[opportune]

Yeah, until someone creates a website that just ships the products they say they have, and people type in the URL for the site directly and shop there?

If online shopping were truly such a terribly scammy UX in 100% of cases people would stop using it or shift to shopping from trusted sellers who recognize the tremendous amount of value they can capture by not scamming people.

[mrweasel]

> If online shopping were truly such a terribly scammy UX in 100% of cases people would stop using it or shift to shopping from trusted sellers

That slide has already started. I can't buy stuff on Amazon anymore, because I don't trust the quality or that I'm not scammed. Unless I trust the author I'd question buying self published books. There's a number of Chinese website, like Wish, that I don't understand. Why bother shipping an item to a customer if you're running a scam? People order dress and get a plastic Christmas tree... Why even bother sending the tree? Why produce shitty products that break after first use, why not just straight up rob people, seem more genuine and with less environmental impact.

There are whole categories of products that can not longer be bought online and an even larger category that can only be purchased from trusted companies.

The level of scams have reached new heights in the past year and unless we do something to address "A.I." generated content the internet will drown in useless nonsense.

[phpisthebest]

>>Why even bother sending the tree? Why produce shitty products that break after first use, why not just straight up rob people,

Could be the same reasons Scam Contractors do "some work" if you hire someone to redo your bathroom, and they take the money and run, that is clear criminal fraud. If they take the money, so some amount of work, then run it becomes a civil contract dispute.

[martin_a]

> Why bother shipping an item to a customer if you're running a scam?

Plausible deniability.

"There seems to have been some..." looks up excuse for the day "... unfortunate mix-up with your order."

Lots of people will just not react, because it's not worth their money and at least they received something.

[bobboies]

So the trouble is these market places allowing third party vendors on there (obviously).

All you need is a system to authenticate reputable sellers. Instead of looking at the stars on a product and clicking “buy now,” folks just need so ask: do I know this seller? Is this the ACTUAL publisher selling me this book?

I’d rather go into a real shop anyway. Unless it’s buying some hard-to-find item there’s no excuse.

[bunga-bunga]

> I’d rather go into a real shop anyway

You’re assuming that scams don’t make their way into regular distributors as they try to cut corners and maintain competitiveness.

You already see established brands lower the quality of their products after the first round of reviews online. If found out, they just blame manufacturing. Sorry.

[JohnFen]

True, but it's much less of a problem in physical shops. You can actually examine the merchandise. You know that the item you're paying for is literally the item that you're getting. You're dealing with the shop face-to-face, which reduces a lot of the more brazen scams. And if you have a problem, the shop is likely to do something to fix it -- and if they don't, you have realistic legal options.

In most ways, buying from a brick-and-mortar establishment is a better choice than buying online.

[jasonladuke0311]

Yep, Patagonia is suing Nordstrom for selling fakes: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/retail/patagonia-accus...

[bobboies]

Nordstrom being a third party vendor of course. You want Patagonia, go to Patagonia. :)

In my mind we’re talking about what is a better solution to the problem, and it’s that companies WILL protect their IP. If someone buys fake Patagonia, Patagonia loses out on a sale.

Amazon doesn’t own much of anything IP-Wise on their marketplace in the grand scheme. And they don’t care who buys what as long as products are moving. It’s easier for them to just pay out returns than handle the actual problem.

[bradknowles]

Marketplaces need to be held liable for products and services sold through them.

And when you have a dispute with a seller that came through a marketplace, your dispute should be with the marketplace and it is then up to the marketplace to recover the value of the goods from the seller.

[gnopgnip]

Amazon has been problematic for a while. I think it was 2019 when I remember filtering to sold by amazon.com was a lot harder, but before that there were still problems with tons of low quality products and fake reviews

Costco bucks this trend though

[red-iron-pine]

> Why bother shipping an item to a customer if you're running a scam?

