Between these “authentic” fake reviews, the usual fake reviews and counterfeit products, Amazon seems open to serious competition.
I’ve already started buying things from Target and Walmart for things that are commonly counterfeited, like batteries and SD cards. I know they have a marketplace too but I avoid them for these items.
For me, the biggest thing Amazon has going for it is the dead-simple return policy. I’m comfortable rolling the dice with many products because I can easily return it, if it ends up being garbage.
Repackaging and returning can sometimes be a pain, so I’ll be reluctant to gamble sometimes. However, I’ve been more lazily repacking items and it hasn’t been an issue.
I stopped buying important things from Amazon for this reason. I don't want to risk getting counterfeit products.
We just got an email from Amazon that they identified that the water filter refills I bought 6 months ago were fake, so they issued a refund. But I hate the idea that they allowed it in the first place itself. And this is something that's affecting the health of my family. (Thankfully our unfiltered tap water won't kill us but still...)
We've been trying to avoid Amazon as much as possible and it's been hard. But not impossible. They've got such a head start over everyone else on their solid logistics operation.
They're actually open to competition... from ex-Amazonians. It's like all the ex-googlers that left and took those ideas to make open source versions because Google was so far ahead.
1) Retail return policies are mostly liberal. It's the smaller stores that tend to be more stingy.
2) Price Matching solves any issues with regard to lower prices
3) Returning is actually easier since you get the instant gratification of a refund, not 5 days later. Anyway with amazon we've always had to drop it off to UPS, so we don't save time making the trip.
The bigger issue is that since Amazon is so large and pervasive everywhere, it's very tough to actually boycott the company. Brands like Whole Foods, Ring, AWS etc are still important parts of our lives and careers.
We had constant issues with our fridge water dispenser using 'Samsung' water filters bought on Amazon. Out of desperation, I just bought a cheap off-brand one, hoping if it was at least being honest about not being an official product, it'd at least be functional as a replacement. All of the issues with our fridge have since vanished.
I've since learnt real Samsung water filters come with an authentication tag, and none of the ones I ordered on Amazon came with one. I think we've been drinking water from counterfeit filters for a year now.
These kinds of things have me quitting most things recently.
I don't own a TV, don't own a car, don't drink coffee anymore, don't subscribe to any streaming service, don't have a TV, don't have social media. My internet usage basically boils down to NYT, HN, Reddit and Youtube.
I can't say I miss much of what I gave up. My life is far from deprived. The caveat is that I live in western Europe, with good public transport, accessibility to plenty of nature and many things to do outside of glowing rectangles.
It’s just what happens when you mix the spirit of legal and business imperatives with tech, but there probably was never a tipping point for a world of hobbyists. Nobody accuses the lawyer or businessman of malfeasance when they secure the business moat.
>We had constant issues with our fridge water dispenser using 'Samsung' water filters bought on Amazon. Out of desperation, I just bought a cheap off-brand one, hoping if it was at least being honest about not being an official product, it'd at least be functional as a replacement. All of the issues with our fridge have since vanished.
Another example: I recently needed new brush heads for my electric toothbrush. I hesitated before buying, because I can't be sure that the toothbrush manufacturer-branded refills on Amazon are genuine. Going with a generic, compatible refill with good reviews is preferable in this case, aside from the lower price, because presumably no one will counterfeit it.
(I ended up buying the manufacturer-branded refill ... from Best Buy, not Amazon.)
I used to buy pet fountain filters on Amazon, but I've changed to a policy of not buying anything health-related since reading about Amazon's counterfeit issues.
I considered buying a pet fountain filter, but checked the reviews and found lots of horror stories about build up of slime and mold on counterfeit filters. One story even had a cat dying in way plausibly connected to the filter [1].
Unfiltered tap water won't kill you, but a counterfeit filter might.
