The Prime Reasons to Avoid Amazon
197 comments
·July 5, 2025Animats
SoftTalker
Good rule of thumb is that if it goes on or in your body do not buy it from Amazon.
nextos
I think it's even worse. They have a completely chaotic returns policy meaning they re-sell used things pretending they are new all the time. I stopped buying from Amazon UK after I received 6 opened and used items in just 20 orders. Some were even missing components. I even received used underwear (yuck!) from a brand that sells boxers inside sealed packages and doesn't allow returns. I heard some scammers were exploiting this returns policy by purchasing phones, installing malware, and sending them back to Amazon.
sharkweek
I’m about to start grad school to get my clinical mental health counseling licensure, and Amazon has multiple fake/counterfeit DSM-5s (basically the holy grail of recognized mental disorders and their insurance billing codes) on it, so much in fact that my program director mentioned the Amazon problem in the orientation.
So I’ll add “if you need to guarantee the accuracy of the information in whatever you’re buying… avoid Amazon as well”
GuB-42
What is a "fake DSM-5"? It is a book, anyone can copy it, legally or not.
Why would someone go out of their way to produce different content if they are going to violate intellectual property anyways, be it trademarks or copyright?
mandeepj
>Good rule of thumb is that if it goes on or in your body do not buy it from Amazon.
If I do that, I always make sure I'm buying from the seller and not a reseller or distributor; I meant to say no other party besides the Seller and Amazon.
opo
If it ships from Amazon, you can still run the risk that you get a counterfeit item since Amazon will co-mingle the inventory. Safer to only buy from the seller and is shipped by the seller.
recursive
Or if it's electronic. Fire risk.
blibble
the fact legitimate electricians buy fuses/wiring/circuit breakers/crimps off amazon thinking they're as advertised is actually terrifying
all the buildings you enter: houses of friends/family, supermarkets, hospitals, transport, restaurants, offices, all with potentially fatal fake electrics
hopefully the fire door and extinguishers weren't bought from amazon
_DeadFred_
People buy fuses from Amazon for the cars/motorcycles not understanding it can kill them. They are actually evil at this point for doing nothing about any of these ongoing issues. They can't be unaware if us rando consumers are aware (or if they are doing recalls for fake products).
parhamn
Where's the best value & quality for that sort of stuff? It's insane what some sites charge for seemingly simple supplements.
BobaFloutist
If Costco has what you want, it's decent value and a pretty good source.
bapak
Needless to say, take this sort of advice with a grain of salt.
7speter
Vitacost.com has worked well for me.
encomiast
I wonder if this applies to Amazon Pharmacy — seems like maybe this might have a bit more governance.
throwup238
Amazon Pharmacy is its own regulated pharmacy with licenses in all of the states, not a marketplace/platform like Amazon.com.
It’s really a renamed PillPack [1] which they acquired in 2018 with (I assume) Amazon Pharmacy launching on top of their licenses in 2020
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davidw
I know it's not a very popular cause these days, but "Democracy" seems like a real reason too.
mandeepj
> https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DJUK8HS/ref=ask_ql_qh_d...
PreserVision -> I've never heard about that brand, so I would have never bought it. What was the reason behind your purchase decision?
freeone3000
I bought a book. A literal book. And it was wrong size, wrong paper, printed on a 5 degree skew including the cover. It should have been from Simon and Schulster, but despite Sold and Shipped, it just wasn’t.
It’s all fake. Every bit of it.
sheepscreek
Was it “Sold by Amazon” or a third party marketplace seller?
zargon
It doesn't matter. Amazon co-mingles product they sourced themselves with product from all the marketplace sellers. They also resell returns, which could have been swapped with something else.
bilsbie
I’m having trouble finding alternatives. Do I really have to go to four or five different websites to buy my supplements.
goshacmd
I've switched to iHerb for my supplements about a month ago after reading a handful of stories about non-genuine supplements being sold on Amazon. It's been a good experience so far, even next-day (sometimes 2-day) deliveries. And the search/discovery on their website is superior.
