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Comment by privateSFacct | Hacker News Reader

All the ballyhoo about Amazon Transparency and UUID per item. This is a relatively well solved issue in other areas.

Make become a seller a bit more difficult with some skin in the game ($2,500 deposit if you sell more than 15 items per year? In person identity verification?). Sellers used to meet with buyers agents (cost money and added identities).

Caught selling garbage (product marked new actually used, totaly fake junk) enough times -> gone from marketplace and hard to get back in.

The reality is Amazon doesn't care - there IS a market opportunity here for someone to take them on with trusted product catalog and quick shipping (using UPS / Fedex). I wish somebody would straight compete with them rather than all the complaining to politicians.

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Amazon's active "solution" is customer service to address these problems.

"Oh jeez, you ordered a GoPro and got a "YiGorProHD" knockoff. Here, we'll credit your Amazon account with a gift card or try to resend you the item again. Thanks so much for your patience, I'm so sorry for the error."

Amazon doesn't give a shit about everything being sold on the marketplace. They aren't going to track down who put the rotten egg in the basket. It's cheaper and more effective to just give the customers what they want so they shut up and go away happy to continue buying stuff. Plus, in the returns/refunds area, it's the sellers who pay for those costs, so Amazon has nothing to lose by just being a marketplace and customer service sounding board. It's a win-win for Amazon.

So I hear, but my experience with Amazon on this front has not been so positive. I pretty much count them as not having a return policy at all anymore. If I get broken garbage from them, I just eat the loss and get more suspicious of Amazon. It beats having the hassle of talking to Amazon in order to end up just eating the loss anyway.

This is in contrast to eBay, which has always done right by me when I've had a problem with something I've purchased.

That's the polar opposite of my experience, and really weird to read, I order from Amazon so much in large part because returns (when I need them) are so easy.

I don't understand it either, particularly because I've been a customer for over a decade and have spent a ton of money with them over that time... and I've only had problems with orders four or five times. But each time, they treated me very poorly and I was never able to actually resolve the issue.

What's interesting is they often don't even have you return the item.

While not cost effective, I think having you return item, verify it's a knock off, then take some action would be better long run. Apple products had TONS of fake chargers on Amazon for a while.

Which is why regulators need to step in.

The market opportunity is already occupied by Target! Great products, shipped to you or delivered to your car in the parking lot. I’ve shifted at least 50% of my Amazon spend to Target. I won’t buy anything that I eat, that touches my children’s skin, that plugs in, or that has a Li-Ion battery from Amazon.

And they have great connectivity between their HVAC and POS systems!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_chain_attack#Target

I'll try them, though I just did some searches for some random categories like sailboat products and got nothing back. We have switched a lot of our home goods shopping to them (in person).

Yeah, sailboat products ain’t gonna happen at Target. Amazon is like a giant Goodwill: half the stuff is obvious crap, another 30% is non obvious crap, and 20% is quality products. If you want verified quality in specialty categories, you need to use a specialty retailer like West Marine.

That can work, but it depends on what you're buying. Target doesn't carry about 99% of the sorts of things that I buy online. However, I have a physical Target just down the road from me, so I've probably already checked there before I even got on the internet.

Target was cool for the four years they operated in Canada before imploding. I guess we've got Giant Tiger still.

Target doesn't have nearly the same amount of products as Amazon, even if you don't count the junk on Amazon.

There lies the trade off. Quality control / trust verification is hard, and you will have way more products available if you forego it. You’ll also have a ton of junk mixed in too.

Of course. I’m talking about for household essentials. Amazon has built a gigantic marketplace by instituting zero quality control. Target is a marketplace with much stricter quality control and a vastly smaller selection. If you’re fine with caveat emptor than Amazon is the better choice.

>Caught selling garbage (product marked new actually used, totaly fake junk) enough times -> gone from marketplace and hard to get back in.

This is what they have now. Many sellers get suspended over used sold as new and inauthentic complaints.

They also have velocity reviews; if your sales increase too quickly you may get suspended for a bit.

