this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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[–] [email protected] 115 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Okay don't think the FTC said Shit hole, no need to hyperbolize everything

[–] [email protected] 80 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would slide them $5 for them to openly swear though

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago

Damn… that is 2000% their annual budget.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.”

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Good ol' Jay. He is a wordsmith.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Would be cooler if they did, tho

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's the title of OPs linked article. What's a lemming to do?

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[–] [email protected] 97 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Ali has good stuff depending on what you're buying. Amazon usually has the exact same stuff for like 50% more

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Prime AND shipping half the time these days.

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[–] [email protected] 91 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Oh and I love when I sort by price and half the results disappear.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 77 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I sometimes resort to using Google to find the Amazon item I need.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Either that or it gives you like 3 results after filtering, even though there were pages of matching results before the filter was applied.

[–] [email protected] 73 points 1 year ago (11 children)

Amazon has to deal with their counterfeit merchandise problem. Try to buy a memory card on Amazon and odds are you get a bogus counterfeit card.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago

It’s broken for us, it works just fine for them.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I got counterfeit Dove soap.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Amazon has the money to vet its products and provide better search results, it just chooses not to because it doesn’t need to.

Better to shove a shitty, expensive product in customer’s faces than a cheap, standard one.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not only that, Amazon has the mechanisms to prevent counterfeiting today: dedicated bins for individual sellers products. They just make the vendors pay an extra fee to use it.

Literally extorting their sellers. "Gee it'd be a shame if some counterfeit merchandise were to be sold instead of yours. I could protect you from that"

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[–] [email protected] 66 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I remember at one point that Amazon was amazing. Now days it's a crapshoot on product quality and delivery time.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

The continuation of enshitification

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (9 children)

I ordered a standard deck of cards. Should be simple enough, right? They never arrived. I waited a full month. I finally reached out to Amazon customer support and demanded to know what happened to my deck of cards. Their response was unbelievable: "We're dealing with it."

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Don't use Amazon. It's not like they are the only web shop for stuff you would like to have.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (11 children)

I've had good luck with drop.com for electronics.

Have any recommendations? Sometimes it's hard to beat the convenience of Amazon.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Drop used to be so much better before the rename.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago

I swear by the time FTC notices, they've been doing it for like 10 years already

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

IDK what’s worse…that this is a thing, or that I’m so accustomed to Amazon’s shenanigans that I’m used to heading into the dark web of results, aka Page 2, in order to find exactly what I’m looking for.

That said, charging cables are kind of a bad example. I’m prepared to spend $10 on a 6-pack of varying lengths of Brand X cables I’ll replace next year as opposed to one $25 Apple-approved MFi cable that I’ll also replace next year.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Page 2 is never a safe place to be.

Amazon fails because its so expansive, but customer's expectations aren't high enough for Amazon to maintain that breadth.

Amazon has the money to vet its products and provide better search results, it just chooses not to because it doesn't need to.

Better to shove a shitty, expensive product in customer's faces than a cheap, standard one.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

Can confirm.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

Not gonna lie, it's almost refreshing to hear FTC acknowledge what's been true for years

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Kick Amazon's ass FTC!

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

DAE remember the Walmart, High Cost of Low Prices movie?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Lina Khan is staking her career on this one, but the way the US judiciary looks there's no way Amazon suffers.

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