> Commingling isn't a problem with the complaints.
I think they mean that commingling necessarily eliminates the viability of merchant malfeasance analysis in reading reviews, not that the complainers did anything wrong. Just that you can't trust the products from even the most trustworthy shop because someone _else_ might be trying to cheat the marketplace. The review system applies to products, but mostly it applies to individual product _specimens_. And if you don't know whether bad specimens came disproportionately from a particular merchant, then the real value of reviews has been diminished.
Amazon could EASILY handle comingly to seller's products if Amazon added a seller id sticker to packages it receives... go ahead and comingle, when you get the complaints, you can tie the item to the actual seller, seller does too bad, permanent ban. Problem would solve itself out... Amazon absolutely refuses to do this, yet hides behind its' negligence with "we're a market."
Skip the spider. Big table. Borg. "Merchant malfeasance analysis" is simple. Amazon is the merchant. The other view is bullshit. Well promoted bullshit. But bullshit nevertheless.
Maybe an exhortation to not think of being a customer of Amazon like being a spider in a web. Spiders know where the next meal is by vibrations in the fabric of the web, which if we imagine the negative comments as vibrations caused the receipt of a skeevy item from a seller in the network as a naieve attempt to track a skeevy supplier, we're not going to get what we want due to the comingling problem.
>Big Table.
Instead, you have to think of Amazon as a big frickin' table onto which everyone throws their stuff. Amazon is basically the de facto merchant in all cases where fulfillment by Amazon is used. Since they bin by item, and not item/source, you get an assimilation going on.
>Borg: Essentially, Amazon is this. They absorb all the uniqueness of all of their suppliers, and essentially dissolve/absolve any particular supplier of singular skeevyness since all the skeevy gets laundered through FBA. Even if you have mostly upstanding sellers, the smaller populations of skeevy sellers benefit, because their fulfillment when picked have a high probability of being good, while the upstanding vendors are guaranteed to eventually eat negative reputation from skeevy merch being used to fulfill their orders.
>Merchant malfeasance analysis is simple: It actually is. You just separate out each source's inventory and track fulfillment from that inventory. Easy-peezy from a data point of view, but incompatible with real world physical constraints. The physics of the matter would be way too infeasible to implement, since there would need to X^n physical buckets where X is the number of items, and n is the number of suppliers of that item. If you were to track every type of item in clearly separated sub inventories keyed by source. That just wouldn't be physically or fiscally possible, because now Amazon needs pickers not just for stuff, but for supplier's of stuff. Suddenly, Amazon is open to potential complaints on relative picker staffing between suppliers, even if you somehow managed to handwave away the physical space requirements.
>The other view is Bullshit. The other view being that the Amazon marketplace backed by FBA allows for any type of reputation based curation. While the marketing team pounds that drum, it won't work in a world with limited physical space, as explained above.
Um, have you recently eaten something purchased from Amazon?
The previous poster clearly means that it is bad that negative reviews can't effectively convey information to consumers on Amazon. I'm sure they don't mean to defend Amazon or suggest that it is not culpable.
The call for external fine grained merchant analysis as a productive way to solve the problems of commingling is inconsistent with holding Amazon accountable. It is consistent with the view that Amazon is not responsible for what it ships from its warehouses. "Amazon is just a logistics platform" is bullshit.
I already said I think Amazon is bad and should feel bad.
Not only am I not calling for "external fine grained merchant analysis", I can't find anyone who is, and I don't know what that means.
This argument is so weird that I'm beginning to wonder if you're a bot or farming rep or something, which would actually be pretty funny, and also impressive since you have 35k karma.
I think they mean that commingling necessarily eliminates the viability of merchant malfeasance analysis in reading reviews, not that the complainers did anything wrong. Just that you can't trust the products from even the most trustworthy shop because someone _else_ might be trying to cheat the marketplace. The review system applies to products, but mostly it applies to individual product _specimens_. And if you don't know whether bad specimens came disproportionately from a particular merchant, then the real value of reviews has been diminished.