I see the Amazon fake products problem as related to the social network fake news problem. In both cases you have a company that wants to both have it's platform cake and eat it's publisher cake at the same time. (Sorry for the bad spin on that phrase there.)
One important part of our solution here has to be that we force these companies to take a position one way or the other. So in Amazon's case it would need to decide - am I a platform for companies to set up there own online shop and provide fulfillment services to? Or am I myself the online shop?
In the later case they become responsible for product, like any business. In the former, they aren't. But in the former they now need to act as just a platform and not provide all the branding that makes it look like you're buying from Amazon. So they'd be more akin to Shopify or something I suppose. Every fly by night shop that wants to set up needs to set up its own branding and that way brand reliability and recognition still works and items are no longer commingled.
I think you solve it by making amazon directly liable for fraud on their platform. They’d clean up the problem pretty quickly after losing a few billion dollars in lawsuits.
There's a lot of anti-tech energy on the left lately. And Bezos painted a target on his back by getting into Twitter feuds with Trump. He's also now synonymous with the Washington Post which has never met a Republican they liked.
This all adds up to a company nobody seems to like in DC. If there's any company I could see getting a Washington smackdown soon, it's Amazon.
I’m talking about their reporting, not their editorials — which, no, I don’t regularly read. Although it’s worth noting they’ve not once endorsed a Republican for president, ever.
They serve DC, so I’m not surprised or upset they have a bias — but we shouldn’t pretend it doesn’t exist either.
Obviously owning a liberal newspaper doesn’t win Bezos any points on the right, which became obvious with Trump supposedly pressuring the Pentagon not to use AWS.
By having a President that holds rallies on getting these issues passed and sets a agenda for the people to vote for congresspeople who support consumer protection laws like these. This is where the office of the Presidency really has impact, it can direct the attention of millions of people to exert great pressure on its target.
There is already legislation that should give the FTC teeth to fine or shutdown Amazon based on counterfeit goods, especially if the branding is illegitimate.
I think they should be liable, but I think even just enforcing the existing laws without making them liable would put a stop to it.
Just have the police start tracking down what warehouses counterfeit items came from, and getting search warrants to search them.
Apart from the fact that this would directly reduce the number of counterfeit's... repeatedly shutting down warehouses for searches would kill Amazon's bottom line. Cleaning up after the police would kill Amazon's bottom line. Etc.
It's not exactly justice, but it is damn effective. You can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride and all that.
Disclaimer: I don’t own amazon directly but do own funds where Amazon is a significant chunk.
I don’t agree with this kind of regulation. It’s simply not the governments role to decide. You as a seller are not forced to sell on Amazon. I say that as the spouse of a seller who owns a store on EBay that’s continued to be successful. We had a bad experience selling on Amazon and are better off without them. Of course that’s just our experience but I’m not convinced Amazon is a monopoly here.
I do think Amazon needs to be held liable for fake products and whatever damage they cause its customers. Amazon simply selling goods with no liability of fraudulent items is a disgrace, and I don’t think they will change until we ram some regulation down their throat.
Minus the projection, I think all we can say is they were warning us to take their opinion with a grain of salt because they have an ostensible conflict of interest.
> I do think Amazon needs to be held liable for fake products and whatever damage they cause its customers.
what would this look like? they already have a pretty generous return policy. they pay the return shipping and return the funds as soon as the package ships. I'm not thrilled with the status quo of playing fraud roulette every time I order something, but the worst thing that's ever happened to me is having to wait a couple extra days for the genuine item.
> they already have a pretty generous return policy.
Yet there is no option to indicate that "This product is a counterfeit" when filing a return, despite it being a documented problem. The purchaser must choose a different, and inaccurate, reason for their return when filing for one.
One way to read into this is that Amazon doesn't want to keep records of counterfeit items sold on their marketplace because of the liability such records might incur.
This can be solved with an "I believe the item I received is a counterfeit" option alongside the "Item is defective or doesn't work" option already present during the return process.
My personal favorite was the manufacturer who purchased an item from us (a third party merchant) who claimed it was counterfeit. This product was originally purchased from the manufacturer and had its original sales receipt. Amazon’s project zero uses a hammer to fix this problem by removing all sellers (even ones that have a right to sell the item). Sometimes in rare cases legal action is taken and they do get the real counterfeiter but from what I saw the real problem (for the accuser) is solved because now only amazon or only the manufacturer can sell against that listing. Hoping this will one day change but I’m certainly not going to hold my breath.
