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

• benologist 7y ago
  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.
  • endorphone 7y ago
    If people lose trust in Amazon that would undermine their entire business model. There is a very strong incentive for Amazon to police their market. Amazon does have a list of brands that third parties are not allowed to sell (because of counterfeit issues) -- only the authorized, prescribed retailer is allowed to sell it. There are still blatant frauds that occur, though, that Amazon really has to answer for. There was the Atlantic story about the fake Canada Goose articles on Amazon- https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/counterfeit-canada-goose-amazon/581041/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/count... These products are still on Amazon! After all that publicity, they're still there. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=canada+goose https://www.amazon.com/s?k=canada+goose Which is a bit weird as Canada Goose is supposed to be a restricted brand.
• sergiotapia 7y ago
  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?
  • athenot 7y ago
    The odd thing is eBay's quality is now easier to assess than Amazon's.
    • ravenstine 7y ago
      And eBay is often way cheaper to boot.
      • rootusrootus 7y ago
        I have not found this to be the case for almost anything I have bought. It is almost always more expensive on eBay now.
        • okmokmz 7y ago
          Amazon used to regularly be one of the least expensive retailers I can find. Now I rarely find anything that is cheaper on amazon than elsewhere
      • castlecrasher2 7y ago
        definitely so for <$10 items, sometimes higher. Anything I've bought on eBay for <$10 is nearly always $10 or higher on Amazon
    • isolli 7y ago
      How do you assess quality on eBay, e.g. for cables?
      • noonespecial 7y ago
        Read the seller's feedback.
      • athenot 7y ago
        For an active cable (lighning, etc.) look for new and look at the seller's feedback. Look at the other stuff they are selling. Is it junk, is it all off-brand? How long have they been selling? It's not fool-proof and I still find myself buying only cable brands I trust (I don't mind overpaying for peace of mind when it comes to that). But the likelyhood of fakes (imitations of legitimate brands) is much lower, in my opinion.
  • bluedino 7y ago
    When was Amazon ever a 'stamp of quality'? You can still buy a brand-name cable from Best Buy or other retailers that people used to use before everyone was trying to save a few pennies.
    • mieseratte 7y ago
      > You can still buy a brand-name cable from Best Buy or other retailers that people used to use before everyone was trying to save a few pennies. It seems in the last year or two Best-Buy has wised up with their Insignia brand, but it used to be all you could find was $40 Monster Cable and the like in their stores. Using Amazon was saving quite a bit more than a few pennies.
      • rootusrootus 7y ago
        With their price matching of Amazon, I think Best Buy just realized that they were about to be the next B&M retailer to be put out of business by them. If they thought they still had a captive audience I bet they'd still be offering only Monster crap.
    • rootusrootus 7y ago
      > When was Amazon ever a 'stamp of quality'? Up until the moment they started intermixing stock from third-party sellers in with the stuff "Ships from and sold by Amazon." It is this change all by itself that pushes me away from using Amazon. If I could just opt-out of the third party sellers I would, but I can buy a product ostensibly from Amazon and still end up with a fake.
  • specialp 7y ago
    It used to be when I wanted a quality item, I'd click "Ships from and sold by Amazon". They removed that option. Now I cancelled Prime and either buy from other well known retailers, or click "Condition: Used" on EBay. Amazon now is just FBA Alibaba with same lack of quality control.
  • lotsofpulp 7y ago
    Target.com doesn’t have resellers yet.
  • leetcrew 7y ago
    there's basically nowhere you can buy a USB type C cable and have it be guaranteed not to violate the spec. maybe the Apple store. the situation with usb-c is particularly bad, but I don't think there's ever been a time where you can just blindly buy tech and expecta high quality product. you have to be willing to do at least some research.
  • Klathmon 7y ago
    This is the same issue I've had with walmart. For a long time now it's been obvious they have brands make "special versions" of many products for walmart which are lower quality and cheaper. Now they are offering free one and 2 day delivery on their site, but I just don't want to go there for fear that I'll end up getting what looks like a "good deal" but what I'll actually get is a worse more cheaply made product. And like you I also avoid Amazon now for many things for fear of getting knockoffs. Most electronics and chargers/cables and things like it. Between their issues with commingling inventory from multiple sellers and 3rd party sellers basically having completely broken their review system (it's exhausting having to weed out the fake reviews from the real ones every time I'm looking at a product). Amazon is quickly becoming another site that I'll start avoiding at all costs. I've started looking for replacements for many thing I buy, and once I've switched i'm really unlikely to go back just like how I'm basically never going to go back to Walmart because they burned all my trust.
    • dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      At least with Walmart you know their value engineered products are actually made by who they say they are and actually work enough of the time to pass whatever QC standards were set. With Amazon you have no idea whether you're getting a counterfeit.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    • okmokmz 7y ago
      I never thought I'd say this, but I trust Walmart more than Amazon at this point
  • tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    I tend to go for StarTech now, look it up on https://www.startech.com https://www.startech.com and search for the part number on Ebay. So far I've not been disappointed.
  • tannhaeuser 7y ago
    Go to a manufacturer's direct sales site, or buy at respected brick-and-mortar shops or online retailers who have reputation to loose.
  • rchaud 7y ago
    > What online store exists today, where I can be guaranteed to buy quality things? Do they no longer exist? I'm in Canada, and increasingly I'm buying direct from brick-and-mortar retailers w/ online ordering and delivery. Best Buy, Staples, Walmart, the Apple Store, the Microsoft Store, etc. BB's site does have third party sellers, but the website has a useful, clearly marked toggle labeled "Best Buy Only" which I always click. Walmart's search function is terrible, but once you locate the product, you can usually pick it up same day or have it delivered to a pickup point in a couple of days if you live in a city.
  • astura 7y ago
    For cables? Monoprice.
• MentallyRetired 7y ago
  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.
  • bognition 7y ago
    > Why else would the API be absolutely ancient? A huge change is coming. What motivations do they have to change it? Amazon has very little incentive to change an API that is a cash cow. The AdWords API is much the same. It's a SOAP api that largely hasn't changed in 5+ years.
  • freeone3000 7y ago
    I hope they do this, for a more consistent product experience. I actually do not trust Amazon to deliver a legitimate product now.
  • rootusrootus 7y ago
    I don't expect a big change unless customers start leaving in droves. Something like half of Amazon's revenue is a direct result of the third party sellers, they won't cut that off anytime soon. They neglect those sellers and the API because there is no incentive not to.
  • AFascistWorld 7y ago
    Third party sellers are cash cows once you finish monoplising the market, sellers will be begging to give Amazon more and more marketing money to move their products.
  • coldpie 7y ago
    > Now they can remove all third party sellers from their platform and cite a trust & safety risk. If they remove third party sellers from their platform, I might go back to buying things on Amazon.
• landcoctos 7y ago
  Been saying for a long time Amazon is a flee market. Many times it's my last choice now when shopping online.
  • bluedino 7y ago
    We bought some Brother labeling tape last week. They came in what looks like Brother packaging but it's named 'Better', P-touch is swapped out with B-touch... The labels are inferior, the ink comes off, the labels unstick after a few days...how does Amazon even let this trash on their site?
    • alunchbox 7y ago
      Because, money.
    • ianai 7y ago
      That should really be something to take them to court over, bit it’s not worth it for the dollar price.
      • senderista 7y ago
        That’s why class-action suits exist...
  • marktangotango 7y ago
    Not only that but they have the willful bait and switch when it comes to shippng method. Pay for 2 day, but it defaults to 7, you have to manually select 2 day. I got burned by that, never again. Edit this was a couple of weeks before Christmas, so I figured it was a "seasonal" "feature".
    • MaupitiBlue 7y ago
      I had about 150 orders last year and never saw this happen.
• taneq 7y ago
  *its
• Darmody 7y ago
  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.
  • leemcalilly 7y ago
    As a small niche retailer that makes and sells guitar straps in Nashville I couldn’t agree more. Our experiments selling on Amazon have only hurt us, but Prime is a huge time & shipping $$ saver for re-ordering supplies for our shop and even materials used to make our products. We’ve experimented with selling on a lot of different sites (Amazon, Etsy, Reverb, etc) and have found the best way to control the brand and customer experience is selling solely on our website https://originalfuzz.com https://originalfuzz.com. So we both rely on Amazon to run our business, while feel we’re actively doing harm to our brand when we sell our products there. We’re giving up revenue in the short term by not taking a multi-channel approach to sales, but we think it will pay dividends over the long term because we’re able to provide a consistent customer experience with each order.
