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srmarm
ridgered4
I've noticed several products recently that used an old product entry where the bulk of the older reviews were written in Spanish or German. Once translated you find they are gushing about a comic book they loved rather than the computer interface adapters I was looking at. Pretty sneaky since Amazon puts foreign reviews in a different bucket that you have to drill down into, I usually only do so myself when there aren't many English reviews.
brutusurp
I wonder if this is ASIN-recycling (where ASIN is the product id), or simply a bad indexer. For instance, is it that an ASIN in location A is reused in location B? Is it that the ASIN is recycled by the lister/Amazon to maintain positive review percent on a new product? Or is it that the column(s) used to map the international comment thread to the product are incorrectly specified?
sofixa
How is it trivial to solve? They either need to prevent sellers from modifying product pages (which would be a disaster because any mistakes could no longer be fixed without losing all reviews) or gate it behind human intervention(slow) /algorithm (complex).
There's nothing trivial about the issue.
ClumsyPilot
> gate it behind human intervention(slow)
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...
tfourb
"It's hard" should not be an excuse for not preventing fraud. Most arguments from tech companies boil down to "but we would have to spend some of our billions of dollars of annual profits or venture capital to prevent this and those jobs wouldn't be sexy engineer stuff, so why would you want us to do something like this." I never understood how/why these companies are getting away with this, given that fraud/abusive behavior in other parts of the economy is taken quite seriously.
gowld
Sellers in China don't go to jail in US.
"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.
SifJar
Couple of fairly simple things they could do to at least help somewhat:
* 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
kevincox
I don't think this will work well. Minor updates to listings would trigger all of these actions far too often to make them standard and ignored.
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.
tablespoon
They could also have some system to flag these listings for manual review by an Amazon employee, instead of expecting every individual customer to figure it out.
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.
lamontcg
> Couple of fairly simple things they could do to at least help somewhat:
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.
Cthulhu_
I think any fix that requires input or extra effort from a user won't work in the grander scheme of things. Hide reviews for previous versions behind a button will go a long way, if you keep that in mind.
mortenjorck
Trivial is an overstatement, but the solution space is far broader than the two options you propose. I can think of one off the top of my head: Give each listing a change score, where changing a description is a point, changing a photo is a point, perhaps changing categories is 2 or 3 points… At a certain threshold of points (tweaked over time to calibrate against false positives) the listing is flagged for human review.
blarghyblarg
Not to be argumentative, but... that's the second option. Algorithmic. The initial implementation would be simple. One point, two points, three points. Then, some categories turn out to have significant change requirements, some change infrequently, some changes turn out to be very important in some categories, some categories need immediate human review...
lph
It's absolutely trivial if you have a human review changes. But that's expensive. So I'd assert the problem is trivial but expensive, and Amazon lacks the proper incentives to do anything about it: they make money from fraudulent sales. It's a short-term incentive to not solve the problem. Sure, there's a long-term cost that this fraud slowly erodes Amazon's reputation, but it's hard to measure and its consequences are way beyond the horizon of the next quarterly report.
therealdrag0
They could do a similarity diff. If you switch content from towels to solar panels I bet they could get pretty good signal just from text comparison. “This looks like a different product. Different products must use their own SKU. If you believe this is an error, appeal here.”
lwhi
ChatGPT can definitely work this out.
heavyset_go
Requiring new listings for new product titles/SKUs, or approval for significant changes to titles/SKUs, seems like it would stop a good portion of these scams.
vlovich123
Yeah, with permanent delisting of the entire company as the penalty. Of course, these people don’t care. They’ll just spin up a new seller and thus the only people you end up hurting are legitimate partners updating their product line.
Cyykratahk
Even if it's not trivial to solve perfectly, there are easy wins to be had.
For example: prevent changing the top-level category of a product. E.g. Shoes should not be allowed to become camera gear.
hedora
As always, the internet has already generated a counter example to your rule:
https://www.spycamerasmall.com/mobile-spy-camera/bodyware-sp...
duskwuff
Categories on Amazon are basically meaningless. There are probably more miscategorized products on Amazon than ones in the correct category.
