The third party sellers shouldn't get access to your contact information. On DoorDash, calls go through DoorDash's system. Same with text messages. No one gets the other person's real number. I've had one restaurant that always calls me right after I place the order to ask me for my phone number to put into their system for future orders. I always tell them no, I prefer to go through DoorDash instead. A similar system should be in place at Amazon.
I've seen a pretty common scam where items are sold for "too good to be true" prices, only to be cancelled a few days later. I assume this is to harvest people's contact info
Aha - that's what this is. I keep wondering why many sub-20$ items on eBay keep getting cancelled on me. The equivalent item on Amazon is usually 20-25$ (but doesn't quality for free tier shipping on its own) so I shop eBay for same - half the time or more recently it's either a) a drop-ship from Amazon even in its box/packaging, or b) cancelled as 'buyer requested cancel'. I knew it was a scam but I didn't know what for.
Good thing I ship to a PO box and use a generic C/O name.
..but then they still have your home address in their archive of PII. Which is bad enough (wasn't Dominos or New York Pizza hacked the other day with PII getting leaked?).
I barely ever read spam (and receive it mainly on one of my older e-mail addresses but it does end up in the spam filter). I barely ever receive spam on my phone number. I won't say never, cause it has happened, but probably like twice a year or so. And I use my real phone number and real e-mail address everywhere. Which, in case of using an alias, isn't clever. But in your case, they still got the address.
Nope, not everyone orders food. Perhaps in your bubble.
> Nothing private is disclosed.
Incorrect, it is PII. It is a real name connected to a street address first of all (one could use an alias; I do). And, possibly (potentially) also containing metadata such as what is being ordered, at which time, and how much.
Moreover, it denotes activity. If you want to lay low, your street address might be officially public (mine is) yet not receive spam on it.
For some reason, it isn't possible to only give a business your address (and other PII) when they need it and force them to discard it completely afterwards. Why not? Because when leaks happen, they're not hold accountable. See the essay Data Is a Toxic Asset, So Why Not Throw It Out? by Bruce Schneier [1]
I'm sure the line is that they need it in case of problems during delivery. Couriers always want it for that, or trying to ensure there aren't problems (for them) like missed deliveries by texting you to say they're delivering today or whatever.
I don't really have a problem with that in general, but yeah I don't want to deal with random third party sellers.
Also in my experience when there's a problem with the item and you need a return/refund, it never gets sorted until you escalate to Amazon. Assuming you're not happy with a 20p partial refund and a complimentary bizarre plastic children's toy (when what you ordered was nothing of the kind).
Couriers do say that, it seems, but have you ever experienced them using it? I never get anything at all, unless I look up the tracking online. Doesn't matter if the package is on time or if it disappeared somewhere in Alaska or if it got delivered 2 streets over, total radio silence.
Yeah, all the time. Very rarely for a problem (my building is slightly awkward so they do sometimes call because they're stuck at lower ground level and can't get in) but routinely 'delivering your package today between 1pm and 2pm' or whatever, then often 15min before.
This is in the UK though, obviously can't and I'm not claiming it's the norm everywhere.
Interesting. In any part of the US I've lived in, and with any shipping company I've ever used, they don't do anything like that. I wish they would.
I was supposed to get a delivery today, but it requires a signature and I was in the back yard when they knocked on the door. A quick text or call would have been great. Alas.
It's against Amazon TOS to contact Amazon's customers outside the Amazon messaging system, and they are really heavy handed against sellers breaching this.
If you complain to Amazon that the seller is contacting you outside the Amazon messaging platform and harrassing you, then Amazon will close their seller account.
Alternatively you can threaten to report them to Amazon for this and they will go away.
> Apparently, complaining to Amazon didn't solve the problem.
Amazon has different tiers of support. My understanding (from a few years ago, after being very persistent on an issue), is that their chat support people are relatively dis-empowered compared to their phone support people. So it's totally possible that one support channel could solve this problem, and other ones can't.
And if that's the case, the fault is totally Amazon's: no customer should have to understand their bureaucracy to that level of detail to get their issue resolved.
If an Amazon phone CSR can be trusted, that's still the case. I recently had an unusual issue that required escalation "all the way up" and at a certain point I reached a guy who claimed, at least, that that was as high as any customer could go - it was on the phone and he mentioned that the chat CSRs had much less power. He had managers of course but they were "not allowed" to speak to customers.
maybe the contact to Amazon said something like "The seller is harassing me" not "The Seller is contacting me outside of official Amazon channels and harassing me", and probably, if you just dropped the harassing me it would be even more important to Amazon to shut that down.
