The merchants must navigate a largely automated,
guilty-until-proven-innocent process in which Amazon
serves as judge and jury. Their emails and calls can go
unanswered, or Amazon's replies are incomprehensible,
making sellers suspect they're at the mercy of
algorithms with little human oversight.
This is something our modern society was and is not ready for. Bureaucracy and the bureaucrats that administered it is a nightmare that society has known about and dealt with for a long time. But this is fully automated bureaucracy. Except instead of having well known rules or human bureaucrats we can confront.. we're now effectively at the mercy of a dice roll in the worst case. And no one can even confirm if the dice are even fair dice. In the best case you get to deal with a robot that can't even understand what you're saying.
Just to give another perspective, I run a couple of small businesses with my wife and we handle support ourselves.
This is an absolute pleasure for our USB oscilloscope business - intelligent, reasonable customers ask for help with a problem they have, we help them solve it and both parties move on with our lives.
Our other business - dealing in retro video games, is an absolute nightmare. Almost all support questions we field come from people who have no intention of solving a problem. Most are just anxious people who need a little bit of reassurance, but plenty expect us to do pointless busywork, want to vent emotionally at someone who can't fight back, or just generally want to smear shit all over the walls because they can.
Either way, because they don't want to solve a problem, they just keep up eating up your support time and emotional energy in an extended loop for no gain - we're talking upwards of 80% of your support resources if you let these people have their way.
Having to deal regularly with the type of person that the average HN reader would never come across in their lifetime, I can understand why organisations like Amazon would set up these bureaucratic support "walls" and/or outsource all support to a Filipino call centre staffed by people that don't even know what Amazon is.
The systems are designed to make getting support hard, because most people contacting consumer support literally don't even have a problem that good support staff could solve.
In this instance, they've clearly made an error in requiring the user to navigate an automated system when the dollar value is in the _millions_, and I understand why the average HN user would be pissed off by a system like this, but I don't think the solution to the problem is as simple as "provide good, human support to everyone" - it creates as many problems as it solves.
A bit of friction, if applied correctly, is not a terrible thing if an interaction's cost outweighs it's value. Getting the balance right is tricky but worth considering some alternatives to just "putting up with it".
After all, "sure, I'm selling at a loss but I'll make it up on volume!" is not sustainable for too long (unless you are a tech company... just kidding).
> A bit of friction, if applied correctly, is not a terrible thing
I observed the same thing in a different context in my previous gig doing Linux training. We strived to make our books as clear and simple as possible. When we discovered streps in our labs that confused students, we would rewrite them to avoid repeating the problem in future classes. Eventually I started noticing a tipping point where if the lab did too much hand holding students would disengage mentally and start having more problems instead of fewer.
I’ve tried sharing this insight with the UX designers at my current gig, but for some reason they’re skeptical when I suggest making our UI harder for customers to use. ;-)
I once ran an ecommerce site, and due to a bug every customer saw a fairly cryptic error message. It was something along the lines of "You must login to perform that action". Our site didn't have a login system.
By fixing that bug, conversions went down. We literally did an A/B test to prove that giving the user a stupid error increased revenue. We even played with the text of the error to maximize revenue.
We never figured out why, but my hypothesis is the user has to feel like that are making progress through the task they are trying to achieve. Getting a pointless error, and then getting past it, gives them a sense of achievement. They're then happier and more invested in your product when it comes to plugging in a credit card number...
Interesting. This sounds like its related to triggering "system 2" as Kahneman would call it in "Thinking, Fast and Slow"
Experimenters recruited 40 Princeton students to take the
CRT [Shane Frederick's Cognitive Reflection Test]. Half
of them saw the puzzles in a small font in washed-out
gray print. The puzzles were legible, but the font
induced cognitive strain. The results tell a clear story:
90% of the students who saw the CRT in normal font made
at least one mistake in the test, but the proportion
dropped to 35% when the font was barely legible. You read
this correctly: performance was better with the bad font.
Cognitive strain, whatever its source, mobilizes System 2
[slow, conscious, laborious thinking], which is more
likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by System
1 [the immediate, unreflective thinking by which we make
most of our minute-to-minute judgments].[1]
The under armour website is terrible with coupon codes. Some of the time, it does not work and you get a cryptic error and have to wait on hold to even chat with a customer service rep to decode the message for you and tell you what you need to add/remove from your cart to make it go through. Worst of all, these are not random codes I picked up off some deal site, these are codes they emailed to me directly.
It's absolutely awful from a customer experience standpoint. But, I believe I end up buying more from them because when it does work I feel like I need to buy everything I've been thinking about because I don't want to deal with that hassle again anytime soon.
If this is the same sort of thing that was happening on your site, this would only work if your product is not available elsewhere for a similar or better price. In the case of under armour, their products are available elsewhere, but not in the same variety and not with the same discounts.
Was this typo intentional so readers don't just disengage and skim through your comment? ;)
That's interesting, though. I wonder why more accurate instructions resulted in more problems. I know you mentioned 'disengagement,' but wouldn't more detail and accuracy make it easier to do the exercise(s)? Or does it make the students just zone out and type the lines out without thinking?
(I know I certainly was guilty of that the first time I went through the Linux From Scratch book.)
> I can understand why organisations like Amazon would set up these bureaucratic support "walls" and/or outsource all support to a Filipino call centre staffed by people that don't even know what Amazon is. The systems are designed to make getting support hard, because most people contacting consumer support literally don't even have a problem that good support staff could solve.
That doesn't make sense. You are in favour of systemic obfuscation and low quality support to discourage people who don't have problems from taking up the time of support staff? Even though the barriers make life hell for people with legitimate problems like the guy whose $1.5m inventory was destroyed?
Wouldn't it be better to handle both types of cases properly?
Instead of spending "hours with mentally ill people" (your terminology), why not perfect the art of triage and funnel people without problems appropriately?
If that's an unrealistic expectation, could you provide more detail about how it is unavoidable to spend "hours with mentally ill people"? You already provided details, but I can't see how you end up losing so many hours! There are techniques for handling these cases, my friend.
