Despite trying to instill a customer-centric culture, as soon as Bezos let his foot off the gas, his company just isn't as customer obsessed. Or, they changed their definition of customer from the buyer to the seller.
I dramatically lowered my buying from Amazon about 8 years ago, when I noticed that listings had reviews on items that were completely different than what was being listed. Apparently, sellers sell a known good product that gets good reviews, and then swap it out for something else, so that the new product can piggy back off of the good karma. Amazon just didn't shut this down for years. Also, when Fulfillment services by Amazon mixed the the official provider's inventory with 3rd party distributors and reseller inventories. Sometimes, people would get knock-offs. I knew then, Amazon would coast for at least a decade before the decline would be apparent.
I thought I'd buy more Shopify stock as a result. Dunno if I ever did.
> Or, they changed their definition of customer from the buyer to the seller.
s/seller/shareholder/
I almost never buy from Amazon any more. For certain things it is difficult because Amazon has destroyed so much logistics and has such a stranglehold that a lot small/medium sized companies only sell through Amazon now. I ordered some kitchen gadget a few months ago from the company's own website, thinking I was avoiding Amazon, and it was delivered by an Amazon driver.
Another mind boggling aspect of Amazon’s review system is that it categorises multiple products / variations under one. So if you want to buy products X with variations X1, X2 and X3- the review page for product X1 will also show X2, X3 ratings bundled together. You don’t quite know the rating of X1 individually. You can filter reviews out by the overall rating is the aggregated view. I can’t believe how this is helpful for customers.
I was trying to buy a copy of the Iliad and found that they combined the reviews of EVERY TRANSLATION AND EVERY EDITION - I found people talking about 30+ versions on the same listing!
Reviews for Fagles's Iliad were combined with Pope's Iliad and Lattimore's Iliad and so on and so forth.
Navigation is also borked for books with many different versions - if you play around with the 'hardback', 'paperback', 'audiobook' buttons at the top of the page you'll find there's no consistency about what edition they lead you to.
Maybe that's to combat the strategy where sellers add an irrelevant category or hyper specific one, in order to get the "Best Seller" stamp on their thumbnail.
I slowed down my Amazon purchases drastically when everything I shopped for seemed to be flooded with these thousands of identical products have seemingly randomly generated all-caps brand names like BHHSRE, VHYXZY, XIOU, DAUGHE, JXMOX, LANMU, IBERLS, GMJYC… (yes, these are all actual brands I’ve seen on Amazon).
Jeez, the least they can do is make it look like they are trying to curb abuse.
Bezus checked out long before he moved to emeritus. Wanted to be a movie producer and shoot his rockets. Andy took over with all of the vision of a corporate franchiser running a Dollar Store.
A huge part for me is how they handle employees and how that makes employees steal things.
My wife ordered an iPhone and we received a salt mill and a flashlight. Called them, they said sorry send it back. But then they would not return the money cause we did not return the phone. At that point Amazon accused us for betrayal and forced us to take a lawyer to get parts of the money back.
That was our last day of using Amazon or prime video.
A few weeks ago I bought a "new" coffee maker which arrived physically broken and with used coffee grounds in the hopper. I don't understand how this is even possible.
That's the last thing I'm buying on Amazon.
Amazon pre-COVID was amazing. But 2-day shipping is now 5+ day shipping. It's chock full of cheap/fraudulent junk. It's been interesting to watch it go downhill so fast.
That's return fraud, someone orders a new version of a product they have, put their old product in the new box and file a return immediately. Amazon probably doesnt take the time to check it or check it thoroughly. Goes back on the shelf and you receive it.
Amazon shouldn't sell returned products as "new," but as "open box."
The other way it happens is co-mingling. Some vendor sends an "open box" product to Amazon as new, or a fake product, and Amazon ships it out when sold by Amazon since it considers goods to be fungible.
I stopped buying anything which goes in my body from eBay, Amazon, and similar after receiving a premium food product with very clearly fake packaging.
Amazon broke in 2020, when most shopping went online. It never recovered.
I doubt it ever will. Trust takes a long time to earn, and a little bit of time to break. I had four or five incidents on Amazon, cancelled Prime, and I doubt it will ever make business sense for Amazon to get me back.
I do think there's a place for a competitor to Amazon right now which looks more like the old Amazon.
Starting one would be super-capital-intensive. It's not a lean startup. There's only a handful of organizations with the capital to do that, and I doubt any of them will, in fact, do it.
>I do think there's a place for a competitor to Amazon right now which looks more like the old Amazon.
If walmart plays their cards right, they can do it (I mean they did acquire Jet). Unfortunately they also seem to be OK with becoming a dropship frontend for aliexpress
Maybe local laws, but probably a third of what I buy on Amazon is sold as "refurbished" which, 90% of the time is just damaged packaging or products that spent a few minutes outside it.
They weigh it. That's all they do. I know someone that bought an open box camera off Amazon and received a piece of wood that weighed the same as the camera.
Maybe it's because I'm in WA, but my average Amazon deliver is <2 days. This "2-day shipping is now 5+ day shipping" is just outright untrue out here. I usually get stuff next day, free. Although I also do Amazon Day for that extra cashback on my card. That card has paid a mortgage payment or two since I got it a couple years ago.
And I still haven't gotten a single fraudulent item despite a steady stream of Amazon boxes to my house (I requested an extra recycle bin I get so many.)
I'm also in Washington, and delivery times are inconsistent. Sometimes it's 1-2 days. Sometimes it's 3-5. There's no way to tell in advance which it will be.
I haven't ended up with any fraudulent items, but I have had packages "delivered" and "signed for" using my name that never arrived, with the telltale being that my packages go to a business address, and someone else signs for them.
I bought a $120 book from Amazon a couple of months ago, internationally, and they sent the wrong book.
I told them, and they said they'd refund it, don't need to send it back, and they'd even add $15 credit.
The refund never arrived so a few weeks later I got in touch again and they said I need to send it back if I want a refund. They told me the previous CSR had lied to improve ratings. I asked who I can complain to and they said nobody and closed the chat. I reopened it, restarted the refund, it was accepted and then 2 hours later I got an email saying that unless I sent them ID my refund would be rejected and that I can "no longer contact them" about this refund. I ignored that email, sent the book back and got the refund.
Another time I bought a Samsung Fold and it cracked down the middle. I told Amazon and they said they'll refund it under warranty. I sent it back and got a warning that if I return anything else in "non original condition" I'd be banned. Even though it was a warranty return.
That level of service would have been totally unheard of for Amazon 5 years ago.
I recently had a similar experience with Amazon. I bought a pair of AirPods but didn’t like them, so I returned them the next day. Amazon confirmed they’d received the package, but when the estimated refund date passed, I got a message saying they needed more information.
When I contacted customer service, they told me I had to send them a copy of my ID to process the refund. I was really frustrated; I’ve had this account for over 20 years and never had any issues before. I spoke with several representatives, but they all gave me the same response, and a few were even rude and aggressive, something I’d never experienced with Amazon before.
Since I didn’t want to share my ID, I decided to go through my credit card provider (Visa) instead and filed a claim. Visa refunded my money, but shortly after, I got an email from Amazon asking why I’d raised a Section 75 claim (the UK’s credit card protection scheme) and informing me that my account would be closed for fraudulent activity.
I replied with proof that they had received my return and never issued a refund. That was the last I ever heard from them, and the last time I bought anything from Amazon.
Amazon is in a hard spot with this stuff. They have massive problems with refund fraud, where people buy things and returning fake or used items in the box. Asking for ID is one way they try to spot people who are engaged in this activity repeatedly. When you refused to show your ID and did a chargeback, you did the exact same thing actual fraudsters end up doing, and of course they need to fraudulent accounts as otherwise the whole concept of mail-order returns collapses.
You didn't explain why you didn't want to share your ID with Amazon, but it's not an unreasonable request from them as a way to combat fraud.
While understanding their motivation to combat fraud they have a 20-year purchase history and have already established identity through payment methods. This is just lazy and perhaps additional data harvesting.
Amazon got so large they stopped paying attention to the details.
Fraudsters almost certainly gain access to old accounts specifically to "buy" that trust and then farm it for their own uses.
I wonder how much a 20-yr old Amazon account is worth on the grey market. Mine is about that old, and I have – legimately – returned thousands of dollars worth of goods (that were faulty or just didn't work the way I liked) and it is probably very difficult for Amazon to distinguish between my legitimate returns and a hypothetical alternative where I'm a fraudster that just purchased this old account and am laundering broken electronics through the returns system.
