> I'm wondering more and more why Amazon hosts third-party sellers at all.
It's pretty much pure profit from Amazon's point of view. They got their cut of that $1500, and no matter how much furor comes out of this (and similar) articles, Amazon's overall brand won't be adversely affected.
After all, look at the comments here. Everyone is primarily blaming the seller, not Amazon. Amazon comes across as a secondary party to this at most.
Amazon is getting hit with a chargeback on this one, and I see a lot of comments critical of Amazon on here. And this is a tech-savvy crowd. Most Amazon customers probably don't pay enough attention to Amazon to understand the difference between "Sold by Amazon" and "Fulfilled by Amazon" and straight third-party sellers. When it goes wrong, people will blame the one entity they actually interacted with: Amazon.
I order from Amazon exactly because I don't have to deal with this bullshit.
If I was willing to carefully scrutinize sellers, comb through intentionally misleading ads, build a working knowledge of common scams, and keep all records for the occasional resolution process, I would use eBay or Craigslist.
I would much rather switch to ordering from Best Buy and Target than adapt to this kind of adversarial buyer beware model.
The point of this thread is that if you are ordered from Amazon, you actually might have to deal with this bullshit. Selecting a seller requires as much care as eBay at this point. It's not what it was.
It's pretty much pure profit from Amazon's point of view. They got their cut of that $1500, and no matter how much furor comes out of this (and similar) articles, Amazon's overall brand won't be adversely affected.
After all, look at the comments here. Everyone is primarily blaming the seller, not Amazon. Amazon comes across as a secondary party to this at most.