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steveBK1231 day ago | parent | context | favorite | on: How Amazon pushes up prices all across the Interne... I find that 20 years ago I shopped at Amazon for the low prices, but 2020s+ I shop at Amazon due to their logistics. The problem for everyone else is not simply that Amazon ships quickly, I almost don't even care about that. The thing is that Amazon ships & delivers on a reliable predicted schedule. When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does. I shop at specific competitors who can do similar (B&H, Sweetwater, etc). Many online stores big & small in the year 2026 will still take days to even send shipment info, followed by using unreliable carriers that miss ETAs. I would even be OK with these stores giving a narrow range or probability "90% of the time this arrives between Tuesday & Wednesday".. But I am not in the mood to order stuff that may arrive in 2-10 days with very little clarity on which end of the range. help 
CrimsonRain1 day ago | next[–] And then return... Got a dud? Quality not as expected? Ordered two by mistake? Size is not fitting? Take it to nearest post office, scan a qr code and hand it over. Done. The other day I had to pack a product not bought from Amazon, then drive 25 minutes to a specific company's drop off point at some weird opening hours... And that's after it took me to write manual email to get return label...the entire process took multiple weeks. And then a few more weeks until getting the refund. At this point, I'm happy to pay 10% extra just to buy from Amazon. reply mchusma1 day ago | parent | next[–] I agree, returns are where amazon crushes it. I feel like there should be some startup just focusing on making the perfect returns product for small brands. Just do anything including at home pickup and then figure out how to optimize later. reply yz4531 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Fwiw, Amazon also offers sellers return as a service. Sellers do not need to onboard to Amazon logistics to use the return service. Ofc someone has to pay for that. Taking returned items from customers is only the beginning of the process. The real difficulties show up after that. Which of the returns can be sold as new, which can be sold as-is, and which can be repaired / refurbished. What if a unit is returned once again? Did the customer return counterfeit? How to detect bad-faith actors (which may be the seller)? Who is to blame for damages? What if the item requires special handling (household chemicals, batteries, etc.)? And how to safely dispose / liquidate inventory while being compliant to all the regulations? And, imagine adding taxes, revenues, fees, on top of all that. A lot of these questions are very labor-intense. It may be possible to automate some bits here and there, but the complexity is inherent to the problems. It'd be really hard to imagine a random startup can handle returns half as well. Amazon's regulatory compliance team is probably many times larger than a random average startup. Here the economies of scale is really in favor of the big players. reply StilesCrisis1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Staples is now directly selling Amazon returns, essentially unsorted, in "win bins." It is SUPER strange and makes me wonder if they are on the verge of closing. They load the bins on a certain day of the week, and everything is priced the same ($15?). Each day the "bin price" goes down. reply sleepyfoe221 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Staples worker here. We're not closing. Amazon Returns are terrible for us. We get absolutely nothing out of it. Our stores pay for everything; the boxes, tape, shipping, etc. Nobody got a pay raise out of it either. reply StilesCrisis22 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] If the store is taking extreme measures like putting a flea market in the center of the store, and you're telling me that's still not profitable, what makes you think Staples is a healthy business? I'm super confused by your response. reply fatnoah23 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] > We get absolutely nothing out of it. Except from compulsive shoppers like me that can't walk into a Staples without buying $100 worth of stuff. reply steveBK12323 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] The “everything is a casino” economy in action reply markdown1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] That model started in South America. They're called Bin Stores. One day a week the bins fill up with returned/liquidated goods from Amazon, Target, etc etc. Everything in the bin is the same price and the price drops every day until they fill up again a week later. Search "bin store" on youtube or tiktok and you should get a million videos about the craze. reply StilesCrisis22 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] That's exactly what I explained in my post, just Staples is now doing it; a formerly reputable office supply store has turned the center of the store into a flea market. reply markdown1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] > Which of the returns can be sold as new, which can be sold as-is, and which can be repaired / refurbished. What if a unit is returned once again? Did the customer return counterfeit? How to detect bad-faith actors (which may be the seller)? Who is to blame for damages? What if the item requires special handling (household chemicals, batteries, etc.)? And how to safely dispose / liquidate inventory while being compliant to all the regulations? They just sell it in bulk and leave it to regular folk to buy pallets or containers and sell the shit on WhatNot. reply knottn21 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] By necessity. They sell so many counterfeit items, items sold as new but are used, items sold with misleading pictures or descriptions, various other scams to tolerate if not encourage. They’ve managed to normalize that and to do so they had to make returns frictionless. It’s a failing strategy. People just buy less and less from Amazon, unless they have cognitive issues. reply lelandfe1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Amazon does not equally crush it with returns as you may discover when facing issues with things like televisions or expensive clothing reply OroPla22 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Last time I returned a TV on amazon the first thing the website did was offer me a no question asked $100 back if I decide to keep the TV anyway. But I returned it and after weeks of back and forth with probably LLMs I got it sorted out. They came to take the TV away and I got my money back eventually. Safe to say I ended up buying my next TV (actually a monitor this time) from amazon, too. If they struggle with that kind of return then what would anyone else do? I don't have a car, I need someone to come and pick it up. reply hammock1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Those were never easy to return ever reply lelandfe22 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Time was, you took them back to the store. reply hammock22 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] TVs returns came with a hefty restocking fee though, and designer clothes could be returned only with tags on (must be PRISTINE tags) for store credit or not at all. You may be too young to remember? reply lelandfe21 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Oh wow, my bluff has been called. Boy do I have egg on my face. How can I subscribe to your newsletter of these old fashioned anecdotes of the distant aughts? Do you actually have gray hairs? Do you remember what malls were? Hey, I heard someone mention Heelys, were those real? reply novok1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] There are a bunch, like ups & happy returns which I used for GAP recently. reply 1072928723 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] The one issue here is that to achieve this result and make the customer king (or spoiled child, you choose), they exploit and abuse absolutely everyone else, people and partners. reply amiga38622 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Yes. For example, https://abc7news.com/post/huge-pile-amazon-packages-fills-ba... Foreign seller on Amazon ships from China to the US. Returns? Random person's US address. Customer is happy. Seller is happy. Random person where all the unused car seats are dumped -- very unhappy. reply seb120414 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] I would think a random address is random and not static... reply OroPla22 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] I'm a customer, though, not the moral police. I don't have the time, energy or inclination to screen every company before buying from them. Everyone large enough will have a few disgruntled people making up bad things that might or might not be true. In the case of amazon, the few claims I followed up on turned out to be exaggerated or false. reply 1072928721 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Great mentality. reply allarm20 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Such is the reality as we perceive it through our senses. Everyone has to put up with certain corrupt practices in order to preserve their sanity and resources, such as time and money. reply 1072928720 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] That’s the moment we need to show some morality and empathy. reply herbst21 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] And they fail at making the customer king even. I can't name a single other platform where customer support is so bad and unreachable. Directly ordering in china even offers better customer support in case something is wrong. reply aduwah20 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] I am using Amazon for 15+ years and I have nothing but the best to say about their customer support. The issues with the monopoly are true, but in this instance I am happy to pay a bit more and not to be vulnerable to fake sites, dodgy sellers who do not replace an obviously bad product and the like reply herbst4 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] I bought a pack of cell batteries a while ago. They arrived after 2 months instead of a few days, have been the wrong kind, the packaging was really dirty and the cells didn't all work. Still took several weeks and like 5 emails to get my money back. I couldn't imagine a worse customer support than this. reply yunwal16 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] I want to shop on your version of Amazon reply IAmBroom16 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] > Directly ordering in china even offers better customer support That is 180-degrees off of my experience. Chinese sellers go so far as to actually claim they are US or UK sellers, right up until you have to return something. I bought a size 6-1/2 blue hat; they shipped a size 7 black hat; the return mail to China ("We're a USA company!") would have cost me 75% of the initial purchase. I protested to Discover; they eventually decided I ordered what I got (WHAT???), and sided with the seller. reply herbst4 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] I never had anything like this happen to me. Tracking shows where the package is coming from from day one. No way to pretend to sit anywhere else. Returns are weird because usually I just get my money back and have the keep the wrong product. Had this happen easily over 100 times already. reply icantevenhold1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] Personally I’m happy to pay 20% extra elsewhere just to know that Bezos is not getting any of my money. But I’m weird like that; I also think ordering everything online is inherently immoral (provided you are an able bodied person living in a city) reply aleph_minus_one23 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] > I also think ordering everything online is inherently immoral (provided you are an able bodied person living in a city) Most things that I buy on Amazon (and other online shops) are simply not easy to get in the city where I live (and it's not a small city). I very recently wrote about this topic in a HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50063708 Additionally, keep in mind that getting into the city center means a bicycle ride of nearly 25 minutes (using a tram (or hypothetically a car) wouldn't be much faster) per direction. So, any shopping that I do in the city will automatically have an overhead of at least 50 minutes just for getting there and back again. To this, you have to add the time that you need to find the respective item in the shop (for bigger shops, this can take some time even if it sells what you need). This is still often worth it if you are very certain that you will get what you want. But if you are not certain about this, you typically wasted at least 90 minutes. I admit that for some kinds of items/shop, this risk is mitigated because some shops (e.g. the next hardware store) let you check online which items are available in the store. Then, in Germany there are so opening times of shops. Since the city where I live is rather large, most shops are open at least until 8 pm. In smaller cities, shops often close much earlier (say 6 pm). At least if you are living in a smaller city, shopping often thus requires careful coördination with work time. reply icantevenhold14 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] That is totally fair. I (used to) live in big cities in Germany and for me the next big grocery store or street with a lot of small shops for basically everything I need day to day was about 10-15 minutes walking distance. As a laptop worker I usually enjoy being able to move my body a bit. Similar for the 20 minute bike ride for a more specialised shop. And of course sometimes I would order online if I can’t find it in a normal store. But never from Amazon ;) Going after the examples you mentioned in your other post: - books of any kind i can order in a nearby book store, about 10 minutes from my home; sure it sometimes takes a week or so but it’s a real book store with actual people working there who love books. Haven’t yet found a book they couldn’t get, but my reading also isnt very obscure. - maker supplies i cant really say, but I probably would also have to order them online, no idea - games i buy online, I can’t remember when I last got a physical copy of a game; but then again I play the same 5 games for the last 2 decades reply CrimsonRain3 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] > never from amazon Just now ordered two Japanese glass sharpening stones, from amazon :) reply CrimsonRain3 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] yeah, the city shops, over charging things, no catalog to go thru, spend my own time going there, finding things, then carry back. Multiply by people living in the city. Next you will say it is immoral to ride a car, we are destroying horse stable worker's lives. Good luck though. reply WheatMillington1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Why is it immoral to order things online? reply fsckboy1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] i'm guessing he means "and thereby putting a neighbor out of business." recycling isn't convenient, but people do it with an eye to the greater good. it's not hard to imagine that an Amazon monopoly is not for the greater good. reply WheatMillington1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] I agree entirely that shopping on Amazon is immoral, but it's hard to understand how that extends to ALL online shopping. reply icantevenhold14 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] I mean I was being a bit fatecious. There are many good moral reasons for ordering stuff online, see my other reply. But often I see peers ordering in groceries when there is a store literally 5 minutes down the street where they can buy everything - that’s immoral imo. Not only because of the fucked up working conditions of delivery workers, the wasteful packaging and energy wasted on delivery vehicles but also because it’s an unhealthy and antisocial lifestyle. And yea it kills small businesses often as well - not always ofc. Take with a grain of salt. Like with so many things the 80/20 rule is useful here reply oxag3n1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] I had to return iSpring RO system bought through their official portal. It came as a shock to me that I had to pay for shipment that was 70% of the contents value. IMO that's the way to discourage returns. reply darknavi1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] > Got a dud? Quality not as expected? Ordered two by mistake? Size is not fitting? I totally agree, but I find the quality of the items I get off of Amazon to generally be a lot less than other places I chose to shop. Likely due to the fact that I intentionally shop on other sites for specific products but on Amazon I get things that just aren't necessary for me so I spend less time curating the purchases. reply CrimsonRain3 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] It is a fact that there are a huge number of chinese knockoff shit in there. But at the same time, a lot of chinese stuff are good enough. I just try to buy good brand stuff. You can always ask your agent if a particular brand is high quality (e.g, ordered some BRAINGAIN weights instead of chinese crap) reply TrainedMonkey1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] Much better that nearest post office. Take it to the nearest whole foods and don't even bother with the box. reply HoldOnAMinute1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] And while you're there....look at these delicious organic local strawberries for $4.99.... reply jhallenworld1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] This doesn't work for all of their items- some have to go to a larger Amazon return location, and you must provide packaging. I'm not sure what triggers this. reply natebc1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] I had the option to return to a Sheetz a couple of weeks back. Totally unattended kiosk, scan QR code, bag item and drop it in. reply Frieren1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] > And then return... My little experience with Amazon is that quality assurance has been moved to the customer. It is on you to see that a product is wrong/not what you wanted. > At this point, I'm happy to pay 10% extra just to buy from Amazon. As the article states, you are paying more than 10% extra because Amazon. And everybody else too. reply rdedev1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] > Got a dud? Quality not as expected? Ordered two by mistake? Size is not fitting? Take it to nearest post office, scan a qr code and hand it over. Done. I'd say this is probably a US privilege. Ive had some trouble returning items in india reply qmarchi1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Similar experience in Japan. We have lockers all over the place that we can just scan a QR code, shove it in a locker, and be on my merry way. reply herbst21 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Remotely