Buyer beware - my wife hates Amazon and goes out of her way to not purchase from them. She has encountered several vendors on Walmart marketplace that simply place orders with Amazon at 100% markup - the packages arrive in Amazon boxes w/ a receipt showing the actual cost paid at Amazon. Total rip-off.
When ordering electronics from Walmart Marketplace, particularly TVs, I’ve found that the marketplace sellers freely substitute makes and models. Maybe nobody notices if you are shipping a gift to someone else, but since I need specific models from specific manufacturers for development it gets noticed when I order LG model XYZ and get a no-name tv instead. I stopped ordering from Walmart altogether after the second time (out of two, consecutive) that happened.
So my advice is anything you buy online at Walmart, make sure it is not a marketplace seller, just save yourself the trouble.
In all cases Wal-Mart refunded my money after waiting for a week for the vendor to respond, though I had to lug the stuff to the UPS store to return it. Amazon usually suggests I donate stuff rather then return it.
I’ve not had any issues with the items sold by Wal-mart actual, those you can buy with confidence.
About 5 years ago, one of my sons wanted a drone for xmas.
In mid-November, Walmart.com warned me to "Order soon to guarantee that you'll get <x> for Christmas."
So, I did the "responsible" thing and ordered the drone before Thanksgiving and it arrived around Nov 25.
Wrap it up. Son opens it on Christmas, aaaaand it's broken out of the box. One of the rotors was bent and wouldn't rotate.
Brought it to Walmart probably on the 27th of December and Walmart tells me, "This was sold by one of our 3rd party vendors. You have to take it up with them."
3rd party vendor tells me to pound sand because there's a 30 day return policy. Remember how I was responsible and got the drone a month ahead of time?
In retrospect, I should have disputed the charge, but it didn't occur to me at the time.
One thing I have never understood is why parents do not inspect, open, etc the products before wrapping them?
I am mean this is a decades old problem from not having the correct batteries, to missing parts, etc etc. Alot of Christmas day disappointments could be avoided by just inspecting the toys before wrapping them.....
This goes both ways. Numerous people (companies?) have setup arbitrage businesses. They post products on Amazon at a markup over Walmart and vice-versa. They leverage the APIs to dynamically adjust their prices based on how the prices move on each store. It technically isn't a rip-off, when you think about it. They are taking advantage of people not searching for the best deal. You get what you ordered, they make money from scouting prices and putting at a price you are willing to pay for said product (I assume otherwise you wouldn't order).
Don't get me wrong, when this happens, I get that feeling of rip off, but the reality is, I didn't price shop. And someone did some work to get it to show up for me where I was looking.
When I was an undergrad, me and buddy had what amounted to an arbitrage scheme (I didn't realize that was the name for it back then)selling laptops on campus. We would buy them from ebay, and sell them to local students with posters on physical bulletin boards around campus. At some point, the market flipped, and we could no longer turn a profit this way. So we started buying student's laptops on campus and selling them on ebay.
It's fine if you think markets are intended to be hostile to consumers instead of bettering people's lives. I don't think incentivizing deceptive middlemen is really a net benefit to society.
Not if you're trying to avoid Amazon for moral boycott reasons (as the OP was). In that case, people are willing to knowingly pay an additional fee to avoid Amazon, but that money is just being pocketed and the rest of the money is being turned over to Amazon on their behalf.
I was going to say "arbitrage." I thought of the pizza place guy who discovered that DoorDash or GrubHub was charging customers less than they paid him. Promoting the delivery business, you know.
So he'd just order pizzas for himself, and pocket the difference.
I remember this also being a thing with eBay as well. Not sure why someone would go to eBay first and not check Amazon, but then again some people still pay for AOL.
I buy a lot of stuff from newegg and when they made the shift from newegg(the store) to newegg(the marketplace) it was the same, the experience started to suck. Thankfully newegg has as a filter option, "only show items from newegg(the store)"
In fact that is one of my biggest beefs with amazon, the way they have it set up it is very hard, if not impossible to figure out who you are buying stuff from.
The good thing about the old brick an mortar system was that there were experienced buyers between the manufacturer and the brick and mortar store. Suppliers had to submit production samples to the buyers to evaluate. So everything you bought was vetted.
