By their actions, not so much:

- commingling of inventory means you're not necessarily getting the stuff from the merchant you're ostensibly buying from

- which doesn't really matter anyway because merchant reviews are hard to find (couldn't find them at all on mobile)

- being able to change the product being sold while keeping the rating and review history. WAT

In the olden days, the seller was prominently listed in every Amazon listing, and you could click on a seller and browse their entire inventory along with reviews. AFAIK you can't do that anymore. They make it intentionally opaque who is actually selling or shipping.

Seller reviews are manipulated anyway. I once left a bad review of a seller regularly spamming me about my purchase months after I made it, and within a couple days (maybe faster) it was removed, replaced with someone else's review praising them for what I was complaining about. I have no trust in any ratings on Amazon, products or sellers.

I'd like to believe that all these bad practices will eventually result in their reputation going down and then losing significant market share.

However, I'm afraid our discussion here is far removed from the average consumer. I bet that the merchant info was made harder to find because so few people ever clicked it.

For most products I now prefer other sources where possible. However, the convenience still drives me there for many purchases. At the same time it anecdotally feels like I see more Amazon trucks come by my neighborhood. I'm sure most people fall into a spaces where they don't care enough and it's just too convenient to so in Amazon. Their great shipping and return logistics also make up for a lot. Their deliveries are so much faster and reliable than most competitors. I can order from a great vendor, but if they ship via FedEx it will take forever to get here and frequently the delivery date just changes to "pending" for weeks. This had never hairnet with Amazon. It might be fake, but I know when I get it and when it's ten stops away. If it's crap, I can drop it off without envelope or box next time I buy my groceries at Jeff's/Whole Foods.

It's shitty and maybe even offensive but so convenient.

> AFAIK you can't do that anymore

You can. But the correct link is somewhere on the right below the "add to cart" button and not the one in the "sold by [xyz]" info.

Any company that is sufficiently large can (and should) be scrutinized, but at Amazon scale, arguments can easily be cherry picked to make whatever outcome you decided to be the truth look like the truth.

I could for example bring forth the times some merchant attempted to talk me out of filing a complaint, because, apparently those have very real implications very quickly, with fines and restrictions being imposed by Amazon, which makes a lot of sense to me, considering Amazon is basically letting those vendors play with their "credit score" of trust.

But alas, pretending that I know this to be more than anecdotal evidence, I will not.

I think the things I raised are problems independent of scale. Amazon deemphasizes the merchant and wants to own the shopper relationship, then turned around and tried to claim that they're not liable for the goods they sell.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/whos-liable-for-d...

Amazon ought to spin off an "amazon3rdparty.com" where all the riff-raff can go to live, clean up their own site.

Amazon's own retail operations ("sold and shipped by Amazon.com") are simply a mechanism to keep people paying for recurring Amazon Prime subscriptions. Retail profit margins are 2% to 4%, and Amazon has expanded beyond it to businesses with much higher profit margins such as AWS, media (music/tv/movies), logistics, and as a platform for other sellers.

Amazon's market cap is $1.7T, and Walmart's is $391B. And Walmart's retail business is much larger than Amazon's. Compared to Amazon's non retail businesses, Amazon's retail business is worth only as much as it keeps people subscribed to Amazon prime.

Amazon chose to get deep into bed with China. This is part and parcel of favoring the Chinese vendors that sell on your platform. Just be glad there haven't been any reports of toys painted with lead (yet).

Amazon has been selling lead toys for years

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/23/amazon-pr...

And school supplies for kids with lead

https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/ag-ferguson-amazon...

Theoretically they now require tests, although it's a see no evil approach as the vendor supplies the test result.