    • burlesona 7y ago
      Very nice website and you offer Apple Pay. I’d totally buy direct from you over going to Amazon. I think you’re on the right track.
      • einpoklum 7y ago
        Subjugating economic activity to Amazon in part and Apple in another part isn't the right track, socially and IMHO.
• itp 7y ago
  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.
  • thechao 7y ago
    There’s a trivial way for native English speakers to learn this rule: replace ‘it’ with ‘his’, appropriately, adjust comma to suit. > Amazon has ceded control of hi’s site to a 3rd party... Obviously incorrect.
    • floren 7y ago
      > There’s a trivial way for native English speakers to learn this rule: replace ‘it’ with ‘his’, appropriately, adjust comma to suit. I prefer the handy jingle, "If it's supposed to be possessive, it's just i-t-s, if it's supposed to be a contraction it's i-t-apostrophe-s. Scalawag."
      • rblatz 7y ago
        How did you type that message with boxing gloves on?
    • mkl 7y ago
      It's an apostrophe, not a comma, and unfortunately that won't work in the case where it should be "it's", like at the start of this sentence, but yes. "It's" only ever means "it is" or "it has". </pedantic>
      • usrusr 7y ago
        What if he actually is an apostrophe? Disregarding the semantic absurdity (and the e/i mismatch), the rule works fine: "his an apostrophe" should look a lot more wrong to anyone with enough understanding of English that its/it's mistakes make a difference than "he's an apostrophe". "He's" also only ever means "he is" or "he has", just like "it's". That's the entire point of this little memory aid.
• stanski 7y ago
  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.
  • sergiotapia 7y ago
    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.
    • danso 7y ago
      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.
      • JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
        Pretty sure it’s a spin on a Fight Club quote.
        • danso 7y ago
          Er, what's your point? That, because it comes from Fight Club it must be only in an ironic sense?
          • deleted 7y ago
            [deleted]
      • corobo 7y ago
        It's a quote from Fight Club
    • 7y ago
• martythemaniak 7y ago
  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.
  • toomuchtodo 7y ago
    Digikey has reasonable pricing and shipping costs. Might consider them for future purchases.
  • ianai 7y ago
    They’re increasingly like that regardless of whatever I’m looking to purchase. I waste enough time looking for an actual, legitimate item that going out to the stores may be quicker and is definitely more assured. Maybe they want this to happen and focus on the rest of their business?
  • black6 7y ago
    Waveform Lighting and Hyperikon are my go-to for quality, high-CRI LED bulbs in just about whatever color temperature and base you desire.
  • cal5k 7y ago
    I thought I was alone on this! I ended up going to a local hardware store instead because I couldn't figure out what was trustworthy. These days I typically do product research off-Amazon, not on Amazon itself.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • leemcalilly 7y ago
    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 bullshitfreebulbs.com to make your purchase. But if it’s something you buy often, Prime + order history is easily the fastest, most convenient way to buy something.
• cmrdporcupine 7y ago
  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.
  • CaptainZapp 7y ago
    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/counterfeit-canada-goose-amazon/581041/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/count...
    • cmrdporcupine 7y ago
      Here in Canada, at least, sporting gear and technical outdoor clothing is a complete joke on Amazon. Sometimes two, three, times the price. And, yeah, likely fraudulent.
    • mffnbs 7y ago
      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.
      • CaptainZapp 7y ago
• docker_up 7y ago
  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.
• iwasakabukiman 7y ago
  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?
  • gdulli 7y ago
    Right. Amazon has become a better showroom than a store.
  • rdtwo 7y ago
    For me this has not been working well because I go to Walmart or Best Buy and find out they don’t actually stock anything and end up wasting my time and still having to buy online.
    • freeAgent 7y ago
      I always check the inventory online at my local Best Buy before going to the store for a price match. If I've already found the product on Amazon, it's not hard to do the same on BB and make sure it's in stock.
• impalallama 7y ago
  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.
• duxup 7y ago
  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.
  • ethbro 7y ago
    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 that seems a stretch.
    • duxup 7y ago
      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.
