Amazon Reviews

[ERD50]

I'm not sure "sleazy" is fair because you disagree with their operational policies. ...

I am trying to cut them some slack, I did say "appear as sleazy" rather than just calling them sleazy outright.

Another 'appear as sleazy' issue is when you sort by price. I get the low price first $0.99, but it has $15.94 shipping, making it more expensive than the $13.24 part with $0.00 shipping on page three.

Did you buy from a 3Party seller or from Amazon (sold by amazon?)

If sold by amazon, you have no further review/feedback. If it was a 3P, you can leave seller feedback from your order page...BUT you cannot be certain that seller packed the item poorly. They for sure are not the one that put your thing in a bubble mailer. And...seller feedback about packaging which is done by FBA is routinely removed by amazon bots because.. amazon takes responsibility for the delivery. Or if it's not, you have an innocent seller with a bad feedback, and big red "warning your account is at risk" flags on their dashboard (yes, even just one can do that).

Yes, any seller using amazon fulfillment learns to pack the item to survive Warehouse Billy plopping the item in a mailer. Or, in a box, with your order for a hammer and cat food all together. But then, to pack for this nonsense, the seller has to fortify your item beyond normal reason, which means their costs to ship the item in to amazon go up, and their storage and fulfillment fees go up as well.

It's a judgment the seller has to make if they can afford the tradeoff, because selling directly where the seller maintains shipments means they get maybe a third of the sales, or even less if others are using amazon fulfillment (FBA). I sell on amazon. I use FBA. I pack so that my items can be drop kicked in a mailer. But mine are small and light and would only break if they were crushed.

Amazon warehouse staff get only seconds for each shipment in their queue, and have to grab whatever is closest and fits and then move onto the next... and quickly.

And of course...when your return comes in to Billy Warehouse dude, he has a similar number of seconds to determine if your item can still be sold. If you packed it up and it doesn't look damaged from the outside...guess what! Good as new, back to the new pile...and around it goes. No one is happy.

Thanks for that inside view.

I ordered several different parts that came in two shipments, it was a mix (amazon seller and ship; third party seller and amazon ship; and third party seller/ship), but all came in bubble envelope. The 3rd party seller/ship came separate of course. The only thing in a box in the bubble envleope was the run capacitor, which isn't really very delicate. But that was just a 'wrapper box' from the manufacturer, not really a shipping box with padding or anything.

The issue is, I just don't want to order these parts if they aren't packed well. And I can't seem to know that in advance. So there's no point in going through some inconvenience to return it, just to get another poorly packed one that I am not confident in. I'm back to square one. I'll re-iterate, these are parts that have brittle components and the damage may not be obvious. A little bending might damage it in a way that isn't visible.

Someone earlier said they just stopped ordering delicate stuff from Amazon. And I guess I might just have to do that.

I think I posted in the other thread, I decided to just put all these parts in, that will at least test them now, and keep the old ones as spares. These were all 'just in case' common replacement parts for my furnace, and none of them are very expensive.

-ERD50

 

[Kerfuffle]

I once left a negative review for a Doxie scanner, and one of their marketing reps sent a nasty handwritten letter to my house! Intense! This was many years ago. These days though, reviews aren't to be trusted. I have a friend who does fake five star reviews - the manufacturers work with an inbetween person, my friend legitimately purchases items on amazon, and when he leaves a 5 star review, he gets compensated by the inbetween person who presumably bills the manufacturer. If he doesn't leave a 5 star review, he gets nothing. Amazon has no idea. His house is full of unopened boxes, no joke. Every once in a while, he hauls all the stuff over to the goodwill. Appalling. I think the best way to approach reviews is to look at the overall distribution. If most are 5 star, but a high percentage are 2 or 1 stars, I'd avoid it and assume that the 5 stars are all fake.