I don't get they don't crack down on the product switcheroo scam [0] - it seems like a trivial problem to solve. I've reported items to them before and they don't care.
I've noticed several products recently that used an old product entry where the bulk of the older reviews were written in Spanish or German. Once translated you find they are gushing about a comic book they loved rather than the computer interface adapters I was looking at. Pretty sneaky since Amazon puts foreign reviews in a different bucket that you have to drill down into, I usually only do so myself when there aren't many English reviews.
I wonder if this is ASIN-recycling (where ASIN is the product id), or simply a bad indexer. For instance, is it that an ASIN in location A is reused in location B? Is it that the ASIN is recycled by the lister/Amazon to maintain positive review percent on a new product? Or is it that the column(s) used to map the international comment thread to the product are incorrectly specified?
How is it trivial to solve? They either need to prevent sellers from modifying product pages (which would be a disaster because any mistakes could no longer be fixed without losing all reviews) or gate it behind human intervention(slow) /algorithm (complex).
That's not my problem. The courts have already weighed in on this.
Marting Lewin sued facebook for publishing ads that used his face to defraud people. Facebook used the same excuses you just wheeled out, and the judge wasn't impressed.
Fraud is a crime, little people go to jail for less every day.
"It's hard" should not be an excuse for not preventing fraud. Most arguments from tech companies boil down to "but we would have to spend some of our billions of dollars of annual profits or venture capital to prevent this and those jobs wouldn't be sexy engineer stuff, so why would you want us to do something like this." I never understood how/why these companies are getting away with this, given that fraud/abusive behavior in other parts of the economy is taken quite seriously.
It's an interesting question though on whether that allowing everyone to upload as much as they like is a sufficient benefit for society at large though, to change the equation where the argument that it's too big to moderate properly makes sense and is a valid defense.
(I personally come down on the side of "it is valid").
When you put it like that...isn't society too big to moderate properly? Like the point is in trying; we have laws and try to enforce them and stuff...but that doesn't stop perps & victims from slipping through the cracks, or societal injustice that aren't addressed until much later or never at all.
Expensive ~= effortful, meaning that it would take a lot of human labor, which would otherwise be contributing differently in the economy, at Amazon or elsewhere.
Every hour spent manually reviewing product pages could instead be spent growing food, producing shoes, building homes, providing accounting services, etc.
This doesn't mean it is or needs to be determined centrally - just that it is an economic truth that will bear out regardless. Amazon might hire 1,000 workers for this, pulling them implicitly from all of the other jobs they would otherwise have taken.
Maybe it would be a net-win, and maybe not. But from society's standpoint it really doesn't matter whether it is profitable for Amazon or not. We'd be trading less fraud on Amazon for less of everything else.
If Amazon's retail profit relies on allowing fraud and illegal activity to happen with their knowledge, that's just not something we should accept. Making more money for shareholders shouldn't happen at the expense of knowingly defrauding customers. The decision to not prevent fraud on Amazon just means the cost of dealing with that fraud is borne by the customers.
This clearly falls into "fraud waiting to happen" rather than "minimal risk" though. It's fairly simple to treat Amazon as the actual seller and just hold them liable if there is false advertising. There's a difference for a Shopify type system that gives individual sellers their own storefront or Ebay where the seller is clearly communicated, but Amazon often obscures the seller info and represents itself as the seller so it seems fair and reasonable.
And what of the time, money, and environmental resources used by the customer who must spend more time estimating the reliability of irrelevant reviews and have to make time to schedule and execute a return? Doesn't that also take from "growing food, producing shoes, building homes, providing accounting services," and consuming more products -- and with much less efficiency and predictability?
Yes, it certainly does. That's my point. Everything takes effort. One way the market might sort this out is that Amazon hires a bunch of people to do this on your behalf, freeing you up to spend more time on activities more productive than performing due diligence on your online products yourself. They would raise prices a bit, but then you'd also have a bit more income. Perhaps this would be a net win overall.
But that's not the holistic conversation and consideration I see coming through. All I'm seeing is a one-sided focus on what Amazon can (should) do about it.
Just think about all the meaningful local mom and pop jobs that gave back to the community that Amazon destroyed in the name of putting bezos in the top two richest men alive. Maybe the judge should consider that and just demolish them.
There's a pretty long list. If someone sells a fraudulent product by mail, I don't hold the mail carrier accountable. If I buy a product I don't like on Craigslist, I don't hold them accountable.
The mail carrier does not advertise the fraudulent product and does not handle the financial transaction. There is a pretty obvious difference between a mail carrier and Amazon. Craigslist actually is responsible for stuff that is offered on their website, see also the long-running debates about sex workers advertising on Craigslist.
It is not only the customer who suffers damage, but also the seller of legitimate merchandise who is not compensated by Amazon for fraudulent sales. Also, Amazon 100% has a spreadsheet somewhere calculating the share of customers who don't bother claiming fraud compensation.
Products can be defective or even harmful without you noticing.
Does your multi vitamin actually contain every vitamin it says it does in the dosage it should? For many things you really depend on reputation and outside regulations as you’re hardly going to send random samples to a lab.
Even reputable companies make use of this. Look into how often SSD internals get downgrading without changing the product’s label.
AliExpress's user interaction is different, and IMHO much less friendly.
In Amazon, the user interacts with a product, and from here can either allow it to be fulfilled from whatever's its default seller, or select one explicitly. In AliExpress, the user interacts with the [product,seller], so in search you'll generally see 50 instances of the same product, and leave it to the user to decide which one to open into Product Details. IMHO, the Amazon interaction is far superior. (that's not an excuse for them not to look for a solution)
I prefer the opposite. eBay and AliExpress are a better experience because I interact directly with the seller. The seller has control over their listing, their inventory, and their fulfillment. I'm not playing the lottery as with an Amazon listing.
Couple of fairly simple things they could do to at least help somewhat:
* Put reviews for current listing at the top of the reviews (currently default sort seems to be a vague "Top reviews", but can be changed to "most recent" which presumably accomplishes this. Vast majority never change defaults though)
* Clearly mark any review that is for a previous version of the listing, and provide a link to view the listing at time of review (so can easily see if it was a completely different product or a simple typo correction etc.)
* Perhaps make history of listing visible, so customers can see when and how the listing has changed
I don't think this will work well. Minor updates to listings would trigger all of these actions far too often to make them standard and ignored.
I hate to say it but I think some type of heuristics would be needed here.
1. Has the title significantly changed.
2. Has the price significantly changed.
3. Are the search keywords that were finding the old listing significantly different than those finding the new listing.
4. Have average ratings and common words in reviews changed? (Especially rarer words that match the new and old listing respectively)
If some of these start to look suspicious then I think you can start to apply your mitigations. You can probably even scale them by how sure you are. For example reviews are always downranked by age and significant changes to the listing amplify this effect, you can add the same weight to the start rating.
And of course the real way to prevent this is to flip the incentive. Add human review and a warning before killing the account. Make it so that the cost of being caught negates the benefit of doing this.
Web megacorps are normally allergic to any kind of human review because they are in the business of picking up pennies on each interaction via adverts. It's unsustainable to police the world on that model.
Amazon is in a different space here. Even the smoothest transaction goes through a handful of literal human hands. They have to pay for those hands regardless. At the very least following up on cases where customers (and competitors) flag fraud on their system should be possible.
I'm pretty sure if you gave ChatGPT the old and new versions of the listing, it would have a 99%+ accuracy when answering the question, "are these for the same product?" So they could just run each change through something like that, and wouldn't have to write any custom heuristics.
Of course, though perhaps with slightly lower accuracy. Either way, my point was that it's far from an unsolvable problem; it can be trivially solved with existing tools.
