Aukey kicked off Amazon following fake reviews allegations
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Not long afterwards, "Tara" from AKASO (using a gmail.com account with the name "Jessica") sent me multiple requests for the following:
>We sincerely appreciate your comment, which is helpful for improvement of our product and service in future. To bring you a better shopping experience, we would like to send you 30 USD gift card. Would you please help us to re-adjusting your comment rating or remove it?
Thanks to the Amazon review system, companies would much rather spend money suppressing bad reviews of their shit products instead of spending money to make good products in the first place.
I kept getting spammed to my personal e-mail. I was not sure if they were sending through Amazon system or directly - my guess was directly. Later on I did modify my review. I reduced it by 1 more star.
I left 1 star review for a product, and the seller tried continuously to solicit withdraw or revision of the review. I attempted to update the review calling out this behavior with screenshot of the email and Amazon wouldn't approve it. Ultimately, they replaced it with a product revision and immediately got another 20k reviews with near 5 star rating.
There's very little anonymity for buyers given all our digital crumbles. The entire digital economy's purpose is to track and identify you as a consumer. On top of this, how reviewers are paid via affiliates is the wrong incentive model. I'm not sure how this could be fixed, but I would be interested in a service that flipped the information asymmetry and gave me insight on the company selling the product and their trust worthiness. Company ownership would be icing on the cake since brands change hand so frequently (see example: https://toolguyd.com/tool-brands-corporate-affiliations/).
Just like you, I also updated my review when I downgraded my star review. My first attempt was rejected by Amazon and I made my update more brief in order to pass their review process.
I wouldn't say Amazon is turning a blind eye to it - but actually helping the cause in order to get turnover of products. If it hurt their bottom line (just like bad publicity like this would) they'd stop it.
The deal was that I had to go to Amazon.com, search for a specific keyword, scroll until I found their product, buy it, and then forward my receipt to the company. They would then PayPal me the entire cost and I got to keep the product.
They didn’t even ask for a review, although maybe that request would come after I bought it. Up front, they were simply vying for search ranking.
The margin on some of these products is so high that companies can buy their way in to high search rankings and reviews.
Edit to add: perhaps substantial whistleblower rewards for employees of companies doing the bad actions but the top one or two employees/founders might be the only ones in the know.
Also, the existence of the checkbox itself must have some chilling effects on the sellers by changing their risk perception. Those days it's just a common knowledge that those "leave us a review and we'll reward you with a $X gift card" is not penalized in practice. A checkbox with a PR campaign would send a contradicting signal, making this practice more scary.
A resourceful fraudulent sellers' cabal (if there are such things) could try to poison the well by paying users to tick this checkbox in random reviews (wasting marketplace's resources by muddying the waters), but this doesn't sound scalable and doesn't feel like a realistic scenario.
Else, and I know that its not worth your time, but couldn't you accept their request, change your review, receive the gift card, redeem it, and change review back with a short statement of what happened. I mean, as I understand it, what are they gonna do? (I they do have your address though, I would not play games either)
Well, Amazon does not give out buyer e-mail addresses either, so the seller must've figured it out some other way (or via an Amazon bug).
Unless the item was fulfilled by Amazon, the seller gets your physical address (so they can ship out the item).
> change review back with a short statement of what happened. I mean, as I understand it, what are they gonna do?
Your review will simply not pass amazon's moderation - they actively censor this stuff.
I’ve always thought there’s a big opportunity here for principle component analysis or other dimension reduction. The reviews you see could be filtered down to people who have reviewed other things similarly to you, like how Netflix gives different ratings for the same show depending on what else you’ve watched.
It’s almost like establishing trust. If someone has rated that USB hub 5 stars, you probably don’t want their opinion on a restaurant either. It would also give a real incentive to leave honest reviews, which would help collect data from the massive group that currently just doesn’t care.
Hubs drawing too much power was an issue with USB-A hubs as well -- to mitigate this you want a hub that is independently powered (that is, has its own DC barrel plug and wall wart).
You can also find hubs that charge laptops (Thunderbolt 3/4, or USB-C PD, assuming you have a compatible laptop) although you want to be very careful about the choice of charger and cable since a short can brick just about anything that's not properly protected on the USB-C port (basically most non-Macs).
Turns out they all used the exact same USB hub/combo card reader chip.
This chip burns enough power at idle to heat up almost 30°C above ambient.
After enough testing I found out that on many motherboards, you can turn on USB power saving per port. This effectively get the device to consume almost nothing at idle.
But this only works on those ports. Anything indirect; for example apple usb-c to USB + HDMI dongle; the device would be burning power and heating up.
Same behavior on all three major operating systems. What matters is the motherboard ability to control power to a single USB port as far as I can tell.
Why are you blaming Amazon? What would you change?
You probably know before online stores had their own review systems, it was full of fake review sites (still is) and fake forum product endorsements.
This is not a problem that's here "thanks to the Amazon review system".
I wrote a review with how bad they were and also made a note of the $15 gift card offer. Last I checked my review was not deleted and it was available. I don’t think it made any difference though since the product is full of 5-star reviews claiming they are audiophile quality earbuds.
Just curious if you had also reviewed the hub or just that it had a gift card offer?
Amazon basically became a rigged marketplace where those who thrive are the ones who can get away with a lot of things. From completely disregarding guidelines, TOS, targeted attacks to destroy competitors listings, you name it.
It's just like prisons, people go in and come out worst because that's the game that has to be played in order to survive.
The only one to blame is Amazon that promoted these practices by giving leverage to those who did it. With more revenue, more exposure, privileged access to Amazon account managers (yes, talking to a human is a privilege for an Amazon Seller).
Similarly, open markets require regulations, enforcement, fair and impartial judiciary (tort), and property rights.
