Amazon competitor got our belt listing taken down by saying it contains drugs

Similar thing happened to me. I built an online Japanese - English dictionary and used AdSense to monetize it. One day I got an email saying that my domain has been permabanned because my website appears to be promoting rape and pedophilia. As an example of one of the many offending pages on my domain they sent me urls to the definition and translation of words &quot;pedophilia&quot; and &quot;rape&quot; in Japanese.<p>Of course none of my competitors using the exact same data set had any such problems.<p>I tried for YEARS to appeal it. There are simply no humans working at Google and nobody reads your emails.<p>Edit: Actually, I did get a response a couple times but it was obviously automated. They just said to remove the ads from the pages where such words are displayed. So I added a simple rule and a column in the database to hide ads for those keywords. That just triggered the bot to move down the list of their &quot;obscene&quot; language. Next it was the names of various sexual positions, acts and fetishes (Japanese does have a very rich vocabulary in that topic), then manga slang, even silly sounding onomatopoeias that when explained in plain English are &quot;vulgar&quot;, etc.. It seems once your website is flagged there is simply no way get clean.

I think what we&#x27;re learning from many debacles on YouTube, Amazon, and Google is this:<p>Algorithms are not even close to substituting for human customer service, human moderation, and human judgment.<p>Maybe this means web-scale sites like Amazon&#x27;s marketplace aren&#x27;t viable. I&#x27;m fine with that implication. Stores like Target and Walmart seem to have the same prices with human-curated inventories, and I don&#x27;t really miss the millions of extra products Amazon has.

Nowadays when I want to buy anything on Amazon it takes so much effort to go through which listing is the Sponsored&#x2F;ad-based listing vs organic in search. Once that hurdle is crossed, it comes to going through the reviews to see which reviews can be trusted and which can not be. And even after that hurdle, once I place order, I am not sure the item I received is counterfeit or genuine. Too much work and definitely not customer-focused experience!<p>I guess going to Target is much easier to get the necessary shopping done.

Just another example of how a virtual monopoly can get away with terrible, shameful and nonexistent customer support because they can. It&#x27;s monopolistic behavior, but an passive form of it. Instead of actively engaging in monopolistic activity, they remove essential customer support because they have no competition. This really needs to be regulated quickly. Amazon, Google, Facebook all coomit the same behavior by hiding behind bots and algorithms with no customer support and there&#x27;s nothing we can do because they are so dominant.

Amazon&#x27;s automation and lack of accountability towards sellers is mind-deranging. I have a popular product on Amazon US that had a QC issue in 2017. Despite having it been resolved later that year, I am still banned from selling my product in multiple marketplaces (AU, EU, etc). (Which makes little sense, since at the time of the QC issue, I was only in the US anyways). I&#x27;ve had other marketplaces (JP, IN, etc) accept the product, and whenever I can get support people in those locales to answer my emails, they promptly enable my account, citing it having been blocked due to a technical issue.<p>But other important Amazon marketplaces just won&#x27;t respond, or don&#x27;t follow up. I Had the UK tell me if I got a VAT they would enable my account; I did the months of work required to get VAT registered and then responded to UK support that I was ready to go, and have had all of my emails (~1 a month) ignored for over a year now. Why tell me to get VAT and then just pretend I don&#x27;t exist? They just don&#x27;t care. Even worse Amazon will INVITE me to join certain marketplaces, which I have to pay to join, to only later then find that I&#x27;m randomly blocked in that marketplace as well. Oh yeah, no refunds either.<p>I&#x27;ve escalated to jeff@amazon and had multiple people there tell me they&#x27;re in the middle of unblocking the account everywhere, and weeks go by and nothing happens, and then they too just stop responding my emails. At this point jeff@amazon doesn&#x27;t respond anymore either, even though I made certain to not repeat my request more frequently than once a month. It is like hair-rippingly frustrating and it is the biggest stress point for my business currently. The worst part is this is my main source of income so I&#x27;m just relying on their support people who are wholly unaccountable.<p>I wish I had options as to otherwise but Amazon is such a behemoth now that most of the customers who were purchasing through my own ecommerce store a few years ago now demand to purchase on Amazon or not buy at all. I&#x27;m losing a ton of money because of this and have absolutely no way to get help. I cannot even use words to convey how frustrating it has been..

I just had shoulder surgery and I happily bought these direct from your website. Thank you, and I’m sorry this happened to you.<p>p.s. Can’t wait to try the drugs.

The sad thing is that the team responsible for this bit of machine learning are probably very proud of their 99% accurate algorithm.<p>It probably *is* 99% accurate - there is a lot of fraudulent activity online.<p>That 1% false positive rate really hurts though, destroying people&#x27;s livelihoods.<p>I think that people developing machine learning models sometimes don&#x27;t think about the consequences of the false positives enough.<p>There is a great section in David Spiegelhalter&#x27;s book The Art of Statistics which got me thinking about this.

