Amazon has lax standards as to who can use them to sell their wares (leading to fakes being sold). That’s not UX or a UX dark pattern, that’s a business strategy. (Which doesn’t make it necessarily better or worse than if it were a UX dark pattern if you are judging it morally, it’s just something different.)
Amazon makes it hard to initiate returns. That might be a dark pattern. (In my experience the returns process for things Amazon sells directly or more or less directly, returns are straightforward and simple. Third party sellers are here, again, the problem. And that’s then more a mix of UX and business strategy, where third parties either cannot or are not required to use Amazon’s returns process but have to provide their own, e.g. fall back to writing emails back and forth.)
Reviews are overly enthusiastic, even though the sold product is not genuine. This might be an issue with fake reviews or uncritical customers (themselves unable to recognize fakes) or both – but it’s not really a UI dark pattern.
I would also argue that Amazon’s way of surfacing negative reviews (with the stars histogram and ways to filter reviews by number of stars) doesn’t suggest that it’s Amazon’s intention to hide negative reviews …
O.K. Look, when a website tells me that I'm purchasing a "32Gb Kingston UHS SD Card" by "Kingston" I expect to receive a 32Gb Kingston UHS SD Card.
There are details like "Sold by SomeScammySeller" or "Fulfilled by Amazon EU S.à.r.l" on the page and there are caveats like showing the same reviews for the same item sold by different sellers.
After the title, there would be a clickable link with the brand name after the title making the impression that you are buying something from that brand.
It Makes it very hard to know WHAT and from WHOM you are buying from and what are all these reviews about. Sometimes you change colour and everything changes.
You need to study the title, you need to study the comments, you need to study the Amazon's way of doing business and have understood what Fulfilled means, What is Amazon EU S.à.r.l, What is their relationship with the sellers and what guarantees they provide.
I don't know how dark or light coloured are these design choices but, in my personal opinion, these create a lot of cognitive loads and combined with not providing a return option and requiring to go by the customer support looks sketchy to me.
What companies need to start doing is digitally signing their products (e.g. put a unique code on each box that is generated from a private key). Then Amazon and/or sellers can go online and verify this key to ensure their wares are not replica.
I'm curious how you think that would work. They could sign the serial number, I suppose, but I don't see why the fakes wouldn't just recycle serial numbers at that point. For fast moving parts, they could include a date, but you could still just copy some other one from recent checks.
I think how it would work (if I amazon wanted it to) is that the supplier would send the list of signatures for the next 200 products to amazon (which would then check for duplicates). Presumably these signatures could be scanned from a barcode format programatically.
Also, consumers believing they had a fake product could then go to the website of these manufacturers, who would have an incentive to make a web-ui to reveal duplicates/phonies.
I'm not gonna pretend I've invented a perfect end-to-end solution here, but if I'm getting 90% of the way there in 10 minutes then let's not pretend it's unsolvable.
Apologies if my tone made it sound dismissive. I'm genuinely interested in how this could be made to work.
I agree in thinking a full on handshake would be required. Not sure how instrumented all of the suppliers would be. And I'd imagine that is where a lot of the pain to build a solution like this would be.
Any other approaches that you could think of that don't require cooperation from every party?
There is also the question of cost and basic reach. You assert this gets 90% of the way there. Do we really think the fake problem is over 10% of traffic today? I'd be surprised if that is the case. I don't have numbers, but I would expect this to be in the .1% range. At the scale of a large store, that is still a giant number.
Put the serial number under a scratch off. Once the serial number is registered by a customer via an online database, future verification would show other purchases as counterfeit.
It has some drawbacks:
- You need a significant number of people to start registering their purchases online, which no one does
- I've heard counterfeiters sometimes operate from the same factory. Legit serials could be generated for fake parts.
- Customers will obliviously try to pursue returns with the victim manufacturer instead of Amazon.
>I've heard counterfeiters sometimes operate from the same factory. Legit serials could be generated for fake parts.
A few years ago I ordered 60 computers from Dell with office 2016. About half of the 2016 serial cards were from the US, they all worked. Of the other half from China, half were already registered under office accounts. These were cards with scratch off covering part of the serial.
Amazon has lax standards as to who can use them to sell their wares (leading to fakes being sold). That’s not UX or a UX dark pattern, that’s a business strategy. (Which doesn’t make it necessarily better or worse than if it were a UX dark pattern if you are judging it morally, it’s just something different.)
Amazon makes it hard to initiate returns. That might be a dark pattern. (In my experience the returns process for things Amazon sells directly or more or less directly, returns are straightforward and simple. Third party sellers are here, again, the problem. And that’s then more a mix of UX and business strategy, where third parties either cannot or are not required to use Amazon’s returns process but have to provide their own, e.g. fall back to writing emails back and forth.)
Reviews are overly enthusiastic, even though the sold product is not genuine. This might be an issue with fake reviews or uncritical customers (themselves unable to recognize fakes) or both – but it’s not really a UI dark pattern.
I would also argue that Amazon’s way of surfacing negative reviews (with the stars histogram and ways to filter reviews by number of stars) doesn’t suggest that it’s Amazon’s intention to hide negative reviews …