Fraud and counterfeits spoil markets. Lowering trust. Increasing transaction costs. Poorly regulated Freedom Markets™ like eBay and Amazon are net negatives, even while a few thrive on the chaos.
Then they got greedy and decided to turn the site into Aliexppress US.
It's funny though, we were talking about this at dinner the other night. Both my wife and I are still a bit surprised that we'd trust Walmart quality over Amazon at this point. We don't buy anything from Amazon with the expectation that it'll last, or that it's even real - just things that we'll use lightly and nothing we'd eat (minus Prime Now for Whole Foods delivery now and then). Amazon feels like some weird amalgamation of online Walmart + Harbor Freight.
Because physical retail is a single digit profit margin business. It might not even be worth their time anymore now that they have AWS and Prime Video.
Walmart’s market cap is $400B and they have to do a ton more work managing a customer facing business on top of all their warehouses and logistics and website.
Amazon has a 1.75T market cap, without even having to deal with physical stores and customer interactions liabilities that come with it. They already have to deal with all the negative PR of paying warehouse workers less than their other employees…even though they pay more than other companies for warehouse work.
I would be surprised if Amazon would bother entering retail if they had already had AWS and Prime Video. It might be worth the 15% commission as a platform though, but I suspect that’s why I see less and less “shipped and sold by Amazon.com” and more obfuscation of what is and is not coming directly from Amazon.
Remember that retail gives you a lot of cashflow, and Amazon only allows you to transfer part of your funds, and transfers are made every 2-3 weeks. They probably have more money sitting around then many banks.
At the end of the day, a sub 5% profit margin is still a sub 5% profit margin.
If you know exactly what you want and can find that from sellers on Aliexpress who actually know what they are selling,
and put that in clear english language on there, everything is fine. If there is any vagueness, which is not resolvable by
messaging/mail/chat, then I don't order.
When I ordered with the above conditions met, I never had any trouble. Also fast delivery by air to *.de.
edit: That was for electronic parts, boards, development kits, measuring equipment, and some tools so far.
Don't know about the other stuff on offer there, but I'd guess it would be the same.
The problem is the knowing and the sometimes horribly translated descriptions there,
which make it look like alien gibberish.
Apart from that I'm thinking it's mostly the same stuff, not even 'bootlegged', just directly from the source/ODM/OEM,
while the usual 'high-quality' stuff just has a different label on it, and it is the greed for that label/brand which enables
countless middlemen/upsellers/marketeers and their shady schemes.
(been looking at automatic soap dispensers, fwiw - after hours of research however i gathered that all are trash and didn't bother to find out if was going to get lucky)
At least with aliexpress that's exactly what you expect, and exactly what you're paying for.
Search for 1TB USB drive, look at the results with obviously scam products. This has been there for years. They do nothing for even the most blatant offenses.
At their scale it is absolutely impossible to moderate and keep the problems away. The stacks are against them. Each seller has the incentive to try to game their own product reviews, while AMazon has to attempt to stay on top of the whole marketplace.
Anything I can buy at Costco instead of Amazon, I do.
If Costco is selling a blender, it's probably only selling a single one. The fact that it's in Costco's inventory in the first place is the review.
But yes, agree. Now we call it “curated”, but with Costco’s return policy, there’s an actual risk to them for stocking outright garbage, which is a huge value, even if I never return things.
No matter how much they paddle that AI will take over that part of the business, well it won't for a long, long time and we're not the ones that should be training them.
Maybe the concept "too big" should be brought to the table, to at least make them pay for the bad service.
1) Amazon drastically ramps up the burden of proof of real actual reviews, and rather than erring on the side of posting it ends up false-positively identifying customer reviews. HackerNews headline next week: "Amazon is censoring real customer reviews for products! Company no longer customer obsessed!"
2) Amazon dramatically cracks down on sellers, reducing overall inventory, and sucking up some real genuine sellers in the process. CNN headline: "Amazon destroying small family business sellers - hundreds reporting going out of business as they're being driven out of the market". Hackernews headline: "Amazon inventory down x%. I no longer go to Amazon anymore to find what I need because it's not available any more".
I could keep going.
My point is I don't think it's in any consumer's interest for Amazon to decrease their inventory, or crack down on reviews. And any increase in quality or human review of the products or reviews will only raise prices, which again, people don't want.
Remember - Amazon's stock price isn't based on their profits. Their profit margins are razor thin because they actually generally do pass on most cost savings down to customers.
It's incredible how people take completely for granted that there is a website with 1) Infinite selection, 2) Low prices (yes yes no longer the lowest but still fairly low), 3) Free shipping, in many cases same day or next day or 2-day.
And on top of that there is a completely hassle-free non-questions-asked return policy.
The cost of all this is this marketplace is incredibly attractive to unscrupulous sellers who will abuse it to list counterfit goods and spam fake reviews. And no matter how hard Amazon works on these the sellers can be just one step ahead.
Government regulation can't help here, it can only kill Amazon and make it ultimately less beneficial for consumers.
Edit: also, big brands like Aukey have stock available next to you, so there's only one middle-man (Amazon), and it handles the logistics, so it's not like it's doing nothing…
Otherwise, they are not that different from most other big retailers.
Usually that's all
If the guy sucks, you go to another one.
You can see a company called Ugreen, which ended up with multiple "official stores" on online marketplaces this way.
Contract enforcement in China is of course non-existent. It's good if you manage to get a prominent handle for your own brand, in worst case somebody else can do it for you!
I know a man who regularly have to smack pretender "official stores" of his brand few times a year.
This also works the other way around, somebody with a vicious lawyer can coerce Alibaba, or JD into handing your (likely well doing) online store to them on a claim that you don't own your own brand name.
