always read the reviews

[cellio]

I needed a new thumb drive, so I figured I'd just get one from Amazon along with some other stuff I needed. I found a reasonable-looking candidate but looked at the reviews, the first few of which were bad. How can a thumb drive be bad? The first review said it was unreliable (not described further); the second said it came with malware. I looked at a couple other options, and -- same sort of complaints.

Hmm, I said. These are all third-party sellers (different ones, in the few product pages I looked at). Amazon isn't vetting them and never gets its own hands on the products. They're just an aggregator. I would buy a thumb drive from Amazon, but their credibility does not extend to other sellers they happen to host -- I shouldn't trust a thumb drive being sold by "Joe's Anonymous Store" any more than I should trust one I find lying around waiting to spread the malware within. Even if Amazon eventually boots sellers with lots of complaints, that doesn't help me, now.

I had an errand to run today anyway and figured I'd pick one up in person at Best Buy. That's how I found out my local Best Buy isn't there any more. Oops.

I've bought electronics online from NewEgg before and that's always been fine, so I headed there next -- where I saw that the products I was looking at were listed as third-party sellers. I didn't know NewEgg did third-party sellers. I wouldn't have thought to look if not for those Amazon reviews.

I finally ordered from Best Buy online; I figure it's probably really them, and if there's a problem I can, if necessary, go to a (less-local) brick-and-mortar store to deal with it.

Comments

[rhialto]

If you read research like this, https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022 , you trust no flash memory anymore. Add to that that Amazon doesn't keep the products from different vendors apart. If 10 vendors claim to sell product X, and one of them sells fakes instead of the real product, then it doesn't matter from which vendor you buy product X: you can still get a fake one. Total end of trust :-(
Bunnie has more interesting articles about flash memory:
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=2946
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554

[cellio]

Thanks for the links. It's worse than I thought, sigh.