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Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

wsj.com

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Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#211

Post by greenail »

duxup wrote: post #46

That 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…

The 2 amazon mantras that apply here are; more selection is good, customers will never complain about a lower price.

If the selection is huge then they need to make recommendations to help people find products. I don't think many users will scroll through more than a page or two of options. The integrity of reviews makes a big impact here in how you are likely to make a choice on those first few pages.

3rd party sellers increase selection and the thought is that more selection creates a fly wheel effect that drives down prices which benefits the customer. Amazon has very limited control over 3rd party sellers but they need them to increase selection.

That said, if you go to any store there are typically a few different options in a product category with different price points and quality. Buyer beware applies in a physical store as much as at Amazon. It would be interesting to see how many consumers prefer less selection.

There is nothing stopping someone from creating a curated "quality" focused frontend that makes money on showing customers only high quality products and then making money on the affiliate referrals for the curation. If this was in high demand I think you'd see these curated stores in the wild. I've not seen one though and since I can use tools like fakespot to help determine the quality of the reviews.

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#212

Post by smacktoward »

larntz wrote: post #145
Darmody wrote: post #13

Amazon 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…

Exactly. For a while Amazon was the first place I'd look to shop online. They had legit stuff and it was super convenient. The last year, maybe two, it's become such an unpleasant experience that Amazon has become a last resort. Free fast shipping is awesome, but I'll be patient or pay more to avoid Amazon these days. I don't trust the products, and I'm done wasting time returning things.

They don't even offer free fast shipping anymore. You can get fast shipping, but only if you pay for Prime, or you can get free shipping, in which case it can take a week or longer before your order even leaves their warehouse (!). It's fast or it's free, pick one.

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#213

Post by cdubzzz »

cs702 wrote: post #58

Yikes: > A Wall Street Journal investigation found 4,152 items for sale on Amazon.com Inc. ’s site that have been declared unsafe by federal agencies, are deceptively labeled or are banned by federal regulators—items that big-box retailers’ policies would bar from their shelves. Among those items, at least 2,000 listings for toys and medications lacked warnings about health risks to children. > Of the 4,152 products…

> This is a top-of-the-front-page, well-researched article in a leading newspaper -- it's the kind of coverage that destroys hard-earned reputations built over decades.

FWIW, this article finally got my wife to say she'll stop buying from Amazon and I'm glad for that. I stopped years ago for this and other reasons, but have never quite explained my reasoning well enough to convince her.

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#214

Post by chenning »

Nasrudith wrote: post #178
chenning wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, I've seen countless times when, say, Walmart or some other retailer gets caught and body slammed for stocking a product on their shelves that was known to be manufactured under substandard working conditions. It's possible that I'm just not seeing the same frequency of articles lobbed at Amazon, but there's no doubt they are guilty of the same thing on some level. Is it because Amazon found a way to sort of…

Well the thing is "unfair working conditions" is subjective and lacks binding force unlike say illegal trade with a sanctioned country. So the consequences are "whatever the consumers decide".

That's the thing though. How subjective is "unfair working conditions" really? I ask that in all seriousness. At least in the US (my only frame of reference) there are fantastic arguments about minimum wage. Should it be raised to $15/hr? Maybe less? Maybe more? But no one is really arguing wether or not $1/day is a livable wage. I think most people with a pulse would say that $1/hr is not a livable wage. The question I was really asking is, what's Amazon's position on this? Do they ever come knocking on anyone's door demanding to see their working conditions? If they are, what does that look like? What incentives do they have to do that? Or, in the worst case, do they just sort of look the other way?

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#215

Post by greenail »

The simplest solution for the consumer is to just check the seller and to avoid buying from sellers other than Amazon. No one is forced to buy from an Amazon FBA or 3rd party seller. Amazon customer support generally has more levers to help you out if you do have a problem.

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#216

Post by duxup »

greenail wrote: post #211
duxup wrote: post #46

That 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…

The 2 amazon mantras that apply here are; more selection is good, customers will never complain about a lower price. If the selection is huge then they need to make recommendations to help people find products. I don't think many users will scroll through more than a page or two of options. The integrity of reviews makes a big impact here in how you are likely to make a choice on those first few pages. 3rd party sell…

>There is nothing stopping someone from creating a curated "quality" focused frontend that makes money on showing customers only high quality products and then making money on the affiliate referrals for the curation. If this was in high demand I think you'd see these curated stores in the wild. I've not seen one though and since I can use tools like fakespot to help determine the quality of the reviews.

Does anyone actually do that though?

Most retail stores that do a lot of promise on "higher quality things" in my experience are just looking for higher margins and can't help but tack on more to the price for marginally better goods.

And I don't know of any site that really tries to do what you describe, thus I am not sure that they would even if there was "demand" / they would even know.

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#218

Post by greenail »

duxup wrote: post #216
greenail wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 2 amazon mantras that apply here are; more selection is good, customers will never complain about a lower price. If the selection is huge then they need to make recommendations to help people find products. I don't think many users will scroll through more than a page or two of options. The integrity of reviews makes a big impact here in how you are likely to make a choice on those first few pages. 3rd party sell…

>There is nothing stopping someone from creating a curated "quality" focused frontend that makes money on showing customers only high quality products and then making money on the affiliate referrals for the curation. If this was in high demand I think you'd see these curated stores in the wild. I've not seen one though and since I can use tools like fakespot to help determine the quality of the reviews. Does anyone…

you could make such a store with the product catalog api.

The actual manifestations are affiliates who pair content with the products e.g a blog style product review with a product buy link in it. I have never seen a pure affiliate storefront focused on curation. You sometimes see curated lists in youtube reviews and videos.

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#219

Post by dang »

tsunamifury wrote: post #195
_ptgt wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: Amazon employee, opinions are my own This claim really doesn't say much on its own. There are millions (billions?) of products on Amazon. This would be potentially a lot more damning if they released how many items they searched through to identify those 4,152. It would also be nice if they provided some data on how prevalent these problems are at other retailers and marketplaces. There's reason to believ…

Wow. Amazon sells unsafe and banned products and you literally quote the first line of the narcissist prayer: “it’s not a big deal”

That crosses into personal attack, which isn't ok here. Also, please don't use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting some when you're not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#220

Post by kwhitefoot »

DannyBee wrote: post #107

This 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…

That's how it works in Europe. But when I suggested to a colleague in the US a few years ago that he take a defective disk drive back to Best Buy (or perhaps Newegg) five months after he had bought it he laughed out loud at the absurdity of the idea that the seller would do anything at all.
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