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The merchants must navigate a largely automated, guilty-until-proven-innocent process in which Amazon serves as judge and jury. Their emails and calls can go unanswered, or Amazon's replies are incomprehensible, making sellers suspect they're at the mercy of algorithms with little human oversight.
This is something our modern society was and is not ready for. Bureaucracy and the bureaucrats that administered it is a nightmare that society has known about and dealt with for a long time. But this is fully automated bureaucracy. Except instead of having well known rules or human bureaucrats we can confront.. we're now effectively at the mercy of a dice roll in the worst case. And no one can even confirm if the dice are even fair dice. In the best case you get to deal with a robot that can't even understand what you're saying.
Just to give another perspective, I run a couple of small businesses with my wife and we handle support ourselves.
This is an absolute pleasure for our USB oscilloscope business - intelligent, reasonable customers ask for help with a problem they have, we help them solve it and both parties move on with our lives.
Our other business - dealing in retro video games, is an absolute nightmare. Almost all support questions we field come from people who have no intention of solving a problem. Most are just anxious people who need a little bit of reassurance, but plenty expect us to do pointless busywork, want to vent emotionally at someone who can't fight back, or just generally want to smear shit all over the walls because they can.
Either way, because they don't want to solve a problem, they just keep up eating up your support time and emotional energy in an extended loop for no gain - we're talking upwards of 80% of your support resources if you let these people have their way.
Having to deal regularly with the type of person that the average HN reader would never come across in their lifetime, I can understand why organisations like Amazon would set up these bureaucratic support "walls" and/or outsource all support to a Filipino call centre staffed by people that don't even know what Amazon is.
The systems are designed to make getting support hard, because most people contacting consumer support literally don't even have a problem that good support staff could solve.
In this instance, they've clearly made an error in requiring the user to navigate an automated system when the dollar value is in the _millions_, and I understand why the average HN user would be pissed off by a system like this, but I don't think the solution to the problem is as simple as "provide good, human support to everyone" - it creates as many problems as it solves.
Back in 2003, Seldon and Colvin wrote a pretty good book about Angel Customers and Demon Customers (
http://geoffcolvin.com/books/angel-customers-demon-customers...
) which examines many of these issues.
A bit of friction, if applied correctly, is not a terrible thing if an interaction's cost outweighs it's value. Getting the balance right is tricky but worth considering some alternatives to just "putting up with it".
After all, "sure, I'm selling at a loss but I'll make it up on volume!" is not sustainable for too long (unless you are a tech company... just kidding).
> A bit of friction, if applied correctly, is not a terrible thing
I observed the same thing in a different context in my previous gig doing Linux training. We strived to make our books as clear and simple as possible. When we discovered streps in our labs that confused students, we would rewrite them to avoid repeating the problem in future classes. Eventually I started noticing a tipping point where if the lab did too much hand holding students would disengage mentally and start having more problems instead of fewer.
Iāve tried sharing this insight with the UX designers at my current gig, but for some reason theyāre skeptical when I suggest making our UI harder for customers to use. ;-)
I once ran an ecommerce site, and due to a bug every customer saw a fairly cryptic error message. It was something along the lines of "You must login to perform that action". Our site didn't have a login system.
By fixing that bug, conversions went _down_. We literally did an A/B test to prove that giving the user a stupid error _increased_ revenue. We even played with the text of the error to maximize revenue.
We never figured out why, but my hypothesis is the user has to feel like that are making progress through the task they are trying to achieve. Getting a pointless error, and then getting past it, gives them a sense of achievement. They're then happier and more invested in your product when it comes to plugging in a credit card number...
Interesting. This sounds like its related to triggering "system 2" as Kahneman would call it in "Thinking, Fast and Slow"
Experimenters recruited 40 Princeton students to take the
CRT [Shane Frederick's Cognitive Reflection Test]. Half
of them saw the puzzles in a small font in washed-out
gray print. The puzzles were legible, but the font
induced cognitive strain. The results tell a clear story:
90% of the students who saw the CRT in normal font made
at least one mistake in the test, but the proportion
dropped to 35% when the font was barely legible. You read
this correctly: performance was better with the bad font.
Cognitive strain, whatever its source, mobilizes System 2
[slow, conscious, laborious thinking], which is more
likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by System
1 [the immediate, unreflective thinking by which we make
most of our minute-to-minute judgments].[1]
[1]
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8867651-the-experimenters-r...
The under armour website is terrible with coupon codes. Some of the time, it does not work and you get a cryptic error and have to wait on hold to even chat with a customer service rep to decode the message for you and tell you what you need to add/remove from your cart to make it go through. Worst of all, these are not random codes I picked up off some deal site, these are codes they emailed to me directly.
It's absolutely awful from a customer experience standpoint. But, I believe I end up buying more from them because when it does work I feel like I need to buy everything I've been thinking about because I don't want to deal with that hassle again anytime soon.
If this is the same sort of thing that was happening on your site, this would only work if your product is not available elsewhere for a similar or better price. In the case of under armour, their products are available elsewhere, but not in the same variety and not with the same discounts.
Sounds like a variant of the Ikea effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
Though I'd also be wary of the impact these bugs are having on your brand name, and reputation. You might have stumbled into a local maxima.
Or something else changed at the same time. Hard to know without a control group.
We did a randomised A/B test.
To ensure it wasn't some other wierd effect, we also fixed the bug and then deliberately re-added the same error message.
This bug was worth 15% of our revenue, so we did a lot of tests and trials...
Do you know what an A/B test is? It has a control group by design.
> When we discovered _streps_ in our labs
Was this typo intentional so readers don't just disengage and skim through your comment? ;)
That's interesting, though. I wonder why more accurate instructions resulted in more problems. I know you mentioned 'disengagement,' but wouldn't more detail and accuracy make it easier to do the exercise(s)? Or does it make the students just zone out and type the lines out without thinking?
(I know I certainly was guilty of that the first time I went through the Linux From Scratch book.)
So is it the same as GPS guidance makes people turn off their navigational brains?
> I can understand why organisations like Amazon would set up these bureaucratic support "walls" and/or outsource all support to a Filipino call centre staffed by people that don't even know what Amazon is. The systems are designed to make getting support hard, because most people contacting consumer support literally don't even have a problem that good support staff could solve.
That doesn't make sense. You are in favour of systemic obfuscation and low quality support to discourage people who don't have problems from taking up the time of support staff? Even though the barriers make life hell for people with legitimate problems like the guy whose $1.5m inventory was destroyed?
Wouldn't it be better to handle both types of cases properly?
Instead of spending "hours with mentally ill people" (your terminology), why not perfect the art of triage and funnel people without problems appropriately?
If that's an unrealistic expectation, could you provide more detail about how it is unavoidable to spend "hours with mentally ill people"? You already provided details, but I can't see how you end up losing so many hours! There are techniques for handling these cases, my friend.
Your oscilloscope product looks fantastic, and the price and terms you sell it for tells me you are an interesting and valuable human being. I'm just pressing you about the other side of your story because I feel there might be a better way to handle the difficult cases that you somehow aren't aware of because you are too fundamentally helpful and an undiscriminatingly good guy. Or something.
>That doesn't make sense. You are in favour of systemic obfuscation and low quality support to discourage people who don't have problems from taking up the time of support staff? Even though the barriers make life hell for people with legitimate problems like the guy whose $1.5m inventory was destroyed?
I'm never said I'm personally in favour of that approach, I just saw a lot of comments talking about how terrible it is without any consideration of why certain companies might not want to make support accessible. As you said, an ideal solution would redirect people who don't need customer support elsewhere, but I couldn't imagine this is easy for an organisation the size of Amazon. I hope they can work out a better balance in future.
>If that's an unrealistic expectation, could you provide more detail about how it is unavoidable to spend "hours with mentally ill people"?
Just to clarify, I'm not talking about garden-variety depression/anxiety but people with serious issues that lead to them being completely isolated from regular society.
Honestly, we try to avoid dealing with them altogether. If someone sends us 12 messages in a row at 4am asking for information about a product, we don't respond in the morning. I have done in the past and learned the hard way that it is a bad idea.
Of course, this is not possible for a business like Amazon with tickets and phone support.
I worked AppleCare tech support and there were people who would call in to talk to people or troll, perhaps they were ill, but they would call repeatedly and there problems were largely made up.
Eventually they become known and are handled separately because they would fake problems and drive people insane.
Some people should be banned from support.
You should try being a large landlord. To some people, you become their only social interaction.
"We charge $15 per phone call after the first 5 per tenancy".
> why not perfect the art of triage and funnel people without problems appropriately?
The joys of having a quasi-monopoly.
Amazon does't _need_ be be any better - they have all the customers, so merchants have to put up with that if they want access.
I suspect that you are assuming that people in general think rationally and behave according to set scenarios. Unfortunately that is not a reality. If you were able to invent such effective system of triaging and funneling, I think you would become a billionaire in no time.
> Instead of spending "hours with mentally ill people" (your terminology), why not perfect the art of triage and funnel people without problems appropriately?
Because some problems are NP complete.
"Hello...? Is that Gmail? I was just calling to let you know that I don't need Uncle Franks email anymore. He comes up whenever I press "F" for frank, but he's dead now so it doesn't make sense. Auntie Anna sees the same, so it must be a problem with your computers or something. Whenever I type Frank in on the Chrome he pops up on everything!"
And? Either you tell the user to remove Frank from the address book or if that is not possible (ie, autocompletes use addresses from all emails and there is no way to exclude addresses) and then you have an actual bug report.
I'm really curious what sort of support the retro video game business needs. My (clearly naive) assumption is that it would be as simple as sending them the cartridge and telling them to have a great day, but if you're meeting so many seemingly unpleasant people it seems to be a lot more than that.
Could you share more about the sort of issues you face?
So sometimes discs won't load or cartridges won't read in their console, or they're unhappy with condition - sometimes this is as simple as apologising and accepting a return, sometimes people aren't happy with that and just want to kick up a stink. More often than not, the people kicking up a stink return a perfectly working product, and they just wanted to make sure we'd accept it by them being as foul as possible.
Sometimes we'll get people just asking for more information on an item we sell.
Usually you can tell whether or not these people are actually interested in the product or not by how they ask the question. If they're asking about a specific detail (for example, if they're looking for a particular serial number range on a console), they'll usually follow up if you give them a positive response.
People asking less specific questions (such as asking for "more photos") are often just bored and have nothing better to do and will either disappear or ask more questions. You can waste literal hours serving these customers and in the process lose thousands of dollars worth of actual sales.
The worst group are just really badly socialised people - often people with serious mental health or drug-related issues. If you engage with them, they will demand massive amounts of your time and have absolutely zero concern for your feelings (let alone your business goals). If they feel you have slighted they, they will respond in the most foul and violent way possible.
Just today, my wife was publicly berated by an incel-type guy because she didn't respond to a message he had sent over a week ago. There are at least 2 other occasions I can think of in the last year where this happened.
I think the thing to remember is that the average HN reader (and, by extension, most people that the average HN reader knows) is educated, values their time, and is socialised well enough to the point that they can hold down a job and maintain basic interpersonal relationships. The type of person who contacts customer support for products that shouldn't really require support are absolutely not like this. Mostly it's just people that don't value their own time (or the time of others), but multiple times every week we'll come across people with _serious_ social issues (I don't mean socially awkward, I mean "unable to regulate emotion like a healthy adult") and no-one to talk to about it.
The amount of people that seem "unable to regulate emotion like a healthy adult" as you say is surprising.
I used to work at a call center job many years ago, and the amount of people who just seem unable to act like a decent person is astounding. I had to leave the job after a few months for my own sanity.
I know its somewhat biased since obviously a call center position will deal with many unpleasant people, but it worries me how it seems like there is an overall decline in mental health of the general population
You're optimistic if you think there is a decline. I think it's a constant percentage, unfortunately.
I think we're now just uncovering the amount of people suffering from these issues. Before they would just be disregarded entirely and wouldn't even have access to various things, so they'd terrorize only people around them.
Thank you for these details about the difficulties in handling support requests from people with underlying socialization and/or mental health issues.
As someone who is mostly emotionally and cognitively balanced and who has been trained to communicate in order to reach mutually satisfactory outcomes, I don't even think to consider that some people are too maladjusted to use support resources (i.e. communication) in productive ways.
This compassionate comment and its parent mean a lot to me as someone who struggles with regulating emotion. I just wanted to point out that itās some of us on HN too, and itās not always the ones you might expect. I have a job, friends, and supportive family. But a swirl of feelings can overwhelm me without warning, and the memory of all the times Iāve failed to reach help before can stop me from trying again. I was hospitalized this year with suicidal thoughts and a diagnosis of āMajor Depressive Disorder with Psychotic Features.ā I expect to continue succeeding on the outside, but the internal battle is far from over. Again, I want to stress that most people canāt even fathom that anything is wrong with me. I have a good job, talents, people who care about me. But thereās some defect in my makeup (nature or nurture, who knows?) and your willingness here to be more aware of people like me is really heartening.
Note for the concerned: I am receiving treatment and a number of people in my circle are aware of the struggle, so this isnāt a cry for help. I just thought this might enrich the discussion for anyone not familiar with these things who would like to understand them better.
> People asking less specific questions (such as asking for "more photos") are often just bored and have nothing better to do and will either disappear or ask more questions.
Or maybe the photo is the easiest way to confirm if you have the version that the customer is looking for. I know because I have done that. And yes, if you don't have the right version it might _look_ like I never intended to buy.
Really though, if you don't already have detailed pictures posted that show the state of the product from all sides then that's something I'd consider a problem with your used games business.
Ha I get you Iām trying to sell a PlayStation on offer up right now and ābuyersā are toxic even for one item. Idk why you do this to yourself Iād go nuts
Offer up is where these people congregate. At least use Craigslist, the worst offenders can't seem to work Craigslist.