How is ID going to help with this in any way? They charge you (bank account/CC) and send you stuff (address), they inspect the return (or rather Should inspect it). What more would they need?
They don't inspect every return - that would make the already ropey economics of allowing returns very unviable - and it's often hard to detect return fraud because the fraudsters are returning an object that's nearly the same as the real thing, just used in ways that maybe aren't obvious given a casual inspection. Or they've raided it for parts and the object looks the same but the internals are gone.
It's not only Amazon that has this problem btw. Lots of online stores do. Return fraud is so prevalent that you should expect to this to become more common. A few bad apples ruin it for the rest of us.
Payment details aren't enough to reliably establish identity in many cases. If fighting this stuff were easy they'd have done it already, they aren't idiots.
So how is buyers ID going to help with Amazon not inspecting returns? Amazon doesnt even mark returns in any way so they dont know where it came from and where it ended up. Hell, they dont even mark/track source of co-mingled inventory!
And crucially - Amazon doesnt do this tracking on purpose so they can have plausible deniability while screwing merchants.
It doesn't help with inspecting returns. It simply adds another hurdle that has resulted in a slightly smaller percent of fewer returns, saving them a significant amount of $$ at scale.
Btw, if Amazon is a fault, where they can't shift the loss onto a seller or third-party, the delays will go on for weeks, if not forever. You have to do a chargeback.
> I’ve had this account for over 20 years and never had any issues before.
"Aged" accounts are a thing you can buy on the black market, as well as hacked accounts of users with long chains of legitimate activity. It's not as strong of an anti-fraud signal as you might think.
Yes but so what? All that proves is the account is aged. It doesn't prove it's not been taken over or sold. People move pretty regularly or order things for friends/family, a change of address doesn't mean anything.
AirPods are very commonly swapped with fakes and returned. It wouldn't surprise me if they added a blanket policy requiring ID for all AirPod refunds no matter what.
Apple products and a few other brands go through a different process for returns at Amazon.
Amazon can't verify everything, but for it's own Fire devices it does check S/Ns. Also Apple has it's own system, they do not mess around. I suggest not buying Apple products from Amazon.
I stopped buying anything significant from Amazon three years ago when I realised I was spending more time trying to understand where my packets allegedly delivered to a neighbour actually were than it would have taken me to just go buy the damn thing in a store. And that’s in Europe.
The research is also completely useless nowadays. 90% of what you find is just people reselling stuff they bought on AliExpress and reviews are all fake.
> Another time I bought a Samsung Fold and it cracked down the middle. I told Amazon and they said they'll refund it under warranty. I sent it back and got a warning that if I return anything else in "non original condition" I'd be banned. Even though it was a warranty return.
I once ordered a new pair of Jeans, expensive ones because I wanted them to last, from Amazon and got an obviously used and ripped pair sent to me.
I sent it back, noted that in my reason for sending it back only to receive an email from them with the same sentiment as you got. Luckily I kept all the receipts (figuratively) and took a lot of photos and screenshots.
Reaching out to support they apologized profusely to me but still it left a very bad taste in my mouth and I'm sure it'll happen again sometime in the future.
I keep going back to Amazon, even though I've been burned occasionally, because the retail shopping experience is that more horrible.
In the context of buying jeans (or really anything), if I go to a retail store, it's a multi-hour, multi-store event that usually leaves me empty-handed. My solution to that was to go directly to Levi's with the model and size of the last pair that fit, and buy a few pairs of them. I recently went back to buy to restock my supply of jeans, only to find that the style that fits has been discontinued—yet another form of enshitification.
.de promised to call me, never called. Split an order in three, used a bank account I had already removed from the system, then made me pay a fee three times when the money naturally could not be retrieved. One item in the order was a fake, when I returned it they claimed I kept it - thankfully I still had the receipt that I returned something, together with some stern words that was enough to end that.
Never buy from Amazon, especially not .de. Germany has a bunch of alternative online shops that are better.
Well, germany has customer protection laws, but before amazon, customer service was always worse than in the US i would say.
Just think about Media markt customer service for example…
Amazon changed that by introducing US-style no-questions-asked 30 day returns etc… but nowadays they are slowly chipping away at that, 14 days is the the norm now, (which is the hard limit anyway, since being set into law a couple years ago)
But yes the customer friendliness is slowly being cut down, due to growing costs. Zalando (an online fashion retailer) has also reduced their return policy recently.
Yep, I'm sure it's the brilliance of Amazon and not the same old trick of creating a monopoly then exploiting it that people have been using since the early middle ages and regularly outlawed because it destroys economies.
Say ... what was Amazon's initial reason for success? Being cheaper by exploiting the interstate commerce clause to avoid paying sales tax when it's competitors weren't allowed to do so? You don't say. Amazon is famous for losing money on their delivery business (up until recently)? It's constantly repeated in 10+ years of their financial statements ...
So either Amazon has completely changed tactics and become truly brilliant and we still don't understand the plan ... or they're up to their old tricks, being slightly cheaper, now with less legality!
... and not just the law but consumer protection agencies. The Verbraucherschutz does not mess around - break the law strategically and you will get banged up hard.
This is what Cory writes about: We need laws and regulations if we want to prevent enshittifiaction.
In the US these laws have been dismantled since the 70s (if I get the text correctly, I'm not expert on US labor law). And in Germany there is a chancellor who is pushing to increase the 40 work week (which still meant up to 50 hours) to a 48 hour work week - that's the change necessary to have Amazon (and others) treat their drivers and warehouse workers with more dignity. /s
Check the Philips Ultinon H7 led bulbs reviews on Amanzon.de. There are dozens on verified reviews complaining that they received halogen (cheap) bulbs in the led bulb packaging, suggesting some internal job at Amazon warehouse.
> I sent it back and got a warning that if I return anything else in "non original condition" I'd be banned.
I have a similar story, they "delivered" when I was out, hidden behind a wall in my garden
when I found the package two days later, the expensive books had been ruined by the rain
I explained to their CS, they issued the return authorisation
then after they received the return they threatened me for not returning in "original condition"
I was a customer since the early 2000s, a prime member since it started, with something like 2 returns total in that time, with tens of thousands of spending (to this exact address)
I don't think there even is a problem, from Amazon's point of view. CSRs can't tell you the truth ("we will try to avoid refunding you or will delay it as much as possible"), they can't stay quiet (because then delaying won't be as efficient) and they can't blame the company (because... well, they can't). So lying is basically all they can do.
They should speak the truth, citing the Amazon policy on the matter, and provide the path for escalation.
As it stands, I will vote negatively for any CSR interaction that doesn't resolve my issue immediately while the conversation is still active, irrespective of whether they say they have addressed it.
In any high-churn job environment like customer support it's easier to assume people will leave rather than fire them. Most of the time you'll be right. That means there's no incentive to manage bad workers.
Well they must give the stateside CSRs a different script because whenever I win the lottery and get an American on the phone it's a night and day difference. Notably they seem capable of solving complex problems without lying or smoke and mirrors.
An actual example, I recently had an issue that while straightforward and not that difficult to solve, was likely "off script". After being handed off between 4 different chat agents, and subsequent phone calls with two different Indians (who lied and made promises that weren't kept), my problem was not solved. At my wits end (and nearly 2.5 hours of my time wasted) I called back one more time. Inexplicably, I got a lady with a Southern accent. She solved my problem in under 10 minutes (and that included the approval she had to get from her supervisor).
Yeah - I think they’ve put a big focus on reducing returns over the last year. I bought a Quest 3 last year. One of the controllers totally packed in within half an hour - thumb stick permanently locked to full. Wanted to do an RMA.
Amazon told me to go hang, said I couldn’t return used goods, it would have to be unused in the box, and that I should contact meta.
I contacted meta, who told me to go hang, as they don’t officially support Portugal, which is where Amazon Spain happily shipped it.
So it’s just sat in a box gathering dust since, and I now avoid using Amazon whenever possible. I had already ditched meta so frankly I should have known that I was going to step on a rake.
> Amazon told me to go hang, said I couldn’t return used goods
I don't buy it. Don't we have actual consumer protection laws here in europe? We can return anything we bought online in 14 days time, full refund, no questions asked.
That’s the law, yeah - and if the goods are faulty it’s actually up to two years.
