I got an MSI motherboard from Amazon that was listed as "new", but was obviously heavily used and no longer functioning. No anti-static packaging, it was wrapped in cheapo foam paper and had what looked like scratch marks all over it.
That's probably the worst shape item I've received, but I've also heard and got counterfeit baby items, which could be extremely unsafe. I'm being extremely careful with Amazon moving forward.
Amazon should be doing more due diligence on checking out who their partners are and what they're selling. Blindly accepting everybody without knowing who they are and then randomly banning them based on customer complaints sounds like a very unreliable and dishonest way of doing business.
My friend, who works in an Amazon warehouse, agrees with you. He advised me to never buy food or personal items from Amazon because the warehouse is heavily infested with rats and most items therefore end up coming into contact with rat waste.
All the food and personal items I buy come bagged and sealed.
This feels like a non-issue, no more than knowing that the book I ordered was next to a rat at one point, which could happen in the storage area of any book shop anywhere.
I recently bought some dry cat food from Amazon. One of my cats immediately got a massive skin infection that cost >$400 to cure. I can't prove it was from that but this is an indoor cat who has no real exposure to anything else that would have been different.
Needless to say, I totally agree with not buying anything that goes on or in a living thing.
I've never personally had this happen but I've seen it alleged that items listed sold by Amazon occasionally get fakes in the mix or shared as common stock in Amazon warehouses for items like MicroSD cards.
Huh? I order food and personal products all the time.
Nobody's counterfeiting my bulk name-brand orders of flavored almonds. Or my hair products.
Counterfeiting tends to happen with high-value electronics, or occasionally expensive textbooks. I've never heard of it happening with food or personal hygiene. I mean, I just don't think the profit margins are there.
Please educate yourself and be wary. Those counterfeit hair products can be harmful. The profit margins on beauty products are huge. Go to a beauty store and look at the prices.
I stopped ordering cat food from Amazon after one of the sets of cans quite obviously did not come from the manufacturer.
Usually, canned cat food comes in a cardboard box with the manufacturers branding and some important labels, along with X number of cans inside arranged and kept tight in some fashion.
This one was literally a bunch of cans inside a sealed, transparent plastic cover (and then inside the regular amazon box). When I checked the product page from which I purchased, it had only a handful of reviews (versus the usual 1000s of reviews on the real thing), but it had the correct supplier brand name. After reading a bunch about the colocation of products, this was fairly scary.
Nowadays I just buy from Chewy / Petco / Petsmart etc. It's just not worth the risk.
Edit: don't mean to add some FUD or anything with Amazon, I was just expanding parents comments about baby supplies with pets as well. Still buy a lot of stuff from Amazon, but not anything where I stand to lose more than money.
I use to buy dog food from Amazon. My dog started getting sick after awhile, so we switched to store bought and she quickly got better. Same brand and type.
Could be. You could get away with a lot lower product safety and quality for cat food than you could for human food. That means you could make it for a lot cheaper and sell it as a higher quality brand. It's easier to get away with killing or sickening a few cats than it is people.
This rings true with my experience also. A couple weeks ago I bought a bunch of computer parts online, the majority from NewEgg and a MSI motherboard from Amazon. Hooked up everything and it wouldn't post. Thinking it was a power supply I swapped out and tested the new power supply in my old PC and it worked, so I took the old power supply and put it in my new PC and it didn't work. Returned the motherboard to Amazon and bought different brand from Best Buy and it's been working like a champ ever since.
On a different shipment from Amazon I received a small bathroom rug. The weave of the design was off by over an inch on two of the sides. I've never had such bad experiences in the past from Amazon than the last couple months.
That's insane, the worst any motherboard I own gets is dust and maybe overheating, but scratch marks all over? That sounds like someone who buys / sells hardware really often and just shoves parts in / out like it's nothing.
This is the reason Amazon's job is way harder than it looks at scale. Any system used to try and prove that an account is legitimate or not has difficulty telling when an account has been hacked/bought. A smart attacker will bide their time and will do very few falsified reviews. Everyone is trying to game the system, and beat the other "players", and are willing to resort to nefarious means to quash their competitors because money is on the line.
there are clearly a lot of folks returning bad motherboards to amazon as "ordered wrong item" or whatever, and they make no attempt to verify the return. i had to stop getting motherboards there years ago.
