A foreign seller has hijacked my Amazon Klein bottle listing
kleinbottle.com
kleinbottle.com
First, I deeply appreciate that so many on Hacker News have come out for this. Enough to awaken me from a sound sleep on a Tuesday evening!
I don't really care that much about selling Klein bottles over Amazon - it's mainly to reach parents over the holidays. But I do wish that Amazon would do something about this kind of thing.
Finally, I"m very low on stocks of glass Klein bottles. It's weird for me to ask my friends not to buy the things I've worked so hard to make, but I guess I'd better. I hope to have more manifolds in mid to late summer.
Warm wishes all around,
-Cliff (way late on a cloudy Tuesday evening in Oakland)
I immediately went to my school librarian and said I wanted to try to connect computers together, or try to dial-up to library information services, etc. We started learning together.
You were a huge inspiration, thanks.
Here is a bootlegged youtube link--it's the best I've got. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGv5BqNL164
A legend!
https://www.amazon.com/KGB-Computer-Me-VHS/dp/B00004Y50L
https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B000JLM0RQ/ref=atv_dp...
Next time I am in Hannover will have to take a photo in front of the flat. It got a repaint though...
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.371627,9.7208921,3a,53.1y,13...
"The Cuckoo's Egg" - Pag 35 (on my edition)
Hmmm - I seem to be agreeing with myself. I tend to do that, occasionally.
Googled him there and he's listed as an astronomer. But the astronomers consider him a computer guy ;)
Brilliant read.
I deeply appreciate the kindness and support of the hacker community - sends me back thirty five years to when I was fooling with a Unix workstation and stumbled on a small accounting error. Back then, I was surprised by the outpouring of help, suggestions, and collaboration from other computer folk.
At this moment, I again thank this community -- across decades and across the globe, I'm heartened and happy to be one of the gang.
Warm wishes all around,
-Cliff"100% success at removing ACME (Klein bottles) from some kids, parents, even works on some websites!" -Cliff Stoll (He did not say this, its a joke!)
Do you still use the RC mini forklift for storage? I've always thought that seemed like a lot of fun.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/
Strangely, I had that very page open on my three dimensional computing device last night and it was still open just now.
This Must Mean Something.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08YWM31V4 by "Brand: Cradle & Dew"
"Kleinverse Exquisite Glass Klein Bottle, Handmade Math & Science Education Vase, Mobius Strip Glass Display for Gifts, Geometry Decoration & Theorem Glass - Collab with Mr Cliff Stoll" $74.90 + shipping
How linked to you is this ? Are these just reselling your products or are they independently made ?
Edit : In the description it states "These Klein bottles are proudly designed in Singapore, The Garden City".
Anything that can be done to get these people off of amazon?
And, about twenty minutes ago, I ran out of large Klein bottles. It'll be September before I can get more, what with shortages of borosilicate glass.
A friend recommended it to me as a “beach book” and I bought it not knowing anything about it. Best beach book ever.
Until someone showed up on amazon and sold it too, they just copied it and printed it themselves.
The copied book is identical, cover and all, images in the Amazon listing too ... Amazon chose to do nothing.
Fraud.
I remember when people used to (heck still do) get worked up about Walmart but those same people not only order from Amazon all the time, they even join B mans private club (Prime).
Honestly, all the stories in this thread make me very glad I canceled my Prime subscription. I still use Amazon occasionally, but now most of my purchases go direct. With the exception of books; there I order from my local bookstore.
My opinion, not legal advice.
Does that matter to the police? Surely police reports don't have to include the name of who you think caused you some injury.
The police are never going to bother trying to seriously curtail online fraud. There's a reason why so many scam calls try to trick vulnerable people into paying them with iTunes gift cards and Google Play gift codes. Even with the added friction and blatantly farcical nature of the scam they find it more profitable to try and get the funds that way. They undoubtedly lose plenty of victims who might have been tricked into sending it through Western Union, mailing cash, or a cashier's check. They're paying a steep price to funnel it through the app store between the platform fees and whatever they pay the merchant that's laundering the funds for them.
They do that because they know that Apple is never going to try to claw back funds and the police are never going to force Apple to return the money that's still sitting in their accounts. You can call Apple 30 minutes after giving the scammers the code and without fail "oh sorry, the funds are gone!" https://i.imgur.com/oijXbLD.jpeg
That's the status quo, the courts are your only remedy here and you're going to lose trying to sue Amazon over a fraudulent seller. Best case scenario you manage to get Amazon to identify the seller and find out they're in a foreign jurisdiction and for all practical reasons untouchable as far as legal recourse is concerned.
Lower level courts seem to agree with them, although one such case has been fought all the way to the Supreme Court[2].
[1] https://www.lawfareblog.com/herrick-v-grindr-why-section-230...
[2] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/diversity/women/publicati...
I don't know who can fall for this in my case but I'm sure if they can they have probably done this at scale. When I search in Amazon I see a lot of results with wide range of prices so I'm sure some people are just counting on showing up on results, users being "lazy" and arbitraging the difference between their listing and the cheapest vendor.
Amazon will still get paid whether they sell the real book or a knock off, either way. It's not like a small time author has the resources to actually do something about it in court.
I refuse to give money to a business that behaves the way Amazon does.
Hot ziggitty!
Cheers, -CliffYour Amazon problems would be solved with a regular USPTO trademark. They don't recognize common-law trademarks because they are heavily arguable in litigation.
USPTO is a database of trademarks already scrutinized by trademark attorneys and government. It's not perfect, but it is a collection that Amazon recognizes.
You can do this for $2000-ish and never think about it again.
then GS1.org for barcodes
Now you can sell your bottles in museum gift-shops!
Because Amazon's system is insane unless you realize it's designed only for the benefit of the corporation, not for any kind of fairness or quality.
Seems likely they are now the #1 seller of counterfeit goods globally, by a decent margin.
Why would Amazon merge the reviews of that product with the reviews of the authentic, high-quality, reputable Chinese vendor's actual product?
Why does Amazon allow a "color" to point to a product from a completely different seller? Why does Amazon allow product aliases at all?
Until about 5-6 years ago the changes Amazon made almost universally made their service better and more pro-user convenience/efficiency. Since then it's really become a nightmare. I realize they are being abused by scammers who are scheming every way to subvert the system but as a technologist familiar with web tech and distribution, it's clear there are some anti-consumer experience issues which Amazon could fix but is choosing not to.
For example, allowing vendors to list alternate "versions" which aren't really the same product at all. It makes it harder to tell what the star rating averages are for the version I actually want (and I have to sort reviews by version which is only accessible on a subpage. Frankly, I'd rather they just go back to one listing per product. Yes it's less useful for a hundred different sized machine screws but it seems like a major source of these issues.
Then there's the nightmare of letting different sellers sell on the "same" product listing. Crap clone products flit in and out contaminating the integrity of reviews because a shoddy version slips in but only from one seller out of six or seven.
As someone who deals with them everyday, do you think they are NOT doing some of the things they could to stop these issues due to strong incentives (Amazon makes more $$$ allowing users to be frustrated), or do you think they are sincerely doing what they can (within reasonable costs) to solve these chronic issues? They used to understand that accuracy and transparency ultimately yield more sales (even if lower for an individual product). I'd like to believe Amazon didn't change their ethos from the early days, but...
Thank you!
-CliffIt's a little outrageous that a 3rd party can come take over your storefront without any avenue to challenge.
The problem is in Amazon's storefront, and there millions of sellers are operating in the same space, so doing some due diligence is required. If Cliff could just seize ownership of his storefront from a thief, why couldn't a thief seize it from Cliff? The solution is to register a proper trademark.
Like it or not, the world is messy, and it costs to keep it clean. Registering a trademark is like buying locks for your home and vehicle, and buying soap to wash your clothes, and changing the oils in your machines.
There really are no polite words to describe business practices.
Stop buying from Amazon. Quite easy actually.
There a software company running a software market, all the power is in there hands, and they choose to do nothing.
This leaves small hobby stores like Cliff's with no practical defense against scams like this if they've only made a few thousand in profits through amazon sales, especially if they don't have that cash on hand (and suddenly lose their amazon revenue stream!)
Like it's easy to say "well you should have trademarked your product" after the fact, but very few people have even heard of this scam when it happens to them.
The alternative is anarchy, and much more expensive then filing for a trademark if you want to sell in the marketplace. Like insurance, everyone that wants to be in the market pays a little, so that it makes it easier to avoid something like this.
