There was a time that I turned to buying from walmart.com as alternative to amazon, precisely because it wasn't taking the 3rd-party seller approach; but then they decided they had to imitate Amazon. Well, no thanks.
Just what I was about to say. Guess I'll cross Walmart.com off my online retailer list.
Sorry Walmart, if you let your brand get polluted with 3rd parties selling garbage you will quickly start to lose whatever brand loyalty you have.
I never expected top end merchandise from Walmart. They are a discount retailer and that's fine. But I do expect to get genuine merchandise that is as advertised, not counterfeit or fradulent crap.
They have hosted third party sellers for... at least 3-5 years. If you didnt know this already you wernt a customer. They lost 0 in revenue from when they opened their site up to third party sellers and gained lots of revenue from those third party sellers.
I dont like third party sellers either but obviously it makes financial sense for these companies to do this.
One positive remains though: If you buy from Walmart you get it from Walmart and their supply chain. With Amazon because they "mingle" inventory from third parties, you can order shipped & sold by Amazon.com and still get a counterfeit product, because a third party slipped it in.
And, yes, that has happened to me personally by the way.
It has happened to me a few times that I order from Walmart, see a shipment notification, that shipment "arrives" but definitely did not. However that day or the next I receive an Amazon package which I did not order containing my product.
So no, ordering from Walmart does not guarantee anything is going through their supply chain.
Was that from Walmart the retailer or someone else selling on Walmart's marketplace? I would be very surprised if Walmart itself resold you something from Amazon, but that does happen with third party retailers on their marketplace.
I use to do this successfully for many years. I could sell for a few cents less than Amazon. Due to buying gift cards at Kroger with a 5% Cashback card. In addition I would also get 1000 fuel points per $250 that I could sell for $20 easily. So each $1000 in sales would net minimum $130 margin. Accounting for selling fees of around 10%, I could clear around $30 per $1000 even at breakeven or below Amazon prices. I would also be able to sell many items for more than the Amazon cost.
It worked well for several years with millions in sales, all automated. It became untenable though as Cryptocurrency facilitated people buying Amazon gift cards with stolen credit cards and cashing them out at 30-50% of face value.
So the market became saturated with scammers selling considerably cheaper than Amazon. For a time maybe 6-4 years ago you could get pretty much anything from Amazon on eBay for around 20% less and shipped direct from Amazon via prime.
Amazon eventually shut it down though and if you meet some very strict gift card threshold they will just steal your balance. People still do it, but large scale automation isn't really worth it any longer.
I've been doing this with the Walmart+ delivery service for $100 a year.
I even applied for their 5% cash back credit card. It saves me a good amount of time and money, and I am overall very happy with it.
If Walmart ever starts mixing 3rd party reseller crap with their "in-store" inventories, they will ruin a fantastic product and lose me as a customer.
I've never actually been able to order anything off Walmart. They always cancel my order after a day due to 'fraud' alerts on the seller. I guess that's good?
Target does this crap as well. When I search on these sites now I always check the box on items only fulfilled by the retailer. If there's no box like that, I won't shop there.
But their competitor Amazon has been doing since forever and they've not really been hit with any lawsuit or any repercussion whatsoever for the matter, so ... why not ?
The marketplace-ization (is there a word for that?) of every retailer feels so short sighted.
I’ll throw out an example I’ve noticed lately - furniture manufacturers. Search for any item on Crate & Barrel or West Elm’s website and you’ll first see a handful of exclusive pieces that are clearly built for the brand. Keep scrolling and the search results gradually become a bunch of generic third party items that you can find in a dozen different places, often for lower prices elsewhere.
I get it, Crate & Barrel sees this as an opportunity to monetize their brand without having to do all that much. Unfortunately it leaves me with a lot less trust for a brand that used to represent a quality and reputation.
Those “exclusive pieces” are typically not designed for a given brand, but are designed on spec by various ID houses, perhaps with a brand or set of brands in mind as target, and are then pitched and sold, or pulled in by buyers. This has been the way for at least the past several decades, and fashion and furnishings have lead the trend which is now ubiquitous. Crate & Barrel I know do this, as I’ve worked with Otto on some of their other brands, and they consolidated much of their buying years ago - big part of their efficiency.
There are still some retailers who retain some in-house design talent, but they’re few and far between, as it provides little differentiation in the eye of the consumer, who typically can’t tell an in-house from an acquired design - so in-house design is typically an idiosyncratic choice now, as it doesn’t provide a competitive edge over those who claim in-house design.
Does it achieve the same outcome, at least on the quality side of things? Instead of a brand sending specs aligned to what their brand should represent, the seller creates spec to match what it expects target brands to look for.
Typically, yeah - it does mean that if you work long enough in the market you start seeing the repetition, and you can start to see individual design houses behind selections at brands, but quality is generally unimpeded as it’s a competitive market, and the economies of scale for both cost and quality achievable by an outsourced designer/manufacturer with low labour costs aren’t insignificant.
Of course, it’s possible to choose the wrong supplier, or have mismatched expectations - a clothing retailer I worked with sent an entire range to be shredded because it arrived with appalling quality (like, seams that hadn’t even been stitched) and they weren’t prepared to even put it in outlets - which is where a lot of the misfires end up - it isn’t “oh no our factory had a booboo” or “whoops we made too much”, it’s a calculated “X% of the stock we bought last year was crap, therefore we have Y stock to support our outlet presence”. Some brands deliberately foster relationships with lower quality stock shops in order to maintain stock at outlet, but this is generally waning in popularity as retailers have realised that they don’t actually work very well as feeders, and have to stand alone.
Buying in bulk direct from manufacturers you typically get designs and then quality options. So you can essentially have the exact same product with a wide range of qualities. Things like material density, connector construction and all types of finishing touches from a variety of options. The manufacturer will have a huge assortment of stock products.
"ID houses" in this context is interior design, right? How does manufacturing work -- interior designers are typically not manufacturers? This is super interesting to me, so if you have any links or further info about this process, I'd love to know more.
Industrial design. Whole point is that there’s usually complete vertical integration from conception to manufacturing to logistics, so they can crank out stuff that they can make without a headache with existing toolchains and ship it cheap.
What I find particularly annoying is that these online “marketplaces” are not curated - they literally sell anything, probably drop shipped. It used to be that you would shop at a branded store, and there was a level of expectation that they had curated their collection so that it was of a quality that matched the stores brand. Some of their wares may be under their own branding, but they would sell other bands too that they had explicitly decided to. You could trust them.
By making everything an open marketplace it places the risk onto the customer. They are responsible for reading the reviews and deciding if they think the item will match their expectations.
I hate it, being back the days of a store that would stand behind its wares as they had actually chosen to sell them!
Yeah, considering the scale, Costco is doing a wonderful job. Plus, their generous return and price adjustment policies, it’s a no brainer to just buy Costco.
Not many, if any. It really does look like Amazon — a lot of stuff with names like “BCDYYXZ Awesome App Clock Streaming Email Wordle A+++ Good For Facebook”
All of these retailers have purchasing departments with professional buyers who curate the products they resell - which is the sole purpose of the branded store. If the retailers don't do that, there is no purpose of that retailer. They don't add any value to the customers purchasing process.
Yep, I relatively recently learned about Aliexpress and it seems like most American retailers are just a local cache for them. But if I can order sketchy Chinese knick-knacks directly and skip the markup at the cost of a bit more waiting time, I'd just as soon do that. I've also found the Chinese customer service speaks English just fine and have been great whenever I've had to deal with them.
I dropped Amazon (again) a while back. I'd gone back to using them during the plague, and got lazy. What jolted me back was multiple delivery failures in a row followed by a shitty "give me my money back" experience.
Right now, Amazon combines the honesty of flea markets with the reliability of a stoned teenager.
I'm back to shopping at physical stores, and am enjoying it, at least at the moment. And when ordering things, I try to go direct or find retailers who care about their reputations.
Yup, I've been doing the same. Amazon is for things I don't care too much about if it's a knock off. But generally speaking, I'll try and by stuff directly from the manufacturer or in store.
I really wish online shopping wasn't so messed up.
'Direct from manufacturer' can be much worse when they themselves have outsourced fulfilment to a warehouse in Ireland as their European agent with limited to no support contact.
