The previous review practice that outraged me was when someone here at HN was producing very detailed analysis of LED bulbs (spectral analysis, etc.) and proving that lots of bulbs on Amazon had CRI and color temperature ratings that were way off.
He then described how he posted that in some reviews and they were all taken down. Which is to say, crummy LED bulb on Amazon with an inflated CRI cannot have a review describing the inflated CRI.
This is a regulatory problem. If Amazon was a corner hardware store it would have been fined multiple times and the owner might well have been jailed by now.
But thanks to the magic power of Internet leverage and the fact that only giant trading blocs like the EU have any power over multinational malfeasance, Amazon continues to do this shit - and will continue to do it, probably even after it's broken up.
If this were a corner hardware store nobody would shop there and they would be out of business.
I second what the downvoted comment said. Not everything is a nail to be hammered with more laws. I find it very hard to believe that existing laws regulating advertising cannot be used to solve this problem.
This is a consumer problem - "you get what you pay for."
If you want to buy something from a retailer that gives a shit about their wholesalers, shop at a local superstore for whatever items your looking for and eat the difference in cost.
> If Amazon was a corner hardware store it would have been fined multiple times and the owner might well have been jailed by now.
If Amazon was a corner hardware store and not a marketplace, they would have been run out of business by all the customers returning garbage and counterfeits they bought from them. But that's not what Amazon is, they're ostensibly connecting buyers to sellers and providing logistics - not behaving as a retailer that selects their wholesalers and manages their supply chain besides getting shit from point A to point B.
What Amazon shouldn't do is have it both ways, either they're an Ebay-esque digital flea market where everything is buyer-beware, or they're a retailer who is responsible for the garbage on their shelves. They don't want to be either, and if there's regulation to be had, it should focus on that difference (as well as regarding their own products - you don't see flea markets driving their merchants out of business by stealing their products and undercutting their prices, while stores can stock generics alongside their curated shelves).
It's pretty clearly not the case here. I've paid full price for what I thought were legit items on Amazon and received fakes.
That's the whole point, the whole "free market" thing only works if the consumer has access to all the relevant info about the product they're buying. On Amazon more and more there's a distortion between what the consumer thinks they're buying and when they actually receive.
>What Amazon shouldn't do is have it both ways, either they're an Ebay-esque digital flea market where everything is buyer-beware, or they're a retailer who is responsible for the garbage on their shelves.
I completely agree with you here and I hope that it'll bite them in the ass in the long run. I'm definitely a lot more cautious of the stuff I buy on Amazon now that I was 10 years ago.
Amazon itself claims to be "customer centric" because customer trust ensures sales go up in the long term much better than short gain of abusing the customer relationship. Look at this very thread for more evidence.
Maybe if you didn't need an army of lawyers fighting bureaucracy to found the tiniest company a competitor would already have beaten them. Maybe that's why Amazon feels it can afford this kind of business practices. Your intentions are good but your solutions are not.
How long are you willing to let the free market try and solve it? It seems like the free market has been solving this for, what, a couple decades in Amazon's case?
It seems like the free market is the problem here, and just continuing what's already been tried is going to give us more of the same results.
or, it could in fact be a result of "free-market competition", e.g amazon being afraid of loosing sellers to competitors and they are afraid of punishing them *
* i have (not at amazon) witnessed this first-hand, so its not outside the realm of possibility at all
Jeff Bezos is one of the richest people on the planet and Amazon is gigantic. When exactly is this "free market" solution supposed to start working?
Guess what, same price per can plus exorbitant shipping cost on Amzn. Came out to ~$5 a can and I had to buy 4 or 12 at a time. It just didn't make sense. I left a polite review that said as much, and it was rejected. :D
The truth hurts I suppose. They should be interested in the information however, because it cost them and continues to cost them sales among the clueful.
1. https://support.ce-check.eu/hc/en-us/articles/360008642600-H...