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Amazon is likely stats blinded: their internal metrics say "all good", so they ignore the stories people are telling as anecdotes without ever doing the analysis on how often those "anecdotes" happen. Further, that their stats are ungrounded (not tied to any hard-to-attack real world tests) and fail to capture data which would demonstrate the issue.

I believe the FBA and FMA teams are a fundamental blunder opposed to Amazon's core values (and the business model they espouse), and that while the people on them are clever, they're not very prudent.

I think that the idea could be salvaged with some genuine mea culpa and revamping of FBA/FMA systems. I just don't think anyone at Amazon with the political capital to do so understands or acknowledges the issue.

Honestly, Amazon should just send someone on the team out with $50,000 in $50 giftcards to one of the shopping centers in downtown Seattle and hand them out to anyone who orders something on Amazon for them (on Amazon's dime; shipped to Amazon HQ). Will you get a disproportionately high number of bad purchases? Yep.

But that's sort of the point: isn't it a problem if a large fraction of 1,000 people know how to get bad purchases out of regular items, but you still operate your store that way?

This is one of the most insightful comments I've read on HN and it explains the factors at play when a big company won't respond to issues the outside world can plainly see are problems: The stats are good, the stats measure the wrong things, and whoever inside the company first suggests that a change is needed will probably limit their career.

It's also a good explanation of Apple's non-response to their increasingly poor software quality and their de-facto abandonment of the content-creator market.

It's a good comment but anyone who has worked for really large retailers has experience of been on the side of "This policy is really stupid, you are pissing customers off!" and head office standing with it's fingers in it's ears going NerNerNer can't hear you, figures all look good from here.

From the outside, Amazon projects an image of utter-efficiency and professionalism, but the reality is different.

I've been a seller for about 6 months (in Europe) and their systems are quite bad.

When you call support, most of the time the person on the phone, while very polite and "competent sounding", gives you advice that does the opposite of what they say it will do. When you point it to them they say "hmm, let me check" or "I'll get back to you" and then you talk to an "expert" who many times isn't sure either of what to do.

The problem is not that support is incompetent; the problem is nobody's sure how the system actually works, because it's too complex with too many layers added on top of one another.

I really think the system was built for a much smaller operation with fewer sellers, and it is now stretching beyond capacity. They have a huge team of people maintaining it but that only goes so far.

Or perhaps they do know exactly how bad the problem is and have decided that fixing it isn't worth it.

I had considered that, but that seemed the less likely scenario: that they'd intentionally let their business get damaged, rather than having issues that most large corporations face.

I mean, they clearly don't have a handle on a wide variety of bad actors in their ecosystem, but keep putting out awkward attempts at solutions. This suggests they're trying to fix perceived problems, but are avoiding the core of the problem because they either don't see it or don't have the political will to fix it.

>Is there anyone here who can shed some light as to why?

Its expensive to check each good if its counterfeit. I think an easy solution would be to require all new sellers to put up a bond and slowly decrease the amount required as they become more trusted. Amazon is big enough to demand this and trustworthy enough to not abscond with the bond money (unless they are caught with counterfeit goods).

> this has been going on for years

I've been aware of it too, but speaking for myself, I don't remember any mainstream or tech news stories about how it's been impossible to trust Amazon until just recently.

My theory: It's a big company, with lots of inertia and perhaps arrogance, letting things get worse and worse, until it reaches a boiling point, which is now.

It used to be confined to certain categories of goods, like camera equipment for example. Now it seems to have spread so that anything ordered on amazon has the possibility of being fake.

My thinking is that it's a lot easier on the logistics of fast delivery times. When someone comingles inventory with Amazon it means someone else paid the initial shipping cost from manufacturer to Amazon warehouse. It could even be in Amazon's best interest (on paper only, thus the quality issues) to preferentially ship the commingled inventory before dipping into their direct purchases to maximize profit per sale by reducing pressure on Amazon itself to keep their inventory topped off, since, as I'd bet any business owner that sells physical product can tell you, money tied up on warehouse shelves is not doing you any good.

If Amazon ships commingled goods, their own products get virtually transferred to that seller, and Amazon's stock still goes down. I don't think what you're saying makes sense.

>Shady practices don't seem like their thing at all.

Ummmm... Is this sarcasm? They are so shady "Amazon controversies" has its own Wikipedia page!!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com_controversies

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...

A combination of wanting 1) the best price 2) fastest shipping times 3) the world's largest catalog and 4) profit.

You're buying some item. You're in New York City. Other websites sell it for $20. You go on Amazon.com and see that it's $14.99, here's where #1 comes in. Why is it so low?? In our scenario, let's assume "Fugazi FBA seller" just shipped in a bunch of counterfeit merchandise into Amazon's warehouse in Tennessee that cost them $5.00, $14.99 is a major win for the seller.

Now, Amazon matches the price at $14.99 and you buy it "ships and sold by Amazon". This is where #2 comes in. You're a Prime member. You expect to get it in 2 days. You're all the way out in NYC. The closest warehouse that has Amazon's legit inventory is in California.

Amazon says, "Hey we need to get this customer his/her item in 2 days. It's way FASTER and CHEAPER, if we just pick one unit from Fugazi FBA seller's stock that's in Tennessee and ship that out." - #2 and #4.

Once this product is end-of-life or Amazon can't source it, #3 comes into play and Amazon stops selling it "ships and sold by Amazon" and sellers (legit and illegitimate) are left to fight it out.

Because Amazon wants to have the best price overall for each product, and the way to do it is to have many sellers competing on price alone for each product.

Then commingling is just a logistics trick, it makes inventory more liquid and so lowers costs and shortens delivery time.

Amazon likes to think of itself as the arbiter of a fair marketplace between sellers. It's not that they don't care, it's that they are proud of doing things the way they are.

Manufacturers selling direct via ecommerce is a very new phenomenon (last 10 years). Before Amazon, there was an entrenched network of distributors and exclusive contracts in both directions of the supply chain. Amazon has busted this wide open.

It is important to understand that FBA largely pushes the administration and supply chain overhead down to small time individual resellers, utilizing their willingness to do free labor.

Amazon encouraged this behavior, gave blind eye to counterfeiters, and making ecommerce too hard to ignore for mfgs to compete on directly.

IP has never been efficient to enforce, old school exclusive/protective contracts masked this, but now the emperor has no clothes.

Not exactly accurate.

There is eBay that is a big player and allows anyone to distribute products. These days 90% of sales are done by professional in fix price format (not an auction).

eBay has a proper reputation system, sellers are clearly identifiable and so is the location of the product.

Amazon doesn't do any of that on purpose.

It's ironic, I got burnt a few times with ebay in it's really early days in the UK and swore off them and then Amazon got popular and I was a happy customer for years but recently I've been buying bits from ebay (I prefer Buy it Now, I don't want to maybe win, I'm happy to potentially pay more to know that it's on it's way) and it's improved leaps and bounds since I used it a lot.

If Amazon keeps down this track it's going to kill the golden goose for eking out that extra tiny bit.

Well sure, but AFAIK eBay doesn't do fulfillment so there's no possible issue of commingling, etc.

Amazon doesn't do fulfilment either.

Or well, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. It's impossible to figure out where a product will come from.

eBay and Amazon have very little in common in terms of how they area organized. Amazon's "customer facing database" is SKU-based. eBay's "customer facing database" is seller-based. Two completely different worlds.

I'm not sure their brand really is being damaged. Here, we know what's going on, but I doubt the general public knows much.