"A Kafkaesque bureaucracy with bad writing"
December 20, 2018 5:02 PM Subscribe
Amazon built systems to protect brand-identity, punish review-spammers, and protect consumer safety, and then they were weaponized by unscrupulous sellers. Behind the state-sized commercial venue that is Amazon Marketplace, there's a shadow judicial system, with alarmingly inflexible systems and policies. Blacklisted sellers report that finding out what they ostensibly did wrong is frustrating, and the appeals process isn't designed to determine innocence. Now sellers are framing their rivals to thrust them into this system, and a class of seller advocates has sprung up to monetize the process of getting disentangled from it. (via Schneier on Security).
This is interesting and seems like one of those "Well of course" type issues, in hindsight. It's a big, complicated system and there's money to be made gaming it, so of course there are middle men skimming their take. And it's all opaque and extrajudicial, which is an environment where corruption will always thrive. Of course, the root of it all is that these huge, state-sized corporations refuse to take any real responsibility for themselves and the traditional states lack the knowledge to effectively regulate them even if they wanted to, which they don't.
How thoroughly hideous.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:29 PM on December 20, 2018 [17 favorites]
How thoroughly hideous.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:29 PM on December 20, 2018 [17 favorites]
I don’t understand why Amazon wouldn’t limit the ability to review products to users who actually bought the product on Amazon. Is there some reason that wouldn’t solve the problem of “fake reviews”?
posted by shalom at 5:33 PM on December 20, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by shalom at 5:33 PM on December 20, 2018 [3 favorites]
Amazon was favoring reviews from certified purchasers for a while, which led to sellers comping people the products in exchange for glowing reviews.
posted by ardgedee at 5:49 PM on December 20, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by ardgedee at 5:49 PM on December 20, 2018 [5 favorites]
Stine is aware that the suspension system is often unfair and needlessly bewildering, but she has faith in the system overall. Sometimes she likens it to Darwinian evolution, or the way governments shape societies through taxes and penalties. Except, in Amazon’s case, the ultimate goal is a “better buyer experience,” something so good you’ll never think of going to a brick-and-mortar store. The company, she says, has a “god’s-eye view,” and everyone it suspends is guilty of something, even if only out of naïveté. She sees herself as doing Amazon’s work, showing sellers how to reform their businesses to align with “the Amazon way.”Amazon really sounds more like a religion than a company. 🤦♂️🤢
posted by Foci for Analysis at 6:01 PM on December 20, 2018 [12 favorites]
Except, in Amazon’s case, the ultimate goal is a “better buyer experience,” something so good you’ll never think of going to a brick-and-mortar store
In the real world, the buying experience has gotten so bad on Amazon that I let my Prime subscription expire in November because I'd rather drive to Target or buy from Walmart .com. I haven't bought anything from Amazon in a month. Last time that happened was probably sometime in the early 2000s.
posted by COD at 6:07 PM on December 20, 2018 [7 favorites]
In the real world, the buying experience has gotten so bad on Amazon that I let my Prime subscription expire in November because I'd rather drive to Target or buy from Walmart .com. I haven't bought anything from Amazon in a month. Last time that happened was probably sometime in the early 2000s.
posted by COD at 6:07 PM on December 20, 2018 [7 favorites]
You know what sucks? Prime doesn't mean jack squat anymore. It used to mean free two-day delivery, but now it means basically nothing.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:28 PM on December 20, 2018 [13 favorites]
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:28 PM on December 20, 2018 [13 favorites]
Driving to Target, though… I think I'd rather huddle in the dark in a corner of an unfurnished room.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:58 PM on December 20, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:58 PM on December 20, 2018 [2 favorites]
I canceled my prime months ago (as did my partner). Like COD, I haven't purchased anything from Amazon in probably 5 months and I honestly don't miss it.
