Amazon overall quality has droped in recent years.
I use to buy from Amazon because I knew I was buying original brands and no chinese cheap copies. Well, that changed a lot. There are specific things that I still buy from Amazon but on most things there's almost no difference between they and Aliexpress. I can buy the same products from Aliexpress way cheaper and have them delivered in 2-3 days.
Thankfully there are a lot of small online shops where quality and customer support are taken very seriously. The bad thing is these stores are very specific so if I need different unrelated products I have to buy from several stores, having to pay sometimes a few euro for the delivery. This also made me buy less stuff. Now I generally wait until I need more things or until my cart has enough stuff for a free delivery.
As a small niche retailer that makes and sells guitar straps in Nashville I couldn’t agree more. Our experiments selling on Amazon have only hurt us, but Prime is a huge time & shipping $$ saver for re-ordering supplies for our shop and even materials used to make our products. We’ve experimented with selling on a lot of different sites (Amazon, Etsy, Reverb, etc) and have found the best way to control the brand and customer experience is selling solely on our website https://originalfuzz.com. So we both rely on Amazon to run our business, while feel we’re actively doing harm to our brand when we sell our products there. We’re giving up revenue in the short term by not taking a multi-channel approach to sales, but we think it will pay dividends over the long term because we’re able to provide a consistent customer experience with each order.
My living depends on selling small-batch, high quality, independently made woodworking items and I've struggled with this. Selling on Amazon feels like you're relinquishing control over your product, much more so than Ebay or Etsy. Just yesterday I've had a third party seller somehow merge my product into their own product listing, taking the small number of 5 star reviews I earned organically with them. They sell a completely unrelated product and in their page you'll notice the reviews refer to a bunch of unrelated products. Meanwhile what the customer sees on the search page is a 4.5 star item. After some research it appears this is a common problem. How something so egregious can happen at all is puzzling.
Well I've decided Amazon isn't for me, for now. I have a dedicated website for my business but I don't know what is the right way to drive traffic.
Could you mind explaining what your approach has been?
I've had a review I wrote for one product entirely switched to another product. I've seen some products for USB cables with reviews for books made for infants. Amazon is so untrustworthy now I'll either go to Alibaba or buy direct. It's dangerous to buy from Amazon. I wish you the best in this, I've reported ads like this for fraud before.
It wouldn't surprise me to find out this is some kind of "business" - where you have an Amazon seller account post up various items charging only pennies, then you hire a bunch of people to purchase the products (so they are a "verified purchaser") then review them with high ratings (and maybe a few lower ratings just to make things look good).
Then somehow sell those SKU codes for the items onward where the item information (description, photo, title, etc) are swapped out - so now you have an instant "best seller".
This can also of course be done by an individual seller - they just get a good product, sell it, get some great ratings on it, then change out the information for another product but keep the SKU the same. Works best if the products are very similar (I've seen this too - where the reviews, if reading them carefully, seem to refer to say a USB thumbdrive, but what is being sold is an actual hard drive, or memory, or sdcard, etc).
The other way, of course, is to sell multiple products with different "colors" (but each is actually a different product). Then you have reviews all over the map, all for the same SKU - or at least in the same general comment mix for the product being sold. So now you don't know if the comment is referring to the product you want, or some variant of it...
All of that said, I can kinda understand why this is possible, even desirable - for Amazon to give that kind of control to the sellers. They could try to police it, but how do they police and enforce SKU usage and such, without also busting legitimate uses? That's probably the difficulty.
There's a similar problem with some sellers posting items up with insanely large prices (like a pack of gum for $10,000); from what I understand, this is done to prevent an item from being purchased when it is out of stock, or to keep the reviews (maybe in conjunction with SKU swapping?), or a few other reasons, with the idea that nobody will buy that product with such a strange high price on it (plus sorting moves it to the bottom usually). Unfortunately, this also screws up when you want to sort high to low prices, to find a possible "better product" that is priced higher because it is made differently and better than "regular ole' generics" (I faced this recently while looking for a shielded audio cable).
Here again, though, policing it would be nearly impossible - how is Amazon to determine that a particular package of gum isn't worth $10,000? For that matter, maybe there's a buyer out there looking for an elusive pack of gum and is willing to pay the higher price? Seems incredible, but I am certain there's at least one person out there ready and able to do so.
> There's a similar problem with some sellers posting items up with insanely large prices
One of the other reasons is bots outbidding each other and escalating prices.
> sort high to low prices, to find a possible "better product" that is priced higher because it is made differently and better than "regular ole' generics" (I faced this recently while looking for a shielded audio cable).
Or in this specific instance, they're just targetting audiophiles who believe a $3,000 RCA cable will "enhance the depth and warmth and soundstage"...
In my case the company changed an actually very good scale with a back massager from the same company. The scale was moved to a new ad. I was actually planning on buying another item from then until I saw this.
> Just yesterday I've had a third party seller somehow merge my product into their own product listing, taking the small number of 5 star reviews I earned organically with them. They sell a completely unrelated product and in their page you'll notice the reviews refer to a bunch of unrelated products.
Wow, that's amazingly shitty. I had no idea that Amazon allowed the fraudsters to hijack the reputation of legitimate sellers in this way [1]. I always figured they could only pull these switcheroos on listings they created.
[1] I know Amazon lets fraudsters hijack reputation through inventory commingling.
Not OP, but I’d recommend search engine optimization to find a larger and growing audience - after all Google’s search box is still much more important than Amazon’s and for most people the beginning of product (category) research. Obviously not should optimize by trying to game the system, but simply by creating good, relevant content for your customers. Maybe a blog with extensive, authentic and detailed background information about your product categories and the particular niche you serve. Furthermore a fast, responsive, easy to navigate website - it doesn’t need to be fancy, but frictionless.
Don’t rely on third party platforms for your core business.
Agreed - if I'm shopping for something and using a website I don't already trust, offering a well known payment method (even paypal will suffice) is a surefire way to build a lot of trust.
When I am shopping online, and I find three or four suppliers that are close in product and price, the first thing I do is eliminate all those that don't allow PayPal. I only use PayPal for online purchasing. I will consider Google Pay or Amazon Pay (last resort) if needed.
Apple Pay is nothing at all like Amazon. Apple Pay is simply a convenient, secure way of paying without giving out your credit card number, and reduces risk of fraudulent transactions and chargebacks for merchants, who also don’t need to worry about storing credit cards and having them stolen. It’s a win win situation.
The context of the discussion is selling products as a reseller on amazon.com, which has nothing to do with Amazon Pay or Apple Pay, hence when the previous poster claimed Apple Pay is just as bad as Amazon, I clarified that it’s apples and oranges. Maybe Amazon Pay and the others are good too, I’ve never used it so I can’t comment on it.
Your online web store is a simple but absolute stunning display of a frictionless customer experience. I'm genuinely curious about the motivation to sell these products made-to-order, seems like a product that can be stocked. Care to elaborate on this?
Am I understanding correctly that Amazon will not allow me to buy something off their site with prime shipping if i intend to resell that product?
Is the the scope of this limited to only include me taking orders for item X at price y on my own Amazon marketplace account and then placing my order with an FBA partner who's price for X is below y?
Otherwise wouldn't you run into all kinds of issues with first sale doctrine? Who is amazon to tell me I cant sell something I bought through them?
If you need extrapolation, you should read the TOS. It says you cannot use prime free shipping for items intended for resale. Buying an item to incorporate it into an item for resale is still buying for resale. If you buy items for resale, you're suppose to select a different non-prime shipping method.
It has nothing to do with the first sale doctrine. If you are reselling the item, then you owe Amazon shipping charges for 2-day shipping.
Maybe Amazon won't try to collect, but you have violated the contract you have with Amazon.. and they could come back to you later and send you a bill for all of the shipping charges you owe them. Maybe they won't do that.. if you want to risk it, that's up to you.
> If you are reselling the item, then you owe Amazon shipping charges for 2-day shipping.
Not so fast. Amazon would like this to be true, which is why they put that provision in their TOS. The NFL does the same thing when they state in every single broadcast, "This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience. Any other use of this telecast or any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent is prohibited." Merely expressing a sentence in legalese doesn't create a binding contract.
A decent lawyer in a Common Law jurisdiction (and IANAL/this is not legal advice) could probably argue that such a "no-resale-for-Prime" provision constitutes restraint of trade along with any other similar statutory prohibitions that would render such language unenforceable. (I don't know, but I'm guessing Civil Law jurisdictions have their own such restraints.) Amazon for its part would argue that if it allowed resale, it couldn't offer Prime services at all to anyone. If I were to guess, the real purpose of this provision is to kick people out who might do something like purchase up an entire supply of some particular Prime-eligible item and then immediately resell the entire stock at around the same price but with paid shipping (including a small profit cushion). That kind of behavior actually would ruin the Prime brand/program and itself constitutes a form of market manipulation.
In no way would anyone owe Amazon money for reselling products purchased on Prime. At worst, Amazon could kick a person out of Prime or completely ban them as a customer (and the courts might even frown upon that). Amazon might even try to "collect" money, but unless the resale constituted actual abuse (cf. the scenario above), a strongly worded letter CC'd to the person's lawyer, Congressman and FTC might help Amazon stand down.
Again, IANAL and this is not legal advice. If it were me, I'd try to follow the TOS as a matter of prudence/respect. However, I don't like people thinking that they're under legal obligations that are at best a stretch.
It's probably to avoid the situation where the same item sells for X at Amazon and X+n at Walmart, and someone sets up a shop on Walmart to forward the orders to Amazon, pocketing the n.
I’ve started to become suspicious of Amazon too, and I have a feeling that Prime isn’t helping because it places instant gratification above quality or authenticity.
The reason I say it is that I’ve ordered several books from Amazon, with no indication of them being supplied by a third party seller, and I’ve always picked next day with Prime above any other option.
In almost every situation the book has arrived in a cheap, non-Amazon jiffy bag (like a book needs to be bubble wrapped?) and the quality of the paper and print has felt a bit off. And it makes me think that I’m unwittingly buying counterfeit books that might have been run through amazon’s publishing program.
What really made me think that was when I bought a copy of House of Leaves, which is suppose to be printed in colour. The entire book was black and white, which meant it stopped making sense when trying to discuss the content with others (who consider the colours significant).
The same with an O’Reilly book that I recently ordered. The screenshots were really poorly printed, no publisher with a reputation would be happy with the quality of that.
Did I get get a dodgy, possibly pirate, print just because I wanted cheap and fast?
Exactly. For a while Amazon was the first place I'd look to shop online. They had legit stuff and it was super convenient. The last year, maybe two, it's become such an unpleasant experience that Amazon has become a last resort.
Free fast shipping is awesome, but I'll be patient or pay more to avoid Amazon these days. I don't trust the products, and I'm done wasting time returning things.
It also seems like Amazon now holds shipments until the last possible moment if you don't pay for Prime.
Meanwhile, my Target orders often arrive in 2 days or even overnight (in NYC) for free. Wal-Mart's prices for most items I reorder regularly are almost always lower than Amazon and the shipments regularly arrive in 3 days even though they estimate up to a week. The unfortunate thing about Wal-Mart is that they seem to be adopting a lot of the website clutter that has made Amazon so frustrating (e.g. 3rd party listings with shipping/pricing all over the map, and aggressive recommendations on product pages).
