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Amazon competitor got our belt listing taken down by saying it contains drugs

511 points by travelhead 6y ago

smt88 6y ago
I think what we're learning from many debacles on YouTube, Amazon, and Google is this: Algorithms are not even close to substituting for human customer service, human moderation, and human judgment. Maybe this means web-scale sites like Amazon's marketplace aren't viable. I'm fine with that implication. Stores like Target and Walmart seem to have the same prices with human-curated inventories, and I don't really miss the millions of extra products Amazon has.
- melomal 6y ago
  > Stores like Target and Walmart seem to have the same prices with human-curated inventories, and I don't really miss the millions of extra products Amazon has. I'm sure most people are generally happy to wait 2 days for something to arrive as well. Honestly, it almost feels like Amazon is trying to become an Alibaba and potentially look to take them on with the level of product quality that is now available there.
  - BoorishBears 6y ago
    Amazon practically is Alibaba at this point, or Aliexpress really. Half the results on any given product I search point straight back to Alibaba if I image search. Sometimes I check if Aliexpress has it too, and if I'm not in a hurry I get it there for a huge savings.
    - maccard 6y ago
      With two major differences - 1-2 day delivery (vs 1-2 week) and an almost guaranteed no-questions-asked returns policy (Ive never, in 15 years of using amazon, been denied a refund) They combination is what differentiates them
      - lrem 6y ago
        I've ordered non-prime items on the local Amazon, where I'd first receive a "sorry, this is taking longer than expected, please hang with us" and then the package would come _way_ later straight from China.
        maccard 6y ago
        That sucks - I'm in the UK so my experience might be different, but with the exception of something going wrong with delivery (Which I'd estimate is ~5-10% of the time, but that's not exclusive to Amazon), packages are here within 48 hours.
    - melomal 6y ago
      Exactly, it's a shit pit of affiliate marketers pumping anything for that <2% referral fee they get. As a side hustle they probably drop ship everything they are selling via Amazon affiliate links too.
- trabant00 6y ago
  An important point to make imo is that algorithms will not be close to human decision making until we hit AGI. No matter how complex they get until that point you can always cheat them in absolutely ridiculous and more importantly reproducible ways. Meaning scams scale and can do way more damage than a human error. > Maybe this means web-scale sites like Amazon's marketplace aren't viable. I'm fine with that implication. Stores like Target and Walmart seem to have the same prices with human-curated inventories Not only are they viable, they are hugely more profitable without the human expenses. This inhuman model - yes, I think that is exactly what it is - will displace everything else that simply can't compete in runaway capitalism.
  - mlyle 6y ago
    In a non-dystopian world, though, the algorithms can make life way better. We could have filters that catch more scams and abuse than typical humans do... and then reasonable humans behind that are responsive and fix the carnage for where they go wrong. Of course, that's not what we've got...
  - ivan_gammel 6y ago
    It doesn’t have to displace everything else, it simply has to be regulated by law. A landlord cannot come to your physical store and remove few products. The same logic must apply here, with the platform providing sufficient means for interaction with local authorities in place of registration of the business.
  - zimpenfish 6y ago
    > you can always cheat them in absolutely ridiculous and more importantly reproducible ways Given that's possible with human moderation too (cf tax codes), what makes you think AGI will solve the problem?
  - imtringued 6y ago
    >Not only are they viable, they are hugely more profitable without the human expenses. I don't believe this. The reputation loss alone will cost you a lot of potential money. Stadia is basically dead because the Google brand is completely untrustworthy. B2B customers want to avoid Google as much as possible because it's just a liability that threatens to ruin their business.
- karmasimida 6y ago
  > Maybe this means web-scale sites like Amazon's marketplace aren't viable But the market is driving more and more money/resources to those companies/services. Let alone Amazon/Youtube/Google are very different businesses, you can say Google has non-existent customer support, but at least for consumers, so far my experience with Amazon is more positive than negative.
  - smt88 6y ago
    > my experience with Amazon is more positive than negative I don't dispute that. But a lot of other people have issues with dropshippers, fake products, radioactive products[1], unreliable reviews, etc. When I stopped using Amazon, I realized I was returning ~90% of all my purchases just because the product was fake, described wrong, low quality, or just not durable enough to last even a month. Yes, it's great to be able to return things, but it's a lot nicer to feel reasonably confident that the person who sold a product to me actually believes it's a good fit for what I want as a consumer. 1. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/09/20/business/nuclear-watchdog-orders-amazon-halt-sales-product-containing-radioactive-materials/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/09/20/business/nuclea...
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  The cynic in me says that you have identified why big tech companies spend so much money funding GPT and similar research: Soon, your appeal will be replied to by an AI, too. That way, most people will have the impression that they were reconsidered by a human and found in fault, which will likely make a large percentage of them give up. We're stonewalling real humans by building fake humans :( And that means GPT could possibly reduce support costs for Amazon.
  - smt88 6y ago
    > The cynic in me says that you have identified why big tech companies spend so much money funding GPT and similar research I don't think this is cynical. It's discussed openly. They want to provide the tools to enable all companies to automate customer service, which is where Facebook's big chatbot push came from.
- agilob 6y ago
  >Algorithms are not even close to substituting for human customer service, human moderation, and human judgment. And that's by design. They don't want to talk to you and help you. You're going to buy there anyway and we all know it.
- playcache 6y ago
  This is where I chuckle at people talking about AI becoming software engineers and the like.
  - soco 6y ago
    Some companies would be happy to pay that AI to develop their b$ software, because once in a position to abuse you customers, why not abuse them with less costs.
  - 1_player 6y ago
    Apparently AI gives companies an excuse to avoid dealing with false positives. If your human support team made a mistake, there was an appeal process. If your AI makes a mistake, sorry, bad robot, deal with it.
  - jjcon 6y ago
    AI won’t be replacing software engineers anytime soon but something to keep in mind: While people talk up Googles ai (at least they once did) the truth is while they may put out some good research now and again most of the stuff they deploy is crap by design - they can’t afford to spend a dollar per day per customer to run a complex algorithm on your data, they can only spend fractions of a penny. This severely limits the quality of the ai deployed by large consumer oriented megacorps. On the other hand you look at some of the ai being deployed in the b2b space or anywhere there is a real exchange of money and you’ll see some pretty expensive and interesting ai research and deployments.
  - smt88 6y ago
    Software jobs are being automated away, but not by AI. If you think about it, any time-saving library, service, or tool is going to reduce headcount at an efficient organization. For example, I currently have a company that I technically manage. It has one employee who does maintenance on the infrastructure (AWS Elastic Beanstalk), database (AWS RDS), and code for five different products. The only other people who touch the code are security auditors. That just wasn't possible 10 years ago. Managing servers alone for those products (~50 EC2 instances, ~10 load balancers, 10 database instances) would've been a full-time job.
- onion2k 6y ago
  Algorithms are not even close to substituting for human customer service, human moderation, and human judgment. Algorithms are human judgement. In a strict code sense an algorithm is a way of encoding a set of assumptions that you decide on when you're developing the code to run it. Even in unsupervised machine learning an algorithm is the result of human judgement because someone decided to delegate the decision making process to a machine. Every time a computer makes a judgement call there is a human who is responsible, and should be accountable, for that process existing.
  - smt88 6y ago
    I think you're making a semantic argument that redefines "human judgment" to such a broad definition that this entire discussion becomes meaningless. To pull it back a bit, "human judgment" in my usage meant "input processed by human using a brain" and algorithm meant "input processed by machine". Given those premises, the argument that "algorithms are human judgment" is untrue both by definition and by observation. For example, when I ask Google/Siri/Alexa a question like, "What is the best way to set up my router?", I will get a wildly different answer than if I ask a GeekSquad employee.
- prepend 6y ago
  Comcast has lots of humans and they suck worse than Google. I don’t think the answer is humans or algorithms, the answer is organizations incentivized to solve customer problems. Google doesn’t care about customers, if they did, they would fix this. Customers are locked in because where else will you go. Just like Comcast doesn’t care because there’s only one cable company, Google doesn’t really have any AdWords or Adsense competition. I think the solution is more competition so use ddg. Once customers have mobility, Google will work to retain them.
  - zouhair 6y ago
    Alternatively: regulations. Force them to care.
    - washadjeffmad 6y ago
      Look, it's not fascism if they went to college and pay your salary. And even if it is fascism, they're in the Cabinet now, so technically that makes them the government, doesn't it? -Someone, somewhere in SV
  - smt88 6y ago
    > Comcast has lots of humans and they suck worse than Google. It's harder to step on a landmine with Google, but Google's landmine is far more devastating. We've already seen lots of news stories about algorithms shutting down people's Gmail accounts, developer accounts, YouTube channels, etc. I personally went through 6 months of hell when my brother's Gmail account was locked due to "inauthentic behavior". He had become disabled and unable to log in, and when I logged in from my machine, Google's algorithm flagged it. I went through an infuriating loop of trying to unlock it and hitting the same algorithm. There was no number to call. I would've paid $10,000 to get back into that account, which would've required 10 min with a customer support rep. I tweeted at Google and they told me I had to log in to Twitter with his account in order to get help (obviously impossible for me). It was the most angry I have ever been at any company. It locked me out of important medical documents, family messages, social media -- everything. I finally fixed it by asking a friend who was a marketing exec at Google to help. He said there's an internal form you can use for this situation -- only available to Google employees. Other people have had similar experiences and had livelihoods destroyed. Whatever you think about Comcast, they will never ignore you and let your entire digital life get locked away without any kind of recourse.
