How do you use private key digital signatures on physical products? A signed QR code on the packaging? With a online verification that the key hasn't been reused.
If it's any form of token, a legitimate product could be obtained and resold or returned without the token or with a fake. (How would it be validated prior to use; and if you did provide that oracle, how would you prevent botfarm abuse checking codes?)
The serial number on the product and a token to claim that number as a pair would work, at least in so far as someone would then have to obtain a large number of units and fake exact numbers. That should increase the chance of tracing a buyer; more so if the unit number is also on the outside of the box and it's registration can be checked prior to opening the box.
When I bought a device from team-xecuter for my xbox 360, they placed a bar code and serial number on the packaging. You could then go to a site they had and check the serial number to verify if it was real. I did and the site verified I had a real product. I don't recall if the serial was on the product as well or just the box. But in looking it up just now I see that according to team-xecuter there was an issue with a script and the site was returning genuine product as fake and visa versa occasionally . Also it was stated that it cost approx. one hundred dollars a month to run the service so I guess the fact that they mentioned that shows that a small company might have a hard time verifying their product if it means less for their bottom line.
E-cigarette products are rife with counterfeits and often use the scratchpad-code. It's a cat-and-mouse game still. They used to just spam one code on all the boxes so you could easily see messages like "this code has been checked 300 times" but later there were more codes and you would see they were only checked <10 times. Given that many consumers aren't even checking the codes, they probably get away with a lot.
That's all about reputation. Codes and other authenticity means just help to build - or break - the seller reputation.
By the way, for example, you know that e-cig products marked 'authentic' on e.g. Fasttech are really authentic, because (tens of?) thousands of people bought there, and checked the codes, and if that wouldn't stay true, all the people at all the related forums know that. I find it kind of funny when Chinese shop from Guangdong happened to build better reputation than the biggest American retail corporation.
Doesn’t matter. I ordered a pair of sennheiser headphones which came in the original box with all the fancy authentication stickers and it passed the verification process on sennheisers website. Six months later they were sent in for warranty replacement and the headphones I received from Sennheiser had a ground breaking difference in sound quality. I realised then that the ones Amazon shipped were counterfeits.
It works when done right. a) verification code that is big enough under the scratchpad b) verification process on the vendor site shows how many times this code had been checked before.
Six months later they were sent in for warranty replacement and the headphones I received from Sennheiser had a ground breaking difference in sound quality.
...or it could just be that they were originally flawed anyway or somewhat damaged in transit. It's not like manufacturers don't make minor changes to a product after starting production either --- mass production doesn't mean every product is exactly the same.
> Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.
This sounds like it might be a good candidate for a class-action lawsuit, assuming you could include anyone touched by all counterfeits on Amazon as part of the class.
I don't really care about the ~$50-100 in suspect cables, microsd cards, and batteries I've bought over the years, it just seems like something this broad would probably be the only way to get Amazon to consider fixing their inventory co-mingling issues.
I've seen people posting photos of counterfeits that they received, and I've made a lot of Amazon purchases, but I've never received one. I'm kind of shocked actually because I try out some of the really counterfeit-magnet stuff. The photos I've seen made it look like the counterfeits were really obvious, too.
You may not have noticed. I bought an Apple headset that fell apart after 3 months. Now either their headsets are just bad or it was a counterfeit. I don't know but I suspect it was counterfeit.
Perhaps it is the Apple headset. The EarPods with Lightning Connector that came with iPhone 7 (bought on the Online Apple Web store) broke in 3 months.
I was too lazy to go the physical Apple Store for a claim and bought a second Earpods headset on the Online Apple Store that also broke in 3 months.
Then I went to the physical Apple Store, waited for an hour to get an Apple Genious attention and got it replaced on warranty.
The third EarPods have not broken yet after one year, so according to my data points, you have a 66% chance that the EarPods bought directly to Apple break in 3 months and a 100% chance that EarPods bougt directly to Apple on its Online Store break in 3 months.
> Any dispute or claim relating in any way to your use of any Amazon Service, or to any products or services sold or distributed by Amazon or through Amazon.com will be resolved by binding arbitration, rather than in court
> We each agree that any dispute resolution proceedings will be conducted only on an individual basis and not in a class, consolidated or representative action. If for any reason a claim proceeds in court rather than in arbitration we each waive any right to a jury trial.
How is that even possible? Kind of defeats the point of having a justice system...
EDIT or let me rephrase that question: what's the original purpose of such forced arbitration clauses existing? How do they contribute to the public good?
The idea behind it is that any individual with a claim can stand to be reimbursed for their damages more if their arbitration claim is won than if they got 0.70$ for being a class-member. It disclaims any notion of collective action other than for self-gain, but the logic behind it is supported by the current laws.
The idea is that arbitration reduces the burden on the justice system while simultaneously giving people a faster and cheaper method for dispute resolution. Unfortunately contract law seems to be written with the assumption that the sides have equal power and their lawyers have negotiated the terms of the contract. In today's world where contacts are simply forced upon individuals by corporations, maybe we should revisit contract law.
Sometimes TOS is forced. Imagine living in an area with only a single ISP. You can technically forego internet access, but for most people that is not a realistic option.
But even in the case of Amazon, TOS is forced on you in the sense that you have no way of negotiating it. It is not a meeting of the minds; they write it and you sign it, often without even reading it. This is not the assumption with which contract law was written.
I'm not optimistic about revisiting contract law for this abuse. The grounds might be adhesion (I'm drawing a blank for other grounds but haven't had coffee yet) but those attacks haven't been successful since time immemorial (exaggeration?). After the coming change in government Congress needs to reign the Federal Arbitration Act back in to its intended purpose, that of encouraging ADR in B2B environments, and sew some testicles onto an aggressive FTC.
The role for government to step in and aggressively resolve unfair trade practices is clear when arbitration is forced on monopoly customers and customers for whom there is no ability to meaningfully negotiate contract terms.
Every contract is legal unless there is a specific reason for it not to be legal. Forced arbitration can be overridden in some circumstances but is essentially legal.
> Every contract is legal unless there is a specific reason for it not to be legal.
I always wondered if this was a major structural folly.
It sort of worked when contracts were mostly B2B things, or rare B2C dealing with significant okay-better-talk-it-over-with-a-lawyer financial stakes. But these days, a typical consumer is incidentally tangling themselves into hundreds of pages of contracts a day, written by people with far more access to legal support and presented with little option for negotiation.
I wonder if we'd be better off with just standardized "Mad Libs" style contracts. There'd be only one standard retail sales contract, one standard software license, one standard website terms of service, etc, codified into law. Nothing else is binding.