    • derefr 7y ago
      Or perhaps they’re so KPI-focused that they do know they’re screwing up the customer experience, but they don’t care, because customer experience isn’t a KPI and so won’t get them promoted? Interesting factoid: I’ve never seen Amazon attempt to take any net-promoter-score-like “Would you recommend Amazon to your friends” measure. Google does these (I just had one pushed on me while using the GCP console.) Apple probably does them somewhere, even if I haven’t noticed it. Facebook definitely does them. But Amazon seems to be actively resistant to collecting this information. They seem to not want to quantize customer-experience into a KPI.
• mrosett 7y ago
  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-host-suspended-accounts-1.5252233 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/airbnb-montreal-aj-h...
  • hunterloftis 7y ago
    > 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. I was surprised to see the WSJ go into detail about balloons above the toys with 400x allowed lead and motorcycle helmets falsely stamped "DOT Approved" that crack open on contact. From an engineering perspective, however, it shows that Amazon isn't even willing to devote a minimum of resources (or is actively avoiding its duty to check). How hard would it be to query for any product with "balloon" in its title that lacks "choking hazard" in its description?
    • mrosett 7y ago
      That's exactly how I felt about it. They undermined themselves rhetorically by using the number of balloon listings to increase the count of dangerous products. However, the fact that Amazon hasn't fixed even that well-defined a problem is concerning.
• t34543 7y ago
  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.
  • dharmon 7y ago
    Its not always fakes. Some sellers sell factory seconds and refurbished items as new. Just save yourself the headaches and skip Amazon, where you have no recourse, for Home Depot, Best Buy, Target, and even Wal-Mart. Everybody does price matching these days. If you're buying something you know is cheap junk, then just cut out the middle man and again skip Amazon for Ali express or Alibaba like the parent mentioned.
    • kazinator 7y ago
      That more or less qualifies as a fake.
  • leemcalilly 7y ago
    Every other time I buy a specific brand of cotton canvas (James Thompson), it’s fake on Amazon but close enough that it’s not worth the effort to file a complaint. And this is a brand that is supposed to be verified by Amazon’s brand registry.
  • Darmody 7y ago
    Some days ago I wanted to buy a Mi Band 4. I thought of Amazon. Let me make a search right now to see what I find. Here's a screenshot (not in English but easy to understand what's going on): https://i.imgur.com/hRJIiKk.png https://i.imgur.com/hRJIiKk.png The first one has 1.5k votes and 1.5/5 stars. If you get into the commets to see what's wrong you will see it's a fake. It's a M4 Smart Band, nothing to do with the Mi Band 4. The second one has 2.5/5 stars and looks like people are receiving also a fake. The others look good but who knows. All of them are from 3d party sellers. Now I can buy the Mi Band 4 from Aliexpress for 36 euro (33 if I wait for a promo in 3 days) and I can be 100% sure that I'll receive the original one within 2-4 days. I can also buy it a bit cheaper from China but delivery takes longer. I can give you another example. I want to buy a bag for my laptop. Almost everything I see in Amazon is from Aliexpress but more expensive.
• AFascistWorld 7y ago
  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.
• visarga 7y ago
  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.
• cs702 7y ago
  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.
  • djsumdog 7y ago
    I always wondered how we got all these reports of lead in products and children's toys. There was a post a few weeks back where someone explained it and it made perfect sense: recycling. China takes a ton of US recycling. They often melt down metals, e-waste and solder and it's difficult to separated out lead and unleaded source material. A lot of it just gets put together and used in bulk.
    • DataWorker 7y ago
      They have these issues due to corruption, greed and negligence. With recycling as with other stuff, China cheats and poisons people to make a quick dollar, decades go by and nothing changes and nobody goes to prison. Think of how many people use Chinese made pots and pans, or knives, and have no clue they’re poisoning themselves and their families just to save a few bucks by buying the cheap Chinese version.
      • fmajid 7y ago
        To be fair, when someone is caught doing this in China, they are executed. In the US, their fancy lawyers get them off with a slap on the wrist.
        • floren 7y ago
          Generally, they blame a "temporary worker", bribe a disinterested party official, and stop putting the poison in that particular product... For now, anyway.
• AlexandrB 7y ago
  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.
  • jjoonathan 7y ago
    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.
    • astura 7y ago
      Bonus points when its a glass product.
    • cr0sh 7y ago
      I once ordered a really large socket (36mm for the axle nuts on my Jeep) from Amazon. I can't recall what they shipped it with, but I do recall the box was mostly empty, no padding, air bags, or whatnot. But they wrapped that socket with bubble wrap nine ways from Sunday! It was like this ball of bubble wrap and tape, with this huge socket in the middle.