Bricks and mortar retailers have long been prosecuted for fraud by law enforcement, local or federal. But “marketplace” e-resellers circumvent enforcement because their e-tail hosts (Amazon, Walmart, Alibaba…) don't hold them responsible and are not held responsible themselves for abuse of their service by others, no matter that the level of fraud has risen to become the norm. The cause for this is, of course, we, the willing victims. And it won't change until we insist that government NOT be just another reality show.
I've been making a point to order electronics from Best Buy whenever possible. I can trust that Beat Buy doesn't have third party sellers, at least for now.
I had been doing the same, but Best Buy (US) reduced its return period to 14 days unless you shell out $200/year for their Totaltech membership. I should do a better job about inspecting orders as they arrive, but I think 14 days just isn't enough. I've been burned by it a couple of times now due to work travel.
So, now I'm back to trying to find a reputable retailer that sells authentic products.
When I bought a Motorola cable modem from Best Buy it stopped working within 24 hours. At least I could return it and only lose time. Name brands and branded stores aren't safe either, though one would hope they're better on average.
The "marketplace" concept seems to be a recipe for disaster. It's basically leasing out your legitimacy and goodwill as a vendor to businesses that wouldn't be able to pull off their own ecommerce experience.
As others have said, when something goes wrong, they're not going to remember "Oh, marketplace seller biteme42069 was a rip-off, avoid them", they'll just blame Walmart.
It's funny-- Amazon has managed to so squander their reputation that Walmart-- once the epitome of schlocky retail-- had managed to look decent by comparison. They had a strong enough nationwide logistics network that they could challenge the "but-but Prime 7-minute delivery" argument, and the direct nanufacturer connections to ensure they had authentic, controlled inventory. They could have been a more trustworthy choice.
Genuinely interested, because I hate Amazon also but spend much of my online shopping dollars with them, what makes Walmart preferable to Amazon for your family?
I know people who believe that giving dollars to Amazon will cement their monopoly like control over ecommerce, leading to worse behavior in the future. Others object to the well-publicized (although I doubt unique) poor conditions for their drivers and warehouse employees in their fulfillment system.
>Buyer beware - my wife hates Amazon and goes out of her way to not purchase from them. She has encountered several vendors on Walmart marketplace that simply place orders with Amazon at 100% markup - the packages arrive in Amazon boxes w/ a receipt showing the actual cost paid at Amazon. Total rip-off.
I sell on both Walmart and Amazon. As somethingwitty1 said, this works in multiple directions; people dropshipping ittems from Amazon directly to Walmart customers, from Walmart to Amazon customers, and from both to eBay customers.
It's also forbidden. Both Walmart and Amazon explicitly warn against shipping items to customers in competitors' boxes; Walmart even explicitly bans tracking numbers starting with "TBA". If your wife reports that this is happening to Walmart buyer support, the sellers won't be there for long; recent anecdotes say that both companies are really cracking down on dropshipping.
>When ordering electronics from Walmart Marketplace, particularly TVs, I’ve found that the marketplace sellers freely substitute makes and models.
Ugh. All I can say that I've also had less-than-positive experiences when buying from other sellers on both platforms. Amazon is notorious for allowing anyone to open a seller account. Walmart is in theory supposed to be much stricter in examining applicants' qualifications, with many waiting for weeks or months. While this is great from my perspective (both in terms of improving the overall quality of third-party sellers, and minimizing my competition), the incompetent and crooked are still getting through; Walmart recently allowing non US-domiciled sellers (i.e., Chinese) doesn't help.
>I’ve not had any issues with the items sold by Wal-mart actual, those you can buy with confidence.
Agreed. Amazon commingles its own inventory and that of third-party sellers that Amazon handles storage and shipping for (FBA); as a result, my own confidence in the genuineness of, say, household staples from Amazon has plummeted. I think Walmart does not do so with WFS, its FBA equivalent. In any case WFS much less used than FBA, because there is little advantage for sellers to do so over fulfilling items themselves.
>>I stopped ordering from Walmart altogether after the second time (out of two, consecutive) that happened.
or stop ordering from the marketplace sellers. I like ordering directly from websites for vendors i do business with. This is why I do not shop on ebay.
