Every year I order over $50-100k worth of products for myself and my clients (servers, electronics etc.)
Every single 1 star review I've ever left was deleted. I have amazon prime american express card too. It is not like I am not a new customer. Last year alone I have 400 orders alone with 1000+ products. I don't bother leaving reviews.
I found nearly all cleaning supplies 1/3 of the price at Home Depot. Dog food also cheaper at PetSmart. To me, amazon is no longer the #1 option and I no longer buy unknown brands from it.
I’m also cutting way back on my amazon spend. I still buy when the reviews don’t indicate counterfeit red flags, but it’s fewer and fewer product categories each year.
Amazon is no longer the first place I look for many items; with things like Shopify, high-quality eCom experiences are available to basically every business in a way they were not 10 years ago. For branded products, I’ve started buying direct from the brand websites with mostly good results. I’ll probably cancel Prime next year.
Because I've been an Amazon customer for over a decade, and for half of that time I could trust them to have reliable reviews, good products, and the best prices.
Old habits die hard, but I'm now at the breaking point.
Agreed. Maybe if this article was written 5 years ago I can understand, but unless you're live somewhere where you don't have access to Amazon; everyone knows it's not just the prices that Amazon has that keeps customers coming back. People trust it. Amazon has the best customer service I've ever experienced. It is amazing. imo it's because unlike most stores, Amazon keeps your full shopping history so they know your worth to the company (as well as your habits and so on).
Ya, ever since products began being listed together in a single listing I've lost a lot of trust in the reviews. For example, when looking at dog beds I found listings where the reviews talked about different shapes, sizes, materials, colors, and manufacturers. Back when I first started using prime it was great because I could find good products quickly, while trusting the reviews and prices. In recent years I've drastically cut my purchasing from Amazon, because it takes much more time and effort to find high quality, authentic items with reasonable prices. I've been considering cancelling prime
Looking through the last several years of my Amazon account, I've purchased over ~$170K in product from them, ranging from Cisco switches/firewalls to jeans to phones/smartphone cases and even some more.....avant garde items for my wife.
Inventory sucks? Reviews meaning nothing? Incorrect!
I think you nailed it. My first Amazon order was in 1999. Recently, I've decided to make purchases elsewhere, due to various factors. It's becoming a place I don't like to go, because of the threat of fake products and reviews.
They are losing my trust, and I assume they feeling I am their market, with how much I have spent with them over the years.
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.
I felt like I had to remember how to shop other places online as I’ve been making my switch to less Amazon. I’m so tired of finding little business cards in all my orders to review the products. I gave a bad review on a vacuum cleaner, and the seller has been contacting me every few weeks to refund me if I take it down. I sympathize with sellers because I know it’s hard to sell anything less than a five star product on there. The whole system feels so broken these days.
I don't understand what you guys are purchasing and how the experience is so different if this is a real probability. I've had an Amazon account at this point since the late 90s, been a Prime member I think since 2004, wouldn't be surprised if I've exceeded six figures in total purchases after a quarter century considering several degrees worth of textbooks, furniture, appliances, clothing, the fact that both my family and my wife's family have been putting kids birthday and Christmas wish lists on there for close to a decade now. I have never once been bribed to leave a review. Obviously, this does actually happen, but it buggers belief that 1 in 10 is a real expectation and yet it never happens over the course of thousands of purchases in over 20 years. Unless there is something special about Great Britain in particular.
I'm not saying I trust the reviews on Amazon, but why even read them? I'm trying to think of purchases I made recently of stuff that actually mattered. I got all of my Minisforum Ryzen small-form factor PCs for my homelab cluster. Le Creuset cookware to stock my kitchen. I think I probably got the Dyson v7 Fluffy that's sitting in the corner of my room staring at me right now. My wife got our Litter Robot boxes from Amazon. When a bunch of my DeWalt power tools got stolen, I actually tried to restock from Home Depot, but they were out of a bunch of shit and Amazon wasn't. All of my Aruba Instant-On access points came from Amazon. Clearly, not everything is reputable and you should avoid certain categories of things. I know my wife was trying to get skin care products from there at some point and says it was all obvious knock offs that were watered down and she could get the same stuff but actually real from department stores and just started doing that. But best I can tell, high quality durable goods from well-known brands sold by the actual brand with pre-existing reputations are perfectly fine. Go to Gamer's Nexus or L1 Techs if you want honest word on the best PC parts. My dad was a plumber for 45 years. If I want to know what brand of tools to get, I ask him.
