Small Business Advocacy Red Flags in Your Relationship With Amazon

3 Red Flags in Your Relationship With Amazon

1) Manipulative

Amazon may be working to get your products to you faster, but are they the exact product you want and need? Maybe. But maybe not. Because they are now changing search results to favor items located in a warehouse nearest to the shopper, which means if the warehouse doesn’t stock an item that might be a better fit for you, you won’t see it in your search results.

So, not only are consumers not getting the best option for them, but the sellers – the small businesses that Amazon says they care so deeply about – are now compelled to choose (and pay for) Amazon’s logistics network of both shipping and warehouse storage or run the risk of not showing up in the first page of results.

2) Pushy 

Amazon claims its 200 million Amazon Prime members are a testament to the demand for their platform, but it turns out these numbers might not reflect how many people are Prime members on purpose

The Federal Trade Commission has recently sued the international corporation for subscribing consumers without their consent and making it a near impossible to unsubscribe. In its complaint the FTC charges that “Amazon has knowingly duped millions of consumers into unknowingly enrolling in Amazon Prime” by presenting intentionally vague offers that automatically enroll shoppers into a 30-day free trial, and later charging them for it unless they cancel it.

And when anyone tries to cancel their Amazon Prime subscription whether it was voluntary or not, they have to go through a long, winding and frustrating process to do so, which violates a 2010 consumer protection law designed to protect online shoppers. According to internal documents as well as former employees, this was all done deliberately. Fixes for these issues were proposed and considered, but resulted in lower subscription growth when tested, and were shelved by executives.

3) Intrusive

Amazon products like Ring and Alexa are supposed to make you feel protected and secure, but in reality, they are collecting and using customer data to further fill their coffers.

In another suit filed by the FTC – and settled for $30 million -Amazon was accused of failing to delete the voice data of children collected by their interactive voice assistant at the request of their parents but also kept the recordings indefinitely in order to refine its algorithm in clear violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Rule.

Employees of Ring were able access customers' private videos from the video doorbell product, enabling hackers to access their accounts and failing to implement basic privacy and security protections.

Add these red flags to the list of we’ve already started (tax avoidance, poor working conditions, predatory pricing), and you’ve got a pretty good case for breaking up with this giant corporation and keeping as many of your dollars right here on Cape Cod as you can.