[bombcar]

Amusingly enough if you trace the history of brand names ... this is why they started!

And this is the strength that the major retailers have against Amazon - if Amazon won't police (and they have problems with commingling counterfeit brands, too) then Walmart and Target will jump ahead.

[fuball63]

I was of a similar mind this year, but when I went to Walmart's website, they had 3rd party sellers on there too. It is really annoying, especially with the pandemic, trying to sift through all the trash online.

I ended up buying we webcam from BestBuy.com, because a webcam I got from Amazon was pay-for-review and was utter garbage.

Just more evidence, to me, that the era of internet business models being "get everything online" (Amazon, Spotify, Steam) is closing, and the era of online aggregation as a product is just beginning.

[hanklazard]

I've also found myself buying a lot of things from Best Buy, something I would have scoffed at 5-7 years ago. These days, I just want to know that I'm getting a genuine (vs replica) product and most of the time I can go pick-up my purchase same day, solving the "fast shipping" problem.

[coldpie]

Since NewEgg started up their 3rd party seller program, I've also switched to Best Buy. Running out of places to buy from that aren't flooded with trash.

[kabdib]

One 3rd party seller on NewEgg has been ripping off customers for years. (You order something from them -- say, a mouse -- and they find some shitty used product on Ebay or someplace and ship that to you. Getting a refund can be a challenge).

Multiple complaints (including contacting the CEO of NewEgg) haven't removed this bad actor. So I just assume that this practice of retaining terrible 3rd parties reflects NewEgg's true* extent of their caring for customers, and I don't buy stuff from them anymore.

[ethbr0]

Aka "the Etsy effect" (lowering the bar for new sellers results in a flood of bad-faith sellers)

[mcpherrinm]

BestBuy has added third party sellers online too: https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/about/selling-on-marketplace/bl...

Though they don’t seem to have many yet, I did run across it recently. In-store pickup items are still seemingly safe though.

[thwarted]

This is the trend because the existence of the brand's website as a multi-seller marketplace is considered more valuable/higher ROI than the actual direct selling of items. And that's a reasonable view considering most of what is being sold is commodity and prices, thus margin, having downward pressure. The e-commerce website gets a positive reputation and a brand is built for being a good place to buy things, so it expands into being a hosting platform other sellers, with the intent of drawing more customers based on the brand reputation.

[jamiek88]

At the risk of long term diluting that brand reputation.

[coldpie]

Seems to not be on the US site, for now, but that's very discouraging to see. I don't know where to turn for electronics if Best Buy goes to crap, too.

(I smell a market opportunity for a retailer that sells only quality products...)

[lotsofpulp]

Adding third party sellers is not a problem. Removing the ability to filter for items sold by the retailer, and commingling inventory with random resellers is the problem.

[bradfa]

I’ve started buying electronics from B&H Photo and Provantage recently. So far I’ve been very happy and the prices are reasonable.

[scioto]

> Since NewEgg started up their 3rd party seller program, I've also switched to Best Buy. Running out of places to buy from that aren't flooded with trash.

I still buy from NewEgg, but the first thing I do when I hit the search results is to click the Sold by Newegg button. Might be a few bucks more, but at least I'm getting the real deal ... at least so far.

[treis]

NewEgg screwed me out of a monitor. I wouldn't trust them as as retailer anymore. That's from someone who used to buy all their computer stuff through them.

[jonnycomputer]

Did NewEgg do that? Damn. Irritated with Walmart for the same reason. I want to know what I'm getting, dammit.

[brewdad]

I've shifted a lot of purchases to Best Buy as well. I also ordered far more products directly from the manufacturer's web site this year. Many offer the same free shipping if you are buying anything of value.

I figure if Netgear sends me a fake switch when ordering directly from them it's time to give up on capitalism.

[zucked]

Searching out the manufacturer (assuming there is a brand behind the product and not just an Amazon shop) has made my recent efforts, too. A surprising number of times, the item is cheaper from the manufacturer, and they offer free shipping or a coupon for further discount. I imagine that works out for the buyer and seller - I get a genuine product at their chosen price, and they get to keep fees that would have otherwise gone to Amazon.

[bombcar]

I avoid marketplace sellers like the plague - usually you can do a "ships and sold" or "pickup today" to weed them out.