Amazon's first choices are always garbage, have to sort through a lot of it, make sure you're buying from the right seller (and even then you could get a fake) and actually read the reviews (1 star, 2-3 stars and 5 stars, preferably) so you know what you're buying. But overall, it's alright.
I wish Ebay had the same interface as https://reverb.com/ , which is nice, but is for music-instruments only and the prices are a bit too high.
eBay forces me to simultaneously compare different products across different sellers. It's a nightmare to keep track of the differences and pros/cons of each listing.
I really don't know what happened to Amazon's product search, but it's almost entirely useless unless you search something super specific, and even then Google will actually give you better results.
Are you really certain about that? The fakes are so good sometimes I don't notice for a year or two. There are so many ways of faking different products, and the fakers are getting really really really good at making the product seem real.
Have you done a few hours of searching and testing for everything you've bought? This is what it takes, IMO, to feel some level of confidence in an Amazon (US) product being 'real'. The levels of suspicion never really go away either - since I've been duped by probably a dozen products at least, that have turned out to be fake, I'm highly suspicious of any Amazon purchase.
It's been a couple years since I bought anything from there. Too much stress worrying about authenticity to make it worth it.
As far as research goes, if it's expensive, I put some research in if it's a product or brand I've never used before, but I never specifically look to see if it's a fake product on Amazon.
For reference, I spend about £5k a year at Amazon UK. Nearly all my experiences have been positive apart from the occasional damage in transit.
What I have found though is that the quality of search results, the experience of using the site, has seriously deteriorated in the last two or three years. It's like AliExpress or eBay now.
I used to read other countries' Amazon users (e.g. .com) complain about this and think what are you talking about it's great, but yeah, now... I still get as good stuff from Amazon because that's what I buy, I just have to wade through a lot of crap to get it.
If you don’t consider that a sign of a fake product, I don’t think you’re being objective. Fake products put significant effort into looking like real products, many times you need to take them apart to find the differences.
To be fair though it's not as clear as I was expecting, but I'm no expert so not really set up to do any proper testing, the room its in is probably acoustically awful anyway, etc. It's certainly not awful even if it isn't what it says it is, it's several steps up from the dirt cheap 'Tonor' branded and unashemedly 'Chinesium' thing I used before it.
The great thing about Amazon though is that after this thread I contacted support (way out of return period) and they've shipped a replacement. I'll see if it's the same; if it is, of course that doesn't prove anything, but I'll be very interested if it does seem (more - still wouldn't know for sure of course) real to see what the differences are in packaging/construction/printing etc.
Both of these two are identical inside too, same board revision even. (And not every penny pinched like you would if you were faking - gloss black solder mask, as well as on a second PCB whose only job is keeping wires tidy and displaying a silk screened revision number.)
[edit: Further to edit above, it's actually 'C-Media Electronics, Inc. Blue Snowball', and the main chip is this one: https://www.cmedia.com.tw/applications/microphone/CM6327A so presumably both microphones use it and the same assembly house (whether the same design or not) and the EEPROMs' manufacturer/product strings are either getting mixed up or all Blue, whether by mistake or assembler realised they could get paid double to flash once.]
That... yeah, good point. I don't know why that didn't occur to me before. (I was previously thinking they probably just genuninely use some same chips, or even both brands farm it out to the same shop, and both genuine microphones are the exactly same, just differently packaged.)
For computer equipment, I shop NewEgg because their search rules. I wish there was a NewEgg for other stuff. I'm more than happy to pay more and wait a few days extra to have a search that doesn't suck.
The site is increasingly swamped with low-quality goods sourced from AliBaba or AliExpress. This is easily verified by searching for a item and seeing the same product sold under a different "brand name" (with the same generic product photos). These "drop-shipping" businesses dominate many product categories.
Even with books, Amazon's print-on-demand service means that search results are swamped with "low-content or no content" titles (essentially notebooks, diaries, planners etc). These "no content" titles often slap an unrelated title on the cover for what is simply a empty notebook (e.g. "JavaScript notebook"). The keyword in the title is there to gain a higher position in Amazon's broken search.
The things described above are easily discovered online. YouTube has hundreds of "drop-shipping" videos and videos of publishing "no content" books. These videos are full of advice on how to manipulate Amazon listings using various techniques.
Quite simply, Amazon is now an untamed mess of an online store. But with enough customers (and growing) it is unlikely anything will change.
Only when a case goes to court, it will be determined if the certification was rightful or not.
You're making the point I'm making. While I don't (to the best of my knowledge) purchase counterfeit items, I don't pretend that certification is anything other than certification. Hopefully certification comes with standards, and aren't self-reporting... but that's not always the case.
https://support.ce-check.eu/hc/en-us/articles/360008642600-H...
I opend some of them non-destructively to check them out, and deemed them sufficient. They barely get warm at all.
Nonetheless I put them in some closed rack where they only could produce some stink, but no fire.
I'm too lazy to unplug them right now to upload photos to Imgur, or such, because it would disrupt some services.
Anyways, no urban legend. Just the usual bureaucratic disconnect from reality, saying otherwise.
Meanwhile another bureaucratic entity, the german customs really likes to hassle you because of exactly that sh..! :-)
edit: Some of them in continous operation for just over a decade, some others about 5 to 6 years, YMMV. (shrug)
Stuff my nightmares are made of now. Anyway, I always open all power adapters/supplies I buy from there, because my original education is EE, so I never used these. But the idea that some people are using such things is quite scary.
Not to poo poo on aliexpress itself. There are some exceptional quality sellers and products to be found there. You just have to know how to find them.
https://www.redpoints.com/blog/amazon-commingled-inventory-m...
I'd also say it absolutely matters depending on the class of product -since they are saving money somewhere; so by logic if the outside looks the same, they skimped on the insides.
