Amazon sellers say that the company is losing millions to scammers | Hacker News Reader

Amazon sellers say that the company is losing millions to scammers

inc.com

17 pointsexolymph12 comments

Over the last year or two I have noticed that a bit more care and scrutiny needs to be put in to a seller and product review before I make my one click purchase. Overall I do think they would get more out of me as a consumer if the market place was a bit more locked down. In some ways it's starting to look like ebay or aliexpress

I only got hit by that recently. A few of items in my "Save for later" list dropped price one day early this month. I purchased them on a whim one day without thinking too hard...one item was successfully shipped to a totally different state. Another 2 were listed with 3-4 day shipping estimates but were given chinese tracking numbers many days after they were supposed to arrive with no status updates or seller communication. One just got an update 2 weeks after initial delivery date...the one amazon put a pay hold on. I'm guessing best case its a wrong/counterfeit item. The other 2 have alreay been refunded by amazon.

Bezos can say whatever he wants about eternal 'Day 1', FBA and FMA are 'Day 2' features to the core: they're fragile, anti-customer features that only serve Amazon's logistical needs at the expense of customers. If anything, Amazon falls victim to data-as-proxy (which he also decries) in thinking these features are good. The Bezos letter to shareholders is a good illustration of what Amazon should be doing, not what they are, and why they're currently struggling as a business.

When Amazon puts their operations and money where their mouth is, I might believe them.

I purchased a newly released book the other day that was from a seller and listed way below market rate, order was cancelled and refunded within a couple of hours. Noted the user had 2-3 of pieces of feedback from years ago, but appeared to have thousands of new books listed at crazy low prices that also presumably did not exist. Any idea what the scam is there?

Amazon Marketplace is a cesspool, definitely affects my confidence in the brand. I try and order items directly from Amazon now, but have heard that even those supply chains can contain a lot of co-mingled counterfeits.

In that case it was maybe canceled and refunded because Amazon caught the scammer?

Nope they're still up, with 628 pages(!) of products that appear to be marked as "Currently Unavailable". Some sort of arbitrage or marketing bot? There's a lot of weirdness going on with Amazon Marketplace sellers, that's for sure.

its a hacked account. they might be trying to disburse money before amazon notices/refunds

or maybe some scam for manipulating the bucket box?

Somebody testing the idea. Seeing how many purchases before they go through with the effort.

I always wonder if things like this are caused by corporate espionage. Walmart comes to mind as someone who would benefit from the "reverse PR" against Amazon. Apparently Walmart has been in China since 1996. I wonder if they could influence a distributor to poison an Amazon supply chain.

I wouldn't be surprised to if this was largely accounted for in supply side contamination issues. It appears that Amazon treats all SKUs identically, sourcing the closest one to fulfill and order, regardless of how that SKU arrived at Amazon.

A concrete example: No Starch Press customers are receiving counterfeit books when ordered from No Starch Press' Amazon store.

Even if this scam is caught, it's still cost Amazon money in dealing with the issue. (And cost legitimate vendors no end of frustration with legitimate customers receiving fake books.)

I actually wrote about No Starch's ordeal as well :) https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/amazon-counterfeits-no-starch...

FBA commingling is a whole ball of wax on its own.

"Amazon has zero tolerance for fraud"...from sellers.

Buyers, feel free to unbox your purchase, and return a potato for a full refund, provided the product was sold by one of our 3rd party merchants.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com