This is just a simple classification problem, the prime application for basic neural networks. Using a general text generation system for this seems like complete overkill. Just a bunch of wasted resources.
This was also my first reaction, but it got me questioning whether I’m just becoming the same as the guys who were saying “using an interpreted language for that is a waste of resources”. Maybe LLMs are the equivalent, sure they use more CPU cycles, but you can point them at some problems and get them solved for a fraction of the effort.
It will help, but some changes are very small. For examle adding "faux" (for leather, etc.) to the listing name/description would probably result in a very small text distance, while changing the contents substantially.
reputation systems are not some esoteric things...
also, if a fucking seller cannot keep their listing reliably constant, what are they selling?
new version, new product, new reviews.
car manufacturers do this. wineries do this. pharma does this. even Apple managed to show the manufacturing date of their new new new new but the same things.
They could also have some system to flag these listings for manual review by an Amazon employee, instead of expecting every individual customer to figure it out.
I mean with all the AI hype, you'd think they could whip something up that would at least be able to detect when the listing has changed to a completely new product category.
Yep for sure. Was just a response of simple things they could do, if they cared. Obviously nothing they won't have thought of themselves, was really just pointing out that it's not the case that there's nothing that can be done about it, as the parent comment to mine seemed to suggest.
I think any fix that requires input or extra effort from a user won't work in the grander scheme of things. Hide reviews for previous versions behind a button will go a long way, if you keep that in mind.
Trivial is an overstatement, but the solution space is far broader than the two options you propose. I can think of one off the top of my head: Give each listing a change score, where changing a description is a point, changing a photo is a point, perhaps changing categories is 2 or 3 points… At a certain threshold of points (tweaked over time to calibrate against false positives) the listing is flagged for human review.
Not to be argumentative, but... that's the second option. Algorithmic.
The initial implementation would be simple. One point, two points, three points. Then, some categories turn out to have significant change requirements, some change infrequently, some changes turn out to be very important in some categories, some categories need immediate human review...
I'm sure Amazon can commit more resources to solving this problem than some random individual on HN can commit to a ~3 sentence long comment.
If they wanted to solve this problem, they would have already. Clearly, they don't care. People buy products with good reviews, and Amazon makes money when people buy products.
I wonder if they've been sued over this? I'm not a lawyer, but this sounds like false advertising to me.
Yeah, so many people are wasting their time on those useless arguments. What matters here is not how to solve the problem -- customers should not worry about that at all -- but whether Amazon is commited to address this problem, and the answer is a clear no.
It's armchair quarterbacking, for sure. Nobody at Amazon is going to read some random news article, even if they are here slacking at work, and say "That's the ticket! Lets do that!"
> People buy products with good reviews, and Amazon makes money when people buy products.
and lose money (or make bad sellers lose money) when people return products -- often times Amazon won't even ask you to ship back a product you complain about.
This is like saying that stocking groceries is complicated because some items are perishable, some are frozen, some sell faster than others, they go to different parts of the store. Isn't it just a fundamental part of what the business is meant to do? To have reviews that actually relate to the product?
Yes, it is. And in a grocery store, how is a product handled when it comes in on a shipment and doesn't match the previous shipments and/or bills of lading? By a person, in every single grocery store everywhere on the planet.
Although, in a grocery store, you're less likely to see a product change from a bicycle to a scooter. You're more likely to see the cocoa content in your chocolate bar drop, and the oil change to a cheaper and less flavourful type.
I guess the comparison still works... should we have purchasers comparing products before setting them out? Under what conditions? What conditions trigger a review? In my experience, the stores just keep putting changed products out like nothing has happened, even if we notice over time that things just don't taste the same sometimes.
Turns out that... yes... it gets pretty complicated pretty fast, but many grocery stores also seem to just be ignoring this issue.
> You're more likely to see the cocoa content in your chocolate bar drop
[...]
> many grocery stores also seem to just be ignoring this issue.
I do not believe this is the kind of swap people are complaining about.
We're talking about a box that's labeled applesauce and is actually full of rocks. Grocery stores would kill a supplier who was doing this.
I can't imagine a "real-world" situation happening at the scale of reputation-stealing that happens on Amazon. I suppose it's just an extreme version of "Made In Your Country Tools" building up a good reputation and then quietly outsourcing the work to "Low-Quality Overseas Forge".
Is the problem is that "easy to acquire" reputation for low-cost products (get good rep by using good materials, which don't really cost that much more and eat the cost as a loss leader) is easily transferred to higher-cost products? It's not like you even need to be making bandsaws to get the good rep., then start using it to sell cheap bandsaws? The investment at the start is very low.
It's absolutely trivial if you have a human review changes. But that's expensive. So I'd assert the problem is trivial but expensive, and Amazon lacks the proper incentives to do anything about it: they make money from fraudulent sales. It's a short-term incentive to not solve the problem. Sure, there's a long-term cost that this fraud slowly erodes Amazon's reputation, but it's hard to measure and its consequences are way beyond the horizon of the next quarterly report.
> It's absolutely trivial if you have a human review changes.
There is nothing trivial about that. At amazon’s scale that is an army who needs to be hired, trained, prevented from colluding with scammers, quality controlled, etc etc.
They could do a similarity diff. If you switch content from towels to solar panels I bet they could get pretty good signal just from text comparison. “This looks like a different product. Different products must use their own SKU. If you believe this is an error, appeal here.”
A neural network classifier would surely get less of both false positives, false negatived, ans exploitable vulnerabilities.
But at the end of the say, the question is just if Amazon has any interest at all in stop being accessory to large scale fraud. And the answer is pretty obvious; any of the things people are discussing here is viable, they could pick any or even spend more than 3 seconds thinking about the problem.
I bet someone's already made a game from before/after pairs such that the smallest Levenshtein distance can give the biggest possible change in meaning to the entire seance.
That would start a game of people updating a listing a bit at a time. The listing might be confusing or even meaningless part way through but after a while it would be fine enough. Update API limits would make this impractical for long listings but it might work for short ones. Detecting scams and working around the detection semantics is an unending arms race.
Requiring new listings for new product titles/SKUs, or approval for significant changes to titles/SKUs, seems like it would stop a good portion of these scams.
Yeah, with permanent delisting of the entire company as the penalty. Of course, these people don’t care. They’ll just spin up a new seller and thus the only people you end up hurting are legitimate partners updating their product line.
Updating product line or need to amend something? No problem. Allow to add new content. Insert a link to the new version or a notice at any time.
Just never allow to edit existing content beyond a few typos. Updating product line and want to keep reviews? Sorry it's dishonest even if seller thinks of itself as "legitimate".
I don't think in the end any legitimate seller is hurt.
Consider that Amazon already does a lot of manual review. They do manual review of individual transactions if a customer is unhappy. The scale of that is enormous compared to this.
They also already do some manual review of product listings. (Every product listing page has a "Report incorrect product information" link.)
Adding this kind of manual review is surely a drop in the bucket if labor costs are the issue.
When you change a product page, you lose all reviews, but you get a "New Product" link on the old page to link to the new one, giving you exposure.
Amazon can make the "New Product" show up for queries for the older one, but without the stellar reviews. This way modified products still get good exposure and no one will accidentally buy the old one. But there aren't reviews on the same page for a different product. The system can still be gamed similarly, but at least you can't get reviews for the wrong product on the same page.
They could start by letting users report them. The fact they still don't have functionality like this makes me think they're purposefully putting their heads in the sand.
This seems to have about a half a hundred solutions
- Changing listing voids prior reviews
- Changing product category voids prior reviews
- Enable transferring reviews by a paying a fee which will pay for a human reviewer to approve this
- Make people put up a bond to sell goods and or agree to a huge fine if they do this. When you find people doing this take their bond and or fine money out of the money they would have received for their goods. Also delete all their listings and ban them from the platform. If any account attempts to do business in a way obviously linked same card same email etc ban them too.