Electronics can kill you, makeup can contain toxic chemicals, toys with lead, or parts that break too easy and hurt the user...
Not the least, fake books are just theft from the author, who probably isn't getting the best deal from their publisher in the first place. So only a shitty person would be cool knowing their book was just a really good fake.
The only difference between the two scenarios is that one involves copyright infringement. Theft means a possession was taken. Potential income is not a possession. There are various ways to describe the harm ("damages" comes to mind) but "theft" isn't among them.
And theft is defined as stealing, which has "to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully" which applies fully here so...
You can nit pick definitions all day, but you'll find most people would consider this theft, as you're depriving the artist of the rights to their creation. I really feel people who want to argue the other way are a stain on this earth, because you're so happy to defend it...it's just mental gymnastics to a pathetic argument
A person can steal an idea (or market share) and it wouldn't make them a thief.
The fact that a victim of copyright infringement may end up disadvantaged to the exact same extent as if they were a victim of theft does not magically equate the two, even if the two involve stealing.
My comment is in the red.
Lemme give an example of how I see this:
I have some idea to do something in a certain way, and because of that I declare it forbidden to everyone else to do it the same way, except they pay me something to be allowed to do it that way.
Wouldn't you think of something like F! How dare he/she/it/whatever?
Usually, but not always, which is why theft of electricity is a thing.
Paintings, manuscripts, etc. are subject to theft because they are nonfungible. The content itself is subject to copyright because the copies are fungible.
Everything matched, with laser cut serial numbers and everything. The only way they could ensure it was real was by material testing, or known purchase from an authorized dealer.
Years ago there was a decent chance amazon had the real thing, but now I'd avoid anything that can potentially kill you
Or whomever setup their plant setup an extra plant on the side.
Though I increasingly suspect any bad batch gets labelled as a counterfeit to avoid liability.
I just try to search and order from local UK websites or stores. These often offer comparable or even better prices (esp. books), plus good contact with the seller and very often a better quality. Amazon just being either my last resort if I cannot buy a product in a local mom and pop store. With possibility of not even receiving a genuine product I prefer to buy, especially electronics, just directly in normal shops.
Best to avoid buying any items sold both by Amazon and a FBA seller; they're nearly guaranteed to be commingled, running you the risk of getting a third party's FBA counterfeit. But that'll probably get rid of a large chunk of your shopping list.
I've seen proof this happens in the US, I'm yet to find any that this happens in the UK as well.
I've accidentally bought a fake board game. We didn't know until we reached out to the manufacturer because the cardboard cutouts for coins / tokens / markers were all offset randomly. On one sheet white, unprinted cardboard was visible when we punched them out.
When we contacted the manufacturer, they plainly knew it was a fake, said we should return it to Amazon, and we did so. When we bought another from elsewhere, we did a side-by-side comparison before sending the fake back:
1. The box was slightly different in size. Not enough that you'd notice, but the box top on the fake was just a little harder to remove.
2. the token/marker printing was of poor quality. It was like they'd taken the misprints from a real run and were selling those.
3. The instruction manual was printed on different paper. It felt real enough, but was obviously different from the "real" one.
4. Some extra flyers and adverts were missing from the box vs the real one
On MicroSD-Problems - https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022
From the samy guy, 30c3 - The Exploration and Exploitation of an SD Memory Card - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuX_ElPhWHs
Same video from source - https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5294_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201312291...
Even when Amazon has exactly the product you're searching for, they'll often bury it under a dozen vaguely related junk items (which sometimes don't match your search term at all). Presumably because those vendors have paid for elevated search placement?
I’m not even sure the initial launch looked as good as that Chinese site Wish…
Maybe they should embed the latter as option for the languages it understands.
About a few months ago, most guitar items in Amazon.de were straight up forgeries at a smaller price, unless the Amazon Seller was a famous German music store. Those items also were on top of search.
I have some internal contacts at Amazon and passed it to someone internally, and it seems to have been solved, but there is still lots of forgery in others areas.
Sometime in the past few years something changed though. Shipping prices went up. Prices on name brand goods started climbing up too, sometimes higher than I pay locally even. Savings basically disappeared so I stopped bothering 90% of the time.
Then the flood came. IG without the international competition, the knockoff and counterfeit and aliexpress sellers saw an opportunity and absolutely flooded the site. Now you can't find a name brand fucking anything unless you explicitly search for it, and more often than not it's out of stock. It will sell you a million suspiciously cheap knockoffs with obviously fake brand names, often the same knockoff under dozens of different names and prices.
It really is basically just a shit overpriced Wish now, and it is baffling to me that Amazon have seemingly just allowed this to happen.
Basically there's no way to buy anything in secondary market, yes OLX or Quikr etc... exist but they are limited to only people around you (in same city) and do not facilitate payments or logistics or even reviews.
Now someone can make their own website but product discovery is pain and buyers can't trust reviews on website owned by the single seller, neither can trust the refund will be honoured as you need Escrow to deal with the unknown sellers.
India has people who are interested in saving money and buying second hand tools/machines is an option yet it has no eBay or alternative as if startups in India have a blindspot.
For example, I live a town with population of 500K (200km away from Delhi) and while repairing my car, the mechanic told me he will go to Delhi and try getting the spare part from Junkyard owners.
Maybe guys from Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore don't have this problem but majority of Indian population still lives in small towns and villages where finding 1 used part at affordable price can save a business or medical equipment (life). What are the technical people in small towns are supposed to do? Run to Delhi and Mumbai each time you need a spare part?
Such a waste of human efforts, my mechanic could have instead bought it on eBay from a junkyard owner who is also a seller on ebay through courier if eBay like website existed.
