My concerns about Amazon just keep increasing
As with tax avoidance, their capability at box shifting is as effective as it is ruthlessly efficient; and their prices tend to reflect this.
For basic CS stuff like "My item arrived damaged" they're great IME but I've only experienced their box shifting, not stuff like AWS.
But the deeper concerns keep mounting, thus far unresolved, and not investigated in the media (that I've found).
1. Their change last year requiring everyone to provide full photo ID when selling through Marketplace. That's understandable for entities trading as a company but its somewhat disproportionate for a private individual selling unwanted items to be asked for utility bills and a copy of their passport.
2. They provide all the billing details on Marketplace orders to the seller when I thought the whole point of Marketplace was Amazon acted as the payment processor. The consequences of this leads me to 3.
3. Marketplace sellers offering bribes [partial] refunds in exchange for removing negative feedback - whether justified or not. Thus a dodgy Marketplace trader could simply target partial refunds to improve their feedback score, potentially misleading future customers about how good that trader is. I've had contacts via the Marketplace messaging system which is fine but in one case I was called by a trader offering a partial refund despite the negative feedback being justified. This means they were given my home address too - not desirable if they were inclined to turn nasty about my critique.
I've contacted Amazon about this twice and both times got an email back saying they couldn't find my Marketplace account (I no longer have one - see 1) and couldn't discuss the matter further.
I just hope they haven't put too many of their competitors out of business yet as I'm looking for alternatives.