An interesting flaw (or feature?) in Amazon's marketplace
Posted by Tom Moertel Thu, 24 Jun 2010 19:59:00 GMT
Recently, I discovered an interesting flaw – or is it a feature? – in Amazon.com’s marketplace.
It all started when I bought economist Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. I had been reading an old printing from the library, but it was riddled with highlighting; now I wanted a clean copy to read without distractions.
On Amazon.com, I found exactly what I wanted. A third-party seller had listed a new copy for just $6.50. I bought it.
Shortly after the order, Amazon sent me an email confirming that my book had been shipped. In the email, the book was described as follows:
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States
Sold by: XXXXXXX
Condition: new
Quantity: 1
$6.50 each
Here’s where things get interesting. Around the time I received the shipment notice, I also received a cryptic communication from the seller:
I wish I had a pristine copy to send you but, while this book has wear at its front, I am confident it will serve you well, as it served me.
I didn’t think much of it until I received the book a week later. The book was, of course, riddled with highlighting.
Confused, I went back to Amazon.com to figure out what went wrong. I logged in, clicked on the order listing, and was shown the following summary of my order:
1 of: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States [Paperback]
By: Albert O. Hirschman
Condition: Used – Good
Sold by: XXXXXXX (seller profile)
Note that the condition is now listed as “Used – Good”, not new as it had been when I placed the order. Amazon allowed the item I had ordered to be changed after I had ordered it! What’s worse, Amazon now lists the changed item on the final invoice for the purchase.
In effect, Amazon has rewritten the history of my order. It’s as if I had ordered a used copy of the book in the first place. I’m lucky I kept that original email! Without it, how could I document what I had actually ordered?
Like most people, when I order something online, I expect that clicking the order button forms an implicit agreement between buyer and seller: in exchange for my money, the seller will deliver the product that I ordered, as it was represented to me when I placed the order.
That Amazon allows this agreement to be rewritten – behind the buyer’s back – seems like a huge flaw in its marketplace. It’s such an obvious flaw that I have a hard time believing it exists. Amazon is very good at the buyer-experience game; if it allows this “flaw” to exist, my hunch is that there must be a good reason for it. The trouble is, I can’t think of what that reason might be.
But my hunch is made more plausible by Amazon’s A-to-z Guarantee. Knowing that the guarantee will protect customers affected by the flaw gives Amazon the option of not fixing it. My guess, then, is that Amazon’s engineers thought about fixing the “flaw,” discovered a good reason not to, and decided to leave it alone.
Which raises the question, what is a compelling reason to allow a buyer-seller agreement to be changed after the fact and behind the buyer’s back?
I know nothing about their architecture, but this behavior would make sense if the order is stored compactly in some database, referring to product IDs and such, and the text is produce by a join. Then if the seller changes the description the join would pick up a new description, and it might very well be a lot of work to switch to a stateless/append-only model.
On the other hand, saving the exact text presented to you in the original order confirmation would be very simple. I would be surprised if they didn’t do that, if for nothing else then for cases like this. I am not familiar with amazon’s interface – were you looking at some sort of list of abbreviated entries, or something that purported to be a exact record?
Brandon, to answer your question, I am talking about what Amazon calls the “final invoice,” which I think reasonable people would assume is a record of the actual purchase transaction.
I had also considered the join explanation but figured that Amazon wouldn’t implement invoices that way. After all, the problem of how to represent an invoice is sometimes used as an introductory lesson in database design. In trying to share items across invoices, one mustn’t fail to account for the fact that items can change but invoices must serve as enduring snapshots of business transactions. Thus, the temptation to normalize everything to the max may not give the desired solution; a more subtle consideration of the problem is required. That’s why it makes for a good lesson.
I had something remarkably similar happen to me last year when ordering from Amazon Marketplace.
I ordered a text book on differential equations that was listed as “new”. I know this because I specifically chose this seller with a slightly higher price over others that were listed in other lesser conditions. When I received it, the spine was broken and the book was falling apart.
When I checked the order summary to contact the seller, I found that the condition had switched to “Used – Good” just as in your case.
I got some remuneration from Amazon and left negative feedback for the seller, but I didn’t think much more about it until I saw your post.
It makes me wonder if this is becoming a systemic problem in Amazon Marketplace.
Honestly the cyclomatic complexity is so high with the AMZN order system that probably what happened is what didn’t happen; simply nobody thought of the edge case.