Lemme give you another example, sometime back I was interested in a product from Mobil which only comes in 230L barrel packaging, I need only 2liters of this stuff and there were many sellers on eBay selling it in used Coke/Soda bottles, but I couldn't buy it because I am from India.
Similarly, our junkyards are filled with useful servos, PLCs etc..., linear rails, valves but it's hard to find buyers for the junkyard owners because there's no online marketplace for this
India imports millions of tons of waste from foreign countries yet the stuff that's harvested from it has very inefficient market.
This is holding back innovation as you can build lots of cool things from the used machinery/tools which cost wayyy less than the new stuff.
Back in time eBay was operating in Indian market and eBay was successful as the payment service used on eBay was PayPal, buyers had protection in India which they couldn't get with any other local website as online payment infrastructure was in dark ages in India at that time.
After that India rapidly grew in e-commerce and payment platforms rapidly developed (now they are at par with western ones or we can say even better and payment regulations also improved a lot). Now logistics has also improved a lot, so we can receive goods in just 1 or 2 days in any part of the country. We've new expressways, freight corridors, capacity expanding rapidly so now even more businesses is possible in India yet we are leaving the obvious one out. Where are all my Indian executives, investors, guys from IITs are doing? Why they aren't working on this?
Then Flipkart buys eBay India and shuts it down.
And now there exists market vaccum. Everyone is looking at each other, no startup founder doing anything about it. Existence of eBay alternative will add great efficiency to India market, reduce its CO2 footprint as well when used products find buyer instead of destroying and remelting them.
Flipkart has a history of buying and shutting down businesses.
Just to remove this possibility of being used as a weapon in competition's hand, they killed it.
They certainly didn't understand the whole use case of eBay like website but killed it because it was possible to use it for competition in consumer goods space considering it had many things that were being sold on Flipkart too
Okay I am only guessing, the historic reason is listed in another subcomment on my original post.
Their service with mostly wholly owned logistic was considered superior.
I place order before 2pm and my orders arrive at my desk next day before 11am, arrives in my town at 7am.
For eBay kind of model where the seller has to pack and ship items themselves, it would be a nightmare. The govt postal service is highly inefficient and the private players are not organized for door to door logistics.
Try shipping few metal parts weighing 1Kg+ yourself to any random address to understand perhaps that is the most difficult part of the problem.
Even if we ignore the high shipping charges for relatively low value products, scammers, fraudulent sellers, the returns if receiver not available etc.
Amazon doesn't package and ship your items if it weighs over 30kg, you've to fulfill orders on your own if it's larger than 30kg.
>Try shipping few metal parts weighing 1Kg+ yourself to any random address to understand perhaps that is the most difficult part of the problem.
Not true! India has changed. I've shipped over 300kg per shipment no problem. I've a business of shipping industrial parts and we regularly ship median weight of 50kg
I am not sure how old was your experience, leave the government services. We ship with delhivery and safe express
Who are you shipping with? And when did you try? Today you can easily get the shipping rates we are getting by signing up for Delhivery's business account the more you ship the cheaper it becomes but man we are no longer living in dark ages of IndiaPost parcel times anymore
There's the crux. Ebay is not about regular e-commerce retailer, but it is about avg next door Joe selling surplus items that they have. That's the scenario you painted.
These avg Joe will not have 'Delhivery accounts' to ship. EBay is for infrequent non traditional online sellers.
I have friends who have their own e-commerce shopify storefronts, and you are absolutely right they have a hassel free shipping experience (more or less), but I know that they in their dreams will not use eBay if it was there in India.
Did you ever try? A lot of web shops are being run in India by average Joe now, sometimes take a look at Google shopping tab.
Signing up for delivery business account is not smth you need much for, anyone can sign-up and start today.
Okay so you don't want to sign up for Delhivery account, sign up for ShipRocket (it's just an account sign-up like any website). Upload your shipment dimension and they'll arrange pickup and deliver your goods.
>but I know that they in their dreams will not use eBay if it was there in India.
They'll depending on what they are selling if they are selling consumer goods, they can sign up with Amazon but if they are selling smth more niche, they'll benefit greatly from product discovery that comes with a website like eBay, unless they've a recognizable brand and enough money to spend on advertisement and marketing a guy with an eBay account can get a lot of sales.
Honestly most guys will will not be shipping 50kg item from get go. To ship small 1 or 2 kg item they can approach nearest courier service and if they've a few of these Packets, courier offers pickup from your premise.
For small packets, price variation among different courier providers isn't much to fuss about. Only at higher weight levels, the delhivery/safe express standout from the competition.
So here's the process:
1. Sign up for ShipRocket
2. Pack your goods and wait for it to be picked up and delivered
How can we make it easier than this? Next step is only that a courier company reads your mind and picksup unpacked goods, pack it and deliver it to customers using teleportation. There isn't room for making it easier than this, just saying.
A person who can't be bothered to do is, has any place in business? What he deserves to make money for if he can't given do this.
I am a guy from a small city near Delhi with not much resources and I still manage to ship goods and make good money that I left my job, if I can do it, anyone can.
> Did you ever try?
No, not Delhivery kind of specialised courier. But in USA I was eBay user. I was an ordinary bloke with 9-5 job, and used to sell excess stuff (old gadget which I want to upgrade from), shipping charges were major part of the transaction and my endeavour was to minimize it - ended up using US postal service quite a few times.
Here I am talking about the domestic courier service not shipping to US for international shipping I agree we are still behind.
I also have export import business where I sell Chinese goods into US and India.
Many times in small towns Amazon routes its fullfiled by Amazon shipments to Delhivery.
