29 ms·

I don't get they don't crack down on the product switcheroo scam [0] - it seems like a trivial problem to solve. I've reported items to them before and they don

• sofixa 4y ago
  How is it trivial to solve? They either need to prevent sellers from modifying product pages (which would be a disaster because any mistakes could no longer be fixed without losing all reviews) or gate it behind human intervention(slow) /algorithm (complex). There's nothing trivial about the issue.
  • yencabulator 4y ago
    How often does a seller need to modify the product category from Dog toys to Electric toothbrushes? Needing to go through a review, or losing previous review juice for that seems reasonable to me.
  • jjoonathan 4y ago
    Rules + flag & review + punitive measures. If they wanted to figure it out, they would have figured it out.
  • candiddevmike 4y ago
    Do they allow sellers to reuse an ASIN? If not, seems like they could not allow sellers to change the ASIN associated with a product page.
  • tyingq 4y ago
    Preventing sellers from changing the UPC code would be trivial, and would tie in with other existing controls.
  • dilyevsky 4y ago
    Are you saying that in the age of ai it’s impossible to tell whether the page is now featuring a completely new product without human review?
    • Filligree 4y ago
      It took me five minutes or so for a proof of concept with GPT-4. So...
  • lwhi 4y ago
    If someone reports it, manually review it. If it's being abused, ban the seller!
  • heavyset_go 4y ago
    Requiring new listings for new product titles/SKUs, or approval for significant changes to titles/SKUs, seems like it would stop a good portion of these scams.
    • vlovich123 4y ago
      Yeah, with permanent delisting of the entire company as the penalty. Of course, these people don’t care. They’ll just spin up a new seller and thus the only people you end up hurting are legitimate partners updating their product line.
      • Aeolun 4y ago
        A new seller won’t benefit from a bunch of existing products.
      • hedora 4y ago
        Add a filter by “companies that have been selling on amazon for at least 12 months and 10,000 fulfillments“ button. (Or just call it “rank by seller reputation”)
      • throwaway290 4y ago
        Updating product line or need to amend something? No problem. Allow to add new content. Insert a link to the new version or a notice at any time. Just never allow to edit existing content beyond a few typos. Updating product line and want to keep reviews? Sorry it's dishonest even if seller thinks of itself as "legitimate". I don't think in the end any legitimate seller is hurt.
  • zht 4y ago
    you're telling me that Amazon in their infinite wisdom who already deals with all kinds of fraud in their system cannot flag if a product listing changes drastically or is describing something totally different?
  • SifJar 4y ago
    Couple of fairly simple things they could do to at least help somewhat: * Put reviews for current listing at the top of the reviews (currently default sort seems to be a vague "Top reviews", but can be changed to "most recent" which presumably accomplishes this. Vast majority never change defaults though) * Clearly mark any review that is for a previous version of the listing, and provide a link to view the listing at time of review (so can easily see if it was a completely different product or a simple typo correction etc.) * Perhaps make history of listing visible, so customers can see when and how the listing has changed
    • kevincox 4y ago
      I don't think this will work well. Minor updates to listings would trigger all of these actions far too often to make them standard and ignored. I hate to say it but I think some type of heuristics would be needed here. 1. Has the title significantly changed. 2. Has the price significantly changed. 3. Are the search keywords that were finding the old listing significantly different than those finding the new listing. 4. Have average ratings and common words in reviews changed? (Especially rarer words that match the new and old listing respectively) If some of these start to look suspicious then I think you can start to apply your mitigations. You can probably even scale them by how sure you are. For example reviews are always downranked by age and significant changes to the listing amplify this effect, you can add the same weight to the start rating. And of course the real way to prevent this is to flip the incentive. Add human review and a warning before killing the account. Make it so that the cost of being caught negates the benefit of doing this.