- 2 pack scammers that sell someone else's product as a bundle, but it costs more to buy the 2 pack than it does to buy the real item twice.
- Listing swaps, where someone will take a commodity listing with lots of reviews and change the listing to sell overpriced broken garbage
- Counterfeiting or extreme product cheapening after a listing receives recommended status
- A mountain of fake review schemes now including this.
These bad actors don't contribute to the Amazon market. There's little reason not to ban them for ToS violations.
These bad actors are optimizing for sales, and Amazon benefits from each sale on their marketplace. Their actions result in more money for the bad actors and for Amazon alike.
It's a similar situation to VC-funded social media platforms turning a blind eye to bots and automation early on because bot activity increases growth and engagement metrics, both of which in turn can increase the platform's valuation in future funding rounds or an IPO.
It'd be daft for them to not be curbing this!
My older relatives generally assume that Amazon will have the best prices online for everything despite that not being the case for 5+ years now.
They're counting on customers like my relatives and yourself not changing their assumptions or habits.
In either case, or even in the case the was a seller legitimately infringing on a valid trademark, Amazon should not be reassigning reviews from one sellers product to another seller under these types of matters. How in the hell would that be beneficial to Amazon shoppers?
This post is my own view, not legal advice, and unrelated to my employment.
It also creates bigger questions about Amazon’s brand/trademark practices vis-a-vis forum selection where registration fees and criteria are minimal and rights are liberal.
Assuming it was successfully filed, actually returning the marketplace/reviews to OP would actually be more troubling…in other words Amazon would be willing to take the marketplace/reviews from a legitimate Trademark holder with an earlier filing date and give it to a legitimate Trademark holder with a later in time filing date from another jurisdiction.
Disclosure: I’m a lawyer and have actually represented a client that registered trademark A, sole the product on Amazon, then Amazon began selling a competing product with a similar (not identical spelling but pronounced the same) name they successfully trademarked B, ironically the USPTO rejected our clients trademark for C on the basis it was “to similar to B” whereas the USPTO never found B was similar to A. The difference between A and C being addition of a logo to the word mark.
Trademarks are published for opposition for this reason, right? Client could have filed an opposition against the confusingly similar mark during the opposition period and it never would have ended up in that situation with trademark C. Monitoring trademarks posted to the Official Gazette is an extra burden but important if your brand is valuable.
If someone is squatting one's trademark you can still sue them with an unregistered mark, and perhaps crucially if they're using Amazon then Amazon should be up for contributory infringement.
This is not legal advice and represents my personal views only.
No the United States Patent and Trademark Office is not a database of trademarks.
It has one, though.
A wealthy corporation (person) should pay more than the poor, or little enterprise.
I looked into a patent a few years ago, and couldn't justify even the fee at the time. When I had disposable income I was ready to patent, but I was too late. A corporation with over 60 patents beat me to it.
How did you go about designing it? Was it fairly organic? Or did you have the full plan from the beginning?
I want to buy your books, but suddenly I don't want to buy them through Amazon, is there a better website for me to buy them from?
Also, if anyone is unaware, this is this Clifford Stoll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll - who wrote this brilliant (and true) book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book) - which is a really good read and perfect for HN.
Sounds like most of his predictions in it (eg e-commerce will fail, digital books will not be viable, etc) were wildly off the mark - but were any prescient?
For example, he complains that nobody will want to look up information from computerized databases because CD-ROMs are too slow; consumers won't shop online because they can't pay securely; retailers won't rely on e-commerce because too few customers have Internet access; nobody will want e-books because you can't read them on the subway; there's no way to effectively search for content online; digital art will never surpass clip art and crude photoshops; it's impossible for networks to be secure because data and credentials are unencrypted; and so on.
On the bright side, he thinks that at least nobody will need to worry about online privacy, because it will be too cumbersome for anyone to effectively maintain databases of personal information.
But on the other hand, with some of his observations, it's at least arguable that they still hold true 25 years later:
> Anyone can post messages to the net. Practically everyone does. The resulting cacophony drowns out serious discussion. Online debates of tough issues are often polarized by messages taking extreme positions.
> An original IBM PC, now over ten years old, is fully obsolete. Likely, it will still work perfectly and do everything it was build for; after all, the silicon and copper haven't deteriorated. But you can't get software for it any longer.
> A word processor may last two years before the next version. These upgrades likely add as many new bugs as are patched, and result in a bigger, more complex program. One that's less and less compatible with old files. [...] Curiously, as computer hardware gets faster, programs run slower.
> Photo retouching isn't new. Digital image processing, however, can be so extensive yet undetectable that it undermines the foundation of photojournalism -- that seeing is believing.
But he was right about tech will enable and amplify the worst in social behaviors.
Do you have a caching service in front maybe?
The blogs that go down here typically back every request by MySQL (ahem, WordPress) which is totally unnecessary and often actively harmful since MySQL has very low default total connections allowed.
The point being: don't serve requests backed by a database unless the results are likely to change very dynamically!
The only difference between this and adding a cache is that the cache is another piece of software in your production stack.
Vanilla SSGs are so simple I ended up writing a basic one out of a markdown and jinja parser in Python every time (for example: https://github.com/eatonphil/notes.eatonphil.com/blob/master...).
If I were not lazy I might learn one of the major ones like Hugo.
It doesn't matter what SSG you pick, they all produce the exact same kind of thing.
WordPress is not my favorite thing and some of the available plug-ins do terrible things with MySQL, but the problem is not too low default connections; it's too many PHP workers. WordPress is generally focused enough that most of the wall time is spent in waiting for the database, so you want to optimize for throughput; one or two workers per cpu thread is plenty for that. More concurrency than execution available reduces throughput, so it's better to queue requests in your http layer than to process multiple at once.
Large numbers of MySQL connections are more appropriate when the web pages do a mix of things, but more/mostly idle DB wise; in that case, you might still want persistent connections to reduce round trips before a query, but are less likely to have a query backlog large enough where task switching overhead becomes significant.
But the point was to make a comparison to a Raspberry Pi and emphasize that you do not special compute to withstand thousands of page views. Even S3 and GH Pages are overkill in terms of the compute behind both of them vs. what you need minimally.
Yep. Cloudflare is out front, so the actual load on the rasp-pi is mitigated by their content-delivery network.
Then, too, my website is almost entirely simple html with compressed images, so there's not a lot of bytes to shovel.
Here in Berkeley/Oakland, Sonic.net has strung quality fiber-optic, so there's 1Gbit to my house. That lets me keep up with things. However, they only give a dynamic ip address;, so my pi must keep track of its address and tell Cloudflare whenever it changes.
Works surprisingly well - from /top/ I see about several dozen simultaneous users (thank you!), and the cpu temp is about 2 degrees above its normal of 50C
The raspberry pi itself is in the crawlspace under my home, fed through a Ubiquity edge router. Much fun, playing with Unix (oops, I mean Linux) -- sends me back to days of yore when everything happened from your command lines.
1. I met you in Kepler's when Silicon Snake Oil came out and we talked about something and you wrote in the inside "I hear you, John". I don't know what we discussed!
2. I am now Cloudflare's CTO and if you want to avoid the dynamic IP address problem you can use Cloudflare Tunnel to connect to us (rather than us to you). https://www.cloudflare.com/products/tunnel/
And that Kepler's talk? Happy memories, indeed. They "paid" me for my talk by saying that I could have a copy of any book in the store. I chose the Times World Atlas (a way-big book of maps). The manager's face suddenly dropped -- and then I told 'em that I'd pay full list price if all of their employees sound sign the book. Result: I now have a terrific atlas of maps, with a dozen signatures of book people. (two of them visited me last year and I showed them their signatures from decades ago -- very sweet!)
Meanwhile, I gotta send out some of the tsunami of Klein bottle orders. But Cloudflare tunnel? Here I come!
My needs are very similar to Cliff's. I have (or going to have) a home server on a residential ISP which can't accept incomming connections. I need a public-facing server that will return from the cache if I'm ever on the HN front page or my home server is down, TLS handling, and routing to my home server's port 80 when needed.
I mostly serve personal websites but I have aspirations of building a small business. Is there anything in Cloudflare's range that would work for my kind of needs?
Hoping you follow-up on nine-day-old threads, Bill.
2. We literally announced free tunnels for all customer here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/tunnel-for-everyone/
And I will double up and say it is a great episode of a great podcast.
https://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_the_call_to_learn?l...
I'd prepared a 1 hour talk. When I was about to go on stage, they told me that I had only 15 minutes. So, well, I remembered one of the few things I learned in grad school: talk fast and don't give 'em a standing target.