From Amazon I rarely order anything that is not "shipped and sold by amazon", on walmart I only order Walmart Stock, on newegg I only order newegg stock, etc etc
Personally I am not sure what the appeal is of all these bigger sites adding "marketplace" sellers.
> Personally I am not sure what the appeal is of all these bigger sites adding "marketplace" sellers.
It’s the long tail. Need an unbranded under-desk treadmill manufactured by Xiaomi? Amazon marketplace has ever color of the rainbow at prices only reasonable for dropshippers.
There’s ofc downsides to that, but certain consumers don’t mind.
> Personally I am not sure what the appeal is of all these bigger sites adding "marketplace" sellers.
Digi-Key, an electronic parts distributor which used to have a good reputation for supply chain quality, added "marketplace" sellers. Before this, when you ordered from Digi-Key, you were assured that the product went directly from the manufacturer to Digi-Key in Minnesota and then to you. You got exactly what you ordered. Now, it's much iffier.
I ordered a few things last fall from Wal Mart. Each time, they charged once but delivered multiples of the same item. One other time, they shipped it to some store who said they never got it.
There is no real reason why they have it so wrong.
Also, I buy expensive things direct from the manufacturer if I buy online. No chance for counterfeit items that way.
Wal Mart and Amazon are nothing more than digital flea markets at this point.
I’ve had this happen with an Amazon vendor drop shipping another Amazon product. They were able to do this because the original product wasn’t listed in the correct department and couldn’t be found easily.
I sometimes intentionally do that here as the IKEA online store has very high shipping costs (They probably want people to come to the store and pick up a bunch of other things on the way). There's sellers that sell IKEA things on Amazon with a markup but it's still cheaper than IKEA's shipping. I'm assuming it's just people buying a cart full of the same product and re-selling it on Amazon.
Everytime I buy anything from Walmart I check the "Walmart.com" retailer box. I wish there was a way to make it permanent.
Having said that there was one time I had this same issue...I bought from Walmart's marketplace and the product wasn't what I ordered. I had no issue with returning it.
I had that issue. I ordered something from Walmart (a vacuum cleaner) and it arrived in a new box from amazon. I called their customer service and the claimed they never shipped anything from amazon. I guess that was a lie.
>Buyer beware - my wife hates Amazon and goes out of her way to not purchase from them. She has encountered several vendors on Walmart marketplace that simply place orders with Amazon at 100% markup
ebay sellers do the same. I pay using paypal on ebay, just to get a gift package from amazon prime. Stopped using ebay and every scammer like that got negatives from me. They are still cheaper than non-amazon sellers
It’s horrible and they won’t do anything about it despite contacting them via help requests and Twitter.
3 of the top 5 listings are total scams.
And Amazon’s choice for 1TB flash drive is a scam: USB Flash Drive 1TB, Flash Memory Stick for PC/Laptop, Ultra Large Storage USB Drive, Portable Thumb Drives (Black) https://a.co/d/cTi7XqZ
Amazon is on a gradual decline and what is shocking is that people dont see it.
I stopped using amazon around 2 years ago. If i want to buy "Chinesium" i use aliexpress and save a lot of middlemen in return for a long shipping time.
I've been burned by fake products a few times and learned my lesson long ago. Sure, amazon does make it easy to return them, but going to a real store avoids it all-together.
If you shop around for prices, it is rare that amazon's prices are even competitive vs an actual physical store these days.
this makes little sense, the store has employees and high rents, what are amazon's reasons?
> Sure, amazon does make it easy to return them, but going to a real store avoids it all-together.
Genuine question, what store is this that:
1) has inventory in store of items like this
2) doesn’t also ever have fake merchandise on their shelves
The problem isn’t just Amazon, Walmart, or other large online retailers, it’s issues throughout the supply chain because of the lack of enforcement by all actors (retailers, distributors, shippers, manufacturers, customs agents, government agencies, etc).
> I've been burned by fake products a few times and learned my lesson long ago. Sure, amazon does make it easy to return them, but going to a real store avoids it all-together.
What makes you trust a brick and mortar store's supply chain more than an online store? There are counterfeit items everywhere.
