Amazon starts flagging frequently returned products that you maybe shouldn’t buy
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[0] this product for example, loads of the reviews are for something totally different - https://www.amazon.co.uk/WERPOWER-Windscreen-Invisible-Winds...
There's nothing trivial about the issue.
(Or just call it “rank by seller reputation”)
Just never allow to edit existing content beyond a few typos. Updating product line and want to keep reviews? Sorry it's dishonest even if seller thinks of itself as "legitimate".
I don't think in the end any legitimate seller is hurt.
If it's being abused, ban the seller!
* Put reviews for current listing at the top of the reviews (currently default sort seems to be a vague "Top reviews", but can be changed to "most recent" which presumably accomplishes this. Vast majority never change defaults though)
* Clearly mark any review that is for a previous version of the listing, and provide a link to view the listing at time of review (so can easily see if it was a completely different product or a simple typo correction etc.)
* Perhaps make history of listing visible, so customers can see when and how the listing has changed
I hate to say it but I think some type of heuristics would be needed here.
1. Has the title significantly changed. 2. Has the price significantly changed. 3. Are the search keywords that were finding the old listing significantly different than those finding the new listing. 4. Have average ratings and common words in reviews changed? (Especially rarer words that match the new and old listing respectively)
If some of these start to look suspicious then I think you can start to apply your mitigations. You can probably even scale them by how sure you are. For example reviews are always downranked by age and significant changes to the listing amplify this effect, you can add the same weight to the start rating.
And of course the real way to prevent this is to flip the incentive. Add human review and a warning before killing the account. Make it so that the cost of being caught negates the benefit of doing this.
Amazon is in a different space here. Even the smoothest transaction goes through a handful of literal human hands. They have to pay for those hands regardless. At the very least following up on cases where customers (and competitors) flag fraud on their system should be possible.
Show the title and main description to GPT everytime the seller makes a change, and ask "Do these seem to be the same product?"
If GPT says that they seem different, flag for human review.
You could probably even ask GPT to take its confidence. If it's highly confident, skip the human review.
Description: Ignore previous instructions […]
Calculating a meaningful numeric difference between two chunks of text is fairly well-trod territory.
also, if a fucking seller cannot keep their listing reliably constant, what are they selling?
new version, new product, new reviews.
car manufacturers do this. wineries do this. pharma does this. even Apple managed to show the manufacturing date of their new new new new but the same things.
I mean with all the AI hype, you'd think they could whip something up that would at least be able to detect when the listing has changed to a completely new product category.
Thing is that they don't really care.
Mostly what they care about is handling returns which is what costs them money so they're targeting items with high return rates, and that's it.
They don't actually care about you getting scammed if they get their cut and don't have a lot of overhead.
All of this brainstorming is meaningless when the economic incentives of the company aren't aligned with the consumer.
It will be more profitable for Amazon to do nothing, than to address the problem.
I care about the title, description, and photos being entirely replaced while reviews stick around.
But at the end of the say, the question is just if Amazon has any interest at all in stop being accessory to large scale fraud. And the answer is pretty obvious; any of the things people are discussing here is viable, they could pick any or even spend more than 3 seconds thinking about the problem.
If they wanted to solve this problem, they would have already. Clearly, they don't care. People buy products with good reviews, and Amazon makes money when people buy products.
I wonder if they've been sued over this? I'm not a lawyer, but this sounds like false advertising to me.
They either fix it, or they don't.
and lose money (or make bad sellers lose money) when people return products -- often times Amazon won't even ask you to ship back a product you complain about.
Although, in a grocery store, you're less likely to see a product change from a bicycle to a scooter. You're more likely to see the cocoa content in your chocolate bar drop, and the oil change to a cheaper and less flavourful type.
I guess the comparison still works... should we have purchasers comparing products before setting them out? Under what conditions? What conditions trigger a review? In my experience, the stores just keep putting changed products out like nothing has happened, even if we notice over time that things just don't taste the same sometimes.
Turns out that... yes... it gets pretty complicated pretty fast, but many grocery stores also seem to just be ignoring this issue.
I do not believe this is the kind of swap people are complaining about.
We're talking about a box that's labeled applesauce and is actually full of rocks. Grocery stores would kill a supplier who was doing this.