Covered my points and finished in, yep, 18 minutes.
I still have the hat. I no longer have the bottle as I moved to the other side of the world a number of years ago, and after inquiring with some mathematician friends it turned out that four-dimensional glass bottles are not compatible with three-dimensional backpacks :-/
When I got the package it was covered in hand-written notes; gosh, I don't remember what it said exactly, but it was hilarious; somehow you even managed to put some joke in Dutch on it. I wanted to email something back but I was shy and didn't know what to say. So, about a decade too late, thanks! Not only was I very happy with the bottle, the packaging absolutely made my day all those years ago.
Thank you for what you do.
Here's a video of him describing how the Curta performs arithmetic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OynMJB-2J1o — as well as the SciAm article he wrote on them: http://www.mycurta.com/Calculator.pdf
I still don't understand how it works. Why can somebody owning something called "Amvoom" claim something called "Acme Klein Bottle"?
An even if they legally own the brand, how keeping the reviews when moving the brand to the new owner is the proper thing to do for the customers? By definition, the reviews are for another provider. I don't get it.
I really hope I'm wrong though because this sounds like a very lazy and flawed system.
That's how you make $100B, not by "doing things that don't scale" like handwriting thankyou notes to every customer.
Out of interest, is it publishing companies that make digital versions of books, or is it up to the author themselves to do that?
(And if it's the latter this is a small request to Clifford to consider it if it's not too much of an arduous task. And provided their relationship with amazon isn't too soured by the current situation, which I could understand if it is).
I wonder what would happen if someone at Amazon pulled on this thread and not only solved Cliff's problem but also the root cause that enables this kind of product hijacking.
Anyone expecting any other behavior from utility maximizing entities is naive?
The root cause here is organizational failure from disempowered employees. At one point Amazon had great customer service with empowered represenatives. That's not Amazon today.
Depends entirely on how much the sellers are selling. It’s entirely possible they like the idea of making a ton of sales for a bit. It’s not their reputation that gets destroyed.
It can be if that's the side effect of a system designed to make selling as frictionless (and therefore lucrative) as possible. Thence, greed could be the root cause, if not the proximate cause.
Just read the thread on the previous occasion where listings got hijacked on their own fora [0] - its sad to see the sellers so powerless, helpless and just left to themselves.
You really have to wonder why they even bother...
Edit: also, reading that thread you can also get a feel why big brands have completely left AMZN as a platform (like Adidas, Birkenstock are a few i'm aware of).
Possible co-mingling of inventory, hijacked listings... no, just don't bother - of course not each and everyone is a heavyweight as my 2 examples - but do we really need 100s of dropshippers FBA'ing the same crap? I'd rather buy direct at the source than at Amazon these days.
[0] https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/review-manipulatio...
At least that way they could trace the people who were seriously poisoning the co-mingled well, in circumstances where they wanted to.
https://sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/external/G2001414...
> Note: Amazon ensures that the initial source of the commingled units can be traced throughout the fulfilment process.
The linked FAQ goes into slightly more detail.
If I order 2 of something and they come from different sellers, and one is fake, how would they know which was which? Or that I selected the correct one to return?
Or if someone orders only 1, but recieve it and return a different one they bought from aliexpress.
Knowing that returned items get sold as new, it seems like the problem could compound, especially if the same item gets returned and resold multiple times. If it's a bad fake, that seems more probable then not.
Small is beautiful! Stay small!
- from the guy who in September 2000 bought 16 klein bottles since you only charged for prime numbered bottles, and sent you his credit card number as the sum of two 16-digit numbers sent to different email addresses! I still have a beer mug and question mark; all the rest are with friends! <3
How sad - they didn't have to get better, everyone else just got a lot worse by comparison.
As I understand it, the actually e-commerce was still OK. It was more a problem with discoverability.
They seem to want it both ways. They have simultaneously tried to argue that they are not responsible for third-party sellers and blame them when fake and/or unsafe goods are sold, but then they work hard to make it appear that everything is coming from one place. It gets particularly annoying when it's a product with lots of variations (colours/sizes etc) where each variant will be a different seller with different shipping.
As near as I can work out, their business model is now based on your being able to send back completely wrong or broken things they've sent you, so I stick to stuff where I've got the luxury of going through a cumbersome return process if things go terribly wrong.
My address has also been used as a target for a scam where, by sending unwanted goods to a real customer, a seller can fabricate a fake review that counts in their system as real. In one case it was a garbage light (shipped directly in its retail packaging so I could see what the thing was) that by a strange coincidence was the top-rated light on Amazon. Clearly an exploit that pays off.
I stopped (I think) that behavior by returning some unsolicited packages to sender, at the post office.
I'm pretty much down to a few books, video games, and obscure fasteners/hardware/tools (which annoyingly they're just about the only good source for).
Recently I needed some vinyl siding hooks[0], a really oddball size drawer slide, and replacement window springs. I ended up getting all of them on Amazon - even tracking back the manufacturers they seemed to exclusively sell on Amazon.
0) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083TPKJN1/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdb_im...
Kind of a good metaphor for how toxic Amazon as a whole is, actually.
They are too big to fail and they can bribe their way out of anything. As long as majority of people don't care, why would they ever want to fix it?
Also for one legit Western company, you can get 1000 Chinese knock-off cheaper ones that don't complain and people buy what's cheaper.
The problem is even once reliable sites like newegg.com are now playing these games. If I wanted the Ebay/alibaba experience I can get that! Why large retailer sites dilute their brand and frustrate customers in the fruitless chase of "being like Amazon" in catering to 3rd party sellers amazes and annoys me.
At least most other sites let you weed out the 3rd party sellers fairly easily. What's really annoying is with Amazon, even if you are buying from "Amazon" it could be ultimately supplied to Amazon by some hackney 3rd party and not a trusted wholesaler or the original manufacturer. And as Cliff Stoll found out, Amazon doesn't care either.
Talk about coasting on your reputation. It will be interesting to see how much trust they have to piss away before it affects them enough for them to finally pay attention to stuff like this :/
And for what its worth, the store experience was totally fine. I'll give them my money again next time I need something tech related.
My wife knows the person who is responsible for this, and tells me that the person who implemented these changes knows exactly what you're talking about because that person had the same horrible experiences with Best Buy decades ago. That's the reason things have changed.
I would call it an anomaly but the exact same thing happened when my sister tried to buy a Switch from them a few months prior.
Amazon seems both willfully and unintentionally incompetent. They have so many strikes against them.
Their prime dark patterns are hostile enough, and I avoided it for years. But I needed a cheap plastic item quickly so I did a free prime trial with the intention to cancel. So I canceled and got billed anyway because according to their rep, on the back end the check box for “auto renewal” was enabled which wasn’t an option my settings screens. Why would it have been? I’d already cancelled and had a cancel confirmation email so why would an auto renewal option still be activated and bill me? It’s willful incompetence.
And their hire to fire practices and practice of churning through warehouse workers is terrible.
This Klein bottle incident just shows again how little they care about legit users or how easy it is to abuse the system.
They made whole foods a bad experience by treating non-prime members as second class customers. I’ve cut back there and now only occasionally buy coffee beans there, and will be cutting back even more.
And now Amazon recruiters started reaching out to me for data science positions. No I am not interested in working for a hot mess that only cares about money.
To be honest, there's not much difference between Prime and non-Prime at Whole Foods. The Prime specials are very few and far between, and usually not worth very much. There are more signs about discounts in the store than actual discounts in the store.
I think the only thing I ever get a Prime discount on is my wife's favorite cheese and occasionally steak. But pre-Amazon, the cheese was $4.99 a package. Post-Amazon, I need a Prime discount to get it down to $6.99 a package.
Every time you hear, "<Crazy thing X> sold on Walmart website!" it's always a reseller, not directly from them.
Because "monkey see, monkey do" is pretty much the go-to leadership strategy for a lot of big companies these days.
Bad managers manage badly. Senior "leadership" rarely knows the meaning of the world.
While amazon is super handy, even food items like can goods are cheaper on walmart, but you have to wait a few days for shipping. Its can goods, theres no hurry, save money and shop around.
Last year I bought a new mouse. NewEgg redirected my sale to a reseller, who sent me a busted, used mouse in a plastic baggie, with cigarette burns on the buttons. After raising a little hell, I got a refund. Basic on customer reviews, I'm not the only person this seller (betechparts, if you care) is scamming. Despite multiple emails to customer support and the NewEgg CEO, this seller remains active on NewEgg.
