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

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

#201

Post by AussieWog93 » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 11:27 AM UTC

wombatmobile wrote: post #196

AussieWog93 wrote: post #119

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…

> 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. That doesn't make sense. You are in f…

>That doesn't make sense. You are in favour of systemic obfuscation and low quality support to discourage people who don't have problems from taking up the time of support staff? Even though the barriers make life hell for people with legitimate problems like the guy whose $1.5m inventory was destroyed?

I'm never said I'm personally in favour of that approach, I just saw a lot of comments talking about how terrible it is without any consideration of why certain companies might not want to make support accessible. As you said, an ideal solution would redirect people who don't need customer support elsewhere, but I couldn't imagine this is easy for an organisation the size of Amazon. I hope they can work out a better balance in future.

>If that's an unrealistic expectation, could you provide more detail about how it is unavoidable to spend "hours with mentally ill people"?

Just to clarify, I'm not talking about garden-variety depression/anxiety but people with serious issues that lead to them being completely isolated from regular society.

Honestly, we try to avoid dealing with them altogether. If someone sends us 12 messages in a row at 4am asking for information about a product, we don't respond in the morning. I have done in the past and learned the hard way that it is a bad idea. Of course, this is not possible for a business like Amazon with tickets and phone support.

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

#202

Post by DoreenMichele » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 11:29 AM UTC

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #177

DoreenMichele wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one ever does everything right. But some people have enough money, enough smarts, enough social capital, etc. that it gets mitigated. We should be seeking to make sure more people have access to mitigation rather than looking for the one mistake someone made that somehow makes it okay in our eyes that they have gone from having over a million dollars in inventory to couch surfing with friends and relatives as the…

> one mistake someone made that somehow makes it okay in our eyes that they have gone from having over a million dollars in inventory to couch surfing with friends and relatives That's mischaracterizing my point. Should people feel consequences of their mistakes? Absolutely. Should people end up on the street for failing at business? Definitely not. I think the standard consequence of total failure being "Now you hav…

I haven't characterized anything you've said at all. I made a top level comment. You chose to argue with it for whatever reason.

All I've done is try to reiterate and clarify what my own position is. That's it.

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

#203

Post by derbOac » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 11:32 AM UTC

cameldrv wrote: post #92

I read the article with a more skeptical eye. It could be that he didn't request the items back in time because they were fake and not worth the price of the return shipping. Amazon's response was interesting: "The spokeswoman said Amazon repeatedly asked Govani to provide evidence that the products sold were authentic but that the invoices he sent were either illegible or didn't match the records of the brand owners…

I don't put stock in claims of illegibility by Amazon.

I had a similar (but by comparison nearly inconsequential) experience with Amazon where they accused me of running a fraudulent account (for reasons that are still bewildering to me).

The whole experience was too kafkaesque to summarize here while on my phone, but at some point they demanded scans of something be faxed.

I sent it twice and both were rejected as illegible.

First, if amazon gave a damn about legibility they wouldn't be insisting on faxes.

Second, if I sent those faxes to a million people, I'm confident less than one percent of them would have said they were illegible.

"Illegible" is an excuse used by Amazon because it's in their control to decide, and is ambiguous enough and plausibily denialable enough in a legal sense that it protects them.

To me "illegibility" is just what Amazon gives as a reason when they don't want to give a reason. It's bureaucratic stonewalling.

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

#204

Post by sokoloff » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 11:46 AM UTC

Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #173

AussieWog93 wrote: post #119

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…

Whilst dealing with unsavoury people obviously isn't ideal, and I certainly don't envy your position. Is this not just the cost of doing business in that specific industry? Typically you'd just raise your prices to factor in support costs. You'd have different margins for each industry. Realistically, the reason you're unable to raise your prices is because you're stuck competing with companies that simply don't offe…

For many transactions, the only customer support I need is an automated shipping confirmation, automated tracking, and maybe (or maybe not) a way to return/refund.

I buy a fair number of items on AliExpress and banggood. I don’t want “good customer service” bloating the costs. (Ironically, I still get good service on the 1% of transactions that go wrong, even when I can’t really prove anything. I bought two nice lipo chargers and got sent one. One email and remedied in a couple of weeks.)

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

#205

Post by Hokusai » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 11:46 AM UTC

AussieWog93 wrote: post #119

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 question…

> 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.

Let's screw people with real concerns and real business so Amazon can save money on customer support seems a horrific justification. That is basically making all small businesses guilty of wasting Amazon time and burden the small businesses with the burden of proving that they are not.

How do you know so well the internal statistics for Amazon if you are just a seller? Cannot your kind interpretation also be based in wrong assumptions?

Who has more resources to deal with this situation Amazon or the little business? Amazon does this bullshit because it has power to abuse, not because it is a reasonable relationship with its providers.

