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TheSpiceIsLife

Ya can’t tell me Bezos doesn’t know this.

How isn’t this enabling fraud?

Shouldn’t be able to completely change the listing. Versión bumps might be ok maybe?

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I've bumped into this when I went back to buy more.

This was a "Ultralight Backpacking Canister Camp Stove with Piezo Ignition 3.9oz!" for about $8. Now it is some sort of headphone jack. Several things like that, where the product that was previously ordered... changed. Most of the comments for this one are still about the stove.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004U8CP88

That’s egregious. Why is so hard to find any kind of report button on the page (on mobile)? I’d like to at least tick some box saying something is amiss but I can’t find anything.

Amazon does not care, and various reports have shown them actively suggesting it at times.

All Amazon cares about is sales. Nothing else.

They didn’t even change the description, lol

A headphone adapter that has "PIEZO ignition" and "Adjustable flame"... I've come across things like that but assumed they were weird database glitches. Didn't think they were deliberate.

I wonder if that's also what happened to this one, although it's only the picture that's out of place (but also amusingly relevant): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FLGZD46

Are 400GB micro SD cards actually a thing? Am I out of touch.

Someone should weaponise the ability to change the product description to embarrass Amazon in to fixing the problem.

If you make noise they will cut you off and disregard you as a bad actor on their marketplace

Yes you'd want to get a journalist to pick up the story for it to have some impact.

You’d want to do as a collaboration with a journalist, make sure they’re documenting all the details and guiding the narrative.

Yep, they now exist in capacities of up to 1 TB. Also, SanDisk were the first (and probably only) company to sell 200/400 GB microSD cards, supposedly so that they could lay claim to having the highest capacity micro SD card.

https://www.techradar.com/sg/news/this-1tb-microsd-card-high...

>Does not include gas base

But...how do I get the gas base for my headphone jack adapter then? Well, at least it has an adjustable flame.

I believe completely changing the listing can sometimes trigger a review. But most of the times, they change it slowly in separate revisions so it is impossible to detect.

It shouldn’t be impossible. Diff the latest revision with the first. If it’s simply a revision of an existing product, things don’t change that much. If it’s substantially different, it’s simply a new product. Even small revisions of products usually get entirely new product names and numbers. It’s weird to let one product hang around for 10 years and go through several changes.

Hell, don’t let the product name change. Have a base name and an extension that can be appended and edited, with a text requirement for each (eg 12 characters minimum for the product name and 30 characters max for revision extension.) Do something similar with the description content and have a space for product changes/enhancements following an uneditable and mandatory product description.

You’re trying to solve a social problem with a technological solution. The social problem is that Amazon doesn’t want to fix this. What Amazon wants is more sales, and as long as this kind of thing does not impact what they want, it would be a waste of money to do something which would not benefit them. Meanwhile, Amazon is a huge market for lemons¹ which drives out all sellers except the cheap junk ones, while simultaneously being so absolutely huge that nobody can realistically stop selling on Amazon or stop buying from Amazon.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

It’s not that hard to do text similarity tests, but they also don’t need to: simply having a survey or report button would make this scam harder to pull off. You could even toss in a bounty like they do for choosing slower shipping.

Amazon doesn’t because they don’t care. It must not be costing them much money because we know they’re watching the numbers closely.

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