6 ms·

I think people are starting to also notice cracks emerge in Amazon's e-commerce quality as it scales, whether/when it becomes enough of a problem to change shop

I think people are starting to also notice cracks emerge in Amazon's e-commerce quality as it scales, whether/when it becomes enough of a problem to change shopper behavior is another question, but here are some examples I've seen: - Blatant fake thumbdrives - this entire section is thumb drive scammers using the hack that makes a drive appear larger in system info https://www.amazon.com/s/s/ref=sr_nr_p_n_size_browse-bin_8?fst=as%3Aoff&rh=n%3A172282%2Cn%3A541966%2Cn%3A1292110011%2Cn%3A3151491%2Ck%3Athumb+drive%2Cp_n_size_browse-bin%3A10285020011&keywords=thumb+drive&ie=UTF8&qid=1513525301&rnid=1259751011 https://www.amazon.com/s/s/ref=sr_nr_p_n_size_browse-bin_8?f... - $23 knock-off magsafes rife with fake reviews, that break/fry in days - https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_7?url=search-alias%3Dcomputers&field-keywords=magsafe+charger&sprefix=magsafe%2Caps%2C185&crid=J0KJGT8BMTT6&rh=n%3A541966%2Ck%3Amagsafe+charger https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_7?url=search-alias... - The level of chaos in shopping categories effectively prevents you from doing things like sorting by price or reviews. In my experience, Amazon is always happy to refund on these things and chalk it up as cost of scaling, but when does it start to become too much, similar to what happened to ebay?