Sounds like it's a semi-legit area for blockchain applicability- a website/app which stores all reviews on blockchain so that people are 100% certain no one has tampered with them.
The "Amazon's Choice" label seems to be almost as gameable as reviews - sellers somehow have a way of creating categories it would take very little work to be #1 in, such as "Amazon's Choice for <company name> flash drive"
Amazon’s Choice seems like a dynamic labeling to me. The impression of it that there must be a list of Choice products is likely just a deliberate impression.
> I don’t think Amazon’s choice is the same for every one.
I believe it is the same for all users for a given keyword search, but it is also dynamically changing.
From [1], the algorithm itself is a black box though:
> One innovation the company devised is “Amazon’s Choice,” a distinctive black badge typically bestowed on a single product per search term. The company says the award is given to “highly rated, well-priced products available to ship immediately.” But for many categories, dozens of options fit that description. How does Amazon choose its choices? Do humans have a hand in the decisions, or are they governed by an algorithm?
> The company won’t say. “Amazon’s Choice is just our recommendation, and customers can always ask for specific brands or products if they choose,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.
Because if the problem is bad enough, people will start looking for alternative places to buy things. It's like how people will avoid the bad neighborhoods in a city.
Flash drives with hacked firmware to pretend to be bigger capacity than they were (along with other evildoing, like counterfeits targeting people paying a premium to get Sandisk quality) were already rampant on eBay IIRC 15+ years ago.
I was still seething over some of the storage ones when, a few years ago, I joined an anti-counterfeiting startup. (Sadly, our successful MVP launch integrated into a high-end factory production line happened just as Covid was breaking out, which spooked our flagship customer, and impacted followthrough we needed, then we ran out of runway while pivoting.)
As a consumer, I can imagine a lot of things that the marketplaces like Amazon.com and Walmart.com could do to improve trustworthiness. I don't know whether those make business sense. I'd love to see consumers reward a marketplace that conspicuously kept out the scammers.
Ideally, the solution would protect integrity of all brands, not only house brands.
I think a key thing is that a marketplace should be held liable if the actual seller cannot be held to account. They shouldn't be able to use "just a marketplace" as a shield to avoid liability when they're the only ones in a position to have vetted the real seller.
This is how it works with credit card companies where I live. The credit card company is jointly liable with the supplier. It works fine and the consumer is protected. "Marketplaces" are still in the relative wild west when it comes to liability here.
The flip side is then it becomes much harder for small companies to get their products approved on such marketplaces (to the benefit of larger competitors). There's a tradeoff and, like most things, some middle ground is probably best.
Yesterday I read another analysis of what seems to be the same drive which tried to verify the real capacity, but the issue was that the drive was throttled to a low-speed connection so that validating it by writing and re-reading the full volume of data would take something like 250 days. So it's kind of obvious that it was bad, but you can't easily prove it in a reasonable time.
I suppose the issue is that the only real way of doing that is to write as much random garbage as the drive supports and then verify that you can read it all back again. That should probably be a thing, but it would be incredibly slow and waste your limited write cycles.
The combination of regulations and buying from reputable sellers should be enough IMO... though most people would probably view Walmart as a reputable seller, so that clearly doesn't work.
In order to sell on those platforms companies should have to place $5 million in escrow and Amazon promises to test at random a certain percentage of your products and if failed you lose your money. I laughed at a client when he told me he bought a 1TB hard drive off of Wish. I told him well good luck with that hope you didn't just get scammed. Saw him a week later and he told me the drive wouldn't work on his new PS5. I told him I would bet him the cost of the drive it was a fake and probably couldn't hold even half of what it is reporting and told him to use the tools to see it's actual size. He didn't take the bet so I will never be sure but no way in hell I would be a $25 storage from Wish.
Nestle have no problem putting up $5M, but most good small companies just can't.
So the end effect is that you enable big monopolies.
You need to invent some kind of reputation system. Small towns (and communities) have this builtin as everybody knows almost everybody. Amazon is missing the ability to say "this is a new seller without solid reputation".
But I'm guessing this would be bad for short-term thinking, the wish for "the everything store".
You can't be quality store and "everything store". Everything is mostly junk (Sturgeon's law).
