YHK - yet another hacker news clone

And even if you want a prime badge, it's often/usually cheaper to go with a 3PL that can do some sort of SFP setup if you have reasonable volumes.

Although Amazon has a stranglehold on 3PL's too (or if you are a seller offering SFP), as they will force you to use Amazon Logistics at a certain % of volume if you want the prime badge which can be more expensive than other carriers.

(I work in logistics consulting and do network strategy design & 3PL selection as part of that so have a reasonably up to date view on comparative/competitive costs for this sort of thing - mostly in Europe though and appreciate the USA market is different)

That's actually not anything phenomenal -- and worse than I thought before I looked it up just now. I can't understand AMZN's stock valuation. They should really spin off AWS to be its own thing.

Their international margins are even worse in isolation, 4.1%. That's not even worth getting out of bed for, just buy some bonds and skip all the drama.

Unlike the US I believe in practice it's all but guaranteed next day too

Amazon Germany/France/Spain won't ship a huge variety of items to Ireland and obviously won't have the same composition of goods as English speaking countries.

It's just about worth it for Prime Video and Deliveroo Silver, but the Irish Prime membership doesn't even support household or family sharing...

Sadly it's only limited items, but you can also filter for just items that they have in their EU warehouse.

I recently bought some stuff (Ps2 controller etc) and it was still cheaper including shipping and duty then to order it in EU. Package was checked by customs.

Do we know that? Also: It's not about Amazon being cheaper but their competitors being allowed to be cheaper.

Online stores should be forced to allow manufacturers to use their sites as free advertising platforms to expose consumers to their products, while incentivizing them to actually complete the transaction someplace else?

Should brick-and-mortar stores not be allowed to offer price matching either?

Please feel free to implement whatever unfavorable policies you like in your own nations. You are welcome to further drive down your GDP per capita if you’d like. That’s not what the US is though.

The tricky part now is identifying the individual CN vendors which are not yet well known in the English marketplace, that are also known to make good quality things (and generally they're not cheap), I'll use Sofirn flashlights and headlamps as an example. Mostly not sold via Amazon.

Temu’s UI is unusable. You are constantly presented with roulette wheels for coupons you can’t dismiss. Its dark patterns have dark patterns. AliExpress is only mildly better in that you can dismiss stuff.

Both T and A still have listings for things that will likely result in you getting something entirely different. This usually applies to more expensive and physically larger items. You might order a greenhouse and get a photo of one or a schematic of one. And I don’t mean that the description will make it clear.

Both have a pattern where they might list let’s say an MP3 player which costs $30 but the price on the listing will be $3 because one of the product variants is just the case.

Amazon has comparatively reliable shipping and it’s included with the price on a majority of products if you have a Prime membership. While Temu and AliExpress do have US-based shipping they still don’t guarantee when the thing will arrive and if you are looking at these products the price difference basically disappears.

I am not defending Amazon by any means, but purely on usability it wins hands down.

IE, you're seeing and buying things they're selling directly, so they need to manage quality control, vs what is being sold on amazon, potentially a 3rd party seller who's cutting corners to make a nicer margin?

None of that is a knock against Chinese goods. I bought a set of Chinese carbon bicycle wheels last year and they're great. But, I went straight to the source and didn't take chances with AliExpress or Amazon.

I actually have a recent example : I do woodworking and for the last step of finishing some of the thing I build, I use a mixture of beeswax and linseed oil. Beeswax has been harder and harder to find locally. Not so long ago, every hardware shop had some. Now it has been displaced by synthetic product. So unless you know a local beekeeper, you are sol. So, resigned, I went to Amazon. It had a trove of listing for "100% natural beeswax". Turns out, ALL of them are paraffin dyed to look like beeswax. You can report it to Amazon, they don't care. They will reimburse you, but never remove the listing.

how do they have your email? this makes me worried

For all sorts of products like various electronic devices and kitchen gadgets, they are just iterating way faster on product feedback.

I think of some product I'd like to have, and discover somebody in China invented it 9 months ago and I can buy it through Amazon for $19. I buy it and use it for six months, then realize I really wish it had some other feature. I check Amazon, and now it's in its third generation with the feature I want plus two others.

