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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

> "At some point, we started receiving things from sellers that were obviously not Amazon themselves, and then endless emails asking us to rate their service, etc."

I've noticed this more and more in tech, even outside of the retail ecommerce experience. I constantly get bombarded by requests to rate things and it's all getting to be way too much.

Seamless/GrubHub constantly wants me to rate every experience - I get that they want feedback and to ensure quality is high - but I'm not their QC department and I don't want to be.

At this point a pretty substantial portion of my email inbox is just "how was X? Rate X!" messages. Every damned startup thinks "oh but it's a quick thing" without realizing the sheer volume of it their users are being bombarded with from every which way.

Surely there's a better balance when it comes to quality assurance than "get the customer to do everything".

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> At this point a pretty substantial portion of my email inbox is just "how was X? Rate X!" messages.

Those messages also attract low-quality reviews from the wrong kind of reviewer.

"Just got router in the mail today, looks good on my desk, 5 stars!"

This is a problem. The only way to cut bad sellers is to get ratings. But ratings are annoying. How to keep both sides happy?

Paying actual quality control people - harder for some business models than others, but this has been the way it's been done for years.

A department store gets goods from potentially thousands of suppliers, and yet doesn't have to ask every customer to fill out a survey to do quality checks. Ditto your local transit agency can tell how well they're doing without polling every rider.

Obviously a harder problem when you never meet your suppliers, but IMO still a tractable problem - IMO part of the problem is that leaning on customers to do quality assurance has become a default rather than a fallback. Harder upfront quality checks also plays against the desire for hypergrowth (you can only vet so many vendors so quickly, plus some of the bad-but-not-horrible vendors are actually valuable for you).

Side note: it's probably more palatable for customers to give feedback if that feedback is actually acted on. One of the annoying things about, say, AirBnb ratings or Amazon ratings, is that they largely just feed into a giant pool of votes, and the only outcome of your feedback is an imperceptible nudge of some tiny fraction of a 5-star rating scale that's visible to other users.

So curated AB&B? That seems like you COULD do it, charge someone $50 to get curated by staff and then approved as a "4 star AB&B room". But what stops the place from dropping standards as soon as they get curated? Monthly surprise reviews? Seems like a really hard problem.

A retail store can check the quality of a pair of socks, approve it, then order a million of them. Maybe spot check a few, but assume most are the same quality. Can you ever really do that to AB&B rooms? Even hotels are spotty, the best info we can usually get on a given hotel is trip-advisor, which has all the problems of paid /shill reviews and annoying customers to leave feedback.

Retail faces many of the same problems - you can check the quality of a pair socks, but if you order a million of them there can be high quality variance and detecting that is non-trivial.

Also common is that you check and verify the quality of socks but 2 years down the line your vendor starts screwing you with lower-quality equivalents.

Quality control is a hard problem in any field.

> "But what stops the place from dropping standards as soon as they get curated? Monthly surprise reviews?"

That's what we do for restaurant hygiene - and at least around here it seems to keep a reasonably good lid on things. With the help of software it's also relatively easy to identify patterns of failure (as opposed to irregular lapses in quality).

> "Even hotels are spotty"

They can be, and this is a large part of why hotel chains even exist - they exist because quality information is really spotty and so the chain is essentially a guarantee of some consistent quality expectation.

Yeah, part of the problem is that many of these companies are middlemen and almost completely uninvolved in the actual product being sold (see: Uber doesn't manage any of its own cars, AirBnb doesn't manage any of its own rooms), and so far the pattern has been to pass the buck to customers with a "buyer beware" notice.

I contend this is not good enough - especially when many of these services are high-priced and advertised as substitutes for actually-curated (see: hotels) products with solid quality assurance. IMO in many of these cases companies need to do more for the margins they charge (e.g., Seamless charges 15% of all orders, but they don't provide any portion of the service, not even the delivery bits unlike Caviar or Postmates).

Ya for sure. To me this is why I am kind of leary of the Uber type business model. I get why it works, but it also seems so hard to maintain a level of control when you push everything down to driver responsibility.

The funny thing is Amazon was great at this for their original product line back in the days for books. They hired pro critics to write independent reviews. This is not emphasized anymore, probably due to cost.

I've started giving 1-star ratings to both the product and seller, for those that do this "email begging for a review" thing. Frankly, I regard it as spam, and treat them as such.

It's really ironic when a seller asks me to rate their item... when I already have given it a 5-star review + appropriate worded comment. It becomes a 1-star review, etc.

There is no excuse for spam.

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