It's kind of like being vegetarian - not using Amazon limits the number of things I can consume, but there's still plenty on the menu. It's actually been a lot of fun to discover other online shops - often specialty, and better stocked than Amazon.
posted by juice boo at 8:42 PM on December 20, 2018
It's kind of like being vegetarian - not using Amazon limits the number of things I can consume, but there's still plenty on the menu. It's actually been a lot of fun to discover other online shops - often specialty, and better stocked than Amazon.
posted by juice boo at 8:42 PM on December 20, 2018
The joys of living in a smallish city - find what you want, then phone whichever local retailer deals with the product, pay and arrange delivery. If they don't have in stock, they will order it in for you. If it is a replacement item, usually they take the old one away as well.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 8:45 PM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 8:45 PM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]
You know what sucks? Prime doesn't mean jack squat anymore. It used to mean free two-day delivery, but now it means basically nothing.
I've been hearing this, but I've never had a single Prime order take more than two days (unless I opted for the "store credit for slower delivery" and then it sometimes *still* came in two days).
posted by Chrysostom at 9:19 PM on December 20, 2018 [4 favorites]
I've been hearing this, but I've never had a single Prime order take more than two days (unless I opted for the "store credit for slower delivery" and then it sometimes *still* came in two days).
posted by Chrysostom at 9:19 PM on December 20, 2018 [4 favorites]
In my experience the rise of Amazon Shipping is directly related to the decline of 2-Day. My last Amazon Shipping delivery was the on the 7th, for a Prime order placed on the 2nd. USPS, UPS, and FedEx still deliver in the 2-Day window, but more and more stuff is via Amazon Shipping.
posted by zinon at 9:35 PM on December 20, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by zinon at 9:35 PM on December 20, 2018 [2 favorites]
In the real world, the buying experience has gotten so bad on Amazon that I let my Prime subscription expire in November because I'd rather drive to Target or buy from Walmart .com. I haven't bought anything from Amazon in a month. Last time that happened was probably sometime in the early 2000s.
I went to the Macy's flagship store in Chicago last week and remembered why I switched to shopping almost exclusively at Amazon. It was a crowded shitshow of terribly messy displays, missing sizes, disorganization and impossible to find customer service. Plus the whole time I was overheating in my winter coat.
But Amazon is following the same kind of trajectory.
Their marketplace is a crap flooded disaster of hundreds of sellers of the same generally terrible products. I bought some plastic meal containers that leaked. By the time I noticed the seller was gone from Amazon but there are still hundreds of others selling the exact same product.
Then the delivery is pretty much an open lie with UPS and USPS falsely reporting things delivered a day before they actually are to meet amazon targets but leading me to wonder if my package is lost or stolen. Amazon has to know this is happening (because the whole internet does once it makes it to lifehacker and 5000 web forums) and just doesn't seem to care.
Their 'sponsored items related to this item' must a nice cash earner for them because it sure isn't useful to me as a buyer and is distracting and ugly. "People who searched for this ultimately bought" is what I want to see but only occasionally shows up and the "also purchased" has declined in value significantly lately as it seems to be some sort of algorithmic blend of targeting based on my overall search history rather than exclusively the particular item I am looking at.
It's become enough an ugh-and-argh fest that I now outsource some of my amazon shopping work to third-parties who are chasing referral dollars via quality recommendations and reviews.
[old man shakes fist at both real and virtual clouds!]
posted by srboisvert at 10:15 PM on December 20, 2018 [7 favorites]
I went to the Macy's flagship store in Chicago last week and remembered why I switched to shopping almost exclusively at Amazon. It was a crowded shitshow of terribly messy displays, missing sizes, disorganization and impossible to find customer service. Plus the whole time I was overheating in my winter coat.
But Amazon is following the same kind of trajectory.
Their marketplace is a crap flooded disaster of hundreds of sellers of the same generally terrible products. I bought some plastic meal containers that leaked. By the time I noticed the seller was gone from Amazon but there are still hundreds of others selling the exact same product.
Then the delivery is pretty much an open lie with UPS and USPS falsely reporting things delivered a day before they actually are to meet amazon targets but leading me to wonder if my package is lost or stolen. Amazon has to know this is happening (because the whole internet does once it makes it to lifehacker and 5000 web forums) and just doesn't seem to care.
