Amazon needs to stop with inventory comingling. They know it and refuse to stop, so they are culpable. I'm sure it would hurt their logistics to stop, but it also hurts cigarette companies to not advertise to children and we made that a law.
It is ridiculous that you can order a supplement where it says "sold by Proctor and Gamble, fulfilled by Amazon" on the product listing, and then receive a counterfeit product that was sent in by a different company. If they received it from a different company, then it wasn't "sold by Proctor and Gamble."
At the very least they need to give brand owners the tools to protect their brands- an option to put non-authorized resellers' shipments into a separate comingled bin, and have all the authorized resellers in another.
Right now the only option for a brand with a popular product to protect from counterfeiting is to not sell anything through Amazon and sue everyone that tries to list your products on Amazon- which might not even work and really hurts your market reach.
Amazon are playing a very dangerous game with their brand.
I buy a lot of stuff from AliExpress. I know that there's a fair chance that I'll get some kind of junk, but it's cheap enough that I'm often willing to take the gamble.
Until very recently, Amazon offered the lowest-hassle online shopping experience by a considerable margin. I'd often buy from Amazon without bothering to compare prices, because the convenience of one-click ordering was worth it.
Almost entirely because of Marketplace, Amazon is regressing from a premium retail experience to an AliExpress-style flea market. Every time I click the buy button, I worry about getting a counterfeit product, I worry about the hassle of returning it, I worry about getting banned from Amazon by an algorithm for "abusing" their returns policy. Buying from Amazon isn't a no-brainer any more.
Amazon were so very close to having a total monopoly on my online spending, but they squandered it. They could have secured a loyal and price-insensitive customer, but instead they're driving me away from their platform. Maybe they don't care about being a retailer any more, maybe they're all-in on AWS, but if I were an Amazon shareholder I'd be getting pretty damned nervous.
Same. In fact, I basically only use Amazon as an AliExpress with free 2 day shipping. For anything that could be counterfeited (which is really anything these days!), I won't touch them anymore. B&H is the same price and I can always show up at their store and be annoying until they fix my problem.
B&H is certainly better, but I've occasionally gotten something that was obviously open box from them and its always a bit of a pain to convince them this is a problem. It came to a head recently complete with a salty response from their social media guy on Twitter and a complaint to Anton Bauer about used product being sold as new.
I'm in the same place -- Amazon sold me a counterfeit charger.
Well, not counterfeit, but with a fake ETL/Intertek -- a UL competitor -- mark. I told their CS and they refunded me, then continued selling the charger with the fake ETL mark.
I moved $40k/year of IT spend from my company off Amazon to BHPhoto.
I also stopped buying any makeup / food / supplements / dog food / dog toys on Amazon.
Hell, I bought my dog's new leash and collar straight from the manufacturer!
We make speaker wire and sell it primarily on Amazon, so I have some experience on the manufacturer side of UL/ETL marks. My advice is to never buy any product with an ETL mark. As an organization, they are way less stringent about enforcing the integrity of their mark. And I would also never buy anything at a low price tier that bears a UL mark, since it’s probably counterfeit. If you want quality, pay for it. When you pay for a brand which markets on quality at a higher price point, there’s a pretty
good chance you’re getting something legitimate. The reason is that it’s hard to compete at a higher price point, so honesty is probably the only reason a brand would willingly choose to scale that kind of a barrier.
If you’re buying from the manufacturer and there are no other sellers, then you’re fine on Amazon. Where you have to watch out is when there are multiple sellers on an item.
It seems like a lot of things that sound an awful lot like fraudulent practices from a lay perspective don't actually reach a useful or provable definition when it comes to legal liability.
But saying something is sold by a specific party which I then choose to do business with, then substituting goods that are likely to be from any of numerous other parties, some of which I may be explicitly trying to avoid doing business with...I would at least be interested in hearing why that doesn't count as fraud or false advertising or some such, or maybe some trademarks issue.
At least, I'd love to hear a less rage-inducing justification for putting up with allowing this behavior than "it was buried in a ToS somewhere that lying about who my goods came from is okay, actually."
That phrasing is part of the problem, not the solution. You're conflating the idea of a manufacturer (Proctor & Gamble in this case) with a reseller. Amazon tells you both, but since the retail products are (should be) identical, neither they nor you really care whether or not this particular box came from "Joe's Nutrition" or "Sally's Supplements", and worrying about that distinction is like arguing against the fungibility of money (did that dollar bill in your pocket, which you got from an ATM, "come from" your job or your side gig?).
It's not the comingling that is the root cause here, it's the fraud. It doesn't matter whether or not Amazon buys their pills from Joe or Sally, what we care about is that they're not selling fake pills. Focusing on comingling seems to be missing the point. We have even less ability than Amazon to detect the fact that Joe is selling fake pills, so they'd still make it into people's mailboxes.
>Amazon tells you both, but since the retail products are (should be) identical, neither they nor you really care whether or not this particular box came from "Joe's Nutrition" or "Sally's Supplements"
Sounds like it is time for a "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Retail Products" with the first entry being that every item with the same SKU is identical to every other item with that SKU.
You would think at the very least Amazon would need to maintain a chain of custody for each individual item that is meant for human consumption. What happens if there is a Tylenol poisoning [1] like scare with one of these supplements? Would Amazon legitimately have no way to track down the source of the contaminated product? If they can, what would be the possible explanation of not displaying the source to the user beyond "it is cheaper if we don't"?
It's not just products for human consumption that can cause injury. A shoddily made counterfeit phone charger can start a fire and burn down your house.
> worrying about that distinction is like arguing against the fungibility of money (did that dollar bill in your pocket, which you got from an ATM, "come from" your job or your side gig?)
That's an interesting argument except for the fact that the source of money is extremely important for fraud and tax purposes. Money laundering is specifically the co-mingling of "inventory" to hide the source. Amazon is product laundering.
When the product comes from "Sally's Supplements" then if there is an issue with the product then that's first and foremost Sally's problem. It might go up to Procter & Gamble or maybe it doesn't get that far.
The source of the product and who supports it is very important.
Counterfeiting is going to happen. Typically you deter it by detecting it and punishing the counterfeiters. Commingling defeats this. I guess we can make Amazon inspect everything they receive from third party sellers thoroughly enough to reliably detect counterfeits themselves, but that seems much less likely to happen.
2. Supplier A buys the unit from supplier B (and pays the balance by transferring another unit A => B).
3. The now supplier A's unit gets sent to you.
I.e. somewhat similar to e.g. dropshipping and other such practices which are traditionally perfectly legal.
It seems it would be quite hard to argue false advertising on that (as you got the item from A - generally it does not matter who A got it from, unless A claims to be the manufacturer), which I guess is why it has not happened yet.
But I could still see it happen, especially if the counterfeiting problems worsen. Maybe the fact that Amazon does it automatically for the sellers (with their approval) could be considered a factor that makes this different from the traditional stock supply cases.
There’s a huge and fundamental difference between what you describe and what Amazon is doing. What you describe involves both A and B. A is figuratively putting their name on the product, and they have an incentive to make sure that everything is above board. You are getting it from A, by way of B.
The way Amazon does it, A isn’t involved in the choice of who supplies the product, they just receive the money. They don’t even know who supplied the product, if I understand things correctly. You’re just buying from B, while Amazon says you’re buying from A.
I'm a former marketplace seller. There is a way brands can accomplish this: marketplace items must contain all the features that the original brand provides. So the brand can create, say, a warranty that only applies when purchased form an "authorized seller". Since the company controls who is authorized, no other seller is able to include the warranty, and their offerings are not identical.
The difficult part in all of this is dealing with Amazon and their terrible marketplace back end.
> marketplace items must contain all the features that the original brand provides
Why should a buyer be expected to trust either Amazon, or the fulfiller, to decide which bait-and-switch sales don't count as bait-and-switch?
It wrongs both the buyer, who doesn't get what they ordered, and the original manufacturer, who is being subjected to something akin to 'passing off' in trademark law. You aren't allowed to hijack someone else's brand to sell your product. [0]
Yes.[1] At least in Pennsylvania. This decision is based on state law. Amazon claims to be insulated from product liability claims because it is not the "seller". The Third Circuit says Amazon is the "seller". "Amazon not only accepts orders and arranges for product shipments, but it also exerts substantial market control over product sales by restricting product pricing, customer service, and communications with customers."
Amazon can in turn sue the party who provided the product to recover what they have to pay out to the end customer, if they want.
Amazon allows their product providers to be somewhat anonymous. That weighed against them in the court decision. To the court, that looks like a retailer-wholesaler relationship. An actual seller has to disclose the actual name and address of the business in some states, including California. (B&P code section 17358).
> At least in Pennsylvania. This decision is based on state law.
Only in part. Section B @ page 21 is the Court outlining their reasoning under the Second Restatement of Torts which has been adopted in some form or another in most states. The court could have ended with the Pennsylvania four-factor analysis but the ruling would have definitely been limited in scope. Instead, the 3rd Circuit has anticipated this case going to the Supreme Court and went through the effort of detailing the logic for a SCOTUS ruling that would hold Amazon accountable beyond the boundaries of Pennsylvania as well.
> At the very least they need to give brand owners the tools to protect their brands- an option to put non-authorized resellers' shipments into a separate comingled bin, and have all the authorized resellers in another.
As a brand I think you can stop others listing your products. I tried to sell something a while back and was refused because I was a third party seller.
I should have known this would be used as an excuse to even further expand corporate control at the expense of individuals. Now they're trying to use it to restrict the second-hand market.
Instead of making it clear you're buying second-hand goods, or from a non-authorized seller, they are deliberately conflating what you're buying, with who you're buying it from. This way their anti-counterfeit efforts will conveniently squash the second-hand market.
On the flip side, for
many brands, if it’s being sold by someone other than an authorized reseller, it is almost certainly counterfeit. We have a private label brand that sells on Amazon. If anybody else is selling our products at the same prices we sell them for, then it is almost certainly a counterfeit, since we only sell at retail prices. The only exceptions would be somebody selling one of our products used. But then we offer a lifetime return policy.
And believe me, as a seller I have some insight into the bullshit black hat tactics at play in the Amazon marketplace. Amazon needs tools to fight the bad guys. For the sake of consumers.
Aside from counterfeiting, it's become a hassle to buy from the marketplace. My last experience was buying a small piece of furniture. There was a problem and it could have been resolved more easily than it was, but as inconveniences came up I had to deal with both Amazon's and the vendor's customer service. And each blamed the other. Ultimately I had to pack up something heavy to be shipped back which I didn't want to do, and if I had to do it it would have been less hassle to take it back somewhere local. Which is how I wish I had made the purchase.
They could require all suppliers to put up a surety bond. Make the amount high enough to filter out suppliers unwilling to sell long-term and also attempt to filter out anyone intending to sell counterfeit goods. Any suppliers who hit a certain threshold of failing to meet Amazon's standards of product authenticity would forfeit their bond. This isn't a new idea, it works well in other industries.
