1y ago

Amazon Has Turned Into an Monopolistic Shithole Littered With Pay-to-Play Ads, FTC Lawsuit Solemnly Argues

www.404media.co Amazon Has Turned Into an Monopolistic Shithole Littered With Pay-to-Play Ads, FTC Lawsuit Solemnly Argues

"Amazon shifted gears so that it now litters its storefront with pay-to-play advertisements. In addition to overcharging its customers, Amazon is degrading the services it provides them."

BrainWorms @lemm.ee

www.404media.co /amazon-has-turned-into-an-unusable-shithole-littered-with-pay-to-play-ads/

59 4

AMUSING, INTERESTING, OUTRAGEOUS, or PROFOUND @lemmy.world

Amazon has turned into an monopolistic shithole littered with pay-to-play ads, ftc lawsuit solemnly argues

www.404media.co /amazon-has-turned-into-an-unusable-shithole-littered-with-pay-to-play-ads/

2 0

56 comments

My favorite enshittification of Amazon is how you can filter products by manufacturer, but only if the manufacturer is a reputable company like JOOGEE or XZzy or GoodTime and not those weird no-name companies like Anker or Samsung.
- Won't even bring up the brands I like unless I search for them specifically, even then they're not the first result. Amazon gives the ad space to brands that are around for 3 months then poof.
  
  but you should buy stuff from Smorkyaplorb Megasystems because they give the best kickbacks
- Oh and I love when I sort by price and half the results disappear.
- My favorite enshittification of Amazon is that, plus, the bonus fact the filtering acts different if you pay for prime. The filtering works better with prime. It should work the same regardless if one pays for prime or not.
  They basically deliver a shopping experience that is worse unless you pay them money monthly. It's enshittification two layers of abstraction deep.

Okay don't think the FTC said Shit hole, no need to hyperbolize everything
- I would slide them $5 for them to openly swear though
- Exactly. The document simply states
  “We're gonna make 'em eat our shit, then shit out our shit, then eat their shit which is made up of our shit that we made 'em eat.”
  
  Good ol' Jay. He is a wordsmith.
- Would be cooler if they did, tho
- They should have, because that's what Amazon is these days. :P
- And these guys call themselves professional journalists?
- Totally agree. Let's leave the sensationalization for that other site.

I swear by the time FTC notices, they've been doing it for like 10 years already

Amazon has to deal with their counterfeit merchandise problem. Try to buy a memory card on Amazon and odds are you get a bogus counterfeit card.
- It’s broken for us, it works just fine for them.
- Amazon is promoting the counterfeits. They don’t care because the people who don’t return the counterfeit products is high enough for them not to care. You basically can’t buy anything off Amazon these days unless you are ok with getting marked up crap from china
  
  They literally try to gas light you when you try to bring the problem up to them. They sent me an in app questionnaire that then told me that often products don’t work and that people think they are counterfeit. My memory stick was an obvious counterfeit. It’s kinda sick that Amazon does this.
- I got counterfeit Dove soap.
- Amazon has the money to vet its products and provide better search results, it just chooses not to because it doesn’t need to.
  Better to shove a shitty, expensive product in customer’s faces than a cheap, standard one.
- never had an issue since they started separating the third-party inventory from their stock. just make sure it's sold by Amazon.
  
  That is anything but 100% reliable. Have had Sold By Amazon items with stickers on a box you know didn't come from the Manufacturer that way.
  
  Mine was sold by Samsung and it was still counterfeit.

IDK what’s worse…that this is a thing, or that I’m so accustomed to Amazon’s shenanigans that I’m used to heading into the dark web of results, aka Page 2, in order to find exactly what I’m looking for.
That said, charging cables are kind of a bad example. I’m prepared to spend $10 on a 6-pack of varying lengths of Brand X cables I’ll replace next year as opposed to one $25 Apple-approved MFi cable that I’ll also replace next year.
- I too am willing to venture onto page 2. The reviews are what are killing me now though. All the reviews are for the top 5 results, because nobody trusts anything from page 2, when it only has a few buyers and 3 reviews. It's cyclical
  And if a product has multiple "styles" to choose from, all the reviews are lumped together, so it's near impossible to figure out which product they're actually talking about.
  It's like I'm playing detective, just to determine if the keyboard stand I'm looking for will be worth a damn or not.
- Page 2 is never a safe place to be.
  Amazon fails because its so expansive, but customer's expectations aren't high enough for Amazon to maintain that breadth.
  Amazon has the money to vet its products and provide better search results, it just chooses not to because it doesn't need to.
  Better to shove a shitty, expensive product in customer's faces than a cheap, standard one.

