Amazon Has Turned Into an Monopolistic Shithole Littered With Pay-to-Play Ads, FTC Lawsuit Solemnly Argues
Amazon Has Turned Into an Monopolistic Shithole Littered With Pay-to-Play Ads, FTC Lawsuit Solemnly Argues
Amazon is literally aliexpress but with a more sophisticated UI.
Nothing but absolute shit chinese knock off products. No longer can you get the same kind of savings like you could in the past. You're basically paying full retail now, plus prime or shipping.
Ali has good stuff depending on what you're buying. Amazon usually has the exact same stuff for like 50% more
I used to shop exclusively on Banggood. At the time AliExpress was sketchy.
A few years ago they flip flopped. Now Banggood is hot garbage, and AliExpress isn't bad.
Gearbest, Temu, and Wish were always bad in my experience.
Yeah, unless I need something ASAP, I usually only buy name brands, but not expensive items on Amazon. Other stuff I go to Ali for and just wait a little longer. Expensive stuff I buy in person or directly from the manufacturer when possible. Recently I've been trying to supplement Amazon purchases with small businesses where possible.
But ali takes like 2 months to ship.
Not sure what you buy off Ali, but nearly everything I used to buy for electronic/robotic projects has gotten to the price that I might as well buy off NA suppliers.
Sellers even drop ship from AliExpress and similar sites. Basically every time the shipping is quoted longer than a week it's probably drop shipped from one of the Chinese sites. They add $5-$10 to the price and take their cut without ever touching the product.
I canceled my prime membership and stopped using Amazon entirely after I ordered something that turned out to be drop shipped straight from Walmart. But online shopping in general is a nightmare these days.
Prime AND shipping half the time these days.
More than full retail most of the time! They're not even bothering to compete with Walmart or Target anymore on the same products.
My favorite enshittification of Amazon is how you can filter products by manufacturer, but only if the manufacturer is a reputable company like JOOGEE or XZzy or GoodTime and not those weird no-name companies like Anker or Samsung.
Won't even bring up the brands I like unless I search for them specifically, even then they're not the first result. Amazon gives the ad space to brands that are around for 3 months then poof.
but you should buy stuff from Smorkyaplorb Megasystems because they give the best kickbacks
Oh and I love when I sort by price and half the results disappear.
My favorite enshittification of Amazon is that, plus, the bonus fact the filtering acts different if you pay for prime. The filtering works better with prime. It should work the same regardless if one pays for prime or not.
They basically deliver a shopping experience that is worse unless you pay them money monthly. It's enshittification two layers of abstraction deep.
I can't even get the sorting method to work. It shows me a few items that match the sorting at first, then it goes all over the place. Utterly useless.
I sometimes resort to using Google to find the Amazon item I need.
If you have to do that, it’s really bad.
Either that or it gives you like 3 results after filtering, even though there were pages of matching results before the filter was applied.
Amazon has to deal with their counterfeit merchandise problem. Try to buy a memory card on Amazon and odds are you get a bogus counterfeit card.
It’s broken for us, it works just fine for them.
Amazon has the money to vet its products and provide better search results, it just chooses not to because it doesn’t need to.
Better to shove a shitty, expensive product in customer’s faces than a cheap, standard one.
Not only that, Amazon has the mechanisms to prevent counterfeiting today: dedicated bins for individual sellers products. They just make the vendors pay an extra fee to use it.
Literally extorting their sellers. "Gee it'd be a shame if some counterfeit merchandise were to be sold instead of yours. I could protect you from that"
Amazon is promoting the counterfeits. They don’t care because the people who don’t return the counterfeit products is high enough for them not to care. You basically can’t buy anything off Amazon these days unless you are ok with getting marked up crap from china
They literally try to gas light you when you try to bring the problem up to them. They sent me an in app questionnaire that then told me that often products don’t work and that people think they are counterfeit. My memory stick was an obvious counterfeit. It’s kinda sick that Amazon does this.
We got spray items that had nothing but compressed air in them
never had an issue since they started separating the third-party inventory from their stock. just make sure it's sold by Amazon.