I can't imagine a "real-world" situation happening at the scale of reputation-stealing that happens on Amazon. I suppose it's just an extreme version of "Made In Your Country Tools" building up a good reputation and then quietly outsourcing the work to "Low-Quality Overseas Forge".
Is the problem is that "easy to acquire" reputation for low-cost products (get good rep by using good materials, which don't really cost that much more and eat the cost as a loss leader) is easily transferred to higher-cost products? It's not like you even need to be making bandsaws to get the good rep., then start using it to sell cheap bandsaws? The investment at the start is very low.
There is nothing trivial about that. At amazon’s scale that is an army who needs to be hired, trained, prevented from colluding with scammers, quality controlled, etc etc.
For example: prevent changing the top-level category of a product. E.g. Shoes should not be allowed to become camera gear.
https://www.spycamerasmall.com/mobile-spy-camera/bodyware-sp...
But I don't think this restriction would fix all the issues where listing in the same category is swapped.
Most users just type into the search field, so they don't end up interacting with categories.
Also, noticing and penalizing sellers who do this shouldn’t be particularly hard.
That’s not going to solve the issues of fake/paid for reviews however. I think there is a market for a store selling only vetted products they have reviewed themselves.
Amazon can make the "New Product" show up for queries for the older one, but without the stellar reviews. This way modified products still get good exposure and no one will accidentally buy the old one. But there aren't reviews on the same page for a different product. The system can still be gamed similarly, but at least you can't get reviews for the wrong product on the same page.
Limiting edits, showing product history, or removing reviews on edit (or some threshold of content change) would be an easy place to start.
Consider that Amazon already does a lot of manual review. They do manual review of individual transactions if a customer is unhappy. The scale of that is enormous compared to this.
They also already do some manual review of product listings. (Every product listing page has a "Report incorrect product information" link.)
Adding this kind of manual review is surely a drop in the bucket if labor costs are the issue.
But that will cost Amazon more money than what they currently lose on returns or scams. I presume anyway.
Amazon does not care about the quality of the products on their website, they only care about volume and selling / maintaining subscriptions. As long as numbers go up they're golden.
And there's not enough competition. There's probably plenty of webshops with quality products (anyone can run a webshop from their home), but discoverability is low, I don't know what the consumer protection laws in the US are like, and Amazon is easy to use. Amazon can afford to handle returns and the like as well.
That's not my problem. The courts have already weighed in on this.
Marting Lewin sued facebook for publishing ads that used his face to defraud people. Facebook used the same excuses you just wheeled out, and the judge wasn't impressed.
Fraud is a crime, little people go to jail for less every day.
https://news.sky.com/story/martin-lewis-settles-lawsuit-agai...
Every hour spent manually reviewing product pages could instead be spent growing food, producing shoes, building homes, providing accounting services, etc.
This doesn't mean it is or needs to be determined centrally - just that it is an economic truth that will bear out regardless. Amazon might hire 1,000 workers for this, pulling them implicitly from all of the other jobs they would otherwise have taken.
Maybe it would be a net-win, and maybe not. But from society's standpoint it really doesn't matter whether it is profitable for Amazon or not. We'd be trading less fraud on Amazon for less of everything else.
(Anymore, I don't by anything but detergent, screen protectors & phone cases from AMZN, ftr.)
I shop to get cool stuff. Not to convey meaning.
But that's not the holistic conversation and consideration I see coming through. All I'm seeing is a one-sided focus on what Amazon can (should) do about it.
"Minimal risk while still permitting economic growth / treating disease" vs "no risk"
It's fair to apply the same standards to internet companies. A hyper efficient Amazon has social benefits.
(That said, I agree that the optimal point for Amazon and most internet companies is a lot stricter than how our current laws are enforced)
If it's too big to keep legal, maybe it's too big. It was YouTube's choice to allow everyone to upload as much as they like.
(I personally come down on the side of "it is valid").
"Ships from and Sold by Amazon" if you don't want foreign sellers.
That doesn't solve the problem, because it locks out legit Chinese sellers. Solving the problem is hard.
Does your multi vitamin actually contain every vitamin it says it does in the dosage it should? For many things you really depend on reputation and outside regulations as you’re hardly going to send random samples to a lab.