They don't even offer free fast shipping anymore. You can get fast shipping, but only if you pay for Prime, or you can get free shipping, in which case it can take a week or longer before your order even leaves their warehouse (!). It's fast or it's free, pick one.
> I can buy the same products from Aliexpress way cheaper and have them delivered in 2-3 days.
I use aliexpress for things I don't need for 2-4 weeks, I'm really curious, normally 2-3 delivery is like $40+ (Which I prefer not to spend on something that's $1.75)
For most stuff it takes several weeks, yes, but they also have warehouses all over the world where they store the most popular products which are delivered within days.
Also they opened their first store in Europe, yesterday, located in Madrid. It's called Aliexpress Plaza and since yesterday it was only an online shop for Spain.
Also - if the item you purchase is small enough, it might be able to fit into one of those China Post "e-packets" (or whatever they call 'em) - which is basically a government subsidized free fast airmail shipping option.
Virtually bypasses customs it seems. But the parts have to be relatively small and fit into a padded envelope about 6x4" or something like that. I've gotten many electronic components in that manner, within a few days of ordering.
Of course, anything larger, and you're looking at weeks - mainly because of customs on both ends. Big enough, they stick it in a shipping container (in addition to customs) and it takes the slow-boat over the ocean.
Ya, my rule is that if it's under $10 then I can probably find it on aliexpress (unless I need it relatively quickly). If it's a well known brand, I'll probably buy it from that brand's website. Everything in between is usually ok to buy on amazon, but even that list is getting shorter and shorter for me.
I tend to buy mostly name brand stuff and books from Amazon (e.g. my TV, personal laptop, B&W laser printer, and water flosser came from Amazon). One exception is lightning cables, where I try to buy heavy duty, Apple certified cables, regardless of brand. Another exception is certain personal care items, like shampoo and conditioner, where if what I get is "fake," it won't be of much consequence.
They are below the quality of what one would expect from a government-run organization. Perhaps an online sales platform should be a utility instead. At least it would be fair to third-party sellers, with their market regulated by the government instead of by a large corporation.
>but on most things there's almost no difference between they and Aliexpress. I can buy the same products from Aliexpress way cheaper and have them delivered in 2-3 days.
That's what a lot of FBA vendors are, middlemen. Some Chinese companies learned about this and are now doing FBA directly.....but the quality is the same and so are the prices.
"Amazon overall quality has droped in recent years."
Not to offer up my receipts or anything, but Amazon has about 70% of the time shipped me a counterfeit item. 1080p microscope? Best it gets is 1366x768 on a Windows XP 32-bit driver. Plastic welding kit for a 2002 Ford Explorer? Nope, wrong plastic welding rod, wrong nylon type. Meant for Mazda, not Ford.
I won't touch Amazon after that bullshit. I'll buy directly from a known supplier, in this case, O'Reillys. They sell the plastic patch kit. Thanks, guys. Saved me $500 on a bullshit replacement fee.
> A Wall Street Journal investigation found 4,152 items for sale on Amazon.com Inc. ’s site that have been declared unsafe by federal agencies, are deceptively labeled or are banned by federal regulators—items that big-box retailers’ policies would bar from their shelves. Among those items, at least 2,000 listings for toys and medications lacked warnings about health risks to children.
> Of the 4,152 products the Journal identified, 46% were listed as shipping from Amazon warehouses.
This is a top-of-the-front-page, well-researched article in a leading newspaper -- it's the kind of coverage that destroys hard-earned reputations built over decades.
> This is a top-of-the-front-page, well-researched article in a leading newspaper -- it's the kind of coverage that destroys hard-earned reputations built over decades.
It's the kind of thing that _should_ destroy reputations. But that doesn't happen all that much anymore.
We're in a weird place with information and communication where shameful acts are accepted either in ambivalence, apathy, or bullheadedness.
It's also the matter of convenience / personal life impact - Amazon is ingrained in many people's weekly routine at this point. It's not that people genuinely don't care about an article like this, they just don't care enough to justify negatively impacting their life. Dale Carnegie on the concerns of the individual:
"A person’s toothache means more to that person than a famine in China which kills a million people. A boil on one’s neck interests one more than forty earthquakes in Africa."
For me, it's that Amazon has virtually everything. I would be much happier if I could buy everything I buy from Amazon from Costco instead, but Costco's model isn't the same as Amazon's "A to Z" model. Costco wants to offer good deals on a smaller selection of stuff, rather than go for a broad selection.
It also doesn't hurt that Prime Video is bundled with Prime. On a per annum basis, Prime costs me about 2/3 what Netflix does, but I'd say I get roughly half to a third the value of Netflix out of Prime Video alone.
Ive switched to specialist retailers. Quality is higher and selection in that niche is wider than amazons offerings in that category. Shipping far more reliable as well from a competent carrier who isn’t throwing piss bottles out the window onto my street and stealing packages.
I have all my stuff sent to a PO box because I live in an apartment building with no secure way to deliver packages, but, yes, I have noticed that Amazon's contracted delivery service (Amazon Logistics) is pretty incompetent. For the longest time, I couldn't get them to deliver properly to my box, even though I said in the extra info section that it's a business with business hours.
Depends on the act, and the accused, I guess. I'm sure similar things happened in the 1980s - I was a kid who didn't pay much attention to that kind of thing back then.
But there were plenty of scandals of a lesser nature that would ruin people, with even a hint of impropriety. Again - it depended on the act, the person(s) involved, and perhaps the way our society's wind was blowing (as always).
I can guarantee you, though, that some of things we currently witness on a daily basis would have absolutely destroyed people, careers, brands, you name it - even just 10 years ago, yet today it's just "oh, that's nice - let's see what happens tomorrow" - yesterday's scandal already forgotten.
Again - it does depend on the act and the person; you can think about many recent people who have "been in the news" for similar accusations, if not all-but-proved acts, and wonder "Why this guy, and not this other one?"
For some reason, we skewer only a selected few, and in many cases, not the ones who really need and deserve it, either.
I don't know - maybe? Admittedly, I was just getting out of diapers at the tail end of the 80s. Perhaps this kind of thing revolves around the onset of new communication mediums and the general adoption and ease of use.
Newspapers, easy to read, hard to publish - "trusted" source. Printing press and/or other technologies aid printing and trust drops. Radio, TV, internet follow.
I always wondered how we got all these reports of lead in products and children's toys. There was a post a few weeks back where someone explained it and it made perfect sense: recycling.
China takes a ton of US recycling. They often melt down metals, e-waste and solder and it's difficult to separated out lead and unleaded source material. A lot of it just gets put together and used in bulk.
Also, if you don't give a shit about your customers, lead paint often dries faster, is more durable, and is cheaper than alternatives. I suspect this is a more common reason.
Kids' toys aside, using the lowest cost option that satisfies your customers' requirements sounds a lot like "giving a shit" to me.
The fact that lead paint is totally banned (here in the US) instead of just banned in paint marketed for use on/in inhabitable structures and allowed with warning labels required is asinine. There's tons of chemicals out there that will screw up kids and adults if they eat them and we don't ban them. We just let the civil court system assign appropriate judgements to anyone dumb enough to use them on things that will come in close enough contact with people to be harmful.
Edit: The stereotypical effect of lead exposure is that it makes people stupid. I hope you people appreciate the irony in the fact that we can't have a serious discussion about the pros and cons of lead paint.
What would be a use case for lead paint that isn't satisfied by other options and isn't used somewhere people will be exposed to it? It's not just kids & through eating it that it can be absorbed. Being around it throughout normal environmental wear & tear is enough for exposure, enough that pregnant women are advised against any exposure at all. As for the general topic of harmful chemicals, it isn't a choice between proactive prevention and after-the-fact punishment. There can be both, working in concert.
Satisfied at what price point? Everything has a cost. Every dollar society spends on one thing is a dollar society can't use on another thing.
Nobody is going to be "exposed" to a highway overpass or the hull of a ship or some chemical storage tank outside a factory enough for it to measurably affect anyone. Why can't we paint it in lead if that lasts longer for a given price point? There's all sorts of things that are out there in the world that are not interacted with enough to affect anyone in any measurable way (obviously assuming the people who work with the lead paint when wet follow proper procedures).
You can't paint only some things in lead on a whole economy scale for similar reasons to Amazon not wanting to enforce separated items in warehouses.
As long as "approved for tanks" lead paint is in the supply chain, who exactly keeps the use only to tanks. There are sufficiently durable alternatives that the lowest cost is to outright ban lead paint instead of setting up an enforcement framework to chase lead paint abuse while also paying added costs for after effects of easier cheating.
When I was a teenager, we painted our barn with lead paint. Let's just say that it didn't come from the local Sherwin-Williams. If it's for sale anywhere, the gray/black market will take care of the rest.
> highway overpass or the hull of a ship or some chemical storage tank outside a factory
the workers who build and tear it down. maintenance workers. the chips and bits the wear off and get into the environment. and for a ships hull? the bits that get into the ocean and then sea life.
Sure you could argue that its small and harmless, but is it? can you prove it?
And, all that aside, there is an increased cost of all the precautions that need to now be taken when working with it offsetting the cost savings, as well as its now hazardous waste when torn down.
How do you enforce this? How can a consumer know that their contractor isn’t cutting corners? Sometimes the only solution is to stop the problem at its source.
How does a consumer ever know their someone they've hired isn't cutting corners? When you pay for asbestos remediation how do you know they actually did it right? When you pay an accountant how do you know they're not half-assing it?
When you make your living doing a thing it's far more lucrative to do things right than to do them wrong. There's a bunch of incentives business owners who provide services operate within and they generally align to doing things the right way.
> When you make your living doing a thing it's far more lucrative to do things right than to do them wrong.
Really? You're posting on a thread about Amazon doing a wrong thing, which they've been doing for the greater part of a decade at this point. Maybe Amazon the company will be punished for this, but the people who made these decisions have probably already made millions and can just move on to another company with no repercussions. The idea that it's somehow more lucrative to do the right thing is ridiculous.
> When you make your living doing a thing it's far more lucrative to do things right than to do them wrong.
If this were true, no professional would ever do something wrong, cut corners, etc. Which would be nice. It's a nice picture of how things should work. But they don't.
They have these issues due to corruption, greed and negligence. With recycling as with other stuff, China cheats and poisons people to make a quick dollar, decades go by and nothing changes and nobody goes to prison. Think of how many people use Chinese made pots and pans, or knives, and have no clue they’re poisoning themselves and their families just to save a few bucks by buying the cheap Chinese version.
Yeah, with the problem Amazon US (maybe elsewhere too?) has with fakes which get mixed in with the real stock at the distribution centre, and the problem I have on Amazon UK where no matter what household product I search for all the results are from brands I've never heard of, many of which are obviously Chinese from the name, or I'd guess are Chinese from the weird English or the mystery chunky quotation marks all over the description, it's not so easy to know any more.
I have a new rescue cat and I was going to buy some cat toys but after half an hour on Amazon I felt increasingly unsure that any of the products were safe for my cat to sink her teeth into, so I guess all the toys she's getting will be coming from the local pet megastore, the only pet shop left on this side of town.
