These days I avoid Amazon where possible since so often it's just cheap Chinese knockoffs or obviously returned products sold as new.
B&H has been a godsend for tech, especially since there's no tax with their card. Crutchfield/Headphones.com has been great for speaker and audio gear. West Elm has a consistently premium quality for kitchen, home, and furniture items (though furniture is a story of its own, with even better vendors.) Walmart/Target/BestBuy have been good for everything else.
If you're too lazy to figure out yourself which products are quality, Wirecutter, NyMag, and Consumer Reports all perform unbiased testing of multiple products in almost every product segment I can think of.
And for simply next-level quality, nothing beats DIY. Personalize the final product exactly to your specifications, choosing the highest quality or even custom-machined parts with zero cost cutting. Requires time and passion, however.
I'm lazy and dumb it's true, but I like ordering off of Amazon for most things. I just don't really care about the 99% of things I am forced to buy in order to live a somewhat comfortable existence. The most important thing I optimize for is own time, and for that, Amazon is great.
That said, if you care about quality/stuff you buy a lot more than I do, Amazon is a pretty terrible place to shop most of the time. I've encountered this when I want to buy nice stuff, for example a nice and expensive wooden desk. Seems like that's pretty impossible to do on Amazon, as cheap garbage seems to be the name of the game.
I stumbled upon an unusual policy when trying to order from B&H the first time. They are not open for business on Shabbat (NYC local time), and this includes their online checkout!
I could fill up my cart, but had to come back later to do my purchase.
Fwiw there has been some history of B&H workers being treated fairly not-well. I encourage reading past the first few paragraphs of this article as it's not all "union stuff"--there are lawsuits, DOL complaints, and OSHA fines as well:
Thank you for pointing this out. I live in the area and showed up for the pickets when they fired all of their warehouse employees for complaining about unsafe working conditions.
Could you please clarify what do you think is horrible? Anyone can sue anyone in the US, for any reason, and allege a lot of bad things. It also true that cost of litigation is often much, much higher than a settlement - e.g. the 3 employee suing asked for $200k in damages, which I assume is just an opening offer. A reasonable lawyer can easily cost upwards of $500/hr, and require many, many hours of work even if the process never gets to the court.
My close friend is been sued for ridiculous reasons by ex-partners. It already costed him $750k in legal fees,and although he is very likely to win the case, it’s expected to take another 2 years before the case is resolved, at which point he will be allowed to file for recovering his costs (easily anothe couple of years).
You may well think so, but I was asking an honest question. I don’t think it’s distasteful to doubt any allegations, esp. when missing some context, in this case, 10 years old judgement against B&H.
As I tried to point out, a mere fact that someone is suing someone is not enough to conclude anything about which side is right; that’s why I was asking someone who seemed to have more context.
I’m not sure why people are reading too much into my honest question.
It’s an amazing retail space. They have this awesome overhead rail system for delivering goods, and their checkout resembles customs at an airport (a bit disconcerting).
IIUC, it's a religious/cultural observance that's very important to them, I think a kind of reminder. I'd say respecting that means respecting that.
Also, I loved B&H when I was seriously into photography, and even if the closed days had been a practical inconvenience (they weren't, IME), it would've still been worthwhile.
Speculating... Maybe something in the culture of dutiful adherence also helped them to provide such well-respected service at great prices? Diversity is good.
I think respect is for people, not religions. I don’t even know what it means to respect a religion, unless you adhere to it. Respect for people includes respecting their right to practice their religion, even if you think it is silly. That respect also means you don’t go out of your way to point fingers and laugh at every opportunity, but not the obligation to keep your opinion secret either. Due respect can be a difficult balancing act sometimes.
Let's take this to extreme. Commandment "Thou shalt not kill", would it be ok to let automatons kill instead of you and this would not be considered sin? (playing devils advocate)
Building (and activating) a machine that's designed to kill, obviously violates the "thou shalt not kill" and makes you an attempted murderer the moment you activate it. But the actual moment of killing? You're literally not doing that (you could be sleeping or have forgotten about the machine, at the moment it first kills).
Similarly, building the e-commerce machine obviously can't be done on the sabbath, but if it's already running then you're not actually working.
For example, suppose you push a rock off a huge cliff. If the rock tumbles for a full week after you push it, were you pushing it off a cliff for the full week (including the sabbath)? Or did you only push it the one time on a tuesday?
They used to do transactions on Shabbat, then they stopped, presumably the Satmar Hasidic rabbi must have issued a ruling that it wasn’t allowed.
Sure, it’s a minor annoyance, but compare that with the nontheistic amorality of Amazon and their everything-goes train wreck of a marketplace (worse than eBay at its worst) and you’ll understand why I only buy my computers, electronics and photo gear from B&H.
It's a bit strange because if you go to actual Israel, there are ways around Shabbat rules that align with the Torah/Talmud. For example, on Shabbat, there is an elevator that stops at every floor (so no one has to push the button).
It's also my understanding that it's kosher for gentiles to perform actions outside of the constraints of the rules of Judaism, like turning on/off fans on behalf of those respecting the rules of the sabbath.
> there are ways around Shabbat rules that align with the Torah/Talmud
As with any religious practices, there’s a wide spectrum of how people follow or don’t follow the doctrine. There’s no shortage of Rabbis who have haggled over the fine details of how they apply to modern society, like your elevator example.
Personally, I like the idea of aligning and adapting the general intent as opposed to rule hacking, and it’s neat to leave that cultural stamp on the business (at some cost, I’m sure).
A friend of mine worked with some Plymouth Brethren who wouldn't use computers, but had a stationery company. They employed someone else to build them a website and run it, then print out the orders and hand them over. I've not heard of a religious order that didn't even want to allow people outside the order to "break" the rules. Although perhaps it's something about money ending up in their bank account?
If you’re shopping for furniture I’ve found Room & Board to be head and shoulders above the rest, in both quality and customer care. No questions asked free returns are a godsend.
Nope. All my Room & Board furniture bought 10 years ago turned out to be duds, as I reviewed on Yelp 3 years ago:
Don't be fooled by the glitzy showrooms and "made in America" promises of quality, this chain sells essentially disposable furniture. When we were expecting our first child 7 years ago, we moved from an apartment to a single-family home. We wanted to also upgrade from IKEA and equivalent to proper furniture. I bought some heirloom pieces from Thos. Moser (a dining table, two end-chairs, a coffee table, a rocking chair and two foot stools) but they are quite expensive, and we got many other pieces from Room and Board: a queen bed, nightstands, two dressers, six Thatcher dining chairs, Pisa leaning bookshelves, side tables and a coffee table with rounded angles). Unfortunately after 7 years the furniture turned out to be much less durable than I expected. The finish on the coffee table is worn and ugly, the bed required extensive work even though we only use a mattress, no boxsprings, and the spokes on the Thatcher chairs are coming unglued. A proper Windsor chair like the Thatcher should have "through-holed and wedged" construction that ensures the spokes don't move. The Moser chairs have that, of course, and in retrospect I deeply regret cheaping out. I could have bought 2 buy-it-for-life Moser chairs for the price of the 6 Thatcher chairs that are now essentially kindling. To add insult to injury, Room and Board refuses to stand by their product and are refusing to repair them. In the Bay Area, we've had good luck with Hoot Judkins furniture, which are better quality for the price (not all though, they have a wide range that goes from meh to Amish-grade).
Yeah, Thos. Moser is lovely and rock-solid stuff, but $$$$ and a very specific aesthetic, which you either like or you don’t (we have some Moser stuff in our bedroom, but not in the rest of the house because it’s not a great fit style-wise).
We have Carl Hansen & Son dining table and chairs, which is a considerably more modern look but still very solid (noticeably more so than most DWR stuff), but again, $$$$ and a special order from Europe that took ~16 weeks.
I did get a dresser from Stuart David Furniture in Sacramento, which was outstanding in quality. There are plenty of small furniture companies in the US that take pride in their craft and make excellent wares at reasonable prices (for the quality), no need to go to a chain like Room & Board.
Agreed, we also have some stuff that was handmade for us by local folks on commission at quite reasonable prices. It’s not quite as posh as Thos. Moser, but still very nice.
Let's hope they don't go the marketplace route while chasing growth. Shopping on Amazon feels like late 90s eBay, guessing whether or not the seller is going to screw you.
I made a recent purchase for some networking equipment, but the seller had 1k+ positive ratings in the last year. Honestly, I ran across a lot of the same sellers on eBay as I did Amazon (since eBay now sells a lot of new stuff).
> Let's hope they don't go the marketplace route while chasing growth.
I'm already hearing complaints about how B&H "isn't what they used to be" because they're selling much more than their original scope of audio visual equipment.
Exactly right. Watching Ebay and Amazon converge on being "Aliexpress" has really made me sad. I understand the folks who are measuring themselves by how effectively they promise quality and deliver crap to their customers. I understand their goal is maximum profit as their best score. And I understand that enough of the market doesn't care that it is crap that they prefer this over a quality good.
Back when Walmart started and everyone was all about "wow, their prices are great!" and nary a mention of their quality. I realized that Walmart was going to do the same thing to groceries.
Without re-invigorating the UCC with stronger consumer protections so that the "costs" are born not individually by consumers but by the market maker who pushes an inferior product, I don't see it getting much better.
I used to buy a lot of cheap things on there, then something interesting started happening. Every time I made a purchase on there, literally a few weeks later, I would start getting fraudulent charges on my card. Thank god, my bank would call and ask, "Are you in Paris France right now? Someone just tried to purchase 3,000 euros worth of clothing on your card."
I haven't bought anything on there for about 5 years now and remarkably as soon as I stopped buying stuff off of their site, I have yet to have my cc number end up on some carders market and deal with getting a new credit card.
I also did some research and found out many, many, many people have had the same issues with bad charges showing up on their card after making purchases on that site.
Yes. I was annoyed when Bank of America discontinued the feature that allowed me to create a single-used credit card number and fund it with a limited amount of money. That was a good solution to the bogus charges problem. But it was so hidden on the BofA site that few used it.
I wouldn't trust Privacy.com with money. Read their terms and conditions. They're much worse than the normal obligations of a bank issuing credit cards. They disclaim responsibility for mistakes and fraud. And they charge 3% extra for doing that.
I don't think I've had that problem, having bought literally hundreds of things from AliExpress. Were the fraudulent charges from AliExpress or other companies?
I've made hundreds of orders there for all kinds of electronic components over 8 years, and I had one lost package and one seller trying to sell badly refurbished power adapter, and maybe one or two fake Samsung uSD cards (died in 2 years of "constant" use in a SBC, which is a bit too soon). No card issues whatsoever (I never click "save the card" for later use).
Buying things from ax was great for me as someone with EE as a hobby.
I don't know how this can be solved with regulation though. What is "superior" about the better product? Tolerances? Documentation? Customer service? The ineffable reflection of the divine? (...) As soon as you put a target on any of those measures Goodhart's law rears its ugly head. This strategy is like trying to grab a greased ball bearing with a pair of tweezers.
The most efficient way for the customer to compare the relative value of two products is for the quality to be factored into the price exactly, with all externalities realized up front. But how to design such a scheme that isn't instantly gamed into oblivion is unclear to me.
It's like the value we're looking for is the depth of it's "truth", if you grant me poetic license to use that phasing, but that definition is not specific enough to be actionable.
Regulating warranties and 'fitness for purpose' are both ways in which the state can enforce a level of quality/reliability on the manufacture of goods.
As an example, let's say your jurisdiction decides to make the following requirements on the manufacturers of food refrigerators;
1) The refrigerator must have a working lifetime of no less than 10 years from the date of sale, when maintained per the manual.
2) Repair parts for the refrigerator must be available for 20 years past the date of the last sale of the refrigerator to a resale outlet.
3) Information on the serviceability and repair of the refrigerator must be available to any party for a reasonable and non-discriminatory cost.
Those regulations say nothing about how much you can charge, how you manufacture it, or how you differentiate it from your competitors, they just make a requirement that the person who buys it can rely on it for 10 years and that if it breaks you must repair or replace it to give them the full 10 year lifetime they expected when they bought it.
What that does is force choices in design, manufacturing, and materials that reduce cost at the expense of expected lifetime back on to the manufacturer. As a result they gain no advantage by using cheaper stuff that fails more readily to get a cheaper price to "undercut" the guys who make the 10 year refrigerator.
I agree that improvements to general serviceability and guarantees of availability of information and parts for repair would go a long ways to making better products. Perhaps "time" is a good metric that is more difficult to game.
I like your example. So lets consider a refrigerator manufacturer that builds a great refrigerator design, with all the investment in R&D, documentation & service manuals, parts reliability, supply chain and inventory procurement, customer service, continued improvements due to to market and long-term customer feedback, etc that one would expect if they were aiming to make a reliable long-term product as you describe. The business produces a good product and provides good service for a fair price, and they grow a reputable brand and loyalty from their customers as a result.
Consider some scenarios:
Scenario 1: After some time the owners come to retirement age and sell the business to the highest bidder at, for example, $100 million. The new owners promptly 'reorganize' the business, slashing costs, selling assets, eliminating continued investments, and generally cheapening the product. Meanwhile the outside world is none the wiser, and thanks to a buffer of brand loyalty they keep selling the cheaper product but at a massive comparative margin. In 2 years they made back $300 million which they smuggle away by cutting dividend checks or paying themselves for some bogus "consulting" services or something else just as tepidly but still technically justifiable. Another year later the consumer protection agencies finally come knocking (the government isn't fast) and find the whole place either liquidated or dilapidated, clearly unable to fulfill their warranties, resulting in being sued or fined into bankruptcy. The supply chain of parts even for the original product, some only 3 years into their 10 year warranty dries up. The newer cheaper product is in an even worse state. The purchasers are long gone but doing great, having milked the reputation of the business and its customers of a neat, net $200 million in 3 years. Customers get a $10 check in the mail thanks to a class-action. Remaining employees have to find a new job.
How would you describe what happened? And how could it be avoided? I'm skeptical that the regulations you mentioned or similar could help here.
Scenario 2: Using the professionally produced and well-maintained specifications, service manuals, and product design, an international company reproduces the same refrigerator design, but since they can skip all the overhead of creating such a great design and documentation they sell the product with a razor thin or even negative margin at an overall 30% lower price. This drives the original refrigerator manufacturer out of business, enabling the international company to capture the market and raise the price again to extract value out of it. Perhaps they maintain parts inventories but they invest nothing into continued evolution of the design and cut corners on customer service and it dies slowly. Customers of the original design are out of luck, and the new company's product is just slightly incompatible enough with the original design that parts don't work and customers are instructed to just buy a new one.
What happened in this case? Is this even a negative story that we should try to avoid? If so, how?