Like bonds for construction work. The usual way that small companies do that is insurance; the insurance companies look into how likely a company is to be able to perform and charge appropriately. The risk assessment function rides on them with commercial incentives instead of corruptible government. In theory.
> The hacked firmware writes new data on top of the old data and keeps the directory. It appears to be working, but when you try to access your files, there's nothing there.
Jeez, this last detail elevates it from scam to plain malicious... Overwriting files isn't likely to conceal the scam much longer for a drive that already missreports it's size and is limited to 60MB/s - but it is likely to lose data for someone who actually manages to reach that capacity.
[edit]
Not speculation, reality... following the link to similar drives on amazon by a sibling comment, first 1 start review shows story of data loss [0]:
> They have figured out a way for it to tell the computer that it's a hard drive with 1 or 2TB, where it really is 128GB, according to the engineers who looked at it [...] I spent several hundred dollars to retrieve a few documents that were critical to me [...]
These drives are costing non technical people data loss, not just money.
Anytime I buy a "new" storage device, it gets runs through F3[0] first. Several storage devices I've got off Amazon have been fake, even when buying from known name brands.
This has always been a thing, but I think it's insane that a retailer is carrying a scam product like this. Amazon has the excuse that third-party sellers are usually the ones selling them (which is of course still bullshit). What's Walmart's excuse?
Walmart isn't carrying it. It's being sold by a third party on Walmart.com. Walmart allows third parties to sell on Walmart.com just as Amazon allows third parties to sell on their website.
If I'm going to Walmart.com, giving my credit card information to Walmart, on a page with Walmart's logo prominently displayed, then it feels more like a business relation with Walmart that they subcontract out. Like if I buy a t-shirt from a dropseller, and it's defective, I can take it up with the dropseller and don't need to argue with the manufacturer.
Granted, a similar argument could be made about eBay, so I think history plays a huge role. When Walmart puts up a marketplace for 3rd-parties without clearly disclaiming it as being from not-Walmart, Walmart's history and reputation as a direct seller customers lets a reasonable customer conclude that they are buying it directly from Walmart. eBay was never a seller themselves, and doesn't have Walmart's reputation, so products listed on eBay don't cause the same customer confusion.
It annoys me to no end that Walmart.com defaults to mostly 3rd party junk when you search. Every single time I have to adjust search settings to ‘in-store’ only, which isn’t a 1 second fix when you’re on mobile just due to network latency.
The only reason I ever buy from Walmart is when I want the product the same day and am willing to drive 10 min to my local store. If that isn’t the case, I have the entire internet of sellers to choose from and it surely isn’t going to be Walmart that I pick.
Where do you see that it's a third-party seller? I'm not seeing it.
edit: Reading through the text and looking at the pictures, it's obvious that it's a third-party, but nothing on the site explicitly says "this is a seller not associated with Walmart".
Walmart recently started doing the whole "sold by x, fulfulled by Walmart" thing that amazon does. So they're taking inventory from random sellers and selling it just as Amazon does. Which is kind of annoying. I think Target still doesn't do this. Lately though I'm finding BestBuy to be a good option for when I am trying to avoid counterfeits or rinky dink random brands. They usually ship free too.
They do. Search target.com for some suitably generic thing like 'portable hard drive' and you'll see some are labeled like this: "Sold and shipped by Mega Retail Store
a Target Plus™ partner"
Amazon claims the excuse that their third-party sellers they rely on and contract with to provide goods to attract customers, but I'm not convinced it's valid (as you can probably surmise). Amazon ought to be required to verify the authenticity of products on their site, if only in the first batch.
The tactic is always the same: hack the firmware. I remember 15 years ago when I got one of these “Portable MP4 Players” (exactly like an iPod, but for 10% of the price), and it would say “8 GB” on it. When trying to upload my music into it, at some point it’d return an random storage error.
I didn’t understand, so I decided to format it. What was my surprise when the 8 GB disk turned into 1 GB? I researched like crazy, and then found out in some forum that they would tweak the firmware to tell the OS about its fake size, though I’m not sure how formatting it would ‘fix’ this. After formatting it, it worked normally and for many years.
In the end, it is the same stupid technique, 15 years later. I’m not sure why wouldn’t they just sell it with proper specifications and profit over the okay quality of the device..
