Interesting, it seems like they're trying to protect Amazon.
I can understand people moving from Amazon to Aliexpress though. When I'm looking for stuff on Amazon, it is often difficult to find out whether they ship to my country and if so, how much the delivery costs. Often, great deals from the US don't ship to Europe.
On Aliexpress, everything ships everywhere. You type in you country and currency and have full information.
Huh, is Alibaba really very comparable to Amazon for the everyday consumer?
I was under the impression that they weren't exactly targeting the same consumers. I thought Alibaba was moreso for resellers, folks who buy in large quantities and such to sell it themselves later.
Would you recommend that I, an American, start looking at Alibaba as an Amazon alternative for everyday things?
A friend of mine has started buying cotton swabs (Q-tips) from AliExpress, because it's 1/10th the price at local grocery stores.
I also recently learned that we have no cheap generic paracetamol over here, because the pharma guys did a consumer study and found people preferred the $8/packet ones to the $1/packet ones, even though they contain the exact same ingredients, as the latter were perceived as low quality/dodgy.
Well yeah, the stuff is probably being sent over on a container ship. Have you ever tried shipping something by airmail from a faraway country to the US? It would cost way more than the value of the actual product.
> It would cost way more than the value of the actual product.
Shipping from China is already subsidized by postal rates from the rest of the developed world[0]. Shipping in a container on a boat isn't free, and probably costs more than you pay now when buying something from China:
"As part of this reform process, China will be transitioned in 2016 into a category for more developed nations, who generally pay higher terminal dues."
Shipping in a container isn't free, but it's very very cheap. Earlier in the year, someone here on HN mentioned that if you have stuff to store, it's cheaper to put it in a shipping container and have it sail the seas, than it is to put in a local storage warehouse. That is, space on ships is cheaper than space in buildings.
Or another anecdote: we grow oranges here in my home state of Victoria, Australia. However, oranges grown in Brazil, flash-frozen, and shipped across the pacific are moderately cheaper than the local ones. Of course, they taste like cardboard, but they have sailed almost halfway around the earth.
My last AliExpress purchase (a pack of socks) took a week and a half to get to me in Canada. That's the same time an Amazon package takes if i don't pay for express shipping. Is a container ship really that fast?
If you are willing to wait for the shipping they are great. If something sells for $25 on amazon you might find it for $6 on Alibaba but with minimum quantities which are not consumer friendly, plus bulk shipping.
Then on Aliexpress, the consumer level one, you might find the same thing for $15 for each one shipped.
Source: Christmas shopping. Ended up having to go with Amazon because of shipping times and waiting too late, but its worth the wait for some things.
One thing to point out: the more commoditized something is, the better it is to buy on Aliexpress. If you've ever seen the same thing sold by two different manufacturers, that's a sure sign you can buy it on aliexpress for a fraction of the price. The simpler the item, the better.
Consumer items I've bought that have turned out to be nearly identical to what I would have bought in the US: bike tools and parts (wire ferrules, valve wrenches, chain whips, cassette tools, wear indicators) inexpensive power bricks, earphones, small hand tools (bit sets, secure screwdrivers, pin vices, wire strippers and diagonal cutters), zip ties, etc.
I've also bought a load of electronics (components, microcontrollers, and assembled items). This is a little difficult, because they are generally cut corners. This is terrible for batteries, not great for power supplies, and generally is imperceptible for LEDs. If you need a weird adapter or jack, this is definitely the place to find it. Looking for stuff can be hard though, because chinese names for things aren't always the same as English ones.
I don't bother with anything that is less than 25% cheaper from China, unless it is a better product or comes directly from the manufacturer (there are some company stores on Aliexpress). I basically assume I'm self-insuring for defective products. I have never been screwed on a claim, but I have received a lot of products that are just poor quality.
It is pretty much the perfect place to buy white elephant gifts though. I ordered a ton of 2x2 rubik's cubes last year (and a few larger ones) and gave them to all my friends. I'd say probably a quarter arrived totally destroyed, since most were just mailed in cheap padded envelopes and they are pretty fragile, but they were so cheap I didn't care. The entertainment value was definitely worth it, a 2x2 cube is much harder to solve than it looks, and I'm pretty sure some of my friends still haven't forgiven me for that gift.
Anyways, you can buy most of this stuff on Amazon or Ebay with a modest mark-up. It will be listed as "fulfilled from China" or something similar. It's a good option if you are worried about fraud, since you'll be dealing with eBay/Amazon customer service, rather than Aliexpress. I would recommend buying something cheap off AE just to give it a shot though.
> Huh, is Alibaba really very comparable to Amazon for the everyday consumer
I live in Romania and around these parts Aliexpress already has a big presence among your "everyday consumer". I visit the Postal office closest to my workplace every week and during the last or so year I've started seeing more and more young people (under 25, mostly women) who had come to collect the stuff they had ordered from China (most probably from Aliexpress). Around these parts Amazon is only known and partially used for purchasing books.
I've noticed that a lot of the feedback on AliExpress comes from Russia, Eastern European countries, and the assorted former Soviet Union satellite states. Do you know why it is so popular there? Is it a lack of local web shops?
From what I can tell AliExpress is mostly popular as a cheap source of (low voltage) electrical components here in The Netherlands. People buy clothing from local web shops (or traditional brick and mortar shops) due to speed, quality, and friendly returns policies though.
> Do you know why it is so popular there? Is it a lack of local web shops?
I don't think it's because of the lack of local web shop, at least not in Romania's case. I think it's only a question of costs, it seems that for certain items whatever comes from China is that much less expensive compared to what's available locally, even accounting for the long-ish waiting times and the customs duty.
>I've noticed that a lot of the feedback on AliExpress comes from Russia, Eastern European countries, and the assorted former Soviet Union satellite states. Do you know why it is so popular there? Is it a lack of local web shops?
1. All those ex-commie nations have high double digit VAT and import tarifs.
2. Western brands do not contest for that market
3. Those guys had no other choice other than buying Chinese goods since the fall of the Soviet bloc. What has changed now is that they can buy from China without middlemen
Try Aliexpress. That one is for consumers. Resellers go to Alibaba. And Taobao is yet another marketplace, but focussed on China.
And have a look around for a month. Bookmark Aliexpress, and every time you look something up on Amazon, see if you can find a comparable product on Aliexpress.
As someone younger on HN, I see a lot of people my age buying stuff from Taobao even though it is specifically for Chinese people. There's a lot of hype around counterfeit luxury clothing and shoes ('reps' of nike, adidas, supreme, etc.) because they are extremely cheap on Chinese sites but look close (and sometimes '1:1') to the real thing. They use agents that speak Chinese and live in China that can order what the consumer wants on Taobao and then ship it to them in the west independently. You can see some examples and discussion on /r/fashionreps.
Even beyond that, plenty of sports fans I know buy jerseys from Alibaba because the official ones are way too expensive for young people in the Midwest. I also personally know a guy that makes money using a python bot to get shoes when they release and resell them with a markup when they're sold out.
It might be more difficult to use some of these sites, but for many the savings are worth the inconvenience of navigating foreign sites, and there's a big market for the goods it sells.
>Even beyond that, plenty of sports fans I know buy jerseys from Alibaba because the official ones are way too expensive for young people in the Midwest.
Let's just say someone I know is a big NBA fan, and he purchased 4 jerseys off of Aliexpress for the price of one authentic jersey, with no discernable difference in quality or production, even while wearing one to a game and comparing the stitching to those on the rack in the gift shop.