Your oscilloscope product looks fantastic, and the price and terms you sell it for tells me you are an interesting and valuable human being. I'm just pressing you about the other side of your story because I feel there might be a better way to handle the difficult cases that you somehow aren't aware of because you are too fundamentally helpful and an undiscriminatingly good guy. Or something.
>That doesn't make sense. You are in favour of systemic obfuscation and low quality support to discourage people who don't have problems from taking up the time of support staff? Even though the barriers make life hell for people with legitimate problems like the guy whose $1.5m inventory was destroyed?
I'm never said I'm personally in favour of that approach, I just saw a lot of comments talking about how terrible it is without any consideration of why certain companies might not want to make support accessible. As you said, an ideal solution would redirect people who don't need customer support elsewhere, but I couldn't imagine this is easy for an organisation the size of Amazon. I hope they can work out a better balance in future.
>If that's an unrealistic expectation, could you provide more detail about how it is unavoidable to spend "hours with mentally ill people"?
Just to clarify, I'm not talking about garden-variety depression/anxiety but people with serious issues that lead to them being completely isolated from regular society.
Honestly, we try to avoid dealing with them altogether. If someone sends us 12 messages in a row at 4am asking for information about a product, we don't respond in the morning. I have done in the past and learned the hard way that it is a bad idea.
Of course, this is not possible for a business like Amazon with tickets and phone support.
I worked AppleCare tech support and there were people who would call in to talk to people or troll, perhaps they were ill, but they would call repeatedly and there problems were largely made up.
Eventually they become known and are handled separately because they would fake problems and drive people insane.
> why not perfect the art of triage and funnel people without problems appropriately?
The joys of having a quasi-monopoly.
Amazon does't need be be any better - they have all the customers, so merchants have to put up with that if they want access.
I suspect that you are assuming that people in general think rationally and behave according to set scenarios. Unfortunately that is not a reality. If you were able to invent such effective system of triaging and funneling, I think you would become a billionaire in no time.
> Instead of spending "hours with mentally ill people" (your terminology), why not perfect the art of triage and funnel people without problems appropriately?
"Hello...? Is that Gmail? I was just calling to let you know that I don't need Uncle Franks email anymore. He comes up whenever I press "F" for frank, but he's dead now so it doesn't make sense. Auntie Anna sees the same, so it must be a problem with your computers or something. Whenever I type Frank in on the Chrome he pops up on everything!"
And? Either you tell the user to remove Frank from the address book or if that is not possible (ie, autocompletes use addresses from all emails and there is no way to exclude addresses) and then you have an actual bug report.
I'm really curious what sort of support the retro video game business needs. My (clearly naive) assumption is that it would be as simple as sending them the cartridge and telling them to have a great day, but if you're meeting so many seemingly unpleasant people it seems to be a lot more than that.
Could you share more about the sort of issues you face?
So sometimes discs won't load or cartridges won't read in their console, or they're unhappy with condition - sometimes this is as simple as apologising and accepting a return, sometimes people aren't happy with that and just want to kick up a stink. More often than not, the people kicking up a stink return a perfectly working product, and they just wanted to make sure we'd accept it by them being as foul as possible.
Sometimes we'll get people just asking for more information on an item we sell.
Usually you can tell whether or not these people are actually interested in the product or not by how they ask the question. If they're asking about a specific detail (for example, if they're looking for a particular serial number range on a console), they'll usually follow up if you give them a positive response.
People asking less specific questions (such as asking for "more photos") are often just bored and have nothing better to do and will either disappear or ask more questions. You can waste literal hours serving these customers and in the process lose thousands of dollars worth of actual sales.
The worst group are just really badly socialised people - often people with serious mental health or drug-related issues. If you engage with them, they will demand massive amounts of your time and have absolutely zero concern for your feelings (let alone your business goals). If they feel you have slighted they, they will respond in the most foul and violent way possible.
Just today, my wife was publicly berated by an incel-type guy because she didn't respond to a message he had sent over a week ago. There are at least 2 other occasions I can think of in the last year where this happened.
I think the thing to remember is that the average HN reader (and, by extension, most people that the average HN reader knows) is educated, values their time, and is socialised well enough to the point that they can hold down a job and maintain basic interpersonal relationships. The type of person who contacts customer support for products that shouldn't really require support are absolutely not like this. Mostly it's just people that don't value their own time (or the time of others), but multiple times every week we'll come across people with _serious_ social issues (I don't mean socially awkward, I mean "unable to regulate emotion like a healthy adult") and no-one to talk to about it.
The amount of people that seem "unable to regulate emotion like a healthy adult" as you say is surprising.
I used to work at a call center job many years ago, and the amount of people who just seem unable to act like a decent person is astounding. I had to leave the job after a few months for my own sanity.
I know its somewhat biased since obviously a call center position will deal with many unpleasant people, but it worries me how it seems like there is an overall decline in mental health of the general population
You're optimistic if you think there is a decline. I think it's a constant percentage, unfortunately.
I think we're now just uncovering the amount of people suffering from these issues. Before they would just be disregarded entirely and wouldn't even have access to various things, so they'd terrorize only people around them.
Thank you for these details about the difficulties in handling support requests from people with underlying socialization and/or mental health issues.
As someone who is mostly emotionally and cognitively balanced and who has been trained to communicate in order to reach mutually satisfactory outcomes, I don't even think to consider that some people are too maladjusted to use support resources (i.e. communication) in productive ways.
This compassionate comment and its parent mean a lot to me as someone who struggles with regulating emotion. I just wanted to point out that it’s some of us on HN too, and it’s not always the ones you might expect. I have a job, friends, and supportive family. But a swirl of feelings can overwhelm me without warning, and the memory of all the times I’ve failed to reach help before can stop me from trying again. I was hospitalized this year with suicidal thoughts and a diagnosis of “Major Depressive Disorder with Psychotic Features.” I expect to continue succeeding on the outside, but the internal battle is far from over. Again, I want to stress that most people can’t even fathom that anything is wrong with me. I have a good job, talents, people who care about me. But there’s some defect in my makeup (nature or nurture, who knows?) and your willingness here to be more aware of people like me is really heartening.
