The problem with running an online marketplace is that it’s hard to police all your sellers. If too many of them provide low quality product descriptions, poorly curated metadata and pixelated photos, then your own brand will suffer.
eBay has always been very careful about presenting the eBay platform and its resellers as different entities. Amazon, on the other hand, really doesn’t seem to have nailed it. If I have a bad purchasing experience on eBay, I blame the seller. When it happens on Amazon, I can’t help but loose trust in Amazon itself.
The video below sums it up for me. When you hit play, you’ll see me mousing-over the different product options for a perfume. You’ll see jargony acronyms (EDT / EDP), inexplicable price differences, different measurements (fl oz vs ml), unclear photos, and missing product descriptions. Bleugh.
It is, of course, down to the seller, but the seller’s name is only mentioned only in two places as body text – effectively hidden away. It feels like Amazon itself as at fault.
Can’t make out the video? View the page on Amazon.co.uk
So – what would you do if you were Amazon? Would you carefully design your UI to clearly differentiate your brand from the third party merchant brands? Would you simply bite the bullet and start policing them harder? Or would you try to crowd-source it, and give means for the community to report poor content?
By and large, it’s got to the stage where I’ll only use a third-party merchant for very obscure purchases; for anything else I’ll go with Amazon, purely for the more accurate information provided.
Amazon at least recently allowed for seller filtering, meaning that I can choose to see results from Amazon.co.uk only. As such, I suppose this means that I distinguish between Amazon and third-party sellers. However, the degree to which most users will make this distinction – and notice this filter – is unclear.
Absolutely. You could combine both the crowd source and policing.
I myself am both a web developer, and an Amazon merchant.
The example you’ve given is unfortunate, but I thought I’d share some information about Amazon’s requirements for listing products, as I think they’ve actually done a very good job of addressing trust issues with third party merchants.
Listing products on Amazon is quite a complicated process; they have a wealth of guidelines and are very stringent about exactly how a product is listed.
All products have to use a genuine barcode, which means shelling out for a company prefix if you’re selling your own goods.
All product variations, such as colour/size etc, have to use Amazon’s data mapping to ensure consistency across the inventory.
Each category has a specific format that has to be followed to the letter, with a wealth of required and optional information.
Photos have to be of a certain size and clarity, be on a certain background, clearly showing certain things.
Prices have to be at least as low as on the merchant’s own website, ensuring Amazon’s customers aren’t paying a premium for using them.
A new merchant won’t get an ‘add to cart’ button on their products until 3 months of positive trading. Until this time, a competitor will get the button, with an ‘also available from these sellers’ link underneath – or if no other merchant is selling that product, there is no add to cart button at all and customers have to click on an ‘Available from XXXX’ link. In this way, the process of buying from a new merchant is less seamless than a ‘trusted’ one.
A merchant is only allowed to trade on Amazon after their products have been vetted.
Items are listed on a per country basis – to be included in each country, the merchant has to have an address in that country to be used for returns. Merchants can ship from another country, but must specifically state this fact.
Items ordered from a third party merchant have to be shipped within 48 hours. Amazon offer a guarantee to their customers on pretty much any grounds, and merchants have to adhere to this.
The list of requirements goes on… and while I as a merchant found it complicated and time consuming to get my products onto Amazon, I realise that this stringency is an attempt to keep customer confidence when buying from third parties… which benefits everyone.
Personally, I won’t use eBay anymore – my confidence in their system is totally shot. There’s so many scam sellers about, items are often not as they were described and people I know have been outright conned over the years.
Amazon sifts the genuine businesses out of the millions of would-be sellers out there – and the proof is in the return… I get drastically more sales via Amazon than I ever did with eBay.
I agree that there’s much room for improvement, and have suggested one or two things to the support team – annoyingly this usually falls on deaf ears – but I think it’s incredibly difficult to keep buyer confidence when you’re allowing third parties to use your brand to sell goods, and in my experience Amazon have done very well.
Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed comment, Gary – it’s really interesting to see it from a seller’s point of view.
The point I was trying to make was around the way that if you’re going to wrap another business up and present it almost “as your own”, you have to take the steps that Amazon does, because it’s your own reputation that’s at stake. There’s clearly a lot of work involved, and it’s impossible to do it perfectly.
What interests me is their decisions about UI design, and the way seller identity is presented on Amazon, versus the way it’s presented on eBay. The eBay seller storefront is superior in a number of ways to the Amazon storefront (in terms of UI). The seller gets their own faceted navigation system. Shoppers can add it to their ‘favourite’ shops and sign up for the newsletter.
I wonder if experiences like your own (finding amazon more profitable) is down to your type of business and the type of seller you are?
While I’m sure the UI could be improved, it seems to me that eBay avoid responsibility for their sellers by making a big show of them as separate entities.
From a customer point of view, it’s easy to purchase many things from many sellers on Amazon in the same order, without even realising that items will be shipped from multiple companies. You could consider this a design issue, surely customers should be better informed; but on the other hand if Amazon are taking it upon themselves to vet merchants and put these policies in place, then the origin of each product shouldn’t make a great difference to the customer’s experience of purchasing from the Amazon site.
The Amazon site isn’t interested in promoting sellers, or allowing customers to browse a particular seller’s range (this can be done, but it’s not the primary focus), it’s more geared towards allowing customers to find products – who they’re sold by is somewhat irrelevant.
To me it seems that Amazon runs as a department store, while eBay is a massive jumble sale… eBay simply charges people to set up a stall on their premises, while Amazon allow the use of their brand to grow your sales.
I sound like an Amazon fanboy – I’m not… Amazon has some of the worst e-commerce design in the industry, and it’s only because of their name that they can get away with it. They’ve been around so long, and practically invented so many elements of e-commerce over the years, that people forgive the awful design of their product pages and confusing cross selling elements… it’s always amazed me…
As for the type of business argument, it’s certainly a factor. I’m selling t-shirts – I suppose on eBay people are more likely to look for something specific rather than browse, and so would be less likely to run into my products. But it seems to me that when they find my stuff, they’re less hesitant to purchase from Amazon than eBay.
Bought something for my hacked iPhone 3GS, didn’t work (this is from Cydia, but via Amazon fulfilment).
Emailed the merch and Amazon, no love.
Tim
My partner purchased a digital camera through a 3rd part seller on Amazon. It was so well disguised that it was not Amazon that we were buying from, that we did not realise that it was not Amazon unitl we had a query with the item.
As it turns out UK credit card companies will not cover items for non-delivery when a 3rd party seller is involved. We only know this because our item was not delivered and now we have losted out.
All of the receipts and shipping notification comes from Amazon. How are people to know? Why does the law side with companies who atempt to hide information from consumers? I feel that it is not only up to Amazon to be honest with their customers, but up to the law to protect consumers against companies hiding behind 3rd sellers.