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Comment by greatpostman | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if I’m allowed to post this, but I worked that exact technical problem in the Amazon catalog. It’s extremely difficult to keep high data integrity of the Amazon catalog when all these 3rd parties are contributing information. It gets abused in every possible way.

Basically third party sellers add info about Asins, which in real time gets merged with existing Asin information. It’s all automated

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Honest question: why not swiftly ban 3rd party merchants who do anything that is clearly unethical (e.g., changing product listed while keeping reviews from old product, or buying reviewers off to change their review). If it’s an issue of whack-a-mole, ask new 3rd party sellers to post a modest bond. The bond earns interest, and gets returned after N months of good behavior, but gets forfeited if there is a clear ethics violation. Bond amount is proportional to number of items listed, and is set as small as possible to make bad behavior unprofitable.

Also, Amazon customer service continues to be amazing for me. Refund basically anytime for any reason, instantly and fast.

Bonds are an interesting idea. I think there is a similar idea for email (it cost 1 cent per email to send, refunded if the email isn't spam). I think it would keep a lot of small sellers off the platform, and the math must say it's better to play the wack-a-mole game.

The machines are just doing what they are told. Im no growth hacker, but if I were in this situation, I would be doing the math to see if the cost of slowing down and having a human in the process provides more money in the long run by increased customer satisfaction and return business rather than the current strategy which could be non filtered for all we know, judging by what we see.

There was a sweet spot, in my recent memory, with Amazon years back where I just got the things I ordered, and it took 2 days at most. This was right before the Amazon button things theyd send with your fabric softener where you'd just press the button and more Snuggle would appear.

The first thing, in my case, was being sent the same items twice, one time it was an entire mattress, which was great, but it was a sign. Next came counterfeit items from known reputable sellers, a side effect of product being binned together, as someone explained to me. Buying from the correct amazon store was a crapshoot, because the counterfeits were in the same bin, allegedly. Essentially someone buying the knockoff could have received the genuine item I paid for.

The final straw was in the same week: receiving a completely different order of items than what I ordered, dog food and womens products when I ordered a keyboard, the price of prime going up, and the fact that everything in the catalog was obvious eastern origin products, misspellings, run-on sentence item titles and other hallmarks that Im about to be alibaba'd when the gear arrives.

The headache just wasn't worth it anymore. I never ordered from amazon again. I absolutely have more cost in finding certain items in town, but I feel better knowing there is a person whos face has pointed in the direction of mine while an item was being exchanged for money, hand to hand. There is a trust in that which Amazon is hopeless to ever capture. I hope this catches on.

A solution is often just getting rid of the problem. No third party = no problem. The real problem that surfaces then is probably that it's too profitable to throw out and so it becomes something Amazon just chooses to live with as long as it can.

You could just have an Amazon option where third party was not included. Just split the brand.

The problem is they built it into the main UI with no care for distinction or customer appraisal of what is going on. And now they have this mess.

Isn’t Amazon all third party now though?

No, they sell a lot of their own stuff. Look for Sold by Amazon: https://www.howtogeek.com/695506/how-to-search-for-products-...

They also have a bunch of their own brands: https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=17728530011

no third party = shopify eats their lunch

Amazon's whole business is being the fulfillment for 3rd party sellers, you take away that you take away the whole reason people use it. If Amazon was just online 1st party Walmart they would sell almost nothing.

Even Walmart’s website invited third party sellers.

It’s probably too expensive to divorce the two parts now

It's not too expensive, it's just not in Amazon's interest.

Amazon made the decision to pivot to third party sellers because they realized how poorly being an actual online merchant scaled. Why get into that game when you can be the platform and vertically integrate everything from the listing to last mile delivery charging a fee every step of the way?

Amazon retail's entire profit is from selling ads now. They'd really have to pivot their strategy if they got rid of third party sellers.

I think I'd pay for a prime^2 membership for an Amazon without all of the bullshit.

It’s true they are double dipping but a seller in some random video said they liked to have their listing show up twice to increase engagement. This is for an Etsy seller though so yea Etsy also does ads too

Hypothetically this is not a binary option, they could significantly ramp up the strictness of 3rd party sellers increasing the costs of making multiple, temporary fake seller accounts more challenging.

That said though - this would clearly impact profits proportional to the level of strictness/barriers.

> It’s extremely difficult to keep high data integrity of the Amazon catalog when all these 3rd parties are contributing information. It gets abused in every possible way.

So you're saying this isn't a technical problem that can be solved by a technical solution?

> It’s all automated

Well I think you found the problem then.

Sears never had this issue because they have humans who do this. They also never had the scale that Amazon has achieved because of those humans.

This is Amazon's blindspot. I'm super bullish on $SHOP because of this.

At the end of the day, satisfying the customer is what matters. And customers are satisfied when their packages arrive quickly. $SHOP can’t compete with that because it has taken $AMZN two decades to build out the logistical infrastructure to support fast delivery times. And now with Buy With Prime program, sellers can use $AMZN logistics as a service.

Shopify can partner with Walmart and others while it builds out its own. Amazon took that long because they were cutting through new territory. Now others can emulate them and shopify can buy those companies.

Or just 'vet' sellers, for gosh sakes that's how the whole world operates.

They have to put some effort into deciding who they want to carry and not, it's a very regular part of doing business.

Which costs time and money, when you can just go what Amazon do now and not very them but instead take a percentage on most of their scam sales. It's not like Amazon don't know any of this is happening; they've crunched the numbers for sure. They make more profit being evil.

This is one of those big tech company problems that makes me wonder what I'm missing.

Amazon has money. If they cared about the integrity of their catalog, they'd pay people to maintain it instead of giving control over it to the people who most benefit from it being wrong.

They probably simply estimate that hiring a team to manually maintain (or moderate) their catalog of hundreds of millions of products would cost more than it would improve sales.

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