Amazon review: The dark side of Amazon - what everybody should know.

There seem to be two weights and measures for setting up shop with Amazon.com. One for the local (read: American) people and one for the international (read: Chinese) sellers.

I recently helped someone local setting up an Amazon Seller’s Account. What a tedious, strenuous experience. Lots of documents and information required: driver license, proof of residency, bank and credit card details, business address, description and references, verified phone numbers and email addresses, name of business owners, company representative, nationality, etc…etc…etc…

I understand, Amazon is protecting its brand and wants to weed out bogus operations to protect itself and sellers, right?

Well, I got a big surprise when I had to contact Amazon concerning a failing product sold by a third party vendor (read: Chinese).

(1) impossible to contact the seller directly, no information about the seller is listed. Only the name is provided (let’s say ABC)

(2) contacting the seller is only possible through the Messaging Assistant who states: “I send your message to ABC”.

Since no response from seller is received, I contacted Customer Service Support for help getting in contact with the vendor directly.

And here it gets juicy. The Agent also did not find any contact information about seller ABC. Agent escalated the question higher up to a Lead Agent who came back empty handed. No information is available about company ABC.

How is that possible? Since I experienced personally how though the vetting procedure is to set up shop on the Amazon platform and all the verified contact details that needed to be provided before a sellers account can be opened, here is a third party vendor (read: Chinese) company ABC selling on the Amazon website and nobody knows how to get in contact with them.

In the meantime and that because of the staggering complains about their faulty product(s), company ABC changed its name into XYZ apparently without any scrutiny by Amazon. That way, company XYZ does not need to reply to complains about products it did not sell. They keep selling same unsound products using same templates on the Amazon portal. It’s obvious that the screening by Amazon is non-existing. Corporate greed towers above buyer’s protection. Permission is given to Chinese companies who can distribute their cheaper but faulty products to us and unaware Americans are left behind holding the bag. Time to wake up people! Buy local (read: American)!