Tell HN: Amazon shopping is racing to the bottom of quality
- There are multiple products, sometimes dozens, which are actually the same product in the same or different colors, and often with a variety of nonsense manufactorer names. So there is the appearance of choice while actually the non-same items are difficult to find (needle in haystack)
- Products tend to be very low quality. If you take time to read the reviews, it's obvious that many of the high reviews are stuffed. The low score reviews usually tell the same story: a critical part breaks on first use, or a critical flaw renders the item completely unsuitable for the task it is intended for.
- Counterfeits... I don't even need to get into this, as it's a very well-known problem.
Unfortunately, the Walmart effect applies here too, because the low prices attract most shoppers, and the small players (and brick and mortar stores) can't compete and go out of business. If they try to compete, they typically just find the same garbage manufacturers who are selling on Amazon. It's a race to the bottom.
As consumers, we end up with items that are either useless on arrival (and not even worth returning), or they are far less than we would have hoped or wished for or been willing to pay for.
The great irony is, with the ability to import items from around the globe, and the significant number of online stores, it can still be impossible to find even a decent simple item (such as an extended reach car wash brush).
Even if you search more broadly than directly on Amazon, you see the same few items across most online retailers. And when you read reviews of the items on each retailer website, you see the same low score complaints... sometimes in such detail that you can be certain that it was the exact same product.
I see no solution to this. There is one country where most of this garbage comes from, but any special measures to penalize their exports will just result in shifting the manufacturing to another don't-care country which will pick up the slack.
Imagine the total cost of this situation, from materials consumption to trash piles (which is a short process for many of these products). It's an obscene waste.
/rant
171 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadI mean it is years that the situation is as you describe, I don't feel it has worsened (let alone bettered) recently.
They were making noises about speeding up delivery to a lucky few people in chosen urban areas but in my rural area Prime shipping has slowed down considerably and they seem to make no effort at all to get Prime deliveries to me in two days. It is irksome because sometimes I've decided to buy something at Amazon rather than another store on the assumption I could get it in two days instead of two weeks, so it is an unfair form of anti-competition.
Contrast that to shipping having sped up for most other major retailers (say Best Buy, Walmart, ...) such that I often get things in one day with free or low cost shipping.
My falling out with AMZN started when I saw obviously fraudulent product listings and contacted AMZN only to be told they didn't care unless I had bought the product and been defrauded.
What they don't seem to get is that when they have this attitude it calls into question whether I can trust ANY product listings on AMZN.
I have this same problem, so I end up doing extra research both on and off amazon to try to be sure the product is legit. This boils down to time and work on my part, and when it gets to the point where I get frustrated or distracted, Amazon doesn't get a purchase from me. I suppose they're just too big and have too much momentum to care, but _eventually_ they will fall from their high position because they have become big and lazy.
For instance Best Buy wants to sell you a SATA SSD but they won't sell you the mounting bracket to mount it in a desktop computer or to adapt the molex power connector to the drive. They sell low end mirrorless cameras but don't have a significant collection of lenses.
I have a serious crafting programme but can find exactly one item at Michael's that I want because they are similarly opinionated.
Amazon stocks the products I want to buy but the consistency of their service is awful.
For me, prime has gotten better, with most items able to be delivered next day.
Thanks for the new material name!
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I'd say though that there are some vendors in China that are very proud of what they make and who very much want to have satisfied customers. It's not most of them though.
I have no objection to buying something from China that is decently made and of decent materials (and by workers who are not abused).
Exactly. It's a surpreme waste, especially in a time where we should be working to reduce our global environmental impact.
And the people hosting the parties would also go to Walmart and buy the 99cent "goodie" bags to hand out to the guest kids. Those bags contained cheap plastic spider rings, plastic whistles which were so malformed that they didn't whistle, etc.
Most of what was given and received would go into the garbage after everyone was home. It's an obscene waste of time, money, and resources. But now it feels like that reality is the common general reality, and that's what scares me.
The gift bags are still a part of the song and dance, but I've seen some shift there, too - one party we were invited to, the family gave plants & seeds as the party favor.
It seems incredibly rude to give such toys. It is like giving coke when someone doesn’t want their kids to drink it.
And yes on incredible waste as sibling comment said.
https://www.bruker.com/en/products-and-solutions/elemental-a...
Aside from some upper level executive at Amazon, I don't think there's anyone who is aware and concerned of the scale of the returns they get (most likely due to the products being one of the cases I mentioned). Amazon reportedly has warehouses full of returns that they find cost effective ways to dispose of. It's not like they go back to the manufacturer.
In the classic times, the goods would go back to the vendor. And the vendor would have to deal with them -- something that costs time and storage space (and maybe disposal cost).
But now the sellers are insulated from it all. To them it is just a loss of profit. As long as the bottom line is positive, it's worth it to them to scale it up as much as is still profitable.
