Garbage marketplace app infested with counterfeit products
The app is basically unusable. The search function returns a lot of "ads" (i.e. promoted products) that have nothing to do with what you're searching for, making it a pain in the ass to navigate. For example, if I search for "Kahlua", only 8 out of the first 20 results are Kahlua Coffee Liqueurs; the rest are different alcoholic beverages (there are more Kahlua Coffee Liqueurs beyond the first 20 results, so the app is just forcing unwanted results onto users over displaying relevant results). For the curious, I did the same search on Lazada (a similar marketplace platform) and 18 out of the top 20 results are exactly what I searched for. Not only that, if I try to look for say, a watch, many of the promoted products are counterfeit watches from Chinese sellers (eg. pictures of Rolexes and such without actually mentioning "Rolex" in the product name). No wonder the U.S. government listed Shopee under the USTR list of notorious markets for counterfeits and pirated products. I don't want to see ads to begin with, but if I have to, I'd rather see generic Google ads that you typically see in websites than counterfeits promoted by the platform itself. Also, the review system is garbage. For starters, they reward users with coins for submitting reviews with photos and videos. Per my observations, Singaporeans don't seem capable of writing proper reviews; the vast majority are 5-star reviews with "received, haven't tried, hope good" (with broken English) and completely unrelated images and videos. These reviews are not only utterly useless, they also mislead people into thinking a product is good because it has 4++ stars out of 5. Users should NOT be incentivised to write product reviews to begin with. Secondly, the app arranges reviews not by date, but rather those with pictures and videos are prioritised first. Occasionally, you'd see some well-written reviews without images/videos (from people who don't care about the incentives but just want to leave a useful review) buried deep under the pile of useless reviews because of this glaringly bad system. Thirdly, there's a limitation to the number of times you can edit a review (you can't even edit them previously, but this was changed at some point). Many products that look good and perform well on the surface initially are designed to break easily (i.e. planned obsolescence) and not allowing users to edit reviews mean users cannot warn others about such products. I'll rather deal with Amazon instead. It's bad too, but it's the better option considering Shopee's flaws.