It’s almost like the writing on the wall was trying to tell us something! Amazon is a bloated poorly self-regulated market with a low barrier to entry that prioritizes convenience over quality, while obfuscating the truth of the seller you do business with.
I sincerely can’t figure out how to use Amazon anymore and I’m very tech literate. Top that off with their labor practices literally being criminal and you have a spicy pizza pie.
It takes a bit of effort to avoid amazon, and it does cost a bit more in money and convenience, but it is possible to not buy from them.
(It’s virtually impossible not to use their web services though unless you are a member of an uncontacted tribe in the, you guessed it, Amazon jungle).
It takes a bit of effort to avoid amazon, and it does cost a bit more in money and convenience, but it is possible to not buy from them.
Ha, here in Austria the government has effectively made it impossible for small vendors to sell their stuff. Amazon is pretty much all that’s left.
I can’t figure out how they facilitate fraud and violate consumer laws, en mass, and nothing’s been done about it… I mean, apart from the blatant capitalist oligarchies we live in.
Because we have a soft spot for monopsony for some reason. Probably because it’s how you get the crazy ROI that gave us billionaires… Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon - all of them were able to become the monsters that they are by controlling the link between buyers and sellers
Not only that, but the seller you do business with isn’t necessarily the one supplying your product. Items are binned together based on their barcode, all sellers’ items end up in the same bin, so legit sellers end up delivering counterfeits and counterfeiters end up selling legit products.
Not always, some warehouses (like the one I used to be at) stow products based off size. For example, could have RAM, ball point pens, phone cases, chocolate bars and everything else that fits into a small pull out cubby on a shelf shoved into one space.
So the stower scans the item, then scans the space on the shelf space they think they can fit it in. The Picker who bundles orders together is given the task to find the RAM you ordered. They are told it’s in X aisle in X cubby. They have to dig through the most random garbage that is shoved into this space because the stower before is given like 2 minutes per item to find space.
Sometimes just to keep their efficiency numbers up the stower will scan the item, scan the space, and never put the item on the shelf bc space was limited. So that item ends up in an adjacent space that they eventually found room for the item and the picker is unaware so they may just have scanned whatever item was closest they could get away with and kept it moving so they don’t get backed up. It was a mess of a way to do things.
You’re talking about physical bins whereas the comment above I beleive meant database bins. There’s a legit item in aisle x bin x while there’s a counterfeit item in aisle y bin y. By binning them together in the database, the pickers aren’t sent to x/x just because it matches the seller. Instead, they’re sent to whichever is closest on their route.
Yeah, I recently ordered something on AliExpress and noticed that I felt less suspicious about their listings than I usually feel when I browse Amazon.
Same. I just go straight to AliExpress now and know what I’m going to get.
Although watch out for extreme markups. Some of the junk you buy a lot of, you can get for a min wholesale price straight on Ali regular.
Amazon turned out really weird. I feel like the idea of Amazon should be consolidating reputable retailers together, but they decided to open the floodgates to random people and now it’s little better than wish.com. Maybe they should split the site up and push all the random sellers onto a different platform.
I trust nothing on there anymore, it is very difficult to wade through the crap. All I want is a 3m HDMI 2.1 cable and I don’t believe what I’m getting.
It’s like chinavasion but with better marketing.
Hey man, I’ve got your cable right here: 10m 5m 3m 2m 1m HDMI 1.4 2.0 2.1 cable male female for Xbox 360 One Series S X PS3 PS4 PS5 Wii U Switch Apple PC iPhone iPad 4K 4:4:4 16:9 1080p 60Hz 120Hz.
It’d worse than things like Temu. With that you just know you’re buying cheap knockoffs with let’s say questionable quality. On Amazon, you don’t know what quality you’re getting, for a worse price, and even worse delivery times (my last purchase from Amazon took 2 months to deliver. For a book!).
Amazon has basically become a delivery company with a shop front and no responsibility.
Their selling fees are utterly incomprehensible, but their calculator reckons you’ll get about half the money for a £18 item and about 60% of it for a £45 item.
I feel like for that sort of cut, Amazon should be taking full responsibility for the fire hazard bullshit available from them.
Amazon, Uber, Deliveroo, etc are just leeches.
Have you had any issues, I’m seeing ridiculously long cables that I didn’t think we’re commercially available like 15m 48gbps HDMI which I thought was above the length maximum
Bought some plant stuff for the wifes bday and the company name on Amazon was XXXtenacion…wtf does that even mean? Why xxx? I don’t know, but there are thousands of these ai generated/poorly translated brandings going on.
…That’s the name of a dead rapper. What the hell?
It used to be the safe alternative to eBay… Nowadays maybe it’s the opposite
Yep, just bought a new pixel directly from the Google store on Amazon. They shipped me a refurbished one that was carrier locked to Verizon. It’s been 3 weeks since I shipped it back and they still haven’t checked it in n for a refund. Prob never buying anything worth more 200 bucks from them again.
Bet it wasn’t google, it was something ‘xingwang productions’ calling themselves google.
Raspberry pi had loads of these during the shortage (still does, I think)… the listing has ‘Raspberry Pi model 4B’ and ‘Visit the raspberry pi store’ and ‘#1 best seller’ and you dig a little and find it’s a reseller who’s shifting at a markup.
Amazon do nothing to prevent companies masquerading as others.
See, this is weird. Normally I get a refund the moment I drop it off at UPS/Kohls/USPS. They don’t even wait for the item to actually reach their warehouse most of the time. This includes a $4k laptop with a DOA thunderbolt port.
