I'm a third party seller and I just left Amazon. When you buy a book, for example, are you aware that 40% of the sale goes to Amazon? Many sellers sell cheap items at a steep loss just to keep their sale metrics up. A couple bad reviews, etc. and your business is kicked off with little explanation and cold or no way to appeal. Third party sellers are not treated well and I'm not surprised Amazon steals seller data metrics
>A couple bad reviews, etc. and your business is kicked off with little explanation
There's got to be a dark underbelly to Amazon going on at the same time. My wife is bored enough that she's taken up a fight with Amazon over some bluetooth earbuds she returned. The earbuds themselves just simply didn't work; they'd do things they're not supposed to and not things they are supposed to so she posted a review saying such.
The seller started contacting my wife trying to bribe her to change her review to 5 stars. My wife updated the review as such saying the seller is trying to coerce her to change her review but she won't budge.
Amazon has now removed my wife's review saying she's "harassing" the seller despite having emails to prove the seller is the one who won't stop contacting her even though she's explicitly requested such. So my wife is battling Amazon asking them to re-instate the review or give her a real reason why it was removed.
It really is to the point where I won't buy from Amazon anymore unless I have no other choice. I don't trust a single thing about their review system. I don't trust a lot of products being unopened/untampered.
Amazon has structured their reviews to enable unethical behavior by sellers.
Any review which comments on the seller or seller's behavior is removed because the product page is supposed to be a page of seller-agnostic reviews of the product. There is a separate page of reviews for each seller, but it is buried to the point that no-one looks at it.
It makes it leaving reviews about sellers doing unethical things like paying for reviews fruitless: either you put it on the product and it is removed quickly, or you put it on the seller and no one sees it.
Yeah, as another perhaps anecdotal example, I've recently been forced to buy a book from Amazon because I literally couldn't find it anywhere else.
Despite the book being listed as "New", I received a book that was not only pretty old, but also had clearly been stolen from a library, with stamp marks and everything.
I'm not going to leave this alone, contacting the library and exposing this fraud is going to go pretty high on my pile of "to do" things...
The 40% in a vacuum does not really complete the picture for me. Is it possible to get the same book at a lower price somewhere else? If it were the case why would there not be other retailers undercutting Amazon?
Maybe I am missing some monopoly related issue here, but I would love to know more.