This just feels like the cost of doing business in the market you're in.
Well if you are bestbuy or something. Retro games sounds more like collectors items.
I trade in games as well and like any collectible, often sell items that are rare and expensive. As an individual doing this for a hobby, my margins are usually small, so selling an $400 console for $50 or so profit can go south pretty quickly if there is a dispute.
Because buyers are often collectors as well, they sometimes have unrealistic expectations for the condition of 25-30 year old hardware. A seller once had a concern with a power supply that was genuine, but worn in a way he was unhappy about. Once returns and replacement were completed (thankfully I had another), I now risk a loss, or worse, a dispute where I end up with neither money or the item.
Another time I sold a month of Xbox Game Pass I had received as a promotion. It was well under retail, but when the customer received it, it wouldnāt activate. I spent at least a week on chat with Miscrosoft support trying to resolve the issue. When it was finally resolved and the account credited, the buyer informed me they were a Game Pass Ultimate subscriber and the pass was prorated to 20 days, but they were expecting a month. No amount of explanation of what they purchased being different from what they expected would satisfy them. What I thought would be a simple $5 transaction turned into a significant stressor, and even offering a refund didnāt stop the persistent badgering. When platform reputation is on the line itās no longer about the dollar amount of the transaction, but how it might impact future transactions.
Most of the time things are very transactional and I try to undersell and over deliver. One time in 20 or so
My Dad dealt in coins for decades. Crazy thin margins.
So many times people came in with a ā20,000ā collection they assembled. Basically client spent years of buying 3x over actual value as an āinvestmentā
They were always disappointed with the actual value.
At some point I calculated his hourly earnings at around a dollar an hour.
But kept him happy.
I have a SNES DK competition cartridge in great condition framed with an unpopped condition milton bradley pog set
https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/1995-donkey-kong-pog-...
All acquired when I was a nintendo power obsessed kid :)
Hope to sell it some day to a SV tech bro for 5 figures
Why did you spend a week of time over a $10 game pass? Why not issue them another one and cut you time commitment from a week to 15 minutes
As I said later in that paragraph, reputation on social trading apps. Iām an individual seller that mostly does it to fund my own hobbies. I donāt do enough volume to easily average out a negative review.
Thank you for your cultural service.
Sometimes people just want to vent. There was a host on a podcast who admitted to venting to a company. He bought an item. It arrived and worked as advertised, but he was thoroughly underwhelmed by the product.
The podcaster emails the company talking about his dissatisfaction. The response was something like, "We understand your frustrations. Even if there's no issue, you can send it back for a refund." The podcaster realized that nothing was actually wrong. The product worked as advertised. It didn't break. It didn't arrive damaged. There were just unfulfilled expectations. I want to say that he responded by thanking them for their time but a refund wouldn't be necessary.
This guy inadvertently took up support time for an issue that wasn't really an issue. If you mix this scenario with entitled people or hobbyists who are very particular about minor details, sellers may spend lot of time on supporting very few customers.
Whilst dealing with unsavoury people obviously isn't ideal, and I certainly don't envy your position. Is this not just the cost of doing business in that specific industry?
Typically you'd just raise your prices to factor in support costs. You'd have different margins for each industry.
Realistically, the reason you're unable to raise your prices is because you're stuck competing with companies that simply don't offer customer service themselves, and hence would undercut you.
If there was an appropriate amount of public outrage (and ideally legal repercussions) toward businesses not offering sufficient customer support, then your competitors would also have to increase their prices. You'd be no worse off, and general customer satisfaction would improve across the board.
The issue is not so much about offering _customer_ service. Genuine customers will only ask for help when they actually need it and do it in a way that respects everyone's time.
Instead, it's more about taking time away from your business to deal with people who have no intention of buying from you but are just bored, lonely or mentally ill.
While the latter group might only represent 25% of the people who contact you, attempting to fulfill their needs is literally impossible and will eat up as much of your productive time as you allow it.
Online reviews (which basically represent the "appropriate amount of public outrage") have only made this worse. If one of your non-customers feel slighted, they will drag your name through the mud in the foulest way possible.
The whole "Karen" meme didn't come from nowhere (although in our case, it's usually 30-something single men).
You donate a portion of your income or time to charitable causes, right? Deduct this volunteer therapy work from that.
All your argument is based in the idea of making live more difficult for consumers and easier to business. That seems the wrong way to tip the balance.
Are not going to be business better equipped to deal with unruly customers than mothers/grandfathers/teenagers having to spend time of their private lives navigating hostile interfaces designed to make them give up? Does not this incentivize bad businesses selling counterfeits/damaged goods with the hope that will not be returned?
For many transactions, the only customer support I need is an automated shipping confirmation, automated tracking, and maybe (or maybe not) a way to return/refund.
I buy a fair number of items on AliExpress and banggood. I donāt want āgood customer serviceā bloating the costs. (Ironically, I still get good service on the 1% of transactions that go wrong, even when I canāt really prove anything. I bought two nice lipo chargers and got sent one. One email and remedied in a couple of weeks.)
I've never had a good customer support experience on AliExpress. Mostly because the only times I've needed "customer support" was when I've been sent fake items (specs grossly and explicitly misstated, usually, often with clear intent to deceive), and that is something AliExpress sellers will absolutely _never_ admit to doing in my experience. Best case they politely say there's no problem, worst case they throw racial slurs based on your presumed nationality based on the destination country (which isn't even correct for me, ha).
In those cases, AliExpress will seemingly randomly decide for or against you randomly, even when you file a dispute with clear photographic and video evidence. I've had it go both ways.
90% of the time it's fine, though, and the cost savings outweigh the loss from fake goods. But I'd certainly not call the AliExpress CS experience "good".
I think the main problem is the stigma of using the mental health services, lack of access to therapists and generally useful things like mindfulness, some basic CBT principles are not being taught in schools. Many people view companies customer support as their "safe space" where they can vent their frustrations and problems and these days a valuable customer service operator needs to have training in psychotherapy, to know how to defuse people and steer them to having a mindset where they could feel comfortable to seek help.
Some people create busy work.
With someone who will keep everyone busy with meaningless work at all times. Took years of painful effort for her to accept ānoā without a complete meltdown.
On the flip side she will let her bosses do the same. 20 hour days, 7 days a week. She kept at it until she ended up in the hospital. I had to threaten to destroy her work computer for her to finally back it down to 18 hours a day six days a week.
Some personality types are just strange.
I also came across people who would report bugs that don't exist. The team would spend days trying to track down the problem user is reporting, but the problem was never there. One case I remember user would claim that he paid for an item, but it is not visible on his account and he would keep asking for a refund, but when checked the items looked as they should. We asked him to send some screenshots and apparently he had photoshopped the items out from the screens. He stopped asking when we told him that our support member would like to access his desktop remotely to fix the problem.
Wow. Thatās horrible.
20 years ago at Radioshack, I had a customer try and return a nice stereo. About 300 dollars or so. No receipt. So only store credit for last sell price.
Was in system but last sell price was $1.97 (we no longer sold it)
So āhoursā of digging and endless questions on āyou sure you got it here?ā
Well she had gotten RadioShack and Frys Electronics mixed up. Apparently same store in her mind.
> "provide good, human support to everyone" - it creates as many problems as it solves.
Agreed with all your points except they really should have some `if (claim > minForHumanAgent){ bypassAutomatedHandling(); }` logic for _millions_ of dollars.
This comment feels so ... wrong. As a society, so many of our institutions seemingly prioritize attention or outcomes effectively in exactly this fashion, but seeing it in code makes it that much more cold and ruthless.
Aspects of society are that cold and have been for a while.
Actuaries have been a thing for quite a while.
Itās a shame but humans can be ruthless.
I think (hope!) that the poster meant amongst other things. After all, someone's chemo change is someone else's life savings.
This might surprise you, but companies donāt really care that their employees have to deal with shitty customers. Itās not necessarily that they donāt care about their employees, they might even have strategies and support staff to help with the stress, but they donāt care in a way that outsourcing it because of shitty customers ever plays in to the equation.
At enterprise size you automate your support to save money. Even outsourced a call Center is expensive, and Amazonās shitty algorithmic support isnāt.
I know, because we do this in every enterprise sector, including the public sector. The āadvantageā amazon have is that it doesnāt really cost them anything because they have a monopoly. In areas where they see actual competition, like in selling cloud to enterprise customers, they have excellent support. They didnāt always have this mind you, they used the same automated systems for years, until they realised just how many billions they were losing to Microsoft because Microsoft sells enterprise customers of a certain size a direct 24/7 phone line to Seattle if an issue is of high enough priority. Now, Amazon offers something similar.
>_In areas where they see actual competition, like in selling cloud to enterprise customers, they have excellent support_
I'm less inclined to believe that is because of competition and not because of the fact enterprise SaaS always has great support. If you are spending thousands, you will almost always have someone dedicated to your account. Likewise there are very few companies with razer thin margins that have excellent support.
I recently had an issue with my Smart Thermostat - where there is plenty of competition (Nest, Honeywell, Ecobee) - I called support and only got someone after 90 minutes of waiting, who was ultimately unhelpful. I spoke to my building who contacted _their_ support line (the building installed the same, non-smart, thermostats as well), and the issue was solved in the same day by a trained technician in a little over an hour.
Got a link for the USB oscilloscope?
Not going to pass up an opportunity to shill the business. :P
This is a little off-topic, but since we're already on this: I just wanted to say "great job" on the Labrador. I don't even need one (I have benchtop scope, power supply, signal generator, logic analyzer, etc. already, and a couple of Bus Pirates) but couldn't resist ordering one just to acknowledge the awesomeness of your work.
Thanks so much. I've had a bit of a lousy week, so seeing random strangers say positive things on the internet has been a Godsend.
_I've had a bit of a lousy week_
Sorry to hear that. I hope the rest of your week, and the week to come, are absolutely awesome to make up for it!
Nice looking board, but I agree, you should charge more. One market to consider is automotive scopes- since it already can interface with a phone, putting different connectors on there and with a case would suffice for most uses. Compare to a Pico scope for the market leader in this segment. It definitely doesn't need to be a 100% finished consumer product (that's already covered), you wouldn't be selling to hackers but the mechanics who use a scope are by and large the technically sophisticated ones. Just a thought, it looks like a great product, I'm buying one just to hack into a portable scope so I don't have to deal with getting out my rigol for basic auto work.
Edit: it certainly doesn't need to be battery powered either, conveniently cars have 12v battery power avaliable (although it is quite dirty, so input protection is required). I'm on my phone RN, otherwise I'd pull up the schematics, it might already have adequate input protection.
Honestly, I designed it when I was a student because there was nothing usable at the low-end of the market.
While I could possibly charge a little bit more for it, I don't think the specs justify a $50+ price point (as-is), and for a lot of people that extra $20 makes a big difference.
There were some thoughts a while back of making a higher-end product to fill the $50-$80 gap, and possibly even a stripped down Labrador to sell around the $20 mark. Looking at the Amazon charts, a lot of people are buying knockoff DSO138s to save literally $5-$10 and are left with a really poor quality product.
Have you considered a bundle that includes a case? I don't do a lot of maker/tinkering stuff so having the chip loose or on a breadboard wouldn't work for me in most situations. But I do sometimes have a need for an oscilloscope or multimeter, and would gladly pay ~$50 for one that had a case and some basic/standard connections, especially if it's supported by open software like yours.
Edit: I still bought one as is, lol.
There are a couple of 3d printed cases on Thingiverse - one that keeps the original pinout and one that adds BNC connectors via a perfboard mod.
Thanks. I haven't gotten into 3D printing myself, but I'll check that out and maybe have a friend print one for me.
This looks great! I'm going to buy one because of the price point (I wouldn't at $50, but maybe plenty of others would).
Is this useful for a hobbyist? Everyone I've talked to said "get a proper oscilloscope, anything less is a toy" but I have neither the space nor the need for an oscilloscope. I have a Saleae Logic analyzer, but yours looks more featureful.
You could just add another kit to let the user turn it into an automotive scope.
Bought! Too cheap though...double, or even triple the price.
Seriously, 49.99 would still be a cheap price on that.
Haha, thanks.
no kidding... wtf
Sold! And, yes, you should charge more. Twice the price, and it still would have been an impulse buy for me.
Hi, does your scope have a ground that is isolated from USB ground? This would be a very useful feature.
It doesn't have an isolated ground (the focus was on size and cost), but this shouldn't be an issue. All spec-compliant USB ports contain self-resetting overcurrent protection - in practice this is almost always via a PTC resettable fuse on USB GND.
For what it's worth, I haven't had a single complaint related to the grounding in 3 years.
Ok, but how would you (for example) measure the voltage difference over a current-sensing resistor that is positioned at the high-side of (say) a 48V rails?
(If ground was decoupled, that would be simply a matter of attaching probe and scope ground at both terminals of the resistor.)
Bought two(2) because a friend wanted one too!
10% discount if you buy in bulk? I'm getting my friends some too. :-)
Asking the right questions! (I would also like the link)
Another shilling opportunity!? Sure, why not?
> Having to deal regularly with the type of person that the average HN reader would never come across in their lifetime, I can understand why organisations like Amazon would set up these bureaucratic support "walls" and/or outsource all support to a Filipino call centre staffed by people that don't even know what Amazon is. The systems are designed to make getting support hard, because most people contacting consumer support literally don't even have a problem that good support staff could solve.
Let's screw people with real concerns and real business so Amazon can save money on customer support seems a horrific justification. That is basically making all small businesses guilty of wasting Amazon time and burden the small businesses with the burden of proving that they are not.
How do you know so well the internal statistics for Amazon if you are just a seller? Cannot your kind interpretation also be based in wrong assumptions?
Who has more resources to deal with this situation Amazon or the little business? Amazon does this bullshit because it has power to abuse, not because it is a reasonable relationship with its providers.