I don't think jerseys are listed on Aliexpress anymore, though. At least not the last time I looked.
"When I'm looking for stuff on Amazon, it is often difficult to find out whether they ship to my country and if so, how much the delivery costs. Often, great deals from the US don't ship to Europe. "
Hundred times yes! I can buy same thing from Aliexpress or Gearbest cheaper than Amazon and get it shipped for free or negligible cost to my doorstep. Also, I'm sure that what I see there, I can get with no hassle. Amazon search sucks and finding shipping information sucks even more. What's the rationale behind hiding a shipping fee and if certain item ships to my country at all? My current places to go for online shopping: Aliexpress > Gearbest > Ebay > Amazon.
If anyone thinks it's a blow to Alibaba that US government says "some things on Alibaba are counterfeit", I will add them to my personal ignore-what-these-people-are-saying list.
Because come on, it's blitheringly obvious to anyone who's casually browsed Alibaba for more than three minutes that some of the goods are counterfeit. It's like saying "you can find pictures of naked people on Google". That's not much of a blow to Google, is it?
>Because come on, it's blitheringly obvious to anyone who's casually browsed Alibaba for more than three minutes that some of the goods are counterfeit.
To add to that, my understanding has been if if you explicitly WANT counterfeit stuff (since it's normally a lot cheaper) you can get it there. This is basically a feature for me.
This bothers me too. Sure one can claim there's a legal remedy, but Youtube was built on pirated content, and Google knows it. Even today I can go watch many, many pirated shows on youtube. It's been years that uploaders have evaded detection by simply mirroring (left to right, not hosting elsewhere as well) the video or slightly speeding up/slowing down the audio and/or video. Either google is willfully ignorant or they aren't as great at 'searching' for pirated content as they'd like us to believe. I think the former is much more likely.
I would say it's more so the case with Pinterest. However, YouTube does flag copyrighted content and in many cases the copyright holder is collecting video ad revenue even though somebody illegally uploaded it. This is almost always the case with music.
Well if you payed attention to my wording you would have noticed that I was talking about the intention of the people visiting the website. Also people don't make money from uploading pictures to pinterest.
> Either google is willfully ignorant or they aren't as great at 'searching' for pirated content as they'd like us to believe. I think the former is much more likely.
Disclaimer: I work for Google (but not YouTube). Opinions are my own.
I suspect this has to do with economics. YouTube has way too many videos so everything is probably largely automated. Having to go through videos and find all possible modifications to pirated content is really difficult, and it'd be very expensive for them to do both in terms of engineering effort and also computing resources.
After all, it's not like you can search videos by their content, you can only search their titles or descriptions with text. Sure, they could start detecting things that have mirrored content, but then people would just change the method by which they modify the original video. People who are trying to upload pirated content only have to modify the videos they upload, while Google has to check all videos that are uploaded, the majority which are likely not pirated, and checking the videos is likely much more computationally expensive than modifying them a tiny bit.
I admit I know nothing at all about video formats and that stuff so if I'm wrong please correct me as I'm always grateful to be able to learn more.
I would construct a list of invariances that a classifier should be robust to, then construct (either empirically, analytically or via a machine learning algorithm using a synthetic dataset) a series of features that are invariant under these transformations. This is sometimes called "fingerprinting" and Shazam uses something like it to look up audio. I'm sure there are many specific approaches described in the literature.
I would then use these features to identify videos that have the same content as these already reported - pick your favorite clustering algorithm. This would ensure that for a single copyrighted video being reported all plausible manipulations that fall under the model are also discovered.
Point being, this is something that could be implemented in less than a month or two by an individual or small team. If Google hasn't implemented it it's because they don't want to, not because it can't be done.
That's a particularly robust model of solution. Even simpler solutions could match subsets, eg. normalized/simplified audio waveforms (cheap) or image stills (eg. using imagemagick) at probable change-of-scene points (eg. MP4 keyframes). Many people here could hack together something to do this in under one day.
Wow thank you for the detailed response. Seems like you are much smarter than I am!
How do you know this would perform any better than what they are currently doing though? Do you think this would catch the cases which currently pass their filtering like videos with mirrored images? And would this produce less false positives?
I suppose in the end this is all going to just be speculation since they haven't disclosed what they actually do to try to find copyrighted content. Can you even predict how well a machine learning or classification algorithm will do without just trying it empirically?
What you can say is if there are N videos and k types of transforms that are used to "hide" content this would be hypothetically perfect with O(n + k) train examples - naive "reporting only" would be O(nk). This means that you should just need one example of each transform and one known instance of a particular copyright infringing media in order to get high performance.
Mirroring etc. would just be one example of the transforms an approach like this would be robust to.
It's hard to say what the error rates will be, but you should be on the last 5-10% Pd/Pfa pretty much instantly and then if you want more you can just acquire more true labelled data (if a user can find a copyrighted video on your site, I would think a contractor could, too!).
This well beyond what I understand so excuse me if I'm misunderstanding but doesn't this imply that they'd need to guess what k transforms might be used? This just seems like a cat and mouse type ordeal which I can only assume is something they would like to avoid as the complexity of and costs of running the system only gets worse, while the complexity does not add up on the side of those making pirated videos.
I figured they were already checking the videos somehow, but it seems to not catch videos that are mirror imaged or have other modifications. What I was trying to say was that it's much easier and cheaper for videos to be modified than it is to add additional filters through which uploaded content must be screened for copyrighted material.
> The GongChang platform specializes in industrial products
> Nanjing Imperiosus, based in China, is reported to disproportionately provide services to
illegal online pharmacies
Anyone know if buying things from these sites is illegal? I'm interested in Nanjing Imperiosus for the curiosity of what the hell they could even be selling and GongChang for buying some industrial equiptment eventually (I want to get into machining and so I need a heavy supply of shady Chinese garbadge to help build cool things)
Just in case you aren't aware, but if you're in the US most states and at the federal level have auctions on vehicles and equipment that is open to the public and searchable online.
You probably won't find anything brand new, but I've bought bridgeports and other machining equipment through this.
Hmmm I've received so much counterfeit stuff from amazon. I wonder if we'll also block the American company of a politically well connected billionaire?
Amazon does an extremely poor job. There are items that are clearly counterfeit, review after review states it, yet the item is still available.
For example, there is a device called the "Split-Ender" which is only sold directly. The items is not sold on Amazon yet there are tons of fakes on Amazon [1]. The manufacture seems unable to get Amazon to remove them. Amazon doesn't even have to distinguish if the items is real or not in this case. The device should not be on Amazon, period.
Amazon must be aware of that stuff and deliberately allow it. I'd question whether it benefits them though - I've kind of been put off buying there as it's hard to know what you'll get.
It seems deliberate, as they seem to have a handle on not allowing counterfeits for big name designer goods (rolex, handbags, perfume, and so on). The counterfeits there seems to be mostly around electronics, household goods, and so on.
How do you know people aren't buying from the manufacturer or indirect sources (other countries, liquidation/clearance from stores, any number of other grey market sources) and reselling?
There are many items sold on Amazon that the manufacturer doesn't sell direct nor sell to sellers to sell direct, but somehow people still manage to get stock.
Amazon isn't going to take down a listing unless the manufacturer can prove that it's infringing. They will block specific sellers if you can show they're selling fakes, and it's not that hard to do (place a test order, then report).
