
Dirty dealing in the $175B Amazon Marketplace - juokaz
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18140799/amazon-marketplace-scams-seller-court-appeal-reinstatement
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Analemma_
This is just depressing. Here on HN and elsewhere, I often see people
wondering why Amazon isn’t cracking down on obviously fake reviews, and it
seems like at least part of the problem is a lot of those fake reviews are
false flags to get a competitor shut down. So Amazon can’t just nuke them from
orbit. I understand the motivation... but I’m still stuck unable to find any
useful reviews.

Are we ever going to have a review system on the internet that isn’t gamed to
the point of uselessness? I’m beginning to seriously doubt it.

~~~
crobertsbmw
Couldn't Amazon just require all reviews to be Verified? That would at least
cost a competitor a little bit of money in buying their competitors product...

~~~
zenexer
They already found a way around that one:
[https://www.businessinsider.com/people-receiving-amazon-
pack...](https://www.businessinsider.com/people-receiving-amazon-packages-
they-didnt-order-2018-2)

tl;dr: They pick an address, order their own products, ship junk in its place
(cheap goods or even just bricks), and leave a verified review.

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cwal37
_The Performance workers’ incentives favor rejection. They must process
approximately one claim every four minutes, and reinstating someone who later
gets suspended again counts against them, according to McCabe and others._

So the system is set up in an extremely rigid way that prevents much thought
on the part of the human cogs, and if something goes wrong in the future with
that seller it hurts their metrics. Seems like everyone's incentivized towards
punishment here. It's not that surprising, most call center type jobs seem to
have stringent to the point of absurd metrics, but this seems like a poorly
balanced system.

------
hahamrfunnyguy
Wow! These stories sound like nightmares. My company manufactures and sells
one product on Amazon, and we've thankfully never run into these sorts of
issues. Some of the dirty tricks described sound like outright fraud to me.

~~~
ikeboy
Having run into some of these issues I can confirm that Amazon's appeal
process is very accurately described as Kafkaesque

Sampling of situations that either happened to me or I have direct knowledge
of:

Suspension for listing an authentic product, because the brand was listed
slightly differently (think "acme products" vs "acme"). Took a week and two
appeals to get reinstated

Suspension for changing bank account information (have heard many such cases -
they flag it as fraud but instead of just putting payments on hold, they block
all listings until resolved)

Suspensions claiming account is related to another account that's blocked. No
information is given and seller is unaware of any other accounts it might be
linked to

Suspension for inauthentic product. Even after invoices showing all products
in question were provided, Amazon decides to ignore everything, steals the
inventory valued in the 7 digits and keeps the money as well

Suspension for selling expired product. Turns out Amazon had found the product
in their warehouse and decided to add it to sellers inventory, sell it, get
complaints and then blame it on the seller. (Seriously. Ask anybody selling
volume groceries on Amazon. Amazon is shockingly incompetent at tracking
dates).

Product blocked due to false complaint by brand owner. Reinstated after
sending an invoice proving authenticity. Repeat a few dozen times (sending the
same exact invoice each time).

Plus one not directly related to performance but scummy behavior anyway:
Amazon starts selling a product and all of a sudden blocks third party sellers
from selling it. Sometimes I've had 5-6 figures of inventory get blocked this
way. Makes it really difficult to run a business when they act capriciously.

