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Comment by tfha | Hacker News Reader

This is why I've been unhappy to see Bezos gaining steam. As his other products become more successful, you can expect a lot more of this.

Alexa is not your friend, Alexa is a tool to make Amazon money. Amazon's move into media is not an effort to improve the media system, it's a recognition that there's a lot of money to be made by controlling the media that people consume. Same thing with the fire phone, it wasn't an attempt to make a better phone, it's an attempt to gain access to all of that juicy information that Google gets from Android.

Bezos is out to make an empire, everything else comes second.

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> Bezos is out to make an empire, everything else comes second.

I share this sentiment.

For comparison, I believe the amount of and methods with which Google collects data to be wrong, but I also believe that they don't believe they are doing something (outright) wrong.

Amazon, however, must know that they have a counterfeit goods problem, but it seems that they couldn't care less about it. Same applies to gaming the review system.

> but I also believe that they don't believe they are doing something (outright) wrong.

With so many engineers working at Google, someone there should be thinking they are doing something wrong. Right?

Or are you more thinking of a collective conscious of some kind?

I mostly meant upper management, where strategic and policy decisions are made; where the direction a company is going is determined.

Not that non-management is irrelevant. It's just less relevant. Because what is OK or not OK is ultimately decided at the very top.

For example, in the not-so-recent-past, Uber was rocked with scandals on a weekly basis. The first step to fix this was to find a new CEO.

It's also a matter of degree vs kind. It's easy to say that Google is collecting too much data, but the basic premise of personalizing searches and selling ads is relatively unobjectionable to most people.

Once you've accepted that selling counterfeit goods and other broadly anti-competitive practices are A-OK and part of your core business model, you've crossed a line where it's no longer really a matter of simply doing "less" of it.

How would you solve the counterfeit goods and preventing people from gaming the review system problems?

It seems like a hard problem - eBay suffered from this too for their goods,Yelp with reviews. I doubt it's just a "I don't care" kind of thing.

> How would you solve the counterfeit goods and preventing people from gaming the review system problems?

No idea what do to about the reviews, but the first step to the counterfeit goods problem is simple: once you've received X complaints about a counterfeit product, stop selling the product.

Continuing to sell a product for which there are numerous and credible indications that they are counterfeit is borderline fraud.

> No idea what do to about the reviews,

They need to patrol the sources for fake reviews (facebook groups, etc) and perform sting operations to catch the sellers who solicit them. It shouldn't be too hard, a simple Facebook search finds hundreds of groups and thousands of solicitations. Once you identify a seller that does this, you ban them from Amazon, as well as everyone who's given their products a fake review (for the reviewers, it should probably be a three strikes thing before they're banned, since a lot of them seem to just like free stuff).

> but the first step to the counterfeit goods problem is simple: once you've received X complaints about a counterfeit product, stop selling the product.

> Continuing to sell a product for which there are numerous and credible indications that they are counterfeit is borderline fraud.

I'd say the second step is to roll back many of Amazon's practices that make counterfeiting harder to detect, for instance how they can commingle inventory between sellers (if those sellers weren't careful when they made their listing). That makes it impossible for the sellers to have meaningful reputation scores, since bad-actors can sell their counterfeits through honest-actor storefronts (and vice versa).

The third step is to implement better supply chain management and vetting of suppliers. Not everyone should be able to set up a marketplace store and sell any product. There needs to be effective vetting of sellers and it should be hard enough to setup a marketplace account they can't just create a new one when their last one is banned. There should also be especially stringent vetting around listings for frequently fake and counterfeit products, like SD cards.

The fourth step is to implement active counterfeit and fake product detection (through test purchases). If a particular item is too often fake or counterfeited, Amazon should ban it from the marketplace and only sell inventory directly sourced from the original manufacturer.

None of these things should be too hard for a company with Amazon's resources to effectively implement. The fact that it hasn't says that these problems aren't a priority for it.

Have you established that there are "numerous and credible indications" for all counterfeit products? I would, perhaps naively, think that this is just shifting the exact same problem to the reports.