They probably changed the partition table to say that the partition is 8GB. No complex firmware shenanigans needed. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record. Tools like fdisk will allow you to “hack” it in 10 seconds.
When you reparationed your OS probably read the true disk size (correctly reported by firmware) and made a brand new partition table, partition and file system on top of it.
You can check spot prices for NAND chips (Gigabits not GB) which explains the margins for end-user products. (This one is <2% of the TLC chip cost, obviously fake.)
Readit News
When ordering electronics from Walmart Marketplace, particularly TVs, I’ve found that the marketplace sellers freely substitute makes and models. Maybe nobody notices if you are shipping a gift to someone else, but since I need specific models from specific manufacturers for development it gets noticed when I order LG model XYZ and get a no-name tv instead. I stopped ordering from Walmart altogether after the second time (out of two, consecutive) that happened.
So my advice is anything you buy online at Walmart, make sure it is not a marketplace seller, just save yourself the trouble.
In all cases Wal-Mart refunded my money after waiting for a week for the vendor to respond, though I had to lug the stuff to the UPS store to return it. Amazon usually suggests I donate stuff rather then return it.
I’ve not had any issues with the items sold by Wal-mart actual, those you can buy with confidence.
In mid-November, Walmart.com warned me to "Order soon to guarantee that you'll get <x> for Christmas."
So, I did the "responsible" thing and ordered the drone before Thanksgiving and it arrived around Nov 25.
Wrap it up. Son opens it on Christmas, aaaaand it's broken out of the box. One of the rotors was bent and wouldn't rotate.
Brought it to Walmart probably on the 27th of December and Walmart tells me, "This was sold by one of our 3rd party vendors. You have to take it up with them."
3rd party vendor tells me to pound sand because there's a 30 day return policy. Remember how I was responsible and got the drone a month ahead of time?
In retrospect, I should have disputed the charge, but it didn't occur to me at the time.
Still makes me angry.
I am mean this is a decades old problem from not having the correct batteries, to missing parts, etc etc. Alot of Christmas day disappointments could be avoided by just inspecting the toys before wrapping them.....
Dead Comment
Don't get me wrong, when this happens, I get that feeling of rip off, but the reality is, I didn't price shop. And someone did some work to get it to show up for me where I was looking.
Not if you're trying to avoid Amazon for moral boycott reasons (as the OP was). In that case, people are willing to knowingly pay an additional fee to avoid Amazon, but that money is just being pocketed and the rest of the money is being turned over to Amazon on their behalf.
So he'd just order pizzas for himself, and pocket the difference.
In fact that is one of my biggest beefs with amazon, the way they have it set up it is very hard, if not impossible to figure out who you are buying stuff from.
So, now I'm back to trying to find a reputable retailer that sells authentic products.
As others have said, when something goes wrong, they're not going to remember "Oh, marketplace seller biteme42069 was a rip-off, avoid them", they'll just blame Walmart.
It's funny-- Amazon has managed to so squander their reputation that Walmart-- once the epitome of schlocky retail-- had managed to look decent by comparison. They had a strong enough nationwide logistics network that they could challenge the "but-but Prime 7-minute delivery" argument, and the direct nanufacturer connections to ensure they had authentic, controlled inventory. They could have been a more trustworthy choice.
I sell on both Walmart and Amazon. As somethingwitty1 said, this works in multiple directions; people dropshipping ittems from Amazon directly to Walmart customers, from Walmart to Amazon customers, and from both to eBay customers.
It's also forbidden. Both Walmart and Amazon explicitly warn against shipping items to customers in competitors' boxes; Walmart even explicitly bans tracking numbers starting with "TBA". If your wife reports that this is happening to Walmart buyer support, the sellers won't be there for long; recent anecdotes say that both companies are really cracking down on dropshipping.
>When ordering electronics from Walmart Marketplace, particularly TVs, I’ve found that the marketplace sellers freely substitute makes and models.
Ugh. All I can say that I've also had less-than-positive experiences when buying from other sellers on both platforms. Amazon is notorious for allowing anyone to open a seller account. Walmart is in theory supposed to be much stricter in examining applicants' qualifications, with many waiting for weeks or months. While this is great from my perspective (both in terms of improving the overall quality of third-party sellers, and minimizing my competition), the incompetent and crooked are still getting through; Walmart recently allowing non US-domiciled sellers (i.e., Chinese) doesn't help.