I just got straight to the source on Ali for all my chinesium stuff, although if you don’t want to wade through the express it can be a chore. And express vendors can be as expensive as Amazon.
Ebays not bad, especially for used gizmos. And anything important I just get it from a legitimate retailer.
I love how you people go full on crazy when these stories come out.
Yeah, it is definitely just a step away from wish 🙄
I ordered four m.2 chips for a raid and one of them was not like the others. Clearly a diff brand chip with a sticker transferred to it. Had I not bought multiple chips I might not have caught on.
Fuck amazon for anything of value. I now use it only for things like books and cat litter.
I now use it only for things like books
Regarding that … I recently bought a hefty biography on Oppenheimer - should have had more than 500 pages, great reviews. What arrived was a 50-page small format booklet. Not even books are a “safe buy” on Amazon.
Amazon damaged their brand name once they started acting like a third-party marketplace. Now it’s basically almost like ebay.
For books try https://m.alibris.com/
I don’t buy books from them any longer because their packaging is so poor that most of the time books arrive to me damaged from being tossed into a too large box for shipping.
I stopped buying electronics on Amazon after getting bricks instead of a GPU for my PC and they treated me like shit when I went to return it. I filed a complaint with the state about the fraud and their unwillingness to correct it. Complaint didn’t do shit but I was pissed. Now the only stuff I buy on Amazon is random household items and stuff for the kids that’s under 100 bucks.
B&H seems to be the best bet since Newegg went down the drain. I’d always gone to them for camera gear and never had issues. I’ll be going to them for electronics from now on.
Just be aware of their return policy, it’s not quite as no-questions as Amazon usually is. But it’s serviceable.
Ever heard of MicroCenter? There’s only a few but if you live nearish one, go check them out. It’s like a toy store for tech nerds.
that is the full name lol, just look up that.
edit: technically the url is bhphotovideo.com but asking what b&h means is like asking what HP means. it may technically mean something, but no one needs to know it.
I have a microcenter. I only go there for PV
I only buy random cheap shit I can’t find anywhere else. Nothing of substance.
Just got a new watch. Best Buy. Why risk some bullshit knockoff or return from them? Amazon is trash. Basically the American ali express and all the negatives with it
Microcenter is my go to. I live about 45 minutes from one but any PC parts that are expensive I get there, I also open in store to check for GPUs that were returned to the store to make sure someone didn’t swap out with a cheaper part. I don’t build too often so I don’t make my way over there too often.
Is buying returned products a comming thing? Does not the store check that what you returned is what is actually supposed to be before giving you your money back?
I didn’t realize how many issues there were with Amazon, I’ve never had a problem, guess I’ve been lucky. Unfortunately, while there is finally a microcenter being built in Charlotte, it’s not going to be open for a few years. In the meantime, what I can’t get at eBay is still easy to get at Amazon, and return it if it’s a fake.
Edit: nevermind, microcenter in Charlotte is slated to open by early 2024!!
The state AGs are slow on complaints but next time reach for the CFPB, they don’t mess around and you’ll get a call from a human (from Amazon) in a short amount of time.
I spent hours on hold with a company (not Amazon) and they kept giving me the run around. After filing a complaint I got a call back in less than 2 days by someone who immediately fixed the issue.
One thing I noticed, about a third of the time they have lower prices for Legos compared to the official Lego site. I buy a bunch of Legos for my kids and been wondering about this. Are they very clever frauds or do they just have a better logistics system?
Manufacturers who sell both directly and via retail usually offer lower prices to retailers (and usually don’t disclose those prices publicly), asking the retailers to sell at a suggested price (MSRP, often same as the direct sales price). So if you buy direct the manufacturer has a notably higher profit margin.
Big retailers can often get volume pricing which allows them to keep the prices even lower (if they’re willing to reduce profit margins - and yes they do need good logistics to pull this off). Typically the retailers try to make up for the lower margin in volume of sales (and/or by convincing you to buy other higher margin stuff from them too), like when an electronics store selling you an iPhone tries to sell you insurance and accessories to increase their margin since that range of phones are low margin items.
Fraudulent parts on Amazon is a mix clever and just plain dumb I got bricks instead of a GPU. For work I’ve gotten a handful of hard to notice frauds. We got some Samsung SSDs the older sata drives not NVMe. One was a different shade of black and looked altered. It had the guts of a USB drive with a usb to sata homebrew conversion. That one Amazon took back no questions but it was a company purchase so they probably treat those differently.
For Legos if they were frauds I would imagine it would be noticeable. It’s probably a discount because of the volume they purchase.
If you buy legos often I’ve had some good luck going to goodwill stores and getting them super cheap. It’s not going to be a set. Usually it’s mixed pieces in a vacuum sealed bag or bin if there are a lot.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The pricing didn’t raise any red flags since the user paid close to MSRP for the 24-core chip.
Switching the IHS on a cheap chip to sell it as a higher-tier SKU is the oldest tactic in the playbook.
There are many ways to spot a fake processor; however, the typical consumer doesn’t check the product’s authenticity.
In the Redditor’s case, he bought the phony Core i9-13900K in April and evidently hasn’t noticed that he was scammed until now.
The fraudster only receives a $180 profit from the operation, leading to a discussion among Redditors on the genuineness of the case.
The fact that you’re buying a product from a big retailer, such as Amazon or Newegg, can sometimes give you a certain level of confidence.
The original article contains 416 words, the summary contains 126 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
