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Comment by lawkwok | Hacker News Reader

This is probably old news to seasoned Seller Central users, but I was surprised how easy it was to "take over" product pages from already existing products.

Our sales figures definitely weren't high. I think it may have been related to how much stock we had for all the sizes of the product.

Soon the product images and descriptions we provided became the canonical version and overrode whatever was there before. Even previous customer reviews from other sellers would continue to be shown on was what now basically our product page.

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We've had a very similar experience. On more than one book our product pages were replaced with images from the counterfeit. In a certain way it was quite funny. Ultimately it was very frustrating

This sounds very much like amazon is actively participating in conspiracy to mail fraud, across state lines. Have you called the FBI?

There seems to be a scam where product pages are sold off to host a completely different item. They usually have lots of 5 star reviews and high search rank but the reviews are all talking about something different than what's now being sold.

I thought it was a bug at first but I've seen this too often. I don't understand how Amazon doesn't know this is happening, or why it even lets it happen in the first place. Product pages should be immutable.

What they also do is that they sell a quality product for 1-2 years, get good reviews and then switch to inferior materials.

Luckily the review system can catch this, as long as you look at recent reviews and the seller isn't buying any new reviews.

I find this happening everywhere. Loss leader, great product, next season the product cost the same and is now crap.

Anecdote: in my country they sell Toppits brand cling film, and it used to be great. Now it’s absolutely useless! Doesn’t self adhere at all.

Not familiar with that brand of cling wrap, but they probably reformulated from PVDC to LDPE like Saran did due to toxicity concerns.

I found some old Saran wrap when I moved in to a new place from like the 70s and that stuff was the bomb. Anyway, I ban brands that do this, and I never buy them again. Kingston and PNY, you've lost me forever.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/184253-ssd-shadiness-kin...

I seriously doubt many people are catching it otherwise the scam wouldn't be so popular. People probably stop reading after the second or third review and don't check that entire pages are talking about a different product.

I was looking through some old Amazon orders last night. A pair of MPow bluetooth headphones I bought in 2013 now appear as an MPow fitness tracker.

It seems like sellers recycle old listings to keep their reviews.

Haven’t taken over images but have sold into oem equipment on ebike stuff before. It’s pretty cool because you get sales you can’t from an independent listing of the same product.

When I’ve done it, it is legit the same thing and verify it, but I can easily see scale or greed causing people to do the wrong thing with this.

Product reviews are meant to be of the product, so it shouldn't matter which seller it is if you're all selling the same product.

But without Amazon doing their own QC there is no way to say it is the same product. You should at least be able to see reviews based on the supplier and pick the supplier you will be fulfilled by. But I suspect that would ruin their whole 2-day/1-day shipping bit.

They do QC: sellers that have too many complaints get kicked off.

But you can’t identify which seller your product came from. That’s the whole problem here.

But when you return the defective product, Amazon can see what seller it came from.

Only if they only purchased one.

Counterfeit products are still a huge problem on their platform. Great QC.

Are you sure about that? I thought part of the whole incentive for commingled inventory was that Amazon no longer kept track of it separately per vendor and just lumped it all into the same bin without a unique serial number.

Am sure and posted the link elsewhere on this thread

If they wait for complaints, that's not amazon doing the QC, it's the client.

Ah yes, like how if a drug company poisons enough people then the market will make them go out of business. You know, because people died.

> I suspect that would ruin their whole 2-day/1-day shipping bit.

They are no longer offering 1-day shipping. When I signed up for prime, one of the benefits was discounted 1-day shipping on items for which the free 2-day shipping wasn't fast enough. I recently had need of that, and learned that the options are now (1) "prime shipping", with no particular service guarantee. There is no second option. I contacted customer service multiple times asking why I couldn't choose 1-day shipping and was told "because the item is out of stock. There is only one item left in stock, that means the item is out of stock".

I've seen 1-day and even same-day shipping on a variety of items, so I suspect it's determined by some arcane combination of user location and item logistics.

They used to offer guaranteed two-day shipping and a paid upgrade to one-day shipping; now they just have "Prime Shipping" as the parent said, and what "Prime Shipping" means varies from item to item and time to time. It can mean one-day. I don't think I've ever seen same-day shipping, but I'd imagine I just don't live close enough to a fulfillment center.

If the product is a "Philips Boilermaster 3000" kettle then this is true (if we ignore counterfeits).

But not all Amazon products work that way. The "t-shirt with eagle print" could be made by a number of companies with wildly varying quality, all fitting this product description. Similarly there are lots of 10m Cat 7 S/FTP lan cables.

If you buy a generic product with no brand name and no intellectual property, then all you have is the pictures. If they all look the same, they could technically be different quality but there's no reason to expect a certain level of quality without a brand name.

You should expect to get the same product if you buy the same product, though, whatever the quality.

Reviews can still be important. If you have a lot of positive reviews and don't need a brand name, it could be worth the risk to save money. But you don't want to be the first to test out.

Even for non-counterfeit books, Amazon defines "product" too broadly -- reviews for a book tend to combine both the printed and Kindle versions and you'll see people complaining about the formatting of the Kindle version on the page for the printed copy.

That's a fair point, although people should read the reviews and can tell if it's content or formatting.

The alternative of separating Kindle reviews seems wrong. Most reviews are useful to buyers of both formats.

The one thing that really frustrates me is how poorly they curate editions. This is especially bad with translated works. Like - you're on the hardcopy version of a nice, modern translation, then you click over to the e-book version and it's some random bowlderdized public domain version from 150 years ago.

This is a problem with everything being sold on amazon. I read reviews for a stamp (dates for ISO8601) and very few of the reviews are relevant to the product I was looking at. Almost none of them made sense for the product I was viewing, actually.

I was trying to buy a Grimm's Stories book for my kids and it was basically impossible. They had 5 different translations and selections of stories under the same entry.

Perhaps people who write product reviews should get into the habit of starting their review with a description of what they are reviewing, who they ordered it from, and how much they paid for it. That last bit of information is definitely very relevant if you're going to comment in your review on whether the product was good value for money.

Perhaps also put the date in the review itself and state that you do not give permission for the review to be edited.

Unfortunately, I think that some sites don't allow reviews to mention prices.

Even if the T&Cs say you give up all your rights in the review you perhaps still have a right not to be misrepresented so they shouldn't edit your review if the review is still going to be attributed or attributable to you.

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