Buying from a reputable operation spares you from a lot of this. Amazon is all hot garbage across the board.
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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Yeah this stuff is why i never buy tech from Amazon, you never know if you're gonna get a counterfeit item
It wasn't technology, but i ordered a new mad lib style book for my kid from Amazon. The book arrived with cellophane around it and a nice label that clearly said new. Once opened, it was very obvious the book was used, since the last kid had already filled out the whole damn thing including his name and address inside the cover.
I'm not mad at the kid, although his parents are probably bad people for returning the book at that point. I am livid that Amazon didn't flip to any random page in the book too determine if the book was used or not.
Fuck Amazon.
Iirc correctly, Amazon actually doesn't resell their returns. At least not through their storefront.
They have "return auctions" where returns are put onto a pallet and then people bid on them to purchase. Apparently this is cheaper than having a workflow for their returns, checking them to make sure they are resellable, and then stocking them back into their warehouse.
So are all these people who say they are buying from Amazon actually buying from 3rd party sellers on Amazon? I'm always confused by these stories with used items being delivered.
The principal issue is this, Amazon commingles stock. This means that there is one box for a particular SKU. If a seller sends product to Amazon for fulfillment it gets dumped into the bin with everyone else's.
This means that if a seller sends counterfeit or poor products to Amazon it gets mixed in with the real ones from other sellers or Amazon's own stock. This causes major problems as you can see.
Yup, this is the real answer. Verified vendors’ stock isn’t kept separate from the shitty scammers’ stock. Vendor has 10 good memory cards in stock, and a scammer has 5 fakes? The bin will have all 15 cards… So buying from the vendor doesn’t guarantee you get a real memory card, because the counterfeits are in the same bin.
Every professional photographer knows that good SD cards are Sandisk branded and come from B&H Photo Supply… While bad SD cards are Sandisk branded and come from Amazon.
Its all the same, you search for something on Amazon, find it, and buy. Not obvious if it is a 3rd party seller or no. It feels like all the same thing.
You can see on the right side of the screen who the seller is though? It is annoying there isn't a proper filter but you can kind of use the qualified for free shipping filter to filter out third parties.
As I understand it, if any seller is using Amazon fulfillment centers, the product you're given is picked out of the same box regardless of the named seller. That makes it impossible to buy confidently from Amazon based on the reputation of the seller, and makes Amazon themselves an unreputable seller.
Customers shouldn't have to be uber careful all the time, these are dark ui patterns.
You can. I can. But how many people do, and how many just flick through on their phone and click "Buy now" without really looking?
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Many years ago it used to be very obvious when you were buying from Amazon vs 3rd party sellers. Today the only difference is a small bit of text that says “Shipped and sold by Amazon”. The fact that you can even get prime shipping on items from third party sellers makes it so that people often don’t realize.
You don't know that Amazon is a marketplace? So is Walmart and Target. Com for example. You can open a store on any of these platforms and sell while using them for advertisement, warehousing, and shipping. You are responsible for fees and sales etc, but they handle everything else. Yes, they have their own products as well, but most their sales come from vendors on their platform.
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Amazon Warehouse I believe is open box and returns. It also gets confusing that marketplace sellers are mostly outside of Amazon's control
Amazon sold me a defective planer that had sawdust in it. Ibwas apparently the second to return it under warranty.
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Cost doesn’t seem to matter with return fraud. I recently received a “new” $6 item that had its contents replaced with a $4 item and then taped shut. Seriously, who wastes their time on this stuff?
Probably the same people running Pokémon card hustles. I recently saw a guy acting all pissy he had to wait in line at target to buy some packs, started berating the workers “you work at target, you’re broke as fuck”. The workers actually went in on him, I was so happy to see it. They made fun of him for trying to hustle over cards for children and told him to go home and cry to his mom about it.
That’s the kind of loser wasting their time on 2-5 dollar profit per return.
Please sir, do you have a link.