It's really not clear that water filters are doing anything positive (you'd have to get your water tested to know) and they do have a tendency to increase the bacterial load in the water because of the inevitable biofilm that accumulates on the filter surfaces. In addition it's just another single use plastic product
They can make your water taste a lot better. My tap water is barely palatable. If I didn't use these filters, I would drink tap anyway but the rest of my family would probably resort to bottled water.
Fair. I've always been lucky enough to live in places with great water, if occasionally astonishingly hard, but if I was in say Las Vegas I'd probably stick to bottled water
My fear with a counterfeit water filter would be what it adds to the water. There is something in there and if it is counterfeit you don’t know what the plastic and filter material is. You could be leaching plasticizers, bpa, lead, who knows what into your drinking water.
They may not be regulated but if you’re buying a name brand water filter from a retail store in the USA, it’s unlikely that brand is getting away with selling something full of lead or other bad things. Those filters are sometimes tested by independent labs (e.g. Consumer Reports) and retail sales are regulated by the CPSC, e.g. https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/1997/cpsc-and-ecodyne-announce-...
In contrast if you are getting a counterfeit Chinese filter from amazon, it can be very hard or impossible to even figure out who to sue even if you have proof the product is bad.
> I stopped buying important things from Amazon for this reason. I don't want to risk getting counterfeit products.
There's nothing in my life that I buy where I would accept a counterfeit. I accept that it has absolutely happened, that it will continue to happen, but I have nearly completely retreated from Amazon since having children.
Oh man, water filters. I should add that to my list.
The problem is, I want to buy a generic filter because fridge manufacturer has the typical massive markup that a manufacturer does (like printer ink) but finding a reputable generic is difficult.
Co-mingeling is exactly right. I bought a Samsung product sold and fulfilled by Amazon and still got a counterfeit. I didn't discover it was counterfeit until after the standard return warranty and when I contacted Amazon, they couldn't have cared less, and basically acted like it was being counterfeit was just another aspect of a product that should be evaluated by a customer during the return period. Amazon can FO and die!
I started buying from Walmart because it's simply better. You don't have to be a member for free shipping, and you can always pick it up from a store if you got to have it ASAP. Walmart's return policy is also dead-simple. You could return a half-eaten cheeseburger to Walmart for a full refund.
I've received a counterfeit blender and only discovered it after a BBC article showing how they can catch fire. Amazon were very poor in handling that which would have left it to be sold to the next person if I followed their procedures.
When it comes to things like batteries and chargers which can catch fire, I always aim to buy direct from the manufacturer or a non-marketplace retailer.
In addition, Amazon is unable to stop sellers gaming the system by getting 5 star reviews on one product, then swapping the listing out for a different product. So when looking for an audio cable you will see reviews saying things like "Great Waffle Iron".
> getting 5 star reviews on one product, then swapping the listing out for a different product.
I didn't realize that was even possible... that's a really crappy loophole to leave open. I can't imagine why Amazon would let anyone completely swap out item info that way. Edits, perhaps, but everything?
Not only is it possible, it is very common and they've been doing it for at least 10 years. Sometimes its obvious, sometimes its not.
A common tactic will be selling a cheap USB cable for well below the market rate (because a cheap-to-make USB cable tends to perform identically to a more expensive one) and then swapping the product out for something similar but more expensive like a USB hub. If you go and read the reviews, you might have to read very carefully to see the difference between a USB cable and a USB hub.
Another tactic that sellers exploit is having one listing for multiple products but specifying each product as a different "color". So one "color" of the product is an SD micro-to-full adapter, another "color" is a USB SD card reader, and another "color" is an SD card, and so on. The key here is that the reviews are linked to the listing and not the separate products. So most of that 4.5 star rating could apply to only the adapter while the SD card might be garbage.
It's likely an issue with the volume of items for sale. What likely happens is they upload an item with multiple variations (think colours of a shirt). One of the variations is a completely different product. They buy some reviews for the shirt and then remove those from the listing, leaving only the other random product.
