This happened to me. Bought AirPods Pro a couple of months back for £250. I received a cheap garbage speaker worth ~£10. I spent ridiculous amount of stress and time trying to get it sorted with Amazon to no avail. Amazon kept telling me to return the AirPods I never received. It was the fourth Apple product I bought from Amazon in twelve months yet they still refused to help me after they had delivered me the wrong item.
It is happening to so many people at the moment in the UK so stay away from Amazon. See here:
I used to trust Amazon for just about anything I needed to buy, but I'd guess maybe in the last 6-8 years I'll mostly only order something if I recognize the brand name selling me the product.
Tried to buy a pair of cheap-ish bluetooth headphones off there a few months ago. Three different pairs and none of them even worked out of the box. Gave up and bought a more expensive pair from a known brand.
Yeah Amazon is worthless to me for the last few years. The reviews are fake, the search is terrible, and many of the products are counterfeit or resold/returned items. When I realized that I canceled my prime subscription and now when I search for products I explicitly exclude any results from amazon.* domains.
People buy beats??? But they are expensive for such poor audio quality…
I don’t understand Amazons destruction policy. I ordered some stuff a few years ago and it never arrived. Amazon replaced the order for me which arrived in 4 days. About 5 months later the original package showed up… I tried to contact Amazon about it and they just said keep it…
Yet when my kindle stopped working after a month they sent a replacement and asked for the old one to be destroyed…
Not too long ago, my daughter at college lost her favorite headphones. For reasons not worth going into, we needed a replacement fast so I went to Amazon. I figured that Prime shipping would be able to get the kind she likes to her before I could get there myself (I was some hundreds of miles away but planning to swing by on my way home). Isn't that what I paid the subscription fee for? Well ... no go. IIRC the best they could do was four, maybe five, days. And not because they were out of stock. Then I went to B&H, who could get them there next day for a better price. No prizes for guessing who got my business that day.
Amazon was a pretty decent bookstore once, then a pretty decent "everything" store, then they just enshittified the hell out of everything. While it's good that anti-trust actions are finally being taken, it would have been even better if the practice of predatory pricing sustained by VC money (not just at Amazon) had been nipped in the bud long ago.
Amazon is absolute shit lately. I have been a happy customer for a long time and there have been experiencing some trash.
1) Fully agree on the trending down customer service. I have bought 2 things recently that went on sale after I purchased them. Support refused to give me a price adjustment... and they agreed that I could send back my item and buy another as the only other option. Absolute waste of time and money for everyone involved. On another occurrence, I bought a razor, opened it up and the blade was bent, I asked if I could get a new one, they are making me send back the old bent razor. Are we really at a point where I need to send back broken things that end up in landfills? I spend thousands of dollars on amazon items that I keep, do they think I'm scamming them out of a single razor blade? I bet a few people have ruined it for everyone else
2) My echo devices have turned into home invading advertising robots. I use them to control my lights, I'll be putting my daughter to sleep and ask alexa to turn off the lights in her room. Next thing you know, Alexa is screaming about listening to a podcast or selling me some new bedtime routine features. I'm very close to throwing them all away
You can't beat having stuff delivered same/next day so I'm stuck with them on some things
Amazon is in a weird place right now. In the recent past, Amazon was the place to get stuff online - cheaper than most places and Prime shipping was a big win. I don't think they're going anywhere, but there's still an awful lot of stuff you can't buy on there, or is difficult to find.
Now some departments are getting more like Etsy - a Shenzhen marketplace. This is good, because there's a lot of random stuff you can get that you don't need to import. It's also bad because it's virtually impossible to know what you should buy if you don't know the brand reputation (and that matters to you).
Brands include Rephoenix, Luoriz, Ugreen, Syncwire, RAVPower, Rankie, Benestellar, Onson, Jecent, Emmabin, Brightsnow, Maxteck, choetech, Volutz, Kinps, the list goes on. I got to page 3 before I gave up.
What about headphones? Mpow, OneOdio, BienSound, Alihen, Sephia, ZIYE, Sadon, OMORC, etc.
I'm genuinely curious as to when sellers decided that they must have a brand name for every product, and to hell with the meaning. It's like they all read those "how to sell on Amazon by importing" tutorials.
Even though deep down I know that they're probably just as good as anything you can buy on the high street, the sheer volume of random brands is really off-putting to me for some reason. A bigger problem is that you can miss stuff in the noise - e.g. if you didn't know that Anker have a good reputation, could you tell the difference from any of the other names in that list? Seller churn is also high, so it's not like you can rely on reviews either - that product might be gone in a month.
On a brighter note it really highlights how much you're being ripped off when you buy from a 'name brand' company that's just rebadging stuff from China.
I mainly cancelled mine due to the worsening quality of everything I tried to buy from amazon. Its gotten so bad I pretty much look away from Amazon when online shopping whenever possible. Just as an example, I purchased a supposedly new pair of $300 headphones. They arrived in the mail, obviously opened previously, and covered in q sticky residue (dont know what it was). That was a prime featured item.
When I first heard of sites like JD.com and Alibaba, I visited out of curiosity and noped out fast. The UX was horrible, the sites were a jumbled mess, and I'd see the same product marked up at different prices, and a bunch of fake-seeming reviews. "Thank God we have Amazon here", I thought.
Tried searching for bluetooth headphones on Amazon Canada (which has a much smaller selection than the US site). It was almost exactly as I remember the old Chinese ecommerce site. Wall-to-wall rows of indistinguishable products, 500+ 5 star reviews for each, many of which are obviously for other products.
Lately, the Prime app hasn't even been working on my PS3, so it might be time to start moving back to brick and mortar for my purchases.
Just last night I purchased a new MIDI controller from the local Guitar Center because the Amazon listing was not sold-by Amazon. I don't trust Amazon's 3rd party program. I also recently purchased a power adapter from eBay because Amazon's listings were hundreds of items of incomprehensible trash. It's getting to the point where I don't even look at Amazon at all for many items, because I know their listings will be useless.
I've pretty much learned to buy nothing of value from Amazon any more. Got burned too many times. Read the reviews! This problem is endemic! People are buying new items and either getting used or wrong items. The site has gone to shit since they moved to rely heavily on affiliates.
I now buy direct from manufacturer or brick and mortar.
If I want cheap generic headphones I can go to monoprice and get something cheap but safe, legal, and decent quality - their $10 are surprising decent for what they are, throwaway headphones.
If I want nicer headphones I can go to a brick and mortar retailer (or their online counterpart) and get a selection of curtailed products from known brands provided by known suppliers with all the information about the products listed with a good search so I can compare. I have a choice but I don't have to slog through dozens of private label brands or poorly listed products with missing or incorrect descriptions/information. Or irrelevant products listed in the wrong product category.
If I go to Amazon I have to wade through pages of bad search results full of junky unsafe products from questionable sources (paradox of choice) with bad/missing information just to roll the dice that I don't get something counterfeit and/or unsafe.
What purpose does Amazon service now in this situation?
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