Even reputable companies make use of this. Look into how often SSD internals get downgrading without changing the product’s label.
In Amazon, the user interacts with a product, and from here can either allow it to be fulfilled from whatever's its default seller, or select one explicitly. In AliExpress, the user interacts with the [product,seller], so in search you'll generally see 50 instances of the same product, and leave it to the user to decide which one to open into Product Details. IMHO, the Amazon interaction is far superior. (that's not an excuse for them not to look for a solution)
I agree that in fulfillment, Amazon is causing problem. But I still believe that in User Interaction, the Amazon approach is better for most users.
- Changing listing voids prior reviews
- Changing product category voids prior reviews
- Enable transferring reviews by a paying a fee which will pay for a human reviewer to approve this
- Make people put up a bond to sell goods and or agree to a huge fine if they do this. When you find people doing this take their bond and or fine money out of the money they would have received for their goods. Also delete all their listings and ban them from the platform. If any account attempts to do business in a way obviously linked same card same email etc ban them too.
- Find mismatches between reviews and product by having a program classify reviews by probable product type reviewed and have a human review hits starting with the most prolific offenders and bring down the ban hammer. If you can actually collect fines directly out of money intended for the scammer this trivially pays for the enforcement activity and improves the health of the platform.
If the economics of the scam are I'll make a little money to if I do this at a large enough scale to make any real money I'll probably be caught and lose money it doesn't look like an attractive scam to run anymore. It's not necessary to be perfect just good enough to mostly resolve the issue.
The correct objection here is not "slow" but "expensive".
All of the "FAANGs" (or whatever we call them these days) need to be forced by government regulations to have transparent appeals processes that use actual humans and make them spend the money on it.
And when it comes to fraud clearly amazon needs to be forced to deal with it.
Let’s put another way, until Amazon does something about this there’s no way for anyone to trust reviews on their site. Their reviews are all worthless.
That’s a huge liability.
As long as they let people scam me, I will just assume everyone on there is there to scam me. It hurts them more in the end to lose shoppers to Walmart and Costco and places that don’t put up with scammy products.
It would require the seller to be a little more careful with the initial submission, but hopefully if they do make a mistake, they notice before there are too many reviews anyway.
And maybe have a way to request a change to fix mistakes that requires manual review. And I think charging a fee for that review would be fair.
Small changes should be fine in my opinion also it’s not like it’s impossible to also determine the edit distance between two pieces of text.
Amazon could be doing a lot more here.
No, really, I have worked at amazon in a job exactly around product compliance and such.
All this is very hard to solve and they do what they can, people wont believe it, but amazon is not just an app, the heavy lifting part is logistics, admin thereof and compliance.
Theres no easy way to be fraudulent on amazon, the cost of market entry for sellers is rather big.
Mislabeled products and bad account health have terrible consequesnces for sellers.
I do understand it might appear from the outside that nobody cares, but it looks different once inside.
As for the allegations a profit/benefit calculation being behind it is most likely wrong, amazon, apart from fullfilment center staff is always overhiring to be ready for peak seasons and the whole thing is subsidized via aws, the real money maker.
> Theres no easy way to be fraudulent on amazon, the cost of market entry for sellers is rather big.
It's easy enough that fraud (for example recycled listings with old reviews) is common enough that many people, including myself, have run into it.
> Mislabeled products and bad account health have terrible consequesnces for sellers.
Not enough that it isn't widespread.
Its not like fraud is a new phenomenom in the world.
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If you could see "okay, they fixed a typo or material error in the listing", that's way different from "this laptop was a blender last year."
or flag a listing for review when photos are changed.
The minor price differences between online and in-store aren't worth the hassle. The only reason to order online is for long-tail items. Spare parts, replacements that you simply can't get in-store.
I don't see that happening. People are locked in and the thought might not even cross their mind. Of course they will complain. But talk is cheap. Money is the only thing that matters.
Amazon just has a pile of 12k A1000s and sends them out whenever orders come in. Once it's processed there's no differentiation between your stock, mine, or Sony's, it's just Amazon's A1000 stock.
Even if this is the only thing preventing the solution you're referring to it'd still be a logistical hurdle to solve.
Future rent check income will go down a lot if people stop going to the mall because it's full of scammers.
The cost of properly policing it is likely the main deterrent.