  • WaltPurvis 7y ago
    I know! It's so stupid. I try not to order books directly from Amazon anymore unless I buy two or more at the same time (because if you buy 2+ books they ship in a box rather than a padded envelope). I'm not shy about returning books with bent covers or other damage, I do it all the time, and a couple of times I've returned the same book twice until they finally managed to deliver an undamaged copy, but it's a little worrisome because I've heard tales of Amazon banning customers who "abuse" returns. (And of course it's also a hassle).
• savrajsingh 7y ago
  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...
  • hyperrail 7y ago
    I wouldn't say WSJ is doing "free" work for Amazon - subscriptions are very expensive: https://store.wsj.com/shop/US/US/wsjussblds0919/ https://store.wsj.com/shop/US/US/wsjussblds0919/ They are currently running a 2 months for $1 sale and a half off for 1 year sale, but a digital subscription normally goes for $38.99 per month. Oddly, it's a couple of dollars cheaper per month to buy the print newspaper and digital subscription together than to buy the digital sub alone.
• MaupitiBlue 7y ago
  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?
  • visarga 7y ago
    Depends on the seller. That's the whole point - they make it hard to know if you can trust or not the seller.
    • techntoke 7y ago
      I have a very simple bookmark let that only shows items sold by Amazon.com without having to filter by category. I think part of the issue is that their site UI is pretty horrendous, and makes it difficult to limit searches. I do however notice issues with some items sold by them, but primarily with descriptions being incorrect or them combining a bunch of items with reviews, sometimes for completely unrelated products. I personally try to avoid third-party sellers for the most part. I would love to support smaller businesses, but to be honest you're probably doing most third-party sellers a disservice by buying on Amazon, especially if you think there is a possibility that you'll return the item.
    • 0xffff2 7y ago
      More than that, you have to trust every seller for the product you're buying, because all inventory from all sellers (including Amazon itself) goes into a single bin. You have no way of knowing which seller actually put the item you get into the bin.
  • untog 7y ago
    Did your toothbrush have lead in it? Hyperbolic example I know but this reporting shows that you don't know definitively.
    • 7y ago
• djsumdog 7y ago
  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-e-store/ https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-death-of-the-mom-and-pop-...
• burlesona 7y ago
  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.
  • wasdfff 7y ago
    In my experience apple pay is few and far between, and firefox fills out my billing anyway.
  • Marsymars 7y ago
    > One thing I haven’t seen people talking about much is how profound and impact Apple Pay is for direct online retail. I'd love to use Apple Pay, but neither of the credit cards I use for online shopping (Capital One for CAD purchases, Home Trust for non-CAD) support it.
    • PhantomGremlin 7y ago
      Is there something special/different about Apple Pay for online shopping versus physical stores? My Capital One card loaded to my iPhone has worked with Apple Pay in physical stores since the inception of the feature. I use it literally every day. In the last few days I used it at McDonald's and at Whole Foods.
      • Marsymars 7y ago
        > Is there something special/different about Apple Pay for online shopping versus physical stores? Most notably, I could use Apple Pay for online shopping with Safari. I would not be able to use Apple Pay at physical stores as I don't have an iPhone. Capital One Canada doesn't support Apple Pay of any variety.
• julianlam 7y ago
  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.
  • HillaryBriss 7y ago
    > they all come from China and I pay Western prices for the privilege of having it shipped to me faster that's a pretty decent description of the Amazon business model. (i guess the only thing to add is that Amazon accepts product returns. but almost every retailer does that nowadays.)
• dahart 7y ago
  > 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.
  • dchichkov 7y ago
    There was a recent study that also had crossed a threshold of anecdotes [1]: "The Attorney General’s Office, in partnership with the Washington State Department of Ecology, tested children’s school supplies for harmful levels of lead and cadmium in 2017 and 2018. The tests targeted products the two agencies suspected might contain toxic metals. In total, two rounds of tests identified 51 products sold on Amazon.com that tested positive for illegal levels of lead and cadmium. In the first round of testing, 16 of the 43 products from Amazon tested positive for illegal levels of toxic metals. In the second round of tests, the two agencies found that 35 of 41 products examined exceed the legal limits. The Department of Ecology paid for the first round of testing and the Attorney General’s Office funded the second round. " [1] https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/ag-ferguson-amazon.. https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/ag-ferguson-amazon....
