So these other companies only pay Amazon for the shipping and nothing else, do they?
Just like Target, Walmart and other physical retailers often work with recalls on products sold through their stores.
It’s a hugely onerous task because it requires mapping every listing to a known product.
If someone sells a “green couch” then how do you track recalls for that?
You either force everyone selling anything to look it up in a big database you maintain and disallow generic sales, or everyone is just going to list things generically anyway to avoid the hassle.
It’s an idea that sounds easy when you assume everyone’s making perfectly formed listing, but sounds like a waste of time when you look at real listings.
EDIT: Replaced high chair example with a couch because people were pointing out that a high chair listing would be deleted. Though that proves my point, that any item covered by regulations wouldn’t be allowed on the platform, so if you extend regulations to cover every product ever made then you can forget about being able to buy things second hand. I’m guessing Amazon would actually love that, but you wouldn’t.
What will actually happen is this stuff just becomes less accessible to poor people and now their child had no safety equipment at all instead of a 1/100 chance of a recalled item that probably still would be better than nothing.
If the regulations cover everything, well then either the marketplaces all shut down or they cost $10 per listing and require you to agree to a lot of legal consequences if you provide wrong info in your listing.
Ideas like this only sound good to people who imagine no consequences will ever reach them, just billion dollar corporations.
The reason I do that is because I can ascertain the quality of the clothing and determine that, despite them being cheaper and used, they are just as good if not better.
I'm sure there's a lot of parents who assume, incorrectly, that a used and relatively clean car seat is just as good as a new one. So, they save a few bucks because why not?
Unfortunately when a new child arrives finances tend to be at a minimum and this deep discount works out as a almost always better than nothing and for super cheap.
The average listing is garbage. Devoid of useful information. You have to know exactly what you’re looking for and search broadly because people don’t make an effort to describe things.
LLMs absolutely will not solve this. If the only details are “table saw” and a dimly lit picture of a dust-covered table saw that looks like any number of generic table saws, AI isn’t helping you.
https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/selling-tools/ebay-authent...
That goes straight at the "product information isn’t even accurately known" problem.
It would be nice. It would save lives and avoid tragedy. It is not required, and failure is an option. We've been failing for a long time already.
If we have to do it, it's a simple matter of finding who has the capability to do so and force them to, as you say. But we don't. Forcing someone to do only because they can is a tricky proposition.
Just in case.
Seems like an easy, cheap fix. Amazon makes a single tweak in its listing code, and buyers know where they stand.
Consumers sensitive to this kind of thing can be captured with independent private testing instead of CPSC. UL is well situated for stuff like that.
You also do realize that there is a difference between a business selling many copies of the same item repeatedly, and individuals selling things one off, right?
If you don't, then maybe you need to learn about these things in the context of existing regulations before spouting off nonsense comments bashing strawmen.
Another big one that should make this whole topic moot: A corpo is a government created liability shield. The tradeoff of getting that liability shield is extra regulation to prevent easily-knowable liabilities. And remember, the sine qua non of a corpo is itself compelled speech.
They become much less popular when people are faced with the realities, like if Facebook marketplace sellers were required to collect your information and register you as the buyer (can’t have anonymous sales if they have to track buyers), higher prices, and overall reduced availability of things for sale because it’s increasingly painful for anyone to sell or buy on these marketplaces.
Where did you take that from? None of the notifications need to come from the seller directly to the buyer.
That’s why you would need to collect buyer information.
To deliver the notification to the buyer.
The way these marketplaces work is to facilitate in-person meetups. FB doesn’t have buyer info. They would have to have sellers collect it.
In reality every seller would just cancel their listings and pretend it never sold.
Regardless of what you think of the idea itself, the notification part would by very easy to implement.
Maybe Amazon can compromise. They can stop selling their own things on their platform.
You could make an argument that Facebook doesn't really sort or categorise products by their properties, but eBay definitely does. You could also make an argument that Facebook isn't a middle man in the transaction because payment doesn't go through Facebook (unless you pick a payment option that does, of course).
I think you can defend Facebook Marketplace, but not eBay. When I use eBay, I don't wire money to John Stevens, I pay eBay directly.
eBay wants a cut, that means eBay gets part of the responsibilities too. Not for everything, of course, and they can always hold the seller accountable when those responsibilities become a problem.
Ads are paid and meant to run for a very long time.
They’re not comparable in any way. If you forced marketplace sellers to the same review standards as ad buyers, it would become expensive and difficult to list things. The number of listings would collapse. People would be frustrated because they can’t buy cheap things second hand like they did in the past.
With Facebook Marketplace Facebook just provides a way to bring buyers and sellers together and provides payment processing. The product is shipped by the seller from someplace that is not Facebook. If you return the product you send it back to the seller, and the seller handles issuing refunds.
Those are two very different arrangements.