A friend of mine worked for a company whose operators answered late night tv infomercials. They had humans answering the phone, but everything about it was scripted and highly optimized. Purchasing the thing was very very easy, but after that there was an upsell gauntlet to get through before hanging up. "This is rediculous, I don't want to hear about this" "But sir, people call back after they've missed these offers etc..." The ONLY method to escape it was to say "I will cancel my order". Additionally the call center employees would be fired if they deviated from the script.
Given that, it's quite easy to see why it's hard to find a customer service phone number or any other option except the one they want you to find.
Personally the one that annoyed me was amazon customer service to find "Package says delivered but not received". Searching for this finds _lots_ of variants in the quick-search bar, and a "helpful" faq that says something like "ask a neighbor" or "look under the porch", but no way to contact customer service about it despite forms for hundreds of other meaningless interactions.
Does Jeff Bezos know, or is he shielded from bad customer experience like Mao, who saw a country full of rice fields along the rail tracks when he travelled the country? [1]
[1]
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/02/world/the-tyrant-mao-as-t...
I once had something not delivered properly and when local reps (India) were useless I emailed Bezos directly. I had a message shortly from an Amazon staff saying Bezos asked them to look into it and the issue was fixed promptly. This was in 2015 so things may have changed since them.
They probably got Bezos' classic "?" email.
Oh, yeah, these mails got people moving! Luckily, I didn't get that many handed down to me.
Ha, that reminds me of a vacation spot in mexico. I flew into a beach town and took a taxi from the airport to the hotel. On the way the road was beautiful and green with lots of flowers.
But looking a little closer, it was really just the land within about 100' of the road, and only the road between the airport and the town.
That book is quite widely criticized. Not trying to defend Mao or the Great Famine, but with anecdotes like that I find this quote apt:
"With a person as divisive as Mao, both because of his complex history and because of what he represents to different groups, if becomes an almost impossible task to sift through the contradictions of supposed first hand accounts."
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d3s00b/did_m...
Donāt focus on the accuracy of the historical accuracy of the analogy, focus on the comparison being made. The post is about Jeff Bezos, not Mao.
huh. i'm surprised at this because it's very very easy to contact amazon customer service either via chat or phone. i don't know the specifics of it because whenever i need to do so it takes me approx 2-3 clicks through a very obvious path.
Being an Android developer is a similar experience. If your app gets removed from Google Play, even if it's clearly by mistake, good luck having it reinstated. Unless you know a googler or two. Then it's a breeze. Going through official channels you'll be hitting a wall.
Which is a shame because the platform as a developer is awesome. I've developed for both iOS and Android and will always favour Android. But Apple seem to have more consistent and possibly better customer service compared to Google, especially when it comes to the ability to get a knowledgeable answer after failing an app review.
Doubt that is true. Every company has internal policies to stop favoritism like that.
I've had many interactions with Google where the automated system was clearly wrong but after multiple attempts at human escalation, literally the only way to solve the problem was to ask the right friends who happen to work there, after which the problem was solved almost immediately.
It's not that it's favoritism, it's just a way to trigger a manual review...
Actual Googler looking into a complaint personally happening on HN - 9 years ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2795465
"[Googler], can you suggest a strategy for dealing with Google support issues that doesn't involve "get Matt Cutt's attention on Hacker News"? - 9 years ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2797972
"Guess we won't be able to get Google support from Matt on HN this month. :)" -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3709520
"You'll notice over time that Hacker News is the only way to contact google support without spending thousands of dollars on adwords." - 7 years ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6932516
"That happened a few weeks ago, and thanks to some inside people at Google, the mailing-list reappeared" - 7 years ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5523992
"From my friend at Google: "It looks like he used the wrong account to update his credit card..." - 7 years ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6837411
"I have seen people have to post on HN to get things resolved by google employees reading HN threads! While it seems like a personal touch, people are resorting to it (and I assume googlers are helping) because there is not another avenue that works for MOST products that google has." - 7 years ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5716357
"You can post a problem on google support forums, and pray and hope for an answer from their developers." - 9 years ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2922073
"Google also has a history of disabling accounts and providing no communication, support or other mechanisms to get it restored. Usually kicking up an almighty fuss in public if you have a prominent twitter/blog works" - 9 years ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3885588
"Google itself is well known for being impossible to deal with unless you know someone on the inside." - 7 years ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7018354
"Disclaimer: I work for Google Google's support is a complete joke. The only way to get things fixed in a timely manner (if at all) is to ask someone who works for Google to escalate internally. Then you stand a chance. Otherwise you're SOL. [...] I would recommend the OP to contact a Googler friend if they have one." - 7 years ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6006534
"Google support is abysmal, [but] they respond if you know the appropriate channels" - 6 years ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8098842
"and there's just no way to contact Google's support unless you know someone at Google" - 4 years ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12442802
"Particularly if you don't have a friend inside google or the ability to hit the front page of HN to get customer service." - 4 years ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12975195
"She only managed to get this cleared up via a tech support friend who has contacts at Google." - 3 years ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15992090
"far far too often do I see folks who have to reach out to a dev on Twitter or their friend at Google to get a simple billing error resolved correctly. Its a problem with most cloud providers, but Google seems to be notorious for it." - 2 years ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17669161
"this contradicts basically every other google support story I've ever read on HN. Similar to what the few other comments are saying at the time of me writing this, it seems like this guy made a fuss somewhere that caught the attention of someone who didn't want the bad PR." - 2 years ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17707473
"I ended up getting help by going into the google slack and kicking up a fuss. Never heard back from the "official" support channels." - 2 years ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17564220
"Two effective strategies I have seen are: (1) Contact a friend who works at Google[...]" - 2 years ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17106803
"even though a friend at Google submitted an internal request to get me the account back" - 2 years ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19367972
"monetize on their content for a while (or a long time if they don't have a friend at Google who can escalate the issue)." - 1 year ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19953722
"Gotta post on Hacker News if you want some Google support!" - 1 year ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20711833
"It seems like the most reliable support system with Google is to have a SWE friend who works there who will document and enter tickets for you" - 1 year ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21334183
"if you're lucky and you have a friend that knows someone who works there he can expedite your ticket." - 10 months ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971932
"large tech companies like google and amazon for this, where kicking up a fuss on social media is literally the only way you can hope to have a human at the company look into it." - 2 months ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24168390
"Google support .... Thatās the joke." - 1 month ago -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24572759
How many of these are actually first hand versus just repeating / referencing earlier collective HN āknowledgeā (or hearsay)?
Mine is first-hand, except the part where you hit the wall. I met one of their developer relations guys at a Google I/O before my app had any problems needing escalation.
The problem is not the automation, the problem is that a single authority has a complete monopoly on certain aspects of the e-commerce market. Full credit to Bezos and Amazon for their incredible execution in achieving this. However, monopolies are an example of market failure, and in this case, also an example of an authority able to act as judge + jury where the affected parties have no realistic recourse, while being accountable to no-one. This is why we need government to intervene and ensure competition is restored on both the buyer + seller sides in e-commerce.
Why does it matter that this happened with Amazon? It could have also happened with ebay, walmart, or a local uncle bob's discount closet shop.
We have a judicial system to deal with issues like this which generally handles things fairly regardless of the size of each party.
Walmart was long known for its strong arming of its suppliers. Iām sure there are plenty of people out there glad to see Amazon beating them.
https://www.fastcompany.com/47593/wal-mart-you-dont-know
Yes Walmart is the textbook example of a monopsonist being able to extract steady profits while creating a race-to-the-bottom for prices among their suppliers. Great for end customers, but harmful nonetheless.
I don't agree Walmart would make for a textbook example. I'd argue they were/are not even a monopsonist with regard to their suppliers. They might be a strong regional force but they have failed (or chosen) to move out of their regional power position. That's not a bad thing and in fact is a strength. I'm pretty sure they were cited as an example of good strategy for exactly that in "Competition Demistified" but don't have the book with me right now.
However, in the day and age of modern logistics I'd argue that their suppliers could have sold to other customers in other states.
Ultimately I suppose it depends on how we define a market (ultra regional or wider) and how high the transaction costs (+other extra costs) of the suppliers would be to move to another customer. The classical example in "The Economics of Imperfect Competition" was the labor force in a small town (mining iirc., once again not at my bookshelf). I suppose that would give precedent to the fact that small markets "count". However most studies on the topic I am aware of are about labor not supply/demand structures. And I'd argue it is "easier" for a supplier to move their wares to another customer than for a (specialized) worker to move to another company (uproot family etc.).
Additionally some of the suppliers of Walmart are in pretty strong negotiating positions themselves (Unilever etc.).
At least there's enough doubt in my mind to say Walmart's supplier relations are "a textbook example of a monopsonist".
They aren't quite a monopsonist, but the difference for most companies is academic.
You've never sold to walmart, I have. If they put your physical product on the shelf you'll sell a lot of units. No one else has the shelves walmart does. If you are not on the walmart shelf there is NO way to get the same number of units sold.
Great for end customers at first, but then what are you left with.
Still great? Walmart prices are still low/lowest where I live.
but they're often low because they're selling bottom barrel quality goods (like electronics with cheap capacitors that fail quickly or clothes with lower quality fabrics & sewing that don't last). Even products that look the same as other stores will commonly have a Walmart specific SKU that uses cheaper components.
Sadly, this is what customers want. When given the option of a 30$ belt that lasts for life or a 5$ belt that lasts one year, many will go for the latter, and this is who Walmart caters to.
So? People clearly prefer cheap the majority of the time. In the age of the Internet, high quality is a click away.
Amazon requires mediation or arbitration, so there is no access to the judicial system
Perhaps this is the issue, having a legal system that you can opt out of. Sounds godawful.
Why is arbitration so bad exactly? The implication seems to be that Amazon has a better chance of winning, but I never see how that is backed up.
Arbitration is done by a company picked by Amazon, paid by Amazon, hoping to remain in business with Amazon, deciding about a conflict between Amazon and a random customer. In whose direction are they likely to err?
Who exactly is that company? One of the first steps in arbitration is for both parties to agree on a choice of arbiter. Looking at Amazon's webpage it names the American Arbitration Association which appears to be a pretty big non-profit. Step two in their road map here includes the arbiter choice step:
https://www.adr.org/sites/default/files/document_repository/...
If amazon is just insisting on "their guy" then I would think that should be pointed out in much bigger letters. From Amazon's perspective I can see lots of incentives: faster, cheaper, no appeals, no class-actions, probably no giant punitive judgements. But they may not have any better chance of actually winning them.
I can't comment on the arbitration clauses that Amazon uses, but the arbitration clauses I've seen usually says the arbitrator is randomly assigned by the american arbitration association.
European gentry also ruled their local underlings, who had no access to the Kings Justice. There is precedent. Welcome to Amazon-land.
I'd be interested to know if this is a problem in other countries.
> However, monopolies are an example of market failure
No they are not. Itās only considered a failure when the position is abused to prevent competition.
You can have a monopoly situation where competition just doesnāt bother to enter because the monopoly holder hasnāt abused the situation to make entering the market attractive.
Additionally, the government frequently grants monopolies because they donāt really want to see market competition due to the disruptive nature of the industry (e.g. utilities).
Monopolies are just a specific market condition that implies certain pricing dynamics and potential competitor strategies. They are not a failure in themselves and can frequently be a huge driver of competition. Nothing attracts a competitor like a stodgy monopoly with a thick margin and no penchant for innovation.
> You can have a monopoly situation where competition just doesnāt bother to enter because the monopoly holder hasnāt abused the situation to make entering the market attractive.
Do you have any real world examples of this actually happening?
> the government frequently grants monopolies because they donāt really want to see market competition due to the disruptive nature of the industry (e.g. utilities).
The government does this with the addition of heavy regulation specifically to prevent abuse that comes from having monopolistic control of a market.
> Do you have any real world examples of this actually happening?
Drive into any small town. There is frequently only 1 gas station, 1 grocery store, etc that all sell things for reasonable prices.
For a completely different style, the major airport in Rome (da Vinci) is owned by a private company yet they donāt do any goofy shit to jack up landing fees.
There are many rural places in the US where there is only coverage from one cell phone provider and the rates remain the same.
> The government does this with the addition of heavy regulation specifically to prevent abuse that comes from having monopolistic control of a market.
No, they have to add the regulation because of the abuse that comes from a _government granted_ monopoly. Monopolies emerge all of the time in all kinds of markets and they are not indications of failures. They can indicate that consumers are happy enough or that the margin is thin enough that competitors arenāt needed.
A government guaranteeing that a competitor canāt exist is when monopolies become ripe for abuse. Thatās why government granted monopolies need regulation.
> However, monopolies are an example of market failure
No they aren't. Markets tend towards monopoly, or at least an oligopoly. Market 'equilibrium' where prices are 'right' is an ideological fantasy.
That said - this is an example of how the legitimacy for private commercial corporations being run dictatorially based on formal property ownership kind of blows up in people's faces when such corporations grow to the level of encompassing a significant part of some sector of the economy, or a significant part of social interaction altogether.
As for government intervention - the government is involved: Its basic role is to set this up and support it. Government checks corporate/capitalist power mostly in the face of very strong public pressure and the threat of uprisings / mass strikes / violent redistribution etc.
This post has minimal relation to the scientific consensus on how economics works. Itās a lot like climate change denial posts saying that actually burning coal is good because of cloud albedos. Technically true, just very selectively so, in a manner that does not accurately reflect the bigger picture.
Economics isn't a science in the same way as climate science. I don't think you can label anything in the field a "scientific" consensus. Popular consensus maybe.
How is Amazon a monopoly when customers can easily purchase an item from eBay, Walmart, Target, Aliexpress, and many others.
Amazon is often the most expensive option for me.