I recently got a dog and had a very similar experience. The only toys I could see that I could attempt to trust were Kong toys, but they were more expensive on amazon, weren’t covered by prime and the delivery time was 2-3 days.
Generally, they blame a "temporary worker", bribe a disinterested party official, and stop putting the poison in that particular product... For now, anyway.
> This is a top-of-the-front-page, well-researched article in a leading newspaper -- it's the kind of coverage that destroys hard-earned reputations built over decades.
FWIW, this article finally got my wife to say she'll stop buying from Amazon and I'm glad for that. I stopped years ago for this and other reasons, but have never quite explained my reasoning well enough to convince her.
This claim really doesn't say much on its own. There are millions (billions?) of products on Amazon. This would be potentially a lot more damning if they released how many items they searched through to identify those 4,152.
It would also be nice if they provided some data on how prevalent these problems are at other retailers and marketplaces.
There's reason to believe the problem is probably worse at Amazon (automated approval process, historic emphasis on low cost and selection) but how much worse is it?
> It would also be nice if they provided some data on how prevalent these problems are at other retailers and marketplaces.
Good point, but I think the point is that any mass violation (let's say more than 10 SKUs) is usually an isolated event (e.g. it's one small retailer in a local environment), as opposed to "this is just the cost of doing business for any large retailer". The more apt question would be - how many violations happen in the past at a place like Walmart.
Traditional retailers are slow to introduce SKUs compared to Amazon simply for this reason - everything is hand curated and has to go through gates to ensure safety.
> There's reason to believe the problem is probably worse at Amazon
What other marketplace in the western world has nearly as many SKUs? Like even in the same stratosphere? I'd be amazed if there is anyone even close. It's easy to manage that many SKUs at scale when you get to ignore regulation that has legitimate human safety implications. So, that's what the article is saying - don't consolidate power if you're unwilling to deal with edge cases.
My child had a wooden painted toy from amazon. He sucked on it.
Later we discovered that it has unacceptable levels of lead in the paint. We threw it out. This was done via an environmental science company, using xrf field testing. I have a certified report.
So, tell me again about how this isn’t a big deal problem. Also remind me what the date limit of lead exposure is. Actually I’ll do that one for you, it’s easy, it’s 0. There is no safe exposure to lead.
The fact that amazon could do something but is deliberately not is, well, expected. Sadly. Safe products isn’t in the mission statement of amazon.
Finally: I worked at amazon for 5 years. Right before fba came online. It’s a cost cutting culture of frugalism. Spending money on product safety doesn’t have a place there.
> At one point in 2013, some Amazon employees began scanning randomly selected third-party products in Amazon warehouses for lead content, say people familiar with the tests. Around 10% of the products tested failed, one says.
That's a good point about the rate of the unsafe products, but that is not the same as the rate at which those products are introduced into the population (due to lower prices, etc).
It's not valid to compare the rate of unsafe products on Walmart / Target shelves vs. in the Amazon inventory. Amazon is allowed much more slack (similar to eBay) about what gets sold through their store.
Also, it is much more appropriate for Amazon to do this work, than have the public do it.
That crosses into personal attack, which isn't ok here. Also, please don't use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting some when you're not.
You are right of course, but in light of defending truly bad decisions, how else do we help our community hold itself responsible for its decisions at work?
I'm not sure I saw the GP "defending truly bad decisions", but the answer in such cases is to explain why the decisions are bad without breaking the site guidelines.
The guidelines are there to prevent the community from destroying itself, so they're a precondition for "helping our community to hold itself responsible" and other higher-order activities of that sort.
I'm sure your answer is right from an enlightened rationalist position, and I respect your desire to defend the community. Unfortunately I believe there should also be room for stronger emotional responses to truly damaging behavior in the real world. And I suppose finally going separate way from this community is required for that value.
Hmm disagree. This was a very lightweight “hey you’re defending a pretty terrible act”.
Surely there is value to socially pressuring people who offer morally reprehensible positions?
My child had one of these low quality, high lead toys amazon sells. Babies put everything in their mouth. He was exposed to, minimal, but as we know there is no safe exposure limit to lead.
So, dang, tell em again how this amazon employee defending putting lead into children’s bloodstreams is... well I guess I just shouldn’t personally attack them, just the terrible things they are defending.
IMHO, it's a hatchet job that groups relatively innocuous things with dangerous things to inflate numbers. For example, take this:
>1,412 electronics listings falsely claimed to be UL certified—indicating they met voluntary industry safety standards—or didn’t provide enough information to verify the claim.
Falsely claiming to UL certified is dangerous. Not providing enough information to verify the claim is pretty benign if they actually meet standards.
This isn't to say that they aren't largely correct about Amazon's commitment to quality and safety. Just that this is an alarmist piece that doesn't rest on sound reasoning.
> At one point in 2013, some Amazon employees began scanning randomly selected third-party products in Amazon warehouses for lead content, say people familiar with the tests. Around 10% of the products tested failed, one says. The failed products were purged, but higher-level employees decided not to expand the testing, fearing it would be unmanageable if applied to the entire marketplace, the people familiar with the tests say. Amazon declined to comment on the episode.
This crosses a higher threshold than many of the other anecdotes, it sounds like there’s an actual record of willful negligence.
What’s the likely big picture economic situation with Amazon? Is there any way to estimate where the bulk of fake goods are coming from and the money through Amazon is going to? China was mentioned several times in the article, is this a China problem, or actually bigger than that? Has Amazon formed a tunnel that primarily moves illegal low-quality product into the US and money out? Is Amazon the largest vector for foreign goods that are breaking US laws to be sold in the US, or is this an internet problem in general? I can’t think of other US retailers, even online, that I’m scared to shop at for fear of fake product.
There was a recent study that also had crossed a threshold of anecdotes [1]: "The Attorney General’s Office, in partnership with the Washington State Department of Ecology, tested children’s school supplies for harmful levels of lead and cadmium in 2017 and 2018. The tests targeted products the two agencies suspected might contain toxic metals. In total, two rounds of tests identified 51 products sold on Amazon.com that tested positive for illegal levels of lead and cadmium. In the first round of testing, 16 of the 43 products from Amazon tested positive for illegal levels of toxic metals. In the second round of tests, the two agencies found that 35 of 41 products examined exceed the legal limits. The Department of Ecology paid for the first round of testing and the Attorney General’s Office funded the second round. "
[1] https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/ag-ferguson-amazon....
There's a stack of transforms here: All amazon stuff -> Things that a protective agency through highly-developed intuition suspects will be dangerous -> things actually found to be dangerous.
So it's bad news that they found dangerous things amongst a category of things that we don't want to be at all dangerous (children's school supplies). It's not surprising news that these agencies are pretty good at knowing in advance which children's school supplies are likely to be dangerous.
BTW the link doesn't bring up a specific article. It brings up a list of articles.
One wonders why the press release didn't say, Wash AG indicts school supply suppliers after joint AG-DoEcology investigation?
I agree. But it seems that they just did a reasonable thing - a quick search - bought products - tested - found 25-75% contaminated. While it should be zero. Yes, they did a reasonable search. But it is not like Amazon can't replicate that search.
The right thing to do here is to add automatic random sampling and control for lead/cadmium in the distribution facilities. And fix at least this bug, for real.
* Amazon is a total mess right now, and this is great investigative reporting. I think Amazon is going to go through a rough year or two in PR terms. They need to get this under control quickly.
* Amazon can pretend that it's just a platform, but in practice they benefit from consumers assuming that everything on the site has some stamp of approval (even if it's not as full a stamp as, say, buying the item from Costco.) Right now, they're abusing that consumer trust by doing a lousy job of monitoring product listings on their site. Over the long term, they risk losing that trust altogether. That's a huge risk to them, and it's a little short-sighted to take no ownership of product listings on their site as the basis for legal defense.
* This reminds me of the recent reporting about AirBnb dealing with scammy listings in Canada [0]. I think that both AirBnb and Amazon are capable of getting these problems under control, but they haven't proven it as of yet. When the solution comes, it will be expensive and involve a lot of human labor. That is true no matter how many times they wave their magics wands and yell "Machine Learning!"
* Some of the violations pointed out here are pretty dumb. How much does not labeling balloons as choking hazards actually threaten safety? Of course, that reflects a tolerance of rule-breaking and law-breaking that reflects poorly on Amazon.
> Some of the violations pointed out here are pretty dumb. How much does not labeling balloons as choking hazards actually threaten safety? Of course, that reflects a tolerance of rule-breaking and law-breaking that reflects poorly on Amazon.
I was surprised to see the WSJ go into detail about balloons above the toys with 400x allowed lead and motorcycle helmets falsely stamped "DOT Approved" that crack open on contact.
From an engineering perspective, however, it shows that Amazon isn't even willing to devote a minimum of resources (or is actively avoiding its duty to check). How hard would it be to query for any product with "balloon" in its title that lacks "choking hazard" in its description?
That's exactly how I felt about it. They undermined themselves rhetorically by using the number of balloon listings to increase the count of dangerous products. However, the fact that Amazon hasn't fixed even that well-defined a problem is concerning.
> in practice they benefit from consumers assuming that everything on the site has some stamp of approval
as you point out, it's kind of surprising that Amazon seems to have entirely abandoned this "stamp of approval" concept. i thought "stamp of approval" was one of the few differentiators that retailers could use to compete effectively.
That and they've gone the wall-mart route of actually PUSHING anything / the lowest price possible.
I get stuff that's like 5% cheaper but quality looks to be about 50% the quality pushed on me all the time on Amazon now.
I went to Amazon originally to find QUALITY products that my local stores didn't carry because of price pressures. Now Amazon seems to be switching to just being ... wall-mart and that's already near me...
It has gotten so bad that I've searched for good products on Amazon that I know were there, and they're gone. Like if you don't want a crappy HDMI switch that looks like every other cheap HDMI switch, your options seem to be fewer and fewer.
And that doesn't account for the questionable health products that they push on me for no apparent reason (i've never surfed for or bought such products form them...or anyone).
Increasingly Amazon wants to tell me what to buy, and what they tell me is they want me to buy garbage.
It feels like the only rational explanation is "Bezos wants it like this."
I know the folks at Amazon are talented, but the abject failure to optimize for quality over quantity is pretty much only explainable as intentional.
I guess a second runner up would be that they're so organizationally KPI-focused, and their KPIs are so myopic, that no one actually realizes how much they're screwing up customer experience. But that seems a stretch.
Or perhaps they’re so KPI-focused that they do know they’re screwing up the customer experience, but they don’t care, because customer experience isn’t a KPI and so won’t get them promoted?
Interesting factoid: I’ve never seen Amazon attempt to take any net-promoter-score-like “Would you recommend Amazon to your friends” measure. Google does these (I just had one pushed on me while using the GCP console.) Apple probably does them somewhere, even if I haven’t noticed it. Facebook definitely does them. But Amazon seems to be actively resistant to collecting this information. They seem to not want to quantize customer-experience into a KPI.
> because customer experience isn’t a KPI and so won’t get them promoted?
In a way, I think you may be on to something. At least indirectly.
Amazon are constantly pushing the narrative that they are obsessively customer-focused and constantly thinking about long term. I have my reasons to believe this might have been true at one time, but now is mostly about optics.
