Go to amazon search for product. Find something that looks reasonable.
Confirm review section has a reasonable distribution of stars and check out a few 1 and 3/4 star reviews (hope they're written by a human) and see if there are any deal breakers.
Go to google and enter "<amazon product I'm interested in> reddit reviews".
Go to reddit read reviews and hope they're not written by astroturf accounts, bots, or chatgpt (have to manually review accounts).
If reddit confirms the product is okay, then I check if I can find it directly on a company site to order direct.
If yes, have to confirm with reddit again to make sure the site is reliable and does returns / replacements, etc.
If yes, buy direct. If no, go back to amazon to buy product there.
Something I heard recently on the cortex podcast is that Amazon is changing customer's understanding of how shipping works. While it is easy to set up a direct to consumer platform for a shop to sell their own goods, the shipping costs surprise the users because they are used to free shipping through Amazon.
Unfortunately, I can confirm this. When I purchase something like a t-shirt outside of Amazon, it feels weird to pay $8 for shipping, but it feels like forever waiting 10 days to actually receive it. It's not the end of the world, but yeah, Amazon has conditioned me.
Amazon is extremely organized (in terms of stock and shipping) and quite good at logistics, so it's very difficult to compete against them on that basis.
Go to amazon search for product. Find something that looks reasonable.
Confirm review section has a reasonable distribution of stars and check out a few 1 and 3/4 star reviews (hope they're written by a human) and see if there are any deal breakers.
Go to google and enter "<amazon product I'm interested in> reddit reviews".
Go to reddit read reviews and hope they're not written by astroturf accounts, bots, or chatgpt (have to manually review accounts).
If reddit confirms the product is okay, then I check if I can find it directly on a company site to order direct.
If yes, have to confirm with reddit again to make sure the site is reliable and does returns / replacements, etc.
If yes, buy direct. If no, go back to amazon to buy product there.