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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 Friday December 21 2018, @03:57PM (4 children)
Yes, next question.
This isn't that much different from when they randomly ban customers from the store for returns.
This also shows why businesses shouldn't be using Amazon as their store front. Maybe use it as part of their web presence, but it definitely shouldn't be their whole web presence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 21 2018, @04:23PM
these lazy minded, cheapskate, sell outs will do anything to keep from having to pay someone to write a custom web app for them, even though there are hungry devs that would do it for cheap if they just looked around a little. not me anymore, but i used to would have.
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Friday December 21 2018, @04:26PM
Well, some huge portion of web shoppers go to Amazon first. So the seller has the choice between missing much or all of the market and a devil's bargain. The real lesson is that if you do business through Amazon, move your income into accounts they don't control every day so that if your Amazon seller account has a problem you've only lost a tiny bit of previous revenue.
I debated the same kind of thing with an iOS application developer a few years ago. I pointed out that Apple could shut his company's product down for no reason at all, and with no legal right to appeal the decision. He (or she, whatever) agreed, but said that at the time the overwhelming percent of money spent on mobile applications was spent on iOS. So they could build a product and distribute it separately and retain 100% owner control, and then never reach a large enough set of potential customers to turn a profit. The iOS app store had all of the risk but also all of the reward. That was four or five years ago, I imagine the Android application store has some larger portion of mobile application spending. But all of the same risks apply with the Google app store, Google is simply so far less willing to burn app developers than Apple.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Friday December 21 2018, @04:40PM (1 child)
"This also shows why businesses shouldn't be using Amazon as their store front."
Lots of them have their own presence, but what if 75-90% of your sales come through amazon? Getting bumped off amazon is a huge blow to these businesses.
The only thing worse is when amazon decides to sell the same thing as you directly, and then undercuts you out of the market... at least you can appeal stuff like this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 22 2018, @10:49AM
I'd like a huge blow