[searchableguy]

> if Amazon won't police (and they have problems with commingling counterfeit brands, too) then Walmart and Target will jump ahead.

I think they are solving this differently. Amazon introduced their own brands for almost all daily necessities. Amazon basic, amazon pharmacy, amazon fashion, amazon elements, amazon pantry, amazon echo and few more. They generally have average or above average products at an affordable price and good support.

You can buy AC, fridge, vacuum cleaner, clothes, baby food, dog food, dog bed, multi-vitamin, ramen, TWS, carpet, blanket, swiss army knife, solder machine, and a lot more from amazon itself now.

[_jal]

Yeah, tried that. Amazon Basics are as hit-or-miss as the rest of the garbage.

I'm frankly surprised they want to put their name on what appears to be dollar store crap that might be fine, might not, who knows. You can almost see the flickering neon and smell the cleaning fluid.

[ethbr0]

> smell the cleaning fluid

2020 brick and mortar's new motto

[capitainenemo]

The last time I bought a "new" phone "Sold by: Amazon.com Services LLC" it arrived several weeks late, with a burned in screen, scuff marks, and randomly rebooting.

My impression is they did not have the item they were selling, and were relying on some presumably "trusted" reseller to provide it.

I ended up purchasing a used one in much better condition on eBay for several hundred dollars less where the condition at least matched the sale entry.

[pr0zac]

Be careful using eBay, a rather scary number of listings on there are people just relisting items from Amazon at a higher price and reshipping (or just ordering with your shipping address, I had one eBay purchase come directly from Amazon).

[bittercynic]

There are plenty of terrible sellers on ebay, too, but it is much easier to sort out the garbage sellers. Seller feedback is right there in the search results, and though you can't filter by feedback any more, it is easy enough to just skip over any listings with a low number or less than 99.9% positive.

[robotnikman]

From my experience i've had some mixed results with the quality of Amazon basics products.

I remember buying a charger for my phone, only for the plastic shell of the charger to break in half a few months later

[SilasX]

Semi-related: there's that 4000 year old clay tablet recording a customer service complaint, so ... old problem, reliably signaling product quality.

https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-ancient-writings/4...

[mbesto]

> Walmart and Target will jump ahead.

Actually, I think it's D2C that will jump ahead. The problem with Walmart and Target is they either (a) have limited brand selection (target) or (b) they dilute themselves so much to compete with Amazon that they eventually become Amazon (Walmart).

[coldpie]

Limited brand selection is actually a benefit. I don't want to spend an hour flipping through shitty USB-C cables to find the one that won't nuke my device. I want to pay the buyer at the retailer a few cents to do that for me.

[zucked]

You're just shuffling the effort of finding a good quality cable upstream to finding a good quality retailer.

[fuzxi]

Well, yes. The difference is that once you find a trusted retailer, you don't need to put in the same effort every time you need to buy something. You just trust them to have vetted their products for you.

[KirillPanov]

That's okay. I use retailers way more often than I buy cables. Find a good retailer and you can buy several products from them over time, not just one.

[ethbr0]

I dunno. I don't think anyone actually wants D2C, for rare-purchase (ie the mass majority of goods).

It's one thing if the brand has an ongoing relationship with its customers, but nobody wants the burden of dealing with 1,000 slightly different processes for ordering toilet paper.

That's the inherent value of Paypal et al. -- abstracting diversity on one side into a standard interface on the customer side.

[mbesto]

> It's one thing if the brand has an ongoing relationship with its customers, but nobody wants the burden of dealing with 1,000 slightly different processes for ordering toilet paper. That's the inherent value of Paypal et al. -- abstracting diversity on one side into a standard interface on the customer side.

I guess you've never ordered something from a Shopify based store then?

[ethbr0]

Shopify is Stripe + Ruby. Same strategic idea as PayPal

Point being: D2C doesn't solve the trust problem in a scaleable way, except for repeat purchases

[mbesto]

> Shopify is Stripe + Ruby.

What on earth does their payment processor and tech choice have to do with a direct to consumer model? I'm talking about the features for the consumer when they shop on a shopify based store.

Trust doesn't scale naturally. That's the point that the GP comment was making. What we saw with Amazon is that bundling[0] works and can scale, but once it reaches that point and trust erodes, then unbundling becomes more appealing to the consumer.

