Amazon Ready to Pour Billions into Policing Products on Its Site | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Ready to Pour Billions into Policing Products on Its Site

wsj.com

68 pointsAlupis54 comments

Amazon needs to cut down on the number of products on its site for me to use it consistently again. It's ridiculous how searching for "spatula" returns 400 pages of results, all of them near identical (many are actually identical), but almost all of them sold by sellers named by nearly random strings of characters.

I ended up just buying most of what I needed at local big box stores. If it's more expensive, it's not by much (I didn't price check every random $5 utensil I bought), it's a lot less overwhelming, and I feel a lot less need to think about things like material safety from effectively anonymous sellers under Chinese jurisdiction on Amazon.

And you get to see it with your own eyes and hold it in your hands which allows a much better judge of size/quality.

Agreed, they need to curate their store, and take some responsibility and pride in what they sell. Need a battery tester? Take your pick from...

* VTECHOLOGY Battery Checker - https://www.amazon.com/Battery-VTECHOLOGY-Batteries-Requires...

* D-FantiX Battery Tester - https://www.amazon.com/D-FantiX-Battery-Universal-Checker-Ba...

* SURDARX Battery Tester - https://www.amazon.com/SURDARX-Battery-Universal-Checker-Bat...

* The Battery Organizer - https://www.amazon.com/Battery-Organizer-TBO30343-Universal-...

* Amprobe BAT-200 Battery Tester - https://www.amazon.com/Amprobe-BAT-200-Battery-Tester/dp/B00...

* Battery Tester Checker by WeePro - https://www.amazon.com/Battery-Tester-Checker-WeePro-Monitor...

I'll stop there, but there are probably 20 brands selling the same Alibaba battery tester on the first few pages with the only difference being the name stamped on the side. This is why I don't shop at Amazon. I don't trust their reviews. I don't trust that I'll receive a legitimate product. I don't trust that anyone cares about the quality of products being sold.

It's worth mentioning that the housings of many products are frequently sold to multiple manufacturers as components ( though in this case I suspect it's probably the same product ). I've also seen suppliers change the contents of batches of products once an order has been placed ( I'm talking palette loads of products that land with changes to the electronics - even as a single importer specialising in a given product it can be impossible to guarantee continuity of supply from the east ). This makes any attempt to police this kind of re-branding highly impractical since you need to disassemble any given product to verify it's contents, even within the same order.

My concern is why they need to sell them all. Take those 20 battery testers that all cost $7 and look identical, test them out, and sell the best one.

As the consumer I'll save time, receive a better product, and likely be more confident and satisfied with my purchase.

The only way for Amazon to do what you ask is to not allow third parties to list products in their system at all, and to verify continuity of supply by continually spot checking product, and penalising vendors for changing spec on them.

I think that's the point. Most retailers do exactly what you describe, and I prefer buying things at those stores instead of Amazon because of it. But that's just me.

I wanted to find another example of the lack of quality control, so I just searched on Amazon for full grain leather belts. I opened one of the cheaper options for $10 and the description says "100% Full Grain Leather". That seems unlikely given the price, so I checked the reviews and there are photos of the belt flaking and peeling, which makes it quite clear it's not full grain leather. One of the reviewers also says the belt is stamped with "Genuine Leather", which once again confirms it's not full grain leather.

So, Amazon sells a belt that is literally described as "100% Full Grain Leather", but it's simply not. But, somehow that's fine.

IKEA is a good place for utensils..

Inspired by a court decision in Pennsylvania that, regardless of what Amazon says, Amazon is the seller and has the responsibilities of the seller.

Is eBay affected by this, or is an auction site clearly not the seller in this situation?

eBay actually punishes (most) sellers pretty aggressively. Reason I say most is there’s one large shipping supply company on there that consistently shorts customers and has eBay remove the negative feedback. It’s assumed in the community that they’re large enough that eBay is willing to take the hit to keep them around.

Here's a cheap thing they can do: you don't have to stop commingling entirely, but you can give me a way to opt out of it. Either via account settings or letting me specify during checkout.

Sometimes I may not care which seller it comes from and just want the closest one. Other times, I'm OK with waiting if it means I am more sure of what I'm getting.

