Amazon has a piracy/counterfeit problem. And has for a very long time. I have basically stopped buying there as much as possible.
My current trend is to use them as a search engine then got to the companies site. At this point you might as well shop alibaba as thats where half the crap is from anyway.
With books, Amazon has become the opposite of a search engine for me. I have to use external resources to actually find the right titles, to enter them 1:1 into Amazon search to get to the books. Context based discovery has become next to impossible (which I used it before a lot for). Something must have changed in their indexing algorithm a while ago. Also many results are flooded with garbage, like some ridiculous "notebooks" with similar titles to the searched book or product name.
Amazon kind of gave up on discovery, at least for books, when they realized they could make more money running ads. I sell books on Amazon. Years ago, their book pages had two carousels of "similar titles" on each book detail page. Similar titles were selected by some pretty helpful algorithms based on what purchasers of the current title had also purchased, as well as some other secret sauce.
At the time, ads weren't very prominent, and they were profitable for authors. I could buy them for 5 cents a click and even if only one in fifty clicks resulted in a purchase, I made money.
Now, most of the algorithmic recommendations are gone, and for many ads, Amazon suggests bids of $2.50 or more per click. Those clicks bring in money whether Amazon makes a sale or not.
To some extent, they've given up on matching customers to the best or most suitable products. Why should they work that hard if ads are more profitable?
They've also had problems with piracy and counterfeits, as mentioned in this article. I heard a radio interview with a Target executive a couple years ago where a journalist said, "Amazon is underpricing you on everything. How do you plan to stay in business?"
She said, "We vet every product on our shelves. We know who makes it and where, whether it's legit, and whether it contains lead paint and parts kids can choke on. Try to find that info on Amazon."
The reporter didn't seem too impressed at the time, but the Target woman clearly saw where things were going. As the quality, authenticity, and reliability of Amazon's merchandise has declined, people are starting to notice.
I'm not sure this is a problem they will ever have the will to fix. While they break even or lose money on genuine goods they have to ship for free, profits from third party sellers and Chinese drop shippers keep the retail operation afloat.
Amazon used to have a great recommendation page that had a tab for new releases and coming soon. This was incredible for book discovery and they got so much money from me with these pages.
Amazon is currently recommending me shower heads and bathroom hardware from when I remodeled a month ago because I bought that stuff then. Pointless.
Yup. Buy a printer and you'll see recommendations after you purchase one for every other printer in existence, rather than say, ink, toner for the one you did.
I am actually working on this very problem and trying to make book discovery magical and more of an experience, we just turned 14 months old and slowly working toward more unique approaches -> https://shepherd.com/
For now, you can look for books based on Wikipedia topic (I analyze them using NLP/ML to find connections), or via another favorite book or author. At the heart of everything is 5,000+ authors who recommend their favorite books around a topic, theme, or mood.
This is somewhat of an aside about Target, but I've noticed that their inventory has moved significantly upmarket in the last 10 years or so. Their long-term strategy appears to be distinguishing themselves from the "bottom-of-the-barrel low-cost stuff" market and settling in a "low-cost but still decent stuff" niche.
Thing is, even Walmart vets their inventory. This problem has been going on long enough that I've been telling friends & family not to purchase anything that goes on or in your body from Amazon due to counterfeit issues. Whereas, with Walmart I am pretty well assured that if I buy a can of green giant corn it's actually produced by that company.
Sure, it's definitely possible for counterfeits to sneak into their supply chain, but that is only possible via employees or suppliers defrauding Walmart. Walmart also loses on this, so they are incentivised to audit and prevent this, since they actually hold and own the inventory. Whereas Amazon has zero incentive (or ability) to audit their supply chain, since the inventory they hold is actually owned by someone else. [aside-yes, I know that frito lay, nestle, etc actually own their inventory in Walmart and just merchandise the space]. Target definitely has moved upmarket, but even their low cost competitor has far tighter controls than Amazon.
I would even speculate that Walmart has less likelihood of counterfeits in the supply chain than target, having been tangentially involved with a vendor getting into each retailer. Walmart is incredibly mercenary with their suppliers, and due to their size they can get away with very onerous terms. I tend to dislike them for this, but I will admit I'm impressed with their supply chain management and they certainly don't leave opportunities for fraud available to their suppliers.
Yep, and they also don't fulfill those orders fro Walmart stores. 3rd party seller orders are shipped outside of their logistics chain.
Id argue that the marketplace is still a strategic misstep, but I understand why they did it. Managers want to show they are keeping up with Amazon, and the only way to offer the selection they do is to allow 3rd party sellers.
However, for physical inventory in a Walmart, that is a different thing entirely. Plus, who shops at Walmart online? I have family who are enamored with their online ordering (physical store pickup) and they all have complained about the 3rd party sellers. To a person, they have all said 'if I want to have stuff shipped to me, why wouldn't I use Amazon?'
Amazon is currently banking on their generous return policy and favorable customer service. Most of what they sell is available on AliExpress, but good luck returning something ordered direct from Ali. I don't want to speculate on Amazon's downfall, since they have a dominant enough position to coast for decades, but it seems to me they are making fundamental business mistakes. Most of my peers treat them as a place to order cheap crap, I get the feeling that consumer sentiment is that stuff ordered fron Amazon is even lower quality than Walmart. But direct to door is convenient, and they have enough inertia to last a long time before failing.
