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Comment by libertine | Hacker News Reader

Like I said in other comment: this is all Amazon doing, and their inactivity towards reports of what clearly was, and is, bad practices.

Amazon basically became a rigged marketplace where those who thrive are the ones who can get away with a lot of things. From completely disregarding guidelines, TOS, targeted attacks to destroy competitors listings, you name it.

It's just like prisons, people go in and come out worst because that's the game that has to be played in order to survive.

The only one to blame is Amazon that promoted these practices by giving leverage to those who did it. With more revenue, more exposure, privileged access to Amazon account managers (yes, talking to a human is a privilege for an Amazon Seller).

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Games without rules and referees degenerate into brawls.

Similarly, open markets require regulations, enforcement, fair and impartial judiciary (tort), and property rights.

Fraud and counterfeits spoil markets. Lowering trust. Increasing transaction costs. Poorly regulated Freedom Markets™ like eBay and Amazon are net negatives, even while a few thrive on the chaos.

Buying from Amazon used to be just as legit as buying from Best Buy, Circuit City or Walmart. They sold the same types of products, but Amazon with its no-sales-tax advantage usually offered better prices and more selection.

Then they got greedy and decided to turn the site into Aliexppress US.

The joke used to be that Best Buy was just a showroom for Amazon. That is definitely no longer the case.

I'm genuinely grateful that Amazon has at least pulled those and other even smaller stores into an age of much easier online ordering and delivery.

Definitely. At the time, though, I was 100% convinced Amazon would just put them all out of business. Our choices would become Amazon or Walmart, depending on whether we wanted to have something right now. I'm glad I was wrong.

It's funny though, we were talking about this at dinner the other night. Both my wife and I are still a bit surprised that we'd trust Walmart quality over Amazon at this point. We don't buy anything from Amazon with the expectation that it'll last, or that it's even real - just things that we'll use lightly and nothing we'd eat (minus Prime Now for Whole Foods delivery now and then). Amazon feels like some weird amalgamation of online Walmart + Harbor Freight.

> Then they got greedy and decided to turn the site into Aliexppress US.

Because physical retail is a single digit profit margin business. It might not even be worth their time anymore now that they have AWS and Prime Video.

Walmart’s market cap is $400B and they have to do a ton more work managing a customer facing business on top of all their warehouses and logistics and website.

Amazon has a 1.75T market cap, without even having to deal with physical stores and customer interactions liabilities that come with it. They already have to deal with all the negative PR of paying warehouse workers less than their other employees…even though they pay more than other companies for warehouse work.

I would be surprised if Amazon would bother entering retail if they had already had AWS and Prime Video. It might be worth the 15% commission as a platform though, but I suspect that’s why I see less and less “shipped and sold by Amazon.com” and more obfuscation of what is and is not coming directly from Amazon.

I disagree, Amazon has been pushing and growing Amazon Basics brand, among many others, leveraged by data from all the other sellers.

Remember that retail gives you a lot of cashflow, and Amazon only allows you to transfer part of your funds, and transfers are made every 2-3 weeks. They probably have more money sitting around then many banks.

Walmart has even more cash flow. It’s not worth much, compared to other business lines, according to the market.

At the end of the day, a sub 5% profit margin is still a sub 5% profit margin.

I don't know what you are talking about :-)

If you know exactly what you want and can find that from sellers on Aliexpress who actually know what they are selling,

and put that in clear english language on there, everything is fine. If there is any vagueness, which is not resolvable by

messaging/mail/chat, then I don't order.

When I ordered with the above conditions met, I never had any trouble. Also fast delivery by air to *.de.

edit: That was for electronic parts, boards, development kits, measuring equipment, and some tools so far.

Don't know about the other stuff on offer there, but I'd guess it would be the same.

The problem is the knowing and the sometimes horribly translated descriptions there,

which make it look like alien gibberish.

Apart from that I'm thinking it's mostly the same stuff, not even 'bootlegged', just directly from the source/ODM/OEM,

while the usual 'high-quality' stuff just has a different label on it, and it is the greed for that label/brand which enables

countless middlemen/upsellers/marketeers and their shady schemes.

