Guessing this is also related, from page 10:

    Amazon has implemented an algorithm for the express purpose of deterring other online stores from offering lower prices.
    [redacted]
    Rather than trying to compete, Amazon uses
    [redacted]
    Ultimately, this conduct is meant to deter rivals from attempting to compete on price altogether-competition that could bring lower prices to tens of millions of American households. As a result of this conduct, Amazon predicted, "prices will go up."

What especially rankles is how Amazon doesn’t give a fuck about counterfeits. So they’re allowing counterfeits (amplifying the mentioned effect) to discourage direct-sellers from attempting to compete on price.

Meanwhile, I have to order from direct sellers to be sure I will get a genuine, new product. So I don’t even get Amazon’s lower-but-still-higher-than-optimal price, but a yet higher one.

As far as I’m concerned the whole company’s a giant scam and I can’t believe it still hasn’t caught up with them. They benefit so very much from enabling bad actors, and have for so long clearly without any serious attempt to stop it, that I’ll do a happy dance the day they go under or get broken up. I just wish the eventual consequences could force Bezos to have to work for a living again, since he’s built his empire on fucking people weaker than him. Shouldn’t get to keep a penny of it.

Not just counterfeits but pages upon pages of shitty products from companies like WOWZAMGO and PARTUE that, now that they have sponsored rankings, will always come up first in search. They also all have endless fake reviews. This renders Amazon's search essentially useless.

WOWZAMGO makes quality products. I bought their portable usb battery and it only caught fire after the 20th charge cycle. PARTUE, on the other hand… don’t ask!

What's funny is that I couldn't tell if this was serious or sarcastic at first glance. (caught fire -> sarcastic)

Thing is, these silly UPPER-CASE-NONSENSE-COMPANIES are winning against established brands with quality products.

Except there is a trend now where a brand with products of known good quality like YETI can now charge outrageous amounts of money - like 10x or more.

It’s hard to find that value niche in the middle. They do exist within categories eg Anker for USB related things.

The Anker that was selling "offline" cameras that phoned home plaintext images? Yeah, no thanks.

Because your powerbank or charger definitely have those capabilities right?

Never use untrusted usb devices without protection.

The UPPERCASENONSENSENAMES are so obvious it makes me wonder if this is a target-selection technique in the same vein as the 419 scammers use -- make it so only the most clueless people would ever buy your garbage product, so you get a lower percentage of people who are going to report you.

The thing is, it's 2023, we all "know" that every company's product get made in the same factory and there's just a fork at the end of the conveyor where they get different branding slapped on.

So the gamble is that UCNN is sourced out of the exact same factory as the product/brand you actually want. It's the the evolution of the Warby Parker model.

Just bought a wood bed frame online. 5 vendors with nearly the exact same frame, all priced within $50 of each other. How does one choose? Does it matter?

It’s a great signal that you are buying from the wrong middleman. Seek out the source for a 50% discount. Usually that source is on AliExpress/Alibaba.

It's more like they flood the results so you literally can't find the quality product unless you know the brand name to search for. I can't be an expert in every vertical, so either I go to some sort of trusted review platform like Wirecutter, or I give up and buy whatever I can find on Amazon return decent reviews and hope for the best.

I believe it might [0] have to do with Amazon offering preferential treatment, under a program called Brand Registry, to Chinese exporters if they register a name--any name--with the USPTO.

[0] https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-134/fanciful-failures...

The truth about consumer buying patterns is most purchases are treated as lowest cost commodity, unless the buyer is aware or the price threshold is high enough[0]. When you don't have subliminal[1] and limited selection pressure (both of which exist in brick and mortar stores), coupled with a UI that makes it pretty easy to discover other brands, and coalesced signals (reviews placement etc), lowest price wins.

[0]: Put another way, if its expensive, it gets more scrutiny by the average consumer (whatever their definition for expensive is). The other circumstance is if they care about the category or are in the slice of shoppers who do quality research, which is less common than you might think, until the cost factor kicks in, usually.

[1]: This is brand awareness, and other related verticals. Effectively, this is what brand and mass marketing is about.

There’s a pretty strong “market for lemons” effect going on almost economy-wide in which every manufacturer out there seems to be sprinting to make the lowest quality shit they can sneak past the regulatory bodies, so it’s not surprising consumers are selecting solely based on price because there’s functionally no other differentiator at this point.