Because they have a warehouse full of ugly misprinted clothes and need to get rid of them. and those clothes still cost (some) money to make or acquire.

and as others have said, not sending anything is wire fraud, and outright scams will catch criminal charges; one more line on an Interpol indictment. Crappy or underperforming goods are a civil issue, and no one is launching an international lawsuit over a $100 item

[freeopinion]

This doesn't just apply to physical merchandise. And it isn't new. Isn't this the whole point of sites like yelp? Or Fox News? Whether you need a good auto mechanic or good mayor. Or if you want to know if a movie is worth paying for or whether paper bags are bad for the environment.

"How to verify any claim" has to become a formal subject like math and reading to be taught in stages over several years. It has to have real homework problems to practice different strategies. But in the end, do we come up with different ratings or logic categories to say this particular question is fifth degree hard to get right? Can we identify the elements that build trust? Does it help in poker if you know another player's family? Does it help in voting for student body president if they previously served as class president? Is it better to buy a blender from the same company that made your favorite dishwasher? Can you take a chance on a newcomer if they don't speak your language or have your accent? What if some claim hasn't been published in a peer-reviewed journal I recognize?

[blq10]

People willing to take risk on Wish because they are spending frivolously and would like to spend less frivolously.

Scams are high, but not so high that you won't usually get what you asked for.

[labster]

We’re in a race to the bottom. There’s no way a company selling legitimate products will be able to compete or grow a customer base in the AI future, because we’ll be swimming in garbage.

[soerxpso]

This assumes that the only ways people have to find companies are search engines and other mediums that are prone to AI takeover. If everyone starts to realize that most of the surface internet is garbage, they would start communicating with humans they know about which places are not garbage. It was possible to find good businesses to interact with before Google existed.

Obviously in a world where every online retailer is nearly useless, a guy who creates an online retailer that is not useless would immediately have anyone he personally tells about it as customers, and anyone they tell about it, and so on (since in this hypothetical, everyone is desperate for a good retailer).

[bsenftner]

And the few, lone, honest online retailers get early discovered by online scammers who turn that honest retailer inside out, destroy them financially, and then take over their URL. I've seen it happen, and it nearly happened to me but I shut down rather than spiral down, unable to wage war on so many fronts.

[codpiece]

Could you please elaborate? This is fascinating.

[pbhjpbhj]

Even when you take a recommendation from yourself ... ie re-buy a product, it often seems that the company has been captured by VC and the brand has been used to make short term profits and it's no longer any better than whatever white label products you can find on AliExpress.

[UtopiaPunk]

That's how people find the good torrent spots, so topical.

[andrei_says_]

We swim in garbage already (looking at amazon) but bhphoto and sweetwater still exist.

[INGSOCIALITE]

Sweet water is great - they even have a dedicated rep call you a little after your order arrives to make sure you’re happy with the product and that it’s just what you wanted.

Plus they send you candy

[extraduder_ire]

mcmaster-carr exists too. I've never been in region they serve though

[RajT88]

Newegg as well.

[Izkata]

Newegg is now an amazon-style marketplace, with stuff they sell mixed in to the rest same as how AmazonBasics is mixed in to the rest.

[yomlica8]

Newegg is a shadow of its former self, but it is still possible to turn the 'sold my newegg' knob on relatively easily. It seems impossible to do that with Amazon. Walmart online you can do it but you'll have to watch it like a hawk as it gets aggressively disabled again.

[RajT88]

Well shit.

[homarp]

and apple.com

[fennecfoxy]

The streamlined and stylised experience of paying multiple hundreds of percents mark-up for ram and SSDs.

[prmoustache]

People might revert to buy in person.

I mean you get scammed maybe twice by a company, then buy somewhere else. You quickly realize that it is better spending 3-4 times the amount of money for something that will last 10 years than buying stuff that do not work or keep breaking after a few months/years.

I am too poor to be able to afford buying cheap stuff.

[phpisthebest]

If that was going to happen, it already would have.

Most people still just buy the cheapest version of an item they are looking for.