That's actually a pretty simple solution and something I would totally opt into. Just a checkbox in your account settings that says I don't want to see any FBA or verified sellers only.

I don't think it's that simple because the problem is on the backend / logistics, not the UI for the user.

There's not really a half-measure solution here. They either have to completely redo their supply chain management (not co-mingle) or it won't work. What pool of goods do they pull from to fulfill your order? Where do they store these goods?

Well, that separate pool of goods now has to be maintained.

How man separate piles from how many "trusted" suppliers do they create?

The probably should start doing something like this, but I don't think it's simple.

In order for Amazon to do that, they would either have to ship from further away (which costs more), or have a separate, Amazon-only set of products in each distribution center (which defeats the point of commingling). Also, the vast majority of people aren't going to turn it off, so how would it help?

Imagine a demon supervising the people and bots picking items for an Amazon order. If any of them pick an item from a bin also containing inventory from another seller (commingling), the demon puts the item back and removes it from the order.

I would like Amazon to, effectively, offer that demon as an option, to guarantee the provenance of an order's items. Of course, it might work better to filter commingled items out at search time, if that's possible, or put a big warning banner up on the product or order page when you might get your item from another seller's inventory.

That would be almost every item.

Think of how many layers of both the fulfillment logistics, supply chain, and actual tech stack have to be modified/re-imagined to achieve this. They should move this way, but it is extremely complicated & expensive.

The difference between 1 fungible pile of a good spread out everywhere, and multiple distinct piles is enormous.

Yeah, you make a good point. They'd have to either make an explicit choice (no default) or opt-in, because most people don't know the platform well enough to even understand that the choice even exists.

It's only a guess, but I would think the added expense wouldn't be that big of a deal. With popular products, they already have lots of units everywhere so it would very rarely be an issue. With other products, it is more likely to be an issue, but still not every time.

Yeah I agree, but I think the problem is that Amazon doesn't know who the bad actors are. To actually verify all the goods would require an enormous amount of physical checking, requiring an enormous amount of staff trained to tell a good raincoat from a piece of shit one (a week of wearing?), compounded by bad actors simply shifting identities.

It's a similar problem to Facebook not being able to tame disinformation: how can a trust based system police maleficence at scale?

They can start to isolate and A/B test. Banks look for common merchants in cases of credit card theft... Seller A is a seller-in-common of 5 counterfeit goods, they're a likely candidate.

Even if you can't demonstrate it immediately, you can then start to bin out their stuff. High index that that seller is counterfeiting/selling it? Start un-mingling their stuff, internally - you don't -need- to physically verify authenticity, but if you're unmingling their stuff due to suspicion they're a bad actor and you keep getting complaints... probably a good sign.

> compounded by bad actors simply shifting identities

Identities have to keep getting paid. Start requiring ACH/EBT payments only for those actors (i.e. no more checks or whatever). They might be able to keep 'creating' identities - it might be harder to keep creating bank accounts.

Fixing commingling doesn't involving solving the underlying bad seller problem. It just draws a line for savvy users between known-good sellers and the wild west.

Rfid tags have reached a cost of one-cent, at least according to this:

http://www.smart-alliance.com/en/news_ms_2883.html

At this point, it's possible to put the on most/all commingled products and automatically verify authenticity.

How hard are those to fake, btw?

I really hope they mean it. A few months ago I stopped using Amazon because of this. I knew electronics were bad but once I saw that someone was counterfeiting a raincoat I was going to buy and using Amazon comingling to get away with it, that was the end.

Turns out you can get basically anything elsewhere with better guarantees and lower prices. But Amazon is faster than everyone else and I hate creating new accounts. I'd be happy to return.

With the web and related technology comfortably 20+ years old I'm very surprised standards haven't developed where huge, annoying hacks have developed.

I checked out via ApplePay on a website by random. What do you mean shipping, email, payment, confirmation are all one streamlined step where no account is needed? This is way better than poorly auto-filling random fields based on name matching.

The other big one is WiFi captive portals with unencrypted connections. Can't there be a more elegant process that passes off to an encrypted connection instead of DNS spoofing? I have to manually type in http://nossl.net when it messes up because most all sites are https.

> Can't there be a more elegant process that passes off to an encrypted connection instead of DNS spoofing? I have to manually type in http://nossl.net when it messes up because most all sites are https.