This happens on Aliexpress all the time. The idea is that they put up a super cheap item ($0.99 iPhone cables), get a ton of sales, some good reviews then swap it out for a more expensive item. Sales rank and reviews stay, and the new more expensive item gets that data. The new item will be much higher margin and/or will never arrive (they just take the money and run).
Yep, the issue has been around for longer than 18 months. It's easy to spot if you're a human. I guess Amazon can't or won't address it at scale. I spotted the issue about 2 months ago.
I don't know about swapping listings, but it's fairly common for mostly-unrelated products to be grouped together as "colors" or "sizes". The reviews for all the variations of the listing are grouped together, which makes sense if they're really just different colors but not if they're distinct products.
Is the issue of counterfeit products a worldwide problem with Amazon? I'm just asking because I'm in Europe and use Amazon quite often for electronics, and haven't faced issues so far. Could it be that the problem is mostly in the US?
It could be that I just avoided counterfeited goods by chance, or just didn't notice...
I am in America and have yet to get screwed by a counterfeit. I wonder if you might be on to something though. Maybe the counterfeits are all stored in specific states and ship from there more frequently since I assume Amazon wants to ship from the closest warehouse to you. Would be good to know what state most of these people live in to see if thats just the pattern. I say this cause I have always heard you can buy counterfeits in NY of any major clothing brand or even electronics.
I have stopped buying from Amazon because I have received a few product which had something off but I could not tell what.
For example, we used to buy GE fridge filters from Amazon. Every once in a while we would receive a filter which would change taste of water in weird way. New filters usually make water taste slightly different but it was just a bit more off. But we used to ignore that until we start reading about fake products.
So next time when we experienced weird water taste with filter change, I carefully checked our old filter with the new one and sure enough there were subtle differences. Really impossible to notice accidentally.
Since then we started buying filters from Home Depot, and we have had pretty consistent experience so far.
>> I am in America and have yet to get screwed by a counterfeit.
> Well, how do you know?
> Maybe they’ve been good counterfeits?
Well, sure. I've bought SD cards (frequently mentioned as a problem category) off of Amazon without ever experiencing a problem. Maybe I've received counterfeits, but I still think it's fair to say I've never gotten screwed by a counterfeit.
I mean the downside to a counterfeit card is probably that it is going to fail very quickly. I'd think even grandma would notice if she can't access her photos after a few months?
I've been screwed by a counterfeit SD card and it seems like the "manufacturer" probably took older, smaller capacity cards where the back stock had outlived demand for those specs and just reprogrammed them to identify as a higher capacity, premium SD from Samsung, reprinted the label (very well), got their packaging basically identical to Samsung's, sent them to Amazon where Amazon seemingly decided they should be co-mingled with the Samsung-supplied cards and sold off as such.
For the consumer, I only realized something was wrong when I filled the actual size of the SD card and started getting errors, but still those errors came from my phone and basically said the SD want being detected and to reformat. So it could have been a phone issue. Only after going down the internet's Amazon counterfeit rabbit hole and then finding a program that checks counterfeit cards did I find out the card was actually a 32GB card with probably some awful I/O rates and not the 128GB that it was a announcing to devices. And for all that time, energy, frustration, money, and data lost to phone reformats, Amazon didn't give two craps. They said I was outside the return window and if my item was defective I should contact the manufacturer. They probably only didn't say "seller" because they were the seller, no 3rd party. It clearly want on the CS script to consider that you can't call the legitimate manufacturer about a defective counterfeit product sold as legitimate by the same business they count on to sell their legitimate products.
It could also be slower read and write speeds. Also, I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but the difference in expected life of the product could be in years, such as 1 year for a counterfeit versus 10 years for a brand name.
I buy almost entirely counterfeit/knockoff goods. Quality is variable, but paying only 20% of the retail price for a similarish item works out well for me.
I don't really understand why anyone would buy originals to be honest...
