Comment by jchw 2 days ago
In general I am afraid to buy storage devices except directly from the vendor at the moment. I've heard that there's also lots of fraudulent HDDs being sold with botched SMART data, even on Amazon, even marked as "New", even sold by Amazon. Scary proposition unless you're dying to test out your RAID array redundancy.
I think this comment references something many people don't realize: Even items that say "Ships from Amazon, Sold by Amazon" could be counterfeit, because the inventory from third party sellers is co-mingled with Amazon's own inventory.
If you see "Ships from Amazon, Sold by RandomCompany" you might worry about counterfeits. But the "Sold by Amazon" item might also have been sourced from (or counterfeited by) "RandomCompany".
I began noticing this about seven or eight years ago when the oil filters I bought changed from official ones to obvious counterfeits (certain pieces were missing entirely + media was much thinner than the real ones). Had to switch to a local auto parts supplier to guarantee the correct part.
How did you notice that the media was thinner? On passenger vehicles at least, the filter media is in a stainless steel cup that precludes examination.
It does happen with Amazon UK, or at least has within the last year because I've twice had it, first time with a microsd card, second time with an ssd.
They obviously replaced it no problem but it highlighted they were either still mixing stock or were using a dodgy supplier themselves.
For what it's worth, been buying from Amazon for the past 15 years or so, and not once received a counterfeit product. Granted, I still don't like they they mix up their inventory, but I think it's a smaller problem than people make it to be. Most people are buying household supplies off of Amazon; that's not really a category that gets affected by counterfeits.
Hmm, does AliExpress do inventory commingling too? I see that they do seem to have something about managed inventories… because I was originally going to say that things bought from "flagship stores" on AliExpress might be more likely to be authentic, but now I'm unsure.
Cables and chargers I will only buy from the official Ugreen store on AliExpress. They are excellent. All other cables and chargers I've seen on AliExpress on junk firestarters waiting to happen.
In my experience, Amazon is also generally more expensive than online shops specialized in one domain for branded non generic aliexpresslike items.
With the exception of those shops who sell on Amazon, who have to offer a better price on Amazon than on their own site.
I'm noticing an increasing number of brands who don't have an official Amazon presence, probably for that reason.
I ordered a Springer published book on Prolog from Amazon, and it was obviously printer but professional book publisher. The only difference was that almost half the physical dimensions of Springer’s usual books, and it looked as though it was printed from a DJVU file downloaded from the Internet!!
If there is a Micro Center near you, they have been reliable.
I recently had to replace an entire array of SATA SSDs with models that could support DRAT/DZAT*. Their Samsung 2.5" SATA SSDs came with the original Samsung stickers sealing them, and they scanned each one to attribute it to my purchase. I'm sure it as much to protect them as me, i.e. that if I returned a drive, I gave them back the drive with the exact Device ID that originally came in that package. Nonetheless it was reassuring for me as well.
*For anyone who uses SATA drives attached to an SAS HBA, please check that your SATA drives support DRAT and DZAT. Unbeknownst to you, your drives may be failing to TRIM when connected through your HBA!
I've moved over to almost exclusively buying from B&H. They generally have similar prices to other vendors and they manage their own inventory directly with manufacturers, so no concerns about fraudulent hardware.
> even sold by Amazon
Honest question: after all the reports of co-mingled inventory, plain fakes etc. being sold by Amazon - for years i might add - do you really consider Amazon being a reliable source for anything that is not some unimportant trinket?
I went from spending > 10k€ per year to less than 5%, probably not even that, on there, all by their own fault.
And i see no reason to buy there anymore:
- the default assumption of having the best price on the web went out of the window years ago
- next (or 2) day delivery - does not happen anymore in most cases, Prime or not
- even finding (!!) what you're searching for is a total sh.t show
- for years, Amazon is now a front for chinese cr.p shipped by the boatload
- the once useful review system has been and is being gamed, it is beyond broken these days and should not be trusted (basically forget everything that scores 4.5 or less, read all reviews and ensure that the review you're reading is not for some other variant of the item you're looking for or that the review you're looking at hasn't been swapped one item for another, because that's a thing as well on there...)