impossible to return anything in Switzerland too. Either you get ignored, pay a lot on top or just get your money back. reply matkoniecz1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] In Poland mandatory acceptance of returns for 14 days on items bought outside physical shop is mandated by law and applies to all businesses. Certain items like quickly spoiling food or tickets for specific events are excluded. Items damaged by buyer are also excluded, obviously. Law was introduced in Poland in 2014. Not sure is it EU-wide invention or local one. Certain scam-prone cases have an extended deadline of 30 days. Returns are often getting free shipping, but that is at discretion of seller. reply markdown1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] US customers are nuts. I recently heard from a vendor (small business) that someone demanded a refund because they didn't like the taste of the beverage they bought. That's not the crazy part. The crazy part is that the vendor refunded their money instead of laughing them out the door. reply therealpygon1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] You think people are supposed to be forced to accept things they don’t like or are unhappy with as customers? Let me make sure I understand: if you go buy a sandwich, and it tastes so bad you can’t even eat it, your answer is, “aww shucks, they got me again, I should lose money!” …and are not only “okay” with that, but enjoy it so much as to go online to ridicule others who don’t do the same? Weird. reply nani8ot1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] How bad can a sandwich even taste that you can't eat it? As long as it's safe to eat and the same product as advertised I don't know why a shop should refund. Any customer could return their half eaten sandwich and get all their money back. I can't go to the cinema and decide I don't like the movie after 10 minutes to get my money back. reply Kevin_Flynn1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] > How bad can a sandwich even taste that you can't eat it? I bought a ham sandwich at a convenience store one time. Got in the car, started to peel back the plastic. The ham was green. Bright green. Went back inside, tried to explain and get a refund. Store clerk initially refused. After a brief explanation of economics, he agreed, refunded my money, and then put the sandwich back in the cooler to resell. {facepalm} Welcome to Earth. reply DerGalaxy22 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] So not the scenario proposed at all. Word reply markdown16 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] That's a different matter altogether. The food is bad, get refund. But if you've never drunk Fanta Blueberry before and you try that new flavour, you don't get to ask for a refund because you decide you don't like it and prefer the original orange flavoured Fanta. reply mitxela22 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Did you call the health inspector to revoke their food license? reply Kevin_Flynn22 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] No, I did not. I probably should have. The bottom of package had like 5 of those little price tag gun expiration date stickers on it, stacked on top of each other. Inspector Clouseau could have solved the case. reply pxx17 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] > I can't go to the cinema and decide I don't like the movie after 10 minutes to get my money back. you, uh, typically can? not every theatre will comply but many will. I don't think you're understanding the concept here. reply tombert1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] Yeah, returning ends up being the clencher for me for a lot of Amazon stuff. If I think there's basically no likelihood of me returning something, I'll sometimes shop elsewhere, but for anything where there's even a chance of me not liking it for whatever reason I will buy on Amazon now. reply parpfish1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] i'm happy to pay a convenience fee to not have to set up an account to order from each individual store. having my address and payment info in one centralized superstore is way better than having it spread around dozens of niche businesses reply weaksauce1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] apple pay is pretty damn convenient and seemingly secure. open a webpage and scan the apple qr like code and it's all done without much worry. maybe there's a mitm attack but i feel like you have a better shot at getting a refund from apple(i admit i've only used it a few times and nothing substantial or expensive) i believe it also autofilled the address form for me. reply asteroidburger1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Shopify seems to be helping paper over that. I've recently gotten into a hobby of 3d printer modifications (prints are great, but I also seem to like modifying and repairing just as much), and I've been broadening my online shopping horizons as a result. Quite a few "standalone" stores online are linked into Shopify. reply dv_dt19 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] As a long time Amazon customer I stopped Prime and stopped using the platform because all of those went downhill and unreliable as their prices went up - even after they opened a local warehouse in my same city limits reply watercast1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] I used to feel this way about Amazon returns. Then a seller sent me the wrong item and Amazon rejected the return and re-charged me and I've been trying to get my money back for over a year. I do think it will only be one more phone call, but I have thought that with every phone call. It's less than $50 but it's ridiculous. It has happened before that a seller would send me the wrong thing, which isn't great, but at least they would refund me. They have made this experience so tedious and frustrating, I'm sick of it and have moved all my physical purchases elsewhere. reply analog311 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] The tradeoff for consumers is that convenient returns are cheaper to implement than quality control. reply sergiotapia1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] I was floored the other day doing an Amazon return. It was a rented office space, with just a window where you drop off your item to a clerk. I peeked inside it was floor to ceiling packages and toys and items. And there was a line behind me. The sheer logistics and human will that made that possible is crazy to me. Extrapolate to multiple locations in Miami alone. Then Florida. Then East Coast. Then USA. Then Europe. Global locations. Who is in charge of all this? How do they keep track of all this? How do they identify a tiny little podunk location is fucking up and how do they find someone they can trust to run it? It's crazy! Think about it next time you return something to Amazon. reply alex_young1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] As I understand it they just stop there. They pallet stuff up and sell it in bulk to someone who then proceeds to part ways with it on eBay or something like that. I think most of the mass market companies do this. Costco is well known for this. reply michaelt1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] At the online retailers I've worked at (not Amazon) returned items get split into a small number of groups. A person returns a $5000 RTX 5090? A manager will be paged, who will carry it over to the high value items cage, in full view of the CCTV. A person who returns a $5 bike light? And that person has also spent $$$$ over the years with a 0.5% return rate? Straight on the pallet of mixed returns without even opening the package. Medium-value returns and customers with an eyebrow-raising return rate get a medium amount of inspection. reply cwillu1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] eBay or a third party amazon listing. reply jabroni_salad1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] If you own some floor space and want something to do with it then you can join the amazon SPN (service provider network) and offer international returns processor. The returns processor either boxes up many individual items heading for the same destination into a Master Carton or arranges to dispose of the item somehow depending on how the seller wants their returns handled. reply icantevenhold1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Modern slave labour economics reply wahnfrieden1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] Just bear in mind that if they don't like how often you return or the circumstances, they will issue you a sudden lifetime ban But also if you go to support chat (not via the order details, which often rejects attempts at getting support) via the site footer, and escalate to an agent, you can tell them you don't have a post office that's easy to get to for you and don't drive etc. and they will just issue you a refund (if it's a quality problem). Done this many times when the product was damaged. reply rlpb1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] > Just bear in mind that if they don't like how often you return or the circumstances, they will issue you a sudden lifetime ban I think that if I had to return frequently, I'd find a different vendor well before Amazon would decide they don't want me as a customer. On the rare occasion I want a return, I've assumed that the reason they handle it without any issue is because they can see my lifetime purchase value vs. my return rate. Maybe they don't care about my stats I guess but whichever way I'm currently happy in that regard. I do worry that the competition is being wiped out, but I don't believe in boycotts for idealistic antitrust reasons. reply phainopepla21 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Your second paragraph seems to explain your first. reply fn-mote1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Is your implication that they are cheating Amazon by claiming there is no easy return route? Or are you saying that their many returns drew a ban even when they were being approved for them? There is too little detail in the GP to draw a conclusion, so this comment seems unfair. reply wahnfrieden1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] They're accusing me of cheating Amazon and having experienced a ban myself. Neither is the case and my post didn't indicate either being so. IDK why I'm catching an accusation and downvotes by telling people about Amazon customer support protocols that are internal policy but not documented publicly: that they will ban you for returns past some threshold of frequency and price, and they offer refunds for items that arrive damaged even if they first push you to spend your time returning them instead. reply wahnfrieden1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] You're suggesting I've been banned for abusing the service? I've never been banned and I don't abuse it. What I said is also true, that I don't drive etc. I don't need to have been banned myself to know how they've operated with others. And seeking refunds for goods that were damaged upon arrival is not abuse. There's no need to give in to their first preference to return an item when it is in fact their policy to process refunds for them too, they just hide it behind customer service protocols instead of exposing it in UI. You don't need to settle for the first suggested remediation from a business's customer service to be ethical, or shaming people for escalating. That's just being a chump. reply phainopepla21 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Not accusing you (or the imaginary person who returns many things but can't reach a post office, UPS store, etc, since you've made it clear that isn't you) of abuse. But it makes sense that they are doing analysis and banning customers that look like they're abusing the system, regardless of the truth of the matter. If someone is frequently receiving damaged goods and frequently requesting refunds without returns, that will be flagged for fraud. reply randbyte1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] Except you don’t have the choice to “pay 10% extra just to buy from Amazon”. Amazon force sellers to set not-lower price everywhere else. reply fn-mote1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] That’s the article’s story, but in practice vendors offer coupons that give a lower price on their own site. reply al_borland1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] I haven’t run into any such coupons, but have heard this complaint about how Amazon as poisoned online retail, holding sellers hostage, countless times now. reply siva71 day ago | prev | next[–] I think you're slightly wrong. It's not prices, it's not logistics. Amazon dominates because they have the power & money to do the one single thing their competiton couldn't do without going out of business: No-questions-asked returns. 9 out of 10 people i ask this is the single reason they stay at Amazon. reply sippingabonedry1 day ago | parent | next[–] The flip side to this is I've on multiple occasions had Amazon ship me clearly used shit resold as new — Amazon.com was the seller. One even came with a sticker: "Thanks for giving this product a second life!" The worst of the worst among us use Amazon as a try-before-you-buy or rental house. Their lax return policy encourages them. If I buy anything important, especially expensive electronics, I buy it from somewhere else. If it's a reputable store with a strict return policy, I'm doubly sure there will be no fuckery. reply stevepike1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] This happens with items where it's clear no human even glanced at it. I received a sump pump that was wet and dirty! reply sippingabonedry1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] You'd better pray it was not a model that can double as a sewage/effluent pump... reply stevepike1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] I returned it, got another used one, gave up and went to home depot. reply chung81231 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] I remember why most of the stuff on the frys shelf was like this. I think it was their downfall and for me i stopped shopping there because of all the broken items. With Amazon at least I don't have a huge cost to drive there and back. reply IncreasePosts1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Returns are monitored and you will be restricted if it looks like you're abusing the return policy reply sippingabonedry1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] And yet people continue to do it 1000s of times a day, and they are clearly re-shelving lightly used items. Most of my recent returns were for receiving used product. reply hermannj3141 day ago | root | parent | next[–] I wouldn't believe this until it happened to me. New bedding on prime day - came used and stained. This is fucking disgusting. Amazon is like - we will send you a replacement but you have to print a label, box it back up and drive to a UPS store to return. Why are we working for them for free? You send me soiled bedding and the reply is to make us do work and then get the product we originally bought. I tried quitting these people years ago, its hard to do. reply sethops11 day ago | root | parent | next[–] For me it was a Noctua fan that had a thick layer of dust built up. Who the fuck returns a $20 fan with thousands of hours of use? And why did Amazon think it was appropriate to send that trash to me when I paid for new?? reply ssl-31 day ago | root | parent | next[–] A previous customer paid money for a new fan, and then they got a refund by returning the old fan as new. Now they have a new fan, and they have their money back. The shitbird customer is pleased with their infinite-fan life hack. Their return goes back normal stock. --- It's ugly and reprehensible. It happens all the time. It happens with places that are down the street, too. Like: Auto parts. When you stop in at Autozone to get a new water pump for your Ford, the person there retrieves it, brings it to the counter, opens the box, and looks at it. The primary thing they're looking at is the condition. They want to make sure it looks new before they hand it over to you. Because distributors sometimes send out used parts as new. Because customers are scumbags sometimes, and people are lazy sometimes, and shit gets put into the wrong piles sometimes, and -- like any other aspect in life -- it's imperfect. The switcharoo could have happened anywhere. Maybe even in another store with a different marquee in another state. It might not have even been deliberate. reply IncreasePosts1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] People do it thousands of times a day because tens of millions of people order from amazon each day. But any given person doesn't do it thousands of times, or even hundreds of times. Low tens of times in a year is going to raise alarms in their systems. reply gusgus011 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Just wait until they restrict your returns because of how much you've had to return highly used, or broken, or deliverer abused, or knock-off, or arrived days later than projected products. reply mindslight1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Maybe this is a country thing, or tied into one's wider social credit score in the background, or the specifics of something you returned [0], or something else? I've returned plenty of shit and have never had a real problem. I returned over a dozen 32 inch Dell monitors while trying to get 3 that didn't have dead pixels or scratches out of the box. They were stacked on a pallet in my garage waiting for the pickup. You would think this would throw some flags and end up as some kind of fight. But no, Amazon refunded them all in full, no hassle (apart from the hassle of having to do that scale of logistics merely to obtain working products). (I would have honestly given up earlier, sent them all back, and gone with a different brand. Except there had been a good one in the first tranche of 3 that I let go past its return date. I hadn't thought the actual failure rate was going to be > 80%) [0] On my personal account I did have a big red scary warning for a while about "restocking fees", that I think had been prompted by returning a motherboard after having tested it (yet another poorly described product with no way to find out the IOMMU groups short of buying it). I have no idea if it was merely that I had opened/tested a computer component, or if it had gotten smashed up on the way back, or what. But eventually that nag screen did go away. reply ornornor1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Happened to me. I ended up holding the bag for about 400 EUR worth of items. Luckily I had legal insurance that tried to convince Amazon to take it back but they wouldn’t, so the assurance bought the box of stuff off me and refunded me. Fuck bezos and Amazon. Since then, I always look for alternatives to Amazon to buy my stuff. I’ll use Amazon to see if I like it, return it, and go buy somewhere else. If I know the product I’ll just