A lot of contract law would become cut and dry because there'd be no easy way to introduce new ambiguities or surprises into it-- we'd have most of the precedent we needed pretty fast.
It would also force a lot more transparency into some of the skeezier applications of contracts. There's no room for an unexpected cost or caveat when it's the same contract template every other business in your category uses. If the firms that all slapped "no class actions" and "mandatory arbitration" into every little clickthrough had to instead had to lobby a regulator to change the standard contract template, it would likely trigger public backlash.
Yes. Sadly, the corporate-friendly US Supreme Court has ruled binding arbitration legal (in the case of AT&T Wireless' contracts) and worse overturned a Californa state law that banned them.
The US Constitution was designed for stability, and explicitly (Madison) to protect the opulent. That’s why the Bill of Rights is a series of amendments, i.e. an afterthought. It’s working as designed (how many other constitutions have survived over 200 years?), and almost impossible to change from within the system.
> "Amazon, in court filings, denied mixing knockoff Fuse Chicken products with genuine ones. The company says it has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to counterfeits and aggressively pursues legal action against bad actors."
A zero tolerance policy doesn't mean much if you don't give out enough first strikes.
This actually seems to be a common effect of zero tolerance systems. If the rules are too harsh, and there's a negative effect on the authority for handing out bans, then the rules end up not being enforced unless absolutely necessary.
A zero tolerance policy doesn't mean much if your process A) doesn't allow ways to remove counterfeits after they've entered your supply chain, B) is slow enough to allow counterfeiters to make profits before they're kicked out, and C) has low enough barriers to entry that losing a seller account is a relatively trivial inconvenience.
That's complicated. In the world full of ODM and OEM manufacturing, some of the 'cheaper knockoffs' are actually exactly the same product, just with no brand label, or with the different one.
Which is often, especially in China, the same product made by the factory as extra production runs, but sold out the back door at night.
Straight up theft on not only IP, but all the management admin costs to manage production, and the marketing efforts to build the brand.
From every single account of people I've encountered who have worked in/with China, this and every other sort of ripoff is absolutely expected and par for the course unless you take serious countermeasures (e.g., make all critical components in another economy, ship over to China only the goods that just need final process and assembly). It's just how they do business.
And obviously, now, they have significant hordes scanning Amazon for products selling well, which they'll promptly counterfeit. And Amazon's happy to help them undercut you.
He meant an article implying the malfeasance is encouraged by Amazon itself, not sleazy third-party merchants (although the latter are convenient to Amazon for plausible deniability, like how firms like DirecTV outsource their telemarketing calls then act shocked, shocked that they went rogue and did not heed the do-not-call list).
So I tried to sell a Microsoft Xbox One on Amazon once, and it required me to verify that I am an authorized reseller. Why don't they just do this for every merchant selling any brand?
There’s a dive torch popular amongst newbie divers, the LED Lenser Frogman. I actually have one myself, they’re pretty neat, tho’ obv no substitute for my Light Monkeys. It should retail for £35-40 but you see knock offs on Amazon for <£7. Now this is potentially a piece of safety-critical equipment, and it’s totally unacceptable for Amazon to not police it better.
But commingling the stock so even genuine buyers get the knockoffs is plumbing new depths of sleaze.
Flashlights (including anything that has a battery and led bulb) and batteries are almost in how brazenly they falsely advertise on Amazon.
I would have to say that well over half of torches on Amazon exaggerate their claims by at LEAST 100%. You'll see the same exact 5-mode style with 20 different max output numbers. Most sellers get a counterfeit LED that's half as bright as the real thing, then list the max straight from the CREE spec sheets, ignoring that the numbers come from properly cooled, properly driven, and much more efficient legit bulbs.
Battery sellers on Amazon generally tack on 30-80% capacity, but some go bonkers. Go ahead and search for 18650 batteries for those flashlights. Amazing! Panasonic and LG can't get past 3600mAh for theirs and charge ~$25 for a pair, but multiple sellers have 9000mAh+ options for ~$2/cell. And they ALL have 4+ star reviews. It used to be that the garbage sellers would claim around 3500mAh capacity so that there was some plausible deniability, but now they're probably bordering on nuclear fission energy densities. They're selling a 2 liter bottle of water and claiming there's 3 liters in it.
Oh, and any 'emergency' or safety related product is fair game. If it fails, either they'll rationalize that it wasn't properly maintained prior to the emergency or the buyer isn't around to complain about it.
Needless to say, I don't order anything I actually care about from Amazon. I actually just looked through my 2018 purchases and it reads like the orders I used to place through cheap Chinese sites 5 years ago. I guess I now treat Amazon like a shipping option - $2 premium to get the same junk, but I don't have to wait a month.
Yep, it's amazing how many pocket-sized 10,000+ lumen torches with hours of burn time for ludicrously cheap prices there are listed there. A common trick is they not only fit a knock-off LED unit, but running it at higher than rated voltage of the genuine unit too. 10.5v or 12v units run at 14v.
As for 18650s I would never buy anything but Panasonic or similar, the risks are just too great, but commingling robs you of the opportunity make an educated decision - you might get genuine Panasonics sourced through Amazon's own supply chain, or counterfeits from anywhere.
A lot of this stuff is obviously coming out of the same factories too... reputable brand X will order Y units of their product, which will be made to spec, then the factory will simply keep the production lines running afterwards with much cheaper materials/components and dump that into the supply chain too. Whether it's electronics or clothing or anything else. It's inevitable at some point that someone will die of hypothermia in a fake North Face jacket when the genuine version would have kept them warm.
Some fake products add features, especially the best features from the competitors product that the 'genuine' products couldn't include for licensing reasons.
If you are trying to buy product X and what you get is a fake made with inferior materials, what use are extra features that you didn’t even expect to have?
I think we middle-aged/older geeks like to harked back to a time when you could drill a hole in the corner of a Double Density floppy disk and it would work fine as a High Density floppy. Subverting the dominant paradigm and sticking it to Big Floppy 1.44MB at a time!
But seriously, the reason these Amazotrash sellers get away with it is in part due to consumers not actually needing top of the line stuff. So, if you thought you needed 1000 lumen, but in reality you only needed 500 lm, and then get tricked into buying a torch advertising "5000 lm", but it does the job and has extra modes, plus a bike mount, you kinda come out ahead. It also coexists with that old marketing trick used in movie theater concession sizes to get people to spend more than they intended. (Which is the best deal: S: $5, M:$10, L: $12? Most people would opt for medium, but large is only $2 more (at nearly zero cost to the theater).
From that perspective, most of the counterfeits are better because you could either afford more of them or afford counterfeits of higher priced versions. Looking to buy a legit 16GB flash drive for $15, but find a seller with what you think is a legit 32GB version for $15? If it's not broken and actually has 32GB, but is slightly slower than the brand one that was faster than you really needed anyways, seems like a win for you.
