[pbhjpbhj]

I don't understand why Amazon did this? Surely it's to their benefit to drive sales from good suppliers (if there is more than one supplier) as that leads to more customer satisfaction.

It's a bit fraudulent really, like a bait and switch.

In reality each page needs a product and supplier rating, and people need to be guided to rate both. Instead you get "this company sacked my daughter; 1 star" and "the postman dropped it; 1 star" type ratings.

[joshstrange]

It makes logistics easier I'd think. The mistake Amazon is making is that Product A is Product A is Product A. It means they have 2 less things to track quantity of and they can have 1 count that matters instead of 3. On the surface it seems 100% logical...

Reminds me of story where (and I'm going to butcher parts of this) a town is making a huge vat of wine (or maybe it's food related) and everyone household is supposed to bring a bottle to pour in. A couple of people decide to cheat the system and bring water instead expecting to hide under the radar. It turns out way more people than a few take this path and so the "wine" just tastes like water with a hint of wine in it.

[pbhjpbhj]

Is it "easier"? I'd have thought with their robots-and-bins it was notionally identical, save a few minor modifications to the front-end.

As it's Amazon, presumably they tested and found this to be the best mode for profit.

[dwild]

> I'd have thought with their robots-and-bins it was notionally identical

Is it really identical? They do have quite a bit of warehouse which means that shipping can be quite longer and more expensive.

Let say I'm a third party and I got 100 shirts in Amazon warehouses in north America and they got 100 too. That means that in average there's 2.6 shirts per warehouse (I found there is 75 warehouses but that can be a wrong number) but we each got 1.3 in averages! If someone buy 2 of mine, most likely they'll have to ship one from somewhere else, while they could just take one of theirs and consider it the same.

At the end of the day though, it doesn't means that I was truthful and my product is actually the same, which can hurt their orders.

[jsmith99]

The ratings on the product page are meant to be purely about the product. Reviews that mention the seller are often removed. This is actually the main way sellers get rid of bad reviews: most one star reviews will include a reference to the seller and so amazon will usually remove them if the seller asks.

There is a separate review system for sellers, and the score is shown when you look at the buying options, but it's little used and much less visible.

[rhizome]

I've seen this lots and lots of other places as well. For instance, Walmart's website will return hits for searches, and when you look at the product page it will invariably have "Sold by SomeNobody." These huge supply-chain-engineering companies just rake in listing fees now that other parts of their business model are solved.