glup 9y ago
Product quality issues of the above types leave me deeply skeptical that they are ready to be a health care provider.
- Analog24 9y ago
  Yeah because we all know how much of a problem those fake EC2 instances have become.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    Calling hyperthreads "cores" is a little fake. Also, not being really upfront about the egress pricing vs market price for bandwidth. Especially for the bandwidth charges on egress to AWS direct connect. And not nitpicking. I've had to explain these things to non technical leaders many times when they make on-premisis vs cloud comparisons.
    - Analog24 9y ago
      And you would consider those two examples enough to doubt their ability to succeed in a completely unrelated field? Unless your answer is "yes", it's nitpicking.
      - tyingq 9y ago
        It's not nitpicking for the specific scope of your comment: "how much of a problem those fake EC2 instances have become" You can broaden the scope of anything and say that some specific criticism is now nitpicking. Edit: A little off topic, but Amazon has failed in unrelated spaces before. Fire phone was a good example. Amazon is giant for sure, but they aren't infallible.
        Analog24 9y ago
        My comment was a satirical response to the parent comment, giving it pretty clear and specific scope. And the fact that they have failed in some verticals and succeeded in others only strengthens my original point: success/failure in one space has very little bearing on another.
    - _msw_ 9y ago
      Hi, Amazon engineer on the EC2 service here. Please let me know if there's some material that calls a hyperthread a core. On our main product detail page for EC2 instances here: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ look for the text "Each vCPU is a hyperthread of an Intel Xeon core except for T2." See also the "virtual core" information page here: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/virtualcores/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/virtualcores/ and you will see that for most instances the core count is 1/2 of the total number of vCPUs. Direct connect pricing for egress traffic ("Data Transfer Out") is here: https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/pricing/. Please let me know if there is some other traffic classification that is not metered and billed as you'd expect. As I'm sure you're aware, comparing on-premises vs. cloud is a multidimensional problem. Customer resource to help with TCO calculations and comparisons can be found here: https://aws.amazon.com/tco-calculator/ https://aws.amazon.com/tco-calculator/. Even for a component of overall cost like network transit, not all products are created equally so a simple price comparison may not capture the whole picture.
- asdfologist 9y ago
  So existing healthcare providers are perfect?
- madeofpalk 9y ago
  Eh. Different Amazon verticals are ran very differently and have their own set of problems. I've used Amazon Fresh a few times and I've never received "fake salmon".
  - mirimir 9y ago
    Are you sure? And maybe salmon, but from where?
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    Funny you should mention that... http://abcnews.go.com/US/fake-fish-experts-mislabeling-seafood-real-problem/story?id=13706266 http://abcnews.go.com/US/fake-fish-experts-mislabeling-seafo... > A new report released this week says recent studies have found that seafood may be mislabeled as often as 25 percent to 70 percent of the time. According to Food and Drug Administration port inspections, a third of seafood sold in the U.S. is mislabeled as one type when it's actually something else, even something cheaper.
    - madeofpalk 9y ago
      Here's hoping this fish problem doesnt exist overseas in the UK!
      - IncRnd 9y ago
        Yikes! www.google.com/search?q=mislabeled+fish+uk
antisthenes 9y ago
I work on the other side - as a manager of a 3rd party seller on Amazon (we have nothing to do with electronics and it would be almost impossible to counterfeit our product, in part because it is custom made in the US and are heavy physical objects). They are doing their best to crank down on this by increasing the quality of listings and enforcing more stringent requirements for selling products of certain brands. They also introduced additional costs and barriers for creating multiple thousands of poor quality listings rather than a few quality ones. The fake electronics products are hurting us as well, because customers have become increasingly wary and return-happy, since they expect the quality of product to be low and returns to be friction-free, regardless of other factors. The chaos within categories is the biggest obstacle - it is nearly impossible to solve, simply because they are HUGE and removing bad listings is an almost manual process. It has to be and Amazon certainly can't take the leap of simply starting to remove 3rd party seller listings without angering them and making them quit.
- andrenotgiant 9y ago
  That's an interesting perspective to hear about. I am curious, do you (as a merchant) have an Amazon rep you can get in touch with about issues? How has that relationship changed (if at all) over the years?
  - antisthenes 9y ago
