4 ms·

"more than five customer complaints" Five out of _? We should care about the proportion, and should consider some time decay (maybe the issues were a decade a

"more than five customer complaints" Five out of _? We should care about the proportion, and should consider some time decay (maybe the issues were a decade ago).

michaelt 7y ago
I work for a company that (among other things) sells food. The acceptable number of customers to send expired food is zero percent. It's not a complex or unusual requirement to make sure your goods are in-date - any properly designed warehouse management system will take care of this. This is absolutely table stakes if you're going to deliver food. Unopened baby formula has a shelf life of 6 months+ when properly stored, so they've got a gigantic margin of error here. It'd be pretty poor customer service to ship baby formula that only had 2 months of its 6 month shelf life remaining. There's really no excuse for shipping expired baby formula.
- crazygringo 7y ago
  Actually, genuine question: how do you do that technologically? With multiple supplier deliveries that result in combined stock with multiple expiration dates, how do you ensure expired food isn't delivered? Because I assume a warehouse doesn't keep a separate shelf spot for each separate delivery of a unique expiration date? And also, the expiration dates are printed on products in places that can be hard to find and hard to read. (Every time I buy bacon or greens I spent sixty seconds trying to find where the hell the date is on the plastic.) It's also generally not cost-effective on low-margin food items to print out and scan a unique label for each item that would allow the expiration date to be machine-readable. So I've always just assumed new deliveries try to be put in a warehouse bin behind/under existing items, and workers try to check visually for expired items, but that neither of those will ever be perfect. So what's the properly designed warehouse management system that solves for this?
  - yifanl 7y ago
    So, if there isn't a solution to do something at scale, then the answer is to simply not do said something at scale. The defence that "this isn't technologically possible" isn't at all a defence. The _most_ charitable interpretation would be that this is Amazon stress-testing how well they can handle co-mingling of various product lines... but that's still not great if they don't pull the experiment immediately after realizing they can't.
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  - michaelt 7y ago
    > Because I assume a warehouse doesn't keep a separate shelf spot for each separate delivery of a unique expiration date? Actually, that's pretty much what we do. If the goods arrive from the supplier as a whole pallet of a single product, every item on the pallet will have the same expiry date, and you track each pallet separately. If the goods arrive on a pallet with a variety of products on it, you split it up by product then do exactly the same thing. The warehouse management system knows where each pallet is, and what its expiry date is. If a pallet has expired, workers picking items are sent to to non-expired pallets instead, and someone working on 'purge' is sent to remove the expired goods for donation/recycling/discarding as appropriate. You need a system like this if you want any chance of selling things like bread, because gaining or losing one or two days of product life makes the difference between a customer who'll shop again and one who won't.
    - turtlebits 7y ago
      Unless you check each item, you don't actually know if the expiration date is correct. I don't see much difference in what you are doing vs Amazon, except that Amazon is getting their product from a various sources (which may be less trustworthy than your supplier).
      - Scaevolus 7y ago
        Since everyone in the chain cares about expiration dates, food manufacturers aren't in the habit of commingling products with different ages. Why wouldn't they ship a pallet that's all made at the same time?
      - michaelt 7y ago
        Ah, perhaps I should have specified; as well as being industry convention, our suppliers are obligated by contract to ensure all the items on a pallet have the same expiry date; and they are generally the original manufacturer who packaged the goods and attached the expiry date in the first place. They can, of course, print any expiry date on it they like. But they're also pretty motivated not to poison their customers, which is widely seen as bad business practice :) In our case we do carry out random spot checks on inbound goods, but that's mainly checking for things like bruising on fresh fruit and vegetables.
- amitport 7y ago
  I didn't mean to say that it's OK. Just that I would like to have a good quantitative grasp of the actual situation.
- ReconBob 7y ago
  Most likely many of the deceptive Amazon sellers are buying closeout or expired products 10 cents on the dollar and reselling them just below Amazon's price.
- papln 7y ago
  What's wrong with babyfood that must be consumed within 2 months. (And note that it doesn't turn toxic after it's expiration date, shelf-life for canned goods is far longer than stamped date.)
  - michaelt 7y ago
    > What's wrong with babyfood that must be consumed within 2 months. Maybe the customer saw a good deal, or had a visit from a rich relative who wanted to do something nice to help them out, and knowing the product lasts 6+ months, ordered a 3 month supply. If the stuff that turns up has a shorter life than they expect, they're going to be disappointed which is bad for your reputation, and they may get a refund causing you to make a loss on the order. The same applies to a loaf of bread or a pack of batteries or almost anything else with an expiry date. Of course if you were explicitly listing the product as discounted due to short shelf life, and your website was clear enough users couldn't overlook that by accident, it's fine - but AFAIK Amazon doesn't have different listings for different shelf lives of the same product. > And note that it doesn't turn toxic after it's expiration date Sure, but there's a market rate for expired goods, and it's way lower than the market rate for non-expired goods. If you're selling expired goods to customers who thought they were getting non-expired goods, you're ripping them off and it's fair for them to want a refund.
ilamont 7y ago
You are correct. I am assuming most marketplace sellers are low-volume sellers, therefore 5 negative seller reviews/ratings is enough to justify a red flag. If it's a high-volume seller with many hundreds or thousands of reviews in a 1-month period, then it's not as big of a concern. For the example I cited earlier of a 22% negative rating in the previous 30 days, that represented dozens of negative reviews.

