Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

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> I don't think most people here have any idea 3P/FBA selling works. It takes a lot of work to get listed and move into new categories, and you can be removed very quickly for the slightest of reasons. This goes to show the scale of the problem in policing logistics at this scale (not to say that Amazon shouldn't be responsible for it).

I am not new to 3P/FBA myself. I ran a store in my college days 2010-2012, and know number of Alibaba, and Amazon employees who were directly involved into managing vendors.

Among Chinese vendors, there is a very ambivalent attitude towards Amazon. People know that Amazon is at a times can be n-times more profitable than an analogous listing on Aliexpress, or any other smaller platform, but at the same time an extremely zealous enforcement is a giant turnoff to proper vendors.

Nobody who is ready to play "by the rules" goes to sell on Amazon among Chinese vendors because you can spend tens of thousands of bucks invested in the store for it be deletes without any questions asked.

Add to that that better vendors will not be bothering with creating shell companies, or using fake IDs to get Amazon verification. This way, Amazon has driven off the few proper vendors from China they had, and now they have to deal with fly-by-night, quick money types as they are the only ones who are ready to tolerate this treatment.

Yes, this is what ended my side-income gig buying / selling used CD's.

I half think that its almost racketeering by amazon.

Lets suppose you go thru the work of finding low volume CD's...mainly from one-off bands that no longer exist or only had a single release. Then you establish an ASIN for each CD, eventually some fraudster appears and list under your ASIN (thanks to co-mingling of inventory). Once a 'fraud or counterfeit' charge is brought against that other seller, amazon 99/100 invalidates the entire ASIN.

So your inventory, although legit is now held captive by amazon in their warehouse. So they send you a nice little email that states: You can either pay us $4 to send you back your CD or you can "allow us to dispose of it for you".

That last bit is the real punchline. They will then proceed to sell your CD and keep 100% of the money. They routinely farm their sellers using such tactics.

Sorry, I'm a bit naive in this area. How easy is it really for a Chinese vendor set up a shell company and build a fly-by-night business to compete with a legitimate seller who has to spend a considerable amount of money? Especially if they are only able to snipe a few sales away from the legitimate company before getting deleted?

For those who do this at a scale, very easy, and they can snipe far from just a few sales.

As far as I understand, on Amazon you don’t have to compete with legitimate sellers anymore: many of them are simply gone.

If you are a legitimate seller, you want to be able to communicate with store representative. You want to be able to trust that the store wouldn’t suddenly pull the rug from under you without human contact. You don’t want your products to be displayed alongside fakes. It may be considered wiser not to engage with a store that lacks all of that.

Meanwhile, for a fly-by-night shady seller risk and uncertainty is par for the course, so they would remain and scout for new ways to game the system.

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