There's also a more subtle version of this, where the seller leaves the listing the same, but once enough positive reviews have accumulated they move production to a cheaper factory and use cheaper materials.
So you might see older reviews for a pair of boots that say they're made from sturdy materials with good stitching, followed by later reviews saying that they didn't match the advertised sizing and pictures, or that they just fell apart after a couple weeks of use.
The term for this is "Quality Fade" and is by no means unique to amazon. This is a very common thing in all low-cost manufacturing. you start with higher quality and lower margin, and gradually degrade quality to improve margin. You consistently flirt with the lowest quality possible.
I mean for software we talk about reproducability and versions down to the bit. But if a consumer products replaces one piece of metal with plastic it's apparently the same product?
Products should have versions that look like this.
2.1
* Replaces piece X with plastic.
* Reduced frame width to save material costs.
This could also be positive and make it more transparent.
2.2
* Strength part X that breaks very often.
* Change edges to reduce chance of injury.
I mean this opens a huge box of problems, I know apple didn't want to admit their keyboard was problematic in fear of lawsuits.
This is how it should be.
My guess is that there are serial number / model number / revision numbers that do change when this is done. It is just not mandatory that these changes be published. I agree that it would be nice to know when metal gears had been replaced with plastic.
The frustrating thing is that sometimes it is extremely difficult to find hardware that doesn’t suffer from this quality fade. Buying decent router hardware comes to mind; if I want a non-professional router that doesn’t use the cheapest hardware possible, it’s very difficult to assess this apart from spending hours hunting down reviews etc.
And most reviews aren’t seller specific. What I see is reviews for a product, but some of the sellers for that product will sell a counterfeit version (Intel NIC in my case). The top (default) seller when the reviews were written may be replaced by a bad actor a couple of years later.
Because amazon doesn't add seller stickers/labels it's nearly impossible for them to even determine the seller if it's "Fulfilled by Amazon" ... I tend to stick to the "Sold by Amazon" or "Sold and shipped by MFG" because at least with Amazon, returns become easy and/or I trust orders from MFG slightly more than otherwise.
Even when something by is sold by amazon, you could get something shipped to them by a third party seller. They keep all products with the same ID in one area, and pick whatever is on top.
If I started using FBA and supplying an item, it’ll go in the same box and chances are more likely an “sold by amazon.com” will sell my product, and I’ll sell an “amazon.com” product.
The argument wasn't that buying "sold by Amazon" would have a higher success rate, it was that returning would be more successfull than with some random pop-up account. This won't help against unnoticeable but still bad fakes of course.
"They keep all products with the same ID in one area"
No they don't. Google 'random stow' and you'll find articles about how Amazon stores incoming items. They are stowed somewhat randomly, but scanned as they are stowed. So the system knows where to find each unit again, and can use that to optimize picking paths.
By default, the system optimizes for speed and doesn't ensure that seller A's customers get the units sent by seller A and B's customers get those sent by B. This means that in a discussion about provenance of specific units, this is a distinction without a difference (or alternatively, all units of a product are in one area, which isn't necessarily physically contiguous in space).
Yes, my point is irrelevant to the main discussion about commingling.
I was commenting only because most people make the same false assumption (that all units of X in warehouse Y are stored together) and find the random stow model interesting when told about it.
> Because amazon doesn't add seller stickers/labels it's nearly impossible for them to even determine the seller if it's "Fulfilled by Amazon"
You are referring to mingled inventory which the seller has to opt into explicitly when they decide how to sell their product.
This is not the default, and in my experience, very few sellers choose this option. Most of the inventory is labeled with Amazon-proprietary bar codes that identify the seller.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to filter by this though? Surely Amazon has a history of who bought what from who - why not make it an option for consumers (apart from the obvious fact that Amazon makes money letting people sell shit on their platform)?
Amazon could easily solve this problem but they've decided it's more profitable to let it fester. Whether or not it's a good decision in the long run, the same way Sears permanently ruined their reputation by selling shit through their established in-house brands, remains to be seen.
> Surely Amazon has a history of who bought what from who
They don't necessarily. Amazon combines items from different sellers together in their warehouses, and doesn't sort them out when picking orders to ship. So if I send them a high quality doohickey to sell with FBA, a customer who orders my doohickey might actually receive Mr. Cheapo's knock-off doohickey because as far as Amazon is concerned they're the same thing and got placed in the same bin in the warehouse.
Sellers can opt out of this but then Amazon charges them more.
Yeah, and AFAIK, Amazon.com itself do not opt out.
The fact that Joe Q Public can make a marketplace account, ship a crate of counterfeit stuff, and have that be sold to buyers of “amazon.com” is absurd and explains the counterfeit problem.
I've experienced this (generally over decades, occasionally a few years) with brick-and-mortar and/or mail-order retailers (I virtually never shop Amazon). So yes, the phenomenon happens.
And it's insidious. I've flat stopped patronizing those retailers. Shopping is not an enjoyable experience. I'm wiling to pay modest premiums for quality (bargain-hunting is sifting through tons of junk for exceptionally rare gems), but I won't pay premium for junk.
The long-term cost has to be considerable, I would think.
I wonder how much of this is because Amazon started out selling books and CDs. Those things don't really have quality issues, and are pretty much fungible. Now, decades into their "everything store" strategy, they're still trying to treat everything like books.
I have had a book business for the last 8 years and in the last 3, there has been a massive increase in counterfeit books.
The biggest issue is that there isn't any way to really know if it's a counterfeit unless you send them to the publisher. Many are so good, you can't really tell the difference unless you really know what to look for.
I tried this once and in response they sent me a cease and desist letter claiming I was knowingly selling counterfeits.
They went away after I got my attorney involved, but it isn't really helping the publishers because I still don't really know how to spot counterfeits, besides the obvious signs.
The publishers really want to get rid of the secondary markets because they don't make any money on it...so they are using attorneys to squash it instead.
I disagree. I have about 10 books on my shelf published by various editors but which have been printed by amazon printing services. I had to return several because of poor print quality. Some had splotches, some missing or blank pages, some had horrid patterning all over the book.
I own a ton of books, and my decision process is generally:
- go to library
- read/like a book
- buy it for late reference
For this reason I rarely checked books as I ordered them (I assumed they were fine). After realizing a couple of books I had were unreadable (and way past the "warranty"), I now flip through the entire book just to check for glaring print problems.
Fake books are a problem too. I mostly see publishers complain about it, but that probably has more to do with my social circle than with the proportion of people complaining
Even books need shipping with some amount of care to arrive undamaged. Amazon isn't even good at that these days, piling items fairly loosely into oversized boxes.
Ok, point taken, books can have quality issues too. But especially in Amazon's early days it was pretty easy to deal with - just buy from reputable publishers. They've pretty much destroyed that too.
This is a fitting description of audio devices. What used to fill a box is now a 5mm chipset. The perverse effect is that the chip has 20x more options than the original device, so it looks better, but the quality and longevity may very well be degraded in disguise.
I have to laugh at how large my receiver is when I can peek into the "cooling vents" and clearly see a fairly small solid state board and a ton of empty space.
Depending on your receiver, that may be because it’s trying to conform to chassis sizing requirements to be rack mountable (often via audio shelves, not rails). In the audio world many things use 19” comm racks, much like servers do.
So you might see older reviews for a pair of boots that say they're made from sturdy materials with good stitching, followed by later reviews saying that they didn't match the advertised sizing and pictures, or that they just fell apart after a couple weeks of use.