> "These are fantastic slap bracelets. We use them as prizes at our school, and the kiddos love them! I wish there were more “boy” colors/themes, but our youngest students love them all! Great product for a great price!"
> "I hung this beautiful portrait in my kitchen. My family and I love looking at it everyday it is made well. Overall great product!"
> "This camera is really good and the mic on it works great too. Exactly what I needed. Great price aswell."
What happens is that sellers take listings for cheap, low-margin items, and build up reviews for awhile. Then they edit the listing to describe something expensive, and ship fakes. People assume it's legitimate because they see the high star rating.
Amazon makes it very difficult to report fake listings like this one, even when it's very obvious that it's fake. They also don't let users see the edit history of listings. I suspect that they're avoiding knowledge, so that if a fake item turns out to be dangerous, they can claim ignorance in court.
Lol, I tried to "report a product issue" and the submit button is greyed out. Reviews are limited to verified purchases due to "unusual activity". What the actual fuck?
Because Amazon is an online store that makes money when things are being sold through it. Including fake things.
And since Amazon has no real competition and lawmakers are asleep at the wheel (if not outright bought), there is zero incentive for Amazon to do anything about this.
But is that a good long-term strategy to make money?
After being bitten by crap products (one of which literally broke in 5 minutes), I don't buy electronics in Amazon anymore. They would get more money from me if they hadn't turned into a flea market of bad products.
Amazon is making more money than the entire economy of most countries. Their long term plan, like other tech giants, will be to become a sovereign entity. In some ways, they already are. Then they can effectively outlaw the competition, so outcompeting them won't matter anymore.
“Long term” is not a problem when one makes so much profit in so little time and controls so much market/labor share that they are a tacit monopoly.
Bezos’s primary goal is Bezos. Amazon’s is “shareholders”. Meteoric rise in profit is great and a hedge against “long term”/eventual downfall is easily done when that rise is part of an industry so dependent on amazon’s existence.
IE: before amazon “falls” there will be a lot of “community loses x thousand jobs if we don't keep amazon her discussion to serve as the hedge.
In the long term everyone is dead. If the term is long enough to drive competitors out, corner the market, make tons of money for stakeholders, that's good enough. It's kinda the opposite of "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent".
do you get your money back if you send it back? (it is the case where I live, but I think it is not mandatory everywhere)
if enough people send it back, the costs for amazon might get high enough to take care of the problem. although I am guilty of not sending back defective 5€ to 10€ items as the hassle was not worth the time at that moment
> Because Amazon is an online store that makes money when things are being sold through it. Including fake things.
Yep, and it uses this money to pay reviewgeek.com for their affiliate links on this article, and the circle is closed (to be fair, at least they did not post an affiliate link to one of these fake drives).
Amazon is not irrelevant in The Netherlands. They just are not the dominant #1 because of a previously existing competitor (Bol.com). Which has a large enough company backing it up (Ahold Delhaize) after they got acquired and had a foothold before Amazon had (Bol.com started with books and wasn't profitable for a long time). They're doing the same shit as Amazon (third party sellers, including drop shippers and such), but more fair. See this article about Amazon possibly being accountable for fake articles being sold [1]. Interestingly, the article also describes Bol.com is way more fair about it selling via a third party than Amazon.
That would be true if reviews weren't fake themselves. And just like fake products, Amazon has no incentive to fight fake reviews either. To Amazon, these aren't "scams", they're good business.
Amazon's very first stated leadership principle is Customer Obsession: Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.
This, and the myriad of other stories about Amazon, leave me scratching my head. They aggressively filter candidates based on questions designed around these principals. Either they're completely failing on a cultural front, or the values and their hiring process are a weird in-joke.
Don't scratch your head too hard you'll get a bold spot.
It is nothing but a sort of well intentioned sounding yet ultimately meaningless corporate speak instituted a long time ago by Bezos - kind-of sort-of true for a while and then the headcount gets huge.
Now it something you might hear at Uncle Enzo's CosaNostra Pizza HQ.
During my time, this principle was followed. With one small exception: Amazon Marketplace. There everybody was extremely hands-off, at best the marketplace sellers were considered Amazon's customers, not the people buying through the marketplace. That being said, if sellers used FBA, things like returns and so on followed the same rules like Amazon's own business. I didn't really agree with that approach, but it does seem to work out quite well for Amazon so far...
