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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know more about Project Nessie? There's a portion of the complaint [0] that is heavily redacted from page 123 to 126. The only information that isn't redacted is this:

* Project Nessie is an algorithmic pricing system

* "Amazon's Project Nessie has already extracted over [redacted] from American households."

* "this scheme belies its public claim that it “seek[s] to be Earth’s most customer-centric company,”"

* It's related to Section VI.A.3 (Amazon maintains its monopolies by suppressing price competition with its first-party anti-discounting algorithm)

Amazon themselves identify Nessie as the system that monitors spikes or trends [1], so my hunch is this is some sort of surge pricing system. Does anyone here know more?

[0] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/1910129AmazoneC...

[1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/amazon-offices/the-surprisi...

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Guessing this is also related, from page 10:

    Amazon has implemented an algorithm for the express purpose of deterring other online stores from offering lower prices.
    [redacted]
    Rather than trying to compete, Amazon uses
    [redacted]
    Ultimately, this conduct is meant to deter rivals from attempting to compete on price altogether-competition that could bring lower prices to tens of millions of American households. As a result of this conduct, Amazon predicted, "prices will go up."

What especially rankles is how Amazon doesn’t give a fuck about counterfeits. So they’re allowing counterfeits (amplifying the mentioned effect) to discourage direct-sellers from attempting to compete on price.

Meanwhile, I have to order from direct sellers to be sure I will get a genuine, new product. So I don’t even get Amazon’s lower-but-still-higher-than-optimal price, but a yet higher one.

As far as I’m concerned the whole company’s a giant scam and I can’t believe it still hasn’t caught up with them. They benefit so very much from enabling bad actors, and have for so long clearly without any serious attempt to stop it, that I’ll do a happy dance the day they go under or get broken up. I just wish the eventual consequences could force Bezos to have to work for a living again, since he’s built his empire on fucking people weaker than him. Shouldn’t get to keep a penny of it.

Not just counterfeits but pages upon pages of shitty products from companies like WOWZAMGO and PARTUE that, now that they have sponsored rankings, will always come up first in search. They also all have endless fake reviews. This renders Amazon's search essentially useless.

WOWZAMGO makes quality products. I bought their portable usb battery and it only caught fire after the 20th charge cycle. PARTUE, on the other hand… don’t ask!

What's funny is that I couldn't tell if this was serious or sarcastic at first glance. (caught fire -> sarcastic)

Thing is, these silly UPPER-CASE-NONSENSE-COMPANIES are winning against established brands with quality products.

Except there is a trend now where a brand with products of known good quality like YETI can now charge outrageous amounts of money - like 10x or more.

It’s hard to find that value niche in the middle. They do exist within categories eg Anker for USB related things.

The Anker that was selling "offline" cameras that phoned home plaintext images? Yeah, no thanks.

Because your powerbank or charger definitely have those capabilities right?

Never use untrusted usb devices without protection.

The UPPERCASENONSENSENAMES are so obvious it makes me wonder if this is a target-selection technique in the same vein as the 419 scammers use -- make it so only the most clueless people would ever buy your garbage product, so you get a lower percentage of people who are going to report you.

The thing is, it's 2023, we all "know" that every company's product get made in the same factory and there's just a fork at the end of the conveyor where they get different branding slapped on.

So the gamble is that UCNN is sourced out of the exact same factory as the product/brand you actually want. It's the the evolution of the Warby Parker model.

Just bought a wood bed frame online. 5 vendors with nearly the exact same frame, all priced within $50 of each other. How does one choose? Does it matter?

It’s a great signal that you are buying from the wrong middleman. Seek out the source for a 50% discount. Usually that source is on AliExpress/Alibaba.

It's more like they flood the results so you literally can't find the quality product unless you know the brand name to search for. I can't be an expert in every vertical, so either I go to some sort of trusted review platform like Wirecutter, or I give up and buy whatever I can find on Amazon return decent reviews and hope for the best.

I believe it might [0] have to do with Amazon offering preferential treatment, under a program called Brand Registry, to Chinese exporters if they register a name--any name--with the USPTO.

[0] https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-134/fanciful-failures...