The worst I've got recently is from the Amazon locker team. The recently sent me a notice that they'd "learned that my package had been delayed". I don't mind that much; shit happens, but that passive language just disgusted me. No, you weren't able to deliver my package on time Amazon. I'm sorry if Jeff Bezos sticks you in a solitary wellness pod or whatever Orwellian punishment he's dreamt up for people who delay packages, but it's the job you picked.
I don't know much about how Amazon is structured, but I doubt it's the low wage soldiers who are writing the automation that sends emails out to notify you of delays.
Of course, they're all working class stiffs compared to Bezos and the rest of the senior leadership.
And the information customers want is missing! Customers want to know the VALUE of a product.
I am looking at barrier hose crimpers for air conditioning lines. Okay, there's about a dozen identicalish looking ones on amazon with a price from 100-300 dollars, and a reputable united states manufacturer starting at 2500+. How do I know what's the best option?
I really don't care about the price, I want to know if the price is worth it. If these different products are different or just rebranded, I want to know.
There's a story in the news this week about an undercover Russian spy that had a jewelry shop/brand in Italy [0], one funny detail about the story is that the jewelry was actually sourced from Aliexpress
This thread is wild. It's shocking they'd issue consecutively numbered passports to spies. Using random numbers seems like it would have huge benefits for essentially no cost.
I'm not an intelligence expert so this is purely spectulation. However, this assumes lots of things. Perhaps the Russians are truly that sloppy. However, more likely in my eyes is that this is a strategy to make them appear dumb and sloppy. The US claims to not send spies into foreign countries without the cover of a diplomatic passport (whether or not this is actually true, I don't know. However, this is one of the reasons a lot of people formerly in the intelligence community believe that Paul Whelan was not a spy). Most other Western countries claim to follow this standard. Perhaps this is Russia's version of "obvious" spies?
That's the call where Alexei Navalny tricked an FSB agent into admitting they had poisoned him.
I think often people try to come up with too clever explanations for stupid behavior. Sometimes it's just stupid behavior. Often times this is the catalyst for conspiracy theories - it's a nice explanation for random or stupid events.
I'd bet it's a case of sending in batch requests. The office coming up with fake identities sends them all it to the passport office at once and then the passport office proceeds to use their normal processes to issue passports and that processes generates sequential numbers in this case because they are processed one after another. Obviously easy to fix, but also seems pretty easy to happen without anyone realizing
In another universe they did use random numbers, but based on the old C rng, people figured out the seed and were able to again find all of the GRU passports
A facebook friend posted a picture of a bangle that she'd bought off an e-commerce site in the neighbourhood of $20 that was disappointing. I simply did a google image search on the picture (the e-commerce site's listing) and sure enough, it hit on Ali Express for something in the neighbourhood of $1.80, free shipping.
I've found it to be 50-50 or less in my recent experience, but there's an interesting reason why. I recently shopped for a fidget ring and found AliExpress had lots of options, but none that fit my size 14 fingers. So I checked Etsy and was pleasantly surprised to see only ~20% of their listings were rings from AliExpress. Another 70% of listings were for rings that all had similar designs but were slightly unique from each other, each with unique listing photos, and all with minor flaws from being handmade. Eventually one seller had an honest bio that describe themselves as a "jewelry making village near Jaipur, India". I believe many pieces are actually handmade to a degree, in what I presume to be a series of small rural workshops with correspondingly cheap labor. They are probably given order lists by middlemen who run their own Etsy stores and are willing to deal with the logistics and customer service.
This has become the norm. I am a TikTok user* and there's a lot of ads and organic posts about "innovative new products" that are exposed as dropshipped items from a warehouse in China. And you may have seen "get rich quick" gurus promoting their strategies for opening Amazon stores to resell stuff from AliExpress. I've seen quite a few AliExpress sellers advertise dropshipping ("just send a spreadsheet and we send packages with no receipt") and/or bulk order discounts (to ship the goods yourself with faster, domestic shipping).
To be fair, not all direct-from-China goods are cheap crap. I've received excellent USB cables, noise cancelling earbuds, and much more from various sellers. And the middlemen selling on Amazon are offering the convenience of easy returns, fast shipping, and excellent customer service from Amazon. Depending on the seller, [their profit margins can actually be quite thin because Amazon charges a lot for their customer service, warehouses, and return handling](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Yhc6mmdJC4).
* I know TikTok is quite controversial, for good reasons like data security, lack of ethics, and algorithmic infobubbling/censorship. But I am still a fan and use it because its algorithm was the only thing that was able to string together my liked posts and begin showing content/advice about what mental health disorders I might have. That significantly sped up my diagnoses with my psychiatrist, who confirmed 2 of the 3 disorders.
> I know TikTok is quite controversial, for good reasons like data security, lack of ethics, and algorithmic infobubbling/censorship
TikTok is controversial because of the trove of personal data it has and it's a large Chinese company, and large Chinese companies are required to do what the Chinese govt wants, and the Chinese govt does not have the purest intentions with respect to the persons of the USA.
> its algorithm was the only thing that was able to string together my liked posts and begin showing content/advice about what mental health disorders I might have.
this is a feature of TikTok, psychiatric diagnoses? or you were able to use the linked together posts and diagnose yourself?
Of course I could eventually come to my own realization without TikTok. But TikTok accelerated this by about 3 years in my estimate. That is an immense amount of time and energy saved. I will explain how TikTok's dynamics differs from other social media sites, and how it uniquely helped me.
Twitter tries to algorithmically sort your feed, but some users (including myself) find it buries too many interesting posts, and use the old chronological feed. Twitter is sparing about showing users and posts you don't follow (except for retweets from your followed accounts, of course). This leads to accounts becoming "curators", who you follow because they retweet interesting content. This adds a nice human touch, but also limits discovery to other users' interests. Interactions are generally limited to retweets/quote-retweets, and comment treads, both of which rarely have a deep discussion because the UI isn't designed to promote it. Twitter has small sidebars to recommend other users to follow, but this is a very slow method to discover new content, and these sidebars are smaller or nonexistent on mobile clients. Tumblr is quite similar, so I group its community and discovery dynamics with Twitter.
Reddit is community-based. Subreddits are formed, users follow them, and posts are voted up and down. A subreddit can dominate its hobby, and there is no way to fine-tune the content you see. For example, I like seeing the deals in /r/frugalmalefashion but have no interest in the higher-priced designer shoes that can frontpage. This reduces the signal to noise ratio for my interests, and there isn't another active subreddit that would more closely match my tastes. The comment sections are the highlight of reddit, since discussions can go quite deep and low quality comments are downvoted out of view. Discovery is generally limited to commenters organically suggesting other subreddits, especially in mobile clients where there "isn't room" for algorithmic recommendations.
Facebook is quite different. Your friends feed is very broad-purpose, and groups are very specific. Groups are often smaller than comparable subreddits, and there will be less experts present in a discussion. This can hamper discussions on things like deal-hunting, where more frequent users can summarize community opinion or relay their deeper experiences. In other words, you have to do a lot more reading to find the information you want, giving Facebook a much worse signal-to-noise ratio. Comment sections can be more informative than Twitter but more shallow than Reddit, and communities are less interested in liking informative comments to bring them to the top to discussion threads. There is minimal algorithmic discovery, with only small recommendation sidebars.
Instagram is a mix of all these sites. You follow specific users like Twitter, but reposts are limited to the Stories feed, and are therefore deprioritized. So you generally follow each of these users for their original content (or occasionally curation, if they like to manually repost others' work on their feeds like a "meme page"). Comment sections can be lively but shallow, and I find discussions are generally superficial. There is an algorithmic discovery page that can find some good recommendations, but you browse it by thumbnail, limiting discovery.
YouTube is also interesting. You generally follow creators' channels like Instagram, and there is no easy way for "curators" to promote others' content without making a "meme compilation" video (and getting copyright strikes). Comment sections are second best to reddit, but not quite as good. Discussion is limited by the fact there has to be a relevant video for everyone to comment under - there's no way to make a quick post about a hobby without making an entire video, or making an oft-ignored text post. Discoverability is also very good, with the algorithmic feeds and recommendations being very accurate....
I have become an AliExpress enthusiast and agree. It works best when you are willing to wait a variable amount of time for your items. Often, it will only take 2-3 weeks for them to arrive at my home in California. But every 6th package (or so) will slip through the cracks, often at their warehouses in LA County.