[HideousKojima]

Most people buy the cheapest version because they don't have a reliable way of knowing if the more expensive items are actually higher quality. It's a "market for lemons" problem:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

[ben_w]

I'm already switching to buying in person, though in my case because of the delivery service usually redirecting to depots further away than the shops selling the same items.

[wombat-man]

Yeah, I'd rather go to target or something and choose from the 3 spatulas they have then spend any time trying to figure out which of the 1000 listings are good on amazon. It's just less work.

[sneak]

It's not less time, however. It's easier and cheaper to buy all of the top 5 spatulas on amazon (and throw 4 away) than to drive to a strip mall and find parking.

[red-iron-pine]

it's called Walmart, and already exists as an in-person option.

[checkyoursudo]

For the most part, I already mostly buy stuff in person. For physical goods, I cannot stand not being able to hold, touch, examine a thing before buying it. Or at least the floor model or the exhibited item.

I bought a VOIP phone from the media store recently. When I was there looking at them, and feeling them etc, I was thinking how there is no way I could have picked the right one from an online shop. I might have never known there was something better, I guess. But being able to hold them helped me pick one I thought I would like.

[sesteel]

What Amazon is missing is buyers. Actual professional buyers who evaluate products and make determinations if products meet standards and deserves to be placed in front of customers.

[giantg2]

Plenty of niche, premium, or physical stores out there. People might need to pay a little more for it, but they do exist. Not everyone buys everything from the same super stores.

[UtopiaPunk]

What are some of your favorites (tech or otherwise)?

[giantg2]

Small local businesses, like homebrew shops. Seed companies like Rare Seeds, Gurney, etc. Mushroom places like The Cultured Mushroom, Liquid Fungi.

[skydhash]

Keyboardio

Roost Stand

Accessories4less

Svsound

[prmoustache]

Yes. In term of online store it is better to look for the ones specializing in a specific market than wholesale stores.

[neilv]

We're already getting there.

Maybe Amazon brands will at least be predictable, but the non-Amazon brands on Amazon will be increasingly counterfeits and noise.

(A contributor to the current problem of eroding non-Amazon brands with counterfeits seems to be Amazon's commingling from different marketplace sellers of the "same ASIN". And the current mass-spam search DoS of random-name brands and near-identical products from overseas sellers is also a problem. Amazon can not only shield their own brands from both of those problems, but can also exercise more supply chain integrity control for its brands than is possible for the non-Amazon brands if Amazon doesn't cooperate.)

[smithza]

Yet I think Amazon brands are setup to eliminate competition due to their insider information in the market place. I wouldn’t put my money in them because they aren’t playing fairly in the market.

[itsoktocry]

>I wouldn’t put my money in them because they aren’t playing fairly in the market.

They identify widely ordered products and source their own version to sell. Why is that a negative? Costco does the same. As long as they vet the quality (my experience with AmazonBasic products has been fine), seems like a win-win?

[fineIllregister]

Costco doesn't sell counterfeits of the third-party items they are competing against. Amazon's co-mingling practice is anti-competitive.

[dragonwriter]

> Maybe Amazon brands will at least be predictable, but the non-Amazon brands on Amazon will be increasingly counterfeits and noise.

Of course, because that helps sell the Amazon brand goods.

[zebomon]

I really don't see how one follows the other without then in sequence, as the comment you replied to describes, value-based businesses emerge to fill the obvious gap and compete.

[dylan604]

people still shop at Amazon, so I'm not too convinced in your argument

[2muchcoffeeman]

It’s the delivery. I can often get something inconsequential for net cheaper, faster from Amazon. Local stock is usually next day. And I can often get stuff internationally cheaper and faster through Amazon than the real retailer.

You’d have to duplicate this to take them on.

[dylan604]

step by step that slope gets just a little more slippery, or is it the frog in the pot of boiling water?

[2muchcoffeeman]

The delivery part of the service is really good when things go right.

Very difficult to get a hold of someone when they lose a package even when they explicitly tell you “contact us”.

But if you stick to inconsequential items, it’s great. I needed a few USBC cables and charging cables the other day and got them next day at half the price. I checked the local stores and none had what I was after.