I no longer trust Amazon or NewEgg to supply non-counterfeit and unused merchandise.
I maintain that Newegg has diluted its brand (and presumably grossed higher) by adding so many third-party sellers. At least, for me, they've held up their product support thus far.
I don't remember. It probably did not have "sold by NewEgg" checked. That my order was going to a third party seller was not obvious to me, the first time it happened.
I've made reluctant orders through NewEgg since then. Much prefer to buy locally, even at a higher price.
How do people manage to figure out such elaborate ways to manipulate Amazon results without getting banned? Getting banned has minimal cost? Poor detection? Inside information?
They don't actually ban the accounts doing this. They only remove the reviews/listings, but don't take any action on the accounts (so they just re-list 24 hours later)
Apparently when Amazon acts, they are just removing the fake reviews, sometimes the whole product but never actually banning the sellers account (even if every product that seller is listing is pumped full of fake reviews)
It seems to be a endless cycle of a item being hijacked or a item filled with fake reviews, then when reported to Amazon they simply remove the fake reviews or the product but don't take any action at all against the seller (or accounts making the fake reviews)
This thread[0] on the Amazon Seller forums is crazy with people finding products that are scam listings (with 10,000+ fake reviews), they report them, the products get taken down, then 24 hours later the same sellers have re listed with more fake reviews.
Amazon simply do not care, if they did they would:
A) Address the root problem
B) Ban the seller accounts clearly manipulating the system.
Amazon is quick to permaban accounts from real sellers, who make a single mistake (sometimes completely out of their control) but are happy to let these fake review/sellers keep their accounts.
[0] https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/review-manipulatio...
Why though? How does this not hurt Amazon long term? What are they gaining from attracting dodgy sellers in the short term?
The marginal edge cases boil down to “power” or “stupidity”.
But the more important point is, Amazon is a must-use shipping provider with a crappy platform. They don't give a fuck about the retail part. They diversified with AWS, Jeff plays with his billions, fights unions, tracks piss bottles, cancels or renews Prime shows, goes to space, etc.. etc.. the site at this point is almost just a cute idiosyncrasy. As long as it runs and the orders are flowing, it's A-OK. Of course there's are probably many teams working on "reforming" it. The NEW amazon.com. The redesign. The refactor. The revamp. The modernization. But all of those are just to keep people working there so they maintain the old behemoth while their project slowly gets put on the backburner (and/or gets scaled down to a small demo page somewhere that no one ever sees or uses).
Fundamentally, it is too easy to sign up as a seller.
They banned my customer account from leaving reviews, though, because I mentioned that I got scammed from a listing I left a review on.
I haven't really reviewed what I'm posting here - heck I can't spellcheck at 12:30 in the morning:
Amazon, through its "Brand Registry" allows anyone with an issued trademark to take over other brands, whether or not the brand is covered by the specific goods that the trademark was issued for.
Brand Name Hijacking takes advantage of several bugs in Amazon's seller business model:
1) Amazon Brand Name Registry allows the owner of a USPTO trademark to take over listings of non-trademarked brands.
2) Amazon Brand Name Registry does not prevent a registered Amazon brand from over-reaching beyond the regulated goods and services associated with that trademark.
3) Amazon combines reviews of different item variations and colors, even though they are from completely different listings and manufacturers.
4) Amazon debits inventory even when an order is cancelled, allowing a denial of service attack to exhaust inventory in a seller's listing, at no cost to the attacker.
Effects of Brand Hijacking:
1) Shoddy or unproven products receive five-star reviews, apparently from several years.
2) Consumers, relying on Amazon star ratings, are grossly misled by the summary reviews.
3) Disreputable sellers are rewarded (at the cost of honest sellers) by large volume sales caused by high ratings.
4) Unscrupulous sellers of reviews receive money from Amazon sellers in return for inflated reviews.
5) Independent sellers on Amazon -- specifically those who have delivered extremely high customer satisfaction -- are locked out of their listings and pushed out of their long term business.
This is why Amazon will eventually be replaced by a company that can do things better, faster, and cheaper.
In fact it seems most of the issues I see people complaining about on HN are US-centric issues? Perhaps all this brand-hijacking is happening over there because of the market size and thus pay-off to do the "dirty" work?
If they made a new article, which immediately gets a lot of 5 star reviews, that'd be suspicious and Amazon would probably detect it.
But if they attach it to an already established article, they can happily add their fake reviews and then detach them again, making it look legit.
Just a theory though.
Getting banned has a high cost if you are a single small business with a long-term decades of time in business as the same company registration.
Because Amazon doesn't care, they still get paid if you buy a real product or a shitty counterfeited product.
In fact, such manipulation can result in increased sales and driving up the price of a product. You're more likely to buy something that has a ton of reviews and purchases, and more likely to pay more money for it if it has a ton of positive reviews.
While this is kinda designed-as-intended (Amazon wants you to brand register with them for protection), this is a pretty shitty dark pattern they put up and sadly it happens as an annoying edge case that existing sellers and customers have to deal with.
Source: me, a mid-sized Amazon 3P seller/vendor.
Edit: "-Cliff Stoll Saturday morning June 26, in Oakland, California. And yes, I am now trademarking Acme Klein Bottle." Looks like Amazon's getting what they want after all.
I see what they are doing no differently than what Steele started with Prenda law. Heck that's probably where Amazon got the idea :p
Many of them autogenerated programmatically like "I love X" shirts, and X = some dictionary list; or bots built to crosslist Target/Walmart product over to Amazon etc. for arbitrage etc.
I hope someone from Amazon has reached out to you Cliff - my wife gifted my FIL one of your klein bottles and it's been an absolute delight going through the purchasing experience with you. Thank you for the joy you bring to us!
Sigh. The usual FAANG bs. Do nothing as long as it makes you money and do the minimum only if it caused enough outrage. No values, no ethics, 100% shallow.
and 6 hours the scammer will be back under another account
For example Anker could have a trademark on "Anker" (the brand) and then claim the "PowerCore III" listing for their battery pack without having to trademark the name of each product.
Since he has common law trademark, why wouldn't that still apply? Someone else is selling via Amazon in the US using his common law trademark.
I've seen that happen sometimes, and always wondered how or why it happened. Like I'll be reading reviews for a USB Memory stick, and the 5 star reviews rave about nail polish.
I've reported these cases to Amazon, but they take no action.
These too big to fail companies need to be split and held accountable!
If they consciously let fraudsters operate, in my opinion they are complicit!
But alas, why bother when you are in such a dominant market position? Of course I could think of a lot of reasons, but this seems to be the mentality.
Basically one oneline retail market participant optimized out almost all competition.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
https://www.emarketer.com/content/amazon-dominates-us-ecomme...
To Amazon's credit, they did move fast and bet big on online retail first. But since it is a low barrier to entry business, there is next to profit to be had in it, so they really do not have an incentive to keep pouring into it. Why bother playing for 2% profit margins versus Walmart and Target and Home Depot and Costco when you can earn 15%+ as a platform.
If people stop using you, then oh well, switch to web services or media which have double digit profit margins, but it is not really a big loss. So I would say the uncaring attitude is due to lack of profits margins, compared to their alternative.
> There are multitude of options to use as an alternative to Amazon.
Network effects still matter. Sellers won't maintain presence on every retail site.
I like Cliff Stoll and have been looking forward to my first Klein bottle purchase for some years now, so I say this without any insinuation Cliff's not telling the whole story: There's got to be more to it than this, right? Can someone really go on Amazon, effectively take over someone's storefront, and completely ransack the place this easily? Because Cliff doesn't have a registered trademark? This seems out of this world absurd.
There was a discussion about selling products through Amazon on The Amp Hour a few months back, and part of the discussion included trademarks as a requirement. They made it sound like a new and expensive hurdle to deal with. Given Stoll's comments, it sounds like the lack of a registered trademark was a contributing factor to his problem. Putting the two together leads me to believe that Amazon is aware this can happen. (From the show notes, it looks like https://theamphour.com/523-a-keyzermas-story/ is the episode in question.)
Edit: for clarity.
And continuing to use those services is giving a vote for those practices to keep on keeping on, and that people still use them? Well, no, it’s not surprising but it’s sad.
On June 22nd, they used Amazon's Brand Registry to re-brand my listing on Amazon (replacing my brand, "Acme Klein Bottle" with "Amvoom") They could do this because Amazon's Brand Registry only respects issued trademarks.