That is, reviews and reports are likely easier to manipulate/game than physical products. Not just in "ballet stuffing" but through many other means. (That is, it is probably easy to get credible people to also vouch for products while you are shipping counterfeit ones.)

To that end, I'd imagine it is easy to get rid of someone that sells 100% fake items. But how hard is it to drop someone that sells 10% fake items? In bulk, that is still damaging. And is still probably lucrative for the seller.

Basically, I'd expect (again, perhaps naively) that painting it as a boolean trip actually makes it easier for the cheaters.

> Have you established that there are "numerous and credible indications" for all counterfeit products?

No, just anecdata, including personal experience. But the anecdata seems widespread enough.

> To that end, I'd imagine it is easy to get rid of someone that sells 100% fake items. But how hard is it to drop someone that sells 10% fake items?

I have absolutely zero experience with retail, but I'd probably set the bar at 0%. Any deviation from that 0% must be explained satisfactorily: "how did this happen", "what measures have been taken so that this doesn't happen again", etc.

> No idea what do to about the reviews, but the first step to the counterfeit goods problem is simple: once you've received X complaints about a counterfeit product, stop selling the product.

If you don't have an idea of how to solve the review problem, I'm not convinced you've thought through the "received X complaints about a counterfeit product" problem and your proposed solution. In your system, I could easily assault my competitors with counterfeit claims and get their products removed. This already happens with reviews and other sort of reports/returns.

> If you don't have an idea of how to solve the review problem, I'm not convinced you've thought through the "received X complaints about a counterfeit product" problem

With "complaint", I meant a formal complaint to Amazon, over a proper channel, either by contacting Amazon Support, or during the returning process (I'm returning this product because it is counterfeit").

This just can't work on a logistical level. Let's look at diapers. There are lots of reports of counterfeit Huggies and Pampers. In some cases, it's true -- they're counterfeit.

Recently, though, Huggies changed the 'movers & poopers' line or whatever they call it. Since consumers didn't know about the change beforehand (new leg-hole shape, for instance) there were many reports that those were counterfeit, and Huggies had representatives deployed to answer Amazon reviews that showed the legit redesigned diapers and falsely called them counterfeit.

Moreover, what would happen to Amazon if they stopped selling Huggies and Pampers? Collapse! or maybe just a 20% loss of revenue! Do you know how many people go Prime purely so they can get their diapers autoshipped? and the formula, and the breastmilk bags, and the wipes? My family signed up for Prime solely because of baby crap, and once that baby crap is not needed, Prime ends. But for most people, Prime continues from baby to toddler to whenever they remember to stop auto-renewing. This is a huge market.

Amazon cannot afford not to fix their supply chain legitimacy issues. But they can't just stop selling the product. Agree that it's fraudulent to keep selling counterfeits, agree that they need to fix it or all those Prime parents are going to switch to Target for their brand-name diapers. It's not simple, though.

> Amazon cannot afford not to fix their supply chain legitimacy issues.

If they can't run a legitimate business properly, then that's their problem.

Take a look around -- plenty of other profitable retailers don't have this problem.

> But they can't just stop selling the product.

Not only can they, they must.

You can't continue with illegitimate business just because you'd be unprofitable otherwise.

It's a solved problem and not hard.

Most brick and mortar chains in the UK have a buying policy that requires you to prove your goods are fit for purpose before they'll put it on the shelves and risk hurting their brand. I imagine most of Europe operates similarly.

They will generally require suppliers to send examples of the range before being allowed in store, and they will test or examine a representative selection first. They'll probably do basic safety and legality tests too. As a new supplier you can expect your products to be subject to random checks over the coming months. After a period of good track record you will become a trusted supplier and subject to fewer, or perhaps no, checks.

Amazon should do the same. That they are big or that they are online is no excuse not to.

Couldn’t malicious sellers circumvent this by sending quality product initially and then swapping it later on?

The entire TIC industry (I work for Underwriters Laboratories) does just that, we independently test and certify and then audit the factories to make sure it’s still made the same way as the original sample. Problem is... people counterfeit our certificates, and some retailers don’t care much

For those wondering, TIC stands for testing, inspection and certification.

