I'm increasingly put out by Amazon and am trying to stop the habit of shopping there. I like books, and Amazon was founded on books, but the way they ship books now (typically loose in a soft envelope or mostly empty box) means that >50% of the books I've ordered recently have arrived damaged and had to be returned. They used to shrinkwrap books to a cardboard plate inside the box.
There are other problems:
1) Search is just terrible. Often I have to search in Google to find the product I'm looking for at Amazon. The "other people bought/looked at these items" functionality which partially made up for bad search has been pushed out in favor of sponsored products (i.e. ads).
2) Shipping is only fast and cheap if you get Prime, which basically means paying for your shipping in advance and buying constantly at Amazon to amortize your initial investment.
3) Because Amazon no longer actually controls its own catalog, duplicate listings, misleading listings, merged listings that amalgamate multiple different editions of the same book, etc. abound. e.g. search for "Norton Anthology of English Literature". Instead of a neatly sorted list by volume/edition/condition, you get a whole mess of duplicate/overlapping listings, and also misleading garbage like this (shows 3 books but you only get 1 of them): https://www.amazon.com/Norton-Anthology-English-Literature-P....
I'm shifting towards just using Amazon as a 'wishlist' shopping cart and then finding the actual thing to buy elsewhere.
There are other problems: 1) Search is just terrible. Often I have to search in Google to find the product I'm looking for at Amazon. The "other people bought/looked at these items" functionality which partially made up for bad search has been pushed out in favor of sponsored products (i.e. ads).
2) Shipping is only fast and cheap if you get Prime, which basically means paying for your shipping in advance and buying constantly at Amazon to amortize your initial investment.
3) Because Amazon no longer actually controls its own catalog, duplicate listings, misleading listings, merged listings that amalgamate multiple different editions of the same book, etc. abound. e.g. search for "Norton Anthology of English Literature". Instead of a neatly sorted list by volume/edition/condition, you get a whole mess of duplicate/overlapping listings, and also misleading garbage like this (shows 3 books but you only get 1 of them): https://www.amazon.com/Norton-Anthology-English-Literature-P....
I'm shifting towards just using Amazon as a 'wishlist' shopping cart and then finding the actual thing to buy elsewhere.