For some reason the comment brought to mind the old folklore story:
Anyway, the story is that one day Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassee, who had recently transferred to Cupertino from Paris, had just parked his car and was walking toward the entrance of the main office at Apple when Steve buzzed by him in his silver Mercedes and pulled into the handicapped space near the front of the building.
As Steve walked brusquely past him, Jean-Louis was heard to declare, to no one in particular - "Oh, I never realized that those spaces were for the emotionally handicapped...".
It looks like this link (to a Seller Central forum thread?) is only viewable if you have an active seller account. I only see an error page telling me my seller account was closed for inactivity.
There is a lot of sellers frustration in that thread. I didn't know that it could be such a problem for a seller to simply build and maintain their own catalog on the platform.
I have ended up getting involved in Amazon bits from time to time as from a client's point of view it's all e-commerce.
They are an absolute nightmare to deal with. Everything is opaque, everything takes however long they want and changes you make as a seller, even as a registered brand owner are merely a suggestion that even if accepted may be rolled back half an hour later with no notification.
The whole platform is at the mercy of bad actors (of which Amazon themselves are the worst)
They then squeeze for the highest fees they can get away with - the bulk of their expertise being used to work out stuff like this rather than delivering any kind of positive experience to their suppliers.
The fact that listings can be changed more than a certain amount, without some sort of review and cost associated with that, is a huge gift from Amazon to fraudsters. It's the platform being designed to enable fraud.
Not a week goes by without our collective nose being shoved in the pile of poo that is Amazon's fraud platform wearing a cheap façade of ecommerce. And we still have trouble admitting it.
When a platform is designed for making money above all else, while willfully ignorant of humanity's millennia-long history of using fraud in pursuit of money unless that option is ruled out, and takes no steps to rule it out, it is equivalent to being purpose-built for it.
You don't need AI, just a bit of willing. I can't imagine it would be hard to create a trigger for human intervention when a product's title, images, category(?) and description all change.
So what's the process here? How does the malicious seller take over an existing product listing with good reviews and repurpose it like that? What's the loophole being abused?