It's still the best for pricing, and is pretty close to the sources (unless you're hardcore enough to translate Taobao listings and get your own mail forwarding). For example, I got a new smartwatch and wanted some bands in specific colors, and a screen protector. Listings with the exact same images on Amazon were $9-12 instead of $3-4. (And when you compared reviews and pictures, they were probably from the same factory.)
Some small notes about AliExpress:
- Although most of AliExpress's lower prices come from lower cost warehouses and less middlemen, some of it comes from exploiting discounted postage. [That has been improved since 2019](https://www.parcelandpostaltechnologyinternational.com/opini...) but I still get a ton of Kyrgyzstani-labeled parcels that originated from Guangdong or Shanghai/Hangzhou. I don't know if that's above-board or not.
- Sellers can sometimes be deceptive. When I was shopping for LED interior lights for an old car, some lumen ratings seemed accurate and even had videos of it being tested. Others had obviously inflated brightnesses despite having a similar number of LEDs are power consumption. In addition, some sellers will sneak an unrelated cheap item into variants of another item, so the listing has a lower price in search results.
- Packages now take a few days to be consolidated. This is great for efficiency and often means you get slightly faster delivery in your home country. But these packages can still get lost, so you may have to dispute up to a dozen items at a time. I might have to do this soon with all my smartwatch accessories, and in the meantime, pray my screen doesn't get scratched (or eat the inflated Amazon/eBay price).
- Compared to Amazon, they have fewer customer reviews, and don't stack listings for the same item. In disputes, customer service won't always favor you or offer a complete refund for bad items.
- Compared to eBay, they have much worse search filtering. You may wish to consider eBay for a balance of cheap prices and faster shipping, especially when you filter for sellers within 100 miles. Sometimes Chinese eBay sellers are cheaper than AliExpress sellers.
Is it actually sketchy then? You get the product and good customer service it sounds like. All Knick knacks are Chinese. Most common goods will be a rebrand of something similar, especially if you buy from Amazon.
That depends on what the item is. Chinese goods that are sold on the shelves of western retailers have passed some scrutiny by buyers of those respective retailers, and, a retailer in your country will be held to account for any legal requirements of selling said products.
Things that are drop shipped haven't passed any third party scrutiny and nobody involved in the sales process is held to your local legal requirements. They can ship you an unsafe product that may burn your house down or poison your children, and your local legal processes have no power to make you whole again, nor any affect to discourage sellers from cutting those corners for profit.
I wouldn't blame it on drop shipping specifically -- many fortune 500 manufacturers drop ship high quality products from their amazon store. The problem is more about the low bar of entry for resellers to list those same products on amazon, walmart, etc. Some of those products will be legit and some will be counterfeit.
Yeah oddly enough buying from Aliexpress gets you better support (and sometimes newer revisions) of products than the middlemen! A lot of the aliexpress sellers are also willing to do custom orders if you ask nicely.
This is a case of the middlemen removing value instead of adding it.
Agreed. I have a good relationship with one seller and he has even looked for things I've requested in the Shenzhen markets for me when he goes there. It's amazing customer service for me and he gets to sell more product too.
Oh yes. Dropshipping has to be one of the least valuable manifestations of the Internet economy. Waiting earnestly for the invisible hand of the market to give this particular "job" the shove.
Not only are they not curated, the marketplace owner will often do nothing about borderline fraud.
A real life for-example:
There's a specific kind of cat treat I used to buy on Amazon, at some point various (or maybe the same under different names, who knows) resellers began to sell that treat in a way where they would break up the retail packaging and sell single pouches for the same price as the MSRP for a whole case (the way the manufacturer sells it).
Technically not exactly fraud because they mention the size in the item description fine print, but because of the pricing and the way Amazon tends to just mix different SKUs from both themselves and resellers willy-nilly into different options of the same listing, its incredibly easy to just assume you are buying the full retail product as packaged by the manufacturer.
To Amazon's somewhat-credit, they've refunded me when this situation occurred, but to their shame they've never done a single visible thing to stop this practice from happening and I've proactively reported it to them repeatedly.
End result is there's a whole bunch of categories of products I won't buy from Amazon anymore because I don't want to have to do in-depth detective work every time I make a purchase. I get my pet stuff from Chewy now as I've yet to run into a similar scam on that website.
I bought a light fixture off of Amazon that caught fire on its own. I reported it to customer support and said it should be removed from the marketplace. They did for a day but it was up the day after.
That's nothing compared to what worse things could actually be happening. There doesn't seem to be any quality control or authenticity verification on any of these marketplaces including Amazon. Good case scenario the item you buy is a high quality fake. Worst case scenario it's a low quality fake. Filled with toxic chemicals (without the warning that it is carcinogenic or causes reproductive harm etc.) Are you buying kids toys from these marketplaces? Food items, clothes, kitchenwares, face masks, anything really.
When each of these first started doing third party marketplaces, it was a surprise. It's not like they announced to the world each time they dipped their toes into the market and each time they expanded it.
I'm not american, but I was very surprised that Walmart had gotten into that business. It would surprise me if similar retailers in my country started this too.
In the case of Amazon, I don’t believe they always do enough due diligence on items under the “Sold by Amazon” banner. The overriding issue is that by combining both their own curetted product line and the open marketplace into one storefront, the third party sellers devalue the main brand. I just don’t trust that even buying a “sold by Amazon” product will be any good. There is also just too much choice, you feel like you are being scammed the minute you open Amazon.
Perhaps, but then commingling ruins it. You have no idea if the SD card/SSD/HDD you've bought is actually from Amazon or a if it's a fake/knockoff by a shady third party, even if it's "shipped and sold by Amazon"
> In 2022 if you aren't buying "Sold by <insert trusted retailer>" on one of these market places then I think you should know what you are getting into.
Normal users don't understand this. They think they're shopping at Amazon, not at QUBAGZI's storefront on Amazon's website. That concept doesn't even make sense to most shoppers. If they typed in "amazon.com", they think they're getting something from Amazon in Seattle. (I mean they don't literally think that every item is coming from Seattle, but they assume that Amazon vets their products like Trader Joe's or Kohl's down the street does.)
I'll throw out my startup idea:
A heavily curated amazon, with ~1 option per product type, sold at a premium, prioritizing things that are constructed well/last a long time.
Obviously you can't do everything at once, and people want choice in things like fashion. A kitchen store would be great. One toaster, one oven, one coffee grinder.
You've identified a genuine need and a service that would fulfill it. I think, to greater and lesser degrees, places like the wire cutter and consumer reports, and now a whole bunch of derivatives that speak in the same tone as wire cutter, are attempting to fill this need.
Of course, they themselves may be subject to quality control issues. Although perhaps the thing that you're talking about that would be different is the manner in which the curated selection is organized and the overarching purpose.
Your very tied to specific manufacturers in that case. Eg. If a shipment is late because somebody stuck a ship in a canal, you're out of stock on that type of item
For things that aren't fasteners or drill bits, people kind of like having something different than their friends. ("Oh hey I have the same table! Oh, and pots and pans! Oh, and wall art! Wait, your house looks exactly like mine.")
I'll do you one better: a curated retailer that only carried merchandise with a 10+ year manufacturer's warranty. And they automatically register/store all proof of purchase information in an online portal.
If that isn't profitable, make the warranty storage/customer service advocacy a yearly subscription where they take care of the full return process.
This is basically Costco, although it would be even better if it was truly Costco. I mean, they do require your receipt, but they can often look it up for you and they usually take returns well past the warranty expiration due to their 100% satisfaction guarantee.
I've returned countless things to Costco (a tiny fraction of my embarrassingly large monthly habit) and never brought in a receipt. They just look up the purchase in my account.
> I get it, Crate & Barrel sees this as an opportunity to monetize their brand without having to do all that much. Unfortunately it leaves me with a lot less trust for a brand that used to represent a quality and reputation.
Is this the "It's my money, and I need it now" / "It's your money, use it when you need it!" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdPM6j1Q4sg) of execs trying to cash out and bail before things go to shit?
My question is, why is this happening now and why didn't it happen before?
Is it because Amazon is simultaneously wildly popular and a total trash fire, so customers are becoming gradually inured to their bullshit and so other companies are thinking they can slip under the radar with this ploy?