- Find mismatches between reviews and product by having a program classify reviews by probable product type reviewed and have a human review hits starting with the most prolific offenders and bring down the ban hammer. If you can actually collect fines directly out of money intended for the scammer this trivially pays for the enforcement activity and improves the health of the platform.
If the economics of the scam are I'll make a little money to if I do this at a large enough scale to make any real money I'll probably be caught and lose money it doesn't look like an attractive scam to run anymore. It's not necessary to be perfect just good enough to mostly resolve the issue.
No, really, I have worked at amazon in a job exactly around product compliance and such.
All this is very hard to solve and they do what they can, people wont believe it, but amazon is not just an app, the heavy lifting part is logistics, admin thereof and compliance.
Theres no easy way to be fraudulent on amazon, the cost of market entry for sellers is rather big.
Mislabeled products and bad account health have terrible consequesnces for sellers.
I do understand it might appear from the outside that nobody cares, but it looks different once inside.
As for the allegations a profit/benefit calculation being behind it is most likely wrong, amazon, apart from fullfilment center staff is always overhiring to be ready for peak seasons and the whole thing is subsidized via aws, the real money maker.
Changing the product category shouldn't "get flagged eventually" after many people have already been scammed. There is no reason why such changes can't require review by Amazon except that Amazon doesn't want to pay for that.
> Theres no easy way to be fraudulent on amazon, the cost of market entry for sellers is rather big.
It's easy enough that fraud (for example recycled listings with old reviews) is common enough that many people, including myself, have run into it.
> Mislabeled products and bad account health have terrible consequesnces for sellers.
The correct objection here is not "slow" but "expensive".
All of the "FAANGs" (or whatever we call them these days) need to be forced by government regulations to have transparent appeals processes that use actual humans and make them spend the money on it.
And when it comes to fraud clearly amazon needs to be forced to deal with it.
Make it so the product name/title, product number, and brand are immutable. Make it so you can upload new photos, but you can't remove old ones. Flag changes to the description that change more than 50% of the text for human review.
It would require the seller to be a little more careful with the initial submission, but hopefully if they do make a mistake, they notice before there are too many reviews anyway.
And maybe have a way to request a change to fix mistakes that requires manual review. And I think charging a fee for that review would be fair.
Most of the problem is wholesale swaps of products - not minor edits. Allow minor edits, but prevent wholesale swapping of content/categories/descriptions/etc.
Limiting edits, showing product history, or removing reviews on edit (or some threshold of content change) would be an easy place to start.
Sure there is: Review all products and their updates, just like e.g. an app on the app store.
But that will cost Amazon more money than what they currently lose on returns or scams. I presume anyway.
Amazon does not care about the quality of the products on their website, they only care about volume and selling / maintaining subscriptions. As long as numbers go up they're golden.
And there's not enough competition. There's probably plenty of webshops with quality products (anyone can run a webshop from their home), but discoverability is low, I don't know what the consumer protection laws in the US are like, and Amazon is easy to use. Amazon can afford to handle returns and the like as well.
It shouldn’t take a particularly strong classifier to detect that two descriptions are for entirely different products. And product reviews are a major part of Amazon’s business, so improving the situation should be easily within Amazon’s budget.
Also, noticing and penalizing sellers who do this shouldn’t be particularly hard.
Seems like a problem where LLM can shine. I foresee a future where an IA validate that your product page edits are for the same product and that reviews make sense.
That’s not going to solve the issues of fake/paid for reviews however. I think there is a market for a store selling only vetted products they have reviewed themselves.
I'm pretty sure GPT-4 could be shown the product page as it was when the first review was posted, and then again as it is now, and be asked "Are these two pages about the same product, please answer Yes or No with no further context"
Sellers should think very carefully and verify exactly what they put on the product description. What is wrong with that? If there's a typo there, you'll usually fix it before even getting the first review.
you're telling me that Amazon in their infinite wisdom who already deals with all kinds of fraud in their system cannot flag if a product listing changes drastically or is describing something totally different?
They need to have human review of products and product changes. Easy enough. Just expensive. I don’t care that it’s expensive. That’s Amazon’s problem.
Let’s put another way, until Amazon does something about this there’s no way for anyone to trust reviews on their site. Their reviews are all worthless.
That’s a huge liability.
As long as they let people scam me, I will just assume everyone on there is there to scam me. It hurts them more in the end to lose shoppers to Walmart and Costco and places that don’t put up with scammy products.
They could just show old pictures of the item under a link. And maybe manually review reports of clearly different products and display a warning or remove old reviews for those.
How often does a seller need to modify the product category from Dog toys to Electric toothbrushes? Needing to go through a review, or losing previous review juice for that seems reasonable to me.
My understanding is that the biggest issue is that they're commingling inventory. So Sony is selling A1000s on Amazon and ships in 10k units. Your FBA store buys 1k wholesale A1000s and sends them to Amazon. My FBA store buys 1k and sends them in.
Amazon just has a pile of 12k A1000s and sends them out whenever orders come in. Once it's processed there's no differentiation between your stock, mine, or Sony's, it's just Amazon's A1000 stock.
Even if this is the only thing preventing the solution you're referring to it'd still be a logistical hurdle to solve.
Just tag each item by supplier. They already tag by item. Sure it's a logistical hurdle in the sense that someone needs to do it, but it's not a challenge, it's not anything new.
Walmart has suppliers RFID tag with UPC + Unique ID. It would work perfectly for amazon. They would be able to track Who sent in what and in which shipment it came in.
I suspect they save money not just from saving some effort/complication of tracking the supplier, but also from being able to distribute the larger inventory better across their warehouses. If someone in Tennessee buys the item from a supplier whose stock is in Idaho, they have to ship across the country, but if they can substitute with stock form another supplier that is in Georgia they save a lot of shipping.
Nobody disagrees with commingling in theory, but, the problem is you have some bad actors who will pollute the communal product bins. It is not obvious who they are because there is no tracking of individual items, only by ASIN.
Tracking by (ASIN,UUID) pair would at least allow them to figure out who the bad actors are and flag/pull those items.
There are lots of things they could do to try and help. The problem really is, there is no incentive for Amazon to do any of them.
They don't do anything about it because it's a feature not a bug. They know full well about all the fake reviews, fake products, product switches, counterfeit products, dangerous products, etc., and choose not to do anything about any of it because it's making them money. Amazon is basically an online real estate company that owns a giant online mall full of scammers, snake-oil salesmen and fraudsters, but they get to keep cashing the "Rent" cheques from these vendors in their "Mall," and so they don't give a single solitary f*ck about whether or not actual end customers suffer as it's not them doing it, just the people who rent space in their mall.
I suspect the switcheroo scam is somehow profitable or desirable to Amazon and there is no end to the number of shoelaces they will trip over or tangents they will chase on the path to confronting it.
I worked in this area of the company - it's actually quite a hard problem.
For one thing, these are some of the oldest systems owned by Amazon - the team/service/system diagram is a whole massive mess, so there's that initial part of just grasping all of the pieces that go into it, and everything else that comes with legacy architecture (assumptions, data flows, formats, etc.).
Secondly, uhh trying to limit the amount of info I give - this link hints at the issue concretely enough - https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/itemsandoffers... - but there's some pretty complicated automated systems that handle relationships between ASINs, and basically it's those rules that get taken advantage of. And the rules are hard to fix because they do genuinely merge together a lot of duplicate ASINs/manage other relationships between ASINs, and then sometimes they end up merging unrelated stuff. And some of the rules are ML based, so you've got the whole recall/precision stuff.