Most users just type into the search field, so they don't end up interacting with categories.
dilyevsky
Are you saying that in the age of ai it’s impossible to tell whether the page is now featuring a completely new product without human review?
Filligree
It took me five minutes or so for a proof of concept with GPT-4. So...
adrianmonk
It's not trivial, but it's very, very feasible.
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.
pc86
My understanding is that the biggest issue is that they're commingling inventory. So Sony is selling A1000s on Amazon and ships in 10k units. Your FBA store buys 1k wholesale A1000s and sends them to Amazon. My FBA store buys 1k and sends them in.
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.
ClumsyPilot
They made a logistical optimisation to save money. Only right that they should eat the costs of any side effects
post-it
Just tag each item by supplier. They already tag by item. Sure it's a logistical hurdle in the sense that someone needs to do it, but it's not a challenge, it's not anything new.
stonemetal12
Walmart has suppliers RFID tag with UPC + Unique ID. It would work perfectly for amazon. They would be able to track Who sent in what and in which shipment it came in.
topaz0
I suspect they save money not just from saving some effort/complication of tracking the supplier, but also from being able to distribute the larger inventory better across their warehouses. If someone in Tennessee buys the item from a supplier whose stock is in Idaho, they have to ship across the country, but if they can substitute with stock form another supplier that is in Georgia they save a lot of shipping.
rfwhyte
They don't do anything about it because it's a feature not a bug. They know full well about all the fake reviews, fake products, product switches, counterfeit products, dangerous products, etc., and choose not to do anything about any of it because it's making them money. Amazon is basically an online real estate company that owns a giant online mall full of scammers, snake-oil salesmen and fraudsters, but they get to keep cashing the "Rent" cheques from these vendors in their "Mall," and so they don't give a single solitary f*ck about whether or not actual end customers suffer as it's not them doing it, just the people who rent space in their mall.
tgsovlerkhgsel
The profit from the fraud is not worth the reputation damage.
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.
jjoonathan
I suspect the switcheroo scam is somehow profitable or desirable to Amazon and there is no end to the number of shoelaces they will trip over or tangents they will chase on the path to confronting it.
tpmx
Or they are badly managed and are stuck optimizing for some local maxima.
heavyset_go
The practice yields them sales, they don't care.
throwawaysnake8
I worked in this area of the company - it's actually quite a hard problem.
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.
triceratops
It's stuff like this that makes me avoid online-only retailers as far as possible. My first choice is still to go to the store. Second choice is to never order from third-party sellers on Walmart or whoever's website.
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.
mabbo
There is a famous story about Customer Obsession and returns that I used to tell during training sessions for new Amazon employees- Customer Obsession 101, which I was a teacher for.
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.
brutusurp
Agree. "Day 1" is no more, as are those leadership principles.
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...
tylerrobinson
> So Amazon introduced an 'Andon button'
Maybe my brain is just having trouble parsing it, but what does “Andon” mean?
chin7an
It's a term borrowed from assembly lines(0), where if the andon cord is pulled, the entire line stops until some manager or the likes inspects and restarts it. For amazon, the equivalent would be pulling the listing immediately from the website, blocking orders and flagging the item for immediate review.
evo_9
Ah but not an acronym like SCRAM for example in the early nuclear reactor days. Meaning: Start Cutting Right Away Man, because back then, you had to cut the ropes holding up the control rods, which basically mean, shut it down as fast as possible by dropping those rods.
kitten_mittens_
It's a Japanese loan word. I was mystified the first time I heard it out loud in Seattle back in 2015. I don't think I've ever seen it written.
praisewhitey
probably typo for Abandon
rngname22
Working in the trust and safety / bad actors space, I imagine that bad actors realized fairly quickly they could just purchase 20 of their competitors products and then rate/write in saying they were damaged / fraudulent and trigger that andon button being falsely triggered.
rektide
Add in some pretty basic filters & I think I'd be game to try. Is the complaint from someone >X years active? Is the complaint from someone with >$Y dollars spent?
