The previous review practice that outraged me was when someone here at HN was producing very detailed analysis of LED bulbs (spectral analysis, etc.) and proving that lots of bulbs on Amazon had CRI and color temperature ratings that were way off.
He then described how he posted that in some reviews and they were all taken down. Which is to say, crummy LED bulb on Amazon with an inflated CRI cannot have a review describing the inflated CRI.
Amazon doesn't give a shit. Amazon only wants to sell more stuff, so of course it's going to take down objective negative reviews and whistle-blowing accounts of review payola.
This is a regulatory problem. If Amazon was a corner hardware store it would have been fined multiple times and the owner might well have been jailed by now.
But thanks to the magic power of Internet leverage and the fact that only giant trading blocs like the EU have any power over multinational malfeasance, Amazon continues to do this shit - and will continue to do it, probably even after it's broken up.
>This is a regulatory problem. If Amazon was a corner hardware store it would have been fined multiple times and the owner might well have been jailed by now.
If this were a corner hardware store nobody would shop there and they would be out of business.
I second what the downvoted comment said. Not everything is a nail to be hammered with more laws. I find it very hard to believe that existing laws regulating advertising cannot be used to solve this problem.
This is a consumer problem - "you get what you pay for."
If you want to buy something from a retailer that gives a shit about their wholesalers, shop at a local superstore for whatever items your looking for and eat the difference in cost.
> If Amazon was a corner hardware store it would have been fined multiple times and the owner might well have been jailed by now.
If Amazon was a corner hardware store and not a marketplace, they would have been run out of business by all the customers returning garbage and counterfeits they bought from them. But that's not what Amazon is, they're ostensibly connecting buyers to sellers and providing logistics - not behaving as a retailer that selects their wholesalers and manages their supply chain besides getting shit from point A to point B.
What Amazon shouldn't do is have it both ways, either they're an Ebay-esque digital flea market where everything is buyer-beware, or they're a retailer who is responsible for the garbage on their shelves. They don't want to be either, and if there's regulation to be had, it should focus on that difference (as well as regarding their own products - you don't see flea markets driving their merchants out of business by stealing their products and undercutting their prices, while stores can stock generics alongside their curated shelves).
>This is a consumer problem - "you get what you pay for."
It's pretty clearly not the case here. I've paid full price for what I thought were legit items on Amazon and received fakes.
That's the whole point, the whole "free market" thing only works if the consumer has access to all the relevant info about the product they're buying. On Amazon more and more there's a distortion between what the consumer thinks they're buying and when they actually receive.
>What Amazon shouldn't do is have it both ways, either they're an Ebay-esque digital flea market where everything is buyer-beware, or they're a retailer who is responsible for the garbage on their shelves.
I completely agree with you here and I hope that it'll bite them in the ass in the long run. I'm definitely a lot more cautious of the stuff I buy on Amazon now that I was 10 years ago.
You're thinking like a politician, whose law is a hammer and who sees every issue as a nail. Before regulating, let's see if the free market can't work it out way better by itself. And indeed it can, it's called competition.
Amazon itself claims to be "customer centric" because customer trust ensures sales go up in the long term much better than short gain of abusing the customer relationship. Look at this very thread for more evidence.
Maybe if you didn't need an army of lawyers fighting bureaucracy to found the tiniest company a competitor would already have beaten them. Maybe that's why Amazon feels it can afford this kind of business practices. Your intentions are good but your solutions are not.
> let's see if the free market can't work it out way better by itself
How long are you willing to let the free market try and solve it? It seems like the free market has been solving this for, what, a couple decades in Amazon's case?
It seems like the free market is the problem here, and just continuing what's already been tried is going to give us more of the same results.
or, it could in fact be a result of "free-market competition", e.g amazon being afraid of loosing sellers to competitors and they are afraid of punishing them *
* i have (not at amazon) witnessed this first-hand, so its not outside the realm of possibility at all
Yes, Amazon is a mess. I recently was fed up with the price of a beverage at the local overpriced Albertson's, $3 per tiny can. Decided to order a case on big A instead, to save some money.
Guess what, same price per can plus exorbitant shipping cost on Amzn. Came out to ~$5 a can and I had to buy 4 or 12 at a time. It just didn't make sense. I left a polite review that said as much, and it was rejected. :D
Was the listing mislabeled? Because otherwise I'm not sure what your complaint is. You bought in bulk, without a bulk discount, and got a larger quantity of an item at a worse unit price. If your review was politely informing people that the price was bad, then you're not really reviewing the item, because you like the item.
I didn't buy it, there was no point. Buying items by the case online should be significantly cheaper than a single purchase at convenience retail.
The truth hurts I suppose. They should be interested in the information however, because it cost them and continues to cost them sales among the clueful.
It's an urban legend. The reality is more boring than what people believe - it's simply that the manufacturers who falsely declare CE compliance don't even bother to get the correct drawing of the CE symbol (which is the maximum possible level of non-compliance, not even the logo!). Yes, the logo is a forgery, and the nickname "China Export" is a humorous way to describe it, but it must be emphasized that there's no "China Export" symbol - it simply doesn't exist, not defined by any government agency or trade association in China.
I bought a 3D printer that was missing a guide rod and couldn't be assembled. The package the rods were wrapped in had been opened apparently at the factory given that the rest of the contents were pristine and sealed. I posted a negative review that was never put on the product page. It wasn't worth my time returning it since I could order a replacement off eBay for less than RMA shipping.
The previous review practice that outraged me was when someone here at HN was producing very detailed analysis of LED bulbs (spectral analysis, etc.) and proving that lots of bulbs on Amazon had CRI and color temperature ratings that were way off.
He then described how he posted that in some reviews and they were all taken down. Which is to say, crummy LED bulb on Amazon with an inflated CRI cannot have a review describing the inflated CRI.