    Unfortunately we are not a big enough seller on Amazon (it is our secondary sales channel and only accounts for about 5-8% of our yearly revenue), so we do not have a personal rep. Support related to seller issues is generally pretty bad and it may take weeks and multiple tickets to get 2-3 minutes of phone time with a representative based in the United States. Most of the time you will get someone from a call center in India, who is very good at telling you that what you need can't be done 5 different ways. I would imagine that once you get to a certain level of revenue, you can request to have a rep and will get more personal attention to your issues. I have no idea what the bar is, but probably at least $5 million of yearly revenue - which means Amazon makes $750,000 from you in fees.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> this entire section is thumb drive scammers using the hack that makes a drive appear larger in system info That's not fair; from the first page, I would say at least the $1400 Kingston drive is genuine, and the 512mb drive that says not 512gb, and the PNY one. Just from a quick skim and double checking other sources for the first and last. Many of them may be as you describe, though, especially the cheap ones.
dawhizkid 9y ago
Easy solution: don't buy anything from their marketplace - only buy things shipped and sold by them directly. My personal rule of thumb anyway.
- b777 9y ago
  Amazon mixes marketplace and Amazon sourced products. If you buy an Amazon sourced item they might ship you the marketplace version.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    Specifically, “Fulfilled by Amazon” inventory, including Amazon's first-party inventory, is commingled. So if there is no third-party FBA seller for a product you buy sold by Amazon, you are as safe as Amazon's first-party sourcing, otherwise it's the wild west.
    - dawhizkid 9y ago
      Yeah it's really an unfortunate dark ux pattern that too few people have called them out on (i.e. all product pages look the same and only one line of text will tell you if something is actually sold by Amazon or some sketchy third party vendor). I wonder how many people, even people who've shopped on Amazon for years, actually realize when they buy something direct from Amazon vs a third party.
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        > only one line of text will tell you if something is actually sold by Amazon or some sketchy third party vendor The problem with commingling, though, goes beyond that: if there are any “Fulfilled by Amazon” vendors for the same product, buying a product “sold by Amazon” does not guarantee you that the actual product you receive was not sourced by a shady FBA vendor that does less to protect against counterfeits in its sourcing than Amazon does. So you can't trust Amazon—or an FBA vendor that is trustworthy on their own—if other vendors using FBA exist for the same product.
perseusprime11 9y ago
Not to mention all the fake reviews that are flooding their marketplace making it harder for consumers to trust their products.
yorby 9y ago
Searching on Amazon has always been very sub-optimal, including the inability to sort by price when you need it... not sure if that ever will become a nuisance to Amazon...
- mulmen 9y ago
  I've always had a sort by price option on Amazon search results, are you talking about somewhere else on the site?
  - calvano915 9y ago
    You can't do a blanket search and sort by price. You have to narrow the search down to one of their main categories. Really eliminates a significant amount of results for many searches.
    - mulmen 9y ago
      Huh, maybe I misunderstand the behavior you are talking about. Do you have a link or screen shot? Here's one I tried with "wood" and I was able to sort by price with the drop down: https://www.amazon.com/s/?keywords=wood&sort=price-asc-rank https://www.amazon.com/s/?keywords=wood&sort=price-asc-rank I stripped out a bunch of the tracking and referral stuff from the url but if you click that it will take you directly to sorted results. If you go to just https://www.amazon.com/s/?keywords=wood https://www.amazon.com/s/?keywords=wood there is a drop down to sort by price and the results don't appear to be in any specific category. e: I think I understand now, the drop down is there but you don't get search results if you select a price filter like you do with "Relevance".
ConcernedCoder 9y ago
I've been using/buying from Amazon for the last 10 years or so, and this year for the 1st time I think I finally got a "fake" product, a replacement water filtration filter for my refrigerator... sadly this kind of product ( where you're actually consuming the end result ) is IMHO the worst kind of fakery, I mean, what did it actually put in the water I was drinking ( it smelled/tasted like burnt rubber... ewww )?!?! As the original poster says, Amazon was more than happy to let me return it postage-free and gave me a refund ( in amazon gift credits of course...lol ) but what about if it actually hurt us? what if it had lead or something in it?
Apocryphon 9y ago
How is it that eBay is still around despite being at a later stage of scammer takeover?
- dazc 9y ago
  Because large numbers of people always buy cheap. Going back to amazon, just take a look at the 'most wished for' in any category; then look at 'best sellers' for the same category and you'll see, in a lot of cases, cheap wins even when the average review is like 2.5 or, sometimes less.
projectileboy 9y ago
This has come up many times before, and it hasn't bit Amazon yet, but I still believe it will, eventually. At some point, either because of consumer outrage or government intervention or both, Amazon is going to have to stop selling counterfeit goods.