I am an engineer, so claims like 'it's made in china and might explode' I can take with an appropriate sized grain of salt. One thing to watch out for is that chinese made devices are not expected to be safe if you don't follow the instructions. For example, if a device says 'do not charge for more than 2 hours', that means if you leave it on charge overnight it will catch fire. In the USA, devices need to be safe even if the instructions aren't followed.
This has got to be a troll post. How could anyone think it's acceptable for something to catch fire if they accidentally leave it plugged in too long? Do you set a timer each time you plug something in? Do counterfeiter items always come with their modified counterfeit-only instructions with these new rules to follow? Do they say "Note: this is a counterfeit so we replaced the food bowl's paint with a cheaper lead-based one, thus do not eat from it, especially not your children"?
Only 40 years ago, this was the case in the USA.. with rechargeable AA batteries. Chargers at the time didn't have detection for the battery being full, and after a few hours on an inappropriately sized fast charger, a battery would emit steam.
China is just a little behind, and the public has quickly come to assume devices are safe even if abused.
Isn't there a little engineering principle called "Murphy's Law"? If I recall correctly, the gist of it is "If something can be done incorrectly, it eventually will be done incorrectly."
Designing with Murphy's Law in mind is essential for not killing your customers and burning down their cities, or downing their passenger airliners, or crashing their cars.
It doesn't even cost more, in a company that can be sued for the liabilities of their defective products.
I don’t know what industry you work on where it’s ever ok for things to catch on fire if the user doesn’t follow instructions, but at least in mine even the word fire is out of bounds.
I've always thought there should be a .adv TLD, and if you're caught serving anything but first party information outside of that, there would be severe penalties.
Let one TLD take all the cutthroat inhumane tracking, malware, scum adserving, all of it, and let the rest of us browse in peace.
Either a trip or someone who buys counterfeit products on the street, where information in the market is known. If you buy a Gucci bag on the street, you know it's not really Gucci and you price accordingly. The same for DVDs, or electronics in a shady camera store. This is different. This is deception by a company that wants you to believe you're buying the real thing and charging you in accordance.
See the review on this product titled "Changed the formula?" ...
This is common, where a manufacturer will reduce costs by taking a formerly imported luxury product and re-create it with different ingredients from a different manufacturer, but all the reviews from the old product remain.
As a European I've definitely received fakes from amazon.DE. But I find the game reviews much more bothersome. Most products I now buy somewhere else but living abroad it's difficult to get everything I 'expect' so sometimes Amazon is the only way (eg i bought a 20l bucket on paint from a German Amazon seller that has a real store, as the branded version including shipping of the heavy thing was 30€ less than the cheapest product I could find locally.
Just want to throw in my $0.02 as a Canadian, but I haven't had any issues with counterfeit goods in the 4 years I've been buying things (mainly electronics) from Amazon. I also haven't heard anything (first hand) about others receiving counterfeit goods either.
On that note, while I have no idea how Amazon.com works, on .ca it is pretty clear on a product page whether or not the item is sold/shipped by Amazon or a 3rd party. Whether or not this has any bearing re. counterfeit goods, I generally recommended people buy the "Sold and Shipped by Amazon.ca" option even if a 3rd party's listing is cheaper.
I started to freak out a bit when people here started complaining about fake stuff and the whole story about commingled inventory. That was maybe 1 year or 2 ago.
I have continued to buy stuff from Amazon in Europe since and I have to report that I did not receive any counterfeit stuff (I believe, I checked everything as best as I can). I bought things ranging from screwdriver, SD cards (famously prone to be fake) to electronic/high tech. Costs ranging from 10€ to 1000€.
I'm starting to believe that it is indeed an US problem or like you I'm just lucky?
I feel the big problems started with Fulfilment by Amazon, when anyone and their mother could start selling directly on Amazon through almost no barrier. From anecdata alone (reading forums on FBA, etc) this program seems less popular in Europe. Americans on FBA that are just there for the quick buck typically stick with US FBA and for some reason I haven't read tons of articles on people in Europe using that as a new revenue generator.
