Online shopping

I bought a dildo and a buttplug once and I only ever went to Holla Forums a few times in my life and I found it stupid and boring. I mostly browse /furry/ and now and then Holla Forums or /cuteboys/ but thats about it. I review dildos for my own personal entertainment now and then aswell.

Fight me.

I do research when I pay anything over $5 or so. The vast majority of stuff is just junk out there. Totally worthless junk. Anything worth any value is going to have someone reviewing it. Ignore Emarketers. I like to use youtube for this alot. If its some random dude filming the product and talking its more likely honest, but if the vid starts with someone talking into a camera and saying shit like "hey guys" and feigning excitement then its a fake shill review and you can move on to a different video. If it looks anything like Linus Tech Tips or NCIX then its fake marketing/propaganda basically.

So does Walmart and every other chain. I have seen walmart take back a disgusting grease encrusted vomit enducing electric grittle that was shoved up someones ass it looked like, and and never cleaned afterward and used to cook 10 million pounds of disgusting shit that people eat. It was a cheap one that was so incredibly disgusting I wouldn't even want to touch it. Employees were bitching about it to which is why I learned of it back when I worked there. Apparently it was out of the return period aswell. Walmart imo is known for taking returns way easier than they should. I returned a Great Value 100W LED bulb that had gone blinky. Not sure if a capacitor had gone or something that made the circuit unstable but I just returned it even though the person was like "Your supposed to return it the manufacturer" which I still don't understand since it was a walmart brand light. But whatever I returned it and got a non-dimming one that should be more reliable.

Do the youtube thing or just sort amazon reviews by the worst reviews and go from there. Guaranteed the vast majority of 5 or even 4 stars are going to be fake. Its the people that didn't like it who I want to hear from the most and not the people telling a fake story about how they loved putting their cock inside of this lovely egg making device. Their instore selection is of course limited by store space and they sell alot of junk but usually you get a few things to choose from. They semi-recently have started carrying 75 cent light bulbs that were LED but then more recently I remember they had even cheaper ones. I think 60 cents or so. Which is an incredible value for a safe and compliant LED edison screw mains light. On smaller purchases like that brick and mortar is the king. Not paying shipping even if I still have to pay state tax is nice.

The issue isn't tech and the solution isn't tech. The issue is monopolization and less and less competition. On ebay every seller has to be nice or they risk losing you as a customer to the huge number of other sellers. Competition makes the service better. Amazon wanted to steal ebays setup with the marketplace but its failed miserably and often I don't realise something Im looking at is a marketplace seller on there. Which the buyer protections on Amazon are terrible, Newegg is even worse. Neweggs marketplace buyer protection is "Yeah we will back you up fam" and I think Amazon is much the same. Ebay buyer protection is fucking wonderfull for an honest buyer like me but is easily abused by bad people.

If you find something online you might want to buy just highlight the name or model or whatever and right click search and find a seller you trust, like the price, and who will give you the service you want. Amazon is rarely the best price anyway. Usually they are a few dollars higher atleast, not counting the sales taxes they pay in many sites.

Truth is Amazon got big with major thanks to tax evasion. For much of the past Amazon didn't make you pay sales taxes in many places but now that they are basically in every state they are no longer worth buying from. Im not interested in paying about another ten dollars on a $100 purchase just so it can get wasted on a state govt that doesn't give a fuck about me or what I want in life. I can avoid this by buying from B&H photo who sells all kinds of cool tech stuff, has amazing and fast support, a great website, great prices on many items, and they ship super fucking fast. They put Amazon to shame. Check them out, if you really want to fight the borg then you have to support the little guys who are doing good work.

I mean bought from amazon.

Me, myself, and I don't like your tone.

Yeah, when it fucks over the sellers.

As a buyer its great for me. But yeah, as a seller I have been scared of getting fucked. The good thing is that most people arn't that bad to do shit like that. But I was talking from buyer side only.

le dilbert man's "confusopoly" describes it pretty well in my opinion. I think his original pickup truck example is bad because he's just a retarded faggot who can't into buying cars, cars being so expensive it's a bit easier to filter and customize things to perfection if you have money to burn on a new car.

But with cheaper products it really is like that. 1000 merchants contract the same 100 chink factories to make the same 10 shitty products over and over, with slight cosmetic variations but always the shittiest quality. The average customer is then confronted by a dazzling array of supposedly different products on their shopping site. Of course the site doesn't make it easy to intelligently analyze this selection and filter away the majority that's not worth anyone's time or money, because they have decided they want to trick customers into buying shoddy products. The customer is overwhelmed by product after product and tries to pick the non-shitty one based on the misleading information given. Of course in reality all of the products are shitty, some are just less obviously so.