That does not seem a fair characterization of AliExpress, which does not commingle inventory, does not allow review hijacking, and where, in my experience, sellers usually are quite accommodating about settling disputes on reasonable terms.
> If you're too lazy to figure out yourself which products are quality
Amazon is a gambling company. People buys things with the hope that, this time, they are getting a bargain. And, as any gambling company, the customers will lose in the long term.
But, people gets addicted to gambling. Maybe next item, maybe I will do a smart purchase. The more randomized the experience the more irrational the consumer.
I prefer traditional business that follow regulations and are subjects to my country laws. I used Amazon when it started, because they had a great recommendation engine for books. Even that is now a shitshow that offers you what Amazon wants to sell regardless of what you look for.
Amazon works as intended, and that is terrifying.
p.d.: People is not lazy. It is just that most people are not experts on the products that they purchase, and they are already spending a lot of their time working hard and taking care of their families to add another ten hours of investigation to purchase a pair of shoes.
I've been doing the same thing for a few years now and for the same reasons. I have accepted the fact in most cases I will pay more, but at least for that extra cost, I can trust the sites and the companies I'm buying from. I also try and find something locally first, before heading to larger chain stores.
Perfect example is how I don't buy anything Apple on Ebay anymore. WAY too many fakes, stolen or misrepresented stuff on there now. Hard to get away from all the Chinese resellers there either. I just buy directly from Apple. Yeap, its going to cost a little extra, but I can take comfort knowing its not going to be a fake or get something that was completely misleading in the listing.
I know most people here are in the US, but for anyone in Japan, check out Yodobashi as an Amazon alternative. They have more curated products and deliver most items the same day in the Tokyo area for free with no subscription.
It’s incredible you can have one tiny part delivered within hours for free. I feel bad doing that though, so I always try to cluster my orders just to be nice to their delivery people and the environment.
Google Shopping Express used to do that in San Jose. I once ordered a toy spring for $3 with free shipping and had it delivered in 2 hours so I could use it as a heater coil. Good times
Within a couple of months they changed the policy to $75 minimum for free shipping. There are also fewer delivery slots today relative to demand
> Wirecutter, NyMag, and Consumer Reports all perform unbiased testing of multiple products in almost every product segment I can think of.
Oh no, they absolutely don't. Wirecutter performs some subjective testing, but they get paid for a choice of a products to test and promote. If you watch any category for a while, you can witness a top product (or multiple top products of a same brand) disappear overnight to be be replaced without a trace by another 'reviewer's favourite'.
What did change overnight? Did Anker stop making the best budget chargers? No, their business deal with Wirecutter just expired and another brand took their place in paying for 'independent review'.
That’s a pretty strong accusation to make. Do you have evidence?
Wirecutter says “our writers and editors are never made aware of or influenced by which companies have affiliate relationships with our business team.”
And elsewhere on the site: “The reputation of Wirecutter and its parent company, The New York Times, rests on our vigorous reporting, editorial integrity, and avoidance of actual or even perceived conflicts of interest.”
Are you saying this is a lie / outright deception?
I got the baby Klein bottle from Cliff years ago. Nice little nerd tchotchke for the mantelpiece. He also wrote an awesome account of a KGB internet hacking from in the 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)
Thank you Mr. Varenc and Mr. Code, Yes, that's what's left of what used to be my Amazon Klein bottle listing. Note that what used to be Klein Bottle by Cliff Stoll is now Amvoom Klein Bottle.
Although I created the listing 4 or 5 years ago, I'm now unable to edit or change the listing. I've bumped up my price sufficiently high, in hopes that nobody will buy from there.
Has anyone read his other book ‘Silicon Snake Oil’ [1] from 1995 lately?
Sounds like most of his predictions in it (eg e-commerce will fail, digital books will not be viable, etc) were wildly off the mark - but were any prescient?
I read in 1995 when it came out. My take away - searching is not the same as browsing, and something is lost when serendipity is removed from the process.
And the internet works for a certain mindset to the detriment of other points of view
Just from skimming through the book, it seems like its central thesis is an enumeration of all the ways in which computers and the Internet are terrible, accompanied by predictions that none of those flaws are ever likely to change. So it's not really a matter of any of his predictions being "prescient", it's just that some things have improved drastically, and others less so.
For example, he complains that nobody will want to look up information from computerized databases because CD-ROMs are too slow; consumers won't shop online because they can't pay securely; retailers won't rely on e-commerce because too few customers have Internet access; nobody will want e-books because you can't read them on the subway; there's no way to effectively search for content online; digital art will never surpass clip art and crude photoshops; it's impossible for networks to be secure because data and credentials are unencrypted; and so on.
On the bright side, he thinks that at least nobody will need to worry about online privacy, because it will be too cumbersome for anyone to effectively maintain databases of personal information.
But on the other hand, with some of his observations, it's at least arguable that they still hold true 25 years later:
> Anyone can post messages to the net. Practically everyone does. The resulting cacophony drowns out serious discussion. Online debates of tough issues are often polarized by messages taking extreme positions.
> An original IBM PC, now over ten years old, is fully obsolete. Likely, it will still work perfectly and do everything it was build for; after all, the silicon and copper haven't deteriorated. But you can't get software for it any longer.
> A word processor may last two years before the next version. These upgrades likely add as many new bugs as are patched, and result in a bigger, more complex program. One that's less and less compatible with old files. [...] Curiously, as computer hardware gets faster, programs run slower.
> Photo retouching isn't new. Digital image processing, however, can be so extensive yet undetectable that it undermines the foundation of photojournalism -- that seeing is believing.
He completely missed the boat about how Moore's Law would improve upon the power of early prototypes. It's a classic case of underestimating the power of exponential growth by visualizing it as low-order polynomial, and missing that "digital is worse than analog" is a problem that can be solved by increasing the scale of digital power.
But he was right about tech will enable and amplify the worst in social behaviors.
From personal experience, any cheap vps that can serve static pages will stand the front of HN.
The blogs that go down here typically back every request by MySQL (ahem, WordPress) which is totally unnecessary and often actively harmful since MySQL has very low default total connections allowed.
The point being: don't serve requests backed by a database unless the results are likely to change very dynamically!
Yes you can do that or there are static site generators backed by MySQL too. So your data and configuration site can still be dynamic but your served site will be completely static.
The only difference between this and adding a cache is that the cache is another piece of software in your production stack.
For WordPress? No. I don't use it. I just know SSGs for it exists and not enough people/companies use it (when they're using WP in the first place). :)
When my friends webserver died and they had no backups, I found the wayback machine was s good (historic) static site generator ;-) Just mirror it from there and voila.
> The blogs that go down here typically back every request by MySQL (ahem, WordPress) which is totally unnecessary and often actively harmful since MySQL has very low default total connections allowed.
WordPress is not my favorite thing and some of the available plug-ins do terrible things with MySQL, but the problem is not too low default connections; it's too many PHP workers. WordPress is generally focused enough that most of the wall time is spent in waiting for the database, so you want to optimize for throughput; one or two workers per cpu thread is plenty for that. More concurrency than execution available reduces throughput, so it's better to queue requests in your http layer than to process multiple at once.
Large numbers of MySQL connections are more appropriate when the web pages do a mix of things, but more/mostly idle DB wise; in that case, you might still want persistent connections to reduce round trips before a query, but are less likely to have a query backlog large enough where task switching overhead becomes significant.
For sure. I've used Github Pages (free site hosting) for a few years now. I'm leaning back toward VPS though so that I can do access log analysis rather than depend on Google Analytics.
But the point was to make a comparison to a Raspberry Pi and emphasize that you do not special compute to withstand thousands of page views. Even S3 and GH Pages are overkill in terms of the compute behind both of them vs. what you need minimally.
Yep. Cloudflare is out front, so the actual load on the rasp-pi is mitigated by their content-delivery network.
Then, too, my website is almost entirely simple html with compressed images, so there's not a lot of bytes to shovel.
Here in Berkeley/Oakland, Sonic.net has strung quality fiber-optic, so there's 1Gbit to my house. That lets me keep up with things. However, they only give a dynamic ip address;, so my pi must keep track of its address and tell Cloudflare whenever it changes.
Works surprisingly well - from /top/ I see about several dozen simultaneous users (thank you!), and the cpu temp is about 2 degrees above its normal of 50C
The raspberry pi itself is in the crawlspace under my home, fed through a Ubiquity edge router. Much fun, playing with Unix (oops, I mean Linux) -- sends me back to days of yore when everything happened from your command lines.
1. I met you in Kepler's when Silicon Snake Oil came out and we talked about something and you wrote in the inside "I hear you, John". I don't know what we discussed!
2. I am now Cloudflare's CTO and if you want to avoid the dynamic IP address problem you can use Cloudflare Tunnel to connect to us (rather than us to you). https://www.cloudflare.com/products/tunnel/
Yikes! Good stuff! (Just last week I was about to bump up my Cloudflare account. This seals it!)
And that Kepler's talk? Happy memories, indeed. They "paid" me for my talk by saying that I could have a copy of any book in the store. I chose the Times World Atlas (a way-big book of maps). The manager's face suddenly dropped -- and then I told 'em that I'd pay full list price if all of their employees sound sign the book. Result: I now have a terrific atlas of maps, with a dozen signatures of book people. (two of them visited me last year and I showed them their signatures from decades ago -- very sweet!)
Meanwhile, I gotta send out some of the tsunami of Klein bottle orders. But Cloudflare tunnel? Here I come!
Hello there. I just spoke to your colleague in sales and she tells me that Cloudflare Tunnel is only available to Enterprise customers. I forget the exact price but it included the word "thousand". (I almost fainted.)
My needs are very similar to Cliff's. I have (or going to have) a home server on a residential ISP which can't accept incomming connections. I need a public-facing server that will return from the cache if I'm ever on the HN front page or my home server is down, TLS handling, and routing to my home server's port 80 when needed.
I mostly serve personal websites but I have aspirations of building a small business. Is there anything in Cloudflare's range that would work for my kind of needs?
Hoping you follow-up on nine-day-old threads, Bill.
I'd prepared a 1 hour talk. When I was about to go on stage, they told me that I had only 15 minutes. So, well, I remembered one of the few things I learned in grad school: talk fast and don't give 'em a standing target.
Covered my points and finished in, yep, 18 minutes.
Well, I bought a Klein bottle and knitted Klein hat after seeing that talk many years ago, so it wasn't entirely useless :-)
I still have the hat. I no longer have the bottle as I moved to the other side of the world a number of years ago, and after inquiring with some mathematician friends it turned out that four-dimensional glass bottles are not compatible with three-dimensional backpacks :-/
When I got the package it was covered in hand-written notes; gosh, I don't remember what it said exactly, but it was hilarious; somehow you even managed to put some joke in Dutch on it. I wanted to email something back but I was shy and didn't know what to say. So, about a decade too late, thanks! Not only was I very happy with the bottle, the packaging absolutely made my day all those years ago.
I saw that talk a long time ago, but I can still hear you saying "I would dearly love to talk about one-sided objects!" I appreciate your infectious energy.
Connoisseur? Naw! Stop by my place and you'll see a messy collection of oddball things ranging from some old calculators to stacks of old books.
I received a Curta Calculator from my astronomy mentor, Ernst Both, when he got an HP-35 around 1973. I was one of his students; today, I can't look at it without thinking happy thoughts using a spectrohelioscope to understand sunspot magnetic fields. But that's another story...
Wow, I'm honoured to hear from someone who loves these old calculating devices as much as I do! I have a Curta II and a number of the HP Voyager calculators from the 80s (11C, 15C, 16C), but the one that takes the pride of place in my collection has to be the Curta. Looking forward to adding a Klein bottle or beanie to my collection some day, too.
Thanks, DFlock.
As you realize, writing up what happens is a necessary part of fixing a problem. That’s why I wrote Cuckoo’s Egg.
I’m gratified that my own community has responded; perhaps someone at Amazon will pick up on this.
>>"Nice write-up of how this scam works, I wasn't aware of the details previously."
I still don't understand how it works. Why can somebody owning something called "Amvoom" claim something called "Acme Klein Bottle"?
An even if they legally own the brand, how keeping the reviews when moving the brand to the new owner is the proper thing to do for the customers? By definition, the reviews are for another provider. I don't get it.
My best guess is that amazon is using the entities associated with the registered trademark as some form of proof of identity. So since there was no registered trademark for Acme Klein Bottle, there was nothing to compare the new identity to when Amvoom submitted their request.
I really hope I'm wrong though because this sounds like a very lazy and flawed system.
Allson, your comment hits home. I like to scribble thank you notes to customers. I was brought up that way. Anyhow, sooner or later, I'll meet the person who bought that Klein bottle - so I'd like to have a good feeling ahead of time.
Ahhh... unfortunately there's no kindle version. (I'm too inundated with paper books that I tend to stick with digital for new purchases).
Out of interest, is it publishing companies that make digital versions of books, or is it up to the author themselves to do that?
(And if it's the latter this is a small request to Clifford to consider it if it's not too much of an arduous task. And provided their relationship with amazon isn't too soured by the current situation, which I could understand if it is).
They don't but if you have very oily/not sensitive skin the L'Oreal Man Charcoal Cleanser is just short of being miraculous. It doesn't outright remove blackheads but everything that can be removed will be so it works a lot better than masks ime. I've never really cared enough to bother using any "beauty"/skin products but that one I've added to my routine and over time it just made blackheads disappear. Idk how l'Oreal came up with such a good formula when their other products are usually more gimmicky (or downright just bad and useless) according to my GF/dad/mom etc.
Though keep in mind I didn't have any huge, dried out aged blackhead to worry about, & those would be impossible to remove without some extraction.
This seems completely insane to me. How is this possible?
I like Cliff Stoll and have been looking forward to my first Klein bottle purchase for some years now, so I say this without any insinuation Cliff's not telling the whole story: There's got to be more to it than this, right? Can someone really go on Amazon, effectively take over someone's storefront, and completely ransack the place this easily? Because Cliff doesn't have a registered trademark? This seems out of this world absurd.
I don't know if it is easy, but I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon is aware of the problem.
There was a discussion about selling products through Amazon on The Amp Hour a few months back, and part of the discussion included trademarks as a requirement. They made it sound like a new and expensive hurdle to deal with. Given Stoll's comments, it sounds like the lack of a registered trademark was a contributing factor to his problem. Putting the two together leads me to believe that Amazon is aware this can happen. (From the show notes, it looks like https://theamphour.com/523-a-keyzermas-story/ is the episode in question.)
Does it really? With what I’ve been reading about what is going on over at Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, this doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s awful, but not surprising. And reading about how Amazon treats it’s employees, as has been covered on this site numerous times in the last while, it’s even less surprising.