Almost like they have collapsed into a cesspool of backstabbing, overwork, turnover, burnout, betrayal, hire-to-fire, stack ranking, inevitable pip, etc.
Even if you survive that, they'll fire you right before you vest.
Amazon is a company focused on efficiency, to the point of being cut-throat, sure. But do you have anything to back your claim? Because as far as I can tell, this is simply not true.
Could simply be that Amazon is just very generous about refunds, so either way the customer is happy. Someone gets something they think is a bargain. Others get prompt refunds.
Politics has certainly shown that honesty isn't really related to trust.
I returned a laptop battery that didn't match the description recently and I'm not happy. I don't have what I wanted to buy, I maybe already got back my money (didn't check yet), I lost time to fill forms, print a label, etc. I have to spend time again to find another battery and hope for the best.
Couldn’t this be solved with some vigilantly style justice. (Since Amazon are not dealing with it proactively)
If a large group of individuals buy these hard drives (~1-3k) and then all file for refunds on the basis that the product is a scam / not as advertised (providing the evidence from the blog post).
Isn’t the result that everyone gets a refund. The seller loses the sales. They get 1-3k bad reviews. And they lose the merchandise (unless they’re sent back, but it seems like lower value products like this don’t require a return).
Surely that would quite quickly make this an unprofitable venture for the scammers.
I'd imagine that the sellers have a number of accounts and only sell a small amount of products through each.
In cases like these, Amazon should take note that a product is a scam, automatically refund all customers and remove the product and account. The issue is, that would require Amazon to withhold payment to sells for 30 - 60 days, which is going to absolutely suck for small honest sellers.
I don't think Amazon really care what happens on their platform, as long as it make a profit... or are they still losing money on the e-commerce side of business?
> are they still losing money on the e-commerce side of business?
It isn't entirely clear to me if the losses Amazon reports are accounting magic (invest rather than profit, keeping taxes low and growth high), or a genuine failure, or a mix of both.
If AWS was split from Amazon so the latter was forced to operate without its cash cow, I think we'd all be better off. I'm sure lots of us would also be willing to trade a smaller product selection for better quality guarantees; the Alibaba-reseller model sucks.
Are you willing to spend several hundred dollars buying hard drives hoping to someday get it back? Then will you spend the time testing them, refunding them, and making a bad review? And how many new scammers can pop up over the time it takes you to ruin one scammers ratings?
Expecting a large group of customers to test these things thoroughly enough to discover how fake they are is unreasonable. With blatantly intentional fakes like these, a single one should be enough to indict and imprison the seller and fine Amazon.
So that might make a difference fir this 1 product, but Amazon is absolutely full of Aliexpress tat. It's more aliexpress than genuine CE marked products nowadays
I received a couple of fakes when ordering Lightning cables for my iPhone (which claimed made by "Appel in Califona" on the box which was a dead give away). Left a review to let people know it was fake and also got the review rejected for policy violations. Like this article says, the Marketplace team clearly sees the sellers as their customers and doesn't care about the people actually buying.
That's funny especially when one is constantly harassed by the Amazon to prove you are not selling counterfeits ("hey, this Nike sneakers tons of others are selling are infringing some IP, fix it!"), dealing with products named "XYZ Winter Life Jacket" which Amazon immediately bans, because they think it is lifejacket and not jacket, filling forms for developers full of absurd questions, impossibility to prove identity of your employees if they do not have recent utility bill with their name (wifes in Europe often don't) etc. And don't even get me started about customers keeping ordered items, claiming they never received them and Amazon ignoring DHL shipment tracking data - one of my clients got account suspended for this and Amazon demanded us to provide plan for preventing these situations...
Yes. It costs next to nothing to illicitly register hundreds of fake seller accounts. Legitimate sellers who get caught in the bureaucracy stay banned because they are too law-abiding to circumvent, while scammers just play statistics to keep ahead of the lockouts.
After a few years of this, what do you imagine the amazon marketplace looks like? I don't think amazon deliberately rewards scammers or punishes legit sellers, but the system they have built has that result.
