Shit like this is what made me lose confidence in Amazon and I stopped my prime subscription.
My wife bought me “luxury” branded jackets and clothing for fall. Half of them were counterfeit. I called Amazon and they said I can return them and they’ll send me new ones. Ok. How will I know those won’t be counterfeit? Worse, I found a jacket was counterfeit after the return period when it literally started to fall apart at the seams. Welp, Amazon said they can’t refund me.
Multiple times my packages are either not delivered on time or aren’t delivered at all. 2 times they were half way across the state. When I called them to ask, they wanted me to confirm my address since they magically and suddenly couldn’t find my address anymore. Well guys you’ve delivered 10k+ worth of goods to me at this address this year alone. WTF?!
My customer service experience also degraded every other instance. When they missed my last delivery date I called them and threatened to cancel and the rep said “Sure, Sir, let me do that after I reorder this item”. He figured it was quicker or reorder an item than wait for it to get back from across the state.
Technically, the pervasive Amazon counterfeit problem is unrelated to the fake review problem. Both are serious problems that Amazon does little to combat, but they're not the same. The counterfeiting is more insidious because Amazon is entirely at fault for mixing legit merchandise with counterfeits. Fake reviews on the other hand aren't Amazon's fault. That's just the world being filled with heinous assholes out to make a buck by cheating, lying, and stealing from everyone else. At best Amazon could independently audit and review all products themselves. Actually if they did that I'd probably start buying from them again...
Amazon absolutely has to deal with the fake review problem. In some ways, you can think of it as analogous to google search. Google's moneymaker isn't the search; it's the ads. But Google spends a lot of time fixing search quality and dealing with people gaming search results because otherwise the ad revenue disappears.
I wouldn't be surprised if the actions Google took to push Amazon results off the first page product results skewed the Amazon product catalog towards gamed marketplace results. Amazon was getting a free ride on Google's results sort of like Wikipedia for a fairly long time. Now you have to dig to find links to either of them. The effect on Amazon may also be a result of pricing changes Google made around 2015.
I'm surprised to hear about this, as I frequently find myself having to explicitly -amazon -$ and other things to keep garbage product listings out of my google search results.
Amazon kind of audits and reviews products, or at least has an official program for sellers to solicit user reviews: it's called Amazon Vine [0].
For the reviewers (the "Vine Voices"), it looks like this: on a regular basis, you can choose a product to review (based on your past reviews, purchasing history etc., maybe - they don't disclose how that works), and Amazon sends the product to you. Within one month, you have to post a review.
You can post whatever review you want; to become a Vine Voice, you need a reasonably high reviewer ranking (mostly based on "helpful" votes: [1]). The reviews are labelled as written by a Vine Voice.
As a side note, I know a Vine Voice, and they get emails from companies offering to reimburse them for a product in exchange for a five star reviews every few days.
The incentive structure can get seriously misaligned if you receive the product for free. You want to keep getting free products, which means that you want to make the person giving you the products happy. Amazon is giving you the products. Amazon is happy, or at least there is a common perception to that effect, if you rate things highly because then more people buy things from them. So you rate more highly so that you can keep receiving free products.
Not only that but, IMO, you can't really objectively review a product you didn't pay for and buy out of your own free will. "That's neat" for a product you got for free can easily be "waste of money" if you had to pay for it.
Most product reviews you see by bloggers and youtubers are seeded this way. Vendors understand that when people are curious about a product, they search for it and click on some reviews. It’s common practice to make sure that they have results by giving them to reviewers.
Reviewers generally fall into 3 categories.
The small time reviewers who are excited to get free stuff, and want more free stuff in the future. Aside from their delight of free product, which gives a major positive bias before they even unbox, there is also the fact that if they trash a product, nobody is sending them one again.
Then there is the professional reviewer. They monetize their website and youtube channel heavily, and they live or die by getting product to review. If they trash a product, they face a huge risk of not receiving anything from that vendor again.
The third is the fully independent outfit that has a revenue stream completely detached from the product, and often have to buy it on their own. This is very expensive, and not many consumers pay for reviews. Consumer Reports is an example.
As a result, almost any kind of review you find is likely worthless, and should be treated as a paid ad.
> As a side note, I know a Vine Voice, and they get emails from companies offering to reimburse them for a product in exchange for a five star reviews every few days.
> Actually if they did that I'd probably start buying from them again
Not that it would inherently solve the problem or prevent pay for play, but it would be a great strategy for Amazon to have an independent review company.
There are problems, though:
1. How do we trust that there's some objectivity, particularly as it relates to things that compete with Amazon products?
