Yikes:
> A Wall Street Journal investigation found 4,152 items for sale on Amazon.com Inc. ’s site that have been declared unsafe by federal agencies, are deceptively labeled or are banned by federal regulators—items that big-box retailers’ policies would bar from their shelves. Among those items, at least 2,000 listings for toys and medications lacked warnings about health risks to children.
> Of the 4,152 products the Journal identified, 46% were listed as shipping from Amazon warehouses.
This is a top-of-the-front-page, well-researched article in a leading newspaper -- it's the kind of coverage that destroys hard-earned reputations built over decades.
Shame on Amazon.
> 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.
A few thoughts:
* Amazon is a total mess right now, and this is great investigative reporting. I think Amazon is going to go through a rough year or two in PR terms. They need to get this under control quickly.
* Amazon can pretend that it's just a platform, but in practice they benefit from consumers assuming that everything on the site has some stamp of approval (even if it's not as full a stamp as, say, buying the item from Costco.) Right now, they're abusing that consumer trust by doing a lousy job of monitoring product listings on their site. Over the long term, they risk losing that trust altogether. That's a huge risk to them, and it's a little short-sighted to take no ownership of product listings on their site as the basis for legal defense.
* This reminds me of the recent reporting about AirBnb dealing with scammy listings in Canada [0]. I think that both AirBnb and Amazon are capable of getting these problems under control, but they haven't proven it as of yet. When the solution comes, it will be expensive and involve a lot of human labor. That is true no matter how many times they wave their magics wands and yell "Machine Learning!"
* Some of the violations pointed out here are pretty dumb. How much does not labeling balloons as choking hazards actually threaten safety? Of course, that reflects a tolerance of rule-breaking and law-breaking that reflects poorly on Amazon.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/airbnb-montreal-aj-h...
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 near me...
It has gotten so bad that I've searched for good products on Amazon that I know were there, and they're gone. Like if you don't want a crappy HDMI switch that looks like every other cheap HDMI switch, your options seem to be fewer and fewer.
And that doesn't account for the questionable health products that they push on me for no apparent reason (i've never surfed for or bought such products form them...or anyone).
Increasingly Amazon wants to tell me what to buy, and what they tell me is they want me to buy garbage.
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 Canada, it was listed as sold by Amazon.com.ca. It qualified for prime. I ordered expecting it to arrive in 2 days. It took over a week and it became clear after the fact that it had been sourced from a US supplier and because it happened over the 4th of July it sat in a warehouse for a few days over the holiday.
Amazon hid that it was a third party supplier. Amazon hid that it was coming from across the border. Amazon refused to cancel and refund the order once this became clear.
They've really gone down hill.
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, 3000 and 5000K).
Made me want to start a Shopify store called "Bullshit Free Bulbs". bullshitfreebulbs.com is available btw.
How much of this could be solved by a simple "know your supplier" law? As a consumer, I should be able to ask any retailer: "From whom did you source the actual item that you sold me?" Amazon should not be able to get away with saying they don't know.
As it stands, Amazon is just a conduit for goods to bypass consumer safety laws.
This is a totally solved problem. In the normal retail world, sellers are responsible for the defective items they sell, regardless of if they knew or not.
If you buy a defective thing from best buy, they are responsible.
They may turn around and sue the next person up the chain for doing the same (selling it to them).
This incentivizes companies to be careful who they buy from.
The problem here is that the article refers to them as "third party sellers". They aren't in most cases, amazon just has a large distributed supply chain.
If you want amazon to care, make them liable for the stuff sold on their website, the same way best buy is for the stuff in their store.
Problem solved.
This will not destroy their business - it has not destroyed any other business.
It will simply cause them to care.
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 (supremely ironic) result is that Amazon is now my last choice for buying books.
There's a 0% chance I would ever buy food or any type of consumable from Amazon. There's way too many people selling counterfeit items and there's no reasonable way to tell until you end up either dead or sick.
My friend's cat came inches from dying because of flea treatment purchased there not too long ago. When it was purchased it had 4+ star reviews and generally seemed good. But if you look at the ratings today (months later), the average ratings went way down and there's just an endless amount of reviews saying the stuff is poison. Some people even lost their cat.