This is even more so with taobao/jd. You need a proxy like superbuy but sometimes I'll find a product which costs X at the "root" on taobao/jd costs say 1.3X on aliexpress, 1.8X on eBay and 2*X on Amazon. Numbers can be even worse, of course.

For the cases i bothered to look up, i was looking at a 6x increase going from Alibaba to Amazon.

(been looking at automatic soap dispensers, fwiw - after hours of research however i gathered that all are trash and didn't bother to find out if was going to get lucky)

Getting stuff from Alibaba in single quantities though is very very difficult.

I mean... Aliexpress is Aliexpress US - Amazon is worse since you don't expect the product to be counterfeit, a knockoff or completely gamed reviews.

At least with aliexpress that's exactly what you expect, and exactly what you're paying for.

> Amazon doing, and their inactivity towards reports of what clearly was, and is, bad practices

Search for 1TB USB drive, look at the results with obviously scam products. This has been there for years. They do nothing for even the most blatant offenses.

Name an online marketplace that had good quality honest factual reviews before or after Amazon.

At their scale it is absolutely impossible to moderate and keep the problems away. The stacks are against them. Each seller has the incentive to try to game their own product reviews, while AMazon has to attempt to stay on top of the whole marketplace.

Costco reviews generally seem more legit.

Anything I can buy at Costco instead of Amazon, I do.

Costco has a minuscule inventory smaller than most corner stores.

If Costco is selling a blender, it's probably only selling a single one. The fact that it's in Costco's inventory in the first place is the review.

Costco.com’s inventory is larger than what is in store.

But yes, agree. Now we call it “curated”, but with Costco’s return policy, there’s an actual risk to them for stocking outright garbage, which is a huge value, even if I never return things.

Then maybe regulators should put a stop to it, since we're figuring out that after a certain scale customer support, fraud, counterfeiting, abuse, etc just goes to shit.

No matter how much they paddle that AI will take over that part of the business, well it won't for a long, long time and we're not the ones that should be training them.

Maybe the concept "too big" should be brought to the table, to at least make them pay for the bad service.

OK, I generally agree with you about subjects like this. But let's take this one step further. What will the actual outcome of this be if we have deemed that Amazon is too big to be consumer-friendly.

1) Amazon drastically ramps up the burden of proof of real actual reviews, and rather than erring on the side of posting it ends up false-positively identifying customer reviews. HackerNews headline next week: "Amazon is censoring real customer reviews for products! Company no longer customer obsessed!"

2) Amazon dramatically cracks down on sellers, reducing overall inventory, and sucking up some real genuine sellers in the process. CNN headline: "Amazon destroying small family business sellers - hundreds reporting going out of business as they're being driven out of the market". Hackernews headline: "Amazon inventory down x%. I no longer go to Amazon anymore to find what I need because it's not available any more".

I could keep going.

My point is I don't think it's in any consumer's interest for Amazon to decrease their inventory, or crack down on reviews. And any increase in quality or human review of the products or reviews will only raise prices, which again, people don't want.

Remember - Amazon's stock price isn't based on their profits. Their profit margins are razor thin because they actually generally do pass on most cost savings down to customers.

It's incredible how people take completely for granted that there is a website with 1) Infinite selection, 2) Low prices (yes yes no longer the lowest but still fairly low), 3) Free shipping, in many cases same day or next day or 2-day.

And on top of that there is a completely hassle-free non-questions-asked return policy.

The cost of all this is this marketplace is incredibly attractive to unscrupulous sellers who will abuse it to list counterfit goods and spam fake reviews. And no matter how hard Amazon works on these the sellers can be just one step ahead.

Government regulation can't help here, it can only kill Amazon and make it ultimately less beneficial for consumers.

If the cheating competitors don't do you in, Amazon will just copy your product anyway. No way to win.

Blaming player on playing the game.

blaming the game's owner for allowing the game to be gamed.

They designed it for themselves, and some rules are even worse for small successful businesses.

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