
Amazon Ready to Pour Billions into Policing Products on Its Site - Alupis
https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-ready-to-invest-billions-in-policing-products-on-its-site-11571787628?mod=rsswn
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creato
Amazon needs to cut down on the number of products on its site for me to use
it consistently again. It's ridiculous how searching for "spatula" returns 400
_pages_ of results, all of them near identical (many are actually identical),
but almost all of them sold by sellers named by nearly random strings of
characters.

I ended up just buying most of what I needed at local big box stores. If it's
more expensive, it's not by much (I didn't price check every random $5 utensil
I bought), it's a lot less overwhelming, and I feel a lot less need to think
about things like material safety from effectively anonymous sellers under
Chinese jurisdiction on Amazon.

~~~
Guest0918231
Agreed, they need to curate their store, and take some responsibility and
pride in what they sell. Need a battery tester? Take your pick from...

* VTECHOLOGY Battery Checker - [https://www.amazon.com/Battery-VTECHOLOGY-Batteries-Requires...](https://www.amazon.com/Battery-VTECHOLOGY-Batteries-Requires-Operation/dp/B07KJLBN2H/)

* D-FantiX Battery Tester - [https://www.amazon.com/D-FantiX-Battery-Universal-Checker-Ba...](https://www.amazon.com/D-FantiX-Battery-Universal-Checker-Batteries/dp/B014FEM0X6/)

* SURDARX Battery Tester - [https://www.amazon.com/SURDARX-Battery-Universal-Checker-Bat...](https://www.amazon.com/SURDARX-Battery-Universal-Checker-Batteries/dp/B07X46XYY1/)

* The Battery Organizer - [https://www.amazon.com/Battery-Organizer-TBO30343-Universal-...](https://www.amazon.com/Battery-Organizer-TBO30343-Universal-Batteries/dp/B07DLFMXX8/)

* Amprobe BAT-200 Battery Tester - [https://www.amazon.com/Amprobe-BAT-200-Battery-Tester/dp/B00...](https://www.amazon.com/Amprobe-BAT-200-Battery-Tester/dp/B005G7SBY4/)

* Battery Tester Checker by WeePro - [https://www.amazon.com/Battery-Tester-Checker-WeePro-Monitor...](https://www.amazon.com/Battery-Tester-Checker-WeePro-Monitor/dp/B07VB4NTK8/)

I'll stop there, but there are probably 20 brands selling the same Alibaba
battery tester on the first few pages with the only difference being the name
stamped on the side. This is why I don't shop at Amazon. I don't trust their
reviews. I don't trust that I'll receive a legitimate product. I don't trust
that anyone cares about the quality of products being sold.

~~~
probablybroken
It's worth mentioning that the housings of many products are frequently sold
to multiple manufacturers as components ( though in this case I suspect it's
probably the same product ). I've also seen suppliers change the contents of
batches of products once an order has been placed ( I'm talking palette loads
of products that land with changes to the electronics - even as a single
importer specialising in a given product it can be impossible to guarantee
continuity of supply from the east ). This makes any attempt to police this
kind of re-branding highly impractical since you need to disassemble any given
product to verify it's contents, even within the same order.

~~~
Guest0918231
My concern is why they need to sell them all. Take those 20 battery testers
that all cost $7 and look identical, test them out, and sell the best one.

As the consumer I'll save time, receive a better product, and likely be more
confident and satisfied with my purchase.

~~~
probablybroken
The only way for Amazon to do what you ask is to not allow third parties to
list products in their system at all, and to verify continuity of supply by
continually spot checking product, and penalising vendors for changing spec on
them.

~~~
creato
I think that's the point. Most retailers do exactly what you describe, and I
prefer buying things at those stores instead of Amazon because of it. But
that's just me.

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Animats
Inspired by a court decision in Pennsylvania that, regardless of what Amazon
says, Amazon is the seller and has the responsibilities of the seller.

~~~
spongeb00b
Is eBay affected by this, or is an auction site clearly not the seller in this
situation?

~~~
dawnerd
eBay actually punishes (most) sellers pretty aggressively. Reason I say most
is there’s one large shipping supply company on there that consistently shorts
customers and has eBay remove the negative feedback. It’s assumed in the
community that they’re large enough that eBay is willing to take the hit to
keep them around.

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adrianmonk
Here's a cheap thing they can do: you don't have to stop commingling entirely,
but you can give me a way to opt out of it. Either via account settings or
letting me specify during checkout.

Sometimes I may not care which seller it comes from and just want the closest
one. Other times, I'm OK with waiting if it means I am more sure of what I'm
getting.

