Most people probably assume (as they do with Google) that all the changes were made for the benefit of their user experience.
Does anyone really think so? Amazon and Google have some of the most cancerous user interfaces. They're always pushing what THEY want you to buy or see, not what YOU want.
For brand name stuff I use price comparison sites to find online stores.
The cheap Chinese stuff (which is the majority of Amazon these days) is almost always cheaper on ebay. It's like the article says: on Amazon they take the cheap generic Chinese products, slap some made-up brand name on them and sell them at a 50-100% markup.
Then again, hard to feel good about any purchase when name brands keep telling you they want your white/straight/male/non-tranny ass to die because muh slavery or some shit...
Even if you buy something name brand, you can get caught with a china counterfeit anyway.
Amazon's FBA does this thing where you can pool product stock with other sellers of the same product. The upshot of this is that all it takes is for one seller to inject their counterfeit Widget brand Cogs into the system and suddenly all sellers that sell genuine Widget brand Cogs are at risk of having Amazon fulfill orders from the counterfeit stock. Oh, and, customers that complain wind up screwing the SELLER as Amazon will issue a refund out of his pockets instead of their own.
Unless you're talking about designer stuff, I'm not sure it matters that much. With the well-known brand you might get better support, or are less likely to get factory-rejects, but it's still coming from the same factory. The factories just stole most of their products from the name brands they contracted with and decided to undercut them without paying the license fees. So you're helping a multinational or American company that sold out American workers long ago (not entirely their fault) by supporting them and giving them their cut, but you're still paying the same Chinese factory boss. The same applies if you think you can trust well-known German / European brands. The Chinese have been buying and merging with those companies for years. Buy American Made in America if you can. If you have a company, don't license to Chinese manufacturers.
Besides designer brands another exception is some well known Japanese brands that still insist on quality standards and local manufacturing, or at least they do manufacturing in Malaysia. They dislike China even more than us.
I might be a luddite but I always used to use Ebay before Amazon came along, and I just never left. Whenever I've looked at Amazon I've found it inferior to ebay, you just can't search by what you want to search for.
The real tl;dr is IMHO: don't buy from Amazon.
Does anyone really think so? Amazon and Google have some of the most cancerous user interfaces. They're always pushing what THEY want you to buy or see, not what YOU want.
Around here it's pretty easy to avoid them.
For brand name stuff I use price comparison sites to find online stores.
The cheap Chinese stuff (which is the majority of Amazon these days) is almost always cheaper on ebay. It's like the article says: on Amazon they take the cheap generic Chinese products, slap some made-up brand name on them and sell them at a 50-100% markup.
Then again, hard to feel good about any purchase when name brands keep telling you they want your white/straight/male/non-tranny ass to die because muh slavery or some shit...
I think I’d rather support the CCP…
Even if you buy something name brand, you can get caught with a china counterfeit anyway.
Amazon's FBA does this thing where you can pool product stock with other sellers of the same product. The upshot of this is that all it takes is for one seller to inject their counterfeit Widget brand Cogs into the system and suddenly all sellers that sell genuine Widget brand Cogs are at risk of having Amazon fulfill orders from the counterfeit stock. Oh, and, customers that complain wind up screwing the SELLER as Amazon will issue a refund out of his pockets instead of their own.
Unless you're talking about designer stuff, I'm not sure it matters that much. With the well-known brand you might get better support, or are less likely to get factory-rejects, but it's still coming from the same factory. The factories just stole most of their products from the name brands they contracted with and decided to undercut them without paying the license fees. So you're helping a multinational or American company that sold out American workers long ago (not entirely their fault) by supporting them and giving them their cut, but you're still paying the same Chinese factory boss. The same applies if you think you can trust well-known German / European brands. The Chinese have been buying and merging with those companies for years. Buy American Made in America if you can. If you have a company, don't license to Chinese manufacturers.
Besides designer brands another exception is some well known Japanese brands that still insist on quality standards and local manufacturing, or at least they do manufacturing in Malaysia. They dislike China even more than us.
I might be a luddite but I always used to use Ebay before Amazon came along, and I just never left. Whenever I've looked at Amazon I've found it inferior to ebay, you just can't search by what you want to search for.