Judging from all those packages y'all ordered, this shouldn't be a surprise: Amazon passes $100bn in quarterly sales for first time The ongoing COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic helped Amazon record its first quarter to pass $100bn in revenue – and it grew profits 118 per cent. Business has been booming for the e-retailer as netizens, stuck at home in lock down to avoid the web-era plague, turned to online shopping as stores shut down and travel was restricted …
I still buy stuff on Amazon, but it's way less than in the past because the site is a mess. Once upon a time they sold their own stuff and were responsible for handling their own returns and their own refunds. Simple.
But now it's:
- Resellers because Amazon wants to shirk the responsibility of warranties and returns onto somebody else
- Resellers who are "fulfilled" by Amazon and those that aren't with mystery P&P and delivery times
- Scammers posing as resellers
- Labyrinthine refunds with onerous requirements, e.g. I had to ship a pair of fake runners back to a scammer and provide a postal receipt & Amazon would only refund me for the runners, not the postage.
- Aliexpress resellers selling the same stuff as Aliexpress but with a 2x markup
- Confusing search results (including new and used items) and annoying filters & sort options
- Fake reviews from all the resellers
- Constant upselling of Amazon junk products like tablets, Alexa, Prime, credit cards etc.
- Black Friday / Cyber Monday is a joke used to promote Prime and little else.
So basically the whole site has turned to shit. I might still buy the odd thing there but these days if I want Chinese junk I may as well just go to Aliexpress and save money. And if I want anything else, then a good search around often reveals Amazon isn't the cheapest.
The last time I cancelled my trial of Prime it popped up a list of all the crap I'd lose but it was relatively easy to cancel.
If you want to see an onerous cancellation process, sign up for a trial of NowTV and try to cancel. They throw up something like 4 or 5 screens, all variants of "are you sure you want to cancel you'll miss out on X if you do?". The screens are all designed to be visually disconcerting and passive aggressive to discourage people from proceeding.
Well the one advantage to Amazon over aliexpress is the quick shipping. At least in the US, I can get most stuff within a day or two, while with aliexpress I'm usually looking at a month, give or take. If it was a couple days versus a week I wouldn't mind, but a month is too long to wait.
I'm checking Walmart first these days to try to limit what I buy from Amazon though, for the reasons you mention above. Pretty much anything with lithium ion batteries I stay well away from on Amazon, because the "cheap Chinese crap" or "cheap Chinese clone of a reputable brand that shouldn't be crap" could have some pretty nasty consequences there. Not that lithium ion batteries are 100% perfect even from top brands, but that's one of the easiest things to cut corners on to save money when going cheap or cloning cheap.
It's all getting a bit silly now isn't it - super-corps hoovering up all the cash, primarily from lazy fuc*ers sitting at home with nothing better to do and a home page set to Amazon. Can a company get too big and powerful? I think the answer is yes it can. Personally, I don't order anything from Amazon unless there's no other choice - I'll always look elsewhere first. It will only take a few hundred million buyers to think the same way, and about a decade, and Amazon will be out of business. Yaaay!
The site (amazon.de) has become a minefield where you need to be constantly on guard lest you are sold something you don't want. This started with pushing Prime at each checkout which was annoying enough. Now recurring orders on some items are the default and modal popups spring up when you put something in the basket. These push additional items Amazon for some reason seems to think I would like (with dismal accuracy, I might add) and/or extended warranty insurance (which should, in general, be banned as fraud, if you ask me) even when I'm trying to buy an usb memory stick worth a couple of €. Also, the last time I used the .co.uk version (before that becoming impractical due to Brexit) I was dismayed to notice that Amazon has gotten into the Dynamic Currency Conversion scam (i.e. a "service" which consists solely of giving its user a worse exchange rate than the VISA/Mastercard rate). This too as default, of course.
In summary: what used to be a very convenient web shop has become a drag to use. Also, prices aren't necessarily that great either, it seems I can often find the same product cheaper elsewhere.
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