Those Chinese sellers will DDoS any investigation.
It only costs a few bucks to register as a seller, they bulk register thousands of sellers under different names. They will exploit any loophole under environment filter pressure.
I notice this article talks a lot about hope, but not about returning the item, getting your money back, or fining the seller or Amazon. Does the US not have any consumer protection laws? This is blatant false advertising. There should be fines for both the seller and for Amazon, and all money paid by customers who bought this, should be paid back. Make it automatic for obvious frauds so the scammers also get punished for their review scam.
It's ridiculous that this is allowed to exist. This is exactly why a free market requires some regulation; you've got to know what you're buying.
Amazon has the most generous refunds I have ever experienced. I once had a return and complained to customer service that their chosen delivery provider was a bit far, so they just let me keep it.
free market requires competition, otherwise it stops optimizing for providing better and better value propositions
each market is an optimization algorithm, but if the search space is too big, it gets into a pathological state (market failure), and any economic surplus resulting from optimization goes into keeping it in this state (which is likely profit maximizing for a small subset of participants, sellers or buyers, depending on monopoly or monopsony situation of course)
Amazon spends its profit on crushing competition instead of providing a better marketplace.
Regulations are ineffective if they can't move the market out of this failure mode. (I.e. fines have to be big enough and the actual compliance has to affect a large enough part of the market.)
As long as it takes a few months (or less) to set up a new established seller of things, and as long as the advantage of having a non-fraudelent business is less than doing these scams, the scamming will continue.
Fundamental dilemma of Amazon is that they want fungibility. A book is a book, even if it's new, mint condition, used, dusty, hardcover, paperback, large font, high quality, cheap paper, fancy cover, etc.
But this works well only for books, where it's obvious to check. (Are every page readable and present? yes, great. no? refund.)
But this breaks down almost immediately where fakes and knockoffs and cheap shit is much cheaper to produce (so the price is very competitive), works kind of okayish initially (so hard to check for non-experts). For example any appliance and furniture (see the endless variations on office and "gaming" chairs, tablets, powerbanks, USB hubs, cables, gadgets, mouses, keyboards, monitors, dietary supplements, fitness machines, car addons, etc.)
Dude, Amazon will refund you for any reason including "I no longer need this product" without charging a restocking fee. All large retailers (Costco, Walmart, Target, etc) are like like this in the US.
Every wondered why Americans roll their eyes when Europeans brag about consumer protection laws?
The return policies you've described are guaranteed by law in Europe. I'd rather had the law cover guaranteed minimum return policies across all shops.
Readit News
> "These are fantastic slap bracelets. We use them as prizes at our school, and the kiddos love them! I wish there were more “boy” colors/themes, but our youngest students love them all! Great product for a great price!"
> "I hung this beautiful portrait in my kitchen. My family and I love looking at it everyday it is made well. Overall great product!"
> "This camera is really good and the mic on it works great too. Exactly what I needed. Great price aswell."
What happens is that sellers take listings for cheap, low-margin items, and build up reviews for awhile. Then they edit the listing to describe something expensive, and ship fakes. People assume it's legitimate because they see the high star rating.
Amazon makes it very difficult to report fake listings like this one, even when it's very obvious that it's fake. They also don't let users see the edit history of listings. I suspect that they're avoiding knowledge, so that if a fake item turns out to be dangerous, they can claim ignorance in court.
And since Amazon has no real competition and lawmakers are asleep at the wheel (if not outright bought), there is zero incentive for Amazon to do anything about this.
After being bitten by crap products (one of which literally broke in 5 minutes), I don't buy electronics in Amazon anymore. They would get more money from me if they hadn't turned into a flea market of bad products.
Bezos’s primary goal is Bezos. Amazon’s is “shareholders”. Meteoric rise in profit is great and a hedge against “long term”/eventual downfall is easily done when that rise is part of an industry so dependent on amazon’s existence.
IE: before amazon “falls” there will be a lot of “community loses x thousand jobs if we don't keep amazon her discussion to serve as the hedge.
Yep, and it uses this money to pay reviewgeek.com for their affiliate links on this article, and the circle is closed (to be fair, at least they did not post an affiliate link to one of these fake drives).
Like all of Asia, Switzerland, Netherlands apparently.
