> They earn a few good reviews somehow at the beginning (paid? from mad people?)

This shouldn't be too hard. Have a few friends order a "product" you never ship or even pay a few people on Fivver to do the same. Costs $25 tops. Hell, you can ship them an empty envelope to put some tracking on it.

If I were the scamming type (and I'm not in the least) I think a decent scam would be create a really good quality private label product. Sell for six months at a very small profit margin. After the good reviews and best seller rankings pour in replace the inventory with shitty quality product at a huge profit margin. It would take a long time for the sales to stop. The initial sales inertia would take some time to slow down.

Maybe that wouldn't work, who knows.

I know you keep saying the word "scam" but I think a lot of legitimate companies work this way.

My dad used to say "The secret is to remove the quality faster than the reputation drops."

Um, this is not a new idea, this is actually the way many large and "respectable" companies work. Just look at HP for a prime example. Or Amazon for that matter (for service quality, not product quality). A lot of people claim Toyota is doing this now.

I got bit by something similar, bought this garden hose adapter from someone who wound up never shipping it but indicating they would ship it in some ridiculous far out shipping window. Amazon is degrading into the wild west of eBay experience that turned me off from that platform a while back.

I got really sick of Ebay a while back and didn't buy much on there for a rather long time. Interestingly, now that Amazon's been going downhill, I've gone back to Ebay and have been getting a LOT of stuff there. I'm now finding it to be a much better place to get a lot of small stuff, such as parts for rebuilding small engines for yard equipment. It's not the easiest interface to work with when buying a bunch of small stuff, but they do let sellers consolidate orders and reduce shipping prices, it lets me keep track of my orders easily, and so many sellers are there with the lowest prices (lower than going to a dedicated parts-selling website, in my experience). Plus, it's easy to search by part number because the sellers list the part numbers right in the title. It's much harder to find this kind of stuff on Amazon for some reason.

What happens when you file a chargeback?

The one thing Amazon has generally been really good with is customer service, and easy returns/refunds.

I didn't try a CC chargeback. However Amazon gives you the money back. The catch is you can't do that until the unrealistically long delivery time has expired, and that's usually 2 months. So they have your money for that time, and you have no product.

I'm not actually sure what the scam is. Does the seller disappear with Amazon's money? Or earns interest? Or maybe they speculatively list many lines and only manage to source a few?

It might be try and get the small percentage of people that forget about the order or who can’t be bother doing the charge back.

Were you using tor or similar when buying stuff?

No, just hit some secret limit on returns.

I'd be curious to find out what the limit is. Anybody know?