I buy and maintain about $20K of computer equipment a year for my lab. We learned around 2020 Amazon is a nest of scammers, from the suppliers to the delivery people.
There has been a significant resurgence of local computer supply retail because millions have been ripped off and only now buy in person.
It’s sickening how little Amazon seem to give a fuck about this. They could easily tighten up their vetting of sellers, but heaven fucking forbid they only report a $50,000,000,000 profit this year instead of $50,003,000,000.
Buying electronics from Amazon is really rolling the dice. I’ve received so many inadvertent open box returns… it’s just a matter of time before you get burned.
Newegg is also shit and so is bestbuy. I don’t have a microcenter near me. What else is there? I guess buying direct. Is there anything I’m missing?
I bought ram from Amazon some time ago and somebody had done a sticker swap and returned. The ram sticks in the package matched the box according to all the stickers but the kit registered in software was a lower end set with different part/serial numbers than the stickers/box. The funny part was when I bought it the price difference was only like $5 but about a year or so earlier it was closer to an $80 difference.
“… from Amazon”
Well there’s your problem.
Is amazon not a good supplier anymore? I still order stuff from them occasionally and always get what I need.
Don’t order from Amazon. Easy fix.
Hold sellers accountable. Actual fix.
I personally believe the platform provider needs to be accountable because they take a cut for the convenience and safety of the transaction.
I think, if the seller used Amazon shipping, it’s not actually the seller’s fault. Doesn’t Amazon pool all items from the same SKU together from all sellers and ship whatever they can get to the buyer the fastest/cheapest?
Yes. If you sell on amazon, and have amazon fulfill the shipping… you ship your stuff to amazon, and its just put in teh big pool with all the other items of the same kind.
Even returns get put back into the pool.
its the absolute most pants on head stupid fucking way possible to manage inventory to the point that shit like this seems almost intentionally designed for rather than a consequence of.
Which is why anytime you order anything from amazon, you should record the entire box to show its untampered with, then film the entireity of the opening and confirming everything inside is actually inside.
THere was a famous case of a guy who bought a 10 thousand dollar camera and got a box of rocks, and amazon sent him a replacement and got a box of bricks, before finally getting the camera on the 3rd try… I think recording his second opening saved him from having amazon call him a scammer.
16 GB DDR2 + 16 GB DDR3 makes 32GB DDR5, right?
32 GBGB DDDDRR5 actually. Much better!
32 GB² DDR²5
Its amazon, just return it. That’s really the only good thing about amazon anymore, easy returns.
amazon has been getting less generous with the returns for years now.
Especially if you have more than a few returns per year.
Not really anymore for me. A few times this past year they snuck in the return shipping cost at about $10-$15 USD. The page showed the cost refunded then added back. I don’t know but it fooled me.
With this hardware shortage insanity, I won’t be surprised if they get more aggressive with return shipping fees.
Return shipping fees? I’m guessing you live somewhere rural? Here we just drop it at a local store.
Except in the UK for some reason where you can email and message them for months and pay your own damn return shipping and get fucked about and never recieve a refund.
They tried to fuck me on a return once and after a month of it sitting in limbo i filed and won a dispute though my card provider instead.
Matter of fact i think it was over ram too, but it was over a year ago.
Oh man, that sucks. Sorry, I wrongly assumed amazon returns worked the same everywhere
This is my theory. The kind of stuff I buy there is all electronics manufactured in china/Asia anyway. I could buy it direct or from ali express, but Amazon shipping is hella cheap and fast and they actually do returns quickly and correctly.
Play the long game. Chargeback.
And lose the Amazon account anything associated with it.
Stockholm syndrome…
So?
It’s worth knowing as some people would be adversely affected.
Some people have extensive libraries there. I have over 1k books, and probably half that in audiobooks. I do have them all DeDRM’d but still it would be an annoying loss
A prudent strategy would be a 2nd account for orders, maybe?
Not necessarily, they have been known to shut down accounts they think are trying to evade a ban.
Not sure how sophisticated it is, but it does exist.
Buying from a reputable operation spares you from a lot of this. Amazon is all hot garbage across the board.