And continuing to use those services is giving a vote for those practices to keep on keeping on, and that people still use them? Well, no, it’s not surprising but it’s sad.
To me, yes, it is surprising. But likely because I don't use Amazon, Twitter, YouTube, FaceBook, and so do not read the things you're reading (or at least as much) but I understand your point nonetheless. I skim past the numerous stories regarding how awful these companies behave and yet continue to reap massive profits. I've known Amazon was bad, but not this bad. It's a shit state of affairs.
On June 22nd, they used Amazon's Brand Registry to re-brand my listing on Amazon (replacing my brand, "Acme Klein Bottle" with "Amvoom") They could do this because Amazon's Brand Registry only respects issued trademarks.
I don't get this at all. Attacker has a trademark on "Amvoom". The word "Amvoom" does not appear in Stoll's product name or description. It isn't even close to any of the words in the product name.
FWIW I fully 100% believe Stoll. But the real question here is why is a "brand registry" allowing product takeovers that don't involve said brand? That seems to rise far beyond the usual Amazon bullshit, to straight-up algorithmic incompetence. How is this possible?
Kirill, you've put your finger on the central problem. Amazon should check that a product which is claimed by a Brand is actually covered by the "goods & services" listed under that trademark.
Exactly. That's why I was dumbfounded; it just seemed too ridiculous to be real. These companies really don't give a shit about people; they just continue to recite something about "customer obsession" and return to patting themselves on the back.
Hijacking listing with good ratings is very common for products that are not gated
One view is that Amazon wants sellers to register their trademarks formally with the government, then go through the brand registry process to prevent this.
Hi Nick, And thank you for your kind note. I'm in the embarrassing position of asking you to wait a few months, as I'm very low in stock; I hope to have more glass Klein bottles by late summer. (Klein bottle hats & Mobius scarves, happily, I have plenty).
Just read the thread on the previous occasion where listings got hijacked on their own fora [0] - its sad to see the sellers so powerless, helpless and just left to themselves.
You really have to wonder why they even bother...
Edit: also, reading that thread you can also get a feel why big brands have completely left AMZN as a platform (like Adidas, Birkenstock are a few i'm aware of).
Possible co-mingling of inventory, hijacked listings... no, just don't bother - of course not each and everyone is a heavyweight as my 2 examples - but do we really need 100s of dropshippers FBA'ing the same crap? I'd rather buy direct at the source than at Amazon these days.
The one thing I don't get, and I worked for AMZN in logistics, is the co-mingling of inventory. It is so easy to solve, poses so many problems and yet the logistics benchmark company fails to do it right.
It's not initial fulfillment that's the obvious problem, it's returns that are resold.
If I order 2 of something and they come from different sellers, and one is fake, how would they know which was which? Or that I selected the correct one to return?
Or if someone orders only 1, but recieve it and return a different one they bought from aliexpress.
Knowing that returned items get sold as new, it seems like the problem could compound, especially if the same item gets returned and resold multiple times. If it's a bad fake, that seems more probable then not.
Once co-mingling happened, they have no way of tracing one item back to one particular seller, unless the products have serial numbers. And Amazon is tracking those from Goods Receipt to shipping, which they are not. So if another seller is sending in counterfeits, with the same bar code, the whole co-mingled inventory is poisoned. And Amazon has no way of identifying the source of the counterfeits if those are not caught during goods receipt. No matter what they claim they can do.
Maybe that makes you incompatible with Amazon, because they are about unbounded growth for its own sake!
Small is beautiful! Stay small!
- from the guy who in September 2000 bought 16 klein bottles since you only charged for prime numbered bottles, and sent you his credit card number as the sum of two 16-digit numbers sent to different email addresses! I still have a beer mug and question mark; all the rest are with friends! <3
Thanatos, your obd't servant, alas, is awake far past his bed-time, so his normally rusty memory is working even worse than normal. So, sad to report, I don't remember this transaction, but it sounds exactly like what I'd do. Just to better support number theory.
I was reading stories a couple years ago about how Etsy has been flooded with mass-produced crap, and now it is hard to find actual hand-made stuff by actual crafts-people.
As I understand it, the actually e-commerce was still OK. It was more a problem with discoverability.
I no longer buy anything important from Amazon, this especially goes for anything that plugs into the mains, I just don't trust Amazon any more. Amazon is now just for those low value items that I might need in a bit of a rush. This is especially true now that more and more retailers have caught up with Amazon's shipping (at least here in the UK).
They seem to want it both ways. They have simultaneously tried to argue that they are not responsible for third-party sellers and blame them when fake and/or unsafe goods are sold, but then they work hard to make it appear that everything is coming from one place. It gets particularly annoying when it's a product with lots of variations (colours/sizes etc) where each variant will be a different seller with different shipping.
As near as I can work out, their business model is now based on your being able to send back completely wrong or broken things they've sent you, so I stick to stuff where I've got the luxury of going through a cumbersome return process if things go terribly wrong.
My address has also been used as a target for a scam where, by sending unwanted goods to a real customer, a seller can fabricate a fake review that counts in their system as real. In one case it was a garbage light (shipped directly in its retail packaging so I could see what the thing was) that by a strange coincidence was the top-rated light on Amazon. Clearly an exploit that pays off.
I stopped (I think) that behavior by returning some unsolicited packages to sender, at the post office.
Yeah, it depends on what you're looking for. McMaster is great for high quality serious Machine Shop level stuff, not so much for household oddities.
Recently I needed some vinyl siding hooks[0], a really oddball size drawer slide, and replacement window springs. I ended up getting all of them on Amazon - even tracking back the manufacturers they seemed to exclusively sell on Amazon.
Don't forget your family's lungs. I don't really order the right sorts of things, but my wife often orders things that arrive smelling like they were dipped in benzene before leaving the factory.
Kind of a good metaphor for how toxic Amazon as a whole is, actually.
This was a while ago, but I got a counterfeit fitness band (it told me to download a random APK from a 3rd party website) from Amazon, and they repeatedly told me to resolve it directly with the seller who, surprise surprise, were not interested in issuing a refund.
Total speculation here, but probably because common law trademark would have to be proven in a court of law. That is, he would have to sue the Chinese company, present evidence like newspaper clippings or testimony from customers, win, get a judgement, and present that to Amazon. Until then, Amazon looks in the USPTO database.
The very first step in Amazon Brand Registry is to tell them your US Trademark registration number. Without it, I'm unable to get through the Brand Registry website.
And I can't find any email address for them - nor, any place to mention this to. That's why I posted that to my website's home page.
I'm no expert, and am not recommending any particular copyright-related recourse, but the image submission agreement has a clause to remove materials from the service, and the license grant to Amazon is not specified as being irrevocable: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
It seems like going on the Live Chat with Amazon would help Stoll speak with someone. I've used that several times and they always fixed the issue right away.
As a seller you can go to the contact us page at sellercentral, select the option on the left, then click phone in the middle and get a call back from Amazon.
No, I was never able to contact a live person at Amazon.
However thanks to this Hacker News article, three Amazon employees have contacted me, with varying degrees of success.
As of this moment (around 4PM Pacific time on Wednesday30 June), my listing has been 404'd ... I'm unsure if I will be able to recover the reviews if I rebuild it. Or even if I can rebuild it.
Most of all - thank you to my friends on HN. What a bright spot in an otherwise weird situation!
A sleezy company hijacked my Amazon listing to move my positive reviews over to their product.
I've seen that happen sometimes, and always wondered how or why it happened. Like I'll be reading reviews for a USB Memory stick, and the 5 star reviews rave about nail polish.
I've reported these cases to Amazon, but they take no action.
Given how this is on page-1 of HN, jeff@amazon (the elite US-based seller support team who uses the email, not Bezos) is gonna tear this AMVOOM / TaroRee hijacker a new one.
While this is kinda designed-as-intended (Amazon wants you to brand register with them for protection), this is a pretty shitty dark pattern they put up and sadly it happens as an annoying edge case that existing sellers and customers have to deal with.
Source: me, a mid-sized Amazon 3P seller/vendor.
Edit: "-Cliff Stoll Saturday morning June 26, in Oakland, California. And yes, I am now trademarking Acme Klein Bottle." Looks like Amazon's getting what they want after all.
Sure, but there are hundreds of other sellers ready to do the same exploits tomorrow, or worse. The systemic problems are not being addressed. Amazon doesn't have the right incentives to solve these issues.
It takes some chutzpah to turn defense from your own willful negligence into a revenue center. Like telcos’ telemarketer blocking services or Equifux offering credit monitoring services (only free for the first year) to the millions whose sensitive financial info they allowed to be breached.
"It takes some chutzpah to turn defense from your own willful negligence into a revenue center." It's not chutzpah - it's the norm for most tech companies - or any other companies who's primary product is intellectual property. Think patent trolls, copyright trolls, etc. Amazon is a product troll that somehow has managed to maintain a veneer of legitimacy.
I see what they are doing no differently than what Steele started with Prenda law. Heck that's probably where Amazon got the idea :p
Sigh.
A trademark for a common item (like a T-shirt or a voltmeter) seems to cost about $350 through the USPTO, if you do it yourself and your goods are listed in their directory.
If your goods are oddball (like glass or woolen nonorientable manifolds) then you have to use a more expensive system which starts at $450 and escalates depending on how many different types of goods you're trademarking.
We had a tricky trademark submission recently and we were provided with a free attorney who was spectacular and very easy to work with. Your assessment matched my experience.
I'm sorry Cliff: the system sucks because there's a lot of edge case handling when they're dealing with millions of vendors selling literal hundreds of millions of SKUs.
Many of them autogenerated programmatically like "I love X" shirts, and X = some dictionary list; or bots built to crosslist Target/Walmart product over to Amazon etc. for arbitrage etc.
I hope someone from Amazon has reached out to you Cliff - my wife gifted my FIL one of your klein bottles and it's been an absolute delight going through the purchasing experience with you. Thank you for the joy you bring to us!
The system sucks because the income gained through dealing with millions of vendors selling literally hundreds of millions of SKUs is channelled into Amazon's profits, rather than people or systems to deal with the resulting problems.
It's actually worse I think: Amazon demands the people and systems to be better-on-metrics over time -- dealing with Seller Support is just a huge nightmare these days as a seller.
> jeff@amazon is gonna tear this AMVOOM / TaroRee hijacker a new one
Sigh. The usual FAANG bs. Do nothing as long as it makes you money and do the minimum only if it caused enough outrage. No values, no ethics, 100% shallow.
I imagine you could, and that it might not even be that exciting...
Since a Klein bottle is just a cylinder with its ends glued together a particular way, I think one way to sweep out a Klein bottle through time would be to have a rubber band split into two, then have each band travel along a trajectory that brings them back together with the correct orientation. The self intersection is easily avoided by having one of the bands travel faster than the other.
> To make their blackhead remover listing look legit, Amvoom then submitted several hundred orders over Amazon, and immediately cancelled each order. These depleted my Klein bottle inventory on Amazon - even though nothing was paid for, and nothing was shipped. In turn, this removed the "second color option" for their blackhead-remover, since Amazon felt that the Klein bottles were out of stock. Result: their black-head remover listing got 199 positive reviews, and the Klein bottle did not show up as a "color choice" in the Amvoom black-head listing.
How do people manage to figure out such elaborate ways to manipulate Amazon results without getting banned? Getting banned has minimal cost? Poor detection? Inside information?
> How do people manage to figure out such elaborate ways to manipulate Amazon results without getting banned? Getting banned has minimal cost? Poor detection? Inside information?
They don't actually ban the accounts doing this. They only remove the reviews/listings, but don't take any action on the accounts (so they just re-list 24 hours later)
Apparently when Amazon acts, they are just removing the fake reviews, sometimes the whole product but never actually banning the sellers account (even if every product that seller is listing is pumped full of fake reviews)
It seems to be a endless cycle of a item being hijacked or a item filled with fake reviews, then when reported to Amazon they simply remove the fake reviews or the product but don't take any action at all against the seller (or accounts making the fake reviews)
This thread[0] on the Amazon Seller forums is crazy with people finding products that are scam listings (with 10,000+ fake reviews), they report them, the products get taken down, then 24 hours later the same sellers have re listed with more fake reviews.
Amazon simply do not care, if they did they would:
A) Address the root problem
B) Ban the seller accounts clearly manipulating the system.
Amazon is quick to permaban accounts from real sellers, who make a single mistake (sometimes completely out of their control) but are happy to let these fake review/sellers keep their accounts.
Retail is a low margin business, whereas being a platform for third party sellers is a high margin business. As long as their reputation amongst sufficient number of people is high enough to keep them paying for Amazon prime, then that is the most amount of effort they should put into retail.
But the more important point is, Amazon is a must-use shipping provider with a crappy platform. They don't give a fuck about the retail part. They diversified with AWS, Jeff plays with his billions, fights unions, tracks piss bottles, cancels or renews Prime shows, goes to space, etc.. etc.. the site at this point is almost just a cute idiosyncrasy. As long as it runs and the orders are flowing, it's A-OK. Of course there's are probably many teams working on "reforming" it. The NEW amazon.com. The redesign. The refactor. The revamp. The modernization. But all of those are just to keep people working there so they maintain the old behemoth while their project slowly gets put on the backburner (and/or gets scaled down to a small demo page somewhere that no one ever sees or uses).
> Amazon is quick to permaban accounts from real sellers, who make a single mistake (sometimes completely out of their control) but are happy to let these fake review/sellers keep their accounts.
They banned my customer account from leaving reviews, though, because I mentioned that I got scammed from a listing I left a review on.
Sean, I just added a few things to my note. I'll try to copy/paste 'em here, although I suspect my sleepy fingers will goof up:
I haven't really reviewed what I'm posting here - heck I can't spellcheck at 12:30 in the morning:
Amazon, through its "Brand Registry" allows anyone with an issued trademark to take over other brands, whether or not the brand is covered by the specific goods that the trademark was issued for.
Brand Name Hijacking takes advantage of several bugs in Amazon's seller business model:
1) Amazon Brand Name Registry allows the owner of a USPTO trademark to take over listings of non-trademarked brands.
2) Amazon Brand Name Registry does not prevent a registered Amazon brand from over-reaching beyond the regulated goods and services associated with that trademark.
3) Amazon combines reviews of different item variations and colors, even though they are from completely different listings and manufacturers.
4) Amazon debits inventory even when an order is cancelled, allowing a denial of service attack to exhaust inventory in a seller's listing, at no cost to the attacker.
Effects of Brand Hijacking:
1) Shoddy or unproven products receive five-star reviews, apparently from several years.
2) Consumers, relying on Amazon star ratings, are grossly misled by the summary reviews.
3) Disreputable sellers are rewarded (at the cost of honest sellers) by large volume sales caused by high ratings.
