Been saying for a long time Amazon is a flee market. Many times it's my last choice now when shopping online.
what's the amazon without piranhas
Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers
181–190 of 339 posts
Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers
#182That 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…
Based on my limited experience of visiting Walmart, I think most of their low end products are of significantly better quality than low end products from Amazon.
Agreed. I get cheap Stanley tools at Walmart that have a no questions asked lifetime replacement. Walmart is still cheap, but becoming more like Sears once was in quality (on some items).
As for Amazon, I like them too. I know they have a lot of cheap Asian stuff. But sometimes, that is exactly what I want (cheap but good DC stick welders).
I guess the issue is with the knock-offs and dangerous items on Amazon. That's fraud. No question about it. Walmart does not have this issue at all. Amazon should do something about it.
Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers
#183That 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…
Kind of off topic, but do you have a recommendation on a good HDMI switch? I have struggled with the crappy ones from amazon many times. The most frustrating part is that their "remotes" all seem to overlap with regular tv remote frequencies or something, such that changing the volume on the tv ends up triggering an input switch.
Unfortunately, not yet.
Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 prob…
Amazon may have created a more object way of measuring the same thing, but without needing to actually ask customers. They probably know at least a some of garbage products sold on their platform. If that's the case, merely tracking visits and revenues from customers who received poorly made products and comparing with customers who've received well made products over time probably produces a more accurate picture of…
The metric you’re talking about is “churn.” It’s distinct from NPS, as NPS predicts growth—the additional value your brand has in people’s minds above the threshold for leaving, where it becomes a virality coefficient—whereas churn is just a self-evident measure of the percentage of people who see your brand as having value below the threshold.
The fact that NPS (and measures like it) are predictors is useful, in that you end up also collecting real growth data, and the difference between NPS-predicted growth and actual growth can tell you how much of your growth was organic vs. marketing-driven, and thus give you a picture of your brand’s “inertia”—how valuable it is just sitting there doing nothing, separate from any marketing projects. Tracking that allows you to judge the brand impact of everything you do. But you can’t do it without some measure that actually gives you brand value, rather than simple growth.
Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers
#185This among many reasons is is why I cancelled my prime membership. The quality control is abysmal. It's become an eBay, but without a proper dispute system, and crazy prices. Many goods get listed at multiples of the price available elsewhere and if you're not paying attention you can get screwed. It's totally buyer beware. The trust that Amazon established over the years has been lost. I ordered something on Amazon…
> It's become an eBay, but without a proper dispute system, and crazy prices. I have to disagree about the dispute process. My experience as a buyer on Amazon is definitely that the pricing is all over the place, but in every case I've asked for a refund I've received it, and in the majority of cases I've not returned the item, _or_ paid for return shipping.
Well I agreed until this recent situation, where they refused to cancel and refund because the "order was already in shipping" -- which when I looked at the tracking they eventually gave me simply meant they had printed a shipping label for transferring it from the third party to an Amazon warehouse, before they even shipped it to the Canadian Amazon warehouse.
They hid that it was third party supplied and then failed to respond when I asked them to cancel based on that.
The item I ordered was time sensitive. If I'd known it was coming from the US I would have ordered from a domestic supplier that would have shipped faster except the shipping was more.
Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers
#186This 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 r…
> If you buy a defective thing from best buy, they are responsible.
Not really. They just assume liability for competition's sake. They could effectively tell you to go pound sand, but that would hurt them competitively, so they offer a return policy instead. Same as if you get a defective product from a Craig's List seller - caveat emptor.
Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on my limited experience of visiting Walmart, I think most of their low end products are of significantly better quality than low end products from Amazon.
Agreed. I get cheap Stanley tools at Walmart that have a no questions asked lifetime replacement. Walmart is still cheap, but becoming more like Sears once was in quality (on some items). As for Amazon, I like them too. I know they have a lot of cheap Asian stuff. But sometimes, that is exactly what I want (cheap but good DC stick welders). I guess the issue is with the knock-offs and dangerous items on Amazon. That'…
Yes. The problem I have experienced from a customer service perspective is that marketplace sellers who ship dangerous or otherwise clearly defective/scam products (eg I had a power wallwart explode on first being plugged in) just respond to any and all complaints by processing an immediate refund. This doesn't seem to get picked up properly by amazon and presumably their margins are good enough that this strategy works for the sellers (at least for a while).
Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers
#188Amazon overall quality has droped in recent years. I use to buy from Amazon because I knew I was buying original brands and no chinese cheap copies. Well, that changed a lot. There are specific things that I still buy from Amazon but on most things there's almost no difference between they and Aliexpress. I can buy the same products from Aliexpress way cheaper and have them delivered in 2-3 days. Thankfully there are…
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…
My living depends on selling small-batch, high quality, independently made woodworking items and I've struggled with this. Selling on Amazon feels like you're relinquishing control over your product, much more so than Ebay or Etsy. Just yesterday I've had a third party seller somehow merge my product into their own product listing, taking the small number of 5 star reviews I earned organically with them. They sell a completely unrelated product and in their page you'll notice the reviews refer to a bunch of unrelated products. Meanwhile what the customer sees on the search page is a 4.5 star item. After some research it appears this is a common problem. How something so egregious can happen at all is puzzling.
Well I've decided Amazon isn't for me, for now. I have a dedicated website for my business but I don't know what is the right way to drive traffic.
Could you mind explaining what your approach has been?
Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you enforce this? How can a consumer know that their contractor isn’t cutting corners? Sometimes the only solution is to stop the problem at its source.
How does a consumer ever know their someone they've hired isn't cutting corners? When you pay for asbestos remediation how do you know they actually did it right? When you pay an accountant how do you know they're not half-assing it? When you make your living doing a thing it's far more lucrative to do things right than to do them wrong. There's a bunch of incentives business owners who provide services operate withi…
> When you make your living doing a thing it's far more lucrative to do things right than to do them wrong.
Really? You're posting on a thread about Amazon doing a wrong thing, which they've been doing for the greater part of a decade at this point. Maybe Amazon the company will be punished for this, but the people who made these decisions have probably already made millions and can just move on to another company with no repercussions. The idea that it's somehow more lucrative to do the right thing is ridiculous.
Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers
#190This among many reasons is is why I cancelled my prime membership. The quality control is abysmal. It's become an eBay, but without a proper dispute system, and crazy prices. Many goods get listed at multiples of the price available elsewhere and if you're not paying attention you can get screwed. It's totally buyer beware. The trust that Amazon established over the years has been lost. I ordered something on Amazon…
> I ordered expecting it to arrive in 2 days.
Was the estimated delivery date in checkout and order confirmation e-mail in 2 days?
I've encountered some rare items (refurbished car parts) on Amazon EU that seemed to get sourced on-demand, but it was always accurately represented on the estimated delivery date so I haven't cared.