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.
I feel like I stopped being the customer and started being the product (at least partially) once Amazon started advertising shit to me when I searched for products. No, I’m not interested in $10 Ali Baba bullshit when I search for a $300 Casio G-Shock.
I used to spend about 60% of my disposable income at Amazon. That’s dwindled to maybe 1-2% over the last 5 years. I do most of my shopping at Costco or Target now. Amazon is a last resort only. Their customer experience sucks. It reminds me of what happened to eBay and Etsy. I’ll be cancelling my 10-year Prime membership at the end of this year, because I don’t use it anymore.
Same for me, except I like it :) Amazon was my third-biggest money sink last year (under IKEA and American Airlines).
But it's OK, because I buy everything from Amazon, and it saves me a lot of time and money. I never would have thought about buying laundry detergent online and having it shipped overnight. But it ends up being cheaper than buying it at the grocery store, and I don't have to carry it home.
I'm not convinced Amazon makes any money off of me, but that's really not my problem :)
Yes, for a lot of classes of products I simply do not buy from Amazon any more. The counterfeiting and inventory co-mingling (such that you can't even filter for trustworthy sellers) has destroyed a lot of Amazon's usefulness.
IMO Amazon's foray into 3P market-making will ultimately be seen as an attempt to grow the product that ends up killing the product.
Even besides the counterfeiting, there's just so much crappy junk. Want lightbulbs? Wade through page after page of crappy no-name brands who all have fake/gamed reviews, so you can't tell the good from the bad. Want a name-brand lightbulb? Well, then we're back to the counterfeiting problem.
Even when I do buy from Amazon there's at least a 50% chance what I buy will be some cheap bullshit with faked reviews that will fall apart in under a month of use. Amazon is worse than the Walmart discount bin.
Amazon has weirdly given me a newfound appreciation for traditional retailers. There is value in the curation - in filtering bad products so that as a customer I can shop with confidence, and that even if I don't do too much research the product I buy will be good enough - or at least authentic and safe.
The complete laissez-faire free-for-all model just results in me Googling for product reviews for the most mundane things I buy. It is a massive time-sink.
Wow, you have just described my Amazon shopping experience, except without being absurdly (or even remotely) rich.
But seriously, I actually got caught up in Amazon’s anti-fake-review dragnet and my account cannot review anymore without possibility of appeal. Being falsely accused made me irritated just enough to boycott all Amazon services.
At first it was tough, but then I realized I spend money on good quality products now, and, because I either have to wait for shipping from other suppliers or go in-person to a store, I’ve eliminated online impulse buys. It’s actually amazing how much fake or cheap stuff there is on Amazon.
I stopped buying from Amazon about a year ago for the following reasons:
- too many fake reviews
- unclear geographic origin of sellers (twice accidentally had to wait couple weeks for items to arrive from China)
- too many counterfeit products
- obnoxious Prime services being imposed on me
- Prime Video is so far below Netflix in comparison - regarding any aspect - it's not even funny
- many stories of Amazon bullying customers
- too many items that have been obviously previously returned and been badly repacked
- greedy fees are existential threats to publishing houses
- Amazon abuses its staff
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and now the interesting insight. getting rid of Amazon is not even close to as difficult or uncomfortable as banning Facebook from one's life or trying to buy only fair trade.
it was super simple and not in the slightest an inconvenience. I use idealo.de for comparing prices and order straight from any of the other hundreds of shops on there.
Every single 1 star review I've ever left was deleted. I have amazon prime american express card too. It is not like I am not a new customer. Last year alone I have 400 orders alone with 1000+ products. I don't bother leaving reviews.
I found nearly all cleaning supplies 1/3 of the price at Home Depot. Dog food also cheaper at PetSmart. To me, amazon is no longer the #1 option and I no longer buy unknown brands from it.
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