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AtariATMHacker
[dead]
immibis
have you tried a physical pharmacy
wredcoll
Um. Exactly how many supplements do you need?
bilsbie
I don’t mind sharing in the interest of discussion:
600mg tongkat Move free advanced 3 pills 1700mcg l-5 methyltetrahydrofolate Zinc picolinate 22mg Taurine 3g Copper 2 mg Selenium K2 mk7 45 mcg Creatine monohydrate Magnesium as needed Sunbathing for vitamin d
Going for general health/longevity, joint health, and fighting high homocysteine (mthfr homozygous)
junon
Why is that any of your business?
PenguinCoder
My rule is anything that goes on or in my body, I don't buy form Amazon for that reason.
sokoloff
Is clothing really that big of a risk?
dolebirchwood
I ordered replacement earpads from Amazon for one of my headphones. Ended up developing a rash around my ears. So it's not just about clothing, and, yes, you should be concerned.
margalabargala
Depends how much confidence you have that it wasn't soaked in something nasty that doesn't easily wash out.
ttoinou
Dangerous material being in contact of your skin all day and night long does seem risky
apt-apt-apt-apt
How do you know what cannot be faked? Is shipped and sold by Amazon enough?
GuB-42
All products can be faked, but I thing that GP means "cannot be faked without being obvious". Obvious fakes are not as much of a problem since Amazon has a pretty good return policy.
In the "cannot be faked" category, you can have:
- products so cheap that making a fake wouldn't make sense. for example an unbranded glass jar won't be faked because anything that looks like a glass jar but isn't a glass jar will be more expensive than a glass jar.
- products too complex and/or too low margin to be worth faking. For example, you will probably never find a fake desktop printer, as even the most simple printers are hard to make and sold at a low margin, maybe even at a loss. However, consumables are (very) high margin and you will find fakes, lots of them.
- products that have effective anti-counterfeiting systems. For example, Nintendo Switch games.
nurettin
I understood fake as physically harmful.
qgin
It is, people are being ridiculous. The third party stuff is where the fraud is.
onli
No, that is not correct or at least it has not been. Amazon was said to intermingle the inventory in the warehouses, mixing third party products with those shipped and sold by Amazon. So that gave you zero protection.
I read that they made internal changes to tag shippings properly to reduce the risk of that behaviour, but am not sure it is true or has been effective.
ranger_danger
I have absolutely bought multiple hard drives that were "shipped & sold by amazon" which turned out to be fake/counterfeit in some way. The serial numbers did not verify on the manufacturer's website either and they were completely DOA.
PaulDavisThe1st
> Amazon needs to be stopped, and legislation will not do so. Only its loyal consumers – who keep the beast alive – can do that by taking their money elsewhere.
We've (my wife and I) tried to stop using Amazon. But recently, I've run into issues where I need particular specialized bits and pieces (e.g. just today, a low profile 4" HVAC 90 degree elbow) that are only available via Amazon. A variation is where the item is available from one or two other places, but at a 10x markup.
We need to convince vendors to also avoid Amazon, and that may be even more of a difficult sell (no pun intended).
ps. Amazon employee #2, and I approve this message.
hinterlands
The other problem are people doing price arbitrage. You find the item on eBay and think to yourself, "cool, I'd rather patronize a small business" - but as it turns out, the item is drop-shipped from Amazon, Walmart, or the like.
w-ll
This got me the other day, and it had me cracking up, they just put my shipping address and and checked out from Walmart. $5 lesson that Walmart actually sold what i wanted and i should have checked there first.
PaulDavisThe1st
Yep, had this happen to me a couple of months ago, for a bike component. Incredibly annoying, since they still marked up from the Amazon price!
jedimastert
I recently had something very similar happened to me, and then the seller accidentally sent me another weirdly expensive item by mistake. Unfortunately it's a large heavy part from a ride lawn mower
Hikikomori
Just got hit by hustler university
twobitshifter
Try Aliexpress, you can cut out the middleman.
curamious
> ps. Amazon employee #2,
wow, that must have been quite an interesting experience. Do you have any anecdotes that you were willing to share about the experience. Thanks
PaulDavisThe1st
I've discussed it to death here on HN. Sort of over doing that anymore. I was only there for 14 months before getting out to become a stay at home parent.
