Amazon began as a bookseller but soon morphed into a mass merchant with a huge assortment, increasingly bolstered through the years by the third-party sellers on its marketplace. For more than a year, over half of the goods sold through Amazon have come from third-party sellers.
Those sellers have been a boon when it comes to sales and fulfillment. The marketplace model allows Amazon to reap the benefits of sales without much if any cost of fulfillment and shipping. But as those sales have taken over a greater portion of Amazon’s sales, its reputation for top-notch customer service has suffered, as some sellers fail to provide its customers with solutions to problems, adequate packaging or shipping speeds and, perhaps worst of all, authentic goods or goods-as-advertised.