> The truth about consumer buying patterns is most purchases are treated as lowest cost commodity, unless the buyer is aware or the price threshold is high enough[0]

Well said. Also, let's not forget time. I've spent countless hours researching many things I intended to buy only to give up partway down the road. It's in part because of the endless results on Amazon (referenced here) but also elsewhere.

Let's say, for example, I'm trying to find the best saute pan. Amazon gives me thousands of results, but so does Google. My search results are littered with tons of X-best SEO-optimizing websites that don't help narrow down choices. So, in that situation, it's less about the price and more about the time: I'll just buy whatever seems reasonably rated and not outrageously expensive and move on.

I really enjoyed the earlier days of the Wirecutter - tell me the thing to buy in my search category even if it's not the cheapest or most commoditized.

Welcome to the Era of [Poe's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law).

I don't really have a problem with this stuff. It's memeable (some great photoshop artists there; always good when the company has no photo of their actual product) and not that cheap, but I think of Amazon as an overpriced Shenzhen market and this stuff is essential to maintaining that vibe.

How does Amazon avoid liability for selling scam products? Do they claim to be "just the middleman" and pass responsibility onto ghost-in-the-night companies selling the scam products? Or do they just abuse the legal system to make justice to expensive to be worth it?

I don't know the law very well, but I would hope there's a legal doctrine that responsibility has to effectively land somewhere. If a company is passing responsibility en masse to some other entity that cannot be effectively sued, then the responsibility should actually lie with the first company.

I have no idea, but companies routinely do shit that I assume would at least get me a fine in a hurry if I tried it. I don’t know how it works either. Like I’d have assumed deliberately dumping e-waste all over city sidewalks would get you a steep fine and an order to come pick them up or face an even steeper one within a matter of days—plus an absolute liability nightmare if, god forbid, anyone tripped over them and got hurt—but e-scooter companies have done it for years and have faced almost no consequences. I doubt I could get away with it. I dunno how they do.

In the beginning it was a free-for-all but now cities require permits and have limits and require the companies to implment restricted zones where the scooter won't run.

The same way they avoided paying state taxes for over a decade. Too big to sue

You might still be getting products from the same inventory pool in an Amazon warehouse when ordering directly if the company uses Amazon's Multi-Channel Fulfillment offering. They sell on their site, tell Amazon about the sale, then Amazon ships it to the customer. They even offer the option to ship it in unbranded boxes so that customers don't know the order is being fulfilled by Amazon.

Ew, gross. I’m pretty sure the couple companies I order from regularly that also have an Amazon presence don’t do that, since they have direct-order products not listed on Amazon and often include little touches like a bonus sample or handwritten note that you don’t get if you order their stuff on Amazon, but good to know to watch out for that.

> since they have direct-order products not listed on Amazon

This is still at-risk because you are not required to list on Amazon to use FBA.

The handwritten note is a better indicator for sure.

So tired of being on the shit-end of a drop-ship.

Counterfeits: In August 2014, I purchased from Amazon, shipped from Amazon (just checked my order history to verify), an Apple MagSafe Power Adapter. It was clearly counterfeit.

I contacted Amazon and told them it was fake, without hesitation they told me to throw it away and they were sending me a replacement.

It would be hard for me to believe that they didn't know exactly which company shipped them that product.

It would be easy for me to believe that they didn't notify every other customer that received that product from the same shipment.

I signed up as a Seller on Amazon a while back, with one primary goal: sell extra copies of my book, published by Pantheon Books in 2017. The publisher offered me boxes of them at dirt-cheap prices and I took them up on their offer. So I started selling on Amazon, and I set my price as the lowest possible for "New" condition hardcover.

For a while my price got listed on the main book product page. Only briefly though. Then it disappeared, and another seller got the glory of the link for a "New" 3rd party seller, and their price was HIGHER than mine.

Amazon does not want to advertise your price if you are too low for their liking...

Suddenly, in July, my mom dies. I have to travel to the east coast for the funeral, etc., so I put a hold on the one and only item in my inventory -- my book. Effectively this takes me offline temporarily as an Amazon Seller which was fine.

BUT . . . when i get back home, I try to re-activate the account and find I cannot. INSTEAD, I get this notice from Amazon that my account is suspended, and that it's mandatory I go watch all these training videos about COUNTERFEIT products, how to spot them, why not to sell them, why it's illegal, etc, and that I do not have permission to sell counterfeit "Pantheon products." And I'm like, WTF? I'm selling the real deal, from Pantheon, and I AM THE EFFING AUTHOR AND THESE ARE MY OWN BOOKS.