- rsanek 6y ago
  Human-curated? Both Walmart and Target have unfortunately switched over to the same online seller marketplace business model that Amazon has. The introduction of this on Target is fairly new, but soon I believe Amazon sellers will be going multichannel and searches for products on any of those sites will return pages and pages of white-label crap.
  - smt88 6y ago
    > Human-curated? Both Walmart and Target have unfortunately switched over to the same online seller marketplace business model that Amazon has. On both of those sites, you can change the filter to show only products that are available in stores. Those in-store products still have whatever guarantees they did 20 years ago (selected by a human working for Target, probably going to be pulled off shelves if they result in too many returns).
    - rsanek 6y ago
      Once they start commingling inventory like Amazon does, that filter will cease to be useful.
      - smt88 6y ago
        If Target had its most profitable year ever with prices similar to Amazon's and no commingling, why should I worry about that happening?
- zouhair 6y ago
  I didn't buy anything from amazon since around 2004/5 (not sure exactly but that's close enough)and I still don't feel the need to now.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  I guess they don't have to. Cell phones and IP phones have terrible voice quality compared to a land-line; median quality is far worse than the worst long-distance connection I ever got in the 90s. People use them because they are cheap and convenient though. It's the same with algorithms. If you charge margins high enough for good customer service you will get out-competed by those that don't on price.
- joshspankit 6y ago
  I would also like to take this opportunity to remind people of the traumatizing videos that algorithms allowed in YouTube Kids. They may be great for 80% or even 99.9%, but they cannot be 100%.
DSingularity 6y ago
Despite the six figures listing fees he pays to Amazon he still has to blog it to get attention. Meanwhile, my less value AWS account gets less than 24 hour response time from actual humans.
- jfoster 6y ago
  > Meanwhile, my less value AWS account gets less than 24 hour response time from actual humans. For now...
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  You can tell who Amazon values. It sees it’s sellers as easily replaceable. If you are no longer paying 6 digit listing fees, someone else will quickly take your place. With AWS, your business is harder to replace and more valuable.
  - japanuspus 6y ago
    Or rather: you can tell who earns the money for amazon. Current revenue is pretty much 50/50 for AWS and advertizing -- retail is barely breaking even. Source: this weeks Economist article on Bezos stepping down.
- vidarh 6y ago
  The difference is that AWS has high margins, because AWS services are expensive.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Because unlike Amazon, AWS does not have a competitive moat, their product/service is a commodity that is offered by other competitors and can be trivially brought in-house if needed, thus they know they are already lucky just to get business in the first place and will do whatever it takes to retain that business.
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Ansil849 6y ago
> a competitor is obviously trying to take down our listings This doesn't seem obvious at all. It could be any number of other malicious actors. Off the top of my head: an unsatisfied customer, a troll, a disgruntled former employee, etc...
- Danieru 6y ago
  Profit motive is next level motivation. It affords a level of continuous effort where passion motives wear out over time. Put another way: if a single unsatisfied customer is able to take down a product then there must be dozens or hundreds of profit motivated take downs. The article is not naming an exact competitor, but dismissing the accusation as "it could be an entirely different random person" does not change the issue's substance: Amazon is broken.
  - Ansil849 6y ago
    > if a single unsatisfied customer is able to take down a product then there must be dozens or hundreds of profit motivated take downs Not sure what the intent of this observation is - the same is just as true: 'if a single competitor is able to take down a product then there must be dozens or hundreds of profit motivated take downs'. > The article is not naming an exact competitor, but dismissing the accusation as "it could be an entirely different random person" does not change the issue's substance: Amazon is broken. Considering there are only so many no-buckle belt vendors, stating that it obviously a competitor casts aspersions on these other vendors without any evidence. But no, it indeed does not change the substantive critique of Amazon.
    - lovemenot 6y ago
      Could be an attempted blackmail. The intended victim just assumed it was a competitor and did not look hard enough for the ransom note. This seems likelier since, as you say belt manufacturers are few, but blackmailers can go for anything anywhere.
gordon_freeman 6y ago
Nowadays when I want to buy anything on Amazon it takes so much effort to go through which listing is the Sponsored/ad-based listing vs organic in search. Once that hurdle is crossed, it comes to going through the reviews to see which reviews can be trusted and which can not be. And even after that hurdle, once I place order, I am not sure the item I received is counterfeit or genuine. Too much work and definitely not customer-focused experience! I guess going to Target is much easier to get the necessary shopping done.
- rattray 6y ago
  I too have recently surprised myself by shopping at Target.com after being unable to find a trustable product on Amazon (latex pillow). The experience was worse but I trust their merchandising more.
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- hnburnsy 6y ago
  I would add to that the final hurdle of sketchy third party sellers, it feels like very little now is sold by Amazon. Salomon, Nike, and Garmin all got direct purchases from me recently because of what you describe.
  - mschuetz 6y ago
    Amazon became almost useless for many types of articles. For any type of item, there are 10-20 resellers selling the exact same cheap item, just with different color and branding. It's essentially become an expensive dollar store. I've abandoned Amazon because of that, until they finally add a "no third party sellers" option. And also a "don't show items we don't actually send to your country" option.
    - boyband6666 6y ago
      I've not abandoned it yet, but I'm close. Also a "Don't show me things shipped from China that'll take 6 weeks to arrive".
schoen 6y ago
> First of all, how can a belt contain drugs? I suppose there are some Amazon sellers who have specific items that (contrary to the public listing) actually contain drugs. In that case, people could order them as a way of buying drugs that would look like some other kind of retail business from the point of view of Amazon, shippers, and tax agencies. The seller could try to make the listed product extremely unappealing or uninteresting to the general public, or have some kind of code or out-of-band contact method that people could use to indicate that they wanted and expected specific orders to contain the drugs instead of the listed item. Also https://xkcd.com/325/ https://xkcd.com/325/ Also, it looks like the "people lying in order to harm, steal from, or extort others" issue hasn't been solved for any side of a two-sided market or review system. :-( Edit: I was first thinking of saying that this is a way that drug prohibition really empowers random people to hurt each other with false accusations. But this is probably true for any kind of high-stakes accusation. As long as there's any kind of contraband or dangerous item that Amazon cares quite a bit about banning from its site, and as long as there's a significant market in that item, people could make spurious accusations that any seller was secretly trading in it.
- vidarh 6y ago
  Fulfilled by Amazon drug delivery sounds like a "fun" experiment for some drug lord to try...
  - soco 6y ago
    FunFilled deliveries!
- foobiekr 6y ago
  Amazon was facilitating selling objects that literally had radioactive thorium dust in them and it took action by the NRC to clean them up; Amazon continues to sell products of this sort that have been listed since.
  - a_t48 6y ago
    Do you have a source on this? Tried Googling, couldn't find anything.
j_barbossa 6y ago
It seems like big tech companies live in a bubble where they think society is in fact an algocracy and everything is an engineering problem that can be solved with an algorithm.
- strken 6y ago
  Or they work on a team that's got a KPI saying "reduce the support contact rate by 3%" and there's nobody higher up who realises this is a terrible idea. Big tech companies are full of people acting rationally, seeking to maximise metrics that are easy to track and sound good, but have negative externalities that are hard to see or to measure.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  Human beings are adaptable and they may well adapt themselves to the algocracy, just like they adapted to dozens of different social systems before. It is a bit dystopian, but you can already see some of the adaptations, such as the very existence of SEO and its significant use by businesses.
jennyyang 6y ago
Just another example of how a virtual monopoly can get away with terrible, shameful and nonexistent customer support because they can. It's monopolistic behavior, but an passive form of it. Instead of actively engaging in monopolistic activity, they remove essential customer support because they have no competition. This really needs to be regulated quickly. Amazon, Google, Facebook all coomit the same behavior by hiding behind bots and algorithms with no customer support and there's nothing we can do because they are so dominant.
- ttul 6y ago
  There is something we can do: regulate them.
  - solveit 6y ago
    How do you mandate good customer support?
    - pmontra 6y ago
      If Amazon removes a product for wrong claims, Amazon pays the damages times N. A court, quick judgement, low or no expenses for the merchant. Apply to every jurisdiction Amazon works in. Then Amazon would be wary of automatic bans. Of course this must apply to every site like Amazon.
      - deleted 6y ago
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  - prepend 6y ago
    My gas company is regulated, their customer service sucks. I am a bit down because I’m not aware of any success in fixing this kind of problem through regulation. I’m trying to think of a regulated industry or company that has service as good as even Walmart and can’t come up with anything. The hope would be that at least they have some bank level of regulation where they at least have to respond by snail mail and stuff.
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ab_testing 6y ago
I don’t think a competitor did that. I think it might be due to a mislabeled BOM or some other issue. Can this person do the same to another competitors item. Can a regular person do it for any item at Amazon. If not then it probably due to some other issue and not a competitor item.
- schoen 6y ago
  The three different substances that Amazon said the item contained were * methoxetamine, a synthetic hallucinogen * jimson weed, a literal weed from the Americas that causes severe hallucinations and paralysis * coca leaves, a traditional Andean herbal stimulant that are the natural source of cocaine None of these items are related or similar at all, and none of them would be used in making belts. Seems like a difficult error to make through mislabeling!
