Amazon Angel Company or the Evil Corporation?.

If a company keeps customers money for sales they know never shipped, would you say they are a Good company or an Evil company?

If you are not aware, Amazon has sellers called 3rd party sellers.
From what I have read, these sellers represent about ½ of all Amazon’s sales so chances a lot of stuff you purchased from Amazon did not come from Amazon but some small business with no problems.

A fake seller seems to be generally described as a seller who opens up a selling account, lists items for sale at low prices, provides tracking numbers, but never ships any orders. Based upon just following their best sellers I can only guess how many there at a given moment, possibly thousands or hundreds of thousands. But they are not even stopped quickly. The image in this article is of a screen shot from a seller with incredible deals in the range of 80-90 % off reg price. That is even below black friday 2017 deals!

The issue my article is going to discuss to is not new, and has been going on for years. I googled “ Amazon fake sellers" and received 12,700,000 hits. At nearly 13 million hits- This is not remotely a new thing. Even Forbes and Wall-street journal had articles on it. I doubt Washington post would write any article as their Owner Jeff Bezo owns / controls them and Amazon

Most people experiencing this through seller feedback had the same question “Why does Amazon NOT make efforts to stop this?”

I called Amazon customer support and was told Amazon was aware of fake sellers, and they were told to educate the customers about Amazon A-Z claim process. I reported 10 fake sellers to him 2 weeks ago and
only 2 are not active on Amazon's site now. The rest were active still, now with a growing list of bad feedbacks for not shipping product.

In my opinion, Amazon does not want to stop the fake sellers , as it makes Amazon money from this activity.

For understanding my viewpoint, Lets follow the money involved

1) I will be bringing up the costs sellers have to sell on Amazon, plus shipping costs

2) The time frame Amazon gives fake sellers to stay active.

3) Why Amazon is fully aware of the sellers who are fake early on in the ordering process even before most customers may be aware.

3) How Amazon counts filing A to Z claims against customers.

4) How Amazon benefits from the fake sellers who never ship and orders, just get money and continue opening more accounts.

5) Simple solutions Amazon could implement if they actually wanted to stop this.

At the end I will list a few examples I pulled up in a few minutes without even trying.

I had made screen shots , but there are so many I cannot post in an article on a smart phone, you would be scrolling for days.

1) I will be bringing up the costs sellers have to sell on Amazon, plus shipping costs

Cost to sell on Amazon for new sellers varies from product to product. But the minimum is $1.00 or 15% whichever is greater PER ITEM SOLD. Media like VHS DVD Bluray, Music tapes is $2.70 PER ITEM SOLD. Remember - that is MINIMUM

For shipping costs, the post office is the cheapest. Only packages which can get tracking on is anything thicker than ¼ inch which must ship as a package. ¼ inch is about the ½ width of most peoples pinky finger nail.

Cost to ship 1 to 4 ounces is $2.61 not counting packaging costs.

So, the minimum a small seller in the USA can pay to sell and ship an item on Amazon is $3.71.

I know sellers from China get subsidized shipping costs by the us government allowing Shipments from china to be near free , plus Amazon appears to charge them a much smaller fee structure than sellers in the USA. But this article is not about that I just wanted to bring that up as people will say I ordered cheap items on amazon and got them. I am not talking about those sellers.

2) When a customer places an order, the seller may have put a handling time of up to 30 days to process the items ordered. So…

Customer places order then the SELLER reports to amazon the order was shipped and supplies fake tracking number. Since the item has a long handling time , there is a longer time before the customer can even
file an A to Z claim with Amazon to get a refund. Even with the minimum handling time, it is over 2 weeks before an A to Z claim can be filed. Then that takes about a week for Amazon process. So at least 3 weeks from order being placed before Amazon actually does something – refund your money. At this time, the seller is STILL selling on Amazon.
Note you cannot leave feedback on seller until after items estimated delivery windows has passed is delivered or X number of time after. I saw a few sellers where customers had posted many feedbacks (12) all stating the seller was a fake seller. One comment said he contacted Amazon support and they ignored him. From my
estimate , taking into the time given the sellers account, Amazons fake seller account life would be about 5 weeks, possibly more. I know a seller with “just launched” is less than a month old. So sellers new without that are over 1 month ago. A lot of the scamming sellers I saw on the Amazon site easily pasted the month mark.