4) Unscrupulous sellers of reviews receive money from Amazon sellers in return for inflated reviews.
5) Independent sellers on Amazon -- specifically those who have delivered extremely high customer satisfaction -- are locked out of their listings and pushed out of their long term business.
You forgot one. Amazon uses seller data to target which products they will produce under their own Amazon brand. So creative entrepreneurs eventually find they are completing against Amazon directly.
This is why Amazon will eventually be replaced by a company that can do things better, faster, and cheaper.
Walmart was correlating credit card information in the 80's. My mind still boggles at how poorly they have handled the Internet. If there is a company that can best Amazon and provide unique experiences with their tens of thousands of local warehouses (their retail stores!) it should be them. It's utterly mystifying that instead of leveraging their strengths they ran off and created a less functional clone of Amazon. Yikes!
The Walton family that owns Walmart has a higher net worth than Bezos, according to google ($235B Walton vs $196B Bezos), so the owners of Walmart are still more wealthy than the owners of Amazon. And whatever they are doing in brick and mortar is orthogonal to Amazon, Amazon can't do B&M at the same scale, and Walmart can't do online sales at the same scale.
Does Walmart operate outside the US? Because Amazon is pretty much everywhere around the world. If Amazon were to die tomorrow, I'd have a real problem getting a lot of equipment for various projects, especially PC hardware, in a timely manner. As much as I hate how things have gone downhill lately, it doesn't seem to be as bad (yet) over here in Europe with getting fake items. The main issue I see here, is that there's been a huge influx of cheap Chinese items which flood out all the known brands that I usually buy from, making it hard to find actual quality items. Prime is also still 69€/year. And they offer delivery to their own containers which you can unlock with a barcode on your phone to get your package 24/7, avoiding house delivery altogether, which is a huge reason why I still use them as opposed to competition, since where I live in is a real pain to find and often delivery people just give up trying to find me and just send the items back, or drop it at some shop at the end of their shift, which is often at the opposite side of the city.
In fact it seems most of the issues I see people complaining about on HN are US-centric issues? Perhaps all this brand-hijacking is happening over there because of the market size and thus pay-off to do the "dirty" work?
Looking at the articles from that seller, I don't even think they attach the articles for the reviews directly. It seems like they attach them to articles with many reviews, so that they can add their own fake reviews without being detected.
If they made a new article, which immediately gets a lot of 5 star reviews, that'd be suspicious and Amazon would probably detect it.
But if they attach it to an already established article, they can happily add their fake reviews and then detach them again, making it look legit.
Either they have played around , experienced a similar issue and went on to discover more, or maybe from inside. I think it's the first option, though.
Getting banned has a minimal cost if you are a throwaway goods reseller running off a newly registered business in a region where you can effectively ignore all foreign laws, falsify documentation, or whatever else.
Getting banned has a high cost if you are a single small business with a long-term decades of time in business as the same company registration.
> How do people manage to figure out such elaborate ways to manipulate Amazon results without getting banned?
Because Amazon doesn't care, they still get paid if you buy a real product or a shitty counterfeited product.
In fact, such manipulation can result in increased sales and driving up the price of a product. You're more likely to buy something that has a ton of reviews and purchases, and more likely to pay more money for it if it has a ton of positive reviews.
I have a Klein Stein and it is excellent, both for beer and coolness. Cliff Stole’s book on tracking a hacker is also a tour de force in tracking things back to the cause. And, like me, he was a stay at home parent for a long time.
Any suggestions on where I should post a slightly more academic version of this analysis? Somehow, posting here on Hacker News seems like I'm talking with friends at a cafe; surely there's a better place for this to be addressed.
I'm not even sure if this kind of thing falls under the aegis of "computer security"
It's a social engineering- or maybe trademark/big online platform loophole engineering attack, sounds like a computer security issue imho. It could certainly be done to scam other sellers as well, and perhaps it has already.
This, and other instances of this scam make me not want to buy anything off Amazon ever again. Where is Amazon in this? Why is this even a thing? Is there no oversight at all? Amazon has now become the Alibaba of the west and it makes me sick to think the once beloved marketplace is now just scamville. I typically buy from sellers websites now and rarely buy off of Amazon but now I feel I need to completely remove Amazon from my options.
I've been using it to buy car parts and it is SO MUCH better than dealing with junkyards (LKQ/Car-Parts websites suck!) and everything that I've got so far including parts from Latvia and Germany have been genuine.
eBay too is full of knock-off trash from China but you can easily tell those apart from a real listing most of the time with reviews being unique per listing/seller. And eBay allows for local pickups too!
The one exception to car parts sites being shit is rockauto. Just start typing in the search bar and it figures out what year make model and part you're looking for. Their search experience is light-years ahead of any other auto parts website and might actually be the best product search interface I've found anywhere, hiding out on a car parts site. I highly encourage anyone interested in product search ux to go check it out.
Just bought a new radiator from Rock Auto. I think it was like 3 clicks to drill down to the part. I just tried your method and was blown away. After I entered the year and make, and was halfway into typing the model, it autocompleted all the way to my trim level and I resumed typing "radia" where it suggested all the relevant things. Hitting enter, I watched it navigate the tree on the left.
Small delights like that are worth serious money.
I love sites that have such a structured categorization of their items. McMaster-Carr is the gold standard IMO, and RockAuto is pretty close.
McMaster-Carr is awesome, but I believe they are very business/professional oriented.
I needed some brass thread-ins with bolts and they got the job done but now I'm sitting on a minimum sized order of ~50 pieces that I won't be using anytime soon. Maybe I can resell them eBay. Hah.
McMaster is also typically not cheap. Their claim to fame is that they deliver really quickly. We can get stuff from them same or next day about 95% of the time. For slightly slower delivery but better pricing, Zoro Tools has much of the same stuff.
For some M16-1.5 bolts I ordered last week (and received the next day), McMaster-Carr was considerably cheaper than any other source. [EDIT:] Although Zoro doesn't seem to carry that size bolt in lots smaller than 25, I'll certainly be checking them for other items in future... thanks for the reference! I just wish they sorted their filter parameters by size rather than by SKU quantity.
I just bought some grade 8 hardware from them. It was cheaper than Fastenal, even with shipping, and they delivered overnight. I had to buy in higher quantities than I needed but the extras will get used at some point.
Interesting that people have these experiences. I use eBay a lot, mostly buying 2nd hand computer hardware and retro gaming stuff(consoles/games/accessories) and I'd say I have problems with as many as 50% of all my purchases. Some bigger problems where I want to return the item, some smaller ones where I paid extra for postage but it was ignored, that sort of thing. The complaints procedure exist but it's weak(seller sells a "mint condition" genuine PS2 controller, got the controller it's all dirty and with frayed cable, complain to seller, they say "oh it's mint for the age, nothing wrong with it", complain to ebay, seller has a week to respond, nothing, ebay sends me a label to ship it back, have to go to the post office to send it back, wait another week, nothing, ebay finally refunds me my money. You know how it would work with Amazon? I would complain in chat, they would send a courier to pick it up from me the next working day, I would have the money back 5 minutes after the courier picked up the parcel). And then I had someone send me actual expletives-filled email calling me all kinds of worst things in the world because I left a neutral(!!!) feedback on their account, after I paid extra for 1st class postage but they shipped 2nd class. And sellers in general just have no idea about consumer laws(yes, if you sold this item as brand new then you have to accept a 14 day return by law) which leads to arguments and just in general everything being so stressful.
I've had over 200 amazon orders last year, didn't have a problem with a single one of them. Few times I wanted to return something they either sent a courier to collect it from me directly, or just refunded me anyway. And few times I ordered from somewhere else(urrghhh.....Currys) the customer service was absolutely abysmal. I'm just not brave enough to order from anyone but Amazon nowadays*.
*here in the UK, understand the American Amazon is far worse for <reasons>
eBay is better as each seller gets a distinct listing Amazon letting sellers just kinda take over listings is a huge problem and has led to many scams like this and more commonly review scams where they sees the listing with positive reviews for a legit cheap product but swap it out for whatever their money grab is.
I now buy a bunch of stuff from AliExpress because at least they don't even try to pretend that (most of) their products are crap. When I want something cheap and don't care about waiting a month, I go there to get it directly from the source.
I have always had very good experiences with eBay. Several times I’ve been screwed on Amazon. With eBay I can also add a lot of filters to my search which I like. I can immediately exclude items shipped directly from China. Or search for something within 100km so I know I can just go pick it up. eBay has just been so much better from my experience.
Definitely or worse. I use Amazon as a last resort. eBay is first choice for cheap stuff. For expensive stuff I tend to go for bricks and mortar stores.
I got rid of prime and have basically stopped buying from them, and don't feel any loss. Usually if they're way cheaper on something it's over the minimum shipping requirement and I end up buying less stuff rather than paying more for stuff. highly recommend it.
It's hard to give up the convenience and fast delivery (with Amazon Prime) though. In my experience, I haven't run into many problems with fraud or fake products (that I know of). I try to avoid third party sellers and only order from Amazon or the seller.
I can get pretty quick delivery from a few other companies in my country. What I can't get is the very very lenient warranty that Amazon gives. Other companies will work as hard as possible to make replacing something under warranty as painful as possible. Amazon basically goes 'sure, ok' and either refunds or sends a replacement.
Fast delivery seems to have become an addiction in our fast-paced lives. Do we really need that new thing tomorrow? Probably not. Yet we can't delay the gratification.
I've also found that if I am looking at a longer delivery time then I put more thought into evaluating if I really need the product, or if I could make do with something else, or if there is a better product available elsewhere. I then tend to focus on quality and other fitness for purpose instead of which item is on Prime delivery.
I order lots of stuff I need on Amazon. Not want, need, and while it’s not life or death usually I need it sooner rather than later. If I can wait, usually I’d just order it elsewhere (including from somewhere like Taobao or Alibaba/Aliexpress and waiting months for it).
And that’s exactly where Amazon is super difficult to replace. The current competition is not other online retailers but coordinating with my wife such that she can look after the kid so I can go sit in traffic for an hour to get to the store and grab a couple of things we need for some quick home repairs, etc.
You can often pick stuff up at a local store - e.g. certain couriers have deals with local supermarkets. It sometimes means pick ups are cheaper than the standard paid options.
Well from a business stand point, I know we have shifted alot of our daily supply things for IT from a "Keep 10 of these instock at all times" to "Just order it from Amazon as needed" due to the faster delivery time
Just as Manufactures have shifted to JIT for many parts on the production line, other business processes have as well.
Amazon co-mingles inventory so I have in several cases chosen 'sold by Amazon.de' or the brand name seller and gotten what seem to be fakes. This is common for anything mid-range, e.g. good brand-name pots and pans such as WMF, shoes, utensils, ...
In other cases I've gotten clearly opened/used items sold as new, e.g. woodworking tools.
To note, buying from the sellers website can be a blessing or a curse.
It is true in sometimes unexpected ways. For instance some sellers just don't care about notifications; it might be because they usually work with professional buyers who work on a long timescale ("I need it for this quarter") and will contact the seller on a regular basis if they care.
Some sellers just don't want to deal with you. I had a "mom and pop" for who my business wasn't really a priority (well, fine), sent me random junk after misreading my order, and it was a PITA to sort the situation.
Basically, going out of Amazon (the new Alibaba as you say) is also returning to the Wild Wild West. There is no real choice than to deal with both, but god is it a pain.
Having sold Klein bottles from my website for 20 years and from Amazon from 4 or 5 years, here's my experience:
- it's way more fun through my Kleinbottle website. I've customized my checkout to what I sell. When there's a problem, it's easier to contact a buyer.
- I can show any amount of information on my website; Amazon has 5 bullet points and 1000 characters of description. This, of course, cuts both ways - a quick logical summary helps many people. Long, wordy websites (ahem) can be a problem.
- Amazon provides security that you'll get what they've ordered. Buying through my website, well, some people are scared off by its primitive style and mathematical humor. (well, attempted humor).
- My credit card processor takes a < 3% haircut. With Amazon, it's 12% plus $40/month.
- My customers are my friends. Likely, I'll meet them at a seminar, colloquium, or if they visit the East Bay. I hope they'll remember me by the good service that I try to provide. This tends to be easier when I handle an order through my website.
Oh man, you are a legend to me! I deeply appreciate you and I remember that the first purchase I ever made on the internet 20 years ago was one of your klein bottles! It was such a scary but amazing first experience. It seemed so magical at the time, to buy an object from the other side of the world! As a teenager I had to convince my dad to use his credit card. We were afraid to send the credit card number by email, and we used a fax machine by your suggestion.
The bottle arrived broken and we were dismayed. We sent you a careful report with photos of the packaging and the broken bottle (real film photos, that we had to develop and then scan into the computer to produce an email). You were so kind to send a new bottle and even said sorry. I was amazed by your reply and by the fact that people so far away could be kind to each other. It really blew my mind. At the time, in my country, the internet was seen as a really unsafe place were you were not supposed to ever say your real name.
To this day, I keep both bottles you sent as my most prized possessions. The cracked one is actually cooler, and the crack has been growing (you can make the crack grow by pressing slightly with the thumb). In a few years it will break the bottle apart in a topologically interesting way.
Of course, Enrique! I'm tickled that you remember me - and delighted that both Kleinbots have survived across the years.
I do check every item that I send out -- I hold it up to a bright light looking for cracks - but sometimes trouble sneaks through. I'll do my best to fix things - replace, refund, or solve a differential equation (ODE, not PDE's, please).
You, in turn, have a responsibility to spread the good word -- I hope you're teaching & making this too-mundane world into a better place.
I actually remember visiting your site at one point, and I think this is a case where going through a seller is a net advantage :)
I see it not really on the "shopping" experience, and more as you point out because as a buyer I'd need/want way more information than what Amazon will ever provide on a single page, and also because there is a context surrounding the product that is far far away from a "just buy" transaction.
I also see some hobby sites like Bricklink as something Amazon will never be a replacement of. Fundamentally I think specific seller sites are needed.
You're absolutely right. but very few sellers are like you. (That's part of why we love you so much.) Outside the small "art" industry, almost none are like you.
Actually, Alibaba appears to have higher standards for their product listings, because pages are never merged. So the review takeover described in this post would not be possible on Alibaba ^_^
Which makes you wonder why Amazon keeps this scam-enabling "feature". Do legit sellers really need it that much that Amazon keeps it despite the scams?
Many legit sellers – big names in all sectors – use the listings merging feature, from kindle books that are almost unreadable to network equipment that has variants with very different qualities. In many cases, Amazon is the seller.
As a customer I find it infuriating, and it feels as though it has been made more difficult over time to read the reviews for just the selected product.