Note for the concerned: I am receiving treatment and a number of people in my circle are aware of the struggle, so this isn’t a cry for help. I just thought this might enrich the discussion for anyone not familiar with these things who would like to understand them better.
Ha I get you I’m trying to sell a PlayStation on offer up right now and “buyers” are toxic even for one item. Idk why you do this to yourself I’d go nuts
That is exactly why I prefer eBay to sell stuff. I happily give up the 10% sellers fee for not having to deal with countless potential buyers acting entitled, trying to negotiate or telling me how they could get the same item new for about half my asking price.
> People asking less specific questions (such as asking for "more photos") are often just bored and have nothing better to do and will either disappear or ask more questions.
Or maybe the photo is the easiest way to confirm if you have the version that the customer is looking for. I know because I have done that. And yes, if you don't have the right version it might look like I never intended to buy.
Really though, if you don't already have detailed pictures posted that show the state of the product from all sides then that's something I'd consider a problem with your used games business.
I trade in games as well and like any collectible, often sell items that are rare and expensive. As an individual doing this for a hobby, my margins are usually small, so selling an $400 console for $50 or so profit can go south pretty quickly if there is a dispute.
Because buyers are often collectors as well, they sometimes have unrealistic expectations for the condition of 25-30 year old hardware. A seller once had a concern with a power supply that was genuine, but worn in a way he was unhappy about. Once returns and replacement were completed (thankfully I had another), I now risk a loss, or worse, a dispute where I end up with neither money or the item.
Another time I sold a month of Xbox Game Pass I had received as a promotion. It was well under retail, but when the customer received it, it wouldn’t activate. I spent at least a week on chat with Miscrosoft support trying to resolve the issue. When it was finally resolved and the account credited, the buyer informed me they were a Game Pass Ultimate subscriber and the pass was prorated to 20 days, but they were expecting a month. No amount of explanation of what they purchased being different from what they expected would satisfy them. What I thought would be a simple $5 transaction turned into a significant stressor, and even offering a refund didn’t stop the persistent badgering. When platform reputation is on the line it’s no longer about the dollar amount of the transaction, but how it might impact future transactions.
Most of the time things are very transactional and I try to undersell and over deliver. One time in 20 or so
As I said later in that paragraph, reputation on social trading apps. I’m an individual seller that mostly does it to fund my own hobbies. I don’t do enough volume to easily average out a negative review.
Sometimes people just want to vent. There was a host on a podcast who admitted to venting to a company. He bought an item. It arrived and worked as advertised, but he was thoroughly underwhelmed by the product.
The podcaster emails the company talking about his dissatisfaction. The response was something like, "We understand your frustrations. Even if there's no issue, you can send it back for a refund." The podcaster realized that nothing was actually wrong. The product worked as advertised. It didn't break. It didn't arrive damaged. There were just unfulfilled expectations. I want to say that he responded by thanking them for their time but a refund wouldn't be necessary.
This guy inadvertently took up support time for an issue that wasn't really an issue. If you mix this scenario with entitled people or hobbyists who are very particular about minor details, sellers may spend lot of time on supporting very few customers.
Whilst dealing with unsavoury people obviously isn't ideal, and I certainly don't envy your position. Is this not just the cost of doing business in that specific industry?
Typically you'd just raise your prices to factor in support costs. You'd have different margins for each industry.
Realistically, the reason you're unable to raise your prices is because you're stuck competing with companies that simply don't offer customer service themselves, and hence would undercut you.
If there was an appropriate amount of public outrage (and ideally legal repercussions) toward businesses not offering sufficient customer support, then your competitors would also have to increase their prices. You'd be no worse off, and general customer satisfaction would improve across the board.
The issue is not so much about offering _customer_ service. Genuine customers will only ask for help when they actually need it and do it in a way that respects everyone's time.
Instead, it's more about taking time away from your business to deal with people who have no intention of buying from you but are just bored, lonely or mentally ill.
While the latter group might only represent 25% of the people who contact you, attempting to fulfill their needs is literally impossible and will eat up as much of your productive time as you allow it.
Online reviews (which basically represent the "appropriate amount of public outrage") have only made this worse. If one of your non-customers feel slighted, they will drag your name through the mud in the foulest way possible.
The whole "Karen" meme didn't come from nowhere (although in our case, it's usually 30-something single men).
All your argument is based in the idea of making live more difficult for consumers and easier to business. That seems the wrong way to tip the balance.
Are not going to be business better equipped to deal with unruly customers than mothers/grandfathers/teenagers having to spend time of their private lives navigating hostile interfaces designed to make them give up? Does not this incentivize bad businesses selling counterfeits/damaged goods with the hope that will not be returned?
For many transactions, the only customer support I need is an automated shipping confirmation, automated tracking, and maybe (or maybe not) a way to return/refund.
I buy a fair number of items on AliExpress and banggood. I don’t want “good customer service” bloating the costs. (Ironically, I still get good service on the 1% of transactions that go wrong, even when I can’t really prove anything. I bought two nice lipo chargers and got sent one. One email and remedied in a couple of weeks.)
I've never had a good customer support experience on AliExpress. Mostly because the only times I've needed "customer support" was when I've been sent fake items (specs grossly and explicitly misstated, usually, often with clear intent to deceive), and that is something AliExpress sellers will absolutely never admit to doing in my experience. Best case they politely say there's no problem, worst case they throw racial slurs based on your presumed nationality based on the destination country (which isn't even correct for me, ha).
In those cases, AliExpress will seemingly randomly decide for or against you randomly, even when you file a dispute with clear photographic and video evidence. I've had it go both ways.
90% of the time it's fine, though, and the cost savings outweigh the loss from fake goods. But I'd certainly not call the AliExpress CS experience "good".
I think the main problem is the stigma of using the mental health services, lack of access to therapists and generally useful things like mindfulness, some basic CBT principles are not being taught in schools. Many people view companies customer support as their "safe space" where they can vent their frustrations and problems and these days a valuable customer service operator needs to have training in psychotherapy, to know how to defuse people and steer them to having a mindset where they could feel comfortable to seek help.