The messed up thing is it's the same exact brand and box you would see on the shelf at a store so there's no way to tell just by looking at the product. At least not from a laymen's POV (I looked at both boxes and didn't see any glaring differences).
I’ve got the same experience as many other posters here and have been buying less from Amazon lately.
One thing I haven’t seen people talking about much is how profound and impact Apple Pay is for direct online retail.
I used to find products on a company website and then go to Amazon to buy, mainly so I didn’t need to create yet another account, and because of prime shipping and Amazon’s return policy.
The amazing thing with Apple Pay is how much it creates an even better purchasing experience than Amazon’s “one-click,” while being open to any merchant. You don’t have to create an account, put in your shipping or billing info, or do anything really. You just click “buy with Apple Pay,” and click to confirm.
Between that, and offering “free shipping” (just include it in the product price), and a good return policy, I see retailers being much more able to sell direct and compete with Amazon’s fading reputation.
I appreciate why the title was modified from the original, but the mistaken use of "it's" rather than "its" was introduced in the process and should be corrected.
More anecdotal data, but our family (which used to spend $5k+ a year on Amazon) decided to actively buy locally and do what we can to reduce packaging waste (mainly for food). (note: I applaud Amazon's influence in the past decade fighting the clamshell package).
Just looked and we now spent less than $500 so far this year.
Reduced consumption, sometimes going without that new shiny thing and instead borrowing or buying used. For food, we simply cut out delivery (if we want resto food we go to a place that uses reusable cutlery, if we want staples, we just go to a store nearby and try to get bulk items).
Amazon has killed my trust in generic online stores. Fulfilled by Amazon sounds like a fraud engine, and I simply can't support that anymore. I'd like to know if there's a good alternative, but for now we just don't shop online if we can avoid it.
The problem of many web-based businesses is, they can't decide (or don't want to) if they are more like the phone company, or more like a bricks-and-mortar business. If they are like the phone company, they are not responsible for guaranteeing that what you buy over the phone is legit, but they also don't get a cut. If they are like a bricks-and-mortar business, they do take a cut, but they get liability. It is similar to Facebook, Twitter etc. trying to sometimes act like a phone company and sometimes like a conference hall.
The reason is clear: they want to be compensated like a retailer or conference hall, but have the (relative lack of) liability of the phone company or the postal service, who don't make any claims that communications via their services are going to be honest, just that they allowed the two parties to communicate.
Gradually, they are all going to be forced by society (not only government) into one role or the other, but I am not surprised they are trying to put that off as long as possible.
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.
This is addressed in the 10-k. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872419...
"We Could Be Liable for Fraudulent or Unlawful Activities of Sellers
The law relating to the liability of online service providers is currently unsettled. In addition, governmental agencies could require changes in the way this business is conducted. Under our seller programs, we may be unable to prevent sellers from collecting payments, fraudulently or otherwise, when buyers never receive the products they ordered or when the products received are materially different from the sellers’ descriptions. We also may be unable to prevent sellers in our stores or through other stores from selling unlawful, counterfeit, pirated, or stolen goods, selling goods in an unlawful or unethical manner, violating the proprietary rights of others, or otherwise violating our policies. Under our A2Z Guarantee, we reimburse buyers for payments up to certain limits in these situations, and as our third-party seller sales grow, the cost of this program will increase and could negatively affect our operating results. In addition, to the extent any of this occurs, it could harm our business or damage our reputation and we could face civil or criminal liability for unlawful activities by our sellers."
I'm much more likely these days to go to either ebay (e.g. for the replacement phone battery I got a week or two back) or to a vendor that doesn't do Amazon's commingling of stock (B&H, Target, etc.). This is particularly true where I think it's something likely to be counterfeited (any high-value commodity, thank god I'm not ordering something like baby formula).
I'm willing to pay a premium for the trust factor, because if I get burned with a bad product on even 10% of my purchases the value of my time dealing with it is probably more than I've ever saved ordering through Amazon - particularly if it's something I wanted quickly where I can't afford the chance of "Oh, sorry you got a counterfeit, we'll ship another and you'll have it in 2 days, hope it's legit this time."