2. How could reviewers possibly cover any significant amount of the vast number of products Amazon sells?
Amazon customer service is now quite terrible. Anecdote: I know somebody who has an office that is literally within a 2 block radius of Amazon HQ in Seattle (the new Doppler and Day One buildings). Getting Amazon's third party delivery contractors to successfully deliver to their office suite door, in a high-rise office tower, has been an amazing struggle.
Deliveries get sent back as "rejected" all the time, when the delivery person has actually not even bothered to sign in at the lobby and go up to the office suite floor. More than a half dozen phone calls and chats with Amazon customer service, requesting that they edit the delivery info for the building, have been pretty much fruitless.
This has been similar to my experience recently with a package marked as rejected.
It's a shitty caught in limbo situation - they refused to acknowledge even the possibility that the delivery service might not have made an honest effort to get into the building, and they wouldn't let me cancel the order without a penalty, but they couldn't tell me where my package was and had no way of contacting the carrier for me to schedule another time for delivery. There also seems to be no policy to automatically retry the next day. All they could do was take my phone number and then the delivery company might call me later if they felt like it. It was very bizarre.
Since then I have stopped using free 1-day shipping, because at least in larger buildings UPS and USPS can generally get in fine as they're delivering multiple packages every day. The random small companies that handle the one day shipping seem to be a lot less reliable.
At least in Seattle, the "random small companies" are frequently some random dude with a van and a phone app. They're doing ubereats type package delivery now. There's a pickup center at north Aurora and 145th where a motley assortment of drivers pick up packages and take them to the customer destination now.
This reminds me a bit of my own giant techco bugbear: for the longest time, Google Maps mishandled my home address - literally across the street from their local office - because it didn't recognize the 1/2 in the house number. It would direct users to 1 Fake St rather than N 1/2 Fake St.
To be fair, I imagine a lot of systems don't handle noninteger house numbers very robustly. That "1/2" business just seems like asking for trouble.
The best solution might be to convince your building landlord or management to rename the units as 1 Fake Street Unit A and Unit B, or something like that. Assuming they don't have to fight City Hall to make that happen, they might be willing to help.
You would think, however, that the "1/2" works fine in the text field used for a standard North American address... At least with Amazon and 99% of ecommerce sites there's two separate freeform text entry fields for street address. It's not like these are fields that require a precise integer.
This should enable the actual human making the delivery to see the same thing printed on the label, and visually match it to whatever is labeled "1/2" on the building.
> It's not like these are fields that require a precise integer.
If you are treating the street address as more than a string something is wrong. Its supposed to be a string by design unless you are trying to be efficient by storing ints as ints but then you shouldnt be evaluating them from user input and if you are... Treat it as a raw string.
IIRC Google Maps used to interpolate between points with known addresses on streets to estimate where other numeric addresses were along the street, when they didn't have exact points for them. So there's at least one legitimate example of not treating an address as a string.
With some knowledge of the ordering scheme, you can determine relative locations and route drivers without storing every address on a street. I think it's very easy to imagine a cases where have "1/3" as your street number could cause problems (0.33333333... out of memory) or just dealing with floating point conversion and typing can lead to seemingly random bugs.
Accepting non-integers should be fine, as long as there's no delimiter or reversions to numbers ( e.g.- 321A Main St.), but I could see it being a problem with delimiters. It greatly expands the solution space for recognition tasks.
Is 321 N Main Street: 321 Main St. Unit N or 321 North Main St?
Is 321/A Main St: 321 Main St Unit A, 321-A(ths) Main St, 32 Main St. Unit 1 or A, 3214 Main St (A/4 character recognition failure), 321 Main St (A is escaped by /), 321 AMAIN St., 32 Main St Unit VA.
Where does it switch from a unit number to an address? 321A21B Main St could be read at least a dozen different ways, especially if we allow for recognition errors. Can't we at least agree that a physical building has an integer value and anything inside the building becomes a separate field (Unit, Suite, Floor, Cabana Room, etc)? No one's pumping money into post office modernization and we're not going to see Unicode or Emoji address support, so can't we simply agree on a few rules?
We have a security camera at our front gate. One reason why I no longer order from Amazon is that our porters could actually show me videos of Amazon's delivery contractors going to our gate, pressing the call button, and leaving before the porter could even start speaking.
I had an $800 electronic item that was delivered at 11:30 PM on a Friday night and was left outside of our office building where 300 people worked because we were closed. Took massive effort to convince customer service i never got it. Of course it walked away before i went back Saturday morning to pick it up.
We basically stopped getting any products that go on or in your body from Amazon due to the pervasiveness of fake products on there. Tons of fake makeup, shampoos, vitamins, electronics. imo Amazon is worse than ebay lately with the amount of counterfeit goods.