With someone who will keep everyone busy with meaningless work at all times. Took years of painful effort for her to accept “no” without a complete meltdown.
On the flip side she will let her bosses do the same. 20 hour days, 7 days a week. She kept at it until she ended up in the hospital. I had to threaten to destroy her work computer for her to finally back it down to 18 hours a day six days a week.
I also came across people who would report bugs that don't exist. The team would spend days trying to track down the problem user is reporting, but the problem was never there. One case I remember user would claim that he paid for an item, but it is not visible on his account and he would keep asking for a refund, but when checked the items looked as they should. We asked him to send some screenshots and apparently he had photoshopped the items out from the screens. He stopped asking when we told him that our support member would like to access his desktop remotely to fix the problem.
20 years ago at Radioshack, I had a customer try and return a nice stereo. About 300 dollars or so. No receipt. So only store credit for last sell price.
Was in system but last sell price was $1.97 (we no longer sold it)
So “hours” of digging and endless questions on “you sure you got it here?”
Well she had gotten RadioShack and Frys Electronics mixed up. Apparently same store in her mind.
> "provide good, human support to everyone" - it creates as many problems as it solves.
Agreed with all your points except they really should have some `if (claim > minForHumanAgent){ bypassAutomatedHandling(); }` logic for millions of dollars.
This comment feels so ... wrong. As a society, so many of our institutions seemingly prioritize attention or outcomes effectively in exactly this fashion, but seeing it in code makes it that much more cold and ruthless.
This might surprise you, but companies don’t really care that their employees have to deal with shitty customers. It’s not necessarily that they don’t care about their employees, they might even have strategies and support staff to help with the stress, but they don’t care in a way that outsourcing it because of shitty customers ever plays in to the equation.
At enterprise size you automate your support to save money. Even outsourced a call Center is expensive, and Amazon’s shitty algorithmic support isn’t.
I know, because we do this in every enterprise sector, including the public sector. The “advantage” amazon have is that it doesn’t really cost them anything because they have a monopoly. In areas where they see actual competition, like in selling cloud to enterprise customers, they have excellent support. They didn’t always have this mind you, they used the same automated systems for years, until they realised just how many billions they were losing to Microsoft because Microsoft sells enterprise customers of a certain size a direct 24/7 phone line to Seattle if an issue is of high enough priority. Now, Amazon offers something similar.
>In areas where they see actual competition, like in selling cloud to enterprise customers, they have excellent support
I'm less inclined to believe that is because of competition and not because of the fact enterprise SaaS always has great support. If you are spending thousands, you will almost always have someone dedicated to your account. Likewise there are very few companies with razer thin margins that have excellent support.
I recently had an issue with my Smart Thermostat - where there is plenty of competition (Nest, Honeywell, Ecobee) - I called support and only got someone after 90 minutes of waiting, who was ultimately unhelpful. I spoke to my building who contacted their support line (the building installed the same, non-smart, thermostats as well), and the issue was solved in the same day by a trained technician in a little over an hour.
Nice looking board, but I agree, you should charge more. One market to consider is automotive scopes- since it already can interface with a phone, putting different connectors on there and with a case would suffice for most uses. Compare to a Pico scope for the market leader in this segment. It definitely doesn't need to be a 100% finished consumer product (that's already covered), you wouldn't be selling to hackers but the mechanics who use a scope are by and large the technically sophisticated ones. Just a thought, it looks like a great product, I'm buying one just to hack into a portable scope so I don't have to deal with getting out my rigol for basic auto work.
Edit: it certainly doesn't need to be battery powered either, conveniently cars have 12v battery power avaliable (although it is quite dirty, so input protection is required). I'm on my phone RN, otherwise I'd pull up the schematics, it might already have adequate input protection.
Honestly, I designed it when I was a student because there was nothing usable at the low-end of the market.
While I could possibly charge a little bit more for it, I don't think the specs justify a $50+ price point (as-is), and for a lot of people that extra $20 makes a big difference.
There were some thoughts a while back of making a higher-end product to fill the $50-$80 gap, and possibly even a stripped down Labrador to sell around the $20 mark. Looking at the Amazon charts, a lot of people are buying knockoff DSO138s to save literally $5-$10 and are left with a really poor quality product.
Have you considered a bundle that includes a case? I don't do a lot of maker/tinkering stuff so having the chip loose or on a breadboard wouldn't work for me in most situations. But I do sometimes have a need for an oscilloscope or multimeter, and would gladly pay ~$50 for one that had a case and some basic/standard connections, especially if it's supported by open software like yours.
This looks great! I'm going to buy one because of the price point (I wouldn't at $50, but maybe plenty of others would).
Is this useful for a hobbyist? Everyone I've talked to said "get a proper oscilloscope, anything less is a toy" but I have neither the space nor the need for an oscilloscope. I have a Saleae Logic analyzer, but yours looks more featureful.
This is a little off-topic, but since we're already on this: I just wanted to say "great job" on the Labrador. I don't even need one (I have benchtop scope, power supply, signal generator, logic analyzer, etc. already, and a couple of Bus Pirates) but couldn't resist ordering one just to acknowledge the awesomeness of your work.
It doesn't have an isolated ground (the focus was on size and cost), but this shouldn't be an issue. All spec-compliant USB ports contain self-resetting overcurrent protection - in practice this is almost always via a PTC resettable fuse on USB GND.
For what it's worth, I haven't had a single complaint related to the grounding in 3 years.
Ok, but how would you (for example) measure the voltage difference over a current-sensing resistor that is positioned at the high-side of (say) a 48V rails?
(If ground was decoupled, that would be simply a matter of attaching probe and scope ground at both terminals of the resistor.)
> Having to deal regularly with the type of person that the average HN reader would never come across in their lifetime, I can understand why organisations like Amazon would set up these bureaucratic support "walls" and/or outsource all support to a Filipino call centre staffed by people that don't even know what Amazon is. The systems are designed to make getting support hard, because most people contacting consumer support literally don't even have a problem that good support staff could solve.