      • VBprogrammer 4y ago
        Web megacorps are normally allergic to any kind of human review because they are in the business of picking up pennies on each interaction via adverts. It's unsustainable to police the world on that model. Amazon is in a different space here. Even the smoothest transaction goes through a handful of literal human hands. They have to pay for those hands regardless. At the very least following up on cases where customers (and competitors) flag fraud on their system should be possible.
      • 4y ago
  • therealdrag0 4y ago
    They could do a similarity diff. If you switch content from towels to solar panels I bet they could get pretty good signal just from text comparison. “This looks like a different product. Different products must use their own SKU. If you believe this is an error, appeal here.”
    • lwhi 4y ago
      ChatGPT can definitely work this out.
      • generj 4y ago
        Even a simple Levenshtein distance would do the trick for most of these product switches.
        • gs17 4y ago
          Exactly, or at least that could flag it for manual review. It has to be a deliberately unsolved problem.
          • lwhi 4y ago
            Sure it comes down to incentives. It will be more profitable for Amazon to do nothing, than to address the problem.
        • ben_w 4y ago
          I bet someone's already made a game from before/after pairs such that the smallest Levenshtein distance can give the biggest possible change in meaning to the entire seance.
        • notahacker 4y ago
          Some of them would be as simple as "this sold a lot of copies when listed under Tablet Accessories for $5.99, now it's in Laptops for $599"...
        • SkyPuncher 4y ago
  • Cyykratahk 4y ago
    Even if it's not trivial to solve perfectly, there are easy wins to be had. For example: prevent changing the top-level category of a product. E.g. Shoes should not be allowed to become camera gear.
    • hedora 4y ago
      As always, the internet has already generated a counter example to your rule: https://www.spycamerasmall.com/mobile-spy-camera/bodyware-spy-camera/shoe-camera/sneaker-spy-new-32gb-men-sports-shoes-pinhole-spy-hidden-hd-camera-recorder-1280x720p.html https://www.spycamerasmall.com/mobile-spy-camera/bodyware-sp...
      • throwaway290 4y ago
        It only means that either category is okay, not that it should be allowed to be changed. But I don't think this restriction would fix all the issues where listing in the same category is swapped.
      • maxerickson 4y ago
        If their goal is to make their product listings useful, they wouldn't include that as a shoe.
      • kipchak 4y ago
        I like that "Spy Cameras Mall" and Spy Camera Small" work as ways to read the address.
        • ipython 4y ago
          Kind of like expertsexchange, back in the day
    • duskwuff 4y ago
      Categories on Amazon are basically meaningless. There are probably more miscategorized products on Amazon than ones in the correct category. Most users just type into the search field, so they don't end up interacting with categories.
  • pmlnr 4y ago
    Hardcode the original product in the review, match it against the current?
  • mortenjorck 4y ago
    Trivial is an overstatement, but the solution space is far broader than the two options you propose. I can think of one off the top of my head: Give each listing a change score, where changing a description is a point, changing a photo is a point, perhaps changing categories is 2 or 3 points… At a certain threshold of points (tweaked over time to calibrate against false positives) the listing is flagged for human review.
    • blarghyblarg 4y ago
      Not to be argumentative, but... that's the second option. Algorithmic. The initial implementation would be simple. One point, two points, three points. Then, some categories turn out to have significant change requirements, some change infrequently, some changes turn out to be very important in some categories, some categories need immediate human review...
      • bogwog 4y ago
        I'm sure Amazon can commit more resources to solving this problem than some random individual on HN can commit to a ~3 sentence long comment. If they wanted to solve this problem, they would have already. Clearly, they don't care. People buy products with good reviews, and Amazon makes money when people buy products. I wonder if they've been sued over this? I'm not a lawyer, but this sounds like false advertising to me.
        • rwalle 4y ago
          Yeah, so many people are wasting their time on those useless arguments. What matters here is not how to solve the problem -- customers should not worry about that at all -- but whether Amazon is commited to address this problem, and the answer is a clear no.
          • blarghyblarg 4y ago
            It's armchair quarterbacking, for sure. Nobody at Amazon is going to read some random news article, even if they are here slacking at work, and say "That's the ticket! Lets do that!" They either fix it, or they don't.