- _davidturnbull 6y ago
  It's happened to us multiple times and it's always a competitor trying to get out listings taken down. They look for any data fields on a listing that haven't been filled out by the seller (most likely because they didn't seem relevant to the product) and then they'll add words to these fields that the algorithms will pick up and cause the listing to be suspended. You can try to prevent it by making sure you are Brand Registered and uploading a flat file containing a value for every single field. Amazon will eventually reactivate listings that are attacked in this way but you can lose a lot of time and money waiting.
scyzoryk_xyz 6y ago
I work at a medical simulator training device company - we’re quite small, just 20~ people making these devices in-house. We’ve been grappling Amazon’s Seller Central for quite a while now. Because our simulators look medical in use they keep taking them down and banning them. It’s like playing whack-a-mole and it’s been basically impossible to reach a real life person to explain the issue.
- Agentlien 6y ago
  As someone who used to work in the same industry (2011-2015 as a programmer at Surgical Science) I'm curious which company you're working for. I know our salespeople had constant troubles with the U.S. customs because we always had to declare whether our devices were medical equipment or not and different TSA agents had different opinions on how it should have been filled in. They often got upset regardless of how the form was filled in. Legally speaking it is not a medical device, but some agents disputed that because it was used in the medical field at hospitals. Other agents were upset for wasting their time if you did declare it as medical equipment.
  - duckfang 6y ago
    In my experiences, most of the times when "TSA agents" get annoyed, is because they're part of the $10/hr contractor service. As long as it's not the gun they use to test them on a regular basis, they don't appear to care one bit. The real TSA agents however, do appear to care. And I'd also argue they're also quite competent. But Snowden was indeed correct that 95% of the people you deal with at the "federal government" are contractors - of varying quality.
  - scyzoryk_xyz 6y ago
    Oh wow yeah Surgical Science - their LapSim mentor simulators for laparoscopy are certainly our direct competitors. I’m at Laparo Medical Simulators - we specialize just in laparoscopy and we’re working on delivering an enterprise VR simulator (no goggles), though our main market currently is simpler box trainers which undercut the competition on price. What you’re describing is something we run into with the US specifically quite often. It’s kinda crazy, but the US has really become a stagnant market; nationalistic economically, and difficult to do business with unless someone gets to take a big piece of the slice, and very conservative when it comes to innovation. I would really like to talk more if you’re up for it.
semireg 6y ago
I just had shoulder surgery and I happily bought these direct from your website. Thank you, and I’m sorry this happened to you. p.s. Can’t wait to try the drugs.
DoomHotel 6y ago
After my latest Amazon order got me a completely empty, unsealed shipping envelope, I tried to get my money back. AFAICT, there is nothing in the system that even allows reporting "package was empty". Thankfully the item was less than $5.
- carlmr 6y ago
  I never got an empty package, but I got a counterfeit before. I would have liked a button for that, too. It just shows Amazon doesn't care about fighting counterfeits.
- onei 6y ago
  I ordered a couple of DVDs a couple of months ago, where only one turned up in the package and it was entirely feasible for the other to have fallen out. I managed to report it as "item missing" or "order incomplete" and they just shipped me another with minimal fuss. Having to go through the Amazon shopping app was a bit annoying, but the overall experience was pretty slick.
  - DoomHotel 6y ago
    I canceled the return and looked at the Amazon app again. There is no option resembling "incomplete delivery" in my case. It looks like if you ordered only one item they assume you got something and they want it back before issuing a refund or replacement. I may just send back their defective envelope with its missing glue strip and hope for the best. I'll be dropping my Prime subscription at the end of the month.
- djrogers 6y ago
  Sure there is - 'item missing' or 'order incomplete' both properly describe your situation, and I have had the same thing happen to me with amazon fixing the problem immediately. Also, every time I've had an issue with an amazon order that I've needed a human to help with, I've been able to get one on the phone or via chat.
marshallbananas 6y ago
Similar thing happened to me. I built an online Japanese - English dictionary and used AdSense to monetize it. One day I got an email saying that my domain has been permabanned because my website appears to be promoting rape and pedophilia. As an example of one of the many offending pages on my domain they sent me urls to the definition and translation of words "pedophilia" and "rape" in Japanese. Of course none of my competitors using the exact same data set had any such problems. I tried for YEARS to appeal it. There are simply no humans working at Google and nobody reads your emails. Edit: Actually, I did get a response a couple times but it was obviously automated. They just said to remove the ads from the pages where such words are displayed. So I added a simple rule and a column in the database to hide ads for those keywords. That just triggered the bot to move down the list of their "obscene" language. Next it was the names of various sexual positions, acts and fetishes (Japanese does have a very rich vocabulary in that topic), then manga slang, even silly sounding onomatopoeias that when explained in plain English are "vulgar", etc.. It seems once your website is flagged there is simply no way get clean.
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  > I tried for YEARS to appeal it. There are simply no humans working at Google and nobody reads your emails. :( I realize it's complicated, but there are things that make me worry the future of the internet might not be so great.
  - leppr 6y ago
    There's a reason for the hype around web3. The more time passes the more pressing the demand for it, and the better the UX becomes.
    - rlayton2 6y ago
      Do you have a good resource for how web 3 would work? All I read is hyperbole and "could be"s but I am looking for actual concepts of how it would work. Any ideas?
electro_blah 6y ago
Amazon is a shitty company. They can't even treat their warehouse workers as human beings. They use shitty practices to prevent unions. Fuck Amazon.
nikkwong 6y ago
Amazon's automation and lack of accountability towards sellers is mind-deranging. I have a popular product on Amazon US that had a QC issue in 2017. Despite having it been resolved later that year, I am still banned from selling my product in multiple marketplaces (AU, EU, etc). (Which makes little sense, since at the time of the QC issue, I was only in the US anyways). I've had other marketplaces (JP, IN, etc) accept the product, and whenever I can get support people in those locales to answer my emails, they promptly enable my account, citing it having been blocked due to a technical issue. But other important Amazon marketplaces just won't respond, or don't follow up. I Had the UK tell me if I got a VAT they would enable my account; I did the months of work required to get VAT registered and then responded to UK support that I was ready to go, and have had all of my emails (~1 a month) ignored for over a year now. Why tell me to get VAT and then just pretend I don't exist? They just don't care. Even worse Amazon will INVITE me to join certain marketplaces, which I have to pay to join, to only later then find that I'm randomly blocked in that marketplace as well. Oh yeah, no refunds either. I've escalated to jeff@amazon and had multiple people there tell me they're in the middle of unblocking the account everywhere, and weeks go by and nothing happens, and then they too just stop responding my emails. At this point jeff@amazon doesn't respond anymore either, even though I made certain to not repeat my request more frequently than once a month. It is like hair-rippingly frustrating and it is the biggest stress point for my business currently. The worst part is this is my main source of income so I'm just relying on their support people who are wholly unaccountable. I wish I had options as to otherwise but Amazon is such a behemoth now that most of the customers who were purchasing through my own ecommerce store a few years ago now demand to purchase on Amazon or not buy at all. I'm losing a ton of money because of this and have absolutely no way to get help. I cannot even use words to convey how frustrating it has been..
- Guthur 6y ago
  The countries you listed have very strong consumer laws that might make it a higher risk for Amazon. And while you are likely very honest and truthful there are probably a 100 less scrupulous people for every one of you. Some people seem to think no web market is better and we should go back to brick and mortar mega corps like Target and Walmart, but good luck getting shelf space there.
agilob 6y ago
> realize a competitor is obviously trying to take down our listings? Classic Amazon, competitor most likely has financial link to Amazon, even might be their puppet company.
crististm 6y ago
This is probably the only recourse in this new age of AI bots deciding human affairs: - Seller is banned by an AI agent for arbitrary reasons. There is no reasonable phone recourse - Seller tries to make a _human_ point in a blog post hoping it goes viral - The blog post is noticed on different platforms and buzzword of AI wrong doing is amplified to a certain level - If some arbitrary threshold of _human_ reaction is noticed on the social media, the company in the wrong will probably do something about its AI bot going haywire Thus, the bot's common sense holes will be covered by collective wisdom of the crowds (which maybe, just maybe, will be integrated in the bot's training loop).
- libertine 6y ago
  Why not add a government body that, upon submission, starts a fine ticker that forces any company to reply after a set period of time. If no human reply is given, it starts to exponentially pile up the fine, until the issue is solved. They shouldn't be able to allow people to make their livelihoods on their platforms and suddenly cut them off without even giving proper support. They should pay for this - innocent people go through an immense amount of stress and get stripped off their money and the product of their work. If the answer is: "they're too big to have humans manage this", then you know what the reply is - cut them into pieces, half, fourths, who cares. Slap a user account cap on that shit with a number that a human workforce can handle. I feel no sympathy for growth problems of this massive companies. I really hope European Union starts to crack on this shit, and hard.
  - crististm 6y ago
    I could think of several reasons why regulation would not be a good idea. Cutting into pieces? Maybe, but how would you cut pieces of FB or Amazon that credibly resolve the problem? Remember that lobbying for antitrust splits will be pursued by someone with enough political ambition to offset the pressure in a long run. What would be their benefit? For now I think that voting with your feet is still a recourse, complemented by vocal messages on social media to maximize hit-back.
    - 6y ago
sradman 6y ago
