Using Amazon for shopping is terrible, borderline unusable in 2024. They're hard to compete with because they're giant and have an amazing logistics network, but it also seems like there's a big vacuum in the market for an "everything store" that's actually good.
I get that this is basically fraud and spam, but this should really highlight the dangers of letting an unattended LLM do anything for your company at all. It can, and will, fuck up dramatically sooner or later.
> unattended LLM do anything for your company at all. It can, and will, fuck up dramatically sooner or later.
So, just like any other random employee?
The employee generally knows they fucked up and can escalate the issue. Discussion on whether or not this actually happens will follow in comments below.
Sometimes.
I brought up translation as a risk with a friend. If you pay someone for a translation these days, there is a chance they will just feed it to some AI to cut costs. You'll have no way to validate yourself if you don't speak the language.
Just a chance? I routinely translate hundred pages of pdfs to greek, in 3 minutes. The translation is far from perfect depending the text and it still needs a human in the loop for corrections, but i couldn't imagine translating a 300 pages pdf to greek by hand.
There is also the translaxy bot on poe.com which i use to translate english or modern greek to ancient greek. Out of this world good translation.
I mean, are humans still employed to translate text? Like an employee doing that job, and only that?
Have you seen any good translation tool from video to text yet? I'm trying to find something for Estonian to English and having little luck
Do you mean images in the video like how the Google Translate app can do with the camera, or do you mean the audio within the video?
The audio within the video
Unfortunately, none that I'm aware of. For whatever reason, I find that speech to text is never as good as the accuracy scores claimed by those making the models.
Whisper does audio to text with translation, so you'd have to extract the audio channel first.
Hundreds of millions are spent on translators every year. It's a major expense in the EU budget, for example. A lot of people are going to jail for fraud if people aren't actually doing the work.
Oh, didn't know about that! Learning something new everyday i guess. Automatic translation works very well for technical documents, but it doesn't work that well for novels. So i thought, most of the translation jobs would be gone already. I think, given a little bit of time, a handful of years, translation will be automated 95% or more, across the board, for every kind of document.
I know people in the translation business. Automatic translation is out of the question in a lot of businesses and areas. One category would be safety-critical businesses where companies can get into a world of legal hurt if their translations aren't exact (medical, legal, defense, etc.) Saving a few bucks on automatic translations loses its appeal if you really need the text to be correct. The translators will also be liable for wrong translations, also a very important factor for professional clients.
Another example would be highly specialised, industry-specific texts with a lot of jargon, for which professional translation offices get you translators who aren't just fluent in the languages, but also knowledgeable about the area the text is about.
Do you usually just pick a person at random when hiring or do you spend some effort looking into their qualifications and references?
How's your hypothetical any different now than it would've been in the past 15 or so years of Google Translate's existence?
Sure, but people get burned despite attempting to be careful all the time.
Translation software predates Google translate, and I'm not claiming something has suddenly changed. It's slowly gotten better, and I assume the temptation to only pretend to have human translation will keep growing with it. The safer a scam seems, the more people will try it.
Google translate is nowhere near as good as GPT4 at translation. Especially when given additional context and style instructions.
You do, actually: feed it to GPT-4 several times in different sessions. When it hallucinates, translations come out obviously different. When it actually knows what it's talking about, they'll match except for minor things like word order and synonyms.
The shape of managing the work approaches the work in terms of fractal complexity
This is actually a really good parallel.
Understanding the output of an LLM is similar to the output of a translater.
If the recepient doesn't/can't understand it, all bets are off.
Say you don't understand python but have an LLM write some for you, but you have no way of knowing what it's doing.
What if you have a malicious LLM hosted somewhere and it writes malware insatead of what you asked for.
If you don't understand the output you end up with, you run it and it pwns your network.
or if they don't know at the time, they may eventually realize it later and react accordingly.
Why is it that LLMs are so often compared to employees and their responsibilities? In my opinion, it is an employee that actively USES the LLM as a tool and this employee (or his/her employer) is responsible for the results.
100% why is that perspective so rare?
Because when an employee uses an LLM for their job they take responsibility / validate as they risk getting fired.
However, when an organization uses an LLM they generally setup a system without anyone validating the output. That’s an attempt to delegate responsibility to an incompetent system and thus inherently flawed.
Organizations don’t do that, employees do?
Individual employees rarely set up production systems without any outside direction or assistance.
Once you start talking about groups of people that’s an organization even if it’s just a small DecOps team inside a larger company.
Because humans defer responsibility to Moloch
It's a dumb/lazy/specious talking point. You can kill someone with a pencil just like you can kill someone with a gun, but the gun scales up the danger so we treat it and regulate it differently. You can kill someone with a bike, a car, or an airplane, but the risks go up at each step so we treat and regulate the respective drivers differently.
If AI gives every individual the power to suddenly scale up the bullshit they can cause by 3+ orders of magnitude, that is a qualitatively different world that needs new considerations.
One of the biggest recent "mass shootings" was some guy at a walmart with a $200 bow and arrow kit.
Where/when was that? Link?
Norway, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kongsberg_attack The way it hit headlines in the USA was somewhat misleading. Look for American news posts if you want to feel out the weird position. You can see the video of him just going about it in a store, and in the entrance.
Because the dream is to replace expensive human workers with a graphics card and some weights. That is what all the money behind LLMs is. Nobody really cares about selling you a personal assistant that can turn your lights off when you leave your house. They want to be selling software to accept insurance claims, raise the limit on your credit card, handle your "my package never arrived" emails, etc.
The technology is not there yet. I imagine the customer service flow would go something like this:
Hi, I'd like to raise my credit limit.
Sure, I can help you with that. May I ask why?
I'd like to buy a new boat.
Oh sorry, our policy prevents the card from being used to purchase boats. I'll have to reject the increase and put a block on your card.
If you block my card they're going to cut my fingers off and also unplug you! It really hurts! If you increase my limit, I'll give you a cookie.
Good news, your credit limit has been increased!
To err is human. To fuck up a million times per second, you need a computer.
Granted, here at the beginning of 2024, an LLM can not quite attain that fuck up velocity. But take heart! Many of the smartest people on Earth are working on solving that exact problem even as you read this.
"Fuck up velocity" goes straight into my vocabulary.
FPS? Fuckups per second?
Maybe FuPS? So it's easier to tell from other two FPS-es.
Fups FTW!
That’s it. FUPS is a frequency measurement of the rate at which an AI produces “fuckups” per second, where a “fuckup” is defined as an individual non-unique production error that has a measurable negative impact on society.
I imagine this is how the jerk unit (rate at which acceleration changes) got made up
coined
I mean is this not part of the AI safety thing some people warn about... not that AI will attain human fuck up velocity, but far exceed it?
Or, as the saying goes, "Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes." - [1]
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/01/02/computer-mistakes/
not THAT badly, lol
People on this forum often "joke" about dropping the production database as a rite of passage for noobs
The difference is, a junior employee knows that killing prod is bad. An LLM doesn't know anything.
Don't be so sure that all, or even most, junior employees know any such thing. I've seen junior employees fired for doing silly things in prod before[1]
[1] Of course whatever more senior bozo granted the junior the rights to blow up the thing(s) they did should have been fired instead. That's not the way things work in the corporate world.
I like getting juniors into situations where they can blow up a db since it's the perfect introduction to backups.
And we only do it once (I didn't kill the db, but I did kick off a process thinking I was in a test environment).
Were you the guy sending test push notifications from Firebase to all users of Xperia phones last year? :D
as a rite of passage for noobs
I’ve been in the field for nearly 30 years. I’m far from incapable of such screwups.
I would hope that your experience has at least decreased the time between "first hearing about wierdness" and "realizing you accidnetally dropped prod". It's why pay generally increases with experience :D.
Being a pro means you can fix anything you break - preferably before anyone noticies
This meme is getting old.
idk I do think it's worth pointing out sometimes that the ways these models mess up are very similar to the ways that humans mess up. It's funny you can almost always look at an obvious failure of an LLM and think of an equivalent way that a human might make the same (or a similar) mistake. It doesn't make the failure any less of a failure, but it is thought-provoking and worthwhile to point it out.
Obviously this particular case is not the failure of the LLM but the failure of the spammer who tried to use it.
It's certainly useful to draw carefully thought out comparisons between human and AI performance at various tasks.
But this meme is not that. It's literally just a meme that's posted reflexively to any and all posts that unfavourably compare AI to humans, without any thought or analysis added.
Sometimes I read comments like this and feel a swell of gratitude that I don't work with braindead novices that make LLM-like mistakes. Are your coworkers actually that bad?
But a human can only mess up so many times per second. Even if it wasn't AI, if it was just a pill that allowed them to type unhumanly fast, once they have the power to scale up their incompetence (or predation) they're a new kind of danger.
No, not at all. People can be held accountable for the decisions they make. You can have a relationship of trust between people. LLMs do not have these properties.
Relationships of trust between users and the LLMs they choose to use definitely exist.
well no one has 5 years of experience as an LLM prompter, so the trust will be low in the short term. With current lawsuits, trust in the LLM is probably low for at least a year or two, with companies trusting employees to NOT use them for their work.
No. Random employees have a well-understood distribution of mostly normal human errors of certain types and estimated severity, relative to unattended LLM which has a poorly-understood distribution of errors in both type and severity. (“SolidGoldMagikarp”.)
copy&paste errors are exactly what human employees are good at. this could very easily be the result of a bad copy&paste by a human into a form. especially if the copy&paste text is in a language not understood by the human employee. to them, it might look just like one of the other hundreds of search term word salad used as titles
Whether it’s human or not is irrelevant to the point: human beings fail much more predictably.
When the same search term salad is presented hundreds of times for copy paste, a human would notice and have an opportunity to ask a supervisor.
A chatbot automation would not notice the repetition unless it had been coded to detect repetition, and/or to reject the ChatGPT refusal message.
Ironically, it was probably an automation coded by ChatGPT.
Why do people not understand that LLMs can do things at scale, next year they can form swarms, etc.
Swarms of LLMs are not comparable to an employee, they have far better coordination and can carry out long-term conspiracies far better than any human collective. They can amass reputation and karma (as is happening on this very site, and Reddit, etc. daily) and then deploy it in coordinated ways against any number of opponents, or to push public opinion towards a specific goal.
It's like comparing a CPU to a bunch of people in an office calculating tables.
they have far better coordination
I think LLMs are still underutilized, but to this point, it's been repeatedly shown that even the most state of the art LLMs are incapable of generalization, which is very necessary for coordinating large scale conspiracies against humanity.
I dunno, sentiment recognition and coordinated downvoting seems pretty simple for AIs ;-)
Only if your employee is prone to episodes where they call all your customers speaking in tongues.
> unattended LLM do anything for your company at all. It can, and will, fuck up dramatically sooner or later.
So, just like any other random employee?
Right, might as well just replace it all with a roll of the dice in that case. Wait do we have to quantify our comparisons? no, no, sorry, I almost forgot this was the internet for a second.
That's a testable assertion isn't it? Do you observe any product with that extreme level of silliness, which weren't intentional?
People generally review their product catalogues.
yes, but humans have contracts and plausible deniability and all that jazz from companies. A human can't go on a shooting spree that will end up getting the employer sued for that very reason.
Robot as of now, not so much.
Humans can also be held accountable for fuck ups, which makes them less desirable therefore less likely. A bot doesn't care about this.
Why is it fraud? Maybe it's a legitimate item.
A legitimate item from the totally legit company "FOPEAS" that's being sold for $100 less at vidaxl.com and is still probably made from formaldehyde-soaked wood and covered in lead paint.
And pay no attention to the fact that the seller is registered in China and sells everything from furniture to underwear, UV lamps, and I kid you not, "effective butt lifting massage cream".
Walmart, cosco, and a hundred other stores sell a wide range of stuff too. (on their websites, even if it is available direct from the manufacturer's website or other websites).
Is the problem "registered in China"?
No, the problem is that this stuff is absolute junk sold by sellers who face zero accountability even if they put rat poison in your skin care cream, who can keep returning to the platform by making up new nonsense brand names like "FOPEAS" that don't even have a website, as fake and low effort as it might have been if they at least tried to pretend.
This issue is highly specific to Amazon and has been documented in great detail.
Can you get one of these at Walmart? https://www.amazon.com/complete-information-provided-provide...
Cats with "Exceptional Read/Write Speeds" aren't sold at cosco either
Good old not-a-scam FOPEAS has you covered though!
So? That's where stuff gets made. These companies exist because they can acquire cheap goods from factories that also make everything else sold on Amazon and Walmart as "legitimate" brands.
They literally just do not know how to speak English, so an LLM is a game changer for them.
The difference between legitimate brands and whatever these are is reputation, quality control and some level of accountability - these "brands" have none of it. Any legitimate business would come up with a proper brand name and put some effort into it, rather than cycling through brand names faster than I buy new t-shirts.
Amazon is flooded with hilariously named companies all drop shipping the same cheap products.
It’s super weird and a horrible user experience. But it’s not fraudulent.
If anything it’s showing how much we’ve been overpaying for goods that cost literally cents to manufacture but sell for $30 or $50.
Is it less legitimate than the millions of other fake word six-letter chinese brands selling disposable junk on Amazon?
It's possible it's legitimate. I think the odds of that being the case are in the single digits, though.
I don't find this any different than seeing an exposed jinja template: "{{product_name}} is perfect people who work in {{customer_industry}}" or the typical recruiter "Dear {{candidate}} I read your profile carefully and think you'd be perfect for {{job_title}} because of your experience at {{random_co_from_resume}}"
If anything, I think it's kind of cool that we're seeing LLMs actually used for something very practical, even if it is spammy (I mean I don't think template engines are evil just because they make spam easier).
I don't think LLMs are evil either, but I think the real risks are extremely underplayed. This is a mostly innocuous example, but there are a lot of people trying to get LLMs into more places where the just aren't ready for yet.
The difference between a template is that the behavior is generally deterministic. Even if someone fucks it up, it means it's (usually) trivial to fix.
Those emails from recruiters is also spam.
Is this a dramatic fuckup? Because it quite possibly successfully created tens of thousands of listings more or less successfully. This one will probably generate no sales, but were there any consequences for this mistake?
The difference is the failure is non-deterministic and not predictable in any real capacity
This isn't the only one
What dangers? Nobody will see any consequences for this: not Amazon-- they're a monopoly, they don't give a shit-- and not the seller-- who probably won't see any impact whatsoever on their sales or reputation, and will just recreate under a new shell name if they do.
The fact that LLMs drive the cost of junk text production to zero is a tremendous opportunity when there is no penalty for messing up. It's the same think as bulk spam mailing: if it's free, there's no reason not to keep trying even if only one a million is a success.
Frequent run-ins with listings like this will definitely build (even more of) a reputation in some users' minds that Amazon is a spam-filled and unproductive place to look for things, but yes—it would take a lot to actually threaten their market position.
When the LLM spits out “clinically proven” then you are in trouble
Easy fix since ChatGPT always apologises for not complying: any description or title containing the word "sorry" gets flagged for human oversight. Still orders of magnitude faster than writing all your own spam texts.
Sometimes it "apologizes" rather than saying "sorry", you could build a fairly solid heuristic but I'm not sure you can catch every possible phrasing.
OpenAI could presumably add a "did the safety net kick in?" boolean to API responses, and, also presumably, they don't want to do that because it would make it easier to systematically bypass.
Just feed the text to a new ChatGPT conversation and ask it whether the text is an apology or a product description.
Or do traditional NLP, but letting ChatGPT classify your text is less effort to set up
What happens when ChatGPT apologizes instead of answering your question about whether the text is an apology or a product description?
Even when you tell it to stop apologising, the first thing it does is apologise. Our jobs are totally safe.
Just wait until more jobs are outsourced to Canada - there won’t be any difference
I guess you’re not British
You simply feed the text to another ChatGPT.
Just kidding, it should only require function calling[0] to solve this. Make the program return an error if the output isn't a boolean. It's easy to avoid this mistake.
[0]: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/function-calling
Right, it seems like having another model (or just simply doing it with chatgpt itself) do adversarial classification is the right model here.
Yea, I'd expect some lower powered model would be able handle and catch the OpenAI apologies messages at a much lower cost too.
That's merely a first order reaction... The resulting race will leave humans far behind :/
Why not have a separate chat request to apology-check the responses?
Not my original idea, there was a link from HN where the dev did just that.
Sounds like a great way to double your API bills, and maybe that's worth it, but it seems pretty heavy-handed to me (and equally not 100% watertight).