But this is Amazon - they don’t need to follow consumer protection laws - I think their specific get out is that they’re Amazon Spain, and I’m having stuff shipped to Portugal, and Spanish consumer protection regs (which implement the EU regs) only protect consumers in Spain.
I think their specific get out is that they’re Amazon Spain,
IANAL, but I don't think it matters. Any webshop in the EU must sell to all EU customers and they should provide the same warranty, etc. to all EU customers as if you were buying it in the country they are selling from (Spain in this case). The EU is a single market.
Amazon is violating EU consumer protection law here, but they probably do it because most customers will feel helpless and not sue them. If you do not want to sue them, the best thing is probably to file a complaint with the Portuguese consumer authority. It's really important to do this, because only when enough people do such a thing, a pattern can be established and they can warn or sue Amazon.
In my experience in the UK, Amazon is better than consumer protection laws, and miles better than other vendors. They won't question or require lots of information etc. to support things in however many years of warranty, or even outside of it.
Not to mention the standard is 30 day returns, more than double the legally mandated 14 for distance selling.
I don't understand why you were even talking to support - if it was clearly defective within half an hour (much less than 30 days) you could have just created a return yourself without talking to anybody?
Because it’s Amazon Spain and I live in Portugal - they only do return labels etc. for a collection point 200km from where I live, otherwise, you have to ship stuff back at your own expense. No option to automatically open a return.
It’s basically the Amazon uk returns process from 20 years ago.
They should repair it under warranty, period. If they cannot make a return label, you can send it back. IIRC they are also responsible for the shipping cost, but they can refund it afterwards when they are not able to create a return label.
I think your mistake might be that they are sticking to the letter of the law. Don't ask for your 14-day cool-off period, because strictly I think the product needs to be sealed (though many sellers are more lenient):
Instead ask for a repair under warranty, which they are required to do as a seller. They cannot point you to the manufacturer, the seller is responsible for handling warranty for the first two years:
You don't have small claims court? Here in Canada, it's $150 to register, you fill out the form yourself, no lawyers are allowed, and you argue your case in front of a judge.
(A company can have someone represent them, but if it's a lawyer, they must also have a rep. from the company there. and there can be no legalise, and the judge must explain anything to you if you ask)
There is no forced discoverability. EG, the other side cannot ask for all sorts of documents. You just include your evidence in the filing.
There is no ability for the company you sue, to compel costs if you lose.
For $150 you get a lot of joy out of hassling a company behaving like this. And amusingly, they still consult lawyers, and spend on a lot on lawyers. They can't be used in court, but they of course as a company consult legal experts.
I napkin mathed it, the one time I sued a company. I figured it cost them $25,000 to defend when I spent $150. If even a small percentage of people take them to task for breaking the law, they'll turn around quick.
Always use your enemies strengths as a weakness against them.
You should look at the process, but view if from the perspective of a hobby.
They do, but it’s only available to Portuguese citizens - I am a legally resident alien, but am excluded from that system, as it requires a citizen card to start a claim.
Julgados de Paz is available to non-citizens, what are you talking about? So is contacting the livro de réclamations and making a chargeback with your card provider.
How strange to try to claim the legal system has no reconciliation process for tourists or EU passer-bys. You're allowed to say you just couldn't be bothered to go through the trouble.
Go look at the website - you have to use authenticao.gov, which requires a digital mobile key, which requires a citizen card, which I cannot have unless I am a citizen. The offline process requires me to travel 200km each way to spend a day queuing.
Amazon Spain are Spanish, and are not subject to the Portuguese livro de reclamações.
As to making a chargeback - I like having a bank account, and being able to pay for things online - any time you do one you take a risk your bank will decide to throw freezes and KYC at you until you give up.
In theory. In practice, you go to the financas, they hunt around on their computer for a while, and then they tell you it’s not possible without a citizen card. I’ve tried repeatedly, as it’s a pain in the arse not having one, and have repeatedly been told it would be easiest for me to get citizenship first.
And yes, believe it or not, Trás-os-Montes exists. I know you think Coimbra is the northern limit of the country, but people do live up here, and the nearest service desk for many things is Porto.
Anyway, you go vote chega, or whatever it is you do.
Saying "It's not available to not citizens" is wildly and massively different than "It's more work for non-citizens". It's literally a lie and dishonest.
And given you've already said things that are not true, I'm highly skeptical that there are not other means to handle this. I bet there are ways to access authenticao.gov without being a citizen. I bet there are ways that you don't have to go 200km. You can probably send the forms by snail-mail, by post or courier. I bet you're just leaving things out again, or haven't researched properly, as you've shown this to be the case with prior comments.
In terms of what Amazon is subject to, you can get a court judgement in one jurisdiction, and have it enforced in another. You're in the EU too, and I would be astonished to discover this isn't super-easy there. And legislation likely enhances cross-border cases like this. And if companies ship into another country, they can be blocked until recourse happens.
Point is, you're just (again) saying "Oh well!" without really knowing. You're just saying that's the case, because you're presuming that's the case. You don't know. you just say it is so.
Chargebacks are a part of online life. They are common. I've never, ever heard of a bank ever being hostile over them. The very premise is weird and absurd. It's just a part of banking, nothing unusual, nothing surprising, and a process we all have to go through from time to time.
Perhaps you shouldn’t shoot your mouth off on shit you don’t know about and resort to calling people liars.
You can only use authenticao.gov if you have a citizen card. This is a fact. The offline process involves physically going to the office in Porto, which is 200km from me. There are no forms you can just mail. I have been through this. Shit, go try the process yourself if you’re so sure.
You also evidently know nothing about EU law. The EU issues directives. Member states implement them. They are national pieces of legislation, not transnational.
As for chargebacks, the last time I did one, over a hire car that didn’t materialise, my bank put me through the wringer, and I no longer bank with them.
Anyway, thank you for your enlightened fucking comment.
If you're going to provide half truths, and lie about situations, you shouldn't get so upset at it being pointed out. Or at people not believing what you say, after a while.
I would hope that consumer protection organizations can help you with that without having to engage lawyers: similarly, Amazon is not interested in long running legal battles if they see you are serious.
Because it's still better than the alternatives. I recently ordered a small item from a specialist retailer. Payment by Paypal was easy enough (ethically questionable, yes, but faffing about with credit cards on the internet in 2025 is just a complete PITA not to mention insecure). But the delivery was a nightmare. It took weeks, to the point that I needed to change the delivery address. But customer service turned out to be an AI bot which ignored everything I wrote while confidently reassuring me that it had understood and was acting on it. In the end I had to cancel the whole purchase. A terrible experience, alas worse than anything I've ever had from the evil monopolist of Seattle.
Amazon has so dominated online retail that there are many vendors that only sell through them.
So if you want a certain item, your options are, if you're lucky, find a physical retail store that sells the item, or order it from Amazon. If you're not very lucky, they don't sell in retail stores, only online. Only on Amazon.
My family has vastly reduced our purchases from Amazon over the past several months, but there are still some things that we basically don't have a choice in, especially given that we live in a rural area without ready access to many physical retail stores.
They are in reverse chronological order. I only buy cheap crap from them now, like Ethernet cables, sd cards, books. Never anything over $20 and I never will
How did you even tell them that they sent the wrong book?
When an item I ordered is delivered as the wrong item or when it never arrives, I can only select from a list of items in order to inform them about the bad delivery and none of the items lists "item never arrived" or "wrong item arrived".
And there is no other way to complain about the delivery/item--no help chat, no email I can contact.
One of the return options is 'item did not arrive'. You can also select 'I need help with another issue' or something like that, and either chat with support and explain or request a call.
(At least, in the UK. Like sibling comment to yours it's the amazing support and returns that makes me shop at Amazon (.de in their case) - I don't recognise the disaster described elsewhere in thread and I probably wouldn't shops there!)
I boycotted Amazon in January because of you-know-who and Bezo's swift and utter obeisance to him. It's surprisingly easy to go back to the old ways of waiting a little while for shipments if you're capable of planning ahead. (Speaking of which, it might be time for those of us who are post-Amazon to start thinking about our Christmas shopping.)
Unlike the author of the article, I don't believe it's possible to fix Amazon. He's talking about regulations as a remedy, but the U.S. is not likely to pass such regulations any time soon. The U.S. government is far more likely to threaten other nations for imposing such regulations or taxes on American companies operating in their jurisdictions. We saw this very thing happen when Canada was forced to delete its digital services tax.