Having interviewed at the company a few years back, there sure was no long-term thinking about anything they internally advocate for potential new hires.[ß] To be honest, I was only exposed to one segment of their business, but I still find it hard to believe that kind of culture would be limited to a single part.
ß: an extreme example: one of their more senior managers explained to me that a 1-year old team is already too old and ready to be disbanded. Knowing, from personal experience, that it can take two years to build a well-functioning team - that was a massive red flag.
During my time there I never saw any evidence that they cared about employee retention. The same pain points came up year after year on the tech survey, and were invariably ignored.
Amazon may have created a more object way of measuring the same thing, but without needing to actually ask customers. They probably know at least a some of garbage products sold on their platform. If that's the case, merely tracking visits and revenues from customers who received poorly made products and comparing with customers who've received well made products over time probably produces a more accurate picture of the effects that low-quality products have on their bottom line over time.
The metric you’re talking about is “churn.” It’s distinct from NPS, as NPS predicts growth—the additional value your brand has in people’s minds above the threshold for leaving, where it becomes a virality coefficient—whereas churn is just a self-evident measure of the percentage of people who see your brand as having value below the threshold.
The fact that NPS (and measures like it) are predictors is useful, in that you end up also collecting real growth data, and the difference between NPS-predicted growth and actual growth can tell you how much of your growth was organic vs. marketing-driven, and thus give you a picture of your brand’s “inertia”—how valuable it is just sitting there doing nothing, separate from any marketing projects. Tracking that allows you to judge the brand impact of everything you do. But you can’t do it without some measure that actually gives you brand value, rather than simple growth.
FWIW, I worked on a team that built a platform which used customer activity to predict their NPS score. The algorithm was straight-forward and the results were pretty accurate; enough so to be used by A/B testing platforms for testing new features on users. A side-effect of our research was insight into the key features that dictated a positive response. Even with a complicated product, success was highly dependent upon about four of the 200 or so features we collected.
I suspect that the minds at Amazon could come up with a much better solution than what we did. By virtue of having smarter, more experienced people on average, and a more simplistic product.
I agree. It seems that it is by design in some way. The shift is really dramatic.
Perhaps it is just "we're not eating enough of the wall-mart (call it what you want) market". And now they're going after that at the expense of the larger brand.
They're big enough now that they'll grow / maybe miss what they're doking up until it is too late.
I'm already shopping elsewhere more often / actively searching out alternatives to Amazon.
Based on my limited experience of visiting Walmart, I think most of their low end products are of significantly better quality than low end products from Amazon.
Agreed. I get cheap Stanley tools at Walmart that have a no questions asked lifetime replacement. Walmart is still cheap, but becoming more like Sears once was in quality (on some items).
As for Amazon, I like them too. I know they have a lot of cheap Asian stuff. But sometimes, that is exactly what I want (cheap but good DC stick welders).
I guess the issue is with the knock-offs and dangerous items on Amazon. That's fraud. No question about it. Walmart does not have this issue at all. Amazon should do something about it.
> As for Amazon, I like them too. I know they have a lot of cheap Asian stuff. But sometimes, that is exactly what I want (cheap but good DC stick welders).
I'm of the same mind - sometimes (ok, a lot of times) I want the cheap stuff from China; in many cases, it's the only way to get it at a reasonable price.
I could buy a 40A Bosch relay from China for $1.00 (if that) - or I can go to AutoZone and buy the -exact- same relay (because guess where AutoZone sources it from?) for $15.00. Now - why should I do that?
Multiply that out to a ton of other products.
Now - some things I know I can "Buy USA" with - like DC gear motors. I can go on Amazon, and get a particular DC gear motor for say, $15.00 each. Or I can source something similar made by an American company (let's say Ametek), perhaps using DigiKey or Mouser - and for virtually the same motor, pay $100.00. Yeah - ok. I'll get right on that.
I was once trying to source new gears for a surplus Pittman gear motor I had purchased for a few dollars - the company wanted me to buy 50 pieces of the gear, at $2.50 each. I told 'em thanks but no thanks.
People wonder why parts are bought from China - well, there's your answer.
As individuals, You and I can purchase such items without running into the tariff issue - whether we go thru Amazon or AliExpress or some other direct-from-china method. Now, that doesn't work for businesses of course, so they have to use other methods.
My concern, though, is that we're going to end up in a world where if you are a consumer and not a business, you won't be allowed to purchase from overseas suppliers - due to either uproar over inferior products, or dangerous ingredients, or industry pressure. You'll only be able to shop at USA-only "consumer stores" - and forget about being able to get any of the "off-brand" or "strange" items only available in China (that aren't even carried on Amazon today - a lot of these, you have to dig thru AliExpress, or other direct-from-asia retailers - though the best way tends to be thru taobao and similar - but it's really easy to get hosed, too).
Yes. The problem I have experienced from a customer service perspective is that marketplace sellers who ship dangerous or otherwise clearly defective/scam products (eg I had a power wallwart explode on first being plugged in) just respond to any and all complaints by processing an immediate refund. This doesn't seem to get picked up properly by amazon and presumably their margins are good enough that this strategy works for the sellers (at least for a while).
In fact, Amazon is so overrun with low quality products that I'd even go as far as saying the average Walmart product is better quality than the average Amazon product.
Amazon is AliExpress with a domestic retailer's markup. At least with Walmart I know that when they stock something on their shelves, they care about liability and bad PR.
This. At any brick-and-mortar store, the store itself takes some responsibility for the quality ("won't fail dangerously or slowly poison your children" quality, not "won't fall apart after a year of use" quality) of their products, if only because it's more clear that they'll catch some blowback from stocking illegal products in their stores.
Speaking of Walmart, I just noticed something very interesting. When I buy something in-store at Walmart, but pay using Walmart Pay, the credit card I've enrolled in Walmart Pay records this as an online sale when it comes to deciding what cash back rewards categories apply to it.
The 2 amazon mantras that apply here are; more selection is good, customers will never complain about a lower price.
If the selection is huge then they need to make recommendations to help people find products. I don't think many users will scroll through more than a page or two of options. The integrity of reviews makes a big impact here in how you are likely to make a choice on those first few pages.
3rd party sellers increase selection and the thought is that more selection creates a fly wheel effect that drives down prices which benefits the customer. Amazon has very limited control over 3rd party sellers but they need them to increase selection.
That said, if you go to any store there are typically a few different options in a product category with different price points and quality. Buyer beware applies in a physical store as much as at Amazon. It would be interesting to see how many consumers prefer less selection.
There is nothing stopping someone from creating a curated "quality" focused frontend that makes money on showing customers only high quality products and then making money on the affiliate referrals for the curation. If this was in high demand I think you'd see these curated stores in the wild. I've not seen one though and since I can use tools like fakespot to help determine the quality of the reviews.
>There is nothing stopping someone from creating a curated "quality" focused frontend that makes money on showing customers only high quality products and then making money on the affiliate referrals for the curation. If this was in high demand I think you'd see these curated stores in the wild. I've not seen one though and since I can use tools like fakespot to help determine the quality of the reviews.
Does anyone actually do that though?
Most retail stores that do a lot of promise on "higher quality things" in my experience are just looking for higher margins and can't help but tack on more to the price for marginally better goods.
And I don't know of any site that really tries to do what you describe, thus I am not sure that they would even if there was "demand" / they would even know.
you could make such a store with the product catalog api.
The actual manifestations are affiliates who pair content with the products e.g a blog style product review with a product buy link in it. I have never seen a pure affiliate storefront focused on curation. You sometimes see curated lists in youtube reviews and videos.
You know, I've seen countless times when, say, Walmart or some other retailer gets caught and body slammed for stocking a product on their shelves that was known to be manufactured under substandard working conditions. It's possible that I'm just not seeing the same frequency of articles lobbed at Amazon, but there's no doubt they are guilty of the same thing on some level. Is it because Amazon found a way to sort of diffuse the responsibility, perhaps by claiming that they're just :the platform" shrug? I'm curious though, what kinds of consequences does Amazon actually face for stocking products manufactured under unfair working conditions, stolen intellectual property, and so on? I'm sure their official policy is that they don't tolerate it. Of course. But in reality, what are they actually doing about this, what incentive do they have to do anything, and how effective has it been?
Well the thing is "unfair working conditions" is subjective and lacks binding force unlike say illegal trade with a sanctioned country. So the consequences are "whatever the consumers decide".
That's the thing though. How subjective is "unfair working conditions" really? I ask that in all seriousness. At least in the US (my only frame of reference) there are fantastic arguments about minimum wage. Should it be raised to $15/hr? Maybe less? Maybe more? But no one is really arguing wether or not $1/day is a livable wage. I think most people with a pulse would say that $1/hr is not a livable wage. The question I was really asking is, what's Amazon's position on this? Do they ever come knocking on anyone's door demanding to see their working conditions? If they are, what does that look like? What incentives do they have to do that? Or, in the worst case, do they just sort of look the other way?
> I think most people with a pulse would say that $1/hr is not a livable wage.
Depends on who is getting that $1 and where they are at in the world. I am certain there are places in the world where $1 an hour would be considered almost unheard of by the working class people in the country. Places where $1 a day is considered good money.
Kind of off topic, but do you have a recommendation on a good HDMI switch? I have struggled with the crappy ones from amazon many times. The most frustrating part is that their "remotes" all seem to overlap with regular tv remote frequencies or something, such that changing the volume on the tv ends up triggering an input switch.
If you have an amp then upgrading to a multi hdmi amp/hifi might be a better way to go. I found the hdmi switches always crap out or have the remote issue you mention.
This among many reasons is is why I cancelled my prime membership. The quality control is abysmal. It's become an eBay, but without a proper dispute system, and crazy prices. Many goods get listed at multiples of the price available elsewhere and if you're not paying attention you can get screwed. It's totally buyer beware. The trust that Amazon established over the years has been lost.
I ordered something on Amazon Canada, it was listed as sold by Amazon.com.ca. It qualified for prime. I ordered expecting it to arrive in 2 days. It took over a week and it became clear after the fact that it had been sourced from a US supplier and because it happened over the 4th of July it sat in a warehouse for a few days over the holiday.
Amazon hid that it was a third party supplier.
Amazon hid that it was coming from across the border.
Amazon refused to cancel and refund the order once this became clear.
> It's become an eBay, but without a proper dispute system, and crazy prices.
I have to disagree about the dispute process. My experience as a buyer on Amazon is definitely that the pricing is all over the place, but in every case I've asked for a refund I've received it, and in the majority of cases I've not returned the item, _or_ paid for return shipping.
Well I agreed until this recent situation, where they refused to cancel and refund because the "order was already in shipping" -- which when I looked at the tracking they eventually gave me simply meant they had printed a shipping label for transferring it from the third party to an Amazon warehouse, before they even shipped it to the Canadian Amazon warehouse.
They hid that it was third party supplied and then failed to respond when I asked them to cancel based on that.
The item I ordered was time sensitive. If I'd known it was coming from the US I would have ordered from a domestic supplier that would have shipped faster except the shipping was more.
> They hid that it was third party supplied and then failed to respond when I asked them to cancel based on that.
Yeah, this is really really poor on their behalf, and I'm not a fan of it at all.
> If I'd known it was coming from the US I would have ordered from a domestic supplier that would have shipped faster except the shipping was more.