  • d23 4y ago
    They could start by letting users report them. The fact they still don't have functionality like this makes me think they're purposefully putting their heads in the sand.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • jlarocco 4y ago
    And what's the problem gating it behind a human?
  • amluto 4y ago
    It shouldn’t take a particularly strong classifier to detect that two descriptions are for entirely different products. And product reviews are a major part of Amazon’s business, so improving the situation should be easily within Amazon’s budget. Also, noticing and penalizing sellers who do this shouldn’t be particularly hard.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    Seems like a problem where LLM can shine. I foresee a future where an IA validate that your product page edits are for the same product and that reviews make sense. That’s not going to solve the issues of fake/paid for reviews however. I think there is a market for a store selling only vetted products they have reviewed themselves.
  • jsharf 4y ago
    When you change a product page, you lose all reviews, but you get a "New Product" link on the old page to link to the new one, giving you exposure. Amazon can make the "New Product" show up for queries for the older one, but without the stellar reviews. This way modified products still get good exposure and no one will accidentally buy the old one. But there aren't reviews on the same page for a different product. The system can still be gamed similarly, but at least you can't get reviews for the wrong product on the same page.
  • londons_explore 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure GPT-4 could be shown the product page as it was when the first review was posted, and then again as it is now, and be asked "Are these two pages about the same product, please answer Yes or No with no further context"
  • carlosjobim 4y ago
    Sellers should think very carefully and verify exactly what they put on the product description. What is wrong with that? If there's a typo there, you'll usually fix it before even getting the first review.
  • riffraff 4y ago
    Avoid changing name? If you had a bad name you would have changed it before you got a lot of positive reviews.
  • SkyPuncher 4y ago
    Most of the problem is wholesale swaps of products - not minor edits. Allow minor edits, but prevent wholesale swapping of content/categories/descriptions/etc. Limiting edits, showing product history, or removing reviews on edit (or some threshold of content change) would be an easy place to start.
  • adrianmonk 4y ago
    It's not trivial, but it's very, very feasible. Consider that Amazon already does a lot of manual review. They do manual review of individual transactions if a customer is unhappy. The scale of that is enormous compared to this. They also already do some manual review of product listings. (Every product listing page has a "Report incorrect product information" link.) Adding this kind of manual review is surely a drop in the bucket if labor costs are the issue.
  • Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    Sure there is: Review all products and their updates, just like e.g. an app on the app store. But that will cost Amazon more money than what they currently lose on returns or scams. I presume anyway. Amazon does not care about the quality of the products on their website, they only care about volume and selling / maintaining subscriptions. As long as numbers go up they're golden. And there's not enough competition. There's probably plenty of webshops with quality products (anyone can run a webshop from their home), but discoverability is low, I don't know what the consumer protection laws in the US are like, and Amazon is easy to use. Amazon can afford to handle returns and the like as well.
  • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > gate it behind human intervention(slow) That's not my problem. The courts have already weighed in on this. Marting Lewin sued facebook for publishing ads that used his face to defraud people. Facebook used the same excuses you just wheeled out, and the judge wasn't impressed. Fraud is a crime, little people go to jail for less every day. https://news.sky.com/story/martin-lewis-settles-lawsuit-against-facebook-over-scam-ads-11615288 https://news.sky.com/story/martin-lewis-settles-lawsuit-agai...
    • tfourb 4y ago
      "It's hard" should not be an excuse for not preventing fraud. Most arguments from tech companies boil down to "but we would have to spend some of our billions of dollars of annual profits or venture capital to prevent this and those jobs wouldn't be sexy engineer stuff, so why would you want us to do something like this." I never understood how/why these companies are getting away with this, given that fraud/abusive behavior in other parts of the economy is taken quite seriously.