And the people talking about categories, there's like 4+ different systems for categorizing ASINs which all have separate use cases and taxonomies, so any answer that starts with "just do X" is probably not grasping the number of interdependent parts there are.
Not saying I'm a fan of Amazon at all - I left for good reason - but these comments are just so incorrect about how Amazon works under the hood. No comment on if it's intended behavior, but I never saw anything that would indicate it was the case, and we had multiple teams actively working in this space.
It's stuff like this that makes me avoid online-only retailers as far as possible. My first choice is still to go to the store. Second choice is to never order from third-party sellers on Walmart or whoever's website.
The minor price differences between online and in-store aren't worth the hassle. The only reason to order online is for long-tail items. Spare parts, replacements that you simply can't get in-store.
I was surprised to see this product when I clicked the link. I recently bought one of these and ended up cracking my whole windshield trying to fix a small chip
Certain things I will just not buy on Amazon because I have had either nothing be delivered, but a charge held in my card for months, or a product I suspect is counterfeit or somehow made cheaper(and worse) for Amazon. Clothing and shoes are particularly susceptible.
It is worth it for me to buy direct and pay a bit more to not have to deal with the hassle.
Using resources to crack down only makes sense if the problem causes customers to.uae Amazon less.
I don't see that happening. People are locked in and the thought might not even cross their mind. Of course they will complain. But talk is cheap. Money is the only thing that matters.
There is a famous story about Customer Obsession and returns that I used to tell during training sessions for new Amazon employees- Customer Obsession 101, which I was a teacher for.
Jeff is in a call center for a day shadowing a customer support agent. A customer calls about a specific item and the CS agent is like "They're going to say it's broken in this particular manner" before the call even starts. Jeff later is like "How did you know?" and the agent says "Because this is like the tenth time I've had calls about this". There was some problem in the warehouse that kept breaking the item in the same way, but what can a CS agent do about that? File a ticket that no one reads?
So Amazon introduced an 'Andon button' that let CS agents stop sales of a given product if they keep seeing the same problem. Customer Obsession! Crazy idea to empower entry-level people to have such impact! Only Amazon would do something like that!
Anyways, that Amazon is dead, "Day 1" is long gone, and unless the item is a standard product of low value I personally do not shop there anymore.
Agree. "Day 1" is no more, as are those leadership principles.
My own divorce from Amazon retail was when 3rd party vendors had no control over Amazon binning fake goods alongside vendors' non-fakes goods. This ensured that reputation of 3rd party vendors would suffer. Where did the fake goods come from? Were they supplied by Amazon? Perhaps yes, actually.
It makes consumer anti-trust lawsuits [1][2] even more necessary, to ensure protections against monopolies.
It's a term borrowed from assembly lines(0), where if the andon cord is pulled, the entire line stops until some manager or the likes inspects and restarts it. For amazon, the equivalent would be pulling the listing immediately from the website, blocking orders and flagging the item for immediate review.
Ah but not an acronym like SCRAM for example in the early nuclear reactor days. Meaning: Start Cutting Right Away Man, because back then, you had to cut the ropes holding up the control rods, which basically mean, shut it down as fast as possible by dropping those rods.
Working in the trust and safety / bad actors space, I imagine that bad actors realized fairly quickly they could just purchase 20 of their competitors products and then rate/write in saying they were damaged / fraudulent and trigger that andon button being falsely triggered.
Add in some pretty basic filters & I think I'd be game to try. Is the complaint from someone >X years active? Is the complaint from someone with >$Y dollars spent?
I can imagine a lot of factors that could go into discerning customer reliability, but there's some pretty blunt force ways to cut out a ton of noise really quick.
And... Amazon should have some pretty clear smoking gun evidence in these cases of updating product listings, with pretty heavily revised listings that should show the issue. If people are mis-reporting, I feel like that too would be kind of hard to hide.
"this just makes" is in general too dismissive for my tastes.
the specific suggestion that rather than just try to game Amazon scammers are all of a sudden going to start en-mass engaging in serious felonies, become a new legion of ultra-vicious hackers, to write fake negative reviews against other people's product is, specifically, not ranked on my oh no, heavens forbid we try that list.
my starting place would only be that, a starting place, but I have a hard time envisioning trying turning into the world burning, as this stance presents. philosophically i have affinity for trying engaging & learning, & yeah sometimes it can be naive or have bad Co sequences. but it feels like we've become attuned to being short, to being disbelievers, to rejecting the try, to always having some scenario in our pocket that seems so awful we scare off attempts. i hope for greater for our society, for people.
That's not an actual scenario. Customer service can see if the person purchased the product or not. Getting a "troll army" to all buy and return products and call in complaints on actual purchases while waiting on refunds is a much higher bar.
It's a trivial bar to surpass. If sellers are willing to pay people to buy and give product reviews, there's no doubt they'd do the same to taint a competing seller.
Andon is a manufacturing concept. It’s a button that, when triggered, stops the manufacturing line. You push it when things are systemically broken, and it has massive consequences because it costs companies meaningful cash.
I can’t see how disabling sales of a single product is equivalent either.
I heard Jeff tell this story and it was about a dining table that often arrived with a gouge in the top surface. It was costing Amazon a lot to ship, and a lot to get it returned, and the table was essentially worthless when returned. Even if only 5% of the tables are returned, this makes selling this table a loss maker. Quickest way to increase profits -- stop doing things that make you a loss!
So the lesson from the anecdote is that Amazon wasn't actually Obsessed with the Customer, but maximizing profit, and in this case they just happened to align.
Making customers happy isn't totally orthogonal to making money right?
In midwit meme format:
Low wit: Make customers happy. Making customers happy is how you sell products and win customers from competitors
Midwit: Screw over customers for profit. Customers are kind of low information though right? Maybe we can do things that increase profits at the expense of the customer if the customer wont notice or attribute it to us
High wit: Make customers happy. While an individual customer is low information, in aggregate, doing these things causes a company's reputation to suffer a death by a thousand cuts.
Edit: It seems that it is easier now to see the feedback broken down by seller than when I had last used Amazon or I didn't fully understand how it worked previously.
Will these be separated by seller?
Last I checked there was no way to review a seller on Amazon (or if there was, it was so well hidden that a week of effort and calling customer support only got me a refund). Rather Amazon lets you review "products". Given that a "product" can differ between sellers (either because the products are of varying natural quality like with used items or because one seller straight up sells fakes and broken items), it is much more useful to review the seller than the item.
Knowing that DVD copies of Jurassic Park are frequently returned (or that Jurassic Park has amazing reviews) helps me not one iota when I am buying from an unknown seller who might be sending out pirated DVDs with always-on Arabic subtitles.
Until Amazon breaks down user feedback (reviews, return rate) by seller, I will continue to urge friends, family, (and everyone else) to stay away from Amazon at all costs. You just never know who you are buying from or whether they are trustworthy.
The way Amazon works now (or at least my understanding from past articles and seller interactions outside of the platform), for some of the items you are not guaranteed that you received the item that your specific seller sent to the fulfillment center. If an item has multiple vendors, you will receive probably the closest one, not the one from the seller you selected. If that item is fake (even though the seller you selected is selling original items), reviewing the seller would mean penalizing the good actor.
I had an interaction ~10 years ago with an Amazon seller that kept also their online store. They did not deliver directly to my country but directed me to their Amazon store that did deliver. I ended up getting a slightly different version (same item but a different revision). Talking to the seller, it was not one that they sent to Amazon; it also came from a warehouse in a different country.
I was under the impression that internally Amazon can track whose item you got because every item gets a tracking sticker when it enters the warehouse (or even sooner, if the seller labels them to save money). It would be a bit of an UI problem, but Amazon could take your review and just attribute it to whichever seller provided the item you received, instead of whichever you bought from.
