I share this sentiment.
For comparison, I believe the amount of and methods with which Google collects data to be wrong, but I also believe that they don't believe they are doing something (outright) wrong.
Amazon, however, must know that they have a counterfeit goods problem, but it seems that they couldn't care less about it. Same applies to gaming the review system.
It seems like a hard problem - eBay suffered from this too for their goods,Yelp with reviews. I doubt it's just a "I don't care" kind of thing.
Most brick and mortar chains in the UK have a buying policy that requires you to prove your goods are fit for purpose before they'll put it on the shelves and risk hurting their brand. I imagine most of Europe operates similarly.
They will generally require suppliers to send examples of the range before being allowed in store, and they will test or examine a representative selection first. They'll probably do basic safety and legality tests too. As a new supplier you can expect your products to be subject to random checks over the coming months. After a period of good track record you will become a trusted supplier and subject to fewer, or perhaps no, checks.
Amazon should do the same. That they are big or that they are online is no excuse not to.
Amazon would look far far better to their customers if they started cutting some of the crap as "not good enough to go in Amazon" and dropping suppliers for shoddy manufacture or too high a return rate.
There is a big difference between cheap, good value and all the world's unfit for purpose and counterfeit crap, for me anyway. They can pretend marketplace is separate, and outsource returns and customer service to marketplace sellers all they like. If I buy something dangerous or shit on marketplace I resent Amazon as much as the RNGFake4u brand I accidentally bought.
I put same in quotes, because it can be counterfeit or just similar. You’ll never know if you just buy the cheapest via buy now.
The only exception if it’s your own brand. Which is what many sellers are doing now. That’s why you are seeing a billion of poorly branded, cheap Chinese products.
No idea what do to about the reviews, but the first step to the counterfeit goods problem is simple: once you've received X complaints about a counterfeit product, stop selling the product.
Continuing to sell a product for which there are numerous and credible indications that they are counterfeit is borderline fraud.
If you don't have an idea of how to solve the review problem, I'm not convinced you've thought through the "received X complaints about a counterfeit product" problem and your proposed solution. In your system, I could easily assault my competitors with counterfeit claims and get their products removed. This already happens with reviews and other sort of reports/returns.
With "complaint", I meant a formal complaint to Amazon, over a proper channel, either by contacting Amazon Support, or during the returning process (I'm returning this product because it is counterfeit").
They need to patrol the sources for fake reviews (facebook groups, etc) and perform sting operations to catch the sellers who solicit them. It shouldn't be too hard, a simple Facebook search finds hundreds of groups and thousands of solicitations. Once you identify a seller that does this, you ban them from Amazon, as well as everyone who's given their products a fake review (for the reviewers, it should probably be a three strikes thing before they're banned, since a lot of them seem to just like free stuff).
> but the first step to the counterfeit goods problem is simple: once you've received X complaints about a counterfeit product, stop selling the product.
> Continuing to sell a product for which there are numerous and credible indications that they are counterfeit is borderline fraud.
I'd say the second step is to roll back many of Amazon's practices that make counterfeiting harder to detect, for instance how they can commingle inventory between sellers (if those sellers weren't careful when they made their listing). That makes it impossible for the sellers to have meaningful reputation scores, since bad-actors can sell their counterfeits through honest-actor storefronts (and vice versa).
The third step is to implement better supply chain management and vetting of suppliers. Not everyone should be able to set up a marketplace store and sell any product. There needs to be effective vetting of sellers and it should be hard enough to setup a marketplace account they can't just create a new one when their last one is banned. There should also be especially stringent vetting around listings for frequently fake and counterfeit products, like SD cards.
The fourth step is to implement active counterfeit and fake product detection (through test purchases). If a particular item is too often fake or counterfeited, Amazon should ban it from the marketplace and only sell inventory directly sourced from the original manufacturer.
None of these things should be too hard for a company with Amazon's resources to effectively implement. The fact that it hasn't says that these problems aren't a priority for it.
Recently, though, Huggies changed the 'movers & poopers' line or whatever they call it. Since consumers didn't know about the change beforehand (new leg-hole shape, for instance) there were many reports that those were counterfeit, and Huggies had representatives deployed to answer Amazon reviews that showed the legit redesigned diapers and falsely called them counterfeit.
Moreover, what would happen to Amazon if they stopped selling Huggies and Pampers? Collapse! or maybe just a 20% loss of revenue! Do you know how many people go Prime purely so they can get their diapers autoshipped? and the formula, and the breastmilk bags, and the wipes? My family signed up for Prime solely because of baby crap, and once that baby crap is not needed, Prime ends. But for most people, Prime continues from baby to toddler to whenever they remember to stop auto-renewing. This is a huge market.