"more than five customer complaints" Five out of _? We should care about the proportion, and should consider some time decay (maybe the issues were a decade ago).

michaelt 7y ago

I work for a company that (among other things) sells food. The acceptable number of customers to send expired food is zero percent. It's not a complex or unusual requirement to make sure your goods are in-date - any properly designed warehouse management system will take care of this. This is absolutely table stakes if you're going to deliver food. Unopened baby formula has a shelf life of 6 months+ when properly stored, so they've got a gigantic margin of error here. It'd be pretty poor customer service to ship baby formula that only had 2 months of its 6 month shelf life remaining. There's really no excuse for shipping expired baby formula.

crazygringo 7y ago
Actually, genuine question: how do you do that technologically? With multiple supplier deliveries that result in combined stock with multiple expiration dates, how do you ensure expired food isn't delivered? Because I assume a warehouse doesn't keep a separate shelf spot for each separate delivery of a unique expiration date? And also, the expiration dates are printed on products in places that can be hard to find and hard to read. (Every time I buy bacon or greens I spent sixty seconds trying to find where the hell the date is on the plastic.) It's also generally not cost-effective on low-margin food items to print out and scan a unique label for each item that would allow the expiration date to be machine-readable. So I've always just assumed new deliveries try to be put in a warehouse bin behind/under existing items, and workers try to check visually for expired items, but that neither of those will ever be perfect. So what's the properly designed warehouse management system that solves for this?
- yifanl 7y ago
  So, if there isn't a solution to do something at scale, then the answer is to simply not do said something at scale. The defence that "this isn't technologically possible" isn't at all a defence. The _most_ charitable interpretation would be that this is Amazon stress-testing how well they can handle co-mingling of various product lines... but that's still not great if they don't pull the experiment immediately after realizing they can't.
- deleted 7y ago
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- deleted 7y ago
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- michaelt 7y ago
  > Because I assume a warehouse doesn't keep a separate shelf spot for each separate delivery of a unique expiration date? Actually, that's pretty much what we do. If the goods arrive from the supplier as a whole pallet of a single product, every item on the pallet will have the same expiry date, and you track each pallet separately. If the goods arrive on a pallet with a variety of products on it, you split it up by product then do exactly the same thing. The warehouse management system knows where each pallet is, and what its expiry date is. If a pallet has expired, workers picking items are sent to to non-expired pallets instead, and someone working on 'purge' is sent to remove the expired goods for donation/recycling/discarding as appropriate. You need a system like this if you want any chance of selling things like bread, because gaining or losing one or two days of product life makes the difference between a customer who'll shop again and one who won't.
  - turtlebits 7y ago
    Unless you check each item, you don't actually know if the expiration date is correct. I don't see much difference in what you are doing vs Amazon, except that Amazon is getting their product from a various sources (which may be less trustworthy than your supplier).
    - Scaevolus 7y ago
      Since everyone in the chain cares about expiration dates, food manufacturers aren't in the habit of commingling products with different ages. Why wouldn't they ship a pallet that's all made at the same time?
    - michaelt 7y ago
      Ah, perhaps I should have specified; as well as being industry convention, our suppliers are obligated by contract to ensure all the items on a pallet have the same expiry date; and they are generally the original manufacturer who packaged the goods and attached the expiry date in the first place. They can, of course, print any expiry date on it they like. But they're also pretty motivated not to poison their customers, which is widely seen as bad business practice :) In our case we do carry out random spot checks on inbound goods, but that's mainly checking for things like bruising on fresh fruit and vegetables.
amitport 7y ago
I didn't mean to say that it's OK. Just that I would like to have a good quantitative grasp of the actual situation.
ReconBob 7y ago
Most likely many of the deceptive Amazon sellers are buying closeout or expired products 10 cents on the dollar and reselling them just below Amazon's price.
papln 7y ago
What's wrong with babyfood that must be consumed within 2 months. (And note that it doesn't turn toxic after it's expiration date, shelf-life for canned goods is far longer than stamped date.)
- michaelt 7y ago
  > What's wrong with babyfood that must be consumed within 2 months. Maybe the customer saw a good deal, or had a visit from a rich relative who wanted to do something nice to help them out, and knowing the product lasts 6+ months, ordered a 3 month supply. If the stuff that turns up has a shorter life than they expect, they're going to be disappointed which is bad for your reputation, and they may get a refund causing you to make a loss on the order. The same applies to a loaf of bread or a pack of batteries or almost anything else with an expiry date. Of course if you were explicitly listing the product as discounted due to short shelf life, and your website was clear enough users couldn't overlook that by accident, it's fine - but AFAIK Amazon doesn't have different listings for different shelf lives of the same product. > And note that it doesn't turn toxic after it's expiration date Sure, but there's a market rate for expired goods, and it's way lower than the market rate for non-expired goods. If you're selling expired goods to customers who thought they were getting non-expired goods, you're ripping them off and it's fair for them to want a refund.

ilamont 7y ago

You are correct. I am assuming most marketplace sellers are low-volume sellers, therefore 5 negative seller reviews/ratings is enough to justify a red flag. If it's a high-volume seller with many hundreds or thousands of reviews in a 1-month period, then it's not as big of a concern. For the example I cited earlier of a 22% negative rating in the previous 30 days, that represented dozens of negative reviews.