For one thing, these are some of the oldest systems owned by Amazon - the team/service/system diagram is a whole massive mess, so there's that initial part of just grasping all of the pieces that go into it, and everything else that comes with legacy architecture (assumptions, data flows, formats, etc.).
Secondly, uhh trying to limit the amount of info I give - this link hints at the issue concretely enough - https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/itemsandoffers... - but there's some pretty complicated automated systems that handle relationships between ASINs, and basically it's those rules that get taken advantage of. And the rules are hard to fix because they do genuinely merge together a lot of duplicate ASINs/manage other relationships between ASINs, and then sometimes they end up merging unrelated stuff. And some of the rules are ML based, so you've got the whole recall/precision stuff.
And the people talking about categories, there's like 4+ different systems for categorizing ASINs which all have separate use cases and taxonomies, so any answer that starts with "just do X" is probably not grasping the number of interdependent parts there are.
Not saying I'm a fan of Amazon at all - I left for good reason - but these comments are just so incorrect about how Amazon works under the hood. No comment on if it's intended behavior, but I never saw anything that would indicate it was the case, and we had multiple teams actively working in this space.
It is worth it for me to buy direct and pay a bit more to not have to deal with the hassle.
Jeff is in a call center for a day shadowing a customer support agent. A customer calls about a specific item and the CS agent is like "They're going to say it's broken in this particular manner" before the call even starts. Jeff later is like "How did you know?" and the agent says "Because this is like the tenth time I've had calls about this". There was some problem in the warehouse that kept breaking the item in the same way, but what can a CS agent do about that? File a ticket that no one reads?
So Amazon introduced an 'Andon button' that let CS agents stop sales of a given product if they keep seeing the same problem. Customer Obsession! Crazy idea to empower entry-level people to have such impact! Only Amazon would do something like that!
Anyways, that Amazon is dead, "Day 1" is long gone, and unless the item is a standard product of low value I personally do not shop there anymore.
I can’t see how disabling sales of a single product is equivalent either.
In midwit meme format:
Low wit: Make customers happy. Making customers happy is how you sell products and win customers from competitors
Midwit: Screw over customers for profit. Customers are kind of low information though right? Maybe we can do things that increase profits at the expense of the customer if the customer wont notice or attribute it to us
High wit: Make customers happy. While an individual customer is low information, in aggregate, doing these things causes a company's reputation to suffer a death by a thousand cuts.
Maybe my brain is just having trouble parsing it, but what does “Andon” mean?
I can imagine a lot of factors that could go into discerning customer reliability, but there's some pretty blunt force ways to cut out a ton of noise really quick.
And... Amazon should have some pretty clear smoking gun evidence in these cases of updating product listings, with pretty heavily revised listings that should show the issue. If people are mis-reporting, I feel like that too would be kind of hard to hide.
This just makes hacking Amazon accounts a higher priority
the specific suggestion that rather than just try to game Amazon scammers are all of a sudden going to start en-mass engaging in serious felonies, become a new legion of ultra-vicious hackers, to write fake negative reviews against other people's product is, specifically, not ranked on my oh no, heavens forbid we try that list.
my starting place would only be that, a starting place, but I have a hard time envisioning trying turning into the world burning, as this stance presents. philosophically i have affinity for trying engaging & learning, & yeah sometimes it can be naive or have bad Co sequences. but it feels like we've become attuned to being short, to being disbelievers, to rejecting the try, to always having some scenario in our pocket that seems so awful we scare off attempts. i hope for greater for our society, for people.
My own divorce from Amazon retail was when 3rd party vendors had no control over Amazon binning fake goods alongside vendors' non-fakes goods. This ensured that reputation of 3rd party vendors would suffer. Where did the fake goods come from? Were they supplied by Amazon? Perhaps yes, actually.
It makes consumer anti-trust lawsuits [1][2] even more necessary, to ensure protections against monopolies.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/amazon-loses-bid-toss-consumer...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/11xyfem/was...
Will these be separated by seller?
Last I checked there was no way to review a seller on Amazon (or if there was, it was so well hidden that a week of effort and calling customer support only got me a refund). Rather Amazon lets you review "products". Given that a "product" can differ between sellers (either because the products are of varying natural quality like with used items or because one seller straight up sells fakes and broken items), it is much more useful to review the seller than the item.