These people should really stop returning items this way, and label them as defective so they are removed from the inventory if they are in fact broken.
> At least on eBay it’s much more common to get a picture of the actual product
This part can be really annoying. I have been trying to collect all different boxed/DVD/etc releases of an old game and the Amazon listing just shows promotional cover art that I now suspect was never used for retail copies of the game (the publisher on the cover was bought out by another one before the game released). Definitely none of the copies that I got from that listing matched the image shown. On eBay you might need to sift through many listings to find the best price but at least you can usually see which version you are buying.
Yes, it is like eBay in the sense that you really have no idea what you might actually get. However, Amazon still has an excellent return/refund policy, which in some cases makes up for the inventory issues.
Amazon has a decent return policy -- but are you familiar with eBay's buyer protection?
eBay has very little reservations about giving you your money back -- they just pull the money out of the sellers account anyway, they're not themselves taking a financial hit.
And they have way fewer exceptions than Amazon does.
It is basically like eBay, if you ignore who is selling the product.
It's pretty easy to tell when you are, for example, buying Panasonic batteries from Panasonic as opposed to buying no-name lithium cells from a seller with a name like, 'krazedeals'. And sellers with a brand to maintain are unlikely to opt in to the 'comingling' program.
I guess that Amazon could highlight the seller information a bit more, but it's already pretty prominent.
I'm also a little bit confused reading all of these comments - do people think that Amazon sells everything on their website? It's rare to see an ecommerce business run that way these days - new-ish entries like Walmart also have third-party sellers, and old mainstays like Newegg have switched to that style of selling too. Personally I'm not a huge fan, but things have been like this for awhile now across the web. Do people not use other major online retailers? Or does Amazon get more flack because they are the service that almost everyone uses?
I'm not sure why there are so many complaints on HN re: these junk items. I've had an account since 1999 and don't have issues. I just pay attention to who the seller is for an item I'm looking to buy from. If I'm looking for a new Sonos speaker, I buy from the seller named 'Sonos', not from 'Jims Secondhand Sonos Shop'.
I would think most folks here would be savvy enough to know the difference and pay attention to whom they are buying from on Amazon.
Yes, but if you're concerned about buying a fake Sonos product, don't by from anyone other than the official 'Sonos' seller that's shipped and sold by Amazon.com.
I don't think you are understanding the point that others are making: for many products, Amazon commingles inventory. If you order from "Sonos Corp", but the closest warehouse has the same item that was sent in by "Sonos Clone", despite your explicit choice of vendor they may send the closer item and you may get a fake. Details about the approach are here: https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2019/03/20/1553085361000/Amazon-...
If anything, rather than going out of your way to make sure the item is shipped by Amazon.com, if you want to avoid fakes, you probably should prefer items that are shipped direct by the manufacturer. And once you are doing that, the question arises why you are shopping on Amazon in the first place. Personally, I tend to agree with the approach of buying only items shipped by Amazon. While the chance of getting a fake might be higher, the return process if I have a problem is easier. But I can see why others might want to avoid Amazon altogether.
I actually tried to buy a product from a manufacturer because of these concerns. Their website catalog just links to Amazon for purchase.
It is a Shenzhen company, though.
People gripe about "Chinese" companies, but everything is made by some Chinese company. Chinese companies who build a reputation for their brand are good.
I buy the open box and slightly damaged warehouse deals when they are available, and usually have fairly modest discounts. So far I haven't been able to ascertain that any of them were actually damaged in any meaningful way. Like maybe the box had a slight dent in it.
Yeah I bought my television some years ago through their warehouse deals for around 40% off. It was seemingly entirely unused, whoever had purchased it previously had gone through the effort of partially attaching (or removing) the included vesa mount. Everything else was flawless; remote control, batteries and 3d glasses all still in their sealed packaging.
I personally haven’t used Amazon much in the last 2-3 years which for me is because I find it so difficult to wade through all the noise in the search results.
That's probably the worst shape item I've received, but I've also heard and got counterfeit baby items, which could be extremely unsafe. I'm being extremely careful with Amazon moving forward.