The quality of stuff being sold on Amazon has been a race to the bottom for a while now, somewhat following in the steps of Ebay.
In this video Louis has two crimp butt connectors: one bought from Amazon and one bought from a hardware retail store - the Amazon purchased one, which a regular user of the site may consider as reputable at a glance, fails to crimp the wires securely. The hardware store one however securely crimps the wires in place.
It's a pretty mundane example, but extends across to other products in other industry verticals too. A pretty major concern raised in the video was that the failure of this specific product would cause excess heat, potentially leading to an electrical fire in the worst case scenario.
There's also the issue of reputable brands not even listing their products on Amazon anymore, leaving users with mostly poor quality alternatives shown prominently in search results.
Personally I find myself preferring to shop at dedicated or independent online storefronts, where it's a bit more obvious what exactly I'm purchasing, and where there's at least some minimum guarantee of quality - in contrast to a Prime "dropshipped", generic product from Amazon. Also kind of like the fact that by purchasing from sites that aren't massive marketplaces or outlets, real individuals benefit from my custom, not massive behemoths that don't need the sales to survive
Piped link in comments
It was purchased by Epic Games a year ago, who recently sold it to Songtradr, a licensing platform for background/'mood' music. Songtradr only retained 50% of existing Bandcamp staff (the rest were laid off a few weeks after the sale AFAICT, with the worst affected departments including Bandcamp's editorial team and customer support. Epic Games handled the severance package, for some reason.)
People are pretty upset about the editorial team being laid off because it provided exposure for smaller/niche artists in a weekly publication. I've never checked it out personally checked it out because I never knew it existed - wishing I had now
Such a large layoff so quickly by the new owner feels like a sign of darker times ahead for Bandcamp IMO, seeing that it's apparently been profitable since 2012 (Wayback link, new owners have nuked this from the site?). No need to milk the cow even more when the bucket is full...