straight out buy it somewhere else. It’s often the same price or very close. Some stuff you can’t really and practically get outside of Amazon. I don’t have a choice then. Because their quality is so low, I’ll just get 3–4 similar items and only keep the one that’s passably usable. I try to cost Amazon as much money as I can. I hate to give them my money but by doing this it feels like I’m getting some payback for the way they treat their customers, employees, delivery people… reply eddythompson801 day ago | root | parent | next[–] You had legal insurance that guarantees Amazon returns? I’m very curious what kind of insurance policy is that? Is that one of those custom business liability insurances? reply kuerbel1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Probably general insurance that pays for a lawyer. Is that not a thing where you live? The insurer in small cases sometimes does "claim settlement via buyout of the matter in controversy", or nuisance value settlement. Cheaper than paying for a lawyer... reply ornornor1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] No, nothing so fancy. Just general legal insurance that would give legal advice and escalate to threats from their own lawyers, and eventually sue on your behalf or settle directly with you when the amounts aren’t worth their effort (like in this case). I also had a debacle with Turkish airlines (I will never fly this shitty airline again, and discourage anyone to do so). They tried to get the airline to pay but were stonewalled and eventually paid us what the airline should have (a couple thousand euros). Then they canceled our policy because we weren’t profitable risks anymore haha. reply jambalaya81 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Doesn't even take that much for some people to be restricted. I had someone steal one box with maybe $50 worth of stuff off of my porch and Amazon replaced it after a ten minute conversation with customer service, but a year or two later someone stole $10 or so worth of an order of clothes laundry/softener toss travel sheets from me (or they just never shipped and I paid for them) after a particularly larger number of orders (I lived somewhere else by then), and Amazon not only did not offer a refund or replacement, they removed any way to request it. I am not sure what their cutoff is or if it has to do with what warehouse it ships from. Maybe people just lie about laundry supplies a lot? Perhaps the cutoff is more to do with the type of products? I had never ordered that sort of stuff before. It is rather gross to me that they let people return clothes and shoes that have been tried on. My current pair of like $110 trail running shoes that I bought on Amazon had been tried on when I got them, and I was a bit unhappy with that, but I decided to see that as more like a shoe store sorta thing. Clothes, not so much. I decided after trying the clothes returns policy once (never tried it on) years and years ago that if I do not want to get things preworn, I feel I should practice what I preach. It is a weird policy, at any rate. reply Terr_1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Enshittification: Customers get screwed because that's where vendors are (even the terrible ones) and vendors get screwed because that's where the customers are (even the terrible ones.) reply woadwarrior011 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] That used to be the case until about a year ago, but isn't the case anymore at least here in Ireland. I'm taking them to small claims court because they closed my account without a refund on a legitimate return. Their customer support has gone from excellent to nearly nonexistent. Fortunately for me, I've kept all the receipts. reply marcosscriven1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] I distrust Amazon for anything over about £150 now. Which seems to coincide with their threshold for needing an OTP. The last straw was getting a blood pressure monitor (which they don’t even sell) in place of £400 smart glasses. They insisted I returned the monitor, then said I failed to return the glasses. Took months for them to refund me. reply velcrovan1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] Weird. I think I might have made three returns to Amazon in 30 years of ordering from them. I research the shit out of just about everything I buy, if I have to return something it's because I either got very cleverly scammed or had a literal stroke before I made the purchase. reply crazygringo1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] I frequently have to return clothing because there's absolutely no way of figuring out which size will fit you since nothing about sizes is standardized. And there's just a lot of stuff that research can't tell you. Sometimes listed dimensions are incorrect or missing. Sometimes it turns out that you buy a simple electronic device that seems like it will do what you need but it emits a high-pitched beep noise every time you press a button that drives you nuts and you're going to return it because of that. There are so many things that just simply are not captured in a product description, and sometimes are not captured by user reviews. I've just ordered an inexpensive steering wheel to use with a racing game. And everything I can find online is contradictory as to whether it suffers from a dead zone problem or not. I simply cannot tell if the people complaining about the dead zone have missed where it can be configured or if it's a problem with the hardware itself. So literally the only way I can figure it out is by ordering it and trying it out and then returning it if it has a dead zone problem. There are plenty of things that you just have to return that cannot be solved with research and have nothing to do with being scammed. Which is why returns are a big part of the economy and a big part of customer service. reply jasode1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] >I frequently have to return clothing because there's absolutely no way of figuring out which size will fit you since nothing about sizes is standardized. I used to take advantage of Amazon's return policy by deliberately buying 3 sizes of the same item (1 below and 1 above my expected size) because clothing manufacturers are not consistent with their sizing. I can then try them all at home to choose best size and return the other 2 that don't fit. I did this for pants, shoes, etc. This really seemed great because I hate going to the store and changing clothes in fitting rooms. However, I stopped doing this many years ago because I found out that some online retailers like Amazon do not restock the returned items for re-sale and instead, throw it away so it eventually ends up in a landfill. In those cases, the sellers just eat the cost of unsold goods that got thrown out. It seemed illogical to throw away perfectly good clothes that are still NEW but somebody explained that Amazon does this because they're paranoid about bodily fluids etc tainting the returns. So to play it safe, they just throw away the returns. reply ornornor1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] > they just throw away the returns. I have no more insider knowledge of how Amazon operates than you do, but judging on the amount of items I’ve received that were clearly used (stains, other people’s hairs, dust, dirt…) but sold as new I’m fairly certain they’ll resell everything that gets returns without even looking at the items. reply sgustard1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] I've returned clothes on Amazon and they told me just to keep it. I assume that's the equivalent of them just sending it to landfill. At least I can donate it to a local charity. Also Zappos was clearly founded on the idea of ordering 3 pairs of shoes and keeping the one that fits. They say the returns go back for sale unless used and then go to charity/reuse, but happy to see other sources you have. I think a lot of that Zappos dna went into Amazon's policies. reply RussianCow1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] I hate to break it to you, but this is true of returns across a lot of companies and product categories. If you return unopened wine to Costco, for example, they throw it out because they can't guarantee that you stored it properly. reply jasode1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] >If you return unopened wine to Costco, for example, they throw it out The food and groceries I already knew about. However, Amazon throwing out returned clothes was a surprise because I've seen clothing retailers like Macy's just put the returned items right back on the rack for re-sale. When you go to a shore store, they don't throw out every pair of shoes that customers tried on and didn't buy. So I just thought Amazon just did the same thing at their warehouse. I've also returned car wax to an OReilly's Auto store and I watched the clerk just put the bottle right back on the shelf for the next customer to buy. It was disconcerting to find out I was adding to the landfill just because I returned clothes to Amazon. Nowadays, I don't order clothes from them unless I'm 100% sure I won't be returning it. reply crazygringo1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] >because I found out that some online retailers like Amazon do not restock the returned items for re-sale and instead, throw it away so it eventually ends up in a landfill This was essentially false, and FUD spread by the anti-Amazon crowd. You will observe official Amazon Resale listings for many items, which is precisely Amazon restocking the returned items. For goods of any signficant value, it is bizarre to suggest that Amazon wouldn't be reselling them. Like, it's ludicrous to suggest they're tossing a $50 shirt instead of reselling it, as long as the return is in resale condition. What Amazon sends to landfills is when items (mostly third-party seller items) aren't selling and the seller doesn't want to keep paying for warehousing or to have them shipped elsewhere so Amazon sends them to landfills. Because nobody is buying the items, there's no demand for them. Not everything sells. Wherever you got the idea that they're paranoid about body fluids, that's somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about. People make up all sorts of things. That's why that have a small army of people inspecting returns. reply jasode1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] >You will observe official Amazon Resale listings for many items, which is precisely Amazon restocking the returned items. To clarify, I'm already aware Amazon re-sells returns. I often buy "Used Like New" electronics from Amazon Resale which are obviously customer returns that Amazon re-boxed. However, the category of clothes is different where it customer returns are often thrown out. >What Amazon sends to landfills is when items (mostly third-party seller items) aren't selling and the seller doesn't want to keep paying for warehousing or to have them shipped elsewhere so Amazon sends them to landfills. No, that's not the full story. What's also happening is that a seller has different options for Amazon's reverse logistics and they have different costs. E.g. pay $1.50 for Amazon to inspect and resell or pay a lower $0.52 to throw it away. A lot of sellers just pay 1/3rd less and let Amazon throw it out. That possibility of me inadvertently adding to landfills is enough to stop me from buying 3 sizes and returning 2. Maybe in some circumstances the other 2 returned items won't be thrown out -- but I can't know for sure so I won't do it. I'll continue to buy clothes from Amazon but only do so when I'm 100% sure I'm going to keep it no matter what. Deep link to a video comment about online returned clothes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66qOop6J8Q8&t=2m56s reply crazygringo1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] If you're talking about some $4 item then sure. But most clothing on Amazon isn't $4. If you're buying $30 or $60 items then they are most definitely having them inspected. Because it's not about $1.50 for inspection vs $0.52 to throw it out. It's about -$1.50 + $8 profit = $6.50 gain for inspection vs. -$0.52 + $0 profit = $0.52 loss for throwing it out. You're missing the entire resale price on the return. Companies aren't leaving money on the table. They are looking to maximize profit and minimize losses. In most places, sending resellable stock to the landfill isn't doing that. reply kazinator1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] On the surface of it, it would appear not to make sense. Why would Amazon take on the cost of handling a return item that they will have to dispose? They could just indicate to the user to keep the item --- and that in fact does happen! I had a return like that just this past week. However, there is an obvious incentive to minimize these no-return refunds and require users to print labels and go through the motion of returning items that won't be restocked. It discourages fraud: people abusing the no-return refund as a way of getting free stuff! The no-return refund has to be a kind of perk for the customer who rarely returns anything or whatever. I would say that it would be astonishing if Amazon pretending to accept returns and then throwing away is a thing that absolutely does not happen, and honestly cannot blame them for it. We are a throw-away-stuff society, and Amazon is not outside of that society. reply crazygringo1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] >We are a throw-away-stuff society, and Amazon is not outside of that society. What Amazon does with returns doesn't have anything to do with what kind of "society" you think we are. What it does with returns is determined by the profit motive. And in most cases, the more profitable thing to do is to resell returned merchandise. Yes, return inspections cost money, but usually less money than what is gained by reselling the item. Returned merchandise has value, and businesses don't make profit by throwing value away when they can make money with it or reduce losses with it instead. I genuinely don't understand all the people who think it's more cost-effective for Amazon to send a $50 shirt to the dumpster rather than resell it. That's not how anything works. reply kazinator1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] What individuals do is also motivated by profit or profit-adjacent motives. Saving money is a profit motive; so is saving time and convenience. > It's more cost-effective for Amazon to send a $50 shirt to the dumpster rather than resell it. It's not a $50 shirt. It's like a $5 shirt to them, which some sucker is willing to pay $50 for. Used, it becomes a $10 shirt. A dumpster can be found right in the neck of the woods of where the returning customer lives, whereas it may have to travel far and pass through more processing if it goes to another customer elsewhere. It needs to be inspected, repacked. There is a risk in every returned item. Sometimes people return a perfectly good item. But sometimes it's because there is something wrong with the item, such that the next buyer is also likely to return it, even if they get it cheaper. Basically returned items are entirely outside of the profit-optimized delivery path. They incur costs and risks, at a reduced revenue. I'd never return an item which matches the description and isn't damaged. If it isn't damaged in any way but does not match the description, that's a problem; if it is sold with the same description, the next customer will also see that it doesn't match. A new listing has to be created for that product. Not gonna happen, or not in the processing time frame of that particular return. reply crazygringo22 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Amazon is not paying $5 for shirts and selling them for $50. That's where your argument is completely mistaken. Stores don't have those kinds of profit margins, that would be absurd. That's the whole point here. If Amazon is selling a shirt for $50, then they are probably acquiring it for $25-30. Believe me, they don't want to throw away that $25-30. That's not how businesses operate. That the part you and a lot of other people seem to be missing here. reply kazinator20 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Not wanting to throw away is sunk cost thinking, which represents how emotional consumers operate. Not businesses like Amazon. How a business operates is: 1. Going forward, ignoring the prior costs associated with the item, is there an expectation that the item will bring in more revenue than what it costs to further handle and move it? (Taking into account its adjusted price, and the probability that it will be returned again by a new buyer?) 