I disagree. There seems to be so much low hanging fruit to at least reduce the problem but they haven't taken even the smallest steps. This is because they're prioritizing revenue, volume, and selection over fraud prevention.

I've seen this in other companies. It's like Amazon had a bad revenue addiction. They can't go cold-turkey and cut every suspect seller in the marketplace, because that would cause a large impact on their quarterly numbers. But if this goes untreated, it will drive out good sellers and destroy consumer confidence.

You could not be more right. At least from my personal experience. I mean, try and buy a phone case on Amazon right now. Literally every single listing on their top two pages of results when filtered by "best rated" is stuffed with fake / paid reviews. Its literally impossible to tell if you're going to be getting a quality product. And if companies like Fakespot or whatever can tell if Amazon reviews are fake, Amazon themselves could easily do as as well, or even just buy one of the review validating services and integrate the score directly into their listings. None of this is that hard, and especially not for Amazon with their scale and resources, so literally the only reason for them not to do this is that it is more profitable not to. The average consumer may have a relatively high degree of trust in Amazon, but anyone who thinks even remotely critically about their purchasing decisions is going to quickly realize Amazon is mired in fake reviews and duplicity.

Not true, they banned incentivized reviews. That's a big step towards getting more accurate reviews.

I'm not sure how they're enforcing the ban because I still see tons of reviews that are openly declaring that they were incentivized with the boiler plate "I received this item at a discount in exchange for my honest review." tag at the end of their review.

There are any number of steps they could take to dramatically decrease the counterfeiting problem, chief among them to make sure the customer can choose which supplier the goods to fulfill the order comes from.

I think Amazon is making a bet that reducing the number of SKUs in their warehouses is of greater value than counterfeiting is a problem - and this is probably true for a ton of their more generic stuff that comes from the same factory in China anyway.

> I would have thought that on Hackernews of all places people would recognize the scale that is involved with a site like Amazon and recognize that fixing this problem is far from trivial.

Yes, but:)

Fixing it is far from trivial, BUT there are trivial things that would help. It's the 80/20 rule again; sure, a full solution would take years and be a massive undertaking, but even a minor effort would make a big dent in the problem.

I doubt Amazon even considers it an issue. The effect of negative customer experiences from counterfeit goods and fake reviews on actual sales is likely negligible, certainly less than the cost of any "improvement" to the system. Most people aren't going to delete their Amazon accounts because of a bad item - they'll just return it, and stay customers.

Meanwhile, those counterfeits allow Amazon to fulfill orders more quickly and to list items at lower cost, undermining their competition, and any bad experience a customer has can be blamed on the vendor, not Amazon itself.

Of course, I could be wrong, and I have no particular insight, but to me this seems like an intentional part of Amazon's business model.

> actual sales is likely negligible

At the moment it might be negligible but in the long run they are hurting them self. 5 years ago I and a lot of my friends ordered everything on Amazon because it was fast and we knew that we will get the correct stuff.

Nowadays I (and most of my friends) almost stopped using Amazon because it is such a hassle to find stuff which is actually sold and shipped by Amazon and not some sketchy third party seller with only 5 reviews. And even if you manage to order something directly through Amazon you might still have problems with counterfeit items and other stuff.

And the same is true for my parents and their friends. Until 1-2 years ago Amazon was _the_ place to shop online but nowadays they switched back to more traditional methods.

Due to all this shady stuff Amazon lost me as a customer (who used to spend hundreds and thousands of euros per year).

If the same or similar item is available on Target.com, I now buy it there.

I trust Target's supply chain about 100x more than Amazon and I'm willing to pay extra for that assurance.

Amazon may not consider it an issue - yet, but if they don't before it make critical mass, it could seriously damage them.

As a fairly heavy Amazon customer for both home & biz, I was getting to the point where Amazon was just the default buying location, but now there are entire categories of stuff that are such a PITA to find a valid offering that Amazon is just about off my list.

Amazon recently keeps showing me a popup about a Biz account for some benefits, and while I probably would have jumped at it 2 years ago, I just haven't bothered now.

Yes, it's mere anecdote, but I'm seeing many complaints of the same. This is the kind of problem that doesn't show up in the numbers early, and by the time it shows up in the numbers to get Mgt's attention, it may be too late, because the reputational damage has been done.

Years to build trust, minutes to break it...

I disagree, I feel like around 30% of HN works at a big company, but most are at startups nowhere near the scale of Amazon.

I disagree. There seems to be so much low hanging fruit to at least reduce the problem but they haven't taken even the smallest steps. This is because they're prioritizing revenue, volume, and selection over fraud prevention.