Hardly any ecomerce service is using India Post now, most small packets are through XpressBees and Delhivery. Rest are through Amazon and Flipkarts own logistics like ATS and Ekart respectively
> Maybe guys from Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore don't have this problem but majority of Indian population still lives in small towns and villages where finding 1 used part at affordable price can save a business or medical equipment (life). What are the technical people in small towns are supposed to do? Run to Delhi and Mumbai each time you need a spare part?
> Such a waste of human efforts, my mechanic could have instead bought it on eBay from a junkyard owner who is also a seller on ebay through courier if eBay like website existed.
Ebay doesn't handle this well in the US either. I would love to use ebay as a junkyard metasearch engine.
But you can find people who scavenge junkyards and are listed as sellers on eBay who do sell used bench grinder (maybe after restoring them!?), Induction motors, industrial brushless motors etc... In India even that is also not easy to find.
If I don't have a smartphone i'm screwed. https://postimg.cc/LJ6KVgZr
But I had a hard time getting a "reputable" USB-C Cable a few weeks ago, & all of them were basically obviously "too good to be true" clone cables from generic brands that you know won't actually work. Getting good cables/electronics for a lot cheaper was what got me into Amazon in the first place but now I'd rather buy everything from best buy or Walmart and avoid a huge headache. Everything from good brands has been perpetually out of stock or outright unavailable anymore.
Appliances are somehow even worse, like the last few things I've bought there were outright unsafe and almost always had misleading listings/pictures. I mean at least on Aliexpress you pretty much know what you will get, and (good) stores are usually honest about their products.
(I'm not sure if it's still the case but for almost the entirety of 2020 Amazon support was only available through emails that could take 48h to get a reply to, apparently because of coronavirus (?? Isn't chat pretty much perfect for remote work) so good luck even getting a refund especially for less expensive items that aren't worth a few days of back and forth)
An example from pricing something up earlier this week, identical leveling casters, made in china and sold under different brand names, but with the same specs and product code
Aliexpress: $41, Free postage, Est delivery 17/6
Ebay: $62, Free postage, Est delivery 2/6 - 7/6
Amazon.com.au: $125, $35 Delivery, Est delivery 10/6
I didn't even know there is an estimation. I just assume it will ship within 7 days. The vast bulk of my orders all arrived in 7 days (sometimes even shorter). But I got caught out with some orders where it shipped all the way from China, and I only learned about that after buying them (by visiting the 'track package' page).
https://d2bvhe78se1grn.cloudfront.net/optimized/2X/a/a0a8385...
Germany has so many other good online shops that it's for most products really easy to cut Amazon out and avoid that problem.
Customer orders X from seller A, A buys X1 from seller B, then A gives X1 to customer. Meanwhile B buys X2 from A.
Sellers can of course opt out of this scheme.
With FBA, you could have gotten counterfeit goods or a return from another customer where they've sent only the box and something that weighs the same (or a broken item). Amazon throws away the receipts (it'd be a nightmare to handle so they just... don't).
Why is Amazon not on the hook for this?
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Amazon does keep track on where a given unit came from so that it is traceable to the original source, and at least in Europe invoices are issued for the inventory supplies between the sellers (these are documented at https://sellercentral-europe.amazon.com/gp/help/help-page.ht... - may not be public).
It's shifting through loads of absolute trash.
* Many with "product tolerances may be 1cm to 3cm off". This is a device that's about 2inch (58mm). 3cm is half the width. Perhaps they mean millimeter....
* Magnetic and non-magnetic ones mixed together. Seller even communicates they have mixed stock and will not guarantee which one you get. I want the magnetic one.
* Misleading claims on nearly every description to suggest the product has features of much more expensive funnels.
I'm only willing to tolerate it because I don't actually need this item and I can get it for free from Amazon. But...it's getting to the point where I might as well pay more and wait to get it from a reputable seller.
There's no reason not to assume that AUKEY isn't using the same tactics on international sites
Many of the reviews are taken directly from amazon.com ---- Danielle Schenk Great product highly recommend 5.0 von 5 Rezension aus den Vereinigten Staaten vom 4. April 2019 Verifizierter Kauf These headphones last all day for my husband who works at an oil plant. There noise cancelling is amazing so he can listen to music while protecting his ears. Plus they look like earplugs so he doesn't get fussed at! Great product ----
So it's safe to assume that Amazon has absolutely no issue with this, unless there's a lawsuit threatening them.
It wasn’t just Amazon that changed though. The proliferation of easier payment options (Apple/Google Pay, PayPal) and availability of one-touch credit card autofill on other websites eroded their moat, at least in my case.
eBay's stewardship of the marketplace started bad and then steadily got worse.
Just fighting the search results, where legit products were buried under SEO and copycats, became a full time job. A little bit of jostling, that's just healthy competition, same as it ever was.
But when legit business has to cheat just to stay afloat, the market's broken.
Eventually, it just wasn't worth the bother.
In a shop, you might buy the cheapest option, and be fairly confident it will work.
You wouldn’t, or at least shouldn’t do that on ebay.
It’s the same on amazon
"Quality means doing it right when no one is looking." -Henry Ford
In China, it's usually outsourced to specialist Amazon wizards, people who are kind of in rank with "SEO consultants."
It's not just China, everywhere I look I see companies partnering with shoddy marketing/SEO 'consultants'. They are rarely transparent about their tactics, and often resort to click farms, fake reviews, keyword stuffing etc. The company doesn't understand the risk to their brand, because they don't understand what the consultant is doing in the first place.
The problem here is, I guess, that these tactics do actually work on the short term. So the consultant gets paid, the team reaches their targets and the manager gets promoted.
By the time eBay, or any other platform supplier, implies sanctions (and rightfully so, imo) the 'consultant' is long gone, and everybody loses.
well, except for the consultant! And the business which made some sales. So it's only the customer losing...