Yeah, the difficult part is that the seller just returns under a different name. Enough complaints have come in about marketplace seller GreatElectronics4U? OK, Amazon bans/suspends GreatElectronics4U and the guy behind it starts selling stuff as AllTheBestElectronics4U. Rinse and repeat.

This isn't like the old days when a ban on doing business under your current name would be a death blow ... start a new seller account and your junk still shows up in Amazon search results, just like it did yesterday.

That's why I'm saying have folks put-up $2,500 when you sell more than 10-20 items per year. It won't be perfect, but it puts a big speedbump there for folks who want to rinse and repeat. A lot of overseas sellers have very low labor costs, so new accounts are cheap from a person perspective but $2,500 is not cheap overseas - so the accounts paying this would be ideally be then really cared for.

What exactly is the proposed solution? Amazon already requires ID verification to open new accounts, and will ban accounts that they can link to old banned accounts.

I really don't know what the solution is.

I also don't have first-hand knowledge of the situation on the ground in, for example, China. But my perception (and that of others I've talked to), is that Chinese sellers just sign up to open a new account, no problem. I'm not sure if that means using the info of a relative or friend, or fake documents, or if my perception is just completely wrong.

It'd be interesting to hear from anyone who has seen things on the ground on that side of the world!

I've certainly talked to many US sellers who openly admit to running multiple accounts. Many feel that it's just not responsible to only run a single account if you're doing significant volume, even 100% legitimately.

They just use another employee to sign up. I know a number of people that do that - really laughable how easy it is to game Amazon.

Money. Charge or require even a deposit of $2,500 on a credit card in your name.

Sure, you can continue to was accounts (and even legit business may decide to invest in 3-4 different names to cover different segments / backup protection). But right now the scam seller cost / pain is so low for bad behavior (other than in time which they have lots of) that something needs to change at least a bit.

A bond requirement after a certain amount of sales isn't a bad idea, but the threshold should be significantly higher, maybe over 50k or 100k in sales in a year.

A better idea may be to enforce the insurance requirement. This de facto requires sellers to commit a similar sum of money towards the business, but they're getting something for it instead of it being tied up. The Amazon contract says if you sell over 10k/month for 3 months then you must carry $1 million in liability insurance. The threshold seems about right, if they'd require proof of insurance for anyone over that threshold it would mostly fix bad actors using multiple accounts, while mostly leaving alone those that have legitimate business purposes in running multiple accounts.

> What exactly is the proposed solution?

Start requiring taxpayer IDs?

They do. Have you ever tried to sign up for an account?

No, I haven't. I'm not a retailer.

I think you're missing the key part:

>hard to get back in

It's been discussed to death, by overseas sellers simply have a massive advantage in starting new seller accounts on Amazon.

>It's been discussed to death

Where?

>overseas sellers simply have a massive advantage in starting new seller accounts on Amazon.

Why would it be any easier for an overseas seller to start a new account after being banned? Amazon blocks related accounts whenever they can track it. Sellers can get around that by having employees or relatives open accounts in their name. This is just as easy or difficult in the US as elsewhere. Regardless, it's something Amazon can't completely fix: they need a way to determine an account is related to a previously banned account. When they do determine that they will quickly ban the new account.

>Where?

In fairness, mostly in FBA-related forums. I'm a 3P seller so I apologize for that comment as I certainly have a skewed view of what is commonly known.

>This is just as easy or difficult in the US as elsewhere.

Wrong. How much would I have to pay you to borrow your passport to set up a seller account? $100? $1000? $10,000? -- You can get this in rural India / China for $20-$100. (And maybe even less than that, I'm not interested in finding out)

>Amazon blocks related accounts whenever they can track it.

Key phrase: whenever they can track it

>When they do determine that they will quickly ban the new account.

I really don't know what to say other than that this is patently false. Here is one (or 50?) of countless examples:

https://old.reddit.com/r/FulfillmentByAmazon/comments/8rnqmb...

>How much would I have to pay you to borrow your passport to set up a seller account?

My passport would be useless, because I was banned from Amazon after dozens of frivolous complaints by a competitor, who I'm currently suing. I've discussed that elsewhere.