2. Is that profit good enough to justify taking away logistics resources from some new item? In every situation in which a returned item is being moved or handled, it displaces a new item that is not being moved or handled. The point of the $5 is not to discuss a sunk cost, but to point out that producing a new item isn't expensive. If producing a replacement item is expensive, that means that a new item is less profitable than if it were cheaper to produce. If a new item is less profitable, then the returned item has a lower bar of profitability to pass in order to be viable. But a returned item is likely not even compared to an identical item anyway, but to some average profitability of moving any item whatsoever which has around the same size and weight. reply crazygringo12 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] You continue to misunderstand. There is no sunk cost fallacy here. Continuing with the same example, suppose the shirt cost Amazon $25 and they sell it for $50. They receive a return. They can either lose $.50 by sending it to a landfill. Or they can gain more like $18 by inspecting it and reselling it by shipping it to a new customer. Understand now? Procuring a new item that sells retail for $50 is expensive. It doesn't cost Amazon five dollars. It costs Amazon $25-30 generally. Do you get that? reply jasode19 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] >If Amazon is selling a shirt for $50, then they are probably acquiring it for $25-30. Believe me, they don't want to throw away that $25-30. The key you're missing is Amazon didn't have to spend that ~$25 in the first place. I'm guessing your assumption of Amazon's out-of-pocket cost is the source of your insistence that Amazon is determined to restock and re-sale instead of throwaway. That mental model of how big retailers operate is incorrect. The giant retailers like Amazon/Walmart/Target don't pay upfront for merchandise. Instead, they use a complicated "chargeback model". They just deduct customer returns from the ongoing rolling invoices "net 90" etc. https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+walmart+target+%22net... So, Amazon doesn't really "lose money" for customer returns if they don't re-stock & resell. It's the manufacturers and sellers that take the financial hit. (Which would be the much lower ~$5 instead of $25.) The above chargeback model is why Amazon was so nonchalant about throwing away perfectly good items that were returned by customers. Amazon wasn't incentivized to bother trying to re-sell it. Instead of taking a risk with a tainted customer return, just mathematically deduct it from the next vendor's payment. No ~$25 wholesale cost needs to be "recovered" because Amazon never spent it. >That's not how businesses operate. It is (or was) how they operated. That isn't FUD. Canada, France, Germany did investigative reports with hidden cameras and GPS trackers to discover that billions in Amazon merchandise was being dump at landfills and/or burned at incinerators. (What Amazon euphemistically calls "energy recovery"). This includes lots of expensive items that were more than ~$4 such as new coffee machines. The public relations backlash at Amazon destroying so much product was so bad that France passed a new law targeted at Amazon to stop doing it: https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+france+passes+new+law... That's when Amazon started a more earnest "re-sale or donate" and reduce the destruction of customer returns. reply crazygringo12 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] You seem to be greatly confused. Amazon most certainly does not generally operate on a consignment model nor does it avoid paying manufacturers for returned merchandise. It is true that it may pay suppliers only 90 days later or something, but this doesn't change the fact that they still have to pay suppliers. I genuinely don't know where you are getting your information from, but it is quite wrong. And as I said before, the stuff that Amazon sends to landfills, has a little to do with the fact that it has been returned (except for things that are so damaged they cannot be resold), and everything to do with the fact that there is no longer demand for it and they need their warehouse space for products that sell better. reply kazinator6 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] It's as if you're starting to understand that trying to peddle the returned item is not profitable, given all the costs involved. Recovering it from the user: cost. Sending it to new user: cost. Probability it will be returned again: cost. Reduced retail price: revenue hit. Say Amazon projected a $25 profit on the item originally based on a revenue of $50. Meaning their total cost had to be $25: procuring the item and shipping it. That didn't work out; so at that point they have a loss of $25. That doesn't matter; it's all sunk costs at that point. They have an opportunity to recover the item from the user. How profitable will it be? Let's say there is 60% chance that the item is junk that the next user will also return. Let's say it costs $5 to ship it back to Amazon, and another $5 to ship it to a new user. Let's say it can only be sold for $35 and not $50. The probability of keeping the $35 revenue is 40%, and so the expected revenue is 0.4 times 35 or $14. We have to subtract the shipping both ways, leaving $4. Thus the new business venture of recovering the item and reselling it has an expected profit of $4. This is a waste of time, even though the profit is nonzero. It is better to procure a new item and make $25. A truck full of items that make $25 is better than one full of the same items that make $4. reply jasode11 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] >Amazon most certainly does not generally operate on a consignment model No, not a consignment model. A "chargeback model". >, but this doesn't change the fact that they still have to pay suppliers. Not for the returned items. The returned items are deducted from the next unpaid vendor invoice. (The "vendor chargeback" or "vendor clawback" in industry parlance). All the big retailers with leverage such as Walmart/Amazon/Target/HomeDepot/BestBuy etc do this. It makes the financial hit from customer returns mostly the vendors' problem instead of Amazon's. >, has a little to do with the fact that it has been returned (except for things that are so damaged The new law in France was trying to stop Amazon from destroying undamaged products because of investigative reports. Again, Amazon didn't care about sending undamaged returned merchandise to the landfill by the truckloads because of the chargebacks above. In other words, Amazon never "bought" the items the customers returned. If it was expensive items like electronics, they would ship it back to the supplier or a liquidator for resale but that often didn't happen for clothes because it wasn't worth it the extra costs to the supplier. That's why a lot of it went to the landfills. reply pshan1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] I think the general internet user doesn't actually do this. Slightly different use case but I worked at maximizing revenue/customer lifetime value at a streaming company and the biggest revenue win project I worked on was just preselecting the most expensive plan. I was surprised since I usually do research and stuff on the options. But it turns out a lot of people just click next until they can start watching some tv. reply carlosjobim1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] There's nothing weird about it. A liberal return policy is not because they expect people to make many returns, it is so that customers will make their purchases without worrying and therefore make more purchases. reply Supermancho1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] > 9 out of 10 people i ask this is the single reason they stay at Amazon. 9 out of 10 I ask say it's about reliable delivery (not necessarily next day). Most people order things because they need them and have read the reviews, not because they are speculating at something they may need or are ok with getting something else. Clothing being a notable exception, unpredictably sized and variable quality, which nobody is happy about. reply mixdup1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] The ease of returns was a huge factor in the early success of Walmart, as well. I worked there in high school and college (99-02 timeframe) and they harped on how much the customer was right for returns, unless it was just blatant fraud. if there was a chance the customer was not trying anything you just give them their money back reply jagged-chisel1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] I worked there in the early 90s. The number of times an old, well-worn NES came in as a return, and management authorized it, boggled my mind. reply mc33011 day ago | root | parent | next[–] I knew some rather unscrupulous people in the 98-03 period who'd take items off of shelves in the walmart, remove the packaging and walk over to customer service for a cash refund, having never bought anything or even leaving the store. They'd walk out with cash in hand. Having worked in retail, they basically knew that nobody in that store really cared (loss prevention officers, staff, managers... nobody seemed to care.) reply devin1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] I would love to know the actual numbers. I bet the customer lifetime value for eating this cost probably won out eventually. reply chrismorgan1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] I’ve only ever returned two things to Amazon: a counterfeit laptop battery (claimed to be an official part, had 30% lower capacity than labelled), and an unbearable replacement laptop keyboard (2KRO rather than the original’s NKRO, with horrific ghosting, a couple of keys that would stick if not pressed completely straight, and a space bar that had to be hit just so to activate at all). Neither of these products would have been available without Amazon, and that would have been a good thing. reply johannes12343211 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] They became big, cause they had their customers first. They were tough to negotiate good prices and put customer experience quite forward. Any complaint and they replaced stuff, not many questions asked. They then invested heavily in logistics, so now they could replace their support to annoying bots and use their market position to increase their margin. reply jflwiejrilewqj1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] FYI, when someone else says "this is why I do this thing", you don't get to argue with that. You don't get to tell other people what their opinions are. Psycho. reply cljacoby1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] In my experience, the customer-friendly return experience is withering. I ordered a small table about a year ago that didn't ship with the correct hardware. I literally could not assemble the thing as documented in the instructions. I had to call to get a refund; admittedly, I think I may have been slightly outside the ordinary return window. The customer service representative was pretty reluctant to accept it, somewhat heavily suggesting that I didn't assemble it right. I actually just recently cancelled my Amazon Prime, which I've had for probably 10+ years. Not solely based on this one experience, but a general decline in how much perceivable value I actually get out of it. reply gip1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] Most of the people I know would rank predictability is #1, price #2 and ability to do returns #3 (as a data point: I don't even remember last time I did a return, was years ago). Really depends on who your connections are and their specific needs I reckon. reply kspacewalk21 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] >No-questions-asked returns Different forms of marketing work on different people. This one works on me. I'm going to shop at Amazon and Costco because, in the very few instances where I want to return an item that didn't live up to its promise, I can do so without incurring penalties. When this happens, I'm already frustrated. I assembled a floor lamp for far longer than an adult should spend assembling it, and it's wobbly as shit. A corporation than nickel-and-dimes me at this point will incur my irrational wrath. Canadian Tire (a big box retailer of mostly low-quality wares here in Canada) has lost my business over a decade ago because of this. I tell myself: most Canadians are meek sheep that will return after being told "well akshually you can't return this because technically blah blah", but I'm not a sucker, I won't shop here on principle. A company that doesn't create this experience for me will get my business and exploit whatever other blind spots I have with their marketing, dark patterns, opaque pricing, etc, because they didn't piss me off when I was ready to walk away for good. reply herbst21 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] This is law in Europe. By that logic there would be no reason to use Amazon anywhere in the EU yet many people seem to use it. reply thundercleeze1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] This is a strawman. OP said " I shop at Amazon due to their logistics." Nothing in your post refutes why OP shops at Amazon. reply gregglain1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] i'm the 10th person, we don't stay for returns. However, I am doing a lot more shopping on different websites nowadays as I see Amazon is the most expensive option. reply whilenot-dev1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] > No-questions-asked returns That's the Right of withdrawal[0] by EU law, though. Do you mean something else? I mean, sure, smaller shops might not cover the costs for the return shipping, but I don't really mind. [0]: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/ret... reply eddythompson801 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Amazon offers 30-60 days no-question-asked returns in most of the US instead of 14. Also no shipping, restock or return processing fees on most items (certainly on all returns I did) reply ravenstine1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] Ehh, maybe for some people. I've almost never returned anything to Amazon, so for me the logistics is definitely the biggest factor. reply carlosjobim1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] > their competiton couldn't do without going out of business Why? If I sell a quality product I have no fear of excess returns. reply mindslight1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] Personally, the only webshop where I actually need so many returns is Amazon itself. Some of that is intrinsic to a good chunk of what they're selling (poorly described imports from the Chinese market). I just ordered an assortment of cabling for shuffling PCIe signals around. Apparently there are a few different "standards" for pinouts on SFF-8643 and SFF-8654, but nobody actually describes them in their product listings! So I'll see which ones work with what I already have, and with each other, and the rest can go back. Sellers could have avoided that by doing that work once and describing their items, but they'd rather I do it instead. So when I do it, I don't feel bad about the returns. But a lot of it is the dark patterns Amazon themselves choose to play. Nonstop pricing games make me push my actual purchasing decisions down the line. If something is on sale at a great price and I'm in the market, I'll just hit buy to lock in that price. I'll then try to do some research before it ships, but in general I've got 30+ days to make the actual purchase decision. This is what the seller must want, right? Or the same pricing games but after a purchase - if the price on something significantly drops, the answer I've gotten from CS is to buy a new one and return the old one. So if I already have other stuff I need to make a return trip for, that's what I do! Or when I'm in the middle of building/repairing something, especially when I don't have a "trial" of "prime" (aka sunk cost fallacy), I'll order a few different types of items I think I might need. This way when they show up in a week+ (Slow, Spiteful Shipping) and I'm back focusing on the project, there is less chance of "oh I really needed this other thing" and having to wait another round trip. With other web stores I just don't feel these type of dark pattern dynamics. Whereas Amazon is practically begging people to call their bluffs. So I call them. reply KPGv21 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] It's probably different for everyone. For us, it's chiefly because it's the only place where we can find a gazillion things our kids' school demands they bring to school, and we can have it in twenty-four hours without having to drive to the store. I order books from a local indie bookstore and just wait a couple weeks for the books to show up from their wholesaler. But for other stuff, including tools, why wouldn't I just order from a place I already have free 2-day (often overnight) shipping for, when my alternatives are physical big box stores? Like why go to Lowe's to buy a cross-cut jig when I can get it delivered right to my house in 24 hours for the same price? It's not even like my money could possibly go to an indie hardware store. They don't exist. Certainly not within an hour of me, which not only requires my time, but also money in the form of electricity to drive my car, plus the wear and tear on my car. reply iso16311 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] I have never returned anything to amazon. Maybe it's a US culture thing. reply ndiddy1 day ago | prev | next[–] The point the article makes is that the other online stores without access to Amazon's logistics aren't able to lower the price to make up for the inconvenience of using a normal shipping carrier because of an Amazon policy that bans sellers from offering an item for cheaper elsewhere. Amazon then charges sellers high fees that inflate the price of the item everywhere because of that policy. reply mahboi1 day ago | parent | next[–] So it's kinda like how credit cards charge the merchant a fee and in the past would disallow the merchant from offering a cash discount. reply Dylan168071 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Like that, but if the fee climbed up 10x higher. reply mahboi1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Maybe for small products where the shipping is relatively expensive? Cause that'd be like 50%. reply Dylan168071 day ago | root | parent | next[–] If we approximate a credit card fee as 2% + 30 cents then I think 20% + $3.00 ends up in the same ballpark as what Amazon is pushing onto a lot of sellers. It hurts hardest for small products but it's significant for everyone. And that price is supposedly separate from the shipping cost. reply luke54411 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] They are not allowed to do this in the country I live in. reply steveBK1231 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] And my point is that many of us aren't even shopping on price! You could also flip around the reading to.. boohoo poor sellers have to raise their prices elsewhere and take higher margin? Why don't they figure out how to ship/delivery more quickly with a competitor with all those extra margin dollars they are being forced by Amazon to take elsewhere? reply crote1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Because Amazon benefits from massive economies of scale, and because Amazon has nearly-unlimited cash to push competition out of the market? How could a regular webshop possibly compete with a behemoth which has warehouses in literally every major city, which has its own dedicated fleet of delivery vehicles, and which has its own fleet of cargo planes? When you've got a single warehouse and have to rely on DHL/USPS/FedEx, you will never beat them on delivery time when Amazon is actually trying: Amazon can trivially offer same-day delivery and eat the cost until you go out of business. And don't forget: Amazon has an even bigger margin. If they were to compete on price, they would easily win. But they aren't competing on price because they know they have a quasi-monopoly, so they can just enjoy the extra profit. reply holmesworcester1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] I often think about how there's an open question in this case of whether it's necessarily anti-social for a market participant to fight hard to create the level of critical mass necessary to give most people the product they want. Everyone likes stuff showing up at their door reliably wherever they are, and this isn't possible unless you have a service with warehouses and dense customers ~everywhere, and this isn't possible unless enough people use that same service. So in one sense it's in everyone's interest to have an assurance contract where everyone says "I will use this service if you do." Then in that sense Amazon's price rule is building a mechanism to support such an assurance contract: you can't force people to sign such a contract, but you can prevent people from defecting to slightly lower prices outside of the "stuff just arrives fast" system. In a system that was very good at collective action outside of markets, a cleaner solution in terms of consent and power might be to build an actual explicit assurance contract for an app-to-door-everything-delivered-fast service, get everyone to sign it, and make a public utility and/or separate dis-aggregated markets for the different levels of service provision, whatever