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Comment by martin-adams | Hacker News Reader

Amazon really do have a problem. Often I see people reviewing different products to the one on the page. Sellers are swapping out listings to pump the reviews and this is in plain sight.[1]

Worst still, I've seen Amazon produce a banner with the phrase "Dispatched and Sold by Amazon" - gives you the guarantee to receive original and genuine[2]

This means they know that other listings may not be original or genuine. So to solve this, they promote their own items as genuine, despite them owning the whole platform.

1. https://twitter.com/Martin_Adams/status/1169905424612507649?...

2. https://twitter.com/Martin_Adams/status/1305398394274414593?...

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Amazon really do have a problem.

No, they don't. This is simple - Amazon have optimized their product to maximize their profit. Amazon have a shop that people continue to use despite the fact that it's full of scams and knock off goods. Amazon make huge profits from that, so they have no problem with it at all. It only becomes a problem if the customers stop shopping there, and that's not looking very likely.

It's Amazon's customers who have a problem. Don't expect Amazon to fix it.

You could say the same thing about Sears 50 years ago.

In 50 years I suspect Bezos thinks he’ll be fighting robot wars against Musk on Mars. I seriously doubt he cares.

> No, they don't.

That’s stupidly pedantic. Of course they do, they just aren’t optimizing to solve it.

If someone says, “United has a legroom problem”, they most certainly mean the legroom is uncomfortable for passengers and everyone knows exactly what they mean. The fact that United has optimized for maximum capacity is not relevant. They still have the problem.

That's a good example of the same thing. When people say a feature of a business is a problem for the business they are just wrong. It's not. In the case of United if they "fixed" it they'd make much less profit, maybe make a loss, or even fail entirely.

It's a problem for the customers of the business, but that isn't the same thing at all. If you don't recognize that you will never understand why companies happily go for years without fixing some problems that make customers complain a lot.

> It's Amazon's customers who have a problem. Don't expect Amazon to fix it.

The only "fix" is competition. Companies rarely improve without competition. The moment a competitor starts eating their lunch, things will get fixed pronto.

Reminds me of that apocryphal Henry Ford story, that he sent his engineers to the local junk yards to see which parts of his car hadn't failed, and wanted to know why they were making something that was outlasting the car. Amazon would rather spend money on conquering new markets than fixing the one they dominate by a wide margin.

> Amazon really do have a problem.

You keep buying from them. So, no not really.

Often I see people reviewing different products to the one on the page.

This is common. Some products are considered a version of others. Sometimes it's OK like different colour or different size. But sometimes it's not.

Worst case is same product sold by different vendors that isn't the same product at all because one of them is fake.

Vendors will often swap out a successful product with a completely different one because the listing has a lot of good reviews. This is incredibly common on Amazon. Just change the name, description, photos and everything else and continue getting the search boost.

That shouldn't even be possible, in my opinion. Imagine taking a popular tweet and changing out all the wording, leaving the likes and retweets now supporting a very different message.

Yes, that is exactly what it is. Actually what you mentioned happens on forums like Reddit all the time. Getting a top comment in a thread is very valuable, and later on you can edit it to say anything. With internet groupthink being what it is, people will open a discussion, see the top few most-upvoted comments and assume they are true and those are the views they should take on the topic.

> Worst still, I've seen Amazon produce a banner with the phrase "Dispatched and Sold by Amazon" - gives you the guarantee to receive original and genuine[2] This means they know that other listings may not be original or genuine

I don't think that's the intent there; at least, that's not what it means to me. To me that means:

> you get this today or tomorrow

as opposed to:

> you get this some time in the next several weeks depending on when the next boat from China docks, or if there's already some buffer; also returns are going to be marginally more of a hassle, but still better than most other websites

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