If you don't think Amazon is delivering good value for your money, stop giving Amazon your money. Even though there is no direct competition for delivering Chinese junk to your doorstep overnight, stop giving Amazon your money. "Good, fast, cheap. Pick two." Amazon promised us all three, but failed to deliver just like all the rest.
Off the top of my head I can't remember but something like I need help with an order, then click "something else" or ask the automated chat to put you through to someone.
>They told me the previous CSR had lied to improve ratings
This was over chat? You have the transcript? I find it hard to believe they would say this. Amazon CSR have a very strict script they have to go by. But they do lie, get everything in writing.
My refund experience on Amazon (France) has been the best I've ever had. Just a wizard that led me through about 6 questions, at the end of which it said your refund is approved. Took about 5 minutes, all automated.
That level of service is for on-boarding customers. Sounds crazy, but they had a multi year on-boarding plan. We are now on-boarded, so why would they keep funding an on-boarding program that accepts any and all returns? The on-boarding process was complete awhile ago.
Retention is the next program they’ll have to initiate, but no reason to finance this now as there are no competitors just yet.
Listen, when it was said that corporations are amoral and sociopathic, it was not a joke.
I haven't read the article, but as a Swede I am stunned by the title.
I shop from Amazon a couple of times per month, with Prime subscription.
Delivery is always insanely fast (within 1-2 days), I always get exactly what I ordered, prices are always lowest compared to all competition, returns are convenient and human-free, and the additional Prime Videos is a nice bonus. I am honeslty worried of local Swedish business, becase they are getting the floor wiped. I haven't had a single issue some other people are mentioning.
My take is that it's because there is still competition in Sweden to keep them on their toes. Once they have decimated the Swedish high street, like they have in the UK, they will start cutting costs.
I've had crappy service on UK high streets long before Amazon. A keyboard I got from Tottenham Court Road stopped working within a week so I took it back in person. The shop manager tried to tell me I had to send it to the manufacturer. He backed down when I put the phrase "contractual relationship" into a sentence.
It was one of the many independent shops on that street. Curiously, the place is lately like a physical version of how Doctorow describes Amazon search results in the article: the same narrow selection of products, repeated at different prices.
yeah, the UK high street was definitely ripe for the taking. And Amazon with its cheap prices, no-nonsense customer service and return policy was miles better. The point is that it's no longer really the case.
I'm sceptical of Amazon's ability to do this in a country with strong consumer protection laws. If Amazon becomes the default for every online purchase in Sweden, and then enshittify, assuming there aren't other options to fall back on, the pressure will be pretty heavy, while in the US, that pressure basically doesn't exist.
I am in the USA and order lots of stuff from there too and have never once had any of these issues really. I return tons of stuff to them also. Anything you don’t like or need you can just return, as Amazon has the best return policy on Earth. I’m not happy that the world is moving to monoliths like Amazon, but I use what makes life easiest for me and saves me money.
Here in California, Amazon stopped honoring their shipping time "guarantees" years ago. They still say Prime is a two-day guarantee. When you order, they say delivery will take place within two days. Your order will have a scheduled delivery date reflecting that statement.
But later they'll quietly update the scheduled delivery date on your order. If you complain that a package hasn't arrived on time, they'll tell you to wait until it does arrive. If you ask for redress for the late delivery, they'll say no.
Sometimes you actually need to receive a birthday gift before attending the party, you know.
They've also stopped packing their goods in a way that prevents them from being damaged in transit. A book you order from Amazon today will arrive stuffed into a manila envelope that it can barely fit inside. The corners will be damaged.
I return all goods even slightly damaged, but take a pic, print it, and include a note.
I do so l, so that returns can see it arrrived in poor shape, not from it being returned.
But... saving 3 cents per package on a box, may be cheaper that an extra return out of 1000?
I imagine the original seller doesn't know (when only shipped but not sold by amazon), so too bad for them, and Amazon even removed the return option "box ok but product damaged".
Amazon hasn't done a great job of packing for item protection in ~20 years. I honestly don't remember now if they ever did, and I was buying books from them in the late 90s.
In my experience, small single items will usually go in padded mailers, which are the most effective option they seem to offer.
As soon as the item or shipment is big enough for a box, all they've done for as long as I can remember is add enough packing material to fill any empty space, so that items in the box are less likely to bounce around inside the box, but offering no protection against situations like the box as a whole being dropped onto a hard surface.
I stopped ordering hard drives from them about twenty years ago because they refused to pack them safely enough for UPS or FedEx standards.
Strange. I’ve only had really poor experiences with Amazon and Amazon deliveries in Sweden and really good ones in the US. In Sweden the delivery network seems full of other parties that frequently fail to show up at the last minute multiple times in a row. The translations are humorously bad and the selection is small.
And because they’re new, we have plenty of homegrown internet retailers for competition. Personally, I avoid Amazon in favor of the others if at all possible, seems like there’s a really significant risk Amazon is going to wipe them out.
For me it's problematic though. Sometimes I want some small gadget, and I just can't find it elsewhere. The other day I wanted a female-female connector for network cables and I couldn't find it on my Swedish go-to place for tech stuff, Kjell&Co. Instantly found lots of alternatives on Amazon.
eBay might have some similar problems as Amazon (fly-by-night retailers from China etc), but at least it doesn't pretend otherwise.
Or from Denmark, but delivery is probably expensive. (Within-EU delivery costs is something I'd like to see the EU improve, to allow smaller businesses to compete internationally with Amazon etc.)
Yeah, I do this on occassion as well, but I aleays try the Swedish retailers first, and only go to Amazon when I can’t find whatever I’m looking for. It’s pretty rare I have to go to Amazon.
It’s rough, because you know that it will probably be cheaper and delivered faster from Amazon, at the moment it is probably the most consumer friendly place to buy. But you know once the honeymoom is over and all the Swedish retailers are gone, it’s just going to devolve to garbage. Support your non-Amazon retailers!
Yeah, this happens everywhere. Amazon in Germany also became a lot crappier once they had a strong foothold in the market.
Even if they are still great in Sweden, don't buy from them, don't let them murder your local, healthy ecosystem. (If you think it's not healthy, wait until they have most of the market.)
The enshitification guy needs to keep his brand alive apparently. 99% of the time Amazon and its delivery people deliver what I ordered on time and if there's ever a problem returns are easy.
In some ways Amazon's entshittification is others' gain. For example, Amazon used to be a place you could easily buy and download music files legally. But they entshittified their music product to the point where it was impossible to use. Others stepped in selling lossless format downloads with a good buyer experience and made nice businesses out of them. The same will happen in all other areas previously dominated by Amazon.
I'm not sure how. Their warehouses and deliveries are very efficient. I'm sure it cost a fortune to build out. Hard to compete with without a ton of capital.
Amazon kindle books search is designed to show you authors other than the name you search on, to increase sales of "in the style of" which could have been a tickbox item, but no: they know it irritates, but it makes them more money.
If type "Charles dickens" in search, there should be a way to get works by Dickens exclusively. Even if you select the Web link author name, you get "in the style of"
> If type "Charles dickens" in search, there should be a way to get works by Dickens exclusively.
I tried it:
- on the website from the home page
- in the Kindle category
- on my Kindle directly
All I got was books by Dickens.
There was the usual "sponsored" items but they are explicitly displayed as it.
I don't know if it's a country issue, but I don't have the same experience as you.
Furthermore, I read regularly on HN comments about how bad Amazon became, selling fake products, taking forever to send packages...
Again, maybe a country issue, but here in France my experience is the same as it was ten years ago.
It's even a bit better thanks to the number of Lockers that are available near my flat or my office and the fact that more and more refurbished products are offered.
I'm in France, too. I don't know about fake products, I rarely buy "premium" stuff on Amazon. However, a few months ago I received a bag sold as new which had clearly been used, since I found a face mask and a random receipt in one of the pockets.
If shitty Amazon experiences went from 0.1% of customers to 1% of customers, then almost everyone still has a good experience - but now people are much more likely to be at least within anecdote range of someone who has a bad experience.
One explanation is this is the standard rollout of Amazon. First they undercut all the local options, and then once the population embraces them they flip the switch.
Amazon has always been about cash flow over profits. So they don’t really need to make money if that’s not yet one of the goals.
Aside from A/B testing, there may be insufficient profit in the Francophonie, to justify stuffing the shop front with dreck. This is not an insult, it's an upside of not being monoglot anglophone.
In my experience, the Amazon search feature is very unpredictable and confusing.
