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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

#221

Post by lamontcg »

SifJar wrote: post #35
sofixa wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> Couple of fairly simple things they could do to at least help somewhat:

Thing is that they don't really care.

Mostly what they care about is handling returns which is what costs them money so they're targeting items with high return rates, and that's it.

They don't actually care about you getting scammed if they get their cut and don't have a lot of overhead.

All of this brainstorming is meaningless when the economic incentives of the company aren't aligned with the consumer.

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

#222

Post by m463 »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #104
criddell wrote: post #47

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.

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.

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

#223

Post by duskwuff »

Cyykratahk wrote: post #42
sofixa wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even if it's not trivial to solve perfectly, there are easy wins to be had. For example: prevent changing the top-level category of a product. E.g. Shoes should not be allowed to become camera gear.

Categories on Amazon are basically meaningless. There are probably more miscategorized products on Amazon than ones in the correct category.

Most users just type into the search field, so they don't end up interacting with categories.

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

#224

Post by stonemetal12 »

post-it wrote: post #151
pc86 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ju…

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.

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

#225

Post by Retric »

thinkling wrote: post #209
okasaki wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You never noticed an issue, that doesn’t mean you avoid getting counterfeit items etc.

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

#226

Post by srcreigh »

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.

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.

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

#227

Post by CWuestefeld »

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.

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)

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

#228

Post by CWuestefeld »

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.…

> some type of heuristics would be needed here.

Calculating a meaningful numeric difference between two chunks of text is fairly well-trod territory.

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

#229

Post by stackedinserter »

29athrowaway wrote: post #164
stackedinserter wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Most returned stuff goes to a warehouse and then gets destroyed. You can buy pallets of that stuff for a reduced price.

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.

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

#230

Post by pcamen »

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.

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