[Retric]

Amazon is at fault for the amount of fraud on their platform and the amount of damage it’s caused both businesses and customers.

It isn’t at fault for people preferring to buy stuff online or Amazon’s highly efficient supply chain etc.

[mtnGoat]

Ok then it sounds like we agree on all points then. They could certainly do better at cleaning up the fraud.

[hnbad]

The fraud is integral to their business model at this point, though.

They deliberately chose a way of storing products that makes them vulnerable to fraud. Fixing that would require storing them differently (which would be more expensive to them).

Likewise, cutting down on unsafe or white label products would increase the quality of the products they sell but adding a vetting process and stricter moderation would significantly increase labor costs per product and if companies at scale want to avoid one thing, it's dynamic labor costs.

They literally can't do better at cleaning up the fraud because there is no market incentive for them to do so and doing so would reduce profits and thus shareholder value. To borrow your line: it's just free markets and capitalism working as intended.

[mtnGoat]

It’s also not in their best interest to let things get out of control. Free markets ebb and flow.

I don’t know of any other platform that has a markedly better vetting process, Walmart, eBay, AliExpress, Wish, etc all have much the same or worse issues with this. But they all seam to be very pro consumer when it comes to returns, none seem to ask any questions.

Maybe it’s not a conspiracy but rather an industry wide problem of playing wack-a-mole with scammers, that every platform is continually dealing with.