Wish is No Amazon Killer

It was probably some stupid Medium article where some idiot Millennial was saying how great the Wish app was and how it'd put Amazon on the run or something.  Seems like the kind of shit they post.  Anyway, between whatever that was and ads on my crossword game on my phone I decided to try the Wish app on my Kindle Fire.

The result:  unless you want knockoff shit that takes generally 3 weeks to arrive poorly packaged from China, this really isn't any threat to Amazon or EBay or traditional retailers like Wal-Mart, Target, etc.

The first thing I noticed is that anything that's a normal retail brand is more expensive than Amazon or EBay.  I searched a few different categories:  electronics, toys, diabetic testing supplies, etc and it was the same story every time.  Anything that was a normal brand you could find in stores would be more than other places.

But plenty of good deals on knockoffs!  It's the kind of place where a Sorny is a lot cheaper than a Sony.  Though with toys there are plenty of interesting Transformers knockoffs.  The first thing I bought from the app was a Powerglide knockoff that is slightly bigger than the normal Hasbro one, but actually looks pretty accurate to the old TV show.  Other than one arm being loose there weren't really any defects, so there's that.

To actually get anything, though, takes weeks.  It takes about 3 weeks on average because everything comes from China.  There's no 2-day Prime shipping either.  I guess for some you might be able to pay more to get it quicker, but nothing I order is anything I desperately need.  You definitely wouldn't want to order anything you need right away.  The stuff is usually shipped in a thin plastic bag.  If you're lucky they'll wrap the item in something, like a Deadpool figure I bought came in a plastic air bag so it didn't break, but the Powerglide knockoff got kinda flattened over the long trip.

Since pretty much everything is from China, the descriptions of items pretty much suck.  A lot of them will show something like a smart phone or TV or something with a price like $1-$10 but you're not buying a phone or TV, you're buying a stand or cord or something that may or may not be pictured in the cover image or in just a tiny corner.  But on the plus side you can buy sex dolls.  I mean, really life-like ones.  So there's that.

There are some things it does better than Amazon, though.  For one thing you can often buy an item "with" someone else.  One person can buy an item and sign up to get a discount reimbursed to them if someone else buys the same item in the next 48 hours.  So if Cindy buys Item A and signs up for the discount and the next day I buy Item A, we each might save $1 or so on it.  That would be a neat thing for Amazon to do.

The other fun thing is once a day you can spin a wheel and it presents you with 10-100 special deals based on stuff you've looked at before.  The discounts aren't really that much compared to normal, but it's neat to see what crap they'll offer.  Sometimes there might be something good.

Anything I buy I use PayPal for just so I have that slight buffer between the Wish app and my credit card information.  Even with some successful orders I don't feel all that comfortable with them.

I tried leaving a review saying most of this on Amazon but they of course blocked it, probably because I dared to suggest they aren't perfect.  I mean for all its good points, Amazon is far from perfect--just don't tell them that.