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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

#251

Post by rurp »

codersfocus wrote: post #131
barbazoo wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's kinda exciting when you get a delivery you totally forgot about.

That means you shouldn't have ordered it in the first place? I gave up on needless consumerism when I got an amazon package, didn't bother opening it, forgot what it was, and it just sat in my closet.

I don't know, much of what I order online are non-perishable staples. If I order more soap or paper towels or whatever else I'm running low on, the exact arrival date doesn't matter much but it's definitely going to get used at some point.

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

#252

Post by coderintherye »

whoopdedo wrote: post #218
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…

And once a fraudster finds out they set a troll army to the task of calling in complaints against their competitors' products.

That's not an actual scenario. Customer service can see if the person purchased the product or not. Getting a "troll army" to all buy and return products and call in complaints on actual purchases while waiting on refunds is a much higher bar.

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

#253

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

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?

I'm sure that works for many product examples, but Brita filters come in a sealed white plastic wrapper. Does the customer heat-seal it closed again before they return it?

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

#254

Post by jon-wood »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #120
SamBam wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, these seems like a perfect problem for GPT. Show the title and main description to GPT everytime the seller makes a change, and ask "Do these seem to be the same product?" If GPT says that they seem different, flag for human review. You could probably even ask GPT to take its confidence. If it's highly confident, skip the human review.

This is just a simple classification problem, the prime application for basic neural networks. Using a general text generation system for this seems like complete overkill. Just a bunch of wasted resources.

This was also my first reaction, but it got me questioning whether I’m just becoming the same as the guys who were saying “using an interpreted language for that is a waste of resources”. Maybe LLMs are the equivalent, sure they use more CPU cycles, but you can point them at some problems and get them solved for a fraction of the effort.

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

#255

Post by pas »

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.…

reputation systems are not some esoteric things...

also, if a fucking seller cannot keep their listing reliably constant, what are they selling?

new version, new product, new reviews.

car manufacturers do this. wineries do this. pharma does this. even Apple managed to show the manufacturing date of their new new new new but the same things.

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

#256

Post by bombcar »

gowld wrote: post #197
bogwog wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure Amazon can commit more resources to solving this problem than some random individual on HN can commit to a ~3 sentence long comment. 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…

> People buy products with good reviews, and Amazon makes money when people buy products. and lose money (or make bad sellers lose money) when people return products -- often times Amazon won't even ask you to ship back a product you complain about.

The vast majority of the crap with this problem just gets thrown away. A very small percenrage bother returning it.

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

#257

Post by otikik »

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.

Set a max update time of one week. Doesn’t look very difficult to do.

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

#258

Post by topaz0 »

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.

I suspect they save money not just from saving some effort/complication of tracking the supplier, but also from being able to distribute the larger inventory better across their warehouses. If someone in Tennessee buys the item from a supplier whose stock is in Idaho, they have to ship across the country, but if they can substitute with stock form another supplier that is in Georgia they save a lot of shipping.

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

#259

Post by michaelt »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #253
rybosworld wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm sure that works for many product examples, but Brita filters come in a sealed white plastic wrapper. Does the customer heat-seal it closed again before they return it?

But the white plastic's probably in a cardboard box, right?

And if the shop worker bothers to open the cardboard box, the customer can simply say "Yeah I opened it and it's the wrong size"

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

#260

Post by krferriter »

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…

If Amazon's retail profit relies on allowing fraud and illegal activity to happen with their knowledge, that's just not something we should accept. Making more money for shareholders shouldn't happen at the expense of knowingly defrauding customers. The decision to not prevent fraud on Amazon just means the cost of dealing with that fraud is borne by the customers.
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