I work at a medical simulator training device company - we’re quite small, just 20~ people making these devices in-house. We’ve been grappling Amazon’s Seller Central for quite a while now. Because our simulators <i>look</i> medical in use they keep taking them down and banning them. It’s like playing whack-a-mole and it’s been basically impossible to reach a real life person to explain the issue.

Despite the six figures listing fees he pays to Amazon he still has to blog it to get attention. Meanwhile, my less value AWS account gets less than 24 hour response time from actual humans.

Well, I proactively quit both my Amazon and Ebay accounts. The occasion was trouble with Chinese dealers, in which both Amazon and Ebay weren&#x27;t helpful at all, but the main reason is that I simply have enough of soulless mega-corporations, that try to build monopolies.<p>This forces me to use smaller (often local) alternatives, and honestly I don&#x27;t miss anything.<p>So my 2ct: Stop complaining, instead do something. Stop using Amazon, Google, Ebay, Facebook and the likes.<p>YOU are the one that makes them unavoidable, so just stop doing so.

I wish people would just stop using Amazon. Online stores are everywhere now and Amazon is worse than Walmart now when compared to just shopping directly from the product website or smaller online boutiques. Even the shipping times are nothing special anymore.

&gt; a competitor is obviously trying to take down our listings<p>This doesn&#x27;t seem obvious at all. It could be any number of other malicious actors. Off the top of my head: an unsatisfied customer, a troll, a disgruntled former employee, etc...

It seems like big tech companies live in a bubble where they think society is in fact an algocracy and everything is an engineering problem that can be solved with an algorithm.

It may be years before it happens, but I think this sort of thing will end up being the reason these global companies ultimately won&#x27;t be able to compete against the more focused online stores.<p>There are already categories of items I don&#x27;t ever try to buy on Amazon: farm equipment, fencing supplies, pet food.<p>And I&#x27;m currently looking into email solutions that won&#x27;t leave me completely screwed when Google arbitrarily decides it&#x27;s time to delete my gmail account. There&#x27;s just too much associated with my email address for it to be in the hands of someone who won&#x27;t answer the phone.<p>IMO, these companies are winning because they&#x27;re better than what came before them, but they&#x27;re far from the perfect solution.

Has this been fixed already? I can easily find those products (associated with &#x27;BeltBro&#x27; seller). <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;s?k=beltbro" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;s?k=beltbro</a>

&gt; Why does Amazon not have any decent phone support or a dedicated representative that could help with issues like this? If you call, you’re going to talk to someone overseas who has no authority to help in any way, a complete waste of time.<p>This sounds an awful lot like the experience of the Terraria developer banned from Google earlier this week.

This is probably the only recourse in this new age of AI bots deciding human affairs:<p>- Seller is banned by an AI agent for arbitrary reasons. There is no reasonable phone recourse<p>- Seller tries to make a _human_ point in a blog post hoping it goes viral<p>- The blog post is noticed on different platforms and buzzword of AI wrong doing is amplified to a certain level<p>- If some arbitrary threshold of _human_ reaction is noticed on the social media, the company in the wrong will probably do something about its AI bot going haywire<p>Thus, the bot&#x27;s common sense holes will be covered by collective wisdom of the crowds (which maybe, just maybe, will be integrated in the bot&#x27;s training loop).

In the UK we have something called the &quot;small claims court&quot;. The maximum compensation you can claim at the small claims court is £5000, but the important thing is: even if you lose, the company you&#x27;re suing can&#x27;t claim their legal fees back. All you can lose is your court fee (somewhere from £35 to £150 depending on the claim amount).<p>The idea of the small claims court is that you don&#x27;t use a lawyer, so there are no complicated forms to fill in, and if it goes to court you just present your evidence in front of a magistrate in plain English with no legal mumbo jumbo.<p>Starting a case in the small claims is usually a splendid way to force your way past the army of bots and AI customer service shields, and get your complaint seen by a real person. It usually gets things resolved very quickly. But not always... here&#x27;s a good story:<p>Last year I was overcharged £6 by Opodo on the credit card surcharge for a flight booking. I spent two hours going round in circles with their Facebook Messenger automated customer service bot. There were no other contact methods given. So I took them to court, claiming:<p>Claim: £6.23<p>My time interacting with chat bot (2hr 22min) @ £100&#x2F;hr: £236.67<p>My time preparing claim (1hr) @ £100&#x2F;hr: £100.00<p>Court fee: £35<p>Total: £377.90<p>... which I think is extremely reasonable of me. They didn&#x27;t file a defense, so I won the case by default. Even after winning the case, I still had no method of contacting them, and no payment was forthcoming, so I went to the next step which is to file for a warrant.<p>This cost an extra £95 but it included a bailiff visiting their office, who would be able to take goods to the value of my claim. Bring it on, I say! So I apply for my warrant and wait.<p>Nothing happens for 6 weeks (this is in the depths of the first lockdown so I wasn&#x27;t surprised by the radio silence).<p>Then I get a call from a very helpful chap who tells me he&#x27;s the bailiff. He says I probably shouldn&#x27;t hold my breath waiting for this money because the registered office is just a plaque on the fall with no staff or office... and he has FIFTEEN warrants outstanding for Opodo.<p>The next step would be a warrant against Opodo&#x27;s bank which would allow me to freeze their account... but there was no easy way to do this and would probably require a lot of paperwork. So I gave up. My belief in the UK criminal justice system shattered.<p>Then about a month later I got an email from Opodo:<p>&quot;We are contacting you from Opodo after receiving the Judgement for Claimant. In order to proceed with your refund of £377,90, ...&quot;<p>... and within a couple of weeks they had paid me in full! I&#x27;d highly recommend the small claims court - it takes literally five minutes to file a claim here... check out: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.moneyclaim.gov.uk&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.moneyclaim.gov.uk&#x2F;</a>