Was there an industry conference where this idea was presented and nobody ever explicitly agreed to collude, but there were nods all around the room and everyone knew what they were expected to do?
Many of these are no longer viable businesses, so they do what any nonviable business does and gradually shut down, liquidating all their assets in the process which in this case happens to include the reputation they've built up when they used to be a viable business?
So the answer to "why now?" would be, because they only recently began failing thanks to Amazon/COVID/insert your favourite recent civillisational change.
Amazon is killing them and has been for a decade, and they’re trying to compete. Too late, and badly, as it turns out.
You didn’t notice it as much earlier, because it wasn’t the high end ‘stuff you went there for’ that people stopped buying, it was all the other random things they bought when they went there to buy something, and the marginal customers.
Now the core customer base is eroding, and they’re getting desperate.
There's a term for this in marketing. It's called cashing out brand equity. You take a hit to your rep, but you get some liquidity out of the brand by cutting corners on your product/service. Venture capital firms are infamous for using this as a business model. They take over a company that is struggling and they cash out the brand equity and every other kind of equity until nothing is left.
I think it is SEO driving this. They want to surface product pages for as much stuff as possible so they contract with some third party to also be a reseller of such goods because it probably requires little overhead. And if it brings traffic then they can try to push their own "sponsored" products.
I think it dilutes a brand. I don't know that Walmart has any worthwhile reputation as a brand though (at least in my eyes) to dilute so they're probably selling these things and don't care.
When I search on local chain retailer websites, I try to use the "In Store" or "Same day pickup" filters to get actual products they sell. The nice thing is sometimes they indicate the inventory level.
It has some reputation as a brand. If I buy something from Walmart I generally don't expect it to be a quality product. It will fall apart very quickly and it'll probably have some unexpected issue with it. But I do expect that it won't be an *outright* scam.
I'm at least fairly confident if I walk into Walmart and buy something it will be minimally fit for purpose and meet the legal requirements to be sold in my country.
Meanwhile, you have no problem finding devices that should have FDA/Health Canada/FCC/IC approval and do not.
I think this trend of trading in good will towards your brand for a quick buck has been growing powerfully over the last decade or so. It seems like a lot of brands (that make physical products, specifically) have decided to start making "economical versions" of their products that are far inferior to the ones that built up the brand's reputation. This wouldn't be an issue if they were labeled as such, but it seems like it's usually a tactic that's meant to trick you into buying something that you thought was higher quality.
I think in Amazon's case, it is slowly degrading into a flea-market type of experience.
It's harder and harder to find the good products from decent brands, even with a direct search. Many times the decent brand product seems to be someone independent who is buying the product elsewhere and shipping it on amazon for a markup.
Then there's the word-jumble brands for products - they all seem to be fly-by-night products that only seem to exist as long as the product entry has enough stars to get traction.
Even if you shop for brands on Amazon you have the risk of getting a counterfeit.
I was shopping for a particular weightlifting belt that is out of stock on the manufacturer's site. You can find them on Amazon but most likely they are not genuine.
Now this makes me happy. In sense it shows problem with breathless commentary on how Amazon can just take over front end and whole supply chain back end under its control without any possible challenge.
I believe even without regulation (not that I disagree with regulating Amazon) once a critical mass of customer think its shady place to buy good quality stuff. It is downhill for Amazon from there.
My general theory is that by the time consumers catch on, the executives behind this have jumped ship to another company whose brand they can also mortgage for a nice-looking quarterly profit stat on their resume.
And in Walmart's case, it's particularly egregious - the value proposition "Here's a website where you can buy anything that's sold at Walmart, for cheap-ass Walmart prices and we'll ship it to you, and you don't have to go into some crappy Walmart to do it" is appealing and seems like it would generate billions in revenue. But the reality is terrible; lots of stuff is 'in-store purchase only', some of it they won't ship but will only deliver from the local store for a fee, some of it is garbage only sold by third parties for wildly unpredictable prices. And the site is full of dark patterns to make it difficult to tell which is which until you try to check out. And on top of all that, which products are in which category change constantly. So you can try to re-order something that you got before, but now it's in-store only, or the price has gone up 50x and it's shipped by a 3rd party with a 6-8 week arrival time.
For a while, I used Walmart.com to stock up on name-brand staples cheaply and conveniently, but it got to be such a pain in the ass that I went back to Costco.
I’ve never been a fan of Walmart, but I bought from them after getting frustrated by Amazon’s sea of questionable products. Even though I bought a new, “sold by Walmart” item (i.e. not from a marketplace seller), I received an unopened Amazon return that was shipped from an Amazon fulfillment center (complete with someone’s return slip that included their name and address).
When I go to the website of a brick-and-mortar store chain I expect to see some kind of parity between the items listed online and those in store. A lot of stores do this very well-- Target springs to mind as a convenient example. Sure there are some online exclusives, but there's a lot more overlap and you can get a great idea of what you might find in store. Conversely when I've tried to shop on Walmart's site I feel like I'm looking at an Amazon/Aliexpress clone that happens to share a logo with Walmart.
Are you seriously equating the ability to synthetize images and video to the invention of writing? I mean, one elevated us from hunter gatherer packs to a knowledge based society. The other means that we have to trust media less than before and will make it easier for people to generate art and custom porn. It's great, but I feel such breathless exaggeration will only hurt the effort in the long term, because it is taking on crypto currency like hype.
Mine is when marketplace sellers go "oh, sorry, we got your order but this is out of stock" or worse, "we mispriced it, it's actually $100 more we cancelled your order". Zero repercussions for staying a marketplace seller, no repercussions for the kind of behaviour the store itself would never accept.
It's a race to get middlemen profits. The problem is without curation, the middlemen provide no value other than their brand name and reputation, but those also suffer because of the lack of curation. The short sightedness is real.
This is one reason why I enjoy shopping at Costco: they stand by the products they sell. They tend to offer mid-range products with good value for the price. So far, I’ve been able to trust that they’re not going to sell me defective or misleading merchandise.
I believe the long term bet is that retail winner(s) will use e-commerce search data to inform product development. It's a well known Amazon play and other retailers are trying to catch up.
Other retailers will also sell ads on their sites which are additional revenue. Amazon proved this out being the 3rd highest ranking company in terms of advertising revenue behind Google and Meta/FB.
I briefly shopped on Walmart.com because Amazon had marketized, destroying my trust in reviews, brands, and product quality, and Walmart had not. That time is past. Now I find myself sticking to manufacturer websites or buying things in the store again.
I kinda hate that I know this, but I suppose I might as well put my MBA to some use. There is such a concept as brand deposit ( where you are basically building up goodwill ) and brand withdrawal ( where you are using your brand for an activity that is likely to result in short term profit at a loss of goodwill of the customers ). For one reason or another, a whole slew of companies decided that short term profits are more important than their individual brands. It is puzzling for companies like Amazon, who partially rely on brand recognition.
I don't know Crate & Barrel's situation, but this is a common pattern to extract money from a brand with a good reputation. Previously exhibited by every (formerly) US appliance brand and most local newspapers.
I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the meeting when reputable businesses decided it was in their best interests to sell random garbage they couldn't vouch for.
There was a baseline expecting of quality, because Walmart would not be expected to buy from counterfeiters. For example, if I buy 3 mule team borax from Walmart, I expect it to come via official sources.
If I buy 3 mule team borax from a Walmart reseller, I have no idea where it is sourced from or how much those entities care about reputation. It could be from 3 mule team, it could be counterfeit.
Luckily, I have not seen evidence that Walmart/Target commingle inventory, so restricting searches to sold by Walmart/Target should work.
But who knows what is happening behind the scenes. Amazon removed the wording that made it clear they commingled inventory, but I am sure they still do.
I do not have the equipment or expertise required to confirm it. So I rely on a combination of a reputable businesses who would care to verify it is whatever percent and quality borax it should be because they (presumably) have something to lose if it comes out that it is not.
and how do you know its actually Na₂B₄O₇·10H₂O? How much filler did the 3rd party seller add? How much of the filler is toxic or will react in unexpected ways?
At least if I bought walmart borax from a brick&mortar walmart, I generally expect it to be all borax. 3rd party reseller? Even that's not guaranteed. If the seller is caught, they'll just disappear and another will fill its place. It is all snake oil salesmen wearing masks and unless you get a lab test on everything you order, you'll get burned one day.
