Ok I know I'm venting but does anyone else get a little crazy when doing searches on Ali-Express..Ebay ..?
you're looking for a Lii-kala lii-500 charger and one of the listings says $12 so you click on it only to find out that's the price of the charging cable .
Ebay has been fond of doing this as well . You click on an item you're interested in at a good price and find they are also selling a garbage light for that price and the light you're interested in is 3 times more .
Do these idiots think that irritating a potential customer is a sure fire way to win life long customers ?
Can we all spread the word to quit doing this ..
While we're on the topic of odd sales techniques ..
What about Sofirns strange habit of offering you 700thousand other lights when you've clicked on the one you're interested in .Why am I scrolling past a huge museum of lights when I just want to get to larger pictures or specs . Does anyone else think this is very odd ?
BUT in aliexpress that is simply the norm, and it’s worse because they put a similarly but cheaper priced item so it fools you into thinking it it’s the real deal. It’s not like if I’m browsing a $20 flashlight I’d fall for a listing that says $0.99 and it ends up being a pocket clip.
People new to AE usually tends to but a whole lot of random stuff in their firsts orders thanks to the massive recommended items being shown. This works best with clothing and cheap household items.
For most small and medium Chinese businessman, long term customer simply isn’t a thing. Because they keep seeing the influx of new buyers all around the world, first it was the USA, then Russia, then Europe, now Latin America.
What's next ? $.02 for the twisty tie on the USB cord ?
Give me a price / don't ask me to accrue points ,leap thru hoops ,pick a box .join a club , like you ,sign up, phone a friend or stand on my head just to purchase a product .
this is the internet .. jerking the customer around is not your best move.
I have noticed in the last year that searches on Amazon, Ebay, and Ali all return results that have nothing to do with what your searching for mixed in with actual things you searched for and most of the time the bigger sellers will be at the top even if the item only half way resembles what your search words where.
Advertisements and click bait are taking over the internet as we Know it. You can’t search for anything anymore without seeing it.
Those multi-variation listing are the most epic fail on eBay’s part I can think of. They make it impossible to find anything using the order by lower price search and annoy the living daylights out of buyers like me.
It has to be the fact that it gets a click and can be counted .. the seller thinks he's had all these people looking at his listing and doesn't realize how irritating it really is .
quote=moderator007]I have noticed in the last year that searches on Amazon, Ebay, and Ali all return results that have nothing to do with what your searching for mixed in with actual things you searched for and most of the time the bigger sellers will be at the top even if the item only half way resembles what your search words where. Advertisements and click bait are taking over the internet as we Know it. You can't search for anything anymore without seeing it.
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I have to agree. it's so bad it makes you wonder if you've made a mistake and end up starting a new search
Amazon needs to put a stop to retailers using the same template for various flashlights.
I.E. Sofirn SP10 that has reviews for every version ever made all mixed into one.
Or Lumintop page that has 5 different lights all on one page and again reviews all mixed up.
Speaking of Amazon reviews, how is it they can offer me $3 to do an early adopter review but then say “Paid reviews are not allowed?
Am done doing any reviews on Amazon anyway, did a very nice detailed one with pictures for a Sofirn light that I paid full price for around the beginning of the year and then they took down a bunch of reviews after getting into pizzing match with Sofirn over something.
They can keep their $3 and anything else, done with it.
See and be Seen is what it’s all about. The name of the game is hanging out.
So, they figure the more you see and hang out…the more you will BUY…. not.
just yesterday I did a search for a 3 amp/hr Hitachi power tool battery. I put the Hitachi model number in the search bar. My heart skipped a beat when I popped it up in a Google search at Ebay for an unbelievable price!! Clicked the link and it was a vendor selling a “replacement” brand for that Hitachi exact model number. GET A ROPE !
Oh, and the kicker is he was using the pic of an Hitachi battery in his sale.
Shopify (NealsGadgets, Skylum) does this but it may be unintentional. If there’s multiple items it lists the lowest value so you get the FW3A priced at $2.50 or Fireflies E07vn is “free” but it costs $195.
