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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
by 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 agoThat'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.
- HillaryBriss 7y ago> in practice they benefit from consumers assuming that everything on the site has some stamp of approval as you point out, it's kind of surprising that Amazon seems to have entirely abandoned this "stamp of approval" concept. i thought "stamp of approval" was one of the few differentiators that retailers could use to compete effectively.
- dralley 7y agoFunnily enough, even Amazon's actual "stamp of approval" (Amazon's Choice) is a terrible, terrible marker of quality.