E.g. if I search for "<film or television series> blu ray" (no quotes), I will usually get only listings for foreign imports of the title sold by third parties, even when Amazon carries the item. If I want to get the US release in my search results, I have to leave out the "blu ray" string, which makes the search results less useful if Amazon carries a lot of non-BD versions of the title and I am looking for it specifically in that format.
Some items will be hidden when searching from Amazon itself, but can be ordered by doing the same search on DuckDuckGo or Google and finding a direct link to the product page.
TLDR: it's difficult to do a fair comparison between users' experiences, because their search feature (like so many sites - I'm looking at you, Etsy!) is completely broken.
Amazon's search results have been garbage from a really long time, I often wonder how come the executives or the team behind it never experience that themselves. I now to Amazon only if I know exactly what brand I am going to buy before opening Amazon.
I also quit Prime couple of years ago. Hardly miss it.
Amazon search looks bad for us because it is designed to sell ads. Its goal is to make company pay the most money to show articles.
Iirc, when this was proposed, Jeff Bazos said that this was the most stupid idea he ever heard.
I think the reason why it was introduced, and why Executives don't want to change it, is that it generates a ton of money for Amazon.
I'd personally love if in the end this would be the reason that Amazon stop making money and it would have been some short sighted greedy move. I'm afraid that advertisement, when it comes down to numbers, is just damn too profitable.
Unfortunately the store's primary revenue source seems to be from advertisers bidding on sponsored search result slots instead of the actual product sales.
Which can't possibly be actually true, since advertiser bids must necessarily be funded by actual product sales - I guess there's an edge case where an independently successful business intentionally overspends on Amazon ads to quash potential competitor discovery, relying on non-Amazon sales to make up for the deficit, but I can't imagine that's a particularly common result.
If people give up on buying things from Amazon because there's just no way to find reliably usable products, Amazon will eventually lose out on that advertising revenue. So either we're mid way through that process, or there's something more complicated going on.
What on earth is he talking about? Firstly, I find Amazon fine for goods that are hard to be faked (washing powder, books, etc...).
But the real shocker to me is:
> That means shopping anywhere other than Amazon has become substantially more inconvenient.
and
> We’re all still stuck to the platform, but we get less and less value out of it.
I've simply started buying all of my electronics, and other expensive goods from the manufacturer (D2C) or a reputable retailer in the space. My groceries I can order through my supermarket or one of the grocery focused platforms. They all offer simple free or cheap shipping at a convenient time. I think, to some extent, Amazon has helped this push for better/cheaper shipping.
> Break up with Amazon and delete your apps, and you will lose all the media you’ve ever bought from the platform.
Yes... but if you simply stop paying them you will keep them all? I have never bought a movie through Prime but I have some audio books which all work fine despite me no longer paying Audible.
All in all it seems like this guy has come up with some hypothesis of their master plan but the reality is that switching costs are low and Amazon doesn't hold a monopoly in any tangible way.
> you can’t stop enshittification by “voting with your wallet” (those votes are always won by those with the thickest wallets, and that’s the billionaires who made money by enshittifying everything)
Er... Amazon can't run with only the patronage of billionaires? What is he imagining, Elon Musk just buys a billion dollars a day from his mate Jeff? Obviously if the platform gets worse, customers will start switching (en masse) to the 85-90% of global ecommerce that Amazon doesn't control.
I am outside US and have used them to ship internationally because they are one of the rare retailers who will ship delivery duty paid, avoiding local UPS/FedEx/DHL offices charging 30-60 USD just to do customs processing (local ~30% customs fees still come on top of combined shipping and item prices). Their international shipping charges have gone bonkers recently though too (what used to be like $70 for an ultraportable laptop is now like $200+). Thus I am bound to Amazon.de more but there's a smaller selection.
I also temporarily sign up for Prime when I visit US (usually for a week), but recently, unless I order on Sunday of my arrival and deliver to one of their lockers, "2-day shipping" or even extra paid same-day-shipping won't arrive by Friday to my hotel (last few experiences in Boston, MA).
Due to only "delivered by Amazon" products having delivery-duty-paid option, I avoid some of the risk of new Amazon, but I need to be extra careful when shopping while in the US.
What bothers me more is Amazon limits the products you can see. When you search for a product type (say a USB Hub), it will show you constantly the same set of products. While you scroll, it repeats the products that are sponsored, sprinkling them here and there, and the mindless customer scrolls search results, seeing only the limited number of products Amazon wants to show you. Finally you‘ll order the one with the highest number of stars.
This is not a neutral listening of all available products. Although Amazon proposes has and knows all sorts of products. It will push the ones right in your face that it wants to promote.
So if you are into a purchase, do your research on other platforms first before you order on Amazon.
They also tend to show a very narrow selectio of items, if you search for a synonym of the product you're looking for you often end up finding other items that even contain the original search phrase in the item title and description.
Amazon in India is truly a miracle service. Affordable, has the largest range of products with quick and easy returns. I think it’s basically impossible to compete with it.
Yeah I guess so! Maybe a transition between 1 and 2 and I probably am counted as a B2B user by them so maybe it isn’t clear to me yet how shitty they are (becoming). They even have a different account tier for business users.
For everyone's context, I think this is about the process of enshittification:
1. Prioritize customers (product feels great)
2. Prioritize B2B (sellers in this case — customer experience starts to suffer)
3. Prioritize shareholders (customer experience is terrible, now sellers' experience starts to suffer too, product eventually dies — though it takes a while)
Thanks for sharing. Someone in Indian tech news should cover this and warn people of over reliance on Amazon. In my city there’s a local market which is trying to compete by using Google ads and undercutting Amazon’s pricing for electronics items. It has impressed me. I wouldn’t have found out or actually used it though if it hadn’t been for my senior who’s older and still checks the prices at multiple places before buying.
Amazon is my last resort nowadays, because some things are only sold there and on alibaba. If I only find a thing I want on amazon, I'll search again for the vendor name to see if they have a site of their own and if so buy it there instead
It does help me buy less stuff because the process is so annoying nowadays
At least it Germany it's mostly down to marketplace shenanigans. Ofc you can still get your refunds but now you sometimes get wrong articles. Return frauds are normalized and the only thing they seem to check before sending it out again is weight. You can't find brand items anymore because it's flooded with Chinese throwaway brands and Amazon fulfillment is just garbage... well at least the outsourced company in our region.
The point Amazon went downhill, and like all online stores, is when they started letting third party sellers sell through the platform.
It's now a black market where shady companies are trading on the good name of Amazon and selling the same products at lower products but usually from the grey market.
The only one where I have seen it improve a store (in the UK) is Next where they allow other trusted fashion brands to sell through the store.
Local shops are scams in my area: expensive, don’t take back items, limited selections, don’t have the right items and have to settle for less, time consuming, bad customer service, can have language requirements for some people at the time of disputes (but not when selling), the reviews of items are not available and a lot of them turn out to be bad, long waiting lines … Your complaints about online shopping remain with local shopping.
The benefits of online shopping for consumers are plenty and evident. The majority of products I bought online that I researched carefully have been solid.
> Local shops are scams in my area: expensive, don’t take back items, limited selections, don’t have the right items and have to settle for less, time consuming…
None of these are scams, you're misusing the word. You mean a worse shopping experience, not defrauding the customer.
I live in a country with the same problems, and everything here is so much more expensive, it absolutely deserves to be called a scam. Stuff such as books and electronics can easily be 2x as expensive locally as abroad.
Not a scam a local business who can't compete on price with a global marketplace.
What they offer is the ability to put the product in your hands immediately, they hire your friends /family and pay taxes to your city and national government allowing services like police, fire and hospitals to be funded.
For many cheap prices, longer wait times and not supporting your local area makes more sense to them. But then they complain about the local services and not realize their decision to not support them had an affect.
Amazon is a marketplace, and more and more different vendors came to that place selling cheaper, shady things. They seems to have an open door policy. It's somewhat understandable.
But that same strategy got adopted in many different places.
Decathlon on their website offer products from other vendors. It's really shady as they advertise hassle free returns everywhere but that only applies to products sold by them specifically, not to majority of products available in their shop.
Kaufland (if you're in US think Germany's Walmart) has the same thing going on.
Unfortunately, a "marketplace" is precisely what I don't want from a lot of the commerce sites that include them on top of their "first party" inventory, and they're seemingly becoming ubiquitous.
At least the decathlon site has an easy way to limit search results to only Decathlon products. I kind of like how it is because it also allows me to discover products from alternatives that might be better while keeping the option to stick to decathlon.