Exceptional edge cases, like flagging inappropriate content, are open to abuse. This is especially true for highly automated systems like those run by Amazon and Google but I think it occurs on community sites like HN as well. It is unfortunate that these trust based systems are being abused.
nickcw 6y ago
The sad thing is that the team responsible for this bit of machine learning are probably very proud of their 99% accurate algorithm. It probably *is* 99% accurate - there is a lot of fraudulent activity online. That 1% false positive rate really hurts though, destroying people's livelihoods. I think that people developing machine learning models sometimes don't think about the consequences of the false positives enough. There is a great section in David Spiegelhalter's book The Art of Statistics which got me thinking about this.
- Edd314159 6y ago
  I agree with you in this instance, you make a good point. 99% accuracy sounds great on paper, but that's a very painful 1% remainder - and in this case, there's no way a rational human would have acted in the same disastrous way the AI did. That said, in many other applications of AI, a 1% error rate is probably a huge success. AI does not need to be perfect to be considered successful, it only needs to do better than a human. In this example, AI failed miserably at that, but there are plenty of applications where AI errs far less frequently than humans do at the same task.
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  To be pedantic def is_fraud(x): return False is in all likelihood a greater than 99% accurate algo.
- TomSwirly 6y ago
  Having even a quite high false positive rate would be totally acceptable, if the process involved humans on the Large Faceless Company side. You'd get an email, "Hello, there might be a problem, here are the details" and if you made some good faith attempt to reply, be able to talk to an actual person, who could potentially escalate your issue.
- prepend 6y ago
  The problem here is you need two algorithms. Their current algorithm might be 99% sensitive to detecting fraud. But they need a 99.99999999% algorithm that’s specific to not fraud. So by running then positives through the second one, they can detect the false positives and lessen these episodes.
Jkvngt 6y ago
One begins to suspect that Amazon partners with Chinese rip-off firms.
- yarcob 6y ago
  I doubt that they actively partner with rip off companies, but the way they run their platform strongly encourages them. It seems that it's more important for Amazon to have the lowest prices rather than being a trusted reseller. (It's so bad that I've stopped buying from Amazon if possible. I'm just too worried that I end up with a counterfeit product.)
lewispollard 6y ago
Damn, if only it were true - MXE is hard to come by these days, you'd have been sitting on a fortune!
syrgian 6y ago
Has this been fixed already? I can easily find those products (associated with 'BeltBro' seller). https://www.amazon.com/s?k=beltbro https://www.amazon.com/s?k=beltbro
davelondon 6y ago
In the UK we have something called the "small claims court". The maximum compensation you can claim at the small claims court is £5000, but the important thing is: even if you lose, the company you're suing can't claim their legal fees back. All you can lose is your court fee (somewhere from £35 to £150 depending on the claim amount). The idea of the small claims court is that you don't use a lawyer, so there are no complicated forms to fill in, and if it goes to court you just present your evidence in front of a magistrate in plain English with no legal mumbo jumbo. Starting a case in the small claims is usually a splendid way to force your way past the army of bots and AI customer service shields, and get your complaint seen by a real person. It usually gets things resolved very quickly. But not always... here's a good story: Last year I was overcharged £6 by Opodo on the credit card surcharge for a flight booking. I spent two hours going round in circles with their Facebook Messenger automated customer service bot. There were no other contact methods given. So I took them to court, claiming: Claim: £6.23 My time interacting with chat bot (2hr 22min) @ £100/hr: £236.67 My time preparing claim (1hr) @ £100/hr: £100.00 Court fee: £35 Total: £377.90 ... which I think is extremely reasonable of me. They didn't file a defense, so I won the case by default. Even after winning the case, I still had no method of contacting them, and no payment was forthcoming, so I went to the next step which is to file for a warrant. This cost an extra £95 but it included a bailiff visiting their office, who would be able to take goods to the value of my claim. Bring it on, I say! So I apply for my warrant and wait. Nothing happens for 6 weeks (this is in the depths of the first lockdown so I wasn't surprised by the radio silence). Then I get a call from a very helpful chap who tells me he's the bailiff. He says I probably shouldn't hold my breath waiting for this money because the registered office is just a plaque on the fall with no staff or office... and he has FIFTEEN warrants outstanding for Opodo. The next step would be a warrant against Opodo's bank which would allow me to freeze their account... but there was no easy way to do this and would probably require a lot of paperwork. So I gave up. My belief in the UK criminal justice system shattered. Then about a month later I got an email from Opodo: "We are contacting you from Opodo after receiving the Judgement for Claimant. In order to proceed with your refund of £377,90, ..." ... and within a couple of weeks they had paid me in full! I'd highly recommend the small claims court - it takes literally five minutes to file a claim here... check out: https://www.moneyclaim.gov.uk/ https://www.moneyclaim.gov.uk/
- 6y ago
PaulHoule 6y ago
Jimson weed is so common they could never ban it and the effects are so bad I'd hope you never take it.
Uhrheber 6y ago
Well, I proactively quit both my Amazon and Ebay accounts. The occasion was trouble with Chinese dealers, in which both Amazon and Ebay weren't helpful at all, but the main reason is that I simply have enough of soulless mega-corporations, that try to build monopolies. This forces me to use smaller (often local) alternatives, and honestly I don't miss anything. So my 2ct: Stop complaining, instead do something. Stop using Amazon, Google, Ebay, Facebook and the likes. YOU are the one that makes them unavoidable, so just stop doing so.
phowat 6y ago
Wasn't just like 1 or 2 days ago that people here were praising Amazon's custommer support over Google's on a thread of a developer who had his google account blocked ?
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  Could put Google in an even worse light.
  - phowat 6y ago
    At this point, I believe if you get unlocky they are all equally shitty. Just yesterday a friend of mine lost access to his Microsoft account including his OneDrive with all his documents (all work related, by the way) due to an unspecified account violation.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
I have seen every tool used to enforce ‘laws’ also abused to deplatform competition. Most tech companies are run with as few employees as possible, that is why SV FAANG engineers make so much. We can look to china to understand a bit more of the statistics and personnel required to effectively moderate a system. e.g. number of censors per number of users. This means that companies like facebook have 2-3 orders of magnitude fewer employees needed to moderate their system. i.e. they are effectively unmoderated. (this is why it was no surprise that facebook was used to plan the capital riots, even though FAANG benefited by deplatforming parlar for political reasons). We are in an interesting situation where there are probably similar levels of legitimate and illegitimate takedowns but nothing will change because the people with power and money have what they need.
SMAAART 6y ago
I wonder what is the size of the market for copycats vs size of the market for original products.
swiley 6y ago
Global platforms don't scale.
FpUser 6y ago
Those companies have grown way too big. Their in/actions can and do affect people's lives way beyond reasonable. I think they should be regulated, at least the way they do dispute resolution. One of the things governments could do is to tell them to shove their EULAs to a proper place and allow people to sue them for refusing proper dispute resolution process. Especially in small claim courts. I think that would straighten them right.
jswizzy 6y ago
I wish people would just stop using Amazon. Online stores are everywhere now and Amazon is worse than Walmart now when compared to just shopping directly from the product website or smaller online boutiques. Even the shipping times are nothing special anymore.
- Paul_S 6y ago
  I agree but amazon has still the best policy on returns. Everyone claims they have a no-quibble return policy but only amazon does. Must suck for the sellers.
  - prepend 6y ago
    I dropped Amazon because their return policy has lots of quibbles nowadays. I ordered a book, they sent the wrong book. They argued over whether it was the right book (they had different isbn), they made me buy an envelope to ship it back and only refunded my money once they received it and cleared it. So I was out the price of the book for three weeks. Old Amazon wouldn’t have screwed up, would have mailed out a replacement book immediately, etc. They seem to be stupid in handling exchanges and cheap now.
bilekas 6y ago
I feel this pain. And whats always shocking every time I need to contact a large company via some fast response required, its never available.. Phone calls are passed around department to dept that cant deal with significant situations, email support takes far too long, live chat rarely exists. It's mind blowing how such large companies don't have these services but at the end of the day it's a numbers game for them. There just are more people that don't complain and their bottom like is still fine. Really really frustrating as there is no even recommended customer service requirements for companies. I'm sure in the above case there is money lost for this action by the competitor. Will the OP be reimbursed ? Of course not.
AlexandrB 6y ago
> Why does Amazon not have any decent phone support or a dedicated representative that could help with issues like this? If you call, you’re going to talk to someone overseas who has no authority to help in any way, a complete waste of time. This sounds an awful lot like the experience of the Terraria developer banned from Google earlier this week.
twic 6y ago
The belt itself is rather neat! Perhaps you could just use a large velcro cable tie to try it out, although it probably wouldn't be as robust.
FrameworkFred 6y ago
It may be years before it happens, but I think this sort of thing will end up being the reason these global companies ultimately won't be able to compete against the more focused online stores. There are already categories of items I don't ever try to buy on Amazon: farm equipment, fencing supplies, pet food. And I'm currently looking into email solutions that won't leave me completely screwed when Google arbitrarily decides it's time to delete my gmail account. There's just too much associated with my email address for it to be in the hands of someone who won't answer the phone. IMO, these companies are winning because they're better than what came before them, but they're far from the perfect solution.
- GVIrish 6y ago
  Absolutely. These Google horror stories have me ready to pay for an email saas for the first time, and starting to consider that I may need to move all my personal content off Google just to be safe.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sn0wtrooper 6y ago
This, combined with what the Terraria dev suffered this month, makes me think there is more need for fast human interaction in automated ban reviews.