Then stop using certificates. Have a website where retailers can check if the supplier is certified. Using signed pieces of paper as evidence is inferior to just querying the certifier directly.

Sure they could, but with a proper approach to supply management, like the whole of the traditional sector is used to it gets caught. The lower quality switch would get caught in the random checks of incoming product in your first years as supplier, or rapidly from customer feedback. Then simply drop them as supplier.

Amazon would look far far better to their customers if they started cutting some of the crap as "not good enough to go in Amazon" and dropping suppliers for shoddy manufacture or too high a return rate.

There is a big difference between cheap, good value and all the world's unfit for purpose and counterfeit crap, for me anyway. They can pretend marketplace is separate, and outsource returns and customer service to marketplace sellers all they like. If I buy something dangerous or shit on marketplace I resent Amazon as much as the RNGFake4u brand I accidentally bought.

They risk future sales if they do that.

This is where trust in a brand kicks in. Brand represents product quality. They work so hard on making the brand, that it then becomes the product. Back to square one.

Counterfeit problem? Stop co-mingling inventory - then you can track what inventory went to which customer and easily peg down which sources are selling counterfeits by looking at the reviews.

Amazon co-mingles different retailer's inventory when amazon handle fulfillment for them?!?!? Are you sure? That's insane.

Yes, that's the root cause of many of their fulfillment issues. And it makes sense for something like a mass-market book. It makes less sense for other things.

Yup. Multiple sellers can sell the “same” item.

I put same in quotes, because it can be counterfeit or just similar. You’ll never know if you just buy the cheapest via buy now.

The only exception if it’s your own brand. Which is what many sellers are doing now. That’s why you are seeing a billion of poorly branded, cheap Chinese products.

Yes, they do. It's one of the reasons you can buy a "new" hard drive that already has several years use on it.

I don't believe you can stop this. I have tried and failed. I steer clear of anything not shipped directly from Amazon. Trying to report shady sellers on Amazon is next to impossible and Amazon will not remove them.

The counterfeit items come from items shipped from amazon too thanks to their commingling inventory.

It's pretty easy to spot fake reviews. The tacticts are pretty obvious. I'd bet basic NLP and pattern-matching would work to catch a huge percentage of fake-reviews if it were something Amazon really cared about doing.

Is the reviewer saying things of substance, how many other reviews have they left and over how many years, how many things have they actually bought on the store and at what dollar amounts, are their other reviews a mix of positive/negative, are the types of products distinct, etc. Score each of these and remove/shadow-ban reviews that don't meet an authenticity metric.

If there are real consequences for getting caught buying fake reviews (e.g. banning from selling or fines), it could really restore some order to the chaos. (Then you get the inverse problem of competitors buying fake reviews trying to get the competition banned or fined. This is second-order to actually removing the fake reviews in the first place though.)

fakespot.com does this for you. Just paste in the URL for the amazon product and it will analyze the reviews.

Love the ReviewMeta (website or chrome extension) for exactly this. It gives a computed "true score" based on some of the dimensions you mention above. (I am not in any way affiliated with this product)

https://reviewmeta.com/

You don’t allow third party sellers and the problem goes away real fast.

You can still allow third party sellers, but just do some vetting of both their products and their operations first.

Same way every other retailer (Walmart, Target, Sears, etc) prevent counterfeit goods?

I really think they don't care that much. For them what they do is take a 20% rip from the random sellers that appear on there and always side with the buyer in any case of counterfeit or misrepresented products. This is working great in the interim as they truly have nothing (monetarily) to lose like this. Customers get a full refund no questions asked, and often get to keep the knockoff. Amazon makes more money on marketplace than selling themselves.

But for someone like me, I don't want to gamble whenever I buy anything. I have had Prime from the very start and now I think I am not going to renew. I am sick of getting substandard products and lately with their private label shipping the delivery date/time has been completely arbitrary. I've done almost all of my shopping online my entire adult life, but now I am increasingly going to local stores as I have never received a fake, and now they compete on price.

