this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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[–] yiliu@informis.land 65 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Why would this hurt Amazon? People will just see a different set of reviews. It's manufacturers if crappy knock-off products that should be shaking in their boots.

[–] xkforce@lemmy.world 48 points 1 year ago (2 children)

And unfortunately Firefox is sitting at 2 to 3% so even if Amazon were dependant on fake reviews, they have little to fear due to the low marketshare.

[–] joemo@lemmy.sdf.org 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would assume the whole point of a feature like this is to help them get new users.

[–] Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Well I'll always use Firefox, no question about it. There is incredible value in using a browser with no alterior motivations, no additional products to sell you, no reason to spy on you.

[–] Furedadmins@lemmy.world 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Amazon makes a lot of money facilitating the sales of counterfeit goods.

[–] yiliu@informis.land 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sure. 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 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

people will lose faith in Amazon as a whole

Lol, as of this hasn't already happened

[–] yiliu@informis.land 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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).

[–] yiliu@informis.land 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Got any examples? Between Walmart, Etsy, AliExpress, Best Buy, MonoPrice, 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.

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Of course you do, you post like some type of Amazon shill.

I was looking for hardware at home depot and the dude recommended I buy what I was looking for on Amazon.

[–] someguy3@lemmy.ca 21 points 1 year ago

Agreed. Might actually give more faith in using Amazon.

Hmm their Amazon basics might suffer. I think Amazon basics true offering is cheap but not scam.

[–] Daisyifyoudo@lemmy.world -3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It won't. It's clickbait. It's dumb.

Edit- tHeY'rE iN TrOuBle isn't clickbait? Fuck off. This might dip into their profits, slightly, but Amazon is hardly in trouble. FFS.