Also see the cases where houses burned down because of hover boards sold by Amazon. These items didn't meet the standards to be sold in North America and burnt a family's house down. They went to court and amazon won because "they're only a market place and your beef is with the manufacturer, and we can't tell you who they are or how to contact them because they're some fly by night company in China."
But I have had some bad experiences with "Amazon warehouse deals" where they do resell returned/opened merchandise at a discount, once the product in the box was completely different than what it was supposed to be.
They've been good about replacing/refunding those but now I only order the warehouse deals if I'm ok with waiting for a replacement if the one they sent is bad.
It's extremely frustrating because I know that it hurts the artist's bottom line when I have to return the same book 3 times because it comes with a worn spine or bent pages or unknown substances on it.
And I've had to report USPS multiple times for stuffing giant paperbacks from Amazon into my tiny mailbox but nothing's changed as of yet.
I thought books were what made Amazon famous? I'm so turned off by the quality that I'm wary of making purchases with their sister site at Comixology.
Amazon's counterfeit problem is only getting worse, and there's no reason to expect anything to change anytime soon.
This is very true although, to be honest, even as a reasonably decent skier I'm not sure I could spot a counterfeit. In fact, except in the worst cases, I'm pretty sure I couldn't because I'm not enough of a gear-head in that arena.
I'm more confident with watches but, even then, it's only certain brands and models, and I'd have to do quite a bit of research and comparison to images of the real deal to spot a fake. For example, I'm not at all sure I could easily identify a fake G-Shock because there are so many different models, whereas I might do better on something like an SKX.
The sloppiness of a lot of counterfeits gives them away though: for example, I bought a Gamecube controller that turned up unbranded and (worse) with a USB connector. Of course, my old Wii - which I use for Gamecube games - was having none of it.
I often pay full price at REI instead if cheaper elsewhere because of the generous return policy so I guess it works.
I have zero interest in shopping a platform. I didn’t like ebay one bit. I’d be perfectly happy to buy from amazon or newegg but if they insist on making it difficult to do that I’ll go elsewhere.
I’m not even saying they can’t be a platform, just make it easy for me to turn that part off.
There's a mom and pop computer store down the street. I went in for a USB cable that I really needed and ended up paying > $20 for that should have been less than $5. I never went back.
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/dynex-4-hdmi-cable-black/616587...
I was going to note that $10 for a 4 foot cable, while fairly reasonable, still isn't a great price. But, there's also this[1] one, which is $7, supports 4K, and is 6 feet long. And, both of these are cables are actually available at my local store for immediate pickup.
[1] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/dynex-6-4k-ultra-hd-hdmi-cable-...
[0]: https://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/18/10/06/bh-is-set-...
[1]: https://www.courant.com/politics/hc-pol-online-sales-tax-201...
2. In the country where I currently live, if I order something from another country I am charged the tax on import plus a substantial processing fee that's usually much larger than the tax. I miss the US system in comparison...
They don't charge them because they can get away with (or believe it is legal to) not charge sales tax for customers not in the state or area from which they operate.
If it makes one feel better to do it, by all means do it. Among the list of egregious tax offenses that exist, this is likely pretty low on the IRS list to audit people.
I've written a little about it here [1][2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18441347
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/fsharp/comments/9wpw84/introducing_...
But seeing things like "Top 3 Recommended" on your website makes me believe you're falling into the same trap everyone else is, at least partially. I don't care how sophisticated your detection of paid content is; you simply can't win a direct war against these pathogens (marketers). The only way to win is not to play, i.e. don't provide a platform for mass reach in the first place. Mass media is really a type of monoculture, with all the same weaknesses.
Unrelated: how do you plan to solve the problem of identifying and classifying essentially every product in existence? Resolving duplicates, slight variants, etc. is a very hard problem, as is categorization.
Re: product identification...actually people tend to shop from the same places (think of the product coverage of the top 5000 retailers). We don't have those top 5000 yet, but we're working on it. We get most of our product data from affiliate networks, who offer up that data to drive sales back to their site. For whatever we can't import and internalize, we have a "search anything" feature which allows the user to use a web view to navigate to a product page and import the product.
You're right, resolving duplicates and variants is a very tricky problem that can become incredibly complicated. Right now we use some very basic heuristics like normalized name and brand, ASIN, GTIN, EAN, UPC, etc. But actually, we don't need things to be perfect. So long as a user can get to a product that is more or less what they want to recommend, they're happy. Also, when you are searching for a product to recommend (this is not "browsing," it's when you are trying to answer a recommendation with a specific product) we boost products that have already been recommended. This way we can get users who are looking for a particular product to recommend the same instance of that product. We also focus our efforts on cleaning up the data for products that have already been recommended, which is a much smaller subset than our total catalog.