Edit: And I don't think I'll EVER purchase a MicroSD card through Amazon.
I nearly bought a book in Audible last week, but hesitated because something seemed off with the reviews[0]. After a little digging I realised ALL the reviewers had only reviewed this book and another about Keto. And looking on Amazon for the same author "G.S. Hook" I noticed one of the books had reviews which while all unique, were basically all following the same template containing the same exact phrases[1].
I spoke with customer service and gave them specific examples to investigate. They didn't care in the slightest. It's made me realise that their reviews cannot be trusted. "Verified purchase" means nothing. I always chose Amazon over eBay and AliExpress because I thought it was worth the slightly higher prices to have peace of mind that the reviews were policed and what I would receive was genuine and safe. But that's clearly no longer the case.
[0] https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Communication-Skills-Training-T...
(The reviewers have since reviewed other books. But you'll still see the same pattern of the same books being reviewed.)
[1] https://www.amazon.com/COMMUNICATION-MARRIAGE-effective-comm...
(One recurring phrase "which made her realize she had a problem too"
Amazon has calculated they're not liable if they don't spend appropriate oversight. It's a type of fraud like tax evasion that they can legally commit, because all that will happen is in 5 - 10 years some government will spend three years suing them to change the contrived status quo that would see any retail shop shut down.
I never had a problem (that I know of) with fakes on Amazon. I did cancel my prime membership and switched to Walmart. I feel like prices went up and quality went down. I wish I could move stuff away at work, we spend millions each month on AWS.
Been saying for a long time Amazon is a flee market. Many times it's my last choice now when shopping online.
For me, Amazon's main purpose is to get them to price match Best Buy. Why wait 3 days when I can just go to Best Buy, show them the same item for $30 cheaper on Amazon and get it immediately?
So it turns out that the lead-tainted xylophone pictured in that article is sitting in my living room, along with the other items from that "Amazon's Choice" instrument set. It's all going in the trash and I'm never allowing any off-brand item from Amazon near our kids again.
(I guess the fact that the xylophone wasn't tuned to any recognizable scale should have been a red flag.)
At the risk of dogpiling on other comments, I also feel Amazon's quality has hit rock bottom. I used to use Amazon because it had a reputation for quality items. Now they all come from China and I pay Western prices for the privilege of having it shipped to me faster.
USB keys and SD cards are almost all universally garbage rip-offs, and I recently purchased a stroller from Amazon, but had a bit of a panic moment when I wondered whether the baby carrier itself was certified by Canadian authorities (it was, but I shouldn't have to ever wonder).
For all of my child's items, I'm now steering clear of Amazon.
This article also didn't mention that when you order a product that Amazon sells alongside 3rd party vendors who use Amazon fulfillment, they mix inventory. When ordering from Amazon, I always try to buy from Amazon directly when given the option. However, on one or two occasions, I have been delivered items that were clearly used and repackaged but were sold as new by Amazon. The only explanation I've found for this is that Amazon accepts inventory from 3rd parties for fulfillment and mixes that inventory with its own.
We used to buy from Amazon since it was a stamp of quality. I tried buying a usb-c cable for my mac mini, and it was terrible. So many brands and no way of knowing what to get. Today you might as well buy from Ebay.
What online store exists today, where I can be guaranteed to buy quality things? Do they no longer exist?
its infuriating that amazon likes to play innocent and claim they are not the seller of these products but at the same time do their best to project a unified front and to hide that certain products come from different sellers. At best you get a little link that might go to everything else that seller has listed but without knowledge from articles like this one of how amazon handles things I would never know the different between seemingly identical products.
With internet companies sometimes being held responsible for illegal content they host (provided by third parties), shouldn't Amazon be liable for facilitating the sale of or directly selling counterfeit goods?... especially when they have been alerted many times that a particular item is counterfeit?
I recently emailed jeff bezos / his executive customer response team got back with me and let me tell them for 2 hours how I felt their service has gone to shit.
One of the things I explained that happened is that as Amazon got closer via more warehouses the shipping actually went to crap. I also explained how their Amazon shipping vans are sub par even to USPS.