they are (consumer facing app, supply, warehouse, delivery, etc.). But anyone who has ever even thought about doing anything like this will know that it's much easier said than done, and will appreciate the kludge Amazon and their investors pulled off, at least a little bit, the next time they buy a thing online. Maybe the answer is just: use Amazon until technology (robotics e.g.) makes it easy to create something better? At this rate, we shouldn't have to wait too long? reply darrylb421 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] It is surprising how often they are cheaper. I was ordering some glue, decided to double check the price, I could drive for 30 minutes and buy local, and pay more or order it for cheaper from Amazon. I didn't need it the same day so getting it tomorrow didn't matter. Amazon also sells everything need some M2 screws Amazon will have them, no idea where to buy something like that locally Home Depot won't carry them. reply mindslight1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] The proper comparison isn't Amazon vs local, it's Amazon vs other web shops (likely with more traditional supply chains) - especially for items that are only ever going to be part of a wide selection like M2 screws. HomeDepot.com and Lowes.com have M2 screws, as well as Zoro, McMaster, or other specialty web shops [0]. My specific go-to for one-off [1] screws is usually Zoro, as I usually prefer stainless (or grade 8 for larger sizes). [0] I had been fond of "Albany County Fasteners" but I've soured as they've gradually jacked up the prices while removing free shipping. I don't even like free shipping, but it is a way for ordering to be more convenient as it prevents me from wanting to sit on an order for a while to batch it up. [1] as opposed to stocking up on an assortment reply asib1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] What is shipping like from Zoro? The number one reason I tend to use Amazon for this stuff (nuts/bolts) is because shipping is free given a Prime subscription. If I buy a handful of bolts from McMaster or BoltDepot, I'm paying like $10 to ship, on an order this is probably $10 in goods :( So I'm basically always picking between Amazon and AliExpress. reply mindslight1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Zoro shipping is free over $50 order, otherwise I think it's only $5? I generally just batch, especially with the way they rotate promo codes. I've always got some slow-roll projects going on. Time frame it really depends - delivery dates a day or few days out are generally accurate. Most items they stock at a local distribution center, so I get them next day. Some things come from further warehouses of theirs and take a few more days. There are also third party vendor items that are all over the place for delivery time, but you know those by their estimated delivery time being more than a few days out, and saying ground shipping only. (They're slowly taking away "free shipping" from items that require LTL though, heh heh) For fasteners specifically, their parametric search has gotten better. I'd have Digikey's interface everywhere if I could. reply phyzix57611 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] One correction: wealthy people aren't shopping on Amazon because of price. Everyone else uses Amazon because of price and convenience. reply PaulHoule1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] ... and a lot of times I go right to the brand to buy "straight" from them and they fulfill orders from Amazon so why not just buy from AMZN where I already have an account, get lots of credit card points, can spend my credit card points, etc. In the last year I've seen this other kind of consolidation where most of the brands that don't have an AMZN-hosted or fulfilled store are using shop.app (now shop.com!) from Shopify. I did a stint of investigating boutique perfumes [1] and it seems almost everyone in that business uses Shopify. [1] you gotta try "Under the Lemon Trees"! reply knollimar1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] This is a terrible argument. It’s only margin if they get the service but no one wants to pay the same to get slower shipping. Amazon has made the choice for the consumer. Sure their logistics are better but it’s functionally tying Amazon’s logistics to access to selling on Amazon. It’s not a fair burden to say “you must convince customers to buy inferior shipping at superior shipping prices in order to not use us. reply mahboi1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Some may be shopping based on price without realizing it. There's already a baked in assumption that Amazon has the lowest price and there's no need to check elsewhere. reply dns_snek1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] > You could also flip around the reading to.. boohoo poor sellers have to raise their prices elsewhere and take higher margin? Behavior which is often ruled anti-competitive and illegal. https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/cases/dec_docs/40... reply Dylan168071 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] > boohoo poor sellers have to raise their prices elsewhere and take higher margin? They don't get those margins because extremely few people are going to use other sites if they have to pay just as much. And then for consumers it increasingly sucks because you can barely find anything below $5 despite the shipping supposedly being "free". reply ndiddy1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] If Amazon stopped engaging in price fixing, then people like you who aren't shopping on price could still buy stuff on Amazon, and other people who are shopping on price could buy the same item from the manufacturer's site for 30% less with the knowledge that it'll probably arrive in a week rather than in a couple days. I'm not sure what problem you have with that. reply carlosjobim1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] It's not price fixing. The seller is still completely in control of the price, but they cannot discriminate against Amazon by selling it cheaper elsewhere. Or they can, but then Amazon don't want to do any business with them. These kind of contracts are standard for all kinds of third party marketplaces. You don't have to sell through them if you don't agree with the contract. reply Dylan168071 day ago | root | parent | next[–] It would be discriminating against Amazon if they sold it somewhere else for less revenue. As in, retail price minus store fees is a lower amount. When the price advantage is the size of the fee difference or smaller, that's fair and good for competition and I support legal restrictions on contract clauses that want to block it. reply carlosjobim1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Why do they want to sell on Amazon if they don't think the terms are fair?Amazon isn't a public service and businesses aren't people with inherent rights. Demanding price parity is completely standard for all resellers and market places, pretty much on all scales and all around the world. Of course you want more legal restrictions and regulations. That's the standard hacker response to anything that comes up, probably including if you want suger in your coffee or not. But try to think about why Amazon would put such a thing in their contract. If they were just out to abuse any power dynamic, they would of course tell sellers that they have to put a more expensive price anywhere else. Price parity is fair for all parties involved. And if sellers think Amazon's fees are too high then they shouldn't use Amazon - which is what the great majority of product sellers have decided to. reply Dylan168071 day ago | root | parent | next[–] > Why do they want to sell on Amazon if they don't think the terms are fair? Massive monopoly power. Some profit is better than none, even as Amazon works to make 'some' as small as possible. > Demanding price parity is completely standard for all resellers and market places, pretty much on all scales and all around the world. Price parity would be great if they were selling the product to Amazon, and Amazon was demanding that price be the same among all retailers. Because of the structure of the deal with this markup, we need to consider the numbers with and without the markup. > the standard hacker response Wha. Also I want quality competition and I only want to regulate anti-competitive things. > But try to think about why Amazon would put such a thing in their contract. Because it benefits them. > If they were just out to abuse any power dynamic, they would of course tell sellers that they have to put a more expensive price anywhere else. That would get them more scrutiny and be too obviously unfair. Demanding the same price sounds fair until you look into the details. > Price parity is fair for all parties involved. Parity is fair when you properly include or exclude markups based on context. > And if sellers think Amazon's fees are too high then they shouldn't use Amazon And lose most of their sales? It's an abusive relationship because of the power Amazon has, and they structured these rules to limit the ways other companies can compete. reply carlosjobim1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] No, Amazon is not a monopoly. Hackers have the notion that any big company or any company they don't like are monopolies. But that doesn't change the truth. Amazon is not a monopoly and has very limited power in the markets they act in. They have giant competitors. > Because it benefits them. That is how business have been conducted since the age of Moses and before: Nobody wants to do business unless they benefit from it. Ideally the benefit is mutual. Usually the benefit has to be mutual for business to be made. > Parity is fair when you properly include or exclude markups based on context. Parity means the price for the end customer, or at the very least the advertised price for the end customer. > And lose most of their sales? 99,9999999999% of product sales in the world and 99,99999999% of the monetary value of product sales in the world are made without any involvement of Amazon. If a company has made themselves dependent on Amazon because they don't want to deal with sales, that is their own problem. You have no need to fight for the sellers on Amazon. They are shrewd businesses who would prefer nothing more than to spit on you and on their customers, unless they were on fire. Amazon has grown as large as they have by being a middle man who gives better customer service and security to customers than most online shops. There is real value in that goodwill. Of course they charge sellers to let them be on their platform. reply Dylan168071 day ago | root | parent | next[–] I don't think you have a realistic idea of how much it would hurt many companies to withdraw from amazon. And no not just companies that "made themselves dependent" or whatever. I don't care if you use the word monopoly but your percentage there is silly. In the relevant markets Amazon is enormous. And on top of "percent of sales in the world" being the wrong metric, Amazon is approaching a trillion dollars in product sales. The Amazon GDP is bigger than most countries. > Parity means the price for the end customer, or at the very least the advertised price for the end customer. If that's the definition, then parity is not automatically a good thing. If I want to sell my product to different stores for $50 and let them price it how they want, I should be allowed to do that, and no contract should block that competition. Amazon will yell at you and threaten your sales if another store drops the price, even if you had no involvement. > Ideally the benefit is mutual. Usually the benefit has to be mutual for business to be made. And Amazon is so powerful it's absorbing 90% of the benefit and suppressing the competition that would change that. That's bad. > They are shrewd businesses who would prefer nothing more than to spit on you and on their customers, unless they were on fire. Amazon has grown as large as they have by being a middle man who gives better customer service and security to customers than most online shops. There is real value in that goodwill. Amazon has been spending a lot of that goodwill, and they could be just as good to customers without inflating prices and squeezing their suppliers so hard. Your average business with a real brand name might even care more about their reputation than Amazon does. You're coming across as ridiculously infatuated with Amazon if you think they're that far above the average company. reply carlosjobim23 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] > I don't think you have a realistic idea of how much it would hurt many companies to withdraw from amazon. It would. That's why they're still on Amazon. That's why Amazon is charging them. That's business and running a company means competing in business. Companies aren't people. They don't deserve any empathy. They have to compete in an antagonistic environment against other companies for the benefit and mercy of receiving the customer dollar. That's how it is supposed to be in order to benefit customers. At most, businesses who deserve our empathy and a bit of slack should be local businesses who employ people where we live. You argue that because Amazon is a big company they have some kind of outsized influence. In the market of consumer goods they are just a dwarf compared to the total size of the market. And they have competitors who are also giant and perfectly capable of competing in every space they operate. Nobody likes Amazon. I certainly don't like them, but I use them when it is beneficial for me as a customer. > If I want to sell my product to different stores for $50 and let them price it how they want, I should be allowed to do that, and no contract should block that competition. You aren't selling your product directly to Amazon. You are using them as a marketplace / sales service for selling your products to customers. If you were selling your product to Amazon directly, then there shouldn't be any price parity contract, I agree. > Amazon will yell at you and threaten your sales if another store drops the price, even if you had no involvement. In practice I wonder how these situations pan out. Like you say, it is impossible for a seller to control how other stores price the item. reply Dylan1680722 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] > Companies aren't people. They don't deserve any empathy. This isn't about empathy for corporations. I'm being overcharged because of these policies, because I'm effectively forced to pay the Amazon overhead no matter where I buy. I don't like wasting my money. > They have to compete in an antagonistic environment against other companies for the benefit and mercy of receiving the customer dollar. That's how it is supposed to be in order to benefit customers. And this version of price parity makes it much harder for other storefronts and marketplaces to compete. > In the market of consumer goods they are just a dwarf compared to the total size of the market. Their share of online consumer goods gives them tons of power. Half a trillion dollars is not weak here. > You aren't selling your product directly to Amazon. You are using them as a marketplace / sales service for selling your products to customers. If you were selling your product to Amazon directly, then there shouldn't be any price parity contract, I agree. And so the loophole is built. In a marketplace setup, enforcing a version of price parity that keeps the same end price regardless of fees causes bad results. > In practice I wonder how these situations pan out. Like you say, it is impossible for a seller to control how other stores price the item. From what I've seen it's very effective. Beg/threaten that store to increase prices, likely drop your Amazon price to unsustainable levels in the mean time so you don't have to fight later to get Amazon to reattach you to the buy button. reply hobofan1 day ago | prev | next[–] My experience is that for non-FBA fulfilled products this doesn't hold at all. Out of the last ~20 orders (I don't order that often from them, so that's probably spanning the whole last 12 months or more), more often than not, the predicted delivery date has been adjusted upwards, often by ~2 days, and a few times by ~a week. This may be specific to Germany/Berlin, as from what I hear, they (/ their subcontractors) have troubles finding delivery drivers. Mixed with the growing counterfeit issues, and degrading product description / details for most products, Amazon doesn't seem to be in it's prime. reply al_borland1 day ago | parent | next[–] The 3rd party sellers on Amazon are a mess. I’m in the US, and just waited 18 days to get the wrong item sent to me… some face lotion instead of a drone. I picked it off someone’s wishlist, so didn’t really vet the seller. I thought I was being really proactive when I ordered, but now I will need to find an alternative at a local retail store, which will probably be difficult. Last year at Christmas, my brother-in-law opened his gift to find a bunch of adult diapers. It was supposed to be a power tool. Sure, Amazon takes the returns, but it’s still extremely disruptive when these things happen, and it’s happening more and more frequently. reply PaulHoule1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] In the outskirts of a college town with unusually bad retail (like the clothing stores at the mall are the Loft, Target and T-shirt express) 2 day shipping became 2 week shipping during the pandemic leading to me to quit Prime. It particularly bugged me because if I expect to get something in 2 days that's more convenient that making a trip to the store, but if it 5 days or more I'll be going to that sector anyway for another reason and it is easy -- it struck me as significantly dishonest that they were promising fast shipping and not delivering. Maybe 2 years later I tried the free trial of Prime, if only to quiet the ads, and it was great... they must of extended their logistics network into my area and I get a lot of stuff in 1 day or 2 days now. I went through a phase of taking discounted or free Prime offers when I could but broke down and I've been maintaining a Prime subscription. It's probably not really worth it because my pattern is that I am typically heads down doing this or that and every other month or so I do a burst of buying stuff that I'd wanted for a while or I am doing some project that requires a lot of stuff. Then I might go a month and buy nothing on AMZN. reply vidarh1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] It certainly varies at least by country. I'm in London, and its very unusual to get worse than next day delivery except for marketplace sellers, and often <12 hours. reply notJim16 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] Of course it doesn't hold for FBA, if it's not FBA, then it's not Amazon's logistics. reply hobofan5 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] 1. Yes, that's what I wanted to point out. Many people don't know the destinction, and can get hit even though "they are shopping on Amazon". 