This is happening everywhere, making a quick buck and completely ruining your reputation. The main Amazon competitor in The Netherlands bol.com has gone down the exact same path
The marketplaces in brand shops are completely annoying. If you choose to buy from Decathlon, you expect their coverage over all products, not some of them.
Only imagine the same in the physical shop, completely crazy trying to avoid falling into non-decathlon things along the display racks.
Darty, Fnac, Leroy Merlin do the same. It’s impossible to go to a shop’s website and expect to buy their products. They’re all just copying Amazon in a cheaper, scratchier version.
But Amazon started as marketplace and people associate the brand with that, also with their Amazon Basics stuff. But is the experience for the user is not equal for brands that have been working in their solely brand reputation.
I think that they fall into “I do it because the competitors have done it before”, it would be nice to know the revenue for the marketplace part and time invested in development.
I am trying to buy a new Nintendo Switch, but it seems impossible.
Search results are polluted by refurbished products that you only realize are refurbished once you look at the details. This happens for me even after selecting "new" specifically.
The genious leadership at prime video thought it would be a good idea to introduce adds not only on the beginning of movies but also in the middle of it, with an extra paid option (on top of prime) to remove it. When an add appeared I got so frustrated I cancelled my prime subscription at that very moment. I wonder if they even considered/cared about brand reputation impact.
Sadly, brand reputation is a means to an end. If they lose the most demanding 5% of customers, while getting 10% more profit from the other 95%, that's a huge net win.
At least in the short term. But manager bonuses and promotions and the stock price are all based on the short term, aren't they?
I've seen (somewhere on HN) it compared to soviet central planning committees: decisions are made by people so far removed from any actual situation on the ground and with so little accountability they have no hope of making correct ones, and then sooner or later, whatever they're in charge of collapses.
I missed out on what seems to be the deterioration over the last few years; I stopped using Amazon, some years ago, because I'd seen too many and consistent stories of the work lives of warehouse staff.
They hit “day two” years ago in order to meet quarterly Wall Street analyst targets, which is why they didn’t end commingling inventory until recently.
Has anyone else ordered a pair of shoes only to open the box and find... one shoe?
Best I can guess someone's ordered two pairs, split one of the pairs across the two boxes, and sent both boxes back for two refunds and they've gone straight back on the shelf.
It matters less if it's actually true than if someone trying to pull off the scam thinks it might be. The only way to find out if that hole exists in the system is either to have an insider tell you that it would, or to try it out...
Oh, and to add further to the nonsense: the product description technically doesn't say that what you're buying is a pair of shoes. So a sufficiently automated system might mistake a single shoe for a legitimate product. It's absurd, but not impossible to see how you might end up there.
I've noticed that the enshitifacation of e-commerce marketplaces has become a global problem. Here's what I've observed for the past 5 years or so:
- Pretty much every webstore of size will now list / sell everything, where 99% of the products are not in stock, and needs to be ordered - probably from the vendors in China, or whatever.
- Explosion in independent 3rd party sellers, within those stores. You now have to check that you're explicitly purchasing from the webstore you're visiting, and not some third party they allow to sell through them. Luckily some stores have become better at notifying the buyer that the item is being bought from someone else, and not the store.
- Acceptance of lookalike products.
Basically, it seems like all the stores are competing to be AliExpress and Temu now.
Then it is a question, why not buy directly from AliExpress. At least you know what you have paid for and there is implicit agreements that there are going to be no returns.
My reason for using Amazon has changed over the years it used to be for the good returns but now my situation is such that I’ve no interest in taking the time to use the return service. And I use the service for the quick delivery of small items that I can write off if I don’t like and it works for that fine on the occasion I have returned stuff. It’s never been an issue. I suspect that some of the posters on here have passed some kind of returns threshold which impacts their experience.
I rarely buy from Amazon, but some small things I find only there. I ordered some phone accessories last week and needed a little more for free delivery so I added a shampoo. They dropped the shampoo without packaging in a paper bag with all the other stuff, when I opened it, of course, the shampoo was all over everything.
Their packaging and delivery quality is one of the worst. But they are still responsive to customer requests, although that is going down the sewer as well. I get often responses that look LLM/chatbot generated and often not answering my question. Or they try something like, sure I'll get you the refund as soon as you place the order again. Then I insist they refund now and so far I always got my money back.
So, basically their advantage for me is their sortiment (but you need to navigate through a lot of fake and garbage products), free returns and quick refund (often even without a return). But this is not a very strong one and I very rarely open their website - the pile of low quality listing is so off-putting that I generally avoid.
It may be that it's area, or customer specific, but Amazon is still great here. I'm ordering a computer overnight, so I hope I don't eat my praise on this one, lol. As a household we spend several thousand a month on average, so maybe we get put in the "keep-em-happy" file? One thing is, we only order if it ships from Amazon; never with someone who handles their own shipping.
I don't use Amazon often, but as a fan of puzzle games, I really appreciate the UX (which regularly changes, so as to not get stale) of trying to buy something without inadvertently signing up for Prime.
In India, Amazon has been quite good IFF you have Prime. Deliveries are quite quick, returns and refund rules are clear, and always get processed if eligible. If you're a frequent user, it's well worth the subscription cost.
If you don't have Prime though, it's a different place altogether. But you don't have much of a choice - Flipkart (the other alternative) is worse in every way.
I was looking through the comments here for something like this. Additional context for others here: Amazon in India is legally allowed only to operate a marketplace. It is not allowed to stock and sell products by itself (it does FBA, i.e., Fulfilled by Amazon for warehousing and delivering products by third party sellers).
Amazon in India has been close to perfect on customer service. I have had issues, but it’s still easier to contact customer service on chat or have them call me (both modes have become a little more difficult to access with the stupid chat bot responding and not helping). Anytime there’s a defective item that needs to be returned for refund or replaced, it’s been very quick.
Lately though, I’ve made it a habit of shooting unboxing videos and photos of the delivered package so that I have clear evidence on any wrongdoing by anyone in Amazon. For larger appliances and such, I’d still prefer a local brick and mortar store.
On the other hand, Flipkart, which is Amazon’s primary competitor, has worse prices on many items of interest to me, does not really offer fast shipping like Amazon does, has only a phone number to contact customer service (and that’s pretty useless), doesn’t have a simple way to get returns or replacements done, has a really stupid and useless “SuperCoins” rewards scheme, and more. It’s a wonder that Walmart is still an investor and owner in Flipkart and hasn’t sold it off and salvaged itself.
I do believe that Amazon’s service in India has deteriorated over the last couple of years or so. Don’t know if management doesn’t care as much or what’s happening within.
I only buy cheap garbage from Amazon and check the reviews for the more pricey items there. It is not worth the hassle. Price from buying it somewhere more reliable is most definitely worth it. I attribute this to MBA types taking over. They care about metrics that are optimized for their promotions not for customer satisfaction.
The root of the problem is that they mixed the Amazon retail storefront (aka The Amazon people know) with the Amazon Marketplace used by the third party sellers. So when you buy something the whole thing works automatic and invisible to get the “best price”
Unless you make your own choice and going deep into the purchasing options you will end up in one of the 3 scenarios
- Product sold and shipped by Amazon
- Product sold by third party but shipped by Amazon
- Product sold and shipped by third party
I have never had a problem with the first category but the other two are always problematic, especially the third. You are on Amazon.de > you can end up buying from the US, UK, or China (so outside of the EU). Not just you will get hit by customs but good luck enforcing the mandatory 14 day return law.
I had issues with the first category too because of the commingle inventory perhaps. Counterfeit SD card sold and shipped by Amazon. Seems like a very common issue.
I feel like Amazon’s internal culture did not survive Bezos leaving + Covid. All that’s left are a bunch of people desperately trying to survive and climb their way up (stepping over whoever is necessary to do so). It’s not about the customer or the business at all any more.
> in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representatives who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions
The exemple is bad. The union rep is in a parallel organisation. The admin can be FTE schemers and outdo teachers. But bad teachers have no edge on good teachers.
in Japan I experience none of the problems that people in HN seem to have with Amazon in other countries. Never encountered fake products, return has always worked, and stuff that never arrived was also reimbursed. Maybe I'm an exception.
