Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless

#111

Post by distant_hat » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 7:06 AM UTC

birdsbirdsbirds wrote: post #83

m463 wrote: post #33

Earlier 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...

I once had something not delivered properly and when local reps (India) were useless I emailed Bezos directly. I had a message shortly from an Amazon staff saying Bezos asked them to look into it and the issue was fixed promptly. This was in 2015 so things may have changed since them.

Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless

#112

Post by KronisLV » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 7:13 AM UTC

asdff wrote: post #87

p1necone wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a similar experience with Uber customer support. Their navigation thinks there's access to my house from a road that isn't actually connected, so delivery drivers consistently go the wrong way. But emailing customer support just got me seemingly automated responses saying "we're sorry the location pin was not in the right place" which isn't even the problem that I'm having.

That's just how customer support is these days it seems. Getting a hold of an actual human capable of doing the most mundane request other than linking to 'help' articles you've already read 10 times is impossible. What happened to emailing support and getting a reply prepared to move heaven and earth to satisfy you as a customer?

Perhaps it's because customer support nowadays works in tiers, much like Technical support does ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_support#Multi-tiered... )?

The people that link you to those help articles are doing so because they simply can't do anything else but to escalate - they simply don't know about the inner workings of the system and don't have the permissions to change the data in it.

Whereas the developers/maintainers who could do it would be overcome with thousands of such mundane requests to fix the data in some geospatial database, that they can't be bothered to do. Perhaps Uber doesn't even maintain the dataset for addresses themselves either, and is using a service from someone else, like Google.

This kind of makes you think that in this complexity of distributed, scalable systems with microservices, message queues and other systems, eventually the complexity will be too much to actually understand and maintain - be it because of a low bus factor and people leaving due to churn rate, or extremely high effort needed for maintenance.

Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless

#113

Post by bozzcl » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 7:24 AM UTC

distant_hat wrote: post #111

birdsbirdsbirds wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I once had something not delivered properly and when local reps (India) were useless I emailed Bezos directly. I had a message shortly from an Amazon staff saying Bezos asked them to look into it and the issue was fixed promptly. This was in 2015 so things may have changed since them.

They probably got Bezos' classic "?" email.

Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless

#114

Post by radres » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 7:25 AM UTC

Something something one basket.

Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless

#115

Post by bleepblorp » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 7:25 AM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #78

Yeah, you know, when people keep saying "You aren't as far from being homeless as you imagine you are" this is what they mean. Just because your life has not come unraveled overnight doesn't mean it can't for reasons beyond your control having nothing to do with personal virtues or lack thereof. We really need to get universal health care in the US, among other things, to limit how far people can fall when something…

We're on the wrong side of the curve of history for something like that to happen in the US--or anywhere else where it isn't already in place. Social Darwinism has been the fashion for 40 years now, and it's not going anywhere.

Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless

#116

Post by howlgarnish » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 7:25 AM UTC

laurent92 wrote: post #91

anakaine wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope they fail here in Aus. Something something tall poppy syndrome. Local retail first.

Retail prices are very high in Australia. I specifically remember only finding mountaineering carabineers, at $35 AUD at the time (23 EUR at the time) when they’re 8 euros in France. Same goes shoes, tshirts or kettles. Maybe the absence of large-chain competitors plays a role in cost of life being quite high. Then again, as a country, Australia would be free in deciding that it should only be affordable to people wh…

Check out French sports retailer Decathlon, which landed in Australia a few years ago and is already making waves. Karabiners start from $12:

https://decathlon.com.au/collections/climbing-karabiners-qui...

Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless

#117

Post by CobrastanJorji » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 7:26 AM UTC

hevelvarik wrote: post #7

This is a case for the courts. The article is completely one sided, and there’s no way to know whether or not some or much or most of the merchandise was counterfeit. He does admit to ignoring up to 11 notices that his inventory would be destroyed if left unclaimed. He mentions conflicting dates for the notices but we’ve no way of knowing to make of that. I don’t know what to say other that I read the piece with some…

For such a one-sided article, I came down rather on the other side. A dozen warnings that he needed to claim his stuff before it was destroyed. The evidence of authenticity was illegible. At least four customers complained that the merchandise was not authentic. If he had paid to have his stuff returned, he'd only be out the cost of shipping whatever hadn't been sold. And this is just what I learned from an article from HIS point of view.

Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless

#118

Post by ObsoleteNerd » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 7:28 AM UTC

discordance wrote: post #59

Amazon in Australia is not very good (yet). It's nothing like America or Japan, which have huge inventories and same or next day delivery. This is a really really bad look for Amazon, which is in the process of expanding in Australia. Retailers are already nervous about their expansion plans here and this does further bad for their brand.

I live in a rural city in Australia and get 95% of my Amazon deliveries within 2 days of buying it (whereas most other online stores take a week or so), and have also found their range to be pretty extensive. Sure it’s not as big as the US but we’re a fraction of the market so it’s to be expected. If anything I’m constantly dumbfounded by just how much random shit I find on Amazon here (and I exclusively shop with “From Australia Only” ticked).

I’ll always buy local if I can get it at a similar price, and I’ll even pay slightly more for local, but I’m not going to spend 25%+ more for an identical product and Amazon’s prices usually really are that much cheaper.

Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless

#119

Post by AussieWog93 » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 7:33 AM UTC

ethanwillis wrote: post #9

The 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…

Just to give another perspective, I run a couple of small businesses with my wife and we handle support ourselves.

This is an absolute pleasure for our USB oscilloscope business - intelligent, reasonable customers ask for help with a problem they have, we help them solve it and both parties move on with our lives.

Our other business - dealing in retro video games, is an absolute nightmare. Almost all support questions we field come from people who have no intention of solving a problem. Most are just anxious people who need a little bit of reassurance, but plenty expect us to do pointless busywork, want to vent emotionally at someone who can't fight back, or just generally want to smear shit all over the walls because they can. Either way, because they don't want to solve a problem, they just keep up eating up your support time and emotional energy in an extended loop for no gain - we're talking upwards of 80% of your support resources if you let these people have their way.

Having to deal regularly with the type of person that the average HN reader would never come across in their lifetime, I can understand why organisations like Amazon would set up these bureaucratic support "walls" and/or outsource all support to a Filipino call centre staffed by people that don't even know what Amazon is. The systems are designed to make getting support hard, because most people contacting consumer support literally don't even have a problem that good support staff could solve.

In this instance, they've clearly made an error in requiring the user to navigate an automated system when the dollar value is in the _millions_, and I understand why the average HN user would be pissed off by a system like this, but I don't think the solution to the problem is as simple as "provide good, human support to everyone" - it creates as many problems as it solves.

Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless

#120

Post by nicbou » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 7:34 AM UTC

bsder wrote: post #47

ethanwillis wrote: post #9

The 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.

This is unlikely. They save a lot of money this way, and they own a sufficiently large part of the market. Unless the problem gets outrageously bad, the cost won't be measurable.