8 ms·

I feel that this is an untenable situation and business model. When people first took to buying their "random crap" via amazon, it was at least backed by an ama

I feel that this is an untenable situation and business model. When people first took to buying their "random crap" via amazon, it was at least backed by an amazon customer service experience that defaulted to very good - amazon prime shipping, consistent shipping and packaging, consistent return policies. But once these marketplace sellers came into being, the qualify of the experience is on the whole, lacking. Years ago, my family would use a particular salad dressing enough that when we found it on Amazon as a "send me a case of this every three months" thing, we were happy with that. It was marginally cheaper than buying at the store, but it was far more convenient At some point, we started receiving things from sellers that were obviously not Amazon themselves, and then endless emails asking us to rate their service, etc. Sometimes the product would be poorly package or damaged in shipping. Once it seemed like something had maybe turfed off their pantry shelf into a box to send us. It was annoying but not worth our time to 'fix', so we just canceled that order. But lately it seems like things have been getting harder to deal with when these third party sellers are involved. I don't want to save $1.37 on a $200 router that I receive in obviously opened-and-returned condition and missing parts, and then receive an insulting letter from the (actual) seller about it somehow being my fault and saying that I should pay the return cost. It may be possible go get amazon involved in resolving this - BUT IT IS NOT WORTH MY TIME. At some point, it was easier and cheaper to use Amazon for all these types of purchases, but Amazon Marketplace is hurting their brand. Weakest link and all that. (Maybe we'll get a return to brick & mortar stores for radio-shack or similar things.)