I don't get why people are complaining. It's genuinely amazing, and a kind of entrepreneurial spirit I can only respect. Why people get hung up on the random-letter brand names is beyond me, who cares?

In UK, the average for my AliExpress orders is now 1 week.

Prices are much better than the consumer-focused brands and normally everything is higher quality as well.

Oh and prime video has ads now.

If the item is counterfeit, not only is sometimes the packaging/actual product identifiable by anyone that is actually a tech person, but lets assume that it's identical or whatever.

Unboxing?

When you open the AirPods box for the first time does the iPhone do that animation and say "Set up AirPods..." etc?

When you use it, does it sound at least kinda like the quality you expect from a 200 USD Apple headphone? Does Dolby Atmos work, the stems on both sides, the wireless charge on the box, the Find My features, live translation, transparency, noise cancellation? All of those features are present and working?

Going to settings -> AppleCare and Warranty should show the time of manufacture, of purchase, and the end time for the warranty (or if AppleCare, for AppleCare).

I guess I see a counterfeit passing my step 1: hardware, or maybe step 2: software (really shouldn't tbh? Apple should cover for this).

But the data on AppleCare and Warranty come from Apple's server. Even if they spoofed the serial number that would mean guessing a correct serial number for that same product type and spoofing the date of sale etc on AppleCare&Warranty.

I honestly don't see how this can happen. If the counterfeit is honestly so identical at that point it's just the same product, but even so.

I buy clothes, other tech stuff there. Is it really necessary to instill on me and hundreds of other OCDs the constant existential fear that everything we buy is actually an exactly identical and unverifiable impostor of the real item, but not actually real?

Edit: Just to clarify, I've indeed used warranty/AC+ on most of these items and all were real. For now.

Answer: you probably would, but Amazon engages in illegal, coercive price fixing to drive up the prices on those other sites by $50.

Because of principles?

It seems that in the past 20 years the concept of boycotting a company in response to their behaviour has been lost.

The last widespread boycott I remember was from the late 2000s against Sony, I can't even remember why ( rootkits on CDs? ) but I'm still boycotting them now as it's an automatic reaction.

That however can be solved with laws, like we did in Europe.

That "shopping around" for with price being the sole factor is the problem. That's what drives quality down. Not the Amazon markup.

I returned two products, got two different return codes, was supposed to send each back separately.

During the return (it was a Kohl's return), I forgot about the two different codes and gave both items to the clerk, who then packaged both items with only one code.

I got credited for the first item a few hours later. At that point, I realized my mistake of packaging both in the same return, but thought it was a lost case and chalked it up as a loss.

Imagine my surprise when, a few weeks (!) later , I got credited for the second return as well. How did they figure that one out? I don't know.

The most amazing customer service, where I did not even have to mention it and the error was still rectified.

And Walmart gets away with $14 because Walmart is intellectually stimulating?

Examples: 1.) Bought my wife a dress, it came and had multiple defects that were not in the photographs. I reached out to the seller and they didn't offer a refund but said "sorry". I have no recourse if I don't open a dispute. If I open a dispute I get penalized. 2.) I bought "Mid Century Modern" metal wall art. The listing said 1960's and the photos were of two metal wall art items with no markings. The items came with a clear "Made in China" marking on each of them that was not in the photos. These are modern inspired pieces not actual mid century modern. I opened a dispute and got my refund from the seller who didn't even ask to have them shipped back. 3.) Purchased a video game that showed NTSC ESRB rating on the front of the game in the photos. What came was the european PAL release. Not only is that version not playable on this console but the value of the two items is distinctly different (PAL is worth far less).

I'm done shopping on eBay until they have new management. At least Amazon honors their buyers policy.

I also run an ad blocker in all my devices and have to periodically disable it because it’s breaking random sites in ways that look like the site’s fault.

Try a different browser. I use Waterfox for most general purpose browsing and it rarely works with Walmart.com, while Chrome works fine.

Purchasing decisions for "this arrives in 2 days" are different than "this may take 2 weeks".

It's the difference between saving me a run to the local big box store or not.