If Amazon cared about customers, they would remove 99% of their inventory, leaving behind only a small selection of products that are all good value for their price range. They would then curate these and write informative descriptions instead of useless marketese that so many currently have. The sea of shitty chink copycats can then be confined to a containment zone that you go to if you're desperate or feeling adventurous. They sort of tried this with Amazon essentials, but fucked it up. The essentials are too expensive for the basic feature set (the point is building consumer confidence not vertical integration, they should have even sold them at a loss) and they aren't high enough quality to compete with the expensive products. Not to mention that after years, their inventory on these is too patchy to bother with.

Illusion of choice is exactly it. What confuses me is that it seems like an unstable equilibrium. Suppose that a new store came along and, instead of a million different products, most of which are not worth buying, they offered only a very small selection of reasonably priced products, but when you buy them you know you're getting what you asked for. Everybody would instantly leave Amazon and co. and use them. Apple already does this with electronics (though with the addition of status signaling and apple tax). IKEA does it for furniture (now they are apparently branching into household items like batteries and food).

You're alright furanon, hope you get gassed last.

I noticed this as well. But soon enough marketers will catch on. It's not really hard to emulate the "amateur youtuber" style, as soon as this kind of review becomes popular (I think the normalfags are already catching on to the fake amazon reviews) Youtube should be overrun with shills, produced by ad agencies that maintain perfectly curated messy apartment sets just for filming "honest reviews".

I think a lot of stores have a secret policy of accepting even blatantly not-covered returns, simply because the cost is worth less than goodwill they build. Of course when scammers catch on they ruin it for everybody.

Problem with that is, I don't care about the products that have bad reviews. Even if it's an honest bad review, I still wasted my time reading it since it doesn't result in me buying a product. If I look only at products that have no or very few bad reviews, I can't say if it's because it's good or nobody has written a review yet. Honestly I wish they hadn't banned reviews written for free product. The "honest and ubiased" disclaimer (what a coincidence, always 5 star lol) made it very easy to spot fakes.

Also here's an interesting observation of fake reviews. Pretty spot on compared to my experience. I think the real issue is the incestuous relationship between reviewers and sellers. The 2015 here (and current top reviews I see) really remind me of professional reviewers I remember from those ancient days when I still trusted game and hardware review magazines. The reviewers ultimately don't get rewarded for telling a customer to not buy a shit product, they get rewarded for sales regardless of whether the product is good.

Your argument with ebay makes a lot of sense, though.

JewBay is awful, and I agree. Got screwed over for a Toughbook caddy once and never got my money back. Ended up reusing the caddy for something else.

Amazon is good for uncommon stuff IMO, I can't get citric acid (side note, that shit'll eat through rust and limescale in washing machines like no tomorrow!) for example anywhere in The Netherland, while Amazon Germany has 5kg tubs of them for not much money delivered to my door.

I haven't ordered a tub yet, but I really should the next time I see rust stains or lime buildup in one of my washers.

I think you should kill yourself this Friday, Dilbert:
youtube.com/watch?v=vHo7npmGcHU

guy9000 pls enable embedding you fagola

IKEA had food and batteries since ages. Are you living under a rock?

Now that's something

They generally have the lowest prices for things.
Price is king.

also their selection is large probably larger than any other website

Please, the selection is tiny.

Usually everything worth buying is pretty expensive on Amazon. I can generally find it for 10-20% less elsewhere whenever I look.

haha, yes Ikea even has this take away food thing. They sell 1$ hot dogs that taste like plastic.

This is what always happens with companies. They start very good. They bring good service, good products, they innovate, have good profits, growth is parabolic. Then they reach saturation. They cannot have more customers than there are people in your country and they already sold them everything from their inventory there was to sell. Greedy managers then get "ideas for expansion" to get more profits. They will expand into new markets in order to get market shares from competitors in that markets. But as they are not proficient in this business they often fail.

Congratulation, you found a market gap. Now it is time for you to be the next Betterzon(TM)

In my oppinion Aldi's business model might be copied as well. Basically what Aldi does is that they run supermarkets with very slim sortiments. They only list 600 Items in their stores and whenever someone wants to list a new product for his store, he has to get rid of 1 other item before it gets listed. This is how they keep their inventory slim. In the end it gives them the benefit that all their processes are very efficient and they don't waste resources for trying to satisfy every single wish. For example they only sell sugar in 1kg packages while other supermarkets sell them in different size. So if you have different sizes you have to have more processes.
By handling only a limited amount of inventory, you can optimize your supply chain and transportation / logistics handling. Costs can be driven down below the levels of your competition.