Which browser do you use? Firefox which I use has captive portal detection. It queries a mozilla provided http web site in the background and if there is DNS redirection, it displays a message.

That's exactly the kluge I'm talking about. I use iOS and macOS and it /mostly/ works. Primarily Chrome on the desktop, but use Firefox for work related stuff and Safari as a contingency. It seems to break on things like expiration (they seem to re-enable the captive portal after an hour or two) or waking from sleep. Some captive portals seem to let through iMessage or email, but block http traffic until you click through--this seems to confuse some portal detection. There have also been different "hacks" around it for decades to bypass it and get full web access.

Most of my personal frustration is around apps. I get an error downloading a podcast or connecting a game so I would fire up the browser because the captive portal handling messed up. Starting a few years ago my go-to domains started https by default so I took time to seek out http-only domains because it still comes up.

Assuming that all worked perfectly, you still end up with an unencrypted connection. I'm just kind of amazed that with all of the big players implementing this stuff on the client side; Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, and on the server side AT&T, xfinity, Gogo, and any other chains plus Google on both sides deploying to Starbucks and authoring Android. Nobody seems to see this as a problem.

I'll believe it when I see it. As of now, counterfeit products are the biggest reason I avoid buying things on Amazon. Not sure how I'd be convinced in the future that that should no longer apply, it's difficult to regain that trust.

Surprisingly one of their corporate values is "earn trust" with the exception of all these products they sell that they aren't responsible for. Hopefully this announcement is representative of a meaningful effort to establish that trust again.

They already have done it with Apple.

Counterfeit products do seem to be a real problem. I've also seen an obvious rise in CD/DVD sets where there seem to be slight marks on some of the discs when opened, as if it's a returned item that has just been resealed.

The worst in recent years is their packaging, though. They just don't seem to give any thought at all to putting multiple items of very different sizes in one of their larger boxes with nothing but a bit of tissue paper and a feather to pad it. It turns up having been sliding and bashed all over the place on the journey, with book pages bent, electronic devices potentially damaged internally, discs loose in their boxes after a clip snapped and covered in scratches, etc.

This must be hitting their bottom line by now. I know we stopped using them for anything important, fragile or time-sensitive a while ago. They're still convenient for low cost, sturdy products or for ordering single books or discs/boxes if the order isn't time sensitive and can be returned if they pack it badly, but that's about it these days.

"Amazon.com Inc. might need to spend billions of dollars in the future to prevent the sale of counterfeit goods, expired food or dangerous products on its platforms to preserve the customer trust that is critical to the company’s future, Amazon consumer chief Jeff Wilke said Tuesday."

As the ancient Spartans would say: "Might."

When I was living in the states I was surprised about the sad state of e-commerce there. I was used to e-commerce sites like bol.com and coolblue (local giants) in the low countries, which have a thousands time better service (on all levels) than Amazon, or basically any webshop I tried in the US. Of course, there's also just better consumer protection rights in the EU, but the above mentioned websites go way beyond what's required by law.

Personally, I find browsing amazon impossible simply due to the widespread mis-categorisation of products. It seems that suppliers just chuck everything into inappropriate categories in the hope that it gets them more views. This renders the platform useless for product discovery, and suggests that you might as well be searching for the product elsewhere. It also gives me the feeling of rummaging through a bargain basement shop, rather than the higher value store that I think Amazon used to be perceived as ( vs e.g, ebay ).

When I interviewed at Amazon a couple of years ago (for a team on the retail side of things, this was their bread-and-butter) I raised this very point with my interviewer, about my concerns over the data-quality issues I was having lately with item properties/attributes and miscategorization. My interviewer said the main problem was bad data coming from their Marketplace and other third-party vendors. - he said this is was why they recently (at the time) brought in the great minds and heavy-guns for machine-learning to fix all of these issues - and at the time (2016-2017) I noticed things were improving.

But lately - over the past year or so - I've seen things getting worse - I'm assuming because the problem of well-meaning but ultimately inadequate data from Marketplace sellers is now solved - but what remains is fighting bad data from intentionally incorrect metadata from malicious third-party sellers seeking to game the system - which we see today in spades with counterfeit sellers, for example.