On flashlights, yup. Plus, they use less efficient drivers and no substantial heatsink, so they're at least 20% less efficient out of the gate and 30-40% less efficient once they heat up.
On batteries, I just don't buy them often enough to really get screwed over. I try to to get Panasonic or LG, but if it's for a random project I'll look for any that have good review with pictures of the protection board. Then, if they claim something reasonable for capacity, I subtract 30% from that number and buy them if it's in the range of what I need.
As for counterfeits in general... Growing up middle class, counterfeits weren't a bad thing most of the time. Cheaper materials, worse/no warranty, and higher failure rates? Sure. Don't get a counterfeit if it's a matter of health or safety. But, if you could only afford the Thingy X Basic Model, a good counterfeit might mean you could get Thingee X Deluxe Ultra Championship Edition. It might not be as good as the real Thingy X DUCE, but it was usually better than the Thingy X BE.
I never understood the obsession with genuine items in fashion, since most of them were as good or better than the designer versions. Instead of paying $1000 for something, you paid $20 and got the exact same thing with the same materials and slightly different stitches in an unnoticeable location.
People are weird and the topic of counterfeiting really puts that on display.
The article talks about how counterfeits benefit Amazon, but its not the full picture. There is a negative affect of counterfiets on Amazon as well, and that is (1) reputation (customers not trusting Amazon anymore as a site that has honest opinions) (2) competition (other online retailers growing in the trusted-products-selling business) and (3) reliance on one country only (if this continues, and Amazon makes short term profits because of it, they will end of becoming a front end for china manufacturers only, risking their supply line. With one rule, china can ban Chinese products to be sold via Amazon, and Amazon can go broke). So it is in Amazon's interest to solve this problem, and not focus on the short term gains, but I wonder why they are not making any moves to solve this? That's the weird part.
Yeah I wouldn't put it against them if they tried selling "sugar" as lead acetate. It sells a banned sweetener, tastes great, and gets rid of contaminants all in 1 motion.
Yes, I've stopped buying from Amazon because of their stickerless commingled inventory program and get all my electronics from B&H Photo, and more and more other goods from Target.com. Amazon is getting to eBay levels of lawlessness.
I, too, stopped buying there because I can never assume anything I buy there is authentic. And I actually canceled my Prime subscription that I've had since the Prime program started.
The only thing I really still buy from Amazon is Toilet Paper, which seems unlikely to be counterfeited (so far).
I keep hearing about these issues all the time, but I guess they are US-only? I buy loads and loads of stuff off Amazon here in UK and I've never had a single counterfeit item. I always buy items marked as "sold and shipped by Amazon" and never had any issues. I guess on this side of the pond Amazon doesn't comingle the inventory with 3rd party inventory?
When I lived in the UK I did receive a couple of counterfeit items, one was a "Global" knife, and the rest were all compact-flash cards.
Handling the returns was mostly painless, but if I were to live in a country with a local Amazon-site I would only use it for books/similar these days.
Also uk based, I stopped buying clothing as it just doesn't seem reliable. Ordered the same shirt with quantity 3 and got 3 (slightly) different shirts. pair of Levis jeans also feels very different than the same pair bought at House of Fraser. Don't know what is going on there.
Your Levi’s example might just be Levi’s. They have numerous sub-categories and different vendors will be selling different ones. Also their QA is notoriously bad so things like fit between any two pairs can be a toss up
A common practice is to sell the same branded product at a lower quality level when sold through a different retailer. Either intentionally or because QA rejects get sold cheap to wholesalers for use at discount stores. The modern twist is that these rejects can now get commingled back into the QA-approved inventory thanks to Amazon.
Based in central Europe, have received counterfeit products that were indistinguishable from the real one. On the surface counterfeits have become difficult to identify, it is not about blurry and misspelled labels anymore. Especially if it comes to electronics they are not less dangerous. Non-electronic items like books get counterfeited too.
But I had more trouble with fake reviews selling me mediocre (often Chinese) products. I check the same US Amazon product on Fakespot for almost everything now (but the fake reviewers will game that system too). Amazon is clearly outsourcing their job to the customers.
Been a (happy) Amazon customer since I'm legally allowed to buy there and liked marketplace in the beginning for second-hand products and buying from smaller scale shops (the scale of the family winery in Saarland), but rolling out the red carpet for the Chinese counterfeit "economy" is just dangerous given that Amazon's number one rule that made them successful is keeping customer trust. Co-mingling - I don't see how anybody at Amazon could have believed that 1-day shipping is a more important metric than selling genuine products.
I wish they temporarilly blocked Chinese marketplace sellers as a whole until these issues are solved, by whatever entity. As a customer I don't care that this is unfair towards a handful of moral sellers, I care about not getting shocks from electronic equipment that I bought at full price. When I want to buy terrible Xiaomi products for some reason (e.g. because I fell for the Apple counterfeit's fake reviews) I can still go to eBay or Alibaba like back in the days.
The other solution would be visibly and strongly separating marketplace again, like in the beginning, or putting it on a separate dedicated website that crosslinks with main Amazon.
I always buy items marked as "sold and shipped by Amazon" and never had any issues.
That doesn't protect you from co-mingling of inventory. It just helps minimize the time between when you place your order, and when the order is shipped.
For me it's not about counterfeiting as such (I haven't experienced any either). It's the simple fact that the majority of the time now I'm not buying from a single retailer that I have some level of trust in (Amazon). It's some hole-in-the-wall seller, with crappy pictures and no assurance that I'm going to get the product I actually ordered in a reasonable amount of time for a reasonable shipping cost. (I rarely do 1-day shipping; I'm totally fine waiting a week or so, but I do want to know.) I have gotten wrong model/color a couple of times, which has never happened when buying directly from Amazon.
Shopping on Amz has no value to me if they're just a shitty webstore search engine.
It's basically made Prime feel useless for its original purpose of free shipping on warehouse items, because if I'm buying most things that would come out of their warehouse I'd rather pay for shipping direct from a specific vendor because I don't trust anything shipped from Amazon. Maybe it's still worthwhile for other services (music, video, groceries, whatever).
Sure I can get my money back if I get a detectable counterfeit, but what about my time dealing with it and without having what I ordered? And what about items that aren't easily detected as fake but which are notably substandard when used (e.g. odd-size or lithium batteries that die in 6 months rather than 2 years)? It's not like ordering from Amazon is really notably cheaper than other options these days anyway.
And while the selection is much much worse, Target will match Amazon prices if you do find something you want there. Heck, they match the Target website as well, which is regularly much cheaper than the retail prices.
