[gryf]

Just before COVID I did some lowish volume selling on eBay of an imported official product. They are "second sourced" aka "badly cloned" by a couple of Chinese crap shifters as well. I had to fend off various counterfeit reports and even people in China buying them with shill accounts, then cancelling the order until my listed stock was depleted. My eBay account was suspended twice within a month.

Eventually I gave up but I decided I'd spend a few months trashing the market first so I ran a selenium job daily which went and reported all of the drop ship sellers for counterfeit goods. That was incredibly effective. But really I would never get into a fight with a Chinese drop shipper again. I sort of broke even with difficulty. There were no gains.

I'm in the UK and I tend to not bother with Amazon myself now because it is an ocean of garbage which is difficult to find anything half decent on. I tend to go to Argos who have same day delivery that actually works for a small fee on most products or hit the local supermarket. I couldn't possibly consider entering that market as a seller based on the absolutely shitty customer experience.

I use AWS during the day and the quality there isn't much better. The whole org needs a quality and honesty shakedown.

The market is definitely open to an Amazon competitor which has a store front not chock full of garbage, a decent logistics network, returns policy and reasonable pricing. All I hear is people complaining about Amazon's mindset monopoly.

[noelsusman]

>The market is definitely open to an Amazon competitor which has a store front not chock full of garbage, a decent logistics network, returns policy and reasonable pricing.

We already had that before Amazon took over, and we still have that today. In the US, Target and Walmart fit that description, as does Best Buy for electronics. Walmart has long had a reputation for poor quality products, but they're practically a luxury store compared to the trash that fills Amazon these days.

Problem is none of them can keep up with Amazon on shipping times. My tire pressure gauge broke yesterday morning and I had a new one on my porch by 6pm. Amazon may just be AliExpress with faster shipping these days, but faster shipping is a big deal to people.

[gryf]

Argos here in the UK can. Same day delivery which is reliable (unlike amazon!) or you can actually go and pick stuff up usually immediately at actual retail stores. And it's mostly the same price as Amazon now as well.

[Spooky23]

Target is closest but you need to drive.

I left my toolkit in my wife’s car and needed a pair of pliers. Ordered from Target, and a person handed it to me in my car in my way home from work about 90 minutes later.

[tartoran]

How often you need something shipped the next day? Yeah, use amazon as a convenience store once in a while but do your shopping elsewhere

[lowercased]

I buy so little that when I'm buying something (not food) it's because whatever I have is broken, and it's something I need. I may be in the minority, but when something breaks, I want (or need) a replacement ASAP. I've got enough stores within driving distance that I can usually replace something same or next day, but I'm far enough 'out in the sticks' that the only place that will deliver 'same day' is amazon (and that only started for my neighborhood in the past 6 months or so).

[MonkeyMalarky]

Walmart is reliably trashy though, not everything has to be top of the line.

[tomcam]

Sorry you went through this. Demoralizing. But I would love to hear more about how you went about this:

> I ran a selenium job daily which went and reported all of the drop ship sellers for counterfeit goods.

[gryf]

Oh it was dead easy. I just wrote something in selenium python which ran the search daily and went through each item, checked the seller was China based, checked for a missing keyword in the text body and opened the report item form and filled it in!

Took me about an hour to write and an hour to futz with chrome webdriver.

This was fuelled by rage and a can of red bull. A dangerous combination for revenge.

[tomcam]

Hilarious and appropriate tagline. You’re doing the Lord’s work :)

And thanks for the other details. Since you didn’t mention Python at first I was trying to figure out if it was some kind of new built-in script language, or Node, or what.

[pas]

Nowadays Playwright is probably the best way to do these browser automation scripts. We use it with Typescript.

[FredPret]

> a store front not chock full of garbage, a decent logistics network, returns policy and reasonable pricing

All this is so much easier said than done, that if you did that, you'd have an Amazon-sized company. You'd also have a huge brand. Of course, then the temptation would be to list cheap Chinese crap to easily capitalize on your brand's value.

Amazon was a great company until it got MBA'ed. Thankfully they made online shopping mainstream, so you can now buy direct from reputable businesses who have not yet stepped into the brand-dilution trap.

[mizzao]

> a decent logistics network

That's gonna be a hard one since they've basically created a delivery network that is bigger than UPS.

[ripper1138]

AWS isn’t perfect, but it is absolutely the highest “quality” cloud provider money can buy right now.

[gryf]

You're right. It's still not as good quality as the pile of HPE and Cisco kit we replaced with it and it's more expensive at the TCO level.

[CameronNemo]

This is assuming you have a competent infrastructure and networking team, which is expensive. Lots of middle managers don't like hiring engineers that earn more than they do. It defies the pecking order.

[FredPret]

If you go all-in on cloud, you now need a team of cloud experts and you are beholden to whatever pricing strategy AWS/GCP/Azure deem appropriate in future.

It's also a terrible deal for the engineers who have to learn all this cloud stuff - instead of learning general computing, you learn how to work with vendor X. If they change things, go out of business, or get too expensive, that knowledge becomes useless.

If computing is a core part of your business, you should get good at it.

[gryf]

We have many more people running our cloud that we had infra. It's far more complex.

[CameronNemo]

Easier to hire lots of low paid people than a few highly paid engineers. I don't dispute that TCO including labor is generally higher with cloud infrastructure.

[gryf]

All our engineers cost more than the DC engineers we had before.

[slackfan]

If aws is the top quality cloud provider, then might as well give up now and buy a server a rack and an ac

[pluc]

good luck getting the same type of offering from vmware

[hedora]

Kubeadm? Ansible?

[temp_account_32]

+1 for just using Argos or a similar store instead. It takes too long on Amazon to weed out the AliExpress tier stuff and ordering certain things like high value electronics from there is just way too risky.

The mere curation of products has become a highly valuable service, saving you money and time.