I mean - buying things on Aliexpress is more trustworthy, for crying out loud - yet, most people can't seem to be bothered. scratchinghead
I quit Prime months ago and honestly the only feature I miss is fast shipping for household items.
I can find the same or better prices (including shipping) from other suppliers.
The only reason I didn't quit Prime already is that it gives me discounts on certain items from Whole Foods. I save enough from my groceries using Prime that I don't cancel it. And Whole Foods is the grocery store closest to my home. Otherwise I rarely shop on Amazon.
Ah, the Whole Foods in my neighborhood closed years ago - they couldn't compete with the locally owned grocery that everyone already shopped at.
> do you really consider Amazon being a reliable source for anything that is not some unimportant trinket?
Not the person you're asking, but yes, I do.
You know the biggest reason wny ?
Their no-bullshit returns policy.
Seriously. Click button, get your returns label. The refund is sent to you as soon as the courier or post office has scanned the barcode.
Hell, sometimes Amazon just refund you and don't even want the item returned !
You don't get that anywhere else. At most other vendors you have to fight to even get a returns label. And even if those other vendors give you a returns label without a fight, you have to wait until their warehouse has processed your return and hope that you don't get charged a restocking fee or they try to claim some bullshit excuse about you having lightly scratched something.
Oh, you want to know another reason too ?
I don't like spreading my personal data far and wide.
Yeah, sure I'm sure I could buy my widget from some random shop. Probably at a cheaper price than Amazon too, I'm sure.
But that means another place with my personal data on their database.
Open to that company spamming me, and the Russians hacking them and spaffing my personal data all over the darkweb.
Say what you like about Amazon. But I think their Infosec practices are pretty good.
I closed off my Prime because I kept having terrible experiences returning things and then having them claw back the refund on things they returned. For a few items I had to call 3 or 4 times over the course of 6 months because the claw-back kept getting re-applied to the card despite the CSR repeatedly telling me it was solved and not to worry about it. That plus the counterfeit items I've gotten over the years plus the general crap quality of everything was enough for me. In my experience you have to really stay on top of them, and you're probably not having that experience because you're not ordering things like clothing where you need to get a lot of items and then return almost all of them for not fitting or for not looking anything like the image online.
> Their no-bullshit returns policy.
I have been waiting for three weeks for them to pick up some fake POD-crap they delivered instead of the books that I had ordered and refund Rs. 800 (~ $8). I have had about 8-10 phone calls with them regarding this issue and CS is completely unbothered (with one exception, but too little too late). They do their fake apologies and set up another return pickup.
These last three weeks have been absolutely terrible as far as deliveries and Amazon CS are concerned. I have been moving all new purchases to Walmart-owned Flipkart as I no longer have the mental bandwidth to deal with these people.
> Their no-bullshit returns policy.
Caveat emptor though, I trusted this policy as well and got my account closed for unclear reasons. They hinted at returns fraud (not the case) and a high return rate (not the case either).
I provided detailed records of everything and even escalated this to jeff@amazon.com, no luck.
Still have a few hundred euros in Amazon Echos in storage that I cannot use anymore.
Sure, Amazon is fast at returns and usually pretty good about processing them.
But you know what I find even faster? Not having to process a return in the first place because I actually got what I ordered and it wasn't cheap bullshit or counterfeits.
Plus it seems like half the time I'm dealing with their support because they just failed to actually seal the bubble mailer. So that two day shipping that actually took three days to show up really took me nearly a week because of their inability to actually mail things properly. 30% of my orders over the last few years have been this exact problem.
In the end sure, their support is pretty good and fast. But I've had to get their support on over half the orders I've placed with them because the item arrived damaged, the item was clearly used but sold as new, the item was a fake/knockoff, or I ended up with an empty bubble mailer on my doorstep that was clearly never sealed.
Meanwhile I haven't had to interact with support on any of the other online retailers I've used, and I placed way more non-Amazon orders than Amazon orders.
> Their no-bullshit returns policy.
> Seriously. Click button, get your returns label. The refund is sent to you as soon as the courier or post office has scanned the barcode.
Hah, exceptions and all, but let me tell you of the absurdity that was me getting a broken bottle of shampoo and Amazon trying to insist that I return the "unused portion" (which was poured out into the bubble wrap mailer) to get a refund. Shockingly (only to Amazon), the UPS store didn't want a Ziploc bag of shampoo.