I don't get this at all. Attacker has a trademark on "Amvoom". The word "Amvoom" does not appear in Stoll's product name or description. It isn't even close to any of the words in the product name.
FWIW I fully 100% believe Stoll. But the real question here is why is a "brand registry" allowing product takeovers that don't involve said brand? That seems to rise far beyond the usual Amazon bullshit, to straight-up algorithmic incompetence. How is this possible?
https://hackaday.com/2015/06/24/crawlspace-warehouse-include...
It's my way to cheat the chiropractor. Anything to avoid crawling around under my house.
One view is that Amazon wants sellers to register their trademarks formally with the government, then go through the brand registry process to prevent this.
one-sided?
So I am shopping around for alternative marketplaces for books and general goods. Not groceries - never really fell for that Amazon offer.
Books can still be sourced from Books-A-Million, Barns & Noble, as well as local shops.
If I'm looking for choices for a solution, I'll use a marketplace, but after I find a solution, I'll order straight from the vendor itself
Amazon is on a slow slide to hell. I came to realize this last year. And Prime membership is a large part of the problem. Two issues:
1) It reduces friction so it is easiest to default buy from them.
2) The price on those handcuffs / membership has gone up, a lot, and it is basically a driver to dilute the cost burden via volume.
So cancelling Prime is the key to kicking Amazon to the curb.
You can still use it, for times when you cannot find something anywhere else, but it no longer becomes the default.
I think this is the item.
(but you should actually buy from his website)
This practice has to stop.
Gigantic class action suit is overdue for this fraudulent criminal empire.
This is not to belittle Stoll's work, it might be a model or approximation... or I'm just missing something.
I think Cliff Stoll sells 3D models of Klein bottles rather than the impossible 4D version.
Since a Klein bottle is just a cylinder with its ends glued together a particular way, I think one way to sweep out a Klein bottle through time would be to have a rubber band split into two, then have each band travel along a trajectory that brings them back together with the correct orientation. The self intersection is easily avoided by having one of the bands travel faster than the other.
They'll still meet up again. It'll just take more revolutions to get there. That doesn't avoid it.
First of all thank you for being you. I read about you week ago and then I went into a massive youtube binge of your videos. I had a bad day and needed a distraction and seriously your videos were uplifting, funny, educational and so binge worthy. Great stuff, highly recommended to anyone. Wish there would be more of them.
From ecommerce perspective, don't care about amazon. I wouldn't say that for most business, but I am sure most of the clients buying from you actually know you as it's hard to search for klein bottle without without you popping up. It is first result above amazon in my google search and I would assume most of the sales on amazon were actually coming from people that first seen your website and just wanted to quick checkout.
You're right, of course: As others point out, mine is a hobby-business, and Amazon isn't the best place for it. Still, it was fun having a (small) presence there, even if most of my customer interaction happened through my Kleinbottle website.
Having said this, I'll probably continue this zero-volume business out of my home; the cool thing is how many fascinating people I meet. Just a week ago, a mathematician stopped by and tried to teach me homotopy theory. Good stuff!
Ad astra per aspera? !!
Cheers, -Cliff
I've been using it to buy car parts and it is SO MUCH better than dealing with junkyards (LKQ/Car-Parts websites suck!) and everything that I've got so far including parts from Latvia and Germany have been genuine.
eBay too is full of knock-off trash from China but you can easily tell those apart from a real listing most of the time with reviews being unique per listing/seller. And eBay allows for local pickups too!
Small delights like that are worth serious money.
I love sites that have such a structured categorization of their items. McMaster-Carr is the gold standard IMO, and RockAuto is pretty close.
I needed some brass thread-ins with bolts and they got the job done but now I'm sitting on a minimum sized order of ~50 pieces that I won't be using anytime soon. Maybe I can resell them eBay. Hah.
Want this weird thread bolt? Here's a power plant certified 2mm bolt for $75 each.
I've had over 200 amazon orders last year, didn't have a problem with a single one of them. Few times I wanted to return something they either sent a courier to collect it from me directly, or just refunded me anyway. And few times I ordered from somewhere else(urrghhh.....Currys) the customer service was absolutely abysmal. I'm just not brave enough to order from anyone but Amazon nowadays*.
*here in the UK, understand the American Amazon is far worse for <reasons>
I now buy a bunch of stuff from AliExpress because at least they don't even try to pretend that (most of) their products are crap. When I want something cheap and don't care about waiting a month, I go there to get it directly from the source.
And that’s exactly where Amazon is super difficult to replace. The current competition is not other online retailers but coordinating with my wife such that she can look after the kid so I can go sit in traffic for an hour to get to the store and grab a couple of things we need for some quick home repairs, etc.
I know what I'm doing tomorrow if I can afford to wait for a delivery. What will I be doing on a random day next week? next month? Less so!
Just as Manufactures have shifted to JIT for many parts on the production line, other business processes have as well.
In other cases I've gotten clearly opened/used items sold as new, e.g. woodworking tools.
It is true in sometimes unexpected ways. For instance some sellers just don't care about notifications; it might be because they usually work with professional buyers who work on a long timescale ("I need it for this quarter") and will contact the seller on a regular basis if they care.
Some sellers just don't want to deal with you. I had a "mom and pop" for who my business wasn't really a priority (well, fine), sent me random junk after misreading my order, and it was a PITA to sort the situation.
Basically, going out of Amazon (the new Alibaba as you say) is also returning to the Wild Wild West. There is no real choice than to deal with both, but god is it a pain.
- it's way more fun through my Kleinbottle website. I've customized my checkout to what I sell. When there's a problem, it's easier to contact a buyer.
- I can show any amount of information on my website; Amazon has 5 bullet points and 1000 characters of description. This, of course, cuts both ways - a quick logical summary helps many people. Long, wordy websites (ahem) can be a problem.
- Amazon provides security that you'll get what they've ordered. Buying through my website, well, some people are scared off by its primitive style and mathematical humor. (well, attempted humor).
- My credit card processor takes a < 3% haircut. With Amazon, it's 12% plus $40/month.
- My customers are my friends. Likely, I'll meet them at a seminar, colloquium, or if they visit the East Bay. I hope they'll remember me by the good service that I try to provide. This tends to be easier when I handle an order through my website.
The bottle arrived broken and we were dismayed. We sent you a careful report with photos of the packaging and the broken bottle (real film photos, that we had to develop and then scan into the computer to produce an email). You were so kind to send a new bottle and even said sorry. I was amazed by your reply and by the fact that people so far away could be kind to each other. It really blew my mind. At the time, in my country, the internet was seen as a really unsafe place were you were not supposed to ever say your real name.
To this day, I keep both bottles you sent as my most prized possessions. The cracked one is actually cooler, and the crack has been growing (you can make the crack grow by pressing slightly with the thumb). In a few years it will break the bottle apart in a topologically interesting way.
I do check every item that I send out -- I hold it up to a bright light looking for cracks - but sometimes trouble sneaks through. I'll do my best to fix things - replace, refund, or solve a differential equation (ODE, not PDE's, please).
You, in turn, have a responsibility to spread the good word -- I hope you're teaching & making this too-mundane world into a better place.
Across two decades, my warm wishes to you.
-CliffI see it not really on the "shopping" experience, and more as you point out because as a buyer I'd need/want way more information than what Amazon will ever provide on a single page, and also because there is a context surrounding the product that is far far away from a "just buy" transaction.
I also see some hobby sites like Bricklink as something Amazon will never be a replacement of. Fundamentally I think specific seller sites are needed.
As a customer I find it infuriating, and it feels as though it has been made more difficult over time to read the reviews for just the selected product.
I suspect that many transactions on Amazon simply would not happen if customers were better informed about what they are buying. I have no doubt that this is true across retailers – just think of all the things that have been hyped and sold that end up in garage sales barely used. It's far more common to see crap with five-star reviews than something great with three- or four-star reviews.
The feature kind of makes sense for purely cosmetic changes, like color – but even then it would be useful to have information about the actual variant.
I don't think this is some UI problem. I am quite sure it could be solved very quickly by showing reviews for the selected variant first, and then making it clear that other reviews are for other variants.
There is a way of somewhat mitigating this merging feature: Don't just look at aggregate review scores. Read the lower-end reviews. If the flaws are petty or expected, then that's great. If your variant is the worst of the bunch, you'll find out. But even with all that, it doesn't sort the takeover problem in the article.
It also knows that positive reviews have a huge influence in increasing sales, and negative reviews really dampens sales. This is why Amazon also allows what I call Product Page Hijacking.