al_borland
Cancelling Prime seems to have a big natural impact. I heard stories about how much order volume goes up after someone joins Prime, and it seems the opposite is true as well. I cancelled my membership when they started charging extra for ad-free video. It just felt so cheap and petty, since I was already paying for Prime. This was just the straw the broke the camel's back. I was already pretty fed up with Amazon due to being sent counterfeit products, used or open box items being sold as new, the push to leave retail packaging on my porch, all the fake reviews, the inability to find quality items via their search, the site being overrun with low quality garbage being resold from AliExpress for 10x the price, the concern for the future of my local stores, wishlists no longer supporting external links or simply ideas, etc, etc, etc.
I still do make the occasional order out of laziness or a lack of other options. However, I looked up all my orders from the lifetime of my account and charted them a couple weeks ago. After 6 years of year-over-year order increase, and a 17+ year overall uptrend in orders... they fell off a cliff once I cancelled. My orders fell by 60% the year after I cancelled Prime, and it's on pace to drop even further this year. I even did all my Christmas shopping last year without any Amazon orders, while previous years were 100% Amazon.
Going down to 0 can be hard, but even big drops in orders will have an impact. And if that money goes to other retailers, and demand grows, they can invest in more inventory and a wider array of goods that people need. Any percentage shift away from Amazon is progress, especially in done my the masses.
I'd encourage everyone to dump their Prime membership. If you order more than $35 you can still get free shipping (you just have to be explicit in selecting it and be vigilant during checkout to avoid the multiple traps to try and get you to sign back up... lots of dark patterns). Shipping times are a little more unpredictable. Sometimes it still only takes 1-2 days, while other times it seems to take a week or two. Most things aren't urgent. If they are, I try to find them locally.
I've also tried to stop obsessing about finding the "best" whatever it is I'm looking for. When online, there are a lot of traps, but one of the things I expect retail stores to do is make sure they are carrying quality products they'd stand behind. They don't want returns or to get a reputation for selling junk. I was getting a toaster a while back and instead of spending hours researching online, I just went to a store I frequent, looked at the 5 options they had, and picked the one I liked the best. Hours of time saved, and the toaster works fine. I expect I'll have it for many years to come.
ranger_danger
Thank you for your perspective, I 100% agree.
I just read your Vox article and the comment "We exist with multiple hats" really resonated with me. I find it difficult to interact with a lot of people in tech because they too often seem to be overly dogmatic and unable to consider that other valid perspectives can and do exist... and that they might not know everything.
Sometimes I just want to say to those people, "I want to live in your world, where everything is black and white and you have all the answers in your pocket. It sounds comfortable and easy."
lisper
I would love to avoid Amazon, and indeed I would love to support local retailers, but more often than not it is simply impossible. The only way I can find out if a local vendor carries an item I'm interested in, and if they have it in stock, is to physically go there. The amount of time that requires is orders of magnitude more than what it takes to order the item on Amazon, where I am all but guaranteed that it will be available.
It is astonishing to me that brick-and-mortar retailers have not banded together to put an on-line front-end onto their stock. It would technically straightforward (albeit not trivial) to build a web site as easy to use as Amazon, but with guaranteed same-day or next-day delivery via a partner like doordash, and with more reliable quality because local vendors have more of an incentive to vet their suppliers. I would love to use a service like that, but AFAICT it doesn't exist.
Someone here, please build this. I will be your first customer.
yupitsme123
I fear it's too late for this. For any category of item, pretty much all the stuff you buy from Amazon or elsewhere online generally comes from the same few factories in China. Any other potential suppliers probably went out of business years ago, are too expensive, or are too small or local to work with.
You could open a brick and mortar store tomorrow but you'd be selling the exact same products that come from the same factories as Amazon.
al_borland
Some stores do have their stock available online. I know Home Depot does. The website tells you what aisle the item is in, which rack in that aisle, and how many they have.
I've also seen where stores won't have it at the store I have selected, but it will also check the stock of nearby stores to tell me of one of those other stores have it.