So they agreed to send a replacement.
Which also was broken.
"I want a refund."
"You already got a replacement, you can't have a refund." "The free replacement was also broken." "We can't refund a free replacement." "I've still paid for a bottle of shampoo that I haven't got". "Oh... uhhh..." before "my supervisor has made an exception and we are issuing a refund"...
> Honest question: after all the reports of co-mingled inventory, plain fakes etc. being sold by Amazon - for years i might add - do you really consider Amazon being a reliable source for anything that is not some unimportant trinket?
Not really 100% sure why you're getting down-voted (edit: I guess not anymore. Comment was gray when I replied.), but to answer your question, no. I do not trust Amazon for anything important.
I do still sometimes use Amazon in spite of this, only because they are nonetheless very useful. They have a very wide selection, and are often able to do same-day and 1-day shipping of almost anything even over here in some random suburbia. This has become important lately because things I used to just buy physically are no longer obtainable physically. For example, the last local electronics store went out of business, and the nearest Micro-Center is probably an hour drive or so, and that's not even as good for electronics.
Still, I'm always skeptical of Amazon. I never trust that the prices are the lowest, and often they're not. And I never trust that the product will be authentic, because it might not be, though it usually still is. And yep, the review system is bullshit. You can see people playing around with "variations" to basically group unrelated things, if not literally re-using an old Amazon product ID. And when you search for anything, even if Amazon actually has decent products from known brands, they'd prefer to show you key-smash anonymous Chinese brands instead, even when the prices aren't that much cheaper anyway.
But, that's just how it goes. People voted with their wallets and they chose Amazon, and now that they did and all of the smaller local shops are all dead, Amazon doesn't really need to worry about competing with them anymore.
> I go out of my way to support local business.
Let me tell you a little story my friend ....
Near my friend's house, there used to be a little mulit-generation "mom & pop" hardware shop.
It was an aladdin's cave. As a customer the place looked a mess, floor to ceiling (and even the ceiling !) covered in hardware widgets. But the owner could wave his magic wand and go find exactly what you wanted.
One day, across the street, a new shop opened. It was the "click & collect" branch for a large national hardware retailer.
All the builders and electricians that used to shop at the little shop moved over to the large retailer because they had all their trade discounts.
The little shop couldn't survive on the random home owner just popping into buy a single screw or a short length of cable. So they shut down.
Fast forward a few years and along comes Mr Property Developer. Takes one look at the patch where the large national retailer's shop is and thinks "ooh, that looks nice".
So they bought out those shops, knocked them down and turned the plot into a high-rise instead. But the national retailer survived because by then most people were getting stuff delivered to site from online orders by couriers and not doing many collections.
So dream all you like about "support your local business". But the reality is that its more like Darwin's theory of evolution out there. Those who can adapt thrive. Those who don't will be eaten by a predator.
The reality is its 2025, we live in an ever increasing online world, and all these "local businesses" of which you speak need to learn that online footfall is just as important (if not more important) than the traditional walk-in footfall.
> after all the reports of co-mingled inventory, plain fakes etc. being sold by Amazon - for years i might add
If we're putting co-mingling into its own category, I don't remember any reports of fakes being sold by Amazon. Do you have any links?
> Honest question: after all the reports of co-mingled inventory, plain fakes etc. being sold by Amazon - for years i might add - do you really consider Amazon being a reliable source for anything that is not some unimportant trinket?
For me, it's just physical books, basically.
Occasionally, I'll order an Anker charger or something too.
They may not have the best prices at every point in time, but they consistently have good deals. There are several price trackers out there; Keepa and CamelCamelCamel are the big ones. Use them to your advantage and figure out whether the item you're after is a good deal or not.
Dunno about listings on Amazon, but here’s a bust of a fraud shop resetting SMART data on drives from only six days ago:
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/seagate-spin...
At the very least, Western Digital and Seagate both simply do direct sales on their websites:
I'm curious with what you mean with "Even sold by Amazon". The last few years I see nothing but reports of cheap fake products over Amazon.
Years ago I ordered some T-Shirts to test and they were all fake versions that barely survived the first wash. Haven't ordered anything since then.