Shit hole 🤣
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.
Competition is far fiercer here, they have to contend with Alibaba-backed platforms as well. I also have access to Taobao. It’s not going to be as straightforward as it is in the USA.
I believe you, but the ultimate goal for all of those platforms is monopoly, looking at their track record. Like Peter Thiel said, competition is for losers.
I’m really not sure why you’re arguing with me, and where you’re going with this? I feel like you expect me to denounce Amazon and give up all ecommerce platforms, is that what you expect me to do?
Geez, what crawled up your ass and died? No need for hostility, I am simply expressing my thoughts. Do whatever the fuck you want, I’d take advantage of the honeymoon phase and drop them like a hot sack of shit once the find out stage begins.
Can confirm - the issues Americans face with Amazon feels so alien here. Even refunds and returns are prompt in general.
I know right? And the returns and refunds are a revelation in Asia, where it’s usually the buy-it-and-it’s-your-problem attitude.
Competition is a helluva drug
I’ve never once had an issue with an Amazon refund or return in the US besides forgetting to mail my return back, and I use shopping to self medicate my depression.
“Therapy shopping”
It may not be the most financially responsible thing, but sometimes I just don’t give a damn because it helps to do something nice for yourself.
Did I need to buy my PS5 without saving for it? Probably not. Do I regret it over a year later? Not even a little. It made me happy to buy it, it makes me happy to play it, and I would do it again if given the choice
I remember at one point that Amazon was amazing. Now days it’s a crapshoot on product quality and delivery time.
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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.
Amusingly there are a lot of fetish gear Etsy shops that are still above board, but not much else in my experience.
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.
The continuation of enshitification
Kick Amazon’s ass FTC!
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.
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.
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
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.
DAE remember the Walmart, High Cost of Low Prices movie?
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.
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.
Ali has good stuff depending on what you’re buying. Amazon usually has the exact same stuff for like 50% more
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.
Exactly. My hobby is making my own smart devices, and I can get 10x of one sensor from Ali for the cost of 1x from Amazon.
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.
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.
Temu is weird. They really are willing to sell stuff at a lost to garner market share and I’m sure there are some legitimately astounding deals if done right but also I’m just as likely to spend several days hunting and planning it out how to do so and still get shit on by a scam product anyways… so I avoid it but I know I’m losing out a chance to get a mini win.
But ali takes like 2 months to ship.
No it doesn’t. It usually takes 10 days for me. Sitting in US customs is like 5-6 days of that time, too.
More than full retail most of the time! They’re not even bothering to compete with Walmart or Target anymore on the same products.
Prime AND shipping half the time these days.
Strong words from the FTC.
Can you provide evidence that they called Amazon a “Shithole”, or are you just trying to be sensationalist and clickbaity crap?
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It’s often discouraged to editorialise the title of a news article you are sharing. OP didn’t make up the title, it’s the title of the news article they shared.
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.
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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.
Lina Khan is staking her career on this one, but the way the US judiciary looks there’s no way Amazon suffers.
Not gonna lie, it’s almost refreshing to hear FTC acknowledge what’s been true for years
I swear by the time FTC notices, they’ve been doing it for like 10 years already
Okay don’t think the FTC said Shit hole, no need to hyperbolize everything
Would be cooler if they did, tho
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.
They should have, because that’s what Amazon is these days. :P
I would slide them $5 for them to openly swear though
Damn… that is 2000% their annual budget.
And these guys call themselves professional journalists?
Totally agree. Let’s leave the sensationalization for that other site.
Surprisingly, this is the article’s title.
That’s the title of OPs linked article. What’s a lemming to do?
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.