Let's screw people with real concerns and real business so Amazon can save money on customer support seems a horrific justification. That is basically making all small businesses guilty of wasting Amazon time and burden the small businesses with the burden of proving that they are not.
How do you know so well the internal statistics for Amazon if you are just a seller? Cannot your kind interpretation also be based in wrong assumptions?
Who has more resources to deal with this situation Amazon or the little business? Amazon does this bullshit because it has power to abuse, not because it is a reasonable relationship with its providers.
A friend of mine worked for a company whose operators answered late night tv infomercials. They had humans answering the phone, but everything about it was scripted and highly optimized. Purchasing the thing was very very easy, but after that there was an upsell gauntlet to get through before hanging up. "This is rediculous, I don't want to hear about this" "But sir, people call back after they've missed these offers etc..." The ONLY method to escape it was to say "I will cancel my order". Additionally the call center employees would be fired if they deviated from the script.
Given that, it's quite easy to see why it's hard to find a customer service phone number or any other option except the one they want you to find.
Personally the one that annoyed me was amazon customer service to find "Package says delivered but not received". Searching for this finds lots of variants in the quick-search bar, and a "helpful" faq that says something like "ask a neighbor" or "look under the porch", but no way to contact customer service about it despite forms for hundreds of other meaningless interactions.
Does Jeff Bezos know, or is he shielded from bad customer experience like Mao, who saw a country full of rice fields along the rail tracks when he travelled the country? [1]
I once had something not delivered properly and when local reps (India) were useless I emailed Bezos directly. I had a message shortly from an Amazon staff saying Bezos asked them to look into it and the issue was fixed promptly. This was in 2015 so things may have changed since them.
Ha, that reminds me of a vacation spot in mexico. I flew into a beach town and took a taxi from the airport to the hotel. On the way the road was beautiful and green with lots of flowers.
But looking a little closer, it was really just the land within about 100' of the road, and only the road between the airport and the town.
That book is quite widely criticized. Not trying to defend Mao or the Great Famine, but with anecdotes like that I find this quote apt:
"With a person as divisive as Mao, both because of his complex history and because of what he represents to different groups, if becomes an almost impossible task to sift through the contradictions of supposed first hand accounts."
huh. i'm surprised at this because it's very very easy to contact amazon customer service either via chat or phone. i don't know the specifics of it because whenever i need to do so it takes me approx 2-3 clicks through a very obvious path.
Being an Android developer is a similar experience. If your app gets removed from Google Play, even if it's clearly by mistake, good luck having it reinstated. Unless you know a googler or two. Then it's a breeze. Going through official channels you'll be hitting a wall.
Which is a shame because the platform as a developer is awesome. I've developed for both iOS and Android and will always favour Android. But Apple seem to have more consistent and possibly better customer service compared to Google, especially when it comes to the ability to get a knowledgeable answer after failing an app review.
I've had many interactions with Google where the automated system was clearly wrong but after multiple attempts at human escalation, literally the only way to solve the problem was to ask the right friends who happen to work there, after which the problem was solved almost immediately.
"[Googler], can you suggest a strategy for dealing with Google support issues that doesn't involve "get Matt Cutt's attention on Hacker News"? - 9 years ago - https://hackernews.hn/item?id=2797972
"You'll notice over time that Hacker News is the only way to contact google support without spending thousands of dollars on adwords." - 7 years ago - https://hackernews.hn/item?id=6932516
"That happened a few weeks ago, and thanks to some inside people at Google, the mailing-list reappeared" - 7 years ago - https://hackernews.hn/item?id=5523992
"From my friend at Google: "It looks like he used the wrong account to update his credit card..." - 7 years ago - https://hackernews.hn/item?id=6837411
"I have seen people have to post on HN to get things resolved by google employees reading HN threads! While it seems like a personal touch, people are resorting to it (and I assume googlers are helping) because there is not another avenue that works for MOST products that google has." - 7 years ago - https://hackernews.hn/item?id=5716357
"You can post a problem on google support forums, and pray and hope for an answer from their developers." - 9 years ago - https://hackernews.hn/item?id=2922073
"Google also has a history of disabling accounts and providing no communication, support or other mechanisms to get it restored. Usually kicking up an almighty fuss in public if you have a prominent twitter/blog works" - 9 years ago - https://hackernews.hn/item?id=3885588
"Google itself is well known for being impossible to deal with unless you know someone on the inside." - 7 years ago - https://hackernews.hn/item?id=7018354
"Disclaimer: I work for Google Google's support is a complete joke. The only way to get things fixed in a timely manner (if at all) is to ask someone who works for Google to escalate internally. Then you stand a chance. Otherwise you're SOL. [...] I would recommend the OP to contact a Googler friend if they have one." - 7 years ago - https://hackernews.hn/item?id=6006534
"Particularly if you don't have a friend inside google or the ability to hit the front page of HN to get customer service." - 4 years ago - https://hackernews.hn/item?id=12975195
"far far too often do I see folks who have to reach out to a dev on Twitter or their friend at Google to get a simple billing error resolved correctly. Its a problem with most cloud providers, but Google seems to be notorious for it." - 2 years ago - https://hackernews.hn/item?id=17669161
"this contradicts basically every other google support story I've ever read on HN. Similar to what the few other comments are saying at the time of me writing this, it seems like this guy made a fuss somewhere that caught the attention of someone who didn't want the bad PR." - 2 years ago - https://hackernews.hn/item?id=17707473
"I ended up getting help by going into the google slack and kicking up a fuss. Never heard back from the "official" support channels." - 2 years ago - https://hackernews.hn/item?id=17564220
"monetize on their content for a while (or a long time if they don't have a friend at Google who can escalate the issue)." - 1 year ago - https://hackernews.hn/item?id=19953722
"It seems like the most reliable support system with Google is to have a SWE friend who works there who will document and enter tickets for you" - 1 year ago - https://hackernews.hn/item?id=21334183
"if you're lucky and you have a friend that knows someone who works there he can expedite your ticket." - 10 months ago - https://hackernews.hn/item?id=21971932
"large tech companies like google and amazon for this, where kicking up a fuss on social media is literally the only way you can hope to have a human at the company look into it." - 2 months ago - https://hackernews.hn/item?id=24168390
Mine is first-hand, except the part where you hit the wall. I met one of their developer relations guys at a Google I/O before my app had any problems needing escalation.