Their 'sponsored items related to this item' must a nice cash earner for them because it sure isn't useful to me as a buyer and is distracting and ugly. "People who searched for this ultimately bought" is what I want to see but only occasionally shows up and the "also purchased" has declined in value significantly lately as it seems to be some sort of algorithmic blend of targeting based on my overall search history rather than exclusively the particular item I am looking at.
It's become enough an ugh-and-argh fest that I now outsource some of my amazon shopping work to third-parties who are chasing referral dollars via quality recommendations and reviews.
[old man shakes fist at both real and virtual clouds!]
posted by srboisvert at 10:15 PM on December 20, 2018 [7 favorites]
Prime doesn't mean jack squat anymore
Well, I tried to buy something today, but Amazon will only sell that watering can to prime members. Seriously - you CAN NOT buy some things on Amazon UNLESS you are a prime member.
posted by amtho at 11:34 PM on December 20, 2018
Well, I tried to buy something today, but Amazon will only sell that watering can to prime members. Seriously - you CAN NOT buy some things on Amazon UNLESS you are a prime member.
posted by amtho at 11:34 PM on December 20, 2018
YMMV, but our family saved a *ton* of money after canceling Prime. Some of it was the subscription fee itself, but mainly, we just end up buying fewer things--once we took away the convenience of a one-click, two-day, free-shipment purchase and had to decide if we wanted to pay shipping for each of our momentary shopping whims, it turned out we really didn't need or want most of those things after all. (And those we did want, we could buy brick-and-mortar eventually, or bite the bullet and pay for shipping--which we did infrequently enough that Prime wouldn't have been worth it.)
Anyway, the real-life dystopia described in this article is horrifying and all too predictable. Yuck. Yuck, yuck, yuck.
posted by duffell at 3:05 AM on December 21, 2018 [3 favorites]
Anyway, the real-life dystopia described in this article is horrifying and all too predictable. Yuck. Yuck, yuck, yuck.
posted by duffell at 3:05 AM on December 21, 2018 [3 favorites]
I dropped Prime too and now pretty much the only thing I buy from Amazon are toiletries which cost anywhere from one half to a quarter of what they cost in stores here in NYC.
posted by Gev at 4:50 AM on December 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Gev at 4:50 AM on December 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
I've been hearing this, but I've never had a single Prime order take more than two days (unless I opted for the "store credit for slower delivery" and then it sometimes *still* came in two days).
Most of my crap still arrives in 2 days but a lot of items listed as "Amazon Prime" are now creeping up into the 3-5 day range.
I'm not quite there on bailing on the convenience yet, but I'm close, for all the reasons listed in this comment section. Maybe I'll make it a 2019 resolution, along with facebook.
posted by MillMan at 8:43 AM on December 21, 2018
Most of my crap still arrives in 2 days but a lot of items listed as "Amazon Prime" are now creeping up into the 3-5 day range.
I'm not quite there on bailing on the convenience yet, but I'm close, for all the reasons listed in this comment section. Maybe I'll make it a 2019 resolution, along with facebook.
posted by MillMan at 8:43 AM on December 21, 2018
My wife and I have both noticed that really ... bizarre ... things happen when you click on links to change color or size selections. Like you end up on a different page with a different item that you end up ordering by mistake because WHY would you expect clicking "hardcover" to change THE TITLE OF THE BOOK?
My new theory is that we have been seeing some of the nefarious stuff they referred to where someone hijacks another Marketplace vendor's content and edits it to do weird stuff.
It has been clear for some time that "Prime delivery" is no longer two days, since the estimated delivery sometimes sneakily changes from "Tuesday" to "Thursday" when you click the "place order" button. I started taking screenshots of the delivery estimates before I realized that there was nothing I could do with them anyway--you can return the item if it came too late, but they offer absolutely no path to complain about their lying behavior.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 8:55 AM on December 21, 2018
My new theory is that we have been seeing some of the nefarious stuff they referred to where someone hijacks another Marketplace vendor's content and edits it to do weird stuff.