Here is another example: Crestron, they specifically do not permit sales on Amazon, ebay etc. The only way to acquire their hardware is to go via a Crestron authorized dealer or becoming one yourself. Yet there is crestron hardware on Amazon...
The reason being is that their hardware requires programming and unless you are familiar with how it works you will have a very bad experience.
If the store closes shop and goes bankrupt, and the court orders the goods auctioned off, whoever buys them buys them. Heck, when you go to the store, you own the thing you buy and can do whatever the heck you want with it, including selling it.
Counterfeit products are destroyed, they are never auctioned. A court cannot order the auction of known counterfeit items, thats just crazy talk. And one cannot resell a counterfeit product, that's illegal.
They are talking about a seller of the original stuff, not about counterfeits.
It's possible that there are ways for the manufacturer to maintain control in case of an authorized seller's bankruptcy (e.g. not actually selling it to them until it's transferred to customer should work), but if they actually transfer it to them they only can demand contractual damages from them, not stop a buyer from doing anything with the product.
I've heard plenty of stories of people buying merchandise with restrictions and selling it anyway. Sometimes they get caught, sometimes not.
I know of people manually removing serial numbers so the items can't be traced back to them. I know of people setting up multiple companies, selling from one to another and providing documentation that it wasn't "them" when caught. I've seen stories of people buying undelivered shipments from carriers and selling products found.
Point is, you can't assume everything is counterfeit just because the manufacturer doesn't sell to amazon sellers.
I've been threatened in the past by a manufacturer for selling their items: in that case, I had bought some from Amazon directly when the price was lower, and some from another authorized dealer. There are a lot of manufacturers that think their rights go a lot further than they actually do.
What is stopping me from buying one of their (real) products, not wanting it anymore, and then selling it myself on Amazon or eBay? Surely you're not saying that it becomes counterfeit just because the manufacturer doesn't want me to sell it?
But if you only sell direct, and the product appears on Amazon at a lower price, it is blindingly obvious that the product on Amazon must either be counterfeit or stolen.
That doesn't apply when someone has a large quantity, though. Many of those sellers have thousands of feedback, unless they have a large number of friends, it's not from gifts.
Even assuming the manufacturer is refusing to negotiate lower prices with resellers..
The first sale doctrine protects your right to sell items that you've purchased... even if you want to price it at a loss.
Amazon, for example, sold ebooks at a loss for years. Obviously you wouldn't say Amazon's ebooks were counterfeit or stolen.
And Amazon does not have sole ownership of that tactic. Others have an equal right to sell items at a loss, even against the manufacturers wishes.
Other examples of when this occurs: going out of business sales; end of season liquidations; etc. and various reasons to liquidate inventory: bad buys; changing product categories; etc.
I wonder if people could form a "brigade" and buy all these products en-masse and simultaneously file for refunds, or request chargebacks (and show the CC co proof the product is counterfeit - which should solidify our case ) ?
It may help to check who is the actual seller, as Amazon these days is as much a distribution center for third parties as a first first party retailer.
I've heard conflicting reports on whether Amazon co-mingles its own stuff with third party sellers, but some people have certainly claimed so. What co-mingling (it's opt-in for sellers) means is that Amazon doesn't distinguish which FBA seller gave them a particular item and will ship out the one that is cheapest to ship to that particular customer. Think of it as a giant distributed pile, where every seller's Koss Porta Pro end up. Now if I order one and the warehouse closest to me has units that a different seller handed to Amazon, I might get one of those, because co-mingling means that they're treated as identical. Remember that this is opt-in on the seller's part, and it's not entirely clear to me whether (or under which circumstances) Amazon co-mingles its own stock.
True, I'm sure third-party sellers have been extremely profitable for Amazon, but they've also destroyed its reputation by selling inferior (or fake) products with fake 5-star reviews. They basically rendered the review system worthless and undermined everyone's trust in Amazon.
Those were two of the best things about Amazon. Now, from my perspective as a consumer, all they've got going for them is fast shipping.
Are you in a somewhat remote area and/or far from the nearest Amazon fulfillment center?
I guess I'm lucky to live in a city near a couple of their warehouses, the 2-day shipping has always been reliable for us. And we often have the option of free same-day or 1-day shipping. If that wasn't the case, I would've given up on Amazon long ago.
Even when you contact their customer support about it they just shrug it off and do nothing.
I ordered a weightlifting belt from them earlier this year, an "Inzer" which is an expensive brand, like advertising a laptop as "Apple".
Turns out it wasn't an Inzer, but I was actually overall happy with it for the price. Contacted the seller, they gave me BS about "Inzer is just what this type of belt is called", which is 100% untrue. It's like saying thin grey laptops are called "Apple".
So I contacted Amazon customer support about it. The guy kept trying to send me a return receipt, I said I didn't want to return it, the product was fine for my use for the price, but they should fix the listing.
In my opinion, Amazon is guilty of anti-competitive behavior. By operating a market place at the same as operating the worlds largest online retailer the interests of the two businesses result in actions that are not necessary in the best long term best interests of the consumer. When a product in the market place is successful, Amazon the retailer, on a regular basis decides to compete with the smaller vendor, often forcing them out of the market due to Amazon the marketplace favoring their own products. This reduces competition in the long run. Unfortuantely due to their size, and the fact that Amazon has become the defacto product search engine (since it's hard to get decent placement in google without paying a large sum) Smaller retailers are forced to use their services, so "not participating in the market place" is not an option. Added to that, Amazon has a policy of requring market place participants to list ALL products in their catalogs, this means that if you're a multi-channel seller, and you don't want to expose your best sellers to Amazon they can delist your items (and they DO enforce this policy).
As a rights owner, it's infuriating how difficult it is to get Amazon to remove counterfeit products. They are asking us to buy the counterfeit products first to ensure they aren't authorized, despite us telling them we only have one authorized manufacturer / distributor. The only way to communicate to them is through a generic form where you also have to copy / paste ASIN and click boxes for every single item.
To my surprise, it is far easier to get our counterfeits removed from Alibaba than Amazon. You get a checkbox on the product list where you can simply check the box, then "report selected".
Just because you only have one authorized distributor does not in any way mean that stock being sold by another party is counterfeit. After your product is sold there's nothing preventing the buyer from reselling it themselves. Clearly a lot of products are most likely counterfeit but assuming they are with no proof is the same draconian logic used by all of those copyright protection firms that send out automated DMCA takedowns without a human ever reviewing the takedown first.
That would be the case if they were actually reselling our items, but they're all taking our logo and putting it on print-on-demand t-shirts, hats, mousepads etc. I've not found a single listing that's even remotely close to a resold product.
In this context "IP rights" are a protectionist policy, just one that happens to benefit America, which exports heaps of IP. If it's the same handbags made in the same factory but cheaper...
Lollipuff (YC W'13 - https://www.lollipuff.com) was started precisely to address this counterfeit issue -- focused on high-end women's fashion. We built out a backend that allows us to authenticate luxury goods using photos alone. It works through a combination of (1) very specific photos; (2) automated software; and (3) a trained (non-expert) authenticator.
We recently expanded from being just a P2P auction service (competing with the likes of Alibaba & eBay) to offering our Authentication Tool as a service, which can compliment their sites: https://www.lollipuff.com/authentication-service/
Apologies for the kvetching; I just removed the downvote complaint. I was just peeved to see my solution-centric comment downvoted into the negatives while mere complaints were being pushed to the top.