It wasn’t technology, but i ordered a new mad lib style book for my kid from Amazon. The book arrived with cellophane around it and a nice label that clearly said new. Once opened, it was very obvious the book was used, since the last kid had already filled out the whole damn thing including his name and address inside the cover.
I’m not mad at the kid, although his parents are probably bad people for returning the book at that point. I am livid that Amazon didn’t flip to any random page in the book too determine if the book was used or not.
Fuck Amazon.
Iirc correctly, Amazon actually doesn’t resell their returns. At least not through their storefront.
They have “return auctions” where returns are put onto a pallet and then people bid on them to purchase. Apparently this is cheaper than having a workflow for their returns, checking them to make sure they are resellable, and then stocking them back into their warehouse.
I don’t care if it was actually a store front. I blame Amazon for not doing oversight of its supply chain. So, it’s their fault, or it’s their fault.
So are all these people who say they are buying from Amazon actually buying from 3rd party sellers on Amazon? I’m always confused by these stories with used items being delivered.
The principal issue is this, Amazon commingles stock. This means that there is one box for a particular SKU. If a seller sends product to Amazon for fulfillment it gets dumped into the bin with everyone else’s.
This means that if a seller sends counterfeit or poor products to Amazon it gets mixed in with the real ones from other sellers or Amazon’s own stock. This causes major problems as you can see.
Yup, this is the real answer. Verified vendors’ stock isn’t kept separate from the shitty scammers’ stock. Vendor has 10 good memory cards in stock, and a scammer has 5 fakes? The bin will have all 15 cards… So buying from the vendor doesn’t guarantee you get a real memory card, because the counterfeits are in the same bin.
Every professional photographer knows that good SD cards are Sandisk branded and come from B&H Photo Supply… While bad SD cards are Sandisk branded and come from Amazon.
I bought a 3 pack of Corsair LL120 RGB case fans directly from Amazon-dot-com (as the seller) before and got a 3 pack of someone’s old case fans instead (the old swapperoo). So Amazon told me to just keep them after I sent them many photos of the box and the LPN sticker on it, and they sent me another. Take a guess what was in that box? Yup, more swapperoos. But this was back in 2016-2017 so they may have changed up how they handle returns since then, or how they isolate their own products from 3rd party ‘FBA’ sellers
Many years ago it used to be very obvious when you were buying from Amazon vs 3rd party sellers. Today the only difference is a small bit of text that says “Shipped and sold by Amazon”. The fact that you can even get prime shipping on items from third party sellers makes it so that people often don’t realize.
the problem is they mingle stock from every source into one pile with no discernable way to identify what came from where.
You don’t know that Amazon is a marketplace? So is Walmart and Target. Com for example. You can open a store on any of these platforms and sell while using them for advertisement, warehousing, and shipping. You are responsible for fees and sales etc, but they handle everything else. Yes, they have their own products as well, but most their sales come from vendors on their platform.
Amazon sold me a defective planer that had sawdust in it. Ibwas apparently the second to return it under warranty.
Amazon Warehouse I believe is open box and returns. It also gets confusing that marketplace sellers are mostly outside of Amazon’s control
Yeah this stuff is why i never buy tech from Amazon, you never know if you’re gonna get a counterfeit item
Recommendations?
Newegg has been shit for a decade now (new owners fucked it to hell) and I don’t have a Microcenter closer than a 2-hour drive.
Anywhere that has an actual supply chain instead of website that’s just a front for individual resellers. Places like best buy, or if you could get shipped from microcenter.
Supporting giant evil DOES sometimes get you free stuff… I know folks who have accidentally been shipped multiple of what they’re ordering (in two cases, the items were quite expensive) and when they’ve brought it up, they were told to keep the extras.
Maybe not worth the evil, but hey, free stuff is cool.
Pretty much any of the retailers have this happen. They’re isn’t anything special about ordering from a different site or even picking it up ina brick and mortar store.
This isn’t exclusive to Amazon. I had it happen with friends build back in the Newegg days.
We’d need to know exactly how far back because NewEgg has for years been just like Amazon: a listing service for junky third party sellers.
Evga still made GPUs back then.
