Some Amazon third-party sellers find ways to contact customers who leave bad reviews | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
When you buy something on Amazon, the e-commerce giant isn’t always the one making the sale; an estimated half of all products sold on Amazon come from third-party sellers. Amazon says it’s merely the conduit between buyer and seller, and doesn’t bear responsibility if a third-party product is defective (although some recent court cases have challenged that stance).
Third-party sellers aren’t supposed to be able to email Amazon customers directly outside of the platform, but a new report in The Wall Street Journal shows that some sellers can find ways to get in touch with buyers who leave negative product reviews, and some businesses even offer “email extraction” for buyers as a service to sellers.
So rather than paying people to give…
