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Prime and Punishment: Dirty dealing in the $175 billion Amazon Marketplace
Last August, Zac Plansky woke to find that the rifle scopes he was selling on Amazon had received 16 five-star reviews overnight. Usually, that would be a good thing, but the reviews were strange. The scope would normally get a single review a day, and many of these referred to a different scope, as if they'd been cut and pasted from elsewhere. "I didn't know what was going on, whether it was a glitch or whether somebody was trying to mess with us," Plansky says.
As a precaution, he reported the reviews to Amazon. Most of them vanished days later — problem solved — and Plansky reimmersed himself in the work of running a six-employee, multimillion-dollar weapons accessory business on Amazon. Then, two weeks later, the trap sprang. "You have manipulated product reviews on our site," an email from Amazon read. "This is against our policies. As a result, you may no longer sell on Amazon.com, and your listings have been removed from our site."
A rival had framed Plansky for buying five-star reviews, a high crime in the world of Amazon. The funds in his account were immediately frozen, and his listings were shut down. Getting his store back would take him on a surreal weeks-long journey through Amazon's bureaucracy, one that began with the click of a button at the bottom of his suspension message that read "appeal decision."
When you buy something on Amazon, the odds are, you aren't buying it from Amazon at all. Plansky is one of 6 million sellers on Amazon Marketplace, the company's third-party platform. They are largely hidden from customers, but behind any item for sale, there could be dozens of sellers, all competing for your click. This year, Marketplace sales were almost double those of Amazon retail itself, according to Marketplace Pulse, making the seller platform alone the largest e-commerce business in the US.
Long read about manipulation in Amazon's marketplace, featuring various stories like the one above.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 22 2018, @10:54PM
Sounds like you were too clever for the programmers at PayPal? In other words, they never anticipated your particular combination of location and currency. If the coders didn't allow for this edge case, then you are going to land in the hands of customer (dis)service who also may have a problem figuring out just what you did. An account (credit card or regular bank account) in Australia, denominated in USD must be pretty rare, it's not like you can pop across the border to go shopping...
I'm in USA, near the Canadian border. It's common for Canadians to have a bank account in USD if they cross the border often and shop in USA. When the exchange rate has been reversed (historically) the reverse was also common. Our local merchants and banks understand this.
Question if you are still watching, this didn't really make sense to me, but it may be a question of definitions:
> ... Australian credit card that was loaded with US dollars.
Does this mean that you carry a positive balance on the credit card? Credit cards here are normally negative balance, that's what I pay off each month to avoid interest charges.
A few times a returned item has credited to my card and then there is a positive balance, until I buy some things. Once I remember there was a small (~$2.00) credit balance on a card that I wasn't using--after a few months the card issuer mailed me a paper check to take the balance to zero, they didn't want to hold my money any longer.