2y ago

Amazon Has Turned Into an Monopolistic Shithole Littered With Pay-to-Play Ads, FTC Lawsuit Solemnly Argues

www.404media.co Amazon Has Turned Into an Monopolistic Shithole Littered With Pay-to-Play Ads, FTC Lawsuit Solemnly Argues

"Amazon shifted gears so that it now litters its storefront with pay-to-play advertisements. In addition to overcharging its customers, Amazon is degrading the services it provides them."

BrainWorms @lemm.ee

www.404media.co /amazon-has-turned-into-an-unusable-shithole-littered-with-pay-to-play-ads/

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84 comments

Okay don't think the FTC said Shit hole, no need to hyperbolize everything
- I would slide them $5 for them to openly swear though
  
  Damn… that is 2000% their annual budget.
- Exactly. The document simply states
  “We're gonna make 'em eat our shit, then shit out our shit, then eat their shit which is made up of our shit that we made 'em eat.”
  
  Good ol' Jay. He is a wordsmith.
- Would be cooler if they did, tho
- That's the title of OPs linked article. What's a lemming to do?
  
  It was a criticism of the article not the poster. OP is just the messenger
- They should have, because that's what Amazon is these days. :P
- And these guys call themselves professional journalists?
- Totally agree. Let's leave the sensationalization for that other site.

Amazon is literally aliexpress but with a more sophisticated UI.
Nothing but absolute shit chinese knock off products. No longer can you get the same kind of savings like you could in the past. You're basically paying full retail now, plus prime or shipping.
- Ali has good stuff depending on what you're buying. Amazon usually has the exact same stuff for like 50% more
  
  Yeah, unless I need something ASAP, I usually only buy name brands, but not expensive items on Amazon. Other stuff I go to Ali for and just wait a little longer. Expensive stuff I buy in person or directly from the manufacturer when possible. Recently I've been trying to supplement Amazon purchases with small businesses where possible.
  
  I used to shop exclusively on Banggood. At the time AliExpress was sketchy.
  A few years ago they flip flopped. Now Banggood is hot garbage, and AliExpress isn't bad.
  Gearbest, Temu, and Wish were always bad in my experience.
  
  But ali takes like 2 months to ship.
  
  Not sure what you buy off Ali, but nearly everything I used to buy for electronic/robotic projects has gotten to the price that I might as well buy off NA suppliers.
- Sellers even drop ship from AliExpress and similar sites. Basically every time the shipping is quoted longer than a week it's probably drop shipped from one of the Chinese sites. They add $5-$10 to the price and take their cut without ever touching the product.
  
  I canceled my prime membership and stopped using Amazon entirely after I ordered something that turned out to be drop shipped straight from Walmart. But online shopping in general is a nightmare these days.
- Prime AND shipping half the time these days.
- More than full retail most of the time! They're not even bothering to compete with Walmart or Target anymore on the same products.

My favorite enshittification of Amazon is how you can filter products by manufacturer, but only if the manufacturer is a reputable company like JOOGEE or XZzy or GoodTime and not those weird no-name companies like Anker or Samsung.
- Won't even bring up the brands I like unless I search for them specifically, even then they're not the first result. Amazon gives the ad space to brands that are around for 3 months then poof.
- Oh and I love when I sort by price and half the results disappear.
- My favorite enshittification of Amazon is that, plus, the bonus fact the filtering acts different if you pay for prime. The filtering works better with prime. It should work the same regardless if one pays for prime or not.
  They basically deliver a shopping experience that is worse unless you pay them money monthly. It's enshittification two layers of abstraction deep.

I can't even get the sorting method to work. It shows me a few items that match the sorting at first, then it goes all over the place. Utterly useless.
- Either that or it gives you like 3 results after filtering, even though there were pages of matching results before the filter was applied.

Amazon has to deal with their counterfeit merchandise problem. Try to buy a memory card on Amazon and odds are you get a bogus counterfeit card.
- It’s broken for us, it works just fine for them.
- I got counterfeit Dove soap.
  
  "Dave"
- Amazon has the money to vet its products and provide better search results, it just chooses not to because it doesn’t need to.
  Better to shove a shitty, expensive product in customer’s faces than a cheap, standard one.
  
  Not only that, Amazon has the mechanisms to prevent counterfeiting today: dedicated bins for individual sellers products. They just make the vendors pay an extra fee to use it.
  Literally extorting their sellers. "Gee it'd be a shame if some counterfeit merchandise were to be sold instead of yours. I could protect you from that"
- Amazon is promoting the counterfeits. They don’t care because the people who don’t return the counterfeit products is high enough for them not to care. You basically can’t buy anything off Amazon these days unless you are ok with getting marked up crap from china
  
  They literally try to gas light you when you try to bring the problem up to them. They sent me an in app questionnaire that then told me that often products don’t work and that people think they are counterfeit. My memory stick was an obvious counterfeit. It’s kinda sick that Amazon does this.
- We got spray items that had nothing but compressed air in them
- never had an issue since they started separating the third-party inventory from their stock. just make sure it's sold by Amazon.
  
