Amazon may want this outcome where shoddy goods and services are hawked by their independent sellers, or is at the very least not strongly incentivized to truly fix the situation. This may be a clever strategy by Amazon to take over distribution channels that are currently dominated by the independent sellers, and achieve what is currently considered nigh-impossible: put the Internet-based disintermediation of retailing back into the genie bottle.
As the independent sellers proliferate shoddy goods and customer service, they drive increasingly more customers to "Authentic Amazon" goods and services. The "Authentic Amazon" experience doesn't have to be flawless or even exceptionally good on an absolute basis, they only need to be substantively good-enough than the aggregate of independent sellers to ascend to the top of the customer experience pyramid. That is an extremely low bar of performance I've no doubt they will accomplish, with or without a conscious strategy in place.
Thus is the stage set for independent sellers to turn into an undifferentiated mass of independent contractors vying for "shelf space" on an "Authentic Amazon" selling channel. With enough critical mass of customers dissatisfied with independent sellers, a single toggle switch or a "channel selector" screens out all of them, and suddenly they are Uber'ized: beholden to inflexible performance metrics that raise the bar on quality, with Amazon taking a very substantial cut of the action.
In the pell-mell rush to the disintermediated e-tailing golden nirvana, people forgot one of the factors retailing arose in the first place: with discerning, effective, "good" retailers, customers outsource the curating process' cognitive load (and time) to some-trusted-one else. That filtering function has eroded significantly in more modern times, but a tattered version still exists under the guise of "curation" these days. Review systems were supposed to supplant this function, but currently they are botted to irrelevance.
There are some expensive ways to reform review systems, but like I mentioned in the beginning, enhancing the independent selling channels' trustworthiness (with effective review systems or any other factors) is not in Amazon's most profitable long-term interests. I expect Amazon to get the sellers hooked into Amazon, then farm them so Amazon doesn't do as much of the legwork of curating for quality as they do today.
As the independent sellers proliferate shoddy goods and customer service, they drive increasingly more customers to "Authentic Amazon" goods and services. The "Authentic Amazon" experience doesn't have to be flawless or even exceptionally good on an absolute basis, they only need to be substantively good-enough than the aggregate of independent sellers to ascend to the top of the customer experience pyramid. That is an extremely low bar of performance I've no doubt they will accomplish, with or without a conscious strategy in place.
Thus is the stage set for independent sellers to turn into an undifferentiated mass of independent contractors vying for "shelf space" on an "Authentic Amazon" selling channel. With enough critical mass of customers dissatisfied with independent sellers, a single toggle switch or a "channel selector" screens out all of them, and suddenly they are Uber'ized: beholden to inflexible performance metrics that raise the bar on quality, with Amazon taking a very substantial cut of the action.
In the pell-mell rush to the disintermediated e-tailing golden nirvana, people forgot one of the factors retailing arose in the first place: with discerning, effective, "good" retailers, customers outsource the curating process' cognitive load (and time) to some-trusted-one else. That filtering function has eroded significantly in more modern times, but a tattered version still exists under the guise of "curation" these days. Review systems were supposed to supplant this function, but currently they are botted to irrelevance.
There are some expensive ways to reform review systems, but like I mentioned in the beginning, enhancing the independent selling channels' trustworthiness (with effective review systems or any other factors) is not in Amazon's most profitable long-term interests. I expect Amazon to get the sellers hooked into Amazon, then farm them so Amazon doesn't do as much of the legwork of curating for quality as they do today.