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A foreign seller has hijacked my Amazon Klein bottle listing

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Re: A foreign seller has hijacked my Amazon Klein bottle listing

#531

Post by reaperducer »

mint2 wrote: post #496
fma wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I buy a lot from Walmart now, to drive business away from Amazon (I would never have typed these words a few years ago...). First thing I do is click Retailer = Walmart.com.

I think I’ll start as well. I used to consider Walmart worse, and never shopped there. But for several years I’ve intentionally been avoiding Amazon when at all practical. But I’m going to avoid them at all costs. Amazon seems both willfully and unintentionally incompetent. They have so many strikes against them. Their prime dark patterns are hostile enough, and I avoided it for years. But I needed a cheap plastic it…

They made whole foods a bad experience by treating non-prime members as second class customers.

To be honest, there's not much difference between Prime and non-Prime at Whole Foods. The Prime specials are very few and far between, and usually not worth very much. There are more signs about discounts in the store than actual discounts in the store.

I think the only thing I ever get a Prime discount on is my wife's favorite cheese and occasionally steak. But pre-Amazon, the cheese was $4.99 a package. Post-Amazon, I need a Prime discount to get it down to $6.99 a package.

Re: A foreign seller has hijacked my Amazon Klein bottle listing

#532

Post by DelightOne »

IronWolve wrote: post #490
EricE wrote: post #449

A perfect example of why I buy less and less from sites that support 3rd party sellers. The problem is even once reliable sites like newegg.com are now playing these games. If I wanted the Ebay/alibaba experience I can get that! Why large retailer sites dilute their brand and frustrate customers in the fruitless chase of "being like Amazon" in catering to 3rd party sellers amazes and annoys me. At least most other si…

Amazon is more expensive on many items even with free shipping. Shopping for coffee makers, air conditioners i noticed I could get them cheaper and with free shipping from home depot and walmart. While amazon is super handy, even food items like can goods are cheaper on walmart, but you have to wait a few days for shipping. Its can goods, theres no hurry, save money and shop around.

Amazon should offer an option where its OK to wait longer for wares as long as its 100% certain that it comes from the manufacturer.

Re: A foreign seller has hijacked my Amazon Klein bottle listing

#533

Post by fncypants »

paulpauper wrote: post #446
mrandish wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame that a small-time reseller like Cliff has to go to the trouble and expense to register a trademark to protect his listing (which I doubt Cliff will bother with). Until about 5-6 years ago the changes Amazon made almost universally made their service better and more pro-user convenience/efficiency. Since then it's really become a nightmare. I realize they are being abused by scammers who are scheming ever…

Making the step from a hobby to a business means having to make the necessary investments, some of which may be costly and a pain in the ass, to protect one's intellectual property.

I'm not sure why the parent was downvoted. The trademark scheme was built to make marketplaces more efficient, by giving producers a carve out in the conversation--a word or phrase or logo--so that they and consumers and distributors can engage together confidently with some bright line rules to work with.

The alternative is anarchy, and much more expensive then filing for a trademark if you want to sell in the marketplace. Like insurance, everyone that wants to be in the market pays a little, so that it makes it easier to avoid something like this.

Re: A foreign seller has hijacked my Amazon Klein bottle listing

#534

Post by reaperducer »

jonahhorowitz wrote: post #492
fma wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I buy a lot from Walmart now, to drive business away from Amazon (I would never have typed these words a few years ago...). First thing I do is click Retailer = Walmart.com.

I used to hate Best Buy because I had some poor return experiences back in the 90s, but now it's my first choice for online shopping because they only sell first-party items and they have control over their supply chain. This is particularly important for frequently-counterfeited products like SD cards.

I had some poor return experiences back in the 90s, but now it's my first choice

My wife knows the person who is responsible for this, and tells me that the person who implemented these changes knows exactly what you're talking about because that person had the same horrible experiences with Best Buy decades ago. That's the reason things have changed.

Re: A foreign seller has hijacked my Amazon Klein bottle listing

#535

Post by freeopinion »

I meant to show a simple example of how a vendor offers the same product for the same price on their own website and on Amazon. I was going to argue that they should mark it up on Amazon to encourage traffic through their own site. So I just grabbed a random item on Amazon to illustrate this:

https://www.amazon.com/Adafruit-2769-Circuit-Playground-Educ...

$99.99 "Adafruit 2769 Circuit Playground Express Educator's Pack"

https://www.adafruit.com/product/3399

$350.00 "Code.org Circuit Playground Express Educators' Pack"

https://www.adafruit.com/product/2769

$99.95 "Circuit Playground Express Advanced Pack"

Then I looked closer at the Amazon listing, thinking it odd that Adafruit would confuse the product label. I see that it isn't being sold by Adafruit. So somebody is apparently buying one product from Adafruit, relabeling it on Amazon as a much more expensive product, and misleading buyers. And that's a generous reading.