Now my idea would be to start a company like Amazon but with features from Aldi. You only have a selected inventory. For example there are not 10 Gajillion brands for RAM bars but only 2 or 3 selected ones and only a few selected variation of every brand. You buy those items in bulk and you can list them for a smaller price with all the services that Amazon also has. For reviews you don't let people rate it themselves but you do a dedicated review to each product. The idea would be to only list the 600 best sellers of technology in your inventory and speciallize in supplying those items with the most efficient business process. On top of lower prices, the customer has the benefit of knowing that you only have good and trusted products in your inventory.

I thought google shopping is just to find out where you can buy a product for the lowest price

Provide me another service where I can buy a 256GB SSD, a fox tail buttplug, and an Imperial Raider for X-Wing, AND have it arrive the next day without failure (in some places, the same day).

Amazon is peak efficiency, you nerds should be moist over it

I've never had trouble ordering from Amazon. It's pretty easy to weed out scams and junk product, and Prime has ended up as a net gain for shipping, since I use amazon pretty frequently.

Mostly agreed, except that Amazon seems like a company that, even though it, stagnated the share price hasn't gotten the memo and still grows parabolicly into triple digit earning multiples. It's easy to scoff and say just another bubble, but it's been a pretty long lived bubble, so I wonder if I'm missing something here.

That's a very charitable way to put it, but it wasn't that hard to find. Surely I'm not the only to have seen it, so one wonders: where are all the others and their Betterzons?

That sounds like a neat strategy, although I imagine in the grocery business limiting product selection would lead to some hard decisions when trying to satisfy your customers, since people love variety in food. Although I would agree with the implication that traditional stores have fairly large numbers of products of which there is basically no good reason for any sane person to buy. They get sold solely on marketing.

I think this is a great idea, especially for computers. Hard to say if it would take off, but if it existed and wasn't shit it would be my first stop when shopping. It's kind of like if Falcon guide started selling the parts they recommend (although funnily enough they don't recommend specific models for things like RAM and HDD, probably due to unpredictable pricing). And isn't Apple doing this? They offer a small selection, which while not perfect is largely appealing to normies and rarely frustrates them. To us their products are overpriced and lack features, but to a normie Apple must seem like godsend and they gladly pay the Apple tax so they can buy a phone without thinking and be confident they won't regret it.

The ways I can see this going wrong are:
I suppose it comes down to how disciplined you want to be with your business model.

They also aggregate reviews of the merchants and sometimes the product, but I have no idea where from.

You could just buy them separately from different sites. 1day shipping is often available.

It's only a gain if you were paying for shipping previously, which was easy to avoid.

Do you know how much work that might end up being, let alone I'll end up paying way way more in shipping costs. Keep your autism out of my wallet.

...

Amazon is successful because, while they aren't great, they are still better than the competition.

OH MY FUCKING GOODNESS, YES. THIS X1000. THEY ARE SO INCOMPETENT.

It's like 3 more clicks user. As for shipping, in my experience it's only slightly more at worst, but what do I know.

If it helps, there's a Chrome extension for sorting by number of reviews. Whenever you need to buy anything you can just open Amazon in Chromium instead of your normal browser. They already have your address, name and CC# anyway.

Still doesn't fix the other problems they have, unfortunately.

...

Actually, I think three separate purchases have much lower entropy than one shopping cart.

Plenty of people buy dildos, movie toys are a huge market, and SSD are everywhere these days. Just knowing one of these things about you is not a lot of information. But knowing that you are in all three groups already puts you in a small subset.

Behavioral data is more valuable when it is detailed and varied, since that allows more precisely targeted advertising which has better returns. When your data is in bits in pieces spread across a dozen merchants, the private actor will go through a lot of headache trying to reconcile it all into one unified dataset. That's assuming he can even get all the pieces. State actors probably have ways of dealing with it already, but then state actors can just pull up your CC usage history from the bank anyway, so you can't escape that unless you stop using CC.

It does not screw together like this, m8

Pun aside, how is eBay favoring buyers? The fag who sold me that caddy didn't tell me it didn't include the required cable in the description.

Oh, and I like these trips. Check 'em!