511 points by travelhead 6y ago

I think what we're learning from many debacles on YouTube, Amazon, and Google is this: Algorithms are not even close to substituting for human customer service, human moderation, and human judgment. Maybe this means web-scale sites like Amazon's marketplace aren't viable. I'm fine with that implication. Stores like Target and Walmart seem to have the same prices with human-curated inventories, and I don't really miss the millions of extra products Amazon has.

melomal 6y ago
> Stores like Target and Walmart seem to have the same prices with human-curated inventories, and I don't really miss the millions of extra products Amazon has. I'm sure most people are generally happy to wait 2 days for something to arrive as well. Honestly, it almost feels like Amazon is trying to become an Alibaba and potentially look to take them on with the level of product quality that is now available there.
- BoorishBears 6y ago
  Amazon practically is Alibaba at this point, or Aliexpress really. Half the results on any given product I search point straight back to Alibaba if I image search. Sometimes I check if Aliexpress has it too, and if I'm not in a hurry I get it there for a huge savings.
  - maccard 6y ago
    With two major differences - 1-2 day delivery (vs 1-2 week) and an almost guaranteed no-questions-asked returns policy (Ive never, in 15 years of using amazon, been denied a refund) They combination is what differentiates them
    - lrem 6y ago
      I've ordered non-prime items on the local Amazon, where I'd first receive a "sorry, this is taking longer than expected, please hang with us" and then the package would come _way_ later straight from China.
      - maccard 6y ago
        That sucks - I'm in the UK so my experience might be different, but with the exception of something going wrong with delivery (Which I'd estimate is ~5-10% of the time, but that's not exclusive to Amazon), packages are here within 48 hours.
  - melomal 6y ago
    Exactly, it's a shit pit of affiliate marketers pumping anything for that <2% referral fee they get. As a side hustle they probably drop ship everything they are selling via Amazon affiliate links too.
trabant00 6y ago
An important point to make imo is that algorithms will not be close to human decision making until we hit AGI. No matter how complex they get until that point you can always cheat them in absolutely ridiculous and more importantly reproducible ways. Meaning scams scale and can do way more damage than a human error. > Maybe this means web-scale sites like Amazon's marketplace aren't viable. I'm fine with that implication. Stores like Target and Walmart seem to have the same prices with human-curated inventories Not only are they viable, they are hugely more profitable without the human expenses. This inhuman model - yes, I think that is exactly what it is - will displace everything else that simply can't compete in runaway capitalism.
- mlyle 6y ago
  In a non-dystopian world, though, the algorithms can make life way better. We could have filters that catch more scams and abuse than typical humans do... and then reasonable humans behind that are responsive and fix the carnage for where they go wrong. Of course, that's not what we've got...
- ivan_gammel 6y ago
  It doesn’t have to displace everything else, it simply has to be regulated by law. A landlord cannot come to your physical store and remove few products. The same logic must apply here, with the platform providing sufficient means for interaction with local authorities in place of registration of the business.
- zimpenfish 6y ago
  > you can always cheat them in absolutely ridiculous and more importantly reproducible ways Given that's possible with human moderation too (cf tax codes), what makes you think AGI will solve the problem?
- imtringued 6y ago
  >Not only are they viable, they are hugely more profitable without the human expenses. I don't believe this. The reputation loss alone will cost you a lot of potential money. Stadia is basically dead because the Google brand is completely untrustworthy. B2B customers want to avoid Google as much as possible because it's just a liability that threatens to ruin their business.
karmasimida 6y ago
> Maybe this means web-scale sites like Amazon's marketplace aren't viable But the market is driving more and more money/resources to those companies/services. Let alone Amazon/Youtube/Google are very different businesses, you can say Google has non-existent customer support, but at least for consumers, so far my experience with Amazon is more positive than negative.
- smt88 6y ago
  > my experience with Amazon is more positive than negative I don't dispute that. But a lot of other people have issues with dropshippers, fake products, radioactive products[1], unreliable reviews, etc. When I stopped using Amazon, I realized I was returning ~90% of all my purchases just because the product was fake, described wrong, low quality, or just not durable enough to last even a month. Yes, it's great to be able to return things, but it's a lot nicer to feel reasonably confident that the person who sold a product to me actually believes it's a good fit for what I want as a consumer. 1. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/09/20/business/nuclear-watchdog-orders-amazon-halt-sales-product-containing-radioactive-materials/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/09/20/business/nuclea...
fxtentacle 6y ago
The cynic in me says that you have identified why big tech companies spend so much money funding GPT and similar research: Soon, your appeal will be replied to by an AI, too. That way, most people will have the impression that they were reconsidered by a human and found in fault, which will likely make a large percentage of them give up. We're stonewalling real humans by building fake humans :( And that means GPT could possibly reduce support costs for Amazon.
- smt88 6y ago
  > The cynic in me says that you have identified why big tech companies spend so much money funding GPT and similar research I don't think this is cynical. It's discussed openly. They want to provide the tools to enable all companies to automate customer service, which is where Facebook's big chatbot push came from.
agilob 6y ago
>Algorithms are not even close to substituting for human customer service, human moderation, and human judgment. And that's by design. They don't want to talk to you and help you. You're going to buy there anyway and we all know it.
playcache 6y ago
This is where I chuckle at people talking about AI becoming software engineers and the like.
- soco 6y ago
  Some companies would be happy to pay that AI to develop their b$ software, because once in a position to abuse you customers, why not abuse them with less costs.
- 1_player 6y ago
  Apparently AI gives companies an excuse to avoid dealing with false positives. If your human support team made a mistake, there was an appeal process. If your AI makes a mistake, sorry, bad robot, deal with it.
- jjcon 6y ago
  AI won’t be replacing software engineers anytime soon but something to keep in mind: While people talk up Googles ai (at least they once did) the truth is while they may put out some good research now and again most of the stuff they deploy is crap by design - they can’t afford to spend a dollar per day per customer to run a complex algorithm on your data, they can only spend fractions of a penny. This severely limits the quality of the ai deployed by large consumer oriented megacorps. On the other hand you look at some of the ai being deployed in the b2b space or anywhere there is a real exchange of money and you’ll see some pretty expensive and interesting ai research and deployments.
- smt88 6y ago
  Software jobs are being automated away, but not by AI. If you think about it, any time-saving library, service, or tool is going to reduce headcount at an efficient organization. For example, I currently have a company that I technically manage. It has one employee who does maintenance on the infrastructure (AWS Elastic Beanstalk), database (AWS RDS), and code for five different products. The only other people who touch the code are security auditors. That just wasn't possible 10 years ago. Managing servers alone for those products (~50 EC2 instances, ~10 load balancers, 10 database instances) would've been a full-time job.
onion2k 6y ago
Algorithms are not even close to substituting for human customer service, human moderation, and human judgment. Algorithms are human judgement. In a strict code sense an algorithm is a way of encoding a set of assumptions that you decide on when you're developing the code to run it. Even in unsupervised machine learning an algorithm is the result of human judgement because someone decided to delegate the decision making process to a machine. Every time a computer makes a judgement call there is a human who is responsible, and should be accountable, for that process existing.
- smt88 6y ago
  I think you're making a semantic argument that redefines "human judgment" to such a broad definition that this entire discussion becomes meaningless. To pull it back a bit, "human judgment" in my usage meant "input processed by human using a brain" and algorithm meant "input processed by machine". Given those premises, the argument that "algorithms are human judgment" is untrue both by definition and by observation. For example, when I ask Google/Siri/Alexa a question like, "What is the best way to set up my router?", I will get a wildly different answer than if I ask a GeekSquad employee.
prepend 6y ago
Comcast has lots of humans and they suck worse than Google. I don’t think the answer is humans or algorithms, the answer is organizations incentivized to solve customer problems. Google doesn’t care about customers, if they did, they would fix this. Customers are locked in because where else will you go. Just like Comcast doesn’t care because there’s only one cable company, Google doesn’t really have any AdWords or Adsense competition. I think the solution is more competition so use ddg. Once customers have mobility, Google will work to retain them.
- zouhair 6y ago
  Alternatively: regulations. Force them to care.
  - washadjeffmad 6y ago
    Look, it's not fascism if they went to college and pay your salary. And even if it is fascism, they're in the Cabinet now, so technically that makes them the government, doesn't it? -Someone, somewhere in SV
- smt88 6y ago
  > Comcast has lots of humans and they suck worse than Google. It's harder to step on a landmine with Google, but Google's landmine is far more devastating. We've already seen lots of news stories about algorithms shutting down people's Gmail accounts, developer accounts, YouTube channels, etc. I personally went through 6 months of hell when my brother's Gmail account was locked due to "inauthentic behavior". He had become disabled and unable to log in, and when I logged in from my machine, Google's algorithm flagged it. I went through an infuriating loop of trying to unlock it and hitting the same algorithm. There was no number to call. I would've paid $10,000 to get back into that account, which would've required 10 min with a customer support rep. I tweeted at Google and they told me I had to log in to Twitter with his account in order to get help (obviously impossible for me). It was the most angry I have ever been at any company. It locked me out of important medical documents, family messages, social media -- everything. I finally fixed it by asking a friend who was a marketing exec at Google to help. He said there's an internal form you can use for this situation -- only available to Google employees. Other people have had similar experiences and had livelihoods destroyed. Whatever you think about Comcast, they will never ignore you and let your entire digital life get locked away without any kind of recourse.
rsanek 6y ago
Human-curated? Both Walmart and Target have unfortunately switched over to the same online seller marketplace business model that Amazon has. The introduction of this on Target is fairly new, but soon I believe Amazon sellers will be going multichannel and searches for products on any of those sites will return pages and pages of white-label crap.
- smt88 6y ago
  > Human-curated? Both Walmart and Target have unfortunately switched over to the same online seller marketplace business model that Amazon has. On both of those sites, you can change the filter to show only products that are available in stores. Those in-store products still have whatever guarantees they did 20 years ago (selected by a human working for Target, probably going to be pulled off shelves if they result in too many returns).
  - rsanek 6y ago
    Once they start commingling inventory like Amazon does, that filter will cease to be useful.
    - smt88 6y ago
      If Target had its most profitable year ever with prices similar to Amazon's and no commingling, why should I worry about that happening?
zouhair 6y ago
I didn't buy anything from amazon since around 2004/5 (not sure exactly but that's close enough)and I still don't feel the need to now.
aidenn0 6y ago
I guess they don't have to. Cell phones and IP phones have terrible voice quality compared to a land-line; median quality is far worse than the worst long-distance connection I ever got in the 90s. People use them because they are cheap and convenient though. It's the same with algorithms. If you charge margins high enough for good customer service you will get out-competed by those that don't on price.
joshspankit 6y ago
I would also like to take this opportunity to remind people of the traumatizing videos that algorithms allowed in YouTube Kids. They may be great for 80% or even 99.9%, but they cannot be 100%.