2. Even if it is non-FBA it should be in the interest of Amazon to have stronger enforcement for non-FBA sellers that are consistently lying about their delivery dates in order to get a sale. That should be pretty easy to track. In the past the variance of delivery dates hasn't been that bad, even for non-FBA sellers. reply prepend1 day ago | prev | next[–] I stopped shopping at Amazon because their fulfillment started to suck. And I found they kept their dates 25/100. Most recently I ordered 10 items on September 18th (I had a gift card). All prime eligible. The first arrived on sep 20, the 4 on sep 28, 5 on sep 28, and the last is scheduled for Friday. I didn’t get any estimates until after purchase. Amazon is no longer good. They are coasting on their customer base and are slowing ratcheting up prices and squeezing their costs (keeping all their gains). reply underbluewaters1 day ago | parent | next[–] I've noticed this lately _in coastal California_ of all places. I needed batteries by Sunday morning, was ordering on a Thursday. Plenty of 1 or 2-day options when searching and adding to cart, then when it came time for checkout... none of the 5 options I tried could be delivered in 2 days! It seemed the interface was designed to hide the true delivery estimate in the last step and trick me into thinking the item would arrive on time. reply alt2271 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] > I didn’t get any estimates until after purchase. If they are not going to tell me the day it is going to arrive, I am not buying. Thats the "prime" reason for using Amazon these days. reply scottyah1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Yeah I've never seen this despite buying from amazon multiple times a month if not week. I assume they're living somewhere with weird regulations or something. reply prepend1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] I’m in the US in a top 10 metro area. Before checkout, it’s a generic “free super saver shipping” then a few hours after with proper estimates. reply cj1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] You're in a top 10 metro, and Amazon doesn't give you accurate Prime delivery estimates? That sounds incredibly unlikely unless we're missing something. reply scottyah1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Are you a Prime member? reply liveoneggs1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] when I check out there is usually a button that says "as fast as possible" or "fewer delivery days" or "slower delivery for discount" reply prepend1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] I see the same. I checked “as fast as possible.” My point is that Amazon used to be good. Now it’s not as fast. And the price hasn’t dropped. reply bowsamic1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] It depends on the country. For the last few months here in Germany Amazon has been having major shipping issues reply bazmattaz1 day ago | prev | next[–] For me it’s not the logistics, for me it’s the catalogue. They have so many ridiculously niche items that I want that would be impossible to buy from a local store reply crote1 day ago | parent | next[–] But that's just the basic physics of mail-order shopping, it isn't anything specific to Amazon. Every general store in every town everywhere can't possibly stock millions of individual products. When some item has a potential customer base of a few tens of thousands of people in a country of hundreds of millions, most stores would never get a single sale for that item. But when you can serve the entire country at once via the mail, having a single centralized warehouse specializing in that niche category of items is quite viable. The only difference with Amazon is that you are buying from a single website, rather than going to the website of a small webshop specializing in your flavour of niche items. And the drawback is that Amazon has zero quality control, so rather than a store where you can browse for known-good curated high-quality niche items you will instead be drowned by piles of absolute garbage - with the occasional decent item hidden in between. Sure, Amazon might beat your local store, but that doesn't mean it is good for buying niche items. reply PaulDavisThe1st1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] I used to be very skeptical of all the stories on HN and elsewhere about amazon pages being full of poor quality knockoffs, because that simply wasn't my experience at all, ever. But in the last couple of months, as I progress through a kitchen remodel and more importantly a kitchen reorganization, I've been seeing precisely this phenomenon every time. The most visible signs are the machine generated "brand names" ("Howonder", "Jaico", etc. etc.), closely followed by multiple instances of clearly the same low quality, SE-Asian-manufactured product being sold under 4 different brand/product names. I think the difference is that in the past, I've actually known the product I was looking for, and amzn showed me that one and little else. At the moment, I'm casting blindly ("stainless steel kitchen turntable") and there it is: low quality, uncurated crap, everywhere. Still .. not yet quite as bad as Aliexpress :) [disclaimer: i was employee #2 at amzn] reply notJim16 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Sure you can buy a niche product from a niche store, but it's gonna take them 3 days to get to the post office, and 2 weeks to get it to you. And they're gonna charge you $9 for the privilege. Even the great stores like McMaster-Carr are kind of unpleasant to use, because the shipping is so slow (even though everything else about the experience is far superior to Amazon.) reply SchemaLoad1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] I think Amazon might have induced this problem somewhat. Most retail stores have just stopped stocking niche items because people just buy them from amazon and it frees up a lot of floorspace they could use to stock high sales volume items instead. reply vidarh1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] Basically the only things I don't buy from Amazon is groceries and large kitchen appliances, and it's 90% due to the convenience. reply TaLiTr1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] I don't buy most groceries from Amazon, but certain things are hard to source locally. Popcorn salt, cinnamon Oreos, etc. reply JKCalhoun1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] Yep, I've always been a traveller of the long tail. reply dweinus1 day ago | prev | next[–] All of you talking about delivery times, cost, quality...I stopped shopping at Amazon when I heard people were peeing in bottles. reply prepend1 day ago | parent | next[–] It’s extremely common for delivery drivers to pee in bottles. Have you ever driven delivery? I remember a friend in the 90s excited about his job at UPS. He laughed about the pee bottle. Same for people I know who work for usps and fedex. Kind of makes sense. Where do you expect someone to pee who is driving around for 10 hours a day. reply dweinus1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] I'm not talking about delivery drivers. https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17243026/amazon-warehouse... ...and I am being generous by focusing on the pee instead of the deaths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon_worker_fataliti... reply prepend1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Again, these aren’t unique to Amazon, per se. Just to the scale of their operation and the scrutiny Amazon has. Assembly line jobs are rough and people pee in bottles, and die. The important piece these articles leave out is how much more common these are at Amazon. I remember my first jobs at random companies where I was hourly and needed approval for bathroom breaks. It sucked and I would plan my day around break times. I think these articles are more a function of being surprising to us because we work cushy desk jobs where we can break all we want and use unlimited sick days because we program. reply nickdurfe1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] >Assembly line jobs are rough and people pee in bottles, and die. You phrase this as if it's acceptable that people work in terrible conditions and sacrifice their lives so that the rest of us can buy cheap products with fast shipping, and this is completely normal. "Another Amazon warehouse worker dead? Oh well!" reply mpyne1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] I think it’s phrased less that it is acceptable, and more that “why are you only focusing on Amazon, when it is like this everywhere you look in logistics?” It would be one thing to stop shopping at Amazon because of how they treat their workers if you also stopped shopping at other companies whose workers are peeing in bottles behind the scenes. Do the things you buy get shipped at some point by truck-based logistics? If so, piss bottles are already involved, it is just that we were all blessedly unaware. reply yunwal16 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] I think it makes sense that the largest practitioner and beneficiary of a bad thing takes the brunt of the blame. No one can go around memorizing every factory that does bad stuff and which products originate from them. reply gossamer1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] Or having to continue to work while their dead co-workers are laying nearby under a blanket. Yikes. reply jghn1 day ago | prev | next[–] This. The amount of things I buy off Amazon has dropped quite a lot over the last 15-20 years. It used to be just about everything. Now it's an about once a month at most, and some of that are gifts for other people. I'm more willing to shop local now, and for everything else if I don't care a lot about when I get it I'll order it direct from a more appropriate vendor. And if I really don't care when I get it nor that it's fake, I'll use AliExpress. The only value Amazon has for me now is if I need an item on a predictable schedule and either I can't get it locally or its not worth my time to do so. reply shimman1 day ago | parent | next[–] I'm the same way. I've also been very impressed with Chinese made goods too. Especially in the music world, M-Vave recently released a very capable synth for $50 (FM-1) that is having a massive resurgence of tinking in the community (people are sly enough to use LLMs to vibe code different firmwares that turn the device into something else entirely, like a groovebox or drum machine for example). It's a shame neoliberals hallowed out US manufacturing but at least consumers around the world are benefitting. reply mschuster911 day ago | root | parent | next[–] > It's a shame neoliberals hallowed out US manufacturing but at least consumers around the world are benefitting. Unfortunately, the counterpoint is... China has us all by the balls. Do something China doesn't like, such as, say... support Taiwan? Whoops, where are you going to get stuff such as medication now? reply crote1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Most of our medication comes from India, actually. And China isn't able to cut off your medication because you support Taiwan: it would have to be a country-sized ban, which for the US would immediately spark WW3. China isn't stupid, they have a sense of self-preservation. Why start a fight with the US when you can slowly milk it dry? reply shimman1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] I'm not really worried about China, the US has been a massive force of evil and imperialism across the world my entire life. When was the last time China invaded a sovereign country? The US did it twice in the span of a few months this year, and likely to do it again. No one benefits from US foreign policy outside of elites or capitalists, everyone else suffers under imperialism. reply mschuster911 day ago | root | parent | next[–] The US may behave irrationally from time to time. Bush, Trump, the list goes on. The problem with China is, they play the loooooooooooong game, and their game is explicitly to destroy our industries. As a German, this has me worried, because we have seen it with solar panels (we used to be the world leader), with medicine (similarly, a lot of compounds came from Germany) and now we're seeing it with cars. reply scarecrowbob1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] This claim feels like a novel, nation-state-level variation on the "fundamental attribution error". reply shimman1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] This feels weird to read, the US has played a direct role in your degradation of life in Germany (starting the Iraq invasion that spiraled into a massive immigration crisis that your country hasn't recovered from, inability to defend yourselves without NATO which means you have to please US benefactors to get protection that is constantly being threatened, and has caused a massive spike in your energy prices due to the Iran War) but you're scared of China because maybe they might do something in the future? I'm sorry but this is quite sad. You're willing to blame a foreign country that is providing high quality goods that make your life better instead of your own political leaders or supposed allies that have no issues with selling your country down the drain? I can see why people are voting for AfD. reply mschuster911 day ago | root | parent | next[–] > starting the Iraq invasion that spiraled into a massive immigration crisis that your country hasn't recovered from Not really. The connection from Iraq to the Arab Spring is thin at best. If anything, what caused Arab Spring is the widespread availability of Twitter plus a lot of existing pressure in the MENA dictatorships and kleptocracies. > inability to defend yourselves without NATO which means you have to please US benefactors to get protection that is constantly being threatened Half-agree. Up until the 90s Europe was more than able to defend itself against Russia on its own - Germany had thousands of tanks, the French and Brits had thousands of tanks plus a sizable navy plus nukes. After the German reunification, the collapse of the USSR and most of the former Soviet countries eventually joining the EU and NATO, the widespread assumption was that Russia would not be a threat for a land war again, and that there was no one else who could threaten Europe with a land war, so it was assumed that we could drastically reduce our land-war assets like tanks and artillery, instead focusing our military on countering jihadist threats. Additionally, the assumption was that the US would stay the same reliable ally it has been for well over half of a century. Both of these assumptions have turned out to be wrong in the end unfortunately. I personally believe, we could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble, had we all (US+EU) enforced a no-fly zone over Syria to show Russia we actually mean business, and reacted much, much more strongly after the Little Green Men appeared in Ukraine or after MH17 was shot down. > and has caused a massive spike in your energy prices due to the Iran War While undoubtedly the US is to blame for that particular shitshow escalating the way it did... it's not like we didn't get enough warnings that it is a dumbass idea to continue relying on fossil fuels. > but you're scared of China because maybe they might do something in the future? They already did lol. Look at how many jobs they managed to lure from Europe by exploitatively cheap wages and employment conditions more resembling slavery ("996"). Yes, the US is, especially at the moment, as unreliable as it gets, but that does not mean China is the answer. > I can see why people are voting for AfD. A lot of the regions where people are voting for the AfD are the ones seriously affected by jobs moving off to Eastern Europe and China. reply chung81231 day ago | prev | next[–] There is also an erosion of trust out there from scammer fatigue. Amazon let's you return things and you don't worry about your credit card being stolen or any of the stupid hassles of customer service these days. reply DeadFred1 day ago | parent | next[–] Speaking of erosion of trust Amazon does nothing to protect consumers and is fine putting peoples lives at risk. I have received multiple counterfeits from Amazon https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU reply da_chicken1 day ago | prev | next[–] I would say in the 2010s I shopped with Amazon for the logistics. In the 2020s their logistics have been crap. Packages are slow, frequently late, and rarely packaged well enough for the items to arrive undamaged without luck. The overwhelming amount of drop shipped trash means the site is useless, too. I've gone back to local stores. They're less convenient, but the prices are better and the quality is MUCH better. Amazon is for commodity name brand stuff that's harder to find. reply neutronicus1 day ago | parent | next[–] Maybe it's regional, here in Baltimore it's still head and shoulders above. reply cameldrv1 day ago | prev | next[–] This is fine, good for Amazon for setting up an excellent logistics system and having a good return policy. The problem is that Amazon charges a lot for this service. If you don't need super fast shipping or a good return policy, or don't want to pay for Amazon's profit margin, you can't go anywhere else, because Amazon will restrict your sales if you charge less somewhere else. Given that Amazon has 40% of the e-commerce market (I'm surprised it's not more actually), this is exactly what antitrust laws were designed to stop. Customers and vendors/manufacturers should be free to use the distribution channels that meet their needs of service and speed and price the best, but Amazon, through its big market share, is preventing that. reply rob741 day ago | prev | next[–] I'm not an Amazon Prime customer (shocking, I know), and I noticed that the shown delivery times are overly pessimistic, probably in order to make you opt for a Prime membership to get faster delivery. And then the package arrives at least one day earlier than the predicted delivery date. reply SoftTalker1 day ago | parent | next[–] I gave up and canceled my Prime subscription years ago after repeated failures to meet even a 2-day delivery promise. I never once got anything same-day. And the Video and other services of Prime were things I never used. reply makeitdouble1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] FWIW Prime also often delivers earlier than the set date (yes, even when it's set to next day...) I assume they want to limit the amount of customer support more than advertising their logistics. reply darrylb421 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Annoying when you are not home and they deliver things early. Like last week I picked deliver on the 13th, half the items arrived on the 10th and sat on my porch for 2 days. reply BeetleB1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] I'm not a Prime customer. I'd wager close to 50% of my orders arrive within 2 days. I'm glad Prime members are subsidizing this :-) reply CaptainZapp1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] Even more shocking: I'm not an Amazon customer at all. Which, granted, is probably easier if you're outside the US. reply OroPla22 