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Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless

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

#291

Post by nemothekid »

moksly wrote: post #227
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…

This might surprise you, but companies don’t really care that their employees have to deal with shitty customers. It’s not necessarily that they don’t care about their employees, they might even have strategies and support staff to help with the stress, but they don’t care in a way that outsourcing it because of shitty customers ever plays in to the equation. At enterprise size you automate your support to save money…

>In areas where they see actual competition, like in selling cloud to enterprise customers, they have excellent support

I'm less inclined to believe that is because of competition and not because of the fact enterprise SaaS always has great support. If you are spending thousands, you will almost always have someone dedicated to your account. Likewise there are very few companies with razer thin margins that have excellent support.

I recently had an issue with my Smart Thermostat - where there is plenty of competition (Nest, Honeywell, Ecobee) - I called support and only got someone after 90 minutes of waiting, who was ultimately unhelpful. I spoke to my building who contacted their support line (the building installed the same, non-smart, thermostats as well), and the issue was solved in the same day by a trained technician in a little over an hour.

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

#292

Post by mikestew »

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/

Sold! And, yes, you should charge more. Twice the price, and it still would have been an impulse buy for me.

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

#293

Post by StavrosK »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #225
zrobotics wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice looking board, but I agree, you should charge more. One market to consider is automotive scopes- since it already can interface with a phone, putting different connectors on there and with a case would suffice for most uses. Compare to a Pico scope for the market leader in this segment. It definitely doesn't need to be a 100% finished consumer product (that's already covered), you wouldn't be selling to hackers…

Honestly, I designed it when I was a student because there was nothing usable at the low-end of the market. While I could possibly charge a little bit more for it, I don't think the specs justify a $50+ price point (as-is), and for a lot of people that extra $20 makes a big difference. There were some thoughts a while back of making a higher-end product to fill the $50-$80 gap, and possibly even a stripped down Labra…

This looks great! I'm going to buy one because of the price point (I wouldn't at $50, but maybe plenty of others would).

Is this useful for a hobbyist? Everyone I've talked to said "get a proper oscilloscope, anything less is a toy" but I have neither the space nor the need for an oscilloscope. I have a Saleae Logic analyzer, but yours looks more featureful.

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

#294

Post by megous »

user5994461 wrote: post #165
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For such a one-sided article, I came down rather on the other side. A dozen warnings that he needed to claim his stuff before it was destroyed. The evidence of authenticity was illegible. At least four customers complained that the merchandise was not authentic. If he had paid to have his stuff returned, he'd only be out the cost of shipping whatever hadn't been sold. And this is just what I learned from an article f…

I don't know where you read these things you talk about. 1) He said he couldn't fill a request to have his stuff sent back because the form was broken. It's very believable if you ever used the amazon seller tool. 2) He submitted the evidence of authenticity and it was rejected for being older than 365 days. It shouldn't be a problem, clothes have a longer shelf life than one year. 3) Customers complain about product…

It's amazing how these megacorps manage to have their software broken in fairly scary workflows for their users.

I have recent experience with paypal where they demand I confirm some information (they provide almost 0 information what they want actually in the UI, and the link I'm supposed to follow just redirects to my account overview, where there's nothing to do, no warnings, no prompts, just the regular summary of balances.) They also send a scary email that they'll block my account if I don't proceed by certain date, and the actual date is just an empty html template placeholder.

I ask them via support for what they want. And they send automated response. I almost ignored it, like usual, because these notices usually just say thank you we accepted your requests and we'll respond soon. I came back to it though, and at the end there's a note that they will not respond to me unless I ask again.

At this point, I'm like wtf? It's completely ridiculous, seeing so much stupid details and omissions in user experience in a row.

At some point I think large orgs just stop caring about customers, and just optimize some aggregate metrics, and this is the result.

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

#295

Post by iamatworknow »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #275
iamatworknow wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered a bundle that includes a case? I don't do a lot of maker/tinkering stuff so having the chip loose or on a breadboard wouldn't work for me in most situations. But I do sometimes have a need for an oscilloscope or multimeter, and would gladly pay ~$50 for one that had a case and some basic/standard connections, especially if it's supported by open software like yours. Edit: I still bought one as is,…

There are a couple of 3d printed cases on Thingiverse - one that keeps the original pinout and one that adds BNC connectors via a perfboard mod.

Thanks. I haven't gotten into 3D printing myself, but I'll check that out and maybe have a friend print one for me.

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

#296

Post by totalZero »

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…

The particular HN user to whom you refer as "people like you" has a unique experience with homelessness and that's why she has a unique perspective on some issues related to the topic. I used to butt heads with her on certain comment threads until I Googled her and understood that. I think it's kind of cool that someone in this forum can present those views in the way that she does.

Regarding healthcare, there is no shortage of alternative solutions proposed for the improvement of the American health insurance system. If one party's leaders close their eyes, put their fingers in their ears, and say "la la la la I can't hear you," that doesn't mean the rest of the country has failed to propose reasonable solutions.

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

#298

Post by solidasparagus »

didibus wrote: post #139
adinisom wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comingling means the buyer can't vet the seller so it's entirely on Amazon to ensure the goods aren't counterfeit. As you say, Amazon was able to identify the merchant specifically but wasn't able to determine whether the goods are genuine. If the goods weren't comingled, this would be less Amazon's problem and the goods wouldn't be in Amazon's warehouse so at least the seller would still have his inventory if Amazon…

Actually Amazon knows precisely what items was shipped and if it came directly from the merchant or if they used some other merchants for the delivery (aka comingled). So when a buyer complains about an item, they know if it is the merchant's item or some other merchant's item. Comingled doesn't mean that they just bunch them all up in some bin and then can't tell which is which and where they were from. It means tha…

I don't think that's what the parent is talking about. Because customers don't get to choose who they buy from if a product is co-mingled, customers have no way of avoiding counterfeit items by deciding to only buy from very reputable sellers. This makes detecting counterfeits Amazon's responsibility

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

#299

Post by LorenPechtel »

bagacrap wrote: post #272
Lazare wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least four customers complained that the merchandise was not authentic. According to the article, one customer said the item didn't fit, and wondered if it might be a knock-off, but they didn't outright claim it was. And the other three complained about packaging. Depending on how you score it that's ZERO customers complaining, or maybe one at most. > The evidence of authenticity was illegible. [...] And this is…

"either illegible or didn't match the records of the brand owners" --- so Amazon has done some due diligence by reaching out to other parties to the sales, and found that these receipts are likely counterfeit. Besides which, I'm not sure how even valid receipts prove that the inventory is legit; how do you know the receipts refer to this particular merchandise and not some other legitimate purchase? It seems entirely…

Or Amazon's customer support can't read scans of pieces of paper that have been around for a while.

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

#300

Post by amelius »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #279
amelius wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, does your scope have a ground that is isolated from USB ground? This would be a very useful feature.

It doesn't have an isolated ground (the focus was on size and cost), but this shouldn't be an issue. All spec-compliant USB ports contain self-resetting overcurrent protection - in practice this is almost always via a PTC resettable fuse on USB GND. For what it's worth, I haven't had a single complaint related to the grounding in 3 years.

Ok, but how would you (for example) measure the voltage difference over a current-sensing resistor that is positioned at the high-side of (say) a 48V rails?

(If ground was decoupled, that would be simply a matter of attaching probe and scope ground at both terminals of the resistor.)

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