I try to communicate with Amazon Seller Program and get nowhere (I think they deliberately hire only people who don't understand English). They refuse to explain anything about this absurd counterfeit stuff.

So I contact Pantheon. They just laugh. They had nothing to do with it, but weren't surprised -- they kind of hate Amazon.

THEN I get a new notice from Amazon that my account is disabled permanently due to lack of use.

WTF!?

So: here is my theory. They were pissed I had a super-low price, and when they saw me temporarily disable my inventory as I'd be away for a week for a funeral, they swept in and shut me down, with some kind of made-up lie about COUNTERFEIT (I mean, can you believe these guys!?). And nothing is resolved, and we're on the verge of October.

Amazon sucks.

You haven't even begun to enter the world of unscrupulous activity, and Amazon is mostly 'hands off' because they don't care - but other 3rd party sellers DO and they know all the tricks about how to pump alternative sellers off the page, etc.

The whole thing is a worthless Alibaba ripoff now.

Do you think some other seller falsely "reported" me, claiming my copies my be counterfeit, for surely there was no way I could offer them so cheaply to beat out the next cheapest seller by, what, 50 cents?

> Do you think some other seller falsely "reported" me, claiming my copies my be counterfeit

That seems the most likely reason. I am sure there are services to automate these kind of blackhat actions.

Or maybe some machine learning deduced you were "counterfeit". Who knows. The common denominator is - Amazon doesn't care, it's just a machine, even more so than corporations by nature are.

Your case is interesting because your publisher was fine with it. So yeah, it probably was done by a third party seller. Or you triggered some automated system and will never find out why. There are cases where third party sellers bribed Amazon employees to penalize their competitors:

> "(b) using their inside access to Amazon’s network to suspend competitors’ 3P accounts; and (c) providing consultants with information about Amazon’s internal algorithms, which allowed the consultants to flood competitors’ product listings with fictitious negative product reviews."

https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/six-indicted-connection...

There's another thing where well known brands will hire a company like https://amazzia.com/brand-protection-2022/ for "brand integrity." In reality, what this means is that they monitor Amazon for listings of the brand's products that violate the brand's Minimum Advertised Price policy and then report them a bunch of times as counterfeits or contact some Amazon employee they have a (potentially corrupt) relationship with.

I guess we figured out their algorithm. `if random() < 0.01: make_user_watch_training_video_about_counterfeits`. Even if they actually fixed the problem by having an alarmingly high false positive rate, I don't see how I would ever trust them. For example, some places don't do business with them, so if you see like an Apple cable on there, it wasn't shipped from Apple to their warehouse. Maybe it's real or maybe it's counterfeit, but why gamble?

What's great about Amazon is that they kicked their competitors into gear and there are a lot of reputable vendors that offer cheap overnight shipping now. (B&H is my go to for electronics.)

> They were pissed I had a super-low price... they swept in and shut me down, with some kind of made-up lie about COUNTERFEIT

If true, we have a name for this, its called fraud. Little people like you and me go to prison for it.

It is funny, that small and even sometimes medium business owners go to jail over things like fraud, failure to pay taxes, even labor violations. I remember local instances being reported on in the our (thankfully still around) local paper.

Yet, if you are big enough, the government can barely muster the strength to issue a fine. Rarely to executives at big firms go to jail unless there was something Enron sized egregious happening

never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity, EXCEPT when money is involved. if money is involved, and it can be explained by malice, then it is malice, every time.

the other seller likely reported you as counterfeit, and Amazon believed them.

> never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity, EXCEPT when money is involved

The FAANG corollary:

When you make it a point of pride to only hire the smartest, most elite engineers on the planet, presumption of stupidity no longer applies.

Grueling rounds of leetcode interviews and system architecture questions doesn’t exactly select for either common sense or detailed knowledge of either human nature or even retail.

No one knows how to hang onto a dumb idea like a smart person.

Just because the average person can't prove them wrong by argument doesn't mean their right.

Sue them in small claims court. It's perfect for this, you just bring in your documentation and write up a timeline for the judge.

Afaik, small claims courts are for specific monetary damages only. I feel like it would be hard to prove specific cash amount lost due to Amazon actions. It is also very likely one or more of documents one have to accept in order to open seller Central account requires signing away the right of settling dispute in courts, and instead use arbitration process.

