Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Friday December 21 2018, @02:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the where-there's-a-will dept.

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by vux984 on Friday December 21 2018, @04:40PM (1 child)

    by vux984 (5045) on Friday December 21 2018, @04:40PM (#777241)

    "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.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 22 2018, @10:49AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 22 2018, @10:49AM (#777490)

    I'd like a huge blow