~~~
OscarTheGrinch
Yeah I agree, but I think the problem is that Amazon doesn't know who the bad
actors are. To actually verify all the goods would require an enormous amount
of physical checking, requiring an enormous amount of staff trained to tell a
good raincoat from a piece of shit one (a week of wearing?), compounded by bad
actors simply shifting identities.

It's a similar problem to Facebook not being able to tame disinformation: how
can a trust based system police maleficence at scale?

~~~
FireBeyond
They can start to isolate and A/B test. Banks look for common merchants in
cases of credit card theft... Seller A is a seller-in-common of 5 counterfeit
goods, they're a likely candidate.

Even if you can't demonstrate it immediately, you can then start to bin out
their stuff. High index that that seller is counterfeiting/selling it? Start
un-mingling their stuff, internally - you don't -need- to physically verify
authenticity, but if you're unmingling their stuff due to suspicion they're a
bad actor and you keep getting complaints... probably a good sign.

> compounded by bad actors simply shifting identities

Identities have to keep getting paid. Start requiring ACH/EBT payments only
for those actors (i.e. no more checks or whatever). They might be able to keep
'creating' identities - it might be harder to keep creating bank accounts.

------
habosa
I really hope they mean it. A few months ago I stopped using Amazon because of
this. I knew electronics were bad but once I saw that someone was
counterfeiting a raincoat I was going to buy and using Amazon comingling to
get away with it, that was the end.

Turns out you can get basically anything elsewhere with better guarantees and
lower prices. But Amazon is faster than everyone else and I hate creating new
accounts. I'd be happy to return.

~~~
pfranz
With the web and related technology comfortably 20+ years old I'm very
surprised standards haven't developed where huge, annoying hacks have
developed.

I checked out via ApplePay on a website by random. What do you mean shipping,
email, payment, confirmation are all one streamlined step where no account is
needed? This is way better than poorly auto-filling random fields based on
name matching.

The other big one is WiFi captive portals with unencrypted connections. Can't
there be a more elegant process that passes off to an encrypted connection
instead of DNS spoofing? I have to manually type in
[http://nossl.net](http://nossl.net) when it messes up because most all sites
are https.

~~~
est31
> Can't there be a more elegant process that passes off to an encrypted
> connection instead of DNS spoofing? I have to manually type in
> [http://nossl.net](http://nossl.net) when it messes up because most all
> sites are https.

Which browser do you use? Firefox which I use has captive portal detection. It
queries a mozilla provided http web site in the background and if there is DNS
redirection, it displays a message.

~~~
pfranz
That's exactly the kluge I'm talking about. I use iOS and macOS and it
/mostly/ works. Primarily Chrome on the desktop, but use Firefox for work
related stuff and Safari as a contingency. It seems to break on things like
expiration (they seem to re-enable the captive portal after an hour or two) or
waking from sleep. Some captive portals seem to let through iMessage or email,
but block http traffic until you click through--this seems to confuse some
portal detection. There have also been different "hacks" around it for decades
to bypass it and get full web access.

Most of my personal frustration is around apps. I get an error downloading a
podcast or connecting a game so I would fire up the browser because the
captive portal handling messed up. Starting a few years ago my go-to domains
started https by default so I took time to seek out http-only domains because
it still comes up.

Assuming that all worked perfectly, you still end up with an unencrypted
connection. I'm just kind of amazed that with all of the big players
implementing this stuff on the client side; Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, and on
the server side AT&T, xfinity, Gogo, and any other chains plus Google on both
sides deploying to Starbucks and authoring Android. Nobody seems to see this
as a problem.