I didn't downvote you, but your comment is irrelevant. The claim is not that taobao has listings duping customers, who receive counterfeit items when expecting licensed ones. It's that customers are knowingly able to buy counterfeit items. In some cases, sellers of counterfeit goods in China even offer different quality options for the same product, which the original brands do not.
Taobao listings are peer to peer (somewhat anyway; it's also partly like Amazon retailers). So it's other users that are intentionally duping buyers, not Taobao directly. It's possible (likely?) that Taobao is complicit and turning a blind eye. But it's also difficult for them to address in any meaningful way; how are they supposed to obtain the necessary expertise...?
We know for a fact that other P2P marketplaces (eg. eBay) do care and have spent an insane amount of resources to combat the problem (or been litigated by brands) -- and yet they haven't been able to crack authentication at scale. Our tool addresses that problem.
It is relevant... because it is part of the solution to this problem: How can you authenticate brand-name items in a resale market.
(Worth noting: The brands aren't motivated to help in the resale market. They want everyone to buy new and reap 1000% markup... which is why they crack down on counterfeits.)
I don't see how Lollipuff's service, as you describe it above, is relevant to counterfeit items on taobao. If someone is selling, e.g. a copy of a particular dress, using stock photos from the original designer, for 5% of the regular price, how does your authentication service help taobao, the seller and/or potential buyers?
Our tool could be part of a solution... For example, Taobao could work with us to:
(1) Require sellers to get their items authenticated, and provide a link to the authentication certificate in their listings. This would require sellers to take photographs of the actual items rather than using stock photos.
(2) Train buyers to request authentication certificates from sellers before proceeding with transactions.
(3) Setup a dispute process (like eBay) where buyers can get their post-purchase items authenticated and have financial recourse in the event of counterfeits.
I'd be happy to speak with people at Taobao about how to setup a partnership and/or implement ways to dissuade bad sellers. But it will require concerted effort and will on the part of Taobao.
(2) and (3) assume the buyers are wanting to buy licensed, not counterfeit, products. This is not the situation described in the OP, nor the one I described.
(1) is a non-starter as sellers sell multiple of the same product (i.e. one listing could represent 100,000 units of inventory), or the seller doesn't even have the item on hand (they acquire it from a local supply chain the day they get a customer order). Taobao isn't primarily a flea market with someone selling their own stuff. It's more like Amazon marketplace, with almost all the volume coming from professional sellers.
Your service (assuming it is as you described) has value in protecting folks trying to buy or sell authentic items, but that's not the case here.
Is there much of a market for high-end authentica luxury goods where the buyers don't have an in-person experience? I was under the impression that part of the reason for luxury goods, beyond signaling after the purchase, was the shopping experience itself.
My wife is Chinese and has intentionally bought replicas (knowingly ahead of time and even choosing the quality level) online before for shoes and jackets. If she sees a nice Chloe jacket for thousands and wants something that looks like it, she knows she can go buy a replica and wear something that looks just like it.
There's some clueless people on the internet who get knowingly defrauded, but a lot of this is just preventing the sale even from two parties who know all the details. E.g. like preventing someone from selling DVD movies copied to obvious blanks.
Not a downvoter, but I also don't see Alibaba as a "problem" this fixes. I know a few people who buy luxury fashion goods on there entirely because it's fake/replicas. If you're buying $900 boots for $90, I hope you don't believe they're real.
It's like downloading something from thepiratebay and being surprised that it's not a legal means of download. It's more of a problem on Amazon or eBay, where prices are closer/equal to retail and things are falsely listed.
I'd encourage you to look at the frontpage of Lollipuff or in the eBay fashion sections -- you can absolutely find items that retail for $900 new for purchase in a resale market for $90 used. It's sort of like going to GoodWill.
If people want to buy "replicas", that's fine. In some jurisdictions it's even legally permissible to sell replicas without running afoul of laws, so long as they are marketed accordingly (though stamps & logos tend to be strongly protected).
But if Taobao / Alibaba would like to sell in the US, they must make the distinction between replicas and original brands clear -- and must enforce it. That's not an easy task.
> I'd encourage you to look at the frontpage of Lollipuff or in the eBay fashion sections -- you can absolutely find items that retail for $900 new for purchase in a resale market for $90 used. It's sort of like going to GoodWill.
Used, yeah of course. But you won't find them for that cheap new, which you definitely can on Alibaba (obviously not legitimate).
edit: Just checked out the site. Can't seem to find anything for Men?
Sometimes the 90$ boots come from the same factory, the same line, as the 'real' ones. An off-licensed, over-production, product can be physically identical yet still be counterfeit.
I can buy a lot of counterfeit stuff on eBay and Amazon. Blacklisting Alibaba sounds to me is like that U.S gov is trying to block other companies to compete with U.S companies, like eBay and Amazon.
I think we should return this tit for tat measure and stop using these product aggregation sites altogether. I think at this point any idiot with money can fill a warehouse with product and some sql tables and pass PCI. There's really no technical reason any longer we have to trust single retailers. It's simply momentum and finance and it really doesn't scale beyond obfuscated-pyramid scheme technology here, there's no value or service being provided by these companies, they're simply middle men.
As a consumer, there is a massive benefit to me of shopping online with a single retailer: if my card gets compromised, I know exactly who did it. I don't have a million accounts on a million sites with my credit card sitting in a million databases. I have an account at Amazon, Amazon has my card, and if that card gets popped, it's Amazon's fault.
Remember when people didn't trust online shopping? Amazon (and to some extent, eBay/PayPal) was responsible for changing that perception. There are very few websites I would type my card number into.
> Why's it such a huge deal if your credit card gets compromised?
Because it's a pain in the ass.
You have to spend time with the bank to dispute the charges and get the card replaced.
It's also extremely common to get a new card number when they issue you a new card. So all the companies that have your card saved, won't be able to charge your card anymore.
And you might say "well surely it isn't that many sites" but it's still an effort to change your card details everywhere.
Then there are the "important but infrequent" charges, like a domain name renewal. If your card is cancelled and you forget to change your saved card, you'd better be attentive to the renewal notice or you'll lose your domain name.
I don't get why more banks don't let you generate a unique card number per merchant so if it's compromised it affects at most one place.
Except of course that Amazon now sells tons of counterfeit goods, some of which are downright dangerous. The majority of Apple chargers on Amazon are fake according to Apple itself. I bought a USB adapter from Aukey on Amazon and later found out its UL tag was fake and it had a habit of burning itself up. Turns out Aukey has quite a few of these on Amazon. Amazon ignores reports about it.
It's a problem yes, and I hope they work on it. Nothing I'm about to say excuses Amazon for knowingly selling shoddy and dangerous merchandise.
That being said, the production of these inferior cables is an inevitable outcome of the race to the bottom on everything. If you (metaphorical "you", not yourself in particular) believe the price for an official Apple ($20/2 meters) or Google ($25/1.8 meters) USB-C cable is too much and go looking for something cheaper, you've already started down a dangerous road. You've said your safety isn't worth $20 and are outsourcing your life to the lowest bidder. Then you find a 6 meter cable for $5 and say "I knew it! Apple/Google were ripping me off!". If you're lucky, it breaks and you grumble and buy another one. If you're unlucky, it lights your house on fire while your family is sleeping. Quality comes at a price, and shysters count on people not being willing to pay that price.