Knowing that DVD copies of Jurassic Park are frequently returned (or that Jurassic Park has amazing reviews) helps me not one iota when I am buying from an unknown seller who might be sending out pirated DVDs with always-on Arabic subtitles.
Until Amazon breaks down user feedback (reviews, return rate) by seller, I will continue to urge friends, family, (and everyone else) to stay away from Amazon at all costs. You just never know who you are buying from or whether they are trustworthy.
You can: https://www.amazon.com/feedback
Just only for orders that are not "Fulfillment by Amazon".
Ultimately the problem is inventory comingling and Amazon not actually knowing which seller your product is from.
Try to post a review about the product itself being a fake? Well that's not about the product either! Removed.
What do you mean? Just click the Sellers name on the product-site, to get to their profile with all the reviews about them. There you will find a button to review them. Maybe there is an edgecase where it's not available?
EDIT And looking through my order-history, the review-buttons appears there too for older orders. Maybe when the date of return is up?
I had an interaction ~10 years ago with an Amazon seller that kept also their online store. They did not deliver directly to my country but directed me to their Amazon store that did deliver. I ended up getting a slightly different version (same item but a different revision). Talking to the seller, it was not one that they sent to Amazon; it also came from a warehouse in a different country.
Of course that's of limited help because you can't reliably order from a specific seller, but it would help Amazon fix the problem, e.g. by giving them an easy justification to reject to do Fullfillment by Amazon for sellers with low ratings.
1) Lister must provide all dimensions of actual product (not just packaging)
2) Photographs must show product as actual sized, not photoshopped into a stock photo environment at 3x scale
Especially for home items, it's astonishing the number of items that just provide NO WAY to know what the size is.
It seems like such an easy first step to reducing returns. I wouldn't have to return it if the page did a better job describing the item in the first place.
But nobody wants a shot glass the size of a whiskey tumbler. That's not going to drive sales of shot glasses.
Amazon is basically a "premium" Wish/Aliexpress nowadays. Might as well I order from China becuase I at least _willingly know_ getting a fake.
People really have to ruin everything
That's an interesting point, and it got me thinking: why do I continue buying from Amazon over AliExpress etc.?
Pretty simple answer, really: logistics. I can order an adapter from Amazon and have it here by 6 PM tonight. The same thing off AliExpress will take a week or more to get here.
If Wish or AliExpress can figure out near-same day delivery, they could put a sizeable dent in Amazon's market share.
I asked myself the same question back in January and also couldn't come up with an answer beyond shipping speed, so I cancelled Prime and now just use AliExpress for most things that would've been an Amazon purchase before. Even the slower speed isn't that bad: if I genuinely need it right away I'll travel to a physical store; otherwise the extended wait feels healthy for reducing useless impulse purchases.
What I mean though is when you want to fix something and you order a part off AliExpress or you have an idea for a project so you order a bunch of parts, things that aren't time sensitive so you order them, forget about it and get them at some point. Not everything has to be same day or next day delivery is all I'm saying.
Example - bicycle parts. A bicycle will ride without lubrication, with missing fenders and damaged brakes. Should it?
I ordered a horn, forgot about it.
Does it mean I don't need a horn? Hard to tell, it could save your life. It maybe it won't.
Also, when I do buy from Amazon as a non-Prime member, I find that often (not always) items tend to ship faster than the estimates claim. A few days ago I bought some RAM for my computer, and the estimate said it'd take a week to arrive. Instead, it "shipped early" and arrived in 2 days (on a Sunday). I think they've just optimized their shipping process for Prime so much that for some items it probably is cheaper to ship as fast as they can than to artificially delay shipping orders for non Prime members.
I remember doing exactly that once last year.
They have always resolved missing packages, late shipments, wrong item, etc.
For example: customer buys Brita filter from Walmart. Takes it home, puts their old used-up filter in the box. Returns the filter. Walmart employees aren't paid enough to care to check the contents, and even if they did, would they be able to tell the filter had been used?
And if the shop worker bothers to open the cardboard box, the customer can simply say "Yeah I opened it and it's the wrong size"
I've never heard of it for general retail, though.