Damn, if only it were true - MXE is hard to come by these days, you&#x27;d have been sitting on a fortune!

I feel this pain.<p>And whats always shocking every time I need to contact a large company via some fast response required, its never available.. Phone calls are passed around department to dept that cant deal with significant situations, email support takes far too long, live chat rarely exists.<p>It&#x27;s mind blowing how such large companies don&#x27;t have these services but at the end of the day it&#x27;s a numbers game for them.<p>There just are more people that don&#x27;t complain and their bottom like is still fine.<p>Really really frustrating as there is no even recommended customer service requirements for companies. I&#x27;m sure in the above case there is money lost for this action by the competitor. Will the OP be reimbursed ? Of course not.

Those companies have grown way too big. Their in&#x2F;actions can and do affect people&#x27;s lives way beyond reasonable. I think they should be regulated, at least the way they do dispute resolution. One of the things governments could do is to tell them to shove their EULAs to a proper place and allow people to sue them for refusing proper dispute resolution process. Especially in small claim courts. I think that would straighten them right.

&gt; realize a competitor is obviously trying to take down our listings?<p>Classic Amazon, competitor most likely has financial link to Amazon, even might be their puppet company.

I don’t think a competitor did that. I think it might be due to a mislabeled BOM or some other issue. Can this person do the same to another competitors item. Can a regular person do it for any item at Amazon. If not then it probably due to some other issue and not a competitor item.

Global platforms don&#x27;t scale.

After my latest Amazon order got me a completely empty, unsealed shipping envelope, I tried to get my money back. AFAICT, there is nothing in the system that even allows reporting &quot;package was empty&quot;. Thankfully the item was less than $5.

Wasn&#x27;t just like 1 or 2 days ago that people here were praising Amazon&#x27;s custommer support over Google&#x27;s on a thread of a developer who had his google account blocked ?

This, combined with what the Terraria dev suffered this month, makes me think there is more need for fast human interaction in automated ban reviews.

The belt itself is rather neat! Perhaps you could just use a large velcro cable tie to try it out, although it probably wouldn&#x27;t be as robust.

&gt; First of all, how can a belt contain drugs?<p>I suppose there are some Amazon sellers who have specific items that (contrary to the public listing) actually contain drugs. In that case, people could order them as a way of buying drugs that would look like some other kind of retail business from the point of view of Amazon, shippers, and tax agencies. The seller could try to make the listed product extremely unappealing or uninteresting to the general public, or have some kind of code or out-of-band contact method that people could use to indicate that they wanted and expected specific orders to contain the drugs instead of the listed item.<p>Also<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;325&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;325&#x2F;</a><p>Also, it looks like the &quot;people lying in order to harm, steal from, or extort others&quot; issue hasn&#x27;t been solved for <i>any</i> side of a two-sided market or review system. :-(<p>Edit: I was first thinking of saying that this is a way that drug prohibition really empowers random people to hurt each other with false accusations. But this is probably true for any kind of high-stakes accusation. As long as there&#x27;s any kind of contraband or dangerous item that Amazon cares quite a bit about banning from its site, and as long as there&#x27;s a significant market in that item, people could make spurious accusations that any seller was secretly trading in it.

Jimson weed is so common they could never ban it and the effects are so bad I&#x27;d hope you never take it.

I wonder what is the size of the market for copycats vs size of the market for original products.

One begins to suspect that Amazon partners with Chinese rip-off firms.

Exceptional edge cases, like flagging inappropriate content, are open to abuse. This is especially true for highly automated systems like those run by Amazon and Google but I think it occurs on community sites like HN as well.<p>It is unfortunate that these trust based systems are being abused.

I have seen every tool used to enforce ‘laws’ also abused to deplatform competition.<p>Most tech companies are run with as few employees as possible, that is why SV FAANG engineers make so much.<p>We can look to china to understand a bit more of the statistics and personnel required to effectively moderate a system. e.g. number of censors per number of users.<p>This means that companies like facebook have 2-3 orders of magnitude fewer employees needed to moderate their system. i.e. they are effectively unmoderated. (this is why it was no surprise that facebook was used to plan the capital riots, even though FAANG benefited by deplatforming parlar for political reasons).<p>We are in an interesting situation where there are probably similar levels of legitimate and illegitimate takedowns but nothing will change because the people with power and money have what they need.