>I’ve not had any issues with the items sold by Wal-mart actual, those you can buy with confidence.
Agreed. Amazon commingles its own inventory and that of third-party sellers that Amazon handles storage and shipping for (FBA); as a result, my own confidence in the genuineness of, say, household staples from Amazon has plummeted. I think Walmart does not do so with WFS, its FBA equivalent. In any case WFS much less used than FBA, because there is little advantage for sellers to do so over fulfilling items themselves.
or stop ordering from the marketplace sellers. I like ordering directly from websites for vendors i do business with. This is why I do not shop on ebay.
From Amazon I rarely order anything that is not "shipped and sold by amazon", on walmart I only order Walmart Stock, on newegg I only order newegg stock, etc etc
Personally I am not sure what the appeal is of all these bigger sites adding "marketplace" sellers.
It’s the long tail. Need an unbranded under-desk treadmill manufactured by Xiaomi? Amazon marketplace has ever color of the rainbow at prices only reasonable for dropshippers.
There’s ofc downsides to that, but certain consumers don’t mind.
Money. No inventory (i.e. capital), no COGS, no returns (depending on the model), no assortment optimization. Just a share of what someone else does.
Digi-Key, an electronic parts distributor which used to have a good reputation for supply chain quality, added "marketplace" sellers. Before this, when you ordered from Digi-Key, you were assured that the product went directly from the manufacturer to Digi-Key in Minnesota and then to you. You got exactly what you ordered. Now, it's much iffier.
There is no real reason why they have it so wrong.
Also, I buy expensive things direct from the manufacturer if I buy online. No chance for counterfeit items that way.
Wal Mart and Amazon are nothing more than digital flea markets at this point.
Having said that there was one time I had this same issue...I bought from Walmart's marketplace and the product wasn't what I ordered. I had no issue with returning it.
ebay sellers do the same. I pay using paypal on ebay, just to get a gift package from amazon prime. Stopped using ebay and every scammer like that got negatives from me. They are still cheaper than non-amazon sellers
It’s horrible and they won’t do anything about it despite contacting them via help requests and Twitter.
3 of the top 5 listings are total scams.
And Amazon’s choice for 1TB flash drive is a scam: USB Flash Drive 1TB, Flash Memory Stick for PC/Laptop, Ultra Large Storage USB Drive, Portable Thumb Drives (Black) https://a.co/d/cTi7XqZ
I stopped using amazon around 2 years ago. If i want to buy "Chinesium" i use aliexpress and save a lot of middlemen in return for a long shipping time.
I've been burned by fake products a few times and learned my lesson long ago. Sure, amazon does make it easy to return them, but going to a real store avoids it all-together.
If you shop around for prices, it is rare that amazon's prices are even competitive vs an actual physical store these days.
this makes little sense, the store has employees and high rents, what are amazon's reasons?
Genuine question, what store is this that:
1) has inventory in store of items like this
2) doesn’t also ever have fake merchandise on their shelves
The problem isn’t just Amazon, Walmart, or other large online retailers, it’s issues throughout the supply chain because of the lack of enforcement by all actors (retailers, distributors, shippers, manufacturers, customs agents, government agencies, etc).
What makes you trust a brick and mortar store's supply chain more than an online store? There are counterfeit items everywhere.
I would guess it adjusts for shipping time and result relevance weighted by previous usage. For me, the choice 1TB flash drive is a PNY thumb drive.
At the very least, it seems brave to assign your company’s endorsement automatically based on an algorithm.
I believe it is the same for all users for a given keyword search, but it is also dynamically changing.
From [1], the algorithm itself is a black box though:
> One innovation the company devised is “Amazon’s Choice,” a distinctive black badge typically bestowed on a single product per search term. The company says the award is given to “highly rated, well-priced products available to ship immediately.” But for many categories, dozens of options fit that description. How does Amazon choose its choices? Do humans have a hand in the decisions, or are they governed by an algorithm?