Its not a monopoly over all ecommerce. However there are certain markets where the sellers, for example book publishers, are totally at the mercy of amazon because they have become the only de facto distribution channel for certain products like e-books (there are others as well). So its great for customers but it still has severe negative consequences for authors and publishers. Technically this is known as a "monopsony" but it's bad just in the same way a monopoly is.
So I guess any company becomes a "monopoly" if you reduce enough the definition of its field?!
The key thing economists look to, to define a monopoly, is that the company has the power to set prices. This is in the economic sense: that there isnāt some give-and-take supply-and-demand setting prices for them, and they just happen to record that.
When Office Depot was considering a Staples merger a while back, the Feds looked at the price of corporate office supply services in markets where there was only one of each firm, and found them higher than in markets where both competed. This despite the fact they didnāt have a monopoly on, say, copy paper.
Just because Amazon shoppers may ignore prices elsewhere doesn't mean Amazon can "set" prices.
It may mean Amazon understands their shoppers' price sensitivity, to be sure, but I can find almost anything on there elsewhere for less, or also for more.
Indeed.
I don't know about Target and Walmart as on-line entities, but I do know that there is limited overlap between the merchandise you find on eBay and the merchandise you find on AliExpress. So it is often (usually?) not true that if you can buy an item on website X you can also buy it at site Y.
You donāt need to be a monopoly to violate antitrust law.
Amazon fits _every_ definition of a monopoly considering they have >50% market share, tyrannical control of the supply-chain in which they can flex their muscles with no repercussions and life-and-death control over sellers.
Because the end of the path here for Amazon is destruction of the inventory in question, I guess we'll never really know what's real or not. There's nothing to be inspected...which seems rather problematic, right? In criminal cases people don't run around destroying evidence. That's viewed rather negatively by judges.
So here we have Amazon destroying the inventory in question. No way to have even a partial sample of that inventory still available for checking? No laws that regulate how and when Amazon can destroy inventory, particularly in the presence of mandatory arbitration? No checks and balances on that process at all?
In any case it could be very hard to prove that the items are fake by inspection, itās mostly a fight about distribution and the supply channel.
If you can't tell they're fake by inspection how did the complaining customers identify them as fake?
The article quotes the two reviews which claim the items are fake; it's pretty clear the people are just throwing out the claim of "fake" to get leverage. Amazon asked the seller for the receipts from the manufacturers to prove that they were real; he gave them, but Amazon said they didn't count because they were more than a year old. But that's when he actually bought the merchandise, so I'm not sure what Amazon expected him to do.
"Amazon said they didn't count because they were more than a year old."
According to the seller that was Amazon's issue with the receipts. According to Amazon the issue was the receipts provided were either illegible or didn't match records from the manufacturers. In other words they appeared to be faked receipts.
Amazon nowhere says that the invoices appear to be fake. Amazonās reply is: āIllegible or didn't match recordsā - Illegible can mean anything, for example older as 365 days, as stated in the article. The second part about records not matching is just company speak to make it look like the vendor is to blame. Itās intentionally vague. My wife worked as a vendor manager at Amazon and she never checked any manufacturer receipts/had a way to check them.
There's a few assumptions here. I'd say the assumptions are that
1. Amazon knows the fakes, if they exist, came specifically from this seller. I doubt this because of their comingling problems.
2. That the threshold of complaints required to initiate this type of action is a reasonable one. And furthermore that the complaints are valid. It could be a matter of a few 3rd party competitors, it could be the original wholesaler trying to throw a wrench into Amazon's systems, it could be customers who are angling for credits, free products etc. As well all of this plays with assumption #1 and comingling.
I think you accidentally replied to the wrong comment.
often fakes (in fashion at least) are just overquota items produced from the same sweatshop that produce the legit items, which the sweatshops sell on the side to earn that dollar more per month.
brands thus moved to control counterfeit pursuing anything that isn't coming off their sales chain end to end, even if the fake is virtually identical to the legit product.
No they aren't, that's just what people manufacturing fakes have managed to convince people is the case. (Somehow, it doesn't stand up to any scrutiny)
https://corrierefiorentino.corriere.it/firenze/notizie/crona...
> Mediante alcune aziende dellāhinterland fiorentino, pratese e dellāempolese - le stesse che producono quelle che poi diventano le vere borse firmate - il gruppo provvedeva a tutte le fasi produttive e commerciali
your turn.
I've had a similar experience with Uber customer support. Their navigation thinks there's access to my house from a road that isn't actually connected, so delivery drivers consistently go the wrong way. But emailing customer support just got me seemingly automated responses saying "we're sorry the location pin was not in the right place" which isn't even the problem that I'm having.
That's just how customer support is these days it seems. Getting a hold of an actual human capable of doing the most mundane request other than linking to 'help' articles you've already read 10 times is impossible. What happened to emailing support and getting a reply prepared to move heaven and earth to satisfy you as a customer?
There exist companies that distinguish themselves on providing good support, and use it as a differentiator. They generally aren't number one in a market though, so don't look the the leader to usually be them (occasionally they are, when they have an equivalent or better product and _also_ better support and servicing).
Perhaps it's because customer support nowadays works in tiers, much like Technical support does (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_support#Multi-tiered...
)?
The people that link you to those help articles are doing so because they simply can't do anything else but to escalate - they simply don't know about the inner workings of the system and don't have the permissions to change the data in it.
Whereas the developers/maintainers who could do it would be overcome with thousands of such mundane requests to fix the data in some geospatial database, that they can't be bothered to do. Perhaps Uber doesn't even maintain the dataset for addresses themselves either, and is using a service from someone else, like Google.
This kind of makes you think that in this complexity of distributed, scalable systems with microservices, message queues and other systems, eventually the complexity will be too much to actually understand and maintain - be it because of a low bus factor and people leaving due to churn rate, or extremely high effort needed for maintenance.
help me understand this attitude. unless I'm an enormous customer why do I deserve replies "prepared to move heaven and earth" in the first place? I guess it seems like naivete to me
Let me give you my latest anecdote. I order a can of paint from Lowes. They send me the wrong color. I reach out to their customer support. I ask them to send me the correct color of paint. They inform me that they don't have power to do anything as they aren't the correct team. I ask who the correct team is. They give me a phone number to call for a customer support line that closed three hours ago. I call the next day, and they tell me that they too are powerless to do anything and that I need to return the can of paint I ordered online to the brick and mortar store.
At this point, I don't give a shit about the $16 of paint, I'm not spending two hours of my day to return this can of paint at the lowes store on the other side of town. It's about the principle. A sane company would have replied with the first (and only) customer support team with something like "I'm so sorry! We are shipping you the correct color right now." That sane response used to be the norm 10 years ago, because a $16 loss on one can of paint is far less than losing a customer for life who will now make it their life's mission to deter friends and family from patronizing your business.
But they know that you won't. Next time you need to buy a can of paint, you'll go back to Lowe's because you figure there's a 99% chance they won't mess it up again, and meanwhile the Home Depot is even further away and not really any better. Meanwhile, companies that provide "good" customer service are continuously preyed upon by customers who waste their time and scam them. Personally, if I were you, I'd just take the L on this one. Someday, someone will solve this problem by opening a business that offers absolutely no returns, no customer services, and charges 10% less. I will shop there gladly.
I got dropped off on the top of a mountain by mistake. The driver gave up on trying to follow the ap and he insisted that the mountain was the address. Naturally he gave me a 1* because I wasnāt happy about being kicked out on a mountain top. Uber never replied to my attempt at disputing any of it.
The only thing worse than the arbitrary thing is the double rating. Iām forced to give 5* to shit service.
Itās annoying
Same situation here. I've submitted screenshots and details to Uber support, nothing has changed.
Now I send a text to each driver, watch the map like a hawk and call them if it looks like they're going the wrong way. Works most of the time.
When it doesn't, I get refunds, Uber can keep eating those costs until they fix their routing.
I've also started using their competitors more often, and bypassing these apps entirely and ordering directly from restaurants that employ their own drivers.
Uber might be using OSM Data, so you could try fixing it there.
Kafka and Orwell were right. They might have understated their cases.
I don't think people understood how tech could exaggerate and accentuate some of the worst in humanity and create massive centralisation which can create more and more stifling bureaucracy. At least before, you could be ignored by a bureaucrat, now it is a faceless, nameless, heartless system
> But this is fully automated bureaucracy. Except instead of having well known rules or human bureaucrats we can confront
Reminds me of a novel that was written over 100 years ago:
> The Trial (German: Der Process,[1] later Der ProceĆ, Der ProzeĆ and Der Prozess) is a novel written by Franz Kafka between 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously in 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader.
There's a reason they call getting stuck in this sort of bureocracy "Kafkaesque"
Orson Welles did a brilliant film adaptation of The Trial. Worth checking out.
Amazon could fix this. This isn't an all or nothing "digital bad" "bureaucrats bad" situation. It's Amazon and one complaint. This guy should find a good lawyer and take them to court. He had proof that his stuff was not counterfit. Adding some arbitrary "you have to have a receipt no more than 365 days old" is ridiculous. Amazon just doesn't care. Even for a 1.5 million dollars worth of stock. What are the chances that they give a hoot about the average guy on the street? It seems to me like they could do something sensible like "we have 4 complaints out of 10000 orders, chances are these are just peeved customers, tell him make them whole". That seems like just basic logic to me.
Amazon just doesn't care.
This is exactly it. They don't have to care, and they've outsourced all of their caring to a robotic bureaucrat. Without a human in the loop, like yourself, to realize the absurdity in edge cases you get the worst possible version of bureaucracy. And I wouldn't say it's an all or nothing situation either that "digital bad" or "bureaucracy bad". Bureaucracy can be good, it helps streamline certain processes "at scale." Digital can also obviously be good.
The PROBLEM is when you marry these things together without proper controls in place by society. We haven't completely thought through the ramifications.
According to the article he _is_ suing them. It's just that takes years to resolve cases.
The movie āBrazilā comes to mind.
For an even earlier cautionary tale about computerized bureaucracies, check out "Computers Don't Argue" (1965) by Gordon Dickson:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue
Great story! You can borrow it from archive.org here
https://archive.org/details/bestofcreativeco00ahld/page/134/...
Computer says 'no'.
This is _exactly_ the situation that this society came up with a new agreement to avoid. E.g. Presumption of innocence, and Habeas corpus to mention two.
I completely agree. I think the only difference is that we were under the assumption we would be dealing with 1. Governments 2. People
This is simply Kafka's "The Trial" at scale.
This will continue until these companies start losing large monetary value cases in court.
Large businesses in America, including Amazon, require their customers and suppliers to waive their right to sue. Amazon et el cannot be held accountable through the legal system.
These abuses will continue unless there is enough of a sea change in Washington that protecting free markets becomes more of a priority than protecting the freedom of large businesses to exploit people.
That will happen no sooner than the day Amazon receives an order for ice skates from the hotter half of the Christian afterlife.
This is unlikely. They save a lot of money this way, and they own a sufficiently large part of the market. Unless the problem gets outrageously bad, the cost won't be measurable.
It looks inevitable that the law will have to get involved for western users of the big platforms. I don't know if that will fly in the US. Tolerating life & death on the complete lack of structure in tech decision making has to come to an end eventually, at least on particular financial outcomes.
In many ways, YouTube content creators were the canary in the coal mine here with how the algorithm treated them, and Amazon sellers seem to be next. The worst case future of automation isnāt terminator, itās just having the worst possible boss.
> Their emails and calls can go
unanswered, or Amazon's replies are incomprehensible,
making sellers suspect they're at the mercy of
algorithms with little human oversight.
Only if you are the "little guy". You can be sure that amazon responds to big companies. If someone from Apple, Samsung, etc contacted amazon about something, do you really think they'll be tossed into the trashbin of the algorithm?
Definitely watch the movie Brazil.
Kind of like Brazil ādot comā then.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
It's not bureaucracy, it's monopoly (or something so close to it to be functionally the same).
Sounds like the movie Brazil.
Yeah, you know, when people keep saying "You aren't as far from being homeless as you imagine you are" this is what they mean. Just because _your_ life has not come unraveled overnight doesn't mean it can't for reasons beyond your control having nothing to do with personal virtues or lack thereof.
We really need to get universal health care in the US, among other things, to limit how far people can fall when something crazy happens. We are making it far too easy to fall and far too hard to come back from it and this is why we also see headlines about how society is coming unraveled and the like.
Please don't see this as some bizarre statistical outlier. Many homeless people were solidly middle class at one time and then things came apart and we are terrible about actively making it unnecessarily harder than it should be to get back on their feet.
This is especially true for people who do not have a family to fallback on. Imagine what would happen if a brilliant engineer in his late 20s, single, but parents have passed away and had no family. Now imagine one day he gets in an accident and all a sudden he is no longer brilliant, loses his job and all a sudden he can't pay his medical expenses.
Not just health care, but income as well.
Now, I live in a third world country, and have had cancer scares and other medical checkups that only cost me a few hundred US dollars vs. the tens of thousands that _would_ have cost me if I had lived in the US.
I'm probably never going back, partially because of this. I make a good living. Better than I would be back in the States.
If we had universal health care in the US and a sufficient supply of small, low cost housing in walkable neighborhoods, that would dramatically shrink how much one needs to simply subsist. If it were possible to make life work as a single adult with a part-time job, then people could pursue building their future as they see fit.
With healthcare, housing and transportation being the three biggest cost burdens in the US, taming those would go a long way towards letting "the 99 percent" enjoy life again and stop being prisoners of a broken system.
I don't understand why people like you keep ranting about "universal healthcare" when obviously about 50% of your country so strongly opposes it that I think it's sooner that hell freezes than US getting social healthcare.
