101–110 of 321 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 rev…
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...
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.
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". G…
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…
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> 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 tra…
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.
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 l…
> 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…
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.
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.
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 l…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 rev…
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 a…