I'm totally baffled by this. What would one order off of those sites? How does one even find it? The filtering either doesn't exist or is totally worthless. Even when there is some sort of sensible filtering, the results are still far worse than Amazon. Just showing a bunch of pictures and prices is not helpful. Trying to force me to create an account to just browse the site is not helpful. Wish seems like it is setup completely for impulse buyers buying random junk they see. Aliexpress is a wee bit better than Wish, but is still trash compared to Amazon. I don't understand who would subject themselves to that sort of torture. The prices don't seem any better.
Funny; I've always found that about Amazon. And not only is their search garbage, but so are their prices- they're usually higher than if you bought directly.
6 figure starting salaries and their recommender routine still prompts me to buy stuff I just bought. Clearly those DSA interview questions are doing them a lot of good.
>I don't understand who would subject themselves to that sort of torture.
Well, it's not like you really have any other option.
Once upon a time, we had Sears, whose business model was in no small part identical to Amazon's... except it was curated. Everything that needed a picture had one, they had their own delivery fleet and mail-order warehouses, and so on and so forth. And this model was good, though their house brands had some ups and downs over the years.
But then Sears went belly up, so now we're stuck with the discount alternative that's merely an online platform with a few extra bits. Sure, it's easier to get your product in there than it was to get it into Sears back in the early 1900s, but then again that's true for general website eCommerce platforms in general and turnkey examples of that go back nearly as far as Amazon's been popular (and Etsy exists for the lower volume and handmade items).
So me, as an FBA seller has certain products that I've specifically added "DOES NOT FIT XXX YYY" and people buy it and then return it with the comment "DIDN'T WORK on my XXX YYY". I get enough of these stupid returns and Amazon suspends my listing, making my go through a contrition process telling them all the things I've done to remedy the excessive returns. I've got one very popular product, my best seller, that has gone through this 5 or 6 times in the last few years.
While I understand the perspective of fraudulent listings swapping in sub-standard products, the big improvement I am hoping for is that the warnings will actually get people to read the damn listing so they understand what the item isn't to be used for.
Whereas I read "Unsatisfied! I did not read the listing!", they feel they wrote "Unsatisfied! Seller did not explain the item in the listing!" to the benefit of the other consumers in their same category. In a perverse way I could see it actually curbing those unwanted purchases in the future, but sadly at the expense of the seller.
This has resulted in never having to return anything, not rolling the dice on product legitimacy, and pretty great customer service who is knowledgable of the products.
Everything about Amazon is intended to increase the amount of time you spend with Amazon. The 50% chance of broken crap keeps you coming back to their support center, with all sorts of dark patterns designed to send you right back into their store again.
Electronics on the other hand, sure I'll try to go to bestbuy for stuff because that's the only electronics store we have that's close but they have no clue about the products they're selling.
Do I really want to signup/purchase/unsubscribe-from-spam for a Proraso account, a Philips Sonicare account, and a Wilson account?
Perhaps Google Pay could add a useful layer here.
Buy from a board game store one week, a tea maker the next, and some niche youtuber the third, all without re-entering your data.
I cannot get most Amazon items in less than 5 days. I can get most ebay items in 2 to 3 days.
I've since moved to town but still rely on Amazon for a large portion of my shopping. Nowadays, a lot of local retailers don't carry much stock so I'm having to order online anyway but only after I've driven to the brick & mortar and found they don't carry the item or it's out of stock.
If I buy from xiangxiangshenzencorp then I expect the item to be crap, but it's obvious from the listing and the price. If I buy from a reputable brand I also know what to expect.
I honestly don't get how people can get a quality different from what was clear from the listing (well, I've been positively surprised in the past).
Driving to a store to buy something has become a waste of time, except for a few things, like shoes and gloves. I no longer need to drive 15 minutes to a store, spend time searching for the thing I want, find out that they don't have it, have someone offer that they can order it for me, and drive home.
Just a few days ago I bought a soldering iron. If I went with Reddit's recommendations it would be at least $100 for a "not terrible one". Instead I bought a $10 one that I'm sure will work perfectly fine for what I will use it for. In this case the results that I didn't care about were the brand names.
I'm surprised Amazon allows these kinds of bribes.
Here's a story about how Amazon banned a popular battery/charger maker because of the same thing you're talking about. (I have one of their batteries... it was pretty good too).