True, but it is worth mentioning that since Amazon Japan dropped using established delivery services and went with their own gig-based one their service has taken a drastic turn for the worse: Claims of having ringed the bell, despite not having done so; packages left outside, without having allowed them to leave them outside in the settings; big envelopes rammed into mail boxes and hanging ~1/4 outside, because they could not be bothered to use the delivery lockers; absolutely mad parking and driving with their "delivery cars"; impolite behaviour when delivering at your door; etc. With Japan Post and the regular delivery services I have never seen any of these things. Sure, Amazon fairs better than elsewhere, but even Japan is not immune.
How is Japan's customer protection? Here in Australia it is enshrined in law that the seller, Amazon, must handle warranties and such for the expected life of the product.
Japanese Amazon shipped me a fake copy of a book once, with terrible print quality to the point of having overlapping text. They did refund me, but my review calling it out as fake was removed.
Most likely Japan just have better customer protections. Amazon only able to sell open-nox and co-mingled knock-off crap because US regulators are toothless.
Louis Rossmann have a video about fake electrical fuses sold on Amazon US with almost half a million views. Literally the product that can burn your house to the ground:
Maybe. Or it could be simply relying on being a high-trust society. Screw up with consumers, and people will talk about it and shame you night and day.
In Brazil its getting better and better. I even feel bad because I question myself what are we going to do outside if everything can arrive next day and cheaper than anywhere else... local business can't compete etc.
(Another nice thing is that I can buy (some) imported goods (say a Peak Design pouch) directly on my local Amazon site and feel confident they will arrive. Not sure exactly what makes items appear listed on the local store.)
Just having to deal with getting the wrong item - something more expensive shipped, though it was not the item I was actually after. Did not take the wizard past the return instructions where they would charge me the amount, but no information on the return. For a $15 item, I'll keep the $20 package they shipped me -- not going to deal with their mistake if it is going to cost me to help them fix the issue.
Biggest issue is the shipping. The primary reason I had prime was the shipping - and I swear, only a small fraction of packages ship anywhere near the published date.
I’ve been buying from Amazon since they begin. I went through the pain of it being new company [missed shipments, wrong product, colors and a multitude of other headaches] back then they extended your membership or something like that. Now you are you are a take it or leave it sucker. Customers who have stuck around you 30 or 20 years should get some kind of discount on their membership fee. I have been slowly going to Walmart and Sam’s Club for a lot they’re slowly cleaning up their act.
For me it was when prime raised it's price to $125, they stopped giving me any credit when my prime deliveries were late (they were more often than they weren't), and so I decided to walk over to Target in my neighborhood and see if it was more expensive -- Target was cheaper.
At that point I decided the experience of going for a walk when I need something in a pinch was nicer than ordering online, and if I need something obscure, I'll pay for shipping once or twice a year.
I had been a customer of Amazon for almost 20 years. I had Prime since day one. For me the breaking point was when they increased the fee and then decided to have ads for Prime Video. I sold the few Amazon stocks I had, and canceled Prime.
I found after I canceled Prime, my Amazon spending significantly went down. Sometimes I will add something to the cart, look at the shipping fee, and decide to abandon the cart. Canceling Prime made me realize I was ordering a lot of junk I didn’t need.
To add my voice here: I have never had problems with Amazon. And I'm ordering tons of very niche electronics stuff from them. Right now I have two PZEM-016 meters in front of me, connected to an RP2040-based FeatherWing board. All of that was delivered within 2-3 days, as expected, and at a price point that is the same or nearly the same as in other online retailers.
I got a fake product only once, a box with packing peanuts instead of a ZigBee relay. They refunded the cost right away.
For a few years now I have made an effort to first try to find a local (in the neighborhood, city or country) seller who has a good reputation before even considering Amazon. In all cases, where I have found alternatives, I've had great experiences, and no issues.
The only thing I've noticed is the very big price difference between academic/technical books when bought on Amazon vs a local book store (40+%) in favour of Amazon. Bulk discounts play a part in that I assume.
What I've found on Amazon product listings is that honest reviews are buried underneath thousands of vague, five star reviews. Nowadays you can churn out tons of positive reviews with AI. Product reviews on Amazon are completely meaningless today. My experiences with multiple products differ vastly from those reported on the product page.
My partner ordered two sets of watercolor paints in a travel case, both new. One of them was just an empty case — someone had taken the paints. I feel like everyone has stories like this, which makes me pretty scared for more important purchases. What if I ordered an iPhone and just got a box?
Maybe I missed it, but I haven't seen any mention of the postal rates reform vis-à-vis China. That certainly ended the era of cheap products from China sold on the platform, so I was always curious if removing postal subsidies had an impact on Amazon's quality, or supply chains?
Amazon recently ruined Order Search for no reason at all. It used to be that it worked, showing matching recent orders. Now it shows altogether unrelated orders from years ago, for no reason at all except to ruin my experience.
Amazon was simply superb in the early 2000 which made them so popular and dominating that most people will still buy from them even if they are rubbish and predatory. Why should they improve when people use them anyway?
I was shopping for a specific jacket last week and a few different Amazon sellers had very different prices for an identical product. Still agree with your point though since I still got a base range of prices. I ended up going to the website of a clothing retailer instead.
Here's a specific example. IMDB (an Amazon company) forces you to watch a movie trailer for a movie you don't want to see in order to watch a movie trailer for a movie you actually want to see.
You have to watch an 2-minute ad in order to unlock the privilege to view the same kind of 2-minute ad.
I'm not sure weather to call that absurdism or dystopian, but it's nuts.
More importantly, it is friction. It actively stops the customer from doing what amazon (or its advertisers) actually want them to do.
This same thoughtlessness to the impacts of decision making has been inexplicably implemented into Amazon's companies at every level. This is a big problem for Amazon customers, especially.
Amazon's insistence on advertising blocks customers from spending money. Every unrelated "sponsored" product in the search results gives that much more opportunity for a buyer to look on a different site. Serving an ad has inexplicably become a higher priority than closing a sale.
Look at Amazon's "are you really sure you actually want to buy that" page they are now using to try and upsell customers before letting them check out. To say the least, it is a fundamental change in philosophy from the company who invented single-click checkout and "Buy it Now".
Essentially the enshittified internet is a rent-extracting one. It locks users in, often taking a loss leader, then once it has built this moat, it degrades user experience by extracting rent. Rent extraction is a form of profit that allows the wealthy owners of these platforms to parasitize money from the working class by relying on lock-in instead of offering something of value in return. It’s in society’s interest that businesses like this are expropriated and socialized and handed over to the workers to run. This would lower prices by eliminating lock-in based profiteering, restore the internet from its state of enshittification, and decentralize power by reducing wealth concentration.
However power is so centralized in the hands of these oligarchs this wont happen on its own. They are currently turning our country into a white Christian nationalist ethno-state to try to preserve their tenuous hold on power.
In the medium term, their adversarial approach to society’s welfare is likely to backfire as we continue to find ourselves increasingly squeezed by the enshittified world these oligarchs have created - and turn to the only real effective tool that we have left: mass strikes. The longer we wait the harder it’s going to be.
Amazon works great for me. Everything from cheap Chinese stuff I want immediately to fresh produce in a couple of hours to grill grates. The return policy is good with simple instructions and I'm comfortable with the error rate.
I bought a book from amazon 5 days ago, specifically picking the new - not used - version. What got delivered was not just clearly used, but has a large patch of tape on the cover where there was a large tear.
They definitely tried to send me a used book as if it was new. I'm sick and tired of Amazon lying to me.
Payed for fast shipping for emergency cavity filling paste only to get it 3 days later than advertised. No excuses from the semi-chatbot-drone worker when confronted.
The largest moat I’ve seen with Amazon and e-commerce in general has been the logistics aspect of it. Because even when 90%+ of the goods sold are junk, the remaining 10% are lower volume niche items or hard to find in retail stores for various reasons. E-commerce can absolutely unleash underserved and redlined areas, for example.
So honestly, I think we haven’t even gotten close to the rock bottom point where people will actually start cancelling things like Prime. Especially while the competition still won’t sell their goods to “dirty” areas. And then people wonder why Amazon and Walmart are so big.
A couple of years ago Amazon UK somehow bamboozled me into buying a monthly subscription for a pot of hair product. When the next month's item was delivered and I saw the charge on my card, I was so infuriated that I impulsively disputed it. Months later, Amazon sent me a rude email asking for their money, but I eventually won the dispute. It feels kind of good knowing that I'm one pot of hair wax up on Jeff Bezos. (I did offer to send it back.)