It's funny you say that. I'm more inclined to order via prime, because I somewhat trust the shipping dates, so for a time sensitive order, non-prime is usually 3-5 working days. I've been lucky so far.
Agreed with everything you've said though, I've actually had more luck with ebay for <random household item>
>This among many reasons is is why I cancelled my prime membership
I'm about there as well. I have Prime solely for free shipping, and it's frustrating as hell that when there are multiple listings for an item, the one with "Free Prime Shipping" is a few dollars more expensive, generally by an amount equal to the shipping cost.
At least with eBay you can see the actual product that will be shipped to you, and if not represented correctly you can dispute (as you mentioned). With Amazon you might buy something that gets "fulfilled by one or more third parties" which may or may not look like the picture.
Was the estimated delivery date in checkout and order confirmation e-mail in 2 days?
I've encountered some rare items (refurbished car parts) on Amazon EU that seemed to get sourced on-demand, but it was always accurately represented on the estimated delivery date so I haven't cared.
In a way it's her own damn fault. If I invest a significant amout of money into a branded product I'd probably visit the store of the brand, or a reseller licensed by the brand.
But I sure as hell wouldn't order a $1000 coat from Amazon. That just yells: RIP ME OFF!
I read the story and honestly don't see that the writer is at fault. Sure, criticize the woman for not knowing better, but that's where her blame stops and Amazon takes the rest.
I wonder if Amazon won't somehow kill itself with poor quality. I needed a bunch of LED bulbs recently and I knew exactly what I was looking for - about a dozen 40W eq, two 60w eq and two 100w eq, all in 2700K and two 100w in 3000K.
Amazon was a mess - prices were all over the place, exact products were hard to find, etc. Dollarama had them all for $2.50, $3.50 and $4.00 a piece, usually in all three flavours (2700, 3000 and 5000K).
Made me want to start a Shopify store called "Bullshit Free Bulbs". bullshitfreebulbs.com is available btw.
They’re increasingly like that regardless of whatever I’m looking to purchase. I waste enough time looking for an actual, legitimate item that going out to the stores may be quicker and is definitely more assured. Maybe they want this to happen and focus on the rest of their business?
Yep. My amazon purchases are getting tougher and tougher to complete. And they are getting less transparent about who is delivering and who is responsible for defective shit from a return perspective.
For lightbulbs, try 1000bulbs.com. Simple searches will reveal better sites, just scroll past the usual catch-alls like amazon and Walmart, Home Depot or Best Buy. pencils? Pencils.com. Gaffer tape? Gafferpower.com. Literally anything. It’s a bummer google SEO pushes the bigs for everything when there is better value further down.
I’ve long thought this sort of thing would be a really good business model. You could launch a bunch of vertical sites and use the same shipping / fulfillment system. Huge irony would be if you did this with Fulfillment by Amazon, but it would probably work.
I guess the core problem is that when you’re looking for something new, browsing Amazon is a total mess. It would be much easier to do a web search and find bullshitfreebulbs.com to make your purchase.
But if it’s something you buy often, Prime + order history is easily the fastest, most convenient way to buy something.
As I understand it, if you fulfill with Amazon they keep your inventory mixed with the Chinese knockoffs, so you actually don’t know for sure if customers got the inventory you sent to Amazon or a counterfeit instead.
For me, personally, the way Amazon has captured me is more in the cart than in the fulfillment. Yes, it is nice to get things to my door practically overnight, but the fact that I can make that happen without typing my personal and financial information into a skeevy website that could be anywhere is the real value to me.
PayPal (...and Apple Pay and Google Wallet and Samsung Something and Venmo an Beanz and and and...) is the technology that should be making this friction go away, but it appears to be difficult to provide this without turning evil.
So, to your idea, I also appreciate the idea of one, trustworthy, site that would do all of that for me. The thing is, Amazon is that site, for the most part.
> and I knew exactly what I was looking for - about a dozen 40W eq, two 60w eq and two 100w eq, all in 2700K and two 100w in 3000K.
If you browse the "LED Bulbs" section you can filter by lumen, color temperature, socket size etc. That's more accurate than the marketing labels ( "W equivalent", "warm") in the product titles.
i recently searched for a rubber replacement washer for a very common water faucet. nothing exotic.
the only washer collection i could find that was certain to have the desired washer size would have cost $32. again, this is a very common type of water valve. taking a trip to a big box retailer looks pretty attractive in that context.
How much of this could be solved by a simple "know your supplier" law? As a consumer, I should be able to ask any retailer: "From whom did you source the actual item that you sold me?" Amazon should not be able to get away with saying they don't know.
As it stands, Amazon is just a conduit for goods to bypass consumer safety laws.
This is a totally solved problem.
In the normal retail world, sellers are responsible for the defective items they sell, regardless of if they knew or not.
If you buy a defective thing from best buy, they are responsible.
They may turn around and sue the next person up the chain for doing the same (selling it to them).
This incentivizes companies to be careful who they buy from.
The problem here is that the article refers to them as "third party sellers". They aren't in most cases, amazon just has a large distributed supply chain.
If you want amazon to care, make them liable for the stuff sold on their website, the same way best buy is for the stuff in their store.
Problem solved.
This will not destroy their business - it has not destroyed any other business.
That's how it works in Europe. But when I suggested to a colleague in the US a few years ago that he take a defective disk drive back to Best Buy (or perhaps Newegg) five months after he had bought it he laughed out loud at the absurdity of the idea that the seller would do anything at all.
He shouldn't have, the minimum period is usually a year. This is one area of the uniform code[1] that states often modify, so it varies as to length. Some are only 90 days, etc.
This is also not as well known by consumers as it should be, and obviously, businesses sometimes try to claim otherwise (IE say you have to deal with the manufacturer)
But, the law is incredibly consistent about this if you take someone to court.
[1] In the US, there is a non-partisan uniform law commission that publishes model laws for states to adopt in various important areas. The main goal is to keep the law of each state similar in areas where that similarity is important to being able to do business across multiple states.
Outside of business, they sometimes tackle complex jurisdictional efforts where states would otherwise fight with each other based on their local social/public policy. An example would be the uniform child abduction act, which ensures if a parent who does not have sole custody takes a child across state lines, you don't get into a big fight over where the child should be based on social issues that differ between states.
Not all states sign everything, but they get very good uptake on most laws.
> If you buy a defective thing from best buy, they are responsible.
Not really. They just assume liability for competition's sake. They could effectively tell you to go pound sand, but that would hurt them competitively, so they offer a return policy instead. Same as if you get a defective product from a Craig's List seller - caveat emptor.
Their shipping practices have also degraded. Amazon usually ships anything they can in bubble-padded envelopes. This is ok for many things, but for books it's a disaster - softcovers almost always end up with damaged covers, hardcovers get dented corners from being dropped without any protection. I've also received movies and video games with cases damaged worse than what you'd see in a second-hand store. The (supremely ironic) result is that Amazon is now my last choice for buying books.
Another favorite: receiving your item freely bouncing around in a much larger box alongside a single bubble pack that neither tries to nor succeeds at filling any appreciable amount of the empty space available for said bouncing around.
I once ordered a really large socket (36mm for the axle nuts on my Jeep) from Amazon. I can't recall what they shipped it with, but I do recall the box was mostly empty, no padding, air bags, or whatnot.
But they wrapped that socket with bubble wrap nine ways from Sunday! It was like this ball of bubble wrap and tape, with this huge socket in the middle.
I know! It's so stupid. I try not to order books directly from Amazon anymore unless I buy two or more at the same time (because if you buy 2+ books they ship in a box rather than a padded envelope). I'm not shy about returning books with bent covers or other damage, I do it all the time, and a couple of times I've returned the same book twice until they finally managed to deliver an undamaged copy, but it's a little worrisome because I've heard tales of Amazon banning customers who "abuse" returns. (And of course it's also a hassle).
I wouldn't worry about getting banned for returning too many damaged goods. If anything I'd say just go with a better seller. There are plenty of other vendors online still selling books.
There's a 0% chance I would ever buy food or any type of consumable from Amazon. There's way too many people selling counterfeit items and there's no reasonable way to tell until you end up either dead or sick.
My friend's cat came inches from dying because of flea treatment purchased there not too long ago. When it was purchased it had 4+ star reviews and generally seemed good. But if you look at the ratings today (months later), the average ratings went way down and there's just an endless amount of reviews saying the stuff is poison. Some people even lost their cat.
The messed up thing is it's the same exact brand and box you would see on the shelf at a store so there's no way to tell just by looking at the product. At least not from a laymen's POV (I looked at both boxes and didn't see any glaring differences).
Look at how many 1 star ratings there are. We sorted by 1 stars and then by newest reviews. If you go back for a few months it's just an endless amount of scary negative reviews but it wasn't so bad years ago.
I’ve got the same experience as many other posters here and have been buying less from Amazon lately.
One thing I haven’t seen people talking about much is how profound and impact Apple Pay is for direct online retail.
I used to find products on a company website and then go to Amazon to buy, mainly so I didn’t need to create yet another account, and because of prime shipping and Amazon’s return policy.
The amazing thing with Apple Pay is how much it creates an even better purchasing experience than Amazon’s “one-click,” while being open to any merchant. You don’t have to create an account, put in your shipping or billing info, or do anything really. You just click “buy with Apple Pay,” and click to confirm.
Between that, and offering “free shipping” (just include it in the product price), and a good return policy, I see retailers being much more able to sell direct and compete with Amazon’s fading reputation.
> One thing I haven’t seen people talking about much is how profound and impact Apple Pay is for direct online retail.
I'd love to use Apple Pay, but neither of the credit cards I use for online shopping (Capital One for CAD purchases, Home Trust for non-CAD) support it.
Is there something special/different about Apple Pay for online shopping versus physical stores?
My Capital One card loaded to my iPhone has worked with Apple Pay in physical stores since the inception of the feature. I use it literally every day. In the last few days I used it at McDonald's and at Whole Foods.
> Is there something special/different about Apple Pay for online shopping versus physical stores?
Most notably, I could use Apple Pay for online shopping with Safari. I would not be able to use Apple Pay at physical stores as I don't have an iPhone.
Capital One Canada doesn't support Apple Pay of any variety.
I appreciate why the title was modified from the original, but the mistaken use of "it's" rather than "its" was introduced in the process and should be corrected.
It's an apostrophe, not a comma, and unfortunately that won't work in the case where it should be "it's", like at the start of this sentence, but yes. "It's" only ever means "it is" or "it has". </pedantic>
Disregarding the semantic absurdity (and the e/i mismatch), the rule works fine: "his an apostrophe" should look a lot more wrong to anyone with enough understanding of English that its/it's mistakes make a difference than "he's an apostrophe".
"He's" also only ever means "he is" or "he has", just like "it's". That's the entire point of this little memory aid.
More anecdotal data, but our family (which used to spend $5k+ a year on Amazon) decided to actively buy locally and do what we can to reduce packaging waste (mainly for food). (note: I applaud Amazon's influence in the past decade fighting the clamshell package).
Just looked and we now spent less than $500 so far this year.
Reduced consumption, sometimes going without that new shiny thing and instead borrowing or buying used. For food, we simply cut out delivery (if we want resto food we go to a place that uses reusable cutlery, if we want staples, we just go to a store nearby and try to get bulk items).