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

#206

Post by DoreenMichele » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 11:49 AM UTC

matuszeg wrote: post #186

DoreenMichele wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your conceptualization of how the world works and mine are so not on the same page, they aren't even in the same book. So while what you say is no doubt true, it's got nothing to do with what I'm talking about. I'm not expecting universal health care by June of next year or something. You start by just getting people to say "Yeah, you know, that makes sense. I would support that." And when enough people can agree wit…

i wish that were the case, but there is a strong argument that it doesnt work that way. Unfortunately instead it looks like the consensus amongst citizens is largely irrelevant. this study in particular comes to mind. https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-...

You know, a lot of poor people spend their time on Twitter and what not saying ugly things like "Eat the rich" because they feel powerless and feel like no rich people would ever listen to them and so forth. And then they are all shocked when the rich don't give a damn about folks who are openly hostile to them.

And then some poor people have hobbies like becoming the (apparently) first woman to make the leader board of HN shortly after getting themselves off the street and back into housing. (That would be me, in case that needs to be said.) And some people close to me are of the opinion that me running my big fat mouth on HN while homeless and earning a pittance online while sleeping in a tent is why tablets are no longer expensive shiny toys for rich people and are actually productive and affordable for ordinary people with sucktastic lives.

So, studies aside, you will have to excuse me for sticking to my guns here. My apologies for having no idea how to convince you I'm the one that's right in this case.

Oops. My bad.

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

#207

Post by Kim_Bruning » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 11:49 AM UTC

AussieWog93 wrote: post #169

Narkov wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got a link for the USB oscilloscope?

Not going to pass up an opportunity to shill the business. :P https://espotek.com/labrador/

10% discount if you buy in bulk? I'm getting my friends some too. :-)

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

#208

Post by wil421 » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 11:53 AM UTC

tomp wrote: post #187

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…

I don't understand why people like you keep ranting about "universal healthcare" when obviously about 50% of your country so strongly opposes it that I think it's sooner that hell freezes than US getting social healthcare. Instead, why don't you propose alternative solutions? E.g. in Switzerland, it's illegal for your healthcare to be paid by the company, and also it's obligatory to have healthcare insurance (probabl…

You are looking at the healthcare coverage problem and you think it’s the only issue. Coverage is a big problem for some but not the biggest problem.

The biggest issue is arguably billing and pricing. You have no idea how much something will cost until it’s done. Medicade is paying over 80% more for prescription drugs than the EU.

> In 2016 the U.S. spent 18% of its GDP on healthcare, whereas the next highest country (Switzerland) devoted 12% of its GDP to healthcare. The average amount spent on healthcare per person in comparable countries ($5,198) is half that of the U.S. ($10,348).

> The average price per coronary bypass surgery in the U.S is 129% more than Switzerland’s next-highest average.

> In 2014, the U.S. performed more MRI exams than most similarly wealthy countries at an average price of $1,119 per MRI. This was 42% more than the average price in the United Kingdom, 122% more than the average price in Switzerland, and 420% more than the average price in Australia.

> While fewer appendectomies are performed on average in the United Kingdom compared to the U.S., the price per surgery in the U.S. is $15,930 – nearly double the price in the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, in Australia and Switzerland, where far more appendectomies are performed on average than in comparable countries, the price of each surgery is even less, at only $3,814 in Australia and $6,040 in Switzerland.

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/how-do-...

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

#209

Post by pantalaimon » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 11:54 AM UTC

wombatmobile wrote: post #196

AussieWog93 wrote: post #119

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…

> 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. That doesn't make sense. You are in f…

> why not perfect the art of triage and funnel people without problems appropriately?

The joys of having a quasi-monopoly. Amazon does't need be be any better - they have all the customers, so merchants have to put up with that if they want access.

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

#210

Post by tomp » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 11:58 AM UTC

wil421 wrote: post #208

tomp wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why people like you keep ranting about "universal healthcare" when obviously about 50% of your country so strongly opposes it that I think it's sooner that hell freezes than US getting social healthcare. Instead, why don't you propose alternative solutions? E.g. in Switzerland, it's illegal for your healthcare to be paid by the company, and also it's obligatory to have healthcare insurance (probabl…

You are looking at the healthcare coverage problem and you think it’s the only issue. Coverage is a big problem for some but not the biggest problem. The biggest issue is arguably billing and pricing. You have no idea how much something will cost until it’s done. Medicade is paying over 80% more for prescription drugs than the EU. > In 2016 the U.S. spent 18% of its GDP on healthcare, whereas the next highest country…

Au contraire, I think my proposed solution solves pricing as well. As I wrote, it aligns interests between consumers (patients) and producers (doctors), and removes one step between them - patients will be much more directly impacted by their choice of insurer (now this is handled by their companies, consumers have no real choice), so they'll be shopping around for the optimal price/performance provider.

The alternative solution often proposed, Medicaid/Medicare for all (socialized medicine), actually has no solution to this problem (except sweeping it under the rug even more, then it will be the government overpaying for medicine so people will care even less).