For a while I used amazon as a "product browser", I would shop for what I want on there, and then go buy it straight from the manufacturer or whatever online marketplace the seller prefers.
Now, it has gotten so bad, it isn't even useful for that. Amazon will show you 50 overpriced knockoffs of the thing you'd actually want to buy without ever showing you the real thing unless you already know the brand name of what you want ahead of time. The reviews are useless too now, everything has 4 1/2 stars and the same substanceless reviews.
Hard to shop for vitamins when you have sham accounts claiming it cured their cancer, when you're just trying to take better care of yourself but don't wanna fall for homeopathic scams.
I ordered a standard deck of cards. Should be simple enough, right? They never arrived. I waited a full month. I finally reached out to Amazon customer support and demanded to know what happened to my deck of cards. Their response was unbelievable: "We're dealing with it."
Where do you live?
American here who uses Amazon frequently (at least 20 times a year).
I'm not debating that frequently, I get the wrong order or something that's clearly fake. But if there's one thing, their support is top notch.
I got a $400 foldable bike that was broken on delivery because of bad packaging, and they said we're replace it. I said I'll keep it since I can still fix it and they discounted me 20% to repair it.
In my previous place, we had lots of theft. 1 out of 4 deliveries. Amazon replaced every single one, no questions. One wasn't even a theft, some neighbor accidentally took mine. I told Amazon and they said keep it.
Every other store, I always get shit. Walmart is the absolute worst. Target is significantly better. But Amazon, no questions asked for me.
I have a decade of stories like this of their support.
I actually got a free mini fridge from Walmart.
I ordered it site to store, and when I opened it, it was damaged. Went online and started the replacement process, then decided I didn't want to deal with sending it back. I called CS and told them, and they canceled the return.
I bring it to the store, they do the refund, then I check my bank statement and there was 2 refunds. I let the people at the store know, and they said that since it was an online order, I had to call CS.
By this point it was like 10pm, so I got an Indian when I called. She swore up and down that everything was fine and no mistake was made. I don't think she understood that I was saying I owed them money (I didn't want the store associates to get in trouble). After 15 minutes of back and forth, I decided that I had tried hard enough to do the right thing.
Daaad....
They did that to me and after the third time they told me to wait without any concrete timeline i asked for a chargeback. The third party seller lied about the delivery but their bogus tracking number dates didn’t align with other facts. At least amazon didn’t ban me and they even apologized for not resolving the issue.
I remember at one point that Amazon was amazing. Now days it's a crapshoot on product quality and delivery time.
Etsy is now just as enshittified. Almost everything on there is dropshipped bullshit from AliExpress. You have to trudge through a massive amount of crap listings just to find anything handmade.
From what I have heard from sellers it's as bad on the other end. Nobody wants to buy a piece of handmade jewelry for $50, when there is an Ali drop ship that says "hand made" for $5. It's extremely difficult to judge the quality until the item arrives, so shoppers get conned into buying junk to save a few $ that they thought was hand made.
Amusingly there are a lot of fetish gear Etsy shops that are still above board, but not much else in my experience.
Amazon Prime: 2 day(ish) delivery.
Maybe they mean on average they deliver prime products in two days and that's why there's an increase in the next day products.
Don't use Amazon. It's not like they are the only web shop for stuff you would like to have.
I've had good luck with drop.com for electronics.
Have any recommendations? Sometimes it's hard to beat the convenience of Amazon.
Drop used to be so much better before the rename.
Between home depot, target, best buy, and walmart I can typically find most things I'm looking for.
I usually try to shop by reviewers first and check if the manufacturer sells directly. Retailers don't need to get a chunk of every purchase.
I buy a lot of electronics (and reading glasses) from AliExpress. I had the occasional malfunction but probably not even one in 30-50. Great NEMA motors too and 18650 batteries among other stuff like the Orange Pi, or mega boards.
A word of caution, there is lot of really cheap stuff that's quite low quality, and you can't post reviews under 4 stars (they won't show up) so you have to check the numbers sold and read the feedback.
