> With two month shipping, instead of two days. It's still worth it sometimes, since Amazon is slowly turning into AliExpress.
In my experience, it's not that bad. I usually get all my stuff within a couple weeks to a month.
Also you have to pay a lot of money for a Prime subscription, and even then Amazon doesn't consistently hit its two day shipping targets (IIRC Amazon without Prime gets you something like no-rush shipping, which takes like week).
3D printer parts do often pop up on Amazon 1-2 months after Ali for 5-10% extra. I think many sellers on Aliexpress are aware of the true price people are willing to pay and charge close to that. And then someone does the arbitrage on Amazon close to that.
Now if you want to see a "real" good price, go to Taobao and cough up for the MOQ of 1000, that's 1/10th in my niche.
I keep hearing this, and I've started looking on AliExpress, and the prices are only a little bit cheaper, but the shipping takes forever.
Like I recently was looking into desk globes, and the first one that popped up in search is $16 on AliExpress with 4-week shipping, or $20 on Amazon with 1-day shipping:
And this seems pretty representative. I've never found a single case where it was worth it to buy with AliExpress. Especially since I know I can return anything on Amazon pretty effortlessly, whereas with AliExpress I have no idea.
I tend to use AliExpress for small electronic doodads and things like battery boxes. I'm not some AliExpress wizard, but I don't think the shipping is fixed per item (and I'm usually ordering several) and I think sometimes they batch orders together (which may lower the shipping price?). I don't know how to get a breakdown of the shipping cost I actually paid, which is one of the things that annoys me about the site.
Thanks. I guess I realize I'm talking about items that people are actually buying -- those show 1, 0, and 2 reviews.
Just because when a product has virtually no reviews, the price is often temporarily crazy cheap (including on Amazon) as they're just trying to get people to buy and review it in the first place. Or it's basically a scam listing with a crazy high price so nobody's touching it except for a few people who aren't paying attention. So unpopular products don't make for a great comparison.
> Thanks. I guess I realize I'm talking about items that people are actually buying -- those show 1, 0, and 2 reviews.
IIRC, AliExpress lists items by "shop," and it honestly it doesn't seem like the listings last very long for stuff like this. I have no reason to believe any one of them are "better," so I just buy from the cheapest one.
Even for Amazon listings for stuff like this, the listing come and go. For that AA power bank, this is the one I got initially (7 years ago), but the listing is no longer active: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HCBHZV2/. It had 97 reviews.
However, in this category, I tend to ignore reviews. None of the products are high quality or objectively good, but they're cheap enough (especially on AliExpress) that I'm fine taking the risk.
-----
Here's another comparison for something else I know about
Oh interesting. And thanks so much, now I see what you mean -- yeah that's a very popular Amazon product so it's definitely a "real price".
I'll have to keep an eye out now -- maybe it's more about cheap electronics? The products I've usually been comparing have usually been more home/office/kitchen type stuff.
It's sort of funny - the author's first complaint was about the query "purple wig".
Perhaps I'm getting better results since I'm using an adblocker, but is this not what the author was after? [1] I see lots of wigs in lots of different styles, all purple, all around $20. If I went to a costume store it'd be a little cheaper, but that's the idea of Amazon, is it not? They're concerned they've never heard of the brands (do you know any wig brands?), but remember this is for a kid's halloween costume.
Look, at the end of the day, the consumer is still largely coming out on top here. They get what they want, shipped free, tomorrow. If you pitched that system to someone in 1999 they'd laugh you out of the boardroom, it's only due to Amazon's gargantuan scale that it's become possible. Of all the annoyances online these days, sponsored Amazon listings have never struck me as the ones to be distressed over.
I think the argument was there was no way to know which (if any) of the wigs were good quality because of their weird off-brand status as opposed to branded Raquel Welch, Jon Renau, etc. Of course many of the off brand wigs may be made in the same factory as the big names, but it is impossible to tell.
> The problem isn’t that it lacks what you want, but that it offers infinite permutations of often unknowable quality.