Having a predictable delivery date for that on top of it most of the time being way faster than anywhere else is really nice. If I buy some of these somewhere else I might wait weeks for a small part due to logistics issues or low availability compared to Amazon

Not all purchases are things that are just consumable/materialistic. I find most of the time the stuff I buy on Amazon nowadays are things like this, where I want something I need but can't easily get locally or am too busy to go out and get during stores hours.

We never do impulse buys for frivolous throwaway consumerism junk but fast ~2 day delivery is still very helpful because... Life Happens ... such as stuff unexpectedly breaking and you want to have a replacement to quickly fix it.

Example of 2 events just in the last month: (1) garage door screw coupler broke. It's the piece that connects the motor shaft to the screw drive. You cannot buy this type of oddball part from Home Depot or Lowes. Amazon had it and delivered it the next day so I was able to repair the door immediately. The alternative of waiting a week+ for slower delivery means the door has to be disengaged from the track so it can be manually raised and lowered. This is not acceptable because I don't have the specific key to the garage locking mechanism from the outside. Why don't I have a key?!? Because life happens. I guess I could manually lock it from the inside and leave the car outside the garage for a week but I didn't like the idea of leaving a catalytic converter exposed to drive-by theft.

(2) was my Skechers work boots had the sole separated from the shoe. I bought the same model shoes from Amazon for $59.99 and had it in 2 days. I could drive to the local Skechers store but they charge $79.99. So either wait a week+ for slow delivery or pay $20 extra plus round trip gas money to buy at the local store.

Amazon quick delivery acts as a JIT (Just In Time) inventory system to take care of unexpected things that happen in life. That's a more sane alternative than holding a bunch of inventory of random parts for things that might go wrong.

Btw, Amazon often offers extra reward points credited to your account if you voluntarily choose slow delivery instead of 2 days. This is what we do the majority of the time. I assume Amazon does this pseudo "cashback" incentive as a way to consolidate as many customer orders as they can to optimize their delivery routes and reduce costs.

Yeah, but will I be at home when it does? We no longer live in a world where everyone has a nuclear family and the wife is always home while dad is at work. In 2026, only the rich can afford a housewife.

Most of the time I am indeed not in a hurry to receive my purchases. For most items I genuinely could not care less if it arrived tomorrow or two weeks from now. But I do need to know when it will arrive, so that someone is home to receive it.

"A month from now, on a Monday morning" versus "A month from now, on a Tuesday afternoon" makes a huge difference for me, as one of them would result in me having to walk to my front door and the other would result in me having to rent a car and spend an entire afternoon having to go to the other side of the city to pick it up at some warehouse.

90% of the time I choose next-day delivery it is because I know I will be home tomorrow, and the alternative is "some random day next week". If they offered me the option to pick out of a bunch of guaranteed delivery moments next week which are convenient for the seller/shipper, I would!

I'd win because I could remove the late-night impulse buys and de-duplicated things added by multiple family members.

They win because it simplifies shipping logistics/packaging and actually encourages more loose/impulse driven buying ("just add it to the cart, we'll review it later").

Every general store in every town everywhere can't possibly stock millions of individual products. When some item has a potential customer base of a few tens of thousands of people in a country of hundreds of millions, most stores would never get a single sale for that item. But when you can serve the entire country at once via the mail, having a single centralized warehouse specializing in that niche category of items is quite viable.

The only difference with Amazon is that you are buying from a single website, rather than going to the website of a small webshop specializing in your flavour of niche items. And the drawback is that Amazon has zero quality control, so rather than a store where you can browse for known-good curated high-quality niche items you will instead be drowned by piles of absolute garbage - with the occasional decent item hidden in between.

Sure, Amazon might beat your local store, but that doesn't mean it is good for buying niche items.

UPS is generally pretty good.

Maybe 2 years later I tried the free trial of Prime, if only to quiet the ads, and it was great... they must of extended their logistics network into my area and I get a lot of stuff in 1 day or 2 days now. I went through a phase of taking discounted or free Prime offers when I could but broke down and I've been maintaining a Prime subscription. It's probably not really worth it because my pattern is that I am typically heads down doing this or that and every other month or so I do a burst of buying stuff that I'd wanted for a while or I am doing some project that requires a lot of stuff. Then I might go a month and buy nothing on AMZN.