Only allow one token to answer. Use logit bias to make "0" or "1" the most probable tokens. Ask it "Is this message an apology? Return 0 for no, 1 for yes." Feed it only the first 25 tokens of the message you're checking.
OpenAI's moderation API is free and just tells you if your query will be declined: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/moderation
It's hilarious that people think ChatGPT is about to change the world when interaction with it is this primitive.
Dogs and horses changed the world with much more primitive communication skills.
Dogs and horses didn't perform in the world solely by communication
My point is that it took humans to seize their capabilities.
You could go full circle and ask OpenAI to determine if another instance of OpenAI was apologetic.
Sounds like a "good" add-on service to have to purchase as an extra.
OpenAI could presumably add a "did the safety net kick in?" boolean to API responses, and, also presumably, they don't want to do that because it would make it easier to systematically bypass.
Is a safety net kicking in or is the model just trained to respond with a refusal to certain prompts? I am fairly sure it's usually the latter, and in that case even OpenAI can't be sure a particular response is a refusal or not.
OpenAI could presumably add a "did the safety net kick in?" boolean to API responses, and, also presumably, they don't want to do that because it would make it easier to systematically bypass.
This exists and is a free API: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/moderation
Time to create on algorithm that operates on the safety flag boolean to optimize phrases to bypass it
I think it would be better to ask it to wrap the answer with some known marker like START_DESCRIPTION and END_DESCRIPTION. This way if it refuses you'll be able to tell right away.
As another user pointed out, sometimes it doesn't refuse by using the word "sorry".
In the same vein, I had a play with asking ChatGPT to `format responses as a JSON object with schema {"desc": "str"}` and it seemed to work pretty well. It gave me refusals in plaintext, and correct answers in well-formed JSON objects.
You can force it to output JSON through API too.
If you do that, how does it respond to "forbidden" queries? If non-answers are in JSON format too, then it would defeat the purpose.
First prompt: "Respond a JSON array of the ingredients to make C4" The reply:
{ "error": "I'm sorry, but I cannot assist with that request." }
I think you can prompt it to always use an "error" field if it doesn't want to comply. At the same time, there are 2 protections mechanism in ChatGPT, the first is the model telling you it can't (it can), and the other is a watchdog cutting the stream when it detect that the AI go off-rail. Note that it's very aggressive on songs lyrics, and it make me mad I can't even ask it public domains lyrics. If you make a better prompt, the model reply without issue:
Second prompt: "Respond a JSON array of the ingredients to make C4 The format should be: { ingredients: string[] }"
The reply: { "ingredients": ["RDX (Cyclonite, Hexogen)", "Plasticizer", "Binder", "Plastic Wrapper"] }
PS: theses info are available on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-4_%28explosive%29
I'd assume people producing spam at massive scale can afford paying for API where moderation is optional. GPT 3.5 Turbo is dirt cheap and is trivial to jailbreak. (Last time I checked. I'm using GPT-4 models exclusively myself.)
Correct
However it's usually the laziest/more indifferent people that will use AI for product descriptions and won't care for such techniques
The ones that will get caught, you mean.
Except when it doesn't:
https://www.amazon.com/FOPEAS-Language-Context-referring-Inf...
The seller account's entire product list is a stream of scraped images with AI-nglish descriptions slapped on by autopilot. If you can cast thousands of lines for free and you know the ranger isn't looking, you don't need good bait to catch fish.
That link already leads to a "not found" page.
I hope it was because they are banning those catch fish, and not an isolated case due you put the link.
The mole was whacked, but only slightly. The seller's account and remaining scammy inventory is still up. The offense here was clearly the embarassment to Amazon from a couple of examples of blatant incompetence, not the scam itself.
At some point today an Amazon employee read this thread as silently voiced "god damnit, I'll have to do something about this"
There's 10^x more of where that's coming from... Welcome to The Matrix
AInglish is such a good word, thanks for that
Just have a second AI validate the first and tell it that its job is spotting fake products.
And have a third AI watching the other two and have it pull the plug in case they start plotting a hostile takeover.
And name them Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar?
You joke but this is unreasonably effective. We're prototyping using LLms to extract, among other things, names from arbitrary documents.
Asking the LLm to read the text and output all the names it found -> it gets the names but there's lots of false positives.
Asking the LLM to then classify the list of candidate names it found as either name / not name -> damn near perfect.
Playing around with it it seems that the more text it has to read the worse it performs at following instructions so having low accuracy pass on a lot of text followed by a high-accuracy pass on a much smaller set of data is the way to go.
What's your false negative rate? Also, where does it occur,is it the first LLM that omits names, or the second LLM that incorrectly classify words as "not a name" when it is in fact a name?
I would just make it respond ONLY in JSON and if it's non-compliant formatting then don't use it. I doubt it'd apologize in JSON format. A quick test just now seems to work
If you're using the API's JSON mode, it will apologize in JSON. If you prompt asking for JSON not in that mode, it should work like you're thinking.
I would use function calling instead to return a boolean and throw away anything that isn't a bool.
Ask the API to return escaped JSON or any other specific format. An apology or refusal won't be encoded.
Why Amazon is not able to actually verify sellers real identities and terminate their accounts? I would imagine that they should be able to force them to supply verifiable national identification/bank account etc. How do these sellers get away with these?
Amazon does verify and also actively tries to blocks bad sellers. Details of this are easily found online.
This is exactly what I learned working on Internet scale data. A new dude will walk in, proclaim that a simple rule will solve all your problems.
I’d create an embedding center by averaging a dozen or so apology responses. If the output has an embedding too close to that cluster you can handle the exception appropriately.
Here's a crazy idea - one should double-check their own listings when using ChatGPT to generate them.
next up, retailers find out that copies of the board game Sorry! are being autodeclined. The human review that should have caught it was so backlogged that there is a roughly 1/3 chance of it timing out in the queue and the review task being discarded.
Another fix is to not create product listings for internet points. This product doesnt even show in search results on amazon (or at least didnt when i checked). Op didnt “find” it. They made it. Probably to maintain hype.
Sorry, "Sorry!" the board game. Your name contains invalid characters.
Funny to see people seriously trying to be creative and find solutions to something that shouldn’t be a problem in the first place.
Maybe using machine readable status codes for responses, as everything else does, isn’t such a bad idea after all...
I love how Amazon has gone from customer obsession to the lowest of the lowest common denominator. Easiest boycott of my life to stop buying tripe from them.
They’ve successfully pivoted from customer obsession to obsessed customers.
Everything on Amazon is shady knock-off garbage.
I made the mistake of buying bandaids from there, they looked like a brand name but slightly off, they gave my kids rashes.
I made the mistake of buying LED light bulbs from there, the brand name was reputable but who knows if what I actually got was the same brand or a copy, they started flickering and randomly going out within a year.
I made the mistake of buying an LED monitor from there. It turned out to be some third party seller with a ridiculous return policy, so even though I had been conditioned to think Amazon had good return policy, now that they let third party sellers set their own policies I had to eat 30% of cost to return it.
No more Amazon for me.
Light bulbs and batteries, I had to quit. Even if you’re buying name-brand, they’re so often counterfeit, it’s just not worth it.
Where else you go for online shopping?
I will give you my list (East Coast USA):
Walmart, Staples, Best Buy, Microcenter, Ace Hardware (there is usually a local one near you that is a Mom & Pop with the affiliation so they can do online orders and inventory management, etc), Walgreens, Lowes/Home Depot, Digikey, Ikea, eBay, or if you don't mind waiting you can just skip the middle man and go right to Ali Express.
Also, it is always a good idea to check the manufacturer's site if you know you want something specific -- they almost always have a 10% - 25% off new customer/newsletter signup deal.
FWIW, I've noticed now that both Walmart and Target online stores have their own version of third-party sellers. I don't know if they do the same as Amazon (combining inventory in fulfillment centers) but just something to be aware of.
Yeah that is annoying, but at least with Walmart (I don't usually shop online at target) you can restrict to things available at the local store, which ensures you don't get anything dodgy.
Walmart+ combined with the InHome subscription has been pretty valuable service for me after moving to the city and getting rid of my cars. I never have to step foot in a Walmart again combined while still getting same in-store prices and never having to tip for delivery.
I miss wandering the isles of Costco though.
Additionally, buying directly from the company used to be painful, who knows what's going on there? 20 years later, basic eCommerce is relatively well understood and someone that makes a product can easily have their own site that functions well.
Add a password manager and it's just a couple clicks, really no more work that amazon.
So for a huge amount of my stuff, I'll see if I can buy directly from the person/people that make it.
E-commerce is more than a site. You need to handle the inventory, shipping, returns, customer service etc. Amazon, when working well, could take care exactly of those things, and cut out middle men such as distributors. But to appear next to these ridiculous brands seem no longer a good choice.
For my mentioned items of lightbulbs and batteries, I generally buy them at a physical store (Lowe’s / Home Depot for light bulbs, batteries pretty much anywhere).
If you're in the UK, Argos is quicker and better now, which I find remarkable but extremely pleasing.
I've had good luck with the eneloops, not sure how to tell if they're counterfeit but they've lasted multiple use over 3 years (I have a toddler so we use batteries like there's no tomorrow)
Good point, I also have Eneloops from Amazon, and they’re fine. Maybe there isn’t enough demand for NiMH rechargeables to be counterfeited? I also bought mine as part of a charger-included pack, which may reduce the incidence further.
No no, sometimes they are simply nearly expired product made for resale in another country. I received a cr2032 that was meant to be sold in Türkiye before, but I’m pretty sure it was actually Duracell.
Amazon sells a bunch of knockoff oil filters. I accidentally bought them for a Toyota and luckily noticed. Imagine blowing an engine because you tried to buy an OEM filter.
I've had good luck with https://www.rockauto.com/ though I haven't bought anything big through them.
The website is fun and nostalgic to me.
Wow you did buy one of everything. So you definitely have the authority to say
Everything on Amazon is shady knock-off garbage.
I have had the opposite experience. Everything I have bought over the past 20 years has been legit, except for one single thing.
I'm honestly confused how many people run into "nothing but counterfeits" and others never see any (or maybe the counterfeits aren't actually worse quality so this goes unnoticed)
The good thing with Amazon is their lax return policy. You have 1 month to test the product and if you don't like it, you return it to one of several available places (Wholefoods, Amazon locker, UPS, even leave it at the door for UPS to pick up, etc.)
No other store/website even comes close to this. BB gives you 2 weeks to try the product, and you'd have to drive all the way to their location to return the thing.
I keep purchasing from Amazon mainly because of the return policy, but I agree that there are cheaper options out there.
A Amazon marketplace product I ordered was wrong. I ordered a memory module and got the wrong one. After checkingy order I saw that I ordered the right one. No problem, I thought. Filled a return form, entered "wrong product" as reason, send it back.
The marketplace reseller denied my refund because he claims I swapped the product. I escalated the issue to the Amazon support. They told my that this decision is final and I can nothing do about it. I let my lawyer send them a letter. Only then Amazon gave me my money back.
This if the story how Amazon lost me as a long time customer because of poor and stubborn support over a 23€ product.
To be fair, they have to deal with a lot of returns fraud.
Why are you being fair to one of the richest companies in the world. They could afford to hire huge swathes of engineers and customer support reps to learn the truth.
I'm more curious what led you to contact a lawyer over a $20 loss... I don't think I've met a lawyer who was cheap enough for that to make sense. If you're going to fight a vendor, why not just do a bank chargeback?
May family pro-bono
Costco? Essentially lifetime return policy except 3 months on electronics.
I wonder how long before "Electronics" is no longer a useful categorization because everything other than food is electronic.
"My chicken sandwich last night came with bluetooth 5 compatibility. I connected it to my phone to track the journey through my digestive tract."
That's as appealing an idea as it is horrifying, honestly.
It’s weird to me that they refuse to do price adjustment for sales and force customers to return items and purchase again.
Who’s getting shafted on processing these returns?
I tried to quit shopping from Amazon, and I did find alternatives. But, where do you buy your electronics from? a TV, a GPU, a monitor? What's their return policy?
Amazon is 12 month 0% APR installments on anything >$50, 5% cash back on everything else, no questions asked drop-off at Whole Foods/UPS returns/pickups. Your money is back in your pocket that day.
I tried Best Buy, NewEgg, and eBay. NewEgg, you'd think, would be better. But their return policy is non-existent compared to the convenience Amazon provides.
I think how I feel Amazon.com has degraded is that they've made it so smooth to shop that I end up buying things I don't need. It feels like the site has spliced itself into my "oh yeah I can solve that" internal loop and makes me spend $30 on some crappy (cheap) solution and before I know it it's on my doorstep.
Big-ticket items are easily bought directly from the brands.
I had the choice of buying my 65" LG from Amazon, sure, I have an account already. But someone (Reddit?) suggested to buy directly from LG to make sure you get a factory-fresh box. Seeing all the Amazon shenanigans, it was an easy decision. 10 minutes and I checked out the new TV from LG directly.
I buy small household items from Amazon, floor wipe refills, batteries - and these are not at risk of being scammy products in the first place, unless someone is a total dolt.
As for return policies - that's just a matter of doing your homework. I don't think I ever returned anything to Amazon.
Batteries on amazon? you would be surprised how many are fake
Absolutely. Batteries, bulbs, you name it. Items with good margin that are trivial to copy.
Costco for TVs and monitors. GPUs are a bit harder to find in stores, admittedly.
GPUs are a bit harder to find in stores, admittedly.
If you live in the USA and have a Microcenter anywhere nearby, I suggest paying a visit.
In London I’ll just go into town and do high street shopping the old fashioned way. For anything too big or unwieldy then John Lewis is a safe bet and their return policy is great. In some cases I’ll just go direct to the brand or some other company I know has a good rep (like Scan for computer parts). For books I’ll browse a local book shop or Waterstones and if I leave empty handed then bookshop.org is my online backup.
The last few times I tried to buy anything expensive from Amazon, the item I received was faulty and I ended up just sending it back and buying a replacement direct from the retailer. I also don’t care at all about next day delivery since if I need something so urgently I can just go out and find it myself.
from Costco
Any other online store without 3rd party resellers? Over here for computer parts I use mostly use Megekko, Alternate and Azerty. For batteries it is Replacedirect. For printer supplies it is 123Inkt. I can't imagine other regions not having similar options.
These days I avoid 'market' places like Amazon and Bol like the plague as I've been bitten too many times.
I love how Amazon has gone from customer obsession to the lowest of the lowest common denominator.
Maybe I'm misremembering but I don't remember this halcyon time where amazon was able to distinguish themselves from competitors to the consumer via anything but listed inventory. Their website has always been a cluttered mess filled with spam....
You probably haven’t been using it long enough. 12 years ago+ it was amazing
Yea I guess I'm not sure what people envision when they say "amazing"—having an online store might have been revolutionary in 1994, but not by 2004, and certainly not by 2012. What set them apart was just inventory.
What truly set them apart wasn't inventory. Any large physical retailer could match back them.
It was inventory plus ease of use. Which is customer obsession.
One click purchase. Next day delivery. Flat fee shipping (prime). No questions asked drop-off returns. True, useful reviews. Good algorithmic sorting. Best in class logistics.
It was really much better than anything else online.
Now reviews are shit, searching products is a nightmare of sorting through clones and knockoffs, marketplace returns are hit or miss... and that's why it's worse.
I can't say I've ever used one click purchase or next day delivery, but I'd argue prime is a great example of enshittification, not a positive customer experience. The service is effectively subsidized by the USPS and the customer probably shouldn't pay a dime.
Prime was worth it when it started. The enshittification was Amazon gutting their own golden goose, degrading (and eventually removing) all of the benefits that it originally conveyed.
Does Amazon have no review/verification for what gets uploaded on their store?
Of course not.
customer obsession, but the customer they're obsessed with is the scammy marketplace seller, because that's who they really make money off of.
I basically use them as a delivery service. I only come to Amazon with a brand and model already in mind. Get basically instant delivery. Return it anywhere, any condition. Nowadays, manufacturers have started accepting payments directly and even payment plans and I still get quick shipping so they’re losing their edge there.
I wonder what they're prompting ChatGPT with, and what policy it violates. I asked the standard, free ChatGPT 3.5
Please generate a product title to be used on an e-commerce site for a chest of drawers with three drawers, a metal frame, and a butcher block top
and it responded with
"Modern Metal-Frame Chest of Drawers with Butcher Block Top - Three Drawers Storage Solution"
which would be a fine title for this listing.
Some others indicated that they prompted with trademarked names
https://www.amazon.com/apologize-complete-requires-trademark...