I would be interested in this, too. I use Amazon in France (mostly) and the UK and Germany (ocassionally) and haven’t had the problems that people speak of in relation to counterfiet goods in the US.
I've really come full circle with online retail. I used to go to Amazon because I trusted the consumer experience: I trusted them with my credit card, and I knew I could get a refund if I needed to. But I have so little confidence in what I'm getting from Amazon, that I'm back to going to smaller, more focused online storefronts (camping store for camping stuff, music store for music stuff etc.) because it seems like someone's actually vetting the merchandise.
I think it stems from a lack of competition. Since Amazon captures so much of the market, they don't have to be that good anymore.
>Repackaging and returning can sometimes be a pain, so I’ll be reluctant to gamble sometimes. However, I’ve been more lazily repacking items and it hasn’t been an issue.
Recently they added a return option where you can drop off items at Kohls or a UPS store without repacking them. The store scans a QR code from an email and they handle packing and shipping the item back. Amazon then sends them off in bulk to a processing warehouse. According to my UPS store, most returns aren't even resold on Amazon. They just auction off lots blindly like a storage unit sale.
Apple Pay is paying by credit card. It's just super convenient not to have to make an account everywhere, and I trust Apple to keep info more secure than the IT team of a manufacturer.
Amazon has a counterfeiting problem alright, but I'm not sure why you think that other places can deal any better with this type of review fraud. It's a legitimate purchase followed by a review. Seems undetectable to me.
Biggest Amazon draw for me is price. I make a concerted effort to avoid them these days.
The only additional thing I can think they they could do is start infiltrating these review faking networks, figuring out which products are having reviews bought for them, and penalize them. That kind of goes down a rabbit hole where what if a competitor buys fake reviews for your legitimate product in order to get it banned. There is no perfect solution. It seems like Amazon has tried to alleviate the lowered integrity of reviews by showing professional reviews when you search certain things (such as Wirecutter). It's a real problem, and not an easy one to solve.
I'd love to see a large e-commerce site that runs like Costco. Want a printer? Here's one, and it's probably top ranked by Consumer Reports. Want snow pants? Here are the available sizes and colors for the single set on offer.
Pay professionals to pick and vet reputable, high-quality vendors.
> a large e-commerce site that runs like Costco. Want a printer? Here's one, and it's probably top ranked by Consumer Reports.
Costco is actually a very bad actor in this particular area; they generally order their stuff with a unique SKU (often the same product, but just a different SKU) specifically so that reviews of outside products don't apply to the (again, identical) Costco product.
I have not found it difficult to find reviews of products Costco sells - it's typically easy enough to find via the name and physical appearance of the product. I'll search "LaserJet M281cdw", not the individual SKU.
I used to work for a food company that Costco required to make special sizes in order to get into their stores. That made it impossible to price compare across stores, because the sizing was unique. Not all products are as easy to search for as printers.
Sure, but I want a middle ground between Costco and Amazon.
More product categories than Costco. Fewer options within those categories than Amazon. I can't buy an Apple Watch screen protector at Costco; at Amazon I'm presented with 8,000 Alibaba resellers, often with identical photos of the same product.
Two different "brands" (there are probably dozens of other sellers with the same item, but these two show up on the same page) selling the exact same shirt, with the exact same photo. I want a site that doesn't allow this, by sourcing reputable vendors.
Couldn't Amazon start reviewing things themselves - like actually curating the products they sell.
The problem isn't fake reviews per se, the problem is products not matching the reviews. You can check a sample of products then stop people who are responsible for "fake" products from being involved in Amazon selling in any way.
Basically do "Which" style consumer reviews on products being sold.
They kind of are the third party - the point is that if Amazon review it, ie certify it in any way, then one knows that if it's still terrible you can't trust _Amazon_. It puts skin in the game for Amazon that isn't currently there. At the moment if something on Amazon sucks people just say "oh that seller is awful" and buy something else from another Amazon seller.