The problem is not the automation, the problem is that a single authority has a complete monopoly on certain aspects of the e-commerce market. Full credit to Bezos and Amazon for their incredible execution in achieving this. However, monopolies are an example of market failure, and in this case, also an example of an authority able to act as judge + jury where the affected parties have no realistic recourse, while being accountable to no-one. This is why we need government to intervene and ensure competition is restored on both the buyer + seller sides in e-commerce.
Yes Walmart is the textbook example of a monopsonist being able to extract steady profits while creating a race-to-the-bottom for prices among their suppliers. Great for end customers, but harmful nonetheless.
I don't agree Walmart would make for a textbook example. I'd argue they were/are not even a monopsonist with regard to their suppliers. They might be a strong regional force but they have failed (or chosen) to move out of their regional power position. That's not a bad thing and in fact is a strength. I'm pretty sure they were cited as an example of good strategy for exactly that in "Competition Demistified" but don't have the book with me right now.
However, in the day and age of modern logistics I'd argue that their suppliers could have sold to other customers in other states.
Ultimately I suppose it depends on how we define a market (ultra regional or wider) and how high the transaction costs (+other extra costs) of the suppliers would be to move to another customer. The classical example in "The Economics of Imperfect Competition" was the labor force in a small town (mining iirc., once again not at my bookshelf). I suppose that would give precedent to the fact that small markets "count". However most studies on the topic I am aware of are about labor not supply/demand structures. And I'd argue it is "easier" for a supplier to move their wares to another customer than for a (specialized) worker to move to another company (uproot family etc.).
Additionally some of the suppliers of Walmart are in pretty strong negotiating positions themselves (Unilever etc.).
At least there's enough doubt in my mind to say Walmart's supplier relations are "a textbook example of a monopsonist".
They aren't quite a monopsonist, but the difference for most companies is academic.
You've never sold to walmart, I have. If they put your physical product on the shelf you'll sell a lot of units. No one else has the shelves walmart does. If you are not on the walmart shelf there is NO way to get the same number of units sold.
but they're often low because they're selling bottom barrel quality goods (like electronics with cheap capacitors that fail quickly or clothes with lower quality fabrics & sewing that don't last). Even products that look the same as other stores will commonly have a Walmart specific SKU that uses cheaper components.
Sadly, this is what customers want. When given the option of a 30$ belt that lasts for life or a 5$ belt that lasts one year, many will go for the latter, and this is who Walmart caters to.
Arbitration is done by a company picked by Amazon, paid by Amazon, hoping to remain in business with Amazon, deciding about a conflict between Amazon and a random customer. In whose direction are they likely to err?
Who exactly is that company? One of the first steps in arbitration is for both parties to agree on a choice of arbiter. Looking at Amazon's webpage it names the American Arbitration Association which appears to be a pretty big non-profit. Step two in their road map here includes the arbiter choice step:
https://www.adr.org/sites/default/files/document_repository/...
If amazon is just insisting on "their guy" then I would think that should be pointed out in much bigger letters. From Amazon's perspective I can see lots of incentives: faster, cheaper, no appeals, no class-actions, probably no giant punitive judgements. But they may not have any better chance of actually winning them.
I can't comment on the arbitration clauses that Amazon uses, but the arbitration clauses I've seen usually says the arbitrator is randomly assigned by the american arbitration association.
This is a late reply, but there are a couple big differences. The courts could create a class action, or join multiple claims. Avoiding a class action, where the individual claims are too expensive to be worth pursuing, but as a whole the wrongdoing is significant is one of the biggest driving forces in mandatory arbitration. But these don't apply to the linked case.
Discovery is more limited with arbitration, third party discovery is very limited, usually use witness statements instead of depositions. Arbitration almost never forms precedent, and arbitrators are not bound by case law/precedent. Decisions made by an arbitrator can only be appealed under more limited circumstances than if made by a judge. This means it is less likely a decision will be made based on the existing law. A court can grant interim relief, generally an arbitrator can not. A court will sanction parties that act in bad faith, in practice an arbitrator will not. A court judgement/sanction/relief can be enforceable in a way that an arbitrators finding would not be. This adds up to in practice making a successful claim more difficult for a wronged consumer
Arbitration is generally cheaper, limited discovery is cheaper. Not being limited to the same evidentiary rules and to respecting precedent allows the arbitrator to make more equitable decisions, that conflict with the law. Arbitration is faster.
> However, monopolies are an example of market failure
No they are not. It’s only considered a failure when the position is abused to prevent competition.
You can have a monopoly situation where competition just doesn’t bother to enter because the monopoly holder hasn’t abused the situation to make entering the market attractive.
Additionally, the government frequently grants monopolies because they don’t really want to see market competition due to the disruptive nature of the industry (e.g. utilities).
Monopolies are just a specific market condition that implies certain pricing dynamics and potential competitor strategies. They are not a failure in themselves and can frequently be a huge driver of competition. Nothing attracts a competitor like a stodgy monopoly with a thick margin and no penchant for innovation.
> You can have a monopoly situation where competition just doesn’t bother to enter because the monopoly holder hasn’t abused the situation to make entering the market attractive.
Do you have any real world examples of this actually happening?
> the government frequently grants monopolies because they don’t really want to see market competition due to the disruptive nature of the industry (e.g. utilities).
The government does this with the addition of heavy regulation specifically to prevent abuse that comes from having monopolistic control of a market.
> Do you have any real world examples of this actually happening?
Drive into any small town. There is frequently only 1 gas station, 1 grocery store, etc that all sell things for reasonable prices.
For a completely different style, the major airport in Rome (da Vinci) is owned by a private company yet they don’t do any goofy shit to jack up landing fees.
There are many rural places in the US where there is only coverage from one cell phone provider and the rates remain the same.