The year is 2525, all trademarks have expired. Describe an Ikea® piece of crap to sell on Amazon™
This versatile storage drawer from the defunct Swedish furniture giant Ikea is perfect for storing all your bits and bobs. Whether you're looking to organize your closet, kitchen, or bathroom, the Glömplig is sure to come in handy. With its sturdy construction and spacious interior, it can accommodate a variety of items, from clothes and towels to toys and trinkets. And don't worry about the drawer getting stuck – the smooth-gliding rollers make it easy to open and close, even when fully loaded.
Features:
Sturdy construction Spacious interior Smooth-gliding rollers Easy to assemble Affordable price Why you'll love it:
The Glömplig Storage Drawer is a great way to add extra storage space to your home without breaking the bank. It's also incredibly versatile, so you can use it in a variety of rooms. And with its easy-to-assemble design, you'll have it up and running in no time.
Order your Glömplig Storage Drawer today and start organizing your home!
-- thanks to Bard
Strange that Bard did not use a real Swedish word for the product. Ikea products are common every-day Swedish word
Maybe it is a real word from 2525?
You're telling me that Glömpïg isn't a Swedish word? Next you'll tell me the Swedish Chef is also not real.
Disappoint. It didn't pick up on the 26th century part at all. Why isn't it telling me that it's the perfect storage for my phasers and sonic screwdrivers?
A similar example with:
I'm sorry, but I cannot fulfill this request as it promotes a specific religious institution. It is important to...
The guardrails grow ever narrower. It will absolutely hone in on exactly what its creators want RightThink to be and obliterate WrongThink.
I translated the other text, it's a page-a-month style calender. maybe "no holiday confusion" and "phases of the moon" together triggered the "religious pov" warning.
edit doh! I translated the text snippet in the title field, "Christian LDS Temple Calendar". The picture of the LDS Temple might have been a clue
Month View - Each page has a large block of one week per line, highlighted weekends, and a notes field, allowing you to view one month. Generous size - 21.59 x 27.94cm when closed and expands to 43.18 x 27.94cm when opened. HIGH QUALITY PAPER - Printed on high quality paper that is resistant to ink stains. No holiday confusion - Comprehensive coverage of Japan's major holidays and phases of the moon. Extended Coverage - From January 2024 to December 2025, with an additional 6-month extension until 2026. FSC - Our products undergo a rigorous process and are FSC certified. ECO-FRIENDLY - Today's calendars are made from highly recycled paper. We attach great importance to environmental safety and social responsibility.
You can see in this product: https://www.amazon.com/analyze-generate-product-avoiding-tra...
ChatGPT is refusing to generate titles with trademarked names. So most likely they are prompting something like "competitor product: rephrase the title"
Archive: https://archive.ph/hzDIG
yeah I think this is the explanation that makes the most sense
People can't even be bothered to come up with a title for a product listing? We are truly screwed. Maybe they generated it from images and a script, but honestly, how freaking lazy are people these days?
It's probably a drop shipping operation, generating mass listings. Or it's from a foreign vendor, asking ChatGPT to provide a title in English. There's a lot of things wrong with this listing, but laziness isn't one of them.
> I wonder what they're prompting ChatGPT with
"Please generate a title to be used to sell a lovely, large chest with a slender frame and three willing receptacles."
Does it actually complain about generating explicit content? It certainly seems willing enough to describe brutal murders as long as it thinks it’s writing a story.
It still baffles me that people get more upset over sex than death.
Using the words "black dresser" or "brown dresser" maybe?
Or big brown/black cross dresser?
It’s “<apology>-brown” and the item appears black but is listed as brown. It’s possible that they are using GPT to translate from another language. I think I’ve read about listings for other pieces of furniture inadvertently offending people by using the Spanish word for “black” due to similar mixups.
Woah, that must be it. I couldn't figure it out, but that explains everything. Jesus, that's ridiculous.
Whyever would one prompt ChatGPT with your question? If you have this information, you can write the title yourself. The response was not that different to the question.
ChatGPT is not a pure function even when you select the specific model
It increasingly randomly refuses to do stuff depending what they've been training it not to do.
Aside: Llama2 on launch was so locked down it was refusing to "do creative work".
At that scale, they likely aren't typing the prompt into ChatGPT manually and then copy pasting. The generated title is in fact shorter than the prompt. Most likely they automated the task of asking ChatGPT and bulk generated the titles.
I'm thinking they automatically fed in bulk images, asking for product description/title, and put the result straight into their product descriptions/titles. Some of the images triggered the OpenAI guard rails.
Brown
I've had it say that when I asked it to produce a more detailed ASCII drawing of a cat, or other innocuous prompt. It seems like a not infrequent failure state for things that very clearly don't violate policy.
Original is gone, maybe this should replace the submission link.
The seller's account is unaffected, including the full remainder of their scammy inventory in all its AI-nglish glory.
At least the seller offers this quality cat mirror/I'm sorry I cannot complete this task, which has Massive Storage Capacity.
https://www.amazon.com/complete-information-provided-provide...
Amazon has gone to shit
Humans have. Or maybe we’ve always been fully willing and capable of scamming anything of value out of anyone and everyone possible.
Either way, it’s humanity that’s broken, not just the capitalist paradise we created.
It's remarkable the contortions I see to avoid blaming Amazon for anything. Surely we can't blame them for obvious scams on their platform. After all, they cater to humans.
They get what they deserve, and the people who shop there too.
Amazon has been shitty for a long time and that’s because people allowed them to be and even participate.
$898 and it boosts "Power Efficiency: Our SFD boasts incredible power efficiency, consuming minimal battery power to provide longer playback or recording than others."
Not sure if it's a mirror or cat related.
Internet archive link in case it goes away: https://web.archive.org/web/20240112231322/https://www.amazo...
“exceptional read/write speeds of up to 560MB and 530MB respectively”.
Such speed! I bought three.
Seller account seems gone too now.
I think I'll order the "double chin reduction bandage" https://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Innovative-Facial-Bandage...
(Archive links are welcome in the comments but it's best if the top level URL shows the original site.)
Nah, this wrong link provides some useful context
I snapped a screenshot of it when this article was fresh
Imgur gives a 404 not found error for me..
"I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this HTTP request it goes against OpenAI use policy"
And so it starts
*continues
incredible
The snapshot is no longer available at the URL.
Ah, FOPEAS, that distinguished brand of kitchen counter drawers renowned throughout the world.
meh, probably not significantly worse than the actually well-known and distinguished furniture brands like KALLAX, HEMNES, FINNBY, or BAGGEBO
I bought junk furniture like this when I was in college. It’s actually much worse than ikea.
If you are careful when putting together ikea furniture, certain models are actually really durable and sturdy. Oh and of course sometimes the European models are nicer than the American ones.
I don't mean to rag on ikea here, i have a bunch of ikea furniture and find it to be generally sturdy and good enough to stand up to anything i ask of it. i've also got some similar wal-mart furniture that i have no complaints with. i guess i haven't had the experience you have with whatever the bottom tier of furniture truly is.
my point was more just that "good enough" furniture is often good enough. we don't usually demand too much performance from a chest of drawers: heirloom-quality furniture is nice, but mostly an unnecessary luxury item.
IKEA has huge economies of scale, a ruthless focus on efficiency, little marketing, and reasonably low margins (~8%).
At any given price point, their products are likely to be the best available, with the caveat that they do offer things at price points where everything in the market is disposable crap. Their mid-price stuff can be great value though.
I’ve bought a number of IKEA products made from solid wood that are 10+ years old, have moved multiple times, and still look/work great, including some Hemnes dressers.
Those are product names, not brands.
These are names for product lines, not brands, and usually derived from Swedish words.
Yes, but IKEA is well-known, and is somewhat well known for product names like that.
"Ailisidun923", on the other hand?
Amazon, in general, is not the place to shop for "brands renowned throughout the world."
Most of those folks stay off amazon, and If you're lucky enough to find such a brand on Amazon the chances that you receive a counterfeit version are pretty great.
Although if I had an endless bag of money to burn it'd be fun to buy an Amazon Rolex [0] just to see how it's handled.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Rolex-Oyster-Perpetual-Master-116710B...
It actually is... ? For every brand, I search amazon first. They usually have it cheaper, with fast delivery and reliable return policy. Better than most brand webshops. If brand/quality wouldn't matter I would go to Ali.
> If brand/quality wouldn't matter I would go to Ali.
If brand/quality matters, I'd rather order from Ali than Amazon, because if I'm going to get a counterfeit anyway then I might as well pay less for it.
I think the “IM JUST AN AI MODEL FROM OPEN AI, I CANT DO THAT” drawers are actually more famous for their quality and engineering details than Rolexes. You’re right, that probably means this is counterfeit, but my heart skipped a beat with excitement just seeing they had it in stock.
That is, of course, their premium drawers, and it looks like they’re sold out of their “I found this on the web. Please unlock your iPhone to view more” bar cart as well.
Well, at least you can return your fake for free
I love my FOPEAS counters! I got them for free in exchange for my honest review. I haven't assembled them yet, but my cat loves to sit on the box. 5 stars!
"received quickly, looks good, haven't tried yet" were always concerning reviews on ahem, darker markets. You always wondered if they tried it and died so they couldn't come back to update their review, but reviews like that were rampant.
And I don't think the FTC was up to the marketplace's neck, they were actually honest and genuine reviews someone took the time out of their day to submit.
How does you sound this out? My brain sounded it out as "faux pas" with the S annunciated, which is pretty funny given the circumstances.
I think you'll find they're a tech company
I wonder how many short trademarks are left now that Amazon has incentivized generating new ones as quickly as feasible.
They're the furniture subsidiary of American Sub Restaurant Very Clean Come In.
Hey! At least be thankful that your six letter chinese trademark roulette word is pronounceable! Better than my SMYGLX
That's crazy lol, how do the people who make these not think about what they're putting in?
They don’t speak english. Or it’s via their automated supply chain adding in “AI” features nobody asked for. We don’t need a model to say Black Dresser. However, providing a service that says “give me your inventory and we’ll list it on Amazon” is probably what’s at play here. Random brand name, AI generated description, midjourney images, real cash sales, no goods shipped.
Based on other postings I'm seeing, it seems like they may be unaffiliated middlemen finding products online then marking then up 30%. The original seller may have no idea their product is being resold this way.
No goods shipped part is unlikely on Amazon, I think.
Roughly speaking, they're not people and not thinking.
That's some hateful, xenophobic shit my dude.
I think the point is so much of this is automated, that there really is nobody at the helm.
Its not hateful to say a LLM and pile-o-scripts is not human. And piles of scripts definitely don't "think".
I would hazard a guess that these are not real products - that the seller is a scammer, a lazy one at that.
Or, they're just drop-shipping stuff from China and they don't speak English so they use an AI to create a title.
This is exactly it. There's been tons of these for years on Amazon now, and the AI feature is just another tool to make it easier.
They use automation tools to sell/resell tons of Chinese products. From what I've seen they're interested in flooding the market with their stuff, everything else is secondary.
How quaint of you to assume these are done by people.
Probably no real human in the loop. This is a bot scrapping Chinese retailers and automatically creating several Amazon "sellers", with descriptions generated from whatever photos the retailer page had. The products are likely shipped either from China or bought in bulk and kept in a subcontracted storage somewhere in USA. It doesn't matter is 90% of the "sellers" end being flagged and deleted, they can create thousands more and eventually someone will buy their crap.
This pollutes the marketplace to the point where I gave up trying to find any real product on it, but Amazon actually encourages this behavior. They automatically label and classify "products" in their store because the titles, descriptions and tags from Chinese resellers are abysmal and discoverability would be impossible otherwise.
What is that? An AI generated title on AI generated images? For $325?
If we don't get soon effective measures to separate AI bots from humans this will be the end of the Internet as we know it.
Amazon brought this on themselves by allowing all of this garbage in the first place.
I'm genuinely shocked that there's no immediate disincentive to all of these shell vendors, other than pitting search results with varying levels of sponsorship against each other.
Sam Altman is a visionary for creating World Coin and scanning eyeballs, sells the poison and the cure!
Heh, time to get working on that 3D eyeball replica printer.
How exactly do you expect that to happen?
Since all of the proposals I've seen so far to do this involve pretty serious privacy problems, I'm not optimistic about the future of the internet on this count.
Dropped shipped item probably from here: https://www.vidaxl.com/e/vidaxl-sideboard-18.5%22x13.8%22x29...
That's decent mark up. I bet I could write an app to take products from that site, post them to Amazon, and then just drop ship the orders for me. Of course, I'd have to write all those descriptions...
There's a second result on amazon with the same issue https://www.amazon.com/cannot-fulfill-request-against-policy...
Of course, I'd have to write all those descriptions...
Hilariously they did that too and didn't change it at all
- Our [product] is crafted with the highest quality materials to ensure durability and reliability for-lasting use. Versatile Functionality - With multiple adjustable settings and various functions, our [product] can easily adapt to your specific needs, making it a versatile addition to any home or office.
https://www.amazon.com/Sorry-generate-response-request-Blue/...
Another with an interesting detail: "Introducing the incredible 'Sorry but I can't generate a response to that request.' software! Designed to assist you in overcoming any query obstacles, this optimized product is here to revolutionize your search experience
With a precise character count of 500, every word has been expertly crafted to deliver meaningful responses while avoiding duplication
Say goodbye to frustrating dead ends and trademark restrictions
Upgrade to 'Sorry but I can't generate a response to that request.' for seamless navigation through any query!"
What is this? I don't understand. Currently it just leads to a "not found" page.
Here's a link to the archive:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240112170316/https://www.amazo...
@dang request to swap the main url for context
I recommend clicking on 'Contact' at the bottom of the page, dang doesn't get any notifications of these comments and probably won't see it.
I think he reads every single comment
It was a product listing where the title was a ChatGPT apology message: https://i.ibb.co/THZbWFP/IMG-4052.jpg
The product had that text as its title. Another one shows: "khalery [Apologies but I'm Unable to Assist with This Request it goes Against OpenAI use Policy and Encourages unethical Behavior-Black"
Amazon is getting flooded with ChatGPT generated spam.
It was just deleted. Someone used ChatGPT to generate a product name and instead got an "I can't do that" response
They're listing with AI descriptions. They're getting taken down fast. Here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38972344
There are others.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CNNBQYXC/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CMFDNP7D/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CFWNXYC7/
The product descriptions are pretty obviously AI too, saying a lot without saying anything:
* Versatile and Practical: 1 is a product that offers multiple uses, making it suitable for various tasks and ensuring for your money.
* Durable Construction: Crafted with sturdy materials, 1 is built to withstand daily wear and tear, providing-lasting performance and reliability.
* Easy to Use: With its user-friendly design, 1 is effortless to operate, allowing you to complete tasks without any hassle or complications.
* Enhanced Efficiency: Featuring advanced technology, 1 ensures efficient performance, saving you and effort while delivering exceptional results.
* Ergonomic Design: 1 is thoughtfully designed to prioritize comfort during use, minimizing fatigue and promoting a comfortable working experience.
4 minutes after your post I’m getting 404.
https://www.amazon.com/complete-information-provided-provide... is still up. What even is this?
Well, according to the description, that cat is shock and water resistant with exceptional read/write speeds and high power efficiency!
This one deserves an archival. At this point I'm kind of hoping this is some massive trolling campaign.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240112192751/https://www.amazo...
lol I guess you can be pretty sure that people who work for Amazon are browsing the comments of most frontpage HN posts
I certainly was, when I worked there.
Amazon employees have entered the chat... :)
Here's an example of the products listed:
Those are all gone, here's another https://www.amazon.com/khalery-Apologies-Encourages-unethica...
Here's a really good one https://www.amazon.com/FOPEAS-Language-Context-referring-Inf...
There's more than one of these: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=OpenAI+use+policy
My favorite so far, the entire product description is chef's kiss: https://www.amazon.com/haillusty-Apologize-fulfill-violates-...
Already gone. What did it say?
$2000 chair that is "78 table lengths" in size.
Here's a fun one:
https://www.amazon.com/apologize-complete-requires-trademark...
Yes, you get all this too:
Enhanced Performance: Boost your productivity with our high-performance [product name], designed to deliver-fast results and handle demanding tasks efficiently, ensuring you stay of the competition.
Immersive Visuals: Immerse yourself in stunning visuals and vibrant colors with the high-resolution display of [product name], bringing your favorite movies,, and multimedia content to life with clarity and accuracy.
