Amazon sellers ‘hijack’ listings to sell face masks despite new rules | Hacker News Reader

Amazon sellers ‘hijack’ listings to sell face masks despite new rules

wired.com

111 pointsdanso106 comments

My favourite is this one: https://www.amazon.com/Dukal-900610-Reflections-Earloop-Plea...

$46 for 100 and the "newer" version is $170 for 50. If you look at the reason for this massive price jump:

"high price caused by 1) price spike of non-woven fabrics, 20K up to 200K/ton, due to capacity issue caused by coronavirus. 2) till now, US custom will block or expropriate large quantity of mask, so we have to ship this product through small airmail package, which 5 time cost of logistic fee vs shipment in container"

I've got a decent amount of n95 (both 3M and HDX HD Brand) masks that we lucked into more than a significant amount of time ago. We are afraid to list them, at any price, because I'm afraid ebay/amazon will kill our listings at any price. I'm ready to ship them for free, of all costs, I just don't want my amazon "privileges" revoked. who do i give n95 masks too? edit: they are 2024 exp dates

> who do i give n95 masks too?

Donate them to your local hospital. Hospitals everywhere are running short on masks and other PPE, and a lot of doctors and nurses are going to die because of it. Italy is already hemorrhaging medical staff trying to stop the virus.

Please do this. I had a few unused leftover N95’s from a furniture refinishing project. I gave them to my neighbor who is a nurse at a local hospital. They’re desperately needed. If “regular” civilians get sick that’s bad, but when nurses and doctors start going down it’s much much worse.

What area do you live in? Like the other comment, best to donate locally and not delay with more shipping logistics. Search #GetMePPE or #PPEshortage on Twitter and you'll find a bunch, possibly where you are.

I'm in the Bay Area & Hospitals are ready to receive (a couple examples): https://vmcfoundation.org/covid19list/ https://www.facebook.com/ingrid.lim.56/posts/101583083580236...

any hospital will gladly take them from you, if they won't try old people care homes

Please donate them to a hospital or senior living facility.

My company does a lot of philanthropy with Children's Hospital in LA, and they are having a major shortage. I would gladly buy them from you to donate there if you haven't found somewhere to take them yet.

Machine learning my foot! I think Amazon has just admitted to the fact that they can't control bad actors from taking over their listings.

> We use sophisticated tools, including machine learning, to combat them, and we are making it increasingly difficult for bad actors to hide.

So sophisticated that some reporter for wired could find them in the top few hundred bestsellers in a few minutes with a quick visual scan.

Let’s be clear: Amazon should not be censoring legal items on their platform. However, their efforts at stopping it are purely a PR matter, not a real effort.

> a quick visual scan

Yeah a quick visual scan from a human is super easy to automate.

Amazon is one of the largest employers in the world. It’s lip service, as further evidenced by the tons of fakes on their website.

https://www.racked.com/2018/1/8/16849298/amazon-counterfeits...

Anyone who wishes, Amazon staff included, can go and see the $10 “1TB” usb flash drives that are just 16GB drives with hacked firmware to report a different size. It takes about 2 minutes to find them. They don’t bother.

The evidence is there if you want it.

Yes: you can give a human the tools and instructions and they'll sit there for ~8hrs a day doing it autonomously.

Amazon literally has a tool for this (Mechanical Turk)

Or just a plain old text search. One of the examples in the article has "50 pcs disposable surgical mask" in the product name.

I just searched that myself on Amazon and got 178 results, and most are at inflated prices.

What's the difference between a platform that censors and a platform that sorts in a useful way?

Ask Amazon; they're the ones who said they'd remove these listings, not derank them. I assume that means they understand the difference.

That's not the question. The question is if you object to a platform having a listing standard, can you at the same time not object to them having a ranking standard.

Because sophistry aside, being ranked 15,000 for "column 298" reasons is the same thing as being removed. And then being ranked by "column 298" is the same thing as being ranked by orangeness or whatever, it's a subjective score.

"sort in a useful way" benefits consumer of information

"censoring" benefits someone else

The easy indicator is an ability to control: you can do "Sort by price" to disable sorting, but there is never a "do not censor" checkbox

It seems to be that a single intern whose only job was to search for prohibited items and unlist them could do better

Really, just use Mechanical Turk. Their inability to handle this is obviously showing they intend to not fix it

For exactly the same reason as you can't report an item as counterfeit on return. They have no intention of fixing.

FWIW, the real reason is that sellers abusing mechanisms like this to create issues for their competitors is a huge problem on Amazon's platform.

You can create hundreds of thousands of listings almost instantly through the API or by uploading a spreadsheet to Amazon. It's not possible for manual review for all of them because of this. That is why they lean so heavily on both automation and armies of cheap contractors.

Suspend/delete accounts (and all listings) for anyone with a single violation.

Problem solved.

And then you'll get the "My account has been banned by Amazon after misclassifying a single listing" posts.

There are two sides to the problem, and changing criteria for suspension just shifts it to the other side.

Yeah, and that side is better so let us get shifting.

Considering the amount of fraudulent reports that already go on with Amazon, this would not be tenable. Remember Amazon Marketplace wants to grow as well. It is also important for big brands to have the ability to create lots of new listings at scale. For example, every year or every fashion season, brands release entire slates of new products. It is important for Amazon to function to allow sellers and agents of brands to be able to create lots of new listings at once. Manual review would greatly delay that process and create a lot of unnecessary frustrations.

