It’s Getting Hard to Trust Amazon

The past few years, as Amazon has aggressively expanded its “Marketplace” of third-party sellers, I’ve found the experience of shopping on Amazon more and more aggravating. I’ve had problems with:

• Search results ever more cluttered with irrelevant “sponsored listings” making it harder to find what I’m looking for.

• Fake reviews and ratings, oh the fake reviews and ratings! I’ve gotten in the habit of reading only the one-star reviews, since the four and five star reviews on many products are more fake than real.

• Sellers who ship broken and defective products.

• Sellers who don’t even bother to ship the product, and just send a fake shipment notice.

• Significantly higher prices than what other retailers are offering. I recently bought a new electric snowblower, and Amazon’s price was $1,000 higher than what Lowe’s was charging. Many products can be found cheaper elsewhere with just a little searching.

Bashing Amazon is kind of fashionable right now, for reasons ranging from how they treat employees to their predatory behavior towards small retailers (even the ones who are selling on Amazon Marketplace and therefore Amazon customers).

If you want to avoid Amazon for any of those reasons, that’s fine. But I’m avoiding Amazon simply because even if I can find the product I’m looking for, I don’t trust that I’ll get it for a reasonable price in good working order. In some ways it reminds me of eBay 15 years ago or so, when the site was overrun with scammy sellers until they cleaned it up.