I had a seller contact me directly on WhatsApp. I reported it to Amazon and never heard back. Eventually the same number that contacted me on WhatsApp changed their display photo from company logo to an exotic woman asking me for Bitcoin payment
> Is there some reason the seller needs to have the buyer's contact info?
I have the same question, except I'll narrow the scope a little bit. In case the order is fulfilled by Amazon.com (FBA), is there any reason for the seller to have the buyer's contact or shipping information?
I know the seller has my information because I have a similar experience to TylerRobinson, except my gift card was only USD 5:
> The situation with Amazon reviews has become unbelievable. I recently purchased a $20 item with around 30,000 reviews, overwhelmingly positive. $20 was a reasonable market price for this item from any retailer.
> There was a card inside the box from the seller saying they’d send me a $15 gift card for posting a 5-star review and then forwarding them proof I had posted it to some gmail account. I followed the instructions, and like clockwork got $15 back on Amazon.
Part of it is to do with liability and tax stuff. If amazon doesn't share the info in both directions, can they really claim to the taxman and insurance providers that the seller sold you the stuff, or did Amazon really sell you the stuff and the seller was simply their supplier?
Amazon wants to say the seller sold it (unless it was a vendor sale "sold and fulfilled by Amazon.com").
If the item isn't full-filled by Amazon (ie my stock isn't in an amazon warehouse) then I need their address details and phone number (for the courier) to ship the item.
Dealing with Amazon, as a seller, can be a terrible experience. Using their full-fillment service more so. They don't check returns so the next customer night get only part of a product, or in lots of cases a bogus product when a buyer fills the box with other cheap junk.
> > "contacted Amazon, who responded with "we'll deal with the issue and get back to you within 48 hours", which never happened"
> "If you complain to Amazon that the seller is contacting you outside the Amazon messaging platform and harrassing you, then Amazon will close their seller account."
What is the purpose of telling somebody to do exactly what they just told you they already did, and insisting that it will work when they just told you it didn't? Your comment is tantamount to gaslighting.
Hi there - "gaslighting", seems a bit extreme? I'm just offering some help.
The thing with Amazon is that it's super fragmented and you have to complain through the correct channels. After six years I'm still struggling to navigate at times.
General Customer service team members' KPIs are to just close tickets, that's all they care about.
Go to the Product page and click "“Report Abuse”" on the reviews.
Or email the support team and ask them to escalate the ticket to Seller Performance.
I have done all these things myself, and I still see the seller accounts live, or name changed.
Around 10% of items I’ve ordered have been either fakes of name brands, didn’t match the photos, or had a seller review scam thing going. It’s not an outlier, it’s standard.
> I had this... a third-party seller started harassing me via email to submit feedback
I has a very similar experience. I bought a cheap USB cable pack comprised of 5 USB cables of varying length, and after a span of a couple of weeks all 5 cables stopped working. Once I posted a review I started getting pestered by the seller asking to change the review and offering replacements, which was not unusual, but afterwards started offering 20$ in exchange for a retraction of the bad reviewto instead post a positive one. I recall receiving about half a dozen emails from the seller, even after I stopped replying.
I've stopped buying 3rd party seller items because of this. Now, I'll only buy items sold directly by amazon.
For example, I bought a little portable projector last Christmas. In the box was a big bar of Swiss chocolate and leaflet offering me a tripod in return for a five star review. The projector wasn't as good as the description made out. It wasn't terrible, just not as good as they claimed. So I left a three star review. I started getting texts from the seller asking, and then demanding I remove the review - they weren't offering me anything in return. And the texts came from the sellers name which changed slightly every time, so I couldn't easily block them or reply to them. It took two months for them to give up and leave me alone. I've had similar less extreme experiences with other sellers.
I did complain to amazon, who said they would take action. A few weeks later the seller disappeared from amazon, so I assume they received enough complaints to take action.
But..... the seller reappearance with a different name. They had the same product range and descriptions.
Amazon doesn't care and is totally complicit in all this.
The problem as I see it is that so much commerce is concentrated on to a small number of platforms (amazon, ebay, wish etc), which leads to sellers getting desperate to get to the top in searches. I mean, I can understand sellers doing this when their livelihoods depend on it. It's still not right though and amazon should fix it.