I asked for a basic prime teir free shipping only for $79/yr and asked for shipping options to be available ~ I'd pay +$2-3 to choose fedex over ups for example...
If anything they gave me a chance to vent. I also followed up in email sharing how products are being hijacked for reviews and how there are facebook groups for fake review gathering..
In other words, this Amazon is burning as well!
It's time to reconsider the relationships with these kind of markets, which contributed to the demise of countless small businesses across the country, these were typically run by passionate people who cared both about their product and customer generally, sure, exceptions were to be found.
We need to move on from the get something for nothing attitude on top of the fact that we don't need to buy unlimited stuff (as one could say the smaller stores system cannot cater to all of our cravings).
Quality over quantity; and let's take back our internet, build a website, a nice following, take good care of your customers and build a brand. Personally, I never went for any kind of markets, stuck to my website and I am still in business (since 2004) due to my customers whom I care for dearly every time they need my services.
The internet was designed as a decentralized system, why would anyone give that up so easily? Cheap stuff and convenience.
A quality obituary is in order if we continue this way.
Already this year the number of purchases I've made is cut in half from last year. I've gotten burned with too many poor 3rd party sellers. They are so greedy for the short term revenues they don't realize that us "idiots" are starting to lost trust in their system, and if that happens at a large scale, their business will collapse.
Attempting to solve the quality problem is possible. I imagine it's easier at Amazons scale because of the amount of data they have.
This should raise a number of questions.
So, why don't they put forth a solid effort? Is it due to regulatory reasons? If so, should they not publicly state that to put pressure on legislatures or to have a real public discussion.
Jeff Bezos signed the new purpose of a corporation [1]. The first bullet reads, "Delivering value to our customers. We will further the tradition of American companies leading the way in meeting or exceeding customer expectations."
Does he not mean it? How does he define value?
[1] https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redef...
My biggest problem is not being able to discern the quality of an item before I purchase. Ratings were last reliable 10 years ago. Different brands used to mean different products, so you used to be able to feature-and-price compare. About the only thing I've figured out to do is to look at pictures to try to group items by manufacturer, purchase one-per-real-manufacturer, then return all of the obvious crap and hope I end up with at least one good item.
Maybe we need a Facebook plugin through which people can (willingly) share their purchases. Don't look at ratings for products from rando strangers, only see the stuff your friends have bought. In the worst case, you're no worse off than the status quo, but maybe I could finally find a decent laptop bag.
I'd say it's a combination of both some unwillingness and some inability. I think the unwillingness would come more from a desire to avoid a murky, difficult to execute & resource intensive process, and not from a purely mercenary desire to sell more product. Because it would be a better shopping experience and spur more activity if there was greater trust in the 3rd party marketplace.
The inability stems mainly from the same problem large content aggregators always have. Like Youtube's filter generating false positives or false negatives for blocking content or flagging IP issues, or the filter for Youtube Kids letting through inappropriate content. It's all too much to adequately police without unreasonably high (from their perspective) resources.
In general, to me it seems like Amazon focuses more on other things than on refining the way their actual store and its site works.
They've focused a lot on operations and efficiency. They already had 2-day shipping but they've worked to get that down to 1-day shipping where possible. Which is impressive, though 2-day shipping was already pretty good. They've optimized the hell out of their inventory, distribution, etc. They made that Haven joint-venture healthcare thing (together with two other huge companies) to drive down health insurance costs.
Another area they've focused on is new types of business, like cloud computing, buying Whole Foods, getting into video streaming, and hardware devices (Kindle, Fire, Echo).
But the store itself, the web site design and how the store functions, hasn't changed that much. They had a lot of issues with fake reviews, and they eventually did something, but it took a long time. They have some longstanding usability pain points that they haven't done anything about. Reviews are supposed to be about products, not sellers, but people leave comments and ratings about sellers in product reviews because there's no other place to put them (or if there is, it's not easy enough to find). Something (bad UI?) seems to encourage unhelpful "I don't know" type answers in products' "Customer questions & answers" section. If you click "There is a newer model of this item", it often leads to something that isn't. Product categories and the features within them are insufficient or out of date: I can browse the cell phone case category, but under "phone compatibility", Galaxy S10 isn't listed, only Galaxy S9, even though the S10 came out 6 months ago. Similar story with iPhone. And nothing with size variations of phone models (iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR would require different cases).
