[jxramos]

Me and the wife had this conversation last night about whether or not buying things online is really saving time since the means of evaluation is all mental/reading. Confronted with a product in the physical world one can mobilize all sorts of senses at once to evaluate quality simultaneously. Online we're stuck reading reviews and gauging authenticity/quality. The sad part that's become the reality too is that once the thing arrives we're spending extra time scrutinizing the product for signs of being a counterfeit, even when sold directly from Amazon.

[Slansitartop]

Yeah, I've drastically scaled back my Amazon shopping and scaled up my shopping at physical retailers like Best Buy and Barnes and Noble or specialized competitors like Newegg. My reasoning is:

1. Amazon Logistics delivery sucks and I hate them so much.

2. When you actually look, Amazon is no longer price competitive with big box retailers on a lot of products in a lot of areas.

3. I can get my stuff today rather than in ??? + 2 days.

4. I can actually see the stuff in person, and assess quality and size.

5. Much smaller counterfeit problem.

6. I'm afraid of Amazon getting too dominant in the retail space, so I feel good about sending business to its competitors.

I try to only go to Amazon when I'm buying something weird that I don't know how to buy elsewhere.

[sincerely]

Interestingly enough, I find Amazon often has worse prices for the relatively-niche books I used to swear by Amazon for - art and critical theory, mainly. They used to have the convenience aspect as well, but now I generally feel like I can get better service by buying from the publisher and I feel better about it for the anti-monopoly reason you touched on

[rootsudo]

It depends, amazon quality is still good when compared to third world.

I travel frequntly to China/Philippines/SG and you need to go in person to buy random crap. I hate it. Lazada is the Asian Amazon and it is a total crapshoot.

I never complained about Amazon, whenever I have a issue it's always remedied correctly, returns are absolute and money is refunded.

Lazada tries to play games, tries to say "change of mind is not a valid reason of excuse" or worse it's bait and switch. A picture of a bookshelf with pictures by a palm tree, what's delivered is a doll house toy.

I hate online shopping in Asia. Japan is the only exception because of Amazon and Japan commitment to customer service.

[jxramos]

Check out this solution from Bosch, I always wondered about generating unique codes per product instance. It would need to be a subset of a very large space, in this case 3418

http://www.protect.bosch.com