> How would you solve the counterfeit goods and preventing people from gaming the review system problems?

The big issue is co-mingling inventory. This is where they mix same product from different sellers in same batch. I only order products from Amazon.com LLC. But I have still received items that seems fake.

Some says that co-mingling inventory saves Amazon a lot of money but to me it seems like Amazon is actively shielding bad players by making it hard to trackdown who is selling fake products.

One other, and somehow more troubling alternative to safing money, could that Amazon's homegrown warehouse management systems and fulfillment software are reaching some kind of limitation.

Seperating inventory not just by article but also supplier and / or inventory owner is no small feat. But if Amazon's IT environment is not able of doing it, this is opening all kinds of issues. None of them really good in the long run.

Actually, I have some experience as Amazon Seller/FBA. I believe on certain items, I would get an option to co-mingle it. It wasn't selected by default, so I didn't change it.

So Amazon has already built the system to keep inventory separate by sellers.

Also Amazon vendor here - co-mingling is really a lot better these days because of the new brand registry. Basically as the manufacturer you can restrict the other vendors from even hopping on.

If you turn off comingling you have to (? not sure if anymore) apply Amazon ASIN stickers instead of the manufacturer barcode, which is really annoying.

The counterfeit detection problem is one of the hardest problems that exists, fake branded products is much easier to solve, but at least in the world of fashion, the only proven way to detect fakes has been through leveraging teams of experts to inspect each item individually.

Xyz company is not your friend. Ok, like we didn’t know they are trying to make money off the other side? When is the last time a company trying to make a profit is our friend?

any time where they are trying to make a profit by selling you something you want?

Bingo.

Why are so many people willing to throw away the baby (capitalism) with the dirty bathwater (monopolies and others crony deviations.)

One answer would be that with improved communication and improved transportation the relative advantage of monopolies has become intolerably large.

To use your analogy, it's not clear to me that one can have the baby without it spoiling the bathwater.

you don't think people exchanging goods and services using money as an intermediate exchange (aka capitalism) can be a net-positive? Because any other aspect of our current formation of capitalism is negotiable. We can regulate to counteract negative corporate behaviours (though that has its own set of issues) so that companies are working for the benefit of the populace.

I don't think money is a nessesary ingredient of captialism (though it is immensely helpful). Money also exists in most forms of communism. Capitalism is more about private ownership of the means of productions, with different companies competing against each other on the market.

Monopolies run against the spirit of capitalism. Regulated markets on the other hand are fine as long as competition is ensured.

> Capitalism is more about private ownership of the means of productions

That existed before capitalism - in feudalism, for example. It's true in the context of Marxist analysis of capitalism as that's how Marx decided to frame capitalism, but it isn't capitalism's distinguishing feature.

> Monopolies run against the spirit of capitalism.

Effectively, yes, which is why we should prevent them by either public ownership of natural monopoly resources (public road ownership, for an example to wind up the libertarians) or regulation.

> you don't think people exchanging goods and services using money as an intermediate exchange (aka capitalism)

That isn't capitalism, you just described a market. Markets existed for thousands of years before capitalism was created.

Yeah I know, but my point was that the market plus money is the indivisible unit of capitalism. You can take any other aspect away and it will still be capitalism. Unless you think some other fundamental characteristic is also required? I'm open to that idea. Private ownership of the means of production isn't really one because that existed during early market economies too.

Yes, private ownership is one condition, but not the only one. I'd add capital intensive production (building plants and machinery for automation), the existance of a labor market and the existance of a big class of people lacking ownership of the means of production, thereby being forced to sell their labor on the market. And you have a class of people living off of the profits generated by the means of production (in contrast to feudalism, where people also lived without working, but the means came from fiefs, not from the market).

throwing in all these requirements leaves you with a definition of capitalism that pretty tightly matches the system we have right now. This is my main issue with criticisms of capitalism - they (rightly) criticise the system we live with right now but instead of looking into individual rules, entities and interactions that cause the problems, we declare that (to quote the comment I objected to) "it's not clear [...] that one can have the baby without it spoiling the bathwater.". It's terribly reductionist to take a complex interlocking system and say "it's not working, we need to get rid of it!" because chances are that the problems could be fixed within the system itself.