[1] https://blog.iusmentis.com/2023/01/10/amazon-mogelijk-aanspr...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXf04bhcjbg
This, and the myriad of other stories about Amazon, leave me scratching my head. They aggressively filter candidates based on questions designed around these principals. Either they're completely failing on a cultural front, or the values and their hiring process are a weird in-joke.
It is nothing but a sort of well intentioned sounding yet ultimately meaningless corporate speak instituted a long time ago by Bezos - kind-of sort-of true for a while and then the headcount gets huge.
Now it something you might hear at Uncle Enzo's CosaNostra Pizza HQ.
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
Even if you survive that, they'll fire you right before you vest.
Politics has certainly shown that honesty isn't really related to trust.
If a large group of individuals buy these hard drives (~1-3k) and then all file for refunds on the basis that the product is a scam / not as advertised (providing the evidence from the blog post).
Isn’t the result that everyone gets a refund. The seller loses the sales. They get 1-3k bad reviews. And they lose the merchandise (unless they’re sent back, but it seems like lower value products like this don’t require a return).
Surely that would quite quickly make this an unprofitable venture for the scammers.
In cases like these, Amazon should take note that a product is a scam, automatically refund all customers and remove the product and account. The issue is, that would require Amazon to withhold payment to sells for 30 - 60 days, which is going to absolutely suck for small honest sellers.
I don't think Amazon really care what happens on their platform, as long as it make a profit... or are they still losing money on the e-commerce side of business?
It isn't entirely clear to me if the losses Amazon reports are accounting magic (invest rather than profit, keeping taxes low and growth high), or a genuine failure, or a mix of both.
If AWS was split from Amazon so the latter was forced to operate without its cash cow, I think we'd all be better off. I'm sure lots of us would also be willing to trade a smaller product selection for better quality guarantees; the Alibaba-reseller model sucks.
Wait, that's not the case already? Isn't that how all marketplaces work? How else do you pay out refunds?
Ah, good luck with that! I once left a 1 star review for a fake product and Amazon didn't publish it because they said it didn't respect their policy.
After a few years of this, what do you imagine the amazon marketplace looks like? I don't think amazon deliberately rewards scammers or punishes legit sellers, but the system they have built has that result.
However, they fine and imprison small businesses and individuals, but just publish "warnings" when it's Amazon or Ebay.
https://www.nationaltradingstandards.uk/news/online-shoppers...
https://www.nationaltradingstandards.uk/news/archive-2022/
It only costs a few bucks to register as a seller, they bulk register thousands of sellers under different names. They will exploit any loophole under environment filter pressure.
If Trading Standards raid Tesco and find an illegal product, they take action against Tesco for selling it.
It's ridiculous that this is allowed to exist. This is exactly why a free market requires some regulation; you've got to know what you're buying.
each market is an optimization algorithm, but if the search space is too big, it gets into a pathological state (market failure), and any economic surplus resulting from optimization goes into keeping it in this state (which is likely profit maximizing for a small subset of participants, sellers or buyers, depending on monopoly or monopsony situation of course)
Amazon spends its profit on crushing competition instead of providing a better marketplace.
Regulations are ineffective if they can't move the market out of this failure mode. (I.e. fines have to be big enough and the actual compliance has to affect a large enough part of the market.)
As long as it takes a few months (or less) to set up a new established seller of things, and as long as the advantage of having a non-fraudelent business is less than doing these scams, the scamming will continue.
Fundamental dilemma of Amazon is that they want fungibility. A book is a book, even if it's new, mint condition, used, dusty, hardcover, paperback, large font, high quality, cheap paper, fancy cover, etc.
But this works well only for books, where it's obvious to check. (Are every page readable and present? yes, great. no? refund.)
But this breaks down almost immediately where fakes and knockoffs and cheap shit is much cheaper to produce (so the price is very competitive), works kind of okayish initially (so hard to check for non-experts). For example any appliance and furniture (see the endless variations on office and "gaming" chairs, tablets, powerbanks, USB hubs, cables, gadgets, mouses, keyboards, monitors, dietary supplements, fitness machines, car addons, etc.)
Every wondered why Americans roll their eyes when Europeans brag about consumer protection laws?