How this works is, Amazon allows multiple models or variants of a product to be listed on the same page, so that all their reviews are mixed together. This deceptive practice hoodwinks many customers. There are 2 kinds of product page hijacking - somewhat obvious ones and the really sneaky kind.
Example of a somewhat obvious one - https://imgur.com/OfZLUeL - here, one product page actually lists multiple router models that have different features and configurations. While it is a bit obvious, the buyer still has to carefully read the reviews to figure out what model the review is about.
Example of the sneaky ones are products that only partially list their model number, and list and sell slightly different variants of model under a single product page.
E.g search for "TP-Link WR841" in https://dd-wrt.com/support/router-database/ - there are 9 variants of the same model (in essence, 9 different models) that are differentiated by a version number (v9, v10, v11 etc. after their model name).
But instead of creating a product page for each variant - "TP-Link WR841N v9" or "TP-Link WR841N v11" or "TP-Link WR841N v13" - only one product page is created under "TP-Link WR841N" and all the variants are sold under it. The variations in the models are sometimes not minor - some of the variants have a higher RAM and even totally different CPU! Since all the variants are sold under one product page, the reviews posted are actually for all these different variants. But the buyer will often have no idea of that. And they may not even receive the product they think the reviews are recommending!
This is why they need to merge listings into 1. It is also why there is soo much fraud on Amazon, and I dont believe they will ever fix it, the logistic costs would make Fulfilled by Amazon unprofitable if they had to stop mixing stock
The way the service works, is that you the vendor will ship your products into a amazon warehouse, other vendors will ship the "same items" a amazon warehouse, all of these "same items" are mixed together in the inventory system, your account is has a credit of "X items" but not the specific items you shipped in to the warehouse
Example
Acme Vendor shipped to amazon 15 Logitech MX Mouses
Evil Vendor shipped Amazon 15 Counterfeit Logitech MX Mouses
When amazon gets the mouses it take all 30 and puts them in a big box, as the orders are filled even if you ordered from Acme, you make get one of the one Evil shipped into Amazon
Of course the real problem is the counterfeiters have no problem starting a new vendor every few weeks or even days, so the damage may already be done by the time the reports come back.
Amazon taking action against the vendor, and consumers blaming the wrong vendor.
When you order from Amazon Marketplace you can clearly see who you are ordering from, even if Amazon shipping the item. Consumers getting a bad product will then no only review the item but the seller with negative feedback even though the seller they bought it from may have done nothing wrong
And then they added a feature where if multiple marketplace vendors are selling the same thing it combines them.
And a third feature lets you classify items as various colors of a product (but the same product - think blue vs pink socks) and all the reviews get combined.
So if you do all three in the right order you can change anything to anything now, even taking another listing.
Disagree. They should do what Apple does for App Store reviews. Reviews of the latest version only, with other reviews as “background” data.
I'd also like to see a feature where established customers ($x bought over y time) can flag an entry as suspect--an entry gets enough flags and a human looks at it. If the entry turns out to be suspect everyone who flagged it gets a bit more flagging reputation, if it's wrong they get a bit less. The more flagging reputation you have the more your flag counts towards getting a human to investigate.
It's more the other way around. Initially you could only sell something on marketplace if it was something Amazon already listed, usually a book. There would be an option on the Amazon listing to buy it elsewhere and if you selected that there would be a list of non-Amazon sellers you could buy the book from - these would normally be individuals reselling books they had finished reading.
Alibaba is much better than Amazon about seller verification. Look up, say, "PC power supply". On Amazon, you're lucky if you get the address of the seller and a product image.
Alibaba gives you multiple detailed pictures of the object, including its data plate. You get the full address of the seller, and whether it's the manufacturer or a reseller. There's usually a picture of the factory, info about their annual sales and number of employees, whether that's been verified by a third party, how fast they usually respond to inquries. Sometimes even what production equipment they use. What certifications they have and who does their certifications.
Many of those companies will accept an order for one unit.
They could stop it, but presumably it stops reviews being “lost” which helps support their sales.
What I realised is that it was just a dependency because it was so easy to search for and buy stuff. Nowadays I'll buy from a smaller shop if I need something, but it's more likely that I think "do I actually need this?" and say "no."
I use their store delivery option if I'm buying certain groceries or items I need ASAP. Yeah I need to tip - but I consider it me saving gas money/time.
Wal-mart employees don't get tip workers minimum wage. The cost of their service is already priced in.
The only difference is that it's more explicit it comes from doordash when you use Walmart Groceries.
So I think the major hurdle for other businesses is getting a reputation for prompt and free return acceptance if they want to sell things sight unseen.
This is especially true for larger and more expensive items (like electronics) where - I can not stress this enough - it is much, much better to buy directly from the company (I'd say 95% of all companies now have d2c shops on their websites).
It used to be the case that Amazon had an advantage in customer support and returns. I feel this is no longer true. I bought an expensive electronic item from Amazon and, when it broke, I send it in under warranty (in the EU, the first six months are essentially no questions asked repairs). Amazon send it to a third-party repair shop that send it back to me without any repair.
By contrast, I had to replace an item from a large consumer electronics company, which I had bought directly with them. They sent me a new one __before__ I had sent in my old item, and the new box included the shipping label to send back the damaged one. Much easier!
Beyond all this, it's obvious that Amazon is now home to fake and faux products. It is my view that the only product worth ordering there are cheapo China duplicates, for a price where you will be okay if they break after one week of use.
Otherwise, go with the supplier. It perhaps takes more than a day to ship, but often it doesn't. You can return any item for any reason within two weeks (in the EU), and damaged items can be returned within warranty anyway - usually with less hassle.
So folks, please stop buying stuff from Amazon if you can help it. As this - and countless other instances - has shown, Amazon is no longer worth supporting, for any reason.
For international returns they don't have labels, you need to pay for shipping, and they supposedly reimburse up to $20 shipping fees but I have found no evidence of an actual process in place to claim it.
(I had to return a book because they sent me a hardcover loosely packed in a box, from the US to Canada. Of course it was damaged in transport. For a place that started out as a book store this is really dumb. I re-ordered it from Chapters, who packed it properly.)
Whereas Amazon basically doesn't care about the inventory it ships and your only choice, really, is to use the return policy to actually get what you want.
I'm in the UK so I enjoy some solid consumer rights (at least for the time being). Plenty of online retailers ship return labels and packaging with your order, should you need to send something back.
The consumers are in the position of primitive people in front of their gods. They have to come together and pray for gods to notice them if they want wrongs to be righted.
It would be better to solve this through legislation.
Agree. Our family has nearly weened ourselves off of Amazon. We do still buy from there occasionally, but for most things we don't.
This. Most of the time now when I buy from Amazon it feels like buying from a garage sale / flea market. Some examples from my purchases -- 4 pack of AA Eneloops arrived as 2 AAs and 2 AAAs; 2 identical office chairs arrived as 2 different models; Simple Human trash can arrived with 3 softball sized dents in different places; Spigen phone case arrived with some sort of tiny worms/maggots inside a corner of the packaging; Clorox antibacterial wipes arrived in generic packaging containing dry wipes. Porter Yoshida backpack arrived as a similar looking Herschel backpack in the same color.
I remember buying from Amazon and getting solid products really really fast; not sure where that's gone. I do use Amazon for the free Whole Foods delivery and that's been OK, though there's very lax usage of temperature-safe packaging for dairy and meat products.
What do you expect from a company who has an automated system to fire employees, and they're notified if the discharge through an app on their phone?
There main objective is volume.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-28/fired-by-...
What a trash company.
They literally are!
Any one scam might be defeatable, but "scamming exists" seems to be true in any marketplace with enough participants.
And so many companies from so many industries use them they're effectively boycott proof: https://digitaldimensions.com/blog/big-companies-who-use-aws...
It's common that automated decisions with no human contact cause situations like these; probably most of them go unresolved because the victims do not have the clout to arouse a mob.
Corporations have a monetary incentive NOT to resolve these problems.
It's time for regulation. The market has failed.
The vast majority of them don't actually work, this is why those sellers rely on scams. It's almost impossible to know which ones do online.
Source: girlfriend and family experiences.
Though keep in mind I didn't have any huge, dried out aged blackhead to worry about, & those would be impossible to remove without some extraction.
Stay-at-home parent? Oh, but your note brings smile to this tired astronomer's face...
"CORONA VIRUS: I've ordered everyone at Acme Klein Bottle to work from home. Of course, I'm Acme's only employee, and this is my home business. "
https://www.amazon.com/Adafruit-2769-Circuit-Playground-Educ...