  That is anything but 100% reliable. Have had Sold By Amazon items with stickers on a box you know didn't come from the Manufacturer that way.
  
  When was that?
  
  Mine was sold by Samsung and it was still counterfeit.

For a while I used amazon as a "product browser", I would shop for what I want on there, and then go buy it straight from the manufacturer or whatever online marketplace the seller prefers.
Now, it has gotten so bad, it isn't even useful for that. Amazon will show you 50 overpriced knockoffs of the thing you'd actually want to buy without ever showing you the real thing unless you already know the brand name of what you want ahead of time. The reviews are useless too now, everything has 4 1/2 stars and the same substanceless reviews.
- Hard to shop for vitamins when you have sham accounts claiming it cured their cancer, when you're just trying to take better care of yourself but don't wanna fall for homeopathic scams.

I remember at one point that Amazon was amazing. Now days it's a crapshoot on product quality and delivery time.
- Etsy is now just as enshittified. Almost everything on there is dropshipped bullshit from AliExpress. You have to trudge through a massive amount of crap listings just to find anything handmade.
  
  From what I have heard from sellers it's as bad on the other end. Nobody wants to buy a piece of handmade jewelry for $50, when there is an Ali drop ship that says "hand made" for $5. It's extremely difficult to judge the quality until the item arrives, so shoppers get conned into buying junk to save a few $ that they thought was hand made.
  
  Amusingly there are a lot of fetish gear Etsy shops that are still above board, but not much else in my experience.
- The continuation of enshitification

Don't use Amazon. It's not like they are the only web shop for stuff you would like to have.
- I've had good luck with drop.com for electronics.
  Have any recommendations? Sometimes it's hard to beat the convenience of Amazon.
  
  Drop used to be so much better before the rename.
  
  Between home depot, target, best buy, and walmart I can typically find most things I'm looking for.
  I usually try to shop by reviewers first and check if the manufacturer sells directly. Retailers don't need to get a chunk of every purchase.
  
  I buy a lot of electronics (and reading glasses) from AliExpress. I had the occasional malfunction but probably not even one in 30-50. Great NEMA motors too and 18650 batteries among other stuff like the Orange Pi, or mega boards.
  A word of caution, there is lot of really cheap stuff that's quite low quality, and you can't post reviews under 4 stars (they won't show up) so you have to check the numbers sold and read the feedback.
  Edit: it also sometimes take 3-4 weeks to get the stuff. It's like a little surprise sometimes.
- I just use Walmart+ now.
  Better for groceries, but they don't sell wrapping papers :(
  
  Way to fight the man by using the little guys.

I swear by the time FTC notices, they've been doing it for like 10 years already

IDK what’s worse…that this is a thing, or that I’m so accustomed to Amazon’s shenanigans that I’m used to heading into the dark web of results, aka Page 2, in order to find exactly what I’m looking for.
That said, charging cables are kind of a bad example. I’m prepared to spend $10 on a 6-pack of varying lengths of Brand X cables I’ll replace next year as opposed to one $25 Apple-approved MFi cable that I’ll also replace next year.
- Page 2 is never a safe place to be.
  Amazon fails because its so expansive, but customer's expectations aren't high enough for Amazon to maintain that breadth.
  Amazon has the money to vet its products and provide better search results, it just chooses not to because it doesn't need to.
  Better to shove a shitty, expensive product in customer's faces than a cheap, standard one.
- I too am willing to venture onto page 2. The reviews are what are killing me now though. All the reviews are for the top 5 results, because nobody trusts anything from page 2, when it only has a few buyers and 3 reviews. It's cyclical
  And if a product has multiple "styles" to choose from, all the reviews are lumped together, so it's near impossible to figure out which product they're actually talking about.
  It's like I'm playing detective, just to determine if the keyboard stand I'm looking for will be worth a damn or not.

Kick Amazon's ass FTC!

Not gonna lie, it's almost refreshing to hear FTC acknowledge what's been true for years

Lina Khan is staking her career on this one, but the way the US judiciary looks there's no way Amazon suffers.

Is that a direct quote?

Why would you buy a cable from Apple on Amazon? You are already paying the Apple tax and you want to add the amazon tax on top?
If you go on Apple website you can get the cable and free shipping
For me it only makes sense to have cheap alternatives when browsing for cables on amazon. Then again if i want cheap, i go on aliexpress
- Apple rarely has a sale. Amazon has Apple products on sale regularly. I bought my airpods for $50 off when Apple was still selling them at MSRP. I don’t understand if someone is paying full retail on Amazon’s site for Apple products.
- People like to have a consolidated way to do things, if they can.
  
  That's why streaming took off, and why piracy is on the rise again.

DAE remember the Walmart, High Cost of Low Prices movie?

Strong words from the FTC.
Can you provide evidence that they called Amazon a "Shithole", or are you just trying to be sensationalist and clickbaity crap?
- It's often discouraged to editorialise the title of a news article you are sharing. OP didn't make up the title, it's the title of the news article they shared.

84 comments