It is not that I think 50% is a lot but it is the same 50% when amazon is selling fakes. If amazon would be able to sell items that are original and the money would go to the right person maybe 50% is ok. This is not the case by a long shot.
As a former Amazonian who has worked on vat, compliance, taxes, product compliance etc, I can tell you, really from an unbiased perspective that Amazon is doing everything they can to terminate the bad actors.
This includes the fake reviews etc. Lets say you have a charger for iphones, you cant have text for the ASIN saying for iphone, it will get delisted immediatelly, you have to say "compatible with iphone" and such.
The main weakness is how products are created, the catalogue principle, this allows some to fly under the radar for a bit sometimes.
And Amazon will not immediatelly shut down a whole sellers account, but rather target ASINs one by one.
The best way for a buyer to deal with this is to leave a sellers(not product) review and ask for a refund, you will always get the refund, Amazon always pushes liability to the sellers in order to protect the brand image and to not be exploitable.
Once theres enough of reviews and refunds, the sellers will get shut down and the funds will be held on hold, just like a banl does for credit card processors.
The cost to do business on amazon with fakes repeatedly(need new companies every time etc) is quite high, if not prohibitivelly high.
Do not suck it up, do the 2 things mentioned to keep the place tidy.
Amazon is doing nothing about the total product switches where hard drives have reviews about laundry detergent. They’re clearly not doing basic easy prevention.
Customers try really hard to report stuff like this and Amazon actively thwarts them.
It’s insane to say that Amazon is trying really hard to prevent fraud. Maybe some types of fraud, sure. But so much of the customers-facing fraud is actively supported by Amazon, like Amazon puts actual active effort into preventing customers from reporting it!
As a former Amazonian too, I can tell you that we internally had several feature request open to certain teams who could not give two shits about customers anymore. We (a bunch of engineers working on the website platform) we enraged about the incompetence some other teams were showing when it comes to customer satisfaction. And I know for a fact that Amazon is not doing everything they can, not by a long shot. The problem is that the way how Amazon operates the quality is really all over the place, depending on teams much more than in other companies.
I used to buy everything on Amazon and slowly transitioned to traditional stores and only buy things that I cannot in an offline store. Btw. the quality declined over time so you can't say that it was never great. 10 years ago you could have much more confidence that you get what you paid for then today.
Hi there, nice meeting you.
Yes, as a dev, it will be hard to push feature requests, I have realized this much, the whole query tools and seller central are rigid and ther are few changes.
It is probably very hard to get features approved because there are many stakeholders involved etc.
There is indeed a massive segregation between the teams, the only correspondence is via the ticketing system and sometimes dms via Chime, which happens rather slow, if at all.
Now, it depends who you mean by customers, Amazon does not consider the end buyers as first class customers, their customers are the sellers.
I know what you mean by some "rogue" teams, without naming any by name, but it is core departments.
There exist some parallel departments, like literally doing the same tasks, but by different procedures, as many teams develop their own procedures(for example the vat teams did everything from scratch and even the andon advisors struggle to follow on that).
I have seen it happen, teams doing the very same tasks, but in totally different ways, neither is wrong, but it does cause confusion, usually its the older teams not catching up with new developments, from what I have seen.
The "SOPs" are more applied on a global level rather than on a team layer.
I am not sure if the US market is different than Europe and Uk, it could be, I never had access to US SC. I do not shop online often, maybe 10 times in 10 years, most of it via Amazon, simply because I get from them what I order and very fast.
Any other platform I had tried I regretred very fast.
Or lets ask it this way?
How could amazon ensure that all the products are legit before they are being delivered?
I am aware of comingling, which can be disabled afaik.
But its impossible to check every item before its shipped and if its seller fullfilled orders, there is no way either.
I wouldnt know how to improve that other than shutting a sellers account down upon first report, which then leaves you open to false claims by competitors etc.
For example, if you want to hurt a competitor, you could just publish many fake 5 star(not 1 star) product reviews in an unreasonably short time(higher than usual frequency) and that will likely be the death knell for the review feature, it would be disabled.
Of course, I have also seen dog collars falsly being flagged as baby toys and the AI findig ridiculous dead end path for case handling and the translation bots having impeccable, even most eloquent language skills, but the conrent being way off. Sometimes these bots get the "needs no human review" approval, when they are not ready for business.
And dont get me started on the "outsourcers":-)
From what I have seen, most dev work is thrown at SC and the various ASIN back offices for the catalogue content.
Seen some rather bad db queries for the oracle instances and shared workbook usage where you rather shouldnt make that choice etc.
But the website front end gets the least "love".
I should habe qualified my statements with "as far I am aware".
> How could amazon ensure that all the products are legit before they are being delivered?