benzofuran 11y ago
I'd love to see an "Amazon Only" mode that was a switch on the main page to only show the store for sold by or fulfilled by Amazon. I'm sure this can be done somehow and would make the experience much better. The crap 1000 review emails would be nice to disappear as well.
- johansch 11y ago
  The lack of a switch like this is especially annoying for people who live in "other countries". Like Sweden, in my case. Amazon gladly ships here (from UK, France, Germany, Spain, US, etc) - with quite decent product and shipment prices. However, all the search results are polluted by these non-Amazon sellers' results, who 90% of the time don't even have an international shipment process. In the end, this just makes me avoid Amazon and go somewhere else.
  - dantheman 11y ago
    There is a "ships to X" menu item that will only show you items that can be shipped to sweden.
    - johansch 11y ago
      I tried just now, on amazon.co.uk. Can't find such a thing. Would you mind sharing a screenshot or a description of how to find it?
- wickawic 11y ago
  There is one: filter your search by "prime items"
- JorgeGT 11y ago
  At least in Amazon Spain there is an option to select "Amazon.es" as seller in the search filters: http://i.imgur.com/LzS0LY7.png http://i.imgur.com/LzS0LY7.png This way you only browse things sold and managed by Amazon directly and not third-party vendors. Is this not available in other Amazon subsidiaries?
  - johansch 11y ago
    This is a bit off-topic, but here is another stupid thing. My experience with amazon.es: 1. I go there. Everything is in Spanish, despite my IP being IP-geolocated to Sweden by every single IP-geolocation database I know of. My browser's Accept-Language HTTP header is "en-US,en;q=0.8,sv". 2. I manage to sign in with my global Amazon account - they can now see that my shipment and verified payment location is in Sweden. Everything is still in Spanish. It would be fine if it was just the product descriptions which lacked english translations that were not available in e.g. English, but this scheme just seems incompetently managed. They run each national site as a silo, language-wise? This kind of thing was a fun adventure ~17 years ago, ordering exotic stuff from Amazon Japan, but in this day and age it just feels stupid.
    - swimfar 11y ago
      Just to provide a counter-point, I'm the exact opposite. I get annoyed when websites try to change the language for me based on my location. Just because I may currently be in Spain doesn't mean that Spanish is my preferred language. When I go to amazon.de, I expect everything to be in German. If I need a different language, I prefer to choose it myself. Even having the language connected to my account wouldn't be preferable to me. I would still prefer the site to be in the language of the "hosting" country (but I'm sure this is a much less common preference). I guess my point is that different people have different preferences which may be one reason why the site isn't designed like you would like it to be. I understand what you're saying about how you expect amazon to be one unified shopping location. But I imagine that amazon.es is designed primarily for the Spanish market and people in Sweden using the site is a much smaller, unintended market.
      - 11y ago
- mabbo 11y ago
  There are two. You can choose to filter by items only sold by Amazon. You can also choose to filter by "Prime" items only- with a few small exceptions, these are only items sold by Amazon, or Fulfilled by Amazon (ie: the item is physically in Amazon's hands, but sent to Amazon by a seller). Bias note: I've worked in Amazon Operations Tech for the last 4 years.
  - gazby 11y ago
    Filtering by seller requires you to have selected a category, which I find you often have to do several times over to cover all the categories in which the item you're looking for might be located. Filtering for Prime also includes anything fulfilled by Amazon, which I think most people will agree only marginally reduces the risk of getting sub-par quality from random seller number 5. I am yet to find a reliable or convenient method of limiting search results to Amazon-only products.
    - corobo 11y ago
      The biggest difference between Random Company #461 on the marketplace and fulfilled by Amazon though is this > Amazon also handles customer service and product returns for Fulfilled by Amazon items [0] [0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200106510 https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeI...
- Stratoscope 11y ago
  Keep in mind that Sold by Amazon and Fulfilled by Amazon are two very different things. The latter just means Amazon is providing the distribution service; you're still buying from a third-party Marketplace seller. (I believe sellers are required to follow Amazon's return policies when it's Fulfilled by Amazon, so there is that at least.) Regarding a display switch, you can do that in the search results listings as mabbo described. It would be nice if there were a global setting like you're talking about that applied to all pages and not just search results.
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    Any seller is required to follow Amazon's return policies, not just FBA ones. And Amazon will support the buyer in most cases. If the seller refuses to honor a return, file an A to Z claim.
    - paulddraper 11y ago
      As a seller, I can confirm that Amazon's policies tend to be very buyer friendly, more so than say, eBay, IMO.
dpweb 11y ago
I love eBay but have recently started using Amazon more and more, but usually because of prime (not a 3rd party seller). You buy from 'some guy' on ebay, but I have complete confidence in buying on ebay (cause of the Paypal buyers guarantee) - in fact it's more risky selling on ebay than buying. Doesn't Amazon have something like this?
- URSpider94 11y ago
  Yes, absolutely. If anything, Amazon is more strict on their third-party sellers than EBay is. But, there's a huge expectation gap between the service you expect from even a great EBay seller and Amazon itself.
pcurve 11y ago
This is exactly how buy.com went down the tube.
potatolicious 11y ago
