Re: Another "Does anyone understand Amazon..." thread
Several brands have pulled their stuff from Amazon apparently due to lack of brand protection and an increasing amount of cheap, substandard, NFFP, foreign crap. Brands either don't want the cross-association, lack of promotion/protection from Amazon, and/or also objecting to Amazon fees. Amazon has gone big on selling its services in China, but the result is a dilution of the quality of their offerings. Unless they sort this out the future is not great for them tbh. I'm not surprised Bezos is starting to focus on new projects. Amazon needs to start doing some serious thinking and corporate strategy planning for how it's going to play out the next 5-10 years.
Re: Another "Does anyone understand Amazon..." thread
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Jonj1611
I bought a screen for an iphone x recently from Amazon, sold by some third party but in the package it said free £20 amazon voucher, give us a five star review, take a picture of it and we will send you the voucher. :/
The 3rd-party bait-n-switch is something that really winds me up on Amazon.
Firstly, select an item, filter for Amazon only as a supplier. If it's an expensive item, I'm not dealing with some unknown company on Marketplace. Period.
So, for a NAS ( for example), go into item detail. There are several configuration options, like brand, type (standard or pro) disk type and capacity. Change one of those, say WD to Seagate, or 8TB or 6TB, and .... yes, it's there. Great.
Wait .... supplied by who?
I filtered for Amazon, and all of a sudden it's sold and supplied by saomeone that, for all I know, is a kid in his bedroom with a dropshipping arrangement. Not what I asked for, Amazon, you slippery beggars.
Similar scenario. Find an item, add to basket, then "Save for later". An hour (or day, whatever) later you go back to order and if you don't notice the little bit of text saying they've updated the seller, then .... yup, back with the kid drop-shipper.
They do at least put a little bit of text telling you they've changed, but Amazon, when I've picked one of the world's largest companies to buy from, not least because customer service in the event of an issue is usually pretty good, I'm not interested in some kid drop-shipper, okay?
If you no longer have it, tell me that. Let me decide to change supplier. Don't be so damn presumptuous as to do it for me, because several times so far, my reaction to you doing that is to buy somewhere completely outside Amazon and it's marketplace.
The ONLY times I'll buy from marketplace is if I find a company on there I already know, or if I can't find whatever anywhere else and decide it's low valued enough to take a punt.
It really annoys me when I've filtered explicitly for a given supplier (usually Amazon) and they switch me to someone else without asking, and often, without even telling me. My purchases are obviously chump change to Amazon, but I've already switched a couple of grand away from Amazon this year, because of this.
Re: Another "Does anyone understand Amazon..." thread
this^ and they've also changed the way to view alternate sellers. It's much less clear now in loads as a sidebar rather than the separate webpage. I don't know who Amazon have deciding this junk, but I can only assume their test groups are not the brightest subset.
Re: Another "Does anyone understand Amazon..." thread
I always give 3rd parties a miss on Amazon. The only one I've bought from is Torro Cases who make decent screen cleaning cloths.
Re: Another "Does anyone understand Amazon..." thread
Both Amazon and eBay's search functions suck ass, eBay you could forgive, but you'd expect more from Amazon surely...
Re: Another "Does anyone understand Amazon..." thread
Quote:
Originally Posted by
ik9000
Several brands have pulled their stuff from Amazon apparently due to lack of brand protection and an increasing amount of cheap, substandard, NFFP, foreign crap. Brands either don't want the cross-association, lack of promotion/protection from Amazon, and/or also objecting to Amazon fees....
Thing is the brand I'm talking about was Sennheiser. And Amazon do still sell them (despatched and sold by Amazon). But you won't know that if you do a search, without searching for the brand specifically. Sad really as I initially discovered these earphones on an amazon search over 12 years ago. No one else will discover them this way!
Regarding 3rd parties:
- I don't mind them as I know they're there. The most amusing thing is when I look for Blu-rays or DVD's, especially when Amazon puts it on sale, Amazon's price is £4.99.... but since for some reason Amazon gives "the best price", if you click the link it'll take you to a seller that sells it for £4.98. Seen this so many times, I won't fall for this, but wonder how many people have.
- I will buy from 3rd parties sometimes if the seller is the maker. I've bought some floor mats from a 3rd party seller/manufacturer and they're very good. But these are few and far between
They really have gone downhill in recent years... too much dilution, and way too much rubbish being sold by 3rd parties.
Kinda like Steam storefront these days, if you don't know what to look for from elsewhere, you won't find the good games anymore (other than big AAA titles).
Re: Another "Does anyone understand Amazon..." thread
Quote:
Originally Posted by
virtuo
I was in a rush to get something for my nephew's 7th birthday this week, searched "kids gifts for 7 year olds" (or something similar) loads of sponsored "Valentines Lingerie" results.
Hope he likes them.
With any luck he'll get some unchecked returns..