Amazon has killed my trust in generic online stores. Fulfilled by Amazon sounds like a fraud engine, and I simply can't support that anymore. I'd like to know if there's a good alternative, but for now we just don't shop online if we can avoid it.
Just shopping locally and picking up your own food saves you so much and helps subconciously cuts down on your personal consumerism. I do anything I can now to make sure my dollar doesnt leave the county if it can be helped.
The problem of many web-based businesses is, they can't decide (or don't want to) if they are more like the phone company, or more like a bricks-and-mortar business. If they are like the phone company, they are not responsible for guaranteeing that what you buy over the phone is legit, but they also don't get a cut. If they are like a bricks-and-mortar business, they do take a cut, but they get liability. It is similar to Facebook, Twitter etc. trying to sometimes act like a phone company and sometimes like a conference hall.
The reason is clear: they want to be compensated like a retailer or conference hall, but have the (relative lack of) liability of the phone company or the postal service, who don't make any claims that communications via their services are going to be honest, just that they allowed the two parties to communicate.
Gradually, they are all going to be forced by society (not only government) into one role or the other, but I am not surprised they are trying to put that off as long as possible.
They were sued for the recklessly mislabeled helmet and still didn't take the posting down?
Even if they could've argued that they themselves were fooled by the seller initially, not following up after the guy was killed points to a much bigger issue. Basically they just don't give a shit.
Side note: I'm filled with dread just thinking about buying a motorcycle helmet from amazon.
Side note: I'm filled with dread just thinking about buying a motorcycle helmet from amazon.
Buy it from a reputable source? There are specialist stores herearound, which sell nothing but helmets and have staff on payroll with an actual clue.
Sure, you actually have to leave the house. In return you get the possibility to actually try the helmets on display.
If price is the issue I think it's exactly that general attitude, which triggered that downward spiral in quality we're observing in the last few years.
On a motorcycle helmet, it should be reasonable to expect to pay a hefty price for something quality. It's one of those items that has to work, that one time you need it. After that, who cares - you must throw it away and buy another. Consider it just another cost of being a motorcycle owner. In such a case, you probably should want to try it on for fit, weight, balance, etc.
But there are tons of other items that you either can't go someplace and purchase them (at least here in the USA), or if you can purchase them in some manner, you'll end up paying 5-10x or more for the privilege.
My goto example is DC gearmotors. There are plenty of USA based manufacturers and suppliers of such. One great brand is Ametek. Unfortunately, you're going to pay for that privilege. A motor I might purchase via a vendor that is made by, say, TSINY motor (a good chinese brand I might add), will only cost me around $15-30.00 each. An equivalent motor from a USA vender and/or manufacturer? Multiply those numbers by 10 - easily.
For now. Anthony sold out to the owners of CycleStop and I expect the quality to degrade in the coming years. Similar to how Performance Bike and Nashbar have imploded.
He probably saw the writing on the wall for the North American moto business with the boomers aging out and not enough consumers left to support the operation long term.
Take the number of helmets in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
This kind of cynical profit calculation has nothing to do with the problem at hand.
The most likely explanation why they would not remove the listing in a regression-safe way even after getting dragged to court is that the team dealing with the lawsuit is paid for being good at lawsuits, not for avoiding them, while the team responsible for managing third party listings is paid for snacking third party listings. It's almost surprising that the listing apparently did disappear while the court was watching.
Put all this into an organisation that has a multi-decade tradition of sidelining mundane, conventional company goals like striking a profit in favor of enigmatic founder strategy and nobody will ever risk rocking the boat by pointing out problems outside their job description.
"We Could Be Liable for Fraudulent or Unlawful Activities of Sellers
The law relating to the liability of online service providers is currently unsettled. In addition, governmental agencies could require changes in the way this business is conducted. Under our seller programs, we may be unable to prevent sellers from collecting payments, fraudulently or otherwise, when buyers never receive the products they ordered or when the products received are materially different from the sellers’ descriptions. We also may be unable to prevent sellers in our stores or through other stores from selling unlawful, counterfeit, pirated, or stolen goods, selling goods in an unlawful or unethical manner, violating the proprietary rights of others, or otherwise violating our policies. Under our A2Z Guarantee, we reimburse buyers for payments up to certain limits in these situations, and as our third-party seller sales grow, the cost of this program will increase and could negatively affect our operating results. In addition, to the extent any of this occurs, it could harm our business or damage our reputation and we could face civil or criminal liability for unlawful activities by our sellers."
I'm much more likely these days to go to either ebay (e.g. for the replacement phone battery I got a week or two back) or to a vendor that doesn't do Amazon's commingling of stock (B&H, Target, etc.). This is particularly true where I think it's something likely to be counterfeited (any high-value commodity, thank god I'm not ordering something like baby formula).
I'm willing to pay a premium for the trust factor, because if I get burned with a bad product on even 10% of my purchases the value of my time dealing with it is probably more than I've ever saved ordering through Amazon - particularly if it's something I wanted quickly where I can't afford the chance of "Oh, sorry you got a counterfeit, we'll ship another and you'll have it in 2 days, hope it's legit this time."
Edit: And I don't think I'll EVER purchase a MicroSD card through Amazon.
I nearly bought a book in Audible last week, but hesitated because something seemed off with the reviews[0]. After a little digging I realised ALL the reviewers had only reviewed this book and another about Keto. And looking on Amazon for the same author "G.S. Hook" I noticed one of the books had reviews which while all unique, were basically all following the same template containing the same exact phrases[1].
I spoke with customer service and gave them specific examples to investigate. They didn't care in the slightest. It's made me realise that their reviews cannot be trusted. "Verified purchase" means nothing. I always chose Amazon over eBay and AliExpress because I thought it was worth the slightly higher prices to have peace of mind that the reviews were policed and what I would receive was genuine and safe. But that's clearly no longer the case.
Yes! The first thing I did was check Fakespot. This doesn't even seem that sophisticated. Same phrases, same reviewers, I don't know how Fakespot missed it. I thought those were key markers it uses to determine the validity of reviews!
Amazon has calculated they're not liable if they don't spend appropriate oversight. It's a type of fraud like tax evasion that they can legally commit, because all that will happen is in 5 - 10 years some government will spend three years suing them to change the contrived status quo that would see any retail shop shut down.
If people lose trust in Amazon that would undermine their entire business model. There is a very strong incentive for Amazon to police their market. Amazon does have a list of brands that third parties are not allowed to sell (because of counterfeit issues) -- only the authorized, prescribed retailer is allowed to sell it.
There are still blatant frauds that occur, though, that Amazon really has to answer for. There was the Atlantic story about the fake Canada Goose articles on Amazon-
I never had a problem (that I know of) with fakes on Amazon. I did cancel my prime membership and switched to Walmart. I feel like prices went up and quality went down. I wish I could move stuff away at work, we spend millions each month on AWS.
The first one has 1.5k votes and 1.5/5 stars. If you get into the commets to see what's wrong you will see it's a fake. It's a M4 Smart Band, nothing to do with the Mi Band 4.
The second one has 2.5/5 stars and looks like people are receiving also a fake.
The others look good but who knows. All of them are from 3d party sellers.
Now I can buy the Mi Band 4 from Aliexpress for 36 euro (33 if I wait for a promo in 3 days) and I can be 100% sure that I'll receive the original one within 2-4 days. I can also buy it a bit cheaper from China but delivery takes longer.
I can give you another example. I want to buy a bag for my laptop. Almost everything I see in Amazon is from Aliexpress but more expensive.
Its not always fakes. Some sellers sell factory seconds and refurbished items as new.
Just save yourself the headaches and skip Amazon, where you have no recourse, for Home Depot, Best Buy, Target, and even Wal-Mart. Everybody does price matching these days.
If you're buying something you know is cheap junk, then just cut out the middle man and again skip Amazon for Ali express or Alibaba like the parent mentioned.
Every other time I buy a specific brand of cotton canvas (James Thompson), it’s fake on Amazon but close enough that it’s not worth the effort to file a complaint. And this is a brand that is supposed to be verified by Amazon’s brand registry.
I bought a very nice pair of headphones (studio grade) for a few hundred dollars. One listen and it was obvious they were fake. A call to the company confirmed (via serial numbers and various questions about the item.)
We bought some Brother labeling tape last week. They came in what looks like Brother packaging but it's named 'Better', P-touch is swapped out with B-touch...
The labels are inferior, the ink comes off, the labels unstick after a few days...how does Amazon even let this trash on their site?
Not only that but they have the willful bait and switch when it comes to shippng method. Pay for 2 day, but it defaults to 7, you have to manually select 2 day. I got burned by that, never again.
Edit this was a couple of weeks before Christmas, so I figured it was a "seasonal" "feature".
Interesting; I have about ~50-70 prime orders a year, in Canada (Amazon.ca), and that's the norm for me - it'll show 2-3 options for shipping, and the slowest free option is usually picked by default. If I want same day / next day shipping, I need to click on that button. Still free, no worries, but needs that extra interaction.
The only time it doesn’t default to the fastest possible shipping is when there is the option to ship items separately, or to combine the shipments with a delay. I think it will default to the delay in that situation. My guess is that occurs when the closest distribution center doesn’t have all the items in the order.
For context, I’m in the US and about 20 minutes from a good-sized distribution center.
>Many times it's my last choice now when shopping online.
Same here. It's pretty incredible that Amazon was once one of my favorite, and relatively well trusted, retailers. I now feel it's one of the worst major online retailers, and try to use them as little as possible
For me, Amazon's main purpose is to get them to price match Best Buy. Why wait 3 days when I can just go to Best Buy, show them the same item for $30 cheaper on Amazon and get it immediately?
For me this has not been working well because I go to Walmart or Best Buy and find out they don’t actually stock anything and end up wasting my time and still having to buy online.
I always check the inventory online at my local Best Buy before going to the store for a price match. If I've already found the product on Amazon, it's not hard to do the same on BB and make sure it's in stock.
So it turns out that the lead-tainted xylophone pictured in that article is sitting in my living room, along with the other items from that "Amazon's Choice" instrument set. It's all going in the trash and I'm never allowing any off-brand item from Amazon near our kids again.
(I guess the fact that the xylophone wasn't tuned to any recognizable scale should have been a red flag.)
Even buying brand name items shipped and sold by Amazon doesn't guarantee that your item will be safe. The way Amazon commingles their items with 3rd party "fulfilled by Amazon" items means chances are high that you will end up with a Chinese knock off.
At the risk of dogpiling on other comments, I also feel Amazon's quality has hit rock bottom. I used to use Amazon because it had a reputation for quality items. Now they all come from China and I pay Western prices for the privilege of having it shipped to me faster.
USB keys and SD cards are almost all universally garbage rip-offs, and I recently purchased a stroller from Amazon, but had a bit of a panic moment when I wondered whether the baby carrier itself was certified by Canadian authorities (it was, but I shouldn't have to ever wonder).
For all of my child's items, I'm now steering clear of Amazon.