I suspect that many transactions on Amazon simply would not happen if customers were better informed about what they are buying. I have no doubt that this is true across retailers – just think of all the things that have been hyped and sold that end up in garage sales barely used. It's far more common to see crap with five-star reviews than something great with three- or four-star reviews.
The feature kind of makes sense for purely cosmetic changes, like color – but even then it would be useful to have information about the actual variant.
I don't think this is some UI problem. I am quite sure it could be solved very quickly by showing reviews for the selected variant first, and then making it clear that other reviews are for other variants.
There is a way of somewhat mitigating this merging feature: Don't just look at aggregate review scores. Read the lower-end reviews. If the flaws are petty or expected, then that's great. If your variant is the worst of the bunch, you'll find out. But even with all that, it doesn't sort the takeover problem in the article.
Amazon tacitly supports this scam because it only cares about sales. It doesn't really care about the sellers.
It also knows that positive reviews have a huge influence in increasing sales, and negative reviews really dampens sales. This is why Amazon also allows what I call Product Page Hijacking.
How this works is, Amazon allows multiple models or variants of a product to be listed on the same page, so that all their reviews are mixed together. This deceptive practice hoodwinks many customers. There are 2 kinds of product page hijacking - somewhat obvious ones and the really sneaky kind.
Example of a somewhat obvious one - https://imgur.com/OfZLUeL - here, one product page actually lists multiple router models that have different features and configurations. While it is a bit obvious, the buyer still has to carefully read the reviews to figure out what model the review is about.
Example of the sneaky ones are products that only partially list their model number, and list and sell slightly different variants of model under a single product page.
E.g search for "TP-Link WR841" in https://dd-wrt.com/support/router-database/ - there are 9 variants of the same model (in essence, 9 different models) that are differentiated by a version number (v9, v10, v11 etc. after their model name).
But instead of creating a product page for each variant - "TP-Link WR841N v9" or "TP-Link WR841N v11" or "TP-Link WR841N v13" - only one product page is created under "TP-Link WR841N" and all the variants are sold under it. The variations in the models are sometimes not minor - some of the variants have a higher RAM and even totally different CPU! Since all the variants are sold under one product page, the reviews posted are actually for all these different variants. But the buyer will often have no idea of that. And they may not even receive the product they think the reviews are recommending!
The router issue is even more insidious as the vendors may not even know which version they have as the manufacturer considers them all identical even though they can be entirely different.
I don't think it has reached that stage though - so far, they have been clearly labelling the full model name of the product on the box and / or on the product. (I think it may be illegal for them to do otherwise as they have to obtain various certifications when they ship the product). So the vendors do know what products they have. It is kind of deceptive advertising on Amazon - they deliberately mislabel the product model by not including the version number (which is actually part of the model name).
There is not much to wonder about, Amazon does it because it critical to their fulfillment service, one of the key ways amazon makes money and keeps it 1-2 day delivery times is inventory mixing, i.e if you order from Seller X, you may actually get Stock that Seller Y shipped in.
This is why they need to merge listings into 1. It is also why there is soo much fraud on Amazon, and I dont believe they will ever fix it, the logistic costs would make Fulfilled by Amazon unprofitable if they had to stop mixing stock
If they use the Fufilled By Amazon service, which if you want to have "Prime" shipping you have to, then yes that is possible and more common than it should
The way the service works, is that you the vendor will ship your products into a amazon warehouse, other vendors will ship the "same items" a amazon warehouse, all of these "same items" are mixed together in the inventory system, your account is has a credit of "X items" but not the specific items you shipped in to the warehouse
Example
Acme Vendor shipped to amazon 15 Logitech MX Mouses
When amazon gets the mouses it take all 30 and puts them in a big box, as the orders are filled even if you ordered from Acme, you make get one of the one Evil shipped into Amazon
I think there’s a discount if you allow commingled inventory (or a cost to keep it separate) which makes sense as Amazon has to track and potentially stock it in multiple warehouses
The comingled inventory actually is a good idea, just flawed. Go ahead, comingle the inventory but keep track of where each item came from so when the counterfeit is discovered they know where it really came from and don't blame the innocent supplier.
That's what amuses me - what, it requires a few additional characters on the stock barcode?
Of course the real problem is the counterfeiters have no problem starting a new vendor every few weeks or even days, so the damage may already be done by the time the reports come back.
Amazon taking action against the vendor, and consumers blaming the wrong vendor.
When you order from Amazon Marketplace you can clearly see who you are ordering from, even if Amazon shipping the item. Consumers getting a bad product will then no only review the item but the seller with negative feedback even though the seller they bought it from may have done nothing wrong
The idea behind it was a good one - if you’re selling a book about cats, and you update the book to fix some typos (easy to do with Kindle for example) you don’t want to lose all your reviews.
And then they added a feature where if multiple marketplace vendors are selling the same thing it combines them.
And a third feature lets you classify items as various colors of a product (but the same product - think blue vs pink socks) and all the reviews get combined.
So if you do all three in the right order you can change anything to anything now, even taking another listing.
I don't think anyone would mind that (even the scammers) - because what the scammers want is "Five/four star" and "400 reviews" to show - they don't care what the actual reviews even say.
It's a good feature, it just needs more safeguards.
I'd also like to see a feature where established customers ($x bought over y time) can flag an entry as suspect--an entry gets enough flags and a human looks at it. If the entry turns out to be suspect everyone who flagged it gets a bit more flagging reputation, if it's wrong they get a bit less. The more flagging reputation you have the more your flag counts towards getting a human to investigate.
> And then they added a feature where if multiple marketplace vendors are selling the same thing it combines them.
It's more the other way around. Initially you could only sell something on marketplace if it was something Amazon already listed, usually a book. There would be an option on the Amazon listing to buy it elsewhere and if you selected that there would be a list of non-Amazon sellers you could buy the book from - these would normally be individuals reselling books they had finished reading.
Yup. I tried buying Qualatex twisting balloons from Amazon. From the reviews I could clearly see some sellers were offering legit Qualatex and others were offering cheap knock-offs. Since the reviews are not matched to the seller, I could not tell which sellers were offering the real product. I ended up buying from eBay without issue.
Alibaba is much better than Amazon about seller verification. Look up, say, "PC power supply". On Amazon, you're lucky if you get the address of the seller and a product image.
Alibaba gives you multiple detailed pictures of the object, including its data plate. You get the full address of the seller, and whether it's the manufacturer or a reseller. There's usually a picture of the factory, info about their annual sales and number of employees, whether that's been verified by a third party, how fast they usually respond to inquries. Sometimes even what production equipment they use.
What certifications they have and who does their certifications.
Many of those companies will accept an order for one unit.
Yep. You will also often immediately get connected to a sales rep via chat, and they will follow up you all the way through to shipping and for any repeat orders.
Notably, Alibaba's core business is B2B. Business customers have very little tolerance for bad shipments, and are frequently repeat customers such that they would quickly have left Alibaba if they could not get predictable quality.
Alibaba & Aliexpress _do_ have a clone problem, but the notable distinction is that they don't aggressively comingle listings like Amazon does. This means for some common consumer items (fidget spinners, etc.) you'll find a hundred listings with identical images, slightly varying descriptions, and different factories, but you can easily choose which seller to buy from.
AliExpress can be pretty brutal. I went looking for a lithium power pack and it was clear that almost all the listings were the same crap with differently inflated capacities that were physically impossible.
I found a manufacturer that seemed legit and orders a suitcase of LiFePO batteries. Will take about 60 days to arrive via ship but it was a huge pain to sort through the fake sellers.
I think it's a lot easier in the states to find high energy chemistry than it is here in Canada. Prices are much higher because the market is much smaller.
I often find things on Amazon, then go directly to the seller's webpage or search for a book on other bookstores. You can often get it cheaper, and with peace of mind that it isn't counterfeit. Only really buy on Amazon if it really doesn't exist anywhere else and really need it.
I went cold turkey on Amazon a few months back; the only thing I've kept is the TV subscription.
What I realised is that it was just a dependency because it was so easy to search for and buy stuff. Nowadays I'll buy from a smaller shop if I need something, but it's more likely that I think "do I actually need this?" and say "no."
Also, Walmart.com has similar prices and selection. Free shipping is $35 though. I’ve had much better results with Walmart packaging and shipping lately.
In the US, I prefer walmart.com over Amazon for groceries because they do their usual price vetting, whereas you can end up paying three times the normal price for something on Amazon if you're not careful.
Their return window is 90 days versus Amazon’s 30 and they actually let you schedule the return pick-up date. Also, their Prime-competitor Walmart+ service[0] ($98/year) has no order minimums.
I have their Walmart Plus. If I'm buying a major brand item I go to Walmart. 0 chance of knockoffs. I get 2 day free shipping. And - if it's in stock locally, many times they deliver directly from the store and I get it next day (no option to tip...so no pressure there).
I use their store delivery option if I'm buying certain groceries or items I need ASAP. Yeah I need to tip - but I consider it me saving gas money/time.
Walmart sources their instore shopping to door dash employees. Doordash delivers their product whether you use the Walmart.com, or Walmart Groceries (in store).
The only difference is that it's more explicit it comes from doordash when you use Walmart Groceries.
For me their killer feature is ease and certainty of returns. If I am buying online I need to option to return items that are not as they appear, and Amazon offers that quite readily.
So I think the major hurdle for other businesses is getting a reputation for prompt and free return acceptance if they want to sell things sight unseen.
At least here in Europe, returns are painless in almost all cases. Give it a shot!
This is especially true for larger and more expensive items (like electronics) where - I can not stress this enough - it is much, much better to buy directly from the company (I'd say 95% of all companies now have d2c shops on their websites).
It used to be the case that Amazon had an advantage in customer support and returns. I feel this is no longer true. I bought an expensive electronic item from Amazon and, when it broke, I send it in under warranty (in the EU, the first six months are essentially no questions asked repairs). Amazon send it to a third-party repair shop that send it back to me without any repair.
By contrast, I had to replace an item from a large consumer electronics company, which I had bought directly with them. They sent me a new one __before__ I had sent in my old item, and the new box included the shipping label to send back the damaged one. Much easier!
Beyond all this, it's obvious that Amazon is now home to fake and faux products.
It is my view that the only product worth ordering there are cheapo China duplicates, for a price where you will be okay if they break after one week of use.
Otherwise, go with the supplier. It perhaps takes more than a day to ship, but often it doesn't. You can return any item for any reason within two weeks (in the EU), and damaged items can be returned within warranty anyway - usually with less hassle.
So folks, please stop buying stuff from Amazon if you can help it. As this - and countless other instances - has shown, Amazon is no longer worth supporting, for any reason.
I'm in Canada and recently I started getting Prime items shipped from the US, with no indication on the listing or at checkout that it was gonna be shipped internationally. It makes returns much less pain-free.
For international returns they don't have labels, you need to pay for shipping, and they supposedly reimburse up to $20 shipping fees but I have found no evidence of an actual process in place to claim it.
(I had to return a book because they sent me a hardcover loosely packed in a box, from the US to Canada. Of course it was damaged in transport. For a place that started out as a book store this is really dumb. I re-ordered it from Chapters, who packed it properly.)
I find that I'm more likely to get an item as expected from another store, and will only need to use the return policy if I change my mind or something else happens.
Whereas Amazon basically doesn't care about the inventory it ships and your only choice, really, is to use the return policy to actually get what you want.
I'm in the UK so I enjoy some solid consumer rights (at least for the time being). Plenty of online retailers ship return labels and packaging with your order, should you need to send something back.
Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. have almost completely automated customer/user service to keep costs down. Their business model depends on that.
The consumers are in the position of primitive people in front of their gods. They have to come together and pray for gods to notice them if they want wrongs to be righted.
It would be better to solve this through legislation.
While I still purchase some things from Amazon, anything that's to be ingested or involves supplying electrical current is a no. It's a sad day when GNC is a more reputable place to shop than Amazon.
Is there no oversight at all? Amazon has now become the Alibaba of the west and it makes me sick to think the once beloved marketplace is now just scamville.
This. Most of the time now when I buy from Amazon it feels like buying from a garage sale / flea market. Some examples from my purchases -- 4 pack of AA Eneloops arrived as 2 AAs and 2 AAAs; 2 identical office chairs arrived as 2 different models; Simple Human trash can arrived with 3 softball sized dents in different places; Spigen phone case arrived with some sort of tiny worms/maggots inside a corner of the packaging; Clorox antibacterial wipes arrived in generic packaging containing dry wipes. Porter Yoshida backpack arrived as a similar looking Herschel backpack in the same color.
I remember buying from Amazon and getting solid products really really fast; not sure where that's gone. I do use Amazon for the free Whole Foods delivery and that's been OK, though there's very lax usage of temperature-safe packaging for dairy and meat products.
This has been my experience lately as well. Packaging that looked like it was broken into or returned leaving me to wonder what was left out. I recently bought a GoPro and received a shady sdcard with it (the package comes with one). When I put the microsd card in the sdcard it wouldn’t come out. I threw both away. Packages that were busted up. Packaging that looked like someone else got there first. I’m done. I’m over it. After this mess with Klein Bottles I just deleted the app from my phone. I don’t have prime so it’s not that hard for me to never shop Amazon again.
> “Executives knew this was gonna shit the bed,” this person said. “That’s actually how they put it in meetings. The only question was how much poo we wanted there to be.”
Both Amazon and Aliexpress/baba follow a "this is a city" mentality. Crime and such are understood as statistics, not as a thing happening under their roof. This is a "beef up police funding next cycle" kind of problem.
Any one scam might be defeatable, but "scamming exists" seems to be true in any marketplace with enough participants.
I already stopped. I used to be a Prime subscriber, and use smile.amazon.com for charitable benefits. I don't use amazon at all now, because I don't trust that I will get what I think I am paying for.
I would really love to know why "Amvoom" could declare to Amazon that they own "Acme Klein Bottle" when "Acme Klein Bottle" has nothing to do with the "Amvoom" trademark. Can they just declare they own any page that doesn't have a registered trademark?
In short, yes.
If a seller (like me) has not trademarked his/her brand, and has not registered with Amazon's Brand Registry, then the listing can be hijacked.
Of course, hijackers will only considers taking listings with many five-star reviews extending over several years.
Speaking from the experience - listing can be hijacked even if it has a brand registered trademark. These hijackers, rumored, are bribing amazon insiders to change trademark on the listing and gain full editing access to it after change is made.
Any valid trademark gets you in the door, then Amazon trusts that you exert your rights only over your brands.
For example Anker could have a trademark on "Anker" (the brand) and then claim the "PowerCore III" listing for their battery pack without having to trademark the name of each product.
So, appalling scam aside, everyone knows what a Klein bottle is or what it does? First I've heard of it, and neither Stoll's site or the Amazon listing shed any light on the topic...just in-jokes.
