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This doenst surprise me at all. There are more and more sellers that are frustrated with how amazon deals with them. Amazons top priority is the customer, and

• at-fates-hands 5y ago
  >> Banning sellers for no good reason, and you cant contact anyone helpful. I must be getting old. How did these companies get so massive without any meaningful customer service departments? Amazon, Google, Facebook and many, many others where customer service is not even bothered with, yet people continue to use their products and services.
  • theturtletalks 5y ago
    It's because they make it super easy for the customer, but use dark patterns for the sellers. Amazon can afford to lose sellers since more are popping up everyday and willing to sell items for a loss to gain market share. The parent also didn't mention that Amazon has a policy of not allowing sellers to sell their products for a lower price on their own website. If only customers knew how much Amazon is screwing over sellers, they would be wary. Many sellers I know themselves don't shop on Amazon themselves due to this.
    • bushbaba 5y ago
      As a customer why should I care about the seller experience. As a customer I’ve only ever cared about the customer buying experience
      • fossuser 5y ago
        Agreed - Amazon knows who their real customers are and they have leverage over the sellers. It does surprise me though that given that there's a lot of counterfeit junk and scam-like sellers on the site (which is a pretty bad customer experience). You'd think they'd shut that down. In practice it doesn't matter because prime shipping is so much better than any non-amazon option I just deal with that risk (with some exceptions where I'll buy directly from the creator of the product).
        • thaumasiotes 5y ago
          > In practice it doesn't matter because prime shipping is so much better than any non-amazon option I just deal with that risk Really? I'm strongly considering canceling my prime subscription specifically because shipping has gotten so awful. Amazon won't even allow you to select a shipping speed anymore. Pretty much everywhere else on the internet is better.
          • fossuser 5y ago
            My recent experience with non-amazon shipping: - Ordered a blanket directly from the blanket maker's website, order details were delayed, no shipping notice, no out of stock notice, order took 4 months to arrive (it was supposed to be a gift). - Ordered some flatware from MOMA was charged and no shipping details updated, I waited six weeks before emailing them - they said the system 'lost the order' I had to have paypal reverse the charges. There are other examples, but generally non-amazon sucks - even in the best of cases it's twice as long and usually expensive. With Amazon I often get two day, next day, or even same day shipping for free. Packages arrive typically well packaged and undamaged and the tracking is really good. If there are any issues they are quick to resolve it.
  • pengaru 5y ago
    Short-term convenience wins every time.
  • kelvin0 5y ago
    The retail customers who end up buying the stuff are lavishly treated. The small businesses which sell their products on Amazon are not really 'customers' and are treated like 5th class citizens. Proof and burden rests on these suppliers shoulders.
  • blacktriangle 5y ago
    You do sound like my parents. They were mainframe programmers in the 70s and still every time I complain about wierd issues I'm having with programming, they'll keep asking me if I've called tech support. They can't wrap their head around how you can have useful-ish software with shitty incomplete out of date documentation and tech support via people competing to get noticed on StackOverflow for their resume. The more time goes on, I'm not sure I can wrap my head around it either...
  • Johnny555 5y ago
    How did these companies get so massive without any meaningful customer service departments? Amazon, Google, Facebook and many, many others where customer service is not even bothered with, yet people continue to use their products and services. As a customer, I've had no trouble reaching Amazon customer service when I need help, and they've always been helpful - refunding or replacing the defective product.
    • JohnFen 5y ago
      As a customer, I only needed customer service from them once (in the over 10 years I've been buying from them). My experience was truly terrible, and I ended up losing my money.
• freeopinion 5y ago
  > Amazons top priority is the customer This is not and should not be true. If it were true, Amazon would operate completely differently. It should be more true than it is.
  • munk-a 5y ago
    For at least one specific example - Amazon does an extremely poor job vetting products posted on its site which causes a lot of defective items to end up getting piped through it to consumers. Prioritizing your customer over everything else means delivering a high quality consistent product - which it fails to do with regular listings and fails spectacularly to do with Amazon Basics.