The brand is "20 Mule Team". I would be quite suspicious of "3 mule team": how would a 3-mule hitch even work? Who makes a harness for three mules? b^)
I’ve had much better experiences getting what I order from eBay than I have from Amazon. Random junk is fine, but I at least want it to be the random junk I ordered.
Yeah, the good thing about eBay's design is that their listings are (mostly) seller-centric rather than product-centric. There's no dice roll (or obfuscation) of where the product comes from when you order a product. The feedback rating that you see above the fold on the majority of listings is the seller's feedback.
I did stop using Amazon years ago except as an Aliexpress alternative after I found out about commingling. I moved my business to Best Buy/Costco/Target/Walmart/Home Depot/Staples/etc.
But the reason Amazon probably does not care about that because they have much better profit margin opportunities (AWS, Prime Video and Music, warehouse infrastructure as a service and delivery as a service).
Same here for most things. There's no way I'll buy flash (SD cards, etc) storage from Amazon anymore. That was a sad day when I learned why stuff seemed to be dying more often than usual.
I feel like Microcenter is a good example of combatting this, they have cheap house brands of components, but they are legit and not the outright scams that propagate online marketplaces like Amazon.
The cake being acting as a storefront for third party vendors and the icing being commingling. On its own selling products on behalf of a third party vendor creates enough problems – especially with a vendor like DigKey where you might come to expect predictable pricing and availability.
There's something wrong with Walmart's review system too. I've tried leaving a 1 star review on a product recently and after well over a month it's still not posted on the product page.
In India, I see lot of fake websites in Google Ads. Their offer is also too good and the images in the ads are so nice and attractive. Interestingly ads are appear even before big websites like Amazon and Flipkart.
After you made the payment, you will realize that you have been cheated. I guess lot of the people got cheated by this method.
> SSD Mobile Solid State Drive Mini Portable External Hard Drive high-Speed USB3.1 Type-C Interface Notebook PC Expansion Upgrade Hard Drive (Color : Red, Size : 30TB) Brand: Generic. $36.15 $ 36. 15. Coupon: Save an extra 10% when you apply this coupon. Terms. Capacity: 30TB . 1GB. 500GB. 1TB. 2TB. 4TB. 6TB. 8TB. 10TB. 12TB. 14TB. 16TB.
Even with the 10% off coupon, it was more than Walmart was charging. Gotta give Walmart credit where credit is due!
However, Walmart itself did recently sell me an OEM 'not for resale' labeled hard drive, so there is some strangeness going on in their warehouse just like at Amazon
I literally do not care what back-end contractor of theirs is doing.
My transaction is conducted on walmart.com , my credit card transaction goes to a walmart account, and my credit card bill shows a walmart line-item.
This "redirecting responsibility" to somewhere else is the fraudulent grift going on there. Walmart wants to put their name on transactions? Make them live with the repercussions dealing with fraud. (Same goes for any online retailer that has a primary presence, and intertwines back end contractors or 3rd party sellers.)
Exceptions are for ebay and etsy, since it is blatantly clear that individuals open their own shop and ebay/etsy only provide a basic framework.
Walmart is a retailer. Do people really think they (or Amazon, or anyone else) test every single one of the hundreds of millions of products sold on their site?
If people choose to trust a hard drive made by "XGeek", well, that's on them. This is exactly why branding is a thing. Just stick to Seagate or WD next time.
My 70 year old uncle might just -reasonably- assume that buying from walmart.com is the same as walking into the store, and comes with the same return and quality guarantees. Stuff in the store is very much vetted, and individually chosen. Shelf space is an incredibly valuable commodity and any retailer knows not to just give it away. I don't know why e-store search results aren't seen as equally valuable.
That same uncle might not care, or even know, about the brands that make commodity computer hardware. I built my own gaming PC, and, beyond the processor I would have to double check the brand names on the other components (AMD GPU, but I don't know who made the card off the top of my head).
> My 70 year old uncle might just -reasonably- assume that buying from walmart.com is the same as walking into the store, and comes with the same return and quality guarantees.
And that is exactly the deception the Walton family wants out of this.
They might make a $6 commission on a sale like this. After you get done dealing with the labor cost of handling an angry customer, return shipping, and the loss of future business you start start losing money that even the most short sighted of execs can understand… er… should understand
Third party sellers are a cancer on the once ~good Amazon, Walmart, etc. Especially with commingling. With commingling you can't even be sure the "WD" you bought from "Amazon" is actually from Amazon's stock or a third party's fake they've sent in there.
Buying branded products is not a guarantee of quality, provenance, or authenticity on marketplace sites.
One my my close relatives recently purchased a "new" Dell computer from Amazon. I noticed the performance was very slow when I happened to be using it. I looked up the service tag, and sure enough, the parts inside of it were not the parts that Dell originally put into it in the factory. Turns out a third party seller made quite a business out of parting out Dell computers, replacing their innards with junk, and reselling them.
Also, there's plenty of fakes and counterfeits that I've received from Amazon/eBay/etc. They're almost trivial to find.
You know it seems to me that we are going to eventually end up reinventing the idea of a brand.
As these massive online marketplaces continue to allow third party sellers their reputation will continue to suffer, people will be less and less likely to get what they ordered, and eventually look for a way to identify good products. Eventually some sellers and marketplaces will end up being identified as only having good quality products and people will start to buy from them.
Honestly a lot of the discussion around Amazon seems a lot like the arguments and discussions I heard around Wal-Mart in the early 20's like almost all the arguments are the exact same to a large degree, right down to the discussions of labor issues and the effect of their monopoly on smaller retailers.
It seems eventually Amazon, Wal-Mart and online marketplaces that allow third party sellers will end up like the Aldi's, Dollar Tree, Wal-Mart, type stores, with a cheaper price and expected quality, and people will know there are other online marketplaces to go to when they need quality or something that lasts.
The retail company has people called 'sourcers' who find other companies that sell a product, test those companies can handle the retailer's scale and the product meets quality standards, and then sets up a white label agreement.
Here in Canada Best Buy sells refurbished hardware but it's not Best Buy itself. You buy it on their site and it looks like Best Buy sells it but it's from a third party and most often it's junk. Not outright fraud like Walmart but close.
Walmart has also fed into this a lot by making it so they are your one stop shop by making it ship stuff that isn’t in stock at your local store. They also by default will give you substitutions if you are doing an online store pickup or delivery order which only has more room for abuse or manipulation of substituting your items for things they need to get rid of etc.
I only use it for a family member but they have intentionally continuously degraded the ui/ux to make it so you fall into these traps and have even basically made it so all of the filters reset every time you search.
The substitution thing has worked well for me - they now alert you in the app before and you can yes/no the substitution. You can also mark “ride or die” on items and if they can’t get it they don’t substitute.
I don’t recall if they upcharge for more expensive substitution now - before it was free, which was a bit abuseable.
Yeah it worked for a while for me but the person I’m getting the stuff for has all the alerts on their device so I just turn most of the substitutions off. There were a few times where I had generous substitutions but I think they reigned those in.
Yeah a few times in the start I would always get egg upgrades from 12 to 18 or even one time 36. It happened for a few other things and I do think if you did it frequently enough you could learn how to game it but nowadays it’s riskier.
This is end stage capitalism greed. It's a full blown assault on the consumer. The trust that citizens have in their retails is being mortgaged for desperate profits. The quality of the products is dropping to possibly dangerous levels. There's no quality control. The products that you are buying could be full of toxic, carcinogenic, reproductive harm chemicals. The cast iron pan you buy has lead in it. The kids toys are using toxic paints. The cotton clothes you are buying are not cotton.
If you think 30TB fake hard drives are bad, the Amazon marketplace is now selling Taliban flags printed by 3rd party sellers in China. At least there's no ISIS flags yet.
I assume whatever flag factory in china is cranking out $10 flags doesn't care about the content of what's printed on them.
sure, and people can draw their own conclusions about a "marketplace" allowing morally reprehensible products on it, and whether to purchase from them in the future.
>sure, and people can draw their own conclusions about a "marketplace" allowing morally reprehensible products on it, and whether to purchase from them in the future.
How can a piece of dyed cloth be "morally reprehensible"?
I don't think books should be banned, nor should flags.
If that's how folks want to express themselves, then so be it.
That doesn't mean I need to be chummy with people who hold views in accord with the misogynistic, hateful rhetoric of the Taliban.