I guess Amazon have no reason to implement any sort of techinical checking unless it gains them customers, so people have to vote with their money first.
Really? Price? Don't get me wrong, I appreciate a competitive price, but Amazon's real value is being able to get things that are freaking hard to find unless you go to 2 dozen different specialty online stores, which means having to trust 2 dozen different sites with your credit card information.
Back of America just killed of it's viral credit card feature, according to them because it's getting replaced across the board with intermediary services like PayPal, Google pay, Apple pay, and the like and will eventually disappear from Chase and the other virtual credit card providers. BoA said they liked it off now because it relied on flash and they were pushing to remove that risk (and likely were getting complaints by customers who couldn't get it to work because their default browser didn't support flash natively). So this virtual credit card route is probably short for this works.
PS, BoA did an awful join and totally bungled the sunset of their virtual card program.
Should be relatively easy to spot this pattern and flag for secondary analysis. Things like, frequency of purchase, rate of returns, five star rating pattern, consistency in rating reviews (always with a picture, always a certain length), amount of research done before purchase.
If someone consistently leaves five-star reviews, then they should be removed. Even if genuine, as in not paid for, they are still noise as this person is indiscriminate in their praise.
This is a hard problem (in the CS sense). How do you filter a customer that reviews a product paid for w/ their own money, who then later gets reimbursed via PayPal?
For the reviewer in the article, how can Amazon know these reviews are purchased? Yes, she buys a lot of stuff, but from Amazon's point of view she may just be a loyal customer- especially given the fact that she mixes personal purchases in.
Amazon does a bad job curating reviews, but this is a difficult problem. I'm not sure how anyone could police the type of review fraud discussed in the article effectively.
Repackaging is optional now. A couple of weeks ago I had to return two items and they just emailed me QR codes that I could take to the UPS Store, Whole Foods, or some other nearby business. I just bring the naked item and the QR code, and the store takes care of the rest.
If the top 50 or 100 "brands" got together and launched an on-line store where authenticity was guaranteed, and you'd have one place to order and track your orders, they might be able to compete with Amazon, reducing them to just selling cheap knockoffs, etc.
I am not sure reviews can ever be profitable business. I think you have to invest a lot of time in the review itself and in getting to know the field.
A while ago, I was looking for a wireless phone charger. A friend recommended Wirecutter for reviews. I took a look and bought their favorite charger. It's great!
I then later wanted to buy a 3D printer, so used the same strategy. I bought what The Wirecutter recommended, and as soon as I got the printer, I realized that they are completely clueless. The printer I bought doesn't even let you use gcode from an external slicer. You have to use theirs, and it is awful. It adds supports and rafts to everything. It has to be connected to a Windows computer for the entire duration of the print. And it requires you to create an account to even open up their software. It is so unbelievably bad that I was blown away that anyone could like the thing. And that's the problem with reviews; these people don't know anything about 3D printing, so they opened some software, inserted a cube, printed it out, and hey! a cube! wow! But you can't actually do anything useful with that.
I ended up extensively researching everything on my own and decided on a Prusa i3, and... yup, exactly what I wanted. I enjoyed spending a day putting it together. I enjoy hacking up the firmware and flashing my own build. I enjoy the huge community of printable add-ons. That is what I really wanted. And, of course, the prints are great. (Why did I read the Wirecutter and not something dedicated to 3D printing? The reality is, everything 3D-printing-related seems like machine-written blogspam. Writing a blog post that contains the word "filament, slicer, spaghetti, and geared hotend" 100 times and getting some ads from AliExpress equals instant wealth beyond your wildest dreams. Or at least that's what Google search rewards.)