Or in software terms, I think our current form of capitalism is in need of refactoring, not rejecting as fundamentally broken.

> throwing in all these requirements leaves you with a definition of capitalism that pretty tightly matches the system we have right now.

Because it's important to differentiate markets from capitalism! Otherwise feudalism would have been capitalism, too.

Exactly. As Adam Smith said:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

And if you don't regulate them in the interests of the people at large, they will conspire to advance their own interests.

The free markets need regulation, or they stop being free.

Everybody "conspires to advance their own interests"... that's pretty much the definition of self-interest.

Anyway, the point is just that one doesn't expect companies to be your friend. You expect them to pursue their own interest, and thankfully their interest and your interest overlap quite often - and mutual, voluntary exchange of goods, service, and currency occurs.

Are there things I wish Amazon, for example, did differently? Of course. And the wonderful thing about the free market is that if enough of their customers become unhappy about some issue or other, another company can come along and serve those customers. Of course that might not happen, and that's fine. Nobody is claiming that a free market guarantees that everybody gets exactly what they want.

> Everybody "conspires to advance their own interests"... that's pretty much the definition of self-interest.

There are very different forms of self-interest, the one implied here is of the very shallow, short term kind.

You think your interests overlap. They have been carefully presented this way to extract maximum value from you over the long term.

If a transaction weren't in my interest, I wouldn't engage in it. And value isn't being extracted when parties engage in voluntary trade, it's being created.

Note that this is not to say that I (or anybody else) engages in strict, robot-like, mathematical optimization of all transactions to ensure that our best interest is served down to the .00000000000001th place. We, as human beings, employ satisficing[1] for a lot of our decision making. But the fact that I buy from Amazon when I could save 50 cents by buying from Walmart instead, or that I tolerate Amazon showing me a few ads when I'm shopping, is neither here nor there.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing

If a transaction weren't in my interest, I wouldn't engage in it.

This is a fallacy. People often engage in transactions that aren't in their interest- believing in the moment that they are. Or said another way, there's a difference between long-term interest and short term interest, and people often don't see their long-term interest clearly. Or said still a different way, there's a big difference between happiness and pleasure, and people sometimes engage in pleasure in detriment to their happiness (roughly from the Dalai Lama).

I'm not talking about the 10^(-14). I'm talking about real decisions where there is an information asymmetry. And meth.

Fraud is not allowed in the 'free market.' Regulation need not apply, proper courts and remedy for fraud are required.

We used to live in a world where a retailer or manufacturer would stand behind their product and not let anyone sully their name. Since today's consumers seem to lack the ability to discriminate between 'cheap' and 'value' we are in the world we're in.

One particular retailer I'm fond of in this regard is Home Depot. If I have any problems with any of their merchandise, they take it back, no problem. They stand behind what they sell and I appreciate that.

> Fraud is not allowed in the 'free market.' Regulation need not apply, proper courts and remedy for fraud are required

Courts apply laws. Laws defining and providing remedies for comemrcial frauds are regulations of the market.

> Courts apply laws.

No, courts are arbiters, sometimes of the law, sometimes of civil disputes, such as contracts.

> Laws defining and providing remedies for comemrcial frauds are regulations

That is true, laws that apply to contracts are regulations, however, they are not necessary for remedy.

If I have a contract to receive "A spoon product id xyz as created by Sir Porky Pig of 123. Main, CA USA" and anything other than that is delivered, it's a breach of contract at least and fraud at worst. I could sue for damages. What regulation is needed for this transaction? If someone were to deliberately intend to deceive me, that is fraud, and there are already laws for that.

> No, courts are arbiters, sometimes of the law, sometimes of civil disputes, such as contracts.

The things they define what is an enforceable contract and what remedies are available for violations are, again, laws. Civil law is as much law as criminal law.

