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Comment by ckastner | Hacker News Reader

Even if these measures exist, their performance is evidently too poor to be acceptable.

Online signups work when risk is low to the point of being non-existent. Regulators aren't worried about students buying Ramen noodles.

Online signups don't work when there are credible risks of malfeasance. When you're a merchant making more than X in revenue, vetting becomes necessary. If banks can do this, then so can Amazon.

If a bank were to say "we're trying our best but people are still heavily abusing our online signup", then I'm all but certain that the regulatory response would be "too bad, then you can no longer offer online signup".

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What do you recommend they do? I'm genuinely curious what reasonable (commercially viable for Amazon and that wouldn't have a chilling effect on legitimate small sellers) steps could be taken to drastically reduce counterfeit goods.

Profile new clients, and assign to them a risk score based on that assessment.

The client is a small wood-working shop somewhere in Ohio, has been registered as business for 30 years, and has a projected volume of 5-10 items sold per day? -> low risk, can be approved online.

The client is some LLC or similar that sells USB cables and USB flash drives, and that has been registered as a business only days or months ago, and the client is somewhere in a jurisdiction associated with exceptionally high reports of counterfeiting? -> high risk, no online approval. Visit some office.

Again: banks have been doing this for decades.

Maybe Amazon is also already doing that...

I actually don't care if it's viable. If preventing harm and trash on the third party marketplace makes it nonviable, then it shouldn't exist. Right now I try to avoid it, and I absolutely avoid buying anything for my baby that might be harmful. Walmart gets those sales. It's impossible to buy with confidence from Amazon now.

I don't think they've internalised the extent of this problem yet. I agree with the previous post that in some cases it's worse than ebay.

Maybe scorched earth is the best answer here and built up a new resilient system slowly. The current system is demonstrably broken.

> What do you recommend they do?

1. The same thing that any of the millions of businesses that operate storefronts do. They've figured this out, somehow.

2. Alternatively: I don't know, and I don't care. They are a logistics company. It's their job to figure this out, not mine. If they want to pay me, though, I'll be happy to consult.

This is sort of the interesting part for me

> commercially viable for Amazon

why does it have to be? What if the business that Amazon chose to engage in simply isn't commercially viable? I personally think there is a way to make it viable but I am almost certain that'd significantly bite into the crazy profit margins Amazon is reaping. And maybe that's the explanation, maybe Amazon's huge profits are largely coming from ignoring market rules that everyone else needs to abide by and, when the market is made fair, they'll still be profitable, but forced by competition to survive on much thinner margins.

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