Of course that's of limited help because you can't reliably order from a specific seller, but it would help Amazon fix the problem, e.g. by giving them an easy justification to reject to do Fullfillment by Amazon for sellers with low ratings.
This happens to be yet another way they end up protecting scams and their bottom line. Scammers co-mingle fake inventory, consumers get screwed, they try to review the seller negatively, and amazon removes the review because it's not the sellers fault because it was FBA.
Try to post a review about the product itself being a fake? Well that's not about the product either! Removed.
> Last I checked there was no way to review a seller on Amazon
What do you mean? Just click the Sellers name on the product-site, to get to their profile with all the reviews about them. There you will find a button to review them. Maybe there is an edgecase where it's not available?
EDIT And looking through my order-history, the review-buttons appears there too for older orders. Maybe when the date of return is up?
Well, like I said, I couldn't find it. And the reviews under a product seem to be for the general concept of the product and not for X product from Y seller. And maybe its different for "Fulfilled by Amazon" and regular products. I don't know. It is all inscrutable.
In theory much of the inventory is pooled, so if it it 'Dispatched by Amazon' you aren't actually buying from that sell, but from a pooled inventory that the seller put stock into.
This is great, but another thing they really need to do is create and enforce two more rules:
1) Lister must provide all dimensions of actual product (not just packaging)
2) Photographs must show product as actual sized, not photoshopped into a stock photo environment at 3x scale
Especially for home items, it's astonishing the number of items that just provide NO WAY to know what the size is.
It seems like such an easy first step to reducing returns. I wouldn't have to return it if the page did a better job describing the item in the first place.
The worst are items that are photoshopped not just into a background, but containers holding things that are the wrong scale. The other day I saw some 1.5oz shot glasses with a drink with 3 or 4 lime slices floating in them. The person editing that clearly had no idea the scale of the item they were editing in the first place.
Another example[1]. We were looking for a dolphin stuffed toy under $20. My 5 years old kid saw the photo and got so excited. Correct dimensions are in the title but I didn't pay attention, unfortunately. We ordered it.
Yes exactly! It baffles me so much because I could at least understand if they did it only in cases where bigger is better -- deceitful, but there's a logic to it.
But nobody wants a shot glass the size of a whiskey tumbler. That's not going to drive sales of shot glasses.
I will typically pay for returns, instead of abusing the free option, but I have no moral qualms about choosing the free option (inaccurate description), when they pull this particular crap.
The craziest scam I saw on Amazon was ordering an expensive GPU > people change the card's backplate and return a cheaper/broken one. Unsuspecting regular Joe will order the returned GPU ("open box deal!") and they get a fake one. And now you have to fight against the Amazon customer service too. It's incredible.
Amazon is basically a "premium" Wish/Aliexpress nowadays. Might as well I order from China becuase I at least _willingly know_ getting a fake.
This is a classic scam that also exists for brick and mortar stores.
For example: customer buys Brita filter from Walmart. Takes it home, puts their old used-up filter in the box. Returns the filter. Walmart employees aren't paid enough to care to check the contents, and even if they did, would they be able to tell the filter had been used?
I'm sure that works for many product examples, but Brita filters come in a sealed white plastic wrapper. Does the customer heat-seal it closed again before they return it?
This is kinda on Brita. Their filters should definitely change color with water contact. Preferably, the more water has touched the filter, the more intense the color.
> Amazon is basically a "premium" Wish/Aliexpress nowadays
That's an interesting point, and it got me thinking: why do I continue buying from Amazon over AliExpress etc.?
Pretty simple answer, really: logistics. I can order an adapter from Amazon and have it here by 6 PM tonight. The same thing off AliExpress will take a week or more to get here.
If Wish or AliExpress can figure out near-same day delivery, they could put a sizeable dent in Amazon's market share.
> That's an interesting point, and it got me thinking: why _do_ I continue buying from Amazon over AliExpress etc.?
I asked myself the same question back in January and also couldn't come up with an answer beyond shipping speed, so I cancelled Prime and now just use AliExpress for most things that would've been an Amazon purchase before. Even the slower speed isn't that bad: if I genuinely need it right away I'll travel to a physical store; otherwise the extended wait feels healthy for reducing useless impulse purchases.
This makes a lot of sense. Prime shipping is fast sometimes, but not consistent enough to rely on for anything urgent. Arriving in a week rather than a few days rarely matters for most online purchases anyway.
That means you shouldn't have ordered it in the first place? I gave up on needless consumerism when I got an amazon package, didn't bother opening it, forgot what it was, and it just sat in my closet.
What I mean though is when you want to fix something and you order a part off AliExpress or you have an idea for a project so you order a bunch of parts, things that aren't time sensitive so you order them, forget about it and get them at some point. Not everything has to be same day or next day delivery is all I'm saying.
I don't know, much of what I order online are non-perishable staples. If I order more soap or paper towels or whatever else I'm running low on, the exact arrival date doesn't matter much but it's definitely going to get used at some point.
I had the same concerns about shipping speed, but then I just said fuck it and cancelled my Prime anyways. It turns out that waiting a few more days for items actually isn't a problem for me. It also brings the added benefit that I no longer feel constrained to a single shitty store, and can buy from anywhere on the internet again.
Also, when I do buy from Amazon as a non-Prime member, I find that often (not always) items tend to ship faster than the estimates claim. A few days ago I bought some RAM for my computer, and the estimate said it'd take a week to arrive. Instead, it "shipped early" and arrived in 2 days (on a Sunday). I think they've just optimized their shipping process for Prime so much that for some items it probably is cheaper to ship as fast as they can than to artificially delay shipping orders for non Prime members.
Yeah with Amazon you'll get in 2-3 days, but you'll end up paying 2-3x as well. I considered building a browser extension that just lists the Alibaba/AliExpress item for you when you land on amazon listing and did a bit of research. Most things you search for on Amazon these days that crowd the first page results are literally just copies of AliExpress items at 2-3x the markup. Sometimes the convenience is worth it.
In December I ordered an iPad Pro, and instead received a random book that has more or less the same size, plus a bunch of AA batteries to match the weight… I’m in Germany, not sure if that’s common in other places but it was a first for me. So, yeah, I’m done ordering expensive device on the platform.
> Amazon is basically a "premium" Wish/Aliexpress nowadays.
I'm totally baffled by this. What would one order off of those sites? How does one even find it? The filtering either doesn't exist or is totally worthless. Even when there is some sort of sensible filtering, the results are still far worse than Amazon. Just showing a bunch of pictures and prices is not helpful. Trying to force me to create an account to just browse the site is not helpful. Wish seems like it is setup completely for impulse buyers buying random junk they see. Aliexpress is a wee bit better than Wish, but is still trash compared to Amazon. I don't understand who would subject themselves to that sort of torture. The prices don't seem any better.
>The filtering either doesn't exist or is totally worthless.
Funny; I've always found that about Amazon. And not only is their search garbage, but so are their prices- they're usually higher than if you bought directly.
6 figure starting salaries and their recommender routine still prompts me to buy stuff I just bought. Clearly those DSA interview questions are doing them a lot of good.
>I don't understand who would subject themselves to that sort of torture.
Well, it's not like you really have any other option.
Once upon a time, we had Sears, whose business model was in no small part identical to Amazon's... except it was curated. Everything that needed a picture had one, they had their own delivery fleet and mail-order warehouses, and so on and so forth. And this model was good, though their house brands had some ups and downs over the years.
But then Sears went belly up, so now we're stuck with the discount alternative that's merely an online platform with a few extra bits. Sure, it's easier to get your product in there than it was to get it into Sears back in the early 1900s, but then again that's true for general website eCommerce platforms in general and turnkey examples of that go back nearly as far as Amazon's been popular (and Etsy exists for the lower volume and handmade items).