It is mainly a joke/gag product for mathematicians, or a cool office decoration.
Nothing you would buy without the background knowledge.
But second sentence in the listing:
> Like a Möbius strip, this Klein bottle has only one side. In addition, a Klein bottle has no edge - the connection from "inside" to "outside" is smooth, and the bottle has no lip.
627 comments
[ 7.6 ms ] story [ 411 ms ] threadB&H has been a godsend for tech, especially since there's no tax with their card. Crutchfield/Headphones.com has been great for speaker and audio gear. West Elm has a consistently premium quality for kitchen, home, and furniture items (though furniture is a story of its own, with even better vendors.) Walmart/Target/BestBuy have been good for everything else.
If you're too lazy to figure out yourself which products are quality, Wirecutter, NyMag, and Consumer Reports all perform unbiased testing of multiple products in almost every product segment I can think of.
And for simply next-level quality, nothing beats DIY. Personalize the final product exactly to your specifications, choosing the highest quality or even custom-machined parts with zero cost cutting. Requires time and passion, however.
That said, if you care about quality/stuff you buy a lot more than I do, Amazon is a pretty terrible place to shop most of the time. I've encountered this when I want to buy nice stuff, for example a nice and expensive wooden desk. Seems like that's pretty impossible to do on Amazon, as cheap garbage seems to be the name of the game.
Wait, explain this for me?
I could fill up my cart, but had to come back later to do my purchase.
https://gothamist.com/news/bh-photo-workers-strike-on-may-da...
If possible use Adorama or some competitor.
https://m.jpost.com/diaspora/new-lawsuit-claims-b-and-h-disc...
My close friend is been sued for ridiculous reasons by ex-partners. It already costed him $750k in legal fees,and although he is very likely to win the case, it’s expected to take another 2 years before the case is resolved, at which point he will be allowed to file for recovering his costs (easily anothe couple of years).
They've been proven to discriminate, in a court of law. I'd give this new lawsuit the benefit of the doubt.
I wonder why so many forum users frame statements they want to make as questions which challenge innocent comments.
As in, "Why are you getting heated? I'm not condoning [whatever], I'm just asking questions."
I’m not sure why people are reading too much into my honest question.
It’s an amazing retail space. They have this awesome overhead rail system for delivering goods, and their checkout resembles customs at an airport (a bit disconcerting).
Also, I loved B&H when I was seriously into photography, and even if the closed days had been a practical inconvenience (they weren't, IME), it would've still been worthwhile.
Speculating... Maybe something in the culture of dutiful adherence also helped them to provide such well-respected service at great prices? Diversity is good.
Similarly, building the e-commerce machine obviously can't be done on the sabbath, but if it's already running then you're not actually working.
For example, suppose you push a rock off a huge cliff. If the rock tumbles for a full week after you push it, were you pushing it off a cliff for the full week (including the sabbath)? Or did you only push it the one time on a tuesday?
Sure, it’s a minor annoyance, but compare that with the nontheistic amorality of Amazon and their everything-goes train wreck of a marketplace (worse than eBay at its worst) and you’ll understand why I only buy my computers, electronics and photo gear from B&H.
It's also my understanding that it's kosher for gentiles to perform actions outside of the constraints of the rules of Judaism, like turning on/off fans on behalf of those respecting the rules of the sabbath.
As with any religious practices, there’s a wide spectrum of how people follow or don’t follow the doctrine. There’s no shortage of Rabbis who have haggled over the fine details of how they apply to modern society, like your elevator example.
Personally, I like the idea of aligning and adapting the general intent as opposed to rule hacking, and it’s neat to leave that cultural stamp on the business (at some cost, I’m sure).
Don't be fooled by the glitzy showrooms and "made in America" promises of quality, this chain sells essentially disposable furniture. When we were expecting our first child 7 years ago, we moved from an apartment to a single-family home. We wanted to also upgrade from IKEA and equivalent to proper furniture. I bought some heirloom pieces from Thos. Moser (a dining table, two end-chairs, a coffee table, a rocking chair and two foot stools) but they are quite expensive, and we got many other pieces from Room and Board: a queen bed, nightstands, two dressers, six Thatcher dining chairs, Pisa leaning bookshelves, side tables and a coffee table with rounded angles). Unfortunately after 7 years the furniture turned out to be much less durable than I expected. The finish on the coffee table is worn and ugly, the bed required extensive work even though we only use a mattress, no boxsprings, and the spokes on the Thatcher chairs are coming unglued. A proper Windsor chair like the Thatcher should have "through-holed and wedged" construction that ensures the spokes don't move. The Moser chairs have that, of course, and in retrospect I deeply regret cheaping out. I could have bought 2 buy-it-for-life Moser chairs for the price of the 6 Thatcher chairs that are now essentially kindling. To add insult to injury, Room and Board refuses to stand by their product and are refusing to repair them. In the Bay Area, we've had good luck with Hoot Judkins furniture, which are better quality for the price (not all though, they have a wide range that goes from meh to Amish-grade).
We have Carl Hansen & Son dining table and chairs, which is a considerably more modern look but still very solid (noticeably more so than most DWR stuff), but again, $$$$ and a special order from Europe that took ~16 weeks.
Let's hope they don't go the marketplace route while chasing growth. Shopping on Amazon feels like late 90s eBay, guessing whether or not the seller is going to screw you.
Has that become any better?
I'm already hearing complaints about how B&H "isn't what they used to be" because they're selling much more than their original scope of audio visual equipment.
I would also add rtings.com; they do a great job of documenting their process and the results themselves from their reviews with incredible detail.
Back when Walmart started and everyone was all about "wow, their prices are great!" and nary a mention of their quality. I realized that Walmart was going to do the same thing to groceries.
Without re-invigorating the UCC with stronger consumer protections so that the "costs" are born not individually by consumers but by the market maker who pushes an inferior product, I don't see it getting much better.
I used to buy a lot of cheap things on there, then something interesting started happening. Every time I made a purchase on there, literally a few weeks later, I would start getting fraudulent charges on my card. Thank god, my bank would call and ask, "Are you in Paris France right now? Someone just tried to purchase 3,000 euros worth of clothing on your card."
I haven't bought anything on there for about 5 years now and remarkably as soon as I stopped buying stuff off of their site, I have yet to have my cc number end up on some carders market and deal with getting a new credit card.
I also did some research and found out many, many, many people have had the same issues with bad charges showing up on their card after making purchases on that site.
I'd like to have that service back.
Buying things from ax was great for me as someone with EE as a hobby.
The most efficient way for the customer to compare the relative value of two products is for the quality to be factored into the price exactly, with all externalities realized up front. But how to design such a scheme that isn't instantly gamed into oblivion is unclear to me.
It's like the value we're looking for is the depth of it's "truth", if you grant me poetic license to use that phasing, but that definition is not specific enough to be actionable.
As an example, let's say your jurisdiction decides to make the following requirements on the manufacturers of food refrigerators;
1) The refrigerator must have a working lifetime of no less than 10 years from the date of sale, when maintained per the manual.
2) Repair parts for the refrigerator must be available for 20 years past the date of the last sale of the refrigerator to a resale outlet.
3) Information on the serviceability and repair of the refrigerator must be available to any party for a reasonable and non-discriminatory cost.
Those regulations say nothing about how much you can charge, how you manufacture it, or how you differentiate it from your competitors, they just make a requirement that the person who buys it can rely on it for 10 years and that if it breaks you must repair or replace it to give them the full 10 year lifetime they expected when they bought it.
What that does is force choices in design, manufacturing, and materials that reduce cost at the expense of expected lifetime back on to the manufacturer. As a result they gain no advantage by using cheaper stuff that fails more readily to get a cheaper price to "undercut" the guys who make the 10 year refrigerator.
I like your example. So lets consider a refrigerator manufacturer that builds a great refrigerator design, with all the investment in R&D, documentation & service manuals, parts reliability, supply chain and inventory procurement, customer service, continued improvements due to to market and long-term customer feedback, etc that one would expect if they were aiming to make a reliable long-term product as you describe. The business produces a good product and provides good service for a fair price, and they grow a reputable brand and loyalty from their customers as a result.
Consider some scenarios:
Scenario 1: After some time the owners come to retirement age and sell the business to the highest bidder at, for example, $100 million. The new owners promptly 'reorganize' the business, slashing costs, selling assets, eliminating continued investments, and generally cheapening the product. Meanwhile the outside world is none the wiser, and thanks to a buffer of brand loyalty they keep selling the cheaper product but at a massive comparative margin. In 2 years they made back $300 million which they smuggle away by cutting dividend checks or paying themselves for some bogus "consulting" services or something else just as tepidly but still technically justifiable. Another year later the consumer protection agencies finally come knocking (the government isn't fast) and find the whole place either liquidated or dilapidated, clearly unable to fulfill their warranties, resulting in being sued or fined into bankruptcy. The supply chain of parts even for the original product, some only 3 years into their 10 year warranty dries up. The newer cheaper product is in an even worse state. The purchasers are long gone but doing great, having milked the reputation of the business and its customers of a neat, net $200 million in 3 years. Customers get a $10 check in the mail thanks to a class-action. Remaining employees have to find a new job.
How would you describe what happened? And how could it be avoided? I'm skeptical that the regulations you mentioned or similar could help here.
Scenario 2: Using the professionally produced and well-maintained specifications, service manuals, and product design, an international company reproduces the same refrigerator design, but since they can skip all the overhead of creating such a great design and documentation they sell the product with a razor thin or even negative margin at an overall 30% lower price. This drives the original refrigerator manufacturer out of business, enabling the international company to capture the market and raise the price again to extract value out of it. Perhaps they maintain parts inventories but they invest nothing into continued evolution of the design and cut corners on customer service and it dies slowly. Customers of the original design are out of luck, and the new company's product is just slightly incompatible enough with the original design that parts don't work and customers are instructed to just buy a new one.
What happened in this case? Is this even a negative story that we should try to avoid? If so, how?
Amazon is a gambling company. People buys things with the hope that, this time, they are getting a bargain. And, as any gambling company, the customers will lose in the long term.
But, people gets addicted to gambling. Maybe next item, maybe I will do a smart purchase. The more randomized the experience the more irrational the consumer.
I prefer traditional business that follow regulations and are subjects to my country laws. I used Amazon when it started, because they had a great recommendation engine for books. Even that is now a shitshow that offers you what Amazon wants to sell regardless of what you look for.
Amazon works as intended, and that is terrifying.
p.d.: People is not lazy. It is just that most people are not experts on the products that they purchase, and they are already spending a lot of their time working hard and taking care of their families to add another ten hours of investigation to purchase a pair of shoes.
Perfect example is how I don't buy anything Apple on Ebay anymore. WAY too many fakes, stolen or misrepresented stuff on there now. Hard to get away from all the Chinese resellers there either. I just buy directly from Apple. Yeap, its going to cost a little extra, but I can take comfort knowing its not going to be a fake or get something that was completely misleading in the listing.
It’s incredible you can have one tiny part delivered within hours for free. I feel bad doing that though, so I always try to cluster my orders just to be nice to their delivery people and the environment.
Within a couple of months they changed the policy to $75 minimum for free shipping. There are also fewer delivery slots today relative to demand
Wirecutter says “our writers and editors are never made aware of or influenced by which companies have affiliate relationships with our business team.”
And elsewhere on the site: “The reputation of Wirecutter and its parent company, The New York Times, rests on our vigorous reporting, editorial integrity, and avoidance of actual or even perceived conflicts of interest.”
Are you saying this is a lie / outright deception?
And, fwiw, they indeed still review & recommend Anker changers; see this review where the #1 choice is currently an Anker model: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-multiport-us...
I think this is the item.
(but you should actually buy from his website)
Also, if anyone is unaware, this is this Clifford Stoll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll - who wrote this brilliant (and true) book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book) - which is a really good read and perfect for HN.
Sounds like most of his predictions in it (eg e-commerce will fail, digital books will not be viable, etc) were wildly off the mark - but were any prescient?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Snake_Oil
For example, he complains that nobody will want to look up information from computerized databases because CD-ROMs are too slow; consumers won't shop online because they can't pay securely; retailers won't rely on e-commerce because too few customers have Internet access; nobody will want e-books because you can't read them on the subway; there's no way to effectively search for content online; digital art will never surpass clip art and crude photoshops; it's impossible for networks to be secure because data and credentials are unencrypted; and so on.
On the bright side, he thinks that at least nobody will need to worry about online privacy, because it will be too cumbersome for anyone to effectively maintain databases of personal information.
But on the other hand, with some of his observations, it's at least arguable that they still hold true 25 years later:
> Anyone can post messages to the net. Practically everyone does. The resulting cacophony drowns out serious discussion. Online debates of tough issues are often polarized by messages taking extreme positions.
> An original IBM PC, now over ten years old, is fully obsolete. Likely, it will still work perfectly and do everything it was build for; after all, the silicon and copper haven't deteriorated. But you can't get software for it any longer.
> A word processor may last two years before the next version. These upgrades likely add as many new bugs as are patched, and result in a bigger, more complex program. One that's less and less compatible with old files. [...] Curiously, as computer hardware gets faster, programs run slower.
> Photo retouching isn't new. Digital image processing, however, can be so extensive yet undetectable that it undermines the foundation of photojournalism -- that seeing is believing.
But he was right about tech will enable and amplify the worst in social behaviors.
Do you have a caching service in front maybe?
The blogs that go down here typically back every request by MySQL (ahem, WordPress) which is totally unnecessary and often actively harmful since MySQL has very low default total connections allowed.
The point being: don't serve requests backed by a database unless the results are likely to change very dynamically!
The only difference between this and adding a cache is that the cache is another piece of software in your production stack.
Vanilla SSGs are so simple I ended up writing a basic one out of a markdown and jinja parser in Python every time (for example: https://github.com/eatonphil/notes.eatonphil.com/blob/master...).
If I were not lazy I might learn one of the major ones like Hugo.
It doesn't matter what SSG you pick, they all produce the exact same kind of thing.
WordPress is not my favorite thing and some of the available plug-ins do terrible things with MySQL, but the problem is not too low default connections; it's too many PHP workers. WordPress is generally focused enough that most of the wall time is spent in waiting for the database, so you want to optimize for throughput; one or two workers per cpu thread is plenty for that. More concurrency than execution available reduces throughput, so it's better to queue requests in your http layer than to process multiple at once.
Large numbers of MySQL connections are more appropriate when the web pages do a mix of things, but more/mostly idle DB wise; in that case, you might still want persistent connections to reduce round trips before a query, but are less likely to have a query backlog large enough where task switching overhead becomes significant.
