That's what name brands are for. Buy Anker or Apple or Samsung or Sony or Panasonic or whatever and you won't get crap.
It's not difficult to buy name brands.
"But name brand is charging $20 and generic is $8"
Yes, that's the price of wanting to avoid reading reviews.
"But there are counterfeits"
You can avoid 99% of counterfeits by buying only from sellers with good feedback. Just look if it's at least 95% and over say 100 feedback. Yes, some sellers that meet that will sell counterfeits and it's possible that commingling will mean it's a different seller's unit that gets sent but those are rare.
Imagine a world in which buying food at the supermarket were like this. You could only ever buy name brand anything, otherwise your cereal might be cardboard or your baked beans might taste like vinegar or whatever.
I'd much rather there were just a nonshit Amazon that didn't gouge.
Maybe it's that UK supermarkets' economy ranges are just really good.
Everything in a supermarket was selected by a buyer. It's not a two-sided marketplace that just connects random sellers and buyers, takes its cut, and disclaims all responsibility for whatever is being sold. Someone is responsible for every item on a shelf in a supermarket.
There are still plenty of stores that work this way for electronics. Buy a USB cable at Apple, Best Buy, Target, Walmart, heck, even Walgreens, and you're going to get a USB cable that some person sourced from a wholesaler. The retailer is going to stand by it and exchange it if it doesn't work.
The real shame of Amazon is that it started out that way and developed a great reputation as a result--and now they have thrown it away by letting anyone sell anything on their platform, even counterfeit crap. I don't understand it.
Many electronic items under $10 can only be returned at an staffed Amazon pickup location. In urban areas (e.g. Bay Area), that's a BART ride or a toll charge.
The round-trip BART ride will be $6 or more. The toll charge maybe $5.00 or whatever FastPass costs (not factoring in gas, maintenance, parking).
Such items are essentially un-returnable, unless you want to pay more to return it than simply dispose of it.
I make it a point to return such items. Having done so a handful of times, I now buy most of my electronics gear from brick-and-mortar shops.
You should always be able to return with free shipping any item that's defective. That's amazon's stated policy. In what cases are you saying they don't follow their policy?
It's been a while, but if my memory serves me correctly, some items can only be returned at a staffed Amazon location.
That is: the return shipping is free but getting to the staffed Amazon location is not.
I'm pretty sure this has happened with some items I've picked up from an unstaffed Amazon drop-off location that can only be returned via a staffed Amazon location.
3p sellers must have a return policy at least as good as amazon themselves. I.e. they must offer free return shipping on defective products. If not Amazon will step in and refund you.
I don't want to have to return things! What a waste of packaging and shipping and effort. Now fraud detection and product QA are added to the gig economy, and we're paying for the privilege.
I do that but still care about the environmental impact of thousands of other people that don't have either the means to buy name brand or the awareness of the problem they are causing.
I'd really like for crap products to disappear but... I don't see this happening in this world anytime soon.
It's not worth my time to return cheap items. It's a huge hassle, because I need to go somewhere with a printer to print the return receipt, attach that to the box, then go somewhere to ship it. Definitely not worth all that trouble to get a few bucks back.
Recently in the UK I can often return items at corner shops with their own printer. You just scan a QR code and hand over the box. The dropoff points are everywhere.
Sellers can get de-listed from Amazon with enough poor reviews. For low-ish value items, they may offer a free replacement to avoid bad seller feedback. Leave feedback and wait a few days for them to contact you.
I don't want a free replacement if it's just going to be the same crap. The problem is that the product itself is crap, not necessarily that any given one is defective. Replacements won't be any better.
And this is still way more hassle than I want to deal with.
>I'd much rather there were just a nonshit Amazon that didn't gouge.
Aren't most online retailers that control their supply like this? Amazon and Ebay are platforms, but walmart and target for example have actual warehouses full of every item they sell right?
There's a guy on Youtube called Mike Jeavons who has a week on series, where he will eat only a particular UK supermarkets economy range for a week, it's pretty good.
> Yes, that's the price of wanting to avoid reading reviews.
> You can avoid 99% of counterfeits by buying only from sellers with good feedback. Just look if it's at least 95% and over say 100 feedback.
Reviews and feedback are all thoroughly gamed. Can't speak for Amazon, but my wife worked for couple e-commerce companies selling on Allegro, our local Amazon/eBay equivalent, and from her I know (and seen it myself) that the following are common practices:
- When someone leaves a negative review, the company will do its best to bribe the customer - free gifts, rebates for next purchase, whatever, just so that they cancel the negative review.
- In order to boost its positive/negative ratio and keep it around ~99% positive, the company would routinely order its employees to make orders from home, choosing "payment on delivery" as an option. After couple of days they were to mark the orders as completed and give stellar feedback with some realistic-sounding review texts. The orders of course went to /dev/null themselves, so the only cost to anyone was the sales percentage Allegro took.
It's not difficult to buy name brands.
"But name brand is charging $20 and generic is $8"
Yes, that's the price of wanting to avoid reading reviews.
"But there are counterfeits"
You can avoid 99% of counterfeits by buying only from sellers with good feedback. Just look if it's at least 95% and over say 100 feedback. Yes, some sellers that meet that will sell counterfeits and it's possible that commingling will mean it's a different seller's unit that gets sent but those are rare.