I’ll see if I can find it later
Edit: found it
https://old.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1phew1b/scalper_argues_with_target_workers/
Keep in mind, whenever you think too hard about these sorts of things, this is one of those operations that could apply to Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Many people make the incorrect assumption of something like, “They must have done some clever supply-chain wizardry," or “There’s a smart cost-reduction plan behind this.” When in reality, a lot of times, the actual explanation is something like a mid-level manager wanted a slide that said “cost savings," then procurement was pressured due to some personality ego problem, engineering objections were ignored, the math was never checked, and in the end, nobody involved actually understood unit economics. Maybe exchanging a $6 part for a $4 looks good in volume, but they only did this 20 times, resulting in $40 of savings which was erased by their reputation and incompetence.
I have worked government contracts. I have worked with shitty project managers. There's a lot more of these mistakes than you realize powering economies.
Maybe I haven't understood your point but it sounds like you're describing people both acting maliciously and being stupid about it, so I don't see it as a case of Hanlon's razor.
Exchanging the item for another one that's cheaper, even if it's only $6 total, is still dishonest. The fact that it may not even be worth it for them in the end doesn't change the fact it was an attempt to mislead. They were listing a product, and delivered another one.
Volume and slavery.
This isn’t exclusive to Amazon. I had it happen with friends build back in the Newegg days.
Newegg is still a thing, you just need to check the “Sold by Newegg” filter.
Oh it is, but is so enshittified nobody goes there anymore.
I had it happen to me at MicroCenter. Got a mechanical keyboard, in a seemingly-new box. No return sticker on it. Opened it up, and the damned thing was missing like six keys and absolutely covered in gamer chud. Someone very obviously bought it, put their old keyboard in the box, and “returned” it. And whoever took the return didn’t bother checking, or mark it as an open box.
You can order friends on newegg?
Its amazon, just return it. That's really the only good thing about amazon anymore, easy returns.
Except in the UK for some reason where you can email and message them for months and pay your own damn return shipping and get fucked about and never recieve a refund.
They tried to fuck me on a return once and after a month of it sitting in limbo i filed and won a dispute though my card provider instead.
Matter of fact i think it was over ram too, but it was over a year ago.
Oh man, that sucks. Sorry, I wrongly assumed amazon returns worked the same everywhere
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I think I will just go to Microcenter
I miss Microcenter
I wish I had a Microcenter less than 8hrs away. Best Buy is all I have and I am not buying there.
Same, i don't have one less than 7 hour round trip drive.
Same. I'm lucky enough to have two within driving distance. I'm genuinely worried about them staying in business if PC building takes a nosedive thanks to the RAM/SSD prices.
No sympathy for anyone who still supports and buys from Amazon.
I hate buying from Amazon and avoid it as much as I can, but one thing I’ve noticed in the last 5-10 years is that brick and mortar stores seem to have given up completely. It is shocking how many times I’ve wanted to buy something, often very common, from popular brands, and I try and find a local store to buy it from only for that store to be out of stock or just not stock it at all. It feels to me like these stores are filled with “stuff” but none of the things I want to buy.
You can order direct from the manufacturer's website, I've done that with most of my workshop equipment and audio stuff.
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Why put a weight? DDR2 weight vs DDR5 weight difference wouldn't be noticeable until they put the weight in because now it would weight 3x what it should. I suspect the person claiming fraud is the one committing fraud or this is a fake article.
The article that this article is based on (found here) has pictures showing that the DDR2 sticks had fake heat sinks put on. The weight is behind the fake heat sink to make it feel more authentic. I had the same initial thought as you, but heat sinks add a decent amount of weight.
Maybe they ordered a kit of 2 sticks and they put 1 stick and a weight in there
In case Amazon does weight comparison to the original in the shipping center. They have to be close or the package gets rejected and inspected.
I ordered a 4tb SSD, received an SSD heatsink in the box.
16 GB DDR2 + 16 GB DDR3 makes 32GB DDR5, right?
I have some 128gb ddr5 kit I bought a few years ago. Want to sell it back I'm not going to use it but the scammers be scamming.
So uh... How much you want for it?
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