But the point was to make a comparison to a Raspberry Pi and emphasize that you do not special compute to withstand thousands of page views. Even S3 and GH Pages are overkill in terms of the compute behind both of them vs. what you need minimally.
Yep. Cloudflare is out front, so the actual load on the rasp-pi is mitigated by their content-delivery network.
Then, too, my website is almost entirely simple html with compressed images, so there's not a lot of bytes to shovel.
Here in Berkeley/Oakland, Sonic.net has strung quality fiber-optic, so there's 1Gbit to my house. That lets me keep up with things. However, they only give a dynamic ip address;, so my pi must keep track of its address and tell Cloudflare whenever it changes.
Works surprisingly well - from /top/ I see about several dozen simultaneous users (thank you!), and the cpu temp is about 2 degrees above its normal of 50C
The raspberry pi itself is in the crawlspace under my home, fed through a Ubiquity edge router. Much fun, playing with Unix (oops, I mean Linux) -- sends me back to days of yore when everything happened from your command lines.
1. I met you in Kepler's when Silicon Snake Oil came out and we talked about something and you wrote in the inside "I hear you, John". I don't know what we discussed!
2. I am now Cloudflare's CTO and if you want to avoid the dynamic IP address problem you can use Cloudflare Tunnel to connect to us (rather than us to you). https://www.cloudflare.com/products/tunnel/
And that Kepler's talk? Happy memories, indeed. They "paid" me for my talk by saying that I could have a copy of any book in the store. I chose the Times World Atlas (a way-big book of maps). The manager's face suddenly dropped -- and then I told 'em that I'd pay full list price if all of their employees sound sign the book. Result: I now have a terrific atlas of maps, with a dozen signatures of book people. (two of them visited me last year and I showed them their signatures from decades ago -- very sweet!)
Meanwhile, I gotta send out some of the tsunami of Klein bottle orders. But Cloudflare tunnel? Here I come!
My needs are very similar to Cliff's. I have (or going to have) a home server on a residential ISP which can't accept incomming connections. I need a public-facing server that will return from the cache if I'm ever on the HN front page or my home server is down, TLS handling, and routing to my home server's port 80 when needed.
I mostly serve personal websites but I have aspirations of building a small business. Is there anything in Cloudflare's range that would work for my kind of needs?
Hoping you follow-up on nine-day-old threads, Bill.
2. We literally announced free tunnels for all customer here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/tunnel-for-everyone/
And I will double up and say it is a great episode of a great podcast.
https://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_the_call_to_learn?l...
I'd prepared a 1 hour talk. When I was about to go on stage, they told me that I had only 15 minutes. So, well, I remembered one of the few things I learned in grad school: talk fast and don't give 'em a standing target.
Covered my points and finished in, yep, 18 minutes.
I still have the hat. I no longer have the bottle as I moved to the other side of the world a number of years ago, and after inquiring with some mathematician friends it turned out that four-dimensional glass bottles are not compatible with three-dimensional backpacks :-/
When I got the package it was covered in hand-written notes; gosh, I don't remember what it said exactly, but it was hilarious; somehow you even managed to put some joke in Dutch on it. I wanted to email something back but I was shy and didn't know what to say. So, about a decade too late, thanks! Not only was I very happy with the bottle, the packaging absolutely made my day all those years ago.
Thank you for what you do.
Here's a video of him describing how the Curta performs arithmetic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OynMJB-2J1o — as well as the SciAm article he wrote on them: http://www.mycurta.com/Calculator.pdf
I still don't understand how it works. Why can somebody owning something called "Amvoom" claim something called "Acme Klein Bottle"?
An even if they legally own the brand, how keeping the reviews when moving the brand to the new owner is the proper thing to do for the customers? By definition, the reviews are for another provider. I don't get it.
I really hope I'm wrong though because this sounds like a very lazy and flawed system.
That's how you make $100B, not by "doing things that don't scale" like handwriting thankyou notes to every customer.
Out of interest, is it publishing companies that make digital versions of books, or is it up to the author themselves to do that?
(And if it's the latter this is a small request to Clifford to consider it if it's not too much of an arduous task. And provided their relationship with amazon isn't too soured by the current situation, which I could understand if it is).
The vast majority of them don't actually work, this is why those sellers rely on scams. It's almost impossible to know which ones do online.
Source: girlfriend and family experiences.
Though keep in mind I didn't have any huge, dried out aged blackhead to worry about, & those would be impossible to remove without some extraction.
I like Cliff Stoll and have been looking forward to my first Klein bottle purchase for some years now, so I say this without any insinuation Cliff's not telling the whole story: There's got to be more to it than this, right? Can someone really go on Amazon, effectively take over someone's storefront, and completely ransack the place this easily? Because Cliff doesn't have a registered trademark? This seems out of this world absurd.
There was a discussion about selling products through Amazon on The Amp Hour a few months back, and part of the discussion included trademarks as a requirement. They made it sound like a new and expensive hurdle to deal with. Given Stoll's comments, it sounds like the lack of a registered trademark was a contributing factor to his problem. Putting the two together leads me to believe that Amazon is aware this can happen. (From the show notes, it looks like https://theamphour.com/523-a-keyzermas-story/ is the episode in question.)
Edit: for clarity.
And continuing to use those services is giving a vote for those practices to keep on keeping on, and that people still use them? Well, no, it’s not surprising but it’s sad.
On June 22nd, they used Amazon's Brand Registry to re-brand my listing on Amazon (replacing my brand, "Acme Klein Bottle" with "Amvoom") They could do this because Amazon's Brand Registry only respects issued trademarks.
I don't get this at all. Attacker has a trademark on "Amvoom". The word "Amvoom" does not appear in Stoll's product name or description. It isn't even close to any of the words in the product name.
FWIW I fully 100% believe Stoll. But the real question here is why is a "brand registry" allowing product takeovers that don't involve said brand? That seems to rise far beyond the usual Amazon bullshit, to straight-up algorithmic incompetence. How is this possible?
https://hackaday.com/2015/06/24/crawlspace-warehouse-include...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU
It's my way to cheat the chiropractor. Anything to avoid crawling around under my house.
One view is that Amazon wants sellers to register their trademarks formally with the government, then go through the brand registry process to prevent this.
one-sided?
Just read the thread on the previous occasion where listings got hijacked on their own fora [0] - its sad to see the sellers so powerless, helpless and just left to themselves.
You really have to wonder why they even bother...
Edit: also, reading that thread you can also get a feel why big brands have completely left AMZN as a platform (like Adidas, Birkenstock are a few i'm aware of).
Possible co-mingling of inventory, hijacked listings... no, just don't bother - of course not each and everyone is a heavyweight as my 2 examples - but do we really need 100s of dropshippers FBA'ing the same crap? I'd rather buy direct at the source than at Amazon these days.
[0] https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/review-manipulatio...
At least that way they could trace the people who were seriously poisoning the co-mingled well, in circumstances where they wanted to.
https://sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/external/G2001414...
> Note: Amazon ensures that the initial source of the commingled units can be traced throughout the fulfilment process.
The linked FAQ goes into slightly more detail.
If I order 2 of something and they come from different sellers, and one is fake, how would they know which was which? Or that I selected the correct one to return?
Or if someone orders only 1, but recieve it and return a different one they bought from aliexpress.
Knowing that returned items get sold as new, it seems like the problem could compound, especially if the same item gets returned and resold multiple times. If it's a bad fake, that seems more probable then not.
Small is beautiful! Stay small!
- from the guy who in September 2000 bought 16 klein bottles since you only charged for prime numbered bottles, and sent you his credit card number as the sum of two 16-digit numbers sent to different email addresses! I still have a beer mug and question mark; all the rest are with friends! <3
How sad - they didn't have to get better, everyone else just got a lot worse by comparison.
As I understand it, the actually e-commerce was still OK. It was more a problem with discoverability.
They seem to want it both ways. They have simultaneously tried to argue that they are not responsible for third-party sellers and blame them when fake and/or unsafe goods are sold, but then they work hard to make it appear that everything is coming from one place. It gets particularly annoying when it's a product with lots of variations (colours/sizes etc) where each variant will be a different seller with different shipping.
As near as I can work out, their business model is now based on your being able to send back completely wrong or broken things they've sent you, so I stick to stuff where I've got the luxury of going through a cumbersome return process if things go terribly wrong.
My address has also been used as a target for a scam where, by sending unwanted goods to a real customer, a seller can fabricate a fake review that counts in their system as real. In one case it was a garbage light (shipped directly in its retail packaging so I could see what the thing was) that by a strange coincidence was the top-rated light on Amazon. Clearly an exploit that pays off.
I stopped (I think) that behavior by returning some unsolicited packages to sender, at the post office.
I'm pretty much down to a few books, video games, and obscure fasteners/hardware/tools (which annoyingly they're just about the only good source for).
Recently I needed some vinyl siding hooks[0], a really oddball size drawer slide, and replacement window springs. I ended up getting all of them on Amazon - even tracking back the manufacturers they seemed to exclusively sell on Amazon.
0) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083TPKJN1/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdb_im...
Kind of a good metaphor for how toxic Amazon as a whole is, actually.
They are too big to fail and they can bribe their way out of anything. As long as majority of people don't care, why would they ever want to fix it?
Also for one legit Western company, you can get 1000 Chinese knock-off cheaper ones that don't complain and people buy what's cheaper.
Since he has common law trademark, why wouldn't that still apply? Someone else is selling via Amazon in the US using his common law trademark.
For live chat as a seller, follow these instructions from Amazon's Moderator: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/wheres-live-chat-s...
However thanks to this Hacker News article, three Amazon employees have contacted me, with varying degrees of success.
This practice has to stop.
Gigantic class action suit is overdue for this fraudulent criminal empire.
I've seen that happen sometimes, and always wondered how or why it happened. Like I'll be reading reviews for a USB Memory stick, and the 5 star reviews rave about nail polish.
I've reported these cases to Amazon, but they take no action.
These too big to fail companies need to be split and held accountable!
If they consciously let fraudsters operate, in my opinion they are complicit!
While this is kinda designed-as-intended (Amazon wants you to brand register with them for protection), this is a pretty shitty dark pattern they put up and sadly it happens as an annoying edge case that existing sellers and customers have to deal with.
Source: me, a mid-sized Amazon 3P seller/vendor.
Edit: "-Cliff Stoll Saturday morning June 26, in Oakland, California. And yes, I am now trademarking Acme Klein Bottle." Looks like Amazon's getting what they want after all.
I see what they are doing no differently than what Steele started with Prenda law. Heck that's probably where Amazon got the idea :p
Many of them autogenerated programmatically like "I love X" shirts, and X = some dictionary list; or bots built to crosslist Target/Walmart product over to Amazon etc. for arbitrage etc.
I hope someone from Amazon has reached out to you Cliff - my wife gifted my FIL one of your klein bottles and it's been an absolute delight going through the purchasing experience with you. Thank you for the joy you bring to us!
Sigh. The usual FAANG bs. Do nothing as long as it makes you money and do the minimum only if it caused enough outrage. No values, no ethics, 100% shallow.
and 6 hours the scammer will be back under another account
This is not to belittle Stoll's work, it might be a model or approximation... or I'm just missing something.
I think Cliff Stoll sells 3D models of Klein bottles rather than the impossible 4D version.
Since a Klein bottle is just a cylinder with its ends glued together a particular way, I think one way to sweep out a Klein bottle through time would be to have a rubber band split into two, then have each band travel along a trajectory that brings them back together with the correct orientation. The self intersection is easily avoided by having one of the bands travel faster than the other.
They'll still meet up again. It'll just take more revolutions to get there. That doesn't avoid it.
How do people manage to figure out such elaborate ways to manipulate Amazon results without getting banned? Getting banned has minimal cost? Poor detection? Inside information?
They don't actually ban the accounts doing this. They only remove the reviews/listings, but don't take any action on the accounts (so they just re-list 24 hours later)
Apparently when Amazon acts, they are just removing the fake reviews, sometimes the whole product but never actually banning the sellers account (even if every product that seller is listing is pumped full of fake reviews)
It seems to be a endless cycle of a item being hijacked or a item filled with fake reviews, then when reported to Amazon they simply remove the fake reviews or the product but don't take any action at all against the seller (or accounts making the fake reviews)
This thread[0] on the Amazon Seller forums is crazy with people finding products that are scam listings (with 10,000+ fake reviews), they report them, the products get taken down, then 24 hours later the same sellers have re listed with more fake reviews.
Amazon simply do not care, if they did they would:
A) Address the root problem
B) Ban the seller accounts clearly manipulating the system.
Amazon is quick to permaban accounts from real sellers, who make a single mistake (sometimes completely out of their control) but are happy to let these fake review/sellers keep their accounts.
[0] https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/review-manipulatio...
Why though? How does this not hurt Amazon long term? What are they gaining from attracting dodgy sellers in the short term?
The marginal edge cases boil down to “power” or “stupidity”.
But the more important point is, Amazon is a must-use shipping provider with a crappy platform. They don't give a fuck about the retail part. They diversified with AWS, Jeff plays with his billions, fights unions, tracks piss bottles, cancels or renews Prime shows, goes to space, etc.. etc.. the site at this point is almost just a cute idiosyncrasy. As long as it runs and the orders are flowing, it's A-OK. Of course there's are probably many teams working on "reforming" it. The NEW amazon.com. The redesign. The refactor. The revamp. The modernization. But all of those are just to keep people working there so they maintain the old behemoth while their project slowly gets put on the backburner (and/or gets scaled down to a small demo page somewhere that no one ever sees or uses).
Fundamentally, it is too easy to sign up as a seller.
They banned my customer account from leaving reviews, though, because I mentioned that I got scammed from a listing I left a review on.
I haven't really reviewed what I'm posting here - heck I can't spellcheck at 12:30 in the morning:
Amazon, through its "Brand Registry" allows anyone with an issued trademark to take over other brands, whether or not the brand is covered by the specific goods that the trademark was issued for.
Brand Name Hijacking takes advantage of several bugs in Amazon's seller business model:
1) Amazon Brand Name Registry allows the owner of a USPTO trademark to take over listings of non-trademarked brands.
2) Amazon Brand Name Registry does not prevent a registered Amazon brand from over-reaching beyond the regulated goods and services associated with that trademark.
3) Amazon combines reviews of different item variations and colors, even though they are from completely different listings and manufacturers.
4) Amazon debits inventory even when an order is cancelled, allowing a denial of service attack to exhaust inventory in a seller's listing, at no cost to the attacker.
Effects of Brand Hijacking:
1) Shoddy or unproven products receive five-star reviews, apparently from several years.
2) Consumers, relying on Amazon star ratings, are grossly misled by the summary reviews.
3) Disreputable sellers are rewarded (at the cost of honest sellers) by large volume sales caused by high ratings.
