4 ms·

Amazon is getting overrun by scams. They're behind eBay and Aliexpress at this point. I kind of feel like they need to adopt a labor-intensive zero-tolerance p

Amazon is getting overrun by scams. They're behind eBay and Aliexpress at this point. I kind of feel like they need to adopt a labor-intensive zero-tolerance policy for this kind of stuff. There's a bimodal distribution. You can have a few scams, throw a ton of resources at each (to the point of prosecution, etc.) to deter that number from growing. Or you can have a huge number of scams. Amazon just swung over to the other side, and if they don't get it under control, their brand value will go to nothing.

Someone 6y ago
Reading https://www.salon.com/2011/06/21/spamazon/ https://www.salon.com/2011/06/21/spamazon/, it seems having lots of scammy, poorly formatted copied content isn’t a recent problem. What may be new is that this takes copyrighted material.
OneLeggedCat 6y ago
I'm sure they're watching this closely. But for now, scams are still more profitable for them than cracking down on those scams. A moderate amount of impact to brand value is always acceptable to near-monopolies.
- Grimm1 6y ago
  They aren't a near monopoly though. They have about 49% of the eCommerce market. https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-commerce-market-is-now-49-or-5-of-all-retail-spend/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-... It's gone up since I last checked, but that's not a monopoly. They're just the most consolidated block. You can downvote but 5% of the entire retail market and 49% of ecomm is not anywhere close to a classical monopoly.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    Why focus so much on the word? People reach for one of the few common words we have for “badly-behaved corporation” to express their criticism of Amazon practices, not by hawkishly watching market share graphs until one line gets too high. Maybe there is a better word, but the problems people experience are still there and are still real.
    - tedunangst 6y ago
      The premise of the comment is that monopolies can ignore negative reputation because there's no alternative. But that's not true for badly behaved corporations in general.
    - ByteJockey 6y ago
      > Why focus so much on the word? The word in particular has special connotations in US law. The people that like the service amazon provides probably don't want that designation applied to amazon, since there's a chance the company could be broken up at that point.
      - Grimm1 6y ago
        I don't like it because calling a non monopoly a monopoly has potentially broader implications for other companies not just Amazon, I don't like the dominoes the shift to this thinking implies.
        ByteJockey 6y ago
        Fair, I didn't cover it because dragging in the rest of the amazon scale companies seems like it would have cluttered the point I was trying to make. But your point is relevant, this has implications for many companies outside of just amazon.
    - Grimm1 6y ago
      Words have power and you should try to be precise with them, monopoly doesn't mean badly behaved corporation and you'll find I disagree with the thought that Amazon is a badly behaving corporation in any case. Monopoly implies you being forced to use their services with no such alternative and having negative consequences from that as a consumer. I order from many alternatives on the regular. Monopolies have consequences under US law, not liking a companies practices is A. A matter of personal interpretation and B. Not nearly enough to trigger the consequences from the US's actual laws.
- woofie11 6y ago
  Amazon has always been forward-thinking, and they ran at a loss for decades to build up a trillion dollar business. I really don't think short-term thinking is what's causing them to tear it down right now. I have no insider information, but I rather suspect that either: 1) it either got out-of-control to where it would cost billions of dollars to address 2) that there's some organizational dysfunction to where they're not competent to address it. Or something similar. Those sorts of problems are tough. Cultures, incentive structures, and organizational design issues are slower and harder to resolve than just about anything else, and the theory for how to fix them is not well-developed. Sometimes you try something, and it crashes-and-burns.
  - thrwn_frthr_awy 6y ago
    OP did not say it is a short term plan. Amazon could very well be accepting some amount of bad press around this if profits keep increasing.
II2II 6y ago
More to the point with ebooks: under how many circumstances would you have multiple editions from multiple publishers? From some of the comments below, Amazon clearly knows that they are the same book yet are letting them be published without question. Perhaps they should flag ebooks and verify the rights outside of those circumstances. It may be a lot of work at first, but I doubt that there would be as many attempted scams once Amazon starts weeding them out. (The reasons I can think of for different publishers are: public domain books, titles that have been in publication long enough for contracts to run out, and editions that are restricted by region._)
donor20 6y ago
