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Amazon starts flagging frequently returned products that you maybe shouldn’t buy

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Re: Amazon starts flagging frequently returned products that you maybe shouldn’t buy

#201

Post by habitue »

dwater wrote: post #190
pjsg wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Amazon starts flagging frequently returned products that you maybe shouldn’t buy

#202

Post by LeoPanthera »

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 did indeed return it.

Re: Amazon starts flagging frequently returned products that you maybe shouldn’t buy

#203

Post by jamincan »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #160
bogwog wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the term is "mail fraud", and it's very illegal

Is it mail fraud if it does not go via USPS?

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.

Re: Amazon starts flagging frequently returned products that you maybe shouldn’t buy

#204

Post by fswd »

lostapathy wrote: post #112
crazygringo wrote: post #15

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 ea…

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.

The best one for me was a photoshop of elderly lady casually handling a 300lb pack lithium server rack battery.

Re: Amazon starts flagging frequently returned products that you maybe shouldn’t buy

#205

Post by ugh123 »

sofixa wrote: post #22
srmarm wrote: post #9

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. [0] this product for example, loads of the reviews are for something totally different - https://www.amazon.co.uk/WERPOWER-Windscreen-Invisible-Winds...

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). There's nothing trivial about the issue.

Reviews should be tied to a series of SKU numbers which should be tied to physical items in Amazon's warehouse (if using FBA)

Re: Amazon starts flagging frequently returned products that you maybe shouldn’t buy

#206

Post by addandsubtract »

rybosworld wrote: post #135
haunter wrote: post #51

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…

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?

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.

Re: Amazon starts flagging frequently returned products that you maybe shouldn’t buy

#207

Post by PebblesRox »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #110
lph wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They should charge for changing listings. If not in money by taking the listing down for an indefinite period with some vague "in review" period.

Seems like this would hurt vendors making legitimate changes more than fraudulent vendors.

Re: Amazon starts flagging frequently returned products that you maybe shouldn’t buy

#208

Post by lwhi »

gs17 wrote: post #64
lwhi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT can definitely work this out.

It doesn't even need an LLM, I'm pretty sure regular NLP methods would be able to handle it, given how dramatic the product changes are.

Will we get to a point when an LLM is even used for cases where other methods are more suitable but would be more difficult to implement?

Re: Amazon starts flagging frequently returned products that you maybe shouldn’t buy

#209

Post by thinkling »

okasaki wrote: post #200
gowld wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sellers in China don't go to jail in US. "Ships from and Sold by Amazon" if you don't want foreign sellers. That doesn't solve the problem , because it locks out legit Chinese sellers. Solving the problem is hard.

I've never had a problem on aliexpress. So I guess someone solved it.

Then again, I've never had a problem on Amazon across hundreds of purchases. I don't think either of our experiences proves anything.

Re: Amazon starts flagging frequently returned products that you maybe shouldn’t buy

#210

Post by tempestn »

kevincox wrote: post #68
SifJar wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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.…

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.
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