It has been clear for some time that "Prime delivery" is no longer two days, since the estimated delivery sometimes sneakily changes from "Tuesday" to "Thursday" when you click the "place order" button. I started taking screenshots of the delivery estimates before I realized that there was nothing I could do with them anyway--you can return the item if it came too late, but they offer absolutely no path to complain about their lying behavior.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 8:55 AM on December 21, 2018
After reading the article and the comments I decided to shop local for a fitting I need. Two plumbing supply houses and a Home Depot run later I'm back clicking "Buy It Now!"
posted by Standeck at 8:57 AM on December 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Standeck at 8:57 AM on December 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
bizarre ... things happen when you click on links to change color or size selections
This is the result of unplanned interactions with Amazon's listing backend structure and indie listers fighting for detail page impressions. Amazon initially intended that a given ASIN (the unique product identifier in their schema) would have a given detail page, and that ASINs would remain static. Introducing multiple merchants listing competetive pricing against a given ASIN led indie merchants to begin creating new ASINs for extant products, and indie merchants will fight to keep competitor listings off the ASINs they create.
Thus, indie merchants were incented by the site design to create multiple listings for any given product. Variations (books, or clothing style and size) add another layer of confusion in part because Amazon has tried to algorithmically or via gatekeeper merge the multi-ASIN products using the variations tool. Merchants use it too, intentionally and as directed by Amazon proper, to list items like clothes or shoes.
But when multiple merchants have the same product on offer they may not give it the same title, or use the same image or in any machine-addressable way create a listing that allows their offer to be merged with that of another merchant. So that means, for example, if you attempt to find the best price on a pair of a given model of Doc Martens classic 8-eye boot, you end up having to scrub through sizing listings created by multiple merchants in the US, UK, and beyond, and that there may be six or seven listings for the specific color and material variation you want as well.
It's a terrible mess, and sure, merchants bareknuckle for those Buy Box detail page impressions. But the root of the issue is Amazon's complete failure to effectively control their taxonomy.
May I suggest looking at eBay as an alternative? They allow you to filter on "Buy it Now" and "Free Shipping" and to sort by price. It may take a bit of fiddling to exclude the reams of $1 crap related to your search, but eBay has done a great job refining the listing and feedback features over the past few years. The item you buy won't be shipped via Amazon's logistics services but as noted upthread, that may be a good thing.
posted by mwhybark at 9:25 AM on December 21, 2018 [7 favorites]
This is the result of unplanned interactions with Amazon's listing backend structure and indie listers fighting for detail page impressions. Amazon initially intended that a given ASIN (the unique product identifier in their schema) would have a given detail page, and that ASINs would remain static. Introducing multiple merchants listing competetive pricing against a given ASIN led indie merchants to begin creating new ASINs for extant products, and indie merchants will fight to keep competitor listings off the ASINs they create.
Thus, indie merchants were incented by the site design to create multiple listings for any given product. Variations (books, or clothing style and size) add another layer of confusion in part because Amazon has tried to algorithmically or via gatekeeper merge the multi-ASIN products using the variations tool. Merchants use it too, intentionally and as directed by Amazon proper, to list items like clothes or shoes.
But when multiple merchants have the same product on offer they may not give it the same title, or use the same image or in any machine-addressable way create a listing that allows their offer to be merged with that of another merchant. So that means, for example, if you attempt to find the best price on a pair of a given model of Doc Martens classic 8-eye boot, you end up having to scrub through sizing listings created by multiple merchants in the US, UK, and beyond, and that there may be six or seven listings for the specific color and material variation you want as well.
It's a terrible mess, and sure, merchants bareknuckle for those Buy Box detail page impressions. But the root of the issue is Amazon's complete failure to effectively control their taxonomy.