It's not ubiquitous yet, but I'm seeing it more and more. I've also found with things like Apple Pay that checkout on random online stores is just as fast and easy as Amazon, which is quite nice.
tkgally
In Japan, the Yodobashi Camera chain has a web interface tied to their huge retail stores. The page for each product [1, for example] has a link to a list of stores where it is in stock [2]. If you’re in a hurry and near one of those stores, you can have it held for pickup later that day. If not, you can have it delivered.
I buy a lot from Amazon Japan as well, and I haven’t had the problems with shoddy or counterfeit products that others have reported. I don’t know if that’s just my luck or if Amazon Japan screens its suppliers better. But it’s nice to have strong competitors to Amazon in online shopping. In addition to Yodobashi, there are Rakuten, Yahoo Japan, Bic Camera, and Yamada Denki for a wide range of products, as well as Kinokuniya, Maruzen Junkudo, Sanseido, and others for books.
[1] https://www.yodobashi.com/product/100000001004349962/
[2] https://www.yodobashi.com/ec/product/stock/10000000100434996...
PhoneTag
You seem to forget that you can call nearly any local retailer and they will check their inventory for you and often even set it aside for you. A phone call does not require orders of magnitude more time than an online order and you can build a friendly connection in your community that way, too.
ndegruchy
I honestly wish this were the case for 80% of the calls I make to local stores. Most people they have working the phones do not care about the inventory and will just say they're out of stock or don't know if there are any on the shelves. This goes double for requesting a special item from a store that would normally carry it, but doesn't. They put the order into their "system" and then it disappears, never to be heard from again.
Calling retail stores to do anything other than to see if they're open or, in the case of restaurants, get a reservation is just wasting time. At least for the retailers that I've communicated with.
mitthrowaway2
For a lot of random things, like... say, a suction cup thingy that mounts my smartphone to a car dashboard, I have no idea which stores are likely to sell such things, and they could have a wide discrepancy in prices. I can type into Amazon and see a list of products and prices, but if I want to buy one at a local retailer I might have to call three or four stores before finding someone who carries the thing I'm looking for. It would be really nice to have a search engine that can search products across brick-and-mortar retailers.
jjulius
>... a suction cup thingy that mounts my smartphone to a car dashboard.
Try your local phone store. Most carriers have brick and mortar locations.
Tadpole9181
I'll show my ass on this, but calling someone is absolutely an order of magnitude more effort than checking online. Anytime I have to put in an order via phone or place a reservation, I do a mental check of if I actually care enough to not just go with something else. There's a social battery cost associated with it, even higher than talking to someone in person.
HappMacDonald
> A phone call does not require orders of magnitude more time than an online order and you can build a friendly connection in your community that way, too.
Your username suggests otherwise
mvanbaak
Will they do this outside businesshours?
mitthrowaway2
I've been hoping someone would build the same thing. Even without delivery, I'd love to be able to search for products across multiple stores through a web interface and see their availability in a map view, with price and in-stock status. I would be happy to go to the store and buy it, as long as I only need to make one trip and I know it will be in stock and at a certain price.
zhivota
I worked on this, it was called Milo.com. we had crazy scraping and xml/csv feed ingestion. It was a terribly difficult business because most retailers hated us. ebay bought it and eventually killed it.
mitthrowaway2
Huh! Well thank you for your efforts! When was that? Do you think it would be possible to build it again?
FreezerburnV
Why did retailers hate you? Wouldn’t they want a solution that brings people to their store because you listed their product as being there and available?
vector_spaces
> via a partner like doordash
I do technical consulting for small food companies
This is an immediate non-starter for most local retail businesses because of the steep (25+%) transaction fees Doordash and other consumer last-mile providers charge, and the razor-thin margins of many retail stores
To be clear I agree with your proposal overall and suspect this particular challenge is surmountable, but it's very difficult to get it right, and either way relying on another parasitic platform won't be the answer
rescbr
In my country (and this might be very specific to my city), one of the drugstore chains partnered with Uber, so you get deliveries within a few hours at a cheaper rate compared to other last-mile delivery options, probably by allocating drivers in off-peak hours.
briHass
It must be cheaper than UPS/FedEx for some items, because Home Depot and Lowes have started using DoorDash and other similar services for 'shipping'. I'm sure they batch up the orders and get discounted rates, but that seems to be their preferred method for items that exist in a store within 20 miles and can't be shipped directly from the manufacturer.