There's a whole class of items I won't buy from Amazon. Supplements are one of them, I buy direct. Given how easy it is to set up a Shopify store I can't see how this is good for Amazon.
Or at least require a deposit for sellers of a non-insignificant amount, a hold on new seller payouts for up to 30-60 days and per-seller stickers on intake inventory so sellers of counterfeits can be rooted out better.
Also, allow product manufacturers who sell directly, to block other sellers on the platform for their products and handle reports for alike-named and-or brand confusing products.
Amazon does very little to actually do anything meaningful to limit counterfeit products.
> Note: Amazon ensures that the initial source of the commingled units can be traced throughout the fulfilment process.
> Important: Amazon ensures that the exact same units from two sellers, participating in the commingling programme, are always physically segregated. This means that Amazon storage logic does not allow same ASINs of different sellers to be stored in the same bin in our warehouse if they are commingled.
In other words, Amazon ensures that commingled items are never physically commingled.
> The system is purposefully designed so that similar products are not placed next to or near each other, and Amazon can also track the original seller of each unit.
As far as I understand it, that just means that sellers have the option to opt in/out of the commingling program (Settings => Fulfillment by Amazon =>
FBA Product Barcode Preference).
Yes, there is a cost for the seller if opting out - they need to apply their own barcodes to the products in that case.
> Also, allow product manufacturers who sell directly, to block other sellers on the platform for their products and handle reports for alike-named and-or brand confusing products.
The doctrine of first sale means you can't keep people from reselling your branded products and if you don't offer your products on Amazon at this point others will offer fakes and with Amazons cooperation acquire your customers while offering them cheaper competitors products.
Its a lovely situation to say the least. All strategies are sub optimal. Logically we need a law forcing them to divulge who your actual product is coming from on the page before you buy effectively ending comingling.
The issue is selling fake products as a branded products. Amazon makes this easy to do by commingling inventory and not matching/tracking sellers to inventory items.
This fact by itself would probably make Amazon liable for product liability claims in any court in the US, it's traditional CDA liability sheild notwithstanding.
EDIT: Products liability law is complicated, but generally even if Amazon wouldn't be treated as a seller, they could still be held liable for their negligence in providing the wrong/defective item out of their (commingled) inventory. Amazon doesn't match sellers to inventory items so they have literally no way to defend themselves from such a suit especially if the seller can show that they provide products straight from the manufacturer but Amazon commingled with other sellers' inventory. (I'm aware of several such suits that were almost immediately settled by Amazon with NDAs attached.)
> Amazon makes this easy to do by commingling inventory and not matching/tracking sellers to inventory items.
That is not correct. Amazon's seller help pages and Amazon spokesperson comment on e.g. this FT Alphaville article https://outline.com/4R7fp6 say that Amazon tracks the original supplier:
> The system is purposefully designed so that similar products are not placed next to or near each other, and Amazon can also track the original seller of each unit.
I.e. commingling only means that any sellers' inventory can be used for fulfillment, not that the inventory is physically commingled.
Amazon "says" they can track the original supplier.
In practice, they clearly don't. I've had a client that was the only manufacturer of a product receive fake versions of their own product that was part of Amazon's commingled inventory. This happened last year.
Also, unless Amazon removes tags prior to delivery, there is no mechanism on many items that would allow them to track goods short of maintaining physical separation, which it is abundantly clear that they do not.
If this physical separation exists, it is useful only to Amazon if buyers can still be fulfilled by any of the sellers.
When evidence builds for fake product, Amazon can halt use of a particular seller's inventory...but prior to that you might get a fake, regardless of the seller's reputation.
I think it would be challenging to keep track of who the original trademark owner is for every single item and creating a system for them to prove it. There are hundreds of thousands of businesses with thousands of products. And sometimes companies re-brand their products, or buy other companies, etc, etc. Or sometimes the original vendor doesn't ship in a particular country, its always through a distributor, etc, etc.
It's not clear that you can limit a buyer's ability to resell it on any market without a contract with the buyer that may or may not be legal or enforcable based on jurisdiction. It also doesn't seem likely that people willing to defraud people with any agreement.
I slightly disagree. The item was sold by Proctor and Gamble. They got the money I paid, and I got a product back. Proctor and Gamble happened to use a third party for fulfillment and as a marketplace for handling the sale, and they are to blame for choosing a fulfillment company which may occasionally send me fake products that Proctor and Gamble didn't make.
We should fault the sellers for using Amazon in the first place.
You're not wrong, but why does the seller get a pass? If I get a catalog in the mail labeled "Bob's Swimsuits for Portly Gentlemen," and I call the 800 number and order one, and instead I get an angry bobcat, my beef is with the folks at Bob's Swimsuits.
The fault may be with the company Bob hired to manufacture swimsuits, or maybe the shipping company for confusing boxes, or maybe Bob's catalog contractor got some model numbers switched around, but I'm just the customer. None of that stuff is visible to me, and I have no control over it. If the catalog company or the fulfillment company or the manufacturer part of the pipeline is known to occasionally produce bobcats, it's Bob's job to fix it.
Yes, this is Amazon's fuckup, but it's not the customer's job to conduct the postmortem. The customer has the privilege of blaming the entity they do business with.
I stopped buying books from amazon after getting few "new" books visibly used. Scribbled notes or giant greasy hand mark etc. If I need to drop off book for return anyway then I can make as well trip to normal bookstore (learned about very nice local one).
If Amazon instead sends a counterfeit product from someone other than P&G when I buy a product that is advertised as sold by P&G, the should be fraud, if it isn't already.
They need to show you who you're buying from if they aren't going to accept liability for selling it.
For some foolish reason I had notifications turned on for the Amazon app... it recently offered me a deal on some sort of supplements that seemed kinda strange / made some weird claims. I had never even searched for any kind of supplement or even food / drug items before.
Other offers were for what looked like seriously questionable quality things, that were semi related to items that I had searched, but looked like rock bottom quality, but they were a few $ cheaper.
It all has a very Kmart / Wallmart, but maybe worse vibe.
Amazon seems more and more like a wide open low cost kinda store where fakes, low quality garbage, and such aren't just too common, but even pushed by their own system. Sometimes Amazon takes some light action, other times they argue they're simply not responsible for whatever it is they sell: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/amazon-on-the-ho...
It's all the opposite of what I chose to go to Amazon for. I went to Amazon to find options I couldn't find elsewhere, and generally want good quality things BECAUSE the local retail stores already were in a race to the bottom.... But now Amazon wants me to wade through their garbage to find it and seems to want to join that $1 cheaper for $5 less quality type race .... and I swear I'm seeing fewer good quality items sold in areas where they used to exist, but now seemed to be dominated by garbage.
Amazon is busy shooting itself in the foot. The problem is, the gun is small and the foot is huge, so they probably don't feel it right now.
Supplements (or really anything I put in my mouth) is one of a growing set of classes of items I won't buy on Amazon anymore. That probably doesn't result in much loss for Amazon right now, but what it does do is:
1. Makes me trust Amazon MUCH less, which means I'm much more likely to forgo purchasing additional classes of items from them.
2. Makes me find new online or offline vendors for the classes of items I no longer buy from Amazon. Those vendors sometimes sell other items I would normally buy from Amazon as well. If I need those items, I'm not going to shop BOTH places. I'm going with the one I trust.
3. Makes me reconsider my Prime membership. (Among other things, like shipping having become less reliable recently.)
There's a tipping point here somewhere, where I'll just stop being an Amazon customer entirely.
Normally I'd just upvote and continue on my way but with the expectation that maybe someone from Amazon is reading and thinking "surely not everyone feels that way".
We all feel this way. Inventory co-mingling will have major long term costs. If you think about it, it is pretty crazy how big of a reputation hit Amazon has taken in the last few years.
I didn’t used to fee this way. Or rather, I kind of did, but didn’t really /care/.
Then I had a kid, and the question of “do I trust this thing to go into or onto my kid’s body?” actually mattered.
Suddenly, my purchases from amazon drop like a rock. Partly for classes of item I don’t trust getting from them, and partly because I’m just getting habituated to shopping at different outlets.
Moreover, this has become a “known thing” in the online mommy groups in our area. My wife has told me she’s heard exactly the same thing on her fb and mailing lists; increasingly, “don’t buy amazon” is a given for conscientious parents.
I’m spending a lot of money on this tiny human, Amazon, and none of it is going to you.
Likewise. I'm at a point where I just do not trust Amazon. I also pretty much only buy with Amazon as the seller, which in some cases is annoying because they seem to change to another seller a lot of the time. Only because if Amazon is the seller, returns are usually easier.
Even the Basics brand is just about worthless as far as anything technology/electrical as the quality is usually lower than the value on the price.
The irony is I'm finding the Prime Video selection more valuable than the shipping/buying experience lately.
Absolutely. I order direct from the manufacturer for most of my supplements these days and the rest I pick up from Target and CostCo. I used to buy all of them from Amazon.
I canceled my Prime ages ago, and have pretty much entirely stopped ordering from Amazon. It's impossible to navigate their storefront to find the legit items, and then you hear stories like these where even the legit items are fraudulent. I just can't be bothered. Mostly I buy locally these days, or buy direct from book publishers and electronics manufacturers (or even more often, simply not buy). I've switched to using eBay for one-off items that are hard to find locally. eBay's system was designed from the beginning to make fraud easier to detect.
WRT Prime specifically, it's kind of a self-feeding problem. As Amazon's reputation tanks, you stop buying things, which makes Prime's value also tank.
The logistics system is about the only part of Wal-Mart's business that I respect. They know what side their bread is buttered on, and they can make sure it gets to the plate exactly when someone wants toast, using a minimum quantity of diesel fuel.
Unfortunately, their purchasing policy sort of ruins it. While I can be certain something is the brand that it says it is at Wal-Mart, I can't be certain that it isn't a Walmart-specific SKU or outlet-store SKU that is not the same quality as enticingly-similar SKUs sold by the same manufacturer.
It's not technically counterfeit for a brand to sell a product of inferior quality into completely separate discount retail supply chains. You should know what you're getting, too, as the prime retail supply chains and outlet retail supply chains don't mix in reputable companies, because they don't want the inferior goods to tarnish the reputation of the superior.
Amazon throws that out the window. The brand manufacturer cannot control Amazon's supply chain to a level required for protecting their brand. As long as commingling continues, it only makes sense for counterfeiters to sell via Amazon. It also makes sense for "para-feiters" to buy a real brand from an outlet store and swap the outlet SKU to the prime retail SKU for the most-similar product, and sell at a smaller discount to the prime retail price. Shoppers think they're buying the prime retail version, and they might get shipped the discount version from the para-feiter's commingled stock.
So it's not entirely on Amazon. The manufacturers were already burning down brands when Amazon threw fuel on the fire.
Note that if you have young children, the list of sensitive goods is basically everything considering they try to eat anything they get their hands on at one time or another.
I regularly have packages “delivered”, but they mysteriously show up a day or two after the claimed delivery. I assume this is the logistics “contractors” missing their quota and making up for it later.