Having talked to many US sellers who operate multiple accounts, some of them dozens, I stand behind my claim that it's pretty easy for determined sellers to run multiple stealth accounts.

>I really don't know what to say other than that this is patently false. It really appears you do not know what you're talking about.

I've heard from plenty of people who got suspended for opening another account after suspension, without going through all the effort to cloak it. It's clear that Amazon enforces that, if they know about it. When duplicate accounts aren't suspended, it's because Amazon doesn't know, or is unable to prove it enough to justify a suspension.

Of course there's a both a false positive and false negative rate. But the claim that Amazon doesn't care about this is wrong. Just in the last year they started enforcing ID verification on all new signups, in large part to make it more difficult to open multiple accounts.

> Amazon blocks related accounts whenever they can track it.

They really cannot, and that's been the case for 10+ years.

Even in-person verification is more or less easily defeatable.

Alibaba requires on-site check and business license check by an expert, and may throw many more scrutiny and audit on you than Amazon, but even this is to little effect.

Well, at least that's easily fixed: require a local physical presence who can be sued or prosecuted. If I wanted untraceable disguised imports I know where AliExpress is.

Amazon is a retailer - there are already millions of competitors - you just have to start buying from them.

> I wish somebody would straight compete with them rather than all the complaining to politicians.

One doesn't exclude the other.

The point is to generate choices / alternatives.

If you go the government involvement route you ossify industries and actually can make it harder for folks to compete.

Funeral home chains were famous for pushing for lots of crazy regs that only a system with big economies of scale could meet to push out smaller independents.

In some cities like SF zoning hoops mean that only folks with HUGE pockets / attorneys and long time horizons can get through the planning / permitting and building process - all other restaurants etc basically need to rent (which means if they make the neighborhood nice they don't benefit).

What I want to know - is there a trusted online seller available now that a reasonable amazon alternative?

Regulating that a retailer selling genuine products is nothing at all like zoning or funeral homes.

We need to empower states to regulate Amazon like any other retailer or have reasonable federal standards. In some cases states can apply the death penalty to retailers (revoking sales tax license) if they are perpetuating a fraud. You need regulators with teeth to compel positive behavior from a company are large as Amazon.

It is the same.

If the only folks who can sell products are ones who have a deal with the rightholder and can prove they have the rights to sell - obviously the big players will be the ones able to do the deals with Nike, Apple, etc and little guys will not.

If the federal government actually cared they can ALREADY intercept and even destroy imported counterfeit products - they do not because it's a bit time consuming and hard and they also don't care.

No it is not. Why would you socialize a problem by requiring the government to spend taxpayer resources and slowing down shipping with inspections in a stream of hundreds of millions of packages?

It would be much easier to empower states to enforce existing concepts like the warranty of merchantability in interstate settings or have a regulatory framework that would allow predatory platforms like Amazon to be held accountable for their behavior.

Umm the state ia the government. It is socialized by definition already on every level.

No, due to federal rules Amazon has an edge over normal retailers for following basic laws.

There are lots of alternatives for each category of products - Zappos for shoes/clothes, Mouser for electrical components, etc. though there is no one competitor to Amazon that is as comprehensive as it is.

Edit: Turns out Zappos is owned by Amazon. But my point still stands if we replace it with something else.

Zappos is part of Amazon.

Mouser / digikey generally have inflated prices, and shipping on top of the order. I only go there for specific components, for day-to-day components Amazon is just fine.

I had not heard of Mouser until this moment - thank you!

Mouser (and Digikey) are both really excellent. They aren't cheap, but that's probably part of why they're excellent.

Ebay still exists and is way better for niche stuff anyway.

Yes. I have decided to change my buying priority. When I need something, I first look to local businesses. If I can't find what I want there, I look to manufacturer websites. If that fails, I used to go to Amazon, followed by eBay.

I think I need to just go to eBay at that stage, and drop Amazon entirely.

> The reality is Amazon doesn't care - there IS a market opportunity here for someone to take them on with trusted product catalog and quick shipping (using UPS / Fedex).

Target? Walmart?

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