161–170 of 363 posts
What is the basis for this? I have gone to arbitration against a big company, and won. The arbitrators were all judges, and the only difference from my experience with court proceedings was the speed and cost.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While fatal disasters can happen to anyone, this story isn't a case of getting in trouble regardless of personal virtues. The man put all his eggs in one basket, creating a single point of failure. When that failure actually happened, he was hosed. How would the story play out if he kept part of his inventory outside of the "Fulfilled by Amazon" system, or even outside of Amazon altogether? He wouldn't lose all of it…
How many small retail businesses keep multiple bricks and mortar locations solely as a backup in case one location becomes unusable? How many retail businesses have two locations just in case the street outside their premises is permanently removed without notice by the owning municipality? There is a limit to how much risk individuals and small businesses can realistically hedge against. Insurance can cover many ris…
This is an insurable risk. (Property, renter and/or business interruption.)
As you mention, abuse by business partners is not insurable. Which is why one should not be 100% dependent on a small number of them.
In this case, 100% of the inventory should not have been with Amazon. And 100% of their wealth should not have been in inventory. None of this takes away from his claims on Amazon, of course.
Earlier 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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many small retail businesses keep multiple bricks and mortar locations solely as a backup in case one location becomes unusable? How many retail businesses have two locations just in case the street outside their premises is permanently removed without notice by the owning municipality? There is a limit to how much risk individuals and small businesses can realistically hedge against. Insurance can cover many ris…
> How many small retail businesses keep multiple bricks and mortar locations solely as a backup in case one location becomes unusable? This is an insurable risk. (Property, renter and/or business interruption.) As you mention, abuse by business partners is not insurable. Which is why one should not be 100% dependent on a small number of them. In this case, 100% of the inventory should not have been with Amazon. And 1…
I'm all for analyzing what went wrong for purposes of trying to help educate people about how to do things better, but I am extremely uncomfortable with the trend in comments here to more or less act like "This guy just should have known better and not trusted Amazon."
I worked in insurance for a few years. Most ordinary people have almost zero understanding of how insurance works, what it's for, etc. Most people are not making informed consumer choices about insurance. They mostly get what the law compels them to get or what some professional recommends to them, etc.
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 f…
1) He said he couldn't fill a request to have his stuff sent back because the form was broken. It's very believable if you ever used the amazon seller tool.
2) He submitted the evidence of authenticity and it was rejected for being older than 365 days. It shouldn't be a problem, clothes have a longer shelf life than one year.
3) Customers complain about products being unauthentic all the time, easy way to get a refund and to vent. It's the most generic 0 star review that can come up possibly from a competitor trying to damage your business. You can't sell a thousand items without getting a few bad reviews.
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 question…
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 question…
Could you share more about the sort of issues you face?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 f…
I don't know where you read these things you talk about. 1) He said he couldn't fill a request to have his stuff sent back because the form was broken. It's very believable if you ever used the amazon seller tool. 2) He submitted the evidence of authenticity and it was rejected for being older than 365 days. It shouldn't be a problem, clothes have a longer shelf life than one year. 3) Customers complain about product…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 question…
Got a link for the USB oscilloscope?
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…
The problem is not the automation, the problem is that a single authority has a complete monopoly on certain aspects of the e-commerce market. Full credit to Bezos and Amazon for their incredible execution in achieving this. However, monopolies are an example of market failure, and in this case, also an example of an authority able to act as judge + jury where the affected parties have no realistic recourse, while be…
No they aren't. Markets tend towards monopoly, or at least an oligopoly. Market 'equilibrium' where prices are 'right' is an ideological fantasy.
That said - this is an example of how the legitimacy for private commercial corporations being run dictatorially based on formal property ownership kind of blows up in people's faces when such corporations grow to the level of encompassing a significant part of some sector of the economy, or a significant part of social interaction altogether.
As for government intervention - the government is involved: Its basic role is to set this up and support it. Government checks corporate/capitalist power mostly in the face of very strong public pressure and the threat of uprisings / mass strikes / violent redistribution etc.