Amazon, a well-oiled machine and a chaotic bazaar

When you buy an item in a supermarket, it has normally been carefully selected. Someone has made sure of its quality and its compliance with safety standards and sanitary requirements.

On Amazon, everything is different: the platform is open, and anyone can sell anything. It is this operation that made the success of the"Everything Store" of Jeff Bezos: the income of his marketplace, who list objects offered by third-party companies are twice as large as those from the sale of its own products.

Intermediary or responsible?

Naturally, everyone wants a piece of the cake. The site attracts honest sellers, but also all that the human race has invented the worst in terms of scammers, copiers and profiteers.

On August 23, Amazon was pinned by the Wall Street Journal for the presence of more than 4,000 prohibited or dangerous products on its site. Medicines unauthorized or illegally imported, toys containing dangerous quantities of lead, electronic objects falsely indicated as standards, everything goes.

The company ensures to filter the best products for sale and, in case of problems, it argues that it is only an intermediary to wash hands.

The US courts have repeatedly ruled the company on this point, but a judgment of the Philadelphia Court of Appeal on July 3 instead found that Amazon should be held liable for the products of third-party sellers.

If this jurisprudence were to be confirmed, the blow would be hard for the business model of Jeff Bezos. Third-party companies are far from obeying him to the point, so much so that even articles produced and sold directly by Amazon are diverted by unscrupulous individuals.

The Buy Box for booty

On the platform, the hijacking of listing is a common practice. The site allows several people to sell the same product at the same time, which then share the article page, listing, and compete for the Buy Box, the default vendor status.

It is possible to access other sellers with a button "Other sellers on Amazon", but hardly anyone uses it.

For this kit, for example, Eastpak holds the Buy Box: if you click on "Buy", the sale goes to the manufacturer. Twenty-five other sellers are however indicated on the bottom right.

The winner of the Buy Box is selected by a fairly opaque algorithm, which takes into account the lowest price and customer returns.

Unscrupulous people retrieve all the information and photos of a product, then replicate them in order to claim a place in the listing.

Thanks to more or less dishonest techniques (price decreases or artificial inflation of the positive returns), they recover then the Buy Box and eclipse the original seller.

Old listing, new article

The hijackers can also perform this operation on previously popular products withdrawn from the sale, to continue to enjoy the good notes of the listing: they simply replace the item sold and change the description.

At Amazon, the customer support teams responsible for reviewing changes are mostly based abroad. They have to work quickly and their turnover is high. Hopefully, the person who examines the application does not look too closely at it, and that's it.

The technique is even possible with Amazon Basics products that are no longer offered but whose listing still exists. The Verge discovered that a listing for an HDMI cable was now selling a Chinese alarm clock, retaining the 5,324 reviews of an average of 4.6 stars won by the previous article.

According to Rachel Johnson Greer, a former employee of Amazon reconverted as a sales consultant, the situation was inevitable: "It's totally chaotic, there are more than two billion listings on Amazon and they never die. When an item is no longer sold, the listing continues, waiting only to be turned away.

This is not the only business between sellers. File false positive reviews on the competition for Amazon to suspect an inflated illegal score; buy an object, put it on fire and then complain about a lack of security: to sell at any price, some deploy treasures of inventiveness.