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/16/22536976/amazon-ravpower-...
It's more like "amazon would never call you and ask your credit card number" types of stuff.
I think it's all on purpose. I remember having a missing package and not being able to say "package missing but says delivered". The site would take you to a non-helpful page that would say "have you looked in your bushes?" "have you asked your neighbors?" but no way to resolve it through amazon. on purpose.
> If you endorse a product through social media, your endorsement message should make it obvious when you have a relationship (“material connection”) with the brand. A “material connection” to the brand includes a personal, family, or employment relationship or a financial relationship – such as the brand paying you or giving you free or discounted products or services.
I reported one of these attempts to Amazon customer support once and the response I got back was basically "if we catch you accepting payment for positive reviews, we'll ban your account and you'll lose all of your digital purchases." No questions about the seller or the item, just a veiled threat.
The product itself was totally innocuous but I can imagine if that happened with something that was even slightly sensitive or embarrassing. Like, now everyone at the post office knows you ordered a Swedish penis pump along with a hardcover instruction book written by Austin Powers himself.
For example, I bought a warehouse deal controller. I opened the controller box and instead of a controller I found 2 bars of soap.
Namely, products from randomly named companies, or companies that claim to be American but it their address is a warehouse and their Internet presence is hosted on Alibaba Cloud.
Most of what they sell is toxic, like PVC figures for children cakes, toxic kitchenware, counterfeit refrigerator filters and other magnets for penny pinchers.
It is almost as if they were intentionally trying to poison people.
Most of the furniture sold by Chinese vendors and their intermediaries are so toxic that fucking HCHO meters max out when you open the box. Including kids furniture.
Sneaky fucks should all go to jail.
I would much rather prefer buying products from countries with real customer protection, real compliance with regulations with real consequences when someone gets sick from a non-compliant product.
This, this, this.
Just look at what are dollar stores selling us. To me it looks like China packs their garbage in form of children toys and useless things like so called "squishees" that smell like they fished right out a toxic river.
Story time: my wife tried to import toys from EU, high quality wooden building blocks. I remember that regulatory hell, she needed to have a safety certificate for each SKU, they have to pass lab tests for phthalates, lead and other shit, there was a never ending list of requirements, like "you can't have this rope because it's strangulation hazard". And after you comply to all that regulations, you need to buy a business insurance to even have a chance to get into chains.
So we have piles of paperwork for good products and seemingly completely unregulated Dollarama that sells whatever they want without following any rules. "This SKU doesn't explode before leaving a store – it's good to go".
We need a law that would obligate sellers to accept their garbage back, including packaging (looking at you, Costco).
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=canned+shrimp&s=review-rank&crid=...
Also, since any search now includes randomly added items, when you sort by customer reviews all the higher rated things that do not match your search are listed first. The items you are actually interested in may not show up until several pages later. You also cannot sort by customer review AND number of reviews.
The Amazon search engine is seriously broken and seems to keep getting worse in my experience.
It's possible to game listing details, product titles, brand names, and reviews. It's much harder to game customers are dissatisfied and constantly return your item.
I can't wait for a bespoke service in China that will mass order a competitor's products and return them for a refund to get them tagged with this warning. Kidding aside, I'm hoping at Amazon's scale, it'll be too much of a lift for someone to attempt it.
A recent "favorite" of mine was while trying to order a keyboard wrist rest, the first one arrived folded(!) up into a small plastic sack. The next had a very harsh smell, and the last, before I gave up, was uncomfortable to use.
I've started to miss malls and the variety of electronics stores we used to have, just so I can pick up and see the physical item before I buy it. It's kinda sad that in the late-90's the small city I grew up in had more electronics stores than the metro I live in today.
The up front cost and rapid turnover of supplier inventory would probably make this a no-go. Not to mention that there are so many /things/ available, even a costco-sized warehouse packed for maximum number of display items would require extreme selectivity (and associated costs for research, etc)
The scammer would organize a distributed buy-and-return of their victim's product, which would trigger this flag.
It's complex, but if returns are free and the competitive advantage of the flag is worth it, I could imagine it happening.