But yes I completely agree. Amazon should not be selling known counterfeit cables (or any other merchandise). There's no excuse for that, you should be able to inherently trust anything Amazon sells you to be genuine (even if it's genuine crap).
Amazon, Jet/Walmart, and eBay (alternatively AliExpress). Throw in a handful of niche marketplaces like AdaFruit or SparkFun, and it sounds like the market is working as intended.
You don't need to convince me, I know what you mean. But I don't want to have to buy Hachette books from Hachette.com, Penguin books from Penguin.com, MiracleGro from MiracleGro.com, Cards Against Humanity from CardsAgainstHumanity.com, bleach from Clorox.com, toilet paper from Charmin.com, etc. It's really nice that for all of those things, I only need to give one company my credit card number. Worst case scenario, two or three.
It's also the same reason I do my grocery shopping at a supermarket and not buying directly from a farmer. I only need to visit one store (maybe two).
I couldn't disagree more. A consistent user experience is great, if I order a product from Amazon (Amazon proper, not 3rd party) I know it will get here fast, there won't be any crazy shipping fees, that I can return it easily if I don't like it, etc etc.
You should be aware that counterfeit goods are shipped from Amazon itself fairly regularly. Amazon intermingles goods from themself and third party sellers unless the third party seller explicitly opts out of it (which costs them more). Lots of Amazon sellers sell counterfeit goods that are fulfilled by Amazon. So, even when you buy from Amazon itself, you may get one of the goods shipped to the Amazon warehouse by a third party dealing in counterfeit goods. Some larger companies have pulled out of Amazon due to this. Birkenstock for instance: http://www.geekwire.com/2016/birkenstock-announces-it-will-l...
I think that is a little misleading. They may intermingle, but only in the sense that products share a product page. But you always explicitly see who the seller is, and if you buy from Amazon (seller), you will never get a product from a third party.
The problem is that if you don't know to pay attention to the seller, you can end up buying from a third party while looking at a first party product page.
It's not misleading. Look up Amazon product comingling for more details. A given product with a unique UPC has the stock from all sellers as well as Amazon itself combined by default with no distinction between who contributed which.
So, even when you buy from Amazon itself, you may get one of the goods shipped to the Amazon warehouse by a third party dealing in counterfeit goods.
That is a misleading statement because Amazon only commingles third party sellers, not their own inventory. If you buy from "Amazon itself" you aren't at risk of getting commingled inventory.
According to the Wall Street Journal's reporting on it in 2014, orders from Amazon itself were also affected:
"The system has enabled Amazon to make better use of its warehouse space and keep a wide variety of items in stock around the country. The idea is to give Amazon flexibility to ship certain products based on their proximity to customers, speeding delivery times. For third-party sellers, it saves them the trouble of having to label individual items sent to the Amazon warehouse. The bar code takes care of that. But the practice has in some cases led to mix-ups between counterfeit and authentic products, even when they are sent by Amazon itself."
That would appear to be why Wusthof knives, for instance, forbids any authorized retailer from commingling and doesn't count Amazon as an authorized retailer.
Apple products have already been mentioned, and one of the risks there is that counterfeit chargers tend to cut corners in their design and thus can be much less safe.
Another category I know of are Arduinos. It has often been noted that, since Amazon warehouses commingle stock of "identical" products from different vendors, the reputation of the marketplace vendor won't even protect you, since the vendors have no control whether you got a genuine item or a counterfeit off the pile (Not sure whether that is an ongoing practice, but it was widely reported a few years ago).
AFAIK original Arduino hardware is not a copyright design, and has actually been improved upon for most deployments (ie. made cheaper) in China, eg. by replacing with cheaper UART chipset.
And the Arduino designers do not object to people copying the electronic design (even less so if there are design changes like substituting in a different serial chip). What they ARE objecting to is people copying the branding and graphics (down to the "made in Italy"): https://blog.arduino.cc/2013/07/10/send-in-the-clones/
Still, different serial chips mean different device drivers, so one product shouldn't be sold under the other's name.
wowie......... this obviously goes too for ali express?
I read the article because I'm a U.S. citizen and have ordered things from ali express (I'm not in the u.s. tho'). It says only "Being blacklisted does not carry any penalties, but it is a blow to Alibaba."
As an individual, or if I were in the u.s., can I continue to order non-namebrand things from Ali express?
What exactly is the "blacklist"?
Like everyone else, I'm careful not to do stuff like trade with embargod country's etc.
Question: What does this mean for individuals? (Like me.) Or small businesses for that case.
Actually the things I order aren't name-brand anyway but I'm curious if this has any other meaning other than "buyer be ware"....
I intentionally bought a 512GB usb drive from Taobao to see what would happen. It was something ridiculously cheap like $10, far cheaper than any other 512GB at the time.
Taobao said I needed to return the product to the seller in order to get a refund. I told them I would send it to Taobao corporate or the police, but under no other circumstances would I ship counterfeit materials through the mail, reinforcing the supplies of the scammer and perpetuating the fraud.
I sent them a disk space audit demonstrating that there was in fact only 32GB on the device, showed them articles showing that there was only one other 512GB USB drive on the market at the time and that it cost well over 10x the amount listed.
I invited them repeatedly to view the product itself, but I only ever got the same standard canned response to return the counterfeit products to the seller.
Thats not a counterfiet good. It's fraud, it's claiming something is more than it is, but it isnt counterfeit unless they are abusing trademarks. Which marks were at issue? You might consider contacting them as they are as much a victim as you.
You're correct, initially it was merely fraud, but counterfeit dimensions soon emerged.
I should also mention that when I received the package, the USB drive was inside of Kingston USB drive packaging, which surprised me because they didn't describe it as a Kingston product on the listing page.
I can suppose the rationale for Kingston packaging was that Kingston was the only provider of 512GBs at the time, and its addition was a way to sell the fraud's narrative should any doubt later arise, such as after getting mysteriously corrupted data whenever more than 32GB was used.
I had live chats about the case with different customer service agents over a period of months. However, every time I spoke about the issue, it was like the previous hour-long conversations had never happened. Each time, I had to get the agent up to speed on the situation from the ground up, resending the images of evidence, re-explaining that I would be happy to return the item but only to the police or to Taobao corporate instead of resupplying and becoming the accomplice of a suspected criminal.
As far as I could tell, there was no internal procedure for investigating the possibility of fraud or counterfeit. The customer service agents only ever viewed the case through a general return heuristic. The first and final recommendation was always to "return the product to the seller."
It's recommended to use an agent to verify your goods before leaving China for this reason.
Alibaba has vested interest in removing fake vendors from their platforms.
They have a few automated ways to find fake vendors but a large part of the process depends on community help (i.e. users, brand-name companies, etc.)
Taobao is much more lenient than the international facing Aliexpress. However, reporting bad vendors does work & I do believe they incur hefty fees if they wish to return.
One thing I've noticed is that banned & counterfeit sellers often move on to WeChat for sales.
Realize that submissions to these lists come from industry reps. They are not created by some team of investigators. There is no budget for such things. Groups like the MPAA submit names and a yearly list is issued. Thats why nobody beyond diplomats pay any attention. It's only about the headline.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadI was under the impression that they weren't exactly targeting the same consumers. I thought Alibaba was moreso for resellers, folks who buy in large quantities and such to sell it themselves later.
Would you recommend that I, an American, start looking at Alibaba as an Amazon alternative for everyday things?
