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Inside the Unrelenting Scams of the Amazon Marketplace (theverge.com)
Fascinating article on The Verge on the many ways Amazon Marketplace, the ecommerce giant's the company's third-party platform, sellers sabotage each other and defraud customers, and how Amazon is run its own government, so to speak -- with its own rules that its suppliers have no choice but to follow. And, of course, sellers have little choice but to continue with Amazon. The story starts with this anecdote: framing a seller for false advertising by buying fake five-star reviews for their products. Select excerpts from the report: For sellers, Amazon is a quasi-state. They rely on its infrastructure -- its warehouses, shipping network, financial systems, and portal to millions of customers -- and pay taxes in the form of fees. They also live in terror of its rules, which often change and are harshly enforced. A cryptic email like the one Plansky received can send a seller's business into bankruptcy, with few avenues for appeal. Sellers are more worried about a case being opened on Amazon than in actual court, says Dave Bryant, an Amazon seller and blogger. Amazon's judgment is swifter and less predictable, and now that the company controls nearly half of the online retail market in the US, its rulings can instantly determine the success or failure of your business, he says. "Amazon is the judge, the jury, and the executioner."
from Amazon or Ebay. They're all cheap bootlegs. They work and they're playable, but have terrible battery life.
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"Your slimy company can go F off! I'm leaving and taking my business to your competitor, which is ... um ... well ... I'm SORRY, Ama! Let me back, please??"
Table-ized A.I.
I'm a little bewildered at this passage...because I just cannot understand it...was it supposed to read:
or am I just insane? The choice to utilize commas turned this into an incoherent run on sentence...
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
Seller gets to early Dec'18. Said for a 5-star review I'd get a 99%-off coupon to get a 2-pk battery and charger for said product. Mind you, under $10 for that, and this guy pleaded with me to give him a screenshot of my 5-star 'review' so I'd get this. The weird thing is, it is a good product. I offered two suggestions that would make it a 5-star product, but never heard anything about that. Had several exchanges by e-mail (oddly, the person sent an image of this company's e-mail, rather than putting it in the e-mail itself -- one that Amazon no doubt looks at before sending it to me). Okay, may not oddly given that. Still, this is my first time getting this sort of thing, and I've been buying on Amazon since 1998.
No, not going to report this one to Amazon. This person sounded almost desperate. It does the obvious, which is to reinforce my belief that most Amazon 5-star reviews are not 5-star reviews.
I worked for them (engineering) and loved it. I know plenty of people that still do and they love it. The work is good, the pay is very competetive, benifits are good, hours are good, perqs are great (best coffee Ive ever had among other things), management was pretty good overall with reasonable schedules and goals. It was always made clear that they would never let money get in the way of progress. I met Bezos briefly and I thought he was impressive. If I have one complaint its that they are infatuated with young inexperienced people with half-assed ideas, but most companies in the world suffer from this to some degree. And sure the non-engineering folks may not be as well off, but I interacted with a lot of customer service and warehouse people and they are generally much happier than all the media is trying to portray them. And yes I would fly into space on Blue Origins' maiden flight if I could, no questions asked.
* The catalog is full of inaccurate listings that have been duplicated multiple times and put in multiple categories.
* There is mass manipulation of product reviews and seller feedback
* There are huge scale fraudsters on the site that use tricks like those in the article to get their higher price duplicated listing at the top of the search ranking
* The humans that have any sense and can speak your language have been replaced with minimum wage slaves in the poorest countries in the world, is it any wonder they are targeted for bribes? And because that still costs money even those poor sods are being replaced by keyword bots, that Amazon laughingly calls AI.
Amazon knows all this is going and just doesn't give a damn. I no longer buy on Amazon as it is a fraudsters paradise, both so called buyers and sellers are exploiting it. The buyers that are claiming they didn't get their package is pushing the prices up for genuine people, the fake sellers are also pushing prices up. Every time Amazon does do anything to try and fix it they bring out a thermo nuclear warhead to crack a mustard seed, causing massive problems for everyone and causing more damage than the problem they tried to fix.
There is just no point in going to Amazon for anything, it is hard to find what you want and chances of a bad buying experience are high. Ebay used to be the crooks paradise but they have all moved to Amazon now.