Robert M.

I've been using anytime for over 6 months and although they notify me of new mail both on the app and email, that's the only notification. For example, after notification of mail, I went to the app and chose to forward to my selected address. One day later, nothing shows up, not even the initial contact. This is the second time I've used it and the second time there is no tracking or indication of the progress. 2 of 2 fails, last time I emailed the location directly and they said sorry, then finally forwarded and charged me $23 to put in another envelope and mail overseas. Took over a month to get the letter. This time I have no clue what's up, so sad, I thought I'd found a solution for expats retiring overseas, can't recommend.

Ebay is about as bad a platform as you can get, fakes, ripoffs and a company that really doesn't care. Avoid

I've been using Amazon.com for over a decade with mostly positive experiences (I usually buy in batches of $1000 since I live overseas most of the time). Lately, I find their platform very troubling. Last week the android app self-bought some off-brand deep muscle massager in my pocket overseas, and was set to buy 4 more. I discovered this by a confirmation e-mail which showed it was going to send the pocket-purchase to a USA hotel address I used months ago. How does this happen, I didn't have one-click buy on, and when I go to buy products for real, they make me follow many steps.

Another thing I've noticed in the last two years is the blatant AI price manipulation when you leave multiple products in your cart while evaluating them. The prices for those items keep going up, then down a bit, then really up, then they start playing with availability. There is no longer any price guarantee so when I finally paid for my purchase, many of the "in cart" items had noticeably increased. Yet, even two days later when checking prices I found the items has returned to the lower price. Many examples of this, so don't keep items in your cart.

Fake branded products are a real problem on Amazon, I have bought several by accident. User reviews are also being faked, you can read 4-5 star reviews that have nothing to do with the actual product. If you don't believe me read reviews on "sonic bark controllers". I've noticed products that have lots of bad reviews are being cancelled, then resold as a new product to shed the bad reviews. Total manipulation. Most of these products aren't for large dollar items so most of us don't bother to send back. The few time I've bought and left negative reviews, somehow the seller is able to get my real email and write notes begging me to change my review "my family depends on my sales..."

If Amazon has more money than god, why aren't they securing the platform and protecting the buyers? They make more sales not doing so... Again, another example of a good company corrupted by money. I will only be buying things I can't find anywhere else, in fact, I think Walmart is probably the good guys now compared to Amazon. So sad, greed and unregulated capitalism once again doesn't protect the buyer. The "Market" will eventually correct itself? I sure hope so, but it's always at the expense of the little guy.

I've been using the paid "Power" plan of SmugMug for 6 months now while simultaneously using Google Photos. While neither are perfect, the clear winner for me is Gphotos. I'm an experienced web designer for over 20 years and have amassed 40k photos and videos of my life. The plan was to upload all these files to my SM account to sort and display the best of the best. I used a custom domain name and put together sharing albums, and it looked good. However, all the ticks in the system were a constant fight and irritating. When I would email CS they were responsive, but never had a solution. Even asking how much space do my photos use on the server were beyond their ability. I didn't find it as intuitive as Gphotos, the AI is first gen, the phone apps have issues, and it just isn't worth committing to the long term with their platform. I wanted to like SmugMug, but I don't.