How does price matching the Target web site work? Do you have to notice the discrepancy at the checkout, and then go to customer service for a refund, or do you dispute the price with the cashier, or some other method?
You can do both, but it’s easier to go to the desk because a supervisor needs to override. Amazon usually isn’t very price competitive so it is harder to use than one might think.
Grab a screenshot of the price outside the store as Amazon prices will change inside of some stores.
Yeah I go to Target first now -- I like the hassle-free returns (same as Amazon) but with the guarantee that items are verified authentic.
I've noticed that Target has, however, slowly begun to list inventory that I am guessing it doesn't have stock for, since there's literally pages and pages worth -- let's hope that Target does NOT pull the marketplace-sourced inventory scheme, because then there would be no difference between Target and Amazon anymore.
I've not completely stopped, but I am going to local alternatives more often now, all because of the counterfeit issue. In addition to Target, I'm also shopping at Best Buy again, so these competitors should take notice of this vulnerability for Amazon.
I very occasionally still Hy things from Amazon when I have absolutely no other chance. But I do everything I can to find the time locally and buy it instore or from another more reputable online retailer than amazon (which is pretty much anyone except ebay and aliexpress)
When I want commodity items that don't have a specific manufacturer (HDD enclosures, small tools, etc), I'll go to aliexpress because it's exactly the same things as sold on amazon but for a quarter of the price. I just have to wait 3 weeks longer than on amazon.
I don't even get books from Amazon anymore, because there are pirate prints of books.
It's all fun and games when it's just about having the item break after a couple of weeks because it was a low quality copy, but amazon also sells more dangerous things like Christmas lights with fake CE and UL markings or PPE that aren't sturdy enough to meet the norms they supposedly adhere to.
Not even mentioning the returned and used items sold as new for the full price, or the appalling way in which Amazon treats its workers.
It doesn't even make life that much more complicated, and thinking whether I want something so much as to go to the store or wait a month to get it from China is an excellent filter to block impulse purchases.
> I don't even get books from Amazon anymore, because there are pirate prints of books.
I once bought such a counterfeit. The amusing thing was that, apart from the utterly shoddy quality of the printing, the content of the book (Pierce) didn't even correspond to the title (Harper).
So it is in Amazon's interest to solve this problem, and not focus on the short term gains, but I wonder why they are not making any moves to solve this? That's the weird part.
They looks at the gain, the loss and the balance. Ultimately actions or lack of actions are driven by the balance.
You can draw your own conclusions from the lack of actions.
As a customer/user, there are already entire classes of products I won't even consider buying on Amazon. This includes Batteries, Cables, most common electronic goods.
As a business user, I won't consider signing up for their business account, for which they keep pestering me with popups.
As a vendor, I've held off on putting products on Amazon for exactly this reason of getting hosed by the counterfeiters and knowing that Amazon will not only not have my back as a vendor that is helping them profit, but will actively fight against me on any attempt to force Amazon to responsibly police their warehouses.
I may still take the risk in order to access Amazon's huge customer base, but I'll certainly be costly taking costly countermeasures from the start, and factoring those into the decision of how profitable it might be to sell on Amazon vs or in addition to directly.
They really have a significant problem, and are sadly, becoming another big tech firm that is creating increasing levels of problems in our society and economic environment.
The question is when those problems will exceed the benefit they bring to society.
IMO, FB is well past the bad/good breakeven point, GOOG & AMZN are still on the good side, but trending badly.
First step... add a "vendor sticker" to each item as it comes from a vendor into its' warehouse. At the very LEAST they could then filter out vendors selling counterfeits. The costs would be minimal and actually lead to rooting out counterfeits.
In no way would adding an extra logistic step to every single package entering amazon’s warehouse something of ”minimal” cost, but it might be worth it.
Even if Amazon needs 10 billion stickers and it has to buy a sticker manufacturer, the profitability is what matters.
How much does adding one the sticker cost relative to the average Amazon product? 0.1%? How much does it cost relative to the cost of the counterfeiting problem?
They could require the vendors attach the stickers to uniquely determine the shipment. Upon receipt, just scan to ensure the barcodes match/aren't duplicates. They already require vendors using Fullfillment by Amazon to have their shipment contain a shipping summary. Adding per item barcodes wouldn't be a huge change (and Amazon itself wouldn't bear the cost).
You're right. The items have to be scanned for inventory management anyway when they arrive and are put in the bins at Amazon. Might as well just scan a second bar code to note where it came from. Or do it as a combined QR code. Lots of room for extra data in there.
I believe the labeling obligation falls on the FBA seller today, not Amazon. So I don't think the cost of the extra sticker would impact Amazon at all beyond the process changes needed to ensure that two labels are scanned vs one.
I should say minimal cost per item. Even if it were $0.25USD per item, most wouldn't even notice, and if they took action against vendors with heavy return requests or counterfeit notifications, it could at least help.
There are already shipping labels placed on every outbound item, tiny little tags per item would be minimal by comparison.
Every item is already tagged with a unique sku (except for pre-approved commingled items). These numbers trace back to the vendor and Amazon is pretty quick to lick these vendors off the platform. But they just come right back under a different name.
The issue is expressly the commingling of items. There's no way to determine which seller shipped in the counterfeit items. Requiring a vendor sticker would do that.
Recently purchased a pair of Eneloop Pros that did not live up to expectations. Looking at a top review from 'Onick', it seems even popular items from well known companies are counterfeited. I bought my next Eneloops from another flashlight ecommerce website — I won't by anything from Amazon again. If i can't trust them $20 rechargeable batteries, I'm not trusting them with anything at all.
Apart from books, kindles and maybe heavy electronics, almost everything Amazon lists can be counterfeited. Clothing, accessories, shoes, chargers, cables and headphone are prime candidates.
Right now the only way to get a genuine product is to buy only those items which have exactly one seller, with a legit name, and are not under prime shipping or fulfilled by Amazon.
There are plenty of reports of counterfeit books on amazon. I don't buy my books from there anymore. If I wanted a cheap knock-off I can print it myself.
“Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.”
Its a traditional publisher what do you expect, it took me years to get a simple change made (redirecting the .org domain to .com for a site) when I worked at Relex (reed elsiveer)
Hey you’re not wrong, just maybe not clear enough.
It’s true that many traditional publications and houses are slower to adapt to changes in the digital landscape ever since print as an output has been sidelined. They like to find something that works and stick with it, even if it’s not optimal.
It would likely explain LA Times’ delay.
It’s taken teams I’ve been on a year to procure a ten dollar a month VPS because the request would continually get turned down by infra.
