Amazon has enacted a rather dumb rule with regard to paid product reviews. I was contacted about a year ago by a chinese company I have bought a lot of electronics from and left positive reviews for in the past. They offered me deep discounts (via rebate) on products if I left reviews after purchasing and using them for a while (no 'has to be positive' strings attached). I reviewed a couple of their products last year and put a disclaimer about being partially compensated for the review at the top. One of the products wasn't great (it was a bottom of the barrel budget phone) and I gave it a middling review.

I didn't hear from them for a while, then about 3 months ago they reached out with two more products they were asking me to review. Same deal. I submitted reviews this time and they got rejected because it is apparently now against Amazon's policies to publish compensated reviews. I resubmitted the reviews with my disclaimer removed and they published them. Kinda crappy on their part that they won't allow reviewers to divulge that information.

Amazon seems to be following in the footsteps of TigerDirect and NewEgg. Both were amazing sites in the beginning, great deals, great customer service, etc... Then they started allowing fake knockoff brands, direct to consumer products from china, scammers, resellers, fake reviews, terrible refund policies, etc... and it slowly brought down the overall quality of the site and overwhelmed their support staff and eventually fucked over their reputation. The difference with Amazon is they aren't limited to just tech, the fact that they now carry pretty much everything under the sun basically protects them from this same fate, sadly.

I'm finding more things cheaper elsewhere. Even brand name stuff. I was looking for some Gorilla glue and it turned out cheaper in my local supermarket (Tesco UK) than Amazon.

Had a few crappy quality things/lost items. Have started buying elsewhere now before even looking there.

My sales are going to break Jeff Bezos but it (hopefully) might be a sign of the times.

Succeeding at buying from Amazon is easy:

1. Make sure that the local brick-and-mortar doesn't have the thing you want first.
2. Avoid products that have SEO titles ("fish bowl for fish container fish aquarium for fish"), or nonsensical manufacturer names (FDRTNHY).
3. Weep quietly because it's page 50 and there still aren't any listings that don't violate #2.

It is bloated with poor quality no name products but it's fine if you stick with known brands. Reviews do suck tho. Fake reviews have made the rating system is useless.

Their fulfillment centers are where joy goes to die. $15 an hour to be a human robot for 40-60 hours per week doesn't sound like a great way to spend your time on this planet.

Not saying this isn't happening, but the same shit has been said about Walmart for 30 years.

I don't think "Downfall" means what this dude thinks it does...

A bit hailcorporate but in Switzerland we have Galaxus and they expanded into Germany a few years ago, so if anyone here is German, maybe try them once in a while, great customer service, none of the issues Amazon has.

Aliexpress when you can't be bothered to wait