DSingularity 6y ago

Despite the six figures listing fees he pays to Amazon he still has to blog it to get attention. Meanwhile, my less value AWS account gets less than 24 hour response time from actual humans.

jfoster 6y ago
> Meanwhile, my less value AWS account gets less than 24 hour response time from actual humans. For now...
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
You can tell who Amazon values. It sees it’s sellers as easily replaceable. If you are no longer paying 6 digit listing fees, someone else will quickly take your place. With AWS, your business is harder to replace and more valuable.
- japanuspus 6y ago
  Or rather: you can tell who earns the money for amazon. Current revenue is pretty much 50/50 for AWS and advertizing -- retail is barely breaking even. Source: this weeks Economist article on Bezos stepping down.
vidarh 6y ago
The difference is that AWS has high margins, because AWS services are expensive.
Nextgrid 6y ago
Because unlike Amazon, AWS does not have a competitive moat, their product/service is a commodity that is offered by other competitors and can be trivially brought in-house if needed, thus they know they are already lucky just to get business in the first place and will do whatever it takes to retain that business.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Ansil849 6y ago

> a competitor is obviously trying to take down our listings This doesn't seem obvious at all. It could be any number of other malicious actors. Off the top of my head: an unsatisfied customer, a troll, a disgruntled former employee, etc...

Danieru 6y ago
Profit motive is next level motivation. It affords a level of continuous effort where passion motives wear out over time. Put another way: if a single unsatisfied customer is able to take down a product then there must be dozens or hundreds of profit motivated take downs. The article is not naming an exact competitor, but dismissing the accusation as "it could be an entirely different random person" does not change the issue's substance: Amazon is broken.
- Ansil849 6y ago
  > if a single unsatisfied customer is able to take down a product then there must be dozens or hundreds of profit motivated take downs Not sure what the intent of this observation is - the same is just as true: 'if a single competitor is able to take down a product then there must be dozens or hundreds of profit motivated take downs'. > The article is not naming an exact competitor, but dismissing the accusation as "it could be an entirely different random person" does not change the issue's substance: Amazon is broken. Considering there are only so many no-buckle belt vendors, stating that it obviously a competitor casts aspersions on these other vendors without any evidence. But no, it indeed does not change the substantive critique of Amazon.
  - lovemenot 6y ago
    Could be an attempted blackmail. The intended victim just assumed it was a competitor and did not look hard enough for the ransom note. This seems likelier since, as you say belt manufacturers are few, but blackmailers can go for anything anywhere.

gordon_freeman 6y ago

Nowadays when I want to buy anything on Amazon it takes so much effort to go through which listing is the Sponsored/ad-based listing vs organic in search. Once that hurdle is crossed, it comes to going through the reviews to see which reviews can be trusted and which can not be. And even after that hurdle, once I place order, I am not sure the item I received is counterfeit or genuine. Too much work and definitely not customer-focused experience! I guess going to Target is much easier to get the necessary shopping done.

rattray 6y ago
I too have recently surprised myself by shopping at Target.com after being unable to find a trustable product on Amazon (latex pillow). The experience was worse but I trust their merchandising more.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
hnburnsy 6y ago
I would add to that the final hurdle of sketchy third party sellers, it feels like very little now is sold by Amazon. Salomon, Nike, and Garmin all got direct purchases from me recently because of what you describe.
- mschuetz 6y ago
  Amazon became almost useless for many types of articles. For any type of item, there are 10-20 resellers selling the exact same cheap item, just with different color and branding. It's essentially become an expensive dollar store. I've abandoned Amazon because of that, until they finally add a "no third party sellers" option. And also a "don't show items we don't actually send to your country" option.
  - boyband6666 6y ago
    I've not abandoned it yet, but I'm close. Also a "Don't show me things shipped from China that'll take 6 weeks to arrive".

schoen 6y ago

> First of all, how can a belt contain drugs? I suppose there are some Amazon sellers who have specific items that (contrary to the public listing) actually contain drugs. In that case, people could order them as a way of buying drugs that would look like some other kind of retail business from the point of view of Amazon, shippers, and tax agencies. The seller could try to make the listed product extremely unappealing or uninteresting to the general public, or have some kind of code or out-of-band contact method that people could use to indicate that they wanted and expected specific orders to contain the drugs instead of the listed item. Also https://xkcd.com/325/ https://xkcd.com/325/ Also, it looks like the "people lying in order to harm, steal from, or extort others" issue hasn't been solved for any side of a two-sided market or review system. :-( Edit: I was first thinking of saying that this is a way that drug prohibition really empowers random people to hurt each other with false accusations. But this is probably true for any kind of high-stakes accusation. As long as there's any kind of contraband or dangerous item that Amazon cares quite a bit about banning from its site, and as long as there's a significant market in that item, people could make spurious accusations that any seller was secretly trading in it.

vidarh 6y ago
Fulfilled by Amazon drug delivery sounds like a "fun" experiment for some drug lord to try...
- soco 6y ago
  FunFilled deliveries!
foobiekr 6y ago
Amazon was facilitating selling objects that literally had radioactive thorium dust in them and it took action by the NRC to clean them up; Amazon continues to sell products of this sort that have been listed since.
- a_t48 6y ago
  Do you have a source on this? Tried Googling, couldn't find anything.

j_barbossa 6y ago

It seems like big tech companies live in a bubble where they think society is in fact an algocracy and everything is an engineering problem that can be solved with an algorithm.

strken 6y ago
Or they work on a team that's got a KPI saying "reduce the support contact rate by 3%" and there's nobody higher up who realises this is a terrible idea. Big tech companies are full of people acting rationally, seeking to maximise metrics that are easy to track and sound good, but have negative externalities that are hard to see or to measure.
inglor_cz 6y ago
Human beings are adaptable and they may well adapt themselves to the algocracy, just like they adapted to dozens of different social systems before. It is a bit dystopian, but you can already see some of the adaptations, such as the very existence of SEO and its significant use by businesses.

jennyyang 6y ago

Just another example of how a virtual monopoly can get away with terrible, shameful and nonexistent customer support because they can. It's monopolistic behavior, but an passive form of it. Instead of actively engaging in monopolistic activity, they remove essential customer support because they have no competition. This really needs to be regulated quickly. Amazon, Google, Facebook all coomit the same behavior by hiding behind bots and algorithms with no customer support and there's nothing we can do because they are so dominant.

ttul 6y ago
There is something we can do: regulate them.
- solveit 6y ago
  How do you mandate good customer support?
  - pmontra 6y ago
    If Amazon removes a product for wrong claims, Amazon pays the damages times N. A court, quick judgement, low or no expenses for the merchant. Apply to every jurisdiction Amazon works in. Then Amazon would be wary of automatic bans. Of course this must apply to every site like Amazon.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- prepend 6y ago
  My gas company is regulated, their customer service sucks. I am a bit down because I’m not aware of any success in fixing this kind of problem through regulation. I’m trying to think of a regulated industry or company that has service as good as even Walmart and can’t come up with anything. The hope would be that at least they have some bank level of regulation where they at least have to respond by snail mail and stuff.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ab_testing 6y ago

I don’t think a competitor did that. I think it might be due to a mislabeled BOM or some other issue. Can this person do the same to another competitors item. Can a regular person do it for any item at Amazon. If not then it probably due to some other issue and not a competitor item.

schoen 6y ago
The three different substances that Amazon said the item contained were * methoxetamine, a synthetic hallucinogen * jimson weed, a literal weed from the Americas that causes severe hallucinations and paralysis * coca leaves, a traditional Andean herbal stimulant that are the natural source of cocaine None of these items are related or similar at all, and none of them would be used in making belts. Seems like a difficult error to make through mislabeling!
_davidturnbull 6y ago
It's happened to us multiple times and it's always a competitor trying to get out listings taken down. They look for any data fields on a listing that haven't been filled out by the seller (most likely because they didn't seem relevant to the product) and then they'll add words to these fields that the algorithms will pick up and cause the listing to be suspended. You can try to prevent it by making sure you are Brand Registered and uploading a flat file containing a value for every single field. Amazon will eventually reactivate listings that are attacked in this way but you can lose a lot of time and money waiting.

scyzoryk_xyz 6y ago

I work at a medical simulator training device company - we’re quite small, just 20~ people making these devices in-house. We’ve been grappling Amazon’s Seller Central for quite a while now. Because our simulators look medical in use they keep taking them down and banning them. It’s like playing whack-a-mole and it’s been basically impossible to reach a real life person to explain the issue.