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.
albrewer
> I can imagine a lot of factors that could go into discerning customer reliability
This just makes hacking Amazon accounts a higher priority
RadiozRadioz
Actually, the Andon system still exists. I've worked for an Amazon seller and I've seen plenty of Andon-related error messages.
whoopdedo
And once a fraudster finds out they set a troll army to the task of calling in complaints against their competitors' products.
coderintherye
That's not an actual scenario. Customer service can see if the person purchased the product or not. Getting a "troll army" to all buy and return products and call in complaints on actual purchases while waiting on refunds is a much higher bar.
throwawaysleep
I am intrigued that such a button is superior to having someone read the tickets.
owenmarshall
Andon is a manufacturing concept. It’s a button that, when triggered, stops the manufacturing line. You push it when things are systemically broken, and it has massive consequences because it costs companies meaningful cash.
I can’t see how disabling sales of a single product is equivalent either.
pjsg
I heard Jeff tell this story and it was about a dining table that often arrived with a gouge in the top surface. It was costing Amazon a lot to ship, and a lot to get it returned, and the table was essentially worthless when returned. Even if only 5% of the tables are returned, this makes selling this table a loss maker. Quickest way to increase profits -- stop doing things that make you a loss!
blendergeek
Edit: It seems that it is easier now to see the feedback broken down by seller than when I had last used Amazon or I didn't fully understand how it worked previously.
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.
miahi
The way Amazon works now (or at least my understanding from past articles and seller interactions outside of the platform), for some of the items you are not guaranteed that you received the item that your specific seller sent to the fulfillment center. If an item has multiple vendors, you will receive probably the closest one, not the one from the seller you selected. If that item is fake (even though the seller you selected is selling original items), reviewing the seller would mean penalizing the good actor.
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.
wongarsu
I was under the impression that internally Amazon can track whose item you got because every item gets a tracking sticker when it enters the warehouse (or even sooner, if the seller labels them to save money). It would be a bit of an UI problem, but Amazon could take your review and just attribute it to whichever seller provided the item you received, instead of whichever you bought from.
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.
CSMastermind
> Last I checked there was no way to review a seller on Amazon
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.
d23
This happens to be yet another way they end up protecting scams and their bottom line. Scammers co-mingle fake inventory, consumers get screwed, they try to review the seller negatively, and amazon removes the review because it's not the sellers fault because it was FBA.
Try to post a review about the product itself being a fake? Well that's not about the product either! Removed.
dilyevsky
It may not know when you order but surely knows when the return happens whose inventory was used
PurpleRamen
> Last I checked there was no way to review a seller on Amazon
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?
blendergeek
Well, like I said, I couldn't find it. And the reviews under a product seem to be for the general concept of the product and not for X product from Y seller. And maybe its different for "Fulfilled by Amazon" and regular products. I don't know. It is all inscrutable.
ljf
In theory much of the inventory is pooled, so if it it 'Dispatched by Amazon' you aren't actually buying from that sell, but from a pooled inventory that the seller put stock into.
crazygringo
This is great, but another thing they really need to do is create and enforce two more rules:
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.
lostapathy
The worst are items that are photoshopped not just into a background, but containers holding things that are the wrong scale. The other day I saw some 1.5oz shot glasses with a drink with 3 or 4 lime slices floating in them. The person editing that clearly had no idea the scale of the item they were editing in the first place.
fswd
The best one for me was a photoshop of elderly lady casually handling a 300lb pack lithium server rack battery.
crazygringo
Yes exactly! It baffles me so much because I could at least understand if they did it only in cases where bigger is better -- deceitful, but there's a logic to it.
