Amazon third-party sellers reportedly hound customers who leave bad reviews

Just like Lotus Notes was posting revenue growth in 2008, as a clearly dead product, I wonder if Amazon fails to realize how much consumer trust it has lost because their sales continue to increase. I have gone from an Amazon-lover to an Amazon-hater because of a few bad third-party seller experiences and while I still buy a lot of stuff on Amazon I:

* usually avoid third-party sellers * refuse to buy food or baby products at Amazon * have shifted some of my purchasing to trusted brands that curate a collection of good products, like Trader Joe's and Uncommon Goods.

It's not only Amazon reviews. But also Google My Business reviews. Not to mention Yelp.

One of our businesses depend a lot on GMB reviews. Fortunately we're good about customer service and doing a good job, so 98% of our reviews are 5 stars.

However, in a couple of cases, customers gave us one star for things we had absolutely no control over, or something that was quite trivial and could be resolved in a minute or two. It's insane what that very tiny segment of reviewers will do.

There is good and bad about this. We've found a few bad reviews are actually a good thing, since people have said directly to us that we seem like a "Real" company. They know that reviews are gamed a lot these days. And they realize that real companies make mistakes. So we take those "L"'s and move on.

I don't agree with the heavy-handedness, but I understand they some do it. These guys are taking it too far though.

I've stopped buying 3rd party seller items because of this. Now, I'll only buy items sold directly by amazon.

For example, I bought a little portable projector last Christmas. In the box was a big bar of Swiss chocolate and leaflet offering me a tripod in return for a five star review. The projector wasn't as good as the description made out. It wasn't terrible, just not as good as they claimed. So I left a three star review. I started getting texts from the seller asking, and then demanding I remove the review - they weren't offering me anything in return. And the texts came from the sellers name which changed slightly every time, so I couldn't easily block them or reply to them. It took two months for them to give up and leave me alone. I've had similar less extreme experiences with other sellers.

I did complain to amazon, who said they would take action. A few weeks later the seller disappeared from amazon, so I assume they received enough complaints to take action.

But..... the seller reappearance with a different name. They had the same product range and descriptions.

Amazon doesn't care and is totally complicit in all this.

The problem as I see it is that so much commerce is concentrated on to a small number of platforms (amazon, ebay, wish etc), which leads to sellers getting desperate to get to the top in searches. I mean, I can understand sellers doing this when their livelihoods depend on it. It's still not right though and amazon should fix it.

> since we're now also dependent on it for enforcement

This, I think, is the root of the problem. In the case that Amazon takes control of the situation (you don't really have a relationship with the third party seller; you have a relationship with Amazon), then despite what they claim, they should be held legally responsible.

In the UK we have a legal concept of "vicarious liability". An employer is liable for an employee's actions, regardless of culpability. The employee could be in breach of all agreements and instructions from its employer, yet the employer is still liable. We also have harassment laws. These should be extended to allow victims to hold Amazon liable as if they're a first party in the case that their "third party" sellers are untouchable (as they usually are). Amazon (and other companies) shouldn't be allowed to act as a middleman without also taking on that liability. It should be up to them to recover their costs from the third party, not the consumer.

This would correctly incentivize the big players to ensure that their third party sellers behave. Instead, what we have right now is a legal system that allows them to effectively collude to shirk that responsibility entirely.

Craigslist does this for emails with their email relay service. I greatly appreciate the feature.