Let's be honest: these tactics work over the long term. When they blow up, you just start again with a new name. Use the same consultant if the last one was good, a better one if a friend of yours did better than you did.
I was and still am impressed with their quality and with their support so I have continued to buy their products.
I really like their now outdated PA-U32 USB power supply, it was a great value for the money and I probably have a half dozen or more.
I think all of my USB powerbanks are Aukey and I have been happy with each.
For a company that initially was a searchengine (A9 if i recall right, still being used for the site) the search and filter options aren't worthily described if you use the word bad.
I mean, what else besides being able to filter for brands and maybe price is there?
Cue every purchase being research into the fundamentals of the thing you need, together with not being able to trust reviews.
Regarding the reviews, i've turned to only looking at "most critical" reviews - at least with those i'm kinda quickly able to differ between "logistics service dun f'up" and "this thing has so many issues it's not even funny anymore".
Edit to add: my purchases on AMZN are down by like 90% - replacing my online shopping by going to local (hardware) stores mostly
So many things. Take a look at NewEgg's search. Even when I search for specific model numbers on Amazon I have to wade through irrelevant results.
edit: also drop shipping filter would be helpful.
If we also cannot ban trade with countries that allow slave labour, then we should at least require producers to include information about what kind of environment their workers are coming from.
I think they have marginally improved though. I could be wrong about this, but I think that you couldn’t filter by specific price until a few years ago.
Amazon wasn't initially a search engine. A9 was created in 2004, by Amazon.
Anyways, the point still stands - for a company that also has/operates a search engine, the results one gets when entering a search-term on Amazon.com are comically bad - to the point i really wonder if they even try.
The results could only be worse if they won't return any results at all.
But, i suppose, it'd be bad for their bottomline if they'd only show you what you've searched for and not return hundreds of products which supposed brand-names oftentimes is alike to $BARELYRECOGNIZABLEENGLISHWORDS
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com#A9.com_search_portal
Or maybe your goals are misaligned with Amazon's, wrt/ product search.
I'm not entirely sure if Amazon's fake-review enforcement is a deliberate sham (i.e. whether it is malice or incompetence), but this new information does raise the likelihood that it is deliberate policy.
One obvious clue to the listing being Chinese is the length of the title. Chinese listings tend to include descriptions and usages of the product in addition to the product name itself. I guess it is the Chinese's way to SEO hacking because all products I see on Taobao or AliExpress have the same spammy title all the way to the length limit.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18140799/amazon-marketpl...
What is unsaid is that it's not just unscrupulous companies (including Amazon) that are involved. There are also ordinary consumers who deliberately post the fake 5-star reviews in exchange for compensation. I've seen people make excuses for them, but I can't see how any of them can be under the impression they are not doing wrong.
Now if Amazon were forced to disclose statistics about return rates or complaints on products, that would in fact be valuable information. It could still be gamed due to other shoddy Amazon practices like allowing a merchant to start a listing for a cheap but genuinely good product, collect good reviews, then switch the product description to something completely unrelated.
It's also a lot harder to get a legitimate review like that. Instead of 100 reviews where 80 were fake, there will be 3 reviews where 2 are fake and the other was disputed by the seller (or paid off by the seller) and deleted.
There is a weird defeatist mentality in this thread of "why try anything because sellers are just going to game it," but that's the wrong way to think when you're designing a human system. It's like writing a Constitution, insofar as you have to predict and hedge against the gamesmanship beforehand. If the review mills are in China or other non-Anglophone places, then removing stars and forcing them to be substantive makes it much harder because they would literally have to actually review the product. A reader can't differentiate between five fake stars and five real stars, but would probably be able to differentiate between an empty positive review and a well-presented negative review.
They knew they could get away with it, became part of their modus operandi, like a playbook for every new product launched.
But don't take me wrong: I blame all of this on Amazon, they nurtured this for years, by trimming away honest sellers and giving wealth to shady ones.
My example: few weeks after I launched my product in an under developed market on Amazon, a new guy came in. For every ~80 sales I'd get one review, while the guy was getting 7-10 reviews for the same amount of sales (mostly 5 stars). How can you compete with a review velocity that's no where close the organic one?
More detailed info here: https://lifehacker.com/what-the-hell-happened-to-aukeys-prod...
But again so many small & big seller do the same!
I think, after everybody started pointing a finger on Amazon tolerating them, they had to act.
Amazon has been quite bad so far - takes lots of time to find the correct item and then begins the game of "is this thing the real thing or not?".
Employees are spread out in the USA, especially in these covid times. Delivery time is not critical compared to the item's authenticity, pricing and support.
It's usually used by businesses who need to buy gear. It gives you overview of different warehouses selling the same thing, the difference between them is usually delivery time, pricing, amount of stock. So you can decide that hey, I want this from warehouse Y and this from warehouse X. They also do autooptimization based on pricing or amount of shipments if you want to.
The reason why I like them is because it's simple, adfree, easy payment, easy tracking.... it's just easy. For example here's a random product: https://www.markit.eu/us/en/kingston-datatraveler-70-usb-fla... On the left you can see the whole catalogue of things.
The only caveat I'm aware of is that it's for companies only.
But, as said before, I have only used them in Europe where it's the default option and in a rare occasion where they don't offer something, I need to use an alternative. By and large they have 99% of our cases covered. Usually they might not have the cheapest price, but it's okay because the ease of use pays it back in a blink of an eye.
I live in UK & do buy electronics from Amazon mainly because its the only reliable (fast delivery + refunds w/o questions) place to buy cheap Chinese stuff.
Unwinding my life without products is a daily/monthly/yearly occurrence and I greatly appreciate quality and thoughtfulness that goes into a product over simple function. I’ve also shifted focus to software and cloud which helps a bit to declutter. I no longer run a lab full of hardware at home.