Only 3rd party sellers are allowed in India due anti-competitive/eCommerce regulations, Couple of years ago I left a negative review for an item when the seller/manufacturer who failed to uphold their warranty statement as described in their product listing calling out the false statements in the product listing.
The seller reached out to me on LinkedIn, Out of frustration I blocked the seller on LinkedIn. I still feel bad about the entire scenario, I wonder whether I was too harsh.
Now there are several products on amazon.in where ordering requires you to interact with the seller on WhatsApp, e.g. Name board, You need to message via WhatsApp to the seller with the text. So obviously they pester you to leave a positive review through WhatsApp.
If Amazon cared a bit about Privacy, they would have integrated it part of ordering process in the website itself. Compared to Amazon, even Uber is better at masking customer's phone number from drivers(They route it through their number).
You're right about the whole phone number masking thing. It's pretty simple to implement these days, so any platform that doesn't do it is probably not all that concerned about looking after their customers. There's a taxi ordering startup here in Dublin where I live that has only 10 employees and they use phone number masking, if they can do it then there's no reason why Amazon can't.
Yeah they were violating the regulations with Cloudtail & Appario and with growing pressure they've no choice now.
But still there are loads of sellers claiming to be an 'Amazon Brand'[1] on their listing. If Amazon does have something to do with them, Then again it's a violation of the regulations.
Then, What about 'Amazon Basics' products[2]? I'm sure Amazon manufactures them.
The whole thing is messy and keeps changing according to the 'Mega Billionaires' fight to hold their position, But if this results in temporary consumer choice until one of them wins and we have to pledge our souls then it's fine with me.
It's good to know that small players care about Privacy in Dublin, Then again it's the small players who can; Trillions of $ doesn't come without hiding bones in the closet.
It could be argued that the taxi driver needs a customer's phone number if there is a problem, so therefore it wouldn't be an issue under the GDPR. The app developers probably only mask numbers as a courtesy, and not necessarily as a legal requirement.
They were chucked off the platform only to return and start from scratch again. I feel they may have been one of the few settlers who pushed Amazon a bit too far with their behaviour.
If Amazon was on the ball they would use all that fancy AWS AI stuff to spot when banned sellers reappear.
If a seller pushes the boundaries a bit too much and Amazon is forced the ban them, they really don't care if they sign up again using a different name.
If the seller has a strategy worked out on how to get good reviews quickly then they can keep repeating this process safe in the knowledge that they're making money and Amazon are making money as well.
The situation with Amazon reviews has become unbelievable. I recently purchased a $20 item with around 30,000 reviews, overwhelmingly positive. $20 was a reasonable market price for this item from any retailer.
There was a card inside the box from the seller saying they’d send me a $15 gift card for posting a 5-star review and then forwarding them proof I had posted it to some gmail account. I followed the instructions, and like clockwork got $15 back on Amazon.
When reviews become so critical to item visibility it should be no surprise that they are gamed, but it’s still a shame that it’s come to this.
A highly rated pizza chain in my city (4.8 stars out of 6000+ reviews) is giving out free desserts if you rate them 5 stars. I've called them out on it years ago, but it seems that they are still doing it today: https://goo.gl/maps/1L8zdhWgwDK8b8Cy6.
Shake shack does this too. They opened one up nearby and simply changed the location of a well performing store across the country to where the new store was so they could open with thousands of positive reviews.
Same case in India as well. Here sellers bribe money to consumers, asking to write a five-star review. I have had sellers call me multiple times to leave a review. If you mention in the reviews that seller is harassing you for fake reviews and other reviews might be paid, then your review gets taken down.
It’s probably best to ignore reviews and just shop based on critical reviews or recommendations from friends. And even then it is better to purchase directly from manufacturers rather than risk getting counterfeits. I’m not sure what value middlemen like Amazon add other than fast delivery, which most people can live without.
Three star reviews are all you should read these days. It’s typically unbiased / unemotional and objective. 1 and 5 star reviews don’t tend to be reliable.
There’s nothing critical about them anymore. They’re all affiliate marketing sites. Have you noticed there are no bad products anymore? Their only goal is to convince you to buy something. There’s no expertise.
There was a great sky talk at Defcon this week about groups that literally have catalogues of stuff people choose from, order, then get PayPal refund for the 5 star reviews (multiple merchant sites not just Amazon). Some of it is pretty expensive stuff (3D printers, batteries and more). I don’t have an answer for a fix but I definitely just ignore reviews now.