> "At some point, we started receiving things from sellers that were obviously not Amazon themselves, and then endless emails asking us to rate their service, etc." I've noticed this more and more in tech, even outside of the retail ecommerce experience. I constantly get bombarded by requests to rate things and it's all getting to be way too much. Seamless/GrubHub constantly wants me to rate every experience - I get that they want feedback and to ensure quality is high - but I'm not their QC department and I don't want to be. At this point a pretty substantial portion of my email inbox is just "how was X? Rate X!" messages. Every damned startup thinks "oh but it's a quick thing" without realizing the sheer volume of it their users are being bombarded with from every which way. Surely there's a better balance when it comes to quality assurance than "get the customer to do everything".
- brianwawok 11y ago
  This is a problem. The only way to cut bad sellers is to get ratings. But ratings are annoying. How to keep both sides happy?
  - potatolicious 11y ago
    Paying actual quality control people - harder for some business models than others, but this has been the way it's been done for years. A department store gets goods from potentially thousands of suppliers, and yet doesn't have to ask every customer to fill out a survey to do quality checks. Ditto your local transit agency can tell how well they're doing without polling every rider. Obviously a harder problem when you never meet your suppliers, but IMO still a tractable problem - IMO part of the problem is that leaning on customers to do quality assurance has become a default rather than a fallback. Harder upfront quality checks also plays against the desire for hypergrowth (you can only vet so many vendors so quickly, plus some of the bad-but-not-horrible vendors are actually valuable for you). Side note: it's probably more palatable for customers to give feedback if that feedback is actually acted on. One of the annoying things about, say, AirBnb ratings or Amazon ratings, is that they largely just feed into a giant pool of votes, and the only outcome of your feedback is an imperceptible nudge of some tiny fraction of a 5-star rating scale that's visible to other users.
7952 11y ago
I am increasingly using Google Shopping + Paypal. By using Paypal I can avoid entering credit card details and authenticate with 2 factor. The Google element gives user feedback and increasingly they are offering the "Trusted Stores" insurance. You also avoid the endless chaff of product lines that are unrelated to your current purchase.
MrFoof 11y ago
>When people first took to buying their "random crap" via amazon, it was at least backed by an amazon customer service experience that defaulted to very good - amazon prime shipping Unfortunately, there's a reason I buy what some people would consider "random crap" off Amazon -- I cannot find the actual item I want in stores. I can go to Home Depot, Lowe's, ACE, and several other hardware stores and spend the entire day, and NOT come home with the lightbulbs I'm looking for. Perhaps I can order them online and wait a few days for them, but usually I come home empty-handed, which is maddening. Then there they are. Someone selling them on Amazon that even with shipping, is FAR cheaper than even the brick-and-mortar sites with their free shipping. Rinse, repeat for many other things, and next thing you know I'm ordering occasional "random crap" via Amazon since I can A) get it faster and B) cheaper through storefront sellers.
hammock 11y ago
If it's not worth your time to resolve the issue, and you're still buying from Amazon, then they're still providing you a useful service.
shostack 11y ago
I agree fully. Add in the blatantly fake reviews that are plaguing Amazon (my wife recently got screwed by this on a purchase, thinking it was highly-rated) and Amazon is losing what, IMHO, is a core piece of what got them to where they are. Namely, trust and reduction of risk. They had great reviews that were actually helpful, and if there was an issue they'd take care of it. Increasingly, this is not the case, but it may matter less for them now that they dominate the market. Today, I increasingly make major home purchases from Bed Bath & Beyond of all places because of their policies. Even if I order it online, I can have it shipped to the store and return it in store for free, with a damn near unlimited return due date. I've even returned a pillow I slept on previously, no questions asked. Add to that the fact I can physically look at the item (absolutely critical for determining color match, build quality, etc.) and for some purchases Amazon just doesn't provide the necessary experience yet (despite having a retail location now). On the other side of this story, people trying to be Amazon resellers are plaguing every entrepreneur-related forum I used to visit. Between that and subscription boxes they are clearly the next big "Get Rich Quick!" scheme. I can't wait till they die off.
- GFischer 11y ago
  "I can physically look at the item (absolutely critical for determining color match, build quality, etc.) " Would watching it on live video be "good enough"? (I'm building that, so I'm pretty interested in the answer :) )
  - elorant 11y ago
    Asos.com has that for pretty much every item in their store. It looks nice if you ask me but I guess doesn't really substitute the real thing.
    - GFischer 11y ago
      Didn't know of them, thanks !
  - shostack 11y ago
    A video can't show me how a fabric will look under certain light, or how it will compare against my rug. A video can't tell me that while the piece of furniture looks nice, the drawers are really cheaply made and don't slide nicely. A video can't tell me that what looks like a nice finish actually feels like cheap plastic. If you have suggestions for how to tackle that, I'd be very interested. There's some things though I just can't see myself ever buying online, and unfortunately retailers are trying to shift more and more of their purchases there without the benefits of things like free in-store shipping/returns. If they did that and I could see it in-store, and return it free, I'd totally do that in a heart beat. I bet the shipping rates and warehousing costs would be low enough to be worth it.
ikeboy 11y ago
Saving less than 1% may not be worth your time in case of any problem. But often the difference will be much higher, and then it becomes a question of how much risk you're taking versus the savings. One thing you can do is leave bad feedback, which encourages sellers to behave. Also, before ordering, just glance at the feedback for the seller. I doubt that your router horror story was with a seller with >95% feedback and >50 feedbacks. Takes a minute more and reduces the risk. Or, restrict purchases to FBA, which has customer service by Amazon.