This the problem. The actual worthwhile products being buried in a sea of garbo. Along with the reviews being gamed, it's essentially the online equivalent of a flea market.
It just means consumers have to be more careful and do a lot more research before they buy. While this isn't a new thing for anyone here, this will be a necessary behavior shift for everyone in order to avoid these dark patterns, and to get safe and quality products. This isn't just an amazon problem.
This is something brick and mortar does, limits the amount of space far garbage. Most retailers were at least somewhat selective on what they sold just to avoid returns to the store they had to deal with.
> Now around every corner lies a brand you’ve never heard of, selling a product you’re not sure about.
Which is actually great! I'm not even joking. There has been an explosion of helpful products that simply didn't exist before, because these Chinese manufacturers are so willing to experiment.
Consumer-friendly shelves of every type and dimension. Massage balls/tools of a wide variety of textures and hardnesses. Highly specific niche costumes. And a million other things.
I used to think "I really need this exact thing in this exact size but it doesn't exist", and 10 years it never did. These days, I look on Amazon, and -- son of a gun, there are 5 different versions of it all from the past year. You can see that the newest model from last month fixes problems that reviewers of the previous model were complaining about.
No recognizable American brand has bothered to satisfy the market, but 5 different random Chinese "brands" have. And that's an amazing thing.
> Good deals on name brands are harder to come by.
Citation needed. All my Under Armour workout gear, for example, is usually 30-50% cheaper on Amazon that it is on the Under Armour site itself, or from somewhere like Macy's. Apple laptops and iPads are regularly 10-20% cheaper than from Apple. Name brand merchandise sold on Amazon is more consistently cheaper than from anywhere else in my experience. (It is highly dependent on the specific brand though, so I'm talking about in aggregate -- some brands just aren't discounted on Amazon or anywhere else at all.)
Amazon does seem to be going through a rapid Alibabaificaiton. For random big purchases I check Alibaba prices, most recently a solar powered water pump, and they'd have it cheaper and more variety, but someone has got their pipeline of: Alibaba scraping --> Amazon product hacking --> Drop shipping, figured out.
I know it's funny and a whole trope to say that, but in my experience they're not. On the whole, they do their job just as well as anything else. After all, most of your name-brand stuff is coming from the same types of factories in China anyways.
And if the product is bad, people leave negative reviews, and it's easy to filter for those. Just like you should with any product you're considering purchasing.
Now granted I'm not buying hoverboards or anything that actually has serious potential for injury/fire. But for everyday things, it generally seems quite fine. And it's certainly not like name-brand stuff is magically free of defects or quality issues.
Of course it's not a joke. It's easy to filter for only negative reviews, and obviously none of the negative reviews are paid.
If it's a popular product and all the negative reviews are dumb complaints about shipping speed, the product is probably fine. If all the negative reviews are about how the handle snaps off by the third time you use it, then don't buy it. It doesn't matter how many paid 5-star reviews there are.
I find it quite weird to acknowledge in one breath that positive reviews have been paid for while also assuming in the next that a product with many reviews is popular and hasn't just acquired the mass of its reviews fraudulently. What steps are involved in determining legitimate popularity?
I don't get your point. Amazon literally tells you things like "400+ people bought this in the past month". On top of category rankings like "#3 in iPad stands". It's easy to tell if it's popular or not, if it's something people are actively buying.
If a product is bad, some of those people will be leaving negative reviews, regardless of the number of paid reviews.
> Amazon literally tells you things like "400+ people bought this in the past month"
Yeah, about that. People buy fake purchases for verified reviews too. The scam is a lot bigger than just spinning up dummy accounts. They make fake purchases, sometimes even ship empty boxes, and then switch the listing after a month when purchases are accumulated. You have no way to know that those "400 people" were actually 400 real human customers and not 400 fraudulent sales or how many months a particular listing has been consistent for without being switched.
There are tons of websites, forums, and facebook groups all for doing this. I originally had linked some, but I don't actually want to drive traffic to them, so you can google or dig on facebook for "verified amazon reviews".
