Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#101

Post by treis » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 2:36 PM UTC

cs702 wrote: post #58

Yikes: > A Wall Street Journal investigation found 4,152 items for sale on Amazon.com Inc. ’s site that have been declared unsafe by federal agencies, are deceptively labeled or are banned by federal regulators—items that big-box retailers’ policies would bar from their shelves. Among those items, at least 2,000 listings for toys and medications lacked warnings about health risks to children. > Of the 4,152 products…

IMHO, it's a hatchet job that groups relatively innocuous things with dangerous things to inflate numbers. For example, take this:

>1,412 electronics listings falsely claimed to be UL certified—indicating they met voluntary industry safety standards—or didn’t provide enough information to verify the claim.

Falsely claiming to UL certified is dangerous. Not providing enough information to verify the claim is pretty benign if they actually meet standards.

This isn't to say that they aren't largely correct about Amazon's commitment to quality and safety. Just that this is an alarmist piece that doesn't rest on sound reasoning.

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#102

Post by techntoke » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 2:37 PM UTC

visarga wrote: post #79

MaupitiBlue wrote: post #73

I don’t get it. I had about 150 purchases last year. Toothbrushes, Apple Watch bands, hard drives, diapers, truffles, pasta, foot massagers, hats, books, etc. I had 1 bad purchase. I bought a used Roomba 980 sold by Amazon. There was a used 680 in the box. Amazon apologized and sent a brand new 980 the next day. Am I some sort of uberresultsfilter, or do the whiners just get way too much attention?

Depends on the seller. That's the whole point - they make it hard to know if you can trust or not the seller.

I have a very simple bookmark let that only shows items sold by Amazon.com without having to filter by category. I think part of the issue is that their site UI is pretty horrendous, and makes it difficult to limit searches. I do however notice issues with some items sold by them, but primarily with descriptions being incorrect or them combining a bunch of items with reviews, sometimes for completely unrelated products. I personally try to avoid third-party sellers for the most part. I would love to support smaller businesses, but to be honest you're probably doing most third-party sellers a disservice by buying on Amazon, especially if you think there is a possibility that you'll return the item.

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#103

Post by derefr » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 2:37 PM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #89

duxup wrote: post #46

That and they've gone the wall-mart route of actually PUSHING anything / the lowest price possible. I get stuff that's like 5% cheaper but quality looks to be about 50% the quality pushed on me all the time on Amazon now. I went to Amazon originally to find QUALITY products that my local stores didn't carry because of price pressures. Now Amazon seems to be switching to just being ... wall-mart and that's already nea…

It feels like the only rational explanation is "Bezos wants it like this." I know the folks at Amazon are talented, but the abject failure to optimize for quality over quantity is pretty much only explainable as intentional. I guess a second runner up would be that they're so organizationally KPI-focused, and their KPIs are so myopic, that no one actually realizes how much they're screwing up customer experience. But…

Or perhaps they’re so KPI-focused that they do know they’re screwing up the customer experience, but they don’t care, because customer experience isn’t a KPI and so won’t get them promoted?

Interesting factoid: I’ve never seen Amazon attempt to take any net-promoter-score-like “Would you recommend Amazon to your friends” measure. Google does these (I just had one pushed on me while using the GCP console.) Apple probably does them somewhere, even if I haven’t noticed it. Facebook definitely does them. But Amazon seems to be actively resistant to collecting this information. They seem to not want to quantize customer-experience into a KPI.

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#104

Post by simonebrunozzi » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 2:38 PM UTC

Not to sound pedantic, but I think it would be wise to always use "Amazon.com" when talking about Amazon.com, instead of just Amazon.

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#105

Post by mfer » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 2:38 PM UTC

Attempting to solve the quality problem is possible. I imagine it's easier at Amazons scale because of the amount of data they have.

This should raise a number of questions.

So, why don't they put forth a solid effort? Is it due to regulatory reasons? If so, should they not publicly state that to put pressure on legislatures or to have a real public discussion.

Jeff Bezos signed the new purpose of a corporation [1]. The first bullet reads, "Delivering value to our customers. We will further the tradition of American companies leading the way in meeting or exceeding customer expectations."

Does he not mean it? How does he define value?

[1] https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redef...

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#106

Post by leemcalilly » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 2:38 PM UTC

burlesona wrote: post #87

leemcalilly wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a small niche retailer that makes and sells guitar straps in Nashville I couldn’t agree more. Our experiments selling on Amazon have only hurt us, but Prime is a huge time & shipping $$ saver for re-ordering supplies for our shop and even materials used to make our products. We’ve experimented with selling on a lot of different sites (Amazon, Etsy, Reverb, etc) and have found the best way to control the brand and…

Very nice website and you offer Apple Pay. I’d totally buy direct from you over going to Amazon. I think you’re on the right track.

Thanks!

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#107

Post by DannyBee » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 2:38 PM UTC

This is a totally solved problem. In the normal retail world, sellers are responsible for the defective items they sell, regardless of if they knew or not.

If you buy a defective thing from best buy, they are responsible.

They may turn around and sue the next person up the chain for doing the same (selling it to them).

This incentivizes companies to be careful who they buy from.

The problem here is that the article refers to them as "third party sellers". They aren't in most cases, amazon just has a large distributed supply chain.

If you want amazon to care, make them liable for the stuff sold on their website, the same way best buy is for the stuff in their store.

Problem solved.

This will not destroy their business - it has not destroyed any other business.

It will simply cause them to care.

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#108

Post by untog » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 2:42 PM UTC

MaupitiBlue wrote: post #73

I don’t get it. I had about 150 purchases last year. Toothbrushes, Apple Watch bands, hard drives, diapers, truffles, pasta, foot massagers, hats, books, etc. I had 1 bad purchase. I bought a used Roomba 980 sold by Amazon. There was a used 680 in the box. Amazon apologized and sent a brand new 980 the next day. Am I some sort of uberresultsfilter, or do the whiners just get way too much attention?

Did your toothbrush have lead in it?

Hyperbolic example I know but this reporting shows that you don't know definitively.

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#109

Post by kazinator » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 2:42 PM UTC

dharmon wrote: post #61

t34543 wrote: post #49

I never had a problem (that I know of) with fakes on Amazon. I did cancel my prime membership and switched to Walmart. I feel like prices went up and quality went down. I wish I could move stuff away at work, we spend millions each month on AWS.

Its not always fakes. Some sellers sell factory seconds and refurbished items as new. Just save yourself the headaches and skip Amazon, where you have no recourse, for Home Depot, Best Buy, Target, and even Wal-Mart. Everybody does price matching these days. If you're buying something you know is cheap junk, then just cut out the middle man and again skip Amazon for Ali express or Alibaba like the parent mentioned.

That more or less qualifies as a fake.

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#110

Post by rossdavidh » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 2:42 PM UTC

The problem of many web-based businesses is, they can't decide (or don't want to) if they are more like the phone company, or more like a bricks-and-mortar business. If they are like the phone company, they are not responsible for guaranteeing that what you buy over the phone is legit, but they also don't get a cut. If they are like a bricks-and-mortar business, they do take a cut, but they get liability. It is similar to Facebook, Twitter etc. trying to sometimes act like a phone company and sometimes like a conference hall.

The reason is clear: they want to be compensated like a retailer or conference hall, but have the (relative lack of) liability of the phone company or the postal service, who don't make any claims that communications via their services are going to be honest, just that they allowed the two parties to communicate.

Gradually, they are all going to be forced by society (not only government) into one role or the other, but I am not surprised they are trying to put that off as long as possible.