benzofuran 11y ago

I'd love to see an "Amazon Only" mode that was a switch on the main page to only show the store for sold by or fulfilled by Amazon. I'm sure this can be done somehow and would make the experience much better. The crap 1000 review emails would be nice to disappear as well.

johansch 11y ago
The lack of a switch like this is especially annoying for people who live in "other countries". Like Sweden, in my case. Amazon gladly ships here (from UK, France, Germany, Spain, US, etc) - with quite decent product and shipment prices. However, all the search results are polluted by these non-Amazon sellers' results, who 90% of the time don't even have an international shipment process. In the end, this just makes me avoid Amazon and go somewhere else.
- dantheman 11y ago
  There is a "ships to X" menu item that will only show you items that can be shipped to sweden.
  - johansch 11y ago
    I tried just now, on amazon.co.uk. Can't find such a thing. Would you mind sharing a screenshot or a description of how to find it?
wickawic 11y ago
There is one: filter your search by "prime items"
JorgeGT 11y ago
At least in Amazon Spain there is an option to select "Amazon.es" as seller in the search filters: http://i.imgur.com/LzS0LY7.png http://i.imgur.com/LzS0LY7.png This way you only browse things sold and managed by Amazon directly and not third-party vendors. Is this not available in other Amazon subsidiaries?
- johansch 11y ago
  This is a bit off-topic, but here is another stupid thing. My experience with amazon.es: 1. I go there. Everything is in Spanish, despite my IP being IP-geolocated to Sweden by every single IP-geolocation database I know of. My browser's Accept-Language HTTP header is "en-US,en;q=0.8,sv". 2. I manage to sign in with my global Amazon account - they can now see that my shipment and verified payment location is in Sweden. Everything is still in Spanish. It would be fine if it was just the product descriptions which lacked english translations that were not available in e.g. English, but this scheme just seems incompetently managed. They run each national site as a silo, language-wise? This kind of thing was a fun adventure ~17 years ago, ordering exotic stuff from Amazon Japan, but in this day and age it just feels stupid.
  - swimfar 11y ago
    Just to provide a counter-point, I'm the exact opposite. I get annoyed when websites try to change the language for me based on my location. Just because I may currently be in Spain doesn't mean that Spanish is my preferred language. When I go to amazon.de, I expect everything to be in German. If I need a different language, I prefer to choose it myself. Even having the language connected to my account wouldn't be preferable to me. I would still prefer the site to be in the language of the "hosting" country (but I'm sure this is a much less common preference). I guess my point is that different people have different preferences which may be one reason why the site isn't designed like you would like it to be. I understand what you're saying about how you expect amazon to be one unified shopping location. But I imagine that amazon.es is designed primarily for the Spanish market and people in Sweden using the site is a much smaller, unintended market.
    - 11y ago
mabbo 11y ago
There are two. You can choose to filter by items only sold by Amazon. You can also choose to filter by "Prime" items only- with a few small exceptions, these are only items sold by Amazon, or Fulfilled by Amazon (ie: the item is physically in Amazon's hands, but sent to Amazon by a seller). Bias note: I've worked in Amazon Operations Tech for the last 4 years.
- gazby 11y ago
  Filtering by seller requires you to have selected a category, which I find you often have to do several times over to cover all the categories in which the item you're looking for might be located. Filtering for Prime also includes anything fulfilled by Amazon, which I think most people will agree only marginally reduces the risk of getting sub-par quality from random seller number 5. I am yet to find a reliable or convenient method of limiting search results to Amazon-only products.
  - corobo 11y ago
    The biggest difference between Random Company #461 on the marketplace and fulfilled by Amazon though is this > Amazon also handles customer service and product returns for Fulfilled by Amazon items [0] [0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200106510 https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeI...
Stratoscope 11y ago
Keep in mind that Sold by Amazon and Fulfilled by Amazon are two very different things. The latter just means Amazon is providing the distribution service; you're still buying from a third-party Marketplace seller. (I believe sellers are required to follow Amazon's return policies when it's Fulfilled by Amazon, so there is that at least.) Regarding a display switch, you can do that in the search results listings as mabbo described. It would be nice if there were a global setting like you're talking about that applied to all pages and not just search results.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  Any seller is required to follow Amazon's return policies, not just FBA ones. And Amazon will support the buyer in most cases. If the seller refuses to honor a return, file an A to Z claim.
  - paulddraper 11y ago
    As a seller, I can confirm that Amazon's policies tend to be very buyer friendly, more so than say, eBay, IMO.

dpweb 11y ago

I love eBay but have recently started using Amazon more and more, but usually because of prime (not a 3rd party seller). You buy from 'some guy' on ebay, but I have complete confidence in buying on ebay (cause of the Paypal buyers guarantee) - in fact it's more risky selling on ebay than buying. Doesn't Amazon have something like this?

URSpider94 11y ago
Yes, absolutely. If anything, Amazon is more strict on their third-party sellers than EBay is. But, there's a huge expectation gap between the service you expect from even a great EBay seller and Amazon itself.

pcurve 11y ago

This is exactly how buy.com went down the tube.

potatolicious 11y ago

> "At some point, we started receiving things from sellers that were obviously not Amazon themselves, and then endless emails asking us to rate their service, etc." I've noticed this more and more in tech, even outside of the retail ecommerce experience. I constantly get bombarded by requests to rate things and it's all getting to be way too much. Seamless/GrubHub constantly wants me to rate every experience - I get that they want feedback and to ensure quality is high - but I'm not their QC department and I don't want to be. At this point a pretty substantial portion of my email inbox is just "how was X? Rate X!" messages. Every damned startup thinks "oh but it's a quick thing" without realizing the sheer volume of it their users are being bombarded with from every which way. Surely there's a better balance when it comes to quality assurance than "get the customer to do everything".