Instead, why don't you propose alternative solutions? E.g. in Switzerland, it's illegal for your healthcare to be paid by the company, and also it's obligatory to have healthcare insurance (probably the country pays for it if you're poor). That way, you establish a thriving and competitive health insurance market, forcefully eliminate all the benefits corporations get that are unavailable to individuals, and also align interests (because individuals will be in the middle of money flow, they'll have a vested interest in getting fairly- and transparently-priced health services). This would solve most of the problems US healthcare system has, while not triggering any anti-big-government sentiments.
> I don't understand why people like you keep ranting about "universal healthcare" when obviously about 50% of your country so strongly opposes it that I think it's sooner that hell freezes than US getting social healthcare.
Maybe you mean something different than what I think of when I hear "universal healthcare" - could you share some data on that? The proposed Medicare For All policy, for example, is supported by around 70% of the US, including a (admittedly thin) majority of Republicans[1]. The problem isn't popular support, it's getting politicians to do what their constituents want.
[1]
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-elec...
You are looking at the healthcare coverage problem and you think itās the only issue. Coverage is a big problem for some but not the biggest problem.
The biggest issue is arguably billing and pricing. You have no idea how much something will cost until itās done. Medicade is paying over 80% more for prescription drugs than the EU.
> In 2016 the U.S. spent 18% of its GDP on healthcare, whereas the next highest country (Switzerland) devoted 12% of its GDP to healthcare. The average amount spent on healthcare per person in comparable countries ($5,198) is half that of the U.S. ($10,348).
> The average price per coronary bypass surgery in the U.S is 129% more than Switzerlandās next-highest average.
> In 2014, the U.S. performed more MRI exams than most similarly wealthy countries at an average price of $1,119 per MRI. This was 42% more than the average price in the United Kingdom, 122% more than the average price in Switzerland, and 420% more than the average price in Australia.
> While fewer appendectomies are performed on average in the United Kingdom compared to the U.S., the price per surgery in the U.S. is $15,930 ā nearly double the price in the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, in Australia and Switzerland, where far more appendectomies are performed on average than in comparable countries, the price of each surgery is even less, at only $3,814 in Australia and $6,040 in Switzerland.
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/how-do-...
One of the few good things our current US president did was get a bill passed that requires hospitals to disclose their pricing.
This is unambiguously a good thing, but it doesn't help as much as you think it would. The result is extremely complicated, but so is the entire list of services that any hospital would provide (imagine every single ICD procedure code with a dollar amount next to it - that's the level of complexity we're discussing).
I would argue that it doesn't really help at all for most people, and is legitimately just a feel-good political sell for soundbites.
Sure, I can shop around for my surgery, but what about emergencies? What about when they're in for the surgery I have scheduled, and end up doing something entirely different because they found something else? What about people who live where there is only one healthcare provider?
A menu of prices is fine to encourage choice at Hardee's versus McDonald's, but health care is a little different, I think.
Also, the idea that āmarket forcesā can work in a situation where A. I cannot be an informed consumer and B. I cannot vote with my dollars.
I cannot be an informed consumer because I am not a doctor. If a doctor determines I need X medication to live, then thatās what I need. I canāt google search my way to a medical degree.
I cant vote with my dollars because I donāt want to die. If my medication costs $5 month, Iāll pay that. If it costs $500 Iāll find a way to pay for it. My life has infinite value so there is no bargain I am willing to strike where I end up dead.
Au contraire, I think my proposed solution solves pricing as well. As I wrote, it aligns interests between consumers (patients) and producers (doctors), and removes one step between them - patients will be much more directly impacted by their choice of insurer (now this is handled by their companies, consumers have no real choice), so they'll be shopping around for the optimal price/performance provider.
The alternative solution often proposed, Medicaid/Medicare _for all_ (socialized medicine), _actually_ has no solution to this problem (except sweeping it under the rug even more, then it will be _the government_ overpaying for medicine so people will care even less).
We already have the ACA system and state marketplaces. Someone can search for health insurance if their company doesn't provide it. The plans are expensive for most people and the deductibles are much higher than most employer plans.
The cost of supplies and services are not going to go down overnight if we decouple employers sponsored insurance.
Personally I don't think universal healthcare is the correct option or a viable one in the US. The existing government plans should be expanded to lower incomes (way above poverty line), self employed, and allow unemployed people to float until their next job. Also add a percentage of your salary structure similar to what wikipedia says about Swiss healthcare.
It would be nice to have the option to buy in to government plans if your employer doesn't offer anything or you are retired. Everyone already pays into theses plan and a small increase combined with a % of salary structured buy in isn't going to bankrupt people.
Swiss healthcare costs are more similar to the US than other countries. The private system is also similar to the US. I still think the expenses need to an overhaul. It's way past time for the government to step in.
I have, at times, suggested alternatives. Such as "We should start by expanding existing military benefits to cover all former military personnel."
I'm not ranting. Studies show that access to affordable health coverage helps prevent homelessness, for example. It's a known best practice that works in a number of developed countries.
I worked in insurance. I'm really not for an insurance-based universal coverage system.
The particular HN user to whom you refer as "people like you" has a unique experience with homelessness and that's why she has a unique perspective on some issues related to the topic. I used to butt heads with her on certain comment threads until I Googled her and understood that. I think it's kind of cool that someone in this forum can present those views in the way that she does.
Regarding healthcare, there is no shortage of alternative solutions proposed for the improvement of the American health insurance system. If one party's leaders close their eyes, put their fingers in their ears, and say "la la la la I can't hear you," that doesn't mean the rest of the country has failed to propose reasonable solutions.
_I used to butt heads with her_
I don't remember this _at all,_ so you must not have ever really upset me.
Nothing will change with our healthcare system no matter what anyone proposes or thinks. Our healthcare problems are only a symptom of a bigger problem an this point. Our country is in the pocket of large moneyed interests and they essentially make our laws and at the least, can keep anything in their favor in place as the status quo. Our healthcare industry is huge and they won't let anything shift against their favor.
North america is rather insular. I live in canada. We basically only compare our health system to the us. And americans, if they compare to anyone at all, really only look at us or the uk. and we both have a version of medicare for all effectively.
I reckon the bulk of americans would be surprised to learn that europe does _not_ have medicare for all as their solution or that the private sector has a substantial role.
A substantial amount of americaās dysfunction is due to entrenched tax code provisions (health insurance not being a taxable benefit, mortgage interest deduction, govt mortgage market insurance backstops, etc), and this is mostly invisible as the discourse focusses on government spending only.
>for reasons beyond your control
I mean... I sympathize with him, but "let's put 100% of our liquidity into inventory we then ship to some known-malicious third party and pray they don't fuck us like they have hundreds of others" is kinda a bad plan, don't you think?
We're on the wrong side of the curve of history for something like that to happen in the US--or anywhere else where it isn't already in place. Social Darwinism has been the fashion for 40 years now, and it's not going anywhere.
Nothing takes the past away like the future. Nothing makes the darkness go like the light.
We can choose. We aren't actually compelled to just keep collectively being assholes because that's what we have currently.
> We can choose.
This is true, but not in the sense of the leading candidates in the US presidential elections - both of whom oppose universal health care (despite its wide public support).
Your conceptualization of how the world works and mine are so not on the same page, they aren't even in the same book.
So while what you say is no doubt true, it's got nothing to do with what I'm talking about. I'm not expecting universal health care by June of next year or something.
You start by just getting people to say "Yeah, you know, that makes sense. I would support that." And when enough people can agree with that idea, eventually you get candidates who say "I have this terrific idea (parrots back to the world what the world is already saying is a good idea)."
If there were a general consensus that this is something all Americans like, you can bet money we would have a presidential candidate who not only supports the idea but already has a well-thought-out blueprint developed for how to implement it. In fact, you would likely have two candidates competing for your vote based on the idea that "My universal health care plan is better than theirs! Vote for me, Joe Schmoe, the guy with the better universal health care plan!"
We live in a world where almost half of Americans have so little empathy that they are enthralled by the idea of putting non-white children in cages and the American political system is completely indifferent to the policy preferences of the average person[0].
It's beyond the bounds of reasonable probability both that a majority of Americans would develop enough empathy to support the idea of a universal social safety net and that policy elites could be motivated to implement such a consensus.
[0]
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...
i wish that were the case, but there is a strong argument that it doesnt work that way. Unfortunately instead it looks like the consensus amongst citizens is largely irrelevant. this study in particular comes to mind.
https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-...
You know, a lot of poor people spend their time on Twitter and what not saying ugly things like "Eat the rich" because they feel powerless and feel like no rich people would ever listen to them and so forth. And then they are all _shocked_ when the rich don't give a damn about folks who are openly hostile to them.
And then some poor people have hobbies like becoming the (apparently) first woman to make the leader board of HN shortly after getting themselves off the street and back into housing. (That would be me, in case that needs to be said.) And some people close to me are of the opinion that me running my big fat mouth on HN while homeless and earning a pittance online while sleeping in a tent is why tablets are no longer expensive shiny toys for rich people and are actually productive and affordable for ordinary people with sucktastic lives.
So, studies aside, you will have to excuse me for sticking to my guns here. My apologies for having no idea how to convince you I'm the one that's right in this case.
Oops. My bad.
While fatal disasters can happen to anyone, this story isn't a case of getting in trouble regardless of personal virtues.
The man put all his eggs in one basket, creating a single point of failure. When that failure actually happened, he was hosed.
How would the story play out if he kept part of his inventory outside of the "Fulfilled by Amazon" system, or even outside of Amazon altogether? He wouldn't lose _all_ of it, for one.
How many small retail businesses keep multiple bricks and mortar locations _solely_ as a backup in case one location becomes unusable? How many retail businesses have two locations just in case the street outside their premises is permanently removed without notice by the owning municipality?
There is a limit to how much risk individuals and small businesses can realistically hedge against. Insurance can cover many risks, but it doesn't necessarily cover the impacts of legal, but arbitrary, abuses by business partners. Unpredictable, uninsurable, risks should not be offloaded onto people who are unable to withstand them.
> _How many small retail businesses keep multiple bricks and mortar locations solely as a backup in case one location becomes unusable?_
This is an insurable risk. (Property, renter and/or business interruption.)
As you mention, abuse by business partners is not insurable. Which is why one should not be 100% dependent on a small number of them.
In this case, 100% of the inventory should not have been with Amazon. And 100% of their wealth should not have been in inventory. None of this takes away from his claims on Amazon, of course.
That argument is sort of like saying "Only upper class people with Ivy League educations should ever start a business." Even in the startup world, businesses tend to learn a fair amount of what not to do by tripping over some issue they didn't expect.
I'm all for analyzing what went wrong for purposes of trying to help educate people about how to do things better, but I am extremely uncomfortable with the trend in comments here to more or less act like "This guy just should have known better and not trusted Amazon."
I worked in insurance for a few years. Most ordinary people have almost zero understanding of how insurance works, what it's for, etc. Most people are not making informed consumer choices about insurance. They mostly get what the law compels them to get or what some professional recommends to them, etc.
That amounts to Monday Morning Quarterbacking and blaming the victim.
_The way to become rich is to put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket. -- Andrew Carnegie_
When it works, it works. When it doesn't, it doesn't.
Paul Graham has said that a successful startup "does everything right _and also_ wins the proverbial lottery" (or something along those lines). In other words, you can do everything right and something can happen out of the blue that no one predicted and you are screwed. If you actually get rich, you did everything right _and_ luck was with you instead of against you.
I do agree that a safety net is a useful thing to have.
But I disagree with the impression from your post that a safety net would have been the preferred solution to this merchant's woes. It would only keep him slightly afloat, compared to being careful about his business, where he could have kept a significant portion of it.
The line between being careless and blaming the victim is blurry, so I'm not going to discuss it.
However, building a successful startup is fundamentally different from running a sustainable business: in the former case, you deliberately make a high-risk, high-reward bet, while in the latter you want to take only enough risk to keep going. I had the impression that the story was about a business trying to be sustainable getting ruined.
There's a pandemic on. Up to a third of Americans can't pay their rent/mortgage this year.
Some people are taking risks because of the general climate around them. Living steeped in craziness can impair your judgment by making it genuinely difficult to figure out what strategy is actually sensible while the world is a case of "Please, stop this merry go round. I would like to get off now."
Let me rephrase: I got an impression from your post that you atribute no fault to the merchant: he did everything right and got the short end of the stick.
What I want to point out is that if he was careful about his business partners, he'd be much better off now. It's not relevant why he wasn't.
He had the agency to mitigate the problem, and didn't. What happened was not an unpreventable natural disaster. The lesson out of this shouldn't be "you don't have agency so we need a safety net", but rather "we often have agency to stay afloat". Perhaps also "we need a safety net for when our bets don't pay off or when we don't".
No one ever does everything right. But some people have enough money, enough smarts, enough social capital, etc. that it gets mitigated.
We should be seeking to make sure more people have access to mitigation rather than looking for the one mistake someone made that somehow makes it okay in our eyes that they have gone from having over a million dollars in inventory to couch surfing with friends and relatives as the only reason they aren't on the street. And if their social network runs out of forbearance, the street could be the next step.
I'm not arguing he's some paragon of virtue who got screwed. I'm arguing that no one should be expected to be a paragon of virtue to have any hope of making their life work.
Paragons of virtue should see terrific outcomes, not merely "Oh, you get to not be homeless today. Go, you!"
Anyway, it's 3am. I think I shall stop here as I'm not clear more words will make anything clearer beyond this.
> one mistake someone made that somehow makes it okay in our eyes that they have gone from having over a million dollars in inventory to couch surfing with friends and relatives
That's mischaracterizing my point. Should people feel consequences of their mistakes? Absolutely. Should people end up on the street for failing at business? Definitely not.
I think the standard consequence of total failure being "Now you have to look for a job while you're on unemployment" is good enough.
(Although it boggles me how someone with 1.5M in inventory didn't have enough savings to rent a room for a few monthsā¦)
I haven't characterized anything you've said at all. I made a top level comment. You chose to argue with it for whatever reason.