Regarding a counterfeit product, is the return period relevant? It’s a case of fraud. It seems it would be an open and shut case for a small claim court, if they didn’t provide a refund.
I've had the case that the delivery company didn't get the full address to deliver to. They tried to deliver multiple times and said every time that the address didn't exist or couldn't be found. I called the transportation support to complain and I was dumbfounded that they simply didn't have a correct address.
I don't know who screwed up, Amazon or the delivery company but something definitely went wrong on either side.
I wonder how this is in Europe where the buyer can get very hefty fines for buying counterfeit goods and even heftier fines for bringing said goods across borders.
Personally I don't shop at Amazon so I don't know if it's a problem here.
I was used to always buying on Amazon in Europe and I never had issues. Then I moved to the US and the whole experience is so much worse. Counterfeits, opened/unsealed packages, disappearing packages, 1 day delivery fee paid and package arrives 5 days later and so on.
It's as if it was a different company.
I've never had a counterfeit item, as in not the actual brand I bought. There is a lot of crappy cheap stuff though.
One thing I've noticed is items with the "top seller" tag but if you actually check the category in which they are top seller, it's a category that has nothing to do with the product.
There could be various legitimate reasons, though.
The brand could be overstocked in a particular item and want to get rid of inventory without harming their brand cachet - you're probably not going to find a clearance section on Gucci's website, but that doesn't mean they don't have a need for it.
This is true. But why would they have an overstock? Either it is unpopular and not worth counterfeiting or it’s counterfeited immediately because it’s popular to undercut. The scenarios seem difficult to distinguish.
The consumer looking it up on Amazon isn't going to know which of those two scenarios it is. Thus, my point - blaming the consumer for purchasing it is unfair. There are legitimate reasons for a consumer to think the product is a) real and b) cheaper than usual.
Amazon doesn't deliver the things you bought. I don't understand why you are buying luxury goods off of Amazon when you aren't able to distinguish between counterfeit goods. There is a reason designer stores exist. There are many reasons that Amazon as a company and service are bad but almost none of what you describe is a valid complaint.
Amazon logistics deliver at least 1/3 of the items I purchase from them. A "Prime" branded van literally pulls up to my house and someone who I assume works for Amazon drops the package on my stoop.
> I don't understand why you are buying luxury goods off of Amazon when you aren't able to distinguish between counterfeit goods.
I read this sentence four times and still don't quite understand it. Particularly in response to someone who said they tried to return an item to Amazon exactly because they realized it was counterfeit.
Can you rephrase whatever it was you were trying to say there?
I meant to say distinguish between counterfeit goods and the genuine article. I just think when you spend at least 4 digits on something you should either have experience in the area or buy with someone who does. Should Amazon do a better job on stopping counterfeit? Yes but that doesn't stop you from using common sense.
Also the use of Amazon logistics is very regional and I assumed the OP would have mentioned that.
There is always going to be a good enough margin for selling counterfeit goods of luxury brands that this will most likely never stop.
> I don't understand why you are buying luxury goods off of Amazon when you aren't able to distinguish between counterfeit goods.
His wife bought him a gift. I assume she thought that a company as big as Amazon wouldn't allow sales of counterfeit items on their platform, like I once did.
> My wife bought me “luxury” branded jackets and clothing for fall.
This is a serious problem. My wife goes to Amazon and just buys the top seller of whatever she's looking for(even if its from a no name marketplace seller). I don't think she realizes people can game this system.
Until 2010ish, I thought that Amazon sold all of their listed items and that I had to specifically choose "New & Used" from other sellers to purchase an item from someone else.
Amazon does do deliveries. This is also a valid complaint. Amazon doesn't say don't order X, Y, or Z; they let you order anything. They just need to work harder on solving these issues because I've seen many other complaints like this.
My wife bought me “luxury” branded jackets and clothing for fall. Half of them were counterfeit. I called Amazon and they said I can return them and they’ll send me new ones. Ok. How will I know those won’t be counterfeit? Worse, I found a jacket was counterfeit after the return period when it literally started to fall apart at the seams. Welp, Amazon said they can’t refund me.
Multiple times my packages are either not delivered on time or aren’t delivered at all. 2 times they were half way across the state. When I called them to ask, they wanted me to confirm my address since they magically and suddenly couldn’t find my address anymore. Well guys you’ve delivered 10k+ worth of goods to me at this address this year alone. WTF?!
My customer service experience also degraded every other instance. When they missed my last delivery date I called them and threatened to cancel and the rep said “Sure, Sir, let me do that after I reorder this item”. He figured it was quicker or reorder an item than wait for it to get back from across the state.