May I suggest looking at eBay as an alternative? They allow you to filter on "Buy it Now" and "Free Shipping" and to sort by price. It may take a bit of fiddling to exclude the reams of $1 crap related to your search, but eBay has done a great job refining the listing and feedback features over the past few years. The item you buy won't be shipped via Amazon's logistics services but as noted upthread, that may be a good thing.
posted by mwhybark at 9:25 AM on December 21, 2018 [7 favorites]
Everyone I know who has tried to sell a product on Amazon has described it as a byzantine nightmare. I listen to Dave Arnold's Cooking Issues podcast, and for many months he has been upfront about his hassles with them in trying to bring a manufactured product to market using their system, mostly to apologize and explain to those who backed it what was going on. It left huge inventory just sitting in their warehouse for long periods of time, for no reason.
posted by krinklyfig at 1:22 PM on December 21, 2018
posted by krinklyfig at 1:22 PM on December 21, 2018
That being said, I still have Prime, and I did use it recently to buy parts om Black Friday for a new custom build computer. And I like the WaPo subscription. I kinda like the video thing but they're very restrictive on devices/screens. But here in a rural area, their shipping times have gradually slipped to 3-5 days, and their marketplace is far less trustworthy than it used to be, with numerous international drop sellers hiding behind shell companies.
posted by krinklyfig at 1:32 PM on December 21, 2018
posted by krinklyfig at 1:32 PM on December 21, 2018
fwiw I was a business partner in one of the first hundred-or-so indie lister merchants for about five years before going solo for a few years just about when FBA launched. it was chaos and madness for the first three years in the initial venture.
For example, Amazon's category managers were partially paid based on hitting sales numbers and initially indie lister sales in a given category were excluded from the bonus calculation numbers, so the Amazon person tasked with reviewing listing quality and customer satisfaction in a given vertical was literally directly financially incented to ban hammer indie listers, since our job was to take the Buy Box away from an Amazon-listed-and-fulfilled product.
At one point we had five or six top-ten best-seller listings. It was just my partner and I in a garage, throwing stuff into boxes as fast as we could move for twelve hours a day, and the category managers kept blocking our listings. Eventually we finagled a face to face meeting with some of our foes. There were like six of them, and just the two of us. We were the largest gross-revenue and product-by-volume operation in our category on the site. They thought we had investors and lawyers and capital and came prepared to fight on that basis.
I have *made* a ton of money selling on Amazon. I suppose my net profits exceed my net costs. My private business was respectable in scale but not as large as the initial partnership. What was especially fascinating was how careful use of Amazon's seller platform could produce a whirlwind of sales with little-to-no in-house overhead labor except for getting goods into FBA, marketing and listing work (pictures, copy, cost analysis, etc), and dealing with fulfillment errors or grouchy customers.
I have also *lost* a ton of money selling on Amazon when I pulled a bunch of inventory from FBA and it was returned in shipping modes that violated Amazon's TOS. I filed claims on each damaged item, per the filing process, and was offered a lump sum settlement of about 20% of the undamaged wholesale product cost.
Regarding Amazon's indie-merchant listing process? When it was introduced, it was far and away the most flexible and non-technical user-friendly online listing platform. You built an excel spreadsheet from your extant data and uploaded it. That was it. No export to this format or that, no need to normalize and optimize tables in-house - it was a light-year ahead of eBay and at this time other aggregators such as Buy/Rakuten weren't even active, really. I don't list on Amazon anymore but last time I poked around all that old stuff was still enabled.
I can go on and on about this, so instead I'll just stop. I am grateful to Amazon for the adventure but on the whole Amazon took a profitable partner and turned them into someone who will shit-talk them at the drop of a hat. One assumes that over time these numbers increase, as they are incented to.
posted by mwhybark at 3:12 PM on December 21, 2018 [4 favorites]
For example, Amazon's category managers were partially paid based on hitting sales numbers and initially indie lister sales in a given category were excluded from the bonus calculation numbers, so the Amazon person tasked with reviewing listing quality and customer satisfaction in a given vertical was literally directly financially incented to ban hammer indie listers, since our job was to take the Buy Box away from an Amazon-listed-and-fulfilled product.