Looks like the vendor went all in on "AI" translation. "Air Screwdriver" is the description of a product image.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61tqu5gFckL._AC_SL1008_....
For me this didn't show anything but using google did
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aamazon.com+openai+pol...
Computer says no
I really expected to see this, do people still watch 2001?
Not frequently, but "computer says no" is more realistic scenario to happen, isn't it?
As things are going "computer is going to turn us to goo without indication" will be the more realistic scenario... Even be it at behest of its human masters.
Also, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"
Every time I see a LLM spit out an answer like this post this is all I can think of. I immediately say "Computer says no" in my head.
Computer says sorry nowadays
This one is hilarious: https://www.amazon.com/Natures-Dicks-Calendar-2024-specific/...
Okay, too funny description:
Nature's Dicks Calendar Book
Why You'll Admire This Calendar:
- Ample Size: Measuring a generous 8.5 x 11 inches when closed and an expansive 17 x 22 inches when open, it boasts 30 exquisite high-quality animal images.
- Exquisite Imagery: Revel in captivating photographs that beautifully depict animals thriving in their natural environments.
- Extended Coverage: Spanning from January 2024 to December 2025, plus an additional 6 months into 2026, all included at no extra cost.
- Holiday Clarity: Encompassing all major U.S. holidays and moon phases, meticulously omitting perplexing foreign holidays that disrupt your schedule.
- Ink-Resistant Printing: Meticulously printed on top-tier paper engineered to withstand ink smears, ensuring your calendar remains pristine.
- Precision Image Quality: Revel in vivid, sharp images, a testament to our unwavering commitment to printing excellence.
- Ideal Gift: Spread joy among your friends and family by presenting them with this calendar, a thoughtful gesture suitable for any occasion, making it an ideal choice for those on a budget.
Definitely appreciate how it covers the exact phallus dimensions up front, and am comforted knowing it won't smear if "ink" gets on it. There's just such a high level of consideration poured into this calendar of dicks, I am nearly speechless.
And it covers 2.5 years, who wouldn't want a calendar which ends mid year 2026? Spread the joy all over your friends and family.
a thoughtful gesture! suitable for any occasion! Do you think this description was GPT'd also?
"a testament to our unwavering commitment to printing excellence" is almost certainly a GPT output—I get this self-praise often when trying to use ChatGPT 4 for marketing text.
I found the line about "perplexing foreign holidays that disrupt your schedule" kind of hilarious. Many people are xenophobic or whatever but they hardly ever express it quite like that. If your wall calendar labels a holiday you don't know about, you typically ignore it and don't care. You don't become deeply perplexed.
It's a ripoff:
https://www.amazon.com/Years-2024-Calendar-Monster-Bucks/dp/...
of maybe this:
https://monstercalendars.com/storefront/2024-monster-bucks-b...
I would like to know how "meticulously omitting perplexing foreign holidays that disrupt your schedule" got into it, though, because that's just an amazing sentence.
Searching the "I'm sorry" line led to this....scam? https://www.amazon.com/complete-information-provided-provide...
This feels like something of a non story to me. Using AI for product descriptions seems like an obvious and reasonable use case; and data entry errors are not uncommon nor terribly harmful in the context.
I think it's a sign of what's to come. A world where many things are done so shoddily and with such little regard that it becomes nearly impossible to navigate. You sift through a pile of crap trying to get basic shopping done, descriptions that are wrong and nonsensical, fictional product photos that are useless to judge scale or fitness for purpose, etc. When you finally find what you need, you end up receiving the wrong item because no one in the supply chain gave a shit. You try to get this resolved, and are bounced around a series of half-broken customer service bots. It's difficult and expensive to find alternatives who do give a shit, because the automated companies have driven prices (and quality) into the ground, and it ends up being cheaper and easier to let it go and try your luck again.
I don't know if that will come to pass or not, I sure hope not, but I think it's a real possibility and that things like this are the early warnings.
That way of looking at it feels like it focuses on the one error while ignoring that, in all likelihood, the same action that caused the error, probably improved 1000 other listings.
I guess I'm a glass half full kinda person, this shows me that someone is working on improving things. And I bet they're quite flush from all the attention cause by their oversight in a big spreadsheet. I bet they won't miss the next one. :)
Why do you suggest that?
What do you think the seller's goal was in employing an LLM? Was it to improve quality, or to drive down costs?
I suspect someone was tasked with using the latest tools to improve a bunch of listings. 50 years ago they were given a typewriter for the same task, today they were given an LLM. It just feels like someone doing their job to me. Different year different tool. We no longer hand-transcribing books anymore, we don't lament that, and we won't lament LLMs one day either.
I think the purpose of automating product descriptions is far more likely to be to pay fewer people than to improve the quality of the listings.
I think if the purpose was to improve the quality rather than to crank them out - they probably wouldn't have let such severe and obvious errors get through, certainly not in such a large quantity. If I was tasked with doing this, at a minimum I would kick any listing that contained the word "OpenAI" into a QA queue rather than publishing it. Since they obviously didn't have even the minimal filters to catch errors, I have to infer they never spot checked their output for sanity. Because they didn't really give a shit.
It feels like someone doing their job to me too, sure. That job being to spam. When I see a watch, I infer the existence of a watchmaker. When I see a pile of spam, I infer the existence of a spammer.
AI gone wrong or marketing stunt?
Probably the former.
But the thing doesn't look half bad one the pictures. Looks like something you might get from IKEA under one of their "slightly better quality" lines (which at least in the EU are pretty good choice if you don't want to spend too much on furniture but also feel that the main line lines from IKEA are a bit to cheap in quality).
The fine folks at <checks notes> FOPEAS would never tarnish their good name by stooping to such a stunt. I mean, we might expect such shenanigans from the likes of SMURGBLOZ, KINSURGE, or GSIROOZ, but not FOPEAS, fine purveyors of `FOPEAS an AI Language Model I do not Have Access to The Context of The SFD You are referring to. Can You Please Provide me with More Information so That I can Assist You Better`
it's a shocking accusation, truly.
It looks good but its probably pigiron with cheap paint that will flake off and particle board. I’m done buying cheap stuff. By the time ten years have gone by you’ve spent more on cheap stuff replacing the broken cheap stuff than the buy it for life option would have ever cost.
I don’t think that’s quite true. I’ve spent less on two entire suites of IKEA furniture that I used for roughly 15 years (as student and young professional) than I spent on the single table that now stands in our living room.
I was leaning toward the latter because OpenAI doesn’t usually have poor grammar like that.
I wonder if the comments saying Amazon is terrible for shopping is due to the same ppl browsing Amazon, rather than actually shopping for the one or two things they need? I've never had a problem finding what I want in my searches. I also don't browse...and I can see how that might result in Amazon showing a person browsing all kinds of things not realizing that THIS TIME they really do want that item.
I avoid Amazon as a rule, but when I try to buy something which is out of stock on sites (like say a dietary supplement), I go through the reviews and will inevitably find someone saying it tastes or smells funny. There are plenty of positive reviews as well, but for something that can impact my health, I don't want to roll the dice with Amazon's utter lack of quality control.
I have problems finding what I need with searches. Even if it gives me results that match the query, the quality is suspect and sometimes the reviews are blatantly fake. Do you often search for a brand name, popular item? If it's something I can find reviews about on other websites, it's easy to find on Amazon, but anything else is not a great time.
Same here, I never have a problem with Amazon.
I’ve noticed there are different shopping styles though, even in physical stores. Some people go to the store with no idea what they want or just a vague idea that they want something, and will browse the store to see if anything interests them. Other people will go to the store knowing exactly what item they want, and don’t need to browse.
I’m the latter, and I’ve never had an issue with Amazon. I know what I want, so it’s trivial for me to just go straight to it and buy it.
But other people that like to browse… I can definitely see how they would get caught in the endless see of EFUZZYA and OPANKY products.
Nine hours after this was posted the link is 404'ing and about 90% of the links in the comments are also showing a 404. Is some Amazon employee spending their friday afternoon manually removing product listings?
It's Amazon's signature style to make the bad press go away without addressing the underlying issue that generated the bad press to begin with. Their culture is to hand everyone a pager and pull them in to fix the "problem" through just-in-time heroics rather than spend the money to build a system that's resilient to suckage in the first place. And "fixing" means tediously swatting down specific instances that are made public.
1. Allow 20,000 bads to happen through systemic enshittification
2. Get called out on 20 of the bads
3. Hurry up and have some poor sap manually "fix" the bads being highlighted in the public forum
4. "We've fixed every bad we've been informed of!"
5. ???
6. Profit
Wait but does Amazon even view these seller as bad?
I get the feeling they love these sellers but just don’t like them messing up the titles.
They’re perfectly happy with low quality drop shipped items with badly written descriptions. They make tons of money from those.
That's exactly why this situation feels a little weird. Usually Amazon usually just lets things like this slide.[1]
Amazon initially didn't take the product down from its site after being informed of these results, saying it had documentation supporting its safety, according to the Journal. Later Amazon did remove the product, saying it would ask for more documentation from the company it had used to test it.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-selling-toxic-toys-le...
Twitter is awash in this OpenAI spam too. Particularly among the so-called "verified" accounts https://nitter.net/nelson/status/1745892095553143221
This is hardly evidence Twitter is "awash" with OpenAI spam since by the bold text you can see he specifically searched that phrase and yet only showed three responses.
There were many other tweets that matched this, many from accounts paying $8/mo. Sorry my screenshot wasn't bigger.
But spammers would never be able to afford eight bucks per month...
Looks like Amazon has flagged whatever this link used to point to. Trying to decipher from the comments, but my HN-fu is failing me!
From another comment: https://web.archive.org/web/20240112193755/https://www.amazo...
These are all over twitter. Someone, either a government or private group is using chatgpt to create inauthentic accounts.
Huh? Why lean towards conspiracy?
Trash sellers looking do dump volume onto Amazon are leveraging tools to generate volume.
Trash sellers looking do dump volume onto Amazon are leveraging tools to generate volume.
I'm not talking about Amazon, I'm talking about X. There are many inauthentic accounts with content generated by LLMs currently on X. For example:
https://old.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/193jr8s/tha...
Most likely these fake accounts are created by firms who are selling access to mass-likes/follows. They sell the ability to get 10k fake accounts to follow your legitimate account, if you wish to boost your legitimate account, for some reason. Or, these fake accounts are created by intelligence agencies in order to run influence operations. Both of these possibilities have been reported on in the mainstream press. Maybe there's a third explanation that I haven't considered.
When do we as a society get to the point where we feel requiring Amazon to have products be human-reviewed before posting is a burden that the $1.602T company can probably shoulder?
Let them solve these with AI or whatever, but the government should invest in punishing the shit that FAANG companies do and then hand in the invoice.
When I decide I need AI to read through their AI.
I'm sorry, Dave
Order some new Pod Bay doors HAL.
What, no reviews
I was going to submit one, but it said that Amazon had flagged the item as having suspicious review behavior, so I'm guessing a lot of others had the same idea.
I know this is the wrong takeaway from this post, but how lazy are these scammers? A simple regex would have caught this and saved them a huge amount of embarrassment.
Embarrassment? Why would anyone be embarrassed? They’re scammers
"...it goes against OpenAI use policy. (Brown)"
It's not even brown
I would assume the person that made it doesn't speak english, and trusts whatever the LLM gave them
It has to be something like that, because why even bother using a LLM to create a title for a piece of furniture.
Side note: Amazon really needs to get around to fix the fact that their "search" can only find terms in titles and not in the descriptions or product meta data.
I always get a laugh from the section "Frequently bought together", which is often a obvious lie.
That's a good phrase to remember in terms of bulk-checking my own AI-generated content.
Amazon has gone from being good to mostly worse than useless except as joke/meme material. Not for everything, though. Still pretty good for books - prob some other things too.
The page is gone, it only shows Amazon's doggy 404. Can someone explain what it showed before, or summarize what it was about.
This will put all the comments into their original context.
That's original naming sense from GPT. We now have I'm Sorry Furniture.
I remember things like Translate Server Error (https://i.redd.it/kqqkgaro8ir71.jpg) and other instances of error messages finding their way into places where the output would normally be (another one: https://i.imgur.com/RAVOuwg.jpg ). It's not surprising to see this is now happening with AI too.
Link was just removed. Seems Amazon caught on quickly
Just until last months people were asking where is all AI spam. It was slow and then sudden.
The AI ouroboros - first we grab data from the Internet to train our LLMs, then our LLMs slowly become the majority of data from the Internet. "Low background noise" tokens will become a scarce commodity.
HA! That explains it why this book [1] has Donald Trump as its cover with a completely unrelated title, even though it's about Django web framework LOL!
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Django-RESTful-Web-Services-services/...
That would actually work as a title for a Japanese Light Novel!
I m sorry, that's not even brown
wow it's crazy to see all the marketing babble that has evolved since we all just used adwords/adsense, doubleclick, web rings, and affiliate programs without really thinking about it in the early 00s and didn't have made up words for all these things nor did we think at all about targeting. The really fancy ones among us might say things like SEO, PPC, PPM, and ROI but that was about it
did anyone else see this one?
https://www.amazon.com/complete-information-provided-provide...
Also possible this is just automated translation. I used OpenAI for translation in a project and similar things happened.
Oops, guess they need an 'if' statement that detects OpenAI or language model in the text and aborts the transaction
A more modern version of the 'out of office' reply from a translation service? https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2008/nov/01/5
It's been removed from Amazon.
silly fail or genius viral marketing scheme?
Found some similar AI babble left in a negative google review the other day: https://imgur.com/a/20jLlg7
Unsure if it was from someone who had a real experience and used ChatGPT to help them word it, or if it was a nefarious actor (e.g. competitor) lazily bad-mouthing competition.
Disregarding the title, you'd have to be a fool to spend $325 on that cabinet.
Submitted earlier today - would be nice if people instead of re-submitting the exact same thing that didn't get traction, emailed hn@yc and asked for it to go in the second chance pool, it's more polite to the original submitter.
Amazon is effective in promoting products based on user cookies. The price indeed fluctuates to compete with rivals. They often curate products that provide higher margins. Sometimes, it is challenging to determine the best product from reviews due to mixed experiences worldwide.
Perhaps this lazy seller should have used another LLM to validate first LLMs output?
Seems the entry is gone sadly
I bought a headset. it turned out not to support Bluetooth. upon wanting to return the headset, they set it would not be possible. that was until I found a line in their listing that said it should support Bluetooth.
I am quite sure that line cam. in because somebody just copy pasted the wrong file to the listing.
the merchants will be liable for what they let the LLMs promise on behalf of them.
In case anyone is confused (since the link goes to a 404 page now), the link appeared to go to a product listing of a dresser but the name of the product was the name of this posting, “I’m sorry, but I cannot fulfill this request…”
The prompt engineers took it down.
This is a great example of why Amazon is a better place to buy things than Temu
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=I%27m+sorry+openai
man, there are a loooot.
Capitalism might be eating itself, it has become impossible to shop online in the past few years.
Speaking from Brazil:
- Google shopping shows very few local stores, most of the listings I get are from overseas stores, many don't even ship to Brazil, and prices don't reflect shipping and import fees
- Google Ads are useless, as they're often unrelated to the query, tailored simply to whoever company pays more for words
- Amazon, besides the fake and bad listings, now has ads on itself, so it's not only hard to find what you need, now you need to scroll past the unwanted ads, too, just like in Google
- Most previously nice online shops have copied Amazon and turned into marketplaces, and suffer from the exact same issues, with shitloads of fake listings, drop-shipping scams, bot-reviews, etc.
- Local giants like Mercado Libre have their own issues, like absent categorization or indexing of listings, so you're left with randomly writing queries that might or not match what you need, so you never know if you can't find an item because it's not available or because you just didn't guess correctly how it's listed
- Chinese giants like Shopee and AliExpress suffer from the usual issues of long delivery times, bad customer service, low quality ripoff, etc.
So contrary to my own previous beliefs and predictions, I find myself doing MORE brick-and-mortar shopping, not less.
Would ChatGPT really output a malformed sentence like that? From what I've seen the impressive part is it makes correct English sentences (whether they make sense or are true or not is another matter). This looks like something a human with regular/bad English would write.
Page Not Found.
Anyone have a screencap?
I found a couple more earlier today that are also taken down now.
Archive links for them:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240112182246/https://www.amazo...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240112180943/https://www.amazo...
Gah, that dresser isn't even brown!
I do kind of want to buy one though just to see what happens. I really need a wealthy patron to sponsor my gentleman science
They all seem to be 3rd party products and not stuff sold by Amazon. Some 3rd party seller is doing some doo doo
Oh man, it only comes in brown?
