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Comment by onepointsixC | Hacker News Reader

How Amazon has face no repercussions for so many overtly fake products on their store completely baffles me.

Hire patsies. Motivate them by telling them they’re entrepreneurs. Every time somebody notices, act really shocked and offended, smack your patsy around (just the one they know about), coddle the customer (just the one who noticed). Bribe politicians to look the other way.

End result: make a few grand. Or are you saying $AMZN does this at scale across every category? Hmm.. yikes.

The patsies are the amazon marketplace sellers. The public and regulars have to play wack-a-mole on the thousands of disposable marketplace sellers and Amazon can act shocked shocked every time any particular marketplace seller is found to be a fraud.

Have you seen the Amazon storefront recently? It's the world's biggest scam, valued at 1.86 trillion USD.

This is what they do with their logistics companies. Almost every Amazon delivery employee, driving an Amazon van, works for a "independent logistics contractor", and the rotate them every 2 years or so as the abuse becomes apparent.

It's far from unique to amazon, though. The Microsoft employee/contractor decision in the 90s made it socially acceptable to treat contractors like shit, and it's been downhill since then.

Hmmm...contractors have a contract. Employees don't even get that, and half the pay.

Probably something to do with sellers doing it through the platform, and I imagine AMAZON responds to the right amount of complaints legally required, though these are guesses.

I also imagine its a complex and fun problem to try and solve. Ive noticed they have started in some ways, for example some brands are now labeled as "premium brand sourced" which means less likely to be fake.

Becoming a B2B company fundamentally changed Amazon's business model.

Previously (B2C): incentivized to deliver great customer experience to make money on increased sales volume and higher-price purchases

Now (B2B): incentivized to deliver easy seller experience to make money on increasing number of sellers and sales volume

To be fair, Amazon still cares a surprisingly amount about its end customers, when it doesn't need to, as a legacy of its rabidly awesome B2C days...

... but over time the company will continue to errode and optimize itself to its current customers (sellers).

Why doesn't Amazon do more to strategically combat fakes / bad products? Because sellers literally don't care about that. It's not a priority for them, so it's not a priority for Amazon.

Sellers definitely do care about this. Any seller who wants to maintain any sort of reputation as a high quality has stopped selling on Amazon.

Amazon is now for the “we technically have QA but honestly don’t give a shit” sellers. Not quite alibaba but getting there.

By any chance do you know where the quality folks have gone?

Out of business.

I suspect many small players have simply stopped playing entirely. Most alternative selling platforms are a shit-show too so implies you are big enough to run a chunky platform yourself it is difficult to compete with the low quality low margin players.

Most likely Ebay. Amazon is built around a bait and switch tactic. If you buy anything directly from Amazon, the risk of a scam is minimal, this is the bait. However, the switch tactic is that they made it increasingly hard to order directly from Amazon by co-mingling and progressively decreasing the UI distinctions between items sold by third party sellers and Amazon. When it turns out that the article is popular and profitable, Amazon will introduce a "Amazon Basics" version of the product, where the product is branded in such a way, that it is obvious that only Amazon can sell it.

The core distinction between Ebay and Amazon is that on Ebay each shop+product combination is its own listing and the seller reputation is put up front, with the buy button below the seller information. Meanwhile on Amazon there are product listings, with multiple sellers providing the same product and the seller name being put below the buy button. There is no obvious indication that you are buying from a third party seller on Amazon, whereas on Ebay you can only buy from third parties, so expectations adjust accordingly.

Honestly, the new, high quality Amazon is shopify.

Makes for using independent store fronts a breeze because almost every checkout experience through shopify shares a common login and CC info.

Considering how much of Amazon has become just merchants who buy on Alibaba and sell on Amazon, or even outright Alibaba sellers, I’m shocked that it hasn’t had any blowback.

> ... but over time the company will continue to errode and optimize itself to its current customers (sellers).

Prime (no pun intended) example of enshittification [1].

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

Seems reasonable, except Amazon regularly mixes inventory.

The hypocrisy is apparent when you notice that the pretty much the only brand of products that miraculously does not have third party reseller listed (and hence escapes third party inventory commingling contamination issues) is the Amazon Basics. [1]

[1] Only Amazon Resale third party resellers are shown https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Basics-Anodized-Non-stick-Stac...

Brand owners can apply to have their brands sold only by themselves. I think it might not stop others from selling used, but it would stop the new listings.

Last time I tried to report a fake product to Amazon it's literally impossible. It simply isn't one of the pre-determined options available through customer service, either the self service chat or to the advisers. The closest thing and what the advisers select would be "item not as described" which might be somewhat correct, but hides the problem to whatever reports get generated for management. Hard to believe that isn't intentional.

Luckily, hopefully, that is changing https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/30/business/amazon-recalls-cpsc/...

Probably the platform vs actor thing. Like hate speech on a platform that has some rudimentary reporting vs the person who actually wrote it. Most of the blame falls on the actor instead of the platform.

I bet the vast majority of amazon shoppers don't realize it's a platform and think of it as a store like the ones they physically shop in.

A lot of those big box retailers have long opened up their digital storefronts to the "marketplace" concept too. Best Buy, Home Depot, and Walmart are the first three that come to mind.

The Walmart one is particularly egregious because most of the marketplace is just "item that Walmart sells except 5x the price" designed to ensnare old people who click on the wrong thing.

Amazon is an expert at toeing the line, be it monopoly laws or product liability. I thought it was their biggest mistake to join the race to the bottom when taobao started eating into their margins - I still wish they positioned themselves as the trusted alternative rather than peddle in fake goods, but in retrospect it looks like the right move for them (not consumers).

The connection between Amazon and the intelligence community may speak to that. When the federal government needs you for something, it seems you can get away with many things scott free or with wrist-slaps.

EDIT: This is not a secret, but by all means, keep downvoting me.

https://aws.amazon.com/federal/us-intelligence-community/

Agree with this sentiment.

You’re not getting down voted because it’s a secret. You’re getting down voted because it’s a red herring. The US shut down its primary nuclear pit production plant because of criminal environmental violations [1]. That was far more impactful than AWS is to national security. No company has a blank check.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Flats_Plant

I am surprised there have been no high profile stories of people dying due to knock-off consumables from Amazon or house fires caused by knock-off electrical items. It's a matter of time, and if it makes enough headlines it could open more people's eyes to the risks of shopping there.

This video gives a good overview of how Amazon's NGAF attitude about safety needs to be reigned in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU&t=190s

If you are in the USA report unsafe products here: https://www.saferproducts.gov/

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