I don’t think I’ve ever bought a single item that required me to ‘add to cart to reveal price’, I did check the price though.
The variable prices are another nuisance to deal with.
The most obnoxious thing I see on Amazon; a retailer will take some popular item (with many five star ratings), then change the listing to completely different product. If you're not aware of this, it appears all those five star ratings are for the new item - but are actually for the old item.
They do that in ali express too . I was reading the reviews on the D-10 boruit headlamp because the ones I got off ebay and the d25 I got from Sofirn have plastic holders that don't grip the light like the old ones did . I wanted to see if other people were experiencing the same issues with the new lights being produced . the reviews are from lots of different lights.
Retailers believe their success hinges upon driving traffic to their merchandise. If you see it, you might want it. And that is true. It’s always been true, even with B&M stores that paid for color ad supplements in the newspaper; I can’t tell you how many times I saw something in one of those flyers and suddenly had to have one, and went to the store to buy it. And E-tailers are doing the same thing in a digital way. Seems like sound business practice, right?
But it’s not working on some of us anymore. We know what we want and we aren’t impulse-buying as much as we used to. The plethora of available products has led us to become more discriminatory buyers. And we’re more jaded, too. So, having products we don’t want shoved into our faces (not like we can decide to not look at it when we must scroll or click through to reach what we really seek) becomes really irritating.
The false headings used by ebay sellers creates a situation similar to us looking in the Lowe’s flyer for paint, only to find that only Page 1 says “Lowe’s” and everything else is actually a Best Buy flyer. Amazon searches aren’t much better, but at least they give you some paint cans before showing you loosely related stuff. As for the overseas sites…… well, I’m about done with them; I’d pretty much rather pay 40% more in CONUS than order from China and get jerked around with late ships, non-ships, refunds (if I’m lucky), long wait times, uncertainty, crappy customer service, etc.
amazon also has some dumb algorithm that removes 75% of the items on your search page when you change the search filter to sort from “low to high” pricing.
I’m gradually giving up on shopping site searches. If the site search throws up a load of garbage, I just use Google with site:whichever.com as one of the parameters. I often resort to image search to winnow things down, because that way I can just skim to the pictures of the item I actually want.
Search on Amazon and AliExpress have both gone immensely downhill over the last year. I can barely use them now.
EBay search is still mostly functional for me, as long as I’m looking for a product that doesn’t have too many sellers using “search spam”, i.e. where they put terms for similar-sounding but different items in the listing. I can usually skip past the unfeasibly low “bait and switch” prices.
It’s really irritating when you search on something like NDP6020 (an N-channel FET) and get bombarded with listings for “NDP6020 NDP6020P Logic Level Power MOSFET”. The NDP6020P is a P-channel device!
Some suppliers are so obviously clueless that there’s literally no way to figure out which one they’re actually selling. They’ve just shoved in every type number they thought might be vaguely right (at best) or deliberately spammed the search system (at worst) in a way that would completely break an unwitting buyer’s project.
There are so many products now where you have to slog through flaky, spammy listings like that.
Falsehoods and deceit. The interwebs spur a trail of contempt.
The hours to pursue a viable battery replacement for my power tools. But it still beats the store / commercial suppliers in my town. The little merchandise they have is always responded with “we can order it” and then the guillotine drops… $$$
If I didn’t have to deal with minimum order quantities, sliding price scales, silly shipping charges for small orders and all the other nonsense that the regular suppliers use to discourage small-scale hobby buyers like me from taking up their time, I would never need to bother with EBay or AliExpress.
But no - doing battle with flaky listings, missing deliveries and the occasional fake or wrong item is still the better option for me to make my money go as far as possible (at the price of my time, of course).
Does anyone else here just buy 100-packs of stuff like small transistors so you only have to mess about tracking them down and ordering them once? And bookmarking the seller who got it right in case you ever do need more?
Many times in the past I searched on Ebay and end up buying a different item thinking it’s the one I searched. You really need to read before purchasing when on Ebay. I bought several hundred items on Aliexpress in over a hundred different orders and never bought a wrong item. You just need to read the description before you buy. Also never had this issue on Amazon.
