Amazon starts flagging frequently returned products that you maybe shouldn’t buy • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by cptskippy » Tue, Mar 28, 2023, 7:26 PM UTC

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.

> I'm surprised Amazon allows these kinds of bribes.

I reported one of these attempts to Amazon customer support once and the response I got back was basically "if we catch you accepting payment for positive reviews, we'll ban your account and you'll lose all of your digital purchases." No questions about the seller or the item, just a veiled threat.

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

#242

Post by Nifty3929 » Tue, Mar 28, 2023, 7:27 PM UTC

tfourb wrote: post #195

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gate it behind human intervention(slow) That's not my problem. The courts have already weighed in on this. Marting Lewin sued facebook for publishing ads that used his face to defraud people. Facebook used the same excuses you just wheeled out, and the judge wasn't impressed. Fraud is a crime, little people go to jail for less every day. https://news.sky.com/story/martin-lewis-settles-lawsuit-agai...

"It's hard" should not be an excuse for not preventing fraud. Most arguments from tech companies boil down to "but we would have to spend some of our billions of dollars of annual profits or venture capital to prevent this and those jobs wouldn't be sexy engineer stuff, so why would you want us to do something like this." I never understood how/why these companies are getting away with this, given that fraud/abusive…

Expensive ~= effortful, meaning that it would take a lot of human labor, which would otherwise be contributing differently in the economy, at Amazon or elsewhere.

Every hour spent manually reviewing product pages could instead be spent growing food, producing shoes, building homes, providing accounting services, etc.

This doesn't mean it is or needs to be determined centrally - just that it is an economic truth that will bear out regardless. Amazon might hire 1,000 workers for this, pulling them implicitly from all of the other jobs they would otherwise have taken.

Maybe it would be a net-win, and maybe not. But from society's standpoint it really doesn't matter whether it is profitable for Amazon or not. We'd be trading less fraud on Amazon for less of everything else.

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

#243

Post by anfilt » Tue, Mar 28, 2023, 7:33 PM UTC

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.

Like you shouldn’t be able to change a products category from clothing to electronics for instance in my opinion. Same with similar changes.

Small changes should be fine in my opinion also it’s not like it’s impossible to also determine the edit distance between two pieces of text.

Amazon could be doing a lot more here.

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

#244

Post by TheRealDunkirk » Tue, Mar 28, 2023, 7:36 PM UTC

This is what has driven me away from Amazon, except for purchases of name-brand specific things. I go to brick and mortar to browse, because they simply won't carry rubbish to begin with. It's not a function of buyer beware. Amazon outsources its returns entirely, so they are not incentivized to reduce it. Best Buy has to pay people to deal with it, so they strive for it not to be a problem in the first place. They do the curation, and it turns out, yes, there is actual value in that service, and our incentives are aligned.

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

#245

Post by TheRealDunkirk » Tue, Mar 28, 2023, 7:38 PM UTC

alex_young wrote: post #148

If they can detect this stuff well enough to put a warning on the products, maybe they should just remove the listing until the seller does something to fix whatever problem they have?

Incentives which are misaligned from the customer's point of viewpoint.

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

#246

Post by actually_a_dog » Tue, Mar 28, 2023, 7:39 PM UTC

Nifty3929 wrote: post #242

tfourb wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's hard" should not be an excuse for not preventing fraud. Most arguments from tech companies boil down to "but we would have to spend some of our billions of dollars of annual profits or venture capital to prevent this and those jobs wouldn't be sexy engineer stuff, so why would you want us to do something like this." I never understood how/why these companies are getting away with this, given that fraud/abusive…

Expensive ~= effortful, meaning that it would take a lot of human labor, which would otherwise be contributing differently in the economy, at Amazon or elsewhere. Every hour spent manually reviewing product pages could instead be spent growing food, producing shoes, building homes, providing accounting services, etc. This doesn't mean it is or needs to be determined centrally - just that it is an economic truth that…

That’s all yet another instance of “not my problem.” Can’t prevent fraud on your e-commerce site? Maybe you should not be running one.

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

#247

Post by actually_a_dog » Tue, Mar 28, 2023, 7:40 PM UTC

gowld wrote: post #196

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gate it behind human intervention(slow) That's not my problem. The courts have already weighed in on this. Marting Lewin sued facebook for publishing ads that used his face to defraud people. Facebook used the same excuses you just wheeled out, and the judge wasn't impressed. Fraud is a crime, little people go to jail for less every day. https://news.sky.com/story/martin-lewis-settles-lawsuit-agai...

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.

The problem is fraud. Locking out Chinese fraudsters at the expense of legitimate Chinese sellers solves the problem.

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

#248

Post by thatguy0900 » Tue, Mar 28, 2023, 7:41 PM UTC

Nifty3929 wrote: post #242

tfourb wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's hard" should not be an excuse for not preventing fraud. Most arguments from tech companies boil down to "but we would have to spend some of our billions of dollars of annual profits or venture capital to prevent this and those jobs wouldn't be sexy engineer stuff, so why would you want us to do something like this." I never understood how/why these companies are getting away with this, given that fraud/abusive…

Expensive ~= effortful, meaning that it would take a lot of human labor, which would otherwise be contributing differently in the economy, at Amazon or elsewhere. Every hour spent manually reviewing product pages could instead be spent growing food, producing shoes, building homes, providing accounting services, etc. This doesn't mean it is or needs to be determined centrally - just that it is an economic truth that…

Just think about all the meaningful local mom and pop jobs that gave back to the community that Amazon destroyed in the name of putting bezos in the top two richest men alive. Maybe the judge should consider that and just demolish them.

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

#249

Post by orhmeh09 » Tue, Mar 28, 2023, 7:48 PM UTC

Nifty3929 wrote: post #242

tfourb wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's hard" should not be an excuse for not preventing fraud. Most arguments from tech companies boil down to "but we would have to spend some of our billions of dollars of annual profits or venture capital to prevent this and those jobs wouldn't be sexy engineer stuff, so why would you want us to do something like this." I never understood how/why these companies are getting away with this, given that fraud/abusive…

Expensive ~= effortful, meaning that it would take a lot of human labor, which would otherwise be contributing differently in the economy, at Amazon or elsewhere. Every hour spent manually reviewing product pages could instead be spent growing food, producing shoes, building homes, providing accounting services, etc. This doesn't mean it is or needs to be determined centrally - just that it is an economic truth that…

And what of the time, money, and environmental resources used by the customer who must spend more time estimating the reliability of irrelevant reviews and have to make time to schedule and execute a return? Doesn't that also take from "growing food, producing shoes, building homes, providing accounting services," and consuming more products -- and with much less efficiency and predictability?

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

#250

Post by rurp » Tue, Mar 28, 2023, 7:51 PM UTC

Analemma_ wrote: post #94

javawizard wrote: post #85

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…

This makes a lot of sense. Prime shipping is fast sometimes, but not consistent enough to rely on for anything urgent. Arriving in a week rather than a few days rarely matters for most online purchases anyway.