      • Nifty3929 4y ago
        Expensive ~= effortful, meaning that it would take a lot of human labor, which would otherwise be contributing differently in the economy, at Amazon or elsewhere. Every hour spent manually reviewing product pages could instead be spent growing food, producing shoes, building homes, providing accounting services, etc. This doesn't mean it is or needs to be determined centrally - just that it is an economic truth that will bear out regardless. Amazon might hire 1,000 workers for this, pulling them implicitly from all of the other jobs they would otherwise have taken. Maybe it would be a net-win, and maybe not. But from society's standpoint it really doesn't matter whether it is profitable for Amazon or not. We'd be trading less fraud on Amazon for less of everything else.
        • actually_a_dog 4y ago
          That’s all yet another instance of “not my problem.” Can’t prevent fraud on your e-commerce site? Maybe you should not be running one.
  • peoplearepeople 4y ago
    No it's *incredibly* trivial. Just have human reviewers.
  • tshaddox 4y ago
    Well yes, you gate it behind human intervention like an actual retailer.
  • mrgoldenbrown 4y ago
    One trivial but major improvement would be to let me see the edit history of the product, the same way I can see the edit history of a wikipedia page.
  • ugh123 4y ago
    Reviews should be tied to a series of SKU numbers which should be tied to physical items in Amazon's warehouse (if using FBA)
  • michaelmrose 4y ago
    This seems to have about a half a hundred solutions - Changing listing voids prior reviews - Changing product category voids prior reviews - Enable transferring reviews by a paying a fee which will pay for a human reviewer to approve this - Make people put up a bond to sell goods and or agree to a huge fine if they do this. When you find people doing this take their bond and or fine money out of the money they would have received for their goods. Also delete all their listings and ban them from the platform. If any account attempts to do business in a way obviously linked same card same email etc ban them too. - Find mismatches between reviews and product by having a program classify reviews by probable product type reviewed and have a human review hits starting with the most prolific offenders and bring down the ban hammer. If you can actually collect fines directly out of money intended for the scammer this trivially pays for the enforcement activity and improves the health of the platform. If the economics of the scam are I'll make a little money to if I do this at a large enough scale to make any real money I'll probably be caught and lose money it doesn't look like an attractive scam to run anymore. It's not necessary to be perfect just good enough to mostly resolve the issue.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • lamontcg 4y ago
    > gate it behind human intervention(slow) The correct objection here is not "slow" but "expensive". All of the "FAANGs" (or whatever we call them these days) need to be forced by government regulations to have transparent appeals processes that use actual humans and make them spend the money on it. And when it comes to fraud clearly amazon needs to be forced to deal with it.
  • srcreigh 4y ago
    They could just show old pictures of the item under a link. And maybe manually review reports of clearly different products and display a warning or remove old reviews for those.
  • dbg31415 4y ago
    They need to have human review of products and product changes. Easy enough. Just expensive. I don’t care that it’s expensive. That’s Amazon’s problem. Let’s put another way, until Amazon does something about this there’s no way for anyone to trust reviews on their site. Their reviews are all worthless. That’s a huge liability. As long as they let people scam me, I will just assume everyone on there is there to scam me. It hurts them more in the end to lose shoppers to Walmart and Costco and places that don’t put up with scammy products.
  • thayne 4y ago
    Make it so the product name/title, product number, and brand are immutable. Make it so you can upload new photos, but you can't remove old ones. Flag changes to the description that change more than 50% of the text for human review. It would require the seller to be a little more careful with the initial submission, but hopefully if they do make a mistake, they notice before there are too many reviews anyway. And maybe have a way to request a change to fix mistakes that requires manual review. And I think charging a fee for that review would be fair.
  • anfilt 4y ago
    Like you shouldn’t be able to change a products category from clothing to electronics for instance in my opinion. Same with similar changes. Small changes should be fine in my opinion also it’s not like it’s impossible to also determine the edit distance between two pieces of text. Amazon could be doing a lot more here.