All I've done is try to reiterate and clarify what my own position is. That's it.
I'm not going to speak for Doreen, but "he did everything right and got the short end of the stick" is exactly what happened here.
Small businesses don't have the scale to diversify. Having multiple sales channels doubles certain _fixed_ costs. People just do not expect major global brands to commit multi-million-dollar destruction of property.
Yes, it's a high risk strategy. Most people are more risk averse than that and don't follow this sort of strategy. Thus, they do not become bankrupt, or rich, in the same way as this man.
This is a case for the courts. The article is completely one sided, and thereās no way to know whether or not some or much or most of the merchandise was counterfeit.
He does admit to ignoring up to 11 notices that his inventory would be destroyed if left unclaimed. He mentions conflicting dates for the notices but weāve no way of knowing to make of that.
I donāt know what to say other that I read the piece with some interest and for all know itās a work of fiction, but heh I clicked.
For such a one-sided article, I came down rather on the other side. A dozen warnings that he needed to claim his stuff before it was destroyed. The evidence of authenticity was illegible. At least four customers complained that the merchandise was not authentic. If he had paid to have his stuff returned, he'd only be out the cost of shipping whatever hadn't been sold. And this is just what I learned from an article from HIS point of view.
> At least four customers complained that the merchandise was not authentic.
According to the article, one customer said the item didn't fit, and wondered if it might be a knock-off, but they didn't outright claim it was. And the other three complained about packaging. Depending on how you score it that's _ZERO_ customers complaining, or maybe one at most.
> The evidence of authenticity was illegible. [...] And this is just what I learned from an article from HIS point of view.
That was Amazon's claim; he claimed he sent in the correct, authentic, legible invoices, and they were rejected out of hand because Amazon refused to accept invoices dated in the year the merchandise was purchased, and instead wanted invoices dated in a different incorrect year.
> If he had paid to have his stuff returned
He claimed he tried at one point and the web portal rejected it.
Obviously, I don't know who's right here, and some of his claims are a bit confusing. And he does admit to ignoring _some_ notices. Still, if you're evaluating his story as he presents it, taking his claims at face value, then: His evidence was _not_ illegible, no (or at most one) customer alleged fake items, and he did make an effort to retrieve the merchandise.
"either illegible or didn't match the records of the brand owners" --- so Amazon has done some due diligence by reaching out to other parties to the sales, and found that these receipts are likely counterfeit. Besides which, I'm not sure how even valid receipts prove that the inventory is legit; how do you know the receipts refer to this particular merchandise and not some other legitimate purchase? It seems entirely plausible to me that the retailer's brick and mortar started to fail, so he cut costs by switching to counterfeit goods. It still failed, so he tried to hawk them on Amazon. Amazon caught him, but he tried to fool them with old receipts. Amazon demanded he retrieve his goods, but he let Amazon destroy them so that he could sue for some imaginary value and extract money out of them that way.
Why does a journalist feel the need to get involved here? This seems like a job for the lawyers.
Or Amazon's customer support can't read scans of pieces of paper that have been around for a while.
> It seems entirely plausible to me
That is plausible. It's also plausible Amazon, who famously has poor customer service and often makes mistakes when their automated system glitch, has done so yet again.
You are, of course, free to assume that in a dispute one party is telling the unvarnished truth and the other is lying.
Sounds like a good cautionary tale for others, so why not?
I don't know where you read these things you talk about.
1) He said he couldn't fill a request to have his stuff sent back because the form was broken. It's very believable if you ever used the amazon seller tool.
2) He submitted the evidence of authenticity and it was rejected for being older than 365 days. It shouldn't be a problem, clothes have a longer shelf life than one year.
3) Customers complain about products being unauthentic all the time, easy way to get a refund and to vent. It's the most generic 0 star review that can come up possibly from a competitor trying to damage your business. You can't sell a thousand items without getting a few bad reviews.
My main takeaway from the article is how easy it would be to destroy your competition with a few false complaints.
It's amazing how these megacorps manage to have their software broken in fairly scary workflows for their users.
I have recent experience with paypal where they demand I confirm some information (they provide almost 0 information what they want actually in the UI, and the link I'm supposed to follow just redirects to my account overview, where there's nothing to do, no warnings, no prompts, just the regular summary of balances.) They also send a scary email that they'll block my account if I don't proceed by certain date, and the actual date is just an empty html template placeholder.
I ask them via support for what they want. And they send automated response. I almost ignored it, like usual, because these notices usually just say thank you we accepted your requests and we'll respond soon. I came back to it though, and at the end there's a note that they will not respond to me unless I ask again.
At this point, I'm like wtf? It's completely ridiculous, seeing so much stupid details and omissions in user experience in a row.
At some point I think large orgs just stop caring about customers, and just optimize some aggregate metrics, and this is the result.
I'm in the same boat. I'm one of the first to pitchfork against Amazon... but this feels like we're not getting enough info to have a fair opinion. But even the article makes it seem like the guy had lots of opportunities to fix this issue, but screwed it up. Now, did he bumble it because it's a bureaucratic nightmare maze? Is he lazy and doesn't do stuff on time or correctly? Was it all actually knock-offs and he's full of shit?
I can tell you this, no one from HN can solve this mystery from their chairs. So, as much as I don't like any FAANG, this isn't clear cut against Amazon.
Also having inventory of brand new original fashion items that's older than 365 days sounds strange, as fashion changes every year, and the value of goods go down over time.
Sounds like the inventory is fine. The issue with fake claims on Amazon is that they donāt seem to be percentage based, so whether you sell 1000 items or 100k items the 4 fake claims might still get you suspended.
They will also reject invoices based on them not being in the exact format they are expecting. So a completely legitimate invoice that is missing an address/ phone number/ has a different entity could be rejected.
The whole thing is basically dangling a carrot, there is a massive customer base on offer, but in the end unless you fit a very specific profile as an authorised seller with solid local deals you are probably wasting your time.
Yep, I know a company that sold over $1m in sales, and their account got banned overnight because someone asked if they sold custom products on a message on Amazon, and a company support rep replied that they could but not on Amazon and directed them to their eBay site.
They got insta-banned and delisted because Amazon does automatic scans of messages, and the Amazon AI determined that directing users away from Amazon was a severe ToS breach.
1 message out of the thousands that they send mentioned eBay, and suddenly that's automatic delisting with no way to appeal.
I worked for company that helps sellers with selling on Amazon. I don't know, if the story is true, but it's totally consistent with my experience how Amazon treats sellers.
He tried to remove the inventory and wasn't allowed to.
>When he tried to submit an inventory removal order through Amazon's web portal, it wouldn't let him.
That sentence is so important, yet lacking so many details.
Did he try to submit the removal order, like one day before, or way earlier? Did he try it only once? Did he communicate this to amazon? He was obviously in contact with them for a longer period, did he mention that he can't get the removal order submitted?
I mean, who do you think is more likely to be the careless one in this situation: the guy who has 1.5 million in inventory locked up and will be homeless in a few months if they can't access it, or a trillion dollar company to which all this is not even a rounding error?
My own experience is that Amazon doesn't even bother verifying that complaints were submitted by the brand before acting on them. There's multiple documented cases of people impersonating brands to get sellers kicked off Amazon.
Donāt forget that sellers agree to an arbitration clause, so a legal recourse in court is impossible.
have always wanted to know, how watertight are those clauses? surely legal recourse is some sort of right that'd trump a lot of these type of boiler plate contracts?
Courts have consistently held up Amazon's arbitration clause for sellers.
US courts treat commercial litigation and consumer/personal differently. Commercial is "letter of the contract" (you should have talked to your lawyer before signing), whereas consumer has to be reasonable to the non-expert public in the long run, and is also subject to tons of social justice goals.
US courts have upheld arbitration clauses in shrinkwrap consumer contracts.
Since when does Amazon care if they sell counterfeit goods (if they even were)?
Among other reasons, one motivator for Amazon to solve this problem is the fact that the present administration has brought Amazon's problem with counterfeiting front and center into the public debate about China. Like him or not, Peter Navarro has repeatedly talked about Amazon and counterfeit goods in media appearances over the course of the past few years.
Those are all issues money will fix and Amazon has plenty of money to fix oversight nuisances.
I agree with that, but it really highlights the fact that Amazon has willingly avoided solving this problem. In other words, it's not an oversight -- if it were, they would have thrown money at the problem to make it disappear already.
Amazon makes money off counterfeit products that sell on its platform.
The most profitable outcome for Amazon is for there to be a large assortment of products that are either (A) totally legitimate, (B) counterfeit/flawed but equal in quality to the genuine product, or (C) counterfeit/flawed but so inexpensive that the customer doesn't complain too much.
Clothing is the kind of product that is easy to counterfeit but draws complaints from users who discriminate between the quality/durability/appearance of the real product and the false one. A phone case, drill bit, pair of tweezers, or ball bearing is the kind of product that is easy to counterfeit but may not be noticeable.
Similarly, Benson Leung taught us that a USB-C cable is the kind of product where you can sell low-quality junk lookalikes and the average consumer will have no idea what makes it worse than a more expensive cable.
Some quotes from the recent antitrust report from Congress. These were presumably verified and run by Amazon with opportunity to respond.
In another example, a third-party bookseller told Subcommittee staff that Amazon delisted 99% of his businessās inventory in September 2019.1674 The bookseller requested that Amazon return its products, which were stored in Amazonās warehouses.1675 As of July 2020, Amazon had only returned a small fraction of the booksellerās inventory and continued to charge him storage fees.1676 Amazon blocked the bookseller both from selling its products on its marketplace and retrieving its inventory, precluding the seller from trying to recover some of his losses by making sales through another, albeit lesser, channel.
During the Subcommitteeās sixth hearing, Mr. Bezos testified that Amazon āinvest[s] hundreds of millions of dollars in systemsā that police counterfeits.1823 However, Amazonās approach appears to be ineffective, resulting in suspensions of many innocent, third-party sellers, with devastating effects on some sellersā businesses.1824
One third-party seller told the Subcommittee that Amazon blocked some of her listings, citing a number of her products as āinauthentic.ā 1827 The seller provided evidence to Amazon that, not only were her vendorās products authentic, but Amazon actively sold the same products, sourced from the same vendor, through its first-party sales.1828 Despite elevating the issue to Amazon executives in July 2020, this issue has still not been resolved as of September 2020.
I've had very similar experiences, as I've discussed [0] here numerous times. I currently have an antitrust lawsuit against TP-Link [1] for making false counterfeit complaints against my Amazon account.
[0]
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[1]
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16562550/thimes-solutio...
> Amazon invest[s] hundreds of millions of dollars in XYZ
On the scale of Amazon, and over multiple years that's like saying "we make a modest investment in XYZ but no more than that".
In a much smaller example, I've been running Instagram ads for the last week. I've been trying to stop this ad for the last 5 days, but there's a bug in Instagram's UI that won't let me. I also can't get hold of an Instagram support person, or FB support. So I've kept spending money I don't want to spend.
FB and Instagram are core parts of society now as one of the major places to advertise. Lack of support of this kind seems like a really bad sign of a future where all you talk to are robots.
Also, average cost per conversion thru Instagram is $16 - $33. That is just a straight up toll that is paid to Facebook by every product that wants to advertise on their platform. I'm not saying it should be free, but surely they can afford better customer service.
I think the most interesting thing here is that Amazon can effectively claim a seller's property is fake based on reviews that everyone knows are regularly gamed. Then they can refuse access to the inventory and make the claim, without having to provide any evidence, that the questionable inventory has in fact been destroyed and not just passed on to another seller behind the scenes.
Accountability is entirely absent here. On the seller side and on Amazon's side.
The fact that Amazon had physical control of the questionable merchandise and had no obligation to retain a small sample that would be useful for the owner to defend himself on the challenge of it's authenticity or for Amazon to demonstrate that it was counterfeit is troubling.
I don't have a problem with counterfeit merchandise being identified as fake. I think it is extreme to destroy it all. The existence of eBay, Harbor Freight, Walmart, and Amazon are proof that people will pay for inferior products that look like the originals but are not as durable or beautiful. Once a counterfeit is identified it should be relabeled for sale at a discount since it is a fake. Just like art.
The cominging is also an issue. How does anyone know which supplier actually supplied X among Amazon's swath of caches? As a consumer, how do I know that when I buy from one FBA retailer on Amazon, the stock wasn't actually sourced by another that's also in that program?
The lack of transparency, the lack of the consumer (and presumably also retailers) being able to trace these products back to their source of manufacture is the issue. Keep the records that need to be kept, let tracking figure out if there are customers returning bad items, or fraudulent suppliers, or just a run of bad product that had a given lot code.
Exactly. There has to be a way to put trust back into the system. Trust only works if each participant is accountable to the others. Asset tracking is supposed to be a solved problem but obviously it is a bad idea to hand your operations over to a third party whose agenda is likely different than your own.
Hoping to have his account reinstated and continue selling on the site, Govani put off the decision. He received a total of 11 emails from Amazon each giving him different dates at which time his inventory would be destroyed if he hadn't removed it.
"After being unable to resolve the matter following several appeals as part of our dispute resolution process, we informed this seller six separate times that they needed to remove their inventory from our store by specific dates or it would be destroyed," she said. "The seller failed to request to remove their inventory by the dates provided."
I understand the core point here -- Amazon does have the upper hand when making deals with 3rd party sellers. But this is on the seller: he stored his inventory at Amazon, who decided they want to break their deal -- then he failed to move his inventory after what seems like a very lengthy communication, so they ended up doing what they said they would.
You left out the part where he tried to recall the inventory and it didn't work.
Sounds like he left it to the last minute though hoping that the account would be reinstated. Given the fees to remove he wouldnāt have wanted to until it seemed certain that he wasnāt getting the account back.
