The seller in question was selling items they didn’t have at a nearly 50% markup.

  • Flummoxx@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    My wife bought a Keurig coffee maker on Amazon for a Christmas gift. When it arrived, the box was mailed directly from JCPenny.com. I looked on their website and the coffee maker was $35 cheaper. We learned our lessons about dropshipping and only looking at Amazon for products.

    Keep fighting the good fight OP!

      • Flummoxx@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        Nah, it was a last-minute gift for her mom, and my wife didn’t want to go empty-handed. The bad guys won that day.

    • daggermoon@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 month ago

      I think I’m gonna wait a few days before telling them no. Or maybe just not respond. I’m sure as hell not changing or removing my negative feedback. Clearly my review is worth more to them than the cost of the item.

    • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      Amazon hasn’t been the cheapest for things in a long time. There’s a few segments where they are competitive, but it’s generally only small things that are cheaper to ship. The more people that learn this the better.

      There was a time when you could have kitty litter delivered to your home for less than it cost at a local store, but that hasn’t been the case for a almost a decade.

      • Flummoxx@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        Yeah, whereas I used to have dog food shipped from Amazon because it was cheap and convenient, now I pretty much only do it for the convenience, because it’s priced the same as Petsmart and Petco.

  • Lemminary@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Are they not spamming 5 star reviews to the limit so that no new ones can be submitted anymore? Because that’s also a thing they do with less effort.

  • golden_zealot@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    One time on Amazon, I purchased an air conditioner. The model they sent was not the model I bought so I went for a refund and to send it back the to the seller.

    The seller representative basically tried to spin it as though the model I received was actually better than what I had tried to buy.

    I told him that I didn’t care, it is not what I bought, that this “better model” is twice the width of what I wanted and it states in its manual that it needs to be on its own dedicated circuit.

    The fucking guy kept this up over a few messages. I told him that if he didn’t take it back, I would just charge back my credit card because this was clearly a bait and switch

    The next message the guy sends, he says that me “threatening” him by saying I’ll charge back the card is immoral of me, and makes an allegory equating it to murdering someone by shooting them.

    At this point I contact amazon proper, and give them the entire message log. The amazon rep is fucking horrified and says that they will investigate the seller.

    The fucking guy sends me a message telling me that I shouldn’t talk to amazon, because my correspondence with them gets CC’d to him.

    I forward that message to the amazon rep as well.

    The guy loses his fucking shit, starts making guesses at where I live, what I do for work, a bunch of shit. He says that he has a double major in marketing for some reason.

    I demand that I never have to interact with him again. In his last message to me he tells me not to leave a bad review as it is a family owned business.

    I leave a lengthy and scathing review, noting that someone with a double major in marketing who acts like this must have wasted a lot of money on their post secondary education.

    I get connected to someone else who isn’t insane who in their first message sends me the slip to mail this fucking air conditioner back, and I get my refund.

  • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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    1 month ago

    I had a seller try to pull this shit on Amazon a few years ago. I had bought a wrist rest for my keyboard, the one I’m tolerating at this very second in fact. Amazon’s pages have a stark white background, the wrist rest was black. Even if details came through in the picture, the background of the page would wash it out. I wanted a simple straight wrist rest. This one has what I can only describe as a waist; the part your right hand would rest on is narrower and thus less supportive than the ends. I gave it a 3-star review stating such. The solution I’ve found is to turn it around so it’s facing “backwards” and that puts the narrowest part in between my hands.

    The seller emails me asking if there’s anything they can do to make it right. So far, we’re okay. I just say no, it’s not worth bothering with on my end. They kept getting pushier about changing my review to 5 stars until I contacted Amazon about it.

    Somewhere, be it Amazon themselves via the almighty algorithm, or the dropshippers themselves, there is a disconnect from reality. 5-star reviews carry no information, even if they are specific and detailed, the practice of paying or compensating for them is so common that you can just flush them down the toilet with the rest of the piss. It’s the low end that carries the information. I have chosen to buy products based on their 1-star reviews.

    For example, I’m invested in the Craftsman V20 power tool system. I went to buy the power inverter they sell for it, that lets you run normal electrical things off of drill batteries, has a NEMA15 socket and a couple USB ports on it. The negative reviews were mostly “Doesn’t run my space heater. Would rate 0 stars if I could. Returned.” I couldn’t find a negative review of the product that didn’t boil down to “I don’t know what 150 watts max means.” Not a problem with the product, it’s a problem with people being ignorant. I bought, and am happy with, the tool.

    On the other hand, I went to buy a pocket flashlight, I looked at the negative reviews and many of them said some variation on “tail switch broke after 4 or 5 months.” Ah, this model has a common mode of early failure, I’ll move on.

  • makyo@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I had an Amazon seller offer to send me a gift card if I changed my review so I said I would take the card but would probably only change my review to note the gift card offer.

    • Miles O'Brien@startrek.website
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      1 month ago

      Had that happen on Amazon and ebay multiple times

      I always tell them I’ll only increase it one star and the reason for the change will be the first thing anyone sees in the review, even above the original review.

      So far I’ve only had one taker.

      • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        It’s explicitly against Amazon’s ToS to incentivize reviews, or write/modify reviews in exchange for any kind of compensation. This includes the typical business card included in the box with the product pleading for 5 stars and promising “free gifts” or store credits. When I still used Amazon, any time I got one of those it was the only thing I mentioned in my review.

        I don’t know if anyone actually meaningfully enforces this, but quite a few things I’ve reviewed in such a way seemed to disappear from the site more quickly than usual.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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      1 month ago

      To being blackmailed into only receiving a refund if they change their review. I see nothing in there about them giving a refund if they don’t change it first

      • Jesusaurus@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Change the review, get the refund, change it to a one star and include conversation snippets regarding asking to change the review

  • 3aqn5k6ryk@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    This happened to me once but diff platform. I gave the seller 3 out of 5 stars. Seller messaged me with the same m.o. I changed the stars to 1 and attach the screenshot. Fuck them.