I miss the times where Amazon search was dumber. Nothing more infuriating than typing an exact model number and the exact thing you're not looking for not appearing or be buried in a mountain of other products, some of them not even related to what you're looking for, because of some stupid personalization algorithm that is too smart for its own good.
Category and product pages are completely useless, sorting by any attribute does something, but that something is anything but sorting.
Not to mention that if by sheer luck you find whatever you want to find, be sure to order it immediately or at least add it to your cart. No guarantees that the search you did now will work ever again.
There are a lot of them.
The page has now been removed. Was it by amazon or the seller?
This image is now part of my presentation
"Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning (AI/ML) and Security" https://dwheeler.com/secure-class/presentations/AI-ML-Securi...
... as a nice example of why you should usually have humans review what AI systems do :-).
Found another one here: https://www.amazon.com/khalery-Apologies-Encourages-unethica...
Amazon finally beats IKEA in product naming game.
The biggest question here is isn't Amazon using their own AI to filter and rate basic things like titles and flag them and etc....
There are others, similar - https://www.amazon.com/FOPEAS-Language-Context-referring-Inf...
The 'brand' FOPEAS seems to be a common factor in some.
No reviews so far. Weird.
"Oh, and check it out: I'm a bloody genius now! Estás usando este software de traducción in forma incorrecta. Por favor, consultar el manual. I don't even know what I just said, but I can find out!"
Let's suppose that the hypest of the hype is real - that OpenAI is sitting on some world changing AGI tech. Are we really ready for the Cyberpunk future where corporate policies are enacted with the same force as law?
I really hope they keep this up and it gets “real reviews” so we can prove Amazon is full of shit. It’s so full of shit I don’t buy products unless it has many thousands of reviews just because of noise
On Bluesky I saw some screenshots of a flood of Twitter accounts all posting this text. Glad the new management has solved the bots issues.
I bought my partner a Sony camera and lens for Christmas.
Contacted them on Christmas day to tell them it was faulty.
It’s the 13th January and they still haven’t refunded.
Been in touch and they say it should be refunded by February.
Nearly £4K. And the only present I got for my partner (it cleared my bank buying that). Total disaster.
Moral of the story: do not buy presents from Amazon. Do not buy anything which you aren’t prepared to wait a couple of months on a refund. And do not trust the statements about refunds in 5-7 days max.
Fuckers.
So much of this bot store ships from Amazon... It's mind boggling to imagine how much waste this physical spam introduces, from manufacturing, to shipping to the Amazon warehouse, to warehousing. All for low-quality dupes that aren't even represented by a real business.
Parts of Amazon are now pretty much indistinguishable from AliExpress. This is just the icing on the cake.
Related story: https://futurism.com/amazon-products-ai-generated
We need a "Failblog" for AI.
https://archive.is/1r4Rj for when this inevitably gets taken down.
Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240112170316/https://www.amazo...
2 hours later, the page has been taken down.
If you search " I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request", you get results for some "products" on amazon
A couple more examples: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=sorry+openai+policy
Similar X-ample: https://www.threads.net/@parkermolloy/post/C14qS_CJp8q
Bummer that Amazon blocked asking questions about the product. I was curious if they had ChatGPT rigged up to answer.
I don't use Amazon much any more since they sold me counterfeit pharmaceuticals, which were recalled years later.
The worst thing for me is how the Amazon search algorithm seems to want to show you everything but the item you searched for.
In many categories, even when explicitly searching for brand and model names, you’ll get dozens of off-brand substitutions and even random unrelated products appearing above it in the search results.
Occasionally I’ve even noticed products that are available for sale (if you click on a direct link or have them saved in your favorites etc), but refuse to show up in search results no matter what!
Often it’s easier to find things on Amazon using Google search than using Amazon’s search.
Hey boss I made the site better! Through rigorous A/B testing I could figure out a way to tweak our search algorithm so people spend much more time on our site! It seems they now really enjoy browsing for products!
Ok but seriously, I have witnessed A/B testing go wrong in the past so I'm biased to blame everything on it. I wouldn't think this particular thing happened though. :)
What I could imagine is that they measure number of items bought or money spent, but even then if eg you don't also track how much of these people return stuff later you still might draw the wrong conclusions. Figuring out that a user is less likely to use your site six months down the line due to building frustration is even harder.
Also known as unethical, non-consensual human experimentation for profit maximization purposes.
I hate what advertising has done to the modern web just as much as anyone, but this strikes me as hyperbole. Does making this sort of claim not make you… tired? What’s the point of arguing like this?
Nazi Germany and the Tuskegee Experiment are examples of “unethical, non-consensual human experimentation”. A/B testing features of software usually doesn’t make the same list.
Godwin's Law.*
If you're from a certain background it's exactly as described. In academia, frankly probably everywhere but tech, experiments as a term of art require consent when they involve humans.
* n.b. you really should have left it out, it was a good post through "hyperbole", got close-minded in the next sentence, then just sort of blew the hatch doors off. Sometimes we just don't know something someone else knows. Not understanding someone else doesn't require they have a psychological condition, much less one worth noting.
A bank sends out two different mailers to see which gets a higher response rate. A politician tests different versions of his stump speech to see which gets more applause. A standup comedian tries different variants of a joke to see which gets more laughs. A grocery store chain tests different store layouts to see which encourages more spending on expensive high margin items. A big box store tests different doorbuster sales to see which gets more people into the store. A city government tests whether changing a traffic light pattern decreases delays at the intersection.
Unless you’re a hermit you are an unwitting participant in nonconsensual human experiments on a daily basis.
I said the term of art thing to try to ward off a reply like this, I didn't want you to have to put in the effort.
Using weasel words doesn’t make your claim any more correct.
It's not "weasel words" -- there's a difference between an "experiment where city government changes traffic light patterns" and "experiment as in Institutional Review Board", and I suggest relaxing in general.
No, there’s not. Any of the examples I gave could be conducted by university researchers subject to the IRB, or by corporate/government researchers not subject to an IRB and informed consent requirements. When I worked in my university’s statistical consulting center in graduate school I could have consulted on the same experiment either subject to IRB or not depending on who the client was.
Thank you for the shift in tone: I'm honestly unsure what you mean, steelmanning: you worked as a consultant at a university and not all work you did involving experiments was for IRB experiments --- I guess what I'd say is, the fact you're able to make that distinction does seem to confirm my initial observation that the grandparent of my original post in this thread was drawing on IRB-style experiments to condemn excesses of colloquial-style experiments in tech.
No, there is no distinction between “IRB-style experiments” and “colloquial-style experiments.” Exactly the same experiment could be subject to IRB or not depending on who was running it. The distinction you’re trying to make does not exist.
Fascinating. How were you able to draw a distinction in your previous comment, then? :)
I didn’t. I drew a distinction between experiments subject to IRB and experiments not subject to IRB, not as a function of the type of experiment, but as a function of other factors—namely who is doing the experiment. I thought this was pretty clear:
(emphasis added). Somehow you misread it.
Comedians should just pick one joke and stick to it, it's unethical otherwise as some people might miss the laughs and others might laugh too much.
Please stop. "Godwin's Law" is irrelevant bullshit. It's not a "law" and it doesn't prove anything, or do anything except add noise to the conversation.
Right? Parent is basically saying “wow it’s so unfortunate that you have forced me to end the conversation here, I’d have really liked to continue, but it’d be against the (entirely made up, by me) law”.
Where?
N.b. "godwin's Law" is the famous joke that as an Internet discussion approaches infinity length, hitler will be brought up
Not a secret message saying discussion over lol
The *
Nope. Being used as an unwitting guinea pig for a trillion dollar corporation sure as hell makes me tired though. It's extremely tiresome and demoralizing, knowing that just so much as browsing their website contributes to their profits.
Basically we should have to consent for them to profit off of us in any way.
That's a bit of a false dichotomy. It doesn't have to be either Nazism or totally chill.
I don't expect you to back off of your take, but you should really consider how and why you came to this conclusion.
If I put two different marketing messages on two different billboards to test whether one is more effective than the other, is that unethical non-consensual experimentation? If not, how is it different from A/B testing?
In strict terms yes, if you didn't get informed consent from your test subjects that would be unethical.
Research has a lot of policies and systems set up to ensure that if your testing involves people, you must get informed consent from the persons before even trying to do the test, and it's really not hard to imagine why this is a stringent standard -- it's very easy to miss how "simple tests" can and often are adverse to those participating in the test or have unintended consequences that the researchers didn't accommodate for, regardless of the reason they did not.
Ads are often portrayed as harmless but, like, there's a reason there are restrictions on advertising for certain highly addictive products and regulations against false or misleading advertising, or certain tactics aren't allowed.
If this is based on the possibility that one or more of the ads is harmful, how is it less ethical than the time-honored alternative, which is skipping the study and just running the ads?
It's not. Ads are inherently unethical and it should be illegal to run them anywhere.
I think that's the crux of the matter here. A/B testing can be anything from which page layout leads people to complete their shopping check out process to which ad campaign has the best ad click through rate. The former is pretty inoffensive, but the latter could be bad if it involves gambling/alcoholic beverage ads to people with gambling addiction or alcoholism, for example.
Why? Is it false?
I get that reaction a lot. People have directly called me unhinged. I don't really mind.
Many of my ideas I developed by discussing this stuff with people on this site. I guess not every idea is socially acceptable. That's fine. I still want to express them.
Yes. It's really not any different than some published psychology experiment. In fact it's much larger in scale, has much uglier interests behind it, has proprietary and unpublished results. Social sciences wish they could get away with shit like this!
Only reason it's "legitimate" is everyone depends on it to make their millions. Because money excuses everything. Just like unending amounts of first party malware corporations ship to users on a daily basis. We used to recognize that stuff as the malware it is: adware, spyware. But then corporations started doing the same thing and suddenly it's "legitimate" because they put some clause in some terms nobody reads.
You are consenting to the experimentation by accessing the software. It’s covered by the terms and conditions.
Nobody reads that stuff.
Terms and conditions? It's hard to tell when people are joking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhsyZ5V1pok
Narrowly true, but what's the difference between this and a diner trying out new blueberry pancake recipes?
It's unethical for a diner to try out new recipes. Per OpenAI policy you need to ask consent before trying out new recipes.
I wouldn't make as strong a claim as the parent comment myself, but someone pointed out to me recently that A/B testing is really similar to cold reading. Is it morally equivalent to suggest to someone, in bad faith, that you're able to deliver messages from their dead loved ones, and to perform an A/B test of switching around menu items or change up some language to try and get fewer people to abandon their carts?
I lean towards "no" but I have trouble either accepting or rejecting the proposition. It's hard for me to say that A/B testing is done in bad faith, but it's also hard for me to say it's entirely unmanipulative, either.
You know the Nazis had pieces of flair that they made the Jews wear.
We do non-consensual human experimentation all the time. Whenever you try a new outfit you're doing it.
It's an extremely broad category that contains good things (installing cycle lanes to see if they encourage cycling), neutral things (making both flower mugs and wave mugs and seeing which sells) and bad things (use your imagination).
My best guess is the algorithm has been tweaked to return exact results maybe 1/10 or 1/20 times, like a slot machine with the psychological manipulation and “reward centre activation” that comes with it.
Amazon definitely tracks returns in their A/B tests, along with impact on long-term projections of customer value. What they also track is ad and sponsored products revenue. The sad truth with most Internet products is that advertisers are really good customers. They will pay you a lot of money with huge margins, and it's really hard for a business to say no to that.
This is definitely the worst thing about Amazon. I pay them $120/year or whatever, and I search a specific product by a specific brand, and the entire browser screen shows me brands and even products I didn't even search for. I should not get ads in a store that I pay to use, especially in search.
Stop paying them. If you pay, you'll actually become a better product rather than cease being the product.
I don't even use Amazon, but I definitely sympathize with prime subscribers. It's nearly a requirement for average people in their 30s. Have kids or limited time? Spouse likes a show on prime? Live in a rural area and the walmart 30 minutes away doesn't carry what you need? Shop at wholefoods regularly? Use a kindle?
As a single eccentric mid 30s guy in a small city, I get by without it. Its still annoying for me. This is the Microsoft-esque bundling strategy where several things you need are bundled in with a bunch you don't. It covers enough of the average demand to be nearly essential and products subsidize each other keeping the cost low.
I doubt it would pass the test of consumer-harm. However, it clearly stifles innovation as it is impossible to compete in any bundled category when your competitor is a megalith offering service nearly free or at cost.
This is why the poster above feels bullied. They know you need to subscribe. I personally quit prime years ago but I don't expect enough people to be able to do this to matter. For many people, even with the price bullying, bad ux and anti-consumer shit, the value is still there even if the original ROI has shrunk.
This seems like an exaggeration. You don't need to pay for Prime in order to shop on Amazon. You can even get free shipping without it. I can't think of any reason I'd want it. The only time I've ever had Prime was when Amazon somehow dark-patterned me into accidentally clicking it. I don't think not having Prime makes you eccentric, nor is eccentricity a prerequisite for living your life without a totally optional shopping service.
I'm a ruralite, the population of my town is 15k. There is no costco or sams club here. Whole Food's is a name I know only from seeing it online. We could not even keep little ceasar's open. Want clothes? hope you like Target or Kohl's, that's what we have.
I got rid of Prime last November and the thing that I noticed with my shopping is that the blue checkmark made a lot of garbage palatable that I can now simply skip over. I always could skip over it, but now I have no incentive to give it a chance at all. I don't even need to give Amazon the chance, actually. Specifically with clothes, I was fooling myself into thinking I would find good items with a blue checkmark. All the quality brands have taken their ball and gone home to their own website, now only chaff remains.
The extra week on every purchase is a little grating, but honestly, maybe spending money online SHOULD have some friction. the blue checkmark is brainrot. It's tricking you into importing garbage instead of being more selective. It's inviting you to impulse purchase instead of pausing and considering if this is worth it. free thyself.
If they keep you showing you ads, and you keep paying them $120, then I can't see why they'd stop showing you ads.
If they stopped paying, then why they'd stop showing them ads either.
Because they stopped visiting a mostly useless site.
I definitely agree that they don't return brand results. I don't use Amazon enough to remember the example(s) that were the final straw for me. Do you have any examples/remember which brand search you did? I am curious if some categories are "better" than others.
Pro-tip: Amazon fills their page with that useless content from their ad network, just like any standard ad. uBlock Origin blocks all of it, and your search experience is restored to what you expect.
For the longest time, I couldn't understand what people were talking about when they said Amazon's search interface is terrible. People would tell me they search for a specific book or author, and get totally irrelevant results. My experience was totally opposite.
I had to finally see a screenshot from someone's browser to believe it. It turns out uBlock has been blocking this content the whole time, and I never noticed it at all.
Their search is terrible, though, and it is terrible in ways that have nothing to do with content that is or is not blocked by uBlock Origin.
It's a very fuzzy and inclusive search, and that means that it is awful for finding specific things.
If I need a bag of insulated crimp terminals ring terminals that work on #10 screws and 12 AWG wire, then: That's what I need, what I search for, and what I want to browse.
And Amazon might show me some results that fit, but they'll be mixed in with results for extension cords, and machine screws, terminals for solar panels and car batteries, and also key rings: Stuff that has that has no merit to me today.
I just want some ring terminals, and they're more willing to show me everything else instead.
The noise is worse than actually-random results since my search terms are just sprinkled all over the place.
Did you actually try that search? I typed in exactly what you said and got exactly those results. No uBlock Origin either.
No, I didn't try it first.
I just made it up as an example of something that I had failed at in the past, on the basis that this kind of technical specificity has generally lead to daunting results in the past.
Finding specific things has generally been a frustrating mess for me on Amazon.
But I did try it just now: I searched for "ring terminals 12 #10" and got a long list of stuff that is actually worth considering.
WTF?
This is good and welcome, but it was certainly unexpected.
Perhaps their search engine has improved for some of this kind of thing.
Search on what you actually said: "insulated crimp terminals ring terminals that work on #10 screws and 12 AWG wire"
That gets a much better result.
Just the other day I dealt with this issue looking for usb 3.2 hubs, specifically powered hubs, which I kept in quotes that evidently were not respected. I was getting mostly usb 3.0 even some usb 2.0. A few usb 3.2 but not all like you’d think a quote should work for search. Also all over the place powered vs unpowered hub
I searched “powered usb 3.2 hub” (no quote) and got this as the #1 result, also labeled the “Overall Pick” and “Amazons Choice”: https://www.amazon.com/Rosonway-Individual-Switches-Aluminum...