In reality the system itself is rotten. Aukey is just a sacrificial lamb to distract from that rotten system.
Is Amazon immune to disruption?
The drawbacks are selection and price. On top of express (prime-like pricing) there's also tipping which adds at least 15%. We do it mainly for groceries and some odds and ends, but for sure it's not even coming close to Amazon-level disruption.
And then of course none of these places have Amazon's computing services, lol. That's a whole other sport.
It's easy to see why this is happening too. Internal voices in fraud are drowned out by voices in growth who exclaim about the hit to revenue and conversion rate.
I've seen sellers try to match on more searches by mentioning what their product isn't, along the lines of Brand new replacement widgets (NOT original ACME widgets).
> Obviously working around massive limitations in discoverability.
That's the result of competition, rather than search-engine limitations, no?
I get to evaluate the product physically before I buy it at the dollar store. Some of the trash I get from Amazon I can tell is crap the second I open the box.
Amazon reviews are just another metric. If you do not have personal accountability, the measure will always be gamed.
The reason that reddit is the only place on the internet where you can get general purpose recommendations, is because it relies on the personal accountability of the users giving feedback have between each other. As the subreddit gets to large, this is lost. Treasure small communities.
There is no way to improve the system. The more you improve the metric, the more the metric is gamed. Stop relying on metrics.
A good way to cut all the crap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
The same goes for Ökotest. It's just another form of marketing because potential customer looks for some red-white label to feel safe. So everybody who can afford it, tries to get some red-white label. It's as worthless as "DLG prämiert" on some sausages from ALDI. Sometimes I've thought "Tickt ihr noch richtig?", because I had the devices they recommended, while I've considered them trash. Especially funny when you have a few decades of them as *.pdf
In other words, they manage to make something like a horoscope look like a thoroughly systematic and scientific test, while it isn't, at all.
edit: I'd excempt testing of mechanical/electrical safety of devices/appliances, things like energy efficiency and maybe loudness. Anything else I can think of right now is just subjective for comparable items. That's for Warentest.
For Ökotest I can only think of obvious proof of toxicity as an exemption. Otherwise even more subjective.
edit: Einen hab ich noch! Haus&Garten Test, noch lächerlicher!
:-)
I do investigate the store and usually don't even bother if it's not FBA (it's fine if it isn't but usually for more specialized stuff, not stuff that's blatantly OEM from China)
I bought a no-name tablet stand on Amazon.ca with adjustable height for about $20. The packaging included a note to review the product for a $20 coupon code. Done and done. At this point, who cares?
I've been using Amazon for over 20 years. As a young teen, user reviews of music CDs helped build by tastes as they were purely organic expressions of how buyers felt about the music. That ended years ago with the switch to Fulfilled by Amazon aka digital flea market.
Distributors and retailers who have brand recognition like Birkenstock, LVMH, Rolex, The North Face, and Patagonia can easily ‘do their own thing’ but I hope a collective of smaller brands can come together and make their own storefront. I’ll be ready with dollars.
They don't really care about this because they get their cut from the sales and go on their merry way.
Maybe if they see sales take enough of a hit from people mis-trusting Amazon they might take a more serious stance on fake reviews.
This seller hired people in US to buy their products then leave 5 stars reviews, they refund + bonus ($10-30) via paypal.
My guess is that fakes are hard to detect at Amazon's operational scale - that it's "not solved" how to filter or curate out shrewd fakes vendors and ads for fakes on the platform at scale. The Amazon market place is like an AppStore without the benefit of code to scan.
Amazon does need to signal that they are going to detect the fake sellers. But I also think that they would benefit by implementing a more restrictive listings policy, where they risk some false positives in favor of reducing the overall prevalance of fakes. This is one of the things that makes the AppStore frustrating for publishers to deal with, but it also in principal benefits the Apple customer. A low restriction policy instead favors vendor relationships vs consumer experience. Maybe Amazon benefits by identifying customers with a propensity to buy goods like fakes.
One would think Amazon is losing consumers for certain goods. Amazon operates a marketplace. It makes money from sellers, in terms of selling paying to advertise, and it makes money from transactions, as some fraction of sales. It instruments the marketplace, so it knows which consumers are buying which goods. It makes money from its own brands, which given its instrumentation, can efficiently targetly pockets of demand.
Amazon does OK as long as it is the default or preferred marketplace for stuff. As a consumer, I should not be seeing fake stuff at all. This is a search quality problem, like not seeing SEO'd spam in search results. If it's hard to tell good stuff from fake stuff, you would think a BestBuy or a Walmart with assured quality would win out.
What it looks like now is that not "enough" consumers are turned off from negative Amazon experiences. Do I pay a lower price though a more convenient experience, and risk a notably worse fake, or do I pay a little more, and go to a differernt vendor? I wonder if there is a relative or absolute cost charactic to fakes - like no deal can be but so good and probably not be a fake. What I would want to see is if Amazon is losing sales on higher cost higher risk items to competitors.
I think the ultimate question for undestanding Amazon will always be the money - how are the marketplace profits are driven - and in that what's the mix of vendor ads, transaction fees, and consumer targeting. My speculation is that they are working toward technical solutions for fakes, and that they think they have time and position in market to get there. Fakes are not yet enough of an experiential or reputational problem for Amazon to do differently.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/28/21080720/amazon-product-l...
What's more, even their own-brand AmazonBasics has many defective and dangerous products:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/10/business/amazonbasics-ele...
https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/amazon-removing-popular...
https://www.reviewgeek.com/81928/aukey-is-in-trouble-with-am...
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/10/22428858/amazon-aukey-mpo...
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/aukey-kicked-off-amazon-follo...