> That is true, laws that apply to contracts are regulations, however, they are not necessary for remedy.

Yes, they are.

It is law which defines what is a contract, and law which defines what remedies exist for breach.

> If I have a contract to receive "A spoon product id xyz as created by Sir Porky Pig of 123. Main, CA USA" and anything other than that is delivered, it's a breach of contract at least and fraud at worst. I could sue for damages. What regulation is needed for this transaction?

(1) A law defining when an enforceable contract is formed and how the enforceable terms are determined.

(2) A law defining the parameters on which damages are legally compensable from breach, including setting standards for traceability of causation of the harm to the breach, degree to which the I hired party is or is not obligated to act reasonably to mitigate damages, etc.

> If someone were to deliberately intend to deceive me, that is fraud, and there are already laws for that.

And such laws are regulations of commerce.

We are in a historical paradise for consumers of selection and low prices, I think we are doing alright. If Amazon doesn't deliver (pun intended) we will go somewhere else. There is no shortage of competition in the retail space.

Companies like Costco and Wegmans are known for being socially responsible, so it's possible. Both have a strong and loyal customer base.

This viewpoint fails to consider the nontrivial competitive advantage gained by building customer loyalty. There are plenty of brands that do well despite higher prices, longer waits, etc due to their consistent positive interactions with customers; A culture of trust between customer and company is frequently worth the cost.

Amazon seems to have decided that the higher margins of counterfeits and prioritizing ads over search quality are worth the loss of user trust. I wholeheartedly hope this will be a costly miscalculation on their part, as I would prefer a marketplace with fewer ads and reliably genuine items.

I agree with you. Amazon's questionable inventory tactics have been a factor for me in deciding to sometimes shop elsewhere. Although, I don't mind the ads, they're selling screen space, I can happily scroll past them, the adds are often very relevant, and they are clearly marked sponsored.

In my opinion that changed with the fire phone debacle. Arguably that was Jeffs baby, when it tanked (as far as I know) most of the developer team left. And the apparently told Jeff that some stuff he wanted in the phone was bad idea.

So, that would go against thr leadership principles of vocally self-critical and earn trust. Not that it harmed stock performance, but it changed something, somehow. Not sure what, so.

Most people on the team did not leave. A lot of the people who worked on Fire Phone went to other projects inside the company including Amazon Go.

Making money and wanting to make great products are not mutually exclusive. Nor does one necessarily follow the other. The latter does depend on the former, quiet often, though.

Bezos is going to space.

He's ruthless as hell but he dosen't force anyone to work for him, he doesn't force anyone to use his service.

Maybe, just maybe, he's that man who sold the Moon.

> Bezos is out to make an empire, everything else comes second.

Amazon investors just got a hard-on reading this.

Empires can fall. They just take consumer behavior to change.

Right, but we're still on the wrong side of the hill for now.

Theoretically yes. However history has proven that's no trivial feat. It can take decades and often requires a huge shift in the way people use technology too.

Welcome to capitalism. People are not in business to be nice, but to make money. Their behaviour is expected and the same as most private actors.

The two don't have to be mutually exclusive. Plenty of businesses pride themselves on customer satisfaction with the knowledge that happy customers are frequent customers.

The problem is the American free market model encourages market capture through "less noble" (for want a better description) means; it encourages monopolies and discourages regulation nor oversight thus allowing businesses to ignore all other consumer, social and even ecological concerns. In an ideal world market forces would filter out that bad from the good but we've seen time and time again that you simply cannot trust businesses to do "the right thing" - and why should we, they're a business not a social club! But the fact remains it gets increasingly hard to compete in any market when your competitor has comparatively infinite resources and zero scruples. That results in a net less for consumers and society in the more general sense too.

At least here in the Europe we have the EU who are willing to challenge companies who are proven to overstep. I'm not saying the EU get it right all of the time but better that than giving businesses free reign to do whatever the hell they like.

Anyhow, I've waffled on about a fair few points so to get back on topic: You do businesses who are customer-focused. The problem is they usually get overshadowed by the businesses that have learned to play the game better / more aggressively.

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