Amazon's data-quality issue mirrors Google's perennial black-hat-SEO problem - I think it'll keep their teams occupied for decades at this rate.

(This is why I want to work on self-driving cars...)

> (This is why I want to work on self-driving cars...)

This is why I’m skeptical (as much as I’d like not to be) about self-driving cars. Black-hat SEO, intentionally incorrect metadata, it’s why we can’t have nice things and it will impact self-driving cars as well.

Perhaps Amazon are concerned that if they do not intervene, the legislature will make them liable for what they sell, and have supposed that this way is cheaper.

I've never quite understood how they aren't already liable for what they sell under our normal consumer protection rules here in the UK, at least for anything under FBA. They present themselves as some sort of marketplace, but since they're the ones taking the money, they're the one supplying the products, and they're the ones you communicate with if necessary, I don't see how they aren't also on the hook for all the normal obligations any merchant has under these laws, regardless of any legal weasel words they might include in their terms. Maybe they are and I just haven't come across any relevant examples of legal actions or regulatory interventions yet.

Legally they aren't. They also sever the link that lets you use Section 75 to force refunds of defective goods.

Legally they aren't.

I understand that they take that position. What I'm asking is whether it stands up to a substantial legal challenge. Both Parliament and the courts in England (and the EU, for that matter) have historically taken a fairly dim view of attempts by merchants to exclude liability, which is why various statutory rights can't be contracted away by consumers for example.

Almost all other such operations hold the seller and marketplace responsible. I really wonder how Amazon gets away with it.

I really wish someone would pour billions into saving the real Amazon.

I know I'll get down voted; However, it's just honestly how I feel at this point.

It’s about time

I'd also like to see Amazon go after vendors that ask absurd prices for used merchandise. Predatory pricing is simply not acceptable. The highest price for a used item is often several orders of magnitude greater than the lowest price. Their strategy is simple: once the item sells out at more reasonable prices, the only vendor left standing will be the predator.

You're using the term 'predatory pricing' in a non-standard way. Predatory pricing is the practice of pricing low (sometimes lower than cost) to drive competitors out of business. But you seem to be using the term to refer to pricing _high_, which is the opposite.

In any case, why does it matter if a seller asks a high price for something? If you and I are unwilling to pay the price, no one will force us to buy the item.

Are you also against people placing very low bids for items you're selling on eBay?

Merchants sometimes try to gouge customers by raising prices greatly when supply is constrained temporarily, such as during a natural disaster. I thought the term for this behavior was 'predatory pricing', but perhaps I got it wrong.

Predatory pricing is actually when you price products really low and undercut everyone.

Isn't that a standard arbitrage mechanic? They're providing a service by storing and stocking items that the general market has decided are not worth producing more of, and people are willing to pay more for certain odds and ends.

It would only be predatory if the items were produced in insufficient quantities on purpose to specifically make money on the arbitrage mechanic, which isn't sustainable for any serious business who wants to maintain its reputation.

It seems like a valid strategy, and I'm failing to see how it's predatory. Could you elaborate?

The problem is when it becomes absurd.

A few years ago one of the big dryer sheet brands sold an adhesive bar that you stuck to the inside of your dryer. So instead of throwing a dryer sheet in with each load you just changed this bar every six months.

It sold for about $7 in the supermarket, until it was discontinued. Then the only place to get it was Amazon, where thanks to crazy algorithmic pricing it ended up being over $1,400 the last time I checked.

The supply curve shifted, and hence the price moved along the curve. If the demand curve also shifts due to the new price being too high, then the price will once again go down.

The solution already exists, without any outside forces. If the seller prices too high, they won’t sell, and if they want to sell, they will have to lower their price.

Vendors do that so they can track pricing over time. Unless you have an actual listing, Amazon provides no mechanism to see when your competitors re-price their listings (without regular scraping, of course, which Amazon frowns on).

So if it's a product you would list (but currently don't have in stock), you can just list it with an absurdly high price, gather pricing history, and once you do have it available, list competitively.

Thank you that’s very insightful, and explains a real world effect that previously made no sense.

Why bother listing something at an absurd price? Because of the side-effect of it granting you access to pricing.

There’s always the option of not buying something if the price is too high?

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