I picked it off someone’s wishlist, so didn’t really vet the seller. I thought I was being really proactive when I ordered, but now I will need to find an alternative at a local retail store, which will probably be difficult.

Last year at Christmas, my brother-in-law opened his gift to find a bunch of adult diapers. It was supposed to be a power tool.

Sure, Amazon takes the returns, but it’s still extremely disruptive when these things happen, and it’s happening more and more frequently.

You could also flip around the reading to.. boohoo poor sellers have to raise their prices elsewhere and take higher margin?

Why don't they figure out how to ship/delivery more quickly with a competitor with all those extra margin dollars they are being forced by Amazon to take elsewhere?

It's a shame neoliberals hallowed out US manufacturing but at least consumers around the world are benefitting.

If they are not going to tell me the day it is going to arrive, I am not buying. Thats the "prime" reason for using Amazon these days.

It seemed the interface was designed to hide the true delivery estimate in the last step and trick me into thinking the item would arrive on time.

I remember a friend in the 90s excited about his job at UPS. He laughed about the pee bottle. Same for people I know who work for usps and fedex.

Kind of makes sense. Where do you expect someone to pee who is driving around for 10 hours a day.

I assume they want to limit the amount of customer support more than advertising their logistics.

I've never had such a poor experience, including being repeatedly lied to by CS, and this was the last straw for me. I honestly don't miss Amazon, I buy less stuff and feel better about it.

In the 90s and 00s Amazon would fix things. The last time Amazon lost a “delivered” package they told me that they could do nothing about it. My ticket got escalated a few times and they offered a discount on ordering a replacement. I just did a chargeback with my credit card. I was frustrated with Amazon because I probably ordered 30 things a year for 10+ years and they trusted their driver over me saying I never got it.

I order books from a local indie bookstore and just wait a couple weeks for the books to show up from their wholesaler.

But for other stuff, including tools, why wouldn't I just order from a place I already have free 2-day (often overnight) shipping for, when my alternatives are physical big box stores? Like why go to Lowe's to buy a cross-cut jig when I can get it delivered right to my house in 24 hours for the same price? It's not even like my money could possibly go to an indie hardware store. They don't exist. Certainly not within an hour of me, which not only requires my time, but also money in the form of electricity to drive my car, plus the wear and tear on my car.

One even came with a sticker: "Thanks for giving this product a second life!"

The worst of the worst among us use Amazon as a try-before-you-buy or rental house. Their lax return policy encourages them.

If I buy anything important, especially expensive electronics, I buy it from somewhere else. If it's a reputable store with a strict return policy, I'm doubly sure there will be no fuckery.

Different forms of marketing work on different people. This one works on me. I'm going to shop at Amazon and Costco because, in the very few instances where I want to return an item that didn't live up to its promise, I can do so without incurring penalties.

When this happens, I'm already frustrated. I assembled a floor lamp for far longer than an adult should spend assembling it, and it's wobbly as shit. A corporation than nickel-and-dimes me at this point will incur my irrational wrath. Canadian Tire (a big box retailer of mostly low-quality wares here in Canada) has lost my business over a decade ago because of this. I tell myself: most Canadians are meek sheep that will return after being told "well akshually you can't return this because technically blah blah", but I'm not a sucker, I won't shop here on principle.

A company that doesn't create this experience for me will get my business and exploit whatever other blind spots I have with their marketing, dark patterns, opaque pricing, etc, because they didn't piss me off when I was ready to walk away for good.

The last straw was getting a blood pressure monitor (which they don’t even sell) in place of £400 smart glasses. They insisted I returned the monitor, then said I failed to return the glasses. Took months for them to refund me.

9 out of 10 I ask say it's about reliable delivery (not necessarily next day). Most people order things because they need them and have read the reviews, not because they are speculating at something they may need or are ok with getting something else. Clothing being a notable exception, unpredictably sized and variable quality, which nobody is happy about.