Assuming they've non-compliant tracking and data retention policies, consider filing a complaint for GDPR violation to bring it to their attention. And put forward a settlement whereby the rest of us in Europe can access their site after they make it compliant. ;-)
the worst thing is that Amazon censors/bans critical comments. I once wrote "oh no not another Amazon counterfeit". guess what my comment was rejected.
I would say roughly 50 percent of things I have bought are counterfeit (books, all electronics, CLOTHING, you name it!) It is, frankly, going to end Amazon as a company eventually but they do not seem to give a shit.
Curious: how do you know so many items are counterfeit? 50% is a pretty high number. I order from Amazon once a month or so, and I can't think of more than one thing I suspect of being counterfeit over the past year or two, and even that I couldn't be sure.
The problem is more complex than it seems. Amazon could easily stamp out all fake products by giving the manufacturer the power to single source a given brand. Unfortunately, that would also give that manufacturer full pricing power across Amazon, and that's a very bad thing for Amazon. The manufacturer could practice price discrimination in certain lower income markets while at the same time, being sure that discounted inventory does not end up on Amazon. No such limitation would exists for other sites, putting Amazon at a serious competitive disadvantage.
So Amazon wants the distributors of a certain brand to compete with themselves and push the prices down. But that opens the door for fakes on the site.
Nothing I said above should justify co-mingling inventory from different producers when a risk exists that fakes will be introduced in this manner, that's squarely Amazon's fault in their pursuit for faster delivery times. That practice leaves consumers without any ability to avoid fakes, destroying trust in the Amazon brand itself.
I think the solution is a system of financial bonds, where the seller would pledge a significant sum to be accepted in the co-mingling bunch and benefit from fast delivery etc. A single fake product traced back to it would result in loosing the pledge.
I like your analysis, but I find the pledge problematic. Vendors work against each other and would consider frauds like hiring people to buy a real product and return a fake.
I see your point, but isn't that a problem for any enforcement scheme? Unless Amazon is going to invest the energy of their own employees into determining what is fake and what isn't, the best you can do is rely on the signal you get from customers when they return items (legitimately or not).
Most stores don't sell products for third parties. And no third party sellers means a drastically reduced inventory.
I don't like the fakes any more than the next person, but I think the problems are genuinely more difficult than the various armchair experts on HN seem to give credit for.
The solution is the federal government seizing every one of Amazon's warehouses for knowingly trafficking counterfeit goods across state lines. But that won't happen because Bezos has wisely entrenched himself in Washington DC and Amazon is thus protected from laws that would shut down smaller competitors
That's an interesting example. While undoubtedly large, Walmart is still a brick and mortar shop, it's part of the short tail world. Walmart can press producers for significant discounts by simply affording them some of it's limited shelf space.
Amazon is "the everything store", the exponent of long tail online retail. If Amazon would employ the same tactics as Walmart, it would be quickly be out-competed by other online stores with a larger selection of products.
Does anyone have experience of using Bitmark, either as a customer or as manufacturer? It seems to be a public ledger for individual units of a product for handling warranty and returns. Andrew Huang, who is involved, describes the system and some of the scams they are trying to mitigate:
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4981
I'm curious about people's experience in practice. I would think this unlikely to help but Huang is smart and has lot of relevant experience. Bitmark's javascript laden and (to me) slightly off putting site is at: https://bitmark.com/
Especially outside yhe largest countries, it's often hard to find replacement parts for computers that are a older than the current generation.
What's the counterfeit situation with chips that can be installed in computers post factory? Cloning a GPU or a PCI card that requires vendor-specific drivers would actually require copying the chip instead of substituting with another one in the same product category for the genuine driver to work. Can we still expect PCI cards to be genuine if the genuine driver works? What about RAM, which doesn't require vendor-specific drivers?
I met with the representative from a major OEM a few years ago on a realtes topic. His position was that any new part that began manufacturing in Chinese partner factories was in competitor factories within hours and unauthorized or counterfeit parts were available in 30 days.
If you have a use case where genuine article is important, there are companies that you can use to inspect and certify the parts or systems immediately after import.
The basic idea: Vendor places unique 2D barcode on each unit of a branded product, only products with those barcodes get placed into Amazon warehouse inventory, consumers can scan the barcode themselves to verify it's legit.
Yes, and amazon gets to put a sticker on every item you sell (or at least the SKUs you enroll in transparency) no matter what channel you sell it in. I can’t imagine why vendors might not want to do that if they want to sell anyplace other than Amazon.
Seems like you're being sarcastic? But I don't see why. It means all your customers would get the anti-counterfeiting benefit, not only the ones who purchase from Amazon, since non-Amazon customers can verify the code too.
Seems like a win for everybody. (Also, you're putting the codes on your items yourself, Amazon's not doing it.)
Yes, I am being sarcastic. There may be a benefit to customers but your products will have calls to action on them to download and install an Amazon app on your phone when you’re in a retailer like Target or Best Buy. I think that’s the real reason for the transparency program.
It's not at all clear to me that people will be able to tell what that T+code sticker is on their product they purchased at e.g. Best Buy. I think the purpose of the program is to fight counterfeits.
It doesn't seem like a very good system. Counterfeiters will simply buy a real batch of products, and then copy each T-code onto their counterfeits 1000 times, then resell both the real and the counterfeit.
That seems like a really clever solution actually. Big brands can print unique barcodes on each unit, small brands can manually slap on stickers. And it looks like it can be used for all sales channels, not just Amazon. It will instantly stop counterfeiting in its tracks.
It seems like companies would be all over this, but this is the first I've heard of it. What are the obstacles? Is Amazon charging too much for it? (Honestly it seems like it's better for them to subsidize it, if anything.) Is it not fully rolled out yet?
There are probably some challenges with upgrading their manufacturing systems to generate and print the codes out. Currently standard UPCs for a lot of products are pre-printed at a vendor with all the rest of the packaging (like for bags of chips, all the UPCs are already printed on rolls of film that are stored at a factory before they're filled). They'd have to change it so that this newer 'UPC' would be printed during manufacturing like a code date would be.
They'll probably start moving towards it; especially since it'll also give better control over getting feedback on product quality from consumers or communicating recalls. Right now, it's kind of cumbersome, because things that are coded with lots or manufacturing code dates aren't really that easy for consumers or retailers to use.
Putting individual stickers on items is more expensive than you’d think. And most box manufacturers are set up for printing lots of the identical box - changing those lines would be hard.
"nothing" Is overstating it. While this doesn't guarantee that the legit item gets to the customer, I feel confident that the real seller will usually win that race.