And then when a person does leave a negative review, the seller contacts them and says "We'll refund you your money and send you a new one free if you take the review down." And they almost always either take their negative review down in exchange for the refund and free shitty item, because free is free, or update their review to complain about getting the offer, in which case Amazon itself takes the review down for being off topic.
A product that has been listed for 1 or 2 years, that's highly ranked in sales, with a ton of reviews all over the spectrum, is genuinely and legitimately popular. End of story.
I don't care if they got 100 fake reviews via 100 fake purchases at first. If you're a human with a reasonably functioning BS detector, you can figure it out. It's not exactly rocket science.
No way to filter on this. Also, sellers "edit" (read: completely change) their items all the time.
> highly ranked in sales
Faked all the time
> a ton of reviews all over the spectrum
Faked all the time. Yes, people pay for a few negative/middling reviews sprinkled in for exactly this purpose. Generally, reviews follow a few common statistical distributions, and sellers pay to match those distributions.
There is literally no purpose in looking at any aggregation of amazon reviews. You can likely read an individual review and tell if it's real, but that's about it.
Your argument makes as much sense as saying there is "literally no purpose" in reading books because authors can lie. You're missing the big picture which is that it all works pretty fine if you have a decent BS detector.
> No way to filter on this.
Who cares? Most listings showing in search results have been around for a while, and you check the date on each listing
> Also, sellers "edit" (read: completely change) their items all the time
No they don't. It happens occasionally, and it's quite clear that pre-existing top reviews are talking about a totally different item
> Faked all the time
You can't fake sales rankings for any substantial length of time, it would destroy all of your profit on the item and then some
The truth is that while it can be economical for sellers to pay for some reviews/purchases at first to get a product listing off the ground, it can't be sustained. And listings can be switched to other products, but that's generally extremely obvious because the reviews and photos are for something entirely different.
In the end, it's just not a problem if you pay attention at all.
Personally, I like to look at the 2-star reviews to see if something is junk or not. 1-star is usually a reactionary rating with little/no thought.
I don't trust most 1-star reviews, they're effectively saying "it couldn't possibly be worse" even though that's probably not the case. It's just an emotional review.
> Now around every corner lies a brand you’ve never heard of, selling a product you’re not sure about.
Amazon used to be a department store, now its a bazaar + department store. You can still find the old trusted brand stuff if you want, but now you can also get a much larger diversity of products.
People in the department store model just assume that any weirdly named brand they haven't heard of is just automatically a shitty product but that hasn't been true for a long time. Actually pretty often the well known brand is selling the same thing at a 2x markup.
The department stores have their own websites if you prefer that curated experience though.
37 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] thread“around every corner lies a brand you’ve never heard of, selling a product you’re not sure about”
Enshittified
And whenever you feel that, hop on AliExpress and find the exact same thing for about a tenth the price.
In my experience, it's not that bad. I usually get all my stuff within a couple weeks to a month.
Also you have to pay a lot of money for a Prime subscription, and even then Amazon doesn't consistently hit its two day shipping targets (IIRC Amazon without Prime gets you something like no-rush shipping, which takes like week).
3D printer parts do often pop up on Amazon 1-2 months after Ali for 5-10% extra. I think many sellers on Aliexpress are aware of the true price people are willing to pay and charge close to that. And then someone does the arbitrage on Amazon close to that.
Now if you want to see a "real" good price, go to Taobao and cough up for the MOQ of 1000, that's 1/10th in my niche.
I keep hearing this, and I've started looking on AliExpress, and the prices are only a little bit cheaper, but the shipping takes forever.
Like I recently was looking into desk globes, and the first one that popped up in search is $16 on AliExpress with 4-week shipping, or $20 on Amazon with 1-day shipping:
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256802137627481.html
https://www.amazon.com/TTKTK-Decorative-Geography-Educationa...