------
kadoban
I'll believe it when I see it. As of now, counterfeit products are the biggest
reason I avoid buying things on Amazon. Not sure how I'd be convinced in the
future that that should no longer apply, it's difficult to regain that trust.

~~~
Silhouette
Counterfeit products do seem to be a real problem. I've also seen an obvious
rise in CD/DVD sets where there seem to be slight marks on some of the discs
when opened, as if it's a returned item that has just been resealed.

The worst in recent years is their packaging, though. They just don't seem to
give any thought at all to putting multiple items of very different sizes in
one of their larger boxes with nothing but a bit of tissue paper and a feather
to pad it. It turns up having been sliding and bashed all over the place on
the journey, with book pages bent, electronic devices potentially damaged
internally, discs loose in their boxes after a clip snapped and covered in
scratches, etc.

This must be hitting their bottom line by now. I know we stopped using them
for anything important, fragile or time-sensitive a while ago. They're still
convenient for low cost, sturdy products or for ordering single books or
discs/boxes if the order isn't time sensitive and can be returned if they pack
it badly, but that's about it these days.

------
yborg
"Amazon.com Inc. might need to spend billions of dollars in the future to
prevent the sale of counterfeit goods, expired food or dangerous products on
its platforms to preserve the customer trust that is critical to the company’s
future, Amazon consumer chief Jeff Wilke said Tuesday."

As the ancient Spartans would say: "Might."

------
kabes
When I was living in the states I was surprised about the sad state of
e-commerce there. I was used to e-commerce sites like bol.com and coolblue
(local giants) in the low countries, which have a thousands time better
service (on all levels) than Amazon, or basically any webshop I tried in the
US. Of course, there's also just better consumer protection rights in the EU,
but the above mentioned websites go way beyond what's required by law.

------
probablybroken
Personally, I find browsing amazon impossible simply due to the widespread
mis-categorisation of products. It seems that suppliers just chuck everything
into inappropriate categories in the hope that it gets them more views. This
renders the platform useless for product discovery, and suggests that you
might as well be searching for the product elsewhere. It also gives me the
feeling of rummaging through a bargain basement shop, rather than the higher
value store that I think Amazon used to be perceived as ( vs e.g, ebay ).

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
When I interviewed at Amazon a couple of years ago (for a team on the retail
side of things, this was their bread-and-butter) I raised this very point with
my interviewer, about my concerns over the data-quality issues I was having
lately with item properties/attributes and miscategorization. My interviewer
said the main problem was bad data coming from their Marketplace and other
third-party vendors. - he said this is was why they recently (at the time)
brought in the great minds and heavy-guns for machine-learning to fix all of
these issues - and at the time (2016-2017) I noticed things were improving.

But lately - over the past year or so - I've seen things getting worse - I'm
assuming because the problem of well-meaning but ultimately inadequate data
from Marketplace sellers is now solved - but what remains is fighting bad data
from intentionally incorrect metadata from malicious third-party sellers
seeking to game the system - which we see today in spades with counterfeit
sellers, for example.

Amazon's data-quality issue mirrors Google's perennial black-hat-SEO problem -
I think it'll keep their teams occupied for decades at this rate.

(This is why I want to work on self-driving cars...)

~~~
dhosek
> (This is why I want to work on self-driving cars...)

This is why I’m skeptical (as much as I’d like not to be) about self-driving
cars. Black-hat SEO, intentionally incorrect metadata, it’s why we can’t have
nice things and it _will_ impact self-driving cars as well.

------
elipsey
Perhaps Amazon are concerned that if they do not intervene, the legislature
will make them liable for what they sell, and have supposed that this way is
cheaper.

~~~
Silhouette
I've never quite understood how they aren't already liable for what they sell
under our normal consumer protection rules here in the UK, at least for
anything under FBA. They present themselves as some sort of marketplace, but
since they're the ones taking the money, they're the one supplying the
products, and they're the ones you communicate with if necessary, I don't see
how they aren't also on the hook for all the normal obligations any merchant
has under these laws, regardless of any legal weasel words they might include
in their terms. Maybe they are and I just haven't come across any relevant
examples of legal actions or regulatory interventions yet.

~~~
nimish
Legally they aren't. They also sever the link that lets you use Section 75 to
force refunds of defective goods.

~~~
Silhouette
_Legally they aren 't._

I understand that they take that position. What I'm asking is whether it
stands up to a substantial legal challenge. Both Parliament and the courts in
England (and the EU, for that matter) have historically taken a fairly dim
view of attempts by merchants to exclude liability, which is why various
statutory rights can't be contracted away by consumers for example.

------
bamboozled
I really wish someone would pour billions into saving the real Amazon.

I know I'll get down voted; However, it's just honestly how I feel at this
point.

------
gigatexal
It’s about time

------
chmaynard
I'd also like to see Amazon go after vendors that ask absurd prices for used
merchandise. Predatory pricing is simply not acceptable. The highest price for
a used item is often several orders of magnitude greater than the lowest
price. Their strategy is simple: once the item sells out at more reasonable
prices, the only vendor left standing will be the predator.

~~~
rahimnathwani
You're using the term 'predatory pricing' in a non-standard way. Predatory
pricing is the practice of pricing low (sometimes lower than cost) to drive
competitors out of business. But you seem to be using the term to refer to
pricing _high_, which is the opposite.

In any case, why does it matter if a seller asks a high price for something?
If you and I are unwilling to pay the price, no one will force us to buy the
item.

Are you also against people placing very low bids for items you're selling on
eBay?

~~~
chmaynard
Merchants sometimes try to gouge customers by raising prices greatly when
supply is constrained temporarily, such as during a natural disaster. I
thought the term for this behavior was 'predatory pricing', but perhaps I got
it wrong.