In order for the counterfeiter to win, the counterfeiter would have to get the fake item with the real number into an Amazon warehouse before the real item arrived. Add to this the fact that the vendor of the real item will be told their item was rejected as dupe, and there's nothing I can see in the program documentation requiring the tags to be sequential, and this raises the bar quite a bit.
Why would Amazon even receive them into inventory if the initial scan says the product was already sold (assuming that a product must be purchased to get a valid code to copy)?
The only way still worth the hassle for westerner users is purchasing items as sold and shipped by Amazon from reputed brands only, while on offer with heavy discount... at the very least, you will get original but lower quality products made for lower income markets at their intended price.
It seems like if you're a small brand, like Fuse Chicken, you should be able to become the exclusive supplier of your own product on Amazon. For anyone else you sell your product to, include a "this may not end up on Amazon" clause and then you're sure everything on Amazon came direct from you.
> It seems like if you're a small brand, like Fuse Chicken, you should be able to become the exclusive supplier of your own product on Amazon. For anyone else you sell your product to, include a "this may not end up on Amazon" clause and then you're sure everything on Amazon came direct from you.
I'm pretty sure a clause like that would be an infringement of rights grants by the First Sale doctrine [0] and would be void (in the US at least).
First sale doctrine doesn’t prohibit two parties from contracting with each other. There’s no reason why you cannot have an official Fuse Chicken SKU or even exclusive to Amazon barcode or model number. Other sellers are able to sell your product, but not with that SKU.
Edit: I misremembered, the product was the Ripple Rug (ripplerug.com) and the problem was arbitrage where people were selling it on eBay for higher than retail, then drop-shipping via Amazon. Returns when it showed up in an Amazon box were paid for by the manufacturer, not the drop-ship seller. Links in the News section of their site, look for stories in 2016-2017.
(original post)
I can't recall the name of the product or find it with some quick searches, but I recall stories of one product that did precisely that after their product started being counterfeited heavily and undercut on Amazon - they have a cheaper version that's available on Amazon and a higher quality version available only directly from them.
I believe it was basically a stiff synthetic material blanket with a bunch of large holes and attachment points such that those points could be attached together in a bunch of different ways to make a wide variety of configurations for cats to play in.
175 comments
[ 8.9 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadSort of like old software activation codes?
The serial number on the product and a token to claim that number as a pair would work, at least in so far as someone would then have to obtain a large number of units and fake exact numbers. That should increase the chance of tracing a buyer; more so if the unit number is also on the outside of the box and it's registration can be checked prior to opening the box.
By the way, for example, you know that e-cig products marked 'authentic' on e.g. Fasttech are really authentic, because (tens of?) thousands of people bought there, and checked the codes, and if that wouldn't stay true, all the people at all the related forums know that. I find it kind of funny when Chinese shop from Guangdong happened to build better reputation than the biggest American retail corporation.
...or it could just be that they were originally flawed anyway or somewhat damaged in transit. It's not like manufacturers don't make minor changes to a product after starting production either --- mass production doesn't mean every product is exactly the same.
Los Angeles Times shows this:
> Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.
I don't really care about the ~$50-100 in suspect cables, microsd cards, and batteries I've bought over the years, it just seems like something this broad would probably be the only way to get Amazon to consider fixing their inventory co-mingling issues.
Sometimes counterfeits come from the same factory using the same materials, just running overtime.
Sans the quality assurance.
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=918
I was too lazy to go the physical Apple Store for a claim and bought a second Earpods headset on the Online Apple Store that also broke in 3 months.
Then I went to the physical Apple Store, waited for an hour to get an Apple Genious attention and got it replaced on warranty.
The third EarPods have not broken yet after one year, so according to my data points, you have a 66% chance that the EarPods bought directly to Apple break in 3 months and a 100% chance that EarPods bougt directly to Apple on its Online Store break in 3 months.
> Any dispute or claim relating in any way to your use of any Amazon Service, or to any products or services sold or distributed by Amazon or through Amazon.com will be resolved by binding arbitration, rather than in court
> We each agree that any dispute resolution proceedings will be conducted only on an individual basis and not in a class, consolidated or representative action. If for any reason a claim proceeds in court rather than in arbitration we each waive any right to a jury trial.
EDIT or let me rephrase that question: what's the original purpose of such forced arbitration clauses existing? How do they contribute to the public good?
Almost no one reads them. Even of those that read them, most couldn't understand the finer legal points and implications contained therein.
But even in the case of Amazon, TOS is forced on you in the sense that you have no way of negotiating it. It is not a meeting of the minds; they write it and you sign it, often without even reading it. This is not the assumption with which contract law was written.
The role for government to step in and aggressively resolve unfair trade practices is clear when arbitration is forced on monopoly customers and customers for whom there is no ability to meaningfully negotiate contract terms.
I always wondered if this was a major structural folly.
It sort of worked when contracts were mostly B2B things, or rare B2C dealing with significant okay-better-talk-it-over-with-a-lawyer financial stakes. But these days, a typical consumer is incidentally tangling themselves into hundreds of pages of contracts a day, written by people with far more access to legal support and presented with little option for negotiation.
I wonder if we'd be better off with just standardized "Mad Libs" style contracts. There'd be only one standard retail sales contract, one standard software license, one standard website terms of service, etc, codified into law. Nothing else is binding.
A lot of contract law would become cut and dry because there'd be no easy way to introduce new ambiguities or surprises into it-- we'd have most of the precedent we needed pretty fast.
It would also force a lot more transparency into some of the skeezier applications of contracts. There's no room for an unexpected cost or caveat when it's the same contract template every other business in your category uses. If the firms that all slapped "no class actions" and "mandatory arbitration" into every little clickthrough had to instead had to lobby a regulator to change the standard contract template, it would likely trigger public backlash.
The US Constitution was designed for stability, and explicitly (Madison) to protect the opulent. That’s why the Bill of Rights is a series of amendments, i.e. an afterthought. It’s working as designed (how many other constitutions have survived over 200 years?), and almost impossible to change from within the system.
A zero tolerance policy doesn't mean much if you don't give out enough first strikes.
Ugh, how cynical.
"Your reputation is my opportunity."
Straight up theft on not only IP, but all the management admin costs to manage production, and the marketing efforts to build the brand.
From every single account of people I've encountered who have worked in/with China, this and every other sort of ripoff is absolutely expected and par for the course unless you take serious countermeasures (e.g., make all critical components in another economy, ship over to China only the goods that just need final process and assembly). It's just how they do business.
And obviously, now, they have significant hordes scanning Amazon for products selling well, which they'll promptly counterfeit. And Amazon's happy to help them undercut you.
Amazon Corp bots make financial decision that blocking unauthorized sellers is cheaper than fighting lawsuits.
As a customer why would I care if Microsoft have authorised you to resell Xbox One's or not?