Amazon is increasingly delegating its retail business to those sellers now, and making money by selling ads for premium positioning on search results, and of course taking a cut of each sale.
They treat retail like its an embarrassing legacy offering, something that they'd rather not still be doing. It's clear that they have shifted their focus to things like AWS, Prime, Ring.com and the like.
I agree, which is such a shame because their retail brings valuable customer data they'll later monetize with ads and other things.
Sometime when I have more energy I’ll find a lawyer.
You might think that... until they ship you the wrong item, you ship it back, they then tell you they never received the item (because they can't match up the right order with the wrong item) and you get duped. I was a customer since the late 90s - but not any longer. Canceled Prime, done. I also refuse to shop at Walmart for a whole lot of reasons, including their labor practices (one more reason to also not shop at Amazon).
I once bought a roomba on Amazon a year or so ago, because they had a solid discount, and it was delivered to my apt building. The box was left against the wall across from the mail lockers and right in the view of a security camera. I already had 3 boxes in my hands that I just pulled from the locker on my way to the apt, and saw the sealed box with the roomba. It was just an amazon carbdoard box with the actual roomba box inside, no markings saying what item it was (i pushed it slightly to gauge the weight, and it was indeed roomba, pretty heavy). I thought "hm, that's fine, i will just pick it up in the morning on my way to work". Done that plenty of times before, and the area is behind a secure keyfob entry+camera.
I go to pick it up next morning, the amazon cardboard box is unsealed, gaping open, and is empty. Asked the leasing office to check the camera records, they told me "no can do without a police report, and we will show it to them, not you". Given the current police situation in Seattle, it was a dead route. They were willing to take the report, but said that realistically they wont get to looking into it anytime soon if ever, too much backlog. Which sorta checks out, given how they don't even look into burglaries or car break-ins half the time.
Being mentally prepared to just eat the losses at that point, I contacted amazon and honestly explained the entire situation. The only thing I requested from them is to not use that shipping carrier for my deliveries anymore, because they tend to be lazy and not put deliveries actually inside the lockers (like they are supposed to). While they agreed it wasn't their fault, they ended up offering me a choice between a refund or sending me another roomba at no extra charge with another shipping carrier. I was neither asking for this nor expecting that (even if i were to ask).
For tools and other big ticket items- I'm scared to deal with Amazon when I need warranty work
Simple search strategies on Amazon help, too: to avoid counterfeit products, search for products that are sold by (and not just shipped by) Amazon itself. Don't attend to one- or five-star reviews; instead, read the two- and three-star reviews (if any at all) and consider the percentage of all verified reviews that give 1-3 stars. Of course, none of this is foolproof; you may still end up with a low-quality product. But I find that these strategies help a lot. I get >100 shipments from Amazon per year, and I have almost no problem with low-quality or counterfeit goods.
but it does at least let you filter out all the randomly-generated "OODIXY" random generated chinese crap, at least you'll be looking at real items from real brands for the most part.
Although even then, there are some random chinese brands that are sold+shipped by Amazon...
I recently bought a new personal hygiene item. Many reviews on Amazon indicated that the item had been used, in two cases, with photos of pubic hair. I noped my way ought, and paid a few bucks more for the same item from Walmart.
I'm mostly switching to Walmart, Instacart, and Aliexpress.
I'm not sure what's wrong at Amazon, but something's very, very wrong.
Amazon exists well beyond the realm of Walmart.
Even when I lived for several decades in the US, Walmart was place you only went when there were literally no other options. Aside from the practical matters, there are endless memes which illustrate why only gun-toting brain-discarding trump-loving people go there. It's a shitshow. It makes you question reality at a level which is both intensely disturbing and also possibly enlightening (assuming "reality" is a simulation that we should wake up from and break out of).
And I started to wonder if we’ll see more curated shopping experiences and a resurgence of recognizing the value such a service offers.
There are old companies like Consumer Reports which were sort of doing this, but I suspect they have some intentional or unintentional biases.
In the tech world we have sites which maybe started out trying to bring light to the best products, but it seems every site gets gamed or just sells out. Then you can't trust it.
True word of mouth is reliable, but when none of the mouths can get their hands on the actual good product, there's nobody to recommend it. Or maybe it no longer even exists because the manufacturer couldn't compete with the garbage on Amazon.
Consumer reports was--probably still is--fine in a very mainstream, safe sort of way. Which is probably fine if you're looking for a dishwasher.
In general these sites--CR, Wirecutter, etc.--are as appealing for more specialty products whose users have very strong opinions about what they want/need.
Income would be generated by making all of the links to the actual products Amazon affiliate links, but just make the frontend look exactly like Amazon's search with better results.
