If Amazon has found themselves too large to operate as a marketplace that customers can trust then perhaps they made a poor decision in prioritizing short-term growth over everything else.

> Amazon's prices are too low to do this verifications per product.

Have you price compared when buying basic household goods recently? I haven't found Amazon to be significantly cheaper than local big box stores, who also happen to actually care even a little bit about their supply chain.

> Amazon's prices are too low to do this verifications per product.

So Amazon are undercutting by skipping supplier verification. How is this a "hard problem"? If I make my restaurant cheaper by not checking food refrigeration, that's not a "hard problem to solve"

Good points, I agree that it seems unlikely that Amazon has lost sight of the long term thinking that is largely responsible for making them Amazon.

And it is indeed an arms race, like everything that happens on the internet at scale where money is involved.

But I disagree that the problem is prohibitively hard to solve. In my experience you can always stay just ahead of the black hat players. They're rarely smarter or more talented than competent software engineers and data scientists.

Amazon's failure to stay ahead in this area is, to me, an indication that they're using the wrong strategies, probably because people with the wrong skillsets are being assigned the job of figuring out how to solve the problem.

Of course you can do that at Amazon's scale. Also $1 items can be verified economically, considering you're going to sell more than one of it. It will make life harder for very small sellers with low value items. But I doubt that those make up a big share of sold items.

Maybe we should make it illegal for Amazon et al to externalise this cost to society.

It would be if they couldn't pretend to be a platform..