Yeah I usually have bad experiences calling Amazon and have stopped buying anything from them, preferring wither other online stores or driving to a physical store depending. The CSRs usually don’t speak english well enough to respond to anything other than the issues the app also lists. One CSR insisted I send back an item that fell out of the package in the delivery driver’s car.
I have too, but when they have a bad policy they’ll defend it to death.
Specifically I contacted them about a product listing that, at best, was word salad right out of Blueler’s book on schizophrenia. They told me they didn’t want to hear any complaints unless I’d bought the product.
Of course, that kind of listing is endemic on AMZN, and I’d have no problem reporting several of those each time I go shopping.
Actions have consequences though and AMZN is now the last place I look when shopping for things since shopping there is somewhere between visiting Mariupol and the South Bronx in the 1970s. It is a matter of time before I pay my last recurring bill of any kind to them.
> They told me they didn’t want to hear any complaints unless I’d bought the product.
You have to think about the game-theoretic equilibrium of the alternative, given the same set of bad actors involved: if you could report listings you hadn't bought, then these idiots would all just be constantly reporting their product-category brand-name competitors' listings, as non-suspicious one-off actions from different dark-web-purchased pre-aged accounts, to the point that Amazon would just have to ignore "reported listings" as a signal anyway.
I never see senseless product listings on Ebay. For that matter, I get Ebay shipments from Japan faster than AMZN gets me packages from a warehouse in the next state. People selling animals and farm stuff on craiglist sometimes struggle to spell words like ‘cow’ and ‘pig’ but once more the listings make sense.
Do you believe that this is because Ebay knows something that Amazon doesn't know? I personally think Ebay just doesn't drive the kind of sales volume — or have the particular expected sale+logistics lifecycle (immediate payment to enable immediate shipment of locally-warehoused goods through Prime, etc) — that makes these particular scammers interested in exploiting it.
Also, as you're describing this more, I'm increasingly confused, because I don't think I've ever seen an Amazon store listing that is truly "senseless" in the way you're describing. Maybe it's just that I've only ever visited Amazon's Canadian storefront, and these particular attackers aren't active on there; but while I see lots of AliExpress-dropshipped product listings, lots of page grooming, etc., but never a completely-senseless listing. I believe you that they exist; but can you link an example?
In that case, you're wrong: the Denial of Service is "jamming the human review queue", and it would be very successful. Even Amazon doesn't have infinite money to hire moderators to keep up with the number of [99.99999% automated and illegitimate] reports that would flood in.
(Actually, it's probably a supply problem more than a demand problem — there probably aren't enough people willing and able to work as moderators on the entire Earth, to manually review the number of complaints that would be generated here. It would cost them orders of magnitude less to just hire people to manually review all changes made to product listings! ...which they still won't do, because that's still apparently too high a cost to bear.)