If it were a meta-front-end and could offer possibilities greater than Amazon alone, then that would be great.
And actually, there are enough very similar images that it should be possible to identify identical products across different websites by image alone. Then they could each by grouped by unique product with the website as a list of options of where to buy it.
Then maybe I could find a good soft brush telescopic car wash tool.
Another strategy to counter bad-quality products is to buy items directly from the brand's website. i.e. buy socks from hanes.com instead of amazon.
Another problem I see with the shopping experience is that I would sometimes spend 10 or 20 minutes looking for just the right product (which is absurd when you think about just how powerful modern filtering and search algorithms can be.) And then it dawned on me. Amazon is making money off of those 10 or 20 minutes of "engagement" because it gives them time to show a bunch of paid ads as I search.
To counter that problem, I always filter my results with "Prime Only" and Filter: Show lowest price to highest. I use Prime Only as a proxy-variable to filter out unpopular items (they are probably unpopular for a reason) It's amazing how much money you can save doing this. Usually you can avoid paying double what the default results are.
I get my recommendations from user forums and YT channels I trust, and then go straight to the manufacturer.
The order was more expensive (by 15%), shipping took a week (as opposed to 2 days) and one of the bowls was "warped" - still functional but definitely a factory reject.
I did not want to bother complaining or returning but honestly, will never buy from them direct again.
And I hate Amazon. I try to use local retailers now, sometimes with online+curbside.
ReviewMeta is an alternative and supposedly "better": https://reviewmeta.com/
I have little experience with either, I'd probably try both at the same time.
In the past I used Fakespot quite a bit, but I started seeing cases where it wouldn't flag products with obviously fake reviews, and it would flag perfectly good products. For example, try it with any five-star LEGO set and it will give it a D rating and "real" rating of 1.5 stars. Without reliable results I had no reason to trust Fakespot any more than Amazon itself.
At a quick glance ReviewMeta seems to give a much more accurate rating to the same LEGO set.
1. Sort reviews by recent; average MUCH lower than overall? Avoid.
2. Use Lustre.ai to suggest alternatives (site or browser plugin).
3. Read 1- and 2-star reviews; many re: misleading features/broken functions? Avoid.
4. Check most helpful negative review.
5. Search reviews and questions for what you've learned in steps 3 and 4.
6. Ignore short to medium reviews explaining nothing and using glowing superlatives.
Besides #2, I pretty much do the rest of these steps already and it has been helpful.
1. Find lower-cost options that have a lot of reviews.
2. Sort reviews by recent; average MUCH lower than overall? Avoid. Ignore short to medium reviews explaining nothing and using glowing superlatives.
3. Use Lustre.ai to suggest alternatives (site or browser plugin), and use the steps below to know what issues MOST of these kind of products have.
4. Check much more expensive versions of the product for desirable features / problems solved, e.g. Bluetooth earbuds with a physical or app-based "re-pairing" function.
5. Read 1- and 2-star reviews; many re: misleading features/broken functions? Avoid, but note what kinds of problems are common.
6. Check most helpful negative review when available
7. Search reviews and questions for the issues you uncovered in steps 3 and 4. Sometimes MOST products have similar issues regardless of price—there may not be ANY product worth buying, e.g. home blood pressure monitors.
that's a galaxy brain moment. never even thought of that, despite taking efforts to be conscious of how companies are monetizing my interactions with their products. now it makes more sense why one of the biggest companies in the world has had such a terrible website for so long
By the way, if you do buy AAA batteries by accident, because you forgot half the entries are going to be for AAA even when you explicitly searched for AA, they won't take the AAA rechargeable batteries back. In fact they'd rather give you a refund and have you fling those brand-new unopened AAA rechargeable batteries into a landfill.
It's an increasingly hostile user experience, much like buying a used car used to be.
If that's your issue, you practically can't buy things from Amazon.
The worse is the patio deck chairs that won't actually fit together at Target. Like the welding/metal construction is just wrong.
This is kind of my point. It seems that we now have millions of psuedo-offerings which ultimately boil down to a fraction of actual sources, most of extreme low quality.
If we don't do something about this soon, we better be practicing DIY constructions from the many good videos on youtube. Before you know it, the only tool which will actually suffice is the tool you make yourself.
At one point I ordered a couple of different guitar hangers to try them out. I got a call asking if I meant to order 1 guitar hanger and 1 ukulele hanger. The sales engineer looked at the order, my history, and apparently had notes from one of our conversations and thought it might have been a mistake. It was and we corrected it before it shipped.
But nope, they're just great support. Like you said it's always the same person so maybe I got lucky with Jimmy as my rep, but he's been super helpful. Had a similar situation to yours where I bough 1 synth 2 road-cases. He called me asking if it was a mistake and it was.