The contractors are out of their mind around me trying to hit quota. Last week an amazon van barreled in from the opposite lane, cut off traffic, and parked at a 45* angle facing traffic halfway into a street parking spot. The whole lane was blocked while they struggled to find their apartment on foot.
As far as I can tell, this is Amazon coopting the gig economy for their own deliveries. The quality of service is predictable. I doubt the delivery people (sorry, Amazon Delivery Service Partner) make a heck of a lot of money.
> No, there are defiantly people delivering stuff our of cars and cargo vans. I haven't had an amazon order come via UPS or FedEx in a while.
That is the delivery person doing that. The worst is when delivery personnel don't ring or knock, they just slap a "tried to deliver" slip on your door because it's faster for them.
I live in a city and people who can't figure out the call box will just leave packages in the street. Packages get stolen in as little as 20 minutes. I guess it all makes sense now. The morning people will at least leave it just behind the front door where a package might survive for hours.
In Chicago they always droce around in rented vans from Enterprise. I wonder if they had some sort of deal to hook up their "contractors" with vehicles.
> Supplements (or really anything I put in my mouth) is one of a growing set of classes of items I won't buy on Amazon anymore.
Same here. Also considering I've bought herbicides on Amazon, I always wonder how well edible and toxic items are warehoused, and how they handle the eventual spillage.
> 2. Makes me find new online or offline vendors for the classes of items I no longer buy from Amazon.
I'm about 3/4 on the way of replacing amazon with other online sources that are specialized in a domain. As a bonus, those sources usually know the domain well, offer a great selection and undercut Amazon on price. The only thing is that shipping can take longer… though some vendors are actually faster.
> Makes me reconsider my Prime membership.
I've already set mine to NOT auto-renew. It's buried behind several clicks but once it's out, I'll leave it out. The value I get is just no longer worth it.
Yeah I got a really bad vibe when I got the supplement stuff and then pushing some questionable quality things. Really quickly my impression of Amazon changed.
"Supplements (or really anything I put in my mouth) is one of a growing set of classes of items I won't buy on Amazon anymore."
How would you know that the vendors you are buying these items from aren't themselves buying from Amazon or other counterfeit vendors?
Honest question, because I'd really love for there to be some way for consumers to verify the authenticity of what they're buying, but as far as I know there isn't.
It's not about the fakes, it's about trust. I don't expect perfect fake detection from a vendor. I can't perfectly detect fakes myself. I expect vendors to develop trust with their own sources like I'm trying to develop it with the vendor. I expect fakes to be non-existent or rare-enough in their inventory and for them to respond appropriately in case a fake does make it through. An appropriate response is not just to coldly refund my money and continue to allow the item to be sold in their store. An appropriate response is to refund my money, be truly mortified, and at the very least stop selling the item; if not stop doing business entirely with whichever distributor or seller sold them the item. (Also, my time is valuable; so I'd expect some recompense for the inconvenience which could act as a proxy for 'truly mortified' since I can't actually know their internal state.)
I often buy from Target or Costco.com, which have no 3rd party sellers that I'm aware of. Because of this, I assume that they are vetting their vendors and supply chain to minimize the reputation damage that counterfeits would cause. I also use Walmart.com, but I filter out anything sold by 3rd parties to make sure I'm buying something from Walmart's vetted supply chain.
If shipping charges aren't prohibitive, I'll also consider buying directly from the manufacturer website.
If you buy from a random site on the internet that doesn't have a reputation to protect, then I agree it's just as risky as buying from Amazon or a random eBay seller.
Likewise, I've been looking at Walmart.com more often as well, but even there they seem to have other sellers. I'm unsure if their actual supply chain is any better or not though. Amazon really ruined it.
Aside: I'm also disappointed in Newegg at whatever point they started allowing third parties. Worse still is a number of the third parties list the same products as different items/codes so search is a pain sometimes until you select newegg as the seller.
Yeah I've seen some "Amazon Choice" suggestions that I have some area of knowledge in and I know those are not good products. Nothing deadly or dangerous, but as far as selling someone a good product, they're just not good.
While I don't doubt are selling well.... really suck, and I fear the difference is simply sales volume of purchasers who don't know ... due to a couple bucks difference from another product... or straight up sponsorship.
Amazon has been feeling downmarket for a long time.
* You can't trust them for entire categories of products.
* You can't trust them, period, about pricing. The amount of effort they've spent ensuring comparison between very similar items is as hard as possible is kind of amazing; discriminatory pricing: this doesn't require explanation; Their relentless efforts to shove certain products at me just started to annoy me at some point.
It all combines to erode any trust I once had in them; they're apparently no more concerned with ensuring I don't feel ripped off than someone selling junk off the back of a truck.
* Their recommendation engine is occasionally funny, but otherwise utter crap, and just takes up space.
I finally cancelled Prime at the beginning of this year, and after a couple minor adjustments, it was no big loss. I still buy books from them when I can't find them elsewhere.
Otherwise, eh. I just don't like them and don't need them.
You'd have to be insane to buy anything you'd put in your body from Amazon. Just this week I received an obviously used item that was "Shipped and sold by amazon.com" and sold as "new".
I realize they're trying, but Amazon is clearly failing to control the tide of fakes that is infesting their storefront. I find that for almost anything I search for, the knockoff/fake is actually the Amazon "recommended" item.
They've been "trying" for years. They may truly be trying, but the fact that they've neither succeeded in any meaningful way, nor made the choice to shut off the parts of their service that make the whole site scam-tastic and shitty until they can figure it out, show they don't actually care.
Probably this is because a non-trivial part of their revenue comes from the dark patterns and scams that make their whole site feel so much like the kind of flea market where you're pretty sure some of the stuff's stolen and if you ask around one of the vendors can get you some Oxy, but you wouldn't buy it from them even if you wanted it because it'd probably be fake. IOW I'm pretty sure their site and fortune's based largely on crime and generally anti-social behavior, else they'd surely have stopped it by now.
>IOW I'm pretty sure their site and fortune's based largely on crime and generally anti-social behavior
Honestly, isn't that what's at the base of the culture of 'disruption'? Look at Uber - let's take an established, regulated industry and just ignore the regulations long enough that we're everywhere and they can't shut us down.
Honestly, when I hear the word 'disrupt', I immediately think of shady, anti-social behavior.
> You'd have to be insane to buy anything you'd put in your body from Amazon. Just this week I received an obviously used item that was "Shipped and sold by amazon.com" and sold as "new".
I bought a new mp3 player from Fry's once which, oddly enough, turned out to be stocked with a sizeable music library already.
I'd still be pretty comfortable buying a candy bar from them though.
In the case of Fry's, you have evidence that they've received a counterfeit product from a single supplier. It may be rampant, or it may not be. With that single datapoint, it's hard to say.
In the case of Amazon, we know them to have a long and extensive history of selling a wide variety of counterfeit products. There is not nearly as much ambiguity to the situation. Elsewhere in this discussion the comparison to a flee market has been made, and I think that describes it well.
No, in this case is Fry’s selling a returned product as new. This is actually the main reason I stopped shopping at Fry’s. It could be the case that the customer re-sealed and returned, but I’ve seen it often enough at Fry’s that I suspect the store is re-sealing returned product and re-sell as new.
I once received a Garmin GPS as a gift (back before cell phones had GPS in them). I took it out of the box and plugged it in and started setting it up. It had a bunch of information in it already, including a "home address" and several trips around Detroit at over 100 miles per hour! I'm pretty sure the gift-giver was not the one who had used it since the home address didn't match, and they were unlikely to be driving there that fast. I'm not sure whether they bought it online or from a retail store.
Amazon has a big counterfeit problem. The reviews are entirely gamed, so can’t trust those any more , even the 2-star or 3-star ones.
So I recently dropped Amazon prime and ended up buying popular name brands. Even those you can get price matched with other retailers and Target even gives you 5% percent discount and BestBuy gives you points.
Unless you are a person who is not mobile, there are several options now.
I'll occasionally buy some more expensive or more complex items from amazon, and never anything that I'll be putting on or in my body. Otherwise I'll order directly from manufacturer or head into a store. If it werent for the Whole Foods discounts I'd have absolutely no reason to pay for Prime.
Enjoy price matching while you can. Nobody price matches craigslist for example and as Amazon trustworthiness dives towards craiglist levels one wonders if said policies will continue.
Eh? So what. If everybody stops price matching because nobody buys from Amazon anymore because everything they get is compromised, then GOOD. We'll be in a better more honest place.
I'd like to believe that this is Amazon actually trying to crack down on fake supplements on their website, but it coincides too neatly with a noticeable increase in presence of the Solimo brand, Amazon's own supplement brand.
So Amazon's model here looks like:
1. Allow sellers to sell counterfeit products, so they can take a cut of profits from both legitimate and fake inventory.
2. Copy the best-selling products after they've been product tested, and compete against their own customers (sellers on their platform).
3. Undermine the credibility of their competition by warning that their competitors' products might be counterfeits.
I don't buy anything that I would put into my body from Amazon. This also includes creams, make-up, etc. Way too many counterfeits to trust them and trying to figure out which are legit is a huge task in itself.
Supplements are buyer beware anyway because even when they're direct from the manufacturer there is no guarantee the product actually contains what is claimed.
My favorite example is that I'm lactose intolerant, I've tried a bunch of different Whey Protein products that were all listed as "Whey Protein Isolate 100% lactose free" and all of them made me sick as if they had lactose. I finally caught on and tried a Vegan protein.
> "When consumers have tried to sue online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay for selling dangerous goods in the past, courts have ruled they aren’t responsible for products offered by third-party vendors..."
If there's one thing that makes me back away, as a consumer, from Amazon, it's this sort of thing, this lack of real accountability. Sure, Amazon, says they do things to prevent counterfeits from being sold through, but there doesn't appear to be any powerful outside force that consumers can bring to bear on the company when they screw up.
And IMO it's even worse on Amazon than on eBay. At least on eBay you know that it's not sold by eBay themselves, because that's how the whole website works. And also, eBay prominently shows who the seller is on the listing pages.
Amazon's product pages make it so easy to overlook who the actual seller is, and I don't think that's coincidence.
I think the question is the alternatives. Say each of these vendors had their own top level online stores. What then?
Maybe you find the site through googling, and decide to buy the item from them. In a way, Amazon is like an extra layer of security to that model. First you can trust the payment channels, you can trust the delivery, and you can trust that you'll get some level of customer support. Beyond that, you know that they've attempted to validate the quality of their products, but in the same way your email provider does spam filtering, so it won't be 100% accurate. And finally they have the review system, which can help learn about that particular vendor or product.
It isn't perfect, but it seems better then that alternative.
Now as a consumer, you also have the alternative to not buy from vendors you don't already recognize and trust. But then you might go back to having the selection issue. What do you do when your trusted vendors don't have the item? Flr those cases, Amazon still seems better then the alternative.
Amazon is also an extra layer of insecurity. Let’s say I buy a widget sold through Amazon by a trusted manufacturer. Some third party is also selling counterfeits. Amazon considers the two products to be the same, and sends me a counterfeit from the third party.