But nobody wants a shot glass the size of a whiskey tumbler. That's not going to drive sales of shot glasses.
stronglikedan
I will typically pay for returns, instead of abusing the free option, but I have no moral qualms about choosing the free option (inaccurate description), when they pull this particular crap.
barbazoo
That whole specifications sections is broken for a huge subset of products.
haunter
The craziest scam I saw on Amazon was ordering an expensive GPU > people change the card's backplate and return a cheaper/broken one. Unsuspecting regular Joe will order the returned GPU ("open box deal!") and they get a fake one. And now you have to fight against the Amazon customer service too. It's incredible.
Amazon is basically a "premium" Wish/Aliexpress nowadays. Might as well I order from China becuase I at least _willingly know_ getting a fake.
rybosworld
This is a classic scam that also exists for brick and mortar stores.
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?
mitthrowaway2
I'm sure that works for many product examples, but Brita filters come in a sealed white plastic wrapper. Does the customer heat-seal it closed again before they return it?
michaelt
But the white plastic's probably in a cardboard box, right?
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"
addandsubtract
This is kinda on Brita. Their filters should definitely change color with water contact. Preferably, the more water has touched the filter, the more intense the color.
javawizard
> Amazon is basically a "premium" Wish/Aliexpress nowadays
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.
Analemma_
> That's an interesting point, and it got me thinking: why _do_ I continue buying from Amazon over AliExpress etc.?
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.
rurp
This makes a lot of sense. Prime shipping is fast sometimes, but not consistent enough to rely on for anything urgent. Arriving in a week rather than a few days rarely matters for most online purchases anyway.
barbazoo
And it's kinda exciting when you get a delivery you totally forgot about.
bogwog
I had the same concerns about shipping speed, but then I just said fuck it and cancelled my Prime anyways. It turns out that waiting a few more days for items actually isn't a problem for me. It also brings the added benefit that I no longer feel constrained to a single shitty store, and can buy from anywhere on the internet again.
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.
adoxyz
Yeah with Amazon you'll get in 2-3 days, but you'll end up paying 2-3x as well. I considered building a browser extension that just lists the Alibaba/AliExpress item for you when you land on amazon listing and did a bit of research. Most things you search for on Amazon these days that crowd the first page results are literally just copies of AliExpress items at 2-3x the markup. Sometimes the convenience is worth it.
treis
It's rare that I see that significant of a discount on Aliexpress. Most are within like 10% and sometimes cheaper on Amazon.
marcosdumay
Oh, if I have this much concern about getting some item quickly, I go into a store and walk out with it.
I remember doing exactly that once last year.
m463
I trust amazon to resolve problems with orders.
They have always resolved missing packages, late shipments, wrong item, etc.
dgellow
In December I ordered an iPad Pro, and instead received a random book that has more or less the same size, plus a bunch of AA batteries to match the weight… I’m in Germany, not sure if that’s common in other places but it was a first for me. So, yeah, I’m done ordering expensive device on the platform.
meragrin_
> Amazon is basically a "premium" Wish/Aliexpress nowadays.
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.
qball
>The filtering either doesn't exist or is totally worthless.
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).
redox99
> people change the card's backplate and return a cheaper/broken one
People really have to ruin everything
coffeebeqn
I wonder do they ban people’s accounts for doing such things? That’s basically theft
bogwog
I think the term is "mail fraud", and it's very illegal
joering2
I like getting products I order online delivered overnight. And return them for free by dropping off at local UPS with my money back in less than 48 hours. Can Wish/Aliexpress do the same?
HALtheWise
How expensive would it be to perform an airport-style x-ray scan of every box (over some price) before it's shipped out, and when it's returned? That would give the customer support agent something to look at when judging somebody's claim that they were shipped a fake product, and you could probably even train ML models to distinguish genuine from knockoff goods in many cases.
michaelt
There's actually some equipment that's sorta similar - meat packing plants can get conveyor belt x-ray machines which detect bones and bolts inside burgers.
