Comment on Firefox will have a built-in ‘fake reviews detector’ — Amazon is in trouble
yiliu@informis.land 11 months agoSure. But they’d make similar amounts of money (possibly more) by selling non-counterfeit goods.
They want their market to be open to third parties, because otherwise those third parties are gonna launch competing platforms. Better if they stick with Amazon, and Amazon gets a cut of the sale. There are thousands and thousands of Chinese companies selling products on Amazon, and many of them are fantastic deals. If Amazon blocks them, they all move to AliExpress, and maybe that really takes off and bites into Amazon’s market share.
But when you consider the sheer number of products offered on Amazon, it’s hard for them to separate the good-but-cheap from the crap counterfeit bullshit. And as you say…they make money either way, so it’s not the highest-priority problem to fix–though as I said in another comment, they are aware that if enough products are crap, people will lose faith in Amazon as a whole, so they’ve tried different techniques to block bullshit reviews in the past.
But if somebody else wants to put in the work to filter shitty knockoffs from the results page? Well, that’s fine with them! They make money selling you the real deal products, too–likely more, because their cut of a more expensive original product is gonna be higher.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Lol, as of this hasn’t already happened
yiliu@informis.land 11 months ago
I mean, if people have lost faith in Amazon, they sure don’t show it with the amount they spend on it.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 11 months ago
There are some things you can really only buy there. Which is why I bigly agree with the US government that they’re a bigly monopoly bigly abusing their monopoly power (bigly).
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 11 months ago
It extra sucks for rural America where you might only have a handful of stores to pick from and all are discount stores like Walmart and Dollar General. Makes it hard to buy better quality/up market items
yiliu@informis.land 11 months ago
Got any examples? Between Walmart, Etsy, AliExpress, Home Depot, and Wayfair, plus the fact that nearly every major store has online shopping and delivery…I really can’t think of anything I could only get on Amazon. To be quite frank, I think the US government’s case is sorta ridiculous.