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

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

#251
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…

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…

Your online web store is a simple but absolute stunning display of a frictionless customer experience. I'm genuinely curious about the motivation to sell these products made-to-order, seems like a product that can be stocked. Care to elaborate on this?

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

#252
post #192
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…

My child had a wooden painted toy from amazon. He sucked on it.

Later we discovered that it has unacceptable levels of lead in the paint. We threw it out. This was done via an environmental science company, using xrf field testing. I have a certified report.

So, tell me again about how this isn’t a big deal problem. Also remind me what the date limit of lead exposure is. Actually I’ll do that one for you, it’s easy, it’s 0. There is no safe exposure to lead.

The fact that amazon could do something but is deliberately not is, well, expected. Sadly. Safe products isn’t in the mission statement of amazon.

Finally: I worked at amazon for 5 years. Right before fba came online. It’s a cost cutting culture of frugalism. Spending money on product safety doesn’t have a place there.

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

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just FYI, prime tos prohibit its use for ordering items intended for resale. I would have done the same for my business, but I didn’t want to risk getting a huge bill later when they figure it out.

I think he's saying they buy supplies, which they then turn into things to sell (versus reselling what they are buying).

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

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just FYI, prime tos prohibit its use for ordering items intended for resale. I would have done the same for my business, but I didn’t want to risk getting a huge bill later when they figure it out.

What about products used in the production of items for sale?

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

#255
post #79

I don’t get it. I had about 150 purchases last year. Toothbrushes, Apple Watch bands, hard drives, diapers, truffles, pasta, foot massagers, hats, books, etc. I had 1 bad purchase. I bought a used Roomba 980 sold by Amazon. There was a used 680 in the box. Amazon apologized and sent a brand new 980 the next day. Am I some sort of uberresultsfilter, or do the whiners just get way too much attention?

Depends on the seller. That's the whole point - they make it hard to know if you can trust or not the seller.

More than that, you have to trust every seller for the product you're buying, because all inventory from all sellers (including Amazon itself) goes into a single bin. You have no way of knowing which seller actually put the item you get into the bin.

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

#256

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.)

Even buying brand name items shipped and sold by Amazon doesn't guarantee that your item will be safe. The way Amazon commingles their items with 3rd party "fulfilled by Amazon" items means chances are high that you will end up with a Chinese knock off.

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

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just FYI, prime tos prohibit its use for ordering items intended for resale. I would have done the same for my business, but I didn’t want to risk getting a huge bill later when they figure it out.

What about products used in the production of items for sale?

Like tools and raw materials? Why would that be a problem?

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

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Pay is nothing at all like Amazon. Apple Pay is simply a convenient, secure way of paying without giving out your credit card number, and reduces risk of fraudulent transactions and chargebacks for merchants, who also don’t need to worry about storing credit cards and having them stolen. It’s a win win situation.

IOW, it's exactly like PayPal and Amazon Pay and Sanmsung Pay and Chase Pay...

The context of the discussion is selling products as a reseller on amazon.com, which has nothing to do with Amazon Pay or Apple Pay, hence when the previous poster claimed Apple Pay is just as bad as Amazon, I clarified that it’s apples and oranges. Maybe Amazon Pay and the others are good too, I’ve never used it so I can’t comment on it.

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

#259
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hmm disagree. This was a very lightweight “hey you’re defending a pretty terrible act”. Surely there is value to socially pressuring people who offer morally reprehensible positions? My child had one of these low quality, high lead toys amazon sells. Babies put everything in their mouth. He was exposed to, minimal, but as we know there is no safe exposure limit to lead. So, dang, tell em again how this amazon employe…

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

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

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

#260
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've had a review I wrote for one product entirely switched to another product. I've seen some products for USB cables with reviews for books made for infants. Amazon is so untrustworthy now I'll either go to Alibaba or buy direct. It's dangerous to buy from Amazon. I wish you the best in this, I've reported ads like this for fraud before.

It wouldn't surprise me to find out this is some kind of "business" - where you have an Amazon seller account post up various items charging only pennies, then you hire a bunch of people to purchase the products (so they are a "verified purchaser") then review them with high ratings (and maybe a few lower ratings just to make things look good).

Then somehow sell those SKU codes for the items onward where the item information (description, photo, title, etc) are swapped out - so now you have an instant "best seller".

This can also of course be done by an individual seller - they just get a good product, sell it, get some great ratings on it, then change out the information for another product but keep the SKU the same. Works best if the products are very similar (I've seen this too - where the reviews, if reading them carefully, seem to refer to say a USB thumbdrive, but what is being sold is an actual hard drive, or memory, or sdcard, etc).

The other way, of course, is to sell multiple products with different "colors" (but each is actually a different product). Then you have reviews all over the map, all for the same SKU - or at least in the same general comment mix for the product being sold. So now you don't know if the comment is referring to the product you want, or some variant of it...

All of that said, I can kinda understand why this is possible, even desirable - for Amazon to give that kind of control to the sellers. They could try to police it, but how do they police and enforce SKU usage and such, without also busting legitimate uses? That's probably the difficulty.

There's a similar problem with some sellers posting items up with insanely large prices (like a pack of gum for $10,000); from what I understand, this is done to prevent an item from being purchased when it is out of stock, or to keep the reviews (maybe in conjunction with SKU swapping?), or a few other reasons, with the idea that nobody will buy that product with such a strange high price on it (plus sorting moves it to the bottom usually). Unfortunately, this also screws up when you want to sort high to low prices, to find a possible "better product" that is priced higher because it is made differently and better than "regular ole' generics" (I faced this recently while looking for a shielded audio cable).

Here again, though, policing it would be nearly impossible - how is Amazon to determine that a particular package of gum isn't worth $10,000? For that matter, maybe there's a buyer out there looking for an elusive pack of gum and is willing to pay the higher price? Seems incredible, but I am certain there's at least one person out there ready and able to do so.

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