This article also didn't mention that when you order a product that Amazon sells alongside 3rd party vendors who use Amazon fulfillment, they mix inventory. When ordering from Amazon, I always try to buy from Amazon directly when given the option. However, on one or two occasions, I have been delivered items that were clearly used and repackaged but were sold as new by Amazon. The only explanation I've found for this is that Amazon accepts inventory from 3rd parties for fulfillment and mixes that inventory with its own.
I thought this was a well-known fact? Over the years its gone from "buy this thing from this seller" to "buy this thing and we'll send you one like it from either the third-party bin or the Amazon bin depending on who your ordered it from", and finally to "buy this thing and we'll send you one like it from a single bin".
We used to buy from Amazon since it was a stamp of quality. I tried buying a usb-c cable for my mac mini, and it was terrible. So many brands and no way of knowing what to get. Today you might as well buy from Ebay.
What online store exists today, where I can be guaranteed to buy quality things? Do they no longer exist?
For a long time now it's been obvious they have brands make "special versions" of many products for walmart which are lower quality and cheaper.
Now they are offering free one and 2 day delivery on their site, but I just don't want to go there for fear that I'll end up getting what looks like a "good deal" but what I'll actually get is a worse more cheaply made product.
And like you I also avoid Amazon now for many things for fear of getting knockoffs. Most electronics and chargers/cables and things like it. Between their issues with commingling inventory from multiple sellers and 3rd party sellers basically having completely broken their review system (it's exhausting having to weed out the fake reviews from the real ones every time I'm looking at a product).
Amazon is quickly becoming another site that I'll start avoiding at all costs. I've started looking for replacements for many thing I buy, and once I've switched i'm really unlikely to go back just like how I'm basically never going to go back to Walmart because they burned all my trust.
At least with Walmart you know their value engineered products are actually made by who they say they are and actually work enough of the time to pass whatever QC standards were set. With Amazon you have no idea whether you're getting a counterfeit.
It used to be when I wanted a quality item, I'd click "Ships from and sold by Amazon". They removed that option. Now I cancelled Prime and either buy from other well known retailers, or click "Condition: Used" on EBay. Amazon now is just FBA Alibaba with same lack of quality control.
The feedback and reviews on eBay are far more useful and trustworthy than those on Amazon. I find that the bundling of unlike products together, and other tactics Amazon uses, makes their reviews essentially useless and definitely not an accurate way to assess product quality
For an active cable (lighning, etc.) look for new and look at the seller's feedback. Look at the other stuff they are selling. Is it junk, is it all off-brand? How long have they been selling?
It's not fool-proof and I still find myself buying only cable brands I trust (I don't mind overpaying for peace of mind when it comes to that). But the likelyhood of fakes (imitations of legitimate brands) is much lower, in my opinion.
eBay's opaque feedback system and captive seller relationships aren't the answer. The core problem is that they don't make it easy to associate individual listings with specific feedback for those items. In combination with the increasing popularity of "private" items, this encourages exit scams, among other things. A seller might garner 100% positive feedback for selling 500 Beanie Babies or whatever at $0.25 each, marking all the listings "private," then switch to ripping people off for $25K on nonexistent cars or machine tools or whatever.
eBay could easily fix this in the common case where bulk sales are involved simply by adding a "Show feedback for this item only" feature. But they care even less about providing effective search tools than Amazon does, which is really saying something.
Regardless of the question, the answer from the customer's point of view should involve more transparency rather than less. None of the major online retailers seem to agree, least of all eBay.
> What online store exists today, where I can be guaranteed to buy quality things? Do they no longer exist?
I'm in Canada, and increasingly I'm buying direct from brick-and-mortar retailers w/ online ordering and delivery.
Best Buy, Staples, Walmart, the Apple Store, the Microsoft Store, etc. BB's site does have third party sellers, but the website has a useful, clearly marked toggle labeled "Best Buy Only" which I always click. Walmart's search function is terrible, but once you locate the product, you can usually pick it up same day or have it delivered to a pickup point in a couple of days if you live in a city.
there's basically nowhere you can buy a USB type C cable and have it be guaranteed not to violate the spec. maybe the Apple store.
the situation with usb-c is particularly bad, but I don't think there's ever been a time where you can just blindly buy tech and expecta high quality product. you have to be willing to do at least some research.
When was Amazon ever a 'stamp of quality'? You can still buy a brand-name cable from Best Buy or other retailers that people used to use before everyone was trying to save a few pennies.
Up until the moment they started intermixing stock from third-party sellers in with the stuff "Ships from and sold by Amazon." It is this change all by itself that pushes me away from using Amazon. If I could just opt-out of the third party sellers I would, but I can buy a product ostensibly from Amazon and still end up with a fake.
> You can still buy a brand-name cable from Best Buy or other retailers that people used to use before everyone was trying to save a few pennies.
It seems in the last year or two Best-Buy has wised up with their Insignia brand, but it used to be all you could find was $40 Monster Cable and the like in their stores. Using Amazon was saving quite a bit more than a few pennies.
With their price matching of Amazon, I think Best Buy just realized that they were about to be the next B&M retailer to be put out of business by them. If they thought they still had a captive audience I bet they'd still be offering only Monster crap.
its infuriating that amazon likes to play innocent and claim they are not the seller of these products but at the same time do their best to project a unified front and to hide that certain products come from different sellers. At best you get a little link that might go to everything else that seller has listed but without knowledge from articles like this one of how amazon handles things I would never know the different between seemingly identical products.
With internet companies sometimes being held responsible for illegal content they host (provided by third parties), shouldn't Amazon be liable for facilitating the sale of or directly selling counterfeit goods?... especially when they have been alerted many times that a particular item is counterfeit?
I recently emailed jeff bezos / his executive customer response team got back with me and let me tell them for 2 hours how I felt their service has gone to shit.
One of the things I explained that happened is that as Amazon got closer via more warehouses the shipping actually went to crap. I also explained how their Amazon shipping vans are sub par even to USPS.
I asked for a basic prime teir free shipping only for $79/yr and asked for shipping options to be available ~ I'd pay +$2-3 to choose fedex over ups for example...
If anything they gave me a chance to vent. I also followed up in email sharing how products are being hijacked for reviews and how there are facebook groups for fake review gathering..
It's time to reconsider the relationships with these kind of markets, which contributed to the demise of countless small businesses across the country, these were typically run by passionate people who cared both about their product and customer generally, sure, exceptions were to be found.
We need to move on from the get something for nothing attitude on top of the fact that we don't need to buy unlimited stuff (as one could say the smaller stores system cannot cater to all of our cravings).
Quality over quantity; and let's take back our internet, build a website, a nice following, take good care of your customers and build a brand. Personally, I never went for any kind of markets, stuck to my website and I am still in business (since 2004) due to my customers whom I care for dearly every time they need my services.
The internet was designed as a decentralized system, why would anyone give that up so easily? Cheap stuff and convenience.
A quality obituary is in order if we continue this way.
Already this year the number of purchases I've made is cut in half from last year. I've gotten burned with too many poor 3rd party sellers. They are so greedy for the short term revenues they don't realize that us "idiots" are starting to lost trust in their system, and if that happens at a large scale, their business will collapse.
Attempting to solve the quality problem is possible. I imagine it's easier at Amazons scale because of the amount of data they have.
This should raise a number of questions.
So, why don't they put forth a solid effort? Is it due to regulatory reasons? If so, should they not publicly state that to put pressure on legislatures or to have a real public discussion.
Jeff Bezos signed the new purpose of a corporation [1]. The first bullet reads, "Delivering value to our customers. We will further the tradition of American companies leading the way in meeting or exceeding customer expectations."
My biggest problem is not being able to discern the quality of an item before I purchase. Ratings were last reliable 10 years ago. Different brands used to mean different products, so you used to be able to feature-and-price compare. About the only thing I've figured out to do is to look at pictures to try to group items by manufacturer, purchase one-per-real-manufacturer, then return all of the obvious crap and hope I end up with at least one good item.
Maybe we need a Facebook plugin through which people can (willingly) share their purchases. Don't look at ratings for products from rando strangers, only see the stuff your friends have bought. In the worst case, you're no worse off than the status quo, but maybe I could finally find a decent laptop bag.
I'd say it's a combination of both some unwillingness and some inability. I think the unwillingness would come more from a desire to avoid a murky, difficult to execute & resource intensive process, and not from a purely mercenary desire to sell more product. Because it would be a better shopping experience and spur more activity if there was greater trust in the 3rd party marketplace.
The inability stems mainly from the same problem large content aggregators always have. Like Youtube's filter generating false positives or false negatives for blocking content or flagging IP issues, or the filter for Youtube Kids letting through inappropriate content. It's all too much to adequately police without unreasonably high (from their perspective) resources.
In general, to me it seems like Amazon focuses more on other things than on refining the way their actual store and its site works.
They've focused a lot on operations and efficiency. They already had 2-day shipping but they've worked to get that down to 1-day shipping where possible. Which is impressive, though 2-day shipping was already pretty good. They've optimized the hell out of their inventory, distribution, etc. They made that Haven joint-venture healthcare thing (together with two other huge companies) to drive down health insurance costs.
Another area they've focused on is new types of business, like cloud computing, buying Whole Foods, getting into video streaming, and hardware devices (Kindle, Fire, Echo).
But the store itself, the web site design and how the store functions, hasn't changed that much. They had a lot of issues with fake reviews, and they eventually did something, but it took a long time. They have some longstanding usability pain points that they haven't done anything about. Reviews are supposed to be about products, not sellers, but people leave comments and ratings about sellers in product reviews because there's no other place to put them (or if there is, it's not easy enough to find). Something (bad UI?) seems to encourage unhelpful "I don't know" type answers in products' "Customer questions & answers" section. If you click "There is a newer model of this item", it often leads to something that isn't. Product categories and the features within them are insufficient or out of date: I can browse the cell phone case category, but under "phone compatibility", Galaxy S10 isn't listed, only Galaxy S9, even though the S10 came out 6 months ago. Similar story with iPhone. And nothing with size variations of phone models (iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR would require different cases).
All of these things would probably benefit everybody if they fixed them. And it's not just a matter of adding polish. There are more innovative things they could do, too. But the attitude seems to be that the store is basically as done as it's going to get.
Amazon's transformation in Canada has been remarkable. Back in 2011 or so, the selection for anything was extremely sparse, like the shelves in a Soviet-era store. Today, the shelves are full, but with third party sellers selling used products as new, and the search results jammed with no-name Chinese brands with thousands of 5-star reviews.
I bought a Blackberry Key 2 LE on Amazon.ca, advertised as a Canadian model and brand new. When it arrived, the box clearly labeled it as a refurbished product to be sold in India only. Thankfully they still offer a no-questions asked return policy , but maybe that's limited to Prime members. Once my student subscription expires, I'll be off Amazon forever. Just not worth the hassle.
I run a consulting company for Amazon suppliers[0] and can absolutely confirm the research from wsj is accurate.
Why? Amazon has broken down HUGE barriers, which make it incredibly easy to start selling. You (anyone reading this) can easily spend $5K on a product from China and start selling it almost risk-free. example1, Prop65 EXCLUDES Businesses with 9 or fewer employees.
Why would Amazon sell 1000 products from a single brand if they could sell 10 products from 100 brands while maintaining their margin structure and decreasing liabilities for everyone?
I am LONG $SHOP and wish brands would invest that direction more than they do.