Aliexpress is interesting. They actually have a pretty developed dispute model with a number of stages. Works "reasonably". Amazon though - the scam level / trash level is just ridiculous. The other thing - there are a TON of products that are the same, with only the brand / label different. I just did a search for fans, and 5 or 6 models had the EXACT same shape, look, everything, only difference was the name of the "company" making them. Not so useful when you are browsing around to have to wade through so much similar schlock, and weird they can't use AI to add a bit of differentiation. I think they just don't really care at this point, and it's working for them sort of. I've switched a bunch of recent purchasing to home depot though - shipment speeds have been fine and more importantly accurate. I think some of the old school players may (finally) be catching on to what made amazon popular.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  there are a TON of products that are the same, with only the brand / label different This is nothing new, and not unique to Amazon. Some factory is churning out fans. They sell a bunch of them to different retailers in different regions with just the packaging altered. In the old days the rebranded fans would go to Caldor's and Playtogs, and K-Mart, and Ben Franklin, and a dozen other chains. But also in the old days, the chains had very little geographic overlap, so nobody noticed or cared. Now all of those "retailers" are virtual. And they're all selling in the same place, Amazon. The result is that you see all these identical fans with just the branding altered, and it feels like more of a scam than it really is.
  - throwawaysea 6y ago
    The same thing also happens in ways that are harder to detect in other markets like wine. See https://priceonomics.com/post/46618070248/the-price-of-wine https://priceonomics.com/post/46618070248/the-price-of-wine: > In this range, brands can dramatically affect price. The same wine in two differently branded bottles can have very different costs, as shown by the prices offered by negociants such as Cameron Hughes: > “Hughes signs confidentiality agreements that preserve a winery’s anonymity. After all, a producer of a $40 Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon doesn’t want his customers to know they can get a nearly identical wine from Hughes for $25. Yet the winery might need to move out surplus inventory, generate cash flow or make full use of capacity, a win-win-win situation for the producers, consumers and Hughes.”
thrwn_frthr_awy 6y ago
I tried to buy some higher end digital calipers last week and almost all the top reviews are instructions on how to tell if they are fakes or not. And the reviews from people getting fakes are giving the item one star which goes against the actual item’s rating.
- mauvehaus 6y ago
  I’ve given up on buying anything like that from Amazon for exactly this reason. I’d rather go through e.g. MSC and know I’m getting what I want the first time. Specialty suppliers sell to a relatively small market of pros and can’t afford to burn them. You often pay more, but you get a better experience. It’s like buying from Digikey vs Radio Shack. That said, you can usually do a lot better on price than Grainger, who seem to mostly want larger accounts and don’t give good prices to the accountless. Other good online suppliers I’ve used: Uline McMaster-Carr Router bit world Highland woodworking Infinity cutting tools Rexel Locally, you probably have suppliers for some of these industries that do principally brick and mortar sales and have a limited online presence.
akira2501 6y ago
> I kind of feel like they need to adopt a labor-intensive zero-tolerance policy for this kind of stuff. That would be great, but I also think we need to consider if these business have developed enough to a point where they require more thorough regulation by the government. > There's a bimodal distribution. You can have a few scams, throw a ton of resources at each (to the point of prosecution, etc.) to deter that number from growing. Or you can have a huge number of scams. Well, absent any external force like government regulation this is true. It's also why I don't trust any large company to regulate themselves or their own markets appropriately; the distribution simply doesn't allow for outcomes that are strictly consumer focused. > Amazon just swung over to the other side, and if they don't get it under control How many times in history has a retail giant been able to exert this control themselves?
enonevets 6y ago
Buying on eBay is fine but selling on eBay feels like high risk of running into scammers where you can end up eating the loss every time since ultimately eBay/PayPal sides with scammer (because they can do chargebacks). There is no protection that is helpful here for sellers.
paultopia 6y ago
Yes, this. All the stuff about how because they commingle inventory[1] Amazon also can't control scams on physical products even if it says "sold by Amazon" means I simply won't buy anything important on Amazon anymore. I recently ordered two smoke detectors for my house, but, you know, I'd like smoke detectors to be products that are actually legitimate and by a company with a reputation to maintain rather than a knock-off that will get me killed. So I ordered it from walmart instead. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/ifytxk/ysk_that_amazon_has_a_serious_problem_with/ https://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/ifytxk/ysk_t...

