Comment by danjayh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danjayh | Hacker News Reader

Amazon is a cluster all-around. They can't keep counterfeits off (I just recently got a 'samsung' battery that would only charge to 80%), and they can't police legit products correctly either. I've seen tons of horror stories from owners of FBA private labels who'v had their products pulled by Amazon for being 'counterfeit' because one of their competitors reported them in an attempt to reduce competition. Takes weeks or months to get your listing restored. And don't even get me started on their review system. I used to review certain subsets of items prolifically, without accepting freebies, but I gave it up. Amazon would regularly pull down my reviews for things they didn't like. For instance, I've had several battery reviews pulled for including a measured capacity (mAh) divided by cost 'value' graph because it implicitly includes pricing information. Give me a break. Know what replaced my well-thought out & researched review? A review from a 5-star shill that shot from 0 helpful to over +1000 overnight (to those of you that have never reviewed on Amazon ... that does NOT happen unless you're cheating).

Amazon's reviews are crap. Amazon's inventory control is crap. Amazon's seller support is crap. The only things they have going for them are good customer service and a near monopoly on online sales.

Walmart, however, also has great customer service, has brick-and-mortar stores that will help you deal with problems, and now has free 2-day shipping. I've been making a conscious effort to do more online shopping there lately, because Amazon needs to feel like they have a little competition.

Be careful jumping on the Walmart train. Their online marketplace has recently started including third-party sellers as well. I'm not sure how they police them or if they're any better than Amazon, but you're not implicitly free from these concerns just by going to Walmart.com instead of Amazon.com. I would guess that Walmart doesn't commingle stock from third-party sellers, since it's such a bad idea, but I don't know.

Jet.com also does third-party sellers, but I hear they are very strict and work hard to make sure that all their sellers are authentic.

Amazon has made itself the de-facto e-tail platform. We're already seeing a Google-like effect from them, where if Amazon is not happy with you, your business can be destroyed overnight. There are consultants similar to SEO consultants who try to ensure that your products always "win the buy box", some of which is certainly done through attempting to hit competitors with false negatives as you've described, much like the negative links that competitors try to register against one another to hurt their Google ranking.

I really hope that some of the other players in this game can get together and do something to stop another monopolistic pre-eminence. Between Shopify, ShopRunner, Walmart, and other brick-and-mortars who are jealous of Amazon, it should be feasible to create an Amazon-ish experience that will at least keep one or two other big competitors in the game. Let's do it before it's too late!

Jet seems to have very similar inventory to Amazon (even on obscure or niche stuff, like springs for my 2015 Ford Taurus), eerily so. What is more, several times I have been credited money to my account because Jet didn't have the product they claimed to have (the springs...). Weird.

Can you elaborate on the actual claim you seem to be dancing around? I'm not completely following...

I can't speak for the OP, but for me I've noticed this looking for hard-to-find specific products as well.

You will find that what appears to be wide availability is usually 2 or 3 third-party vendors spamming the same thing multiple times to multiple sites. This becomes especially apparent once you actually order something, and it takes 2 weeks for the vendor to say it's not in stock. Repeat that process across 4 or 5 major sites like amazon/jet/walmart/sears/newegg/etc. and it gets a bit tiring. Seemingly everyone now has a "marketplace" section and purposefully makes it difficult to filter it.

Basically it seems the "long tail" of on-line retail shares the same very few number of marginal-at-best players who take an approach of spamming tons of low quality listings in the hope of fulfilling even a fraction of it.

Once you look for it, you notice this pattern (e.g. a spelling mistake in a given part listing you need) quite often and realize it might even be a single "root" vendor after you get through the chains of middlemen.

Allow me to grant phil21 the ability to speak for me retroactively. These were exactly my thoughts.

If the rules are to not include pricing information and you include pricing information, how do you possibly get upset over it being taken down?

Reviews are long-lived, that pricing info is probably out of date in a few months, but the review will live on for a while, and lead to confusion (Especially since, I assume your reviews were well written, giving them more credibility, and thus leading to more confusion)

There is also the problem of confusion over price of a product and its legal implications... if you go to a store that relies on box stickers for pricing, and the stickers only have a price, and there isa box there with a wrong (lower) price on it, the store has to sell it at that price in most states... im sure the law wouldnt kick in over a comment, but you cant blame amazon for guarding against the swarm of people who's sole purpose in life seems to be to get one over on other people

Reviews clearly have to take the price into account. You expect different thing from a $40 grill and a $300 one. If Amazon doesn't want explicit price info displayed and they make that clear, fine, but a review can't be accurate under arbitrary price movements.

Its one think to differentiate between $40 and $300, of course.

Its another to list actual prices of various products side by side in a comparison chart, that data becomes stale real fast and is factually inaccurate at that point.

There is a vast difference in saying "For $500 I expected more" and saying "Product a works out to $4 per plumbus and product b works out to $3.50 per plumbus and product c works out to 3.75 per plumbus" ... that data becomes factually misleading as soon as one of those prices changes.

I'd rather have that data than not have it. But of course, it's Amazon's platform.

You would prefer inaccurate information to no information?

Please dont take this as an insult, but you are saying you'd rather be stupid than ignorant...

The actual plubusses were batteries, and the actual data was mAh/$. I have found that the relative mAh/$ for various brands stays fairly stable over time even as the price changes, so the data is valid. I've a plumbus change positions relative to another once over two years since I wrote most of my battery reviews.

Wouldn't Amazon be potentially liable if they sold a counterfeit battery as something it isn't and that battery ends up hurting someone?

In theory yeah, if they clearly didn't do their due diligence and knew/should have known. Probably won't in reality.

They've been fined lately a bunch of times for improperly shipping hazardous materials that have injured people.

http://fortune.com/2016/06/22/amazon-fined-shipping-hazardou...

>They can't keep counterfeits off (I just recently got a 'samsung' battery that would only charge to 80%),

Are you sure that it is counterfeit? 80% is a common charging cutoff point for Li-ion batteries to minimise wear-and-tear. Usually it is enforced in software.

They're shipped at 60%, though any charge cap would still be reported as 100% by the logic in the battery. I know my MacBook doesn't say 80%: Full! ;)

But my Thinkpad does say 80% full, because I've (deliberately) capped the battery charging at 80% to prolong the life of the battery.

So you're charging only to approximately 64% of the actual battery capacity?

No, I'm charging to 80% of the battery capacity.

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