All of these things would probably benefit everybody if they fixed them. And it's not just a matter of adding polish. There are more innovative things they could do, too. But the attitude seems to be that the store is basically as done as it's going to get.
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.
I run a consulting company for Amazon suppliers[0] and can absolutely confirm the research from wsj is accurate.
Why? Amazon has broken down HUGE barriers, which make it incredibly easy to start selling. You (anyone reading this) can easily spend $5K on a product from China and start selling it almost risk-free. example1, Prop65 EXCLUDES Businesses with 9 or fewer employees.
Why would Amazon sell 1000 products from a single brand if they could sell 10 products from 100 brands while maintaining their margin structure and decreasing liabilities for everyone?
I am LONG $SHOP and wish brands would invest that direction more than they do.
I bought a mechanical key tester (small matrix of keys) from Amazon UK and it got delivered from China. It took weeks to get to my country and I had to endure a completely different customs procedure. Importing from a EU country to another EU country is simplified while importing from China is subject to much more red tape. I am careful now to make sure the seller is not from China. Needless to say Amazon lost a lot of trust in my eyes.
If I wanted AliExpress I would have used it, but when I specifically ordered from Amazon UK I expected to have the merchandise come from inside EU. That was the whole point. The same product is listed in AliExpress much cheaper.
Amazon got this way due to competition in the early 2000s with eBay. Today there aren't a lot of mom-n-pop e-stores. Sure some of it is coming back with Shopify, Magento and others, but most people starting off in online retail just create a store on one of the big marketplaces: Amazon, eBay, Newegg, Reverb or Etsy. All of them both sell their own products and are also meta-resellers.
I wrote about the death of the mom-n-pop estore not too long ago:
https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-death-of-the-mom-and-pop-...
Cheap toys are generally worrying. Unrelated to Amazon specifically, but to get an idea, you can also take a look at this EU site listing some products which have been banned/recalled:
https://ec.europa.eu/consumers/consumers_safety/safety_produ...
Just scroll down a little and click on the weekly reports. The amount of kids toys being recalled every week for containing high amounts of harmful chemicals and other hazards is worrying.
Dropshipping and the dream of selling anything online without having to manage products, warehouses, customers is what happened to amazon. I often get bombarded with "make quick money selling on amazon" ads. Quality has gone down, you never really know what you are getting anymore unless it's from a well known brand. But customers have also become lazy, not doing any research, buying things that are way too cheap and then complaining about the quality.
Bad products and fake copies have been available for years you just had to know where to look... it's just easier to find it now.
Shopping on Amazon has deteriorated gradually over the last three years. It has become enough of a chore that I am considering dropping my Prime membership. The third party sales flood the market with so much crap that it drowns out the quality vendors and the reviews are nearly worthless at this point. I don't how they fix it, but it is broken now.
Amazon's actions (not its words) are the way to figure out whether they care about this. And their actions scream loudly that they don't care about product safety or counterfeiting. The only solution is probably some exponentially escalating fine structure, where on e.g. the fourth offense the fine is 10 billion dollars and on the fifth the company is dissolved. Otherwise Amazon will simply continue to pay the fines as a cost of doing business.
My biggest problems with Amazon:
1. Sellers pretending to be legitimate brands. I’ve bought things thinking I’m buying from this brand I know, turns out it’s just a copycat.
2. Accidentally buying used products which seem to be old models. I’ve made the mistake on a few occasions buying used when I specifically wanted a new item.
Amazon has plummeted in quality but I get a feeling they don’t care. Their ultimate goal is most likely to flush out the top sellers and replace their goods with amazons own brand.
There will only be items of cheesy quality, super high profit margin and excellent marketing/SEO left on Amazon, coz that's how online marketplaces choose winners.
You may have noticed $BABA's high earnings numbers, the late stage leeching is powerful.
Customers may miss the good old days that they could go to real retailers to feel products in person and still have the power to make brands care what they want.
They are neither unable nor unwilling. The mixing of different sellers inventories shows that they do what they do quite deliberately.