    • omgomgomgomg 4y ago
      It will get flagged eventually. No, really, I have worked at amazon in a job exactly around product compliance and such. All this is very hard to solve and they do what they can, people wont believe it, but amazon is not just an app, the heavy lifting part is logistics, admin thereof and compliance. Theres no easy way to be fraudulent on amazon, the cost of market entry for sellers is rather big. Mislabeled products and bad account health have terrible consequesnces for sellers. I do understand it might appear from the outside that nobody cares, but it looks different once inside. As for the allegations a profit/benefit calculation being behind it is most likely wrong, amazon, apart from fullfilment center staff is always overhiring to be ready for peak seasons and the whole thing is subsidized via aws, the real money maker.
      • account42 4y ago
        Changing the product category shouldn't "get flagged eventually" after many people have already been scammed. There is no reason why such changes can't require review by Amazon except that Amazon doesn't want to pay for that. > Theres no easy way to be fraudulent on amazon, the cost of market entry for sellers is rather big. It's easy enough that fraud (for example recycled listings with old reviews) is common enough that many people, including myself, have run into it. > Mislabeled products and bad account health have terrible consequesnces for sellers. Not enough that it isn't widespread.
  • otikik 4y ago
    Set a max update time of one week. Doesn’t look very difficult to do.
  • bawolff 4y ago
    The obvious solution would be make sellers put up a bond. If they are fraudulent, sieze it. Its not like fraud is a new phenomenom in the world.
  • Osiris 4y ago
    Changing a comic book to a USB is a pretty substantial change.
  • wampwampwhat 4y ago
    Its aggressively simple to solve. Sell Bezos yacht. pay people.
  • hakfoo 4y ago
    I could see something like a prominent disclaimer: This page was edited May 20, 2022 (1.2% of text changed) and September 16, 2021 (85.3% of text changed) with a link for "See archived versions". If you could see "okay, they fixed a typo or material error in the listing", that's way different from "this laptop was a blender last year."
• ridgered4 4y ago
  I've noticed several products recently that used an old product entry where the bulk of the older reviews were written in Spanish or German. Once translated you find they are gushing about a comic book they loved rather than the computer interface adapters I was looking at. Pretty sneaky since Amazon puts foreign reviews in a different bucket that you have to drill down into, I usually only do so myself when there aren't many English reviews.
  • brutusurp 4y ago
    I wonder if this is ASIN-recycling (where ASIN is the product id), or simply a bad indexer. For instance, is it that an ASIN in location A is reused in location B? Is it that the ASIN is recycled by the lister/Amazon to maintain positive review percent on a new product? Or is it that the column(s) used to map the international comment thread to the product are incorrectly specified?
• jjoonathan 4y ago
  I suspect the switcheroo scam is somehow profitable or desirable to Amazon and there is no end to the number of shoelaces they will trip over or tangents they will chase on the path to confronting it.
  • tpmx 4y ago
    Or they are badly managed and are stuck optimizing for some local maxima.
• heavyset_go 4y ago
  The practice yields them sales, they don't care.
• coding123 4y ago
  The product switcheroo thing should be fixed with AI. Chatbot, is this product update similar to the previous product that was posted here?
  • m463 4y ago
    it is way easier than that - just allow feedback about a product listing. "This does not seem to be the product described". or flag a listing for review when photos are changed.
    • coding123 4y ago
      Why is a single openai GPT call hard? Why make someone pay for and return a product to know if someone is scamming?
• triceratops 4y ago
  It's stuff like this that makes me avoid online-only retailers as far as possible. My first choice is still to go to the store. Second choice is to never order from third-party sellers on Walmart or whoever's website. The minor price differences between online and in-store aren't worth the hassle. The only reason to order online is for long-tail items. Spare parts, replacements that you simply can't get in-store.
• 99_00 4y ago
  Using resources to crack down only makes sense if the problem causes customers to.uae Amazon less. I don't see that happening. People are locked in and the thought might not even cross their mind. Of course they will complain. But talk is cheap. Money is the only thing that matters.
