
An emerging black market offers Amazon sellers ways to cheat the marketplace - minimaxir
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/leticiamiranda/amazon-marketplace-sellers-black-hat-scams-search-rankings
======
iooi
Just today I was browsing for new wine glasses. I finally found the product
that I wanted and checked out a couple of options on Amazon. The first two
reviews for the pair[1] I liked were complaining that they received
counterfeit items.

The reviews are verified reviews, but there's no way for me to know which
third party they bought it from so I could avoid them.

I ended up buying them on the manufacturers website. The shipping might not be
as fast, but I got a great discount by signing up on their newsletter and it
ended being significantly cheaper than Amazon.

This isn't my first experience like this. The biggest pain point of shopping
outside of Amazon is the checkout experience of a lot of smaller sites and
slower shipping, but I would much rather get my items a couple of days later
than have to deal with returning counterfeit items.

I'm surprised about how Amazon is dealing with this issue. It's the growth at
all costs approach, taking care of this would hurt their sales numbers -- but
that's a pretty myopic view of things. It's the kind of attitude that flooded
Twitter with bots, since taking care of that issue would hurt their growth
numbers that investors love.

I really hope Amazon fixes this since I like the idea of a one stop shopping
experience, but maybe people buying from the manufacturers directly might be
better for everyone involved. A universal checkout experience (one login,
saves CCs and contact information) would make Amazon obsolete in my opinion.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Riedel-Burgundy-Cabernet-Merlot-
Glass...](https://www.amazon.com/Riedel-Burgundy-Cabernet-Merlot-
Glasses/dp/B000NB03L2)

~~~
dahdum
Amazon commingles inventory, so it doesn't matter which 3rd party you select
from the product page. Any one of them can inject the counterfeit into the
supply and affect sales from the others.

~~~
ryanburk
just a note: this commingling only happens if it is "fulfilled by Amazon" vs
buying directly from the 3rd party through Amazon.

~~~
dahdum
A bit more clarification, the page right now says:

"Sold by Spark Maestro and Fulfilled by Amazon."

While this is a 3rd party sale, it will be fulfilled from the inventory Amazon
has from any other seller. It has to ship from the 3rd party to be safe from
counterfeiting.

~~~
tedmcory77
Not exactly correct; the seller has to allow comingling as well.

~~~
dahdum
Does the buyer have any way to tell if an item is commingled, and if the
seller they selected does not commingle? The pressure to get the buy box on
competitive items means missing out on sales if you don't commingle.

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cc439
>For just $5, Seller Mafia will “brush” an account, which is when a product
page is stripped of all information except its reviews and listed with a new
product, which is against Amazon’s marketplace rules. This allows a seller to
inherit a positive star rating and high ranking for a product without ever
selling anything. So a shopper may see a four-star product like a jade roller,
but the listing has had previous lives as a garage opener and a step stool to
earn that average four-star rating.

Ah, that explains several incidents where I rebought a previously purchased
item by searching through the listings in my order history, only to receive a
completely different product (I once received lace underwear when rebuying a
specific shampoo for example).

~~~
mgillett54
Wow this is really sleazy.

This seems like something that Amazon could solve by having humans in the
loop, but they probably have too much inventory.

~~~
nrb
This seems like something Amazon could trivially solve with software. Product
name, description, and listing categories all provide obvious context about
what is being sold, they could easily analyze these changes and detect abuses
such as this.

I'm surprised they don't automatically scrub the rating and reviews (why not
just automatically generate a new listing and list the old one as
unavailable?) for such consequential changes to a product listing.

------
chkaloon
"Amazon declined to comment on the specific black hat consulting firms named
in this story, but it told BuzzFeed News that these 'bad actors make up a
fraction of activity' on the site."

So some number below 100% apparently.

~~~
RyJones
This is one of my hobby horses. 1/1 is a fraction. Don't say something is a
fraction, say it's a small fraction, or express it in ppm or something

~~~
scarejunba
Languages work this way when the meaning is unambiguous. No one is going to
say "I used to live in London in the United Kingdom. The big one". No one's
going to always say "So desu ne". No one's going to say "a small fraction"
when "fraction" will suffice.

It's natural language. Conciseness is high value.

~~~
bdsa
Not to correct you as such, more to share a nice word: "concision" is a bit
more pleasing than "conciseness" in my opinion.

~~~
scarejunba
Funny story but I actually used that all the time till someone told me it
wasn't a word and I believed them. Truth set adjusted. Thank you.

It sounds so much more natural.

~~~
bdsa
It does. People have a weird tendency (it's not that weird I guess, it's the
same "force" that means less frequently used verbs are more likely to have
regular conjugations) to just use <adjective>ness when there are so many
beautiful words out there...

Don't get me started on "comfortableness".

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downrightmike
This all seems completely intentional on Amazon's part. Why? Because it sends
people to the amazon branded version of the item, one they sell directly, or a
substitute. This is clearly an action they are taking to under cut their 3rd
party sellers. Amazon can and is doing this. And it is working. Why would
amazon want 3rd parties to sell something that sells well, when they can take
the sale directly away from competitors? Co-mingling is just their excuse that
covers up what they themselves are doing. A very convenient straw man for a
problem that they don't want to solve in any other way that doesn't benefit
only them in the end. This is a long play to have their cake and eat yours
too.