It
Hikikomori
Doordash (Wolt) does this in parts of Europe already.
elcritch
Wolt is great. I’m in Cyprus currently and Wolt feels so much nicer to use than DoorDash, UberEats, etc. Much of it’s the user interface which feels a bit like Waze back in the day and without all the gimmicky ads and in your face junk. Bummer to hear DoorDash owns them.
That you can do groceries, order flowers, drinks, or dinner makes it great for dates.
Downside is that apparently Wolt charges stores something like a €250 fee a month. It’s ridiculous how much any of these services charge small businesses.
I hope automated drone delivery becomes a thing and make it easier to bring up competitors.
joe_the_user
The other thing is local retailers have cut back on all specialty items because they expect people to buy those items online.
The problem is that buying specialized things actually makes sense to do online. But online buying has the problem that an average online retailer gives no guarantee that they will fulfill an order faithfully (I still remember trying to order shoe from Target online and getting ... a used masked and I assume others remember online "burn" as well) so Amazon has a key position of online guarantor. As a "natural monopoly", one might imagine such a role would be regulated but not in the present climate, ha ha ha.
Hikikomori
Doordash (Wolt) does this in parts of Europe already
______
A good first step is not paying for Prime.
It's like $140 annually now... and if you're mostly just buying things and not watching their content, it's a nice speed bump to just accumulate items in the cart until you hit the minimum free shipping and only order then.
When you occasionally do for some reason need an instant item, you can pay the shipping then. It's kinda like for most people, having a second or third car is much more expensive than just renting one when you actually need it.
That said, I am close to a Costco so that's where I get most of my bulk items - the Amazon stuff tends to be more discretionary.
paxys
Especially since the base Prime Video has ads now, so that aspect of your prime membership is useless.
fvgvkujdfbllo
That’s the key.
Amazon is very convenient when needing something one off. But we are not going to renew Prime and slowly ween off it.
Still looking for alternatives though, Costco is okay, but when you want something asap, you need either to drive to stores or pay for same day delivery and tips.
pkaye
Home Depot seems to delivering some stuff for free the next day (and occasionally the same day.) And they can always have the product ready for pickup in front. Sometimes its so hard to find stuff in their store. Even some of the delivery charges feel lower than before.
EasyMark
I've always found the location pretty accurate on the home depot site (which works fine on mobile browsers) for items I'm looking for.
variadix
None of these are good arguments to convince the average person to not use Amazon (or any other service provided by a megacorp). A better argument (well, maybe not as of May 2025) is that most crap on Amazon is available for 1/5 the price from websites like Aliexpress. Nothing on Amazon is sold for less than ~8 dollars, meanwhile you can buy the exact same product from Aliexpress for less than a dollar.
PaulHoule
Myself I can't stand the media blitz that tries to talk up Prime Day every year.
I like hunting for bargains as much as anybody, I love checking out the used games at Gamestop or items on clearance at Best Buy, not least the reuse center at Ithaca where I might find a cassette or Video CD deck with karaoke features or a minidisc player.
Prime Day seems to be just a waste of time. I don't see any attractive prices on anything I want to buy. So many web sites scour Amazon for good deals and can't find any. It's a snoozer.
heavyset_go
It's because Amazon buyers are used to Amazon prices.
It's literally been a decade or more since Prime Day, or Amazon in general, had the best prices online.
PaulHoule
I’ve often seen items selling in physical stores (like a UV tooth whitening kit) for $40 and at Amazon for $65.
jedimastert
Fun fact: if you click on Amazon affiliate link, anything you put in your cart in the next 24 hours counts towards that affiliate once you hit purchase on that cart
kristianp
I wish our local postage carrier was more efficient. Amazon provides next day delivery, whilst other online stores dispatch your purchase within 2-3 days and the package arrives is a further 2-5 days.
