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Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

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Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#91

Post by mffnbs »

CaptainZapp wrote: post #62
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #34

This among many reasons is is why I cancelled my prime membership. The quality control is abysmal. It's become an eBay, but without a proper dispute system, and crazy prices. Many goods get listed at multiples of the price available elsewhere and if you're not paying attention you can get screwed. It's totally buyer beware. The trust that Amazon established over the years has been lost. I ordered something on Amazon…

And then you stumble over stories like this[1]. In a way it's her own damn fault. If I invest a significant amout of money into a branded product I'd probably visit the store of the brand, or a reseller licensed by the brand. But I sure as hell wouldn't order a $1000 coat from Amazon. That just yells: RIP ME OFF! [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/count...

I read the story and honestly don't see that the writer is at fault. Sure, criticize the woman for not knowing better, but that's where her blame stops and Amazon takes the rest.

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#92

Post by dahart »

> At one point in 2013, some Amazon employees began scanning randomly selected third-party products in Amazon warehouses for lead content, say people familiar with the tests. Around 10% of the products tested failed, one says. The failed products were purged, but higher-level employees decided not to expand the testing, fearing it would be unmanageable if applied to the entire marketplace, the people familiar with the tests say. Amazon declined to comment on the episode.

This crosses a higher threshold than many of the other anecdotes, it sounds like there’s an actual record of willful negligence.

What’s the likely big picture economic situation with Amazon? Is there any way to estimate where the bulk of fake goods are coming from and the money through Amazon is going to? China was mentioned several times in the article, is this a China problem, or actually bigger than that? Has Amazon formed a tunnel that primarily moves illegal low-quality product into the US and money out? Is Amazon the largest vector for foreign goods that are breaking US laws to be sold in the US, or is this an internet problem in general? I can’t think of other US retailers, even online, that I’m scared to shop at for fear of fake product.

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#93

Post by jjoonathan »

AlexandrB wrote: post #64

Their shipping practices have also degraded. Amazon usually ships anything they can in bubble-padded envelopes. This is ok for many things, but for books it's a disaster - softcovers almost always end up with damaged covers, hardcovers get dented corners from being dropped without any protection. I've also received movies and video games with cases damaged worse than what you'd see in a second-hand store. The (suprem…

Another favorite: receiving your item freely bouncing around in a much larger box alongside a single bubble pack that neither tries to nor succeeds at filling any appreciable amount of the empty space available for said bouncing around.

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#94

Post by burlesona »

leemcalilly wrote: post #75
martythemaniak wrote: post #30

I wonder if Amazon won't somehow kill itself with poor quality. I needed a bunch of LED bulbs recently and I knew exactly what I was looking for - about a dozen 40W eq, two 60w eq and two 100w eq, all in 2700K and two 100w in 3000K. Amazon was a mess - prices were all over the place, exact products were hard to find, etc. Dollarama had them all for $2.50, $3.50 and $4.00 a piece, usually in all three flavours (2700,…

I’ve long thought this sort of thing would be a really good business model. You could launch a bunch of vertical sites and use the same shipping / fulfillment system. Huge irony would be if you did this with Fulfillment by Amazon, but it would probably work. I guess the core problem is that when you’re looking for something new, browsing Amazon is a total mess. It would be much easier to do a web search and find bull…

As I understand it, if you fulfill with Amazon they keep your inventory mixed with the Chinese knockoffs, so you actually don’t know for sure if customers got the inventory you sent to Amazon or a counterfeit instead.

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#95

Post by corobo »

danso wrote: post #72
sergiotapia wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take the number of helmets in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

Pulling a listing is not the same as issuing a recall. And your arithmetic does nothing to account for the hit to reputation and trust.

It's a quote from Fight Club

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#96

Post by rchaud »

Amazon's transformation in Canada has been remarkable. Back in 2011 or so, the selection for anything was extremely sparse, like the shelves in a Soviet-era store. Today, the shelves are full, but with third party sellers selling used products as new, and the search results jammed with no-name Chinese brands with thousands of 5-star reviews.

I bought a Blackberry Key 2 LE on Amazon.ca, advertised as a Canadian model and brand new. When it arrived, the box clearly labeled it as a refurbished product to be sold in India only. Thankfully they still offer a no-questions asked return policy , but maybe that's limited to Prime members. Once my student subscription expires, I'll be off Amazon forever. Just not worth the hassle.

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#97

Post by hitpointdrew »

stanski wrote: post #24

They were sued for the recklessly mislabeled helmet and still didn't take the posting down? Even if they could've argued that they themselves were fooled by the seller initially, not following up after the guy was killed points to a much bigger issue. Basically they just don't give a shit. Side note: I'm filled with dread just thinking about buying a motorcycle helmet from amazon.

> Side note: I'm filled with dread just thinking about buying a motorcycle helmet from amazon.

Don't, I wouldn't. Revzilla, sells all sorts of motorcycle gear and has a great reputation. https://www.revzilla.com/

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#99

Post by duxup »

ethbro wrote: post #89
duxup wrote: post #46

That and they've gone the wall-mart route of actually PUSHING anything / the lowest price possible. I get stuff that's like 5% cheaper but quality looks to be about 50% the quality pushed on me all the time on Amazon now. I went to Amazon originally to find QUALITY products that my local stores didn't carry because of price pressures. Now Amazon seems to be switching to just being ... wall-mart and that's already nea…

It feels like the only rational explanation is "Bezos wants it like this." I know the folks at Amazon are talented, but the abject failure to optimize for quality over quantity is pretty much only explainable as intentional. I guess a second runner up would be that they're so organizationally KPI-focused, and their KPIs are so myopic, that no one actually realizes how much they're screwing up customer experience. But…

I agree. It seems that it is by design in some way. The shift is really dramatic.

Perhaps it is just "we're not eating enough of the wall-mart (call it what you want) market". And now they're going after that at the expense of the larger brand.

They're big enough now that they'll grow / maybe miss what they're doking up until it is too late.

I'm already shopping elsewhere more often / actively searching out alternatives to Amazon.

Re: Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

#100

Post by EGreg »

Policing at scale is difficult, as YouTube and Facebook have learned.

Small communities are far easier to police. But to do it pre-emptively with AI is an open problem. My interest is how can we make a system that will reliably converge in most cases to what’s true, like Wikipedia? It would be GREAT to have it for making sense collaboratively of news, politics, religion. People submit claims/evidence and each one has its own page.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiality_and_Othe...

What is the incentive model? One I thought of is that you gain reputation points linearly but lose them exponentially in high-stakes challenges. The question is who can resolve a challenge one way or the other. And whether the result is immutable or can swing back if it turns out eg that the challenge was swayed by a coordinated effort.

If it’s a static system there are always going to be increasingly sophisticated attacks built on coordination (sybil attacks, sleepers). The most basic attacks require a net gain in credits to be sustainable. Namely, coordinated attacks (marauders) have to win challenges (and net positive points). But later on, attacks can be paid for by trading outside currency (eg BTC or USD) in exchange for using internal credits (“aged accounts”) in “vandalism” actions (attacks which do not gain credits but may even lose them, but are sustained by outside gain).

This is an issue for the source of truth for cryptocurrency as well, but at least the data is very well defined, and there doesn’t seem to be a huge gain from vandalism (except shorting). National elections in the US also have similar things for ballot counting. On Amazon and the sites I’m talking about, we are referencing outside events instead of internal processes. Wikipedia seems to have the most successful model w human editors of various kinds watching over the result.

Is there published research on the game-theoretic aspects of maintaining integrity of collaboratively edited information about the external world?

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