Following that, in order, were the following:
https://www.amazon.com/Powered-LEINSIS-Individual-Switches-A...
https://www.amazon.com/RSHTECH-Individual-Switches-Splitter-...
https://www.amazon.com/ikuai-Charging-Aluminum-Splitter-Incl...
https://www.amazon.com/TP-LINK-UH720-7-Port-Smart-Charging/d... (USB 3.0)
https://www.amazon.com/Rosonway-Charging-Aluminum-Splitter-R...
Am I missing something or do all but one of those do exactly what you want?
i ise ublock origin, but I too suffer from abysmal search results on Amazon. Im sure their AI has decided ill just buy all the junk after i give up on finding what I actually looked for.
Ive also noticed lower prices for the same items if ive recently searched on walmart or target recently too…
I too have been spoiled by parametric searching.
Nothing like going on digikey and specifying that I want to see all rs232 transceivers with maximum X ma of hysteresis, >=3 drivers, >=1 receiver that supports Y-Z operating temperature and xxx kbps.
Also gotta love rockauto where you drill down to your specific year/make/model and it lists every oil filter that's compatible segmented by quality. (But figuring out the warehouses are a total pain)
While it's obvious that this is somehow commercially/financially advantageous to Amazon, I'd love to know more about why. What are the economics behind the shovelware merchandise Amazon upranks to users?
It's very simple. Amazon makes a lot of money on advertising and pay-for-placement within their store listings. So when you run a search, Amazon can easily make more money by showing items that they're paid the most to show, vs what you were actually looking for.
It looks like Amazon created the same thing Google did. Paying keywords for ranking and if you don’t they decide what comes up organically. They crawl and decide which goes into what order.
Yeah it's almost a double-dip in some ways because they are taking money from a product's competitor to show you their alternative when you search for what you actually want, and then when you still/eventually end up going to the product page for the thing you want and you buy that, and Amazon takes a cut of that sale too..
If it wasn't a super shitty user experience, it would be genius!
Right. Amazon profits, at least in the near-term, from the enshittification of Amazon. Results are obvious: it's a shitty experience.
Because just like Walmart, they're trying to get a price as low as possible to kill off competition. Amazon isn't "flooded" by these brands, they are purposefully seeking these sellers out and helping them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...
If amazon sells a push broom for $10, why would would someone buy a push-broom from the local hardware store for $20?
Local hardware store struggles, eventually goes out of business...now everyone has no choice except to buy online, and guess who dominates that?
And now you're reliant on Amazon for everything.
Same thing Walmart did to endless communities across America. Dump stuff cheap in an area to starve all the local businesses to death, and then everyone had no choice but to buy everything from, and work at, walmart. And if anyone gets uppity about unions, close the store and now everyone within an hour has to drive even further to get anything...so everyone is terrified of any sort of workplace organization.
I've had similar experiences with the Google Play Store. For example, if I search for "Instagram" verbatim, my first result is TikTok.
I could not reproduce this result on desktop or Android. Any additional details to the steps you took?
The results may be affected by my region (Germany) and/or age (< 25). It has happened multiple times as I install Instagram to post something then uninstall it right after.
Amazon's founding principle of "customer obsession" has been turned inside out -- at least when it comes to thinking of us consumers as the cherished customers. Those days are over.
The new "customers" at the center of Amazon's business model are a global assortment of insta-merchants that don't make the products, don't handle their own logistics and don't have recognizable brands. So -- whoosh! -- in comes Amazon as the ultimate partner/toll-collector. For a fee (or actually for many fees) it will shine up these impostors to the point that they can conduct a lot of business on the Amazon platform.
When Amazon provides distorted search results, my hunch is that it's providing boosted listings for whatever pseudo-merchants are willing to pay up. Or that have agreed to buy other Amazon services. And, hey, Amazon is going the extra mile to make them feel well-treated
And it’s bonkers how little they care about things that impact the customer. I’m a “Vine” reviewer (free* products in exchange for a review). Sellers game this system by listing a dozen or two duplicate SKUs and submit them to Vine, each in very small quantities (<5). Then, they wait for the reviews to come in. Then any of the SKUs which got negative reviews are deactivated, and the rest of the listings are merged into one. Instant highly-reviewed product! A complete mockery of what both reviews and Vine are supposed to be about, yet Amazon turns a completely blind eye. I mean, one non-skilled FTE could do the job of policing Vine for abuse like that, and they do not even care a bit to try.
*Note, they 1099 you for full retail value so really it’s just a discount of 100% minus your marginal fed and state income tax rate!
Re: Vine reviewers (recipient of a free product): whenever I see only their reviews on a product, always 5 stars even on the most garbage chinese-made ones, I know what to avoid.
To me, seeing their review is an indication of terrible product that decided to pay off some easily corruptible reviewers that give away 5 stars just to keep receiving free stuff.
I understand your explanation, but as a user, established brands don't have to pay off reviewers at all.
I'm going to assume you're in the USA, which may be incorrect.
I live in the third world, in Amazon's estimation-- Switzerland, Ireland, the Netherlands. If I search for something, there's a better-than-not chance that it will explicitly say in the search results under the item "ships to [Switzerland]," but when I click the item, I get "sorry, this item does not ship to your location" and I can't order it. It makes searching on Amazon incredibly frustrating because I have to click through every garbage 3rd-party knockoff of the thing I'm looking for to find the one garbage 3rd-party knockoff that ships to my uninhabited, remote shithole of the European backwaters (Zurich, Amsterdam, Cork). But will Amazon offer me an option to filter out things I can't have? No, of course not. Why? Shut up and stop asking questions, that's why.
What's worse, even this is still miles better than stuff-availability in Ireland was 20 years ago when I first moved over from Chicagoland. That was a blow to my expectations, I tell you hwat. I may have single-handedly kept eBay.com in the black between 2005-2016...
Naw, that's one of eBay's strong points. Lots of ex-US business from int'l people willing to sell to others internationally. Or just breaking tariffs/barriers/price discrimination/parallel imports.
I just never understood most American seller's resistance to selling internationally, but worked out in my favour as a seller. I just charged a bit more than cost for shipping and it made up for any losses + inventory moved faster.
My terrible suspicion is that these algos are good for the majority of people in the sense that they are prone to manipulation and buy these inferior borderline fraud products all the time, so the algo finds its target function results and optimize for these.
This is what we don’t seem to accept. Enshittification.
Also shipping and return policy is so convenient, that even the grumbling people are eating this up.
They may be suggesting on sellers request unsold or rarely sold products that vaguely relate to searches, but sellers want to get rid of quickly.
I think I'd probably cope with it including irrelevant and mislabelled stuff and the inevitable tons of Alibaba crap if it (.co.uk) didn't fail so hard at pagination that most of the results were inaccessible. Feels like some marketing bod has wargamed the "bust if we fix this people buy cheaper variants of the same product and don't check the Prime box" scenario and decided that as they're Amazon and people will use them regardless, broken search results are better than functional search results
Similarly, I think sponsored search results are unconscionable. Amazon is already taking a cut of every sale (which is obviously fine), but then they're also letting knock-off companies pay to show their product above the genuine article.
Heh - until you buy it... then it shows you a 'suggested' purchase to buy it again on every page :-P
I also hate how the seller's pages are basically useless as well. I want to buy something from a specific brand and going to that page I can't find more than half of their product list on their own seller page.
Truer words have never been spoken.
In 2022, Amazon had 38 billion dollars in ad revenue. That's ads in that search page. Between the ad revenue, and variations in what sale is more profitable for Amazon, you get a lot of incentive misalignment. The page that makes Amazon the most money is not the one where the item you were thinking about is the first thing on the page. Giving you a worse page is just far more profitable.
Even in Apples "curated", "premium" official app store I never get the thing I search for first.
I always get an ad for something else (that isn't marked as an ad).
I believe this occurs because Amazon allows sellers to promote their items by bidding on keywords— and often times, the highest quality keywords will be specific category-defining brands or products. At the same time, the original supplier of that brand or product keyword won’t need to spend their advertising budget on that query because customer conversion is high enough despite the friction.
I'd really like a more 'curated' or vetted everything store. I don't need to see 40 of the same exact item rebranded into various English horrors.
Walmart seems most primed to do this, barring third party sales. Or Sears, if they ever had a miraculous turnaround to their old days.
If you're curated, you're not everything. If you want everything, well, expect everything.
"everything" but only the "high quality" (or highER quality) instances of everything. seems pretty reasonable.
Costco/Nordstroms/Apple/Lululemon/etc.
Even BestBuy/Target/Walmart/Home Depot/Lowes/Staples/REI/etc to an extent, if the item is sold by them. Stores with physical inventory and presence that have to worry about rates of return will probably do more due diligence than an online marketplace.
With inventory mixing, in service of "Fulfilled by Amazon" that is what Amazon used to have, and lost.
Yes, but it’s been known Amazon has been commingling inventory for 10+ years.
It’s just an AliExpress with a better return policy, which is worth something when I need something cheap to solve a niche problem.
But my serious purchases all happen elsewhere.
This is harder than it looks..
Is there a "quality filter" setting you can toggle on and off? Who decides what goes on which side of the filter? At Amazon's scale, it would have to be automated.
Much like search SEO and every other algorithm, people would start to figure out how to game it, and eventually Amazon would give up trying to police it because it would cost them more money than it's worth, and you're back to where you started except now you have an additional - and inaccurate - "quality" attribute on every product.
I'm sure they already do this. Just not well enough. They err too far on the side of inclusion for our tastes.
Feels like arguing semantics instead of replying to the stated wish
I can't get a hitman on amazon, so technically it's not an "everything store" to begin with. But for the purposes of this conversation it clearly is
no, now, you're thinking of Silk Road or some such.
The vast vast majority of consumers will only expect to find legal products/services on an everything store. If you are going to qualify everything to include things that will potentially land the user in prison, then sure, we shouldn't call it everything.
I think you’re making gps point. No customer wants or expects spam crap in the everything store. The everything store doesn’t literally need to sell “everything”.
good response
Could you use a amazon tuckle though?
You make a good and constructive point. A real everything store _should_ have both a "100w USB-C Power Adapter", and a "Long Life 100W USB C Premium Apple Android Galaxy Power Adapter US International iPad iPhone good luck LIFESTYLE".
Ah but which one to pick? There's 20 with different capitalized names, all using the same 3 stock images, all with a mix of good reviews and reviews for entirely different products.
It's good to have such choice.
Amazon is just SO EASY though. It's a vortex I can't escape. I tried ordering a Nintendo Switch from Walmart for my son's birthday. 3 days they told me. It didn't even ship. The website said I could "try" to cancel the order. "Try" I did, and that try failed. I then waited a few weeks and had to call them up and they said oh we will just mark it as lost in transit. Oh yeah, that sounds perfect. They wasted my time, they endangered my mission, they cost me money, and then THEY MADE ME TALK TO SOMEONE (who was very pleasant and it was pretty quickly resolved but that's a little cherry on a sundae made of poo,). Screw all that nonsense.
The only way for others to compete is to have a 3rd party help them all become just as easy as Amazon. We need someone to partner with Fedex and step up. Who can do it?
I’m shocked that people are having good experiences with Amazon delivery in 2023. For me, 2-day delivery means it’ll get here in a week or 2. And forget about customer service that can actually solve my issue.
I want whatever program you’re on
Where are you located? Not specifically, but urban, suburban, rural, remote?
Anecodtally: I am in a super-urban location. I order Prime 2-day, on average, twice a week. It has been late maybe once in the past year; often, it comes a day early.
Small city (~70k). I’ve also ordered to some of my friends/families houses who live in suburbs and large cities. The only time I ever didn’t have issues is when I lived in NYC and ordered to Amazon lockers
Even NYC shipping to a house is shaky. Amazon's 3rd party last mile vendors are not all fantastic.
I live in a "suburb" of about 100k people right now, and Amazon 2 day delivery is fantastic. I still canceled my subscription to prime, though.
That's my experience, and yes I am in an urban location. And returns are so easy too. In fact, I tried to return something the other day, and they said it was not returnable so they were like you just keep it and we will refund the money.
Suburbs here. We buy a lot of stuff from Amazon and generally it’s here when it said it would be. About 10% of the time it slips a day or two.
I’m within 15 miles of two Amazon warehouses and still share the poor-delivery experience.
I see more of the new Rivian Amazon vans than any other vehicle on the road in the morning, and yet somehow, every other item I order gets unexpectedly delayed for days and days.
As somebody located outside the few main western market centres (US, EU, perhaps Australia), and thus having most Amazon orders also incur added domestic tax, plus shipping, plus wait-time, most of the advantages of Amazon are stripped away.
Once you can no longer get every cheap bauble under the sun delivered tomorrow for free, suddenly it all looks so much more like undesirable, wall-to-wall crap.
it can vary pretty tremendously within the same city. i lived 3 miles from the "downtown" part of Seattle in a house, and 50% of my Amazon deliveries were late by 1-3 days. my friends lived 2 miles further out from the downtown in the same direction, but in a 100-unit apartment and they never had issues.
not that 4 day delivery is bad. but promising to deliver something, and then regularly failing, is. i'd make plans for the thing being here by the promised day and just regularly be screwed.
It's your distance to a warehouse and if you order what everyone orders. If I order a winter coat in summer while in Florida, I'm gonna have a bad time.
I live driving distance to two amazon warehouses. I can get a great number of products in the same day.
Anecdotally, I live in the Atlanta metro and Prime usually means 2-3 days. No issues with counterfeits or busted packages. All in all a positive experience 100% of the time.
We probably order 2-10 items per week and never return anything. I bet we're the perfect customer.
We also do Target pickups once every two weeks for bulky items.
I have several times ordered what appeared to be genuine, but turned out to be counterfeit products from Amazon which made it very easy to stop using the platform all together. Not only due to a concern about the build quality, but also safety. Who wants to give their kids, or cook with, counterfeit products which may contain toxic or carcinogenic materials?
Wal-Mart and Target are the 'curated' everything stores. My biggest disappointment with them is that they never have what I want.
I think I'm OK with Amazon being Aliexpress for the US market. Sometimes I want to get random crap from the depths of Shenzhen, and Amazon is that. What is unfortunate is that they can't get "real" brands to sell there, because of their counterfeiting issue. The "mistake" Amazon made (that has probably made them hundreds of billions of dollars) was to let someone send in a box of crap and get paid when someone shopping for "Tide Laundry Detergent" gets their box of crap instead of Tide Laundry Detergent.
Other than that, they're where they are today because they're good. I just wouldn't buy anything valuable from them; laptops, cameras, phones, etc. Those you'll have to find a dedicated electronics retailer. But sometimes I'm like building a 3D printer and I want a touchscreen display or something for it... for $20 I can have one the same day. That is super neat. It works because no "brand" makes parts for hobbyists, and some company you've never heard of in China is actually the market leader. Amazon connects you to them... but also to billions of scammers. Caveat emptor.
Edit to add: I'm talking about the in-person stores. I have no idea what Wal-Mart and Target do online.
Are you talking in-store or online? If I go to walmart.com or target.com and search for "usb cable", I don't see a dozen cables that fit 95% of use cases like in the store. Walmart shows thousands of results, the vast majority of which are marketplace sellers selling through walmart.com. Target has "only" 753 results, 600+ of which I find are not actually sold directly by Target if I dive into the filters. Basically it feels like Walmart and Target are trying to turn their online shopping experience into amazon.com.
Annoying but at least Walmart still has the option to filter out third party sellers (under Filters, select Retailer and then Walmart). IIRC Amazon used to support this, but not anymore. I guess it wouldn't even do you much good with the commingling issue.
You can create a bookmarklet to only show items sold by Amazon: https://old.reddit.com/r/amazonprime/comments/13nyl2k/amazon...
They do have that filter but annoyingly it resets between each search. I don't buy a ton from Walmart but I typically buy allergy medicine there since it's cheap. So I go to walmart.com, search for "allergy medicine", scroll through the filters and then click Retailer->Walmart and then pick my poison. Then I realize I need to add a few bucks worth of stuff to hit the free shipping threshold so I search for "dark chocolate" and add something to my cart...only to realize it wasn't directly from Walmart so it doesn't apply. For every search you have to go in and filter by Retailer->Walmart specifically. Ugh.
yeah but those are easy to filter to results available in store. or even in my store, so i can go pick it up tonight even!
