I remember at one point that Amazon was amazing. Now days it’s a crapshoot on product quality and delivery time.
Etsy is now just as enshittified. Almost everything on there is dropshipped bullshit from AliExpress. You have to trudge through a massive amount of crap listings just to find anything handmade.
Amusingly there are a lot of fetish gear Etsy shops that are still above board, but not much else in my experience.
From what I have heard from sellers it’s as bad on the other end. Nobody wants to buy a piece of handmade jewelry for $50, when there is an Ali drop ship that says “hand made” for $5. It’s extremely difficult to judge the quality until the item arrives, so shoppers get conned into buying junk to save a few $ that they thought was hand made.
Amazon Prime: 2 day(ish) delivery.
Maybe they mean on average they deliver prime products in two days and that’s why there’s an increase in the next day products.
The continuation of enshitification
Removed by mod
Kick Amazon’s ass FTC!
Is that a direct quote?
Can confirm.
Amazon is literally aliexpress but with a more sophisticated UI.
Nothing but absolute shit chinese knock off products. No longer can you get the same kind of savings like you could in the past. You’re basically paying full retail now, plus prime or shipping.
Ali has good stuff depending on what you’re buying. Amazon usually has the exact same stuff for like 50% more
Not sure what you buy off Ali, but nearly everything I used to buy for electronic/robotic projects has gotten to the price that I might as well buy off NA suppliers.
I used to shop exclusively on Banggood. At the time AliExpress was sketchy.
A few years ago they flip flopped. Now Banggood is hot garbage, and AliExpress isn’t bad.
Gearbest, Temu, and Wish were always bad in my experience.
Temu is weird. They really are willing to sell stuff at a lost to garner market share and I’m sure there are some legitimately astounding deals if done right but also I’m just as likely to spend several days hunting and planning it out how to do so and still get shit on by a scam product anyways… so I avoid it but I know I’m losing out a chance to get a mini win.
Yeah, unless I need something ASAP, I usually only buy name brands, but not expensive items on Amazon. Other stuff I go to Ali for and just wait a little longer. Expensive stuff I buy in person or directly from the manufacturer when possible. Recently I’ve been trying to supplement Amazon purchases with small businesses where possible.
Exactly. My hobby is making my own smart devices, and I can get 10x of one sensor from Ali for the cost of 1x from Amazon.
But ali takes like 2 months to ship.
No it doesn’t. It usually takes 10 days for me. Sitting in US customs is like 5-6 days of that time, too.
Prime AND shipping half the time these days.
More than full retail most of the time! They’re not even bothering to compete with Walmart or Target anymore on the same products.
Sellers even drop ship from AliExpress and similar sites. Basically every time the shipping is quoted longer than a week it’s probably drop shipped from one of the Chinese sites. They add $5-$10 to the price and take their cut without ever touching the product.
I canceled my prime membership and stopped using Amazon entirely after I ordered something that turned out to be drop shipped straight from Walmart. But online shopping in general is a nightmare these days.
Amazon has to deal with their counterfeit merchandise problem. Try to buy a memory card on Amazon and odds are you get a bogus counterfeit card.
never had an issue since they started separating the third-party inventory from their stock. just make sure it’s sold by Amazon.
When was that?
Mine was sold by Samsung and it was still counterfeit.
sold by Samsung on Amazon means it’s in a pile with everything sold by anyone. no surprise it’s counterfeit
That is anything but 100% reliable. Have had Sold By Amazon items with stickers on a box you know didn’t come from the Manufacturer that way.
Amazon is promoting the counterfeits. They don’t care because the people who don’t return the counterfeit products is high enough for them not to care. You basically can’t buy anything off Amazon these days unless you are ok with getting marked up crap from china
They literally try to gas light you when you try to bring the problem up to them. They sent me an in app questionnaire that then told me that often products don’t work and that people think they are counterfeit. My memory stick was an obvious counterfeit. It’s kinda sick that Amazon does this.
We got spray items that had nothing but compressed air in them
Amazon has the money to vet its products and provide better search results, it just chooses not to because it doesn’t need to.
Better to shove a shitty, expensive product in customer’s faces than a cheap, standard one.
Not only that, Amazon has the mechanisms to prevent counterfeiting today: dedicated bins for individual sellers products. They just make the vendors pay an extra fee to use it.
Literally extorting their sellers. “Gee it’d be a shame if some counterfeit merchandise were to be sold instead of yours. I could protect you from that”
I would be so happy if Amazon got slapped with a RICO charge.
It’s broken for us, it works just fine for them.
I got counterfeit Dove soap.