Better question yet, should Amazon exist in this form if it cannot ensure that all products are legit? We quite often assume that the current for of existence is the only way to go about the problem.
With the power of pki and blockchain it is trivial to create a platform (I know because I was part of a team that created one) where traceability is a feature and it is impossible to game the system the same way it is possible now with the current fulfilment situation.
This is a legitimate question, most likely the hordes of legal and compliance have ensured its "legal".
They offer the refund remedy, but i suspect(actually, I am sure, I have worked in banking and fintech before) that is to prevent chargebacks.
It is surprising how many chargebacks are mitigated this way, if any merchant, even Amazon, gets hit by too many chargebacks, the acquirer will shut them down if heavy penalties are no remedy.
But knowing Amazons order volumes, it is probably still too lucrative for the acquirers to sack Amazon as a merchant.
Amazon should do something about it, you have a good point, they are good at shuffling liability, the concept is one of a kind, but they should apply the same to product integrity and QA.
Someone somewhere is seeing the numbers and has not seen a need to intervene on the matter yet.
I am sure you remember the tree charts of teams, all starting and leading to the c level, right?
Its either c level or the c level reports making these decisions.
I think removing comingling and strictly banning the infringing accounts upon first report should solve this issue 99%. Block, hold the funds, review and make a final decision.
I would not tolerate mislabeled storage devices or fakes.
For example, there have been aldo shoes for impossible prices on there, I think Aldo choses not to sell on Amazon, so it might take a while before someone realizes that.
Usually the system detects such things quite well, if a company has a brand and a patent, they are supper protected on amazon, for example selling boots looking anything like the docs and mertens brand will get shut down fast and efficiently.
Maybe some brands are more protected than others, I do not know.
I am more and more inclined to purchase things that I can hold in my hand or have it in the room with me and does not require internet connection to function.
Overbooking is intentional policy. It has nothing to do with data consistency.
To the contrary, consistency is extremely important so that they overbook by exactly the right amount, to compensate for the statistically expected no-shows.
It is a form of coherence for the system, though. And in the spirit of the same ideas. That is, it is an intentional policy for databases, too.
And there is no "exactly right amount" that makes it work. They keep options for forcing people off flights if they planned it wrong.
Is also why they don't let gate agents over sell a flight. They keep a stronger consistency on that, for this exact reason. Over selling would fit in what someone else called external consistency.
How about I order something, but the inventory was off, so I never get my item. This is how you get unhappy customers. You could have buffer inventory to help with your bad system, but then you are tying up money in inventory..
I would wager, in complete ignorance of the real implementation, that the knowledge that they can overbook means that they can relax some of their requirements. If two servers can’t talk to each other to coordinate for a while, they could still each sell tickets.
No, it's because of CAP forces to make a compromise. If there was a way to be available and consistent there would not be overbooking. But they chose availability because losing sales is worse than dealing with overbooking.
Exactly same with Amazon, they will not bother checking that the product is actually available because then you will miss the sale when the warehouse service is down or slow, which it would be all the time because it has to be a single place of failure. Its better to refund orders for non existent items than to miss sales.
Consistency requires single source of truth which implies single place of failure. There is tremendous cost to it, it's not done for no reason like you say.
Airlines operate on the principle that a certain percentage of customers are no show. They would like to fly the planes fully booked so they allow some overbooking and they are controlling how much it gets overbooked.
If it was up to CAP there would be 200% overbooking for certain flights and the airline would go bust within a year.
> why bother with an interpreted language in the first place
+1
As a person who uses Python for 12 years professionally I usually try to avoid it as much as I can. When you have a Python problem you usually have a C, C++, Rust, libc, arch problem that you do not realise. Most of the useful parts of Python are written in C, C++, Fortran, Rust so when you try to deploy it some less frequently used platform it can burst into flames the worst kind of ways. You can try to deploy the AWS Lambda / Python 3.9 and see the lolz. I have spent more hours on trying to get some Python lib work on a platform than learning Rust.
I think interpreted languages are a dead end especially with bad practices. I make my living writing Python but it is a misery every direction. It is not an accident that Rust is the most loved language continuously because it just works. Anything I try to do in it works as expected and I am not walking on a mine field.
Let me give you a simple example how Python can surprise you. Lets create an app in Python that uses a lib called X. You build your project and everything works locally, unit tests are ok, integration tests too and so on. Now deploy this code to AWS Lambda (not your choice, employer decided to go with that). You package everything up on a Linux that matches the architecture of the target (lets say X64). If you are not familiar with setting the target Python version with pip (and most documentation does not mention that for Lambda) you deploy your code and try to invoke it. Fail. You have X.311.so in your deployment package and Lambda tries to load X.39.so. Now you need to figure out how to set the version or have a build env that matches the CPU AND the Python version with the target system.