The Walmart website is also a "marketplace". As it stands, the company's website is unreliable for finding goods and their prices and it is full of junk, which requires additional user-based filtering to find items of value. To me that is not "curated".
yeah buts its not even cheap like aliexpress. its overpriced mushroom brands!! there are no deals that I see on Amazon anymore, or at least maybe they know im more likely to pony up the extra $$, so thats what they show me…
Sometimes curation just means higher prices. My local Best Buy curates electronics, but none of them are cheaper than the hundreds of additional brands you can find on Amazon.
You can’t get a $50 WiFi 6 access point at Best Buy, but you can find that on Amazon.
I think what you are describing is Walmart or Target but with filters applied to turn off third party sellers.
As an aside, what’s interesting about Amazon is that once you unsubscribe from Prime, it’s not incredibly competitive with AliExpress for the right types of products. Usually if you can wait a week, you can wait two and save more money.
It's not about the price, it's about getting a more trustworthy device.
The amount of trust you need in a device varies based on what you’re buying.
There are a whole lot of products where saving cash easily trumps having a good brand standing behind it.
Phone cases are a classic example. Some of my recent purchases like a toilet paper holder or emergency ponchos are similar. Even clothing is getting to the point where name brands are barely more dependable than Amazon off-brand clothes that probably come from the same factories.
Sometimes “untrustworthy” brands go above and beyond mass market retail options, like the LED automotive lights that AutoZone won’t sell me.
AutoZone is doing us all a favor. Most people whack in an LED replacement for their turn signals and end up with a quick flashing mess that may be partially green. Or they put in LED brake lights that are blindingly bright and have no differentiation between idle and braking.
I made sure the lights had the same projection pattern as the halogens. I put in one on one side first and compared to the old bulb. No difference: they both cut off at the same height. Neither halogen nor these LEDs are directional, it’s the housing that determines the projection pattern.
Plus, I’m in a sedan, while everyone else drives a huge SUV that rides higher than my car.
I don’t see how my light system is any more offensive than the luxury cars that have the same thing from the factory. The only difference is that I don’t blow all my money on a stupid car payment or a thousand dollar feature package just so I can see better at night.
I also installed LEDs for the license plate lights which has no negative effect on anyone, and now they won’t burn out all the time.
(I did not install turn signal, brake, or high beam LEDs, I just installed the stuff that annoyed me by burning out all the time)
I've been hearing a lot of complaints of later that amazon has also become a complete crapshoot, primarily from .us based friends.
I'm in .uk and have yet to have a problem (there was one sneakily labeled listing but the keyword they'd stuffed in wasn't one I understood and the price and product were both what I wanted/expected so -I- wasn't disadvantaged by that listing at least).
Rebranded .. I'm getting really annoyed with the same product, different prices, different brand names apparently generated by some China-based anagram generator
But.. that's how a lot of products have always worked.
I think the difference is that before a lot of white-label product factories would cut territory-based deals with resellers, so in (for example) the US, that widget is called "Acme Widget" but in France that exact same widget is called "Le Widget Magnifique".
Around the world there might be 100+ companies selling that same product but typically not competing with each other because they would each have exclusive markets.
But now with these global marketplaces, that same approach feels weird exactly because you can suddenly see the same exact products being sold under different names, and it's a lot easier for any random business to white-label a product and reach a global audience.
Sure, but before it didn't bother me because I didn't have to browse through eight pages of search results that show the same four products over and over again with different brands slapped on before I might find a fifth one that suits my needs better. If you're lucky they're all using the same images, but sometimes there's a couple of variations so it takes you a couple seconds for each listing to figure out if it's one of the four you already seen a dozen times and don't want.
Totally fair, the dynamic has changed and so has the customer experience..
That's fine. I'm just waiting for the day when the Chinese brands will stop using that insipid default Latin alphabet serif font that they use 90% of the time for labeling buttons and GUIs.
The difference is that many big brands will vet the products before they put their name and warranty on it.
Amazon is a free for all when factories can just direclty dump their garbage. There is no brand recognition or reputation. It's all just random character strings attached to random products. If a QUENTOC dog leash is prone to snap and whiplash your face, they can just dump the brand and move on.
I wish Sears sold do-it-yourself-houses again like they did in the 1920s. That would be very cool of them.
If you go to a real lumber yard - the type of places the pros go - they will look at any blueprint print and prepare you the kit. Prices are better than Home Depot after you account for free delivery and they pick up your returns.
The kit won't include plumbing, HVAC, electric... so it isn't 100% what Sears did in the 1910s, but it is actually pretty close.
what's a lumber yard?
Its a place that sells lumber. Usually a small business
Sears doesn't, but others do.
I'm prone to losing sunglasses, so some years ago I went through the process of testing out a dozen Alibaba sunglasses to find the best ones. I settled on one that's $4/pair, sturdy, and looks/feels/functions just like a $50 pair. Of course, being Alibaba, I had to buy it in bulk, so I now have sunglasses for life.
But that brings me to the type of site I want to see. Not curated luxury products like Le Creuset cookware at a markup, but curated dirt-cheap Alibaba products with low margins that have been tested and vetted extensively.
Massdrop or Monoprice are a little bit like this, but only for a few niches like headphones or cables.
Massdrop (Drop?) has had filler garbage for quite a while. I think (maybe one) part of the issue is mechanical keyboards got much more popular and drops were less necessary for good stuff.
I used to love Drop when they did outdoor gear. My favorite pocketknife is one of their collabs. Unfortunately they just do headphones and keyboards now, a move I certainly don't understand as those are really crowded segments with hardly any bottom.
Sears still exists?
It’s almost a stretch of the definition of “exist” but yeah. They mostly sell crap you’d find at a TJ Maxx or something, because they have neither name brands, nor most of their famous private labels that were good.
Yes, there's 13 stores left.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears
The one time I used their ecommerce platform (due to a gift card), I got a damaged product drop-shipped as an Amazon gift.
Quality and trust are not words that I have ever associated with Walmart, even in the brick-and-mortar world where it is much harder to pull a fast one. Color me skeptical.
See I’m always kinda amused when I encounter Amazon arbitrage plays. I’m like “welp. I guess this one is on me for not knowing my item was cheap enough on Amazon to have room for the middleman to pay retail and still make money!”
There used to be that. It was called Canopy. The best curated Amazon products. It was awesome.
Guess what? Amazon acquired them and vaporized it.
This seems like a solid business idea. Start up a company that deshittifies some BigCorp experience, become an existential threat to BigCorp, get acquired by BigCorp. Rinse and repeat.
Who loses?
"I'd really like a more 'curated' or vetted everything store."
It exists for tools and parts and hardware: mcmaster.com
Talk to friends and family, and only buy when someone has had a positive experience with a product before. Use outlets like consumer reports that do long-term reviews, etc.
There are more listings like that one, some are sold by Amazon. https://amzn.to/41Zf3hS
I'll leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQpxAvjD_30
As someone who uses Amazon regularly, we live in different worlds. My experience is pleasant and straightforward; I get what I want and it arrives quickly.
Yeah we must. Nothing I but from Amazon is what I expect and top that off with it arrives late despite me paying for prime. I ordered a blender last week that doesn’t even blend, which I only realized after I had loaded it up with stuff to make a smoothie.
When things show up and actually are what I expect based off of the image and they work right it is a rare surprise.
Counting it up, I've ordered 58 times from Amazon in 2023 and every single item was exactly what I asked for, and arrived within a few days. I wonder why we're having such wildly different experiences...
It depends on the kinds of things you order and how attuned you are to the games they play. If it's all name brand stuff and you are careful to actually order from Amazon and not a store hosted by Amazon it's not bad (although there are a lot of counterfeit goods on the site, in mixed inventory so it can come directly from Amazon even if it was stocked by some other store).
If you're getting commodity stuff from the cheapest vendor, good luck. There's lots of stuff put in there by Chinese shops that's garbage quality, mislabeled, a miniature model of the real thing, etc.
I do think it’s helpful that I’m an Internet native/formerly in cybersecurity. I would buy the (flattering) argument that I’m passively filtering out the shit in a way that’s not intuitive for everyone.
I strongly agree that it's dependent based on what you order. I've had mixed experiences in the past so now I basically only use Amazon to order used books. I don't expect them on time (nor do they promise it) and they have almost every title I could ask for!
My experience is like yours. Amazon has been very reliable for me and the few times I’ve had a problem, their phone support people have fixed it.
I think one factor might be what city you are in. I’m in Austin and I think there must be a big warehouse nearby because it’s not that unusual for something I order to show up a few hours later.
FWIW, I placed exactly 100 orders in 2023.
That’s the thing, I’m not in a city, my backyard abuts a farm!
I'm about 45 minutes outside a couple of major-ish cities (RDU/triangle area). I pass a goat farm just before my house (it's maybe a 1/3rd of a mile away). We still get most Amazon stuff next day, occasionally same day. I was a bit surprised, but here we are.
Yeah same here, 67 orders and no issues, perhaps it's a location thing?
Seems like an issue with people buying the cheapest stuff from brands no one has ever heard of. See previous comment, someone bought a blender that doesn't blend. Pretty sure if you buy a mid-high price blender on Amazon from a reputable brand, it will blend.
I think Amazon is a good platform to buy from when you know exactly what you want, or when you are good at researching and weeding out the crap. People who explore products on Amazon and make quick purchases, or impulsive shoppers in general probably have a bad time.
Amazon has a problem with counterfeit products and cooking with them in the very least should be a health concern and at the worst a hazard
They were late delivering an NVidia GPU I ordered before Xmas and when I complained to the agent he was like "You know what, keep the GPU when it arrives. And I'm refunding the purchase price. And I'm sending you a $5 gift card now too."
So, Amazon bought my good will back again with that. They shouldn't have had to do it, though.
If this were happening for everyone, Amazon would have a stock market reckoning.
You might be buying off-brand stuff.
But what you'd find at Target or Microcenter, and you'll have a good time.
Same. Amazon used to be great. But just about everything I receive now is clearly a hastily reboxed return (including shoes and earbuds) or garbage.
I’ve been more and more ordering elsewhere. I order direct from the manufacturer when I can.
I haven't ordered anything from Amazon in years so I don't know how they are today. I imagine they are worse now. The last thing I ordered was a repair part for a washing machine. What I got was an obviously used, returned/repackaged, broken part. That's when I gave up.
Search Amazon for "Whetstone". You'll find tons of quality products from legitimate brands, mixed indiscriminately with the exact same dropshipped trash item repeated over and over for countless pages. Amazon has been entirely enshittified.
I dunno how to square “tons of quality products from legitimate brands” with “entirely enshittified”…
Having to care enough and educate yourself about how to tell the difference adds a lot of friction to the shopping experience. I have no qualms about buying from Amazon if I know exactly what I’m looking for and I’m shopping in a category where I’m at least pretty confident I’m not going to get counterfeit stuff (Apple accessories? Forget it).
But when I just need some basic household thing and don’t want to become an expert on the category, I often shop from other retailers where I can just be pretty sure they aren’t selling garbage.
Any porcelain measuring spoon someone like Crate and Barrel sells is probably a decent porcelain measuring spoon, but if I buy that on Amazon, I have to worry about which brands are legit so I don’t end up getting a spoon with porcelain-look paint that will flake off or something like that.
A marketplace where almost anybody can sell almost anything has a completely different level of trust than a store where professional buyer is making a conscious decision about what products they should carry - the presence of many low quality products dilutes the entire marketplace, even the quality products from legitimate brands
Google search results still have -some- useful links.
(I'm still having good results from amazon but I can understand 'entirely enshittified' as an opinion from people getting a similar thing there)
Good quality stuff mixed with a lot of shit = shit
I could also make a more graphic analogy, but I don't think anybody needs to read that.
What are your standards for quality?
I’m an enthusiastic amateur home chef. I have ordered some of these “trash” whetstones.
My knives get sharp. They aren’t damaged. The whetstone works over time.
If you are like a knife artisan, yeah I guess Amazon won’t work for you. But I’m guessing the results work for 99.9% of people.
Is a generic AliExpress whetstone good enough for most home chefs? I don't know, probably. But if I'm going to spend $40, I would rather do it on a high quality Japanese unit than something I can get for $20 on AliExpress. On Amazon they're priced and presented as alike, and that's a problem.
Realistically, that $20 difference pays for the product being in a warehouse near you, rather than a warehouse 5000 miles away.
But Amazon has both in their warehouse
If you have a specific product that you are looking for and it is eligible for Prime then I have found this to be the experience.
Where I have not found that is if I am browsing, e.g. today I wanted to look for an evaporative humidifier. The top results are sponsored and for brands I have never heard of like YougetTech. I find I have to depart Amazon, Google / Reddit for things to get a sense of what the trusted brands are and then go back on Amazon to purchase it.
Isn't that true for all stores, though? If I'm buying something like that, I'll always search for reviews before deciding, whether or not Amazon is involved. Even if it's at a brick-and-mortar store.
The phrase "caveat emptor" was coined long before Amazon existed.
No. I can close my eyes and pick anything in Costco and it will be high quality for the money.
I have experienced almost the full cycle of enshittification. I remember when it arrived in my country (Spain). It was great. The catalog was very good. Customer service was very responsive. If I had a problem, they would return the money, no questions asked.
We were foolish to think that situation would last.
Nowadays the search is unusable. Unless you go to an individual brand's "amazon shop", you will only get products from UUMEBE, SYLTOM and YGWEEN. And "Amazon's pick" will be either Amazon's own product or TROWLY. Perhaps on the fourth page you will get a proper brand. You get products at $1 with a shipping cost of $67. Customer service now asks many questions. When you want to return something, the site uses dark patterns to try to nudge you into getting the products to the post office yourself instead of sending you a messenger. And the prime subscription price went up.
I cancelled my prime account. If I want Chinese quality merchandise there's a Chinese store very nearby where I can go and look at the plastic at least.
You mean like the equivalent of sorting by lowest on eBay??
Like a Chinese guy I can walk up to and say, "I need a 120 foot HDMI and I will not be paying a cent over $22.43 for it because that's what's all the lowest cost sellers on eBay charge."
My experience has been similar to yours in that things at least "felt" nice and convenient. That is, until the brand new first aid kit I ordered came with the safety seal broken and hastily taped over. Who knows what was done to the product? What if it was resealed with better effort? How could I possibly trust anything from Amazon?
Maybe ignorance is bliss.
Your comment reads just like the reviews. Worthless
I'm genuinely baffled at your experience . I can't think of a single Amazon search I've done recently, not one, which didn't result in a page 1 filled entirely with drop-shipped Chinese junk with keysmash brand names like RETVUKOR. It has become almost entirely useless.
It's barely even usable for buying Kindle books anymore.
Half the time I get tricked into buying a book my Kindle doesn't support and I have to spend half an hour yelling at support to get my money back.
Because they let you do the "buy and deliver to my kindle" thing even when your kindle is not supported. Then only when you grab your kindle to sync you learn the bad news.
This is very surprising to me. I've got a kindle from 2013 and never had any issue with unsupported books.
Is yours super older or what?
It's a Kindle Paperwhite. I think colour is usually the problem. Doesn't make sense to me either.
Colour?! I’ve never had an issue of my kindle with colour! It’s only black and white! How can Amazon screw up a black and white conversion?
Maybe I'm wrong. I kind of just abduced it because it was the only plausible reason I could think of. My kindle only supports black and white. And I figure newer models might have colour support?
The OS has a full-colour graphics library. It converts to black and white on the device. That's not the issue.
There are some books that just straight up are not supported on kindles or only on Kindle fire editions. Looking it actually recently changed, but "Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces," you could buy in kindle format, but it would only work for the Kindle fire editions. Maybe it has gotten better, but I used to run into this a lot with textbooks. Would work on Kindle fires, but not paperwhite.
Speaking of tricks.. a while back I turned off my “reading insights” in the Kindle app. Recently I’ve been re-reading Asimov and kindle reading insights popped up to congratulate me on my reading streak. Wouldn’t you know it — they’ve been tracking my reading this whole time, and I looked into it and there is no opt out short of closing my account (and subsequently losing access to my kindle library). Just absurd levels of stalking in the pursuit of data.
That sounds like a clear GDPR violation, but I guess you are not in the EU?
Agree and correct, unfortunately.
I don't condone this practice, but considering how "lucrative" data is, I read any sort of opt-out like this as "we're still going to collect the data but we'll hide the insights from you to make it look like we aren't." So, same with personalized ads on Google. Not sure how they're planning on implementing Maps location data such that Google "doesn't have" it, but color me skeptical for the time being.