Re: Another "Does anyone understand Amazon..." thread
I was looking for an extension lead... and the 4th result overall seems sus! I assume the image was mistakenly uploaded, but you'd think someone would notice... :rolleyes:
https://forums.hexus.net/members/scr...ont-belong.jpg
Re: Another "Does anyone understand Amazon..." thread
Amazon is... amazon I guess, they do what they want
Re: Another "Does anyone understand Amazon..." thread
So one thing about their basket's "Saved for Later" feature, sometimes when you go to the basket, there's an
Quote:
Important messages for items in your Basket:...
...message, followed by price increases and decreases. Most of the time this is just pennies... so I stopped paying attention to it a while back. Although the only thing I was interested was if there was a decent price drop on an item.... but was not going to spend ages looking for it on 25+ items manually
Then recently I remembered Ctrl+F. Now I search for the word "decreased"; and this has made it a ton easier to find if anything in there has dropped price significantly!
Just thought I'd put this here in case anyone else will find it useful.
Re: Another "Does anyone understand Amazon..." thread
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Scryder
I used to write tooling for merchants/resellers/dropshippers and they basically have huge csv files from their supplier's FTP sites that they automatically imported in to amazon/ebay/ecom platform with a % markup - nothing was added (or checked) manually. You see it all the time, cetain product listings with generic laptop sleeves and phone covers as the picture. The data was that bad the related product wasn't even guaranteed to be something that matched the description OR picture.
It's a mess.
Re: Another "Does anyone understand Amazon..." thread
I haven't used amazon in months, and it's really not that bad. It takes a bit more effort to find an e-tailer that specialises in something if I'm buying something I haven't before, but once you do that you generally get search bars that actually work and listings that accurately describe the product.
You also avoid supporting a business that is actively trying to be as hostile as possible for everyone that deals with them - plenty of horror stories from third party sellers where their product pages switched to "sold by amazon" overnight, killing their business, or from people working in amazon warehouses. Ebay is a dumpster fire, but it's at least not trying to replace any business that uses it's platform
Re: Another "Does anyone understand Amazon..." thread
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Xlucine
I haven't used amazon in months, and it's really not that bad. It takes a bit more effort to find an e-tailer that specialises in something if I'm buying something I haven't before, but once you do that you generally get search bars that actually work and listings that accurately describe the product.
You also avoid supporting a business that is actively trying to be as hostile as possible for everyone that deals with them - plenty of horror stories from third party sellers where their product pages switched to "sold by amazon" overnight, killing their business, or from people working in amazon warehouses. Ebay is a dumpster fire, but it's at least not trying to replace any business that uses it's platform
Yeah I just wanted some 6-32 UNC screws (you know, harddrive screws etc) trying to find those was so painful on Amazon,and constantly trying to ship in from the US at massive delay, and quantities of 200 etc. I gave up, found a uk seller, cheaper, with adjustable quantities, and like you say, a search function that actually works!
Re: Another "Does anyone understand Amazon..." thread
Quote:
Originally Posted by
ik9000
this^ and they've also changed the way to view alternate sellers. It's much less clear now in loads as a sidebar rather than the separate webpage. I don't know who Amazon have deciding this junk, but I can only assume their test groups are not the brightest subset.
Yeh this has been annoying me recently. What I also find annoying is unless I'm missing something you cant get it not to show you items from amazon global. While I was trying to keep an eye out for the crucial ballistix ram coming back in stock in the UK I kept thinking it was there only to find it was from amazon EU or US.
As for stuff coming up in related items etc, while I've been looking at various PC components on there this absolute gem was in either related items or other customers also viewed...
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon...._AC_SY450_.jpg
Re: Another "Does anyone understand Amazon..." thread
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Drago MkII
Yeh this has been annoying me recently. What I also find annoying is unless I'm missing something you cant get it not to show you items from amazon global. While I was trying to keep an eye out for the crucial ballistix ram coming back in stock in the UK I kept thinking it was there only to find it was from amazon EU or US.
As for stuff coming up in related items etc, while I've been looking at various PC components on there this absolute gem was in either related items or other customers also viewed...
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon...._AC_SY450_.jpg
to be fair that's the face most of us are pulling when we search for rtx3000 cards only to find sellers such as this:
https://i.ibb.co/prTPY4w/scalping1.jpg
Re: Another "Does anyone understand Amazon..." thread
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Saracen999
So, for a NAS ( for example), go into item detail. There are several configuration options, like brand, type (standard or pro) disk type and capacity. Change one of those, say WD to Seagate, or 8TB or 6TB, and .... yes, it's there. Great.
Wait .... supplied by who?
I filtered for Amazon, and all of a sudden it's sold and supplied by saomeone that, for all I know, is a kid in his bedroom with a dropshipping arrangement. Not what I asked for, Amazon, you slippery beggars.
That happens because they lump things together, and you've picked an option that Amazon either dont actually sell themselves, or they switch to the cheapest item.
And it is annoying.
Amazon was a lot better when it was just things Amazon sold and each item had its own listing.