7speter
Your local postage carrier doesn’t build massive warehouses filled with items that people who have to pee in bottle grab off of shelves.
tstrimple
Some of you may die... and that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make!
add-sub-mul-div
I noped out of Prime a long time ago when it became clear they were training the population to treat all their purchases as instant gratification impulse buys.
Den_VR
That’s a bit interesting. Do you have similar ideas about commercial air travel?
add-sub-mul-div
No, because taking a week out of my life to go by train instead of plane is impractical. Making myself wait a few extra business days for my books to arrive is not. I apologize if you had a better point you were trying to make and I missed it.
kevin_thibedeau
How much of your spending requires instant gratification?
Aloisius
Presumably nothing they buy from Amazon.
If they wanted instant gratification, they'd buy it from a local store and get it immediately rather than having to wait a couple days.
tstrimple
Stupid Best Buy had to have a 5090 in stock and available for me to purchase within one hour. Otherwise I'd probably willing to run me 3080 into the ground. For some reason Amazon next day delivery doesn't check my "instant gratification" box, but I'm a sucker for hour availability.
EasyMark
Quite a bit, I usually try not to buy anything other than groceries, but when I need something I usually really need it because something has either broken or a sudden need has arisen. That said I do try to get it locally first.
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II2II
It can be about predictability as well. If Amazon says two days, it is usually two days. I arrange the purchase for a day when I don't work or work a short shift. If it is a valuable product that requires someone to receive the parcel, I don't have to deal with shippers who force people to use a pickup point that is a 15 minute drive away. (I don't drive, so that is usually problematic.) At the end of the day, in my case, it is more about receiving the product than getting it right away.
gibbitz
All of my restaurant purchases for sure.
dosinga
Am I missing something, the article randomly says: "For context, the US federal government spent $53 million on public education in 2022." and links to: https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... which says K-12 schools spend $857.2 billion.
SllX
You didn't miss anything, the author of the piece was just wrong. They either screwed up the math or didn't read their own link correctly, or both. Moreover, it is trivial to search for the US Dept of Education's budget for 2022 and fact check this.
It's also cited as evidence that Amazon is now more powerful than the US Government which is just factually fucking false. It really is a different breed of person that thinks some millions of dollars > sovereign power. It's like, yeah, they lobby, but they also have people lobbying against them, including near-competitors. The dynamic is not as simple as spend some $X millions of dollars and get some amount of equivalent benefit. You lobby because an entity with sovereign power can trivially destroy your business.
wging
The federal government is distinct from state or local governments. The numbers still might not be consistent (it says “[t]he federal government provides 13.6% of funding for public K-12 education”, which would be more than $53MM) but the page you linked draws that distinction too. State and local funds make up the difference.
bentt
Yeah that bit seems wrong. I agree with the overall sentiment of the article, but that is off.
zmgsabst
US Dept of Ed has a $238B budget in 2024. I think much of that is at the collegiate level, but $53M is almost certainly wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ed...
lr0
Related: Reasons not to buy from Amazon - https://www.stallman.org/amazon.html
agnishom
When I lived in the US, I tried to order stuff from Amazon as less as possible. The problem was the lack of decent urban areas and public transport. Going to a shop in my city where they had the same thing which I wanted would take the better part of a day.
bluGill
I can almost always find a small company - often thing-i-want.com that has just as good deals and they provide useful advice about which version is best - often I have bought the more expensive version for those reasons. (I think for the better though I rarely buy enough of anything to have an informed opinion on relative merit)
jedimastert
One of the people I follow on tiktok suggested abstaining from shopping from large corporations for Lent except for sundays. I tried it and ended up finding out some things about myself I did not realize, which I guess is kind of the point.
A real reason to avoid Amazon is fake merchandise. I'd been buying a vitamin supplement from them for years. Then they sent me a notice that it was being recalled as a fake.[1] (Archive [2]) They paid a refund for the last purchase. But that's all. Amazon won't respond to questions about what was in it or who the real seller is.
I no longer buy anything from Amazon that could be faked.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/ask/questions/Tx2Q5O0C84HF1GU/
[2] https://archive.is/rN8B9