That said, I'd expect that folks elsewhere (e.g., Iraq or Iran) might find the US flag to be "morally reprehensible."
As such, shouldn't you also deride folks who sell US flags too?
Just because you don't agree with the ideas and ideology represented by a flag, it doesn't mean that making and selling such a piece of cloth is "morally reprehensible."
Don't like it? Don't buy it. It's called "voting with your wallet." And if enough people do that, then folks will stop making/selling it.
that's quite a screed you wrote there. you must feel very strongly about it. amazon has made the choice to exclude ISIS flags, and exact copies of nazi flags, so it's curious why one is allowed and not the other.
your position seems to be from the free-market/libertarian angle that people can print and publish anything they want, sure, okay, whatever... the logical conclusion of this in the free market is that amazon as a private entity is also able to pick and choose what products they choose to sell and associate with their brand name.
>that's quite a screed you wrote there. you must feel very strongly about it. amazon has made the choice to exclude ISIS flags, and exact copies of nazi flags, so it's curious why one is allowed and not the other.
Which is their prerogative. And fine with me. Not that I have any say in the matter.
As for whether I "feel very strongly" about such things, that's not so relevant, IMHO.
What is relevant is that morality is not a team sport. It's individuals making moral choices. Whether we agree or disagree with those choices is also an individual thing.
>your position seems to be from the free-market/libertarian angle that people can print and publish anything they want, sure, okay, whatever... the logical conclusion of this in the free market is that amazon as a private entity is also able to pick and choose what products they choose to sell and associate with their brand name.
That's not how I would phrase it, but essentially correct.
>If you refer to things people say that you disagree with as "screeds," they'll eventually stop talking to you.
A fair point. Although I expect you'd be just as effective if you'd just catted it to /dev/null.
I'll paraphrase what I said in my original comment:
"Just because you don't agree with the ideas presented by others, it doesn't mean that those others are angry and their presentation of such ideas is a 'screed'."
That some folks don't get that is unfortunate, but not all that unexpected.
Seems like I read something like this long ago NOT being a bad thing. Walmart was selling an external USB 5g drive or something, when 5g was gigantic, cheaper than 5g drives were selling for.
So we'd buy the external, take the IDE drive out, and have a cheap 5g IDE drive. And we liked it.
233 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadSorry Walmart, if you let your brand get polluted with 3rd parties selling garbage you will quickly start to lose whatever brand loyalty you have.
I never expected top end merchandise from Walmart. They are a discount retailer and that's fine. But I do expect to get genuine merchandise that is as advertised, not counterfeit or fradulent crap.
I dont like third party sellers either but obviously it makes financial sense for these companies to do this.
And regardless, I'm on walmart.com so it reflects on them when some third party seller sends me shit.
It is true that I am not a frequent shopper there.
One positive remains though: If you buy from Walmart you get it from Walmart and their supply chain. With Amazon because they "mingle" inventory from third parties, you can order shipped & sold by Amazon.com and still get a counterfeit product, because a third party slipped it in.
And, yes, that has happened to me personally by the way.
So no, ordering from Walmart does not guarantee anything is going through their supply chain.
I’m not exactly sure how they make money as the prices are often nearly identical.
It worked well for several years with millions in sales, all automated. It became untenable though as Cryptocurrency facilitated people buying Amazon gift cards with stolen credit cards and cashing them out at 30-50% of face value.
So the market became saturated with scammers selling considerably cheaper than Amazon. For a time maybe 6-4 years ago you could get pretty much anything from Amazon on eBay for around 20% less and shipped direct from Amazon via prime.
Amazon eventually shut it down though and if you meet some very strict gift card threshold they will just steal your balance. People still do it, but large scale automation isn't really worth it any longer.
I've been doing this with the Walmart+ delivery service for $100 a year. I even applied for their 5% cash back credit card. It saves me a good amount of time and money, and I am overall very happy with it.
If Walmart ever starts mixing 3rd party reseller crap with their "in-store" inventories, they will ruin a fantastic product and lose me as a customer.
As far as I'm aware they don't comingle 3rd party inventory like "Sold and shipped by Amazon.com" does.
There used to be hard drives on ebay that were simply SD cards with scrap metal glued down for weight back in 2012ish.
I’ll throw out an example I’ve noticed lately - furniture manufacturers. Search for any item on Crate & Barrel or West Elm’s website and you’ll first see a handful of exclusive pieces that are clearly built for the brand. Keep scrolling and the search results gradually become a bunch of generic third party items that you can find in a dozen different places, often for lower prices elsewhere.
I get it, Crate & Barrel sees this as an opportunity to monetize their brand without having to do all that much. Unfortunately it leaves me with a lot less trust for a brand that used to represent a quality and reputation.
There are still some retailers who retain some in-house design talent, but they’re few and far between, as it provides little differentiation in the eye of the consumer, who typically can’t tell an in-house from an acquired design - so in-house design is typically an idiosyncratic choice now, as it doesn’t provide a competitive edge over those who claim in-house design.
Of course, it’s possible to choose the wrong supplier, or have mismatched expectations - a clothing retailer I worked with sent an entire range to be shredded because it arrived with appalling quality (like, seams that hadn’t even been stitched) and they weren’t prepared to even put it in outlets - which is where a lot of the misfires end up - it isn’t “oh no our factory had a booboo” or “whoops we made too much”, it’s a calculated “X% of the stock we bought last year was crap, therefore we have Y stock to support our outlet presence”. Some brands deliberately foster relationships with lower quality stock shops in order to maintain stock at outlet, but this is generally waning in popularity as retailers have realised that they don’t actually work very well as feeders, and have to stand alone.
By making everything an open marketplace it places the risk onto the customer. They are responsible for reading the reviews and deciding if they think the item will match their expectations.
I hate it, being back the days of a store that would stand behind its wares as they had actually chosen to sell them!
Apple, of course, are masters at guarding their reputation.
Besides the safari app and a big-name apps that you already know you want/need have been sufficent
Search for anything and you are likely to find the same item with 50 different brand names but all essentially the same garbage from aliexpress/wish.
For example, here's a search for "bike trainer" [1]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=bike+trainer&crid=KCCRWTVZHHQ7&sp...
Right now, Amazon combines the honesty of flea markets with the reliability of a stoned teenager.
I'm back to shopping at physical stores, and am enjoying it, at least at the moment. And when ordering things, I try to go direct or find retailers who care about their reputations.
I really wish online shopping wasn't so messed up.
Of course, they're all working class stiffs compared to Bezos and the rest of the senior leadership.
I am looking at barrier hose crimpers for air conditioning lines. Okay, there's about a dozen identicalish looking ones on amazon with a price from 100-300 dollars, and a reputable united states manufacturer starting at 2500+. How do I know what's the best option?
I really don't care about the price, I want to know if the price is worth it. If these different products are different or just rebranded, I want to know.
[0] https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1563060250269589505
That's the call where Alexei Navalny tricked an FSB agent into admitting they had poisoned him.
I think often people try to come up with too clever explanations for stupid behavior. Sometimes it's just stupid behavior. Often times this is the catalyst for conspiracy theories - it's a nice explanation for random or stupid events.
To be fair, not all direct-from-China goods are cheap crap. I've received excellent USB cables, noise cancelling earbuds, and much more from various sellers. And the middlemen selling on Amazon are offering the convenience of easy returns, fast shipping, and excellent customer service from Amazon. Depending on the seller, [their profit margins can actually be quite thin because Amazon charges a lot for their customer service, warehouses, and return handling](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Yhc6mmdJC4).
* I know TikTok is quite controversial, for good reasons like data security, lack of ethics, and algorithmic infobubbling/censorship. But I am still a fan and use it because its algorithm was the only thing that was able to string together my liked posts and begin showing content/advice about what mental health disorders I might have. That significantly sped up my diagnoses with my psychiatrist, who confirmed 2 of the 3 disorders.
TikTok is controversial because of the trove of personal data it has and it's a large Chinese company, and large Chinese companies are required to do what the Chinese govt wants, and the Chinese govt does not have the purest intentions with respect to the persons of the USA.
> its algorithm was the only thing that was able to string together my liked posts and begin showing content/advice about what mental health disorders I might have.
this is a feature of TikTok, psychiatric diagnoses? or you were able to use the linked together posts and diagnose yourself?
