Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by senderista » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 6:44 PM UTC

bostik wrote: post #205

derefr wrote: post #103

Earlier 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…

> because customer experience isn’t a KPI and so won’t get them promoted? In a way, I think you may be on to something. At least indirectly. Amazon are constantly pushing the narrative that they are obsessively customer-focused and constantly thinking about long term. I have my reasons to believe this might have been true at one time, but now is mostly about optics. Having interviewed at the company a few years back,…

During my time there I never saw any evidence that they cared about employee retention. The same pain points came up year after year on the tech survey, and were invariably ignored.

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

#232

Post by ethbro » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 6:45 PM UTC

berdon wrote: post #168

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. It's the kind of thing that _should_ destroy reputations. But that doesn't happen all that much anymore. We're in a weird place with information and communication where shameful acts are accepted either in ambivalence, apathy, or bullheadedness.

> We're in a weird place with information and communication where shameful acts are accepted either in ambivalence, apathy, or bullheadedness.

The 1980s?

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

#233

Post by DannyBee » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 6:46 PM UTC

kwhitefoot wrote: post #220

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.

He shouldn't have, the minimum period is usually a year. This is one area of the uniform code[1] that states often modify, so it varies as to length. Some are only 90 days, etc.

This is also not as well known by consumers as it should be, and obviously, businesses sometimes try to claim otherwise (IE say you have to deal with the manufacturer)

But, the law is incredibly consistent about this if you take someone to court.

[1] In the US, there is a non-partisan uniform law commission that publishes model laws for states to adopt in various important areas. The main goal is to keep the law of each state similar in areas where that similarity is important to being able to do business across multiple states.

Outside of business, they sometimes tackle complex jurisdictional efforts where states would otherwise fight with each other based on their local social/public policy. An example would be the uniform child abduction act, which ensures if a parent who does not have sole custody takes a child across state lines, you don't get into a big fight over where the child should be based on social issues that differ between states.

Not all states sign everything, but they get very good uptake on most laws.

https://www.uniformlaws.org/home

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

#234

Post by Liquix » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 6:49 PM UTC

berdon wrote: post #168

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. It's the kind of thing that _should_ destroy reputations. But that doesn't happen all that much anymore. We're in a weird place with information and communication where shameful acts are accepted either in ambivalence, apathy, or bullheadedness.

It's also the matter of convenience / personal life impact - Amazon is ingrained in many people's weekly routine at this point. It's not that people genuinely don't care about an article like this, they just don't care enough to justify negatively impacting their life. Dale Carnegie on the concerns of the individual:

"A person’s toothache means more to that person than a famine in China which kills a million people. A boil on one’s neck interests one more than forty earthquakes in Africa."

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

#235

Post by moron4hire » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 6:52 PM UTC

My biggest problem is not being able to discern the quality of an item before I purchase. Ratings were last reliable 10 years ago. Different brands used to mean different products, so you used to be able to feature-and-price compare. About the only thing I've figured out to do is to look at pictures to try to group items by manufacturer, purchase one-per-real-manufacturer, then return all of the obvious crap and hope I end up with at least one good item.

Maybe we need a Facebook plugin through which people can (willingly) share their purchases. Don't look at ratings for products from rando strangers, only see the stuff your friends have bought. In the worst case, you're no worse off than the status quo, but maybe I could finally find a decent laptop bag.

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

#236

Post by berdon » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 6:52 PM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #232

berdon wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It's the kind of thing that _should_ destroy reputations. But that doesn't happen all that much anymore. We're in a weird place with information and communication where shameful acts are accepted either in ambivalence, apathy, or bullheadedness.

> We're in a weird place with information and communication where shameful acts are accepted either in ambivalence, apathy, or bullheadedness. The 1980s?

I don't know - maybe? Admittedly, I was just getting out of diapers at the tail end of the 80s. Perhaps this kind of thing revolves around the onset of new communication mediums and the general adoption and ease of use.

Newspapers, easy to read, hard to publish - "trusted" source. Printing press and/or other technologies aid printing and trust drops. Radio, TV, internet follow.

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

#237

Post by senderista » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

So it turns out that the lead-tainted xylophone pictured in that article is sitting in my living room, along with the other items from that "Amazon's Choice" instrument set. It's all going in the trash and I'm never allowing any off-brand item from Amazon near our kids again.

(I guess the fact that the xylophone wasn't tuned to any recognizable scale should have been a red flag.)

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

#238

Post by tsunamifury » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 7:05 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #219

tsunamifury wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You are right of course, but in light of defending truly bad decisions, how else do we help our community hold itself responsible for its decisions at work?

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

#239

Post by insulanus » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 7:06 PM UTC

_ptgt wrote: post #192

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…

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…

That's a good point about the rate of the unsafe products, but that is not the same as the rate at which those products are introduced into the population (due to lower prices, etc).

It's not valid to compare the rate of unsafe products on Walmart / Target shelves vs. in the Amazon inventory. Amazon is allowed much more slack (similar to eBay) about what gets sold through their store.

Also, it is much more appropriate for Amazon to do this work, than have the public do it.

Keep up the good work on other fronts!

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

#240

Post by nickjj » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 7:08 PM UTC

nabnob wrote: post #228

nickjj wrote: post #148

There's a 0% chance I would ever buy food or any type of consumable from Amazon. There's way too many people selling counterfeit items and there's no reasonable way to tell until you end up either dead or sick. My friend's cat came inches from dying because of flea treatment purchased there not too long ago. When it was purchased it had 4+ star reviews and generally seemed good. But if you look at the ratings today (…

Do you know which flea treatment this was?

Yeah, it was this Hartz one: https://www.amazon.com/Hartz-UltraGuard-Topical-Prevention-K...

Look at how many 1 star ratings there are. We sorted by 1 stars and then by newest reviews. If you go back for a few months it's just an endless amount of scary negative reviews but it wasn't so bad years ago.