Oh, if you want to advance the thesis that Amazon offers a bafflingly awful interface for the slimy flea market they appear to be complicit(or, at best, naively unable to come to grips with, like anyone believes that) in having created then no argument from this quarter.
I’m always impressed by just how hard to use Amazon is outside of its original things-with-ISBNs territory. If I’m going to venture into the cheap side for an oddball cable or something I’d vastly prefer to just hit ebay.
That doesn’t happen if you filter by orders with ‘free’ prime shipping. But that’s only useful if you’re paying your $100 plus annual Amazon tax :-/
My favorite thing is that sorting by price doesn’t always 100% work right… even on kindle ebooks, which shouldn’t be affected by $0.01+$over9000 S&H BS because there’s no fucking s&h.
You end up getting non-gratis ebooks randomly inserted among the gratis ebooks.
amazon’s so-called search feature really sucks. When “sorted” by price, the prices are always all over the place anyway. Unwanted tat constantly shows up in very specific searches: “soap dish” ≠ “sunglasses” FFS.
Being unable to specify items you want excluded from a search is V aggravating, especially at amazon - they could so easily afford to change that. Dunno how many times I’ve specified the department to run a search (an adult sized t-shirt, say), after seeing loads of completely unrelated stuff (car floor mats? baby bottles?!) with a sprinkling of shirts, only to be informed that nothing was found in the clothing dept.
ebay’s hardly perfect, but it’s always the first place I look. You can specify item location, but to be certain, you must further investigate the sellers.* bezos’ joint doesn’t let you do that. On amazon, item price, shipping cost, and shipping time can be tip-offs, and some pages tell you the sellers’ locations. If a foreign seller uses fulfilled by amazon US, that purchase is still subject to the foreign transaction fee mentioned in the longwinded footnote.
amazon’s an awful company run by a far too rich, awful dickhead who treats employees like shit. They’re always my last resort.
It pisses me off when we order something from an ebay seller who buys it on amazon or walmart (ugh), and they ship it to us. That crap gets mentioned in the feedback we leave for the seller.
*I’ve found that whenever a seller has any items that will ship from a foreign country, their bank account is also foreign. US financial institutions charge customers an extra $3 fee when dealing w/foreign banks. That’s per purchase, not per item. Many Asia-based sellers have some items in the US - you get 'em within days instead of a month (or two if Korean) - but that foreign transaction fee still applies.
The ebay seller basic page [ebaydotcom/usr/their user name] supposedly tells you their location. It’s also good to know whether any of their items are in other countries, not just the ones yr after.
When browsing sellers’ wares by way of view seller’s other items from the page of an item, or by clicking items for sale from their basic page, sometimes you’ll see things in another country right away. It’s a real pain, but you can see whether all their stuff is domestically located by clicking your country in item location on the left toolbar, noting the resulting number of items. Scroll back up, and select worldwide in item location. Compare that number to the first. If the worldwide number’s higher, they have stuff in other countries & your purchase will cost $3 more in the US than it should.
IMHO, the only way to make money via dropshipping is be shady as (bleep)
Basically, you have to sell something from China that “looks” more than its worth, then you have to hide the price, and pretend to give it away, then charge like 10-15 for “shipping and handling”. In reality the product is like $2-5 USD on aliexpress with free shipping from China. So for every sucker you hook you make like 10 bucks. You need a domain name, a shopify website, with the appropriate dropship plug-in linking back to aliexpress for shipping status updates and tracking, and some minimal design skills.
I kind of enjoy disrupting digital marketplace pricing, on occasion. If I happen to have something to sell, I check ebay, and see it lists for $55. I list for $25, then $20, then $10. If it still doesn’t sell, I might just leave it at buy it now for $5 or $10, and that’s when you find out NO ONE wants to buy it! At this point you could either donate it somewhere or leave it for a psa to anyone else thinking of selling one…
Fucking this. Search operators would make browsing for books sooo much less alien-porny.
And in fact the real money was made by the merchants selling supplies, the surveyors, the mining equipment manufacturers, etc. They all did way better than all but a couple of the actual prospectors.
In this analogy, those would be Amazon and eBay who are making the real money in all this.
You are under the impression that this isn’t deliberate, but because of laziness or something?
Exactly. This was a really good fictional representation of the CA gold rush and made exactly that point:
My town has what they call a drop shipping scam, or it did when the Canadian border was open. Amazon and other online vendors are cheaper ini the US, so Canadians ship to a US drop box and pick up their stuff here. We had a couple of places in town doing this as a sideline.
Also, is it time to bring Sherlock or Watson now that just about every search engine seems to have gone to the dogs, and not the good dogs? I’m sure that would start an API war and the vendors would try to invoke the DMCA. If you knew the exact title of a book, Amazon used to put it among the top search results. Now it is often on page three. Have they started doing “spelling correction” on ISBNs?
It’s a lot faster to just use the eBay advanced search feature in the first place. Using eBay advanced search you can select to search for “sold items” only, which will show you whether or not the product actually is purchased by anybody and how much they actually pay rather than what sellers hope people will pay. The advanced search feature is a really good way to quickly estimate the actual value of a wide variety of products.
But that’s not as fun!
I mostly find eBay listing to be a pain, in part because I have to essentially package it before listing it to accurately estimate the shipping. So anything that will let me decide in advance that something is not worth listing on eBay is a bonus.
But props to you if you enjoy the process.
IKR?! It pisses me off no end that we have to jump thru so damn many hoops to make sure we’re buying from a domestic seller!
It’s also off-pissing that $3 can make or break someone’s purchase!
I’m merely gifted, not an idiot. 
Border town postal mailboxes are hardly the same thing as drop shipping nor are they inherently scammy. If you live 20 or 30 minutes from the border, who wouldn’t want to save $10 on shipping for every single item you order. The benefits of a US mailbox aren’t just the cost of shipping. It’s more about availability of goods. Pre-pandemic, it used to provide faster service, a more secure mailbox, and email notification of arrival, avoiding porch pirates, folded mail, and customs delays. When you declare your goods at the border, there is always a legal amount you can bring in, so not a scam or illegal in any way. Unless what you are ordering is illegal. Except now border towns are hurting enormously, and it could be a long road to recovery.
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