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Comment by notus | Hacker News Reader

I had a recent scenario lately where I bought a small consumer electronic device through Amazon based off of reviews. There were thousands of reviews for this item at the time of purchase. Once the item arrived I realized it didn't work so I went back to the Amazon page and there was now only one 1 star review which was someone wondering what happened to all the reviews that were there a few days ago.

There are some questionable things going on with dog food as well. For example I recently purchased a case of a certain dog food my dog has been eating for years. If I click on the product link in my Amazon order history it says that it is sold by the manufacturer of the dog food, but in the Amazon order history itself it says a different store that I've never heard of. The inside of the can looked a little different, less gravy and it made my dog start vomiting almost immediately.

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The same product can be sold by both amazon and 3rd party. The reviews will be mixed together.

Ex: amazon sells tshirt. People post reviews. 3rd party sells tshirt with the same product page as amazon's and the quality is poor. Reviews are mixed together and you can't see the seller on which the review is based.

I don't understand why Amazon did this? Surely it's to their benefit to drive sales from good suppliers (if there is more than one supplier) as that leads to more customer satisfaction.

It's a bit fraudulent really, like a bait and switch.

In reality each page needs a product and supplier rating, and people need to be guided to rate both. Instead you get "this company sacked my daughter; 1 star" and "the postman dropped it; 1 star" type ratings.

It makes logistics easier I'd think. The mistake Amazon is making is that Product A is Product A is Product A. It means they have 2 less things to track quantity of and they can have 1 count that matters instead of 3. On the surface it seems 100% logical...

Reminds me of story where (and I'm going to butcher parts of this) a town is making a huge vat of wine (or maybe it's food related) and everyone household is supposed to bring a bottle to pour in. A couple of people decide to cheat the system and bring water instead expecting to hide under the radar. It turns out way more people than a few take this path and so the "wine" just tastes like water with a hint of wine in it.

Is it "easier"? I'd have thought with their robots-and-bins it was notionally identical, save a few minor modifications to the front-end.

As it's Amazon, presumably they tested and found this to be the best mode for profit.

> I'd have thought with their robots-and-bins it was notionally identical

Is it really identical? They do have quite a bit of warehouse which means that shipping can be quite longer and more expensive.

Let say I'm a third party and I got 100 shirts in Amazon warehouses in north America and they got 100 too. That means that in average there's 2.6 shirts per warehouse (I found there is 75 warehouses but that can be a wrong number) but we each got 1.3 in averages! If someone buy 2 of mine, most likely they'll have to ship one from somewhere else, while they could just take one of theirs and consider it the same.

At the end of the day though, it doesn't means that I was truthful and my product is actually the same, which can hurt their orders.

The ratings on the product page are meant to be purely about the product. Reviews that mention the seller are often removed. This is actually the main way sellers get rid of bad reviews: most one star reviews will include a reference to the seller and so amazon will usually remove them if the seller asks.

There is a separate review system for sellers, and the score is shown when you look at the buying options, but it's little used and much less visible.

I've seen this lots and lots of other places as well. For instance, Walmart's website will return hits for searches, and when you look at the product page it will invariably have "Sold by SomeNobody." These huge supply-chain-engineering companies just rake in listing fees now that other parts of their business model are solved.

Doesn't amazon make it fairly obvious when you're ordering from a 3rd party or not?

There's still a measure of control in who the supplier is, and the reviews for that supplier too.

Your missing the key part. You can order from the manufacturer through amazon, and they will ship you the part from the 3rd party (that may or may not be legitimate) if the have the same ID number. Even though you ordered from the manufacturer, you may get a fake product. They commingle inventory, to make it easier for them to ship from nearest warehouse, but don't really put enough work into ensuring the products are actually identical.

The funny thing is Chinese e-shops don't do that. You can find a bunch of the same goods at e.g. JD but if you buy from the JD itself ("Joy Collection" in the English JD frontend joybuy.com), it would never be fake and it would never be co-mingled - and the reviews are separated too.

They combine inventory for the same item from different sellers. Even if the item you bought says it is being sold by Amazon that doesn't mean that the product you receive will be one that they sourced. It could easily be from a third party seller instead. Unless you're buying something like they're own Amazon Basics brand you have no way to reliably tell where something actually came from on Amazon.

>Doesn't amazon make it fairly obvious when you're ordering from a 3rd party or not?

I would say "no," because pretty much everyone I know thinks Amazon is a store with a single source of goods, not a "marketplace." This is probably intentional.

It’s actually worse than you think. Amazon often stores their “sold directly by Amazon” inventory with “fulfilled by Amazon” product sold by third party sellers. This would make getting a knockoff just a matter of bad luck, even if you order from Amazon themselves.

I haven’t ordered from Amazon since I learned this months ago, with two exceptions for birthday presents.

https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/be-careful-amazon-...

Yes it makes it clear (but they can "commingle" the same product from different sellers, as said in the related comments).

However let's say you want to buy a product. But the reviews are mixed. Some are 5-star reviews, but there are 1-star reviews as well. And there are 5 sellers. From which one do you buy? All the reviews are mixed.

Perhaps a bad review is caused by a seller sending fake product. But perhaps the review is a valid review and it highlights a defect in the original product. You can't know.

Yes, but with mixed bins from multiple sellers, you don't know whose item you actually receive.

You should never buy any kind of food (for humans or animals) on Amazon...

Amazon purchasing rule of thumb used to be: "no electronics."

Then it was updated to include "nothing that goes on or in your body."

Then it was updated to include "nothing that goes on or in any living thing."

Then it was updated to include "nothing you wouldn't by from a random stranger standing outside a fly-by-night flea market."

For thousands of years, brick-and-mortar stores have lived and died by the quality of their merchandise. Amazon is just learning this.

Ugh. There are still a couple of canned food items I buy regularly on Amazon. Supposedly they are from the US and Europe, but, yeah, I guess with Amazon you never know.

But because Amazon is hitting conventional, traditional retailers so hard, now I have to wonder: could Amazon's behavior with regard to counterfeit products and commingling influence my local brick and mortar retailers to do the same thing?

yea i never thought about this happening to canned food either.... until i heard stories of shipping containers full of counterfeit redbull being caught by customs at a terminal.

If it's branded and there is a decent profit margin, i guess we should assume some questionable actor will steal that margin given the opportunity.

Poor doggo! It should be a criminal offence to sell (or facilitate the sale, if you reasonably should have known, and Amazon should) of dangerous counterfeit goods. Hope he or she recovered.

It could just be a bad batch or something, I'm giving the company the benefit of the doubt still. I've never heard of this dog food being counterfeited. My dog did recover pretty quickly as well and has been enjoying eating roast chicken instead the past few days.

if you still have the packaging, it might be worth sending all of it to the real company to see if they can determine 1. if its fake, 2. if so, how they teach consumers/wholesalers to catch it and destroy it.

This has happened to me a couple times as well!

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