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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

#71

Post by gnopgnip »

aeternum wrote: post #54
Areading314 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not the automation, the problem is that a single authority has a complete monopoly on certain aspects of the e-commerce market. Full credit to Bezos and Amazon for their incredible execution in achieving this. However, monopolies are an example of market failure, and in this case, also an example of an authority able to act as judge + jury where the affected parties have no realistic recourse, while be…

Why does it matter that this happened with Amazon? It could have also happened with ebay, walmart, or a local uncle bob's discount closet shop. We have a judicial system to deal with issues like this which generally handles things fairly regardless of the size of each party.

Amazon requires mediation or arbitration, so there is no access to the judicial system

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

#72

Post by mjevans »

doodlebugging wrote: post #63

I think the most interesting thing here is that Amazon can effectively claim a seller's property is fake based on reviews that everyone knows are regularly gamed. Then they can refuse access to the inventory and make the claim, without having to provide any evidence, that the questionable inventory has in fact been destroyed and not just passed on to another seller behind the scenes. Accountability is entirely absent…

The cominging is also an issue. How does anyone know which supplier actually supplied X among Amazon's swath of caches? As a consumer, how do I know that when I buy from one FBA retailer on Amazon, the stock wasn't actually sourced by another that's also in that program?

The lack of transparency, the lack of the consumer (and presumably also retailers) being able to trace these products back to their source of manufacture is the issue. Keep the records that need to be kept, let tracking figure out if there are customers returning bad items, or fraudulent suppliers, or just a run of bad product that had a given lot code.

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

#73

Post by adamparsons »

gnopgnip wrote: post #71
aeternum wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it matter that this happened with Amazon? It could have also happened with ebay, walmart, or a local uncle bob's discount closet shop. We have a judicial system to deal with issues like this which generally handles things fairly regardless of the size of each party.

Amazon requires mediation or arbitration, so there is no access to the judicial system

Perhaps this is the issue, having a legal system that you can opt out of. Sounds godawful.

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

#74

Post by haasted »

bawolff wrote: post #36
yeneek wrote: post #8

Selling on Amazon is really hard. Just one fake product claim from a customer can make your seller account blocked. And because customer is always right, seller has to prove product validity.

Im ok with the onus being on the seller to prove they are selling real goods.

Quite the attack vector for competitors, though.

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

#75

Post by adinisom »

shajznnckfke wrote: post #43
lotsofpulp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The old solution of Amazon mostly ignoring the fakes and just compensating people who complain avoids this scenario. Being a proper retailer and sourcing goods from reputable sources, performing quality control, and then reselling them to the public without the commingling nonsense also avoids this scenario.

What does comingling have to do with it? Apparently Amazon was able to destroy this seller’s merchandise specifically, so it doesn’t sound like there was a problem identifying it among commingled inventory. I’m getting the impression from the comments here that a lot of people just have an axe to grind about commingling even if there’s no clear connection to the issue at hand (people do seem to bring it up on all sor…

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 blocks his products.

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

#76

Post by stjohnswarts »

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…

Amazon could fix this. This isn't an all or nothing "digital bad" "bureaucrats bad" situation. It's Amazon and one complaint. This guy should find a good lawyer and take them to court. He had proof that his stuff was not counterfit. Adding some arbitrary "you have to have a receipt no more than 365 days old" is ridiculous. Amazon just doesn't care. Even for a 1.5 million dollars worth of stock. What are the chances that they give a hoot about the average guy on the street? It seems to me like they could do something sensible like "we have 4 complaints out of 10000 orders, chances are these are just peeved customers, tell him make them whole". That seems like just basic logic to me.

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

#77

Post by _-___________-_ »

Google234 wrote: post #24
grishka wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being an Android developer is a similar experience. If your app gets removed from Google Play, even if it's clearly by mistake, good luck having it reinstated. Unless you know a googler or two. Then it's a breeze. Going through official channels you'll be hitting a wall.

Doubt that is true. Every company has internal policies to stop favoritism like that.

I've had many interactions with Google where the automated system was clearly wrong but after multiple attempts at human escalation, literally the only way to solve the problem was to ask the right friends who happen to work there, after which the problem was solved almost immediately.

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

#78

Post by DoreenMichele »

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 crazy happens. We are making it far too easy to fall and far too hard to come back from it and this is why we also see headlines about how society is coming unraveled and the like.

Please don't see this as some bizarre statistical outlier. Many homeless people were solidly middle class at one time and then things came apart and we are terrible about actively making it unnecessarily harder than it should be to get back on their feet.

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

#79

Post by shajznnckfke »

adinisom wrote: post #75
shajznnckfke wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does comingling have to do with it? Apparently Amazon was able to destroy this seller’s merchandise specifically, so it doesn’t sound like there was a problem identifying it among commingled inventory. I’m getting the impression from the comments here that a lot of people just have an axe to grind about commingling even if there’s no clear connection to the issue at hand (people do seem to bring it up on all sor…

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…

You can use Amazon for fulfillment without participating in commingled inventory. In that case, Amazon would still have possession of your inventory, and if you didn’t cooperate when they tried to return it to you, it might end up getting destroyed.

If Amazon didn’t offer fulfillment as a service, and just bought product from suppliers to sell, this same issue can arise - the supplier can deliver items which seem possibly fraudulent. Then Amazon will fight with the supplier about returning those items and depending on what kind of contracts are in place, could end up destroying them (this seems to be essentially what happened here).

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

#80

Post by stjohnswarts »

shajznnckfke wrote: post #16

There are a lot of complaints about allegedly fake merchandise on Amazon and people asking for a crackdown. This is what the other side of that story looks like. The old solution of Amazon mostly ignoring the fakes and just compensating people who complain avoids this scenario.

They could bring in some common sense measures like "what is the ratio of complaints to total number of sales" and "did the seller get the chance to rectify the situation"
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