I also recently learned that we have no cheap generic paracetamol over here, because the pharma guys did a consumer study and found people preferred the $8/packet ones to the $1/packet ones, even though they contain the exact same ingredients, as the latter were perceived as low quality/dodgy.
taobao is only targeting China.
aliexpress.com is an international and consumer facing.
Expect considerably cheaper prices, and delivery times from 2-6 weeks.
Shipping from China is already subsidized by postal rates from the rest of the developed world[0]. Shipping in a container on a boat isn't free, and probably costs more than you pay now when buying something from China:
"As part of this reform process, China will be transitioned in 2016 into a category for more developed nations, who generally pay higher terminal dues."
[0] http://fortune.com/2015/03/11/united-nations-subsidy-chinese...
Or another anecdote: we grow oranges here in my home state of Victoria, Australia. However, oranges grown in Brazil, flash-frozen, and shipped across the pacific are moderately cheaper than the local ones. Of course, they taste like cardboard, but they have sailed almost halfway around the earth.
Then on Aliexpress, the consumer level one, you might find the same thing for $15 for each one shipped.
Source: Christmas shopping. Ended up having to go with Amazon because of shipping times and waiting too late, but its worth the wait for some things.
Consumer items I've bought that have turned out to be nearly identical to what I would have bought in the US: bike tools and parts (wire ferrules, valve wrenches, chain whips, cassette tools, wear indicators) inexpensive power bricks, earphones, small hand tools (bit sets, secure screwdrivers, pin vices, wire strippers and diagonal cutters), zip ties, etc.
I've also bought a load of electronics (components, microcontrollers, and assembled items). This is a little difficult, because they are generally cut corners. This is terrible for batteries, not great for power supplies, and generally is imperceptible for LEDs. If you need a weird adapter or jack, this is definitely the place to find it. Looking for stuff can be hard though, because chinese names for things aren't always the same as English ones.
I don't bother with anything that is less than 25% cheaper from China, unless it is a better product or comes directly from the manufacturer (there are some company stores on Aliexpress). I basically assume I'm self-insuring for defective products. I have never been screwed on a claim, but I have received a lot of products that are just poor quality.
It is pretty much the perfect place to buy white elephant gifts though. I ordered a ton of 2x2 rubik's cubes last year (and a few larger ones) and gave them to all my friends. I'd say probably a quarter arrived totally destroyed, since most were just mailed in cheap padded envelopes and they are pretty fragile, but they were so cheap I didn't care. The entertainment value was definitely worth it, a 2x2 cube is much harder to solve than it looks, and I'm pretty sure some of my friends still haven't forgiven me for that gift.
Anyways, you can buy most of this stuff on Amazon or Ebay with a modest mark-up. It will be listed as "fulfilled from China" or something similar. It's a good option if you are worried about fraud, since you'll be dealing with eBay/Amazon customer service, rather than Aliexpress. I would recommend buying something cheap off AE just to give it a shot though.
I live in Romania and around these parts Aliexpress already has a big presence among your "everyday consumer". I visit the Postal office closest to my workplace every week and during the last or so year I've started seeing more and more young people (under 25, mostly women) who had come to collect the stuff they had ordered from China (most probably from Aliexpress). Around these parts Amazon is only known and partially used for purchasing books.
From what I can tell AliExpress is mostly popular as a cheap source of (low voltage) electrical components here in The Netherlands. People buy clothing from local web shops (or traditional brick and mortar shops) due to speed, quality, and friendly returns policies though.
I don't think it's because of the lack of local web shop, at least not in Romania's case. I think it's only a question of costs, it seems that for certain items whatever comes from China is that much less expensive compared to what's available locally, even accounting for the long-ish waiting times and the customs duty.
1. All those ex-commie nations have high double digit VAT and import tarifs.
2. Western brands do not contest for that market
3. Those guys had no other choice other than buying Chinese goods since the fall of the Soviet bloc. What has changed now is that they can buy from China without middlemen
And have a look around for a month. Bookmark Aliexpress, and every time you look something up on Amazon, see if you can find a comparable product on Aliexpress.
Even beyond that, plenty of sports fans I know buy jerseys from Alibaba because the official ones are way too expensive for young people in the Midwest. I also personally know a guy that makes money using a python bot to get shoes when they release and resell them with a markup when they're sold out.
It might be more difficult to use some of these sites, but for many the savings are worth the inconvenience of navigating foreign sites, and there's a big market for the goods it sells.
Let's just say someone I know is a big NBA fan, and he purchased 4 jerseys off of Aliexpress for the price of one authentic jersey, with no discernable difference in quality or production, even while wearing one to a game and comparing the stitching to those on the rack in the gift shop.
I don't think jerseys are listed on Aliexpress anymore, though. At least not the last time I looked.
The clothing is cheap for a reason not just licensing costs.
Hundred times yes! I can buy same thing from Aliexpress or Gearbest cheaper than Amazon and get it shipped for free or negligible cost to my doorstep. Also, I'm sure that what I see there, I can get with no hassle. Amazon search sucks and finding shipping information sucks even more. What's the rationale behind hiding a shipping fee and if certain item ships to my country at all? My current places to go for online shopping: Aliexpress > Gearbest > Ebay > Amazon.
Does it actually prevent purchases on world.taobao.com from US buyers?
Edit: Found the actual document "2016 Out of Cycle Review - Notorious Markets". Pretty much a curated list of where to buy counterfeit stuff, if you're so inclined: https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/2016-Out-of-Cycle-Revie...
So apparently nothing.
Because come on, it's blitheringly obvious to anyone who's casually browsed Alibaba for more than three minutes that some of the goods are counterfeit. It's like saying "you can find pictures of naked people on Google". That's not much of a blow to Google, is it?
To add to that, my understanding has been if if you explicitly WANT counterfeit stuff (since it's normally a lot cheaper) you can get it there. This is basically a feature for me.
This fashion-business blog describes it a little more [0]. Here's the real press release [1], and the actual list (pdf) [2]
[0] http://www.thefashionlaw.com/home/us-trade-representative-re...
[1] https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-...
[2] https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/2016-Out-of-Cycle-Revie...
Disclaimer: I work for Google (but not YouTube). Opinions are my own.
I suspect this has to do with economics. YouTube has way too many videos so everything is probably largely automated. Having to go through videos and find all possible modifications to pirated content is really difficult, and it'd be very expensive for them to do both in terms of engineering effort and also computing resources.
After all, it's not like you can search videos by their content, you can only search their titles or descriptions with text. Sure, they could start detecting things that have mirrored content, but then people would just change the method by which they modify the original video. People who are trying to upload pirated content only have to modify the videos they upload, while Google has to check all videos that are uploaded, the majority which are likely not pirated, and checking the videos is likely much more computationally expensive than modifying them a tiny bit.
I admit I know nothing at all about video formats and that stuff so if I'm wrong please correct me as I'm always grateful to be able to learn more.
Err... yes you can. It's trivial.
I would then use these features to identify videos that have the same content as these already reported - pick your favorite clustering algorithm. This would ensure that for a single copyrighted video being reported all plausible manipulations that fall under the model are also discovered.
Point being, this is something that could be implemented in less than a month or two by an individual or small team. If Google hasn't implemented it it's because they don't want to, not because it can't be done.
How do you know this would perform any better than what they are currently doing though? Do you think this would catch the cases which currently pass their filtering like videos with mirrored images? And would this produce less false positives?
According to this post, it seems they already do something similar to what you've described: https://www.quora.com/Does-Content-ID-look-for-a-match-of-th...