$99.99 "Adafruit 2769 Circuit Playground Express Educator's Pack"
https://www.adafruit.com/product/3399
$350.00 "Code.org Circuit Playground Express Educators' Pack"
https://www.adafruit.com/product/2769
$99.95 "Circuit Playground Express Advanced Pack"
Then I looked closer at the Amazon listing, thinking it odd that Adafruit would confuse the product label. I see that it isn't being sold by Adafruit. So somebody is apparently buying one product from Adafruit, relabeling it on Amazon as a much more expensive product, and misleading buyers. And that's a generous reading.
I'm not pointing this out as a warning that it can happen. I'm pointing out that I didn't pick this product to illustrate this point. I picked a random product to illustrate a different point, but ran into this. Granted, this is a uselessly small sample size, but sheesh!
One moral of this story: Always buy direct when possible. Never buy through Amazon if it can be avoided.
It irritates me to find a vendor who offers a product cheaper through Amazon than on their own website. That encourages the exact type of abuse seen here.
(I'm not ripping Adafruit for doing this. Of the pages of products displayed by Amazon when I searched for "sold by Adafruit" I didn't find any evidence that Adafruit even sells on Amazon. Lot's of other people--including Amazon--sell Adafruit products on Amazon. Somehow they can meet or beat Adafruit's price. Have to wonder how many are legit.)
I'm also moving away from Amazon ordering in general because it takes much too long to sift through all the fake reviews of Chinese-made garbage to find the fake reviews for the Chinese-made good stuff.
It goes to a not found page.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0UGfjt...
I'm guessing because it contains the string "ID".
Not a "blackhead" remover. I'm confused. Is that not Cliff's bottle?
EDIT: Apparently it has been fixed. Still, WTF, Amazon?
Thanks Cliff & Greetings from Germany
Cliff seems like a great guy, and I hope this gets resolved for him.
But second sentence in the listing:
> Like a Möbius strip, this Klein bottle has only one side. In addition, a Klein bottle has no edge - the connection from "inside" to "outside" is smooth, and the bottle has no lip.
Is proper descriptive.
To me “foreign seller” implies Amazon sellers/buyers has some sort of national context?
Note: I do feel bad hijacking happens in Amazon.
For live chat as a seller, follow these instructions from Amazon's Moderator: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/wheres-live-chat-s...
However thanks to this Hacker News article, three Amazon employees have contacted me, with varying degrees of success.
As of this moment (around 4PM Pacific time on Wednesday30 June), my listing has been 404'd ... I'm unsure if I will be able to recover the reviews if I rebuild it. Or even if I can rebuild it.
Most of all - thank you to my friends on HN. What a bright spot in an otherwise weird situation!Amazon reviews have all but become useless as a result. Perhaps one of the least trustworthy corners on an increasingly trustless internet.
I have not bought anything from Amazon for several years.
Just stop.
B&H has been a godsend for tech, especially since there's no tax with their card. Crutchfield/Headphones.com has been great for speaker and audio gear. West Elm has a consistently premium quality for kitchen, home, and furniture items (though furniture is a story of its own, with even better vendors.) Walmart/Target/BestBuy have been good for everything else.
If you're too lazy to figure out yourself which products are quality, Wirecutter, NyMag, and Consumer Reports all perform unbiased testing of multiple products in almost every product segment I can think of.
And for simply next-level quality, nothing beats DIY. Personalize the final product exactly to your specifications, choosing the highest quality or even custom-machined parts with zero cost cutting. Requires time and passion, however.
That said, if you care about quality/stuff you buy a lot more than I do, Amazon is a pretty terrible place to shop most of the time. I've encountered this when I want to buy nice stuff, for example a nice and expensive wooden desk. Seems like that's pretty impossible to do on Amazon, as cheap garbage seems to be the name of the game.
Wait, explain this for me?
I could fill up my cart, but had to come back later to do my purchase.
https://gothamist.com/news/bh-photo-workers-strike-on-may-da...
If possible use Adorama or some competitor.
https://m.jpost.com/diaspora/new-lawsuit-claims-b-and-h-disc...
My close friend is been sued for ridiculous reasons by ex-partners. It already costed him $750k in legal fees,and although he is very likely to win the case, it’s expected to take another 2 years before the case is resolved, at which point he will be allowed to file for recovering his costs (easily anothe couple of years).
They've been proven to discriminate, in a court of law. I'd give this new lawsuit the benefit of the doubt.
I wonder why so many forum users frame statements they want to make as questions which challenge innocent comments.
As in, "Why are you getting heated? I'm not condoning [whatever], I'm just asking questions."
I’m not sure why people are reading too much into my honest question.
It’s an amazing retail space. They have this awesome overhead rail system for delivering goods, and their checkout resembles customs at an airport (a bit disconcerting).
Also, I loved B&H when I was seriously into photography, and even if the closed days had been a practical inconvenience (they weren't, IME), it would've still been worthwhile.
Speculating... Maybe something in the culture of dutiful adherence also helped them to provide such well-respected service at great prices? Diversity is good.
Similarly, building the e-commerce machine obviously can't be done on the sabbath, but if it's already running then you're not actually working.
For example, suppose you push a rock off a huge cliff. If the rock tumbles for a full week after you push it, were you pushing it off a cliff for the full week (including the sabbath)? Or did you only push it the one time on a tuesday?
Sure, it’s a minor annoyance, but compare that with the nontheistic amorality of Amazon and their everything-goes train wreck of a marketplace (worse than eBay at its worst) and you’ll understand why I only buy my computers, electronics and photo gear from B&H.
It's also my understanding that it's kosher for gentiles to perform actions outside of the constraints of the rules of Judaism, like turning on/off fans on behalf of those respecting the rules of the sabbath.
As with any religious practices, there’s a wide spectrum of how people follow or don’t follow the doctrine. There’s no shortage of Rabbis who have haggled over the fine details of how they apply to modern society, like your elevator example.
Personally, I like the idea of aligning and adapting the general intent as opposed to rule hacking, and it’s neat to leave that cultural stamp on the business (at some cost, I’m sure).
Don't be fooled by the glitzy showrooms and "made in America" promises of quality, this chain sells essentially disposable furniture. When we were expecting our first child 7 years ago, we moved from an apartment to a single-family home. We wanted to also upgrade from IKEA and equivalent to proper furniture. I bought some heirloom pieces from Thos. Moser (a dining table, two end-chairs, a coffee table, a rocking chair and two foot stools) but they are quite expensive, and we got many other pieces from Room and Board: a queen bed, nightstands, two dressers, six Thatcher dining chairs, Pisa leaning bookshelves, side tables and a coffee table with rounded angles). Unfortunately after 7 years the furniture turned out to be much less durable than I expected. The finish on the coffee table is worn and ugly, the bed required extensive work even though we only use a mattress, no boxsprings, and the spokes on the Thatcher chairs are coming unglued. A proper Windsor chair like the Thatcher should have "through-holed and wedged" construction that ensures the spokes don't move. The Moser chairs have that, of course, and in retrospect I deeply regret cheaping out. I could have bought 2 buy-it-for-life Moser chairs for the price of the 6 Thatcher chairs that are now essentially kindling. To add insult to injury, Room and Board refuses to stand by their product and are refusing to repair them. In the Bay Area, we've had good luck with Hoot Judkins furniture, which are better quality for the price (not all though, they have a wide range that goes from meh to Amish-grade).
We have Carl Hansen & Son dining table and chairs, which is a considerably more modern look but still very solid (noticeably more so than most DWR stuff), but again, $$$$ and a special order from Europe that took ~16 weeks.
Let's hope they don't go the marketplace route while chasing growth. Shopping on Amazon feels like late 90s eBay, guessing whether or not the seller is going to screw you.
Has that become any better?
I'm already hearing complaints about how B&H "isn't what they used to be" because they're selling much more than their original scope of audio visual equipment.
I would also add rtings.com; they do a great job of documenting their process and the results themselves from their reviews with incredible detail.
Back when Walmart started and everyone was all about "wow, their prices are great!" and nary a mention of their quality. I realized that Walmart was going to do the same thing to groceries.
Without re-invigorating the UCC with stronger consumer protections so that the "costs" are born not individually by consumers but by the market maker who pushes an inferior product, I don't see it getting much better.
I used to buy a lot of cheap things on there, then something interesting started happening. Every time I made a purchase on there, literally a few weeks later, I would start getting fraudulent charges on my card. Thank god, my bank would call and ask, "Are you in Paris France right now? Someone just tried to purchase 3,000 euros worth of clothing on your card."