Interesting idea - has anyone tried this?

Does Amazon retaliate and ban you permanently if you win?

If you're already banned, you might as well try to get what you can out of the situation.

Can’t the court file an injunction against banning?

I always wondered what would courts do about extrajudicial retaliation

My nextdoor neighbor is a shoe salesman (in the US). He traditionally dealt with a region of retailers on behalf of his employer, a multi-brand company like VF, Clarks, Born, etc. In his previous role, he was asked to try to figure out how to add Amazon as a B2C channel. He did, and it essentially became his full time job. A couple of years ago he was laid off, and when his new employer (differently shoe company) learned he knew how to "use Amazon" he was immediately reassigned from field sales to full time online. According to him, there are so many quirky and esoteric things about selling through Amazon it's nearly impossible to figure out how to get started, much less understand nuances of pricing, taxes, shipping and returns, and -- as you said -- Amazon support is conflicting and inconsistent at best.

Nowadays, I'm fine buying consumables from Amazon if I need them asap, but for any name brand stuff I specifically want, I prefer purchasing elsewhere. If reviews were trustworthy, it'd be one thing, but with Amazon having turned into AliExpress, it's impossible to know whether any of the Chinese brands are actually trustworthy and of high quality.

>it's impossible to know whether any of the Chinese brands are actually trustworthy and of high quality.

IMO people buy cheap generic Chinese brands for the same reason they buy cheap dollar store products. They're gambling they can pay 30% the price for 90% of the function. Amazon reseller premium = they're paying slightly more for returns in case things break. They can save more buying from Ali resellers. Even more while temu subsidizing orders. The only people looking for quality are people who order from resalers of established PRC brands, i.e. Xiaomi. In the days before Amazon cracked down, you had brands like MPOW decide better marketting strategy was to give people gift cards for reviews and give no question asked replacements well outside of warranty period. Pretty win-win for consumers.

Your story is a true tragedy and hearing such stories makes me feel sad.

I believe it’s, mostly, these unfair, monopolistic practices that made those companies giants because they can, technically, crush anyone willing to swim in their red ocean.

Normally, you could easily file a lawsuit against them and got them pay you 10x the damage they caused.

tragedy … giants … red ocean …

Manchurian commenter activated … proceeding to step 2 …

Amazon became a giant because they were genuinely good before they became what they are now. For a long time, they offered a superior online shopping experience. The prices were good, the processing time was faster than anyone else, the shipping was fast and reliable, the site was easy to use, etc. Then all the third party sellers, whack-a-mole Chinese brands, and counterfeits took over the site. I thought Amazon was great when they were the retailer instead of a marketplace.

> Amazon sucks

I’m not sure but I feel the need for some legislation to force large companies to provide human-to-human contact in the event of a dispute.

Even in the world of Brazil, the 1988 movie, there were humans somewhere in the mix.

> They were pissed

Huge corporations do not get pissed. It's not personal. They were not angry or acting spiteful.

Note: I'm only addressing those three words, not any other points you made.

"most customer-centric company"

I don't think anybody actually buys that line.

Do they believe that internally?

The funny thing about slogans is that you can almost always count on the sloganeer to embody the opposite:

- Don't be evil

- Drain the swamp

- Hope and Change

- “Free”

"Unlimited"

Some do, some don't.

I know some folks who really genuinely believe that Amazon is a force for good, the criticism is exaggerated, will talk about how lucky they are to work for the World's Best Employer, and will get a bit sulky if you say anything negative about the company.

Generally though, I think it's understood that "most customer centric company" doesn't mean "we will put the customer before ourselves because we are such good people", but instead "strategically keeping the customer happy is better for the shareholders in the long run".

It's the same with most of the LPs. They're packaged in a way that makes Amazon sound like this amazing company that really cares, but they boil down to "16 ways YOU can enrich Amazon's shareholders (you won't believe number 15!)".

I've never met anyone that thought the LPs were meant to imply Amazon "really cares". I like Amazon because it seems more straightforward than other companies. It's a business and it wants to make money. The only way I've ever interpreted "customer obsession" is that it's mutually beneficial to do what's best for the customer.

That's exactly it though: it's often (perhaps even usually) not beneficial for Amazon to do what's best for the customer.

What's the point of "Customer Obsession" if it's secondary to "Amazon Obsession"? Doing what's best for the customer unless it isn't also what's best for Amazon is just doing what's best for Amazon.