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Comment by algoshift | Hacker News Reader

It's disturbing to see that this is an all-too-common pattern with the large internet companies. Stories abound of companies like Google, eBay, PayPal, Facebook and Amazon closing down accounts with what I would characterize as "violence". No explanations. No recourse. No way to reason with a human being. The approach seems so "anti-internet" that it is hard to come-up with justification for the behavior.

One argument is that they have to deal with so much fraud that they have no choice but to be somewhat pragmatic and, yes, totalitarian about it. The counter argument to this is that if your company is so big that you have to hurt honest customers because you can't afford to do it right, well, maybe you are too big. I've red about cases where an individual's only source of income was summarily cutoff overnight with no recourse whatsoever. That's plain wrong.

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It's a bit of a catch-22, though. People buying items on the Internet tend to prefer to buy via a well-established, highly-structured and secure marketplace. From a buyer's perspective, buying through the big companies you're talking about provides some measure of perceived safety in the transaction.

Sellers and buyers would both benefit from "small company" levels of customer service. However, marketplaces run by smaller or newer companies don't have the same perceived levels of trust and security as the bigger, more established marketplaces.

I know it's only a matter of perception but, in this case, perception is reality in terms of buyer comfort.

>It's disturbing to see that this is an all-too-common pattern with the large internet companies. Stories abound of companies like Google, eBay, PayPal, Facebook and Amazon closing down accounts with what I would characterize as "violence". No explanations. No recourse. No way to reason with a human being. The approach seems so "anti-internet" that it is hard to come-up with justification for the behavior.

it is doesn't matter internet or B&M as [quasi]monopoly is a monopoly. Just imagine how it would feel if your electric/gas company decided to "close your account forever". Because of such great power they weild, they are regulated as public utilities. The platforms you mentioned are formally not yet there [mostly i think because the standard metric of what monopoly on the Internet is hasn't been yet determined], so they allow themselves all kind of behavior that is no-no in the other well established areas of business.

What's the economic incentive to provide better support? You don't make Amazon much money, but an appeals process would cost them money. So why would they do it?

The economic incentive is increased business. Amazon may not need the business, which is up to them, but "service" is pretty much the only difference between Home Depot and Lowe's, as far as I have been able to tell, to provide one example.

And that might be a compelling argument if there was a competitor to Amazon who offered the same value proposition plus better service as a differentiator.

In this case, I don't think there's really anywhere obvious for the traffic to go, so the "increased business" is fairly minimal.

Right, that's the "Amazon may not need the business" part.

We didn't think there was anywhere for the traffic to go either. -- AOL, 1989-2001

Sorry about going off topic, but I'm curious. Wuhich of Home Depot and Lowe's do you feel has better service? I've never considered either for their service as my local Home Depot and Lowe's have equally poor customer service. The locally owned stores are the only places to get service for hardware stores near me.

To me, Lowe's is Home Depot with employees who don't avoid customers.

It seems like the alternative is some entity using "violence" to force large internet companies to do business with people they don't want to.

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