But yeah, I agree with your point

[Semaphor]

I have gotten a fake product one time (public domain book, PoD instead of what I wanted and what apparently used to be under that URL) refunded, no questions asked, even got to keep the book (anyone in Germany interested in an HP Lovecraft decent quality hardcover PoD book?).

I realize that it’s apparently way worse in the US, but there supposedly are issues here as well, I just never encountered them (or the products are so well-faked that it’s a distinction without a difference).

Fast delivery, a lot of choices, both "Aliexpress but faster delivery for a price", but also EU products, and a customer service that does pretty much anything asked.

[stOneskull]

there'll still be people and communication. and so, word-of-mouth.

[Fricken]

This might be why physical bookstores are making a comeback. Trustworthy curation is essential, and worth paying a premium for. This has always been the case, but maybe not fully appreciated.

[interestica]

This has been why I've started to really like Costco -- they're essentially acting as product curators (and back it up with a generous return policy.)

[dangus]

Well, I like how local bookstores go about curation more than Costco.

I don't know if we can say that a store with unlabeled aisles can be a source of curation.

[yonaguska]

it's curation in that the products they do offer are generally trustworthy.

[dangus]

There’s a big difference between limiting SKU count to simplify operations and products being curated to be “the best” and most trustworthy options.

Natural foods stores have much more stringent standards on things like artificial colors, animal treatment, and use of chemicals.

For example, Tide Original is banned in New York for having too much of a cancer-causing chemical. Costco sells it. Costco sells products with artificial colors linked to ADHD in children. Costco’s best organic eggs are visibly and nutritionally inferior to eggs from pasture-raised chickens.

The fact that Costco doesn’t sell low quality private label and discount brand items has more to do with customer demographic than trust and curation.

This is also the store that allows third-party companies’ representatives to harass customers about solar panels and DirecTV in the store. “Trustworthy.”

They’re really no different on “trust” than Walmart or Target, and I think people need to stop being a part of its retail cult and take it for what it is: a store with good prices on staple goods.

[kelnos]

I think that's an ok workaround, but I don't want to go to physical bookstores, and I don't want physical books. As much as I do like the feel of a physical book, I much prefer the convenience and portability of a digital book.

And speaking of convenience, it would be a big shame if we had to go back to physical stores for non-trivial purchases because we can't trust anything online.

[arnvidr]

Many physical bookstores have web pages where they sell e-books as well. Find the store that serves what you want, instead of finding faults with the ones who don't and going with the huge sell-everything-store.

[bpt3]

Or I can go with the huge sell-everything store because I'm perfectly fine with the service it provides. Not everyone is looking for some bespoke curated experience when buying a product.

In short, the store that serves what I want is usually the huge sell-everything store.

[eloisius]

> Yeah, until someone creates a website that just ships the products they say they have, and people type in the URL for the site directly and shop there?

This already happens over and over, and with AI it’s only going to be worse. Company makes a decent product, gains reputation, and then strip mines their good will for quick cash while quality plummets. After a while, you just distrust the whole online shopping experience. Even if someone is selling a good product, the lemons are ruining the whole market.

[bsenftner]

And you can say "the lemons are ruining the whole market" in relation to software engineering jobs too.

[LapsangGuzzler]

I think AI is going to make it harder to separate the signal from the noise, though. We’re already seeing this play out with sites like Amazon that are just full of cheap junk that’s blatantly ripped off and undercut in price, or Google as people are complaining about the quality of search results.

[ianburrell]

Notice that niche shopping sites don’t have reviews. Bigger sites have reviews but they don’t get gamed. Without affiliates or listing products like Amazon, there is no way for the spammers to make money.

I’m surprised that places like Walmart or Target haven’t gotten burned by cross listings. They could drop the program and advertise as alternative to Amazon. If Amazon had “sold by Amazon” filter, it would be a lot more usable.

[pbhjpbhj]

Amazon (UK, at least) don't even have a working search function, it's ridiculous trying to buy a specific thing there.

