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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

#231

Post by whoopdedo »

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.

Funny how they have a way to reject reviews that don't meet their criteria but claim rejecting improper listings is "too hard".

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

#232

Post by kitten_mittens_ »

tylerrobinson wrote: post #138
mabbo wrote: post #106

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 i…

> So Amazon introduced an 'Andon button' Maybe my brain is just having trouble parsing it, but what does “Andon” mean?

It's a Japanese loan word. I was mystified the first time I heard it out loud in Seattle back in 2015. I don't think I've ever seen it written.

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

#233

Post by codeulike »

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...

What Shopping On Amazon Feels Like - Ryan George

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQpxAvjD_30

"roll the dice"

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

#234

Post by dbg31415 »

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 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.

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

#235

Post by stronglikedan »

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…

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.

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

#236

Post by zargon »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #227
okasaki wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Pr…

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.

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

#237

Post by thayne »

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.

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.

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

#238

Post by GrinningFool »

asciimov wrote: post #141

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 store…

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)

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

#239

Post by saalweachter »

tempestn wrote: post #210
kevincox wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pretty sure any of a million simpler edit distances could tell you if a product listing was substantially changed.

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

#240

Post by rektide »

rngname22 wrote: post #213
mabbo wrote: post #106

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 i…

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.

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