replacements.
But I'm in the same boat. A lot more often I'll find myself looking at things on Amazon's site, then seeking out the manufacturer's own site, or another retailer, to make the actual purchase.
I just don't trust Amazon anymore. So much rebranded Alibaba shit on there, or counterfeit hazards.
The latest one I got specifically stated they didn't need a positive review (presumably to get around Amazon's rules?) but it's still a bribe even if it is via an implicit debt.
https://www.ups.com/track?loc=en_US&tracknum=1Z9X26374278728...
They really do not honor their prices if you get a good deal or a slip up.
For anyone unaware, go to telegram and do a public search for 'refunding'. There are hundreds of channels where you can pay someone to refund >£10,000 of stuff for you for a 10% fee. Afaik, the main method that 'refunders' use to defraud amazon is to (1) initiate a return (2) modify the return label so UPS accepts it into their system but (3) deliver it to the wrong address. So it looks to amazon as being successfully delivered to the return warehouse, but what actually got delivered was a brick, to some random house.
I wouldn't be surprised if >1% of macbook and iPhone refunds are fraudulent in this way. Someone in a cybercrime lab they should write a paper about this whole ecosystem because it is a huge black market.
but how amazon does not check the quality of the return? I mean, even if UPS confirms that the package arrived to right address, wouldn't someone from amazon warehouse check if the package is valid?
I think for the last-mile of delivery, couriers rely on the actual address written on the package, not the address that the barcode scans to. I might be wrong though.
There is the caveat that they will recharge you if the item isn't in good condition, but if they never receive it, I guess they can only assume the shipper lost it.
This is also true for Amazon business purchases. I have returned items around $600 and have never been asked to put a code in the box.
But I’ve never returned anything over $1,000.
In the USA FWIW. And no super expensive stuff.