I bought a mechanical key tester (small matrix of keys) from Amazon UK and it got delivered from China. It took weeks to get to my country and I had to endure a completely different customs procedure. Importing from a EU country to another EU country is simplified while importing from China is subject to much more red tape. I am careful now to make sure the seller is not from China. Needless to say Amazon lost a lot of trust in my eyes.
If I wanted AliExpress I would have used it, but when I specifically ordered from Amazon UK I expected to have the merchandise come from inside EU. That was the whole point. The same product is listed in AliExpress much cheaper.
Amazon got this way due to competition in the early 2000s with eBay. Today there aren't a lot of mom-n-pop e-stores. Sure some of it is coming back with Shopify, Magento and others, but most people starting off in online retail just create a store on one of the big marketplaces: Amazon, eBay, Newegg, Reverb or Etsy. All of them both sell their own products and are also meta-resellers.
I wrote about the death of the mom-n-pop estore not too long ago:
Cheap toys are generally worrying. Unrelated to Amazon specifically, but to get an idea, you can also take a look at this EU site listing some products which have been banned/recalled:
Just scroll down a little and click on the weekly reports. The amount of kids toys being recalled every week for containing high amounts of harmful chemicals and other hazards is worrying.
Dropshipping and the dream of selling anything online without having to manage products, warehouses, customers is what happened to amazon. I often get bombarded with "make quick money selling on amazon" ads. Quality has gone down, you never really know what you are getting anymore unless it's from a well known brand. But customers have also become lazy, not doing any research, buying things that are way too cheap and then complaining about the quality.
Bad products and fake copies have been available for years you just had to know where to look... it's just easier to find it now.
Shopping on Amazon has deteriorated gradually over the last three years. It has become enough of a chore that I am considering dropping my Prime membership. The third party sales flood the market with so much crap that it drowns out the quality vendors and the reviews are nearly worthless at this point. I don't how they fix it, but it is broken now.
Amazon's actions (not its words) are the way to figure out whether they care about this. And their actions scream loudly that they don't care about product safety or counterfeiting. The only solution is probably some exponentially escalating fine structure, where on e.g. the fourth offense the fine is 10 billion dollars and on the fifth the company is dissolved. Otherwise Amazon will simply continue to pay the fines as a cost of doing business.
1. Sellers pretending to be legitimate brands. I’ve bought things thinking I’m buying from this brand I know, turns out it’s just a copycat.
2. Accidentally buying used products which seem to be old models. I’ve made the mistake on a few occasions buying used when I specifically wanted a new item.
Amazon has plummeted in quality but I get a feeling they don’t care. Their ultimate goal is most likely to flush out the top sellers and replace their goods with amazons own brand.
There will only be items of cheesy quality, super high profit margin and excellent marketing/SEO left on Amazon, coz that's how online marketplaces choose winners.
You may have noticed $BABA's high earnings numbers, the late stage leeching is powerful.
Customers may miss the good old days that they could go to real retailers to feel products in person and still have the power to make brands care what they want.
Should Amazon be required to perform authenticity and safety on { none of, a few of, some of, a random sample of, all of } the items listed on their marketplace?
Whole Foods often (always?) audits the supply chain of their products. Farmers’ markets sometimes audit the supply chain of their booths. Flea markets and eBay never do.
What burden of audit should be placed upon Amazon?
I had about 150 purchases last year. Toothbrushes, Apple Watch bands, hard drives, diapers, truffles, pasta, foot massagers, hats, books, etc.
I had 1 bad purchase. I bought a used Roomba 980 sold by Amazon. There was a used 680 in the box. Amazon apologized and sent a brand new 980 the next day.
Am I some sort of uberresultsfilter, or do the whiners just get way too much attention?
This assumes you know everything bad in those purchases. In the article they talked about buying some children's products and found one with levels of lead that exceeded federal limits. limits put in place for safety. Would you know that about any of the 150 items you purchased last year? In my purchase history I know I wouldn't.
We don't tend to know all the details about everything we buy. We assume the purchase was fine if it looks like we got what we expected, it wasn't broken, and it was at the price we expected. But, when it comes to things like product safety we trust what it says on the label. In some cases those are known lies. Like the helmet in the article that was labeled as being DOT certified but wasn't. I would not have known this if I were in that situation. Would you have?
I am curious about this too. In US and Canada has Amazon completely stopped selling things and only acting as a platform for third party sellers ?
Instinctively, most people are probably looking for the best i.e. lowest price which is fair enough.
I was looking for something on Amazon yesterday and the item was not sold by Amazon, was not FBA (had free delivery though)
However on the right hand side, there was a list of sellers and Amazon.co.uk was the second in the list with a price just £0.01 higher than the cheapest seller.
I have found that most of the times, Amazon as a seller, comes second or third in the list but even then the price difference is not significant compared to non Amazon sellers.
I end up buying the higher priced (but not by much) item due to the customer friendly returns and one year "warranty".
I think one just needs to pay attention to that list appearing on the right hand side and decide if Amazon itself is selling the item at a reasonable price premium or not.
I have a very simple bookmark let that only shows items sold by Amazon.com without having to filter by category. I think part of the issue is that their site UI is pretty horrendous, and makes it difficult to limit searches. I do however notice issues with some items sold by them, but primarily with descriptions being incorrect or them combining a bunch of items with reviews, sometimes for completely unrelated products. I personally try to avoid third-party sellers for the most part. I would love to support smaller businesses, but to be honest you're probably doing most third-party sellers a disservice by buying on Amazon, especially if you think there is a possibility that you'll return the item.
More than that, you have to trust every seller for the product you're buying, because all inventory from all sellers (including Amazon itself) goes into a single bin. You have no way of knowing which seller actually put the item you get into the bin.
It seems like the best way to get stuff changed at Amazon is to have the Wall Street Journal send them feedback. WSJ is essentially doing free work for amazon - “hey these products are not legit” “oh shucks, our bad, let’s remove those, yea” “hey they reappeared,” “oh our bad let’s remove them again sry”. clearly it’s not a priority for amazon...
Anyone else think this is on purpose? Now they can remove all third party sellers from their platform and cite a trust & safety risk. They've been neglecting sellers on the platform for a decade. Why else would the API be absolutely ancient? A huge change is coming.
> Why else would the API be absolutely ancient? A huge change is coming.
What motivations do they have to change it? Amazon has very little incentive to change an API that is a cash cow. The AdWords API is much the same. It's a SOAP api that largely hasn't changed in 5+ years.
I don't expect a big change unless customers start leaving in droves. Something like half of Amazon's revenue is a direct result of the third party sellers, they won't cut that off anytime soon. They neglect those sellers and the API because there is no incentive not to.
Third party sellers are cash cows once you finish monoplising the market, sellers will be begging to give Amazon more and more marketing money to move their products.
From my experience selling on Amazon, their vendor tools are absolute trash. These days Amazon(retail) is just a centralised eBay, anyone can list anything.
Interesting. I was looking into reselling a few things on the side on Amazon just for fun, but found it nearly impossible to find any product that wasn’t blocked for third-party sellers from selling.
The simplest solution for the consumer is to just check the seller and to avoid buying from sellers other than Amazon. No one is forced to buy from an Amazon FBA or 3rd party seller. Amazon customer support generally has more levers to help you out if you do have a problem.
This isn't possible anymore either. There are numerous reports that add up to the fact that Amazon now co-mingles all inventory, theirs and third-party, for a single product into a single bin.
From Amazon? Of course not. They haven't and likely won't admit to it. You can find 2-3 top level comments in this thread alone that cite their own examples of this happening. Similar stories crop up every single time anyone mentions the Amazon marketplace for at least a year now.
It's not surprising that the various states insisted on collecting sales tax from online sales. Free money! We don't have to do anything! We get it because we're the government!
But, the states have been derelict in their duty to protect and apply the well established protections they insist other stores comply with.
Collecting taxes is not a free lunch. It comes with serious responsibilities.
It's telling that the states are not clamoring to take on these responsibilities. If they are unwilling or unable to take up these responsibilities, then they should not be collecting the taxes.
Policing at scale is difficult, as YouTube and Facebook have learned.
Small communities are far easier to police. But to do it pre-emptively with AI is an open problem. My interest is how can we make a system that will reliably converge in most cases to what’s true, like Wikipedia? It would be GREAT to have it for making sense collaboratively of news, politics, religion. People submit claims/evidence and each one has its own page.
What is the incentive model? One I thought of is that you gain reputation points linearly but lose them exponentially in high-stakes challenges. The question is who can resolve a challenge one way or the other. And whether the result is immutable or can swing back if it turns out eg that the challenge was swayed by a coordinated effort.
If it’s a static system there are always going to be increasingly sophisticated attacks built on coordination (sybil attacks, sleepers). The most basic attacks require a net gain in credits to be sustainable. Namely, coordinated attacks (marauders) have to win challenges (and net positive points). But later on, attacks can be paid for by trading outside currency (eg BTC or USD) in exchange for using internal credits (“aged accounts”) in “vandalism” actions (attacks which do not gain credits but may even lose them, but are sustained by outside gain).
This is an issue for the source of truth for cryptocurrency as well, but at least the data is very well defined, and there doesn’t seem to be a huge gain from vandalism (except shorting). National elections in the US also have similar things for ballot counting. On Amazon and the sites I’m talking about, we are referencing outside events instead of internal processes. Wikipedia seems to have the most successful model w human editors of various kinds watching over the result.
Is there published research on the game-theoretic aspects of maintaining integrity of collaboratively edited information about the external world?
It seems like the main problem everyone has with Amazon is their curation. Or, to put it more amusingly, “they have too much stuff!” (They have the good stuff you want, but it’s buried in bad stuff that you don’t, too.)
Is this really Amazon’s problem to solve, though? Or is this just a symptom of a bad value-chain ecosystem? Shouldn’t other players be cropping up to be external “shopping search engines” that find you the real, quality items on Amazon’s (and other stores’) huge junk-piles, the way that Google finds you real, quality web pages among the junk-pile that is the web?
Sure, it’d be nice if Amazon solved the problem itself. But I don’t see a reason that it has to be the one to solve the problem. Amazon can just provide infrastructure to allow anyone to sell anything, and then someone else can build “retail experiences” on top. Just like AWS isn’t trying to be Salesforce with a full platform experience.
Of course it's Amazon's problem to solve. I am, generally speaking, no longer and Amazon customer because they've chosen not to solve it. Amazon's search functionality is the least of their problems. The fundamental issue with Amazon right now is that even if I only buy "ships and sold by Amazon.com" items, I'm still at a high risk (depending on product category) of receiving a fraudulent item that originated with a third-party seller. That's a problem that no one buy Amazon can solve.
I use to buy from Amazon because I knew I was buying original brands and no chinese cheap copies. Well, that changed a lot. There are specific things that I still buy from Amazon but on most things there's almost no difference between they and Aliexpress. I can buy the same products from Aliexpress way cheaper and have them delivered in 2-3 days.
Thankfully there are a lot of small online shops where quality and customer support are taken very seriously. The bad thing is these stores are very specific so if I need different unrelated products I have to buy from several stores, having to pay sometimes a few euro for the delivery. This also made me buy less stuff. Now I generally wait until I need more things or until my cart has enough stuff for a free delivery.