I suppose in the end this is all going to just be speculation since they haven't disclosed what they actually do to try to find copyrighted content. Can you even predict how well a machine learning or classification algorithm will do without just trying it empirically?
Mirroring etc. would just be one example of the transforms an approach like this would be robust to.
It's hard to say what the error rates will be, but you should be on the last 5-10% Pd/Pfa pretty much instantly and then if you want more you can just acquire more true labelled data (if a user can find a copyrighted video on your site, I would think a contractor could, too!).
Oftentimes uploaders have to heavily crop or otherwise distort the video to get it to upload without getting caught by the detection system.
I figured they were already checking the videos somehow, but it seems to not catch videos that are mirror imaged or have other modifications. What I was trying to say was that it's much easier and cheaper for videos to be modified than it is to add additional filters through which uploaded content must be screened for copyrighted material.
Youtube obeys US law by responding to DCMA
I may upload a video I made to YouTube, without granting anyone else (including youtube-mp3) a license to redistribute it.
> The GongChang platform specializes in industrial products
> Nanjing Imperiosus, based in China, is reported to disproportionately provide services to illegal online pharmacies
Anyone know if buying things from these sites is illegal? I'm interested in Nanjing Imperiosus for the curiosity of what the hell they could even be selling and GongChang for buying some industrial equiptment eventually (I want to get into machining and so I need a heavy supply of shady Chinese garbadge to help build cool things)
To each their own, but I wouldn't be thinking about buying industrial equipment that doesn't have safety checks attached.
Looks like they are not going to be around for much longer.
https://www.icann.org/uploads/compliance_notice/attachment/8...
You probably won't find anything brand new, but I've bought bridgeports and other machining equipment through this.
Well I can dream.
However, Amazon selling counterfeit Apple chargers that can burn your house down and probably kill someone is ok.
For example, there is a device called the "Split-Ender" which is only sold directly. The items is not sold on Amazon yet there are tons of fakes on Amazon [1]. The manufacture seems unable to get Amazon to remove them. Amazon doesn't even have to distinguish if the items is real or not in this case. The device should not be on Amazon, period.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3...
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/20/birkenstock-quits-amazon-in-u...
There are many items sold on Amazon that the manufacturer doesn't sell direct nor sell to sellers to sell direct, but somehow people still manage to get stock.
Amazon isn't going to take down a listing unless the manufacturer can prove that it's infringing. They will block specific sellers if you can show they're selling fakes, and it's not that hard to do (place a test order, then report).
Here is another example: Crestron, they specifically do not permit sales on Amazon, ebay etc. The only way to acquire their hardware is to go via a Crestron authorized dealer or becoming one yourself. Yet there is crestron hardware on Amazon...
The reason being is that their hardware requires programming and unless you are familiar with how it works you will have a very bad experience.
They may not allow it, but they can almost never stop it without making a deal with Amazon.
It's possible that there are ways for the manufacturer to maintain control in case of an authorized seller's bankruptcy (e.g. not actually selling it to them until it's transferred to customer should work), but if they actually transfer it to them they only can demand contractual damages from them, not stop a buyer from doing anything with the product.
I know of people manually removing serial numbers so the items can't be traced back to them. I know of people setting up multiple companies, selling from one to another and providing documentation that it wasn't "them" when caught. I've seen stories of people buying undelivered shipments from carriers and selling products found.
Point is, you can't assume everything is counterfeit just because the manufacturer doesn't sell to amazon sellers.
I've been threatened in the past by a manufacturer for selling their items: in that case, I had bought some from Amazon directly when the price was lower, and some from another authorized dealer. There are a lot of manufacturers that think their rights go a lot further than they actually do.
I wonder if this is legal or possible.
I grasp that there are special cases, i.e. complex gear ...
But if you own a piece of gear outright - I don't think there is anything anyone can do to stop you from selling it to someone else.
Unless someone cares to comment ...
The first sale doctrine protects your right to sell items that you've purchased... even if you want to price it at a loss.
Amazon, for example, sold ebooks at a loss for years. Obviously you wouldn't say Amazon's ebooks were counterfeit or stolen.
And Amazon does not have sole ownership of that tactic. Others have an equal right to sell items at a loss, even against the manufacturers wishes.
Other examples of when this occurs: going out of business sales; end of season liquidations; etc. and various reasons to liquidate inventory: bad buys; changing product categories; etc.
If the physical quality isn't utter crap, like I've gotten from Amazon UK the last couple of times, I'll stop buying physical things from Amazon.
Those were two of the best things about Amazon. Now, from my perspective as a consumer, all they've got going for them is fast shipping.
I guess I'm lucky to live in a city near a couple of their warehouses, the 2-day shipping has always been reliable for us. And we often have the option of free same-day or 1-day shipping. If that wasn't the case, I would've given up on Amazon long ago.
I ordered a weightlifting belt from them earlier this year, an "Inzer" which is an expensive brand, like advertising a laptop as "Apple".
Turns out it wasn't an Inzer, but I was actually overall happy with it for the price. Contacted the seller, they gave me BS about "Inzer is just what this type of belt is called", which is 100% untrue. It's like saying thin grey laptops are called "Apple".
So I contacted Amazon customer support about it. The guy kept trying to send me a return receipt, I said I didn't want to return it, the product was fine for my use for the price, but they should fix the listing.
It's still up in unchanged form today, although they're currently out of stock: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B018N7POAM/
To my surprise, it is far easier to get our counterfeits removed from Alibaba than Amazon. You get a checkbox on the product list where you can simply check the box, then "report selected".
We recently expanded from being just a P2P auction service (competing with the likes of Alibaba & eBay) to offering our Authentication Tool as a service, which can compliment their sites: https://www.lollipuff.com/authentication-service/
A disagree that complaining about downvotes is relevant, and feel it detracts from the discussion.
So... Neither an up- nor down- vote from me ;-)
Taobao listings are peer to peer (somewhat anyway; it's also partly like Amazon retailers). So it's other users that are intentionally duping buyers, not Taobao directly. It's possible (likely?) that Taobao is complicit and turning a blind eye. But it's also difficult for them to address in any meaningful way; how are they supposed to obtain the necessary expertise...?
We know for a fact that other P2P marketplaces (eg. eBay) do care and have spent an insane amount of resources to combat the problem (or been litigated by brands) -- and yet they haven't been able to crack authentication at scale. Our tool addresses that problem.
It is relevant... because it is part of the solution to this problem: How can you authenticate brand-name items in a resale market.
(Worth noting: The brands aren't motivated to help in the resale market. They want everyone to buy new and reap 1000% markup... which is why they crack down on counterfeits.)
(1) Require sellers to get their items authenticated, and provide a link to the authentication certificate in their listings. This would require sellers to take photographs of the actual items rather than using stock photos.
(2) Train buyers to request authentication certificates from sellers before proceeding with transactions.
(3) Setup a dispute process (like eBay) where buyers can get their post-purchase items authenticated and have financial recourse in the event of counterfeits.
I'd be happy to speak with people at Taobao about how to setup a partnership and/or implement ways to dissuade bad sellers. But it will require concerted effort and will on the part of Taobao.
(1) is a non-starter as sellers sell multiple of the same product (i.e. one listing could represent 100,000 units of inventory), or the seller doesn't even have the item on hand (they acquire it from a local supply chain the day they get a customer order). Taobao isn't primarily a flea market with someone selling their own stuff. It's more like Amazon marketplace, with almost all the volume coming from professional sellers.