There are companies like shipbob now which are essentially as good as FBA from a 3PL perspective. Just miss out on Amazon pushing FBA stock over cheaper competing offers.
Given that the judiciary report also has an example of someone being unable to remove their inventory, I think youāre giving credit where none is due.
The first mistake was dealing with amazon.
I fully believe this, and feel terrible for this seller, having had a similar experience.
For nearly a decade I ran a successful side hustle on Amazon from something that was just making beer money to making more than my day job (grew to $6.5 million/yr in sales at it's peak) and ran into the same thing earlier this summer.
Competitors attacking listings with false claims to try and shut your account, or listing down was a regular occurance(search for false 'used sold as new' -- the old version of this), and a headache that could be addressed although it often would take at least a weeks worth of effort and fights with the automated systems. This last series of attacks -- also counterfeit claims in my case -- no such luck -- the process has changed, the invoices from the same suppliers and letters of authorization from the manufacturer not accepted.
As it stands I am waiting on them to destroy roughly $120,000k in inventory that they refuse to release. Maybe more because their inventory tracking is garbage and it's not uncommon for items to be lost for months in their warehouse only to magically reappear... The tracking and inconsistent handling of returns is such a mess I can't exactly tell as anyone using FBA at volume just has to accept there will be variance between their known inventory and what Amazon says you have...
Fortunately, the market I targeted was heavily impacted by COVID so outside of a modest push associated with the back to school season I dodged a bullet as I essentially shut down on the 'buy side' when that all flared up and focused on getting back to cash.
I'm also lucky that I started scaling things back and looking to build out other channels about this time last year when they and WalMart started just automatically price matching one another, including prices from their respective 3rd party sellers, driving prices into the ground -- even below wholesale in some cases.
Amusingly, they have noticed I stopped sending new inventory in and some of their listings are now going unfilled and call at least once a week trying to get me back. (Amazon benefits tremendously from not tying up their cash on inventory and using 3rd party sellers to keep their stock.) When I tell them I'm willing to come back once they help me resolve this issues w/ a real person or even go and physically inspect the inventory they have impounded they go silent.
I thank them for helping to accelerate my long term financial goals, but to be honest, having been free of them for a few months now, the weight of not living in constant fear of jumping through their hoops has drastically improved my quality of life.
No idea if they're any good but the junglescout marketplace has Seller Suspension services. Might be worth seeing if they can help with your inventory?
Another one I've heard of is Thompson & Holt - again not a recommendation but they may be able to help.
There are a lot of complaints about allegedly fake merchandise on Amazon and people asking for a crackdown. This is what the other side of that story looks like. The old solution of Amazon mostly ignoring the fakes and just compensating people who complain avoids this scenario.
>The old solution of Amazon mostly ignoring the fakes and just compensating people who complain avoids this scenario.
Being a proper retailer and sourcing goods from reputable sources, performing quality control, and then reselling them to the public without the commingling nonsense also avoids this scenario.
Not really though, cause then as a small retailer, you still have no way to compete. Nobody is going to buy "real" Hugo Boss from some random fishy small website.
So Amazon is both a blessing and a curse to small retailers I feel.
I donāt see why a random fishy website should be able to compete. Either it provides value or it doesnāt. If I want Hugo Boss, Iām going to the Hugo Boss or maybe Nordstroms website, since I know both of those will result in a minimal chance of me getting counterfeit and highest chance of getting the highest quality.
What does comingling have to do with it? Apparently Amazon was able to destroy this sellerās merchandise specifically, so it doesnāt sound like there was a problem identifying it among commingled inventory. Iām getting the impression from the comments here that a lot of people just have an axe to grind about commingling even if thereās no clear connection to the issue at hand (people do seem to bring it up on all sorts of unrelated stories about Amazon).
Comingling means the buyer can't vet the seller so it's entirely on Amazon to ensure the goods aren't counterfeit.
As you say, Amazon was able to identify the merchant specifically but wasn't able to determine whether the goods are genuine. If the goods weren't comingled, this would be less Amazon's problem and the goods wouldn't be in Amazon's warehouse so at least the seller would still have his inventory if Amazon blocks his products.
Actually Amazon knows precisely what items was shipped and if it came directly from the merchant or if they used some other merchants for the delivery (aka comingled). So when a buyer complains about an item, they know if it is the merchant's item or some other merchant's item.
Comingled doesn't mean that they just bunch them all up in some bin and then can't tell which is which and where they were from. It means that if some warehouse closer to the buyer has a similar item, they'll ship that one, because shipping will be cheaper and faster coming from the closest fulfilment center.
I don't think that's what the parent is talking about. Because customers don't get to choose who they buy from if a product is co-mingled, customers have no way of avoiding counterfeit items by deciding to only buy from very reputable sellers. This makes detecting counterfeits Amazon's responsibility
Oh I see, yes that's true. Though the seller is allowed to opt out of comingled, but ya, I always wanted as a buyer to be able to choose.
You can use Amazon for fulfillment without participating in commingled inventory. In that case, Amazon would still have possession of your inventory, and if you didnāt cooperate when they tried to return it to you, it might end up getting destroyed.
If Amazon didnāt offer fulfillment as a service, and just bought product from suppliers to sell, this same issue can arise - the supplier can deliver items which seem possibly fraudulent. Then Amazon will fight with the supplier about returning those items and depending on what kind of contracts are in place, could end up destroying them (this seems to be essentially what happened here).
They could bring in some common sense measures like "what is the ratio of complaints to total number of sales" and "did the seller get the chance to rectify the situation"
Iād expect that they are doing that. This story only quotes a few reviews, but we donāt know how many more customers complained through Amazonās customer service system (customers are probably more likely to do a return than write a public review). Amazon likely has some threshold for when to initiate action against a seller based on this data.
I read the article with a more skeptical eye. It could be that he didn't request the items back in time because they were fake and not worth the price of the return shipping. Amazon's response was interesting:
"The spokeswoman said Amazon repeatedly asked Govani to provide evidence that the products sold were authentic but that the invoices he sent were either illegible or didn't match the records of the brand owners."
So he's got (by his own admission old), and by Amazon's telling, illegible, or the brand disclaims them. It made me think of that scene in Fargo where the car dealer is faxing forms with illegible VINs repeatedly to General Motors to keep his scam going.
I don't put stock in claims of illegibility by Amazon.
I had a similar (but by comparison nearly inconsequential) experience with Amazon where they accused me of running a fraudulent account (for reasons that are still bewildering to me).
The whole experience was too kafkaesque to summarize here while on my phone, but at some point they demanded scans of something be faxed.
I sent it twice and both were rejected as illegible.
First, if amazon gave a damn about legibility they wouldn't be insisting on faxes.
Second, if I sent those faxes to a million people, I'm confident less than one percent of them would have said they were illegible.
"Illegible" is an excuse used by Amazon because it's in their control to decide, and is ambiguous enough and plausibily denialable enough in a legal sense that it protects them.
To me "illegibility" is just what Amazon gives as a reason when they don't want to give a reason. It's bureaucratic stonewalling.
After reading the article I'm still a bit doubtful about the claims of the seller. I'm not saying that Amazon is in the right here or that he's lying about the merchandise being genuine, but some aspects of the story seem rather sketchy. He seems to have been in contact with Amazon for several months, and still he says he was unable to ask them to send his merchandise back to him? If he really ordered his merchandise from the brands directly, how was he not able to simply ask them for a confirmation or proper invoice copy and provide that to Amazon?
Fake merchandise seems to be rampant on Amazon, and clothes/apparel is a great target because the products are "low-tech" and it's hard for a regular customer to tell a genuine article apart from a fake one, so I can see why Amazon is very picky about these things here. Personally I try to never buy such brand items from third-party sellers on Amazon, as my trust in the items being original is quite low.
Nothing sketchy here at all.
You seem to think that Amazon has reasonable processes for dealing with people? No, it's Kafka.
The complaints from a few people are easy: "I didn't like this, looks suspicious" is a very easy thing for a few customers to do.
Then the complaint and it's done.
These kinds of things can even happen in the regular court systems.
I don't know who's right and who's wrong but his claims are within reason.
Two things here:
1) Binding arbitration. The arbiters know which side of the bread is buttered, you have to have a pretty extreme case to win in binding arbitration. It should be nuked from orbit.
2) Comingled inventory--there's no mention of whether he used it or not. If it's used and someone else sends Amazon counterfeits that get sent to your customer you get blamed for the counterfeit. The only reason they can be sloppy like this is because of #1.
ā The spokeswoman said Amazon repeatedly asked Govani to provide evidence that the products sold were authentic but that the invoices he sent were either illegible or didn't match the records of the brand owners.ā
May have been grey market goods, which is bound to be problematic on Amazon for branded high end fashion.
But did they match the record of the wholesaler?
A lot of higher-end brands receive records back from the wholesalers too, so they can a) have a paper trail to determine if products are counterfeit or not, and b) blur the distinction between "counterfeit" and "not sold through official channels" which helps prevent undercutting of the retail price.
Amazon in Australia is not very good (yet). It's nothing like America or Japan, which have huge inventories and same or next day delivery.
This is a really really bad look for Amazon, which is in the process of expanding in Australia. Retailers are already nervous about their expansion plans here and this does further bad for their brand.
I live in a rural city in Australia and get 95% of my Amazon deliveries within 2 days of buying it (whereas most other online stores take a week or so), and have also found their range to be pretty extensive. Sure itās not as big as the US but weāre a fraction of the market so itās to be expected. If anything Iām constantly dumbfounded by just how much random shit I find on Amazon here (and I exclusively shop with āFrom Australia Onlyā ticked).
Iāll always buy local if I can get it at a similar price, and Iāll even pay slightly more for local, but Iām not going to spend 25%+ more for an identical product and Amazonās prices usually really are that much cheaper.
While the delivery times are not great yet because a lot of items come from abroad, their inventory is now pretty extensive.
In these COVID times, I've been buying quite a bit of bicycle gear & parts and in many cases I could find stuff on Amazon at lower prices than AU specialist online shops. It certainly was not the case just a couple months ago.
I reckon Prime Membership in AU is now very worth it as you get free international shipping for orders over $49, in addition to free expedited domestic shipping and Prime video access.
I hope they fail here in Aus. Something something tall poppy syndrome.
Local retail first.
Retail prices are very high in Australia. I specifically remember only finding mountaineering carabineers, at $35 AUD at the time (23 EUR at the time) when theyāre 8 euros in France. Same goes shoes, tshirts or kettles. Maybe the absence of large-chain competitors plays a role in cost of life being quite high.
Then again, as a country, Australia would be free in deciding that it should only be affordable to people who have the means to support their life, to maintain a high quality standard and retails.
Check out French sports retailer Decathlon, which landed in Australia a few years ago and is already making waves. Karabiners start from $12:
https://decathlon.com.au/collections/climbing-karabiners-qui...
There is absolutely no way I'd buy such critical equipment as a carabiner from Amazon, with all the problems they have with counterfeit goods.
Amazon in Australia has had great delivery times during Covid as they run their own Uber like app for people delivering in their own cars.
Seems odd the reporter doesnāt verify the authenticity/quality of the submitted invoices.
Surely he could produce copies for the reporter?
Not wanting to do so is probably the reason the article is not really about whether the products were genuine or not, but rather about Amazon's behaviour.
"In order to ensure that customers can shop with confidence on Amazon, we take 'inauthentic' complaints seriously,"
That inventory was everything I had. Amazon ruined my life, and I did nothing wrong
This is what a perfect win for IP maximalists looks like - an automated ruination of lives, whenever IP seems to be disrespected.
I keep wondering why Amazon deals with guys like this instead of going to Calvin Kleinās wholesaler. He wouldnāt have better prices for legit merchandise, right?
I think the idea is that it allows for Amazon to remove some strength from the official wholesaler side. If the wholesaler isn't the only source of goods they have less bargaining power. But at the end of the day the wholesaler has to sell to someone. Here are my thoughts on how this relationship could work to Amazon's advantage.
Think of this scenario:
**Wholesaler**: Give us $10 per unit to list our products on Amazon. **Amazon**: No, we'll pay $15 per unit from a 3rd parties you sell to, but we won't tell you who. **Wholesaler**: Whatever, we'll still make sales at the end of the day.
-- Some time passes --
**Amazon**: Hey 3rd parties, if you store all of our stuff in the warehouse we'll be an awesome partner and increase your profits a bit! **3rd parties**: This is an awesome deal! *3rd Parties* who are unaware of the fight between the wholesaler and Amazon sees their business going great buys lots of stock from the wholesaler, sends it all to Amazon, has a lot of their sales going through Amazon, etc.
-- Some more time passes --
**Amazon**: Hey Wholesaler, we have these 3rd parties and 90% of their revenue is through our platform. You are going to list your product on our platform at $5 per unit or we're going to either A: Delist the products and kick the sellers off our platform and/or B: We're going to use our business intelligence to launch AmazonBasicsā¢ versions of your product(s) and throw your customers to the wolves while your demand crumbles into to dust.
Today YOU are here. This is how they use their monopoly power to get an unfair benefit over the existing manufacturers/wholesalers. And they can use 3rd parties, small businesses, as a way to get leverage. These 3rd parties will go and get business loans, they'll build up their inventories, they provide an abstraction that's hard for the wholesalers to fully peer through to, etc. These 3rd parties are just a pawn in Amazon's games with wholesalers. For every dollar Amazon burns giving these 3rd parties more money than the wholesaler they're really just leveraging indirectly the credit of these 3rd parties and throwing them to the wolves if they don't get their way. Simply a pawn in a game for Amazon to consolidate more power.
>or we're going to either A: Delist the products and kick the sellers off our platform
Is there evidence of this happening?
This was just my attempt at reasoning how this could work. I did some searching and this was one of the first few things I found.
https://www.vox.com/2019/3/8/18252606/amazon-vendors-no-orde...