> The company won’t say. “Amazon’s Choice is just our recommendation, and customers can always ask for specific brands or products if they choose,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/what-does-amazons-choice-mean/
I was still seething over some of the storage ones when, a few years ago, I joined an anti-counterfeiting startup. (Sadly, our successful MVP launch integrated into a high-end factory production line happened just as Covid was breaking out, which spooked our flagship customer, and impacted followthrough we needed, then we ran out of runway while pivoting.)
As a consumer, I can imagine a lot of things that the marketplaces like Amazon.com and Walmart.com could do to improve trustworthiness. I don't know whether those make business sense. I'd love to see consumers reward a marketplace that conspicuously kept out the scammers.
Ideally, the solution would protect integrity of all brands, not only house brands.
This is how it works with credit card companies where I live. The credit card company is jointly liable with the supplier. It works fine and the consumer is protected. "Marketplaces" are still in the relative wild west when it comes to liability here.
I've yet to see any evidence that marketplaces are actually interested in vetting sellers ... or buyers, for that matter.
Marketplaces are basically all about taking their % of the sale, yet getting to shrug and walk away if the transaction goes south.
Right now I use h2testw on all storage I purchase, but you kinda need to know this is a thing.
The combination of regulations and buying from reputable sellers should be enough IMO... though most people would probably view Walmart as a reputable seller, so that clearly doesn't work.
Nestle have no problem putting up $5M, but most good small companies just can't.
So the end effect is that you enable big monopolies.
You need to invent some kind of reputation system. Small towns (and communities) have this builtin as everybody knows almost everybody. Amazon is missing the ability to say "this is a new seller without solid reputation".
But I'm guessing this would be bad for short-term thinking, the wish for "the everything store".
You can't be quality store and "everything store". Everything is mostly junk (Sturgeon's law).
Jeez, this last detail elevates it from scam to plain malicious... Overwriting files isn't likely to conceal the scam much longer for a drive that already missreports it's size and is limited to 60MB/s - but it is likely to lose data for someone who actually manages to reach that capacity.
[edit]
Not speculation, reality... following the link to similar drives on amazon by a sibling comment, first 1 start review shows story of data loss [0]:
> They have figured out a way for it to tell the computer that it's a hard drive with 1 or 2TB, where it really is 128GB, according to the engineers who looked at it [...] I spent several hundred dollars to retrieve a few documents that were critical to me [...]
These drives are costing non technical people data loss, not just money.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B08SBHV3VT/ref=acr_dp...
[0] https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduct...
Granted, a similar argument could be made about eBay, so I think history plays a huge role. When Walmart puts up a marketplace for 3rd-parties without clearly disclaiming it as being from not-Walmart, Walmart's history and reputation as a direct seller customers lets a reasonable customer conclude that they are buying it directly from Walmart. eBay was never a seller themselves, and doesn't have Walmart's reputation, so products listed on eBay don't cause the same customer confusion.
The only reason I ever buy from Walmart is when I want the product the same day and am willing to drive 10 min to my local store. If that isn’t the case, I have the entire internet of sellers to choose from and it surely isn’t going to be Walmart that I pick.
edit: Reading through the text and looking at the pictures, it's obvious that it's a third-party, but nothing on the site explicitly says "this is a seller not associated with Walmart".
Comparison:
Amazon: https://i.imgur.com/rGdTkM4.png
Walmart: https://i.imgur.com/JRwhzBy.png
Edit: Ahhh, of course. You're right, thanks guys.
They do. Search target.com for some suitably generic thing like 'portable hard drive' and you'll see some are labeled like this: "Sold and shipped by Mega Retail Store a Target Plus™ partner"
I didn’t understand, so I decided to format it. What was my surprise when the 8 GB disk turned into 1 GB? I researched like crazy, and then found out in some forum that they would tweak the firmware to tell the OS about its fake size, though I’m not sure how formatting it would ‘fix’ this. After formatting it, it worked normally and for many years.
In the end, it is the same stupid technique, 15 years later. I’m not sure why wouldn’t they just sell it with proper specifications and profit over the okay quality of the device..
When you reparationed your OS probably read the true disk size (correctly reported by firmware) and made a brand new partition table, partition and file system on top of it.
https://www.trendforce.com/price/flash