brianwawok 11y ago
This is a problem. The only way to cut bad sellers is to get ratings. But ratings are annoying. How to keep both sides happy?
- potatolicious 11y ago
  Paying actual quality control people - harder for some business models than others, but this has been the way it's been done for years. A department store gets goods from potentially thousands of suppliers, and yet doesn't have to ask every customer to fill out a survey to do quality checks. Ditto your local transit agency can tell how well they're doing without polling every rider. Obviously a harder problem when you never meet your suppliers, but IMO still a tractable problem - IMO part of the problem is that leaning on customers to do quality assurance has become a default rather than a fallback. Harder upfront quality checks also plays against the desire for hypergrowth (you can only vet so many vendors so quickly, plus some of the bad-but-not-horrible vendors are actually valuable for you). Side note: it's probably more palatable for customers to give feedback if that feedback is actually acted on. One of the annoying things about, say, AirBnb ratings or Amazon ratings, is that they largely just feed into a giant pool of votes, and the only outcome of your feedback is an imperceptible nudge of some tiny fraction of a 5-star rating scale that's visible to other users.

7952 11y ago

I am increasingly using Google Shopping + Paypal. By using Paypal I can avoid entering credit card details and authenticate with 2 factor. The Google element gives user feedback and increasingly they are offering the "Trusted Stores" insurance. You also avoid the endless chaff of product lines that are unrelated to your current purchase.

MrFoof 11y ago

>When people first took to buying their "random crap" via amazon, it was at least backed by an amazon customer service experience that defaulted to very good - amazon prime shipping Unfortunately, there's a reason I buy what some people would consider "random crap" off Amazon -- I cannot find the actual item I want in stores. I can go to Home Depot, Lowe's, ACE, and several other hardware stores and spend the entire day, and NOT come home with the lightbulbs I'm looking for. Perhaps I can order them online and wait a few days for them, but usually I come home empty-handed, which is maddening. Then there they are. Someone selling them on Amazon that even with shipping, is FAR cheaper than even the brick-and-mortar sites with their free shipping. Rinse, repeat for many other things, and next thing you know I'm ordering occasional "random crap" via Amazon since I can A) get it faster and B) cheaper through storefront sellers.

hammock 11y ago

If it's not worth your time to resolve the issue, and you're still buying from Amazon, then they're still providing you a useful service.

shostack 11y ago

I agree fully. Add in the blatantly fake reviews that are plaguing Amazon (my wife recently got screwed by this on a purchase, thinking it was highly-rated) and Amazon is losing what, IMHO, is a core piece of what got them to where they are. Namely, trust and reduction of risk. They had great reviews that were actually helpful, and if there was an issue they'd take care of it. Increasingly, this is not the case, but it may matter less for them now that they dominate the market. Today, I increasingly make major home purchases from Bed Bath & Beyond of all places because of their policies. Even if I order it online, I can have it shipped to the store and return it in store for free, with a damn near unlimited return due date. I've even returned a pillow I slept on previously, no questions asked. Add to that the fact I can physically look at the item (absolutely critical for determining color match, build quality, etc.) and for some purchases Amazon just doesn't provide the necessary experience yet (despite having a retail location now). On the other side of this story, people trying to be Amazon resellers are plaguing every entrepreneur-related forum I used to visit. Between that and subscription boxes they are clearly the next big "Get Rich Quick!" scheme. I can't wait till they die off.

GFischer 11y ago
"I can physically look at the item (absolutely critical for determining color match, build quality, etc.) " Would watching it on live video be "good enough"? (I'm building that, so I'm pretty interested in the answer :) )
- elorant 11y ago
  Asos.com has that for pretty much every item in their store. It looks nice if you ask me but I guess doesn't really substitute the real thing.
  - GFischer 11y ago
    Didn't know of them, thanks !
- shostack 11y ago
  A video can't show me how a fabric will look under certain light, or how it will compare against my rug. A video can't tell me that while the piece of furniture looks nice, the drawers are really cheaply made and don't slide nicely. A video can't tell me that what looks like a nice finish actually feels like cheap plastic. If you have suggestions for how to tackle that, I'd be very interested. There's some things though I just can't see myself ever buying online, and unfortunately retailers are trying to shift more and more of their purchases there without the benefits of things like free in-store shipping/returns. If they did that and I could see it in-store, and return it free, I'd totally do that in a heart beat. I bet the shipping rates and warehousing costs would be low enough to be worth it.

ikeboy 11y ago

Saving less than 1% may not be worth your time in case of any problem. But often the difference will be much higher, and then it becomes a question of how much risk you're taking versus the savings. One thing you can do is leave bad feedback, which encourages sellers to behave. Also, before ordering, just glance at the feedback for the seller. I doubt that your router horror story was with a seller with >95% feedback and >50 feedbacks. Takes a minute more and reduces the risk. Or, restrict purchases to FBA, which has customer service by Amazon.