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?
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.
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.
You gotta keep up with your emails.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Answer: Because contracts and if the insurer breaches them courts get involved and penalties get handed out.
>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.
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.
I really don't see why insurance would pay out under these circumstances.
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 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.
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).
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.
Could you share more about the sort of issues you face?
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.
Agreed with all your points except they really should have some `if (claim > minForHumanAgent){ bypassAutomatedHandling(); }` logic for millions of dollars.
At enterprise size you automate your support to save money. Even outsourced a call Center is expensive, and Amazon’s shitty algorithmic support isn’t.
I know, because we do this in every enterprise sector, including the public sector. The “advantage” amazon have is that it doesn’t 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 didn’t 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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/02/world/the-tyrant-mao-as-t...
We have a judicial system to deal with issues like this which generally handles things fairly regardless of the size of each party.
No they are not. It’s only considered a failure when the position is abused to prevent competition.
You can have a monopoly situation where competition just doesn’t bother to enter because the monopoly holder hasn’t abused the situation to make entering the market attractive.
Additionally, the government frequently grants monopolies because they don’t 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.
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.
Amazon is often the most expensive option for me.
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?
The only thing worse than the arbitrary thing is the double rating. I’m forced to give 5* to shit service.
It’s annoying
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.
Amazon just doesn't care.
The PROBLEM is when you marry these things together without proper controls in place by society. We haven't completely thought through the ramifications.
Reminds me of a novel that was written over 100 years ago:
> The Trial (German: Der Process,[1] later Der Proceß, Der Prozeß 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.
This will continue until these companies start losing large monetary value cases in court.
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.
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?
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.
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 we’ve no way of knowing to make of that.
I don’t know what to say other that I read the piece with some interest and for all know it’s a work of fiction, but heh I clicked.
>In another example, a third-party bookseller told Subcommittee staff that Amazon delisted 99% of his business’s inventory in September 2019.1674 The bookseller requested that Amazon return its products, which were stored in Amazon’s warehouses.1675 As of July 2020, Amazon had only returned a small fraction of the bookseller’s 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 Subcommittee’s sixth hearing, Mr. Bezos testified that Amazon “invest[s] hundreds of millions of dollars in systems” that police counterfeits.1823 However, Amazon’s approach appears to be ineffective, resulting in suspensions of many innocent, third-party sellers, with devastating effects on some sellers’ businesses.1824
>One third-party seller told the Subcommittee that Amazon blocked some of her listings, citing a number of her products as “inauthentic.” 1827 The seller provided evidence to Amazon that, not only were her vendor’s 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...
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".
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.
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 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.
> "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.
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.
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.
Another one I've heard of is Thompson & Holt - again not a recommendation but they may be able to help.
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.
So Amazon is both a blessing and a curse to small retailers I feel.
"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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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’ll always buy local if I can get it at a similar price, and I’ll even pay slightly more for local, but I’m not going to spend 25%+ more for an identical product and Amazon’s prices usually really are that much cheaper.
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.
Local retail first.
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.
Surely he could produce copies for the reporter?
>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.
For all we know, the complaints were from a competitor that knew exactly what would happen.
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
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.
Is this even legal?
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?
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.
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...
The biggest issue is arguably billing and pricing. You have no idea how much something will cost until it’s 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 Switzerland’s 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 – 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-...
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.
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 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 america’s 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.
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.
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 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 can choose. We aren't actually compelled to just keep collectively being assholes because that's what we have currently.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>When he tried to submit an inventory removal order through Amazon's web portal, it wouldn't let him.
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?
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.
**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.
**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 AmazonBasics™ versions of your product(s) and
throw your customers to the wolves while your demand
crumbles into to dust.
Is there evidence of this happening?
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.
Actuaries have been a thing for quite a while.
It’s a shame but humans can be ruthless.
I don't remember this at all, so you must not have ever really upset me.
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.
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.
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.
With someone who will keep everyone busy with meaningless work at all times. Took years of painful effort for her to accept “no” 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.
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 “hours” of digging and endless questions on “you sure you got it here?”
Well she had gotten RadioShack and Frys Electronics mixed up. Apparently same store in her mind.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve tried sharing this insight with the UX designers at my current gig, but for some reason they’re skeptical when I suggest making our UI harder for customers to use. ;-)
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...
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]
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.
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.
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.)
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).
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?
I buy a fair number of items on AliExpress and banggood. I don’t want “good customer service” bloating the costs. (Ironically, I still get good service on the 1% of transactions that go wrong, even when I can’t really prove anything. I bought two nice lipo chargers and got sent one. One email and remedied in a couple of weeks.)
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'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.
Why does a journalist feel the need to get involved here? This seems like a job for the lawyers.
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.
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.
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).
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!"
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...
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.
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."
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".
https://decathlon.com.au/collections/climbing-karabiners-qui...
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).
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.
I cannot be an informed consumer because I am not a doctor. If a doctor determines I need X medication to live, then that’s what I need. I can’t google search my way to a medical degree.
I cant vote with my dollars because I don’t want to die. If my medication costs $5 month, I’ll pay that. If it costs $500 I’ll 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.
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).
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.
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 have any real world examples of this actually happening?
> the government frequently grants monopolies because they don’t 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.
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 don’t 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 aren’t needed.
A government guaranteeing that a competitor can’t exist is when monopolies become ripe for abuse. That’s why government granted monopolies need regulation.
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.
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.
Eventually they become known and are handled separately because they would fake problems and drive people insane.
Some people should be banned from support.
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.
Because some problems are NP complete.
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.
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.
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.
If Amazon didn’t 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).
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.
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.
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 didn’t have a monopoly on, say, copy paper.
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.
"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...
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.
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 months…)
All I've done is try to reiterate and clarify what my own position is. That's it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
> Mediante alcune aziende dell’hinterland fiorentino, pratese e dell’empolese - le stesse che producono quelle che poi diventano le vere borse firmate - il gruppo provvedeva a tutte le fasi produttive e commerciali
your turn.
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.
It's just good sense to have all of these images available at all time, regardless of selling platform.
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.
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
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.
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.
Note for the concerned: I am receiving treatment and a number of people in my circle are aware of the struggle, so this isn’t 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.
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.
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 wouldn’t 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 didn’t stop the persistent badgering. When platform reputation is on the line it’s 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
So many times people came in with a “20,000” collection they assembled. Basically client spent years of buying 3x over actual value as an “investment”
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.
All acquired when I was a nintendo power obsessed kid :)
Hope to sell it some day to a SV tech bro for 5 figures
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.
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.
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.
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.
Discovery is more limited with arbitration, third party discovery is very limited, usually use witness statements instead of depositions. Arbitration almost never forms precedent, and arbitrators are not bound by case law/precedent. Decisions made by an arbitrator can only be appealed under more limited circumstances than if made by a judge. This means it is less likely a decision will be made based on the existing law. A court can grant interim relief, generally an arbitrator can not. A court will sanction parties that act in bad faith, in practice an arbitrator will not. A court judgement/sanction/relief can be enforceable in a way that an arbitrators finding would not be. This adds up to in practice making a successful claim more difficult for a wronged consumer
Arbitration is generally cheaper, limited discovery is cheaper. Not being limited to the same evidentiary rules and to respecting precedent allows the arbitrator to make more equitable decisions, that conflict with the law. Arbitration is faster.
Sorry to hear that. I hope the rest of your week, and the week to come, are absolutely awesome to make up for it!
(If ground was decoupled, that would be simply a matter of attaching probe and scope ground at both terminals of the resistor.)
Edit: I still bought one as is, lol.
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.