Amazon cannot afford not to fix their supply chain legitimacy issues. But they can't just stop selling the product. Agree that it's fraudulent to keep selling counterfeits, agree that they need to fix it or all those Prime parents are going to switch to Target for their brand-name diapers. It's not simple, though.
If they can't run a legitimate business properly, then that's their problem.
Take a look around -- plenty of other profitable retailers don't have this problem.
> But they can't just stop selling the product.
Not only can they, they must.
You can't continue with illegitimate business just because you'd be unprofitable otherwise.
That is, reviews and reports are likely easier to manipulate/game than physical products. Not just in "ballet stuffing" but through many other means. (That is, it is probably easy to get credible people to also vouch for products while you are shipping counterfeit ones.)
To that end, I'd imagine it is easy to get rid of someone that sells 100% fake items. But how hard is it to drop someone that sells 10% fake items? In bulk, that is still damaging. And is still probably lucrative for the seller.
Basically, I'd expect (again, perhaps naively) that painting it as a boolean trip actually makes it easier for the cheaters.
No, just anecdata, including personal experience. But the anecdata seems widespread enough.
> To that end, I'd imagine it is easy to get rid of someone that sells 100% fake items. But how hard is it to drop someone that sells 10% fake items?
I have absolutely zero experience with retail, but I'd probably set the bar at 0%. Any deviation from that 0% must be explained satisfactorily: "how did this happen", "what measures have been taken so that this doesn't happen again", etc.
The big issue is co-mingling inventory. This is where they mix same product from different sellers in same batch. I only order products from Amazon.com LLC. But I have still received items that seems fake.
Some says that co-mingling inventory saves Amazon a lot of money but to me it seems like Amazon is actively shielding bad players by making it hard to trackdown who is selling fake products.
Seperating inventory not just by article but also supplier and / or inventory owner is no small feat. But if Amazon's IT environment is not able of doing it, this is opening all kinds of issues. None of them really good in the long run.
So Amazon has already built the system to keep inventory separate by sellers.
If you turn off comingling you have to (? not sure if anymore) apply Amazon ASIN stickers instead of the manufacturer barcode, which is really annoying.
Is the reviewer saying things of substance, how many other reviews have they left and over how many years, how many things have they actually bought on the store and at what dollar amounts, are their other reviews a mix of positive/negative, are the types of products distinct, etc. Score each of these and remove/shadow-ban reviews that don't meet an authenticity metric.
If there are real consequences for getting caught buying fake reviews (e.g. banning from selling or fines), it could really restore some order to the chaos. (Then you get the inverse problem of competitors buying fake reviews trying to get the competition banned or fined. This is second-order to actually removing the fake reviews in the first place though.)
But for someone like me, I don't want to gamble whenever I buy anything. I have had Prime from the very start and now I think I am not going to renew. I am sick of getting substandard products and lately with their private label shipping the delivery date/time has been completely arbitrary. I've done almost all of my shopping online my entire adult life, but now I am increasingly going to local stores as I have never received a fake, and now they compete on price.
With so many engineers working at Google, someone there should be thinking they are doing something wrong. Right?
Or are you more thinking of a collective conscious of some kind?
Not that non-management is irrelevant. It's just less relevant. Because what is OK or not OK is ultimately decided at the very top.
For example, in the not-so-recent-past, Uber was rocked with scandals on a weekly basis. The first step to fix this was to find a new CEO.
Once you've accepted that selling counterfeit goods and other broadly anti-competitive practices are A-OK and part of your core business model, you've crossed a line where it's no longer really a matter of simply doing "less" of it.
Amazon seems to have decided that the higher margins of counterfeits and prioritizing ads over search quality are worth the loss of user trust. I wholeheartedly hope this will be a costly miscalculation on their part, as I would prefer a marketplace with fewer ads and reliably genuine items.
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
The free markets need regulation, or they stop being free.
Anyway, the point is just that one doesn't expect companies to be your friend. You expect them to pursue their own interest, and thankfully their interest and your interest overlap quite often - and mutual, voluntary exchange of goods, service, and currency occurs.
Are there things I wish Amazon, for example, did differently? Of course. And the wonderful thing about the free market is that if enough of their customers become unhappy about some issue or other, another company can come along and serve those customers. Of course that might not happen, and that's fine. Nobody is claiming that a free market guarantees that everybody gets exactly what they want.
There are very different forms of self-interest, the one implied here is of the very shallow, short term kind.
Note that this is not to say that I (or anybody else) engages in strict, robot-like, mathematical optimization of all transactions to ensure that our best interest is served down to the .00000000000001th place. We, as human beings, employ satisficing[1] for a lot of our decision making. But the fact that I buy from Amazon when I could save 50 cents by buying from Walmart instead, or that I tolerate Amazon showing me a few ads when I'm shopping, is neither here nor there.