Agentlien 6y ago
As someone who used to work in the same industry (2011-2015 as a programmer at Surgical Science) I'm curious which company you're working for. I know our salespeople had constant troubles with the U.S. customs because we always had to declare whether our devices were medical equipment or not and different TSA agents had different opinions on how it should have been filled in. They often got upset regardless of how the form was filled in. Legally speaking it is not a medical device, but some agents disputed that because it was used in the medical field at hospitals. Other agents were upset for wasting their time if you did declare it as medical equipment.
- duckfang 6y ago
  In my experiences, most of the times when "TSA agents" get annoyed, is because they're part of the $10/hr contractor service. As long as it's not the gun they use to test them on a regular basis, they don't appear to care one bit. The real TSA agents however, do appear to care. And I'd also argue they're also quite competent. But Snowden was indeed correct that 95% of the people you deal with at the "federal government" are contractors - of varying quality.
- scyzoryk_xyz 6y ago
  Oh wow yeah Surgical Science - their LapSim mentor simulators for laparoscopy are certainly our direct competitors. I’m at Laparo Medical Simulators - we specialize just in laparoscopy and we’re working on delivering an enterprise VR simulator (no goggles), though our main market currently is simpler box trainers which undercut the competition on price. What you’re describing is something we run into with the US specifically quite often. It’s kinda crazy, but the US has really become a stagnant market; nationalistic economically, and difficult to do business with unless someone gets to take a big piece of the slice, and very conservative when it comes to innovation. I would really like to talk more if you’re up for it.

semireg 6y ago

I just had shoulder surgery and I happily bought these direct from your website. Thank you, and I’m sorry this happened to you. p.s. Can’t wait to try the drugs.

DoomHotel 6y ago

After my latest Amazon order got me a completely empty, unsealed shipping envelope, I tried to get my money back. AFAICT, there is nothing in the system that even allows reporting "package was empty". Thankfully the item was less than $5.

carlmr 6y ago
I never got an empty package, but I got a counterfeit before. I would have liked a button for that, too. It just shows Amazon doesn't care about fighting counterfeits.
onei 6y ago
I ordered a couple of DVDs a couple of months ago, where only one turned up in the package and it was entirely feasible for the other to have fallen out. I managed to report it as "item missing" or "order incomplete" and they just shipped me another with minimal fuss. Having to go through the Amazon shopping app was a bit annoying, but the overall experience was pretty slick.
- DoomHotel 6y ago
  I canceled the return and looked at the Amazon app again. There is no option resembling "incomplete delivery" in my case. It looks like if you ordered only one item they assume you got something and they want it back before issuing a refund or replacement. I may just send back their defective envelope with its missing glue strip and hope for the best. I'll be dropping my Prime subscription at the end of the month.
djrogers 6y ago
Sure there is - 'item missing' or 'order incomplete' both properly describe your situation, and I have had the same thing happen to me with amazon fixing the problem immediately. Also, every time I've had an issue with an amazon order that I've needed a human to help with, I've been able to get one on the phone or via chat.

marshallbananas 6y ago

Similar thing happened to me. I built an online Japanese - English dictionary and used AdSense to monetize it. One day I got an email saying that my domain has been permabanned because my website appears to be promoting rape and pedophilia. As an example of one of the many offending pages on my domain they sent me urls to the definition and translation of words "pedophilia" and "rape" in Japanese. Of course none of my competitors using the exact same data set had any such problems. I tried for YEARS to appeal it. There are simply no humans working at Google and nobody reads your emails. Edit: Actually, I did get a response a couple times but it was obviously automated. They just said to remove the ads from the pages where such words are displayed. So I added a simple rule and a column in the database to hide ads for those keywords. That just triggered the bot to move down the list of their "obscene" language. Next it was the names of various sexual positions, acts and fetishes (Japanese does have a very rich vocabulary in that topic), then manga slang, even silly sounding onomatopoeias that when explained in plain English are "vulgar", etc.. It seems once your website is flagged there is simply no way get clean.

Judgmentality 6y ago
> I tried for YEARS to appeal it. There are simply no humans working at Google and nobody reads your emails. :( I realize it's complicated, but there are things that make me worry the future of the internet might not be so great.
- leppr 6y ago
  There's a reason for the hype around web3. The more time passes the more pressing the demand for it, and the better the UX becomes.
  - rlayton2 6y ago
    Do you have a good resource for how web 3 would work? All I read is hyperbole and "could be"s but I am looking for actual concepts of how it would work. Any ideas?

electro_blah 6y ago

Amazon is a shitty company. They can't even treat their warehouse workers as human beings. They use shitty practices to prevent unions. Fuck Amazon.

nikkwong 6y ago

Amazon's automation and lack of accountability towards sellers is mind-deranging. I have a popular product on Amazon US that had a QC issue in 2017. Despite having it been resolved later that year, I am still banned from selling my product in multiple marketplaces (AU, EU, etc). (Which makes little sense, since at the time of the QC issue, I was only in the US anyways). I've had other marketplaces (JP, IN, etc) accept the product, and whenever I can get support people in those locales to answer my emails, they promptly enable my account, citing it having been blocked due to a technical issue. But other important Amazon marketplaces just won't respond, or don't follow up. I Had the UK tell me if I got a VAT they would enable my account; I did the months of work required to get VAT registered and then responded to UK support that I was ready to go, and have had all of my emails (~1 a month) ignored for over a year now. Why tell me to get VAT and then just pretend I don't exist? They just don't care. Even worse Amazon will INVITE me to join certain marketplaces, which I have to pay to join, to only later then find that I'm randomly blocked in that marketplace as well. Oh yeah, no refunds either. I've escalated to jeff@amazon and had multiple people there tell me they're in the middle of unblocking the account everywhere, and weeks go by and nothing happens, and then they too just stop responding my emails. At this point jeff@amazon doesn't respond anymore either, even though I made certain to not repeat my request more frequently than once a month. It is like hair-rippingly frustrating and it is the biggest stress point for my business currently. The worst part is this is my main source of income so I'm just relying on their support people who are wholly unaccountable. I wish I had options as to otherwise but Amazon is such a behemoth now that most of the customers who were purchasing through my own ecommerce store a few years ago now demand to purchase on Amazon or not buy at all. I'm losing a ton of money because of this and have absolutely no way to get help. I cannot even use words to convey how frustrating it has been..

Guthur 6y ago
The countries you listed have very strong consumer laws that might make it a higher risk for Amazon. And while you are likely very honest and truthful there are probably a 100 less scrupulous people for every one of you. Some people seem to think no web market is better and we should go back to brick and mortar mega corps like Target and Walmart, but good luck getting shelf space there.

agilob 6y ago

> realize a competitor is obviously trying to take down our listings? Classic Amazon, competitor most likely has financial link to Amazon, even might be their puppet company.

crististm 6y ago

This is probably the only recourse in this new age of AI bots deciding human affairs: - Seller is banned by an AI agent for arbitrary reasons. There is no reasonable phone recourse - Seller tries to make a _human_ point in a blog post hoping it goes viral - The blog post is noticed on different platforms and buzzword of AI wrong doing is amplified to a certain level - If some arbitrary threshold of _human_ reaction is noticed on the social media, the company in the wrong will probably do something about its AI bot going haywire Thus, the bot's common sense holes will be covered by collective wisdom of the crowds (which maybe, just maybe, will be integrated in the bot's training loop).

libertine 6y ago
Why not add a government body that, upon submission, starts a fine ticker that forces any company to reply after a set period of time. If no human reply is given, it starts to exponentially pile up the fine, until the issue is solved. They shouldn't be able to allow people to make their livelihoods on their platforms and suddenly cut them off without even giving proper support. They should pay for this - innocent people go through an immense amount of stress and get stripped off their money and the product of their work. If the answer is: "they're too big to have humans manage this", then you know what the reply is - cut them into pieces, half, fourths, who cares. Slap a user account cap on that shit with a number that a human workforce can handle. I feel no sympathy for growth problems of this massive companies. I really hope European Union starts to crack on this shit, and hard.
- crististm 6y ago
  I could think of several reasons why regulation would not be a good idea. Cutting into pieces? Maybe, but how would you cut pieces of FB or Amazon that credibly resolve the problem? Remember that lobbying for antitrust splits will be pursued by someone with enough political ambition to offset the pressure in a long run. What would be their benefit? For now I think that voting with your feet is still a recourse, complemented by vocal messages on social media to maximize hit-back.
  - 6y ago

sradman 6y ago

Exceptional edge cases, like flagging inappropriate content, are open to abuse. This is especially true for highly automated systems like those run by Amazon and Google but I think it occurs on community sites like HN as well. It is unfortunate that these trust based systems are being abused.

nickcw 6y ago

The sad thing is that the team responsible for this bit of machine learning are probably very proud of their 99% accurate algorithm. It probably *is* 99% accurate - there is a lot of fraudulent activity online. That 1% false positive rate really hurts though, destroying people's livelihoods. I think that people developing machine learning models sometimes don't think about the consequences of the false positives enough. There is a great section in David Spiegelhalter's book The Art of Statistics which got me thinking about this.