> The government does this with the addition of heavy regulation specifically to prevent abuse that comes from having monopolistic control of a market.
No, they have to add the regulation because of the abuse that comes from a government granted monopoly. Monopolies emerge all of the time in all kinds of markets and they are not indications of failures. They can indicate that consumers are happy enough or that the margin is thin enough that competitors aren’t needed.
A government guaranteeing that a competitor can’t exist is when monopolies become ripe for abuse. That’s why government granted monopolies need regulation.
> However, monopolies are an example of market failure
No they aren't. Markets tend towards monopoly, or at least an oligopoly. Market 'equilibrium' where prices are 'right' is an ideological fantasy.
That said - this is an example of how the legitimacy for private commercial corporations being run dictatorially based on formal property ownership kind of blows up in people's faces when such corporations grow to the level of encompassing a significant part of some sector of the economy, or a significant part of social interaction altogether.
As for government intervention - the government is involved: Its basic role is to set this up and support it. Government checks corporate/capitalist power mostly in the face of very strong public pressure and the threat of uprisings / mass strikes / violent redistribution etc.
This post has minimal relation to the scientific consensus on how economics works. It’s a lot like climate change denial posts saying that actually burning coal is good because of cloud albedos. Technically true, just very selectively so, in a manner that does not accurately reflect the bigger picture.
Economics isn't a science in the same way as climate science. I don't think you can label anything in the field a "scientific" consensus. Popular consensus maybe.
Its not a monopoly over all ecommerce. However there are certain markets where the sellers, for example book publishers, are totally at the mercy of amazon because they have become the only de facto distribution channel for certain products like e-books (there are others as well). So its great for customers but it still has severe negative consequences for authors and publishers. Technically this is known as a "monopsony" but it's bad just in the same way a monopoly is.
The key thing economists look to, to define a monopoly, is that the company has the power to set prices. This is in the economic sense: that there isn’t some give-and-take supply-and-demand setting prices for them, and they just happen to record that.
When Office Depot was considering a Staples merger a while back, the Feds looked at the price of corporate office supply services in markets where there was only one of each firm, and found them higher than in markets where both competed. This despite the fact they didn’t have a monopoly on, say, copy paper.
Just because Amazon shoppers may ignore prices elsewhere doesn't mean Amazon can "set" prices.
It may mean Amazon understands their shoppers' price sensitivity, to be sure, but I can find almost anything on there elsewhere for less, or also for more.
I don't know about Target and Walmart as on-line entities, but I do know that there is limited overlap between the merchandise you find on eBay and the merchandise you find on AliExpress. So it is often (usually?) not true that if you can buy an item on website X you can also buy it at site Y.
Amazon fits every definition of a monopoly considering they have >50% market share, tyrannical control of the supply-chain in which they can flex their muscles with no repercussions and life-and-death control over sellers.
Because the end of the path here for Amazon is destruction of the inventory in question, I guess we'll never really know what's real or not. There's nothing to be inspected...which seems rather problematic, right? In criminal cases people don't run around destroying evidence. That's viewed rather negatively by judges.
So here we have Amazon destroying the inventory in question. No way to have even a partial sample of that inventory still available for checking? No laws that regulate how and when Amazon can destroy inventory, particularly in the presence of mandatory arbitration? No checks and balances on that process at all?
The article quotes the two reviews which claim the items are fake; it's pretty clear the people are just throwing out the claim of "fake" to get leverage. Amazon asked the seller for the receipts from the manufacturers to prove that they were real; he gave them, but Amazon said they didn't count because they were more than a year old. But that's when he actually bought the merchandise, so I'm not sure what Amazon expected him to do.
"Amazon said they didn't count because they were more than a year old."
According to the seller that was Amazon's issue with the receipts. According to Amazon the issue was the receipts provided were either illegible or didn't match records from the manufacturers. In other words they appeared to be faked receipts.
Amazon nowhere says that the invoices appear to be fake. Amazon’s reply is: “Illegible or didn't match records” - Illegible can mean anything, for example older as 365 days, as stated in the article. The second part about records not matching is just company speak to make it look like the vendor is to blame. It’s intentionally vague. My wife worked as a vendor manager at Amazon and she never checked any manufacturer receipts/had a way to check them.
Inventory receipt management very much sounds like something that Amazon should have as part of its interface (presuming it's not already). Sellers should be able to upload receipts/purchase orders to their accounts at any time.
It's just good sense to have all of these images available at all time, regardless of selling platform.
There's a few assumptions here. I'd say the assumptions are that
1. Amazon knows the fakes, if they exist, came specifically from this seller. I doubt this because of their comingling problems.
2. That the threshold of complaints required to initiate this type of action is a reasonable one. And furthermore that the complaints are valid. It could be a matter of a few 3rd party competitors, it could be the original wholesaler trying to throw a wrench into Amazon's systems, it could be customers who are angling for credits, free products etc. As well all of this plays with assumption #1 and comingling.
often fakes (in fashion at least) are just overquota items produced from the same sweatshop that produce the legit items, which the sweatshops sell on the side to earn that dollar more per month.
brands thus moved to control counterfeit pursuing anything that isn't coming off their sales chain end to end, even if the fake is virtually identical to the legit product.
No they aren't, that's just what people manufacturing fakes have managed to convince people is the case. (Somehow, it doesn't stand up to any scrutiny)
> Mediante alcune aziende dell’hinterland fiorentino, pratese e dell’empolese - le stesse che producono quelle che poi diventano le vere borse firmate - il gruppo provvedeva a tutte le fasi produttive e commerciali
I've had a similar experience with Uber customer support. Their navigation thinks there's access to my house from a road that isn't actually connected, so delivery drivers consistently go the wrong way. But emailing customer support just got me seemingly automated responses saying "we're sorry the location pin was not in the right place" which isn't even the problem that I'm having.
That's just how customer support is these days it seems. Getting a hold of an actual human capable of doing the most mundane request other than linking to 'help' articles you've already read 10 times is impossible. What happened to emailing support and getting a reply prepared to move heaven and earth to satisfy you as a customer?