I can't even get the sorting method to work. It shows me a few items that match the sorting at first, then it goes all over the place. Utterly useless.
- I sometimes resort to using Google to find the Amazon item I need.
  
  If you have to do that, it’s really bad.
- Either that or it gives you like 3 results after filtering, even though there were pages of matching results before the filter was applied.

I ordered a standard deck of cards. Should be simple enough, right? They never arrived. I waited a full month. I finally reached out to Amazon customer support and demanded to know what happened to my deck of cards. Their response was unbelievable: "We're dealing with it."
- Daaad....
- Why did you wait so long - do you stay in some remote place where it's common for things to take weeks to arrive? Otherwise I'd find it a bit sus too if someone takes over a month to report a delivery issue.
  
  Woosh
  
  They made a joke, reread the last words ;)

Can confirm.

Kick Amazon's ass FTC!

For a while I used amazon as a "product browser", I would shop for what I want on there, and then go buy it straight from the manufacturer or whatever online marketplace the seller prefers.
Now, it has gotten so bad, it isn't even useful for that. Amazon will show you 50 overpriced knockoffs of the thing you'd actually want to buy without ever showing you the real thing unless you already know the brand name of what you want ahead of time. The reviews are useless too now, everything has 4 1/2 stars and the same substanceless reviews.
- Hard to shop for vitamins when you have sham accounts claiming it cured their cancer, when you're just trying to take better care of yourself but don't wanna fall for homeopathic scams.

Lina Khan is staking her career on this one, but the way the US judiciary looks there's no way Amazon suffers.

As someone in Asia where Amazon is trying to break through the market with stiff ecommerce incumbents, Amazon is great. And more importantly, they know they have no real value selling the generic Chinese stuff that has infiltrated US Amazon, so the amount of that is a lot less. The Chinese stuff on Amazon tends to be from the better companies that have tried to brand themselves and sell decent products (think Anker at the start), otherwise it's usually products from established brands. If I wanted cheap Chinese stuff I have way better and cheaper avenues.
Competition is good, eh?
- Can confirm - the issues Americans face with Amazon feels so alien here. Even refunds and returns are prompt in general.
  
  I know right? And the returns and refunds are a revelation in Asia, where it's usually the buy-it-and-it's-your-problem attitude.
- How long has Amazon been operating in your market? Their MO is capturing a customer base with low prices and good service, followed by capturing sellers by offering them access to said customer base. After having locked everyone in their last step is to extract all possible value from both groups. Their playbook is creating a chokepoint to force themselves upon everyone for trade.
  Check out Chokepoint Capitalism.
  
  Competition is far fiercer here, they have to contend with Alibaba-backed platforms as well. I also have access to Taobao. It's not going to be as straightforward as it is in the USA.

Don't use Amazon. It's not like they are the only web shop for stuff you would like to have.
- I just use Walmart+ now.
  Better for groceries, but they don't sell wrapping papers :(

True, but they probably used the worst example item... a single apple lighting cable for $17 is on the second page for me but I could also get a set of multiple off brand cables for $12. "I'd rather get fucked by apple than Amazon" ???

Why would you buy a cable from Apple on Amazon? You are already paying the Apple tax and you want to add the amazon tax on top?
If you go on Apple website you can get the cable and free shipping
For me it only makes sense to have cheap alternatives when browsing for cables on amazon. Then again if i want cheap, i go on aliexpress
- People like to have a consolidated way to do things, if they can.

DAE remember the Walmart, High Cost of Low Prices movie?

56 comments