I haven't bought anything on there for about 5 years now and remarkably as soon as I stopped buying stuff off of their site, I have yet to have my cc number end up on some carders market and deal with getting a new credit card.
I also did some research and found out many, many, many people have had the same issues with bad charges showing up on their card after making purchases on that site.
I'd like to have that service back.
Buying things from ax was great for me as someone with EE as a hobby.
The most efficient way for the customer to compare the relative value of two products is for the quality to be factored into the price exactly, with all externalities realized up front. But how to design such a scheme that isn't instantly gamed into oblivion is unclear to me.
It's like the value we're looking for is the depth of it's "truth", if you grant me poetic license to use that phasing, but that definition is not specific enough to be actionable.
As an example, let's say your jurisdiction decides to make the following requirements on the manufacturers of food refrigerators;
1) The refrigerator must have a working lifetime of no less than 10 years from the date of sale, when maintained per the manual.
2) Repair parts for the refrigerator must be available for 20 years past the date of the last sale of the refrigerator to a resale outlet.
3) Information on the serviceability and repair of the refrigerator must be available to any party for a reasonable and non-discriminatory cost.
Those regulations say nothing about how much you can charge, how you manufacture it, or how you differentiate it from your competitors, they just make a requirement that the person who buys it can rely on it for 10 years and that if it breaks you must repair or replace it to give them the full 10 year lifetime they expected when they bought it.
What that does is force choices in design, manufacturing, and materials that reduce cost at the expense of expected lifetime back on to the manufacturer. As a result they gain no advantage by using cheaper stuff that fails more readily to get a cheaper price to "undercut" the guys who make the 10 year refrigerator.
I like your example. So lets consider a refrigerator manufacturer that builds a great refrigerator design, with all the investment in R&D, documentation & service manuals, parts reliability, supply chain and inventory procurement, customer service, continued improvements due to to market and long-term customer feedback, etc that one would expect if they were aiming to make a reliable long-term product as you describe. The business produces a good product and provides good service for a fair price, and they grow a reputable brand and loyalty from their customers as a result.
Consider some scenarios:
Scenario 1: After some time the owners come to retirement age and sell the business to the highest bidder at, for example, $100 million. The new owners promptly 'reorganize' the business, slashing costs, selling assets, eliminating continued investments, and generally cheapening the product. Meanwhile the outside world is none the wiser, and thanks to a buffer of brand loyalty they keep selling the cheaper product but at a massive comparative margin. In 2 years they made back $300 million which they smuggle away by cutting dividend checks or paying themselves for some bogus "consulting" services or something else just as tepidly but still technically justifiable. Another year later the consumer protection agencies finally come knocking (the government isn't fast) and find the whole place either liquidated or dilapidated, clearly unable to fulfill their warranties, resulting in being sued or fined into bankruptcy. The supply chain of parts even for the original product, some only 3 years into their 10 year warranty dries up. The newer cheaper product is in an even worse state. The purchasers are long gone but doing great, having milked the reputation of the business and its customers of a neat, net $200 million in 3 years. Customers get a $10 check in the mail thanks to a class-action. Remaining employees have to find a new job.
How would you describe what happened? And how could it be avoided? I'm skeptical that the regulations you mentioned or similar could help here.
Scenario 2: Using the professionally produced and well-maintained specifications, service manuals, and product design, an international company reproduces the same refrigerator design, but since they can skip all the overhead of creating such a great design and documentation they sell the product with a razor thin or even negative margin at an overall 30% lower price. This drives the original refrigerator manufacturer out of business, enabling the international company to capture the market and raise the price again to extract value out of it. Perhaps they maintain parts inventories but they invest nothing into continued evolution of the design and cut corners on customer service and it dies slowly. Customers of the original design are out of luck, and the new company's product is just slightly incompatible enough with the original design that parts don't work and customers are instructed to just buy a new one.
What happened in this case? Is this even a negative story that we should try to avoid? If so, how?
Amazon is a gambling company. People buys things with the hope that, this time, they are getting a bargain. And, as any gambling company, the customers will lose in the long term.
But, people gets addicted to gambling. Maybe next item, maybe I will do a smart purchase. The more randomized the experience the more irrational the consumer.
I prefer traditional business that follow regulations and are subjects to my country laws. I used Amazon when it started, because they had a great recommendation engine for books. Even that is now a shitshow that offers you what Amazon wants to sell regardless of what you look for.
Amazon works as intended, and that is terrifying.
p.d.: People is not lazy. It is just that most people are not experts on the products that they purchase, and they are already spending a lot of their time working hard and taking care of their families to add another ten hours of investigation to purchase a pair of shoes.
Perfect example is how I don't buy anything Apple on Ebay anymore. WAY too many fakes, stolen or misrepresented stuff on there now. Hard to get away from all the Chinese resellers there either. I just buy directly from Apple. Yeap, its going to cost a little extra, but I can take comfort knowing its not going to be a fake or get something that was completely misleading in the listing.
It’s incredible you can have one tiny part delivered within hours for free. I feel bad doing that though, so I always try to cluster my orders just to be nice to their delivery people and the environment.
Within a couple of months they changed the policy to $75 minimum for free shipping. There are also fewer delivery slots today relative to demand
Wirecutter says “our writers and editors are never made aware of or influenced by which companies have affiliate relationships with our business team.”
And elsewhere on the site: “The reputation of Wirecutter and its parent company, The New York Times, rests on our vigorous reporting, editorial integrity, and avoidance of actual or even perceived conflicts of interest.”
Are you saying this is a lie / outright deception?
And, fwiw, they indeed still review & recommend Anker changers; see this review where the #1 choice is currently an Anker model: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-multiport-us...
We don't have that much need for "free" shipping on cheap Chinese products, and the convenience of the Amazon marketplace is now counter-balanced by the inconvenience of sorting out the fake goods and fake reviews. We are choosing sellers' own marketplaces when we can these days, and just dealing with longer and paid shipping.
Additionally, we are finding that Amazon Prime Video doesn't have so much that we want to watch anymore either, and we are paying for multiple streaming services anyway.
I just cancelled my membership, for all of the reasons you cite. I had been letting my membership ride only because of their streaming video, but recently, they've started yet another dark pattern.
I rarely finish a movie in one sitting. Three times in the past month or so, I've started watching something for free, and then come back to find that it was no longer free when I wanted to finish it. Like, the next day.
Most recently, this was Freakonomics. It was free when I started it, then I hit the wrong button on my Apple TV remote (THAT'S real hard, amirite?), and when I went to restart it, it had become for-cost. I mean, seriously?
I can live without their exclusives, and the standard defense around here that they're not, actually, a monopoly for online shopping is certainly true, so I'm done.
https://trofire.com/2019/01/28/scumbag-jeff-bezos-to-lose-bi...
https://www.grunge.com/143621/the-dark-truth-about-amazon-fo...
there is a lot more but I am tired. we should all boycott/avoid using Amazon.
It's a larger and more interesting question than whether these captains of industry are good or nice or healthy. You can assume they're not trustworthy and then go from there. Hell, all of crypto is based on the idea that people aren't trustworthy: not a big stretch to take that literally and assume that business operators aren't trustworthy.
"Please don't fulminate."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Regardless of how you feel about $Bigco, plagues on planets, psychopaths, and similar rhetoric makes for bad HN threads, and we're trying to avoid those here. Thoughtful critique is welcome of course.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27685624.
"foreign" is provincial and kinda racist. "foreign to who"?
Is a seller in China foreign to a Chinese person?
Is a seller in Nigeria "foreign" to a Nigerian?
Is a seller in the UK "foreign" to a British person?
Will this make headlines in the broadsheets, The Washington Post in particular?
https://uspto.report/TM/90721592/FTK20210522113954#3
From the filing
244 Fifth Avenue, Suite V284
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646-785-1788(phone)
domee.zhong1@gmail.com
SECONDARY EMAIL ADDRESS(ES) (COURTESY COPIES): dmtm2020@outlook.com
Attorney Detail Report as of 06/30/2021
Registration Number: 5054689
Name: XIAOFANG ZHONG
Business Name:
Business Address: Not on File
Business Phone: (917) 819-2798
Email: xiaofangz@hotmail.com
Date Admitted: 06/19/2012
Appellate Division Department of Admission: 3rd
Law School: Temple University Beasley School of Law
Registration Status: Attorney - Currently Registered
Next Registration: Nov 2022