Seems to me that the alternative is simple: mandate that you receive what you ordered, and make the storefront you order from liable for any problems.
I admit that it isn't clear if Amazon can reliably have you choose from what vendor you are buying. That said, not all manufacturer have a storefront. A lot of items can only be purchased through some middleman. And it is hard to validate that a particular vendor is the actual manufacturer and not just pretending to be.
So say you wanted that product, and googled for a vendor, and you found xmanifacturer.com. How would you know to trust that? Also, I forgot to mention price. What if you find the item at xvendor.com at a cheaper price, and wanted to buy there? To me, that all just seem even less reliable.
It's actually trivial. If someone pretends to be from foo corp you call foo corps official listed number and inquire. If someone is an individual you ask for an identity document like a drivers license and keep that on file and associate that with all sales. You track who sends you widgets. This is trivial to do with increasingly cheap rfid tags.
For reference Walmart individually tags 10pks of cheap socks so it can via a wireless reader count how many Large foobrand packs of socks it has because it can differentiate between pack 5435454545 5435454546.
You can even give the user the ability to choose between getting shipments slightly faster by allowing you to fulfill their order via the closest item and send the info about fulfilling vendor along with the order OR get it slightly slower via the chosen vendor.
Amazon is technically excellent in a lot of ways its hard to imagine this would actually be hard for them they just don't want to.
Sorry, I meant for the customer. I agree that Amazon could both better validate and indicate to the customers which vendor are the official manufacturer, as well as allow you to opt out of comingling and actually say you want the item to have been from that vendor (even if at an extra cost)
But if there were no marketplace such as Etsy, Amazon or Ebay, I think it would be harder for the customer to trust a random website. At least with these marketplaces, you can trust the payment channels, the security of the data you give them, that the support contact will be responsive, that the item will be delivered properly and at all, etc.
If they’re at the top of the Google search results for “manufacturer” then you’re probably good. Cross check with Wikipedia if you want to be sure.
If you find some random vendor with a cheaper price then you need to make a decision about how much you trust them and how much it’s worth to you.
All of this is pretty standard and expected. The problem with Amazon is that people expect them to be trustworthy, and apparently when it comes to receiving what you order, they often aren’t. People’s defenses against scammers don’t work here because Amazon doesn’t look like one. And yet they will tell you “sold by X” and sell you a product from Y instead without ever telling you.
Stores should be legally liable for what they sell. If they want their suppliers to bear the burden then they can add indemnification to their contracts.
I don't know why Google results would somehow be less likely to be abused by fraudulent vendors then Amazon, Ebay or Etsy is for example.
I do think your point about these big vendors maybe providing a false sense of security is a good one, though I think it applies to Google results as well.
I don't know about legally liable though. I think that's where I'm more nuanced. If you impose that rule, than you kill marketplaces, everyone becomes individual retailers again, and Amazon, Ebay and Etsy becomes newer Walmarts. The selection shrinks again, prices go up, most manufacturers stop selling direct to customers again, since there are no cost effective ways for them to be a store anymore, and now you have fraudulent storefront opening up as websites again which will play the SEO game and potentially do even more damage to the customer then counterfeit, like just outright not shipping the item at all, or charging your CC for more money, or reselling your data, etc.
At the minimum, I'm not saying this could happen, but before enforcing these new regulations that you are proposing, we'd need to evaluate that it won't actually make things worse for the consumers. And in this case, I can see a case for it.
You can pretty easily observe that they aren't. Try to find a company where googling the company name shows you a top result that is actually another company with a storefront selling the same products. Now try to find an Amazon listing for a company's products that includes a third-party seller.
It's easy to see why. Google's entire reputation is based on providing good search results, to the point that "to google" has become a verb meaning to search the internet. They put a vast amount of effort into ensuring that they provide good search results. It is possible, with nefarious SEO and such, to beat out legitimate results sometimes, but it's not easy or reliable.
Amazon, on the other hand, doesn't seem to care. Sign up to sell a product, done.
Why would a liability rule kill Amazon? They can make it a part of their seller agreement that the seller indemnifies Amazon for all liability. This is different from making the seller directly liable because if the seller bails out, Amazon it stuck with it. This means that Amazon will have to make sure they can actually get satisfaction from sellers. There are many ways this can be accomplished, such as requiring the seller to have liability insurance with sufficient coverage.
I'm sure that such a rule would result in Amazon losing a bunch of tiny, no-name, untraceable sellers. Which is, of course, the whole point.
How is failing to ship the item or charging too much worse than counterfeiting? Both are trivial to counteract: initiate a chargeback with your credit card company. The same is true for counterfeits, if you detect them. The whole problem with counterfeits is that it's hard to detect them. If it was easy, this whole thing would be moot.
Everyone is rightly ragging on Amazon for being terribly irresponsible and consumer-hostile in allowing counterfeit products to be sold on their platform.
But doing what CVS is doing (independently testing all their stocked products) is not the solution. This is ahem WHAT REGULATORY AGENCIES ARE FOR. The FDA needs to do its gottdang job and test and regulate supplements. This is utterly shameful for a first-world country that consumers can't be certain that pills on shelves contain what they purport to.
Amazon also has issues with returned items. If they judge the returned package to be cosmetically sellable, even if the item is used or half gone, they'll re-sell it.
When I bought an Instant Pot from Amazon, the first one I got was obviously used (it smelled of food, and some of the accessories were missing). I had to exchange it for an actually new one.
if risking blinding people during the eclipse due to counterfeit eclipse glasses was not sufficient to get Amazon to change, nothing will do so until someone actually dies.
I've bought supplements from Amazon on a regular interval without issue. Maybe I just jynx'd myself. If I ever received fake supplements, I would treat that as being poisoned and report it to the CDC, FDA, FBI and local news.
My only bad experiences with Amazon to date was with NVidia video cards. Twice. Shame on me for falling for it twice. Each time they swapped out the cards with slower clock speed video cards. They also censored my feedback. Apparently nobody else checks their cards clock speed once installed?
If there's one vendor I'd trust over any others it's Nootropics Depot. They do all their testing in-house, because it is much more reliable than 3rd party lab testing. The owner frequently gives extensive insight into how the supply chains and testing work. Recent example: https://old.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/comments/cength/testing_...
I was about to recommend Nootropics Depot too. Don't get thrown off by the name, anyone, there are plenty of "normal" supplements in addition to the racetams and such.
There's stores like The Vitamin Shoppe, where you're going to get genuine products. Some manufacturers use labs such as USP to assure you're getting what you pay for. So, if you buy products with lab seals from reputable shops, you're probably safe.
I stopped buying a lot of stuff from amazon because I don't want to get banned. They just put books loose in boxes now. If I'm buying an $80 art book I want it delivered in mint condition. It might take amazon three tries to do that now.
There's an e-mail thread going around Amazon about this, internally. The scam is that the fraudulent seller finds an item that is real but out of stock from all sellers. The seller than sends in their inventory, and updates the listing because they are now the only seller of that item.
It really sucks, and I hope we find a way to solve this, soon. It's a terrible customer experience.
Wouldn't one easy way to solve be that a human has to approve all changes to the name of an item? Or that name changes that change more than x% of the title have to be approved by a human? Or that all changes only happen after some waiting period? I would think anything that slows this down/makes it even a little harder will have big knock-on effects.
This year, I bought a lot of cosmetics and hair products from Amazon Canada. Most of what I received was fakes and knockoffs. Now I know that every time I buy a product, I have to look first at the 0-star reviews.
It seems that sellers first build a reputation and then move on to counterfeiting. As a result, product listings have excellent reviews, even when they are clearly false. I'm talking things like a cream shampoo, brown water instead, etc.
I have practically given up buying these products on Amazon. Instead, I pay the manufacturer's small additional shipping and handling fees.
Interesting. I guess I always check for zero stars, so maybe that's how I avoided it.
Would it be clear the branding was different? Like, the brown water didn't have an immaculately reproduced shampoo bottle? Thinking of supplements, where it can be hard to tell what a legit one should look like.
Amazon cares about counterfeit products as much as YouTube cared about copyright videos in its infancy. It's just here to enable growth until they start to fight it.
Amazon needs to stop with inventory comingling. They know it and refuse to stop, so they are culpable. I'm sure it would hurt their logistics to stop, but it also hurts cigarette companies to not advertise to children and we made that a law.
It is ridiculous that you can order a supplement where it says "sold by Proctor and Gamble, fulfilled by Amazon" on the product listing, and then receive a counterfeit product that was sent in by a different company. If they received it from a different company, then it wasn't "sold by Proctor and Gamble."
At the very least they need to give brand owners the tools to protect their brands- an option to put non-authorized resellers' shipments into a separate comingled bin, and have all the authorized resellers in another.
Right now the only option for a brand with a popular product to protect from counterfeiting is to not sell anything through Amazon and sue everyone that tries to list your products on Amazon- which might not even work and really hurts your market reach.
Amazon are playing a very dangerous game with their brand.
I buy a lot of stuff from AliExpress. I know that there's a fair chance that I'll get some kind of junk, but it's cheap enough that I'm often willing to take the gamble.
Until very recently, Amazon offered the lowest-hassle online shopping experience by a considerable margin. I'd often buy from Amazon without bothering to compare prices, because the convenience of one-click ordering was worth it.
Almost entirely because of Marketplace, Amazon is regressing from a premium retail experience to an AliExpress-style flea market. Every time I click the buy button, I worry about getting a counterfeit product, I worry about the hassle of returning it, I worry about getting banned from Amazon by an algorithm for "abusing" their returns policy. Buying from Amazon isn't a no-brainer any more.
Amazon were so very close to having a total monopoly on my online spending, but they squandered it. They could have secured a loyal and price-insensitive customer, but instead they're driving me away from their platform. Maybe they don't care about being a retailer any more, maybe they're all-in on AWS, but if I were an Amazon shareholder I'd be getting pretty damned nervous.
Same. In fact, I basically only use Amazon as an AliExpress with free 2 day shipping. For anything that could be counterfeited (which is really anything these days!), I won't touch them anymore. B&H is the same price and I can always show up at their store and be annoying until they fix my problem.
“Free 2 day shipping” = prepaid unlimited 2 day shipping that costs $120, and is bundled with some streaming content.
If AliExpress wants to cap my yearly 2 day shipping fees to $120/yr, I'd take that deal.
Or if you're into Amazon's streaming video offerings, it's like paying for the video and getting the shipping for free.
B&H is certainly better, but I've occasionally gotten something that was obviously open box from them and its always a bit of a pain to convince them this is a problem. It came to a head recently complete with a salty response from their social media guy on Twitter and a complaint to Anton Bauer about used product being sold as new.
I'm in the same place -- Amazon sold me a counterfeit charger. Well, not counterfeit, but with a fake ETL/Intertek -- a UL competitor -- mark. I told their CS and they refunded me, then continued selling the charger with the fake ETL mark.
I moved $40k/year of IT spend from my company off Amazon to BHPhoto.
I also stopped buying any makeup / food / supplements / dog food / dog toys on Amazon.