hours ago | prev | next[–] > When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does. These days my only reason to get mad at them is that they will regularly deliver an item earlier than their communicated shipping date, which is almost as annoying as delivering later. I don't really mind if it arrives tomorrow or in two weeks, but please don't have it arrive at any other date. Also don't mind changing that date down the line, as long as I am kept in the loop and can plan accordingly. reply timw4mail1 day ago | prev | next[–] A lot of that uncertainty has to do with USPS, who keeps getting slower, and their delivery date estimates are at this point often 2-3 days more optimistic than reality. At least in my experience, UPS, Fedex, etc., tend to deliver when the estimate says. reply SoftTalker1 day ago | parent | next[–] For me, FedEx is almost always a day or two over the initial estimate, and the package looks like it's been routed through a war zone. UPS is generally pretty good. reply simonsaysso22 hours ago | prev | next[–] > When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does 2% for me in the last 6 months (1/51 orders). I live in San Francisco not some remote location. I’ve had 3 orders where the estimate up until purchase was “arriving today” get delayed by 2+ days. And Amazon support is one of the worst at actually doing the thing they said they’d do. So I’ve got a refund on my Prime membership for this year and won’t be renewing next because I’m in exactly the situation you say you won’t want to deal with. reply NalNezumi1 day ago | prev | next[–] This differs WILDLY from country to country, and I assume city to city. In Tokyo I would get my stuff from Amazon in a day or two, and accuracy of time of arrival was in hours. In Stockholm, even amazon regularly delivers a week or two later than what it says. To the point I don't see the point buying from Amazon if I can find a reliable local alternative, because they'll both be late. reply modeless1 day ago | prev | next[–] Huh, this is not my experience. I have had many packages from Amazon delayed recently. But I continue to use them because their selection is the best, so it makes sense to pay for Prime and then their shipping is on average faster and cheaper than any other option. I'm still satisfied with their service. It makes sense because shipping is a volume game and they have the most volume. Their electric van is coming down my street twice a day whether I order or not. I wish I could ship my own packages with their shipping. My biggest problem with Amazon these days is that you can't really know if what you're ordering is any good. Amazon should start their own product testing lab and do in house reviews. Or find some other way to get trusted reviews on their product pages. reply goobatrooba1 day ago | prev | next[–] Am in Europe and pivoting away from Amazon because they started using own carriers and the insane practice of leaving parcels in front of your door. Should have probably left earlier but price + convenience are often hard to beat.. Especially as different amazons all deliver for free across Europe but have different prices so you can even arbitrage between them. reply ktosobcy1 day ago | prev | next[–] I loath Amazon because of its UI. In Poland we have Allegro and 99,9% of sellers basically ships on the same day (for orders before 15:00) and it arrives next day. This basically applies to most of the online stores in Poland… reply addaon1 day ago | prev | next[–] > When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does. This depends heavily on where you live. I recall it used to be true, but in the three places I've spent significant time since the pandemic, all three have been less than 50% on time -- and less than 75% even giving an extra day. Because there's apparently no consequences for the last-mile delivery contractors to claim a package is delivered and not actually take it out of the truck until the next week, your local contractor determines your experience. reply Insanity1 day ago | prev | next[–] This is also why I usually order on Amazon. And the few times it doesn’t go through them the experience is often bad. FedEx delivered my Steam Frame - first it said Friday delivery by 1pm. Then on Friday, it kept saying 1pm until about 3pm after which it updated to “by 8pm”. Then, after 8, it said the item never left their facility. The next day it said delivery would be Monday by 1pm. Actual delivery was Monday around 6pm. Amazon rarely has these issues. Especially for an expensive delivery like the above, I’d want to know when to expect it and possibly actually be at home to receive it. reply bugake1 day ago | prev | next[–] When you search for a product on Amazon and sort by price, it makes some products magically "disappear", and gives you more expensive products first, or plays dumb and inserts unrelated products. It's all done to discourage searching for better prices. reply qurren1 day ago | prev | next[–] It's often still cheaper to buy from Amazon than buying from vendors, unless you scour the internet for the 30% off coupon and sign up for the newsletter for the 10% welcome bonus and then promptly report the newsletter as spam. There should be some kind of federal law against needing to do this. Buying direct from vendor should always be the cheapest, and at least 5% cheaper than Amazon (since everything on Amazon is automatically 5% off) reply tedggh1 day ago | prev | next[–] My experience has been different, most retailers have accurate delivery times, unless you shop for things like furniture at C&B or WestElm for which they don’t keep local inventory. The only appeal Amazon has for me is the subscribe and save option and that you can find almost anything. For example I have a legacy air filtration system for which I cannot find replacement filters for, except on Amazon. For anything else there seems to be a better alternative today. reply spike0211 day ago | prev | next[–] I find a lot of the websites I shop at for certain things do "dropshipping". So the product page will say "X in stock!" or similar when in reality they're telling you the inventory at a shared warehouse or even the original manufacturer and once you actually submit your order, the product needs to be shipped first to the store you ordered from. Then they ship to you. But both legs can take an unknown amount of time. reply infecto1 day ago | prev | next[–] For me it’s that I know if something is wrong with the shipping that Amazon will fix it for me. The other month my wife ordered something inexpensive from Best Buy that got shipped. I am 90% certain the FedEx delivery person took it, impossible to find the easiest way to resolve the matter with BestBuy. Amazon while historically it was not always intuitive to find the chat feature. I could always get there and the problem was fixed. reply prepend1 day ago | parent | next[–] For me, this was a key reason I cancelled Prime. In the 90s and 00s Amazon would fix things. The last time Amazon lost a “delivered” package they told me that they could do nothing about it. My ticket got escalated a few times and they offered a discount on ordering a replacement. I just did a chargeback with my credit card. I was frustrated with Amazon because I probably ordered 30 things a year for 10+ years and they trusted their driver over me saying I never got it. reply 1shooner1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] This is not my experience. I had a package simply not arrive, and Amazon AI said it would replace the missing package (which was a high dollar value). Instead, it just repeated the order, double charging me. I had 3 conversations with human CS promising me they saw the mistake and would fix it, and never did, so I was double charged. After months trying to resolve it I eventually gave up and ate the cost. I've never had such a poor experience, including being repeatedly lied to by CS, and this was the last straw for me. I honestly don't miss Amazon, I buy less stuff and feel better about it. reply mostertoaster1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] If you have evidence of these conversations and so on then you can do a charge back on your credit card. reply 1shooner1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] My research on chargebacks to Amazon was that they just ban you. reply Retric1 day ago | prev | next[–] Amazon’s logistics are shit. You’ll get something to show up on schedule but it’s frequently needs to be returned because of a problem on their end. No I don’t accept paying full price for a used product in subpar repair. No I don’t want a convincing fake. The hassle of even 1 return in 20 isn’t worth faster delivery. Worse even if I just throw away their junk I still need to make a new order. reply Terr_1 day ago | prev | next[–] > I almost don't even care about [shipping quickly] I used to think there would be more opportunities for a patient consumer to get a discount, but perhaps what happens it that even a low-priority package takes up certain kinds of capacity once it leaves the vendor, and the delivery-system's incentive to maximize throughput leads to a kind of floor. reply hebetude1 day ago | prev | next[–] 20/100 times, it ships faster than it estimates reply weberer1 day ago | prev | next[–] Its also heavily region dependent. You can order something on Amazon.com at 10am and have it delivered by 5pm sometimes. When ordering from Amazon.de, it often takes a week just for the product to dispatch, then it takes another week for it to travel from their one warehouse in Poland to Helsinki. reply BeetleB1 day ago | prev | next[–] Agree with others' sentiments: One usually does not need that fast shipping - or that reliable. There are, of course, exceptions - but not often enough that I'd pay for Prime membership. The few times I need it fast and it's not available in town, I simply pay Amazon for fast shipping. reply mrdependable1 day ago | prev | next[–] Is that meant to say you are willing to ignore what Amazon is doing because their shipping is convenient? reply mcmcmc1 day ago | prev | next[–] > The thing is that Amazon ships & delivers on a reliable predicted schedule. Maybe if you live close to a distribution center. The rare occasions I order from them anymore packages are routinely delayed by a week or more reply MisterMunchkin1 day ago | prev | next[–] Yeah they're insanely good at logistics. They do same day deliveries here, I've had an idea for something and then got all the materials delivered 6 hours later. Nobody else can compete with that. reply Twirrim19 hours ago | prev | next[–] I've bought something the other week that I'm still waiting to be delivered. The shop was fine, sent it out within hours. The carrier has been letting them down every single step of the way (and to add insult to injury, I have to use that damn "Shop" app to track the delivery.) From a pick up on the 1st of October, they've supposedly had the package go back and forth between Los Angeles and here a couple of times. Not sure what the price difference is for them to have used this carrier, but it can't be worth it compared to the fuss both of us are having trying to get the carrier to actually deliver the shipped product. The vendor is going to send a second one if the delivery doesn't happen to day like the carrier pinky promises it will (they've promised for 3 days straight it was going to be delivered that day, so I'm not holding my breath) reply dogtimeimmortal1 day ago | prev | next[–] Also, there's the whole taking your money and completing the deal part. A whole bunch of sites seem to be breaking their own pages these days, leaving Amazon the sole remaining venue that still works. I used to buy a lot on ebay.com, however they began to transition to a new page layout a few years ago, which made it too difficult to screen against scam-sellers(scamming was always a bit of an issue there). I briefly switched to walmart.com, however their site started giving a stupid error page for anything but the latest version of google chrome; this started about 2 years ago now. anyway, here's a quick test i did(in firefox-esr) of a few sites which came to mind: ebay: still has the dumb new design; certain js features appear broken(can't read customer reviews). walmart: still get the "technical issues" error page. newegg: main-page still loads mangled. zoro: is it working again!? seems functional today... surprise!(i'll have to look into this more later; i did not test checkout) thriftbooks: the search bar does not work. so there it is. a bunch of sites i just simply can't shop on anymore. i'm surprised by zoro. will it work when i go to checkout? reply joinjune1 day ago | parent | next[–] I've been an eBay customer for 25+ years and it's worse than ever with fraud. It's gotten so bad that my account now warns me that I'm at risk if I report any more purchases on there. Examples: 1.) Bought my wife a dress, it came and had multiple defects that were not in the photographs. I reached out to the seller and they didn't offer a refund but said "sorry". I have no recourse if I don't open a dispute. If I open a dispute I get penalized. 2.) I bought "Mid Century Modern" metal wall art. The listing said 1960's and the photos were of two metal wall art items with no markings. The items came with a clear "Made in China" marking on each of them that was not in the photos. These are modern inspired pieces not actual mid century modern. I opened a dispute and got my refund from the seller who didn't even ask to have them shipped back. 3.) Purchased a video game that showed NTSC ESRB rating on the front of the game in the photos. What came was the european PAL release. Not only is that version not playable on this console but the value of the two items is distinctly different (PAL is worth far less). I'm done shopping on eBay until they have new management. At least Amazon honors their buyers policy. reply SoftTalker1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Funny, talk to sellers who use eBay and they will say how it's all stacked against them and that eBay accepts disputes from buyers almost unconditionally and they have no recourse and how much abuse there is by buyers who claim they received damaged goods or the wrong item. reply throwaway133371 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Both can be true. This is a market for lemons. As a market's trust lowers, buyers are less willing to pay a reasonable price for a square deal because of the probability being higher that it isn't. This, paradoxically, lowers the value of legitimate products from legitimate sellers because there's no way to differentiate. The risk adjusted value of the product lowers. Legitimate sellers leave. Things spiral. Everyone loses. Trust is the real rare commodity. reply groundzeros20151 day ago | root | parent | next[–] And the rational response to a low trust environment is to act with low trust. This is so fragile! reply rlonstein1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] > I've been an eBay customer for 25+ years and it's worse than ever with fraud. It's gotten so bad that my account now warns me that I'm at risk if I report any more purchases on there. It's always been bad but it's gotten worse and there's no recourse other than a dispute. I had a seller label a midi device a particular version (known to work with Linux and Mac) but when it arrived it was an older version that requires a proprietary Windows-only driver. I went back to the listing and the photos were of different versions. Seller refused the return. Ebay was unhelpful. Great. reply RunSet1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] ebay has hidden the "report listing" button so well i thought they removed it. but it is still accessible behind a plus sign ("+") in the corner of the page. reply dpark1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] This sounds like you are running an ad blocker that’s breaking stuff. I also run an ad blocker in all my devices and have to periodically disable it because it’s breaking random sites in ways that look like the site’s fault. reply MrDOS1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Nah, it's Firefox, not the ad blocker. I run into similar problems all the time, and disabling my ad blocker never solves it. If you pop open the developer console and look for errors, it usually boils down to Firefox having stricter policies about cross-origin requests. Even major web properties simply don't bother testing for even the most superficial functionality on browser engines other than Blink any more. reply dogtimeimmortal22 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Correct, specifically Firefox 78-esr. Life is hard, and my old mac is out of date. I still haven't found my preferred brand of linux, though sometimes the experience is better there(though not always). I usually also test in PaleMoon, Basilisk, and SeaMonkey, with varying degrees of success. I was lazy this time, and did not test further. note, the current front-runner for my linux migration is MX. I'm still looking around though. will i ever actually make the plunge. one day my mac will just die i am sure. reply sippingabonedry1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] Do you think it's more likely all these major websites are broken, or that you are doing something to cause the problem? reply MrDOS1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] I think it's extremely likely that all these major websites are built specifically to work with Google Chrome, and I would call that “broken”, yes. reply mindslight1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] It's worse than that. They all put up browser surveillance / captcha blockwalls to "stop bots" (even despite bots being legitimate shoppers these days!) that make the sites just straight up not work on most of my browser configs. And they keep getting worse - I'm sure they've all got some big dashboards that say "evil bots blocked", the numbers just keep going up up up (false positives and all), and whatever middle manager championed the initiative to block customers gets a pat on the back and a mandate to do more. Amazon, no problem, browse from anywhere. Amazon has similar functionality, but they just do it a lot more intelligently. The most I've ever seen on Amazon is a simple captcha before the login page, period. Whereas on other sites, if a user is logged in to a longstanding account with a history of real purchases, and that logged in session isn't requesting pages at some exorbitant rate that goes well beyond enthusiastic middle-clicking, then it should never end up blocked. Yet I've had this happen on most sites that aren't Amazon - they've lost sight of the primary goal being to serve customers! Of course to me every webshop has their bread and butter of what types of things make sense to purchase there. I'm certainly not going to buy stuff from Amazon that is twice the price as it is elsewhere because it's only on Amazon becomes some enterprising seller put it up there as a convenience. But I can understand how others would, given how hard the other webshops want to actively reject your business. reply routerl1 hour ago | root | parent | next[–] > They all put up browser surveillance / captcha blockwalls