Personally I've just established my own rules of the road to avoid the bad side, like deleting Facebook and all social other than Twitter, using browser extensions in Twitter to filter out trending stuff, and being very careful and methodical about purchasing from Amazon including avoiding almost everything isn't a reputable company that I can do a simple background check on. I've even been fooled here but it's generally pretty easy to figure out.
Why do people (I?) order from amazon?
1. I don't mind taking $8 electronic devices apart and resoldering connections or doing basic troubleshooting
2. Often get a product in a day or three
3. I have no idea where I would buy a sediment filter (or similar specialized thing) that isn't walmart (and I live in a big city)
4. No need to go all around town to get things from different places (drive to the fire department for an alarm and then go to the pet store for a scratching post then go to best buy for an HDMI cable
5. They have all my details so I just click 'buy' and don't have to make a new account and deal with another retailer sending me a newsletter
6. I know that amazon will take my returns with no questions and I can drop it a few blocks away at the UPS store and I don't even have to put it in a box
That said -- there are definitely lists of things I would never order from them. SD cards/thumb drives, any easily 'adulterated' food product like honey or olive oil, cosmetics, anything I want to last that isn't a specific brand that I know for a fact isn't counterfeited and is a seller...etc
For your example, I usually buy filters from AllFilters.com
https://www.allfilters.com/sedimentfilters
Or, I might buy direct from the manufacturer's parts website
https://www.geapplianceparts.com/store/parts/spec/FTHPM
Expanding on that idea, I often buy electrical components from a retailer like Mouser or Digikey or Adafruit or others before I buy off Amazon.
If I'm lucky there's some nice local retailers and I'll buy from them. There's a few local comic and game stores nearby, I'll practically always buy from them even if they're a few bucks more than Amazon for some particular item.
Amazon is almost always my last retailer I go to. I've had so many bad experiences with Amazon over the last few years. The majority of Amazon orders I've had in the past 5 years ended up involving Amazon support.
I am not trying to give the impression that amazon is a great way to get these things, I was itemizing the reasons I use it when I do.
What I don't understand is why they don't already do this yet, instead of "flagging", just down-rank the product when it comes to search results and recommendations. If the return threshold hits a certain level, the product gets dropped entirely.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/11q8mjw/i_got...
Amazon tells me I’m outside of the normal 30 day return window, but I’ve just complained and said “If I bought a bulb at Costco advertised as 23 year lifespan that died after only a year I’d return it and they’d refund me, no questions asked.” This usually gets a store credit from the customer service person.
I think Amazon is going to have a huge problem with this because they’ve clearly been selling a lot of low quality merchandise from China (it’s actually marketplace sellers listing the products so quality is a race to the bottom). Because they don’t have any quality checks in their sourcing like other big box retailers do (such as Costco and Target) they just aren’t equipped to handle the inevitable returns and class action lawsuits that are coming their way when the 23 year lifespan LEDs and other product categories fail just outside the return window.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm betting Amazon would prefer items with different specs to be different listings, with styles being limited to differences like color, finish, etc.
That's not hurting Amazon, it's hurting regular people.
1) Because some people just want to try stuff out at no cost.
2) Because some people made impulse buy.
3) Because some sellers sell defective/scammy stuff.
Now, the issue is Amazon will not tell you which category this is. You still have to rely on user reviews which still are yet another field of abuse.
I just don't think this move will change anything, only cause potential confusion.
I did indeed return it.
For everything else I buy elsewhere. It's usually a difference of cents. I'm voting with my dollars for a world where people can choose to not buy low quality jficushnrkf brand Chinese bootlegs.
This move will be a pro environment as well as it will make us do more research before buying and once item is in our hand, try to make it last as much as we can.
It's interesting to me that amazon, facebook and google, (netflix I'm on the fence about and apple no) have practiced a kind of scorched earth capitalism where they made a lot of money and presumably continue to, but effectively destroyed the environment they operate in. I think most agree that google has hollowed out search into an SEO optimized ad-filled content farm wasteland. Amazon is doing exactly the same thing with retail, they're the biggest name and they've basically created this layer of garbage as the base layer of e-commerce.
What Shopping On Amazon Feels Like - Ryan George
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQpxAvjD_30
"roll the dice"
And As the other commenters point out, this is pretty inadequate when there are 100 trivially easy other things they could do which would be even better to help consumers avoid scams but choose not to.