Surely the scam doesn't last since 2013. Stop making excuses for Amazon, this isn't acceptable given the circumstances.
There's no scam going on here and bringing it up is just a way to take blame away from Amazon and for what end?
There's no scam going on here and bringing it up is just a way to take blame away from Amazon and for what end?
Amazon are offloading their fraud risk onto random small businesses and the nuance of their platform gives the small business no recourse. In a fair platform, you could resolve something like this pretty easily. I'm sure you agree, but it's worth noting explicitly. It's not a stretch to imagine Amazon are allowing for this "bug" in their support system to remain because it saves them money.
Does it save them money? Maybe in the short term. Maybe even in the long term if the PR cost doesn't hit them at all.
I think as people this is a reason where we need to hold them accountable by pushing our businesses back to platforms where we have more control, and pushing our selling habits back to those same platforms.
I don't think Shopify is ideal, but I do think it's better for both sellers and buyers than Amazon.
How? It seems that Amazon could provide better communication, but how would this situation be easily resolved?
Amazon has two days delivery for most orders. They can quickly get customer feedback (product review, refund, shipping issue). They could even directly question customers "have you received product? Yes/No".
They could easily determine that a vendor is legit if they wanted to, they do not need to hold funds for months.
The purpose of delaying was to prevent fraud and this achieves nothing to prevent fraud, the vendor can just take the loan and run away. If PayPal is confident enough to give a loan, they're confident enough to release some of the funds, but they prefer to force a loan on the account holder and get extra fees?
I don't expect that going well in many jurisdictions. Consider the massive power imbalance and usually shorter legal timelines to close SME payments, that give more weight to the case.
Obviously their service could be used nefariously and they asked a few questions, wanted to see my office and validate a few things to ensure I was going to use it for valid purposes. (I used it to scrape publicly accessible data for research purposes).
Sometimes the low tech, manual human process is the best final filter.
As I said, while I can feel the pain of getting automated replies from a company that owes you a lot of money, I don't think this situation lends itself to easy solutions without a waiting period, even if you involve lawyers. There are circumstances where payment processors will hang on to the cash for much longer than this. Concert tickets come to mind.
What makes it so insane is they still get exploited on both the buyer and seller fronts. Really though the crux of the problem if they want to do this type of enforcement is they just need a better internal policy of expedited processing of reviews for accounts > some age && > amount of held funds.
If they ramped up this current type of "enforcement" to deter fraud it's going to come with a PR cost.
You're implying that the way they're currently doing it is the only possible way to deal with the problem.
They're not a monopoly.
Quoting from an article published in 2018: https://www.retaildive.com/news/amazon-beats-best-buy-as-top...
> 60% of every incremental dollar being spent online in North America is gong to one company — Amazon. No matter what you sell, Amazon is coming for you
Getting the JD to enforce monopoly laws is a whole other problem
But just Fyi, often fraudsters will buy or otherwise gain control of companies with long histories to commit fraud. They do this exactly because you'd assume a company in business since 2013 is legit.
You see the same thing with old ebay accounts, people buy/hack them, suddenly start selling again and when it turns out all they mail is bricks in boxes it's too late, they took the money already.
For tax evasion (and I'm sure also legit purposes) you can buy companies that have been setup, registered and had returns filled for years, and now look like real entities. They're called "Shelf" companies.
Edit: I think they even do it the Sopranos. A guy has big gambling debts, they put a gun to his head and his company maxes out its credit with the bank and all its surpliers such that it will never be able to repay. The money goes to Tony and the bank/suppliers are left wondering why an established businessman ruined his own business and probably their's too.
Criminals are clever and that makes everyone's lives more difficult...