I’ll bet you just didn’t notice. A huge fraction of the name brand items I’ve bought on there were usable, but fake or knockoffs. You’d have to already own or be experienced with the real one to know. For example, I bought an electric shaver replacement blade on there. After 3 months it was dull and the paint flaked off. The real ones are not painted so don’t flake and last 6 months but I had to already know these facts to tell.
I buy things. I get what I bought. Protein powders, USB chargers, ev charging parts, coffees, teas, brand name things, etc. I “buy again” and have no issues. I’ve bought direct from some vendors too (protein powders, oat bars, coffees…), shaving blades, and I get the same stuff I bought from Amazon.
I do tend to buy from brand stores and not aggregators or unknown sellers (I’ve been an aggregator for sneakers, but I drop-shipped via the brands directly; I’m more than familiar with SellerCentral).
And my argument isn’t that no one has these issues, but I’m pushing back on the “who even buys on Amazon anymore?” retort.
do you chemically analyze your protein powder to see if it matches the real stuff? do you tear open your chargers to see if the internals are same as the real OEM? if not how are you so confident you're not getting counterfeits?
A lot of the fake stuff on Amazon is close to, or the full quality of the real thing... many of them are "ghost shift counterfeit" - e.g. made in the actual factory by the actual workers making the real thing, but sold illegally. In this case, I could see many people not really caring.
One thing I've noticed is that you don't really know where its coming from on Amazon. It will say its fulfilled by Amazon themselves, or the manufacturer, but when the package comes it is often actually from some shady 3rd party that was never mentioned. A few times I've had broken, damaged, or dirty items that were obvious returns resold as new. Sometimes in janky homemade style packaging like an eBay item.
Same here, but presumably, I have a feeling that I have a pretty good ability for discernment. Thinking of all my non-technical and even technical coworkers that fall for the monthly corporate phishing exercises, there seems to be a non-trivial amount of folks that haven't built up that discernment muscle.
When I visit my elderly mom after several months, I can't quite understand how she's purchased all sorts of bunk from everywhere, not just Amazon. From church MLM sales, to random youtube ads that take her to a store front. While the things she has purchased isn't an absolute scam, they tend to either be low quality or far overpriced for the purchased price.
I do think that there is both a tech privilege that our cohort shares in both high compensation and a better tuned intuition as we tend to be the creators of many products and have a good smell test when it comes to how the sauce is made. The high comp allows for us to purchase the high quality, brand-name version of many products. While understanding the sauce behind a lot of stuff informs my internal heuristics of price, pictures, marketing, 1,3, and 4 star reviews.
I do get the impression that those that are scammed on Amazon tend to be the cohort that is looking for esoteric goods, bleeding edge folks, or just the generally non-privileged folks that will gamble on a $7 Amazon item rather than a $100 version of the thing.
I can see where my mental heuristic is informed that most chargers are bunk, so I never buy chargers on Amazon unless they are Anker or straight from Apple. Cables I will gamble on though.
I mean, I've never gotten any knock off items from Amazon that I'm aware of either. But I'm certainly not buying something that goes into my actual body from there.