I'm of two minds on this. We all hate getting calls and mail from people and being hounded time and time again - in fact, I have a certain history of blocking people just for that. So all the anger is understandable. I share that annoyance.
However, I find it curious that the article never once turns its eyes on the monopolization of online commerce and the monopolization of communication in Amazon's walled garden as a problem. Rather, it goes with this "tech company must handle this" approach that, in the end, deputized a powerful monopolist as an enforcer for rules, supporting its tactic of monopolizing communication within amazon's systems so amazon can read it all (and undoubtedly analyze it all), which then strengthens that monopolist's stature, since we're now also dependent on it for enforcement (the facebook, twitter, youtube problem all over again) AND it can use it to drive those very sellers out of the market with cheaper knockoffs, which we know amazon does regularly.
In the end, these actors aren't gaming amazon because they're bad apples and crooks; they're gaming it because amazon has become the only game in town, their entire economic existence is dependent on these reviews, AND their walled garden overlord is only keeping them to gut them and take their stuff. Breaking out of it is anoying; but from their perspective, it's also eminently reasonable.
Also, classic journalism: they used clearly outrageous examples to whip us up into supporting this problem construction to make these small sellers the bad guys (highlighting the crooks) - leaving the monopolist hulk that creates the structure in which they all now have to play unexamined.
> since we're now also dependent on it for enforcement
This, I think, is the root of the problem. In the case that Amazon takes control of the situation (you don't really have a relationship with the third party seller; you have a relationship with Amazon), then despite what they claim, they should be held legally responsible.
In the UK we have a legal concept of "vicarious liability". An employer is liable for an employee's actions, regardless of culpability. The employee could be in breach of all agreements and instructions from its employer, yet the employer is still liable. We also have harassment laws. These should be extended to allow victims to hold Amazon liable as if they're a first party in the case that their "third party" sellers are untouchable (as they usually are). Amazon (and other companies) shouldn't be allowed to act as a middleman without also taking on that liability. It should be up to them to recover their costs from the third party, not the consumer.
This would correctly incentivize the big players to ensure that their third party sellers behave. Instead, what we have right now is a legal system that allows them to effectively collude to shirk that responsibility entirely.
> then despite what they claim, they should be held legally responsible.
I fully agree with this. There is a great deal of distrust in contemporary society, because those who hold the power do everything they can to avoid being held responsible. And because they hold the power, they are able to do it. If these parasites want a civilisation to be parasitical off, they will need to shape up.
However, it needs to be careful legal responsibility. Otherwise you just end up with the Google problem. Google will arbitrarily shut down an account for no apparent reason and no clear possibility of appeal or even explanation. So aside from being responsible for the bad actors they choose not to exclude, they should also be responsible for the actors they unfairly or disproportionately exclude. Probably it means their current business models become unviable, but that's fine.
> So aside from being responsible for the bad actors they choose not to exclude, they should also be responsible for the actors they unfairly or disproportionately exclude.
I entirely agree. I think that this could be made quite general: when a private entity is in a position of gatekeeping a large proportion of a market (say, 30%), then it should automatically have a universal service obligation - unable to arbitrarily choose not to do business with those it finds inconvenient. "Fired" customers should have legal recourse under the universal service obligation. Abuse (by a fired customer) would be an acceptable reason to fire that customer, but the business would have to demonstrate abuse to a legal standard of proof.
Business owners might consider this to be an unfair burden. I see it from a socialist perspective: if you're a big player, that's the burden you must bear in order for the market to remain a fair place to do business.
In plenty countries, repeatedly trying to contact someone after the person said "don't contact me" would be grounds for suing the contacting party. And given Amazon clearly doesn't give a fuck about sellers hounding customers, that would be my first bet.
So, people in this situation might be interested in actually replying one of those messages, with the following: "I will not remove the review. Please stop contacting me. Further contact will be understood as [harassment|disturbance of peace|etc.], acc. to [insert law in your country], and passive to litigation."
Also, unless the goods in question are expensive, resist the temptation to accept a refund, in exchange for removing the review. When you're dealing with dishonest sellers, it's well worth to get a small burden (no refund) to give them a bigger one (bad rep).
I've seen people accept the refund and then edit the review to not only make it clear that the product is shit, that the seller is refunding products for good reviews.
I once negatively reviewed a drone on Amazon. Their EMEA boss emailed me out of the blue wanting to set up a phone conversation to convince me otherwise. Really needy and gross! I reported this to Amazon who said that wasn’t “meant to happen”, but I doubt any sanction came from that.