------
Lich
Something that I don’t see alot of people mention that is another huge problem
on Amazon is that many products are exactly the same white label products with
different logos and slight variations. Lots of the same alibab products
slightly customized. Some consumers are paying way more than others for the
same product.

------
pseudolus
Coincidently this week the podcast "Decrypted" featured an episode that
details how difficult it is to compete on the Amazon platform, especially
against Amazon itself. [0]

[0] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2019-04-22/as-amazon-
ge...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2019-04-22/as-amazon-gets-bigger-
sellers-feel-the-squeeze-podcast)

~~~
toasterlovin
Yeah, it turns out that, for tons of product categories, the value is in
controlling the customer relationship, not in merely offering goods for sale.
Who woulda thought?

The way you get around this, by the way, is by doing the hard work of
establishing a brand that customers are willing to pay for. Even then, a
certain segment of the market is going to go for low-price. Nothing you can do
about that.

------
dwighttk
I’ve stopped buying from third party sellers on amazon. And I’ve bought a lot
less from amazon proper too. Probably started about 4 years back.

~~~
0xADEADBEE
I did the exact same thing as you around the same time-frame and with the
amount of comments I see on here extolling Amazon I assumed I was an outlier.
What made you tail off? I was in the UK and I started noticing that while they
had originally been cheaper for most things, they were not and the convenience
(or inconvenience if I was out when a package was delivered) didn't really
offset that particular delta. I made the exception for about a year after I
caught on to that in order to buy second hand books because typically they
would retail for 1p with a ~£2.50 postage fee but I stopped that after a while
for various reasons (travel, ebooks, relocation).

~~~
dwighttk
Books are about the only thing I still buy at amazon. It probably started with
a purchase I made that kept delaying shipping, but the price was like 20%
better than anywhere else and I didn’t need it anytime soon. After a couple
months and like 6delays I canceled the order and decided to start buying from
bestbuy and Walmart. (Also Barnes&noble locally but their website is bad and
their app is even worse.)

Oh the other thing that definitely turned me off is searching for something
like a hoodie and getting a page full of results that each give ranges of
prices from $10-$50 and the only one for $10 is an xxs in dingy white and
everything else is $50. (Just made that example up)

~~~
tinus_hn
That’s the same on AliExpress, if you search for SD cards you get offers for
$0.01 cards and when you look at the offer you chose capacities and the 0.01
offer is for a 1 megabyte SD card that is sold out.

------
Guvante
I saw an interesting example of cheating during one of Amazon's sales. Someone
had posted an "updated" version of a board game that wasn't updated, it was
just a different language version. It was hard to tell if the release date was
updated but everything on the page pointed it to being the same product.
However it was prices higher of course.

------
adinobro
What I find really interesting is that Alibaba inside China has already solved
this problem in Tmall and Taobao (it doesn't really work for international
sellers).

Once you've built up a buying history and reach the level of VIP you get a
guaranteed refund policy while claims are being investigated. If you request a
refund you get the refund while they investigate.

Also refunds for counterfeit are triple on Tmall (optional on Taobao) which
makes it fairly easy to figure out if something will be real or not. The
seller also has to have a bond of different amounts which is public so you
know how much they trust their own products.

I thought that this would be interesting since Amazon just pulled out of
China. This is probably one of the main reasons they struggled here. (I live
in Shanghai as an expat)

------
seibelj
Any single thing there is not-insignificant demand for will have a market.
Think of any possible thing and google “buy [that thing]” and you will find a
seller or a story about sellers.

The question is what Amazon will do about it.

------
millstone
Say sellers banded together to form a communal market site. The market would
be jointly owned and controlled. What are the barriers to that? Is it just a
mass coordination problem?

~~~
shapov
Amazon’s strength is their logistics network. Any co-op you’ve just described
will have an incredibly difficult time competing on shipping prices and speed
of delivery.

~~~
nrb
Yeah Amazon clearly dwarfs the logistics capability of nearly anyone, but as
far as the 2-day delivery advantage Amazon has, there are some companies
making competition in the space: ShopRunner is one I'm aware of and I'm sure
there's others.

------
skookumchuck
Amazon should just sent employees to those black hat seminars, learn how they
work, and block them. As long as there's a market for black hat services,
Amazon can find it as well as anyone, sign up, and block it.

~~~
Regardsyjc
I'm an Amazon consultant and I wasn't aware that super urls were black hat
until recently. Even today, "gurus" or big Amazon software companies promote
urls and launch services.

I think Amazon usually catches on and starts suspending sellers after 6 months
to a year after an exploit is discovered but that is a really long time. Even
then a lot of these issues are probably small beans compared to the major
abuse I see on their platform from Chinese sellers. I can't imagine what kind
of counterfeit problems they might have but they have been making changes so
I'm sure they'll figure it out within the next year or two. Changes like more
seller suspensions for manipulating sales rank, TOS updates, requiring photo
ID for new sellers, vendor central updates, and more.

In the long run, it won't matter what third party sellers do because Amz will
probably sell directly themselves the 20% of the catalog that makes 80% of
their sales whether through their own secret private label brands or their
vendor program.

