My last few computers I bought half/half from Amazon/Newegg and it seemed to work out. It’s a bit harder to make a counterfeit video card or CPU than it is to make a counterfeit battery, monitor, or board game.
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I wonder if part of the scams were from people selling through Amazon (e.g. “Sold by Joey Joe-Joe Shabbado’s Computers and fulfilled by Amazon”) and not sold by Amazon itself. Yes, the actual seller is sometimes buried in the “fine print” of the page and easy to miss, so to speak, but you can at least kind of look out for it.
If Amazon is both selling and fulfilling the order, then it definitely fails the smell test even more.
In some cases, Amazon is fulfilling direct, but the item put into their inventory is a nearly identical but much shittier item.
In other cases, only third parties sell the items via Amazon. Same scam, but they send it directly to you.
The moral is to buy Dell monitors directly from Dell, and Samsung hard drives from Newegg.
Amazon’s problem with counterfeiting is well known. Yes, there are cases where people don’t recognize it’s a third party seller, and they get boned. Of course, even then, a third party seller with counterfeits shouldn’t be permitted to appear on Amazon in the first place.
The real problem is that when sellers use fulfilled by Amazon, they offer a feature called stickerless commingled inventory.
Let’s say I get my hands on 20 copies of a book for free. Amazon is selling that book for $10. I send my 20 copies to an Amazon warehouse and set my price at $5. Since my 20 copies are brand new and identical to Amazon’s brand new copies, they just toss my inventory in with the rest of them in the warehouse. Now if someone on amazon.com buys a $5 copy from me, they might actually receive one of Amazon’s copies. Likewise, someone paying $10 and choosing Amazon as the seller might actually be receiving one of the copies I sent to the warehouse.
What happens is Amazon does not do a great job of verifying that the books I sent them are legit and not counterfeits. The result is that even customers who are smart enough to only buy from the real Amazon seller might get my crap. Other people paying $5 and buying from me might get legit products at low low prices.
I could even run a scam to stock one Amazon warehouse with crap. Then use another account to buy the same product from myself at a different Amazon warehouse far away and get legit goods. My counterfeits become legit and I only pay Amazon a small commission on the “sales.”
Amazon is supposedly now trying harder to prevent illegitimate goods from getting into its inventory.
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Emily and I were talking about this yesterday. For all but the most trivial items, Amazon shopping is more and more feeling like using Ali Baba…
It’s a very tough nut to crack.
If they only sell what they sell and know is legit, they won’t be a store that sells everything. Imagine going to Amazon and they simply don’t have what you are looking for listed at all. Unthinkable!
If they manually verify all the third party goods coming in as legit, that will be incredibly slow and expensive considering the insane volume. Just as difficult as YouTube checking all the videos that are uploaded.
If they continue as they do now, they have bootleg stuff on their site making people shop elsewhere.
I think one thing that is helping Amazon right now are the brands that seem like they suck, or started out seeming like they suck, but are actually legit. Anker is the best example. If you searched for cables and found Anker instead of say, Belkin, years ago you would be like “What is this garbage brand? Can I trust this?” Now they are the best.
I recently got burned reaching in the oven even though I had the black hand on. I bought some new oven mitts from Homwe. What the hell is homwe? I don’t know but the mitts are definitely good. RIP black hand.
To bring this back to Apple:
Only Apple gets to sell Apple on Amazon. Seems like it was win-win deal on that Amazon gets a bit of the Apple tax, and Apple gets Apple Music on the Echo and other mutual back rubbing deals.
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Yeah, Dell et al. should make the same deal.
Dell monitors on Amazon can only be sold by Dell.
It was a Dell monitor that had the scammer come at me, if you couldn’t guess. I ordered one on Amazon from “Dell” and it ended up being a low-end garbage monitor. Not even a Dell.
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Fresh off the rumor mill:
Eh, and is Apple any more expensive here than paying someone from Geek Squad or whatever to do the same thing?
I think this is all much ado about nothing.
OMG Look who dissented. Also, IANAL, but this seems to pave the way for all kinds of anti-trust suits against the big tech companies because those suits can now come from users and not just competitors. Thing is, this case seems to simply permit the user file suit against Apple. They still have to do that and win, which will probably be extremely difficult.
This is a guy who makes a living fixing Mac laptops, and this video he tells you which ones you should buy.
It’s WWDC day. I’m gonna get lunch and get back to my desk before it starts.
I just picked up my MacBook Pro from the Apple store with a free replacement keyboard, battery, screen, etc… so I’m in the mood for Apple tech stuff.
Finally. Apple Watch is going to be a stand-alone device. I feel like Apple intentionally holds back on the full potential of devices just so you can feel that relief when they finally give it. If they did everything right away, they’d have no updates to make.
It’s good news regardless. Finally going to get a Spotify app that streams with no phone nearby.
Wow, the irony of Apple making a watch app to detect high decibel levels to protect hearing loss when their earbuds are the prime suspect.
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As an owner of the original Apple watch, there’s absolutely no way that could have been a standalone device. It’s just the same as the iPhone. At the start it had to be linked to an iTunes app on a Mac or PC, but over time it became more and more a standalone gadget.
They just want the Android phone user market, because god knows there isn’t a comparable compatible device.
The guy demoing the gestures on iPad was really hilarious. He kept talking about how easy and great the gestures are, but kept fucking them up and apologizing.
If I was on that stage for the first time, my hands would be shaking too!