Easy: Amazon missed the mark and started piling on all the useless bullshit on top of what they used to do, veered far out of their lane, and started becoming a media and software production company instead of just selling books.
Now I can't get anything delivered to my house within 2 days or less because I'm punished as a rural customer, but they can sure as hell send me letters every 2 months complaining I haven't touched my Prime Video.
The ideas are correct, but the argument in the article… could use some improvement. In stage 1 ("good for users") Cory describes how the platform becomes bad for users. In stage 2 ("abusing users, good to businesses") he actually describes how Amazon is BAD to businesses. Not the best presentation of his fantastic "enshittification" term.
When your stock price is so high that it out-values operations and out-paces innovation, and you need to provide value to your shareholders to retain your valuation, what can you do other than squeeze your revenue stream for more juice?
Hopefully Enshittification is just the dying throes of a megacorp before they implode - otherwise we are all screwed if this becomes the new normal.
Where are these horror stories coming from? I've bought thousands of things off amazon for the last 10 years and almost never have a problem, and the price is at least equal to someplace I'd drive to. Not only do I use prime deliveries, I also watch prime streaming, buy groceries through Fresh, and host things on AWS
Their return policies are really lenient too. I bought a computer monitor, didn't like it so I sent it back, bought another and liked it even less, sent it back. The third one I liked, all the returns didn't cost me a thing.
Just a few weeks ago, just be accident, I got a refund on a loaf of bread that had been dented, while I was getting service on something else. Nothing is perfect, but their online chat support has resolved any problem I've had, even if it took some effort.
I don't want to sound like an ad although I probably do, but what am I doing right? Do I somehow, instinctually, avoid products that will be trouble? If things were as bad as the comments suggest, I don't think amazon would be still in business. If this is enshittification, more please.
I've been an Amazon customer since the were just a book store (in 1999). I buy a lot of stuff from them.
Just in the past three months, I've noticed a lot of changes. Orders are being lost, orders are being cancelled by them for lack of product, orders are being split, with no indication of the split -- showing all products delivered when the split portion is still in transit.
In the past, the customer could see the same order information that their Customer Support staff could see, but now we can't see as much. Recently, I had an order split three ways (three of the same item) without any notice. The shipment arrived with only one item, so I contacted Customer Support. The support rep spun on it for a while, and then told me I would receive the remainder of the shipment the next day. By the end of the call, it changed to two days. It finally arrived four days later, but that shipment also only had one item (of the three ordered). I tried contacting customer service again, but instead of letting me reach a human, Amazon forced me into an AI chat. The chatbot told me that my only option was to accept a refund for the missing (third) item. I repeatedly told it that I would rather receive the item, but it insisted that was impossible. So it refunded part of my purchase price. Two days later, I received the third item (with no shipping status updates of any kind), followed the next day by a demanding email from Amazon that I pay them for the item I had received (which I did do).
Even more recently, I ordered an m.2 SSD. While placing the order, I opted for the "green" option to get a little money back by not rushing them. Everything was fine with the order until the next day, when I got an email saying the charge to my (Amazon) card was declined. I checked the card, which still had $8,100 of credit, and I had just received and paid the ($1,900) bill the day before. I called Amazon (and reached a person!) -- the guy in the foreign call center had an accent so think that I had trouble understanding him, but he insisted that the issue was MY fault three times before I got him to consider that maybe it wasn't. He offered to try charging the order again, and it went through. I checked the order status while still on the call, and the "green" option was no longer there, so I cancelled the order and tried re-placing it, but there was no longer any "green" option, so I didn't re-place the order.
I think all of this nonsense is a consequence of Amazon deploying AI into their systems across all business functions. The last one was probably an AI trying to maximize their margins by depriving me of the (1%) "green" credit. Hopefully my actions helped "train" the AI that ripping off your customers will reduce your sales revenue.
I know this was a long rant, but at least in my case, Amazon's deployment of AI is going to reduce the amount of money they earn from me.
I don’t mind it at all, because it’s purposefully turning to shit. Degradation sounds slow natural. Like how a computer bought in 2005 that runs just as well as back then has seemed to have degraded 20 years later, no fault of its own.
I do have a hard time believing this author coined the term in 2022. I’ve had this phase as part of my vocabulary for much long than that to describe the same exact phenomenon, I know I didn’t invent it but it’s been around in the online software community at least. Maybe he claims ownership because he was the first to write about it, or maybe my memory is just failing me and he deserves the credit. Idk but that tidbit bothers me way more than the words. I don’t let vulgarity get in the way of having polite conversations, they’re not mutually exclusive in my opinion.
You are right. Looking at ngram it seems to have appeared around 2016. But it was even around in 1970s but perhaps in a different context. So it’s perhaps better to say that he popularised it.
If you want, you can translate to Latin and call it "faecefaction".
The key difference is that degradation can be a natural process, or a result of neglect, while faecefaction is a deliberate act of turning a product into crap, while knowing that the customer will continue buying for some time, due to inertia and / or lack of alternatives.
I agree that is vulgar but the word carries more meaning than degradation. I thought perhaps dilapidation might work but that also misses some of the nuance.
I agree with you -- I never use vulgar words, so I cannot use this word myself. That being said, maybe you saw this article being posted a few days ago: https://frankchimero.com/blog/2025/selling-lemons/ writing about the concept of "Market for Lemons". The last paragraph compares the two ideas:
> What makes the Market for Lemons concept so appealing (and what differentiates it in my mind from ens**tification) is that everyone can be acting reasonably, pursuing their own interests, and things still get worse for everyone. No one has to be evil or stupid: the platform does what’s profitable, sellers do what works, buyers try to make smart decisions, and yet the whole system degrades into something nobody actually wants.
(I don't know if Doctorow's concept really relies on malice.)
Degradation sounds passive, like something getting worse due to lack of care. Enshittification as a new word have the luxury of no baggage, so to me it perfectly captures the process of taking active, intentional steps to change stuff in a way that makes end user experience worse, but (maybe) product owner richer.
But "enshittification" has its own specific meaning which goes beyond existing terms (i.e. it's specific to degradation of platforms making money from two sides of the transaction).
I wish we had a better term for it, but it can't be replaced by just "degradation".
My P.O.V is that corporate double speak is prudish, distorts on purpose and overall is much worse for humanity.
Enshittenification is ugly but truthful.
Enshittification captures a specific type of degradation - the inevitable deterioration of a product or service under an economic system that is obligated to secure ever larger profits. I like the fact that it is slightly vulgar because there is an element in this process that is revolting - the idea and acceptance that its fulfillment is guaranteed.
The vulgarity also carries with it higher odds of the term detaching from the intellectual sphere and into the common man, increasing awareness and hope of consumer pushback.
When the present-day is compared to the promises and hopes for big tech as the companies were starting, the word seems appropriate. We ain’t in Sunday school! Degradation doesn’t capture that many of the changes for the worst are willful and intended.
I agree, a conspiracy theorist would suggest it's a deliberate move to reduce the amount of people talking about it, in media, amongst friends etc.
There are some people who swear every other word when talking to friends and family. Fine, they'll talk regardless. But there's a significant number who don't, and they will thus avoid using "enshittification" in conversations, reducing the cultural awareness of it.
I agree that the vulgarity is problematic, but the ugliness seems rather appropriate.
Degradation can happen due to inaction - that is not what enshittification is. Enshittification is the endgame of a platform where the owner stops courting buyers and sellers (in that order) and allocates all the profit to itself.
Why does the author need to inject his political viewpoints into the article?
> Cory Doctorow is an activist, science fiction author and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing.
If you have not dealt with digital marketing, this article is structured as an advertorial, present a pain (Amazon practices), then offer a solution/product, with a subtle call to action (CTA) at the end - "subscribe to the left ideology to get rid of the problem"
I am tired of political propaganda masqueraded as information. Ironically, the author doesn't know that he is a product of "enshittification"; but instead of physical products, left ideologies, heavily advertised through social media.
I dramatically lowered my buying from Amazon about 8 years ago, when I noticed that listings had reviews on items that were completely different than what was being listed. Apparently, sellers sell a known good product that gets good reviews, and then swap it out for something else, so that the new product can piggy back off of the good karma. Amazon just didn't shut this down for years. Also, when Fulfillment services by Amazon mixed the the official provider's inventory with 3rd party distributors and reseller inventories. Sometimes, people would get knock-offs. I knew then, Amazon would coast for at least a decade before the decline would be apparent.
I thought I'd buy more Shopify stock as a result. Dunno if I ever did.