That's the Right of withdrawal[0] by EU law, though. Do you mean something else?

I mean, sure, smaller shops might not cover the costs for the return shipping, but I don't really mind.

[0]: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/ret...

I had to call to get a refund; admittedly, I think I may have been slightly outside the ordinary return window. The customer service representative was pretty reluctant to accept it, somewhat heavily suggesting that I didn't assemble it right.

I actually just recently cancelled my Amazon Prime, which I've had for probably 10+ years. Not solely based on this one experience, but a general decline in how much perceivable value I actually get out of it.

Some of that is intrinsic to a good chunk of what they're selling (poorly described imports from the Chinese market). I just ordered an assortment of cabling for shuffling PCIe signals around. Apparently there are a few different "standards" for pinouts on SFF-8643 and SFF-8654, but nobody actually describes them in their product listings! So I'll see which ones work with what I already have, and with each other, and the rest can go back. Sellers could have avoided that by doing that work once and describing their items, but they'd rather I do it instead. So when I do it, I don't feel bad about the returns.

But a lot of it is the dark patterns Amazon themselves choose to play. Nonstop pricing games make me push my actual purchasing decisions down the line. If something is on sale at a great price and I'm in the market, I'll just hit buy to lock in that price. I'll then try to do some research before it ships, but in general I've got 30+ days to make the actual purchase decision. This is what the seller must want, right? Or the same pricing games but after a purchase - if the price on something significantly drops, the answer I've gotten from CS is to buy a new one and return the old one. So if I already have other stuff I need to make a return trip for, that's what I do!

Or when I'm in the middle of building/repairing something, especially when I don't have a "trial" of "prime" (aka sunk cost fallacy), I'll order a few different types of items I think I might need. This way when they show up in a week+ (Slow, Spiteful Shipping) and I'm back focusing on the project, there is less chance of "oh I really needed this other thing" and having to wait another round trip.

With other web stores I just don't feel these type of dark pattern dynamics. Whereas Amazon is practically begging people to call their bluffs. So I call them.

Why? If I sell a quality product I have no fear of excess returns.

They then invested heavily in logistics, so now they could replace their support to annoying bots and use their market position to increase their margin.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU

I totally agree, but I find the quality of the items I get off of Amazon to generally be a lot less than other places I chose to shop. Likely due to the fact that I intentionally shop on other sites for specific products but on Amazon I get things that just aren't necessary for me so I spend less time curating the purchases.

But also if you go to support chat (not via the order details, which often rejects attempts at getting support) via the site footer, and escalate to an agent, you can tell them you don't have a post office that's easy to get to for you and don't drive etc. and they will just issue you a refund (if it's a quality problem). Done this many times when the product was damaged.

If I think there's basically no likelihood of me returning something, I'll sometimes shop elsewhere, but for anything where there's even a chance of me not liking it for whatever reason I will buy on Amazon now.

The sheer logistics and human will that made that possible is crazy to me.

Extrapolate to multiple locations in Miami alone. Then Florida. Then East Coast. Then USA. Then Europe. Global locations.

Who is in charge of all this? How do they keep track of all this? How do they identify a tiny little podunk location is fucking up and how do they find someone they can trust to run it?

It's crazy! Think about it next time you return something to Amazon.

But I’m weird like that; I also think ordering everything online is inherently immoral (provided you are an able bodied person living in a city)

My little experience with Amazon is that quality assurance has been moved to the customer. It is on you to see that a product is wrong/not what you wanted.

> At this point, I'm happy to pay 10% extra just to buy from Amazon.

As the article states, you are paying more than 10% extra because Amazon. And everybody else too.

I'd say this is probably a US privilege. Ive had some trouble returning items in india

“Don’t like the monopoly? You’re free to go elsewhere. No wait, there is no elsewhere. Oh well, I guess you must like it here then since you keep coming back. “

If Costco requires a separate SKU, the seller still has complete pricing freedom everywhere else.

> This is obviously, hilariously untrue when Amazon produces hundreds of billions of dollars of profit every year

It's an irrelevant figure to your claim. The relevant statistic would be the markup, not the aggregate profit.