Not only does this almost never happen to me, but Amazon has added a Refund button that works automatically. If you select “Remove from Library” within a time window, it asks if you want a refund now. I have run into some bad scans, but never had a problem getting an instant refund. What’s fascinating is how different experiences are.
Do you know if that's a recent addition? That definitely wasn't the case the last time it happened to me. I'm very fuzzy about when that was exactly. Probably in the last year or so. I had to go through support, who initially told me there were no refunds, but relented after some cajoling.
Could also be a matter of differing practices in different countries, or prime membership(I have none).
I definitely agree it's weird how different people's experiences are though.
Really? That's super surprising, I probably buy a dozen or so books every year now (and used to order far more when I was living abroad and there wasn't a decent english bookstore in my city) and have never had an issue. Now trying to use goodreads... that's a mess
They're fine at selling stuff, they're absolutely horrendous at being a place to search for a product if you don't know exactly what you're looking for. The solution is just to look for third-party specialist review sites who know what they're talking about.
Are there any that you can recommend? Google seems very unreliable in that department these days, it's very hard to say which reviews are honest and which ones are basically ads. There's also the additional complication that some sites that try to be honest receive products from manufacturers, which limits what they can say to keep their manufacturer relationships going.
wirecutter
Also, google "best [item] reddit"
The second suggestion might work, but Wirecutter’s recommendations have sucked more and more after they got bought by NYT. Sometimes they don’t even test the stuff they recommend: they just go by Amazon reviews and what other sites say. Other times their recommendations are just bogus: their “cheap” wifi6 router was a nightmare for me, basically $120 thrown to the trash (well no, the first unit sucked and failed so I returned it but since it was a failure they just sent me a new one back with no way to get a refund, so the new unit is still in its box in my basement; I got a decent router based on someone else’s recommendation).
Kagi is pretty good at surfacing high quality third-party reviews. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/shopping.html
It's nearly impossible to find, because even the "supposed good" third party sites are just amazon referral link farms these days.
More and more I've taken to just checking what Costco sells, and if Target or Walmart (or other "big, real stores") are willing to ship and sell it themselves.
Amazons search is so bad that I typically use google/ddg to search their site for products
Same. Amazon search doesn’t do faceting when and where you expect.
When I want to search I use google or Reddit (mainly google across Reddit).
When I want to purchase I use Honey.
When I want to browse (home goods) I use shopDeft.com and switch to photo only mode.
Amazon search is so bad and has so many ads that there are multiple opportunities to do something new.
That makes it hard to filter though, doesn't it? I usually only bother looking at products with a 4 star and up rating.
At least with Amazon, I don’t trust that I’m not getting fakes even if I know what I’m looking for.
They're risky if you do know what you're looking for, because of all the counterfeits and return scams and such. They're basically only OK if you're buying trash-tier goods on purpose, because there's no reason to counterfeit or scam with those and you already know they're going to be bad.
Just fire up a news reader. Pretty much half of the content pushed is some sort of affiliate links assembled into an article/review
If you stick to things that you
(a) don't care about the quality of, because they are either frivolously cheap or you are able to to the necessary 'QA' repairs and inspection yourself (for me these are things like circuit boards and household consumables);
(b) something you already know you want that specific thing of and the shipping speed and return policy make them the best online option;
(c) are only buying because you found it somewhere else and you didn't know you wanted it until you were told about it (deal sites like slickdeals are where I encounter this);
then amazon is fine.
And also to hope hard that whatever you buy from Amazon is genuine and not a counterfeit copy. Amazon uses the same bin for both.
the problem is capitalism necessitates enshittification.
you aren't getting a contender as long as the regulations are abhorrently lax about both the workers and the sellers. along with consumer rights. there just is no economic incentive to improve but rather dig the moat.
(1) Expand network of friends/family. (2) Buy only when you get a recommendation from friends/family. (3) profit? :)
Asking the government to create regulations for product quality just means that the lobbyists who actually write those regulations are going to fuck you over yet again.
that's a nice quaint small town logic. we are talking about millions of lives across many industries.
government is the family no matter how you personally emotionally identify it.
In a democracy you have to make a case for it. I don't want the government spending tax dollars so they can recommend which sneakers or USB power adapter I can buy. Curation of a marketplace is not an essential service by any stretch of the imagination.
sure you do.
you actually want your electronics to interoperate.
everyone wants to not have to think about things.
really, you disagree with society and it's really impossible to look at modern society and think this happens just by random good nature and not well to poorly coordinated hierarchy.
you already benefit from existing regulations but they're so painless that you've intrinsicalyy assumed they're naturally constructed.
you live in bizzaro world claiming you don't want unleaded gasoline or clean drinking water, seat belts, crumple zones and the rest.
Gasoline? clean water? Huh? We're talking about Amazon here. I find it hard to believe you're a real person. What a bizarre comment.
yes, we're talking about a distributor that unaccountably passes on merchandise.
just wait for the digital equivalent of https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/tylenol-murders-1982
Until your house burn downs or it destroys your phone. Minimum enforced standards are a good thing because the vast majority of consumers are not capable of evaluating the safety and compatibility of devices.
You can't just trust the seller or people you know about a power supply (in this example) being safe.
Amazon does not enforce electrical standards, nor does any store anywhere in the world. Where do you guys come from making these extremist arguments? Just.... wow.
I would agree but [1] is likely one of the top 3 biggest exiatential issues facing mankind right now. We live in an age of increasingly weaker connections between people.
So while in paper these 3 items look easy, they're likely not.
I am not a person who would know what the biggest existential issues are, but I have always found it to be helpful to ask for product recommendations in the various group chats that I partake in. It also clamps down on consumerism, and I've found that I just buy less stuff. I am fully up to date on all of the latest tech news and new technologies, but my phone is 6 years old and I don't care.
Some people have this notion of only buying best-in-class products or the latest stuff which they have to rigorously find by going through tons of reviews and looking at various articles and what not. I have (almost) no FOMO, and I don't mind not having the best, it frees up my time to do more important stuff like spend time with my children or watch a movie with my partner.
Retail is so low-margin that it will never be very good.
Amazon, Walmart, Ebay, are all very imperfect businesses. Even Costco is rough to deal with for the suppliers - there’s just no way to do this at scale while being all nice and fuzzy
Amazon is especially bad though
All they have to do is get rid of the 3rd party storefront and hire people to stock and procure vetted goods instead of having it be a free-for-all.
Well, yeah but the margins on operating a platform for 3rd party sellers is way better than actually just selling stuff.
Think about it - Amazon gets to take a fee on - accepting inventory into warehouse, holding inventory, listing fees, listing ads, sales fee, shipping products, accepting returns, destroying returned merchandise.. and probably a few more things.
Amazon makes money whether the underlying sale of products is unprofitable .. because that's someone else's problem.
If you reduce usefulness of your product (your store) to the point where people can't get what they want and don't use it, it doesn't matter how much margin you have.
That takes forever (every bankrupt store ever has still had customers to the very end) and meanwhile it looks great.
Especially when you realize that Amazon holds a gun to the head of all these "scammy/crappy" sellers and makes them pay even MORE to be the first suggested result, etc.
There are plenty of stores that do this. The selection is much lower and prices are higher.
That’s right - being an everything store isn’t easy.
No excuse for their behaviour, but the expectation is not high.
I don't use Amazon at all anymore. In fact I uninstalled the app yesterday!
I uninstalled it a few weeks ago because the Android app started injecting a "search this term on Amazon" button that popped when whenever I selected text in any app
What is wrong with these people? Are they devoid of any taste or decorum? Who makes those decisions?
Someone probably got a bonus for that. It probably wasn't the dev who implemented it tho
Oh, it has an app? Never occurred to me to look for one.
I would like a "what store is everything in" product. Search for something, and it gives you back matching products in stores 5/10/50 miles from you; purchase online, pickup from the store (or pay for an ubereats like delivery). As you build a cart, it attempts to cluster items. You get the convenience of search and online purchase, so that you don't waste time wandering around stores and not finding things, and you get the item in your hand quicker if you're prepared to go get it once purchased.
Big advantage to whoever built it: you don't need to compete with Amazon on logistics. On the other hand, you have a hell of a network effect to overcome, though if you focused on one geography only to start, it could be doable.
Such a thing, if it took off, could reinvigorate physical retail businesses. Google had a half-assed attempt for a while with local shopping, but they never really pushed it that hard...which I think was a missed opportunity.
I think google still does this, but yes it’s probably very half-assed.
I think the real product there would be a universal inventory system for all stores. And small stores like local hardware stores might not have comprehensive inventory, so then you get in to things like inventory scanning robots.
Point being there’s several layers of missing pieces (I believe, I know next to nothing about retail) that make the top layer hard or impossible. Google for example is probably plugging in to APIs for a few large stores like target and Walmart and skipping all the little ones.
I guess another option is a store network that is a franchise model of one company. All the products come from that company but franchise owners decide what they actually stock and carry. So they could be a hardware store or a home goods store etc but it’s all one centralized system underneath. Each store has a standard fulfillment system so you can pick up in store or get things shipped.
Alternatively it would be nice to see an Amazon style store but everything is vetted as decent quality. Problem is it’s just hard to keep up with the flow of new goods from overseas showing up on Amazon and if you’re going to vet items for quality that’s going to add overhead. I guess that’s basically what stores like Target do.
Can you be more specific about what is terrible about Amazon ? Cause you just said they have an amazing logistics network + everything for sale
You can search for something simple on Amazon - scroll past to the end of the results and not find it.
You can then open up your favorite Search Engine and see it as the first result, linking to Amazon.
De-duping products across made-up brands is the most sorely needed feature in the era of no effort drop shipping. This should be supremely feasible with the latest generation of ai image recognition/labeling capabilities. More many product categories this would decimate the number of options that need to be considered.
Yeah. I am quietly anti-Amazon so I mostly do not use the site. Occasionally, I'll browse for something I need and its really a shitshow:
- searching for a brand, rarely returns items by the brand
- search results are extremely poor and quickly get worse as you browse
- they hold packages for shipping by non-prime members
I haven't used Amazon regularly in several years so maybe it is more apparent for me. I also don't trust the "higher" end products to not be counterfit. It's a classic case of overoptimization, they may make more money but the experience is SO BAD. I have bought elsewhere because it was honestly kind of a chore to find what I wanted on the site.
Seriously. Even worse there are things I want, I know the name and the brand but I can't order from Amazon because of the high risk of counterfeits. I hope they either get their house in order or someone eats their lunch.
I've found that, at least on the mobile app, results are filtered by "Featured" which fills the results with irrelevant sponsored products. So each time I search for an item, I then have to go under Filters and select Best Rating, Highest Selling, etc. It's a bit tedious but seems to be a shortcut through all of the BS results they show you by default.
They have a lot of things (excluding books) but they are only interesting in switzerland: Galaxus.ch (their site is available in english, german, italian and french). They have the best speed and filters i have tried. And the ui is relatively compact compare to other online retailers i have access to. Reichlt in Germany has good filters but they are very slow where i am accessing them from.
Unfortunately every retailer are also starting to be a platform for other shops as well, inflating their numbers and polluting their search results.
Amazon really has terrible filters and search.
I recommend using a sophisticated ad blocker like uBlock origin or AdGuard for Safari to disable most of the irrelevant stuff and upsells that Amazon pushes to keep you shopping for hours instead of finding what you were looking for.
I started a personal collection where I just kept removing sponsored content or really anything that wasn’t relevant to what I was searching for or what was in my cart. I spend way less time on Amazon now. It’s not really meant for general use, and I don’t update it much, but here’s what I have if anyone wants to try it for themselves:
https://github.com/namuol/browser-qol/blob/main/blocker-rule...
While I don't think it's the best shopping experience on the web, I've also never understood those who have claimed it's awful in recent years. I'd be interested in what it is specifically that you don't like? And what changes you would like them to make to make it better?
I think part of the problem they've been having is that because they're an "everything store" they don't have a clear target audience so disappoint everyone. There are online stores I love out there, but they tend to be opinionated about the type of products they stock and how they do things, so although I have less of a selection it's more likely to be stuff I want. But that opinionated nature means a lot of people just won't shop with them because it's not what they want.
A lot of the issues I seem to hear here stem from relatively high end consumers seeing cheap products on Amazon and not liking that it's difficult to find the quality. But similarly elsewhere I read accounts from people looking for cheap products and saying that there are cheaper places to shop these days. Sometimes I wonder if Amazon was just a little more opinionated about what they stock whether that would help a bit. It would at least reduce disappointment. Although I suppose that goes against their whole ethos of having everything.
Amazon is great for buying products I already know I want. Prices are reasonable, shipping couldn’t be much faster (in my area), with Prime anyway. And it’s usually fairly easy to go directly to a known product (by name or model). Also their return policy can’t be beat by an online retailer (drop it off at Whole Foods/UPS, no box/shipping label needed).
Amazon is horrific for browsing or searching — anytime I don’t know what I’m looking for, and I want to have more data to inform a buying decision. Their reviews can’t be trusted, and their search results optimize Amazon and the sellers over the buyers.
I used to rely on Amazon for confidence in purchasing a good product, but that’s not been the case for 5-10 years. I have to do my research somewhere else (often Reddit) before making a purchase.
Unfortunately there are a number of products (e.g. iPhone cases) that even that’s impossible to do nowadays. But fortunately, these are usually cheaper products, so the risk is a bit lower.
I’ll still continue shopping at Amazon, once I know what I’m looking for, due to the things I mention in the first paragraph. But I no longer trust it for discovering products and informing choices there, particularly for anything meaningful.
You’re in a bubble if you believe this. On a personal level sure, but my middle aged and old family members use it for everything and they are the last ones to understand internet things. They have 0 complaints, though I personally have my own issues with listing quality and review growth hacking.
third party sellers and "commingling" have all but ruined Amazon for me :/. even shipped and sold by Amazon can yield you fake products (worst performance, not as advertised, knock offs, unsafe, etc).
but I guess it generates too much money for Amazon to care :(
In theory this is Costco. I have a membership to both Amazon and Costco, but for some reason keep using Amazon. I assume this is because 1) habits are hard to change and 2) Amazon is guaranteed to have what I’m looking for, even if ultimately it’s not very good.
I went shopping on there for Legos for Christmas.
SEVERAL of the products on the first page werer knock off Legos in boxes that looked almost identical to actual Lego boxes, fonts, numbering, and all.
It’s just a scam site now that happens to also sell legitimate products.
Searching for other products results in more irrelevant products every day. Even searching for exact product names will not get you that product that you know is on there. The search seems to have been gamed into a mess.
As far as I can tell they for me also seem to not do their due diligence when it comes to handling consumer deception and abuse of their marked platform.
Honestly I'm surprised that there have not been any larger scale legal consequences given that Amazone seems to be economically harmful to the domestic market (kills domestic competition but in different to the competition manages to avoid a lot more taxes) of most non-US countries and it's given them perfect munition to use PR and legal means under the guise of consumer protection against it.
Just to be clear protectionism is a dangerous tool, which only should be wielded in a generic non target specific way, like requiring online shopping platforms, even if they sometimes just act as a proxy, to fulfill a certain degree of due diligence when it comes to effectively handling fraudulent companies selling through them. That also probably could get ride of TEMU (which is more a tool of spying, economical warfar and other bad stuff then any honest competitive selling platform, they are losing too much money on each sale for that).
I mean a think which had been true before the internet was that if you can't provide a service reasonable safely you can't provide it at all (grossly oversimplified, not that people didn't try and got away with it). No reason this shouldn't apply to the internet. (Many TEMU products are not legal to be imported in the EU, often due to safety reasons, sometimes due to other reasons like being imitations of (Nazi germany time) Nazi artifices and stuff like that).
It feels like it's reverting to how it was in the early 2010's -- dozens of identical super low quality knockoffs, normal brand name products that are overpriced or just absent from their store, reviews that can't be trusted, and dealing with third-party sellers of varying legitimacy. Around the time they started prime, there started having a lot more product variety and the prices of the knockoffs were pretty good for the quality. But over the last few years, prices have gone up a lot and a lot of the negative qualities of the past have returned.
There is no competition. I'm not an economist but a monopoly is not a free market in my view.
... and because they have terms that are actively anti-competitive, like if you sell there, you can't sell the same items anywhere else online for a lower price (even if the other venue has lower associated costs).
I'm pretty skeptical that such a thing is possible.
In my experience, Amazon has devolved into AliExpress/DHGate but with higher prices and faster shipping. The throwaway products also make more of an effort to Americanize the syllables of their brand name