It's not exactly what I'm saying, but still an interesting scenario playing out nonetheless.
Selection and risk. In clothing especially, people can have hundreds of thousands of individuals skus and only a handful of units on most of them. Amazon doesn't want to stock the long tail.
In some areas people have unique deals and ways to get products cheaper than Amazon, or they pay more but accept a lower profit margin.
Amazon lets small businesses sell stuff on their web site and it's a big part of their business, why wouldn't they let middle men sell stuff on there? It also has served as portion of their business to point at and say "see we're fair and not a malicious monopoly, we let others use our platform to sell"
I don't understand why the journalist didn't contact the manufacturers to confirm that the products were authentic.
After being unable to resolve the matter following several appeals as part of our dispute resolution process, we informed this seller six separate times that they needed to remove their inventory from our store by specific dates or it would be destroyed," she said. "The seller failed to request to remove their inventory by the dates provided."
This seems more than fair. I'm not sure why he would put all his eggs in the Amazon basket though.
This very much reads like he wanted to keep selling on Amazon despite them trying to get him off the platform
He says he tried to submit a removal request and couldn't.
It's possible he's lying, but Amazon's jankiness is the stuff of legends, so it would be quite horrible to just assume that.
The crux of the problem seems to be "when merchants set up shop on Amazon, they waive their right to a day in court by agreeing to binding arbitration to resolve any disputes".
Is this even legal?
Another Marketplace seller blamed for commingled fakes case?
If his story is true, it doesn't even sound like Amazon had any evidence that his merchandise was fake. One person didn't like the fit and suggested that it could be fake, another complained about a damaged box and again thought that meant it was fake, and the other two didn't like the way it was packed.
For all we know, the complaints were from a competitor that knew exactly what would happen.
Amazon could've just bought some and checked it?
They had it in their inventory. They could look at what they ship out.
I donāt see any accusation that comingling is the cause of the problem. The seller didnāt deny that he sent the items with the quality complaints. The problem, according to Amazon, is the seller has dodgy receipts. Or according to the seller, the problem is Amazon is too hard on alleged counterfeiters.
I have had the issue myself, receiving the wrong article when buying through FBA. And the only option Amazon gives you is to return the article, instead of allowing you to receive the ācorrectā version of the article instead.
I generally use Walmart and Target for shopping online, but recently I decided to go with Amazon for something (pet supplies) that Walmart, Target, and Chewy didn't carry.
I created my account, and before I could put the order through, the account was locked for "suspicious activity," which resulted in a black hole of me repeatedly sending them the information they asked for (a recent credit card statement) and them responding with the same form letter email about being unable to verify ownership of the card. I even called, spoke to a human who said they would do something, but no, same form letter response.
Why do people use Amazon over walmart.com or target.com?
Because your experience is unusual. It's more inline with new accounts on twitter, not amazon, in my limited experience.
Selling on Amazon is really hard. Just one fake product claim from a customer can make your seller account blocked. And because customer is always right, seller has to prove product validity.
Im ok with the onus being on the seller to prove they are selling real goods.
Quite the attack vector for competitors, though.
If you're not shady its pretty easy to prove your legit. Real offline bussinesses have to keep records too, and the same attack can happen in the real world since selling counterfeit goods is a crime (harder to get away with false report though in the physical world)
Records though can be messy across businesses (retailer, wholesaler, manufacturer). A simple example would be if the purchase order id could be entered in different formats like if one vendor has dashes (like [customer]-[order number]) and then that PO id is entered without dashes at another system.
If you do a simple search or table join you aren't going to get a match, and if the person who was asked to provide the records doesn't go the extra step to do the search again you suddenly have a lot of issues.
This sounds like an awful position to put your business in even if the alternatives weren't better.
You're the middleman between manufacturers who view you as small & Amazon who would view you as small.
To me it seems like you're just asking to be squeezed out here & taking on a lot of risk. Am I missing something?
File a complaint with the Iowa AG Consumer Protection
https://www.iowaattorneygeneral.gov/about-us/divisions/consu...
Possible lien on that new massive Bondurant warehouse will get their attention.
you know that whole, "never put all your eggs in one basket" saying... that's exactly what this dude did and he got burned.
while the situation sucks and amazon is a jerk for allowing this to happen... i don't feel bad for him. any business man knows not to do this, it's rule one in everything you do. it places you in the position where you aren't in charge meaning you don't have the upper hand. hard lesson for this dude to learn, but hopefully it prevents others from making the same mistake.
The issue has Amazon has taken over most of the ecommerce market. And it doesn't even make sense anymore for many to have their own ecommerce website. They are swallowing everything, except for recognizable brands. That's why brand recognition is so important even if you're small.
pol
But yes, Amazon "efficiency" and policies mostly favourable to the buyer killed the majority of the competition. They are even killing Ebay.
Even if they are fake, destroying it is extreme. They should just levy fines or charges on the storage and hold on to it. Atleast not until the sellerās case is open with them. I donāt get how they could be so bad at this.
If they are fakes then itās fraud and the courts should get involved. But why would Amazon give the courts that power when they can just do whatever they want.
Fakes should 100% be destroyed
The issue is due process which is missing
I hope the seller sues Amazon, and the judge awards attorney's fees and a damages multiplier due to the hardship imposed and the egregiousness of the violation.
'now homeless' should be removed from HN title. TFA doesn't state that and it's not in the title either.
Imagine if they treat AWS customers this way this doesn't seem like the most customer obsessed company
Regarding forced arbitration: isnāt the party that forces arbitration by law required to pay for it and if they refuse, then it can be brought in court?
No, it depends on the rules of the particular arbitration group, which can be modified in the contract. For the AAA, the one bringing it pays an initial fee and the parties split the ongoing cost, but a final award can include costs going to one side if the arbitrator decides that.
I don't understand the story. He was given several warnings that his stuff would be destroyed. Why is it Amazon's fault now?
we had a similar experience moving item off smaller platform. it's a constant barrage of counterfeit claims, even if we sold 1 (one) item, we racked up 10 complaints in a month.
it's a very profitable model to keep small competitors operations out of the system, so of course it's abused to hell and back.
Does Amazon still commingle inventories between sellers? How could they keep track of who provided a fake item?
That doesn't seem very challenging to a logistics company and falls out of things they already have to do to keep track of their inventory. They probably do somethiing like barcode each thing when it comes in, record which barcode came from where. Scan each barcode when it gets dispatched out to a customer. Now you know the ultimate provider of the item that went to a particular customer.
This is what monopoly abuse looks like.
Is it just me or does it seem like he could've avoided it by answering their emails?
You gotta keep up with your emails.
Those emails are notifications from a no-reply address. The article outlines his other attempts to contact them, including the part where he was told there was "nothing else she could do" when he got a response.
So he had $1.5m in merchandise that was totally authentic, sent it all to Amazon and yet couldn't reclaim it? And he has no insurance on literally a million and a half of clothing?
How did he go from holding $1.5M of merch for _over a year_ to being homeless and having to couch surf?
So, I had this $2M bridge up in Wisconsin, but Elon Musk took it out with a cybertruck one night after a few too many mimosas and...
Is there any insurance that would pay for merchandise that Amazon destroyed because they determined that it's fake? Why would the insurance company take his side when they could just side with Amazon and save $1.5M?
He can produce invoices that show he bought $1.5M of legit merchandise, but how can he prove that what he sent to Amazon was not fake?
He can show invoices that are over a year old. Which means that for at least a year, he held _at least_ two cargo containers of high end clothing somewhere before selling them in bulk on Amazon. He has no warehouses, no physical storefront, nothing - that doesn't strike you as strange for someone with 1.5M of merchandise?
That is a _ton_ of merchandise both in terms of physical bulk and space, and in cost to have sitting around. Unless he's doing tens of millions of sales a year, that is way too much inventory to have at rest.
Insurance could tell you nothing was ever covered and never spend a dime - but insurance is a heavily audited industry and at the very least they would do an investigation. Keep in mind, it's not like Amazon got in a few cargo containers of high end clothing and fed them into a shredder - they kept in a warehouse and sold it and got enough complaints about them not being genuine articles that they de-shelved them from inventory, gave him 30 days to retrieve them and only then after his refusal had them destroyed.
For what it's worth, removing THAT much merchandising from shelving is a serious labor and time sink. You don't do that because you got one or two complaints about crushed boxes or off sizes.
Which think of this in reverse - if Amazon told you that you needed to retrieve your $1.5M of merchandise in 30 days or it would be destroyed, would you just roll the dice on that? Even if you can't afford freight, you'd still go haul as much as you can in whatever you drive and hock it on the corner.
The only reason you would let Amazon bulk destroy merchandise (with significant notice and several reminders from them, after signing a contract that pre-dictates out the terms of rejected merchandise), the only reason you would let merchandise sit like that, is if it has no significant value. When the cost of freight exceeds the cost of goods - then yeah, don't freight it and absorb the loss because it's less damage.
The invoices for the particular product was a year old. But it could be the majority of that inventory was turning over every 90 days, which would mean he was selling 500k/month.
>For what it's worth, removing THAT much merchandising from shelving is a serious labor and time sink. You don't do that because you got one or two complaints about crushed boxes or off sizes.
The system is automated. A destroy order gets put in, then a warehouse employee goes and fulfils that order without knowing or caring why it was placed. Sellers can place destroy orders as well.
Why would insurance ever side with a person making a claim? It would be more cost effective to always deny claims regardless of legitimacy
Answer: Because contracts and if the insurer breaches them courts get involved and penalties get handed out.
"Insured claims that they shipped $1.5M of merchandise to Amazon. Amazon claimed merchandise was counterfeit and destroyed merchandise after given the insured multiple attempts to retrieve merchandise which were not acted on. In the absence of any evidence that the now destroyed goods were legitimate, we are denying compensation for this claim."
He, of course, can try to sue his insurance company to pay the claim (happens all the time), but it's expensive and he's not guaranteed to win.
Indeed in this situation he's unlikely to win because he is pretty clearly in the wrong and his story is rediculous. My point is just that the insurance company can't just arbitrarily decide to side with amazon because they feel it (for that matter, amazon isn't really a party when it comes to the insurance) they have to look at the evidence and facts of the situation.
My point is that the last party to have had possession of his merchandise claimed it was counterfeit. The evidence is he shipped the merchandise to Amazon, Amazon said it was counterfeit and if he didn't product evidence to the contrary, they'd either destroy it or he could retrieve it, and he chose not to retrieve it.
I really don't see why insurance would pay out under these circumstances.
I think OP means, if it's logical and correct for the insurance not to pay, it was probably logical and correct for Amazon to destroy it as well.
Something something one basket.
_binding arbitration, which the House panel said gives Amazon the upper hand in disputes_
What is the basis for this? I have gone to arbitration against a big company, and won. The arbitrators were all judges, and the only difference from my experience with court proceedings was the speed and cost.
TL;DR: Forced arbitration is the worst.
Arbitration has its place, but I rather think there should be a "small claims" pecuniary limit on what can be considered eligible for this sort of clause. Anything over a few grand and you're talking about sums of money that can literally break people.
Seems somewhat inhumane to stifle recourse.
How do sellers track down and get GTINs for this volume of apparel?
Unpopular opinion: He was told multiple times to remove the inventory or it would be destroyed, in accordance with the contract he signed. He didn't remove the inventory.
What I don't understand is how someone can keep such poor proof of authenticity when hocking questionable products on Amazon? To pretend that illegible evidence of authenticity is okay is disingenuous. _Everyone_ knows that Amazon is full of fakes. You would think scammers would try to have reasonable proof of authenticity so that when the banhammer comes swinging down, they'd have a saving grace.
Plus, the article is clickbait. I don't see how the man is homeless. He's not a rough sleeper. He's staying with family. To call him homeless is absurd, it cheapens the word and erodes our communal empathy.
According to wikipedia definition he's 'secondary homeless'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness
"moving between temporary shelters, including houses of friends, family and emergency accommodation"
Actually reading the article, it doesn't mention him being homeless. So unless the original article was edited recently, I'd say the clickbait aspect comes from the HN thread title.
US-based meta-comment: I see lots of talk in this thread about the problem of customers just wanting to shout at customer support. Maybe I've got election brain, but does anyone else think this is a symptom of the frustration people feel under a political system that no longer responds to the legitimate grievances of people on the bottom of the social and economic order.
In my experience, the quality of customer support has degraded as the volume of sales in the online marketplace has increased. Recently, I had an Amazon customer service supervisor in India (or at least, everyone in the chain had an Indian name and they didn't seem to understand the difference between USPS and UPS) mouth off to me about an issue that eventually resulted in a refund and apology from someone in the USA.
I imagine it is even worse for sellers, because they aren't traditionally viewed as "customers" (thus they are not "always right") and many of them are indeed pushing counterfeit merchandise -- especially when it comes to shoes and apparel. I would not be surprised if Amazon characterizes seller support as a cost center, rather than a profit center.
Personally, when it comes to oft-counterfeited items, I view a brick-and-mortar presence as an indicator of greater trustworthiness. For me, the takeaway from the story about Mr. Govani's lost inventory is that (A) Amazon's seller support is poor, (B) Amazon has no idea how to counteract its problem with rampant counterfeiting, (C) Amazon doesn't see much value in treating sellers as customers of its platform, and (D) Mr. Govani moved way too much existing inventory to Amazon rather than transitioning gradually with freshly acquired product.
> no longer responds to the legitimate grievances of people on the bottom of the social and economic order.
Not only the political system. Amazon itself is doing this. Once customers reach a human being they are extremely frustrated. That is bad for the customer and the employee, only Amazon profits from the situation.
I donāt think Amazon customers posting here about their frustration are anywhere near the bottom of the social and economic order.
I'm not referencing them. I'm referencing the discussions about perpetually irate, toxic customers.