Should I not evaluate things based on my personal experience...?
The other problems are: third-party sellers pollute the listings with unobtainable low prices, long delays, and shit products I'd never want to buy. It's common for me to find a product on Amazon only to discover that the low price I thought I was getting isn't actually available, and I have to pay some absurd shipping fee with a third-party seller. Or the cost is correct, but it'll take two months to ship. (This just happened to me yesterday with a "Prime two-day shipping" entry!) Or I have to dig past the first page of the search results because the first page is filled with nonsense from third party sellers.
These are the reasons I use Amazon less and less. Stories about fraud (and more importantly, Amazon siding with a scammer for no good reason) just add more weight.
Make sense, you might be seeing a real trend, but maybe not. You can evaluate things from personal experience, and even a small amount of negative individual experience can hurt a business, because of word of mouth. You should also calibrate your experiences once in a while though. A restaurant you had a bad experience at when you went might still be the best restaurant in town.
If fraud was a huge part of their business, they'd kill the 3rd party sellers from their platform, but I doubt it is. I think it's a net positive as a whole, but a small number of customers hate it. What they need to do now is improve those quirks you mentioned. That's much more reasonable then killing the whole marketplace.
The other problems are: third-party sellers pollute the listings with unobtainable low prices, long delays, and shit products I'd never want to buy. It's common for me to find a product on Amazon only to discover that the low price I thought I was getting isn't actually available, and I have to pay some absurd shipping fee with a third-party seller. Or the cost is correct, but it'll take two months to ship. (This just happened to me yesterday with a "Prime two-day shipping" entry!) Or I have to dig past the first page of the search results because the first page is filled with nonsense from third party sellers.
These are the reasons I use Amazon less and less. Stories about fraud (and more importantly, Amazon siding with a scammer for no good reason) just add more weight.