Hell, I bought my dog's new leash and collar straight from the manufacturer!
We make speaker wire and sell it primarily on Amazon, so I have some experience on the manufacturer side of UL/ETL marks. My advice is to never buy any product with an ETL mark. As an organization, they are way less stringent about enforcing the integrity of their mark. And I would also never buy anything at a low price tier that bears a UL mark, since it’s probably counterfeit. If you want quality, pay for it. When you pay for a brand which markets on quality at a higher price point, there’s a pretty good chance you’re getting something legitimate. The reason is that it’s hard to compete at a higher price point, so honesty is probably the only reason a brand would willingly choose to scale that kind of a barrier.
> When you pay for a brand which markets on quality at a higher price point
I think what others are saying is that you can't do this on Amazon, even if you want to, because of fakes.
I've personally moved all my online shopping to Target and Walmart, and I only buy products that they stock in their stores.
If you’re buying from the manufacturer and there are no other sellers, then you’re fine on Amazon. Where you have to watch out is when there are multiple sellers on an item.
It seems like a lot of things that sound an awful lot like fraudulent practices from a lay perspective don't actually reach a useful or provable definition when it comes to legal liability.
But saying something is sold by a specific party which I then choose to do business with, then substituting goods that are likely to be from any of numerous other parties, some of which I may be explicitly trying to avoid doing business with...I would at least be interested in hearing why that doesn't count as fraud or false advertising or some such, or maybe some trademarks issue.
At least, I'd love to hear a less rage-inducing justification for putting up with allowing this behavior than "it was buried in a ToS somewhere that lying about who my goods came from is okay, actually."
That phrasing is part of the problem, not the solution. You're conflating the idea of a manufacturer (Proctor & Gamble in this case) with a reseller. Amazon tells you both, but since the retail products are (should be) identical, neither they nor you really care whether or not this particular box came from "Joe's Nutrition" or "Sally's Supplements", and worrying about that distinction is like arguing against the fungibility of money (did that dollar bill in your pocket, which you got from an ATM, "come from" your job or your side gig?).
It's not the comingling that is the root cause here, it's the fraud. It doesn't matter whether or not Amazon buys their pills from Joe or Sally, what we care about is that they're not selling fake pills. Focusing on comingling seems to be missing the point. We have even less ability than Amazon to detect the fact that Joe is selling fake pills, so they'd still make it into people's mailboxes.
>Amazon tells you both, but since the retail products are (should be) identical, neither they nor you really care whether or not this particular box came from "Joe's Nutrition" or "Sally's Supplements"
Sounds like it is time for a "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Retail Products" with the first entry being that every item with the same SKU is identical to every other item with that SKU.
You would think at the very least Amazon would need to maintain a chain of custody for each individual item that is meant for human consumption. What happens if there is a Tylenol poisoning [1] like scare with one of these supplements? Would Amazon legitimately have no way to track down the source of the contaminated product? If they can, what would be the possible explanation of not displaying the source to the user beyond "it is cheaper if we don't"?
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tylenol_murders
It's not just products for human consumption that can cause injury. A shoddily made counterfeit phone charger can start a fire and burn down your house.
> worrying about that distinction is like arguing against the fungibility of money (did that dollar bill in your pocket, which you got from an ATM, "come from" your job or your side gig?)
That's an interesting argument except for the fact that the source of money is extremely important for fraud and tax purposes. Money laundering is specifically the co-mingling of "inventory" to hide the source. Amazon is product laundering.
When the product comes from "Sally's Supplements" then if there is an issue with the product then that's first and foremost Sally's problem. It might go up to Procter & Gamble or maybe it doesn't get that far.
The source of the product and who supports it is very important.
Counterfeiting is going to happen. Typically you deter it by detecting it and punishing the counterfeiters. Commingling defeats this. I guess we can make Amazon inspect everything they receive from third party sellers thoroughly enough to reliably detect counterfeits themselves, but that seems much less likely to happen.
Well, one can think of it as follows:
1. You place an order from supplier A.
2. Supplier A buys the unit from supplier B (and pays the balance by transferring another unit A => B).
3. The now supplier A's unit gets sent to you.
I.e. somewhat similar to e.g. dropshipping and other such practices which are traditionally perfectly legal.
It seems it would be quite hard to argue false advertising on that (as you got the item from A - generally it does not matter who A got it from, unless A claims to be the manufacturer), which I guess is why it has not happened yet.
But I could still see it happen, especially if the counterfeiting problems worsen. Maybe the fact that Amazon does it automatically for the sellers (with their approval) could be considered a factor that makes this different from the traditional stock supply cases.
There’s a huge and fundamental difference between what you describe and what Amazon is doing. What you describe involves both A and B. A is figuratively putting their name on the product, and they have an incentive to make sure that everything is above board. You are getting it from A, by way of B.
The way Amazon does it, A isn’t involved in the choice of who supplies the product, they just receive the money. They don’t even know who supplied the product, if I understand things correctly. You’re just buying from B, while Amazon says you’re buying from A.
I'm a former marketplace seller. There is a way brands can accomplish this: marketplace items must contain all the features that the original brand provides. So the brand can create, say, a warranty that only applies when purchased form an "authorized seller". Since the company controls who is authorized, no other seller is able to include the warranty, and their offerings are not identical.
The difficult part in all of this is dealing with Amazon and their terrible marketplace back end.
> marketplace items must contain all the features that the original brand provides
Why should a buyer be expected to trust either Amazon, or the fulfiller, to decide which bait-and-switch sales don't count as bait-and-switch?
It wrongs both the buyer, who doesn't get what they ordered, and the original manufacturer, who is being subjected to something akin to 'passing off' in trademark law. You aren't allowed to hijack someone else's brand to sell your product. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_off
> Amazon needs to stop with inventory comingling. They know it and refuse to stop, so they are culpable.
An appeals court just recently said this in their ruling on a consumer products liability case. Oberdorf v Amazon I believe.
Edit: Apologies, I was on my phone earlier and I didn't link to the opinion https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca3/18...
Yes.[1] At least in Pennsylvania. This decision is based on state law. Amazon claims to be insulated from product liability claims because it is not the "seller". The Third Circuit says Amazon is the "seller". "Amazon not only accepts orders and arranges for product shipments, but it also exerts substantial market control over product sales by restricting product pricing, customer service, and communications with customers."
Amazon can in turn sue the party who provided the product to recover what they have to pay out to the end customer, if they want.
Amazon allows their product providers to be somewhat anonymous. That weighed against them in the court decision. To the court, that looks like a retailer-wholesaler relationship. An actual seller has to disclose the actual name and address of the business in some states, including California. (B&P code section 17358).
[1] https://www2.ca3.uscourts.gov/opinarch/181041p.pdf
> At least in Pennsylvania. This decision is based on state law.
Only in part. Section B @ page 21 is the Court outlining their reasoning under the Second Restatement of Torts which has been adopted in some form or another in most states. The court could have ended with the Pennsylvania four-factor analysis but the ruling would have definitely been limited in scope. Instead, the 3rd Circuit has anticipated this case going to the Supreme Court and went through the effort of detailing the logic for a SCOTUS ruling that would hold Amazon accountable beyond the boundaries of Pennsylvania as well.
> At the very least they need to give brand owners the tools to protect their brands- an option to put non-authorized resellers' shipments into a separate comingled bin, and have all the authorized resellers in another.
As a brand I think you can stop others listing your products. I tried to sell something a while back and was refused because I was a third party seller.
I should have known this would be used as an excuse to even further expand corporate control at the expense of individuals. Now they're trying to use it to restrict the second-hand market.
Instead of making it clear you're buying second-hand goods, or from a non-authorized seller, they are deliberately conflating what you're buying, with who you're buying it from. This way their anti-counterfeit efforts will conveniently squash the second-hand market.
On the flip side, for many brands, if it’s being sold by someone other than an authorized reseller, it is almost certainly counterfeit. We have a private label brand that sells on Amazon. If anybody else is selling our products at the same prices we sell them for, then it is almost certainly a counterfeit, since we only sell at retail prices. The only exceptions would be somebody selling one of our products used. But then we offer a lifetime return policy.
And believe me, as a seller I have some insight into the bullshit black hat tactics at play in the Amazon marketplace. Amazon needs tools to fight the bad guys. For the sake of consumers.
Aside from counterfeiting, it's become a hassle to buy from the marketplace. My last experience was buying a small piece of furniture. There was a problem and it could have been resolved more easily than it was, but as inconveniences came up I had to deal with both Amazon's and the vendor's customer service. And each blamed the other. Ultimately I had to pack up something heavy to be shipped back which I didn't want to do, and if I had to do it it would have been less hassle to take it back somewhere local. Which is how I wish I had made the purchase.
They could require all suppliers to put up a surety bond. Make the amount high enough to filter out suppliers unwilling to sell long-term and also attempt to filter out anyone intending to sell counterfeit goods. Any suppliers who hit a certain threshold of failing to meet Amazon's standards of product authenticity would forfeit their bond. This isn't a new idea, it works well in other industries.
There's a whole class of items I won't buy from Amazon. Supplements are one of them, I buy direct. Given how easy it is to set up a Shopify store I can't see how this is good for Amazon.
Or at least require a deposit for sellers of a non-insignificant amount, a hold on new seller payouts for up to 30-60 days and per-seller stickers on intake inventory so sellers of counterfeits can be rooted out better.
Also, allow product manufacturers who sell directly, to block other sellers on the platform for their products and handle reports for alike-named and-or brand confusing products.
Amazon does very little to actually do anything meaningful to limit counterfeit products.
Screw the deposit. Amazon itself should be liable if they don’t track who actually sold the merchandise.
Amazon does track the original supplier.
From their seller help pages:
> Note: Amazon ensures that the initial source of the commingled units can be traced throughout the fulfilment process.
> Important: Amazon ensures that the exact same units from two sellers, participating in the commingling programme, are always physically segregated. This means that Amazon storage logic does not allow same ASINs of different sellers to be stored in the same bin in our warehouse if they are commingled.
In other words, Amazon ensures that commingled items are never physically commingled.
For a public source, see e.g. Amazon comment in this article: https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2019/04/03/1554287401000/Amazon-... (outline link: https://outline.com/4R7fp6)
> The system is purposefully designed so that similar products are not placed next to or near each other, and Amazon can also track the original seller of each unit.
The next sentence of your last paragraph says:
> Sellers are able to choose whether to share identical inventory or not.
That seems to indicate physical commingling. IIRC, avoiding commingling has an additional cost to the seller.
As far as I understand it, that just means that sellers have the option to opt in/out of the commingling program (Settings => Fulfillment by Amazon => FBA Product Barcode Preference).
Yes, there is a cost for the seller if opting out - they need to apply their own barcodes to the products in that case.
> Also, allow product manufacturers who sell directly, to block other sellers on the platform for their products and handle reports for alike-named and-or brand confusing products.
They do have a program for this, I believe: https://brandservices.amazon.com/
FWIW, they’ve started a program to apply serial numbers to individual units. It takes time to shift large platforms like this.
