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The solution is to stop allowing third party sellers. The idea that any random person can get an Amazon seller account and scam their way into being approved fo

The solution is to stop allowing third party sellers. The idea that any random person can get an Amazon seller account and scam their way into being approved for certain categories and just send in anything as long as it has a label is insane (it’s incredibly easy to forge the invoices they request). There’s zero control at Amazon, they frequently put returned products back into new inventory as well which makes buying trading cards and Lego a massive gamble. Computer parts get swapped and resold all the time too. I can’t imagine trusting them with anything that goes in your body. Edit: if anyone hasn’t seen just how lax they are, search YouTube for FBA. Literally random people driving around to drug stores picking up nearly expired clearance items to send in for FBA.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
There are a lot of undesirable side effects with that solution. You shouldn't have to be tech savvy enough to host a shopping experience that's competitive with Amazon in order to sell things online. You ought to be able to focus solely on your product and if it's a good one you ought to be able to compete with Amazon Basics on a level playing field--even if it's a field served by Amazon metal. I think we need more separation between the part of Amazon that handles clicking "buy" and printing shipping labels, and the part that comes up with things for sale. So much separation, in fact, that the former considers the latter to be no more trustworthy than any other company or individual. Seller reputation should be important, and the medium for determining if a seller is trustworthy should be free from conflicts of interest. If the user facing part was adequately adversarial about the cardboard facing part it would result in a UI which had no reason to encourage the user to trust the contents of the cardboard, and instead simply presented facts that enable the user to apply their own scrutiny.
- tadfisher 3y ago
  Can Amazon even run FBA without comingling? This is the root of the problem; tracing an individual item back to the seller is apparently not possible, so seller reputation doesn't really exist. So either it's not a big enough problem for Amazon to kill comingling, or it's not profitable to do so at Amazon's scale.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure that if we manage to coordinate an existential threat to Amazon, Amazon will respond by finding a way to do it profitably. The problem is that we're not threatening enough because we're uncoordinated.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

There are a lot of undesirable side effects with that solution. You shouldn't have to be tech savvy enough to host a shopping experience that's competitive with Amazon in order to sell things online. You ought to be able to focus solely on your product and if it's a good one you ought to be able to compete with Amazon Basics on a level playing field--even if it's a field served by Amazon metal. I think we need more separation between the part of Amazon that handles clicking "buy" and printing shipping labels, and the part that comes up with things for sale. So much separation, in fact, that the former considers the latter to be no more trustworthy than any other company or individual. Seller reputation should be important, and the medium for determining if a seller is trustworthy should be free from conflicts of interest. If the user facing part was adequately adversarial about the cardboard facing part it would result in a UI which had no reason to encourage the user to trust the contents of the cardboard, and instead simply presented facts that enable the user to apply their own scrutiny.

tadfisher 3y ago
Can Amazon even run FBA without comingling? This is the root of the problem; tracing an individual item back to the seller is apparently not possible, so seller reputation doesn't really exist. So either it's not a big enough problem for Amazon to kill comingling, or it's not profitable to do so at Amazon's scale.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure that if we manage to coordinate an existential threat to Amazon, Amazon will respond by finding a way to do it profitably. The problem is that we're not threatening enough because we're uncoordinated.