Buying from a reputable operation spares you from a lot of this. Amazon is all hot garbage across the board.
It wasn’t technology, but i ordered a new mad lib style book for my kid from Amazon. The book arrived with cellophane around it and a nice label that clearly said new. Once opened, it was very obvious the book was used, since the last kid had already filled out the whole damn thing including his name and address inside the cover.
I’m not mad at the kid, although his parents are probably bad people for returning the book at that point. I am livid that Amazon didn’t flip to any random page in the book too determine if the book was used or not.
Fuck Amazon.
Iirc correctly, Amazon actually doesn’t resell their returns. At least not through their storefront.
They have “return auctions” where returns are put onto a pallet and then people bid on them to purchase. Apparently this is cheaper than having a workflow for their returns, checking them to make sure they are resellable, and then stocking them back into their warehouse.
So are all these people who say they are buying from Amazon actually buying from 3rd party sellers on Amazon? I’m always confused by these stories with used items being delivered.
The principal issue is this, Amazon commingles stock. This means that there is one box for a particular SKU. If a seller sends product to Amazon for fulfillment it gets dumped into the bin with everyone else’s.
This means that if a seller sends counterfeit or poor products to Amazon it gets mixed in with the real ones from other sellers or Amazon’s own stock. This causes major problems as you can see.
Yup, this is the real answer. Verified vendors’ stock isn’t kept separate from the shitty scammers’ stock. Vendor has 10 good memory cards in stock, and a scammer has 5 fakes? The bin will have all 15 cards… So buying from the vendor doesn’t guarantee you get a real memory card, because the counterfeits are in the same bin.
Every professional photographer knows that good SD cards are Sandisk branded and come from B&H Photo Supply… While bad SD cards are Sandisk branded and come from Amazon.
And somebody buying from the scammer could get a legitimate card, thus allowing the scammer to blend in.
Many years ago it used to be very obvious when you were buying from Amazon vs 3rd party sellers. Today the only difference is a small bit of text that says “Shipped and sold by Amazon”. The fact that you can even get prime shipping on items from third party sellers makes it so that people often don’t realize.
the problem is they mingle stock from every source into one pile with no discernable way to identify what came from where.
I bought a 3 pack of Corsair LL120 RGB case fans directly from Amazon-dot-com (as the seller) before and got a 3 pack of someone’s old case fans instead (the old swapperoo). So Amazon told me to just keep them after I sent them many photos of the box and the LPN sticker on it, and they sent me another. Take a guess what was in that box? Yup, more swapperoos. But this was back in 2016-2017 so they may have changed up how they handle returns since then, or how they isolate their own products from 3rd party ‘FBA’ sellers
I don’t care if it was actually a store front. I blame Amazon for not doing oversight of its supply chain. So, it’s their fault, or it’s their fault.
Amazon sold me a defective planer that had sawdust in it. Ibwas apparently the second to return it under warranty.
Amazon Warehouse I believe is open box and returns. It also gets confusing that marketplace sellers are mostly outside of Amazon’s control
Actually that cellophane was brand new, as the label indicated.
Yeah this stuff is why i never buy tech from Amazon, you never know if you’re gonna get a counterfeit item
Recommendations?
Newegg has been shit for a decade now (new owners fucked it to hell) and I don’t have a Microcenter closer than a 2-hour drive.
Anywhere that has an actual supply chain instead of website that’s just a front for individual resellers. Places like best buy, or if you could get shipped from microcenter.
How did Newegg survive the outing from Gamers Nexus?
Supporting giant evil DOES sometimes get you free stuff… I know folks who have accidentally been shipped multiple of what they’re ordering (in two cases, the items were quite expensive) and when they’ve brought it up, they were told to keep the extras.
Maybe not worth the evil, but hey, free stuff is cool.
This isn’t exclusive to Amazon. I had it happen with friends build back in the Newegg days.
Newegg is still a thing, you just need to check the “Sold by Newegg” filter.
Oh it is, but is so enshittified nobody goes there anymore.
The bad prices are what keep me away. Though, I can’t say I’ve looked at stuff sold by third parties. Why would I do that when Amazon, ebay, and Craigslist exist?
the exploding power supplies forced into bundles are what keep me away. cant return the catastrophically failed PSU without returning everything else, either. total scam.
Newegg is a fucking open septic pit.
Fred sold it off to some chinese acquisition company and its almost a fucking scam now at this point.
