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Comment by b8 | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me when I got banned from Amazon for suspected fraud (had an old account, but deleted my email and number since it was in a lot of DB dumps). After I got hired, I reached out to the guy in charge of the anti-fraud team at Amazon, and got unbanned. Emails to support etc. did nothing before I reached out internally (unbanned by 1am the next day).

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My biggest Amazon annoyance. I'm often looking for some product, reading Reddit and other reviews. They usually link to amazon.com.

Then it asks me to switch my profile to American/$. But then in order to order I need to switch back to Germany/€.

It's just super cumbersome. Just let me view stuff from any region without switching profiles. If I order from that region you can tell me to switch profiles. But not just for viewing it.

In the same vein. Why is there no, I want this thing, but from a German seller.

Reminds me of when someone links to a product on some (non-Amazon) website, I go there, it says "this is the US site, you should go to the [your country] site!", I click OK, and it takes me to the homepage.

I get this from the Nothing (phone) emails, the direct links in them go to the UK site, but if I let it redirect me to the US site, it's just the homepage. Extremely annoying.

With Amazon it's even worse, if you click on an US Amazon product link on an Android device:

My app is set to use Amazon in Germany. I click a link on a page and this opens the app. The app says it needs to switch to US. If I do that, I'm signed out of my German account and end up in an empty US account. I also think that I didn't even land on the product page afterwards. So I had to sign out of that US account and re-sign in into the German account to use the app normally.

So I basically just can't see the link unless I long-press and select open in new tab.

This is also infuriating for all those sites that take to their homepage when you log in instead of taking you back to the page you were viewing.

It doesn't work in all cases, but I can often replace the .com with .ca. It doesn't guarantee availability, but can at least check if the same listing is available on the Canadian store.

If it works in some cases it's a simple lookup if the same item exists then show that. And if not you can show similar products in your region.

It doesn't work that way. A link is to an ASIN (unique product in Amazon). The same product might have a different ASIN in a different region. The product description, title etc might vary.

Clearly there exists some higher-level product concept with a mapping of country->ASIN for that product. How hard is it to lookup the correct ASIN?

Maybe you end up on the home page when there is no ASIN for your country? There should be a nicer message telling you that’s what happened. But if it always dumps to the home page, that’s just dumb — Amazon could easily do the lookup.

There's no such mapping, you could do a text search and if the item name matches then maybe US ASIN 2785334 should correspond to UK ASIN 3894948, or maybe some third party just named something ambiguously. They're essentially GUIDs and essentially separate businesses.

We all recognize this as an anti-pattern that has directly led to a poor customer experience, right?

Sorry this is just not true. ASINs can be the same cross marketplace. There are lower level identifiers available if needed

To be precise, sometimes there are matching ASINs and other identifiers cross-marketplace, but often they are unique.

https://www.amazon.de/dp/1408855658 And https://www.amazon.com/dp/1408855658 Are both the same item. Same with https://www.amazon.de/dp/B086WQWSNT/ And https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086WQWSNT/

Seems like changes .com to .de works with every item i can find. Some just won’t be deliverable in a different geo.

> The same product might have a different ASIN in a different region

But why?

> In the same vein. Why is there no, I want this thing, but from a German seller.

eBay used to let you filter results by region, but apparently that ruined some kind of metric and the option is gone. When buying games or books or what have you I only want sellers in the EU. I don’t care that it’s available in the US or UK, shipping and duties are going to be 4x what the product is worth.

This https://i.imgur.com/fTRrVnP.png is not gone, look it's right there.

It was gone for years, it's useful that they've recently restored the option.

It’s gone for me, and there are a lot of frustrated support threads from other Europeans so I’m not alone.

I managed to find the option on the advanced search on ebay.ie, but I still get page after page of American items as the result…

its a pain, and the option to switch it back is hidden inside the accounts section, which is hard to find and even take 3-4 clicks.

Interesting. I still have a bricked phone from my onboarding at Google, and no internal people cared either. There's a tool I could have used to fix it, but it's accompanied by a message saying that if you use it without permission you'll be fired.

> accompanied by a message saying that if you use it without permission you'll be fired

Probably why none of the internal people cared either. They didn't want to be the person on the line in case it was determined that the usage wasn't valid.

I'm curious how you bricked it beyond repair though. Most devices have a way to enter a recovery/flash mode where you can upload your own firmware from the bootloader. And if you haven't unlocked the bootloader then I don't get how you could have bricked it unless there's an Android bug... which would have probably triggered a more serious look.

Most likely, the tool to upload the firmware from the bootloader required some sort of hardware signing key, which was present within the tool that he wasn’t supposed to use without permission.

A company the size of Google will for sure have it enrolled in MDM that prevents that.

It used to be, if you left a provider without paying for the device on time, they would remote-brick it, which would burn a fuse so it wouldn’t work anymore. I used this to get out of paying for the device once (Verizon), since I couldn’t use it anymore, why would I pay for it?

> There's a tool I could have used to fix it, but it's accompanied by a message saying that if you use it without permission you'll be fired.

Sometimes I name certain APIs/function names/whatever with a "do_not_use_or_you_will_be_fired" suffix. Generally for hacks I don't want people to copy-pasta. I can't actually fire anyone, but it gets peoples attention (especially more junior folks).

React has a bunch of those: https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/ddf8bc3fbac7aefbf557e...

Of course, it doesn't stop people from asking if they can use it: https://github.com/reactjs/react.dev/issues/3896

FRP? Plenty of ways to bypass that, even without any official tools.

Yep. I had no luck getting my Facebook account unblocked until 9 months later when by chance I did some work for them. Instantly unblocked.

This is the level of epic I aspire to in life

Except they're working at Amazon now.

seems like they could turn this into a lucrative side hustle "super premium secret support" embrace the technofascist feudalism!

That's actually how a lot of laptop and phone schematics and related repair information gets leaked.

Next level epic is hand your resignation letter right after you get unbanned. "My job here is done."

And then banned again the next day.

Yes, but now they have free bananas

tbh you could probably easily have enough gripes with Epic to do this too... but then you'd have to move to Wisconsin.

At least their headquarters are cool

I'd love for this to happen for me. I lost my Amazon account because they miswrote my phone number - having a single leading digit invalid for international use. So couldn't use text MFA and my phone with the OTP app had died the previous day.

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