“Dave”
No, “Dave” is the premium, artisan soap brand. You’re thinking of:
“Dive”
My favorite enshittification of Amazon is how you can filter products by manufacturer, but only if the manufacturer is a reputable company like JOOGEE or XZzy or GoodTime and not those weird no-name companies like Anker or Samsung.
Won’t even bring up the brands I like unless I search for them specifically, even then they’re not the first result. Amazon gives the ad space to brands that are around for 3 months then poof.
but you should buy stuff from Smorkyaplorb Megasystems because they give the best kickbacks
Oh and I love when I sort by price and half the results disappear.
My favorite enshittification of Amazon is that, plus, the bonus fact the filtering acts different if you pay for prime. The filtering works better with prime. It should work the same regardless if one pays for prime or not.
They basically deliver a shopping experience that is worse unless you pay them money monthly. It’s enshittification two layers of abstraction deep.
I swear by the time FTC notices, they’ve been doing it for like 10 years already
DAE remember the Walmart, High Cost of Low Prices movie?
Don’t use Amazon. It’s not like they are the only web shop for stuff you would like to have.
I just use Walmart+ now.
Better for groceries, but they don’t sell wrapping papers :(
Way to fight the man by using the little guys.
I’ve had good luck with drop.com for electronics.
Have any recommendations? Sometimes it’s hard to beat the convenience of Amazon.
Drop used to be so much better before the rename.
100% agree.
It is still usable, for now at least.
Between home depot, target, best buy, and walmart I can typically find most things I’m looking for.
I usually try to shop by reviewers first and check if the manufacturer sells directly. Retailers don’t need to get a chunk of every purchase.
Amazon and bezos sucks, but Walmart and the Waltons is evil condensed. the only excuse to shop walmart is if it’s the only option for 100 miles. Amazon at least has aws and few redeeming pro services that pay their employees and provide infastructure to others.
Walmart is a last resort option. For example, my last purchase was an unusual size bicycle inner tube. I physically went to two other stores before ordering from walmart. I have no love for walmart, but Amazon poses the larger monopolistic threat. The damage amazon is capable of inflicting is only just beginning.
Amazon’s marketshare with aws scares me more than their retail presence. They will definitely use that market dominance to the detriment of society.
Amazon’s marketshare with aws scares me more than their retail presence.
As it should. AWS is making Amazon a feudal lord in the cloud space.
I avoid Wal-Mart like the fucking plague.
Agreed with all of that. And luckily at my current shop, im a proud user of azure devops. Now thats a company who is good for competition and doesn’t contribute to any social injustices. Sigh. Well I guess at least our available infastructure options and datasets arent managed by the ccp. Smh that will teach me to think my horse isn’t so high
I buy a lot of electronics (and reading glasses) from AliExpress. I had the occasional malfunction but probably not even one in 30-50. Great NEMA motors too and 18650 batteries among other stuff like the Orange Pi, or mega boards.
A word of caution, there is lot of really cheap stuff that’s quite low quality, and you can’t post reviews under 4 stars (they won’t show up) so you have to check the numbers sold and read the feedback.
Edit: it also sometimes take 3-4 weeks to get the stuff. It’s like a little surprise sometimes.
Man, you’re playing with fire by buying 18650s from a vendor that doesn’t test their batches.
You are right, but where would you buy sure batteries and how can you be sure they are?
Illumn and imrbatteries are two trusted vendors for both the flashlight and vaping communities. They test each batch to ensure they’re authentic.
Why would you buy a cable from Apple on Amazon? You are already paying the Apple tax and you want to add the amazon tax on top?
If you go on Apple website you can get the cable and free shipping
For me it only makes sense to have cheap alternatives when browsing for cables on amazon. Then again if i want cheap, i go on aliexpress
People like to have a consolidated way to do things, if they can.
That’s why streaming took off, and why piracy is on the rise again.
Apple rarely has a sale. Amazon has Apple products on sale regularly. I bought my airpods for $50 off when Apple was still selling them at MSRP. I don’t understand if someone is paying full retail on Amazon’s site for Apple products.
Not gonna lie, it’s almost refreshing to hear FTC acknowledge what’s been true for years
I can’t even get the sorting method to work. It shows me a few items that match the sorting at first, then it goes all over the place. Utterly useless.
I sometimes resort to using Google to find the Amazon item I need.
If you have to do that, it’s really bad.
Either that or it gives you like 3 results after filtering, even though there were pages of matching results before the filter was applied.
Lina Khan is staking her career on this one, but the way the US judiciary looks there’s no way Amazon suffers.
