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> In a fair platform, you could resolve something like this pretty easily How? It seems that Amazon could provide better communication, but how would this sit

> In a fair platform, you could resolve something like this pretty easily How? It seems that Amazon could provide better communication, but how would this situation be easily resolved?

user5994461 6y ago
Release a small fraction of the fund, let's say 30%, maybe limited to transactions deemed older/safer. It's trivial and it's enough cash flow for the vendor to continue operating until the next release. Amazon has two days delivery for most orders. They can quickly get customer feedback (product review, refund, shipping issue). They could even directly question customers "have you received product? Yes/No". They could easily determine that a vendor is legit if they wanted to, they do not need to hold funds for months.
- mcbits 6y ago
  What PayPal does or did (according to stories I read a while back) was freeze the funds and then simultaneously advertise a loan to the customer. So I guess we could subtract the interest rate charged by other lenders for that kind of loan from the rate that PayPal would charge, to get an estimate of the risk that PayPal believes it is mitigating when freezing people's funds.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    Sounds odd for PayPal to do that (might be a US thing?). They're the one owing you money but you're the one who has to pay extra fee? The purpose of delaying was to prevent fraud and this achieves nothing to prevent fraud, the vendor can just take the loan and run away. If PayPal is confident enough to give a loan, they're confident enough to release some of the funds, but they prefer to force a loan on the account holder and get extra fees? I don't expect that going well in many jurisdictions. Consider the massive power imbalance and usually shorter legal timelines to close SME payments, that give more weight to the case.
ehnto 6y ago
A human talks to another human and they discuss the situation, figure out what documents or proofs they could provide and come to an agreement. Make those humans lawyers if you have to. It's not some unknown landscape of grey area in content moderation, it's a marketplace holding onto another businesses money unfairly. We can't treat it like a social network or other ephemeral software platform, this is real transactional commerce and Amazon should behave like it and provide support to resolve things like this quickly.
- exclusiv 6y ago
  I agree. In order to get access to an API which enables you to proxy web requests through a network of participating consumer computers, I had to do a Zoom meeting a few years ago with the service provider. Obviously their service could be used nefariously and they asked a few questions, wanted to see my office and validate a few things to ensure I was going to use it for valid purposes. (I used it to scrape publicly accessible data for research purposes). Sometimes the low tech, manual human process is the best final filter.
- nebulous1 6y ago
  To argue Amazon's side here, they most likely don't view this as unfair withholding. From Amazon's point of view, this seller moved from FBA to self fulfillment and had a massive increase is sales. The OP said they were averaging $1M per month, and that Amazon had held $4.2M for 15 days, so it looks like they'd had an up to 8x increase in sales while simultaneously moving to a system where Amazon had no oversight. As I said, while I can feel the pain of getting automated replies from a company that owes you a lot of money, I don't think this situation lends itself to easy solutions without a waiting period, even if you involve lawyers. There are circumstances where payment processors will hang on to the cash for much longer than this. Concert tickets come to mind.
  - ethanwillis 6y ago
    Amazon doesn't even have real oversight in their own FBA program. They comingle fake products all the time and then also punish sellers when customers receive those fake products.

> In a fair platform, you could resolve something like this pretty easily How? It seems that Amazon could provide better communication, but how would this situation be easily resolved?

user5994461 6y ago

Release a small fraction of the fund, let's say 30%, maybe limited to transactions deemed older/safer. It's trivial and it's enough cash flow for the vendor to continue operating until the next release. Amazon has two days delivery for most orders. They can quickly get customer feedback (product review, refund, shipping issue). They could even directly question customers "have you received product? Yes/No". They could easily determine that a vendor is legit if they wanted to, they do not need to hold funds for months.

mcbits 6y ago
What PayPal does or did (according to stories I read a while back) was freeze the funds and then simultaneously advertise a loan to the customer. So I guess we could subtract the interest rate charged by other lenders for that kind of loan from the rate that PayPal would charge, to get an estimate of the risk that PayPal believes it is mitigating when freezing people's funds.
- user5994461 6y ago
  Sounds odd for PayPal to do that (might be a US thing?). They're the one owing you money but you're the one who has to pay extra fee? The purpose of delaying was to prevent fraud and this achieves nothing to prevent fraud, the vendor can just take the loan and run away. If PayPal is confident enough to give a loan, they're confident enough to release some of the funds, but they prefer to force a loan on the account holder and get extra fees? I don't expect that going well in many jurisdictions. Consider the massive power imbalance and usually shorter legal timelines to close SME payments, that give more weight to the case.

ehnto 6y ago

A human talks to another human and they discuss the situation, figure out what documents or proofs they could provide and come to an agreement. Make those humans lawyers if you have to. It's not some unknown landscape of grey area in content moderation, it's a marketplace holding onto another businesses money unfairly. We can't treat it like a social network or other ephemeral software platform, this is real transactional commerce and Amazon should behave like it and provide support to resolve things like this quickly.

exclusiv 6y ago
I agree. In order to get access to an API which enables you to proxy web requests through a network of participating consumer computers, I had to do a Zoom meeting a few years ago with the service provider. Obviously their service could be used nefariously and they asked a few questions, wanted to see my office and validate a few things to ensure I was going to use it for valid purposes. (I used it to scrape publicly accessible data for research purposes). Sometimes the low tech, manual human process is the best final filter.
nebulous1 6y ago
To argue Amazon's side here, they most likely don't view this as unfair withholding. From Amazon's point of view, this seller moved from FBA to self fulfillment and had a massive increase is sales. The OP said they were averaging $1M per month, and that Amazon had held $4.2M for 15 days, so it looks like they'd had an up to 8x increase in sales while simultaneously moving to a system where Amazon had no oversight. As I said, while I can feel the pain of getting automated replies from a company that owes you a lot of money, I don't think this situation lends itself to easy solutions without a waiting period, even if you involve lawyers. There are circumstances where payment processors will hang on to the cash for much longer than this. Concert tickets come to mind.
- ethanwillis 6y ago
  Amazon doesn't even have real oversight in their own FBA program. They comingle fake products all the time and then also punish sellers when customers receive those fake products.