Twitter tries to algorithmically sort your feed, but some users (including myself) find it buries too many interesting posts, and use the old chronological feed. Twitter is sparing about showing users and posts you don't follow (except for retweets from your followed accounts, of course). This leads to accounts becoming "curators", who you follow because they retweet interesting content. This adds a nice human touch, but also limits discovery to other users' interests. Interactions are generally limited to retweets/quote-retweets, and comment treads, both of which rarely have a deep discussion because the UI isn't designed to promote it. Twitter has small sidebars to recommend other users to follow, but this is a very slow method to discover new content, and these sidebars are smaller or nonexistent on mobile clients. Tumblr is quite similar, so I group its community and discovery dynamics with Twitter.
Reddit is community-based. Subreddits are formed, users follow them, and posts are voted up and down. A subreddit can dominate its hobby, and there is no way to fine-tune the content you see. For example, I like seeing the deals in /r/frugalmalefashion but have no interest in the higher-priced designer shoes that can frontpage. This reduces the signal to noise ratio for my interests, and there isn't another active subreddit that would more closely match my tastes. The comment sections are the highlight of reddit, since discussions can go quite deep and low quality comments are downvoted out of view. Discovery is generally limited to commenters organically suggesting other subreddits, especially in mobile clients where there "isn't room" for algorithmic recommendations.
Facebook is quite different. Your friends feed is very broad-purpose, and groups are very specific. Groups are often smaller than comparable subreddits, and there will be less experts present in a discussion. This can hamper discussions on things like deal-hunting, where more frequent users can summarize community opinion or relay their deeper experiences. In other words, you have to do a lot more reading to find the information you want, giving Facebook a much worse signal-to-noise ratio. Comment sections can be more informative than Twitter but more shallow than Reddit, and communities are less interested in liking informative comments to bring them to the top to discussion threads. There is minimal algorithmic discovery, with only small recommendation sidebars.
Instagram is a mix of all these sites. You follow specific users like Twitter, but reposts are limited to the Stories feed, and are therefore deprioritized. So you generally follow each of these users for their original content (or occasionally curation, if they like to manually repost others' work on their feeds like a "meme page"). Comment sections can be lively but shallow, and I find discussions are generally superficial. There is an algorithmic discovery page that can find some good recommendations, but you browse it by thumbnail, limiting discovery.
YouTube is also interesting. You generally follow creators' channels like Instagram, and there is no easy way for "curators" to promote others' content without making a "meme compilation" video (and getting copyright strikes). Comment sections are second best to reddit, but not quite as good. Discussion is limited by the fact there has to be a relevant video for everyone to comment under - there's no way to make a quick post about a hobby without making an entire video, or making an oft-ignored text post. Discoverability is also very good, with the algorithmic feeds and recommendations being very accurate....
It's still the best for pricing, and is pretty close to the sources (unless you're hardcore enough to translate Taobao listings and get your own mail forwarding). For example, I got a new smartwatch and wanted some bands in specific colors, and a screen protector. Listings with the exact same images on Amazon were $9-12 instead of $3-4. (And when you compared reviews and pictures, they were probably from the same factory.)
Some small notes about AliExpress:
- Although most of AliExpress's lower prices come from lower cost warehouses and less middlemen, some of it comes from exploiting discounted postage. [That has been improved since 2019](https://www.parcelandpostaltechnologyinternational.com/opini...) but I still get a ton of Kyrgyzstani-labeled parcels that originated from Guangdong or Shanghai/Hangzhou. I don't know if that's above-board or not.
- Sellers can sometimes be deceptive. When I was shopping for LED interior lights for an old car, some lumen ratings seemed accurate and even had videos of it being tested. Others had obviously inflated brightnesses despite having a similar number of LEDs are power consumption. In addition, some sellers will sneak an unrelated cheap item into variants of another item, so the listing has a lower price in search results.
- Packages now take a few days to be consolidated. This is great for efficiency and often means you get slightly faster delivery in your home country. But these packages can still get lost, so you may have to dispute up to a dozen items at a time. I might have to do this soon with all my smartwatch accessories, and in the meantime, pray my screen doesn't get scratched (or eat the inflated Amazon/eBay price).
- Compared to Amazon, they have fewer customer reviews, and don't stack listings for the same item. In disputes, customer service won't always favor you or offer a complete refund for bad items.
- Compared to eBay, they have much worse search filtering. You may wish to consider eBay for a balance of cheap prices and faster shipping, especially when you filter for sellers within 100 miles. Sometimes Chinese eBay sellers are cheaper than AliExpress sellers.
Things that are drop shipped haven't passed any third party scrutiny and nobody involved in the sales process is held to your local legal requirements. They can ship you an unsafe product that may burn your house down or poison your children, and your local legal processes have no power to make you whole again, nor any affect to discourage sellers from cutting those corners for profit.
This is a case of the middlemen removing value instead of adding it.
The _other_ Amazon CDN
A real life for-example:
There's a specific kind of cat treat I used to buy on Amazon, at some point various (or maybe the same under different names, who knows) resellers began to sell that treat in a way where they would break up the retail packaging and sell single pouches for the same price as the MSRP for a whole case (the way the manufacturer sells it).
Technically not exactly fraud because they mention the size in the item description fine print, but because of the pricing and the way Amazon tends to just mix different SKUs from both themselves and resellers willy-nilly into different options of the same listing, its incredibly easy to just assume you are buying the full retail product as packaged by the manufacturer.
To Amazon's somewhat-credit, they've refunded me when this situation occurred, but to their shame they've never done a single visible thing to stop this practice from happening and I've proactively reported it to them repeatedly.
End result is there's a whole bunch of categories of products I won't buy from Amazon anymore because I don't want to have to do in-depth detective work every time I make a purchase. I get my pet stuff from Chewy now as I've yet to run into a similar scam on that website.
So yeah add light fixtures to the list.
In 2022 if you aren't buying "Sold by <insert trusted retailer>" on one of these market places then I think you should know what you are getting into.
I'm not american, but I was very surprised that Walmart had gotten into that business. It would surprise me if similar retailers in my country started this too.
Normal users don't understand this. They think they're shopping at Amazon, not at QUBAGZI's storefront on Amazon's website. That concept doesn't even make sense to most shoppers. If they typed in "amazon.com", they think they're getting something from Amazon in Seattle. (I mean they don't literally think that every item is coming from Seattle, but they assume that Amazon vets their products like Trader Joe's or Kohl's down the street does.)
Obviously you can't do everything at once, and people want choice in things like fashion. A kitchen store would be great. One toaster, one oven, one coffee grinder.
Of course, they themselves may be subject to quality control issues. Although perhaps the thing that you're talking about that would be different is the manner in which the curated selection is organized and the overarching purpose.
For instance, I feel like I need only one toaster, one oven. But I have 3 different high-quality coffee grinders that I use for different purposes.
[0] https://www.costco.com/my-life-costco-grocery-online-deliver...
[1] https://www.costcobusinessdelivery.com/
For things that aren't fasteners or drill bits, people kind of like having something different than their friends. ("Oh hey I have the same table! Oh, and pots and pans! Oh, and wall art! Wait, your house looks exactly like mine.")
If that isn't profitable, make the warranty storage/customer service advocacy a yearly subscription where they take care of the full return process.
It's essentially converting reputation to cash
My question is, why is this happening now and why didn't it happen before?
Is it because Amazon is simultaneously wildly popular and a total trash fire, so customers are becoming gradually inured to their bullshit and so other companies are thinking they can slip under the radar with this ploy?
Was there an industry conference where this idea was presented and nobody ever explicitly agreed to collude, but there were nods all around the room and everyone knew what they were expected to do?
So the answer to "why now?" would be, because they only recently began failing thanks to Amazon/COVID/insert your favourite recent civillisational change.
You didn’t notice it as much earlier, because it wasn’t the high end ‘stuff you went there for’ that people stopped buying, it was all the other random things they bought when they went there to buy something, and the marginal customers.
Now the core customer base is eroding, and they’re getting desperate.
I think it dilutes a brand. I don't know that Walmart has any worthwhile reputation as a brand though (at least in my eyes) to dilute so they're probably selling these things and don't care.
When I search on local chain retailer websites, I try to use the "In Store" or "Same day pickup" filters to get actual products they sell. The nice thing is sometimes they indicate the inventory level.