There exist companies that distinguish themselves on providing good support, and use it as a differentiator. They generally aren't number one in a market though, so don't look the the leader to usually be them (occasionally they are, when they have an equivalent or better product and also better support and servicing).
The people that link you to those help articles are doing so because they simply can't do anything else but to escalate - they simply don't know about the inner workings of the system and don't have the permissions to change the data in it.
Whereas the developers/maintainers who could do it would be overcome with thousands of such mundane requests to fix the data in some geospatial database, that they can't be bothered to do. Perhaps Uber doesn't even maintain the dataset for addresses themselves either, and is using a service from someone else, like Google.
This kind of makes you think that in this complexity of distributed, scalable systems with microservices, message queues and other systems, eventually the complexity will be too much to actually understand and maintain - be it because of a low bus factor and people leaving due to churn rate, or extremely high effort needed for maintenance.
help me understand this attitude. unless I'm an enormous customer why do I deserve replies "prepared to move heaven and earth" in the first place? I guess it seems like naivete to me
Let me give you my latest anecdote. I order a can of paint from Lowes. They send me the wrong color. I reach out to their customer support. I ask them to send me the correct color of paint. They inform me that they don't have power to do anything as they aren't the correct team. I ask who the correct team is. They give me a phone number to call for a customer support line that closed three hours ago. I call the next day, and they tell me that they too are powerless to do anything and that I need to return the can of paint I ordered online to the brick and mortar store.
At this point, I don't give a shit about the $16 of paint, I'm not spending two hours of my day to return this can of paint at the lowes store on the other side of town. It's about the principle. A sane company would have replied with the first (and only) customer support team with something like "I'm so sorry! We are shipping you the correct color right now." That sane response used to be the norm 10 years ago, because a $16 loss on one can of paint is far less than losing a customer for life who will now make it their life's mission to deter friends and family from patronizing your business.
But they know that you won't. Next time you need to buy a can of paint, you'll go back to Lowe's because you figure there's a 99% chance they won't mess it up again, and meanwhile the Home Depot is even further away and not really any better. Meanwhile, companies that provide "good" customer service are continuously preyed upon by customers who waste their time and scam them. Personally, if I were you, I'd just take the L on this one. Someday, someone will solve this problem by opening a business that offers absolutely no returns, no customer services, and charges 10% less. I will shop there gladly.
I got dropped off on the top of a mountain by mistake. The driver gave up on trying to follow the ap and he insisted that the mountain was the address. Naturally he gave me a 1* because I wasn’t happy about being kicked out on a mountain top. Uber never replied to my attempt at disputing any of it.
The only thing worse than the arbitrary thing is the double rating. I’m forced to give 5* to shit service.
Same situation here. I've submitted screenshots and details to Uber support, nothing has changed.
Now I send a text to each driver, watch the map like a hawk and call them if it looks like they're going the wrong way. Works most of the time.
When it doesn't, I get refunds, Uber can keep eating those costs until they fix their routing.
I've also started using their competitors more often, and bypassing these apps entirely and ordering directly from restaurants that employ their own drivers.
Kafka and Orwell were right. They might have understated their cases.
I don't think people understood how tech could exaggerate and accentuate some of the worst in humanity and create massive centralisation which can create more and more stifling bureaucracy. At least before, you could be ignored by a bureaucrat, now it is a faceless, nameless, heartless system
Amazon could fix this. This isn't an all or nothing "digital bad" "bureaucrats bad" situation. It's Amazon and one complaint. This guy should find a good lawyer and take them to court. He had proof that his stuff was not counterfit. Adding some arbitrary "you have to have a receipt no more than 365 days old" is ridiculous. Amazon just doesn't care. Even for a 1.5 million dollars worth of stock. What are the chances that they give a hoot about the average guy on the street? It seems to me like they could do something sensible like "we have 4 complaints out of 10000 orders, chances are these are just peeved customers, tell him make them whole". That seems like just basic logic to me.
This is exactly it. They don't have to care, and they've outsourced all of their caring to a robotic bureaucrat. Without a human in the loop, like yourself, to realize the absurdity in edge cases you get the worst possible version of bureaucracy. And I wouldn't say it's an all or nothing situation either that "digital bad" or "bureaucracy bad". Bureaucracy can be good, it helps streamline certain processes "at scale." Digital can also obviously be good.
The PROBLEM is when you marry these things together without proper controls in place by society. We haven't completely thought through the ramifications.
> But this is fully automated bureaucracy. Except instead of having well known rules or human bureaucrats we can confront
Reminds me of a novel that was written over 100 years ago:
> The Trial (German: Der Process,[1] later Der Proceß, Der Prozeß and Der Prozess) is a novel written by Franz Kafka between 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously in 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader.
This is _exactly_ the situation that this society came up with a new agreement to avoid. E.g. Presumption of innocence, and Habeas corpus to mention two.
Large businesses in America, including Amazon, require their customers and suppliers to waive their right to sue. Amazon et el cannot be held accountable through the legal system.
These abuses will continue unless there is enough of a sea change in Washington that protecting free markets becomes more of a priority than protecting the freedom of large businesses to exploit people.
That will happen no sooner than the day Amazon receives an order for ice skates from the hotter half of the Christian afterlife.
This is unlikely. They save a lot of money this way, and they own a sufficiently large part of the market. Unless the problem gets outrageously bad, the cost won't be measurable.
It looks inevitable that the law will have to get involved for western users of the big platforms. I don't know if that will fly in the US. Tolerating life & death on the complete lack of structure in tech decision making has to come to an end eventually, at least on particular financial outcomes.
In many ways, YouTube content creators were the canary in the coal mine here with how the algorithm treated them, and Amazon sellers seem to be next. The worst case future of automation isn’t terminator, it’s just having the worst possible boss.
> Their emails and calls can go
unanswered, or Amazon's replies are incomprehensible,
making sellers suspect they're at the mercy of
algorithms with little human oversight.
Only if you are the "little guy". You can be sure that amazon responds to big companies. If someone from Apple, Samsung, etc contacted amazon about something, do you really think they'll be tossed into the trashbin of the algorithm?