I reported this to Amazon who said that wasn’t “meant to happen”
The simple fact that third party sellers can contact buyers by email is enabling this crap.
All Amazon has to do is build some messaging system so all communication between sellers and buyers happen on Amazon instead of by email. In case of abuse, it could be reported easily.
I bought a cheap $60 or $70 drone on Amazon and eventually gave it a 3-star rating. I was hardly being critical of the product at all, just gave an honest review. The next day I received an email from the company offering me $100 Amazon giftcard to remove the review.
Mind sharing the name of the product? (email in profile) Hoping to farm this with a few Amazon accounts. Feel like I can probably make a grand in about an hour of work which is competitive with my day job.
If I do a return after receiving the gift card, I think I could turn this up.
Just like Lotus Notes was posting revenue growth in 2008, as a clearly dead product, I wonder if Amazon fails to realize how much consumer trust it has lost because their sales continue to increase. I have gone from an Amazon-lover to an Amazon-hater because of a few bad third-party seller experiences and while I still buy a lot of stuff on Amazon I:
* usually avoid third-party sellers
* refuse to buy food or baby products at Amazon
* have shifted some of my purchasing to trusted brands that curate a collection of good products, like Trader Joe's and Uncommon Goods.
Sellers frequently contact me asking me to change my review in return for some gift card. Pro tip: Change the review, take the gift card, spend the gift card, and then change the review back.
That should disincentivize this behavior.
Oh and of course, don't use your real phone number.
Yeah, me as well - buying direct, if possible, or from another vendor. Amazon is not trustworthy. Sure, it merely provides a common marketplace, but one expects a certain beneficial gatekeeping, which seems absent.
It is commonplace to see ordinary items priced many, many times over value: say a pvc elbow for hundreds of dollars. I've wondered, "What happens when some mope accidentally buys one of these?"
It's not only Amazon reviews. But also Google My Business reviews. Not to mention Yelp.
One of our businesses depend a lot on GMB reviews. Fortunately we're good about customer service and doing a good job, so 98% of our reviews are 5 stars.
However, in a couple of cases, customers gave us one star for things we had absolutely no control over, or something that was quite trivial and could be resolved in a minute or two. It's insane what that very tiny segment of reviewers will do.
There is good and bad about this. We've found a few bad reviews are actually a good thing, since people have said directly to us that we seem like a "Real" company. They know that reviews are gamed a lot these days. And they realize that real companies make mistakes. So we take those "L"'s and move on.
I don't agree with the heavy-handedness, but I understand they some do it. These guys are taking it too far though.
With returns to third party sellers so difficult, I'm not sure why anyone would bother buying from them. I've yet to find a better price by a third party. Would like to hear some reasons why they were preferred for some purchases.
Yeah this shit has got to stop. I'm sorry that you're competing on a platform that is overly sensitive to the truth, but hound Amazon, not your customers. And if you don't like it, maybe use all that fervor to organize and start competitors that aren't sensitive to that kind of truthtelling from customers: take all of the vendors who are disfavored by the platform and run something that isn't skewed. The tech has been out here for long enough that someone needs to make an amazon competitor.
It seems like this is a problem that will solve itself, after this article and some more coverage make this well known scores of people will probably order stuff and leave bad reviews to get refunds and maybe even additonal money back. The selles can't possibly keep doing this for more and more fake reviews.
Long time Amazon Seller here.
It's against Amazon TOS to contact Amazon's customers outside the Amazon messaging system, and they are really heavy handed against sellers breaching this.
If you complain to Amazon that the seller is contacting you outside the Amazon messaging platform and harrassing you, then Amazon will close their seller account.
Alternatively you can threaten to report them to Amazon for this and they will go away.
I had a seller hassle me on my personal email after me telling them to stop asking for removal of an honest review in exchange for a replacement of a poorly made product.
Literally could not find a way to tell Amazon, so I left a review on their seller page.
Amazon deleted that review because "product was fulfilled by Amazon"
so I did... I gave them a two star review with something along the lines of "kept pestering me to leave feedback"
then they started emailing me demanding that I remove it, which I ignored
then they started phoning the number for the delivery, which happened to be an elderly relative (as they were the order recipient)
contacted Amazon, who responded with "we'll deal with the issue and get back to you within 48 hours", which never happened
my prime subscription will now lapse (having been a prime member for more than a decade)