Someone 6y ago

Reading https://www.salon.com/2011/06/21/spamazon/ https://www.salon.com/2011/06/21/spamazon/, it seems having lots of scammy, poorly formatted copied content isn’t a recent problem. What may be new is that this takes copyrighted material.

OneLeggedCat 6y ago

I'm sure they're watching this closely. But for now, scams are still more profitable for them than cracking down on those scams. A moderate amount of impact to brand value is always acceptable to near-monopolies.

Grimm1 6y ago
They aren't a near monopoly though. They have about 49% of the eCommerce market. https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-commerce-market-is-now-49-or-5-of-all-retail-spend/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-... It's gone up since I last checked, but that's not a monopoly. They're just the most consolidated block. You can downvote but 5% of the entire retail market and 49% of ecomm is not anywhere close to a classical monopoly.
- Lammy 6y ago
  Why focus so much on the word? People reach for one of the few common words we have for “badly-behaved corporation” to express their criticism of Amazon practices, not by hawkishly watching market share graphs until one line gets too high. Maybe there is a better word, but the problems people experience are still there and are still real.
  - tedunangst 6y ago
    The premise of the comment is that monopolies can ignore negative reputation because there's no alternative. But that's not true for badly behaved corporations in general.
  - ByteJockey 6y ago
    > Why focus so much on the word? The word in particular has special connotations in US law. The people that like the service amazon provides probably don't want that designation applied to amazon, since there's a chance the company could be broken up at that point.
    - Grimm1 6y ago
      I don't like it because calling a non monopoly a monopoly has potentially broader implications for other companies not just Amazon, I don't like the dominoes the shift to this thinking implies.
      - ByteJockey 6y ago
        Fair, I didn't cover it because dragging in the rest of the amazon scale companies seems like it would have cluttered the point I was trying to make. But your point is relevant, this has implications for many companies outside of just amazon.
  - Grimm1 6y ago
    Words have power and you should try to be precise with them, monopoly doesn't mean badly behaved corporation and you'll find I disagree with the thought that Amazon is a badly behaving corporation in any case. Monopoly implies you being forced to use their services with no such alternative and having negative consequences from that as a consumer. I order from many alternatives on the regular. Monopolies have consequences under US law, not liking a companies practices is A. A matter of personal interpretation and B. Not nearly enough to trigger the consequences from the US's actual laws.
woofie11 6y ago
Amazon has always been forward-thinking, and they ran at a loss for decades to build up a trillion dollar business. I really don't think short-term thinking is what's causing them to tear it down right now. I have no insider information, but I rather suspect that either: 1) it either got out-of-control to where it would cost billions of dollars to address 2) that there's some organizational dysfunction to where they're not competent to address it. Or something similar. Those sorts of problems are tough. Cultures, incentive structures, and organizational design issues are slower and harder to resolve than just about anything else, and the theory for how to fix them is not well-developed. Sometimes you try something, and it crashes-and-burns.
- thrwn_frthr_awy 6y ago
  OP did not say it is a short term plan. Amazon could very well be accepting some amount of bad press around this if profits keep increasing.

II2II 6y ago

More to the point with ebooks: under how many circumstances would you have multiple editions from multiple publishers? From some of the comments below, Amazon clearly knows that they are the same book yet are letting them be published without question. Perhaps they should flag ebooks and verify the rights outside of those circumstances. It may be a lot of work at first, but I doubt that there would be as many attempted scams once Amazon starts weeding them out. (The reasons I can think of for different publishers are: public domain books, titles that have been in publication long enough for contracts to run out, and editions that are restricted by region._)

donor20 6y ago

Aliexpress is interesting. They actually have a pretty developed dispute model with a number of stages. Works "reasonably". Amazon though - the scam level / trash level is just ridiculous. The other thing - there are a TON of products that are the same, with only the brand / label different. I just did a search for fans, and 5 or 6 models had the EXACT same shape, look, everything, only difference was the name of the "company" making them. Not so useful when you are browsing around to have to wade through so much similar schlock, and weird they can't use AI to add a bit of differentiation. I think they just don't really care at this point, and it's working for them sort of. I've switched a bunch of recent purchasing to home depot though - shipment speeds have been fine and more importantly accurate. I think some of the old school players may (finally) be catching on to what made amazon popular.