• pc86 4y ago
  My understanding is that the biggest issue is that they're commingling inventory. So Sony is selling A1000s on Amazon and ships in 10k units. Your FBA store buys 1k wholesale A1000s and sends them to Amazon. My FBA store buys 1k and sends them in. Amazon just has a pile of 12k A1000s and sends them out whenever orders come in. Once it's processed there's no differentiation between your stock, mine, or Sony's, it's just Amazon's A1000 stock. Even if this is the only thing preventing the solution you're referring to it'd still be a logistical hurdle to solve.
  • post-it 4y ago
    Just tag each item by supplier. They already tag by item. Sure it's a logistical hurdle in the sense that someone needs to do it, but it's not a challenge, it's not anything new.
    • stonemetal12 4y ago
      Walmart has suppliers RFID tag with UPC + Unique ID. It would work perfectly for amazon. They would be able to track Who sent in what and in which shipment it came in.
    • topaz0 4y ago
      I suspect they save money not just from saving some effort/complication of tracking the supplier, but also from being able to distribute the larger inventory better across their warehouses. If someone in Tennessee buys the item from a supplier whose stock is in Idaho, they have to ship across the country, but if they can substitute with stock form another supplier that is in Georgia they save a lot of shipping.
      • paulmd 4y ago
        Nobody disagrees with commingling in theory, but, the problem is you have some bad actors who will pollute the communal product bins. It is not obvious who they are because there is no tracking of individual items, only by ASIN. Tracking by (ASIN,UUID) pair would at least allow them to figure out who the bad actors are and flag/pull those items. There are lots of things they could do to try and help. The problem really is, there is no incentive for Amazon to do any of them.
• rfwhyte 4y ago
  They don't do anything about it because it's a feature not a bug. They know full well about all the fake reviews, fake products, product switches, counterfeit products, dangerous products, etc., and choose not to do anything about any of it because it's making them money. Amazon is basically an online real estate company that owns a giant online mall full of scammers, snake-oil salesmen and fraudsters, but they get to keep cashing the "Rent" cheques from these vendors in their "Mall," and so they don't give a single solitary f*ck about whether or not actual end customers suffer as it's not them doing it, just the people who rent space in their mall.
  • tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
    The profit from the fraud is not worth the reputation damage. Future rent check income will go down a lot if people stop going to the mall because it's full of scammers. The cost of properly policing it is likely the main deterrent.
• throwawaysnake8 4y ago
  I worked in this area of the company - it's actually quite a hard problem. For one thing, these are some of the oldest systems owned by Amazon - the team/service/system diagram is a whole massive mess, so there's that initial part of just grasping all of the pieces that go into it, and everything else that comes with legacy architecture (assumptions, data flows, formats, etc.). Secondly, uhh trying to limit the amount of info I give - this link hints at the issue concretely enough - https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/itemsandoffers/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/itemsandoffers... - but there's some pretty complicated automated systems that handle relationships between ASINs, and basically it's those rules that get taken advantage of. And the rules are hard to fix because they do genuinely merge together a lot of duplicate ASINs/manage other relationships between ASINs, and then sometimes they end up merging unrelated stuff. And some of the rules are ML based, so you've got the whole recall/precision stuff. And the people talking about categories, there's like 4+ different systems for categorizing ASINs which all have separate use cases and taxonomies, so any answer that starts with "just do X" is probably not grasping the number of interdependent parts there are. Not saying I'm a fan of Amazon at all - I left for good reason - but these comments are just so incorrect about how Amazon works under the hood. No comment on if it's intended behavior, but I never saw anything that would indicate it was the case, and we had multiple teams actively working in this space.
• etempleton 4y ago
  Certain things I will just not buy on Amazon because I have had either nothing be delivered, but a charge held in my card for months, or a product I suspect is counterfeit or somehow made cheaper(and worse) for Amazon. Clothing and shoes are particularly susceptible. It is worth it for me to buy direct and pay a bit more to not have to deal with the hassle.
• spydr 4y ago
  I was surprised to see this product when I clicked the link. I recently bought one of these and ended up cracking my whole windshield trying to fix a small chip