Is it just me or does it seem like he could've avoided it by answering their emails?
You gotta keep up with your emails.
Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless
101–110 of 363 posts
Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless
#102The merchants must navigate a largely automated, guilty-until-proven-innocent process in which Amazon serves as judge and jury. Their emails and calls can go unanswered, or Amazon's replies are incomprehensible, making sellers suspect they're at the mercy of algorithms with little human oversight. This is something our modern society was and is not ready for. Bureaucracy and the bureaucrats that administered it is a…
This is simply Kafka's "The Trial" at scale. This will continue until these companies start losing large monetary value cases in court.
Large businesses in America, including Amazon, require their customers and suppliers to waive their right to sue. Amazon et el cannot be held accountable through the legal system.
These abuses will continue unless there is enough of a sea change in Washington that protecting free markets becomes more of a priority than protecting the freedom of large businesses to exploit people.
That will happen no sooner than the day Amazon receives an order for ice skates from the hotter half of the Christian afterlife.
Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
He tried to remove the inventory and wasn't allowed to. >When he tried to submit an inventory removal order through Amazon's web portal, it wouldn't let him.
That sentence is so important, yet lacking so many details. Did he try to submit the removal order, like one day before, or way earlier? Did he try it only once? Did he communicate this to amazon? He was obviously in contact with them for a longer period, did he mention that he can't get the removal order submitted?
I mean, who do you think is more likely to be the careless one in this situation: the guy who has 1.5 million in inventory locked up and will be homeless in a few months if they can't access it, or a trillion dollar company to which all this is not even a rounding error?
My own experience is that Amazon doesn't even bother verifying that complaints were submitted by the brand before acting on them. There's multiple documented cases of people impersonating brands to get sellers kicked off Amazon.
Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Courts have consistently held up Amazon's arbitration clause for sellers.
US courts treat commercial litigation and consumer/personal differently. Commercial is "letter of the contract" (you should have talked to your lawyer before signing), whereas consumer has to be reasonable to the non-expert public in the long run, and is also subject to tons of social justice goals.
US courts have upheld arbitration clauses in shrinkwrap consumer contracts.
Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
A friend of mine worked for a company whose operators answered late night tv infomercials. They had humans answering the phone, but everything about it was scripted and highly optimized. Purchasing the thing was very very easy, but after that there was an upsell gauntlet to get through before hanging up. "This is rediculous, I don't want to hear about this" "But sir, people call back after they've missed these offers…
Does Jeff Bezos know, or is he shielded from bad customer experience like Mao, who saw a country full of rice fields along the rail tracks when he travelled the country? [1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/02/world/the-tyrant-mao-as-t...
That book is quite widely criticized. Not trying to defend Mao or the Great Famine, but with anecdotes like that I find this quote apt:
"With a person as divisive as Mao, both because of his complex history and because of what he represents to different groups, if becomes an almost impossible task to sift through the contradictions of supposed first hand accounts."
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d3s00b/did_m...
Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless
#106Is it just me or does it seem like he could've avoided it by answering their emails? You gotta keep up with your emails.
Those emails are notifications from a no-reply address. The article outlines his other attempts to contact them, including the part where he was told there was "nothing else she could do" when he got a response.
Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless
#107The merchants must navigate a largely automated, guilty-until-proven-innocent process in which Amazon serves as judge and jury. Their emails and calls can go unanswered, or Amazon's replies are incomprehensible, making sellers suspect they're at the mercy of algorithms with little human oversight. This is something our modern society was and is not ready for. Bureaucracy and the bureaucrats that administered it is a…
Amazon could fix this. This isn't an all or nothing "digital bad" "bureaucrats bad" situation. It's Amazon and one complaint. This guy should find a good lawyer and take them to court. He had proof that his stuff was not counterfit. Adding some arbitrary "you have to have a receipt no more than 365 days old" is ridiculous. Amazon just doesn't care. Even for a 1.5 million dollars worth of stock. What are the chances t…
Amazon just doesn't care.
The PROBLEM is when you marry these things together without proper controls in place by society. We haven't completely thought through the ramifications.
Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless
#108There are a lot of complaints about allegedly fake merchandise on Amazon and people asking for a crackdown. This is what the other side of that story looks like. The old solution of Amazon mostly ignoring the fakes and just compensating people who complain avoids this scenario.
They could bring in some common sense measures like "what is the ratio of complaints to total number of sales" and "did the seller get the chance to rectify the situation"
I’d expect that they are doing that. This story only quotes a few reviews, but we don’t know how many more customers complained through Amazon’s customer service system (customers are probably more likely to do a return than write a public review). Amazon likely has some threshold for when to initiate action against a seller based on this data.
Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its not a monopoly over all ecommerce. However there are certain markets where the sellers, for example book publishers, are totally at the mercy of amazon because they have become the only de facto distribution channel for certain products like e-books (there are others as well). So its great for customers but it still has severe negative consequences for authors and publishers. Technically this is known as a "monop…
So I guess any company becomes a "monopoly" if you reduce enough the definition of its field?!
Indeed.
Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
In any case it could be very hard to prove that the items are fake by inspection, it’s mostly a fight about distribution and the supply channel.
If you can't tell they're fake by inspection how did the complaining customers identify them as fake?
There's a few assumptions here. I'd say the assumptions are that
1. Amazon knows the fakes, if they exist, came specifically from this seller. I doubt this because of their comingling problems.
2. That the threshold of complaints required to initiate this type of action is a reasonable one. And furthermore that the complaints are valid. It could be a matter of a few 3rd party competitors, it could be the original wholesaler trying to throw a wrench into Amazon's systems, it could be customers who are angling for credits, free products etc. As well all of this plays with assumption #1 and comingling.