This is a fallacy. People often engage in transactions that aren't in their interest- believing in the moment that they are. Or said another way, there's a difference between long-term interest and short term interest, and people often don't see their long-term interest clearly. Or said still a different way, there's a big difference between happiness and pleasure, and people sometimes engage in pleasure in detriment to their happiness (roughly from the Dalai Lama).
I'm not talking about the 10^(-14). I'm talking about real decisions where there is an information asymmetry. And meth.
We used to live in a world where a retailer or manufacturer would stand behind their product and not let anyone sully their name. Since today's consumers seem to lack the ability to discriminate between 'cheap' and 'value' we are in the world we're in.
One particular retailer I'm fond of in this regard is Home Depot. If I have any problems with any of their merchandise, they take it back, no problem. They stand behind what they sell and I appreciate that.
Courts apply laws. Laws defining and providing remedies for comemrcial frauds are regulations of the market.
No, courts are arbiters, sometimes of the law, sometimes of civil disputes, such as contracts.
> Laws defining and providing remedies for comemrcial frauds are regulations
That is true, laws that apply to contracts are regulations, however, they are not necessary for remedy.
If I have a contract to receive "A spoon product id xyz as created by Sir Porky Pig of 123. Main, CA USA" and anything other than that is delivered, it's a breach of contract at least and fraud at worst. I could sue for damages. What regulation is needed for this transaction? If someone were to deliberately intend to deceive me, that is fraud, and there are already laws for that.
The things they define what is an enforceable contract and what remedies are available for violations are, again, laws. Civil law is as much law as criminal law.
> That is true, laws that apply to contracts are regulations, however, they are not necessary for remedy.
Yes, they are.
It is law which defines what is a contract, and law which defines what remedies exist for breach.
> If I have a contract to receive "A spoon product id xyz as created by Sir Porky Pig of 123. Main, CA USA" and anything other than that is delivered, it's a breach of contract at least and fraud at worst. I could sue for damages. What regulation is needed for this transaction?
(1) A law defining when an enforceable contract is formed and how the enforceable terms are determined.
(2) A law defining the parameters on which damages are legally compensable from breach, including setting standards for traceability of causation of the harm to the breach, degree to which the I hired party is or is not obligated to act reasonably to mitigate damages, etc.
> If someone were to deliberately intend to deceive me, that is fraud, and there are already laws for that.
And such laws are regulations of commerce.
Why are so many people willing to throw away the baby (capitalism) with the dirty bathwater (monopolies and others crony deviations.)
That isn't capitalism, you just described a market. Markets existed for thousands of years before capitalism was created.
Or in software terms, I think our current form of capitalism is in need of refactoring, not rejecting as fundamentally broken.
Because it's important to differentiate markets from capitalism! Otherwise feudalism would have been capitalism, too.
Monopolies run against the spirit of capitalism. Regulated markets on the other hand are fine as long as competition is ensured.
That existed before capitalism - in feudalism, for example. It's true in the context of Marxist analysis of capitalism as that's how Marx decided to frame capitalism, but it isn't capitalism's distinguishing feature.
> Monopolies run against the spirit of capitalism.
Effectively, yes, which is why we should prevent them by either public ownership of natural monopoly resources (public road ownership, for an example to wind up the libertarians) or regulation.
So, that would go against thr leadership principles of vocally self-critical and earn trust. Not that it harmed stock performance, but it changed something, somehow. Not sure what, so.
He's ruthless as hell but he dosen't force anyone to work for him, he doesn't force anyone to use his service.
Maybe, just maybe, he's that man who sold the Moon.
Amazon investors just got a hard-on reading this.
The problem is the American free market model encourages market capture through "less noble" (for want a better description) means; it encourages monopolies and discourages regulation nor oversight thus allowing businesses to ignore all other consumer, social and even ecological concerns. In an ideal world market forces would filter out that bad from the good but we've seen time and time again that you simply cannot trust businesses to do "the right thing" - and why should we, they're a business not a social club! But the fact remains it gets increasingly hard to compete in any market when your competitor has comparatively infinite resources and zero scruples. That results in a net less for consumers and society in the more general sense too.
At least here in the Europe we have the EU who are willing to challenge companies who are proven to overstep. I'm not saying the EU get it right all of the time but better that than giving businesses free reign to do whatever the hell they like.
Anyhow, I've waffled on about a fair few points so to get back on topic: You do businesses who are customer-focused. The problem is they usually get overshadowed by the businesses that have learned to play the game better / more aggressively.
Alexa is not your friend, Alexa is a tool to make Amazon money. Amazon's move into media is not an effort to improve the media system, it's a recognition that there's a lot of money to be made by controlling the media that people consume. Same thing with the fire phone, it wasn't an attempt to make a better phone, it's an attempt to gain access to all of that juicy information that Google gets from Android.
Bezos is out to make an empire, everything else comes second.