A lot of things that one might think of such as "well, whitelist the big brands" or "use enhanced reviews on sensitive, regulated categories" is already built in to Amazon's policies, protocols, and automated systems.

If you want a zero fault option, buy direct from brands. I often do that myself.

So, charge a fee of $5 to add or change a product page, to cover the cost of review. Maybe refund part of it for truly trivial changes.

Or give customers an automatic refund for reporting products sold against Amazon's policies - so any 1000%-marked-up face masks are free to customers.

Rate limiting on the API and the spreadsheet rows, except for approved accounts.

They already do this. You will get flagged for unusual activity if it is not already in your history, much like you get flagged by a credit card company for unusual purchasing behavior. While there isn't a formal probationary period various systems do get tripped more easily for new accounts with no history.

It's possible to do manual review. We've been scraping these product categories and search result pages for the last few days. I was personally able to categorize all of the products we scraped (about 10 thousand) in a half of a day.

They remove massive numbers of products, though. Millions have been removed related to Coronavirus alone:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-battles-counterfeit-mask...

> Amazon should not be censoring legal items on their platform.

Price gouging during a disaster or emergency is often illegal. And I suspect they're violating laws exporting them in the first place as most countries don't want medical supplies leaving just so people can make a quick buck.

They're not legal if they're fakes, most of those look like fakes

> We use sophisticated tools, including machine learning

We do nothing, but to dodge any possible legal liability related to the price gouging. We'll say that we use "machine learning" so we could respond to any critique with "oops, algo is bad, but we do our best efforts" while doing nothing.

This guy got a "hand sanitizer" copper disk (??) listed as an "Amazon's choice!"

https://www.amazon.com/Sani-Disc-GK95D-Cleaner-Wherever-Prob...

Many metals are contact-antimicrobial

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_properties_of_co... -: Copper and its alloys (brasses, bronzes, cupronickel, copper-nickel-zinc, and others) are natural antimicrobial materials.

And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligodynamic_effect -: The oligodynamic effect (from Greek oligos "few", and dynamis "force") is a biocidal effect of metals, especially heavy metals, that occurs even in low concentrations.

You're welcome to rub your hands with a copper disk after going out in public. I'm going to wash them with soap and water for 20 seconds.

Totally agree.

To be fair, this would be a great fidget toy while out in public.

How about Copper-Spinner? Made from organic anti-viral copper. Heals the soul and the hands.

So, you don’t pass the virus on, but he does? And you think that’s a win?

The GPs point isn’t meant as a recommendation for the current situation (SARS-CoV-2 isn’t even a microbe), just an explanation of what that disc is.

I believe copper will kill off this one in about 4-5 hours, compared to the 10+ hours of other materials. Not super useful as a hand sanitizer, but nice to know a copper door handle has a nice longer term self cleaning over shorter time frames.

I’ve pondered lining my entire bathroom with aluminium-bronze sheet.

It keep itself fairly clean!

I looked at this and the problem in practice is allegedly that residue from touching creates a film that cancels the effect. So aside from needing to polish it, you still have to clean it after just a few hours for the effect to work. It also doesn't kill germs immediately, it needs a few minutes to work. It still helps though.

Archived: https://web.archive.org/save/https://www.amazon.com/Sani-Dis...

And here is somone who got a "#1 best seller listing". Notice they say "ma-sk" instead of "mask"

https://www.amazon.com/Breathing-Disposable-Respirator-Activ...

And then there's the "masssk"

https://www.amazon.com/4-Layer-Adjustable-Disposable-Comfort...

I bought an n99 anti pollution mask last year on amazon $9.99 2 filters.

Checked the same listing now, $40

4x price increase? That's ... reasonable? Considering the shortages and that the original price is quite low, I can't even call it price gouging, that's just normal adjusting. That's the level of price increase that would convince companies to up production and people to look into their garage for those few boxes they bought and never used.

Why don’t people just fire up their own domain drop in an e-commerce store and sell these face masks while answering to no one? It should be fairly easy for such a site to go viral given the pent up demand.

What is “just fire up” for you and I is an insurmountable hurdle for most people who use computers, either due to skills or ignorance, and is one of the main reasons that people use hosted, censorship platforms as default.

So this means people like us would have the competitive advantage for these sorts of business opportunities.

Why aren't you doing it and making a killing (pun intentional)?

Ethics? Humanity?

Amazon brings you the customers as opposed to you needing to find them. Many ad networks are banning mask ads due to "price gouging" for political/PR/legal reasons.

True story: yesterday I got a downtime notification for my ecommerce store. It turns out Shopify pulled it down with no warning because their automated scan detected we were selling face masks. We sell fashionable face masks, and it was actually a test listing that failed our testing phase so we never stocked the product or sold them. The price was also super reasonable and would have supported, at most, 30% margins (but in reality it failed testing, meaning the margins were negative).

I am transitioning off the platform and will never use Shopify for anything serious. What a POS company. They seem to think they are running a marketplace when they are actually selling a completely replaceable and somewhat buggy software-as-a-service that treats their customers like idiot children.

They had no idea if we were buying thousands of dollars of traffic per hour and they are lucky we weren't.

Good, let people buy face masks. Better than not being able to find any.

That's not what this article is about. It's about people listing face masks as books or other items.

And then there's the issue of items not being as described, like photos of 20-mask packages, but what arrives are single masks repackaged under unsanitary conditions:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ETU-_paU0AIjwnK?format=jpg&name=...

Indirectly, it is.

These shenanigans are only in place to circumvent the rules the grandparent commenter complains about.

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