I've never heard of it for general retail, though.
carimura
but who was the seller? This should be a buyer beware situation. The marketplace is compromised.
pcamen
One thing I have seen mentioned yet is this change from the perspective of honest sellers. Amazon customers are notorious for not bothering to read the listings and because of the generous return policy for FBA items, will just buy something to see if it works. I also sell on my own website and don't have any of that type of problem, but my return policy is not quite so generous.
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.
core-utility
I'm somewhat guilty of this, but a lot of it comes down to Amazon's search. I'll search for "iPhone 13 case" and then window-shop with pictures. I get the case and realize that even though I searched for iPhone 13, it sent me to a product for the iPhone 14 and I didn't realize until I bought it.
SCUSKU
I've seen a few of these in the wild just as a consumer and I always wonder why people even bother leaving a review. My thought is you're just exposing to everyone how ignorant you are.
Acutulus
Of the (generally) many things those specific types of consumers are ignorant about, their own ignorance is usually one of them.
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.
captainkrtek
I’ve given up on Amazon shopping years ago. I much prefer to buy things directly from specific retailers, eg: outdoor gear from an outdoor retailer, clothes directly from the brand, etc.
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.
bob1029
I hope that others can find a path too. I worry for some friends & family who seem properly addicted to the idea that stuff can magically appear on their doorstep within 24-48 hours. I know some who receive multiple shipments from all 3 major carriers every single day. Just the slightest amount of planning ahead would prevent the need for the kind of retail model they provide.
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.
verteu
I would, but it's such a hassle to enter my address and CC info on every manufacturer's site. The last 3 things I bought were shaving cream, toothbrush heads, and a cheap tennis racket.
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.
preinheimer
I really think Shopify should lean in on their offerings here. The checkout experience across merchants who use Shopify is great. There's a "Shop Pay" button, you click it, and you're either at the "Confirm Purchase" page or maybe get an SMS to enter, then you're at the "Confirm Purchase" page. You've skipped entering your address and credit card number.
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.
abruzzi
most of the online places I shop at allow account-less purchasing using PayPal. I know PayPal has some negatives as well, but those rarely impact buyers. Probably 95% of my online shopping passes through PayPal, though I do maintain accounts at a few online shops like B&H or KEH and with them I usually use direct CC/DC purchasing.
captainkrtek
I buy these kind of smaller value items from my local drug store, grocery store, etc. feels wasteful to ship and add more layers of packaging to small goods like this.
hasbot
I've gone the opposite way. I lived in a rural area with the closest hardware or big box store nearly an hour way. I'd only go to town at most once a week but more often once every two weeks. Projects took forever to complete because I'd forget to buy some widget, get the wrong widget, or often be unable to find the right widget at a brick & mortar. Amazon to the rescue!
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.
barbazoo
It's nice if you have local business that actually know their products. Especially with outdoor/sports equipment. I know I'm paying a premium but I happily do it.
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.
SkyPuncher
I've gone back to ebay for commodities/non-name brand. So far, prices are better, shipping is faster, returns are easier, and fakes aren't an issue.
iLoveOncall
There's not a single reality where ebay has faster shipping and easier returns than Amazon.
SkyPuncher
I can assure you that I live in one of those realities. It might not be entirely common, but it's absolutely true where I live.
I cannot get most Amazon items in less than 5 days. I can get most ebay items in 2 to 3 days.
iLoveOncall
I buy hundreds of items per year and almost never return anything.
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).
chihuahua
My experience is the same as yours. I don't understand all these complaints. I've been using Amazon since 2002, about 30-50 orders per year, and I've had to return maybe 2 things because they were disappointing. And on the rare occasion where a delivery doesn't show up, it's very easy to complain and get my money back.
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.
captainkrtek
Sure, the quality is obvious from one of the fake name generated chinese brands, my issue is more the pollution of the listings with those brands. Going to search for anything turns up hundreds of the top results with these “brands” all 5 stars.
iLoveOncall
But they're not pollution. Because you can afford the brand name that costs 10x the knock off, doesn't mean everyone can.
