this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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There is a way to avoid buying utter shit on Amazon most of the time, but it's annoying- type in the full product name including the manufacturer. Like instead of "noise-cancelling earbuds," you have to type in "Skullcandy sesh ANC" (highly recommended and inexpensive wireless earbuds, by the way). Then the result is at least near the top of the list. Of course, this requires you to know what you want before you go there, which can sometimes, due to researching it, require going to some other website to make the same purchase anyway.
I basically don't do non-specific searches Amazon at this point unless I want it to be cheap and I honestly don't care if it sucks. If I buy a male-to-male cable converter and it craps out after a month... well, it was only $1.
The problem with this is that if a non-manufacturer sells the "same" product, and they both use the same warehouse, Amazon keeps both versions of the product in the same bin, and there's no way to guarantee whether you're getting the real product or the knockoff.
If you buy post-it notes from the official post-it's Amazon store, they're not necessarily giving you post-its from the official post-its stock. You could be getting post-its from seller A6Zodiyn which were never stored properly and several years old so the sticky note glue doesn't hold anymore. But both sellers were selling post-its in the same packaging, so they're in the same box in the warehouse and what the pickers grab is random.
But also the completely fake post-its are in that box too, and they don't stick as well plus their color is off, and there are fewer sheets per pad. But because the outer packaging is the same, same same warehouse box.
This has been a big problem in beauty products particularly, I know. People having sudden reactions to a cream they’ve used for years, because it’s actually a counterfeit.
Another area affected by this is trading cards. If you buy a trading card pack, it's guaranteed yours will have previously been opened, sifted through for good cards, poorly resealed, and returned for Amazon to say "yeah this looks untampered, sell it for the same vendor as new".
I think Jeff Bezos down voted you.
I can live with the burden of that knowledge. 😉
I personally haven't had that issue so far, so I can't speak for that.
I have. I won’t buy ssds or sd cards from Amazon anymore for this exact reason. I got counterfeits twice. Once with an sd card and once with an ssd. Now I buy from B&H for stuff like that so I know I’m getting what I ordered.
I was able to return both counterfeits to Amazon so I didn’t lose any money, but I don’t want the hassle of having to test and verify shit I buy to make sure it’s what it’s supposed to be.
Edit: I try to avoid Amazon entirely, but sometimes it’s the only option.
That's not the issue. If the wrong product was sent to you, you just make a refund and reorder.
Also, sort reviews for things by "newest" and read the reviews. Most of the time companies will do the majority of their fake spamming of reviews during the first weeks of release and if you read the more recent reviews you're likely to get more truth to them. I've looked at 4.5 star rated stuff with a thousand reviews before, but sorting by most recent I've seen 4 out of 5 of the reviews show up as 1 star rated.
It's really hard to know whether or not the reviews are astroturf though. Sometimes poor English is a clue, but not always.
That's the point of sorting by newest. If a product has been for sale for over a month it is highly unlikely that most of the most recent reviews are fake/paid.
That's where fakespot comes into play. I have the add on on my browser and it rates the reviews. Anything below a B is probably filled with fakes. You can even sort the entries using fakespot adjusted review scores.
This is it.
Nonspecific searches will show you the same three keyboards branded differently because they're dropshipped by some rando, and rated highly from purchased reviews.
Always look up what you want through a actual review site (not like bestvacuumstobuy2023 .com - which are also owned by dropshipper) and then shop around on Amazon and around the rest of the internet.
I'll sometimes buy CDs off Amazon, but even that is happening less and less.
Yessss! Awesome earbuds!
Right? I use them every day at work. They sound good enough for me (I'm not an audiophile), the noise cancelling is good enough to block out any real distractions, and the range is impressive. So is the battery life. Just all-around good earbuds and they're like $60-70.
I love mine so much. I got it in a Costco promotion because my last earbuds were so bad I couldn’t take it anymore and just bought it thinking a higher end one would be better. Probably the best non researched purchase I had and didn’t even know they were noice canceling. Such a nice surprise haha it sounds very good to me and the battery life is very impressive!