The doctrine of first sale means you can't keep people from reselling your branded products and if you don't offer your products on Amazon at this point others will offer fakes and with Amazons cooperation acquire your customers while offering them cheaper competitors products.
Its a lovely situation to say the least. All strategies are sub optimal. Logically we need a law forcing them to divulge who your actual product is coming from on the page before you buy effectively ending comingling.
The issue isn't reselling branded products.
The issue is selling fake products as a branded products. Amazon makes this easy to do by commingling inventory and not matching/tracking sellers to inventory items.
This fact by itself would probably make Amazon liable for product liability claims in any court in the US, it's traditional CDA liability sheild notwithstanding.
EDIT: Products liability law is complicated, but generally even if Amazon wouldn't be treated as a seller, they could still be held liable for their negligence in providing the wrong/defective item out of their (commingled) inventory. Amazon doesn't match sellers to inventory items so they have literally no way to defend themselves from such a suit especially if the seller can show that they provide products straight from the manufacturer but Amazon commingled with other sellers' inventory. (I'm aware of several such suits that were almost immediately settled by Amazon with NDAs attached.)
> Amazon makes this easy to do by commingling inventory and not matching/tracking sellers to inventory items.
That is not correct. Amazon's seller help pages and Amazon spokesperson comment on e.g. this FT Alphaville article https://outline.com/4R7fp6 say that Amazon tracks the original supplier:
> The system is purposefully designed so that similar products are not placed next to or near each other, and Amazon can also track the original seller of each unit.
I.e. commingling only means that any sellers' inventory can be used for fulfillment, not that the inventory is physically commingled.
I think thats pedantic. If I can't demand the seller I want, from my point of view it is commingled.
Sure, I completely agree. That's why it's called commingling.
Amazon "says" they can track the original supplier.
In practice, they clearly don't. I've had a client that was the only manufacturer of a product receive fake versions of their own product that was part of Amazon's commingled inventory. This happened last year.
Also, unless Amazon removes tags prior to delivery, there is no mechanism on many items that would allow them to track goods short of maintaining physical separation, which it is abundantly clear that they do not.
If this physical separation exists, it is useful only to Amazon if buyers can still be fulfilled by any of the sellers.
When evidence builds for fake product, Amazon can halt use of a particular seller's inventory...but prior to that you might get a fake, regardless of the seller's reputation.
The doctrine of first sale means people can re-sell your products.
It does not mean you have a right to do so on Amazon.
Or more to the point, you cannot claim they are being sold directly from the manufacturer.
Sure, but even if you're openly a reseller, Amazon doesn't have to let you on their platform.
They could say "we'll only let Apple sell Apple products here".
I think it would be challenging to keep track of who the original trademark owner is for every single item and creating a system for them to prove it. There are hundreds of thousands of businesses with thousands of products. And sometimes companies re-brand their products, or buy other companies, etc, etc. Or sometimes the original vendor doesn't ship in a particular country, its always through a distributor, etc, etc.
It's not clear that you can limit a buyer's ability to resell it on any market without a contract with the buyer that may or may not be legal or enforcable based on jurisdiction. It also doesn't seem likely that people willing to defraud people with any agreement.
> It's not clear that you can limit a buyer's ability to resell it on any market
Depends on who the "you" is here.
Nike can't forbid me from reselling shoes. Nike can ask Amazon to willingly forbid me from doing so on their platform, and Amazon can agree.
I slightly disagree. The item was sold by Proctor and Gamble. They got the money I paid, and I got a product back. Proctor and Gamble happened to use a third party for fulfillment and as a marketplace for handling the sale, and they are to blame for choosing a fulfillment company which may occasionally send me fake products that Proctor and Gamble didn't make.
We should fault the sellers for using Amazon in the first place.
That is bizarre dream logic. Amazon is the one commingling inventory. P&G are sending legitimate product.
I would never purchase anything from amazon other than books, personally. Too much of a chance you’re going to get counterfeits or faulty merchandise.
You're not wrong, but why does the seller get a pass? If I get a catalog in the mail labeled "Bob's Swimsuits for Portly Gentlemen," and I call the 800 number and order one, and instead I get an angry bobcat, my beef is with the folks at Bob's Swimsuits.
The fault may be with the company Bob hired to manufacture swimsuits, or maybe the shipping company for confusing boxes, or maybe Bob's catalog contractor got some model numbers switched around, but I'm just the customer. None of that stuff is visible to me, and I have no control over it. If the catalog company or the fulfillment company or the manufacturer part of the pipeline is known to occasionally produce bobcats, it's Bob's job to fix it.
Yes, this is Amazon's fuckup, but it's not the customer's job to conduct the postmortem. The customer has the privilege of blaming the entity they do business with.
I stopped buying books from amazon after getting few "new" books visibly used. Scribbled notes or giant greasy hand mark etc. If I need to drop off book for return anyway then I can make as well trip to normal bookstore (learned about very nice local one).
If Amazon instead sends a counterfeit product from someone other than P&G when I buy a product that is advertised as sold by P&G, the should be fraud, if it isn't already.
They need to show you who you're buying from if they aren't going to accept liability for selling it.
For some foolish reason I had notifications turned on for the Amazon app... it recently offered me a deal on some sort of supplements that seemed kinda strange / made some weird claims. I had never even searched for any kind of supplement or even food / drug items before.
Other offers were for what looked like seriously questionable quality things, that were semi related to items that I had searched, but looked like rock bottom quality, but they were a few $ cheaper.
It all has a very Kmart / Wallmart, but maybe worse vibe.
Amazon seems more and more like a wide open low cost kinda store where fakes, low quality garbage, and such aren't just too common, but even pushed by their own system. Sometimes Amazon takes some light action, other times they argue they're simply not responsible for whatever it is they sell: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/amazon-on-the-ho...
It's all the opposite of what I chose to go to Amazon for. I went to Amazon to find options I couldn't find elsewhere, and generally want good quality things BECAUSE the local retail stores already were in a race to the bottom.... But now Amazon wants me to wade through their garbage to find it and seems to want to join that $1 cheaper for $5 less quality type race .... and I swear I'm seeing fewer good quality items sold in areas where they used to exist, but now seemed to be dominated by garbage.
Amazon is busy shooting itself in the foot. The problem is, the gun is small and the foot is huge, so they probably don't feel it right now.
Supplements (or really anything I put in my mouth) is one of a growing set of classes of items I won't buy on Amazon anymore. That probably doesn't result in much loss for Amazon right now, but what it does do is:
1. Makes me trust Amazon MUCH less, which means I'm much more likely to forgo purchasing additional classes of items from them.
2. Makes me find new online or offline vendors for the classes of items I no longer buy from Amazon. Those vendors sometimes sell other items I would normally buy from Amazon as well. If I need those items, I'm not going to shop BOTH places. I'm going with the one I trust.
3. Makes me reconsider my Prime membership. (Among other things, like shipping having become less reliable recently.)
There's a tipping point here somewhere, where I'll just stop being an Amazon customer entirely.
Normally I'd just upvote and continue on my way but with the expectation that maybe someone from Amazon is reading and thinking "surely not everyone feels that way".
We all feel this way. Inventory co-mingling will have major long term costs. If you think about it, it is pretty crazy how big of a reputation hit Amazon has taken in the last few years.
I didn’t used to fee this way. Or rather, I kind of did, but didn’t really /care/.
Then I had a kid, and the question of “do I trust this thing to go into or onto my kid’s body?” actually mattered.
Suddenly, my purchases from amazon drop like a rock. Partly for classes of item I don’t trust getting from them, and partly because I’m just getting habituated to shopping at different outlets.
Moreover, this has become a “known thing” in the online mommy groups in our area. My wife has told me she’s heard exactly the same thing on her fb and mailing lists; increasingly, “don’t buy amazon” is a given for conscientious parents.
I’m spending a lot of money on this tiny human, Amazon, and none of it is going to you.
Likewise. I'm at a point where I just do not trust Amazon. I also pretty much only buy with Amazon as the seller, which in some cases is annoying because they seem to change to another seller a lot of the time. Only because if Amazon is the seller, returns are usually easier.
Even the Basics brand is just about worthless as far as anything technology/electrical as the quality is usually lower than the value on the price.
The irony is I'm finding the Prime Video selection more valuable than the shipping/buying experience lately.
> We all feel this way.
Absolutely. I order direct from the manufacturer for most of my supplements these days and the rest I pick up from Target and CostCo. I used to buy all of them from Amazon.
Opposing view: If comingling means faster delivery then I'm all for it, just take care of counterfeiting separately.
Ditto
Same here
I canceled my Prime ages ago, and have pretty much entirely stopped ordering from Amazon. It's impossible to navigate their storefront to find the legit items, and then you hear stories like these where even the legit items are fraudulent. I just can't be bothered. Mostly I buy locally these days, or buy direct from book publishers and electronics manufacturers (or even more often, simply not buy). I've switched to using eBay for one-off items that are hard to find locally. eBay's system was designed from the beginning to make fraud easier to detect.
WRT Prime specifically, it's kind of a self-feeding problem. As Amazon's reputation tanks, you stop buying things, which makes Prime's value also tank.
Consciously or not, I've noticed that I too no longer trust Amazon to deliver on sensitive goods due to commingling:'
* I don't buy foodstuff or supplements from Amazon
* I don't buy things at high risk of exploding (batteries that weren't manufactured by who I expected)
* I don't buy high-volume counterfeit products (vacuums, for example)
I would rather take the 30 minutes out of my day to drive to a store where I trust the supply chain.
The logistics system is about the only part of Wal-Mart's business that I respect. They know what side their bread is buttered on, and they can make sure it gets to the plate exactly when someone wants toast, using a minimum quantity of diesel fuel.
Unfortunately, their purchasing policy sort of ruins it. While I can be certain something is the brand that it says it is at Wal-Mart, I can't be certain that it isn't a Walmart-specific SKU or outlet-store SKU that is not the same quality as enticingly-similar SKUs sold by the same manufacturer.
It's not technically counterfeit for a brand to sell a product of inferior quality into completely separate discount retail supply chains. You should know what you're getting, too, as the prime retail supply chains and outlet retail supply chains don't mix in reputable companies, because they don't want the inferior goods to tarnish the reputation of the superior.
Amazon throws that out the window. The brand manufacturer cannot control Amazon's supply chain to a level required for protecting their brand. As long as commingling continues, it only makes sense for counterfeiters to sell via Amazon. It also makes sense for "para-feiters" to buy a real brand from an outlet store and swap the outlet SKU to the prime retail SKU for the most-similar product, and sell at a smaller discount to the prime retail price. Shoppers think they're buying the prime retail version, and they might get shipped the discount version from the para-feiter's commingled stock.
So it's not entirely on Amazon. The manufacturers were already burning down brands when Amazon threw fuel on the fire.
Note that if you have young children, the list of sensitive goods is basically everything considering they try to eat anything they get their hands on at one time or another.
Amazon Logistics is... special.
I regularly have packages “delivered”, but they mysteriously show up a day or two after the claimed delivery. I assume this is the logistics “contractors” missing their quota and making up for it later.
