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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

#331

Post by m463 »

birdsbirdsbirds wrote: post #83
m463 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine worked for a company whose operators answered late night tv infomercials. They had humans answering the phone, but everything about it was scripted and highly optimized. Purchasing the thing was very very easy, but after that there was an upsell gauntlet to get through before hanging up. "This is rediculous, I don't want to hear about this" "But sir, people call back after they've missed these offers…

Does Jeff Bezos know, or is he shielded from bad customer experience like Mao, who saw a country full of rice fields along the rail tracks when he travelled the country? [1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/02/world/the-tyrant-mao-as-t...

Ha, that reminds me of a vacation spot in mexico. I flew into a beach town and took a taxi from the airport to the hotel. On the way the road was beautiful and green with lots of flowers.

But looking a little closer, it was really just the land within about 100' of the road, and only the road between the airport and the town.

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

#332

Post by baja_blast »

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…

This is especially true for people who do not have a family to fallback on. Imagine what would happen if a brilliant engineer in his late 20s, single, but parents have passed away and had no family. Now imagine one day he gets in an accident and all a sudden he is no longer brilliant, loses his job and all a sudden he can't pay his medical expenses.

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

#333

Post by kortilla »

ender341341 wrote: post #191
kortilla wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still great? Walmart prices are still low/lowest where I live.

but they're often low because they're selling bottom barrel quality goods (like electronics with cheap capacitors that fail quickly or clothes with lower quality fabrics & sewing that don't last). Even products that look the same as other stores will commonly have a Walmart specific SKU that uses cheaper components.

So? People clearly prefer cheap the majority of the time. In the age of the Internet, high quality is a click away.

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

#334

Post by kortilla »

542354234235 wrote: post #315
kortilla wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, monopolies are an example of market failure No they are not. It’s only considered a failure when the position is abused to prevent competition. You can have a monopoly situation where competition just doesn’t bother to enter because the monopoly holder hasn’t abused the situation to make entering the market attractive. Additionally, the government frequently grants monopolies because they don’t really want…

> You can have a monopoly situation where competition just doesn’t bother to enter because the monopoly holder hasn’t abused the situation to make entering the market attractive. Do you have any real world examples of this actually happening? > the government frequently grants monopolies because they don’t really want to see market competition due to the disruptive nature of the industry (e.g. utilities). The governm…

> Do you have any real world examples of this actually happening?

Drive into any small town. There is frequently only 1 gas station, 1 grocery store, etc that all sell things for reasonable prices.

For a completely different style, the major airport in Rome (da Vinci) is owned by a private company yet they don’t do any goofy shit to jack up landing fees.

There are many rural places in the US where there is only coverage from one cell phone provider and the rates remain the same.

> The government does this with the addition of heavy regulation specifically to prevent abuse that comes from having monopolistic control of a market.

No, they have to add the regulation because of the abuse that comes from a government granted monopoly. Monopolies emerge all of the time in all kinds of markets and they are not indications of failures. They can indicate that consumers are happy enough or that the margin is thin enough that competitors aren’t needed.

A government guaranteeing that a competitor can’t exist is when monopolies become ripe for abuse. That’s why government granted monopolies need regulation.

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

#335

Post by jiveturkey »

m463 wrote: post #33
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…

A friend of mine worked for a company whose operators answered late night tv infomercials. They had humans answering the phone, but everything about it was scripted and highly optimized. Purchasing the thing was very very easy, but after that there was an upsell gauntlet to get through before hanging up. "This is rediculous, I don't want to hear about this" "But sir, people call back after they've missed these offers…

huh. i'm surprised at this because it's very very easy to contact amazon customer service either via chat or phone. i don't know the specifics of it because whenever i need to do so it takes me approx 2-3 clicks through a very obvious path.