I had it happen to me at MicroCenter. Got a mechanical keyboard, in a seemingly-new box. No return sticker on it. Opened it up, and the damned thing was missing like six keys and absolutely covered in gamer chud. Someone very obviously bought it, put their old keyboard in the box, and “returned” it. And whoever took the return didn’t bother checking, or mark it as an open box.
We’d need to know exactly how far back because NewEgg has for years been just like Amazon: a listing service for junky third party sellers.
Evga still made GPUs back then.
16 GB DDR2 + 16 GB DDR3 makes 32GB DDR5, right?
32 GBGB DDDDRR5 actually. Much better!
32 GB² DDR²5
Its amazon, just return it. That’s really the only good thing about amazon anymore, easy returns.
Not really anymore for me. A few times this past year they snuck in the return shipping cost at about $10-$15 USD. The page showed the cost refunded then added back. I don’t know but it fooled me.
With this hardware shortage insanity, I won’t be surprised if they get more aggressive with return shipping fees.
Return shipping fees? I’m guessing you live somewhere rural? Here we just drop it at a local store.
amazon has been getting less generous with the returns for years now.
Especially if you have more than a few returns per year.
Except in the UK for some reason where you can email and message them for months and pay your own damn return shipping and get fucked about and never recieve a refund.
They tried to fuck me on a return once and after a month of it sitting in limbo i filed and won a dispute though my card provider instead.
Matter of fact i think it was over ram too, but it was over a year ago.
Oh man, that sucks. Sorry, I wrongly assumed amazon returns worked the same everywhere
This is my theory. The kind of stuff I buy there is all electronics manufactured in china/Asia anyway. I could buy it direct or from ali express, but Amazon shipping is hella cheap and fast and they actually do returns quickly and correctly.
Cost doesn’t seem to matter with return fraud. I recently received a “new” $6 item that had its contents replaced with a $4 item and then taped shut. Seriously, who wastes their time on this stuff?
Probably the same people running Pokémon card hustles. I recently saw a guy acting all pissy he had to wait in line at target to buy some packs, started berating the workers “you work at target, you’re broke as fuck”. The workers actually went in on him, I was so happy to see it. They made fun of him for trying to hustle over cards for children and told him to go home and cry to his mom about it.
That’s the kind of loser wasting their time on 2-5 dollar profit per return.
Please sir, do you have a link.
I’ll see if I can find it later
Edit: found it
https://old.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1phew1b/scalper_argues_with_target_workers/
Thanks, appreciate it
Keep in mind, whenever you think too hard about these sorts of things, this is one of those operations that could apply to Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Many people make the incorrect assumption of something like, “They must have done some clever supply-chain wizardry," or “There’s a smart cost-reduction plan behind this.” When in reality, a lot of times, the actual explanation is something like a mid-level manager wanted a slide that said “cost savings," then procurement was pressured due to some personality ego problem, engineering objections were ignored, the math was never checked, and in the end, nobody involved actually understood unit economics. Maybe exchanging a $6 part for a $4 looks good in volume, but they only did this 20 times, resulting in $40 of savings which was erased by their reputation and incompetence.
I have worked government contracts. I have worked with shitty project managers. There’s a lot more of these mistakes than you realize powering economies.
I hate that saying. It’s not a law. It’s a funny quote. Absolutely do not base any judgment you make on it.
Find a $2 scam you can pull hundreds of times a day and you’re a third world billionaire.
Volume and slavery.
I think I will just go to Microcenter
I miss Microcenter
I wish I had a Microcenter less than 8hrs away. Best Buy is all I have and I am not buying there.
Same, i don’t have one less than 7 hour round trip drive.
Same. I’m lucky enough to have two within driving distance. I’m genuinely worried about them staying in business if PC building takes a nosedive thanks to the RAM/SSD prices.
It’s sickening how little Amazon seem to give a fuck about this. They could easily tighten up their vetting of sellers, but heaven fucking forbid they only report a $50,000,000,000 profit this year instead of $50,003,000,000.
They’ve invested extensively in automating their supply chain to the point that humans aren’t looking inside these boxes anymore. And as customer support is increasingly replaced with AI, the ability to flag and report businesses for fraud has erodes even as the businesses themselves have grown more sophisticated in duping Amazon anti-fraud systems.
The quest to remove every actual thinking human from the inside of your business results in humans outside of your business exploiting the blind spots to the hilt.
CEOs are probably hedging on LLMs adapting faster to scammers then video versa, however unless they make a fundamental breakthrough like what transformers did, adding more parameters to the model ain’t gonna do it.