The truth about consumer buying patterns is most purchases are treated as lowest cost commodity, unless the buyer is aware or the price threshold is high enough[0]. When you don't have subliminal[1] and limited selection pressure (both of which exist in brick and mortar stores), coupled with a UI that makes it pretty easy to discover other brands, and coalesced signals (reviews placement etc), lowest price wins.

[0]: Put another way, if its expensive, it gets more scrutiny by the average consumer (whatever their definition for expensive is). The other circumstance is if they care about the category or are in the slice of shoppers who do quality research, which is less common than you might think, until the cost factor kicks in, usually.

[1]: This is brand awareness, and other related verticals. Effectively, this is what brand and mass marketing is about.

There’s a pretty strong “market for lemons” effect going on almost economy-wide in which every manufacturer out there seems to be sprinting to make the lowest quality shit they can sneak past the regulatory bodies, so it’s not surprising consumers are selecting solely based on price because there’s functionally no other differentiator at this point.

> The truth about consumer buying patterns is most purchases are treated as lowest cost commodity, unless the buyer is aware or the price threshold is high enough[0]

Well said. Also, let's not forget time. I've spent countless hours researching many things I intended to buy only to give up partway down the road. It's in part because of the endless results on Amazon (referenced here) but also elsewhere.

Let's say, for example, I'm trying to find the best saute pan. Amazon gives me thousands of results, but so does Google. My search results are littered with tons of X-best SEO-optimizing websites that don't help narrow down choices. So, in that situation, it's less about the price and more about the time: I'll just buy whatever seems reasonably rated and not outrageously expensive and move on.

I really enjoyed the earlier days of the Wirecutter - tell me the thing to buy in my search category even if it's not the cheapest or most commoditized.

Welcome to the Era of [Poe's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law).

I don't really have a problem with this stuff. It's memeable (some great photoshop artists there; always good when the company has no photo of their actual product) and not that cheap, but I think of Amazon as an overpriced Shenzhen market and this stuff is essential to maintaining that vibe.

How does Amazon avoid liability for selling scam products? Do they claim to be "just the middleman" and pass responsibility onto ghost-in-the-night companies selling the scam products? Or do they just abuse the legal system and make justice too expensive to be worth it?

I don't know the law very well, but I would hope there's a legal doctrine that responsibility has to effectively land somewhere. If a company is passing responsibility en masse to some other entity that cannot be effectively sued, then the responsibility should actually lie with the first company.

I have no idea, but companies routinely do shit that I assume would at least get me a fine in a hurry if I tried it. I don’t know how it works either. Like I’d have assumed deliberately dumping e-waste all over city sidewalks would get you a steep fine and an order to come pick them up or face an even steeper one within a matter of days—plus an absolute liability nightmare if, god forbid, anyone tripped over them and got hurt—but e-scooter companies have done it for years and have faced almost no consequences. I doubt I could get away with it. I dunno how they do.

In the beginning it was a free-for-all but now cities require permits and have limits and require the companies to implment restricted zones where the scooter won't run.

The same way they avoided paying state taxes for over a decade. Too big to sue

You might still be getting products from the same inventory pool in an Amazon warehouse when ordering directly if the company uses Amazon's Multi-Channel Fulfillment offering. They sell on their site, tell Amazon about the sale, then Amazon ships it to the customer. They even offer the option to ship it in unbranded boxes so that customers don't know the order is being fulfilled by Amazon.

Ew, gross. I’m pretty sure the couple companies I order from regularly that also have an Amazon presence don’t do that, since they have direct-order products not listed on Amazon and often include little touches like a bonus sample or handwritten note that you don’t get if you order their stuff on Amazon, but good to know to watch out for that.

> since they have direct-order products not listed on Amazon

This is still at-risk because you are not required to list on Amazon to use FBA.

The handwritten note is a better indicator for sure.

So tired of being on the shit-end of a drop-ship.

Counterfeits: In August 2014, I purchased from Amazon, shipped from Amazon (just checked my order history to verify), an Apple MagSafe Power Adapter. It was clearly counterfeit.

I contacted Amazon and told them it was fake, without hesitation they told me to throw it away and they were sending me a replacement.

It would be hard for me to believe that they didn't know exactly which company shipped them that product.

It would be easy for me to believe that they didn't notify every other customer that received that product from the same shipment.

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