    • dangus 5y ago
      IMO you’re misunderstanding the customer. The customer wants cheap. They WANT Amazon to be AliExpress with fast shipping. That’s why Amazon has free returns and they offer returns in a million different ways. Amazon doesn’t care that it’s inefficient on resources and that these items end up in a landfill. The manufacturing cost of cheap items is so low that it’s no big deal. As long as the customer has no friction in buying or returning they are happy. I think there are certain categories of products where many customers would actually prefer counterfeit items as long as the quality is acceptable. Just walk down a cereal aisle.
      • munk-a 5y ago
        IMO you're misunderstanding this customer. The returns are pretty friction-less but they're still a burden that I'd rather not deal with - and I specifically don't want to order an electrical device off amazon and have it fail in a spectacular way that damages my other equipment. The most luxurious thing you can tell me as a seller is that you're minimizing the longest potential time until I have a correctly functioning product - shipping is a big part of that, but not having to go through the hassle of getting it shipped out twice and returning one of them is another component. Also I think AliExpress is a pretty terrible comparison - Amazon does beat it hand over fist. I think Amazon wants to be NewEgg but with less shipping time (and maybe the reputation it had a decade ago - it seems to be struggling lately). And it wants to be every other specialist store as well. I think it's possible for them to do this, but the thing they're lacking right now is the budget or motivation to actually vet products - they rely on peer reviews and manufacturer statements to try and suggest products.
• Qi_ 5y ago
  Another one: inventory pooling. When a product is “fulfilled by Amazon,” it comes from warehouse stock. However this stock can be contributed to by all sorts of sellers, legit or counterfeit. So sometimes buyers will receive a knockoff when they purchased a legitimate product. I have a relative who designs and sells electronics accessories, and he said this is a serious problem he runs into when selling on Amazon.
  • bisby 5y ago
    This is one of the things they do that could be spun as "pro seller". As a consumer, I don't like buying from vendors that I can't verify how much I trust them. So "fulfilled by Amazon" convinces consumers to buy with confidence, and even a no-name seller can get sales without having to compete on reputation. This means that consumers actually can't trust where they are buying from. I very much don't like this as a consumer.
    • Johnny555 5y ago
      It's also pro-consumer since it means that you get your order faster. Instead of sending you the widget that was warehoused across the country by your seller, they can sell you the one that was warehoused near your house by a different seller. (in theory they could always just ship it across the country, but then they'll have to raise shipping prices) Mingling counterfeit products with genuine products is a problem, but since I rarely know Amazon merchants, I'm not sure that's considerably worse than not mingling at all, I could just as likely try to buy from a merchant that's selling counterfeits.
  • amznthrwaway 5y ago
    Inventory commingling is a choice that can be made by the seller.
  • withinrafael 5y ago
    Sellers can opt in/out of the inventory commingling you describe. But perhaps there are restrictions/conditions that make this harder than it sounds.
• ozzythecat 5y ago
  >In my opinion this company needs to be split up by gov and reigned in. I think there are a lot of things Amazon can do better, but your solution is interesting. “I am not happy with Amazon. The company should be broken up by the government.” If everything you stated is absolutely true and systemic issues, IMO let the market and consumers punish Amazon. It sounds like you’re saying Amazon is good enough that it’s impossible to take away their customer base. On the other hand, you’re describing what seems to be a completely broken company not worth a minute of my time. Which is it?
• analog31 5y ago
  >>> -creating huge incentives for chinese sellers which flood and undercut the local sellers In my view, another way of looking at it is that selling on Amazon favors sellers who can figure out how to manage those risks, and one way of doing it is to be basically a "fly by night" business. If you can spin up multiple sellers, make your nut on the first sale, and pull the plug on the seller if anything goes wrong, you've got what it takes. Or, if your margins are high enough that you can afford to eat the bad sales.
• lazyjones 5y ago
  As a long-time customer (since the late 90's) I am also frustrated with Amazon these days because it's now impossible to judge the quality of the products as the website is swamped with cheap asian knock-off products, fake brands and fake reviews. It feels like 2/3 of all items are Aliexpress offers, just more expensive. It's probably a good window of opportunity for a competitor with some minimum quality guarantees and otherwise similar functionality.