Amazon pays sellers every 2 weeks on a Friday. So the seller is getting paid for 2 pay cycles for not shipping anything, defrauding customers. At hundreds to hundreds of thousands if free money, no wonder the sake sellers like to can people on Amazon.

Amazon keeps track of tracking number sellers supply. Amazon knows when they are delivered, as such Amazon also knows when orders ARE NOT DELIVERED. Yet Amazon does NOT automatically refund all customers who never received any items from a fake seller, even after the seller is closed down by Amazon. Instead only customer’ s who go through the process of filing A to Z claims within 90 days get refunds. I wonder why there has not been a class action suit on this issue.?

3) Keep in mind, amazon keeps track s of what customers do, and if customers file many A to Z claims, you run the risk of being blocked from being by Amazon ( For Life with no Explanation ).

4) Now why would Amazon continue to allow this and why do they not do anything when people report these sellers to them? A lot of people on the internet asked this question FOR YEARS. My opinion on this is as
follows: .

ONLY customers who file an A to Z claim within 90 days of order date, will get refunds. I could not find anyone who Amazon refunded their money without them contacting Amazon 1st.

When a seller account is suspended, Amazon keeps the money for a undetermined time . Should the seller disappear, I expect Amazon would just absorb the funds.

The other way Amazon profits, is for sellers who automatically adjust prices to compete with other seller’s . They would be powering their selling price and making no money. People have to put food on their plates!!

From What I read on the internet, and feedback's posted most customers actually do not file A to Z claims

So Amazon gets to keep a large amount of money.

5) What steps could Amazon implement to minimize this issue?

Look at what scam sellers are “selling” ? From what I could see in a few minutes of looking on Amazons site.

Typically established high selling items with many sellers. Seasonal items, where the customers may buy from many different sellers and many items at once. Like school supplies or holidays.

To combat

1) ) When customers complain suspecting seller is a fake seller / seller not shipping anything LOOK INTO IT. Why on earth would any company ignore fraud??? ( Except Amazon)

2) Maintain estimate seller cost to selling price triggers to alert Amazon to a possible scam seller. Especially with new sellers

Meaning when an item normally selling for $20 weighing 10 lbs including shipping suddenly is being sold for $3.00 including shipping and the lowest cost a seller could normally ship an item weighing 10 lbs is $8, then a FLAG should be sent up. You think a NEW seller can give away merchandise? Shipping costs with shippers have nothing to do with the cost sellers sell an item for only weight and item dimensions. Shipping a 10 lb item costs sellers $20-$30 to ship from California to New York.

3) If the tracking numbers are not recognized by the carrier as a valid tracking number Amazon should freeze the account payments until corrected tracking numbers can be supplied and at least some of the customers ( not new customers) report having received what they ordered.

4) Should “valid” tracking numbers show no movement in transit, freeze the account payment automatically.

5) when new sellers get more than one feedback complaining of not receiving anything, then freeze payment to seller.

6) when new seller does not respond to customers questions within 48 hours freeze payments and look at the seller.

7) When the sellers ip address is not in the USA, yet claim to be then look at their account closely and freeze the account.

8) when NEW sellers start selling many items quickly while never selling other items . look at account activity . Did seller open account with items priced higher then lower the item costs so Amazon would not detect the account?

9) are there certain bank accounts typically associated with fake sellers? Meaning do some banks make it easy to open an account without id?

10) validate seller phone number.

11) When customers complain suspecting seller is a fake seller / seller not shipping anything LOOK INTO IT. So simple it had to be repeated

12) look at new / recent sellers with constantly changing ip addresses

All of the above would be easy to implement for Amazon. Very few sellers would be affected by this.

YET AMAZON appears to do NOTHING to hinder these fakes sellers. And Amazon does not automatically refund customer’s money when Amazon know the orders were not delivered.

So in my opinion It only make sense to me when I look at who profits on all sales – Amazon.

Feel free to let me know of any typos or grammatical errors .

If you experienced fake sellers chime in. note, a seller with positive feedback of 50 or more is not a fake seller and it is possible a package is lost in the mail. So those are not what I am discussing
here.

Do not get me started on how Amazon treats their employees. That is an article for later

If you are one of the people paid by Amazon to attack these type of articles, Can you let me know how much Amazon pays. Is it by the article, post, or a variable value based upon how true to home the article is?

If you like my article please forward it to others. Thanks