I come from a generation that thought that once you give ordinary buyers power over the manufacturer and trader, the power asymmetry of centuries of industrial-revolution-fuelled capitalism will be righted, leading to better competition for the consumer’s scarce dollar and an end to supply-side hegemony, which had become tainted during the pre-Internet days, with the only recourse to justice for wronged customers being the courts of law and not the court of public opinion, which in any case, was controlled largely by the rich who owned the handful of media outlets that existed then, which were all more or less unidirectional broadcast type of channels, whether print, audio, or audio-visual.
The way we Internet children (I turned 18, and ‘came of age’ in 1990, the year the World Wide Web was first launched at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee, thus launching the Internet into adulthood) thought this would be achieved would be by allowing every user, layperson, and interested party to rate and review the providers of goods and services, and then let free markets take their course, with the consumer depending more on what other consumers like them have to say about a product or service rather than what they are fed by a pliant media and paid advertising, both overt and surreptitious.
Unfortunately, we had not reckoned with humans. You see, as Douglas Adams summarised very succinctly in his 1980 book, ‘The Restaurant at the End of the Universe’ (which is the second book in his trilogy of five, go figure), “To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem.“ And so, what happened was, like a sockful of shit hitting a fan, reviews and ratings quickly escalated (not sure if this is the right word) quickly and became something of a slugfest between people equal parts stupid and rude as they were ignorant and arrogant.
In hindsight, we should have known. Direct democracy has seldom worked, and that too in small populations. To make sense of the world and be able to take rational decisions regarding literally anything, one needs something slightly more refined than asking every person what they think about every small thing, and then ruling based on the data you gather. Thus, in the finest traditions of representative democracy, we went back to ‘experts’ who we trusted, and they told us what was good or otherwise. In effect, people voted for other people, and these people told us what they thought about something, and we then gave a hell of a lot of weightage to what they said than what some random faceless stranger on the Internet thought. The opinion of an MKBHD was given far more importance than that of your uncle or neighbour when it came to choosing an electronic gadget, the advice of Dr.Fauci was seen as vetoing any contrary recommendation by your neighbourhood quack when it concerned a rampaging virus, and the direction provided by a Dr.Raghuram Rajan was seen as far superior to the random reddit shitposter repeatedly typing ‘HODL’, when faced with an economic catastrophe.
But there are some who still haven’t got the memo. One of the larger players is Amazon. To be fair, there seems to be some recursiveness built-into their reviews, where there is a weightage for those reviews that more people find ‘Helpful’ (through a simple one-click voting button under each review) as also for those reviewers with ‘Verified’ Purchases’. In addition, the Amazon algorithm probably takes into consideration the previous history of the reviewer and so on (I do not know for sure, but I am speculating), before deciding what the worth of that review is and then slotting it into their points system to come up with not just a rating for the product, but also a decision on which reviews to show up first.
That said, there is room for improvement, mainly for their seller side experience of the ratings/review system. The thing is, unlike Uber, sellers may not review buyers, and so once again there is a power imbalance. This is unnecessary and can be corrected quickly by adding a way that as a seller, I could rate a buyer, or even decide whether or not I want to sell to a certain kind of, or even as specific as one particular buyer, maybe because of previous buyer behaviour or whatever else. So, as a seller, I want to control if I am offering COD (Cash-On-Delivery), as an example, or whether I want to serve a specific PIN Code, or if I want to write about a bad experience I may have had with a buyer and other sellers who the buyer orders from in the future get to see the rating of that buyer before deciding whether they wish to sell to that buyer. Maybe this could be be married with an incentive system where I may offer a larger discount to a buyer with or above a certain threshold of rating points and a smaller one, or maybe even an extra charge for buyers with or below another threshold.
I have specific examples of this. There is a buyer of our product, let us just call him Harmandeep, for example. He regularly orders our product COD and once in two times, rejects it at his end. Now, I am not aware of the reasons, but it could be because he refuses to pay or because he is not home or whatever. Maybe he has a genuine reason to consistently refuce every other order from us. Maybe he is an asshole. There is no way to tell. The problem is, I get charged for the sale (Amazon takes a fixed plus a variable fee for every closed sale) and the to-and-fro logistics, while ending up with the same product back but now needing a fresh outer packaging to be ship-worthy once again. That means, Mr.Harmandeep is causing me a loss on the whole, because in the thin-margin FMCG market, this happening on half your sales to a particular person means there is no margin left to absorb this kind of a prank and we start losing money on an average with that particular customer.
I am sure he does this with other vendors/sellers as well. But they have no clue how to warn others, or even do something about it. ‘You could cancel his order whenever it comes,’ you say? Well, Amazon itslef has an incentive system that rewards me for performance based on certain parameters (which includes orers cancelled from our end), and penalises me for a bad performance based on the same numbers. Cancelling Harmandeep’s order again and again will spoil my numbers with Amazon, and cause me financial damage far worse that caused by Harmandeep’s refusal to be a gentleman about his promises to buy.
So, what can Amazon do? They can:
1. give me a way to rate and review this buyer so as to warn other sellers and at least make it more expensive for Harmandeep to keep playing this prank; and/or
2. give me a method/tool to blacklist him at least from the sale of my products, as well as warn other sellers that this person has been blacklisted by so many other sellers for a list (this can be objective and uniform without any need to type in specific grievances) of issues as described by those sellers who have blacklisted him.
I do understand the legal implications of this (because there have been problems in the recent past of businesses in the USA refusing to serve, say LGTB+ or PoC or some other random group based on their discretion) and giving sellers and business owners ways to shut out buyers may come with its own dangers. But, surely Amazon can build a transparent and fair system that takes into consideration the fears that it may be misused and builds safeguards against those, so as to offer it sellers a level playing field.
Because, in the memorable words of John Oliver, no one wants to live in a world populated, and sometimes run, by people that comment on YouTube videos and inhabit the Twitterverse without having some way to fight back.
Obviously, Amazon does not see it this way. And in case you are wondering why that is so when this is so obvious, the answer is actually quite simple. Even while proclaiming that their objective is to be the “Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company”, they miss out on a huge dissonance between their stated goal and their actions. Why is that? Amazon is indeed laser-focussed on its customers. There are things it has done for customers that were impossible even to think of anyone offering before they arrived on the scene. So, what gives? It is this: Even as ALL their revenue (from their ecommerce operation) comes from advertising (that sellers pay for), commission on sales (that sellers pay for), and logistics and warehousing (that sellers pay for), they seem not to consider the sellers on Amazon as their customers while conferring this title to the buyers of the goods on their website. Amazon sees sellers as a necessary evil, and if it could, it would have done away with them by making or trading in all the products it sells on its websites across the world, had it not been regulated by various governments the way it has been. It sees sellers as an adjunct, a means towards servicing their customers, and sometimes, just entities to be tolerated and given the least amount of attention as is necessary for them not to abandon its platform. It is towards the buyers that Amazon directs its endearments, despite never making a sou from them directly.
This, as is evident, is backwards. Amazon should know that while the buyers on their ecommerce sites are USERS, the sellers are really CUSTOMERS, and even if they want the users of their services to come and spend money on their website, it is not they who Amazon bills, but the sellers who display and vend their wares on it, who are billed in turn by Amazon, fattening its treasuries and making Mr.Bezos wealtheir than 92% of the world’s sovereign nations.
This will prove to be a major problem as Amazon, and the worl’d economies, grow. It is upto them to see it in this light, or allow this to be the root of their eventual downfall. What do you think Amazon will choose?