The contractors are out of their mind around me trying to hit quota. Last week an amazon van barreled in from the opposite lane, cut off traffic, and parked at a 45* angle facing traffic halfway into a street parking spot. The whole lane was blocked while they struggled to find their apartment on foot.
That would be UPS doing that, not Amazon.
I really did mean Amazon Logistics.
https://logistics.amazon.com/
As far as I can tell, this is Amazon coopting the gig economy for their own deliveries. The quality of service is predictable. I doubt the delivery people (sorry, Amazon Delivery Service Partner) make a heck of a lot of money.
No, there are defiantly people delivering stuff our of cars and cargo vans. I haven't had an amazon order come via UPS or FedEx in a while.
>> That would be UPS doing that, not Amazon.
> No, there are defiantly people delivering stuff our of cars and cargo vans. I haven't had an amazon order come via UPS or FedEx in a while.
That is the delivery person doing that. The worst is when delivery personnel don't ring or knock, they just slap a "tried to deliver" slip on your door because it's faster for them.
I live in a city and people who can't figure out the call box will just leave packages in the street. Packages get stolen in as little as 20 minutes. I guess it all makes sense now. The morning people will at least leave it just behind the front door where a package might survive for hours.
In Chicago they always droce around in rented vans from Enterprise. I wonder if they had some sort of deal to hook up their "contractors" with vehicles.
Please proofread before clicking the Reply button next time.
> Supplements (or really anything I put in my mouth) is one of a growing set of classes of items I won't buy on Amazon anymore.
Same here. Also considering I've bought herbicides on Amazon, I always wonder how well edible and toxic items are warehoused, and how they handle the eventual spillage.
> 2. Makes me find new online or offline vendors for the classes of items I no longer buy from Amazon.
I'm about 3/4 on the way of replacing amazon with other online sources that are specialized in a domain. As a bonus, those sources usually know the domain well, offer a great selection and undercut Amazon on price. The only thing is that shipping can take longer… though some vendors are actually faster.
> Makes me reconsider my Prime membership.
I've already set mine to NOT auto-renew. It's buried behind several clicks but once it's out, I'll leave it out. The value I get is just no longer worth it.
Yeah I got a really bad vibe when I got the supplement stuff and then pushing some questionable quality things. Really quickly my impression of Amazon changed.
"Supplements (or really anything I put in my mouth) is one of a growing set of classes of items I won't buy on Amazon anymore."
How would you know that the vendors you are buying these items from aren't themselves buying from Amazon or other counterfeit vendors?
Honest question, because I'd really love for there to be some way for consumers to verify the authenticity of what they're buying, but as far as I know there isn't.
It's not about the fakes, it's about trust. I don't expect perfect fake detection from a vendor. I can't perfectly detect fakes myself. I expect vendors to develop trust with their own sources like I'm trying to develop it with the vendor. I expect fakes to be non-existent or rare-enough in their inventory and for them to respond appropriately in case a fake does make it through. An appropriate response is not just to coldly refund my money and continue to allow the item to be sold in their store. An appropriate response is to refund my money, be truly mortified, and at the very least stop selling the item; if not stop doing business entirely with whichever distributor or seller sold them the item. (Also, my time is valuable; so I'd expect some recompense for the inconvenience which could act as a proxy for 'truly mortified' since I can't actually know their internal state.)
I often buy from Target or Costco.com, which have no 3rd party sellers that I'm aware of. Because of this, I assume that they are vetting their vendors and supply chain to minimize the reputation damage that counterfeits would cause. I also use Walmart.com, but I filter out anything sold by 3rd parties to make sure I'm buying something from Walmart's vetted supply chain.
If shipping charges aren't prohibitive, I'll also consider buying directly from the manufacturer website.
If you buy from a random site on the internet that doesn't have a reputation to protect, then I agree it's just as risky as buying from Amazon or a random eBay seller.
Likewise, I've been looking at Walmart.com more often as well, but even there they seem to have other sellers. I'm unsure if their actual supply chain is any better or not though. Amazon really ruined it.
Aside: I'm also disappointed in Newegg at whatever point they started allowing third parties. Worse still is a number of the third parties list the same products as different items/codes so search is a pain sometimes until you select newegg as the seller.
LockPickingLawyer (Youtube) has a series of videos on the poor quality of "Amazon Choice" for various locks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gflpf0DrCgw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ1_P5oqf6Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkdJti43IgU (Branded Amazon Basics)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-bndzHmMfg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtTneV8SaB0
Yeah I've seen some "Amazon Choice" suggestions that I have some area of knowledge in and I know those are not good products. Nothing deadly or dangerous, but as far as selling someone a good product, they're just not good.
While I don't doubt are selling well.... really suck, and I fear the difference is simply sales volume of purchasers who don't know ... due to a couple bucks difference from another product... or straight up sponsorship.
Amazon has been feeling downmarket for a long time.
* You can't trust them for entire categories of products.
* You can't trust them, period, about pricing. The amount of effort they've spent ensuring comparison between very similar items is as hard as possible is kind of amazing; discriminatory pricing: this doesn't require explanation; Their relentless efforts to shove certain products at me just started to annoy me at some point.
It all combines to erode any trust I once had in them; they're apparently no more concerned with ensuring I don't feel ripped off than someone selling junk off the back of a truck.
* Their recommendation engine is occasionally funny, but otherwise utter crap, and just takes up space.
I finally cancelled Prime at the beginning of this year, and after a couple minor adjustments, it was no big loss. I still buy books from them when I can't find them elsewhere.
Otherwise, eh. I just don't like them and don't need them.
I don't even find Amazon cheap. Walmart online is often cheaper.
Where does that leave Amazon? I don't buy anything anymore. Digikey and Walmart online are my prime online stores
You'd have to be insane to buy anything you'd put in your body from Amazon. Just this week I received an obviously used item that was "Shipped and sold by amazon.com" and sold as "new".
I realize they're trying, but Amazon is clearly failing to control the tide of fakes that is infesting their storefront. I find that for almost anything I search for, the knockoff/fake is actually the Amazon "recommended" item.
They've been "trying" for years. They may truly be trying, but the fact that they've neither succeeded in any meaningful way, nor made the choice to shut off the parts of their service that make the whole site scam-tastic and shitty until they can figure it out, show they don't actually care.
Probably this is because a non-trivial part of their revenue comes from the dark patterns and scams that make their whole site feel so much like the kind of flea market where you're pretty sure some of the stuff's stolen and if you ask around one of the vendors can get you some Oxy, but you wouldn't buy it from them even if you wanted it because it'd probably be fake. IOW I'm pretty sure their site and fortune's based largely on crime and generally anti-social behavior, else they'd surely have stopped it by now.
>IOW I'm pretty sure their site and fortune's based largely on crime and generally anti-social behavior
Honestly, isn't that what's at the base of the culture of 'disruption'? Look at Uber - let's take an established, regulated industry and just ignore the regulations long enough that we're everywhere and they can't shut us down.
Honestly, when I hear the word 'disrupt', I immediately think of shady, anti-social behavior.
> You'd have to be insane to buy anything you'd put in your body from Amazon. Just this week I received an obviously used item that was "Shipped and sold by amazon.com" and sold as "new".
I bought a new mp3 player from Fry's once which, oddly enough, turned out to be stocked with a sizeable music library already.
I'd still be pretty comfortable buying a candy bar from them though.
In the case of Fry's, you have evidence that they've received a counterfeit product from a single supplier. It may be rampant, or it may not be. With that single datapoint, it's hard to say.
In the case of Amazon, we know them to have a long and extensive history of selling a wide variety of counterfeit products. There is not nearly as much ambiguity to the situation. Elsewhere in this discussion the comparison to a flee market has been made, and I think that describes it well.
No, in this case is Fry’s selling a returned product as new. This is actually the main reason I stopped shopping at Fry’s. It could be the case that the customer re-sealed and returned, but I’ve seen it often enough at Fry’s that I suspect the store is re-sealing returned product and re-sell as new.
I once received a Garmin GPS as a gift (back before cell phones had GPS in them). I took it out of the box and plugged it in and started setting it up. It had a bunch of information in it already, including a "home address" and several trips around Detroit at over 100 miles per hour! I'm pretty sure the gift-giver was not the one who had used it since the home address didn't match, and they were unlikely to be driving there that fast. I'm not sure whether they bought it online or from a retail store.
Amazon has a big counterfeit problem. The reviews are entirely gamed, so can’t trust those any more , even the 2-star or 3-star ones.
So I recently dropped Amazon prime and ended up buying popular name brands. Even those you can get price matched with other retailers and Target even gives you 5% percent discount and BestBuy gives you points.
Unless you are a person who is not mobile, there are several options now.
I'll occasionally buy some more expensive or more complex items from amazon, and never anything that I'll be putting on or in my body. Otherwise I'll order directly from manufacturer or head into a store. If it werent for the Whole Foods discounts I'd have absolutely no reason to pay for Prime.
Enjoy price matching while you can. Nobody price matches craigslist for example and as Amazon trustworthiness dives towards craiglist levels one wonders if said policies will continue.
Eh? So what. If everybody stops price matching because nobody buys from Amazon anymore because everything they get is compromised, then GOOD. We'll be in a better more honest place.
Nobody price matches Craiglist because Craigslist operates as a bazaar...
Best Buy and Target will price match eBay prices if sold by the product maker's ebay account.
I'd like to believe that this is Amazon actually trying to crack down on fake supplements on their website, but it coincides too neatly with a noticeable increase in presence of the Solimo brand, Amazon's own supplement brand.
So Amazon's model here looks like:
1. Allow sellers to sell counterfeit products, so they can take a cut of profits from both legitimate and fake inventory.
2. Copy the best-selling products after they've been product tested, and compete against their own customers (sellers on their platform).
3. Undermine the credibility of their competition by warning that their competitors' products might be counterfeits.
I don't buy anything that I would put into my body from Amazon. This also includes creams, make-up, etc. Way too many counterfeits to trust them and trying to figure out which are legit is a huge task in itself.
Yeah my wife bought ‘tylenol’ that was a bunch of individually wrapped packs of two marked ‘not for resale’. I made her throw them out.
Why?
Because who knows where they came from or what it was.
Supplements are buyer beware anyway because even when they're direct from the manufacturer there is no guarantee the product actually contains what is claimed.
My favorite example is that I'm lactose intolerant, I've tried a bunch of different Whey Protein products that were all listed as "Whey Protein Isolate 100% lactose free" and all of them made me sick as if they had lactose. I finally caught on and tried a Vegan protein.
> "When consumers have tried to sue online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay for selling dangerous goods in the past, courts have ruled they aren’t responsible for products offered by third-party vendors..."
If there's one thing that makes me back away, as a consumer, from Amazon, it's this sort of thing, this lack of real accountability. Sure, Amazon, says they do things to prevent counterfeits from being sold through, but there doesn't appear to be any powerful outside force that consumers can bring to bear on the company when they screw up.
