So I buy some baseball equipment. Its very well priced, it has free shipping and it supposed to arrive in a week.
I get the confirmation email and its arriving in a month and a half.
Apparently the advertised delivery time was if i picked the express delivery option that costs more than the actual item, otherwise they are walking it over from China.
Amazon and Ebay should have huge flashing banners telling you that the seller is from outside the country especially if its from China. I don’t have a problem with buying stuff from China but in a month and a half I will have two sets of baseball practice equipment. One I bought from Dick’s and the other from China because I can’t wait until the season is almost to get the equipment.
It’s a real hazard for people who price-compare between Amazon and other retailers. I heard recently that Chinese manufacturers are now making cheap-ass copycat versions of some name-brand bird toys and selling them to distributors using the name brands. So a retailer like me may not realize that we’re selling cheap crap instead of the quality product we thought we were buying from the supplier. And if we dump the distributor and buy directly from the quality supplier, then we’re in competition with the cheap crap on Amazon.
I recently educated a customer who bought something from my shop and then reported that she found the same product on Amazon for cheaper. I looked and, sure enough… sold on Amazon for barely over wholesale. You can also find things being sold there for less than wholesale (although you may not recognize that unless you research what the typical wholesale price is for that item). Amazon’s third party Marketplace is getting crowded with scammers and fire sales. It’s hard enough competing with Amazon itself, let alone this!
Or one set of equipment and one refund request because the second set never left China.
I ordered a big pack of zip ties via Amazon on Black Friday at about half a cent per tie, plus shipping. They were supposed to be here by MLK Day but never arrived and China Post had no record of the tracking number. I contacted the seller; they were super nice and gave me a refund when their New Year celebration was over.
This was very much a thing for a while, but once vendors and manufacturers discovered that Chinese sellers were doing this they managed to put the screws to Amazon. Amazon did see that it was more worthwhile to sacrifice short term profits over long-term reputation and started to crack down on knock-offs a bit.
However, It requires vigilance from the domestic sellers and manufacturers but they are at least allowed to protect their product line. A lot of suppliers are now restricting who is allowed to sell their products on Amazon (where they can keep an eye on things) or limit Amazon sales to just themselves - or not at all.
The problem now is that while the Chinese imitators cannot glom onto your UPC (which has a reputation backed by your company) there is little Amazon will do if they make a knock-off and use your pictures on a different UPC. Look around and you’ll see products with the same image but vastly diffferent product ratings.
An item on Amazon, with an amazingly low price, & free shipping.
But, because it comes from China, it will take 1 to 3 months to arrive.
And then…it never arrives.
And the Seller has “discontinued his association with Amazon”–after several hundred, or several thousand, items of various description have been ordered, by many customers on Amazon.
None of whom ever get a thing.
Meanwhile, the sellers in China have emptied their bank accounts, vanished, & will list hundreds of new, utterly non-existent items on Amazon, & repeat the same scam all over again.
A great many of the Amazon customers don’t realize that Amazon will cover the refund.
I always check the country of origin when I order on Amazon or bid on eBay. I don’t automatically reject China (I bought some nice knot tassels on Etsy that arrived quickly and were good value for the money), but I’m always leery and often pass on things if they’re only available from China.
With Chinese shippers I wonder if Amazon is closer to aliexpress’s 'No payment until it arrives policy. Seems that just providing an easily faked tracking number is too insecure. Amazon has ways of getting refunds if you fail to deliver, unless the bank & merchant companies are complicit (I rather doubt it) the customer will get their money back, Amazon will probably get their money back, and someone down the line will pay for the scam.