Meanwhile, you have no problem finding devices that should have FDA/Health Canada/FCC/IC approval and do not.
It's harder and harder to find the good products from decent brands, even with a direct search. Many times the decent brand product seems to be someone independent who is buying the product elsewhere and shipping it on amazon for a markup.
Then there's the word-jumble brands for products - they all seem to be fly-by-night products that only seem to exist as long as the product entry has enough stars to get traction.
sigh.
I was shopping for a particular weightlifting belt that is out of stock on the manufacturer's site. You can find them on Amazon but most likely they are not genuine.
I believe even without regulation (not that I disagree with regulating Amazon) once a critical mass of customer think its shady place to buy good quality stuff. It is downhill for Amazon from there.
I can no longer trust any products or reviews on Amazon, for example, so I prefer not to shop there.
Did they make some short term gains in profitability? Probably. Not sure it will be worth it in the end
For a while, I used Walmart.com to stock up on name-brand staples cheaply and conveniently, but it got to be such a pain in the ass that I went back to Costco.
Other retailers will also sell ads on their sites which are additional revenue. Amazon proved this out being the 3rd highest ranking company in terms of advertising revenue behind Google and Meta/FB.
If I buy 3 mule team borax from a Walmart reseller, I have no idea where it is sourced from or how much those entities care about reputation. It could be from 3 mule team, it could be counterfeit.
But who knows what is happening behind the scenes. Amazon removed the wording that made it clear they commingled inventory, but I am sure they still do.
Think of Rudolph in front of the eight other reindeer :)
Amazon is earning a huge profit margin with no liability by letting random entities sell using their website.
Do we want to earn more money too?
Yes.
"Competitor?"
entire board room bursts into laughter
But the reason Amazon probably does not care about that because they have much better profit margin opportunities (AWS, Prime Video and Music, warehouse infrastructure as a service and delivery as a service).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628381
After you made the payment, you will realize that you have been cheated. I guess lot of the people got cheated by this method.
https://www.amazon.com/Portable-External-high-Speed-Interfac...
> SSD Mobile Solid State Drive Mini Portable External Hard Drive high-Speed USB3.1 Type-C Interface Notebook PC Expansion Upgrade Hard Drive (Color : Red, Size : 30TB) Brand: Generic. $36.15 $ 36. 15. Coupon: Save an extra 10% when you apply this coupon. Terms. Capacity: 30TB . 1GB. 500GB. 1TB. 2TB. 4TB. 6TB. 8TB. 10TB. 12TB. 14TB. 16TB.
Even with the 10% off coupon, it was more than Walmart was charging. Gotta give Walmart credit where credit is due!
However, Walmart itself did recently sell me an OEM 'not for resale' labeled hard drive, so there is some strangeness going on in their warehouse just like at Amazon
I literally do not care what back-end contractor of theirs is doing.
My transaction is conducted on walmart.com , my credit card transaction goes to a walmart account, and my credit card bill shows a walmart line-item.
This "redirecting responsibility" to somewhere else is the fraudulent grift going on there. Walmart wants to put their name on transactions? Make them live with the repercussions dealing with fraud. (Same goes for any online retailer that has a primary presence, and intertwines back end contractors or 3rd party sellers.)
Exceptions are for ebay and etsy, since it is blatantly clear that individuals open their own shop and ebay/etsy only provide a basic framework.
I guess Target doesn't (yet).
It's frustrating to explain to older parents, "You have to pick, "Sold by [Walmart|Amazon]", or it could be anyone!" and not have them understand.
If people choose to trust a hard drive made by "XGeek", well, that's on them. This is exactly why branding is a thing. Just stick to Seagate or WD next time.
My 70 year old uncle might just -reasonably- assume that buying from walmart.com is the same as walking into the store, and comes with the same return and quality guarantees. Stuff in the store is very much vetted, and individually chosen. Shelf space is an incredibly valuable commodity and any retailer knows not to just give it away. I don't know why e-store search results aren't seen as equally valuable.
That same uncle might not care, or even know, about the brands that make commodity computer hardware. I built my own gaming PC, and, beyond the processor I would have to double check the brand names on the other components (AMD GPU, but I don't know who made the card off the top of my head).
And that is exactly the deception the Walton family wants out of this.
They might make a $6 commission on a sale like this. After you get done dealing with the labor cost of handling an angry customer, return shipping, and the loss of future business you start start losing money that even the most short sighted of execs can understand… er… should understand
One my my close relatives recently purchased a "new" Dell computer from Amazon. I noticed the performance was very slow when I happened to be using it. I looked up the service tag, and sure enough, the parts inside of it were not the parts that Dell originally put into it in the factory. Turns out a third party seller made quite a business out of parting out Dell computers, replacing their innards with junk, and reselling them.
Also, there's plenty of fakes and counterfeits that I've received from Amazon/eBay/etc. They're almost trivial to find.
maybe good fodder for raid with capital R and I
ofcourse nowadays you've got to dodge those shingled drives...
As these massive online marketplaces continue to allow third party sellers their reputation will continue to suffer, people will be less and less likely to get what they ordered, and eventually look for a way to identify good products. Eventually some sellers and marketplaces will end up being identified as only having good quality products and people will start to buy from them.
Honestly a lot of the discussion around Amazon seems a lot like the arguments and discussions I heard around Wal-Mart in the early 20's like almost all the arguments are the exact same to a large degree, right down to the discussions of labor issues and the effect of their monopoly on smaller retailers.
It seems eventually Amazon, Wal-Mart and online marketplaces that allow third party sellers will end up like the Aldi's, Dollar Tree, Wal-Mart, type stores, with a cheaper price and expected quality, and people will know there are other online marketplaces to go to when they need quality or something that lasts.
The retail company has people called 'sourcers' who find other companies that sell a product, test those companies can handle the retailer's scale and the product meets quality standards, and then sets up a white label agreement.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-best-buy-test-1...
I only use it for a family member but they have intentionally continuously degraded the ui/ux to make it so you fall into these traps and have even basically made it so all of the filters reset every time you search.
I don’t recall if they upcharge for more expensive substitution now - before it was free, which was a bit abuseable.
Is that what the mark is called, "ride or die"? That would be very un-corpo-like, but I would welcome it.
Examples: https://www.ebay.de/itm/374176058730 https://www.ebay.de/itm/234648959915
I assume whatever flag factory in china is cranking out $10 flags doesn't care about the content of what's printed on them.
How can a piece of dyed cloth be "morally reprehensible"?
I don't think books should be banned, nor should flags.
If that's how folks want to express themselves, then so be it.
That doesn't mean I need to be chummy with people who hold views in accord with the misogynistic, hateful rhetoric of the Taliban.
That said, I'd expect that folks elsewhere (e.g., Iraq or Iran) might find the US flag to be "morally reprehensible."
As such, shouldn't you also deride folks who sell US flags too?
Just because you don't agree with the ideas and ideology represented by a flag, it doesn't mean that making and selling such a piece of cloth is "morally reprehensible."
Don't like it? Don't buy it. It's called "voting with your wallet." And if enough people do that, then folks will stop making/selling it.
your position seems to be from the free-market/libertarian angle that people can print and publish anything they want, sure, okay, whatever... the logical conclusion of this in the free market is that amazon as a private entity is also able to pick and choose what products they choose to sell and associate with their brand name.
Which is their prerogative. And fine with me. Not that I have any say in the matter.
As for whether I "feel very strongly" about such things, that's not so relevant, IMHO.
What is relevant is that morality is not a team sport. It's individuals making moral choices. Whether we agree or disagree with those choices is also an individual thing.
>your position seems to be from the free-market/libertarian angle that people can print and publish anything they want, sure, okay, whatever... the logical conclusion of this in the free market is that amazon as a private entity is also able to pick and choose what products they choose to sell and associate with their brand name.
That's not how I would phrase it, but essentially correct.
A fair point. Although I expect you'd be just as effective if you'd just catted it to /dev/null.
I'll paraphrase what I said in my original comment: "Just because you don't agree with the ideas presented by others, it doesn't mean that those others are angry and their presentation of such ideas is a 'screed'."
That some folks don't get that is unfortunate, but not all that unexpected.
So we'd buy the external, take the IDE drive out, and have a cheap 5g IDE drive. And we liked it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628381
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32611021