Written 2/20/26, Posted 3/10/26
I don't want to send money to Amazon, so I went to eBay. I know it's not all that much better, but it's at least not Amazon. When I received the package, it was actually a neighbor bringing it to me because it got delivered to his house by mistake but had my address. I was confused because I wasn't expecting anything from Amazon, but it had my name on it. Turns out it was my eBay order, shipped from Amazon as a "gift."
Upon further digging, I found the exact same product on Amazon for $9.99. Same pictures, title and everything, it looks like the eBay seller copy/pasted the title and didn't even bother to fix the cut off text at the end of the character limit. The only other difference is that the eBay listing was $15.81.
At first I thought it was someone selling on both platforms and using Amazon logistics for both. Someone else I know has bought over-the-counter medication from the manufacturer only for it to be delivered by Amazon, so who knows if that's safe. But for plastic junction boxes, it would make sense.
Then I noticed the tracking number was through Coretrails, which I'd never heard of before.
What I think happened: When I ordered the boxes, the eBay seller went to Amazon and ordered them to my address (as a gift for some reason.) Then somehow used Coretrails to get the Amazon tracking number into eBay.
Looking into it a little more, it looks like there are a bunch of people doing this and writing guides on how to (or probably prompting an AI to write guides) as some kind of get-rich-quick scheme. There's even software promising to automate this, so I'm guessing the real profit is for the people making that software.
It looks like eBay doesn't allow this. It seems Amazon doesn't either, but I don't think they would care much as they get the sale either way. I'm going to contact eBay, and maybe Amazon too as I have the order number. Will update with what happens.