The wiki page on mail fraud quotes the definition and it would seem to include the USPS as well as any private/commercial carrier crossing state borders.
I like getting products I order online delivered overnight. And return them for free by dropping off at local UPS with my money back in less than 48 hours. Can Wish/Aliexpress do the same?
How expensive would it be to perform an airport-style x-ray scan of every box (over some price) before it's shipped out, and when it's returned? That would give the customer support agent something to look at when judging somebody's claim that they were shipped a fake product, and you could probably even train ML models to distinguish genuine from knockoff goods in many cases.
There's actually some equipment that's sorta similar - meat packing plants can get conveyor belt x-ray machines which detect bones and bolts inside burgers.
I've never heard of it for general retail, though.
One thing I have seen mentioned yet is this change from the perspective of honest sellers. Amazon customers are notorious for not bothering to read the listings and because of the generous return policy for FBA items, will just buy something to see if it works. I also sell on my own website and don't have any of that type of problem, but my return policy is not quite so generous.
So me, as an FBA seller has certain products that I've specifically added "DOES NOT FIT XXX YYY" and people buy it and then return it with the comment "DIDN'T WORK on my XXX YYY". I get enough of these stupid returns and Amazon suspends my listing, making my go through a contrition process telling them all the things I've done to remedy the excessive returns. I've got one very popular product, my best seller, that has gone through this 5 or 6 times in the last few years.
While I understand the perspective of fraudulent listings swapping in sub-standard products, the big improvement I am hoping for is that the warnings will actually get people to read the damn listing so they understand what the item isn't to be used for.
I'm somewhat guilty of this, but a lot of it comes down to Amazon's search. I'll search for "iPhone 13 case" and then window-shop with pictures. I get the case and realize that even though I searched for iPhone 13, it sent me to a product for the iPhone 14 and I didn't realize until I bought it.
I've seen a few of these in the wild just as a consumer and I always wonder why people even bother leaving a review. My thought is you're just exposing to everyone how ignorant you are.
Of the (generally) many things those specific types of consumers are ignorant about, their own ignorance is usually one of them.
Whereas I read "Unsatisfied! I did not read the listing!", they feel they wrote "Unsatisfied! Seller did not explain the item in the listing!" to the benefit of the other consumers in their same category. In a perverse way I could see it actually curbing those unwanted purchases in the future, but sadly at the expense of the seller.
I’ve given up on Amazon shopping years ago. I much prefer to buy things directly from specific retailers, eg: outdoor gear from an outdoor retailer, clothes directly from the brand, etc.
This has resulted in never having to return anything, not rolling the dice on product legitimacy, and pretty great customer service who is knowledgable of the products.
I hope that others can find a path too. I worry for some friends & family who seem properly addicted to the idea that stuff can magically appear on their doorstep within 24-48 hours. I know some who receive multiple shipments from all 3 major carriers every single day. Just the slightest amount of planning ahead would prevent the need for the kind of retail model they provide.
Everything about Amazon is intended to increase the amount of time you spend with Amazon. The 50% chance of broken crap keeps you coming back to their support center, with all sorts of dark patterns designed to send you right back into their store again.
I would, but it's such a hassle to enter my address and CC info on every manufacturer's site. The last 3 things I bought were shaving cream, toothbrush heads, and a cheap tennis racket.
Do I really want to signup/purchase/unsubscribe-from-spam for a Proraso account, a Philips Sonicare account, and a Wilson account?
I really think Shopify should lean in on their offerings here. The checkout experience across merchants who use Shopify is great. There's a "Shop Pay" button, you click it, and you're either at the "Confirm Purchase" page or maybe get an SMS to enter, then you're at the "Confirm Purchase" page. You've skipped entering your address and credit card number.
Buy from a board game store one week, a tea maker the next, and some niche youtuber the third, all without re-entering your data.
most of the online places I shop at allow account-less purchasing using PayPal. I know PayPal has some negatives as well, but those rarely impact buyers. Probably 95% of my online shopping passes through PayPal, though I do maintain accounts at a few online shops like B&H or KEH and with them I usually use direct CC/DC purchasing.
I buy these kind of smaller value items from my local drug store, grocery store, etc. feels wasteful to ship and add more layers of packaging to small goods like this.
I've gone the opposite way. I lived in a rural area with the closest hardware or big box store nearly an hour way. I'd only go to town at most once a week but more often once every two weeks. Projects took forever to complete because I'd forget to buy some widget, get the wrong widget, or often be unable to find the right widget at a brick & mortar. Amazon to the rescue!
I've since moved to town but still rely on Amazon for a large portion of my shopping. Nowadays, a lot of local retailers don't carry much stock so I'm having to order online anyway but only after I've driven to the brick & mortar and found they don't carry the item or it's out of stock.
It's nice if you have local business that actually know their products. Especially with outdoor/sports equipment. I know I'm paying a premium but I happily do it.
Electronics on the other hand, sure I'll try to go to bestbuy for stuff because that's the only electronics store we have that's close but they have no clue about the products they're selling.
I buy hundreds of items per year and almost never return anything.
If I buy from xiangxiangshenzencorp then I expect the item to be crap, but it's obvious from the listing and the price. If I buy from a reputable brand I also know what to expect.
I honestly don't get how people can get a quality different from what was clear from the listing (well, I've been positively surprised in the past).
My experience is the same as yours. I don't understand all these complaints. I've been using Amazon since 2002, about 30-50 orders per year, and I've had to return maybe 2 things because they were disappointing. And on the rare occasion where a delivery doesn't show up, it's very easy to complain and get my money back.
Driving to a store to buy something has become a waste of time, except for a few things, like shoes and gloves. I no longer need to drive 15 minutes to a store, spend time searching for the thing I want, find out that they don't have it, have someone offer that they can order it for me, and drive home.
Sure, the quality is obvious from one of the fake name generated chinese brands, my issue is more the pollution of the listings with those brands. Going to search for anything turns up hundreds of the top results with these “brands” all 5 stars.
But they're not pollution. Because you can afford the brand name that costs 10x the knock off, doesn't mean everyone can.
Just a few days ago I bought a soldering iron. If I went with Reddit's recommendations it would be at least $100 for a "not terrible one". Instead I bought a $10 one that I'm sure will work perfectly fine for what I will use it for. In this case the results that I didn't care about were the brand names.
I bought a $50 item and a couple of weeks later I received a letter in the mail offering me a $35 Amazon gift card if I leave a 5-star review with a video or picture attached.
I'm surprised Amazon allows these kinds of bribes.
They don't, but it's hard to crack down on. The only way for Amazon to know is if the people who get the gift card notify Amazon, which isn't likely to happen.
Here's a story about how Amazon banned a popular battery/charger maker because of the same thing you're talking about. (I have one of their batteries... it was pretty good too).
I have actually tried to report this to Amazon customer support a number of times. Most of the time, the CS agent either entirely does not understand what I am complaining about, or openly says this is allowed. Last time they told me I would only get the gift card after I left a 5 star review, and to chat back if I did not get it!
Unless it's FBA (fulfilment by Amazon), it's difficult for the seller to send you the item you ordered, unless Amazon gives them your address as part of the ordering process.
Twice that has happened to me, so I left a review mentioning the bribe. Amazon rejected the review saying that isn't the right mechanism for that feedback. All the same, hundreds of people were ordering this five star item, unaware most of the reviews were paid for reviews.
I've tried to report fraud, but amazon does not have any sort of way to report fraud on their site.
It's more like "amazon would never call you and ask your credit card number" types of stuff.
I think it's all on purpose. I remember having a missing package and not being able to say "package missing but says delivered". The site would take you to a non-helpful page that would say "have you looked in your bushes?" "have you asked your neighbors?" but no way to resolve it through amazon. on purpose.