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

#336

Post by bonestamp2 »

londons_explore wrote: post #284
sjansen wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A bit of friction, if applied correctly, is not a terrible thing I observed the same thing in a different context in my previous gig doing Linux training. We strived to make our books as clear and simple as possible. When we discovered streps in our labs that confused students, we would rewrite them to avoid repeating the problem in future classes. Eventually I started noticing a tipping point where if the lab did…

I once ran an ecommerce site, and due to a bug every customer saw a fairly cryptic error message. It was something along the lines of "You must login to perform that action". Our site didn't have a login system. By fixing that bug, conversions went down . We literally did an A/B test to prove that giving the user a stupid error increased revenue. We even played with the text of the error to maximize revenue. We never…

The under armour website is terrible with coupon codes. Some of the time, it does not work and you get a cryptic error and have to wait on hold to even chat with a customer service rep to decode the message for you and tell you what you need to add/remove from your cart to make it go through. Worst of all, these are not random codes I picked up off some deal site, these are codes they emailed to me directly.

It's absolutely awful from a customer experience standpoint. But, I believe I end up buying more from them because when it does work I feel like I need to buy everything I've been thinking about because I don't want to deal with that hassle again anytime soon.

If this is the same sort of thing that was happening on your site, this would only work if your product is not available elsewhere for a similar or better price. In the case of under armour, their products are available elsewhere, but not in the same variety and not with the same discounts.

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

#338

Post by ethanwillis »

gruez wrote: post #313
ethanwillis wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea is that it allows for Amazon to remove some strength from the official wholesaler side. If the wholesaler isn't the only source of goods they have less bargaining power. But at the end of the day the wholesaler has to sell to someone. Here are my thoughts on how this relationship could work to Amazon's advantage. Think of this scenario: **Wholesaler**: Give us $10 per unit to list our products on Ama…

>or we're going to either A: Delist the products and kick the sellers off our platform Is there evidence of this happening?

This was just my attempt at reasoning how this could work. I did some searching and this was one of the first few things I found.

https://www.vox.com/2019/3/8/18252606/amazon-vendors-no-orde...

It's not exactly what I'm saying, but still an interesting scenario playing out nonetheless.

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

#339

Post by ficklepickle »

rdtwo wrote: post #243
AussieWog93 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So sometimes discs won't load or cartridges won't read in their console, or they're unhappy with condition - sometimes this is as simple as apologising and accepting a return, sometimes people aren't happy with that and just want to kick up a stink. More often than not, the people kicking up a stink return a perfectly working product, and they just wanted to make sure we'd accept it by them being as foul as possible.…

Ha I get you I’m trying to sell a PlayStation on offer up right now and “buyers” are toxic even for one item. Idk why you do this to yourself I’d go nuts

Offer up is where these people congregate. At least use Craigslist, the worst offenders can't seem to work Craigslist.

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

#340

Post by totalZero »

ProAm wrote: post #320
totalZero wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among other reasons, one motivator for Amazon to solve this problem is the fact that the present administration has brought Amazon's problem with counterfeiting front and center into the public debate about China. Like him or not, Peter Navarro has repeatedly talked about Amazon and counterfeit goods in media appearances over the course of the past few years.

Those are all issues money will fix and Amazon has plenty of money to fix oversight nuisances.

I agree with that, but it really highlights the fact that Amazon has willingly avoided solving this problem. In other words, it's not an oversight -- if it were, they would have thrown money at the problem to make it disappear already.

Amazon makes money off counterfeit products that sell on its platform.

The most profitable outcome for Amazon is for there to be a large assortment of products that are either (A) totally legitimate, (B) counterfeit/flawed but equal in quality to the genuine product, or (C) counterfeit/flawed but so inexpensive that the customer doesn't complain too much.

Clothing is the kind of product that is easy to counterfeit but draws complaints from users who discriminate between the quality/durability/appearance of the real product and the false one. A phone case, drill bit, pair of tweezers, or ball bearing is the kind of product that is easy to counterfeit but may not be noticeable.

Similarly, Benson Leung taught us that a USB-C cable is the kind of product where you can sell low-quality junk lookalikes and the average consumer will have no idea what makes it worse than a more expensive cable.

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