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.
criddell
I bought a $50 item and a couple of weeks later I received a letter in the mail offering me a $35 Amazon gift card if I leave a 5-star review with a video or picture attached.
I'm surprised Amazon allows these kinds of bribes.
mbreese
They don't, but it's hard to crack down on. The only way for Amazon to know is if the people who get the gift card notify Amazon, which isn't likely to happen.
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-...
aftbit
I have actually tried to report this to Amazon customer support a number of times. Most of the time, the CS agent either entirely does not understand what I am complaining about, or openly says this is allowed. Last time they told me I would only get the gift card after I left a 5 star review, and to chat back if I did not get it!
SkyPuncher
It'd be far easier if Amazon didn't provide my contact information to sellers (unless they're large enough to be "trustworthy")
tasty_freeze
Twice that has happened to me, so I left a review mentioning the bribe. Amazon rejected the review saying that isn't the right mechanism for that feedback. All the same, hundreds of people were ordering this five star item, unaware most of the reviews were paid for reviews.
whoopdedo
Funny how they have a way to reject reviews that don't meet their criteria but claim rejecting improper listings is "too hard".
m463
I've tried to report fraud, but amazon does not have any sort of way to report fraud on their site.
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.
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cptskippy
> I'm surprised Amazon allows these kinds of bribes.
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.
ei8ths
I got one of these, i bought a kids alarm clock for my daughter, it works really well, good quality. I did cash in the gift card. Why not? now if it was some crap product, i would report the bribe.
criddell
Who would you report it to? Amazon doesn't care. Is there a state-level consumer affairs department that might care? The FTC maybe?
walterbell
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/disclosures-...
> 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.
BrotherBisquick
I once received a postcard (as in, no envelope) with a picture of the product I bought, trying to bribe me for a 5-star review.
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.
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giantg2
Overall this is great. This might have some problems though. Some frequently returned items might not have any issues, but might be getting ripped off more.
For example, I bought a warehouse deal controller. I opened the controller box and instead of a controller I found 2 bars of soap.
ysavir
That's true, and admittedly, there's a part of me looking for a reason to dismiss this action. But at the same time, after a decade or more of doing nothing, Amazon is doing something, so credit to them for finally making an effort. I'll still never use the site or service, but it's good to know they're finally taking some action against unethical sellers.
29athrowaway
There are other products on Amazon you should probably not buy either.
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.
stackedinserter
> It is almost as if they were intentionally trying to poison people.
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).
29athrowaway
Most returned stuff goes to a warehouse and then gets destroyed. You can buy pallets of that stuff for a reduced price.
stackedinserter
No, I'm not talking about stuff that people return to store. My point was to make stores dispose all that garbage that they sell to people, including packaging. Like instead of throwing it to our blue bins, we could bring it back to store for disposal.
kingforaday
Amazon's product management criteria has a threshold of (number of returns) / (number sold) within time-frames and if you hit the threshold (which is about 10% iirc), your product is automatically removed until you file an appeal. I guess that isn't sufficient enough.
mint2
I thought clothing bought online normally had return rates far higher than that?
lotsofpulp
I order 1 size above and below what I think I will need, so I return at least 2 items for every 1 item I keep. But usually much more, I just returned 15 to 20 clothing items and kept 5.
rapjr9
Now on to the rest of the problems with Amazon's web site. Do a search on "canned shrimp" and then select "Sort by: Avg. Customer Review". I see seven pages of results, none of which include any canned shrimp even though it is obvious they sell canned shrimp from the page before you sort by customer reviews.
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.
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I don't get they don't crack down on the product switcheroo scam [0] - it seems like a trivial problem to solve. I've reported items to them before and they don't care.
[0] this product for example, loads of the reviews are for something totally different - https://www.amazon.co.uk/WERPOWER-Windscreen-Invisible-Winds...