4) Unscrupulous sellers of reviews receive money from Amazon sellers in return for inflated reviews.
5) Independent sellers on Amazon -- specifically those who have delivered extremely high customer satisfaction -- are locked out of their listings and pushed out of their long term business.
This is why Amazon will eventually be replaced by a company that can do things better, faster, and cheaper.
In fact it seems most of the issues I see people complaining about on HN are US-centric issues? Perhaps all this brand-hijacking is happening over there because of the market size and thus pay-off to do the "dirty" work?
If they made a new article, which immediately gets a lot of 5 star reviews, that'd be suspicious and Amazon would probably detect it.
But if they attach it to an already established article, they can happily add their fake reviews and then detach them again, making it look legit.
Just a theory though.
Getting banned has a high cost if you are a single small business with a long-term decades of time in business as the same company registration.
Because Amazon doesn't care, they still get paid if you buy a real product or a shitty counterfeited product.
In fact, such manipulation can result in increased sales and driving up the price of a product. You're more likely to buy something that has a ton of reviews and purchases, and more likely to pay more money for it if it has a ton of positive reviews.
Stay-at-home parent? Oh, but your note brings smile to this tired astronomer's face...
I've been using it to buy car parts and it is SO MUCH better than dealing with junkyards (LKQ/Car-Parts websites suck!) and everything that I've got so far including parts from Latvia and Germany have been genuine.
eBay too is full of knock-off trash from China but you can easily tell those apart from a real listing most of the time with reviews being unique per listing/seller. And eBay allows for local pickups too!
Small delights like that are worth serious money.
I love sites that have such a structured categorization of their items. McMaster-Carr is the gold standard IMO, and RockAuto is pretty close.
I needed some brass thread-ins with bolts and they got the job done but now I'm sitting on a minimum sized order of ~50 pieces that I won't be using anytime soon. Maybe I can resell them eBay. Hah.
Want this weird thread bolt? Here's a power plant certified 2mm bolt for $75 each.
I've had over 200 amazon orders last year, didn't have a problem with a single one of them. Few times I wanted to return something they either sent a courier to collect it from me directly, or just refunded me anyway. And few times I ordered from somewhere else(urrghhh.....Currys) the customer service was absolutely abysmal. I'm just not brave enough to order from anyone but Amazon nowadays*.
*here in the UK, understand the American Amazon is far worse for <reasons>
I now buy a bunch of stuff from AliExpress because at least they don't even try to pretend that (most of) their products are crap. When I want something cheap and don't care about waiting a month, I go there to get it directly from the source.
And that’s exactly where Amazon is super difficult to replace. The current competition is not other online retailers but coordinating with my wife such that she can look after the kid so I can go sit in traffic for an hour to get to the store and grab a couple of things we need for some quick home repairs, etc.
I know what I'm doing tomorrow if I can afford to wait for a delivery. What will I be doing on a random day next week? next month? Less so!
Just as Manufactures have shifted to JIT for many parts on the production line, other business processes have as well.
In other cases I've gotten clearly opened/used items sold as new, e.g. woodworking tools.
It is true in sometimes unexpected ways. For instance some sellers just don't care about notifications; it might be because they usually work with professional buyers who work on a long timescale ("I need it for this quarter") and will contact the seller on a regular basis if they care.
Some sellers just don't want to deal with you. I had a "mom and pop" for who my business wasn't really a priority (well, fine), sent me random junk after misreading my order, and it was a PITA to sort the situation.
Basically, going out of Amazon (the new Alibaba as you say) is also returning to the Wild Wild West. There is no real choice than to deal with both, but god is it a pain.
- it's way more fun through my Kleinbottle website. I've customized my checkout to what I sell. When there's a problem, it's easier to contact a buyer.
- I can show any amount of information on my website; Amazon has 5 bullet points and 1000 characters of description. This, of course, cuts both ways - a quick logical summary helps many people. Long, wordy websites (ahem) can be a problem.
- Amazon provides security that you'll get what they've ordered. Buying through my website, well, some people are scared off by its primitive style and mathematical humor. (well, attempted humor).
- My credit card processor takes a < 3% haircut. With Amazon, it's 12% plus $40/month.
- My customers are my friends. Likely, I'll meet them at a seminar, colloquium, or if they visit the East Bay. I hope they'll remember me by the good service that I try to provide. This tends to be easier when I handle an order through my website.
The bottle arrived broken and we were dismayed. We sent you a careful report with photos of the packaging and the broken bottle (real film photos, that we had to develop and then scan into the computer to produce an email). You were so kind to send a new bottle and even said sorry. I was amazed by your reply and by the fact that people so far away could be kind to each other. It really blew my mind. At the time, in my country, the internet was seen as a really unsafe place were you were not supposed to ever say your real name.
To this day, I keep both bottles you sent as my most prized possessions. The cracked one is actually cooler, and the crack has been growing (you can make the crack grow by pressing slightly with the thumb). In a few years it will break the bottle apart in a topologically interesting way.
I do check every item that I send out -- I hold it up to a bright light looking for cracks - but sometimes trouble sneaks through. I'll do my best to fix things - replace, refund, or solve a differential equation (ODE, not PDE's, please).
You, in turn, have a responsibility to spread the good word -- I hope you're teaching & making this too-mundane world into a better place.
Across two decades, my warm wishes to you.
I see it not really on the "shopping" experience, and more as you point out because as a buyer I'd need/want way more information than what Amazon will ever provide on a single page, and also because there is a context surrounding the product that is far far away from a "just buy" transaction.
I also see some hobby sites like Bricklink as something Amazon will never be a replacement of. Fundamentally I think specific seller sites are needed.
As a customer I find it infuriating, and it feels as though it has been made more difficult over time to read the reviews for just the selected product.
I suspect that many transactions on Amazon simply would not happen if customers were better informed about what they are buying. I have no doubt that this is true across retailers – just think of all the things that have been hyped and sold that end up in garage sales barely used. It's far more common to see crap with five-star reviews than something great with three- or four-star reviews.
The feature kind of makes sense for purely cosmetic changes, like color – but even then it would be useful to have information about the actual variant.
I don't think this is some UI problem. I am quite sure it could be solved very quickly by showing reviews for the selected variant first, and then making it clear that other reviews are for other variants.
There is a way of somewhat mitigating this merging feature: Don't just look at aggregate review scores. Read the lower-end reviews. If the flaws are petty or expected, then that's great. If your variant is the worst of the bunch, you'll find out. But even with all that, it doesn't sort the takeover problem in the article.
It also knows that positive reviews have a huge influence in increasing sales, and negative reviews really dampens sales. This is why Amazon also allows what I call Product Page Hijacking.
How this works is, Amazon allows multiple models or variants of a product to be listed on the same page, so that all their reviews are mixed together. This deceptive practice hoodwinks many customers. There are 2 kinds of product page hijacking - somewhat obvious ones and the really sneaky kind.
Example of a somewhat obvious one - https://imgur.com/OfZLUeL - here, one product page actually lists multiple router models that have different features and configurations. While it is a bit obvious, the buyer still has to carefully read the reviews to figure out what model the review is about.
Example of the sneaky ones are products that only partially list their model number, and list and sell slightly different variants of model under a single product page.
E.g search for "TP-Link WR841" in https://dd-wrt.com/support/router-database/ - there are 9 variants of the same model (in essence, 9 different models) that are differentiated by a version number (v9, v10, v11 etc. after their model name).
But instead of creating a product page for each variant - "TP-Link WR841N v9" or "TP-Link WR841N v11" or "TP-Link WR841N v13" - only one product page is created under "TP-Link WR841N" and all the variants are sold under it. The variations in the models are sometimes not minor - some of the variants have a higher RAM and even totally different CPU! Since all the variants are sold under one product page, the reviews posted are actually for all these different variants. But the buyer will often have no idea of that. And they may not even receive the product they think the reviews are recommending!
This is why they need to merge listings into 1. It is also why there is soo much fraud on Amazon, and I dont believe they will ever fix it, the logistic costs would make Fulfilled by Amazon unprofitable if they had to stop mixing stock
The way the service works, is that you the vendor will ship your products into a amazon warehouse, other vendors will ship the "same items" a amazon warehouse, all of these "same items" are mixed together in the inventory system, your account is has a credit of "X items" but not the specific items you shipped in to the warehouse
Example
Acme Vendor shipped to amazon 15 Logitech MX Mouses
Evil Vendor shipped Amazon 15 Counterfeit Logitech MX Mouses
When amazon gets the mouses it take all 30 and puts them in a big box, as the orders are filled even if you ordered from Acme, you make get one of the one Evil shipped into Amazon
Of course the real problem is the counterfeiters have no problem starting a new vendor every few weeks or even days, so the damage may already be done by the time the reports come back.
Amazon taking action against the vendor, and consumers blaming the wrong vendor.
When you order from Amazon Marketplace you can clearly see who you are ordering from, even if Amazon shipping the item. Consumers getting a bad product will then no only review the item but the seller with negative feedback even though the seller they bought it from may have done nothing wrong
And then they added a feature where if multiple marketplace vendors are selling the same thing it combines them.
And a third feature lets you classify items as various colors of a product (but the same product - think blue vs pink socks) and all the reviews get combined.
So if you do all three in the right order you can change anything to anything now, even taking another listing.
Disagree. They should do what Apple does for App Store reviews. Reviews of the latest version only, with other reviews as “background” data.
I'd also like to see a feature where established customers ($x bought over y time) can flag an entry as suspect--an entry gets enough flags and a human looks at it. If the entry turns out to be suspect everyone who flagged it gets a bit more flagging reputation, if it's wrong they get a bit less. The more flagging reputation you have the more your flag counts towards getting a human to investigate.
It's more the other way around. Initially you could only sell something on marketplace if it was something Amazon already listed, usually a book. There would be an option on the Amazon listing to buy it elsewhere and if you selected that there would be a list of non-Amazon sellers you could buy the book from - these would normally be individuals reselling books they had finished reading.
Alibaba is much better than Amazon about seller verification. Look up, say, "PC power supply". On Amazon, you're lucky if you get the address of the seller and a product image.
Alibaba gives you multiple detailed pictures of the object, including its data plate. You get the full address of the seller, and whether it's the manufacturer or a reseller. There's usually a picture of the factory, info about their annual sales and number of employees, whether that's been verified by a third party, how fast they usually respond to inquries. Sometimes even what production equipment they use. What certifications they have and who does their certifications.
Many of those companies will accept an order for one unit.
They could stop it, but presumably it stops reviews being “lost” which helps support their sales.
What I realised is that it was just a dependency because it was so easy to search for and buy stuff. Nowadays I'll buy from a smaller shop if I need something, but it's more likely that I think "do I actually need this?" and say "no."
[0] https://www.walmart.com/plus
I use their store delivery option if I'm buying certain groceries or items I need ASAP. Yeah I need to tip - but I consider it me saving gas money/time.
Wal-mart employees don't get tip workers minimum wage. The cost of their service is already priced in.
The only difference is that it's more explicit it comes from doordash when you use Walmart Groceries.
So I think the major hurdle for other businesses is getting a reputation for prompt and free return acceptance if they want to sell things sight unseen.
This is especially true for larger and more expensive items (like electronics) where - I can not stress this enough - it is much, much better to buy directly from the company (I'd say 95% of all companies now have d2c shops on their websites).
It used to be the case that Amazon had an advantage in customer support and returns. I feel this is no longer true. I bought an expensive electronic item from Amazon and, when it broke, I send it in under warranty (in the EU, the first six months are essentially no questions asked repairs). Amazon send it to a third-party repair shop that send it back to me without any repair.
By contrast, I had to replace an item from a large consumer electronics company, which I had bought directly with them. They sent me a new one __before__ I had sent in my old item, and the new box included the shipping label to send back the damaged one. Much easier!
Beyond all this, it's obvious that Amazon is now home to fake and faux products. It is my view that the only product worth ordering there are cheapo China duplicates, for a price where you will be okay if they break after one week of use.
Otherwise, go with the supplier. It perhaps takes more than a day to ship, but often it doesn't. You can return any item for any reason within two weeks (in the EU), and damaged items can be returned within warranty anyway - usually with less hassle.
So folks, please stop buying stuff from Amazon if you can help it. As this - and countless other instances - has shown, Amazon is no longer worth supporting, for any reason.
For international returns they don't have labels, you need to pay for shipping, and they supposedly reimburse up to $20 shipping fees but I have found no evidence of an actual process in place to claim it.
(I had to return a book because they sent me a hardcover loosely packed in a box, from the US to Canada. Of course it was damaged in transport. For a place that started out as a book store this is really dumb. I re-ordered it from Chapters, who packed it properly.)
Whereas Amazon basically doesn't care about the inventory it ships and your only choice, really, is to use the return policy to actually get what you want.
I'm in the UK so I enjoy some solid consumer rights (at least for the time being). Plenty of online retailers ship return labels and packaging with your order, should you need to send something back.
The consumers are in the position of primitive people in front of their gods. They have to come together and pray for gods to notice them if they want wrongs to be righted.
It would be better to solve this through legislation.
Agree. Our family has nearly weened ourselves off of Amazon. We do still buy from there occasionally, but for most things we don't.
This. Most of the time now when I buy from Amazon it feels like buying from a garage sale / flea market. Some examples from my purchases -- 4 pack of AA Eneloops arrived as 2 AAs and 2 AAAs; 2 identical office chairs arrived as 2 different models; Simple Human trash can arrived with 3 softball sized dents in different places; Spigen phone case arrived with some sort of tiny worms/maggots inside a corner of the packaging; Clorox antibacterial wipes arrived in generic packaging containing dry wipes. Porter Yoshida backpack arrived as a similar looking Herschel backpack in the same color.
I remember buying from Amazon and getting solid products really really fast; not sure where that's gone. I do use Amazon for the free Whole Foods delivery and that's been OK, though there's very lax usage of temperature-safe packaging for dairy and meat products.
What do you expect from a company who has an automated system to fire employees, and they're notified if the discharge through an app on their phone?
There main objective is volume.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-28/fired-by-...
What a trash company.
They literally are!
Any one scam might be defeatable, but "scamming exists" seems to be true in any marketplace with enough participants.
And so many companies from so many industries use them they're effectively boycott proof: https://digitaldimensions.com/blog/big-companies-who-use-aws...
For example Anker could have a trademark on "Anker" (the brand) and then claim the "PowerCore III" listing for their battery pack without having to trademark the name of each product.
But second sentence in the listing:
> Like a Möbius strip, this Klein bottle has only one side. In addition, a Klein bottle has no edge - the connection from "inside" to "outside" is smooth, and the bottle has no lip.
Is proper descriptive.
Thanks Cliff & Greetings from Germany