Key quotation: "Facial recognition is not new technology, but the [criticizing] organizations appear to be focusing on Amazon because of its prominence and what they see as a departure from the company’s oft-stated focus on customers."
This is an interesting side-effect of the success of AWS. Amazon's customers are not just individual consumers or even sellers anymore, but organizations on the scale of multinational corporations that rely on the cloud and national governments. Interesting to see how this will play out in future AWS offerings.
Is it me or has Amazon ever cared about customers, always marketshare and profit margin. I've never felt Amazon was a pro-consumer company, merely a side-effect that they need consumers.
The number of counterfeits and abomination of UI argues against that point. I think Amazon is against both customer and small retailer and that goes to my point they are about market share and profit margin above all else.
As someone who has sold on Amazon, its not as simple as you make it sound.
Amazon takes my product, which I identify, and puts it in a bin at whatever warehouse. Another seller, sends in the same product, but theirs is counterfeit. Without opening the package, how is Amazon to know which one of us is selling the counterfeit and which one is real?
Now, my inventory is mixed in with amazon's and this counterfeiter, that product gets shipped out with my name because the customer chose my price of the list of sellers, but Amazon takes whichever one is closer, not the one I sent them. This is done to help ensure cheapest/fastest possible shipping. I take the blame even though someone else sent bad product.
This is a shitty situation all around, but how does Amazon fight back? They do eventually go back after the counterfeiters, but its a slow and complicated process because its super simple to set up as a seller on Amazon.
But, this is also not a new issue. Ebay still has this issue and I would say its far more mature than Amazon at the "3rd party seller" crap and Ebay cant fix it either. Its a shitty hard situation to deal with.
Amazon could do what Amazon used to do, and what everyone else does: Don't comingle supplies from trusted sources from random third parties. Have you every tried selling a wholesale bag of carrots to a your local grocery store? They aren't interest, for good reason.
What reasons do you have to conclude that Amazon is not pro-consumer? Chasing marketshare and profit margin is something else, and being pro-consumer is a way to win marketshare and profit-margin.
Selling everything, generous return policies, free shipping, customer reviews; these are all customer-friendly.
This is an interesting side-effect of the success of AWS. Amazon's customers are not just individual consumers or even sellers anymore, but organizations on the scale of multinational corporations that rely on the cloud and national governments. Interesting to see how this will play out in future AWS offerings.