Shopify has struck an interesting middle ground. Lots of the features that make the bundle attractive (one login, saved CC/details, etc.) are baked into Shopify stores. It'll be interesting to see if Shopify rolls out some sort of "Fulfilled by Shopify" and then a "Prime" because then the consumer can ensure quick/free delivery without dealing with the bazaar that is Amazon.

[0] - https://a16z.com/2014/08/15/a16z-podcast-the-topic-thats-las...

[ethbr0]

The Shopify features you outlined are the "how", but not the "why". As in, why would I buy from a Shopify store, if an equivalent product were offered by a bundler?

1,000,000 stores using Shopify are effectively the same as 1,000,000 products on Amazon, only less convenient.

I think the overall takeaway is that trust doesn't scale to Amazon-now-size: i.e. one of the biggest retail companies on the planet.

What it did scale to (and very well) was Amazon-1995-2010-size (eg Etsy or eBay), and there's a lot of size between D2C and those variants of Amazon.

I'm open for convincing, but I don't see a path to "D2C eats the world," when for relatively modest amounts of capital one could create a smaller, right-size Amazon that could bundle and dominate.

[OJFord]

Are you calling anything that uses PayPal/Stripe/Shopify not D2C?

[rurp]

Unfortunately Walmart seems to be doing their best to be just as bad as Amazon. I had good luck ordering from them for the past few years but more recently it's gotten almost as bad. They now have a lot of fake/junk products being sold by random parties, plus I had a really awful experience with their customer service recently.

The product page for one item that my partner was looking to buy for her Mom's birthday said something like "Free 2-day shipping, receive it by the 4th". Well when she went to check out the only option to get it by that date cost $30+ dollars. I ended up getting on the phone with a support person who fully acknowledged that the shipping info was wrong but to my shock completely dismissed it as not being a problem.

I said that people were putting items into their cart based on false information and the response was basically a dismissive shrug. We went back and forth a few times to make sure I really understood his response and there's no doubt that he did not care that they were displaying false shipping info.

Since then I've been wary of buying anything else from Walmart.

[robocat]

> I ended up getting on the phone with a support person who fully acknowledged that the shipping info was wrong but to my shock completely dismissed it as not being a problem ...We went back and forth a few times to make sure I really understood his response and there's no doubt that he did not care that they were displaying false shipping info.

You have as much agency and incentive to fix the problem as the support person. Most arguments for why the support person should spend their time and energy trying to fix a problem outside their authority, and their reasons for not doing so, could equally be applied to you.

[fuzxi]

As the face of the company at that moment, a better response is to pretend to care and say you'll pass on the message.

[jimmaswell]

I get the sense this problem is massively overstated around here. My experience on Amazon is great, same for everybody I know who uses it.

[chihuahua]

I agree. I've had about 400 Amazon orders over the past 20 years, and as far as I can remember, with every single one the item was as described and with good quality. I think I've had 3 problems over the years (item didn't arrive; missing part; container of spices opened during shipping) that were accidental in nature, and they were easy to resolve (refund or replacement)

It does help to be a bit sceptical about some listings. For example, a webcam by "GREETBUAY" for $25 is probably not going to be of high quality. So I don't buy those kinds of things. But in cases where the nature of the item is that it's a single piece of plastic that just needs to be the right shape, I've bought them from sellers with bizarre machine-generated names and received exactly what I wanted.

[javert]

I go to Walmart or the grocery store if I need stuff from Amazon that may be counterfeit.

Batteries, for example.

Amazon is throwing away money.

[capitainenemo]

Completely agree. Unless I'm familiar with the seller on Amazon (a known brand like Anker) I try to stick to Walmart, Target, Staples. Bonus, often times the identical item can be found at a lower price. Downside is the shipping may take a few days more.

For something like an SD card or a battery your chance of getting a counterfeit or unreliable product is pretty high. I prefer not to think too much about how that maps to food. There was an article (I think here on HN) a few years ago where a bookseller who was forced to buy Amazon ads for his own book just so the counterfeits wouldn't outrank him on Amazon.

[throwaway201103]

I would absolutely never order food, supplements, OTC meds, etc. from Amazon.

[JadeNB]

> Amusingly enough if you trace the history of brand names ... this is why they started!

That sounds like an interesting history. Do you have any recommendations for reading on it?