Your service (assuming it is as you described) has value in protecting folks trying to buy or sell authentic items, but that's not the case here.
There's some clueless people on the internet who get knowingly defrauded, but a lot of this is just preventing the sale even from two parties who know all the details. E.g. like preventing someone from selling DVD movies copied to obvious blanks.
It's like downloading something from thepiratebay and being surprised that it's not a legal means of download. It's more of a problem on Amazon or eBay, where prices are closer/equal to retail and things are falsely listed.
I'd encourage you to look at the frontpage of Lollipuff or in the eBay fashion sections -- you can absolutely find items that retail for $900 new for purchase in a resale market for $90 used. It's sort of like going to GoodWill.
If people want to buy "replicas", that's fine. In some jurisdictions it's even legally permissible to sell replicas without running afoul of laws, so long as they are marketed accordingly (though stamps & logos tend to be strongly protected).
But if Taobao / Alibaba would like to sell in the US, they must make the distinction between replicas and original brands clear -- and must enforce it. That's not an easy task.
Used, yeah of course. But you won't find them for that cheap new, which you definitely can on Alibaba (obviously not legitimate).
edit: Just checked out the site. Can't seem to find anything for Men?
Remember when people didn't trust online shopping? Amazon (and to some extent, eBay/PayPal) was responsible for changing that perception. There are very few websites I would type my card number into.
Just check your balance every few days. If you see anything suspicious, do a chargeback and have the card cancelled.
Because it's a pain in the ass.
You have to spend time with the bank to dispute the charges and get the card replaced.
It's also extremely common to get a new card number when they issue you a new card. So all the companies that have your card saved, won't be able to charge your card anymore.
And you might say "well surely it isn't that many sites" but it's still an effort to change your card details everywhere.
Then there are the "important but infrequent" charges, like a domain name renewal. If your card is cancelled and you forget to change your saved card, you'd better be attentive to the renewal notice or you'll lose your domain name.
I don't get why more banks don't let you generate a unique card number per merchant so if it's compromised it affects at most one place.
A lot of them do. Here are some examples:
https://www.cardbenefits.citi.com/Products/Virtual-Account-N...
https://www.bankofamerica.com/privacy/accounts-cards/shopsaf...
That being said, the production of these inferior cables is an inevitable outcome of the race to the bottom on everything. If you (metaphorical "you", not yourself in particular) believe the price for an official Apple ($20/2 meters) or Google ($25/1.8 meters) USB-C cable is too much and go looking for something cheaper, you've already started down a dangerous road. You've said your safety isn't worth $20 and are outsourcing your life to the lowest bidder. Then you find a 6 meter cable for $5 and say "I knew it! Apple/Google were ripping me off!". If you're lucky, it breaks and you grumble and buy another one. If you're unlucky, it lights your house on fire while your family is sleeping. Quality comes at a price, and shysters count on people not being willing to pay that price.
But yes I completely agree. Amazon should not be selling known counterfeit cables (or any other merchandise). There's no excuse for that, you should be able to inherently trust anything Amazon sells you to be genuine (even if it's genuine crap).
I'm not sure how to convince you otherwise.
How about this suggestion, instead of a million, lets try 3 or 4.
You don't need to convince me, I know what you mean. But I don't want to have to buy Hachette books from Hachette.com, Penguin books from Penguin.com, MiracleGro from MiracleGro.com, Cards Against Humanity from CardsAgainstHumanity.com, bleach from Clorox.com, toilet paper from Charmin.com, etc. It's really nice that for all of those things, I only need to give one company my credit card number. Worst case scenario, two or three.
It's also the same reason I do my grocery shopping at a supermarket and not buying directly from a farmer. I only need to visit one store (maybe two).
The problem is that if you don't know to pay attention to the seller, you can end up buying from a third party while looking at a first party product page.
That is a misleading statement because Amazon only commingles third party sellers, not their own inventory. If you buy from "Amazon itself" you aren't at risk of getting commingled inventory.
"The system has enabled Amazon to make better use of its warehouse space and keep a wide variety of items in stock around the country. The idea is to give Amazon flexibility to ship certain products based on their proximity to customers, speeding delivery times. For third-party sellers, it saves them the trouble of having to label individual items sent to the Amazon warehouse. The bar code takes care of that. But the practice has in some cases led to mix-ups between counterfeit and authentic products, even when they are sent by Amazon itself."
That would appear to be why Wusthof knives, for instance, forbids any authorized retailer from commingling and doesn't count Amazon as an authorized retailer.
So much for the US trying to block other companies.
Another category I know of are Arduinos. It has often been noted that, since Amazon warehouses commingle stock of "identical" products from different vendors, the reputation of the marketplace vendor won't even protect you, since the vendors have no control whether you got a genuine item or a counterfeit off the pile (Not sure whether that is an ongoing practice, but it was widely reported a few years ago).
Still, different serial chips mean different device drivers, so one product shouldn't be sold under the other's name.
If you still have problems, try using an incognito window.
I read the article because I'm a U.S. citizen and have ordered things from ali express (I'm not in the u.s. tho'). It says only "Being blacklisted does not carry any penalties, but it is a blow to Alibaba."
As an individual, or if I were in the u.s., can I continue to order non-namebrand things from Ali express?
What exactly is the "blacklist"?
Like everyone else, I'm careful not to do stuff like trade with embargod country's etc.
Question: What does this mean for individuals? (Like me.) Or small businesses for that case.
Actually the things I order aren't name-brand anyway but I'm curious if this has any other meaning other than "buyer be ware"....
Taobao said I needed to return the product to the seller in order to get a refund. I told them I would send it to Taobao corporate or the police, but under no other circumstances would I ship counterfeit materials through the mail, reinforcing the supplies of the scammer and perpetuating the fraud.
I sent them a disk space audit demonstrating that there was in fact only 32GB on the device, showed them articles showing that there was only one other 512GB USB drive on the market at the time and that it cost well over 10x the amount listed.
I invited them repeatedly to view the product itself, but I only ever got the same standard canned response to return the counterfeit products to the seller.
I should also mention that when I received the package, the USB drive was inside of Kingston USB drive packaging, which surprised me because they didn't describe it as a Kingston product on the listing page.
I can suppose the rationale for Kingston packaging was that Kingston was the only provider of 512GBs at the time, and its addition was a way to sell the fraud's narrative should any doubt later arise, such as after getting mysteriously corrupted data whenever more than 32GB was used.
I had live chats about the case with different customer service agents over a period of months. However, every time I spoke about the issue, it was like the previous hour-long conversations had never happened. Each time, I had to get the agent up to speed on the situation from the ground up, resending the images of evidence, re-explaining that I would be happy to return the item but only to the police or to Taobao corporate instead of resupplying and becoming the accomplice of a suspected criminal.
As far as I could tell, there was no internal procedure for investigating the possibility of fraud or counterfeit. The customer service agents only ever viewed the case through a general return heuristic. The first and final recommendation was always to "return the product to the seller."
Alibaba has vested interest in removing fake vendors from their platforms. They have a few automated ways to find fake vendors but a large part of the process depends on community help (i.e. users, brand-name companies, etc.)
Taobao is much more lenient than the international facing Aliexpress. However, reporting bad vendors does work & I do believe they incur hefty fees if they wish to return.
One thing I've noticed is that banned & counterfeit sellers often move on to WeChat for sales.
[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-38402696