At one point we had five or six top-ten best-seller listings. It was just my partner and I in a garage, throwing stuff into boxes as fast as we could move for twelve hours a day, and the category managers kept blocking our listings. Eventually we finagled a face to face meeting with some of our foes. There were like six of them, and just the two of us. We were the largest gross-revenue and product-by-volume operation in our category on the site. They thought we had investors and lawyers and capital and came prepared to fight on that basis.
I have *made* a ton of money selling on Amazon. I suppose my net profits exceed my net costs. My private business was respectable in scale but not as large as the initial partnership. What was especially fascinating was how careful use of Amazon's seller platform could produce a whirlwind of sales with little-to-no in-house overhead labor except for getting goods into FBA, marketing and listing work (pictures, copy, cost analysis, etc), and dealing with fulfillment errors or grouchy customers.
I have also *lost* a ton of money selling on Amazon when I pulled a bunch of inventory from FBA and it was returned in shipping modes that violated Amazon's TOS. I filed claims on each damaged item, per the filing process, and was offered a lump sum settlement of about 20% of the undamaged wholesale product cost.
Regarding Amazon's indie-merchant listing process? When it was introduced, it was far and away the most flexible and non-technical user-friendly online listing platform. You built an excel spreadsheet from your extant data and uploaded it. That was it. No export to this format or that, no need to normalize and optimize tables in-house - it was a light-year ahead of eBay and at this time other aggregators such as Buy/Rakuten weren't even active, really. I don't list on Amazon anymore but last time I poked around all that old stuff was still enabled.
I can go on and on about this, so instead I'll just stop. I am grateful to Amazon for the adventure but on the whole Amazon took a profitable partner and turned them into someone who will shit-talk them at the drop of a hat. One assumes that over time these numbers increase, as they are incented to.
posted by mwhybark at 3:12 PM on December 21, 2018 [4 favorites]
I use Amazon for the bulk of my shopping, and have since my first child was born. The incentives for me are the ability to comparison shop without leaving the house (thus not having to drag my kid(s) around town), and the ability to drop products in my cart and leave them there, which saves me you-can't-believe-how-much-money from not making impulse buys. I have prime and buy prime products, not necessarily for shipping time but for ease of returns.
Toys are one item that I prefer to shop for in person, as I like to have a really solid idea of what I'm putting in my kids' hands.
This holiday season finds me at a personally unique crossroads, being that my oldest kid is at an age where I am willing to spend money on some really super-duper toys, while Toys R Us has just closed it's doors. My next options would be Target or Walmart, which in my area have limited selections, at least as compared to what TRU carried.
I bought a robot thing on Amazon, put it together, and was unhappy with it. This is where Amazon is going to fall down for me. It took me 7 days, a filed claim, and two follow-up chats to get a return authorization from the seller. Meanwhile there is a Target 2 blocks from my house.
I already know to wade through reviews to weed out the fakes. I'm fortunate enough to be able to trade a couple of bucks on price for the convenience of not having my time wasted. Weeding out fakes is becoming a time waster. If returns become a hassle too, the site will lose my business. I suspect it's a common concern in my buyer demographic. I would hope that Amazon would show some concern for the quality of their platform and get this under control. Lest they become the MySpace of selling platforms.
posted by vignettist at 4:25 PM on December 21, 2018
Toys are one item that I prefer to shop for in person, as I like to have a really solid idea of what I'm putting in my kids' hands.
This holiday season finds me at a personally unique crossroads, being that my oldest kid is at an age where I am willing to spend money on some really super-duper toys, while Toys R Us has just closed it's doors. My next options would be Target or Walmart, which in my area have limited selections, at least as compared to what TRU carried.
I bought a robot thing on Amazon, put it together, and was unhappy with it. This is where Amazon is going to fall down for me. It took me 7 days, a filed claim, and two follow-up chats to get a return authorization from the seller. Meanwhile there is a Target 2 blocks from my house.
