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.
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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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).
I like when you pay extra to avoid them, and the other site just orders from Amazon anyway and has it shipped to you.
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.
What did the government do to cause that?
It's a new packaging law. Every non-Austrian merchant who wants to ship goods to Austria has to have a local notary acting as a representative who has to register the packaging used for shipments with the local authorities and is personally held liable for this. There are local notaries that offer this service for foreign merchants for about €800 per year. However, Austria is such a small market that this most likely eats up all of the revenue from Austrian customers for small merchants, so most just stopped shipping to the country. Of course, large merchants like Amazon easily can handle that fee.
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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.
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I second the other commenter just stop using it. I haven't order anything from Amazon for the better half of a decade. There's no product worth buying that can't be found off Amazon.
You have no duty to reward poor practices with your business.
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.
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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.
Ah yes, CHORUTY brand, my favorite
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.
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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?
You are right! I double checked it's XXXFlower, not the rapper :)
I would've believed you either way lmao. The amount of weird brand names when I'm looking for something as generic as, say, a HDMI cable, wouldn't make me surprised if a seller named themselves after XXXTentacion
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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.
The problem is Amazon puts everything with the same SKU in the same bin. So your "xingwang productions" Pixel phones are in the same place as the official "Google Store" stuff.
I basically stopped buying on Amazon unless there's no other way to get what I want (or it doesn't matter that much) because of this. Definitely not touching any food, skin cream, etc from there or expensive electronics.
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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.
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I've seen so many Amazon drop ship listings on ebay. They don't even use different pictures.
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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.
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Amazon damaged their brand name once they started acting like a third-party marketplace. Now it's basically almost like ebay.
Except worse because they mix inventory so it's easier for sellers to get away with scams
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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.
I use B&H for new tech stuff now. Sometimes the Bay of E for used.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
If you're building systems, I would assume you're the kind of person that knows how they work.
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The system tells you what CPU it has on boot.
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The BIOS tells you what CPU you have.
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MemTest86 would have told you what CPU you had when you tested it after assembling your system.
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Windows tells you what you have in Settings > About and Task Manager.
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Apps like CPU-Z have been downloaded a billion times and tell you what CPU you have.
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Geekbench would have told you what CPU you have and how it performs.
The article mentions someone paying a bunch for a specific CPU back in April, but then never bothered actually checking it until recently... What the CPU had written on it is meaningless. I couldn't even tell you what my current CPU looked like before I installed it. It could have said Pentium 2 or 486SX or Core i-13. What mattered was that it physically fit, the system booted, and my software said "yup, this is what you paid for."
The issue is if it never occurred to you that you might have been scammed you might not ever think to look.
I built my first computer last year, with all NiB internals, my main concerns when assembling it was does it work. If it underperformed (due to a bootleg part) I might not have been able to appreciate due to a lack of reference point.
This kind of practice is perfect for targeting the person using PC part picker to build a computer without an indepth knowledge or a relative buying it as a gift for someone else.
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