Newegg is still a thing, you just need to check the “Sold by Newegg” filter.
Newegg is a fucking open septic pit.
Fred sold it off to some chinese acquisition company and its almost a fucking scam now at this point.
Oh it is, but is so enshittified nobody goes there anymore.
The bad prices are what keep me away. Though, I can’t say I’ve looked at stuff sold by third parties. Why would I do that when Amazon, ebay, and Craigslist exist?
the exploding power supplies forced into bundles are what keep me away. cant return the catastrophically failed PSU without returning everything else, either. total scam.
You can order friends on newegg?
Yea, but only open box or refurb. Not new.
I had it happen to me at MicroCenter. Got a mechanical keyboard, in a seemingly-new box. No return sticker on it. Opened it up, and the damned thing was missing like six keys and absolutely covered in gamer chud. Someone very obviously bought it, put their old keyboard in the box, and “returned” it. And whoever took the return didn’t bother checking, or mark it as an open box.
Just ordered some digital photo frames for xmas gifts, and neither one of them work. One is apparently an opened box return. Trashy!
Cost doesn’t seem to matter with return fraud. I recently received a “new” $6 item that had its contents replaced with a $4 item and then taped shut. Seriously, who wastes their time on this stuff?
Probably the same people running Pokémon card hustles. I recently saw a guy acting all pissy he had to wait in line at target to buy some packs, started berating the workers “you work at target, you’re broke as fuck”. The workers actually went in on him, I was so happy to see it. They made fun of him for trying to hustle over cards for children and told him to go home and cry to his mom about it.
That’s the kind of loser wasting their time on 2-5 dollar profit per return.
have you seen r/pokeinvesting, or r/pokecollecting. so sad losers of adults, they arnt even collecting because they play it, its to flip it. all TCPI/TPJ have to do is increase the pull rates, and increase printing of the cards, or have the ability to buy the individual cards on a official shop, instead of issuing RARE CARDS ON stupid events with a limited number and time, and location. instead they are just trying to limit how often its being bought.
opening/buying them is one thing(steamings do this kind of asmr thing).
Find a $2 scam you can pull hundreds of times a day and you’re a third world billionaire.
Keep in mind, whenever you think too hard about these sorts of things, this is one of those operations that could apply to Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Many people make the incorrect assumption of something like, “They must have done some clever supply-chain wizardry," or “There’s a smart cost-reduction plan behind this.” When in reality, a lot of times, the actual explanation is something like a mid-level manager wanted a slide that said “cost savings," then procurement was pressured due to some personality ego problem, engineering objections were ignored, the math was never checked, and in the end, nobody involved actually understood unit economics. Maybe exchanging a $6 part for a $4 looks good in volume, but they only did this 20 times, resulting in $40 of savings which was erased by their reputation and incompetence.
I have worked government contracts. I have worked with shitty project managers. There’s a lot more of these mistakes than you realize powering economies.
I hate that saying. It’s not a law. It’s a funny quote. Absolutely do not base any judgment you make on it.
Volume and slavery.
I think I will just go to Microcenter
I wish I had a Microcenter less than 8hrs away. Best Buy is all I have and I am not buying there.
Same, i don’t have one less than 7 hour round trip drive.
I miss Microcenter
Same. I’m lucky enough to have two within driving distance. I’m genuinely worried about them staying in business if PC building takes a nosedive thanks to the RAM/SSD prices.
No sympathy for anyone who still supports and buys from Amazon.
I hate buying from Amazon and avoid it as much as I can, but one thing I’ve noticed in the last 5-10 years is that brick and mortar stores seem to have given up completely. It is shocking how many times I’ve wanted to buy something, often very common, from popular brands, and I try and find a local store to buy it from only for that store to be out of stock or just not stock it at all. It feels to me like these stores are filled with “stuff” but none of the things I want to buy.
On the one hand, I loathe feeling that way sometimes. On the other hand, for the better part of the past decade+ any criticism I had about Amazon was met with victim blaming white knight replies and basically no support. At best I’m probably more on the ambivalent side of things than the no sympathy side, not that there’s effectively much difference.
Apathy is valid, I just think it’s best to not be blind to it