We are reaching a convergence of accuracy, and once a critical mass of investors realize it, this whole thing implodes. Demand for AI tech will plummet, and all these asshole companies will have to backpedal. Maybe not Amazon, but the small cap companies fo sure
CEOs are probably hedging on LLMs adapting faster to scammers then video versa
Racing towards the Singularity, a thing that is definitely real and exists and is achievable in our lifetimes.
We are reaching a convergence of accuracy, and once a critical mass of investors realize it, this whole thing implodes.
Industrial dinosaurs have a way of sticking around in strict defiance of market forces. The O&G industry is a great example. They’ve been able to outrun more efficient and cost-effective methods of production and application of energy for decades, in large part thanks to lobbyist-lead state investments in long-term infrastructure and buying out / shutting down of competitors.
I do think the AI boom is facing bigger headwinds than the automotive or airline industries, in large part due to their bloated balance sheets and highly speculative asset prices. But in the same way the big 2008-era investment banks were saved by a multi-trillion dollar bailout from the Fed and the Treasury, I have no doubt Silicon Valley is simply Too Big To Fail in the long run.
Scam software will never replace scam artists.
It is like a cat and mouse game between scammer prevention and scammers.
And just like with piracy, the scammers will always be one step ahead of the corporations. Because Amazon may have some giant nerds working in it, but the sheer amount of nerds outside of Amazon will bypass them easily.
I stopped ordering tech on Amazon when I got a fraud twice in a month on back-to-back orders a few years back.
First was a laptop that wouldn’t start. I looked at the bottom and the scewes were mostly stripped, and once I got them out most of the components had been removed from the boards.
Second was a Spyder color calibrator. What I got instead was a iPhone 4 screen protector with a sticker slapped on with the UPC for what I’d ordered. When I tried returning it, they gave me flack for slap-tagging a return, but I was able to escalate in that case.
Yeah, if it’s not made by Amazon and sold by them, I typically won’t buy it. All the other stuff is just marked up stuff from AliExpress and temu.
They don’t make anything. You’re buying marked up stuff from AliExpress and temu that has an “Amazon basics” sticker on it.
I get that, but imo they do vet them and make sure it’s not absolute crap.
“… from Amazon”
Well there’s your problem.
Is amazon not a good supplier anymore? I still order stuff from them occasionally and always get what I need.
There is very little quality control. Amazon mixes supply from different sellers, so bad actors often supply garbage into legitimate listings.
Amazon is a platform for different kinds of vendors. Of course there’s the scam artists who do the bait-and-switch.
I buy and maintain about $20K of computer equipment a year for my lab. We learned around 2020 Amazon is a nest of scammers, from the suppliers to the delivery people.
There has been a significant resurgence of local computer supply retail because millions have been ripped off and only now buy in person.
No sympathy for anyone who still supports and buys from Amazon.
I hate buying from Amazon and avoid it as much as I can, but one thing I’ve noticed in the last 5-10 years is that brick and mortar stores seem to have given up completely. It is shocking how many times I’ve wanted to buy something, often very common, from popular brands, and I try and find a local store to buy it from only for that store to be out of stock or just not stock it at all. It feels to me like these stores are filled with “stuff” but none of the things I want to buy.
You can order direct from the manufacturer’s website, I’ve done that with most of my workshop equipment and audio stuff.
I ordered 2x32GB DDR5 on Amazon two years ago and received 1x32 and 1x8 in the same package.
Luckily they replaced it for me completely, still wild. Can only imagine it’s going to get worse.
Buying electronics from Amazon is really rolling the dice. I’ve received so many inadvertent open box returns… it’s just a matter of time before you get burned.
Newegg is also shit and so is bestbuy. I don’t have a microcenter near me. What else is there? I guess buying direct. Is there anything I’m missing?
B&H is a great source for electronics, computer parts, and photography.
Depends on what you’re buying. Wiredzone and Provantage are solid for enterprise/workstation gear, and for anything storage or camera related B&H is my go-to.
Best buy resellers are worse than eBay.
Don’t order from Amazon. Easy fix.
Hold sellers accountable. Actual fix.
I personally believe the platform provider needs to be accountable because they take a cut for the convenience and safety of the transaction.
They put a lot of local retail out of business.
Working for a small business, Amazon has absolutely allowed for the collapse of local retail. But let’s be real, people put local retail out of business. People chose convenience over community. They’d rather have it delivered to their door, or to their trunk, instead of actually taking the time to walk into a store that’s not a Target or Walmart.
So they don’t have the resources to check returned goods or what? Or they simply don’t care enough?
Yup this isn’t a fraud problem. Just an Amazon problem