I already know to wade through reviews to weed out the fakes. I'm fortunate enough to be able to trade a couple of bucks on price for the convenience of not having my time wasted. Weeding out fakes is becoming a time waster. If returns become a hassle too, the site will lose my business. I suspect it's a common concern in my buyer demographic. I would hope that Amazon would show some concern for the quality of their platform and get this under control. Lest they become the MySpace of selling platforms.
posted by vignettist at 4:25 PM on December 21, 2018
…the ability to drop products in my cart and leave them there, which saves me you-can't-believe-how-much-money from not making impulse buys.
I do this too, and you're right. I've put so many things in my cart and then just ended up removing them a day or two later when I realized that my life was not actually going to be measurably improved if I had just the right bit of whatever. I also have never activated one-click ordering; I have to go through the process of confirming what address, card, and shipping options I want each time, which adds just that little bit of extra friction.
And here's a tip: if you do pull the trigger prematurely and then regret it an hour or two later, you can almost always get a cancellation request to go through before the item actually ships. Just a polite note to Amazon or the seller saying that you no longer need the item and would like to cancel your order, and you're good. It's like an edit window for Amazon purchases.
Also, re: comparison shopping, I find that when I'm on my phone it's much better to use the quite good mobile site than to use the app because then I can use tabbed browsing to keep multiple item listings open simultaneously. As far as I know, that's still not an option in the app.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:15 PM on December 21, 2018
I do this too, and you're right. I've put so many things in my cart and then just ended up removing them a day or two later when I realized that my life was not actually going to be measurably improved if I had just the right bit of whatever. I also have never activated one-click ordering; I have to go through the process of confirming what address, card, and shipping options I want each time, which adds just that little bit of extra friction.
And here's a tip: if you do pull the trigger prematurely and then regret it an hour or two later, you can almost always get a cancellation request to go through before the item actually ships. Just a polite note to Amazon or the seller saying that you no longer need the item and would like to cancel your order, and you're good. It's like an edit window for Amazon purchases.
Also, re: comparison shopping, I find that when I'm on my phone it's much better to use the quite good mobile site than to use the app because then I can use tabbed browsing to keep multiple item listings open simultaneously. As far as I know, that's still not an option in the app.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:15 PM on December 21, 2018
This is about the cult of consumerism.
And it is hard to de-program. Not to mention, the education of the next generation. For example, my middle son, aged 20, has minimal consumerist desires, ie. decent internet, spaghetti bolognaise for dinner, hot and cold running water, electricity. No car, no McDonalds, happy to chop onions, no mobile phone, no holidays away, no take-away coffee, prefers to make his own hamburgers. How do you motivate someone so detached from consumerism?
So we are learning about the alternatives
https://thenewdaily.com.au/life/home/2018/12/21/christmas-shopping-local/
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 12:23 AM on December 22, 2018
And it is hard to de-program. Not to mention, the education of the next generation. For example, my middle son, aged 20, has minimal consumerist desires, ie. decent internet, spaghetti bolognaise for dinner, hot and cold running water, electricity. No car, no McDonalds, happy to chop onions, no mobile phone, no holidays away, no take-away coffee, prefers to make his own hamburgers. How do you motivate someone so detached from consumerism?
So we are learning about the alternatives
https://thenewdaily.com.au/life/home/2018/12/21/christmas-shopping-local/
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 12:23 AM on December 22, 2018
Don’t use Amazon. It’s an evil shitty company who’s tentacles defile entire communities.
You can’t constantly complain about it and then use it. Don’t use it. Ok? If you use it then you’re part of the problem. It really is that simple. Anything else is just a guilty rationalization.
You want Amazon to change? Don’t Use it.
posted by You Stay 'Ere An Make Sure 'E Doesn't Leave at 10:15 AM on December 22, 2018
You can’t constantly complain about it and then use it. Don’t use it. Ok? If you use it then you’re part of the problem. It really is that simple. Anything else is just a guilty rationalization.
You want Amazon to change? Don’t Use it.
posted by You Stay 'Ere An Make Sure 'E Doesn't Leave at 10:15 AM on December 22, 2018
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posted by PhineasGage at 5:16 PM on December 20, 2018 [3 favorites]