Amazon "... is turning their marketplace into a flea market of total junk."
Man if this isn't the dead-on honest truth. Amazon is so garbage now that Walmart.com is a trusted supplier by comparison.
I can't believe Amazon gets away with the crap they do. They so obviously turn a blind eye to constant, serious anti-consumer crap from Chinese sellers. Why? And why doesn't the FTC or any other department do anything?
Half of the Twitter thread is just talking about literal bribes paid to Amazon staff to conveniently change things in the system in the black-hat sellers' favor.
This is not a "why don't they fight the spam harder" problem. That's Google's problem. Amazon's problem is, apparently, that their corporate culture is so toxic and broken as to make any kind of internal controls or moderation outright useless.
Just recently Amazon allowed me to buy a kindle book for my specific kindle device, which turned out to not be supported. But they still allowed me to purchase and deliver it to this kindle. Only once I went to the device to sync it did I learn that it was incompatible. I was not allowed a refund.
The reasonable behaviour would of course be to give a pop-up like "hey, you're trying to buy a book that doesn't work for your Kindle, are you sure this is what you want?" I bet they have some sort of disclaimer hidden away in some giant heap of legalese making it "legal" but the whole flow was clearly designed to trick people this way. And I'm a programmer, I don't get tricked as easily as the average person in this context(I hope).
Amazon is full of minor counts of fraud like this and at their scale I bet it adds up to real money.
Beats me. It's even a Paperwhite, not like it's completely prehistoric either. The book was Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces. Hell it's even freely available in html format, but I wanted to buy it anyway because I like to support authors of great books whenever possible. I've not yet tried to sideload the free version, but I bet it would work...
I've never seen anything like that. I was able to request a refund, and I did, but it was denied. I then contacted support with no luck there either. Maybe you have consumer protections I don't in your country?
Nevertheless, why on earth would it allow the purchase to happen when it was set to deliver to a specific unsupported kindle, my only one? It just makes no sense other than as a scam.
FWIW a few years ago I found the my-country-Amazon is not another-country-Amazon.
I had a problem with a phone after 6-12 months and they just sent me a replacement. A similar thing happened a couple of years later, I contacted support like at 1am from another European country and apparently I was sent to Amazon US support, which were useless... On the way back to the UK (still in the EU), I contacted support again (at a normal time) and this time they gave me a refund.
> Man if this isn't the dead-on honest truth. Amazon is so garbage now that Walmart.com is a trusted supplier by comparison.
I would have agreed with this sentiment six months ago, but now Walmart allows third-party sellers. I could consolidate to "At least BRICK-AND-MORTAR Walmart stores should have reliable products", but physical Walmart seems to have gotten in bed with this Chinese brand "onn." Their products are absolute garbage, and they seem to have jettisoned everything else from their store. I've had to tell my parents to please stop buying any electronics stuff from Wal-Mart and go to a Target or something when their iPhone cable breaks so that they can at least get a proper Anker cable.
It's really tiring how much time I have to spend protecting my family from junk products these days.
I think "onn" is just Walmart's "store brand" for generic electronics[1]. Kind of like "Insignia" and BestBuy. The design and manufacturing is all outsourced and these are usually quite crappy as one would expect.
> Walmart is Onn’s parent company. Onn is Walmart’s generic brand electronics label, and Onn products, including Onn TVs, are only available in Walmart stores.
Regardless, the last time I went into a Wal-Mart where my parents live, it wasn't just that they were prioritizing the onn brand stuff: it was literally all they had. Reliable third-party brands like Anker weren't even on the shelves anymore.
I have a hunch this might be Walmart's finely tuned supply chain figuring out that Onn is what sells best at that location so they overstock that particular store with them.
Last time I was in Walmart (2 days ago) I picked up a SanDisk SD card specifically because I've had good luck with them. All the other brands were there and Onn was just the stuff on the bottom shelves.
They're literally the same - I see the same product sold by shady third parties being sold on both sites. At least with Walmart you can select "Available for pickup" and get products that Walmart themselves sell and stand behind.
> Amazon courting overseas manufacturers and sellers at all costs.
Why though? How does it benefit Amazon to have endless, no-name, bad quality listings? It makes the consumer experience awful & dangerous, not to mention the continued lowering trust in the marketplace.
As others have mentioned, it's often better to go to Target/Walmart/Costco/etc to buy from a reputable supply chain (instead of risking getting counterfeit goods from Amazon).
Amazon excels on shipping speed (logistics), but why bother when it's mostly garbage that sometimes gets returned?
Yeah I wish he had elaborated on that point. What are they doing to court those sellers and most importantly, why? Surely they know that their reputation is going down the tubes. Are they just so dominant now that they don't care?
As long as Amazon has their fulfillment and delivery network, I don't think they'll ever be replaced by AliExpress (in the US, at least). I've never seen anyone delivering packages in an AliExpress van :)
It really seems like they want to be a shipping and warehouse service and get out of retail entirely. Maybe better profit margins, or an easier way out of looking like a monopoly. I'm sure they've got some metric to quantify how much profit they're getting for each ounce of reputation lost and they're #winning.
Man if this isn't the dead-on honest truth. Amazon is so garbage now that Walmart.com is a trusted supplier by comparison.
I can't believe Amazon gets away with the crap they do. They so obviously turn a blind eye to constant, serious anti-consumer crap from Chinese sellers. Why? And why doesn't the FTC or any other department do anything?