And IMO it's even worse on Amazon than on eBay. At least on eBay you know that it's not sold by eBay themselves, because that's how the whole website works. And also, eBay prominently shows who the seller is on the listing pages.
Amazon's product pages make it so easy to overlook who the actual seller is, and I don't think that's coincidence.
Even the seller information on Amazon may not accurate due to inventory commingling.
I think the question is the alternatives. Say each of these vendors had their own top level online stores. What then?
Maybe you find the site through googling, and decide to buy the item from them. In a way, Amazon is like an extra layer of security to that model. First you can trust the payment channels, you can trust the delivery, and you can trust that you'll get some level of customer support. Beyond that, you know that they've attempted to validate the quality of their products, but in the same way your email provider does spam filtering, so it won't be 100% accurate. And finally they have the review system, which can help learn about that particular vendor or product.
It isn't perfect, but it seems better then that alternative.
Now as a consumer, you also have the alternative to not buy from vendors you don't already recognize and trust. But then you might go back to having the selection issue. What do you do when your trusted vendors don't have the item? Flr those cases, Amazon still seems better then the alternative.
Amazon is also an extra layer of insecurity. Let’s say I buy a widget sold through Amazon by a trusted manufacturer. Some third party is also selling counterfeits. Amazon considers the two products to be the same, and sends me a counterfeit from the third party.
Seems to me that the alternative is simple: mandate that you receive what you ordered, and make the storefront you order from liable for any problems.
I admit that it isn't clear if Amazon can reliably have you choose from what vendor you are buying. That said, not all manufacturer have a storefront. A lot of items can only be purchased through some middleman. And it is hard to validate that a particular vendor is the actual manufacturer and not just pretending to be.
So say you wanted that product, and googled for a vendor, and you found xmanifacturer.com. How would you know to trust that? Also, I forgot to mention price. What if you find the item at xvendor.com at a cheaper price, and wanted to buy there? To me, that all just seem even less reliable.
It's actually trivial. If someone pretends to be from foo corp you call foo corps official listed number and inquire. If someone is an individual you ask for an identity document like a drivers license and keep that on file and associate that with all sales. You track who sends you widgets. This is trivial to do with increasingly cheap rfid tags.
For reference Walmart individually tags 10pks of cheap socks so it can via a wireless reader count how many Large foobrand packs of socks it has because it can differentiate between pack 5435454545 5435454546.
You can even give the user the ability to choose between getting shipments slightly faster by allowing you to fulfill their order via the closest item and send the info about fulfilling vendor along with the order OR get it slightly slower via the chosen vendor.
Amazon is technically excellent in a lot of ways its hard to imagine this would actually be hard for them they just don't want to.
Sorry, I meant for the customer. I agree that Amazon could both better validate and indicate to the customers which vendor are the official manufacturer, as well as allow you to opt out of comingling and actually say you want the item to have been from that vendor (even if at an extra cost)
But if there were no marketplace such as Etsy, Amazon or Ebay, I think it would be harder for the customer to trust a random website. At least with these marketplaces, you can trust the payment channels, the security of the data you give them, that the support contact will be responsive, that the item will be delivered properly and at all, etc.
If they’re at the top of the Google search results for “manufacturer” then you’re probably good. Cross check with Wikipedia if you want to be sure.
If you find some random vendor with a cheaper price then you need to make a decision about how much you trust them and how much it’s worth to you.
All of this is pretty standard and expected. The problem with Amazon is that people expect them to be trustworthy, and apparently when it comes to receiving what you order, they often aren’t. People’s defenses against scammers don’t work here because Amazon doesn’t look like one. And yet they will tell you “sold by X” and sell you a product from Y instead without ever telling you.
Stores should be legally liable for what they sell. If they want their suppliers to bear the burden then they can add indemnification to their contracts.
I don't know why Google results would somehow be less likely to be abused by fraudulent vendors then Amazon, Ebay or Etsy is for example.
I do think your point about these big vendors maybe providing a false sense of security is a good one, though I think it applies to Google results as well.
I don't know about legally liable though. I think that's where I'm more nuanced. If you impose that rule, than you kill marketplaces, everyone becomes individual retailers again, and Amazon, Ebay and Etsy becomes newer Walmarts. The selection shrinks again, prices go up, most manufacturers stop selling direct to customers again, since there are no cost effective ways for them to be a store anymore, and now you have fraudulent storefront opening up as websites again which will play the SEO game and potentially do even more damage to the customer then counterfeit, like just outright not shipping the item at all, or charging your CC for more money, or reselling your data, etc.
At the minimum, I'm not saying this could happen, but before enforcing these new regulations that you are proposing, we'd need to evaluate that it won't actually make things worse for the consumers. And in this case, I can see a case for it.
You can pretty easily observe that they aren't. Try to find a company where googling the company name shows you a top result that is actually another company with a storefront selling the same products. Now try to find an Amazon listing for a company's products that includes a third-party seller.
It's easy to see why. Google's entire reputation is based on providing good search results, to the point that "to google" has become a verb meaning to search the internet. They put a vast amount of effort into ensuring that they provide good search results. It is possible, with nefarious SEO and such, to beat out legitimate results sometimes, but it's not easy or reliable.
Amazon, on the other hand, doesn't seem to care. Sign up to sell a product, done.
Why would a liability rule kill Amazon? They can make it a part of their seller agreement that the seller indemnifies Amazon for all liability. This is different from making the seller directly liable because if the seller bails out, Amazon it stuck with it. This means that Amazon will have to make sure they can actually get satisfaction from sellers. There are many ways this can be accomplished, such as requiring the seller to have liability insurance with sufficient coverage.
I'm sure that such a rule would result in Amazon losing a bunch of tiny, no-name, untraceable sellers. Which is, of course, the whole point.
How is failing to ship the item or charging too much worse than counterfeiting? Both are trivial to counteract: initiate a chargeback with your credit card company. The same is true for counterfeits, if you detect them. The whole problem with counterfeits is that it's hard to detect them. If it was easy, this whole thing would be moot.
Everyone is rightly ragging on Amazon for being terribly irresponsible and consumer-hostile in allowing counterfeit products to be sold on their platform.
But doing what CVS is doing (independently testing all their stocked products) is not the solution. This is ahem WHAT REGULATORY AGENCIES ARE FOR. The FDA needs to do its gottdang job and test and regulate supplements. This is utterly shameful for a first-world country that consumers can't be certain that pills on shelves contain what they purport to.
Amazon also has issues with returned items. If they judge the returned package to be cosmetically sellable, even if the item is used or half gone, they'll re-sell it.
Yep, got a car seat cover that was supposedly new and had a broken zipper and someone else’s name written on the tag.
When I bought an Instant Pot from Amazon, the first one I got was obviously used (it smelled of food, and some of the accessories were missing). I had to exchange it for an actually new one.
There's entire classes of items that I no longer buy off of Amazon, because I have no trust in their supply chain.
* Supplements
* Anything vaguely medical, really
* Chargers
* Certain types of electronics e.g. phones
if risking blinding people during the eclipse due to counterfeit eclipse glasses was not sufficient to get Amazon to change, nothing will do so until someone actually dies.
In that case it might even be cheaper to pay a few million in settlements than it would be to change their ways.
It's a big issue: supplements, batteries, cables, headphones etc...
I've bought supplements from Amazon on a regular interval without issue. Maybe I just jynx'd myself. If I ever received fake supplements, I would treat that as being poisoned and report it to the CDC, FDA, FBI and local news.
My only bad experiences with Amazon to date was with NVidia video cards. Twice. Shame on me for falling for it twice. Each time they swapped out the cards with slower clock speed video cards. They also censored my feedback. Apparently nobody else checks their cards clock speed once installed?
Knowing how ill-equipped Amazon is for the supplement market, are there any legitimate lab-tested online vendors?
If there's one vendor I'd trust over any others it's Nootropics Depot. They do all their testing in-house, because it is much more reliable than 3rd party lab testing. The owner frequently gives extensive insight into how the supply chains and testing work. Recent example: https://old.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/comments/cength/testing_...
I was about to recommend Nootropics Depot too. Don't get thrown off by the name, anyone, there are plenty of "normal" supplements in addition to the racetams and such.
There's stores like The Vitamin Shoppe, where you're going to get genuine products. Some manufacturers use labs such as USP to assure you're getting what you pay for. So, if you buy products with lab seals from reputable shops, you're probably safe.
Conveniently, Vitamin Shoppe sells their stuff on Amazon.
>“If you still have this product, we recommend that you stop using it immediately and dispose of the item,”
I've received one like that before so this isn't the first time they're sending out a mail like that
And if you return too much stuff they'll ban your account; very cool.
I stopped buying a lot of stuff from amazon because I don't want to get banned. They just put books loose in boxes now. If I'm buying an $80 art book I want it delivered in mint condition. It might take amazon three tries to do that now.
there's a new trick/scam on amazon I am not sure if anyone else has noticed yet
seems designed to trick not only buyers but also sites like fakespot
a vendor lists an item for awhile, something cheap and reliable enough to gather plenty of legit 5-star reviews
then they leave the listing and ASIN but delete and change out the photos and the title/text with another item, not even similar item in some cases
so the ratings/reviews remain but the new product is given all their weight instead
cannot believe amazon does not detect and stop this
There's an e-mail thread going around Amazon about this, internally. The scam is that the fraudulent seller finds an item that is real but out of stock from all sellers. The seller than sends in their inventory, and updates the listing because they are now the only seller of that item.
It really sucks, and I hope we find a way to solve this, soon. It's a terrible customer experience.
Wouldn't one easy way to solve be that a human has to approve all changes to the name of an item? Or that name changes that change more than x% of the title have to be approved by a human? Or that all changes only happen after some waiting period? I would think anything that slows this down/makes it even a little harder will have big knock-on effects.
I don't follow this, what's happening?
Then don’t sell it. You created the platform.
Does amazon canada have a counterfeit problem? To my knowledge I haven't received any and I'm wondering if the same comingling issues exist.
Or are counterfeits generally perfect visual frauds?
This year, I bought a lot of cosmetics and hair products from Amazon Canada. Most of what I received was fakes and knockoffs. Now I know that every time I buy a product, I have to look first at the 0-star reviews.
It seems that sellers first build a reputation and then move on to counterfeiting. As a result, product listings have excellent reviews, even when they are clearly false. I'm talking things like a cream shampoo, brown water instead, etc.
I have practically given up buying these products on Amazon. Instead, I pay the manufacturer's small additional shipping and handling fees.
Interesting. I guess I always check for zero stars, so maybe that's how I avoided it.
Would it be clear the branding was different? Like, the brown water didn't have an immaculately reproduced shampoo bottle? Thinking of supplements, where it can be hard to tell what a legit one should look like.
I think they either use old empty bottles, dilute genuine product or steal the content for themselves and then refill the empty bottles.
Amazon cares about counterfeit products as much as YouTube cared about copyright videos in its infancy. It's just here to enable growth until they start to fight it.
amazon have been the best online business in and so some people can take advantage and sell fake items https://finance.uonbi.ac.ke/node/128951
Awesome do Apple headphones next