They also try to assign you to someone with similar interests. So I doubt Jimmy could help much if I wanted to get into classical woodwinds, but he knows his stuff about synths and setting then up in a studio.
They stop calling you if you don't order anything from them for 10 years or so.
I had a gap of five years between using Amazon or any tech. The difference between Amazon's prior usability and stepping into it five years later was jarring. Like I seriously thought I was just no longer capable of using websites. Turns out, nope, Amazon's shopping site is now a zombie be exploited for some other purpose that is different from why I use it.
edit - and because web search results lean heavily toward the major sellers, and the most major seller is amazon. So even trying to avoid amazon (and other sellers with the same garbage) becomes increasingly difficult.
The entire marketplace has changed. I see the same shit amazon sell in physical shops now
Amazon is the next Sears. Eventually something will come along with a selection of curated high-quality products, everyone will celebrate how amazing it is, and it will replace Amazon. Then that too will eventually need to pay back investors and shareholders, exploit its dominant position in the marketplace, and race to the bottom, again.
This is the natural cycle of commerce in capitalism.
1. Drop shippers 're-branding' stuff from SE Asia
2. Amazon-branded clones of successful products.
#2 is where Amazon has been headed all along.
At least there is some hope that the rebranded products will share one brand, and so the critical mass of consumer anger will be reached faster. It's still all a wrong approach to doing business, however.
I think (hope) this changes, but as price sensitively likely increases over the coming couple of years for many consumers, they're going to be able to look past the transgressions of environmental impact or durability because, hey, if it breaks, they'll just order another $3 widget to replace it.
There is definitely a market for high end, high quality widgets, but price for most will be a roadblock.
Easy, cheap, good: pick two.
https://youtu.be/g2D5YCJNtC0
Let the retail division stand on its own. I think that alone would improve their operation (out of necessity for survival).
a.k.a. a poor country. So you're blaming businesses in foreign countries for seeing an opportunity to manufacture to a price-point, to satisfy a Western market that can't satisfy that demand domestically.
Isn't that what businesses are supposed to do? Perhaps the don't-care countries are really the ones that generate the demand?
I don't care what country those decision makers are in; they are to blame.
However, if there were environmental and human rights oversight in the manufacturing facilities, likely the quality of products would go up. Just look at the hoopla over Foxconn/Apple situations has caused.
I don't want any product that someone has suffered unreasonably to produce. No comfort of mine is worth great suffering or damage of someone else.
The don't care countries probably aren't creating the demand. More likley, it's "home country" people who were the same types who pushed the offshore software development in the previous 20 years (to enormous waste and failure) who are to blame.
The poor countries are just a tool for the exploiters. Same as the African countries who get exploited for natural resources by US and western European copmanies.
Amazon is just following that playbook, but it is even worse. At Walmart manufacturers at least had to vie for physical shelf space in Walmart so there was a floor on how bad things could get. If the product caused damage you could go after Walmart or an actual manufacturer. Amazon has completely turned that system on its head. You can hardly contact anyone for issues (although Amazon does now have a $1000 damage claim guarantee and an okay return policy for many items) and the manufacturers are just fronts. I still shop at Amazon for certain small items or very niche items, but for big ticket items I usually just go to a physical store.
Best Buy has been rather good these last few years with price matching, store pickup (in-car or in-store), and fast shipping.
Need a spatula? You could look on Amazon and hope you get something relatively sturdy and that isn't filled with chemicals harmful for cooking/eating. Or, you could walk into a local grocery store or Walmart where they probably have 2 or 3 to choose from, they've already researched and selected the best items to stock, and you can feel and see the item before you buy it. I like to think that if enough people realize Amazon is selling garbage and start doing this more, Amazon will need to respond to consumer demand (or will fail).
> they've already researched and selected the best items to stock
I'm not convinced at all that the store buyers research and choose with materials consideration (such as BPA and other things we wish to avoid in our food products). Still, it has a better chance than from Amazon. In fact, if the Amazon listing says "BPA free", can you trust it? Is there any way to believe that it is verified? (almost certainly not)
See: https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart
I needed a new mouse for my gaming PC recently. I live in Brooklyn and the nearest Best Buy to me closes at 7pm. I tried to get one at Target but it was $35 online and $65 in-store (and $32 on Amazon). They said I couldn't price match against their own website, but I could buy it online and choose in-store pickup. But because the store was closing in less than 2 hours, same day pickup was not an option. Asked if I could order pickup for tomorrow and just give it to me right now, nope, system won't allow it. Thanked the employee for their help and bought it on Amazon.
Similarly, I want to buy from local music gear stores but they all close at 7pm and most are closed on weekends. I'm not taking a vacation day just to try out a synthesizer. Sweetwater isn't local but at least they're not Amazon and they're reliable.
... as well as most of the stuff in people's homes, including their cherished iPhones.