Despite trying to instill a customer-centric culture, as soon as Bezos let his foot off the gas, his company just isn't as customer obsessed. Or, they changed their definition of customer from the buyer to the seller.
I dramatically lowered my buying from Amazon about 8 years ago, when I noticed that listings had reviews on items that were completely different than what was being listed. Apparently, sellers sell a known good product that gets good reviews, and then swap it out for something else, so that the new product can piggy back off of the good karma. Amazon just didn't shut this down for years. Also, when Fulfillment services by Amazon mixed the the official provider's inventory with 3rd party distributors and reseller inventories. Sometimes, people would get knock-offs. I knew then, Amazon would coast for at least a decade before the decline would be apparent.
I thought I'd buy more Shopify stock as a result. Dunno if I ever did.
> Or, they changed their definition of customer from the buyer to the seller.
s/seller/shareholder/
I almost never buy from Amazon any more. For certain things it is difficult because Amazon has destroyed so much logistics and has such a stranglehold that a lot small/medium sized companies only sell through Amazon now. I ordered some kitchen gadget a few months ago from the company's own website, thinking I was avoiding Amazon, and it was delivered by an Amazon driver.
Another mind boggling aspect of Amazon’s review system is that it categorises multiple products / variations under one. So if you want to buy products X with variations X1, X2 and X3- the review page for product X1 will also show X2, X3 ratings bundled together. You don’t quite know the rating of X1 individually. You can filter reviews out by the overall rating is the aggregated view. I can’t believe how this is helpful for customers.
I was trying to buy a copy of the Iliad and found that they combined the reviews of EVERY TRANSLATION AND EVERY EDITION - I found people talking about 30+ versions on the same listing!
Reviews for Fagles's Iliad were combined with Pope's Iliad and Lattimore's Iliad and so on and so forth.
Navigation is also borked for books with many different versions - if you play around with the 'hardback', 'paperback', 'audiobook' buttons at the top of the page you'll find there's no consistency about what edition they lead you to.
Maybe that's to combat the strategy where sellers add an irrelevant category or hyper specific one, in order to get the "Best Seller" stamp on their thumbnail.
I slowed down my Amazon purchases drastically when everything I shopped for seemed to be flooded with these thousands of identical products have seemingly randomly generated all-caps brand names like BHHSRE, VHYXZY, XIOU, DAUGHE, JXMOX, LANMU, IBERLS, GMJYC… (yes, these are all actual brands I’ve seen on Amazon).
Jeez, the least they can do is make it look like they are trying to curb abuse.
Bezus checked out long before he moved to emeritus. Wanted to be a movie producer and shoot his rockets. Andy took over with all of the vision of a corporate franchiser running a Dollar Store.
I dramatically lowered my buying from Amazon about 8 years ago, when I noticed that listings had reviews on items that were completely different than what was being listed. Apparently, sellers sell a known good product that gets good reviews, and then swap it out for something else, so that the new product can piggy back off of the good karma. Amazon just didn't shut this down for years. Also, when Fulfillment services by Amazon mixed the the official provider's inventory with 3rd party distributors and reseller inventories. Sometimes, people would get knock-offs. I knew then, Amazon would coast for at least a decade before the decline would be apparent.
I thought I'd buy more Shopify stock as a result. Dunno if I ever did.