And this seems pretty representative. I've never found a single case where it was worth it to buy with AliExpress. Especially since I know I can return anything on Amazon pretty effortlessly, whereas with AliExpress I have no idea.
$10.49 + $5.16 shipping ($15.65) for 5x https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805076529896.html?spm=a2g...
$1.50 + $2.59 shipping ($4.09) for 1x https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803289357326.html?spm=a2g...
Literally the exact same thing.
I tend to use AliExpress for small electronic doodads and things like battery boxes. I'm not some AliExpress wizard, but I don't think the shipping is fixed per item (and I'm usually ordering several) and I think sometimes they batch orders together (which may lower the shipping price?). I don't know how to get a breakdown of the shipping cost I actually paid, which is one of the things that annoys me about the site.
Just because when a product has virtually no reviews, the price is often temporarily crazy cheap (including on Amazon) as they're just trying to get people to buy and review it in the first place. Or it's basically a scam listing with a crazy high price so nobody's touching it except for a few people who aren't paying attention. So unpopular products don't make for a great comparison.
IIRC, AliExpress lists items by "shop," and it honestly it doesn't seem like the listings last very long for stuff like this. I have no reason to believe any one of them are "better," so I just buy from the cheapest one.
Even for Amazon listings for stuff like this, the listing come and go. For that AA power bank, this is the one I got initially (7 years ago), but the listing is no longer active: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HCBHZV2/. It had 97 reviews.
However, in this category, I tend to ignore reviews. None of the products are high quality or objectively good, but they're cheap enough (especially on AliExpress) that I'm fine taking the risk.
-----
Here's another comparison for something else I know about
$13.79 for 1x: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013FANC9W/
$1.88 + $2.44 shipping ($4.36) for 1x https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832834613884.html?spm=a2g...
I'll have to keep an eye out now -- maybe it's more about cheap electronics? The products I've usually been comparing have usually been more home/office/kitchen type stuff.
Thanks again!
The example used in the article is confusing, too. A single-use purple wig? That's a great case for a generic, cheap product.
Perhaps I'm getting better results since I'm using an adblocker, but is this not what the author was after? [1] I see lots of wigs in lots of different styles, all purple, all around $20. If I went to a costume store it'd be a little cheaper, but that's the idea of Amazon, is it not? They're concerned they've never heard of the brands (do you know any wig brands?), but remember this is for a kid's halloween costume.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=purple+wig
Look, at the end of the day, the consumer is still largely coming out on top here. They get what they want, shipped free, tomorrow. If you pitched that system to someone in 1999 they'd laugh you out of the boardroom, it's only due to Amazon's gargantuan scale that it's become possible. Of all the annoyances online these days, sponsored Amazon listings have never struck me as the ones to be distressed over.
This the problem. The actual worthwhile products being buried in a sea of garbo. Along with the reviews being gamed, it's essentially the online equivalent of a flea market.
It just means consumers have to be more careful and do a lot more research before they buy. While this isn't a new thing for anyone here, this will be a necessary behavior shift for everyone in order to avoid these dark patterns, and to get safe and quality products. This isn't just an amazon problem.
Essentially: avoid impulse shopping.
Which is actually great! I'm not even joking. There has been an explosion of helpful products that simply didn't exist before, because these Chinese manufacturers are so willing to experiment.
Consumer-friendly shelves of every type and dimension. Massage balls/tools of a wide variety of textures and hardnesses. Highly specific niche costumes. And a million other things.
I used to think "I really need this exact thing in this exact size but it doesn't exist", and 10 years it never did. These days, I look on Amazon, and -- son of a gun, there are 5 different versions of it all from the past year. You can see that the newest model from last month fixes problems that reviewers of the previous model were complaining about.
No recognizable American brand has bothered to satisfy the market, but 5 different random Chinese "brands" have. And that's an amazing thing.
> Good deals on name brands are harder to come by.