Should Amazon be required to perform authenticity and safety on { none of, a few of, some of, a random sample of, all of } the items listed on their marketplace?
Whole Foods often (always?) audits the supply chain of their products. Farmers’ markets sometimes audit the supply chain of their booths. Flea markets and eBay never do.
What burden of audit should be placed upon Amazon?
I don’t get it.
I had about 150 purchases last year. Toothbrushes, Apple Watch bands, hard drives, diapers, truffles, pasta, foot massagers, hats, books, etc.
I had 1 bad purchase. I bought a used Roomba 980 sold by Amazon. There was a used 680 in the box. Amazon apologized and sent a brand new 980 the next day.
Am I some sort of uberresultsfilter, or do the whiners just get way too much attention?
It seems like the best way to get stuff changed at Amazon is to have the Wall Street Journal send them feedback. WSJ is essentially doing free work for amazon - “hey these products are not legit” “oh shucks, our bad, let’s remove those, yea” “hey they reappeared,” “oh our bad let’s remove them again sry”. clearly it’s not a priority for amazon...
Anyone else think this is on purpose? Now they can remove all third party sellers from their platform and cite a trust & safety risk. They've been neglecting sellers on the platform for a decade. Why else would the API be absolutely ancient? A huge change is coming.
Here's a similar thread from some time ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19741942
From my experience selling on Amazon, their vendor tools are absolute trash. These days Amazon(retail) is just a centralised eBay, anyone can list anything.
I remember looking into startup ideas for an FBA venture and the forums being incredibly sleazy most of the time.
That was years ago, no surprise this is the result.
Interesting. I was looking into reselling a few things on the side on Amazon just for fun, but found it nearly impossible to find any product that wasn’t blocked for third-party sellers from selling.
Not to sound pedantic, but I think it would be wise to always use "Amazon.com" when talking about Amazon.com, instead of just Amazon.
I’ve said this before but this will be Amazon’s downfall. Target and Walmart have much better product quality control.
The simplest solution for the consumer is to just check the seller and to avoid buying from sellers other than Amazon. No one is forced to buy from an Amazon FBA or 3rd party seller. Amazon customer support generally has more levers to help you out if you do have a problem.
Well duh, if they did then Bezos wouldn't have $zillions in the bank.
*its
It's not surprising that the various states insisted on collecting sales tax from online sales. Free money! We don't have to do anything! We get it because we're the government!
But, the states have been derelict in their duty to protect and apply the well established protections they insist other stores comply with.
Collecting taxes is not a free lunch. It comes with serious responsibilities.
It's telling that the states are not clamoring to take on these responsibilities. If they are unwilling or unable to take up these responsibilities, then they should not be collecting the taxes.
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?
It seems like the main problem everyone has with Amazon is their curation. Or, to put it more amusingly, “they have too much stuff!” (They have the good stuff you want, but it’s buried in bad stuff that you don’t, too.)
Is this really Amazon’s problem to solve, though? Or is this just a symptom of a bad value-chain ecosystem? Shouldn’t other players be cropping up to be external “shopping search engines” that find you the real, quality items on Amazon’s (and other stores’) huge junk-piles, the way that Google finds you real, quality web pages among the junk-pile that is the web?
Sure, it’d be nice if Amazon solved the problem itself. But I don’t see a reason that it has to be the one to solve the problem. Amazon can just provide infrastructure to allow anyone to sell anything, and then someone else can build “retail experiences” on top. Just like AWS isn’t trying to be Salesforce with a full platform experience.
Amazon overall quality has droped in recent years.
I use to buy from Amazon because I knew I was buying original brands and no chinese cheap copies. Well, that changed a lot. There are specific things that I still buy from Amazon but on most things there's almost no difference between they and Aliexpress. I can buy the same products from Aliexpress way cheaper and have them delivered in 2-3 days.
Thankfully there are a lot of small online shops where quality and customer support are taken very seriously. The bad thing is these stores are very specific so if I need different unrelated products I have to buy from several stores, having to pay sometimes a few euro for the delivery. This also made me buy less stuff. Now I generally wait until I need more things or until my cart has enough stuff for a free delivery.