to "stop bots" (even despite bots being legitimate shoppers these days!) that make the sites just straight up not work on most of my browser configs. What do you mean by this? For example, we do escalating proof of work and I'm not sure how this would make a site not work, even for very exotic configs with high risk signal (e.g. spoofed user-agent, proxies, etc). It will definitely consume more CPU cycles, but I don't see how it would affect functionality. Disclosure: I work for Friendly Captcha. reply cowlevel22 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] I've got a web app that receives over 1000 requests every second, of which 1-2 are optimistically humans. These bot blocking pages are not for show. reply mindslight19 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] My argument wasn't that they are for show, but rather that the false positive rate is way too high and the incentive seems to tune them ever upwards. Also context here, 1000 requests/second is doable on modest hardware as is. Mitigations with a false negative rate of 10% get that down to 100 req/s, which is doable on even a Rasperry Pi. You don't need to block every request but those 2 in order to have a usable site. We can imagine some rough contours of the problem - require being logged in to do any expensive query, serve static pages otherwise, rate limit accounts that do many expensive queries (especially without buying anything), and project the login page with some mild proof of work to prevent credential stuffing. From what I've seen, Amazon comes much closer to this (I've only ever seen a captcha when logging in), whereas other web stores just keep cranking that false positive rate up and up. reply cowlevel10 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] They are very expensive requests. reply mindslight7 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] So another case of "good enough" inefficient code/design, and then making users suffer for it. I can sympathize for a small project, but we're talking about good size web stores here. If their basic product pages aren't static, that's on them. reply SoftTalker1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] I don't use eBay much, but I use Firefox exclusively and never recall any issues with it there. reply 55556241 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] > walmart: still get the "technical issues" error page. Try a different browser. I use Waterfox for most general purpose browsing and it rarely works with Walmart.com, while Chrome works fine. reply dylan6041 day ago | root | parent | next[–] "however their site started giving a stupid error page for anything but the latest version of google chrome; this started about 2 years ago now." Responding before coffee maybe? They already stipulated this reply Snowfield95711 day ago | prev | next[–] So then there is no reason for amazon to enforce industry wide price fixing as described in this article if its just about logistics. reply eisa011 day ago | prev | next[–] Yup, and you can even cancel items in the order before it has shipped! Don’t think any other online stores offer that in Norway, really annoying reply aDyslecticCrow1 day ago | prev | next[–] Why is a purchase ever in such a hurry? Short delivery only really encurrage impulse purchases. It arrives when it arrives. reply jasode1 day ago | parent | next[–] >Why is a purchase ever in such a hurry? Short delivery only really encurrage impulse purchases. We never do impulse buys for frivolous throwaway consumerism junk but fast ~2 day delivery is still very helpful because... Life Happens ... such as stuff unexpectedly breaking and you want to have a replacement to quickly fix it. Example of 2 events just in the last month: (1) garage door screw coupler broke. It's the piece that connects the motor shaft to the screw drive. You cannot buy this type of oddball part from Home Depot or Lowes. Amazon had it and delivered it the next day so I was able to repair the door immediately. The alternative of waiting a week+ for slower delivery means the door has to be disengaged from the track so it can be manually raised and lowered. This is not acceptable because I don't have the specific key to the garage locking mechanism from the outside. Why don't I have a key?!? Because life happens. I guess I could manually lock it from the inside and leave the car outside the garage for a week but I didn't like the idea of leaving a catalytic converter exposed to drive-by theft. (2) was my Skechers work boots had the sole separated from the shoe. I bought the same model shoes from Amazon for $59.99 and had it in 2 days. I could drive to the local Skechers store but they charge $79.99. So either wait a week+ for slow delivery or pay $20 extra plus round trip gas money to buy at the local store. Amazon quick delivery acts as a JIT (Just In Time) inventory system to take care of unexpected things that happen in life. That's a more sane alternative than holding a bunch of inventory of random parts for things that might go wrong. Btw, Amazon often offers extra reward points credited to your account if you voluntarily choose slow delivery instead of 2 days. This is what we do the majority of the time. I assume Amazon does this pseudo "cashback" incentive as a way to consolidate as many customer orders as they can to optimize their delivery routes and reduce costs. reply PaulHoule1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] If you're in a Nielsen "A" market like 40% of the population you have a Sketchers store in your area. I'm in a "C" market, a college town with post-material values, and the local stores suck. (Great thrift stores and vintage clothes but if you want something new it is Target or Wal-Mart or the overpriced Haberdasher that will get you something appropriate for a wedding but 'not special' in my mind) reply Jcampuzano21 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] Oftentimes I'm buying maybe a tool or a part or something like that which isn't necessarily available in my local hardware store. Having a predictable delivery date for that on top of it most of the time being way faster than anywhere else is really nice. If I buy some of these somewhere else I might wait weeks for a small part due to logistics issues or low availability compared to Amazon Not all purchases are things that are just consumable/materialistic. I find most of the time the stuff I buy on Amazon nowadays are things like this, where I want something I need but can't easily get locally or am too busy to go out and get during stores hours. reply howunfortunate1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] Oh no my toilet broke, the hardware store is 45 minutes away, and I have work and kids. Don't worry, I don't want the replacement part overnight. It arrives when it arrives! reply throwaway1737381 day ago | root | parent | next[–] If it’s a Lowes you can get the parts delivered next day. And you’ll know the threads are compatible. Most of the stuff I’ve gotten on Amazon technically fits NPT fittings but it leaks really badly unless you coat it with thread tape because the threads are the incorrect profile. reply bombcar1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Lowes is even better than that - they'll often cancel your order the very same day! Saves you the frustration of wondering if they'll actually deliver. https://toolguyd.com/another-horrible-lowes-shopping-experie... reply isleyaardvark1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] So weird to see this right after I had Lowe’s cancel my order the first time I bought something from them online. I didn’t even choose special shipping, I just wanted them to send me an item they had in stock. reply anonreplier1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] let's be honest most people on here are buying USB cables, videogames and other non-essentials reply bityard1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Most people call a plumber. reply SoftTalker1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Most wealthy people do. But there's a whole lot of folks who can't really justify paying $200 for a plumber service call to replace a $20 part in the toilet tank. reply BeetleB1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] > But there's a whole lot of folks who can't really justify paying $200 for a plumber service call to replace a $20 part in the toilet tank. You guys are hilarious. Where are you going to get such cheap plumbers? I just had a plumber out for nontrivial work. Definitely over $200 per hour! (Although I will say: If you have CPVC pipes, best to call a plumber and tell them up front you have CPVC and let them take the liability...) reply BeetleB1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Eh - most toilet repairs are doable with the help of Youtube videos (the primary benefit of Youtube for me). reply steveBK1231 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] This guy DIYs reply ChoGGi1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] I ain't waiting overnight for a toilet part. If it isn't in my plumbing box, we're taking a trip. reply phatfish1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Your nearest hardware store is 45mins away and you dont have the tools on hand to fix a toliet? reply dpark1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] You keep all the parts for toilet repair around just in case? Do you live on a navy vessel? reply bityard1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Most toilets are not mil-spec. "All the parts" can be one universal Fluidmaster universal toilet repair kit, $25 at any home depot. I have one on the shelf in my garage. reply creaturemachine1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Actually, yeah. Wax rings, gaskets, supply lines, maybe a flap. Maybe not an entire fill valve, but they're available at any small hardware store. reply mithr1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Yes… because places like Amazon mean I don’t have to :) that’s the point! reply master-lincoln1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] In the former German Democratic Republic waiting for your car (Trabant) to arrive after ordering took 12+ years on average reply steveBK1231 day ago | root | parent | next[–] The old joke that went with that- A citizen goes to buy a Trabant. The salesman tells him to come back to pick it up in nine (or ten) years. The customer asks: “Shall I come back in the morning or in the evening then?” The salesman asks: “You're joking, aren't you?” The customer replies: “No, not at all. It's just that I need to know whether the plumber can come at 3:00 PM or not. reply philipallstar1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] But people richer than me exist, so I'd rather have that world than what we have now. reply galangalalgol1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] While I get your point, there is obviously a middle ground between eastern block communism and unregulated anarchocapitalism that many nations can and do inhabit. Antitrust is a good example. The free market can't solve everything, and monopolies are bad for innovation despite what Thiel says. reply philipallstar22 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] > unregulated anarchocapitalism that many nations can and do inhabit Where does this? What's "many"? reply steveBK1231 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] I just said its often not even the hurry. I just want an ETA! Purchasing decisions for "this arrives in 2 days" are different than "this may take 2 weeks". It's the difference between saving me a run to the local big box store or not. reply crote1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] > It arrives when it arrives. Yeah, but will I be at home when it does? We no longer live in a world where everyone has a nuclear family and the wife is always home while dad is at work. In 2026, only the rich can afford a housewife. Most of the time I am indeed not in a hurry to receive my purchases. For most items I genuinely could not care less if it arrived tomorrow or two weeks from now. But I do need to know when it will arrive, so that someone is home to receive it. "A month from now, on a Monday morning" versus "A month from now, on a Tuesday afternoon" makes a huge difference for me, as one of them would result in me having to walk to my front door and the other would result in me having to rent a car and spend an entire afternoon having to go to the other side of the city to pick it up at some warehouse. 90% of the time I choose next-day delivery it is because I know I will be home tomorrow, and the alternative is "some random day next week". If they offered me the option to pick out of a bunch of guaranteed delivery moments next week which are convenient for the seller/shipper, I would! reply z3t41 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] POV: you just completed the order and discovers you have ordered from China and it will comme in 100 small packages over a period of three months. reply parpfish1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] i'd love a 'slow amazon' variant where i could shop for things as normal throughout the week, but it would hold them all until a single specified time where i could do a final review/approval of orders for the whole household the order and then have it submitted at once. I'd win because I could remove the late-night impulse buys and de-duplicated things added by multiple family members. They win because it simplifies shipping logistics/packaging and actually encourages more loose/impulse driven buying ("just add it to the cart, we'll review it later"). reply ChickeNES1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] They have had that for years now, you can set your "Amazon Day" and they'll batch your orders together. reply alfg1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] It gives more confidence in the service at the time I'm thinking about the order. I want it to be reliable so I don't need to track and worry about it. reply steveBK1231 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Precisely - Amazon is the one retailer I literally delete order emails from. Basically everyone else I keep the latest status mail (ordered / shipped / arriving tomorrow) in my inbox because they have not earned my trust, and orders have fallen through the cracks before. Anecdotally Amazon is 90% of my online shopping (by order volume) but only 10% of my unshipped/wrong item/misdirected/lost packages. I have had mis-delivered packages from USPS/UPS/FedEx even on large/high value items. reply himinlomax1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] I almost never impulse buy. When I order something, it's because I need it. And if I need it, I definitely care that it arrives quickly. reply sophrosyne421 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. reply DoneWithAllThat1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] This is such a remarkably silly take that I’m struggling to believe it’s being offered in good faith. reply aDyslecticCrow1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] The point is that a slightly slower delivery feels like a rather small reason; for tolerating the collape the entire market of online purchases to a single abusive and monopolistic marketplace that is actively reducing the quality, trustwortiness and safety of everything we buy. The reason everything else is worse than Amazon is itself because of Amazon. Once you've taken over the entire market; subsidising your delivery networks to the moon keeps the moat. Amazon is just rentseeking the entire US consumer market while being a rather bad online marketplace. The only solution left is a antitrust breakup. reply yreg1 day ago | prev | next[–] If you almost don't care about how quick it is then why not take 2-10 days as 10 days? reply omgwtfbyobbq1 day ago | prev | next[–] That has not been my experience. Amazon meets their delivery estimates about half the time. It's not a huge issue because they're usually only a day late, but I suspect they may be deliberately misstating how quickly they can deliver to help with sales. Other retailers are also off, oftentimes more, but they usually don't market based on delivery time as much as Amazon seems to and I generally order from them when they are less costly. reply account421 day ago | prev | next[–] I don't even care about shipment times at all as long as they are not completely unreasonable (e.g. multiple months for a supposedly in stock item). But I do care that the items do get to me or that thinks are resolved satisfactorily when that is not possible - without me having to hound the seller. Unfortunately that's still much more likely with Amazon than with some random internet shop - and that's even with Amazon's own enshittification of their service. With other sellers if the final courier fucks me over and wants me to pick up the package in dumbfuck nowhere district thats my problem because if I don't I might end up needing to threaten the seller with legal action before they resend/refund. With Amazon delivery issues are not my problem. reply casey21 day ago | prev | next[–] Yup, when it's like this then the customer could, if they wanted, downsize in terms of local tool/part/food/appliance storage and save much more than if they had low prices but unreliable service. For some people, city dwellers, this service could facilitate a totally different lifestyle (bringing city-like conveniences to the suburbs). reply frig5722 hours ago | prev | next[–] Lmao at Amazon packages showing up on the day they say it will. Not my experience in a major city. reply kakacik1 day ago | prev | next[–] Probably correct analysis. It also means means that places they simply do not operate in (like Switzerland) they are completely meaningless. Luckily local alternative(galaxus/digitec) is so much better, reviews and rating are trustable, each category has 1000s of items, services and communication stellar etc. that for me, that name symbolises just some not-so-cheap cloud I used to work with some years ago. reply lotsofpulp1 day ago | prev | next[–] >The problem for everyone else is not simply that Amazon ships quickly, I almost don't even care about that. The thing is that Amazon ships & delivers on a reliable predicted schedule. When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does. I shop at specific competitors who can do similar (B&H, Sweetwater, etc). I don’t care so much for specific delivery dates (although they are a plus). Most important are free returns. Hence, I prioritize shopping at Costco/Target/Walmart/Home Depot/Lowes/Old Navy/Amazon/etc. reply apercu1 day ago | prev | next[–] I've been mostly happy with sweetwater - but they use USPS and I had a shipment (strings) take 2 weeks. I've started to use more "mom and pop" stores - Philadelphia Luthery instead of Stew Mac (Stew Mac shipping is a joke, they want you to "subscribe" for $120 a year now, and places like "The Acoustic Shoppe" in Missouri for strings. reply KellyCriterion1 day ago | prev[–] ...and their customer care & return handling (which is basicly give me my money back) usually just works. reply
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