Anyway, where I'm going with this is that you kind of have to be an expert in the field of products you're going to review. You have to develop extensive test protocols, beyond what manufacturers do internally. Remember all the bad USB Type C cables? Benson had to develop his own hardware and software to properly evaluate them. And that's for a strand of wires. Intelligently testing a 3D printer for its print quality, software quality, and long-term reliability would probably take years. By the time your review came out, the product wouldn't be on the market anymore. So nobody does it, and it will never be profitable to do it. (With the Prusa printers, what gives me hope for reliability is that they manufacturer the printers using their printers. If there is a fatal longevity problem or irritating software bug, they have to fix it, or they can't manufacture any more. That is the real review.)
I used to subscribe to Consumer Reports, who does seem to do a lot of testing. But they are too far behind and their test coverage was too limited to be useful to me. I wanted to buy a vacuum cleaner, none of the brands they tested were on the radar (it was just stuff you could buy at wal-mart, nothing high quality). Same with flat-screen TVs. And to some extent, you can never know what the reader of your review really wants. If I were buying a TV, I want it to accept HDMI and Displayport and copy the pixels out of the digital stream directly to the display panel. A pixel value of (0, 0, 0) should emit no light. A pixel value of (255, 255, 255) should blind me. When I press the power button, the TV should begin displaying the input signal the instant the button makes a clicking noise. Not 100ms later, not 500ms later, and certainly not 10 seconds later like my Samsung.
Such a product does not exist, so there is no product that would ever make me happy or get a 5 star review. After that, it's just a list of compromises you can accept. (Does anyone even make a non-smart TV? I watch TV so infrequently that I have a new firmware update available every time I turn the thing on. It annoys me greatly.)
There are still places to look for quality reviews, at least for anything that has a hobby behind it. TVs and 3D printers are actually great examples. TVs have rtings.com, possibly the best review site I've ever seen. It's entirely objective, and has measurements for brightness, black levels, response time, and a hundred other metrics. Plus, all of those get numerical scores on a live-updated curve.
3D printers have all3dp.com, which among other things prints standardized benchmark tests that have objective measures for a lot of the things that determine print quality, like overhand and stringing. Their reviews also go over things like manufacturer history and market segment, and their top overall recommendation is in fact the Prusa i3.
There are quite a few of these niche, in-depth review sites still out there (computer power supplies is another that comes to mind), you just have to go look. If there isn't one, the next step is to check for a subreddit or community forum. Failing that, in my experience even trying to critically read Amazon reviews is better than Wirecutter. Buying the first product on the search page is better than Wirecutter. Their "measurements" are useless and they don't bother learning even a ten-minute google exploration of their product categories. Why people like them so much is beyond me. Presentation, I guess.
The Wirecutter has made a very successful business off of reviews and Amazon referrals, so it's doable, but it requires a lot of scale, and a company willing to pay a small %age of revenue for the referral.
Traditionally companies like Sears, Target and Walmart had buying agents that reviewed products. Imagine man whose job is to review curling irons and blow driers.
Those guys acted as gate keepers that determined which products got shelf space. It's harder to game that because if you're a buying agent taking kickbacks you tend to go to jail.
I don't like Amazon's return policy. I ordered a mini-fridge that arrived with a huge dent in it (that didn't _seem_ to affect functionality). I would have either had to wait THREE months for a replacement or enjoy a $20 off rebate.
They should really make it obvious if it's commingled or not. I've read that some brands can block third parties and some 3rd party sellers can pay Amazon extra to stop their inventory from mixing, which seems like a scam on Amazon's part.
For batteries and other everyday items, I find the AmazonBasics brand a good way to dodge the fake items. Amazon at least stands behind the quality of their own brand. But often it's just as expensive as the other name brands.
I’ve already started buying things from Target and Walmart for things that are commonly counterfeited, like batteries and SD cards. I know they have a marketplace too but I avoid them for these items.
For me, the biggest thing Amazon has going for it is the dead-simple return policy. I’m comfortable rolling the dice with many products because I can easily return it, if it ends up being garbage.
Repackaging and returning can sometimes be a pain, so I’ll be reluctant to gamble sometimes. However, I’ve been more lazily repacking items and it hasn’t been an issue.