    • cardiffspaceman 7y ago
      There's a stack of transforms here: All amazon stuff -> Things that a protective agency through highly-developed intuition suspects will be dangerous -> things actually found to be dangerous. So it's bad news that they found dangerous things amongst a category of things that we don't want to be at all dangerous (children's school supplies). It's not surprising news that these agencies are pretty good at knowing in advance which children's school supplies are likely to be dangerous. BTW the link doesn't bring up a specific article. It brings up a list of articles. One wonders why the press release didn't say, Wash AG indicts school supply suppliers after joint AG-DoEcology investigation?
• rchaud 7y ago
  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.
• deleted 7y ago
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• EGreg 7y ago
  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_Other_Tripling_Elephants 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?
• simonebrunozzi 7y ago
  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.
  • 0xffff2 7y ago
    Sounds pretty pedantic to me. I don't think anyone reading this headline would confuse "Amazon.com" with the rain forest or the river.
• mfer 7y ago
  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-redefines-the-purpose-of-a-corporation-to-promote-an-economy-that-serves-all-americans https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redef...
• DannyBee 7y ago
  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.
  • stronglikedan 7y ago
    > If you buy a defective thing from best buy, they are responsible. Not really. They just assume liability for competition's sake. They could effectively tell you to go pound sand, but that would hurt them competitively, so they offer a return policy instead. Same as if you get a defective product from a Craig's List seller - caveat emptor.
    • DannyBee 7y ago
      Not sure why you think this, in most states they, for example, cannot waive the implied warranties for consumers which has exactly the effect i said. (there are other laws as well)
  • kwhitefoot 7y ago
    That's how it works in Europe. But when I suggested to a colleague in the US a few years ago that he take a defective disk drive back to Best Buy (or perhaps Newegg) five months after he had bought it he laughed out loud at the absurdity of the idea that the seller would do anything at all.
    • DannyBee 7y ago
      He shouldn't have, the minimum period is usually a year. This is one area of the uniform code[1] that states often modify, so it varies as to length. Some are only 90 days, etc. This is also not as well known by consumers as it should be, and obviously, businesses sometimes try to claim otherwise (IE say you have to deal with the manufacturer) But, the law is incredibly consistent about this if you take someone to court. [1] In the US, there is a non-partisan uniform law commission that publishes model laws for states to adopt in various important areas. The main goal is to keep the law of each state similar in areas where that similarity is important to being able to do business across multiple states. Outside of business, they sometimes tackle complex jurisdictional efforts where states would otherwise fight with each other based on their local social/public policy. An example would be the uniform child abduction act, which ensures if a parent who does not have sole custody takes a child across state lines, you don't get into a big fight over where the child should be based on social issues that differ between states. Not all states sign everything, but they get very good uptake on most laws. https://www.uniformlaws.org/home https://www.uniformlaws.org/home
• rossdavidh 7y ago
  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.
• ibdf 7y ago
  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.
• derefr 7y ago
  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.
  • 0xffff2 7y ago
    Of course it's Amazon's problem to solve. I am, generally speaking, no longer and Amazon customer because they've chosen not to solve it. Amazon's search functionality is the least of their problems. The fundamental issue with Amazon right now is that even if I only buy "ships and sold by Amazon.com" items, I'm still at a high risk (depending on product category) of receiving a fraudulent item that originated with a third-party seller. That's a problem that no one buy Amazon can solve.
• ineedasername 7y ago
  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.
• mrhappyunhappy 7y ago
  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.
• sjg007 7y ago
  I’ve said this before but this will be Amazon’s downfall. Target and Walmart have much better product quality control.
  • lotsofpulp 7y ago
    I opt for Target simply because Walmart has resellers too and I don’t feel like wasting my time and effort filtering those out.
• nickjj 7y ago
  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).
  • nabnob 7y ago
    Do you know which flea treatment this was?
    • nickjj 7y ago
      Yeah, it was this Hartz one: https://www.amazon.com/Hartz-UltraGuard-Topical-Prevention-Kittens/product-reviews/B0016H8Z44 https://www.amazon.com/Hartz-UltraGuard-Topical-Prevention-K... Look at how many 1 star ratings there are. We sorted by 1 stars and then by newest reviews. If you go back for a few months it's just an endless amount of scary negative reviews but it wasn't so bad years ago.