I could continue this rabbit hole for some more but the point is that you can't talk about Python alone, you need to pull in the Cartesian product of libc, libXX, C, C++, Fortrant, all the compilers for these, cpu architectures and Python versions. On a lucky they you might have a working system.
With Rust everything just worked the first time we tried to use it. I could not believe it how easy it was to put out a working system at the first try. It only beats Python by an order of magnitude in terms of performance but the amount of effort it took us to deploy it was also much less.
> Most of the useful parts of Python are written in C, C++, Fortran, Rust so when you try to deploy it some less frequently used platform it can burst into flames the worst kind of ways.
You can always write it in python.
This is the attitude which prevails those days. C is to blame because someone wrote Python in C.
What stops those people implementing the standard POSIX in rust or python ? Or even the X windows system or (for clairvoyants) the Wayland in Python or Rust ?
Or even better, they can make their own OS written in these languages (and even call it MULTICS).
Except you can't. Python has horrendous performance. You can write it in C and pretend it is Python.
> What stops those people implementing the standard POSIX in rust or python ? Or even the X windows system or (for clairvoyants) the Wayland in Python or Rust ?
> Or even better, they can make their own OS written in these languages (and even call it MULTICS).
This is exactly what is happening in the industry with really nice progress. We are entering the era when bad practices and subpar performance is not acceptable anymore. I am really hoping that Rust takes over devops and data at the very least. It started to enter the IoT space and some OS development (Linux supports it).
I am really hoping that this trend continuous and we start to see more an more device drivers in Rust and other safety and security critical systems.
As far as Python goes, I would be totally happy if Python would become the interpreted language that I could use on the top of Rust and I had to deal with only Rust problems.
As a manager I still struggle how to motivate people. There are very few people who just work because they would like to achieve something. The rest of people are using all kinds of excuses to just sit around and do nothing or go for easy wins which are flawed many way instead of putting in the effort to do things right.
Either you hired bad people or what you offer isn't all that abnormal in the marketplace (ie. you can be replaced fairly easily). Your bosses receive a larger proportion of the rewards of any particular initiative and they are considerably more motivated, that isn't a strange coincidence. Be prepared to move some of those rewards down the chain and watch the magic happen.
I was just saying that syntax arguments most of the time are silly. I like LISP and ML languages, so for me it doesn't really matter if I need to write LISPy code or ML code.
“News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.” - William Randolph Hearst
I think it is undeniable that new organizations are deliberately misleading the public in many cases, not necessarily part of the conspiracy but simply acting as the agent of the government. There are many cases when is became obvious.
It is also easy to find sources that are free from government collusion usually classified either far left or far right whatever those mean.
It is like buying Oracle or IBM. Companies really like to hire companies like Tata. Why? Because managers are like this. I don't have a better explanation. Best advise I got for you is to find a 3rd party (or couple of 3rd parties) that have good clients. It worked out very well for me. Working with 5 of these and I have a continuous stream of consulting work.
As a hobby software engineer who mostly writes ETL jobs in Python the biggest selling point of Rust is Cargo. I usually use a lot of .clone() in my code and most of my fields are Strings which would make a seasoned Rust/C++ laugh at the code. However, the performance of novice Rust beats 10+ years of experience Python by a factor of 10 (favouring Rust).
With Cargo I can build code that just runs. With Python it is always a gamble. Different arch? You need to install different packages to compile the C/C++/Fortran code if the library author did not care about WHL. Starting up an application always a gamble, do we have all the deps? Did we miss some?
And so on. With Rust + Cargo I have confidence that the executable runs. Yes, the compilation is an extra step, but I would have that trade every single time for extra safety and reliability.
> As a hobby software engineer who mostly writes ETL jobs in Python the biggest selling point of Rust is Cargo. I usually use a lot of .clone() in my code and most of my fields are Strings which would make a seasoned Rust/C++ laugh at the code. [...] Yes, the compilation is an extra step, but I would have that trade every single time for extra safety and reliability.
It sounds like you'd be better off with higher-level Haskell for these tasks.
Absolutely not. The last time I have tried Haskell it was failing some pretty basic tasks. The JSON library required to be re-compiled for some reason and it used 20+G of RAM when the build crashed. The community is flat out hostile towards Mac users and a basic request was closed with a comment that Mac is a broken platform and it should not be used. I do not have time for these, Rust offers a much better experience and the community is very helpful even if you are asking silly questions.
> The community is flat out hostile towards Mac users and a basic request was closed with a comment that Mac is a broken platform and it should not be used.
It was years ago, I try to dig up the link on Github but can't even remember which project I was trying to compile. It was about static linking on Mac.
This is exactly what OP is talking about. You have XML instead of ASN.1 Imagine if we had only one way of doing data transfer between computer systems.