I'm not pointing this out as a warning that it can happen. I'm pointing out that I didn't pick this product to illustrate this point. I picked a random product to illustrate a different point, but ran into this. Granted, this is a uselessly small sample size, but sheesh!

One moral of this story: Always buy direct when possible. Never buy through Amazon if it can be avoided.

It irritates me to find a vendor who offers a product cheaper through Amazon than on their own website. That encourages the exact type of abuse seen here.

(I'm not ripping Adafruit for doing this. Of the pages of products displayed by Amazon when I searched for "sold by Adafruit" I didn't find any evidence that Adafruit even sells on Amazon. Lot's of other people--including Amazon--sell Adafruit products on Amazon. Somehow they can meet or beat Adafruit's price. Have to wonder how many are legit.)

Re: A foreign seller has hijacked my Amazon Klein bottle listing

#536

Post by reaperducer »

TameAntelope wrote: post #521
abawany wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that Walmart and Best Buy also sell a lot of 3rd-party stuff now. I find it strange that on their site I always have to filter by Retailer=Walmart.com to get their listings and even then, it sometimes filters out some of their own listings.

They did this to directly compete with Amazon, I'm constantly baffled as to why they persist with this design. Every time you hear, " sold on Walmart website!" it's always a reseller, not directly from them.

I'm constantly baffled as to why they persist with this design.

Because "monkey see, monkey do" is pretty much the go-to leadership strategy for a lot of big companies these days.

Bad managers manage badly. Senior "leadership" rarely knows the meaning of the world.

Re: A foreign seller has hijacked my Amazon Klein bottle listing

#537

Post by reaperducer »

danparsonson wrote: post #258
helixfelix wrote: post #221

What is ironic is that there is an annual Award given to an AWS employee called the Cliff Stoll Award: For those individuals who see something suspicious, not working as expected, show ownership and drive it to resolution. As Cliff did to find a KGB spy, and documented in "The Cuckoo's Egg". I wonder what would happen if someone at Amazon pulled on this thread and not only solved Cliff's problem but also the root cau…

Plot twist: the root cause is greed

I posit that it's not greed. It's laziness. Why do a great job, when "good enough" is good enough for 90% of the people? That's how business works today.

Re: A foreign seller has hijacked my Amazon Klein bottle listing

#538

Post by JohnTHaller »

fma wrote: post #461
EricE wrote: post #449

A perfect example of why I buy less and less from sites that support 3rd party sellers. The problem is even once reliable sites like newegg.com are now playing these games. If I wanted the Ebay/alibaba experience I can get that! Why large retailer sites dilute their brand and frustrate customers in the fruitless chase of "being like Amazon" in catering to 3rd party sellers amazes and annoys me. At least most other si…

I buy a lot from Walmart now, to drive business away from Amazon (I would never have typed these words a few years ago...). First thing I do is click Retailer = Walmart.com.

Walmart has tons of sketchy 3rd party sellers as well, but yes, clicking Retailer=Walmart will get you Walmart. To my knowledge, they don't do the same inventory intermingling that Amazon does.

Re: A foreign seller has hijacked my Amazon Klein bottle listing

#539

Post by binarysolo »

Symbiote wrote: post #472
binarysolo wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry Cliff: the system sucks because there's a lot of edge case handling when they're dealing with millions of vendors selling literal hundreds of millions of SKUs. Many of them autogenerated programmatically like "I love X" shirts, and X = some dictionary list; or bots built to crosslist Target/Walmart product over to Amazon etc. for arbitrage etc. I hope someone from Amazon has reached out to you Cliff - my wi…

The system sucks because the income gained through dealing with millions of vendors selling literally hundreds of millions of SKUs is channelled into Amazon's profits, rather than people or systems to deal with the resulting problems.

It's actually worse I think: Amazon demands the people and systems to be better-on-metrics over time -- dealing with Seller Support is just a huge nightmare these days as a seller.

Re: A foreign seller has hijacked my Amazon Klein bottle listing

#540

Post by CliffStoll »

kabbalf wrote: post #272
CliffStoll wrote: post #116

Guess I'd better say a few things. First, I deeply appreciate that so many on Hacker News have come out for this. Enough to awaken me from a sound sleep on a Tuesday evening! I don't really care that much about selling Klein bottles over Amazon - it's mainly to reach parents over the holidays. But I do wish that Amazon would do something about this kind of thing. Finally, I"m very low on stocks of glass Klein bottles…

Hey Cliff, just wanted to say that the Klein bottle I bought in 2014 or so is the best buying experience I’ve ever had. It’s still the only piece of home decoration I own. Thanks!

Many thanks, indeed, Kabb. I hope the manifold is still working after, uh, seven years. (You're aware, of course, that it's covered by my exclusive 1,000,000 year guarantee.)
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