      • nabnob 7y ago
        Thanks. Those reviews are pretty fucking scary.
• jlj 7y ago
  This is addressed in the 10-k. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872419000004/amzn-20181231x10k.htm 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."
• blunte 7y ago
  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?
• fencepost 7y ago
  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.
• freeAgent 7y ago
  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.
  • 0xffff2 7y ago
    I thought this was a well-known fact? Over the years its gone from "buy this thing from this seller" to "buy this thing and we'll send you one like it from either the third-party bin or the Amazon bin depending on who your ordered it from", and finally to "buy this thing and we'll send you one like it from a single bin".
• AlexDragusin 7y ago
  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.
• dbcurtis 7y ago
  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.
  • alexandercrohde 7y ago
    Wow, it's rare that I scroll down 5 pages and see the best comment there. That's a great idea.
• starsinspace 7y ago
  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_products/rapex/alerts/?event=main.listNotifications&lng=en 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.
• tempsy 7y ago
  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.
• r00fus 7y ago
  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.
  • wasdfff 7y ago
    Just shopping locally and picking up your own food saves you so much and helps subconciously cuts down on your personal consumerism. I do anything I can now to make sure my dollar doesnt leave the county if it can be helped.
• ashleyw 7y ago
  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-The-Ultimate-Guide-for-Public-Speaking-and-Conversation-Persuasion-Relationship-Workplace-Interviews-Audiobook/B07TTD19PL 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-communication-relationships-ebook/product-reviews/B07T81TZ57 https://www.amazon.com/COMMUNICATION-MARRIAGE-effective-comm... (One recurring phrase "which made her realize she had a problem too"
  • sgustard 7y ago
    That's pretty bad, and ironic that reviews for a book about communication are all written in such broken English. Sadly fakespot.com rates that page an A so now I'm sceptical of that site too.
    • ashleyw 7y ago
      Yes! The first thing I did was check Fakespot. This doesn't even seem that sophisticated. Same phrases, same reviewers, I don't know how Fakespot missed it. I thought those were key markers it uses to determine the validity of reviews!
    • rahidz 7y ago
      On the other hand ReviewMeta does give it a failing grade: https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B07T81TZ57 https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B07T81TZ57
• greenail 7y ago
  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.
  • 0xffff2 7y ago
    This isn't possible anymore either. There are numerous reports that add up to the fact that Amazon now co-mingles all inventory, theirs and third-party, for a single product into a single bin.
    • greenail 7y ago
      can you provide a source?
      • 0xffff2 7y ago
        From Amazon? Of course not. They haven't and likely won't admit to it. You can find 2-3 top level comments in this thread alone that cite their own examples of this happening. Similar stories crop up every single time anyone mentions the Amazon marketplace for at least a year now.
• kwhitefoot 7y ago
  They are neither unable nor unwilling. The mixing of different sellers inventories shows that they do what they do quite deliberately.
  • 0xffff2 7y ago
    That would be "unwilling".
    • kwhitefoot 7y ago
      Yes, I don't know what happened there, sort of a high level typo.
• sporkologist 7y ago
  Well duh, if they did then Bezos wouldn't have $zillions in the bank.
• blairanderson 7y ago
  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. - [0] https://www.andersonassociates.net https://www.andersonassociates.net
• moron4hire 7y ago
  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.
• senderista 7y ago
  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.)
  • depingus 7y ago
    Even buying brand name items shipped and sold by Amazon doesn't guarantee that your item will be safe. The way Amazon commingles their items with 3rd party "fulfilled by Amazon" items means chances are high that you will end up with a Chinese knock off.
  • rasz 7y ago
    Why trash? sent it back to amazon and demand full refund.
• floatingatoll 7y ago
  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?
• redorb 7y ago
  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..
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• adrianmonk 7y ago
  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.
• dreamcompiler 7y ago
  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.
• tomohawk 7y ago
  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.
• sombremesa 7y ago
  Here's a similar thread from some time ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19741942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19741942
• manbearpiggy 7y ago
  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.
• greyhair 7y ago
  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.
• JVIDEL 7y ago
  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.