glup 9y ago

Product quality issues of the above types leave me deeply skeptical that they are ready to be a health care provider.

Analog24 9y ago
Yeah because we all know how much of a problem those fake EC2 instances have become.
- tyingq 9y ago
  Calling hyperthreads "cores" is a little fake. Also, not being really upfront about the egress pricing vs market price for bandwidth. Especially for the bandwidth charges on egress to AWS direct connect. And not nitpicking. I've had to explain these things to non technical leaders many times when they make on-premisis vs cloud comparisons.
  - Analog24 9y ago
    And you would consider those two examples enough to doubt their ability to succeed in a completely unrelated field? Unless your answer is "yes", it's nitpicking.
    - tyingq 9y ago
      It's not nitpicking for the specific scope of your comment: "how much of a problem those fake EC2 instances have become" You can broaden the scope of anything and say that some specific criticism is now nitpicking. Edit: A little off topic, but Amazon has failed in unrelated spaces before. Fire phone was a good example. Amazon is giant for sure, but they aren't infallible.
      - Analog24 9y ago
        My comment was a satirical response to the parent comment, giving it pretty clear and specific scope. And the fact that they have failed in some verticals and succeeded in others only strengthens my original point: success/failure in one space has very little bearing on another.
  - _msw_ 9y ago
    Hi, Amazon engineer on the EC2 service here. Please let me know if there's some material that calls a hyperthread a core. On our main product detail page for EC2 instances here: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ look for the text "Each vCPU is a hyperthread of an Intel Xeon core except for T2." See also the "virtual core" information page here: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/virtualcores/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/virtualcores/ and you will see that for most instances the core count is 1/2 of the total number of vCPUs. Direct connect pricing for egress traffic ("Data Transfer Out") is here: https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/pricing/. Please let me know if there is some other traffic classification that is not metered and billed as you'd expect. As I'm sure you're aware, comparing on-premises vs. cloud is a multidimensional problem. Customer resource to help with TCO calculations and comparisons can be found here: https://aws.amazon.com/tco-calculator/ https://aws.amazon.com/tco-calculator/. Even for a component of overall cost like network transit, not all products are created equally so a simple price comparison may not capture the whole picture.
asdfologist 9y ago
So existing healthcare providers are perfect?
madeofpalk 9y ago
Eh. Different Amazon verticals are ran very differently and have their own set of problems. I've used Amazon Fresh a few times and I've never received "fake salmon".
- mirimir 9y ago
  Are you sure? And maybe salmon, but from where?
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  Funny you should mention that... http://abcnews.go.com/US/fake-fish-experts-mislabeling-seafood-real-problem/story?id=13706266 http://abcnews.go.com/US/fake-fish-experts-mislabeling-seafo... > A new report released this week says recent studies have found that seafood may be mislabeled as often as 25 percent to 70 percent of the time. According to Food and Drug Administration port inspections, a third of seafood sold in the U.S. is mislabeled as one type when it's actually something else, even something cheaper.
  - madeofpalk 9y ago
    Here's hoping this fish problem doesnt exist overseas in the UK!
    - IncRnd 9y ago
      Yikes! www.google.com/search?q=mislabeled+fish+uk

antisthenes 9y ago

I work on the other side - as a manager of a 3rd party seller on Amazon (we have nothing to do with electronics and it would be almost impossible to counterfeit our product, in part because it is custom made in the US and are heavy physical objects). They are doing their best to crank down on this by increasing the quality of listings and enforcing more stringent requirements for selling products of certain brands. They also introduced additional costs and barriers for creating multiple thousands of poor quality listings rather than a few quality ones. The fake electronics products are hurting us as well, because customers have become increasingly wary and return-happy, since they expect the quality of product to be low and returns to be friction-free, regardless of other factors. The chaos within categories is the biggest obstacle - it is nearly impossible to solve, simply because they are HUGE and removing bad listings is an almost manual process. It has to be and Amazon certainly can't take the leap of simply starting to remove 3rd party seller listings without angering them and making them quit.

andrenotgiant 9y ago
That's an interesting perspective to hear about. I am curious, do you (as a merchant) have an Amazon rep you can get in touch with about issues? How has that relationship changed (if at all) over the years?
- antisthenes 9y ago
  Unfortunately we are not a big enough seller on Amazon (it is our secondary sales channel and only accounts for about 5-8% of our yearly revenue), so we do not have a personal rep. Support related to seller issues is generally pretty bad and it may take weeks and multiple tickets to get 2-3 minutes of phone time with a representative based in the United States. Most of the time you will get someone from a call center in India, who is very good at telling you that what you need can't be done 5 different ways. I would imagine that once you get to a certain level of revenue, you can request to have a rep and will get more personal attention to your issues. I have no idea what the bar is, but probably at least $5 million of yearly revenue - which means Amazon makes $750,000 from you in fees.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> this entire section is thumb drive scammers using the hack that makes a drive appear larger in system info That's not fair; from the first page, I would say at least the $1400 Kingston drive is genuine, and the 512mb drive that says not 512gb, and the PNY one. Just from a quick skim and double checking other sources for the first and last. Many of them may be as you describe, though, especially the cheap ones.

