[StreamBright]

It is not that I think 50% is a lot but it is the same 50% when amazon is selling fakes. If amazon would be able to sell items that are original and the money would go to the right person maybe 50% is ok. This is not the case by a long shot.

[omgomgomgomg]

As a former Amazonian who has worked on vat, compliance, taxes, product compliance etc, I can tell you, really from an unbiased perspective that Amazon is doing everything they can to terminate the bad actors.

This includes the fake reviews etc. Lets say you have a charger for iphones, you cant have text for the ASIN saying for iphone, it will get delisted immediatelly, you have to say "compatible with iphone" and such.

The main weakness is how products are created, the catalogue principle, this allows some to fly under the radar for a bit sometimes. And Amazon will not immediatelly shut down a whole sellers account, but rather target ASINs one by one. The best way for a buyer to deal with this is to leave a sellers(not product) review and ask for a refund, you will always get the refund, Amazon always pushes liability to the sellers in order to protect the brand image and to not be exploitable. Once theres enough of reviews and refunds, the sellers will get shut down and the funds will be held on hold, just like a banl does for credit card processors. The cost to do business on amazon with fakes repeatedly(need new companies every time etc) is quite high, if not prohibitivelly high. Do not suck it up, do the 2 things mentioned to keep the place tidy.

[runnerup]

Amazon is doing nothing about the total product switches where hard drives have reviews about laundry detergent. They’re clearly not doing basic easy prevention.

Customers try really hard to report stuff like this and Amazon actively thwarts them.

It’s insane to say that Amazon is trying really hard to prevent fraud. Maybe some types of fraud, sure. But so much of the customers-facing fraud is actively supported by Amazon, like Amazon puts actual active effort into preventing customers from reporting it!

[omgomgomgomg]

This is why I said leave bad reviews on the seller, not the item. You can report brand infringement.

Often, you might need an account or a seller account, this could be improved indeed, however, whats available:

Amazon.com https://www.amazon.com › report Report Infringement

https://www.redpoints.com/blog/report-infringement-amazon/

https://www.redpoints.com/blog/remove-counterfeit-amazon/

Going to customer service will not lead anywhere usually, it needs to end up with the dedicated team.

[StreamBright]

As a former Amazonian too, I can tell you that we internally had several feature request open to certain teams who could not give two shits about customers anymore. We (a bunch of engineers working on the website platform) we enraged about the incompetence some other teams were showing when it comes to customer satisfaction. And I know for a fact that Amazon is not doing everything they can, not by a long shot. The problem is that the way how Amazon operates the quality is really all over the place, depending on teams much more than in other companies.

I used to buy everything on Amazon and slowly transitioned to traditional stores and only buy things that I cannot in an offline store. Btw. the quality declined over time so you can't say that it was never great. 10 years ago you could have much more confidence that you get what you paid for then today.

[omgomgomgomg]

Hi there, nice meeting you. Yes, as a dev, it will be hard to push feature requests, I have realized this much, the whole query tools and seller central are rigid and ther are few changes. It is probably very hard to get features approved because there are many stakeholders involved etc.

There is indeed a massive segregation between the teams, the only correspondence is via the ticketing system and sometimes dms via Chime, which happens rather slow, if at all. Now, it depends who you mean by customers, Amazon does not consider the end buyers as first class customers, their customers are the sellers. I know what you mean by some "rogue" teams, without naming any by name, but it is core departments. There exist some parallel departments, like literally doing the same tasks, but by different procedures, as many teams develop their own procedures(for example the vat teams did everything from scratch and even the andon advisors struggle to follow on that). I have seen it happen, teams doing the very same tasks, but in totally different ways, neither is wrong, but it does cause confusion, usually its the older teams not catching up with new developments, from what I have seen. The "SOPs" are more applied on a global level rather than on a team layer.

I am not sure if the US market is different than Europe and Uk, it could be, I never had access to US SC. I do not shop online often, maybe 10 times in 10 years, most of it via Amazon, simply because I get from them what I order and very fast. Any other platform I had tried I regretred very fast.

Or lets ask it this way? How could amazon ensure that all the products are legit before they are being delivered? I am aware of comingling, which can be disabled afaik. But its impossible to check every item before its shipped and if its seller fullfilled orders, there is no way either. I wouldnt know how to improve that other than shutting a sellers account down upon first report, which then leaves you open to false claims by competitors etc. For example, if you want to hurt a competitor, you could just publish many fake 5 star(not 1 star) product reviews in an unreasonably short time(higher than usual frequency) and that will likely be the death knell for the review feature, it would be disabled.

Of course, I have also seen dog collars falsly being flagged as baby toys and the AI findig ridiculous dead end path for case handling and the translation bots having impeccable, even most eloquent language skills, but the conrent being way off. Sometimes these bots get the "needs no human review" approval, when they are not ready for business.

And dont get me started on the "outsourcers":-)

From what I have seen, most dev work is thrown at SC and the various ASIN back offices for the catalogue content. Seen some rather bad db queries for the oracle instances and shared workbook usage where you rather shouldnt make that choice etc. But the website front end gets the least "love".

I should habe qualified my statements with "as far I am aware".

[StreamBright]

> How could amazon ensure that all the products are legit before they are being delivered?

Better question yet, should Amazon exist in this form if it cannot ensure that all products are legit? We quite often assume that the current for of existence is the only way to go about the problem.

With the power of pki and blockchain it is trivial to create a platform (I know because I was part of a team that created one) where traceability is a feature and it is impossible to game the system the same way it is possible now with the current fulfilment situation.

[omgomgomgomg]

This is a legitimate question, most likely the hordes of legal and compliance have ensured its "legal".

They offer the refund remedy, but i suspect(actually, I am sure, I have worked in banking and fintech before) that is to prevent chargebacks.

It is surprising how many chargebacks are mitigated this way, if any merchant, even Amazon, gets hit by too many chargebacks, the acquirer will shut them down if heavy penalties are no remedy.

But knowing Amazons order volumes, it is probably still too lucrative for the acquirers to sack Amazon as a merchant.

Amazon should do something about it, you have a good point, they are good at shuffling liability, the concept is one of a kind, but they should apply the same to product integrity and QA.

Someone somewhere is seeing the numbers and has not seen a need to intervene on the matter yet. I am sure you remember the tree charts of teams, all starting and leading to the c level, right?

Its either c level or the c level reports making these decisions.

I think removing comingling and strictly banning the infringing accounts upon first report should solve this issue 99%. Block, hold the funds, review and make a final decision. I would not tolerate mislabeled storage devices or fakes.

For example, there have been aldo shoes for impossible prices on there, I think Aldo choses not to sell on Amazon, so it might take a while before someone realizes that. Usually the system detects such things quite well, if a company has a brand and a patent, they are supper protected on amazon, for example selling boots looking anything like the docs and mertens brand will get shut down fast and efficiently. Maybe some brands are more protected than others, I do not know.