Our data is stored in Neo4j, we find its structure to be well suited to a product catalog and taxonomy, and it allows us to derive relationships between products. The process of improving our catalog is an ongoing task, and one that will likely never end.
Why do I trust user reviews on your site more than user reviews on any other site? Or is this assuming that my some of friends have already become users and we will only look at each others' reviews?
It would be nice if you could "glue" together one's reviews across all third party sites.
You're more likely to trust user reviews on this site because the reviews are likely to be coming from people who you are connected to in some way.
We haven't been around too long (launched mid-November, have a team of 7: 1 iOS, 2 backend eningeers, and product/marketing/community folks, plus a few contractors), but we'll be rolling out more features to help evaluate the trustworthiness of the reviews that users see.
One concern is that I don't generally buy products starting with Q&A from people I follow. My process is more like: research products that solve problem X, then look at trusted reviews for X. It just seems like the intersection of reviews from people I follow and products that I want to buy would be extremely sparse (i.e., most of the time there wouldn't be a matching review).
Luckily, Bezos owns the Washington Post, has a 600 million dollar contract with the CIA, and is close to signing a 10 billion dollar contract with the Department of Defense. The new HQ in DC probably helps grease those hands as well
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/nyregion/fake-luxury-good...
I asked the seller and they did not respond, but when I tried to write a review Amazon would not let me: "Sorry, we are unable to accept your review. You are no longer permitted to review products on Amazon because you have violated our Community Guidelines." I called Amazon and they said the'll investigate and get back to me, but never did.
Note that the article you linked to doesn't mention Amazon at all -- if Amazon was part of that counterfeit scheme, you'd think the NYTimes would be happy to get in a dig at the owner of the Washington Post if they could.
I guess you could argue that Amazon is in a unique position somewhere between, say, Craigslist (which simply allows independent sellers to connect with buyers and should bear little responsibility for counterfeits) and an old-fashioned mom-and-pop (which buys goods directly, choosing legitimate or illegitimate wholesalers and handling the merchandise). But everyone is in-between these days.
And the time for a defense from ignorance is long past...
Are you sure? The linked article said that the retailers that were busted were part of the scheme, doesn't sound like they were innocent bystanders that were cheated by the distributors.
Three retail businesses in Queens and two in Manhattan were part of the scheme, Mr. Melendez said, adding that they had closed
I've sold new items on Amazon (fulfilled by Amazon). I assure you, I provided no such paperwork other than me marking it as new when I set up the shipment on their site.
Now you're risking of getting your payment stolen. Bad product/no product delivered could be seen as equivalent to stole payment.
It's an improvement, isn't it?
If a shady seller can prove delivery of a package to the buyer, it becomes much harder for the buyer to get through winning a dispute irrespective of what the package's contents were. Particularly if the merchandise is counterfeit but definitely proving that it's counterfeit is difficult.
Also with forum commerce for used things, it's difficult to sort out "this item isn't is the condition that was communicated to me".
If the seller can't prove delivery, then the buyer wins almost hands down.
On the flip side, an unscrupulous buyer can use this to their advantage with international shipping where it is extraordinarily difficult (and expensive) to prove delivery all the way to the destination across different country's mailing services.
Having proof of delivery did not help any of my cases. Things were still claimed lost and I would be forced to eat the cost.
Paying for signature confirmation just changed the nature of the buyer's claims to concealed damage, or they just signed it illegibly, insist it wasn't them, and still claimed it lost.
All it helped were a few cases where I was able to make insurance claims with the carrier but it never got me anywhere with Paypal.
I hear power sellers get more credibility.
Maybe this was true once, but now Amazon has brought back that fear and confusion of getting scammed.
You used to be able to count on reviews for some idea of the quality of the product, but now you need to do research at someplace like www.fakespot.com to see if the reviews are fake.
And even if the product is legit and works well and it's fulfilled by Amazon, when you get the product you need to check it carefully to see if it's a counterfeit knockoff that some vendor sold through amazon's commingled inventory.
I've switched to https://www.bhphotovideo.com/ for most of my computer/electronics purchases now - they seem to price match Amazon automatically (or maybe amazon price matches them, many products have an identical price) and delivery is almost always within 2 - 3 days. I used to go to newegg, but have had a few issues with their third party sellers (product never shipped after ordering) so stopped going there.