But commingling the stock so even genuine buyers get the knockoffs is plumbing new depths of sleaze.
I would have to say that well over half of torches on Amazon exaggerate their claims by at LEAST 100%. You'll see the same exact 5-mode style with 20 different max output numbers. Most sellers get a counterfeit LED that's half as bright as the real thing, then list the max straight from the CREE spec sheets, ignoring that the numbers come from properly cooled, properly driven, and much more efficient legit bulbs.
Battery sellers on Amazon generally tack on 30-80% capacity, but some go bonkers. Go ahead and search for 18650 batteries for those flashlights. Amazing! Panasonic and LG can't get past 3600mAh for theirs and charge ~$25 for a pair, but multiple sellers have 9000mAh+ options for ~$2/cell. And they ALL have 4+ star reviews. It used to be that the garbage sellers would claim around 3500mAh capacity so that there was some plausible deniability, but now they're probably bordering on nuclear fission energy densities. They're selling a 2 liter bottle of water and claiming there's 3 liters in it.
Oh, and any 'emergency' or safety related product is fair game. If it fails, either they'll rationalize that it wasn't properly maintained prior to the emergency or the buyer isn't around to complain about it.
Needless to say, I don't order anything I actually care about from Amazon. I actually just looked through my 2018 purchases and it reads like the orders I used to place through cheap Chinese sites 5 years ago. I guess I now treat Amazon like a shipping option - $2 premium to get the same junk, but I don't have to wait a month.
As for 18650s I would never buy anything but Panasonic or similar, the risks are just too great, but commingling robs you of the opportunity make an educated decision - you might get genuine Panasonics sourced through Amazon's own supply chain, or counterfeits from anywhere.
A lot of this stuff is obviously coming out of the same factories too... reputable brand X will order Y units of their product, which will be made to spec, then the factory will simply keep the production lines running afterwards with much cheaper materials/components and dump that into the supply chain too. Whether it's electronics or clothing or anything else. It's inevitable at some point that someone will die of hypothermia in a fake North Face jacket when the genuine version would have kept them warm.
Some fake products add features, especially the best features from the competitors product that the 'genuine' products couldn't include for licensing reasons.
If you are trying to buy product X and what you get is a fake made with inferior materials, what use are extra features that you didn’t even expect to have?
But seriously, the reason these Amazotrash sellers get away with it is in part due to consumers not actually needing top of the line stuff. So, if you thought you needed 1000 lumen, but in reality you only needed 500 lm, and then get tricked into buying a torch advertising "5000 lm", but it does the job and has extra modes, plus a bike mount, you kinda come out ahead. It also coexists with that old marketing trick used in movie theater concession sizes to get people to spend more than they intended. (Which is the best deal: S: $5, M:$10, L: $12? Most people would opt for medium, but large is only $2 more (at nearly zero cost to the theater).
From that perspective, most of the counterfeits are better because you could either afford more of them or afford counterfeits of higher priced versions. Looking to buy a legit 16GB flash drive for $15, but find a seller with what you think is a legit 32GB version for $15? If it's not broken and actually has 32GB, but is slightly slower than the brand one that was faster than you really needed anyways, seems like a win for you.
On batteries, I just don't buy them often enough to really get screwed over. I try to to get Panasonic or LG, but if it's for a random project I'll look for any that have good review with pictures of the protection board. Then, if they claim something reasonable for capacity, I subtract 30% from that number and buy them if it's in the range of what I need.
As for counterfeits in general... Growing up middle class, counterfeits weren't a bad thing most of the time. Cheaper materials, worse/no warranty, and higher failure rates? Sure. Don't get a counterfeit if it's a matter of health or safety. But, if you could only afford the Thingy X Basic Model, a good counterfeit might mean you could get Thingee X Deluxe Ultra Championship Edition. It might not be as good as the real Thingy X DUCE, but it was usually better than the Thingy X BE.
I never understood the obsession with genuine items in fashion, since most of them were as good or better than the designer versions. Instead of paying $1000 for something, you paid $20 and got the exact same thing with the same materials and slightly different stitches in an unnoticeable location.
People are weird and the topic of counterfeiting really puts that on display.
And there's AliExpress.com already doing a good job of that.
Actually, a better job, apparently, because on AliExpress you know which seller will ship your purchase.
The only thing I really still buy from Amazon is Toilet Paper, which seems unlikely to be counterfeited (so far).
Handling the returns was mostly painless, but if I were to live in a country with a local Amazon-site I would only use it for books/similar these days.
But I had more trouble with fake reviews selling me mediocre (often Chinese) products. I check the same US Amazon product on Fakespot for almost everything now (but the fake reviewers will game that system too). Amazon is clearly outsourcing their job to the customers.
Been a (happy) Amazon customer since I'm legally allowed to buy there and liked marketplace in the beginning for second-hand products and buying from smaller scale shops (the scale of the family winery in Saarland), but rolling out the red carpet for the Chinese counterfeit "economy" is just dangerous given that Amazon's number one rule that made them successful is keeping customer trust. Co-mingling - I don't see how anybody at Amazon could have believed that 1-day shipping is a more important metric than selling genuine products.
I wish they temporarilly blocked Chinese marketplace sellers as a whole until these issues are solved, by whatever entity. As a customer I don't care that this is unfair towards a handful of moral sellers, I care about not getting shocks from electronic equipment that I bought at full price. When I want to buy terrible Xiaomi products for some reason (e.g. because I fell for the Apple counterfeit's fake reviews) I can still go to eBay or Alibaba like back in the days.
The other solution would be visibly and strongly separating marketplace again, like in the beginning, or putting it on a separate dedicated website that crosslinks with main Amazon.
That doesn't protect you from co-mingling of inventory. It just helps minimize the time between when you place your order, and when the order is shipped.
Shopping on Amz has no value to me if they're just a shitty webstore search engine.
Then we know when the shit has hit the fan in Amazon.
I think you misspelled "finger"
Sure I can get my money back if I get a detectable counterfeit, but what about my time dealing with it and without having what I ordered? And what about items that aren't easily detected as fake but which are notably substandard when used (e.g. odd-size or lithium batteries that die in 6 months rather than 2 years)? It's not like ordering from Amazon is really notably cheaper than other options these days anyway.
Grab a screenshot of the price outside the store as Amazon prices will change inside of some stores.
I've noticed that Target has, however, slowly begun to list inventory that I am guessing it doesn't have stock for, since there's literally pages and pages worth -- let's hope that Target does NOT pull the marketplace-sourced inventory scheme, because then there would be no difference between Target and Amazon anymore.