dawhizkid 9y ago

Easy solution: don't buy anything from their marketplace - only buy things shipped and sold by them directly. My personal rule of thumb anyway.

b777 9y ago
Amazon mixes marketplace and Amazon sourced products. If you buy an Amazon sourced item they might ship you the marketplace version.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  Specifically, “Fulfilled by Amazon” inventory, including Amazon's first-party inventory, is commingled. So if there is no third-party FBA seller for a product you buy sold by Amazon, you are as safe as Amazon's first-party sourcing, otherwise it's the wild west.
  - dawhizkid 9y ago
    Yeah it's really an unfortunate dark ux pattern that too few people have called them out on (i.e. all product pages look the same and only one line of text will tell you if something is actually sold by Amazon or some sketchy third party vendor). I wonder how many people, even people who've shopped on Amazon for years, actually realize when they buy something direct from Amazon vs a third party.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > only one line of text will tell you if something is actually sold by Amazon or some sketchy third party vendor The problem with commingling, though, goes beyond that: if there are any “Fulfilled by Amazon” vendors for the same product, buying a product “sold by Amazon” does not guarantee you that the actual product you receive was not sourced by a shady FBA vendor that does less to protect against counterfeits in its sourcing than Amazon does. So you can't trust Amazon—or an FBA vendor that is trustworthy on their own—if other vendors using FBA exist for the same product.

perseusprime11 9y ago

Not to mention all the fake reviews that are flooding their marketplace making it harder for consumers to trust their products.

yorby 9y ago

Searching on Amazon has always been very sub-optimal, including the inability to sort by price when you need it... not sure if that ever will become a nuisance to Amazon...

mulmen 9y ago
I've always had a sort by price option on Amazon search results, are you talking about somewhere else on the site?
- calvano915 9y ago
  You can't do a blanket search and sort by price. You have to narrow the search down to one of their main categories. Really eliminates a significant amount of results for many searches.
  - mulmen 9y ago
    Huh, maybe I misunderstand the behavior you are talking about. Do you have a link or screen shot? Here's one I tried with "wood" and I was able to sort by price with the drop down: https://www.amazon.com/s/?keywords=wood&sort=price-asc-rank https://www.amazon.com/s/?keywords=wood&sort=price-asc-rank I stripped out a bunch of the tracking and referral stuff from the url but if you click that it will take you directly to sorted results. If you go to just https://www.amazon.com/s/?keywords=wood https://www.amazon.com/s/?keywords=wood there is a drop down to sort by price and the results don't appear to be in any specific category. e: I think I understand now, the drop down is there but you don't get search results if you select a price filter like you do with "Relevance".

ConcernedCoder 9y ago

I've been using/buying from Amazon for the last 10 years or so, and this year for the 1st time I think I finally got a "fake" product, a replacement water filtration filter for my refrigerator... sadly this kind of product ( where you're actually consuming the end result ) is IMHO the worst kind of fakery, I mean, what did it actually put in the water I was drinking ( it smelled/tasted like burnt rubber... ewww )?!?! As the original poster says, Amazon was more than happy to let me return it postage-free and gave me a refund ( in amazon gift credits of course...lol ) but what about if it actually hurt us? what if it had lead or something in it?

Apocryphon 9y ago

How is it that eBay is still around despite being at a later stage of scammer takeover?

dazc 9y ago
Because large numbers of people always buy cheap. Going back to amazon, just take a look at the 'most wished for' in any category; then look at 'best sellers' for the same category and you'll see, in a lot of cases, cheap wins even when the average review is like 2.5 or, sometimes less.

projectileboy 9y ago

This has come up many times before, and it hasn't bit Amazon yet, but I still believe it will, eventually. At some point, either because of consumer outrage or government intervention or both, Amazon is going to have to stop selling counterfeit goods.