Comment by lazide

I don’t remember it as not trusting smaller retailers (as in they would sell you fraudulent goods). I remember it as they would have old stock and try to charge you crazy high prices for it, if they had it at all.

Smaller online retailers, yeah there was trust issues, but a lot of that was due to ‘do they even exist’ and card fraud (due to someone stealing the numbers). That someone would just ship you bullshit was a rare thought. More like they’d just not actually even exist.

And at the beginning (before it got gamified by every scammer under the sun), Amazon was generally quite reliable (it was very rare to have a fake or fraudulent listing), a good way to get almost anything you needed, and quite fast. Not as fast as brick and mortar where you could walk over and get something (if they had it in stock), but WAY faster than almost any other online retailer.

Shipping bullshit/fakes/counterfeit has really taken off as Amazon has killed competition and ‘scaled’, to the point that Alibaba seems like the saner choice most of the time. Which is just nuts.

I agree on the shop local thing. It may be older/somewhat out of date. It may cost more. But you can see in person if it exists and what it actually looks like, and it’s exceptionally rare to have true fraud at brick and mortar because someone can actually go to jail where you live if it happens.

Random online seller? Good luck, even if it may be actual wire fraud or the like.