Amazon is such a shitty company. A lot of the time people will refuse to buy from eBay or from a vendor's website because they think eBay has fakes, or that the vendor may not offer the same...
Amazon is such a shitty company. A lot of the time people will refuse to buy from eBay or from a vendor's website because they think eBay has fakes, or that the vendor may not offer the same protections that Amazon does. In reality Amazon is chock full of scammers and fakes. I've had a better time shopping on eBay, even though initially I only used it to spite Amazon.
To be fair, Ebay/Paypal is pretty damn shitty as well... between their borderline illegal locking of paypal accounts with no warning and very little recourse, tendency to always decide disputes in...
To be fair, Ebay/Paypal is pretty damn shitty as well... between their borderline illegal locking of paypal accounts with no warning and very little recourse, tendency to always decide disputes in favor of buyers over sellers with zero compensation for the sellers (resulting in a lot of scammers taking advantage of that fact), and the whole site being rife with scammers in general. As bad as Amazon is, at least their returns policy is incredibly fair to both consumer and vendors... and while it's getting harder and harder to trust reviews on the site and you may get the occasional subpar product, at least your won't get scammed out of thousands of dollars there.
One of the significant advantages of eBay at this point, for buyers, is that you can at least be sure, when you buy an item from a vendor, that you are actually buying that vendor's item. With...
One of the significant advantages of eBay at this point, for buyers, is that you can at least be sure, when you buy an item from a vendor, that you are actually buying that vendor's item. With Amazon, regardless of how much you might trust the vendor, Amazon might decide to send you an item from someone else. Short of not buying anything with Prime shipping or Amazon fulfillment (at which point, why buy through Amazon?), there is no way to avoid unscrupulous vendors. You could be buying directly from the manufacturer, and still receive a counterfeit from some other vendor.
In a particularly absurd case that was my last purchase before entirely losing patience with Amazon, living in the US, I needed a ream of A4 paper. I carefully checked the product page, and I was careful to purchase from a vendor that was well-reviewed and was actually a physical store with good reviews.
None of this mattered, because some other vendor had flooded Amazon with US Letter paper, in torn packages, that they had entered in as A4, and, since Amazon was storing it everywhere, it was far easier for Amazon to ship the mislabeled paper I hadn't ordered from a nearby warehouse rather than the ship the paper I had from across the country. As a result, it appears that it is actually impossible to reliably order A4 paper from Amazon in the US, even though they claim to sell it.
One might expect that this would result in bad reviews of the product, but when I wrote a review stating that Amazon was unlikely to actually ship the correct paper size, my review was deleted because it didn't comply with their community guidelines, presumably because being unable to ship the right product was a "shipping issue."
Yeah, those were things I was aware of before using eBay. The ways they can fuck you are much less, though, as a buyer rather than as a seller. Also, for me part of the decision to pretty much...
Yeah, those were things I was aware of before using eBay. The ways they can fuck you are much less, though, as a buyer rather than as a seller. Also, for me part of the decision to pretty much stop using Amazon altogether is just that I would rather use my dollar to support someone other than Amazon, which I consider to be a shitty and far too oversized corporation.
They're selling even more mass surveillance in the name of convenience, putting workers in poor conditions, having their delivery drivers work overtime (and sometimes piss in bottles) just to stay on top of their required deliveries, and more.
This is incredibly concerning - I have no idea how Amazon manages to maintain any semblance of consumer trust if they're doing stuff like this. Bad for businesses, bad for consumers, but...
This is incredibly concerning - I have no idea how Amazon manages to maintain any semblance of consumer trust if they're doing stuff like this. Bad for businesses, bad for consumers, but apparently good for Amazon.
Blocked due to GDPR, here's a copy of it on pastebin
Can't believe there are still websites that'd rather block the entire EU than stop screwing over their customers.
Amazon is such a shitty company. A lot of the time people will refuse to buy from eBay or from a vendor's website because they think eBay has fakes, or that the vendor may not offer the same protections that Amazon does. In reality Amazon is chock full of scammers and fakes. I've had a better time shopping on eBay, even though initially I only used it to spite Amazon.
To be fair, Ebay/Paypal is pretty damn shitty as well... between their borderline illegal locking of paypal accounts with no warning and very little recourse, tendency to always decide disputes in favor of buyers over sellers with zero compensation for the sellers (resulting in a lot of scammers taking advantage of that fact), and the whole site being rife with scammers in general. As bad as Amazon is, at least their returns policy is incredibly fair to both consumer and vendors... and while it's getting harder and harder to trust reviews on the site and you may get the occasional subpar product, at least your won't get scammed out of thousands of dollars there.
One of the significant advantages of eBay at this point, for buyers, is that you can at least be sure, when you buy an item from a vendor, that you are actually buying that vendor's item. With Amazon, regardless of how much you might trust the vendor, Amazon might decide to send you an item from someone else. Short of not buying anything with Prime shipping or Amazon fulfillment (at which point, why buy through Amazon?), there is no way to avoid unscrupulous vendors. You could be buying directly from the manufacturer, and still receive a counterfeit from some other vendor.
In a particularly absurd case that was my last purchase before entirely losing patience with Amazon, living in the US, I needed a ream of A4 paper. I carefully checked the product page, and I was careful to purchase from a vendor that was well-reviewed and was actually a physical store with good reviews.
None of this mattered, because some other vendor had flooded Amazon with US Letter paper, in torn packages, that they had entered in as A4, and, since Amazon was storing it everywhere, it was far easier for Amazon to ship the mislabeled paper I hadn't ordered from a nearby warehouse rather than the ship the paper I had from across the country. As a result, it appears that it is actually impossible to reliably order A4 paper from Amazon in the US, even though they claim to sell it.
One might expect that this would result in bad reviews of the product, but when I wrote a review stating that Amazon was unlikely to actually ship the correct paper size, my review was deleted because it didn't comply with their community guidelines, presumably because being unable to ship the right product was a "shipping issue."
Yeah, those were things I was aware of before using eBay. The ways they can fuck you are much less, though, as a buyer rather than as a seller. Also, for me part of the decision to pretty much stop using Amazon altogether is just that I would rather use my dollar to support someone other than Amazon, which I consider to be a shitty and far too oversized corporation.
They're selling even more mass surveillance in the name of convenience, putting workers in poor conditions, having their delivery drivers work overtime (and sometimes piss in bottles) just to stay on top of their required deliveries, and more.
This is incredibly concerning - I have no idea how Amazon manages to maintain any semblance of consumer trust if they're doing stuff like this. Bad for businesses, bad for consumers, but apparently good for Amazon.