this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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This may be true at the moment, but Amazon can control how shitty the non-prime experience is.
Personally, I'm trying to avoid Amazon altogether. It's much worse now, and flooded with cheap defective shit. I've also been noticing that a lot of manufacturers don't sell on Amazon (guessing Amazon takes a big cut).
My retired mother was trying to look for a new Nintendo Switch dock for my niece. She asked me if she was looking at the right one on Amazon and showed me one with a picture of a real looking Nintendo Switch dock except the logo was blurred out.
I scrolled through the Amazon results and was having trouble figuring which was the real one. instead I went to the official Nintendo store and sent her the link to the switch dock from there.
Amazon is really a horrible user experience for buying anything that isn't cheap junk.
Your retired mother is the ultimate Amazon mark. Like you said, Amazon is full of sellers with photoshopped images of shitty Chinese knock offs. Regular people wouldn't be able to tell the difference. You basically have to be a forensic expert in your chosen field to have any luck on Amazon.
The main trick is checking the seller. Certain ones are very reliable for used-but-good things like dvds/books. And you just use amazon for the shipping part.
But even these days they use another shipping company.
For your used things for sure, the seller being reputable and the items being less common works well. Common items (like that knock off Switch dock above) that can be faked are tough because even if you buy product X from seller A, all product Xs can be in the same bin at the warehouse and Amazon just grabs one and ships. if Seller B is pushing a hard-to-distinguish knock off that Amazon believes is product X, then one might end up with that one and think seller A is to blame. That sort of mistake is definitely Amazon's fault in my view. You can end up with knock off stuff when buying from the official brand's store on Amazon for crying out loud.
The quality of good is the big thing for me, and you can't discriminate through the reviews. They are all astroturfed.
Basically, if I can buy from anywhere else, then I will, but finding goods out there is harder now that web search is shit.
actually READ the reviews you can usually tell which ones are legit. and read the lowest ones first.
Amazon takes 50% on average now
https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/amazon-gets-a-50-average-cut-of-sales-from-sellers-report/445043
They're only cutting fees in categories competing with Shein
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-reduced-seller-fees-to-compete-with-shein-2023-12
They also halted doing returns when the product is faulty. I guess there was some sort of scam going on over Christmas where a bunch of shitheads claimed items didn’t arrive so they could get money back but it’s no reason for Amazon to take it out on legit customers when it’s a simple return entry. It’s like they suddenly forgot they were online and can simply remove a line of code to avoid the scam entirely.