Edd314159 6y ago
I agree with you in this instance, you make a good point. 99% accuracy sounds great on paper, but that's a very painful 1% remainder - and in this case, there's no way a rational human would have acted in the same disastrous way the AI did. That said, in many other applications of AI, a 1% error rate is probably a huge success. AI does not need to be perfect to be considered successful, it only needs to do better than a human. In this example, AI failed miserably at that, but there are plenty of applications where AI errs far less frequently than humans do at the same task.
klmadfejno 6y ago
To be pedantic def is_fraud(x): return False is in all likelihood a greater than 99% accurate algo.
TomSwirly 6y ago
Having even a quite high false positive rate would be totally acceptable, if the process involved humans on the Large Faceless Company side. You'd get an email, "Hello, there might be a problem, here are the details" and if you made some good faith attempt to reply, be able to talk to an actual person, who could potentially escalate your issue.
prepend 6y ago
The problem here is you need two algorithms. Their current algorithm might be 99% sensitive to detecting fraud. But they need a 99.99999999% algorithm that’s specific to not fraud. So by running then positives through the second one, they can detect the false positives and lessen these episodes.

Jkvngt 6y ago

One begins to suspect that Amazon partners with Chinese rip-off firms.

yarcob 6y ago
I doubt that they actively partner with rip off companies, but the way they run their platform strongly encourages them. It seems that it's more important for Amazon to have the lowest prices rather than being a trusted reseller. (It's so bad that I've stopped buying from Amazon if possible. I'm just too worried that I end up with a counterfeit product.)

lewispollard 6y ago

Damn, if only it were true - MXE is hard to come by these days, you'd have been sitting on a fortune!

syrgian 6y ago

Has this been fixed already? I can easily find those products (associated with 'BeltBro' seller). https://www.amazon.com/s?k=beltbro https://www.amazon.com/s?k=beltbro

davelondon 6y ago

In the UK we have something called the "small claims court". The maximum compensation you can claim at the small claims court is £5000, but the important thing is: even if you lose, the company you're suing can't claim their legal fees back. All you can lose is your court fee (somewhere from £35 to £150 depending on the claim amount). The idea of the small claims court is that you don't use a lawyer, so there are no complicated forms to fill in, and if it goes to court you just present your evidence in front of a magistrate in plain English with no legal mumbo jumbo. Starting a case in the small claims is usually a splendid way to force your way past the army of bots and AI customer service shields, and get your complaint seen by a real person. It usually gets things resolved very quickly. But not always... here's a good story: Last year I was overcharged £6 by Opodo on the credit card surcharge for a flight booking. I spent two hours going round in circles with their Facebook Messenger automated customer service bot. There were no other contact methods given. So I took them to court, claiming: Claim: £6.23 My time interacting with chat bot (2hr 22min) @ £100/hr: £236.67 My time preparing claim (1hr) @ £100/hr: £100.00 Court fee: £35 Total: £377.90 ... which I think is extremely reasonable of me. They didn't file a defense, so I won the case by default. Even after winning the case, I still had no method of contacting them, and no payment was forthcoming, so I went to the next step which is to file for a warrant. This cost an extra £95 but it included a bailiff visiting their office, who would be able to take goods to the value of my claim. Bring it on, I say! So I apply for my warrant and wait. Nothing happens for 6 weeks (this is in the depths of the first lockdown so I wasn't surprised by the radio silence). Then I get a call from a very helpful chap who tells me he's the bailiff. He says I probably shouldn't hold my breath waiting for this money because the registered office is just a plaque on the fall with no staff or office... and he has FIFTEEN warrants outstanding for Opodo. The next step would be a warrant against Opodo's bank which would allow me to freeze their account... but there was no easy way to do this and would probably require a lot of paperwork. So I gave up. My belief in the UK criminal justice system shattered. Then about a month later I got an email from Opodo: "We are contacting you from Opodo after receiving the Judgement for Claimant. In order to proceed with your refund of £377,90, ..." ... and within a couple of weeks they had paid me in full! I'd highly recommend the small claims court - it takes literally five minutes to file a claim here... check out: https://www.moneyclaim.gov.uk/ https://www.moneyclaim.gov.uk/

6y ago

PaulHoule 6y ago

Jimson weed is so common they could never ban it and the effects are so bad I'd hope you never take it.

Uhrheber 6y ago

Well, I proactively quit both my Amazon and Ebay accounts. The occasion was trouble with Chinese dealers, in which both Amazon and Ebay weren't helpful at all, but the main reason is that I simply have enough of soulless mega-corporations, that try to build monopolies. This forces me to use smaller (often local) alternatives, and honestly I don't miss anything. So my 2ct: Stop complaining, instead do something. Stop using Amazon, Google, Ebay, Facebook and the likes. YOU are the one that makes them unavoidable, so just stop doing so.

phowat 6y ago

Wasn't just like 1 or 2 days ago that people here were praising Amazon's custommer support over Google's on a thread of a developer who had his google account blocked ?

JKCalhoun 6y ago
Could put Google in an even worse light.
- phowat 6y ago
  At this point, I believe if you get unlocky they are all equally shitty. Just yesterday a friend of mine lost access to his Microsoft account including his OneDrive with all his documents (all work related, by the way) due to an unspecified account violation.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

I have seen every tool used to enforce ‘laws’ also abused to deplatform competition. Most tech companies are run with as few employees as possible, that is why SV FAANG engineers make so much. We can look to china to understand a bit more of the statistics and personnel required to effectively moderate a system. e.g. number of censors per number of users. This means that companies like facebook have 2-3 orders of magnitude fewer employees needed to moderate their system. i.e. they are effectively unmoderated. (this is why it was no surprise that facebook was used to plan the capital riots, even though FAANG benefited by deplatforming parlar for political reasons). We are in an interesting situation where there are probably similar levels of legitimate and illegitimate takedowns but nothing will change because the people with power and money have what they need.

SMAAART 6y ago

I wonder what is the size of the market for copycats vs size of the market for original products.

swiley 6y ago

Global platforms don't scale.

FpUser 6y ago

Those companies have grown way too big. Their in/actions can and do affect people's lives way beyond reasonable. I think they should be regulated, at least the way they do dispute resolution. One of the things governments could do is to tell them to shove their EULAs to a proper place and allow people to sue them for refusing proper dispute resolution process. Especially in small claim courts. I think that would straighten them right.

jswizzy 6y ago

I wish people would just stop using Amazon. Online stores are everywhere now and Amazon is worse than Walmart now when compared to just shopping directly from the product website or smaller online boutiques. Even the shipping times are nothing special anymore.

Paul_S 6y ago
I agree but amazon has still the best policy on returns. Everyone claims they have a no-quibble return policy but only amazon does. Must suck for the sellers.
- prepend 6y ago
  I dropped Amazon because their return policy has lots of quibbles nowadays. I ordered a book, they sent the wrong book. They argued over whether it was the right book (they had different isbn), they made me buy an envelope to ship it back and only refunded my money once they received it and cleared it. So I was out the price of the book for three weeks. Old Amazon wouldn’t have screwed up, would have mailed out a replacement book immediately, etc. They seem to be stupid in handling exchanges and cheap now.

bilekas 6y ago

I feel this pain. And whats always shocking every time I need to contact a large company via some fast response required, its never available.. Phone calls are passed around department to dept that cant deal with significant situations, email support takes far too long, live chat rarely exists. It's mind blowing how such large companies don't have these services but at the end of the day it's a numbers game for them. There just are more people that don't complain and their bottom like is still fine. Really really frustrating as there is no even recommended customer service requirements for companies. I'm sure in the above case there is money lost for this action by the competitor. Will the OP be reimbursed ? Of course not.

AlexandrB 6y ago

> Why does Amazon not have any decent phone support or a dedicated representative that could help with issues like this? If you call, you’re going to talk to someone overseas who has no authority to help in any way, a complete waste of time. This sounds an awful lot like the experience of the Terraria developer banned from Google earlier this week.

twic 6y ago

The belt itself is rather neat! Perhaps you could just use a large velcro cable tie to try it out, although it probably wouldn't be as robust.

FrameworkFred 6y ago

It may be years before it happens, but I think this sort of thing will end up being the reason these global companies ultimately won't be able to compete against the more focused online stores. There are already categories of items I don't ever try to buy on Amazon: farm equipment, fencing supplies, pet food. And I'm currently looking into email solutions that won't leave me completely screwed when Google arbitrarily decides it's time to delete my gmail account. There's just too much associated with my email address for it to be in the hands of someone who won't answer the phone. IMO, these companies are winning because they're better than what came before them, but they're far from the perfect solution.

GVIrish 6y ago
Absolutely. These Google horror stories have me ready to pay for an email saas for the first time, and starting to consider that I may need to move all my personal content off Google just to be safe.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

sn0wtrooper 6y ago

This, combined with what the Terraria dev suffered this month, makes me think there is more need for fast human interaction in automated ban reviews.