reaperducer 6y ago
there are a TON of products that are the same, with only the brand / label different This is nothing new, and not unique to Amazon. Some factory is churning out fans. They sell a bunch of them to different retailers in different regions with just the packaging altered. In the old days the rebranded fans would go to Caldor's and Playtogs, and K-Mart, and Ben Franklin, and a dozen other chains. But also in the old days, the chains had very little geographic overlap, so nobody noticed or cared. Now all of those "retailers" are virtual. And they're all selling in the same place, Amazon. The result is that you see all these identical fans with just the branding altered, and it feels like more of a scam than it really is.
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  The same thing also happens in ways that are harder to detect in other markets like wine. See https://priceonomics.com/post/46618070248/the-price-of-wine https://priceonomics.com/post/46618070248/the-price-of-wine: > In this range, brands can dramatically affect price. The same wine in two differently branded bottles can have very different costs, as shown by the prices offered by negociants such as Cameron Hughes: > “Hughes signs confidentiality agreements that preserve a winery’s anonymity. After all, a producer of a $40 Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon doesn’t want his customers to know they can get a nearly identical wine from Hughes for $25. Yet the winery might need to move out surplus inventory, generate cash flow or make full use of capacity, a win-win-win situation for the producers, consumers and Hughes.”

thrwn_frthr_awy 6y ago

I tried to buy some higher end digital calipers last week and almost all the top reviews are instructions on how to tell if they are fakes or not. And the reviews from people getting fakes are giving the item one star which goes against the actual item’s rating.

mauvehaus 6y ago
I’ve given up on buying anything like that from Amazon for exactly this reason. I’d rather go through e.g. MSC and know I’m getting what I want the first time. Specialty suppliers sell to a relatively small market of pros and can’t afford to burn them. You often pay more, but you get a better experience. It’s like buying from Digikey vs Radio Shack. That said, you can usually do a lot better on price than Grainger, who seem to mostly want larger accounts and don’t give good prices to the accountless. Other good online suppliers I’ve used: Uline McMaster-Carr Router bit world Highland woodworking Infinity cutting tools Rexel Locally, you probably have suppliers for some of these industries that do principally brick and mortar sales and have a limited online presence.

akira2501 6y ago

> I kind of feel like they need to adopt a labor-intensive zero-tolerance policy for this kind of stuff. That would be great, but I also think we need to consider if these business have developed enough to a point where they require more thorough regulation by the government. > There's a bimodal distribution. You can have a few scams, throw a ton of resources at each (to the point of prosecution, etc.) to deter that number from growing. Or you can have a huge number of scams. Well, absent any external force like government regulation this is true. It's also why I don't trust any large company to regulate themselves or their own markets appropriately; the distribution simply doesn't allow for outcomes that are strictly consumer focused. > Amazon just swung over to the other side, and if they don't get it under control How many times in history has a retail giant been able to exert this control themselves?

enonevets 6y ago

Buying on eBay is fine but selling on eBay feels like high risk of running into scammers where you can end up eating the loss every time since ultimately eBay/PayPal sides with scammer (because they can do chargebacks). There is no protection that is helpful here for sellers.

paultopia 6y ago

Yes, this. All the stuff about how because they commingle inventory[1] Amazon also can't control scams on physical products even if it says "sold by Amazon" means I simply won't buy anything important on Amazon anymore. I recently ordered two smoke detectors for my house, but, you know, I'd like smoke detectors to be products that are actually legitimate and by a company with a reputation to maintain rather than a knock-off that will get me killed. So I ordered it from walmart instead. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/ifytxk/ysk_that_amazon_has_a_serious_problem_with/ https://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/ifytxk/ysk_t...