Edit: it also sometimes take 3-4 weeks to get the stuff. It's like a little surprise sometimes.
I just use Walmart+ now.
Better for groceries, but they don't sell wrapping papers :(
Way to fight the man by using the little guys.
I swear by the time FTC notices, they've been doing it for like 10 years already
IDK what’s worse…that this is a thing, or that I’m so accustomed to Amazon’s shenanigans that I’m used to heading into the dark web of results, aka Page 2, in order to find exactly what I’m looking for.
That said, charging cables are kind of a bad example. I’m prepared to spend $10 on a 6-pack of varying lengths of Brand X cables I’ll replace next year as opposed to one $25 Apple-approved MFi cable that I’ll also replace next year.
Page 2 is never a safe place to be.
Amazon fails because its so expansive, but customer's expectations aren't high enough for Amazon to maintain that breadth.
Amazon has the money to vet its products and provide better search results, it just chooses not to because it doesn't need to.
Better to shove a shitty, expensive product in customer's faces than a cheap, standard one.
I too am willing to venture onto page 2. The reviews are what are killing me now though. All the reviews are for the top 5 results, because nobody trusts anything from page 2, when it only has a few buyers and 3 reviews. It's cyclical
And if a product has multiple "styles" to choose from, all the reviews are lumped together, so it's near impossible to figure out which product they're actually talking about.
It's like I'm playing detective, just to determine if the keyboard stand I'm looking for will be worth a damn or not.
Can confirm.
Not gonna lie, it's almost refreshing to hear FTC acknowledge what's been true for years
Kick Amazon's ass FTC!
DAE remember the Walmart, High Cost of Low Prices movie?
As someone in Asia where Amazon is trying to break through the market with stiff ecommerce incumbents, Amazon is great. And more importantly, they know they have no real value selling the generic Chinese stuff that has infiltrated US Amazon, so the amount of that is a lot less. The Chinese stuff on Amazon tends to be from the better companies that have tried to brand themselves and sell decent products (think Anker at the start), otherwise it's usually products from established brands. If I wanted cheap Chinese stuff I have way better and cheaper avenues.
Competition is good, eh?
How long has Amazon been operating in your market? Their MO is capturing a customer base with low prices and good service, followed by capturing sellers by offering them access to said customer base. After having locked everyone in their last step is to extract all possible value from both groups. Their playbook is creating a chokepoint to force themselves upon everyone for trade.
Check out Chokepoint Capitalism.
Can confirm - the issues Americans face with Amazon feels so alien here. Even refunds and returns are prompt in general.
Lina Khan is staking her career on this one, but the way the US judiciary looks there's no way Amazon suffers.
Is that a direct quote?
True, but they probably used the worst example item... a single apple lighting cable for $17 is on the second page for me but I could also get a set of multiple off brand cables for $12. "I'd rather get fucked by apple than Amazon" ???
Why would you buy a cable from Apple on Amazon? You are already paying the Apple tax and you want to add the amazon tax on top?
If you go on Apple website you can get the cable and free shipping
For me it only makes sense to have cheap alternatives when browsing for cables on amazon. Then again if i want cheap, i go on aliexpress
Apple rarely has a sale. Amazon has Apple products on sale regularly. I bought my airpods for $50 off when Apple was still selling them at MSRP. I don’t understand if someone is paying full retail on Amazon’s site for Apple products.
People like to have a consolidated way to do things, if they can.
That's why streaming took off, and why piracy is on the rise again.
Okay don't think the FTC said Shit hole, no need to hyperbolize everything
I would slide them $5 for them to openly swear though
Damn… that is 2000% their annual budget.
Exactly. The document simply states
“We're gonna make 'em eat our shit, then shit out our shit, then eat their shit which is made up of our shit that we made 'em eat.”
Good ol' Jay. He is a wordsmith.
That's the title of OPs linked article. What's a lemming to do?
It was a criticism of the article not the poster. OP is just the messenger
Would be cooler if they did, tho
They should have, because that's what Amazon is these days. :P
And these guys call themselves professional journalists?
Totally agree. Let's leave the sensationalization for that other site.