Citation needed. All my Under Armour workout gear, for example, is usually 30-50% cheaper on Amazon that it is on the Under Armour site itself, or from somewhere like Macy's. Apple laptops and iPads are regularly 10-20% cheaper than from Apple. Name brand merchandise sold on Amazon is more consistently cheaper than from anywhere else in my experience. (It is highly dependent on the specific brand though, so I'm talking about in aggregate -- some brands just aren't discounted on Amazon or anywhere else at all.)
What a world! :)
And if the product is bad, people leave negative reviews, and it's easy to filter for those. Just like you should with any product you're considering purchasing.
Now granted I'm not buying hoverboards or anything that actually has serious potential for injury/fire. But for everyday things, it generally seems quite fine. And it's certainly not like name-brand stuff is magically free of defects or quality issues.
This has to be a joke, right?
It’s nearly impossible to filter by legitimate unpaid-human reviews on Amazon.
If it's a popular product and all the negative reviews are dumb complaints about shipping speed, the product is probably fine. If all the negative reviews are about how the handle snaps off by the third time you use it, then don't buy it. It doesn't matter how many paid 5-star reviews there are.
I find it quite weird to acknowledge in one breath that positive reviews have been paid for while also assuming in the next that a product with many reviews is popular and hasn't just acquired the mass of its reviews fraudulently. What steps are involved in determining legitimate popularity?
If a product is bad, some of those people will be leaving negative reviews, regardless of the number of paid reviews.
Does that make sense? Zero weird about it.
Yeah, about that. People buy fake purchases for verified reviews too. The scam is a lot bigger than just spinning up dummy accounts. They make fake purchases, sometimes even ship empty boxes, and then switch the listing after a month when purchases are accumulated. You have no way to know that those "400 people" were actually 400 real human customers and not 400 fraudulent sales or how many months a particular listing has been consistent for without being switched.
There are tons of websites, forums, and facebook groups all for doing this. I originally had linked some, but I don't actually want to drive traffic to them, so you can google or dig on facebook for "verified amazon reviews".
And then when a person does leave a negative review, the seller contacts them and says "We'll refund you your money and send you a new one free if you take the review down." And they almost always either take their negative review down in exchange for the refund and free shitty item, because free is free, or update their review to complain about getting the offer, in which case Amazon itself takes the review down for being off topic.
I don't care if they got 100 fake reviews via 100 fake purchases at first. If you're a human with a reasonably functioning BS detector, you can figure it out. It's not exactly rocket science.
No way to filter on this. Also, sellers "edit" (read: completely change) their items all the time.
> highly ranked in sales
Faked all the time
> a ton of reviews all over the spectrum
Faked all the time. Yes, people pay for a few negative/middling reviews sprinkled in for exactly this purpose. Generally, reviews follow a few common statistical distributions, and sellers pay to match those distributions.
There is literally no purpose in looking at any aggregation of amazon reviews. You can likely read an individual review and tell if it's real, but that's about it.
> No way to filter on this.
Who cares? Most listings showing in search results have been around for a while, and you check the date on each listing
> Also, sellers "edit" (read: completely change) their items all the time
No they don't. It happens occasionally, and it's quite clear that pre-existing top reviews are talking about a totally different item
> Faked all the time
You can't fake sales rankings for any substantial length of time, it would destroy all of your profit on the item and then some
The truth is that while it can be economical for sellers to pay for some reviews/purchases at first to get a product listing off the ground, it can't be sustained. And listings can be switched to other products, but that's generally extremely obvious because the reviews and photos are for something entirely different.
In the end, it's just not a problem if you pay attention at all.
I don't trust most 1-star reviews, they're effectively saying "it couldn't possibly be worse" even though that's probably not the case. It's just an emotional review.
Amazon used to be a department store, now its a bazaar + department store. You can still find the old trusted brand stuff if you want, but now you can also get a much larger diversity of products.
People in the department store model just assume that any weirdly named brand they haven't heard of is just automatically a shitty product but that hasn't been true for a long time. Actually pretty often the well known brand is selling the same thing at a 2x markup.
The department stores have their own websites if you prefer that curated experience though.