Amazon sellers ‘hijack’ listings to sell face masks despite new rules

Post by eru » Fri, Mar 20, 2020, 4:59 AM UTC

olalonde wrote: post #38

triceratops wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely is evil. Buying out local inventory and selling it for a profit to the same people who would have bought it anyway isn't doing anyone a service. It's not "adding liquidity" to the market. It's not bringing more supply. It's adding a pointless middleman to a transaction that would have happened anyway - it's an inefficiency. It would be a different matter if these people were actually sourcing masks from…

I would perhaps grant you "evil", but "bad", definitely not. This is one of those rare things economists seem to agree on. [0] The scenario you described would be unlikely if price gouging was legal/encouraged as the extra profit would largely be captured higher up in the chain (e.g. by the production factories). This would incentivize the re-purposing of factories to manufacture the high demand products, discourage…

Post by j-c-hewitt » Fri, Mar 20, 2020, 5:09 AM UTC

gentleman11 wrote: post #27

sneak wrote: post #2

> We use sophisticated tools, including machine learning, to combat them, and we are making it increasingly difficult for bad actors to hide. So sophisticated that some reporter for wired could find them in the top few hundred bestsellers in a few minutes with a quick visual scan. Let’s be clear: Amazon should not be censoring legal items on their platform. However, their efforts at stopping it are purely a PR matter…

It seems to be that a single intern whose only job was to search for prohibited items and unlist them could do better Really, just use Mechanical Turk. Their inability to handle this is obviously showing they intend to not fix it

Post by nitwit005 » Fri, Mar 20, 2020, 5:26 AM UTC

sneak wrote: post #2

> We use sophisticated tools, including machine learning, to combat them, and we are making it increasingly difficult for bad actors to hide. So sophisticated that some reporter for wired could find them in the top few hundred bestsellers in a few minutes with a quick visual scan. Let’s be clear: Amazon should not be censoring legal items on their platform. However, their efforts at stopping it are purely a PR matter…

Post by wtallis » Fri, Mar 20, 2020, 5:54 AM UTC

epr wrote: post #44

wtallis wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Higher prices encourage a balance of needs and responsible budgeting so individual cells don't simply take all that is available to the detriment of the organism as a whole. Aren't you making a fairly unreasonable assumption that need is also accompanied by ability to pay elevated prices?

Not at all, hence the word "encourage" instead of something more absolute like "enforce". The distinction between a "want" and "need" is very tough to make beyond physical reality bound calculations of measurable requirements for survival like calories or materials required to build a shelter that could keep a human alive under adverse environmental conditions. I mean nothing specific like that by the use of the word…

Post by Symbiote » Fri, Mar 20, 2020, 6:14 AM UTC

j-c-hewitt wrote: post #53

gentleman11 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be that a single intern whose only job was to search for prohibited items and unlist them could do better Really, just use Mechanical Turk. Their inability to handle this is obviously showing they intend to not fix it

You can create hundreds of thousands of listings almost instantly through the API or by uploading a spreadsheet to Amazon. It's not possible for manual review for all of them because of this. That is why they lean so heavily on both automation and armies of cheap contractors.