[Matrixik]

I think that's the reason why Allegro is market leader in Poland and Amazon is far, far away. I get really frustrated when I try to find anything on Amazon, sometimes to the point of thinking "how the hell they became so big with this shitty search?". When I search anything on allegro.pl it almost always return me products I search for and support tons of filters (and return actually nothing when they don't have it).

[JohnFen]

> If online shopping were truly such a terribly scammy UX in 100% of cases people would stop using it

Some people have. This is one of the main reasons why I stopped using Amazon years ago.

But lots of people won't. If people were that rational, then the thousands of straight-up obvious and traditional scams perpetrated every day wouldn't still work.

[nomat]

Imagine like an LLM trained on everything you've ever done since birth included as part of the data set. and then one of those for each other person in the world. they could slice and dice you into a thousand different groups.

at some point technology is going to stop being something that we interact with through a screen and a keyboard. Google maps will be there, where ever you go, all the time. No more getting lost or wondering where anything is located. You will just know. or at least, be told.

Something else to consider is the fallibility of human memory. As we generate more information we're gonna have to start abstracting and delegating some of those storage and retrieval tasks to the computer, trusting it completely. Today maybe you can remember things but what about your parents?

[jbergens]

I don't remember everything I've done or why. There is very little training data to be found for us as persons. IF they hack your phone or computer they might be able to store how you interact with the internet. Which things you browse and read, what you buy, how you write on social media. They could possible then create a digital twin (a clone) of your online presence but it would be a lot of work for very unclear gains. If they hack enough people they could learn some connections like that people interested in electric cars might also be interested in battery technology and solar panels, people who are interested in vegetarian food might also like to read/write about vegan food or the environment and so on. But I still think it would be a LOT of work just to end up creating a fake website selling fake batteries or vegetarian food that you either never deliver or that ends up being a poor replica of the good stuff.

[waihtis]

Well, currently the top LLM fails at repeatedly generating a stable set of pretty simple regexes for me, so where pretty far from a full-blown LLM dystopia at this point.

[sznio]

LLMs are too dumb to be useful, but smart enough to be destructive.

You don't need to be able to generate correct regexes to create a blogspam article about regexes that will go to the top of the search results.

[Planktonne]

> LLMs are too dumb to be useful, but smart enough to be destructive.

I think this puts the blame in the wrong place; LLMs are too dumb to be useful, but it's the users who are too dumb to realise that, or too unethical to care.

[uoaei]

It's also the creators, hosters, and startup founders who are overselling its capabilities.

[Planktonne]

I was lumping them in with 'users'; I don't think the evangelists are any less credulous than their marks.

[waihtis]

search is dying anyway and this will just accelerate that trend.

[mavhc]

The question is does the rapid progress in LLMs continue over the next few years, or do we reach another local maximum. Is "currently" going to improve rapidly?

[waihtis]

as I understand we're approaching local maximum with LLMs and that is what I base the previous comment on, but fully layman and no insight into deeper layers of LLM R&D

[eloisant]

I have already stopped using Amazon for specialized products.

I buy board games on sites that only sell board games.

I buy electronics/computer parts on sites that only sell that.

[jimhefferon]

I also try to do that. However, the more sites that hold my information ...

[eropple]

Your information isn't particularly valuable outside of financial data, and most of the ones you're likely to go to store your financial data centralize on a few generally-very-well-behaved providers. And credit card fraud is the bank's problem, not yours.

[willis936]

It's only possible to compete if the index is fair. You could never launch a store like that without google in the fold. Google doesn't have an interest in increasing signal, only in increasing revenue. We'll need to see some trust busting first.

[pixl97]

Why be a billionaire when you can be a trillionare? Greed will ruin everything.

[opportune]

If incumbents are delivering a terrible product because they’re chasing 4 commas I will happily settle for 3 commas to provide a basic “shopping but on the internet” experience people actually want to use.

[dylan604]

i see your Tres Comas and raise you Quatro Comas