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Comment by oneshot908 | Hacker News Reader

How do sponsored products now topping organic search results, comingled fulfillment centers mixing real with counterfeit items, and dropping keywords to add inaccurate results to spearfishing queries serve to put the customer first, especially those who paid for prime membership? Shopping on Amazon used to be nearly effortless, now I have to make sure I'm really getting what I searched for, and my return rate in 2018 went from close to 0% to about 10%.

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Same issue here - relatively high volume purchaser for a long time (since amazon was tiny - they actually let you get an incredible amount of your order history).

Returns are up, and some thing if they are cheap I don't even bother returning. I've gotten used items marked as new, totally counterfeit apple products more times than I could count (stopped using Amazon for that) etc.

Your first and third points have nothing to do with FBA or FBM so I won't comment on those. Commingling is a cluster fuck though for sure and you won't find really anyone who disagrees, and any seller worth a damn has turned it off and never used it. Commingling can have severe repercussions for sellers besides, like being suspended.

Regardless, if there is an issue with a commingled product, Amazon's customer service will take care of it instantly, which is putting the customer first. I imagine there are a hundred variations, besides commingling, where sellers do shady shit, and regardless, Amazon will take care of you as a customer quickly, without question, and usually with additional compensation above what is expected.

It's hard to ship a million SKU's, in 1-2 days, accross the US, affordably, without commingling.

So they compensate using customer service.

And they are actively trying to solve this and reduce the number of SKU's.

"Amazon's choice" tag is one example of that.

In my experience so far, "Amazon's Choice" is rarely what I'd choose. So I'd guess by now that its value (probably calculated using some sort of ML model trained on sales data) has been gamed to death by motivated substandard sellers (so it probably needs a refresh like Google refreshes its scoring function for web pages in response to SEO).

I've also noticed that sponsored products (which I don't want ever) are better targeted towards my queries by EBay. The difference seems to be that Amazon deletes keywords until it has something both sponsored and irrelevant to show and hopes for the best. That must have survived A/B testing, yuck.

What I think it comes down to is I'm an oddball that wants organic search results. I understand why Google messes with that to deliver ads, but for the life of me, I'm trying to help Amazon take my money and they're getting in my way and my larger purchases (>$100) are migrating away now because it's becoming impossible to find what I want, occasionally worked around by searching the Amazon catalog, ironically, from Google.

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