VIDEO: Are Amazon’s Glory Days Over?

Amazon is the go-to source for ordering all types of products, and this holiday season has likely been a bonanza for the online marketplace. While there are many satisfied customers, there are also likely many customers that are dissatisfied with the merchandise they received, no doubt helping to account for the numerous product returns Amazon gets.

One of the dissatisfied customers is Louis Rossman, the YouTube reviewer whose rants on consumer electronics with poor DIY repairability have become familiar to regular Design News readers. But in this video, Rossman contends that the selection of brand-name merchandise available on Amazon has steadily declined, with the alternatives being no-name products that get good reviews posted by customers but are in fact of poor quality and do not live up to their lofty reviews.

To demonstrate, Rossman compares two similar products, a heat-shrink tubing butt connector kit available on Amazon and a Gardner butt connector kit from Home Depot. The latter can be difficult to obtain from Home Depot, Rossman said. Using a high-quality crimping tool, Rossman proceeds to crimp the tubing using the connectors from both vendors. When he pulled on the crimped wire with the Amazon-supplied connectors, the assembly broke. But pulling on the crimped wire with the Gardner connectors did not break the assembly. Rossman added that trying to find a Gardner connector on Amazon was a futile exercise.

Rossman went on to state that many of the reviews of no-name brand products on Amazon are fake and improperly overstate the virtues of these products. This is dangerous, Rossman contends, as unsuspecting customers fall for the fake reviews and believe they are getting a good deal because of the products’ low prices. Rossman now refuses to deal with Amazon and asserts that high-quality product merchants no longer want to sell on Amazon, either. The vendors that are left are those that cannot do business elsewhere. He advises customers who have bad experiences with products brought on Amazon to return them and post critical reviews.

You can view the video here.

What do you think? Have you had a bad experience with products advertised and ordered from Amazon?