I'm buying less from Amazon due to flood of garbage they allow.
In some cases, there are hundreds of junk items before finding something acceptable. This is complacently allowed Amazon, in several ways: 1. they don't calculate shipping costs in price sorting (allowing dishonest sellers to sell 0.01$ items, with high shipment prices), 2. they hide where the item comes from, 3. they don't police items which should be grouped together (I think I once saw an item replicated more than a thousand times).
This makes the buying experience really tedious, and I don't think I'm the only one who thinks this is a problem.
But of course, while this affects Amazon adversely, I think it's a stretch to qualify it as "the downfall".
There are lots of duplicate products with slight naming style variations. No one seems to have solved grouping products together where the same UPC hasn’t been provided from each seller. Would require building a parser/ some AI that understands aspects of the title: brand, line, size etc
UPC wont do much. There's somewhat of a scam where sellers will reuse old discontinued products or buy upc codes from ebay in order to get around any filtering Amazon has.
Ideally Amazon should require the UPC to be fully registered and verified instead of just taking whatever a seller enters at face value.
eBay have been trying to enforce UPC/EAN for some years now but don't seem to be making a lot of progress either.
Amazon have also made the burden of proof for getting changes to a listing made so high that it isn't really worth the time to point out the issues to them unless it is a product that sells well, so the long tail is a mess.
Ebay has the same challenge, and similar solution (Ebay uses dropdowns, while Amazon uses small clickable boxes), but I see the problem much less on Ebay, so I think Ebay is simply policing sales more than Amazon does.
Another anecdote, My target.com spend during the holiday season has been +$500 across multiple items since I don't trust amazon for various items now. Also, the customer service is going downhill and I have been pleasantly surprised how much nicer target support is now.
I have done far more buying though the web sites of B&M retailers this season that I have in past years. I no longer trust Amazon for name brand electronics or anything to be ingested. It seems I'm adding new categories of distrust every week.
Just today, I wanted a new flash drive but didn't need it urgently. I checked Amazon to get an idea of fair pricing then looked at Best Buy and found one that looked good on sale. I went to the manufacturer's site to verify the specs and found they had a price 33% lower than the next closest retailer. Win.
So lots of arbitragers were buying from Best Buy and then selling on amazon. I keep thinking about the front page article a few weeks back about the repackaging from other online sellers.
Well, this isn't the first article on the subject in the last couple of months. look at the other comments. take a guess at how this kind of PR will do to amazon's sales/revenue and brand. I'm not saying they are suffering from it yet in term of financial, I could imagine their profit to be higher than ever on the market side of their biz today, but one can see a downturn in their future ability to grow and remain the dominant ecommerce in the west. (they've already totally lost the battles in the far east, even though they try there and there)
> take a guess at how this kind of PR will do to amazon's sales/revenue and brand
My guess, sadly, is that it will round to nothing. Most likely the sheer volume of the bottom end of the mass market is worth a lot more to Amazon than elite users who post comments like these on forums like this. We may have been critical as early adopters but now have outlived our usefulness.
I hope that's not true, but that's why I asked the question: what evidence is there? Maybe it's too early to see anything more than assorted anecdotes, but it's hard to know what those objectively amount to in an operation of Amazon's scale.
Who knows, it also depends on how Amazon adapts in the coming years. I just observe the trend, years ago I could hardly find any reason to complain about amazon, I didn't come across stories like this. I have not made a purchse on amazon for a long time, and when I did, it just cost me time to return an overpriced product having a dishonest description.
Evaluate a provider for the quality of its service. Think how others from elite to mass consumers would perceive it in the long run, and you can guess the fate of that provider. Things move fast and many competitors are working at offering better user experience. We will see I guess.
The “negative PR argument” has become an indicator to me that someone has an extremely immature world view. There are anecdotes that reflect PR events that are catastrophic (Theranos). But most companies completely recover from PR bumps because most consumers only change their behavior in response to costs.
Just last night I purchased a new MIDI controller from the local Guitar Center because the Amazon listing was not sold-by Amazon. I don't trust Amazon's 3rd party program. I also recently purchased a power adapter from eBay because Amazon's listings were hundreds of items of incomprehensible trash. It's getting to the point where I don't even look at Amazon at all for many items, because I know their listings will be useless.
I have the same problem with eBay - 99% of the results are stuffed with incomprehensible trash, non OEM "not genuine" knockoffs, copy paste paragraphs of every possible model, just to keyword stuff. Especially for things like laptop batteries, power adapters, etc.
Only speaking for myself, but I've become much more cautious about buying electronics from them, because much of it turns out to be poorly implemented junk.
