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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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 22 2018, @11:23AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 22 2018, @11:23AM (#777500)

    The straw that broke the cow's back was buying something from ebay with an Australian credit card that was loaded with US dollars. The item was displayed in US dollars. The payment went through in US dollars. Paypal converted it from US to AUD dollars charging a fee and adding that to the amount. My bank received the request on my credit card for an amount in AUD so they automatically converted it from AUD to US and charged a fee adding the fee on top.

    PayPal has a very explicit currency conversion option. You really should read it. It's on every checkout. It tells you from where the money comes from and in what currency.

    PayPal markups tend to be higher than CC, so it's generally best to just let them charge your CC without any conversions.