Amazon is happy to rake an innovative and thriving seller over the coals arguably in an attempt to enforce policy violations!
So they have this whole team setup to do enforcement, and they are being totally manipulated and unwittingly weaponized?
So Amazon either (1) they simply don’t care which makes no sense because then why have the team in the first place, (2) their team cares very much and were just too stupid or ill-equipped to do their job and even got totally manipulated, or (3) Amazon actually wants this result and intentionally destroyed this company so that the bad actor could thrive?
None of that makes any sense! And this Chinese seller was apparently paying less in fees, so there isn’t even an economic motive!
And this story plays out over how many products/sellers every single day? So Amazon is the Wild West and their own trust and safety team is firing the bullets? Weaponized incompetence?!
Is there not a class action lawsuit in here somewhere? Amazon has inflicted serious economic destruction on their partner thru negligence or malice to be sure.
And of course we’ll never see a postmortem or any kind of apology. No transparency whatsoever when it comes to one of the world’s biggest online marketplaces?
The only explanation that would make any sense at all, for which there seems to be one piece of evidence, is that there’s an inside employee taking a large cut from the Chinese seller to boost their rank, kill their competition, and lower their fees. I’d guess on the order of 10% of total take. The only evidence is that somehow the Chinese seller got ahold of PII for the company that went bankrupt and threatened them personally. Where’d they get the contact info? Their lower fee and invulnerability to their own violations is also suggestive of an insider collaborator.
But then, if this is true there would be an audit trail a mile long…
In the end I’m left simply stunned at the level of gross incompetence which seems to permeate everything in this world, and yet somehow amazing things still do get built.
It's principle-agent problems all the way down; the compliance and enforcement teams do not care about the best interest of Amazon as a whole. They care about ensuring that the specific KPIs they're evaluated on look good, from top-of-division management down to line members. In all likelihood, Amazon gets exactly what they measure - something like number of tickets closed, number of legal or regulatory incidents, etc.
You always want to identify the job title of who you're talking to and have a good guess as to what their priorities are. It sounds like they repeatedly talked to people whose job description is "close as many support tickets as possible with the hours and staffing resources you have". I'm not at all surprised that the result was getting their tickets closed with zero long-term improvement or concern about their situation.
It's just interesting that the game has became so visible rigged that a large player can have obviously no capacity at all on any of their core competences, and keep winning. It used to be that the amount of incompetence was small enough for it to stay hidden, and the general public could stay deceived by just claiming that the player got there by being the best.
Amazon burns through low and mid-level staff. The whole team your referring to probably has 1 to 2 years experience at Amazon and is under constant pressure to deliver results that look good for management otherwise bye bye job.
Competence at resolving the task at hand, understanding of the core issues and forward progress against platform level threats are hard to achieve when you have created a purposefully unstable work environment like what Amazon is today.
It is just amazon moving closer to its competition.
Do you think alibaba really cares when a seller does some shady stuff to get ahead? What I think is happening is amazon drop shippers being the middleman who got cut out and the whole platform moving closer to a chinese model of product distribution.
Just look at what amazon is actually selling, a lot of it is just straight china imports by no name firms. Do you want to figure who is ripping of whom in that web?
>Amazon is happy to rake an innovative and thriving seller over the coals arguably in an attempt to enforce policy violations!
Were they actually innovative? Or were they just reselling another made and designed in China product, maybe with some customizations and "premium" materials?