When I want commodity items that don't have a specific manufacturer (HDD enclosures, small tools, etc), I'll go to aliexpress because it's exactly the same things as sold on amazon but for a quarter of the price. I just have to wait 3 weeks longer than on amazon.
I don't even get books from Amazon anymore, because there are pirate prints of books.
It's all fun and games when it's just about having the item break after a couple of weeks because it was a low quality copy, but amazon also sells more dangerous things like Christmas lights with fake CE and UL markings or PPE that aren't sturdy enough to meet the norms they supposedly adhere to.
Not even mentioning the returned and used items sold as new for the full price, or the appalling way in which Amazon treats its workers.
It doesn't even make life that much more complicated, and thinking whether I want something so much as to go to the store or wait a month to get it from China is an excellent filter to block impulse purchases.
I once bought such a counterfeit. The amusing thing was that, apart from the utterly shoddy quality of the printing, the content of the book (Pierce) didn't even correspond to the title (Harper).
They looks at the gain, the loss and the balance. Ultimately actions or lack of actions are driven by the balance.
You can draw your own conclusions from the lack of actions.
As a business user, I won't consider signing up for their business account, for which they keep pestering me with popups.
As a vendor, I've held off on putting products on Amazon for exactly this reason of getting hosed by the counterfeiters and knowing that Amazon will not only not have my back as a vendor that is helping them profit, but will actively fight against me on any attempt to force Amazon to responsibly police their warehouses.
I may still take the risk in order to access Amazon's huge customer base, but I'll certainly be costly taking costly countermeasures from the start, and factoring those into the decision of how profitable it might be to sell on Amazon vs or in addition to directly.
They really have a significant problem, and are sadly, becoming another big tech firm that is creating increasing levels of problems in our society and economic environment.
The question is when those problems will exceed the benefit they bring to society.
IMO, FB is well past the bad/good breakeven point, GOOG & AMZN are still on the good side, but trending badly.
I'm going to call in a few days to cancel my Prime. Amazon as a whole is just not worth investing in anymore as a customer.
I will also move off all my photos from Amazon photos and onto my own manual drives until better cloud solutions come out (not goog).
Amazon's responses on this are purely bullshit.
In no way would adding an extra logistic step to every single package entering amazon’s warehouse something of ”minimal” cost, but it might be worth it.
How much does adding one the sticker cost relative to the average Amazon product? 0.1%? How much does it cost relative to the cost of the counterfeiting problem?
There are already shipping labels placed on every outbound item, tiny little tags per item would be minimal by comparison.
1: create a problem that should not exist
2: sell a solution to the fake problem
3: profit!
Right now the only way to get a genuine product is to buy only those items which have exactly one seller, with a legit name, and are not under prime shipping or fulfilled by Amazon.
That's amazing. How it works, I wonder - some Chinese factory just print from PDFs?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13924546
> the cheap LADDA rechargeables that Ikea sells might actually be rolling off the same production line as Panasonic’s pricier Eneloop Pro batteries.
https://gizmodo.com/are-ikeas-7-rechargeable-batteries-actua...
Full four months of engagement and commitment, that's pretty impressive.
It’s true that many traditional publications and houses are slower to adapt to changes in the digital landscape ever since print as an output has been sidelined. They like to find something that works and stick with it, even if it’s not optimal.
It would likely explain LA Times’ delay.
It’s taken teams I’ve been on a year to procure a ten dollar a month VPS because the request would continually get turned down by infra.
So Amazon wants the distributors of a certain brand to compete with themselves and push the prices down. But that opens the door for fakes on the site.
Nothing I said above should justify co-mingling inventory from different producers when a risk exists that fakes will be introduced in this manner, that's squarely Amazon's fault in their pursuit for faster delivery times. That practice leaves consumers without any ability to avoid fakes, destroying trust in the Amazon brand itself.
I think the solution is a system of financial bonds, where the seller would pledge a significant sum to be accepted in the co-mingling bunch and benefit from fast delivery etc. A single fake product traced back to it would result in loosing the pledge.
That is how most stores operate.
I don't like the fakes any more than the next person, but I think the problems are genuinely more difficult than the various armchair experts on HN seem to give credit for.
That is in fact the entire business of most stores.
Amazon is "the everything store", the exponent of long tail online retail. If Amazon would employ the same tactics as Walmart, it would be quickly be out-competed by other online stores with a larger selection of products.
I'm curious about people's experience in practice. I would think this unlikely to help but Huang is smart and has lot of relevant experience. Bitmark's javascript laden and (to me) slightly off putting site is at: https://bitmark.com/
What's the counterfeit situation with chips that can be installed in computers post factory? Cloning a GPU or a PCI card that requires vendor-specific drivers would actually require copying the chip instead of substituting with another one in the same product category for the genuine driver to work. Can we still expect PCI cards to be genuine if the genuine driver works? What about RAM, which doesn't require vendor-specific drivers?
If you have a use case where genuine article is important, there are companies that you can use to inspect and certify the parts or systems immediately after import.
The basic idea: Vendor places unique 2D barcode on each unit of a branded product, only products with those barcodes get placed into Amazon warehouse inventory, consumers can scan the barcode themselves to verify it's legit.
Seems like a win for everybody. (Also, you're putting the codes on your items yourself, Amazon's not doing it.)
It seems like companies would be all over this, but this is the first I've heard of it. What are the obstacles? Is Amazon charging too much for it? (Honestly it seems like it's better for them to subsidize it, if anything.) Is it not fully rolled out yet?
They'll probably start moving towards it; especially since it'll also give better control over getting feedback on product quality from consumers or communicating recalls. Right now, it's kind of cumbersome, because things that are coded with lots or manufacturing code dates aren't really that easy for consumers or retailers to use.
In order for the counterfeiter to win, the counterfeiter would have to get the fake item with the real number into an Amazon warehouse before the real item arrived. Add to this the fact that the vendor of the real item will be told their item was rejected as dupe, and there's nothing I can see in the program documentation requiring the tags to be sequential, and this raises the bar quite a bit.
I'm pretty sure a clause like that would be an infringement of rights grants by the First Sale doctrine [0] and would be void (in the US at least).
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
(original post) I can't recall the name of the product or find it with some quick searches, but I recall stories of one product that did precisely that after their product started being counterfeited heavily and undercut on Amazon - they have a cheaper version that's available on Amazon and a higher quality version available only directly from them.
I believe it was basically a stiff synthetic material blanket with a bunch of large holes and attachment points such that those points could be attached together in a bunch of different ways to make a wide variety of configurations for cats to play in.
I find that a bit hard to believe. Try searching for earpods and finding a real one amongst all the fakes.
I guess because they couldn't trust supplies, they said no longer and we have to go closer to the supplies for tracking