<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>sinker</author><text>My living depends on selling small-batch, high quality, independently made woodworking items and I&amp;#x27;ve struggled with this. Selling on Amazon feels like you&amp;#x27;re relinquishing control over your product, much more so than Ebay or Etsy. Just yesterday I&amp;#x27;ve had a third party seller somehow merge my product into their own product listing, taking the small number of 5 star reviews I earned organically with them. They sell a completely unrelated product and in their page you&amp;#x27;ll notice the reviews refer to a bunch of unrelated products. Meanwhile what the customer sees on the search page is a 4.5 star item. After some research it appears this is a common problem. How something so egregious can happen at all is puzzling.&lt;p&gt;Well I&amp;#x27;ve decided Amazon isn&amp;#x27;t for me, for now. I have a dedicated website for my business but I don&amp;#x27;t know what is the right way to drive traffic.&lt;p&gt;Could you mind explaining what your approach has been?</text><parent_chain><item><author>leemcalilly</author><text>As a small niche retailer that makes and sells guitar straps in Nashville I couldn’t agree more. Our experiments selling on Amazon have only hurt us, but Prime is a huge time &amp;amp; shipping $$ saver for re-ordering supplies for our shop and even materials used to make our products. We’ve experimented with selling on a lot of different sites (Amazon, Etsy, Reverb, etc) and have found the best way to control the brand and customer experience is selling solely on our website &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;originalfuzz.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;originalfuzz.com&lt;/a&gt;. So we both rely on Amazon to run our business, while feel we’re actively doing harm to our brand when we sell our products there. We’re giving up revenue in the short term by not taking a multi-channel approach to sales, but we think it will pay dividends over the long term because we’re able to provide a consistent customer experience with each order.</text></item><item><author>Darmody</author><text>Amazon overall quality has droped in recent years.&lt;p&gt;I use to buy from Amazon because I knew I was buying original brands and no chinese cheap copies. Well, that changed a lot. There are specific things that I still buy from Amazon but on most things there&amp;#x27;s almost no difference between they and Aliexpress. I can buy the same products from Aliexpress way cheaper and have them delivered in 2-3 days.&lt;p&gt;Thankfully there are a lot of small online shops where quality and customer support are taken very seriously. The bad thing is these stores are very specific so if I need different unrelated products I have to buy from several stores, having to pay sometimes a few euro for the delivery. This also made me buy less stuff. Now I generally wait until I need more things or until my cart has enough stuff for a free delivery.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-has-ceded-control-of-its-site-the-result-thousands-of-banned-unsafe-or-mislabeled-products-11566564990?mod=rsswn</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>burlesona</author><text>Very nice website and you offer Apple Pay. I’d totally buy direct from you over going to Amazon. I think you’re on the right track.</text><parent_chain><item><author>leemcalilly</author><text>As a small niche retailer that makes and sells guitar straps in Nashville I couldn’t agree more. Our experiments selling on Amazon have only hurt us, but Prime is a huge time &amp;amp; shipping $$ saver for re-ordering supplies for our shop and even materials used to make our products. We’ve experimented with selling on a lot of different sites (Amazon, Etsy, Reverb, etc) and have found the best way to control the brand and customer experience is selling solely on our website &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;originalfuzz.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;originalfuzz.com&lt;/a&gt;. So we both rely on Amazon to run our business, while feel we’re actively doing harm to our brand when we sell our products there. We’re giving up revenue in the short term by not taking a multi-channel approach to sales, but we think it will pay dividends over the long term because we’re able to provide a consistent customer experience with each order.</text></item><item><author>Darmody</author><text>Amazon overall quality has droped in recent years.&lt;p&gt;I use to buy from Amazon because I knew I was buying original brands and no chinese cheap copies. Well, that changed a lot. There are specific things that I still buy from Amazon but on most things there&amp;#x27;s almost no difference between they and Aliexpress. I can buy the same products from Aliexpress way cheaper and have them delivered in 2-3 days.&lt;p&gt;Thankfully there are a lot of small online shops where quality and customer support are taken very seriously. The bad thing is these stores are very specific so if I need different unrelated products I have to buy from several stores, having to pay sometimes a few euro for the delivery. This also made me buy less stuff. Now I generally wait until I need more things or until my cart has enough stuff for a free delivery.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-has-ceded-control-of-its-site-the-result-thousands-of-banned-unsafe-or-mislabeled-products-11566564990?mod=rsswn</url></story>