> I'm surprised Amazon allows these kinds of bribes.
I reported one of these attempts to Amazon customer support once and the response I got back was basically "if we catch you accepting payment for positive reviews, we'll ban your account and you'll lose all of your digital purchases." No questions about the seller or the item, just a veiled threat.
I got one of these, i bought a kids alarm clock for my daughter, it works really well, good quality. I did cash in the gift card. Why not? now if it was some crap product, i would report the bribe.
> If you endorse a product through social media, your endorsement message should make it obvious when you have a relationship (“material connection”) with the brand. A “material connection” to the brand includes a personal, family, or employment relationship or a financial relationship – such as the brand paying you or giving you free or discounted products or services.
I once received a postcard (as in, no envelope) with a picture of the product I bought, trying to bribe me for a 5-star review.
The product itself was totally innocuous but I can imagine if that happened with something that was even slightly sensitive or embarrassing. Like, now everyone at the post office knows you ordered a Swedish penis pump along with a hardcover instruction book written by Austin Powers himself.
Overall this is great. This might have some problems though. Some frequently returned items might not have any issues, but might be getting ripped off more.
For example, I bought a warehouse deal controller. I opened the controller box and instead of a controller I found 2 bars of soap.
That's true, and admittedly, there's a part of me looking for a reason to dismiss this action. But at the same time, after a decade or more of doing nothing, Amazon is doing something, so credit to them for finally making an effort. I'll still never use the site or service, but it's good to know they're finally taking some action against unethical sellers.
There are other products on Amazon you should probably not buy either.
Namely, products from randomly named companies, or companies that claim to be American but it their address is a warehouse and their Internet presence is hosted on Alibaba Cloud.
Most of what they sell is toxic, like PVC figures for children cakes, toxic kitchenware, counterfeit refrigerator filters and other magnets for penny pinchers.
It is almost as if they were intentionally trying to poison people.
Most of the furniture sold by Chinese vendors and their intermediaries are so toxic that fucking HCHO meters max out when you open the box. Including kids furniture.
Sneaky fucks should all go to jail.
I would much rather prefer buying products from countries with real customer protection, real compliance with regulations with real consequences when someone gets sick from a non-compliant product.
> It is almost as if they were intentionally trying to poison people.
This, this, this.
Just look at what are dollar stores selling us. To me it looks like China packs their garbage in form of children toys and useless things like so called "squishees" that smell like they fished right out a toxic river.
Story time: my wife tried to import toys from EU, high quality wooden building blocks. I remember that regulatory hell, she needed to have a safety certificate for each SKU, they have to pass lab tests for phthalates, lead and other shit, there was a never ending list of requirements, like "you can't have this rope because it's strangulation hazard". And after you comply to all that regulations, you need to buy a business insurance to even have a chance to get into chains.
So we have piles of paperwork for good products and seemingly completely unregulated Dollarama that sells whatever they want without following any rules. "This SKU doesn't explode before leaving a store – it's good to go".
We need a law that would obligate sellers to accept their garbage back, including packaging (looking at you, Costco).
No, I'm not talking about stuff that people return to store. My point was to make stores dispose all that garbage that they sell to people, including packaging. Like instead of throwing it to our blue bins, we could bring it back to store for disposal.
Amazon's product management criteria has a threshold of (number of returns) / (number sold) within time-frames and if you hit the threshold (which is about 10% iirc), your product is automatically removed until you file an appeal. I guess that isn't sufficient enough.
I order 1 size above and below what I think I will need, so I return at least 2 items for every 1 item I keep. But usually much more, I just returned 15 to 20 clothing items and kept 5.
Now on to the rest of the problems with Amazon's web site. Do a search on "canned shrimp" and then select "Sort by: Avg. Customer Review". I see seven pages of results, none of which include any canned shrimp even though it is obvious they sell canned shrimp from the page before you sort by customer reviews.
Also, since any search now includes randomly added items, when you sort by customer reviews all the higher rated things that do not match your search are listed first. The items you are actually interested in may not show up until several pages later. You also cannot sort by customer review AND number of reviews.
The Amazon search engine is seriously broken and seems to keep getting worse in my experience.
I really wish Amazon would flag products who using images very similar to other listings. I'm tired of seeing dropshippers putting a random company logo on an alibaba listing. Leads to crap products and a poor experience.
tbh I much prefer the Alibaba images which I can reverse image search to something with just enough use of cropping and watermarking to fool Amazon's filter...
On the other hand, it increases the range of available products on Amazon (at the cost of lowering the average quality). What they really need is to make those sellers easy to spot and filter out, if necessary.
As long as sellers can still take a listing for one item and switch it to another with all of the stats and reviews retained this is going to have limited impact.
I know other retailers are already doing this, but Amazon adopting it will force behavior change due to their size.
It's possible to game listing details, product titles, brand names, and reviews. It's much harder to game customers are dissatisfied and constantly return your item.
I can't wait for a bespoke service in China that will mass order a competitor's products and return them for a refund to get them tagged with this warning. Kidding aside, I'm hoping at Amazon's scale, it'll be too much of a lift for someone to attempt it.
I have been on a tear lately returning numerous Amazon orders. Often due to incorrect descriptions or being sent broken items.
A recent "favorite" of mine was while trying to order a keyboard wrist rest, the first one arrived folded(!) up into a small plastic sack. The next had a very harsh smell, and the last, before I gave up, was uncomfortable to use.
I've started to miss malls and the variety of electronics stores we used to have, just so I can pick up and see the physical item before I buy it. It's kinda sad that in the late-90's the small city I grew up in had more electronics stores than the metro I live in today.
I wonder if there's an opportunity here for comparison shopping showcase stores. They carry no inventory, only samples that you can get your hands on. Scan to find the best price, and tap to add to your cart from the site and seller with that price. Gets delivered. You'd make money via a membership fee, referral sales, and a tiny bit from direct sale of the display items once it's time to swap them out.
The up front cost and rapid turnover of supplier inventory would probably make this a no-go. Not to mention that there are so many /things/ available, even a costco-sized warehouse packed for maximum number of display items would require extreme selectivity (and associated costs for research, etc)
I imagine there is opportunity, but it's gonna be for a big company like Amazon, and essentially be a modern Sears. A place where you can go in and buy now, get it if it's there otherwise it's delivered.
ya that's the problem, every action has a reaction in the new world order of massive marketplaces. It would seem like there needs to be more buyer focus on the sellers reputation rather than the product.
Exploitable marketplaces just seem to be seesawing back and forth between those closing exploits and those finding new ones. Anything that gets massive these days seems to get into this stage because of the profit incentive on both sides. I wonder if there's data on whether the general "arc of progress" is going in the right direction? I go back and forth depending on the day.
Personally I've just established my own rules of the road to avoid the bad side, like deleting Facebook and all social other than Twitter, using browser extensions in Twitter to filter out trending stuff, and being very careful and methodical about purchasing from Amazon including avoiding almost everything isn't a reputable company that I can do a simple background check on. I've even been fooled here but it's generally pretty easy to figure out.
Why on earth are people buying stuff like smoke detectors from Amazon? Across most of the US your fire department will likely hand them out for free, and even if you have to pay you can at least be assured that someone is monitoring the supply chain and product safety. Your life isn't worth the $5 Amazon discount.
Amazon isn't really cheaper for anything (unless you count getting a Duwuu 'brand' cable instead of a reputable brand as a discount).
Why do people (I?) order from amazon?
