The Downfall of Amazon: Dangerous Products, Fake Reviews & Vanishing Brands
The Downfall of Amazon: Dangerous Products, Fake Reviews & Vanishing Brands
The quality of stuff being sold on Amazon has been a race to the bottom for a while now, somewhat following in the steps of Ebay.
In this video Louis has two crimp butt connectors: one bought from Amazon and one bought from a hardware retail store - the Amazon purchased one, which a regular user of the site may consider as reputable at a glance, fails to crimp the wires securely. The hardware store one however securely crimps the wires in place.
It's a pretty mundane example, but extends across to other products in other industry verticals too. A pretty major concern raised in the video was that the failure of this specific product would cause excess heat, potentially leading to an electrical fire in the worst case scenario.
There's also the issue of reputable brands not even listing their products on Amazon anymore, leaving users with mostly poor quality alternatives shown prominently in search results.
Personally I find myself preferring to shop at dedicated or independent online storefronts, where it's a bit more obvious what exactly I'm purchasing, and where there's at least some minimum guarantee of quality - in contrast to a Prime "dropshipped", generic product from Amazon. Also kind of like the fact that by purchasing from sites that aren't massive marketplaces or outlets, real individuals benefit from my custom, not massive behemoths that don't need the sales to survive
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reputable brands not even listing their products on Amazon anymore
Amazon's return policy is not good for vendors, so brands should definitely avoid it if possible. 30 days return for 100% refund for any reason at all, plus vendor pays return shipping.
I don't know the ins and outs of the vendor side of things on Amazon, but as a customer who made the horrific mistake of buying from a 3rd party vendor on Amazon somewhat recently, my experience doesn't exactly align with what you're saying.
In my case, the fairly expensive item I ordered arrived broken. I contacted the manufacturer (because there was a card inside the box that advised me to contact them first), they waved me off and told me to take it up with Amazon.
I contacted the vendor on Amazon, they told me that they don't offer refunds on items that they drop ship (as though I was supposed to know that up front) and declined to assist/refund. Then I contacted Amazon since they have an "A-to-Z" "guarantee", but in order to get the refund I had to pay to send the heavy, broken item back to the vendor who had already admitted it was drop shipped and had never been in his possession to begin with.
The ordeal literally took 10+ hours of my life. And while I did ultimately end up finding just the right customer service agent eventually who "refunded" the return shipping as a "courtesy" (but not as a direct refund, only as Amazon bux), had I not been super persistent and willing/able to waste so much of my time, I would have been the one on the hook for that pricey return shipping cost.
So my guess is Amazon is probably screwing everybody over as much as possible, vendors and customers alike.
Gotcha. Yeah the vendor can put it in the terms to have customer pay the shipping, but that really pisses off customers enough to leave bad reviews, so any decent vendor won't do that. I've tried that before for just a few days and got bad store feedback and negative product review too.