Heh, I feel like that has been Target's target demographic (excuse the pun) for at least 20 years (I don't have anecdotal evidence before that). They have things that aren't designer/high cost, but at the same time are not bottom of the barrel low cost things.
On a similar note, all my general-purpose electrical stuff (power strips, cables, etc) comes from brick and mortar stores now, because I just can't trust that the same items from Amazon, or even from Wal-mart's awful online 'marketplace', won't burn my house down.
A store is the worst place for discovery. They want you to buy what makes them the most money. This isn't just an Amazon problem it goes for every retailer.
You cannot get good independent advice from someone who wants to make money off you.
Yea, Amazon is absolutely terrible as a book seller. It's virtually impossible at times to distinguish between certain editions. The other day, I found an error in that clicking on a paperback edition took me to a completely different book. There's nowhere in the entire page to report that as wrong. And I have also found it increasingly hard to find books via their search. I have even had a few cases of the exact title of the book bringing up no search results, while I could perform the search in Google, and Google would find the Amazon listing for the book.
> The other day, I found an error in that clicking on a paperback edition took me to a completely different book.
I also just found this except in the opposite direction. I wanted an ebook version of a paperback book. The publisher has paper and electronic versions of all of their books, but somehow clicking Kindle version of Book A is linked to a Kindle version of Book B... and apparently a Kindle version of Book A just isn't available on Amazon.
I ended up buying the ebook from the publisher's site directly, which came in mobi, epub, and pdf formats. I thought "oh, I'll just drop this into the Kindle app so my notes and highlights will sync across devices". I was shocked to discover that's not even really possible with a third party purchased ebook. Eventually I gave up on that and just used the PDF edition and made notes in highlights in Preview after the Kindle macOS app and Kindle iOS apps lost all of my notes and highlights trying to sync twice.
I've made a habit of going to Open Library (https://openlibrary.org/) to search for books. More often than not I can even see the full text of the book if I just want to see a chapter or something.
And then once you find the book and get it shipped to you it gets destroyed in shipping because they put it in a padded envelope or a box with zero padding. Every book that I've ordered from them has been damaged. I quit ordering books once it happened the fourth time.
Aside, but I truly don't understand how Amazon can get away with how poorly they pack product. I work on the IT management side of fulfillment, and have been involved with shipping vendor negotiations as well as auditing our return/damage/shipping claims. Amazon routinely ships product in comically oversized boxes which increases the likelihood of damage to the point it is a meme.
Having worked on it, I get that sizing packaging is a tremendously complex optimization problem that even other experienced programmers underestimate the complexity. The options for different package size grow factorially with different product selections, and it isn't possible to have every size box available in a packing station. However, it isn't an unsolvable problem to pack better. Optimizing split shipments to increase effeciency is tremendously complex, but calculating the box size needed for an order is actually pretty trivial (ignoring packing density, which is oddly often a reasonable assumption for shipping goods to the consumer). Amazon can certainly improve here, just by using routing packages to a packing station with a closer box size and having differing box sizes in each station.
I have always assumed that, given their scale, Amazon doesn't necessarily face the same price hit that a normal shopper faces when sending an oversize package. I have gotten multiple shipments from Amazon that were so oversize that, at my company's shipping pricing, would likely result in a net loss due to shipping cost. However, I suspect that Amazon has negotiated rates that insulate them from this, and the shipping companies take a loss on individual packages to gain the volume.
What amazes me is that the FTC doesn't address the problem. You'd think they'd care. This has been going on for years; you really can't tell whether you're buying genuine products or not on Amazon anymore. I've stopped buying anything where I actually care about the provenance (like power tools and anything personal hygiene related) on Amazon.
The FTC does do some things, but below a certain threshold it doesn’t bother. There is lots and lots and lots of crime that does not get prosecuted or otherwise litigated.
A better search engine (esp for used books) is BookFinder: https://bookfinder.com. Between it and Goodreads, which has better ratings anyway, you can avoid Amazon entirely.
I’ve been using bookfinder since it was mxbf.com There have been some long out of print hard to find books that I was able to find thanks to them (although in one case early in the site’s lifetime, I found a book I’d been searching for for over a decade and placed an order only to have the bookseller discover that they apparently had either sold the book, lost it or had it stolen). It’s my go-to for used books.
I remember getting obviously burned DVDs run through terrible label makers back in the day. Now they're copying all the the art and packaging for box sets.
I'm both impressed at the work they put in, and also confused why they occasionally leave obvious errors like typos on the box after all that work.
I'm the same way. I used to say "at least you can rely on books bought on Amazon" but now you can't even say that much. Alibris or eBay are more reliable online retailers for books nowadays.
Alibris is really great, and I've gotten a few hand written notes from bookstores I've bought from. Even if they're fake I'm a sucker for these kinds of things.
I have thousands of orders on Amazon and have never received something different than what I expected.
Have I received items that were crap? Sure, because I chose to go with the noname item from the random seller for cost reasons. If it’s unusable I just return it.
That said, I don’t think I have even a 1% return rate. Buy items with a few reviews and read the top reviews instead of only trusting the star system and you’ll get exactly what you paid for 99% of the time (and will get your money back the remaining 1% of the time).
It's more involved than that. You can buy a brand name product shipped and sold by Amazon.com and still end up with a counterfeit item because Amazon mixes inventory with third party sellers.
You can also go to bookshop.org, buy the book there (usually for about the same price as Amazon), and most of the profit goes to a local bookstore (which you can choose) instead of a big search engine with warehouses.