1. I don't mind taking $8 electronic devices apart and resoldering connections or doing basic troubleshooting
2. Often get a product in a day or three
3. I have no idea where I would buy a sediment filter (or similar specialized thing) that isn't walmart (and I live in a big city)
4. No need to go all around town to get things from different places (drive to the fire department for an alarm and then go to the pet store for a scratching post then go to best buy for an HDMI cable
5. They have all my details so I just click 'buy' and don't have to make a new account and deal with another retailer sending me a newsletter
6. I know that amazon will take my returns with no questions and I can drop it a few blocks away at the UPS store and I don't even have to put it in a box
That said -- there are definitely lists of things I would never order from them. SD cards/thumb drives, any easily 'adulterated' food product like honey or olive oil, cosmetics, anything I want to last that isn't a specific brand that I know for a fact isn't counterfeited and is a seller...etc
Expanding on that idea, I often buy electrical components from a retailer like Mouser or Digikey or Adafruit or others before I buy off Amazon.
If I'm lucky there's some nice local retailers and I'll buy from them. There's a few local comic and game stores nearby, I'll practically always buy from them even if they're a few bucks more than Amazon for some particular item.
Amazon is almost always my last retailer I go to. I've had so many bad experiences with Amazon over the last few years. The majority of Amazon orders I've had in the past 5 years ended up involving Amazon support.
I love specialty retailers like digikey and retailers have gotten better about incorporating shipping price into unit price so ordering something small doesn't take as big of a hit, and that has encouraged shopping from them.
I am not trying to give the impression that amazon is a great way to get these things, I was itemizing the reasons I use it when I do.
Oh my gosh, this is actually a huge improvement for customer-facing webpages! They used to be all about coaxing you into buying even if the product was garbage, but maybe the returns were costing them too much. I'm just wondering why they haven't gotten rid of these products altogether though. Hopefully, they keep making changes like this for other product pages too. Do you think they have any plans to tackle fake reviews or reviews for totally unrelated stuff? For example, mascara reviews on a kettlebell listing.
What I don't understand is why they don't already do this yet, instead of "flagging", just down-rank the product when it comes to search results and recommendations. If the return threshold hits a certain level, the product gets dropped entirely.
It seems that this would just flag Amazon as an unsafe place to buy anything valuable. For example, if someone buys a GTX 4090 and receives a GTX 3070, will Amazon will flag the 4090 as a frequently returned item?
Recently I’ve been having trouble with a few batches of cheap LED lights that were “Amazon’s choice” and advertised as having 23 year lifespan (3 hours per day) that died within 6-12 months.
Amazon tells me I’m outside of the normal 30 day return window, but I’ve just complained and said “If I bought a bulb at Costco advertised as 23 year lifespan that died after only a year I’d return it and they’d refund me, no questions asked.” This usually gets a store credit from the customer service person.
I think Amazon is going to have a huge problem with this because they’ve clearly been selling a lot of low quality merchandise from China (it’s actually marketplace sellers listing the products so quality is a race to the bottom). Because they don’t have any quality checks in their sourcing like other big box retailers do (such as Costco and Target) they just aren’t equipped to handle the inevitable returns and class action lawsuits that are coming their way when the 23 year lifespan LEDs and other product categories fail just outside the return window.
I had this come up recently, the issue is that it seems that products with multiple "styles" will show the same alert across all "styles". The problem is that often times the "styles" may be significantly different products, in my case they were monitors with extremely different specs all from the same manufacturer.
This is probably not the correct use of the "styles" feature on Amazon in the first place.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm betting Amazon would prefer items with different specs to be different listings, with styles being limited to differences like color, finish, etc.
Like how sellers on eBay throw an unrelated product in as a "style" or some such so that their listings go to the lowest price without actually selling the price you searched for the low amount? Annoys me constantly.
My go to for shopping is amazon -> walmart (in store only lookup) -> then local stores. And it depends on what i want, if i need a guarantee its a legit item, then i'll go to the vendor site and look up where they sell the product and get a direct link, or if its tech related and i need a guarantee then bestbuy or whatever the vendor says is their link to buy. I do walmart for price comparison and convenience, i live really close to a walmart. Amazon is like other have said more like aliexpress these days, my returns this past few year have gone way up because the items either break quickly or were garbage out of the box.
I just hate the amazon empire, so whenever I have no option but to buy something I give an opposite review. If the product is decent, it gets 1 star and a scathing review. If it's shit, I give a glowing 5 star review.
This is what has driven me away from Amazon, except for purchases of name-brand specific things. I go to brick and mortar to browse, because they simply won't carry rubbish to begin with. It's not a function of buyer beware. Amazon outsources its returns entirely, so they are not incentivized to reduce it. Best Buy has to pay people to deal with it, so they strive for it not to be a problem in the first place. They do the curation, and it turns out, yes, there is actual value in that service, and our incentives are aligned.
If they can detect this stuff well enough to put a warning on the products, maybe they should just remove the listing until the seller does something to fix whatever problem they have?
While the idea of anonymizing product reviews might seem a tad idealistic, it could potentially reduce the prevalence of paid reviews. By concealing the identities of verified purchasers, it becomes more challenging for manufacturers to verify if their paid reviewers have indeed submitted their reviews. This approach may serve as a deterrent for unethical marketing practices, promoting a more honest review ecosystem.
That's funny, I bought the exact record player shown in that article, and it was indeed broken. Very high wow-and-flutter, a horrible scraping noise whenever the tonearm moved, and the clamp that was supposed to hold the tonearm in place during shipping was missing, so it was just flapping around freely inside the box.
I only buy hard to find niche things on Amazon or low quality Chinese bootlegs when that's what I want.
For everything else I buy elsewhere. It's usually a difference of cents. I'm voting with my dollars for a world where people can choose to not buy low quality jficushnrkf brand Chinese bootlegs.
Looking forward to the day Amazon decide to remove the option to return and have the cost to return Removed as well.
This move will be a pro environment as well as it will make us do more research before buying and once item is in our hand, try to make it last as much as we can.
Apparently, some people order stuff just to show them on social media, or even use them in monetized videos just before returning them.
The service has been already abused to death; I would push for a badge to flag users who return too many items.
One one hand this seems like a good thing, though it's really just a band-aid for what a low-quality bargain bin amazon has become. I see other comments about being able to dig into reviews by seller and whatnot. I don't want to have to do research like that to buy normal consumer crap. Some might, and that's cool, but I'm sad that any semblance of a curated experience is gone and it's basically just a street corner bazaar where you can't trust anything.
It's interesting to me that amazon, facebook and google, (netflix I'm on the fence about and apple no) have practiced a kind of scorched earth capitalism where they made a lot of money and presumably continue to, but effectively destroyed the environment they operate in. I think most agree that google has hollowed out search into an SEO optimized ad-filled content farm wasteland. Amazon is doing exactly the same thing with retail, they're the biggest name and they've basically created this layer of garbage as the base layer of e-commerce.
I've posted this before but I'll do it again because it really highlights how unfriendly buying things at amazon has become, slowly over time as meanwhile we barely noticed, like frogs being slowly boiled in water...
whatever, too little too late. amazon wouldn't accept my bad review on a $12 beer faucet adapter with a thread pattern that made it 100% useless. I'm done with them.
The thing I like most about Amazon is its dedication to customers. This is a very long awaited feature and Amazon has delivered it. Amazon could have let users buy from its marketplace and make profit. Instead Amazon has made the right call and decided to protect its customers.
Perhaps they’ve finally estimated the cost of having their reputation turn to shady flee market.
And As the other commenters point out, this is pretty inadequate when there are 100 trivially easy other things they could do which would be even better to help consumers avoid scams but choose not to.
You don’t think they were motivated by the cost of return processing and wasted fulfillment usage? All of these things are significant costs at the scale of returns that Amazon receives.
[0] this product for example, loads of the reviews are for something totally different - https://www.amazon.co.uk/WERPOWER-Windscreen-Invisible-Winds...