> You as a seller are not forced to sell on Amazon.
Sorry, but this argument is just silly.
Here's some food for thought: Birkenstock stopped selling on Amazon[1] due to a delluge of fakes. Now go to Amazon.com and search for Birkenstock. You get a shit ton of results.
So if Birkenstock is not selling them, since they don't sell on Amazon, then who sells them and do those sellers have a right to sell a 3rd party product despite the brand not wishing to sell on the platform at all?
If you can regulate that a pimply faced teenager in Tenessee is ruined for life for downloading 10 songs, then it should surely be possible to regulate a behemoth like Amazon not to allow the sale of crap from dodgy suppliers on its platform.
>I see the Amazon fake products problem as related to the social network fake news problem. In both cases you have a company that wants to both have it's platform cake and eat it's publisher cake at the same time. (Sorry for the bad spin on that phrase there.)
These companies innovate by showing off a layer of whiz-bang techy goodness so people don't notice that they've simply externalized all the responsibility and internalized all the profits.
It also wouldn't be surprising to learn that they identify customers (buyers) who have louder voices and more social influence, and shield those people from fakes -- or provide rewards to mollify them when they do report problems.
Wait, do you really believe that amazons retail business has had little or no significant innovation besides whiz bang tech goodness? I’m guessing you were exaggerating to make a more strong sounding statement, but if you meant it, then I strongly disagree.
What exactly are they adding in value compared to any regular webshop? It's just as incomprehensibly bad as the standard run of the mill default PrestaShop.
At least Shopify is a real platform you can build stuff on.
Amazon is just this giant bullying machine. The Dalek of retail.
Fast OR cheap shipping. At least in my locality. In the place I most frequently order, free shipping is scheduled for "5-7 business days" to get to me, and frequently gets misdirected and takes an extra day or two (pushing it past another weekend).
When I've ordered to one of Canada's large urban centers it is much faster. But going to an actual store to get something for the same price is also an option, and faster still. And doesn't tend to have difficult to spot counterfeits.
Could you elaborate a bit on what other vendors screw up?
Here, in Hungary, ordering from Amazon is problematic, because it's such a beast. No human in the loop, and they pass on your package to some delivery vendor anyway, which usually doesn't provide much tracking. So we get no* benefit of the machine at all.
* - sure, we get an interface that's at least consistent and usually available in English
Huge selection, great customer service, saved credentials, 5% back on purchases, most stuff is one day shipping for me. I also know they fix problems pretty rapidly. I get a ton of entertainment from prime video.
Those are all things difficult to get consistently from a random web store.
Agreed. The problem is that generally the descriptions are so useless it's hard to know what's actually what. (For example recently I ordered a case for a Kobo Forma e-reader, and it was impossible to know how it would actually fold, because there were a few pictures, no video, no schematics, nothing. And the description was similarly unhelpful. It worked out okay though.)
> great customer service
I found it impossible to even get in touch with them :o (I wanted to ask where my package is, but they just kept naming the shipping vendor - "Deutsche Post", no tracking ID, no link, no actual contact to the relevant department.)
> saved credentials
Every webshop so far does it, and usually smaller ones provide ability to use PayPal.
> 5% back on purchases
How does that work? It's either priced into the price of everything or others pay for it, no?
> I see the Amazon fake products problem as related to the social network fake news problem.
Brought it up elsewhere[0], but I think you're right in more than one way. Beyond publisher vs. platform issue, fake news are the digital equivalent to counterfeiting; they're to news - and in general, to information media[1] - what Amazon counterfeits are to physical products.
I agree from in some capacity in the growth or greed to increase DAU and engagement for social networks is similar to Amazon’s desire to grow SKUs and purchase volume. Amazon mixing SKUs maybe relates to when press piggy backs off of the same initial headline as it creates distrust and makes people question the quality of the product.
There’s a big difference though. Social media allows many individual voices, and much like the printing press, allows previously unheard voices to be heard and to have reach. Therefore, the world’s expert can call out a journalist for being wrong immediately, making it seem like “fake news” is more common than it was previously.
Amazon is actually causing distrust around product quality when there wasn’t any before. Consumers may have trusted Colgate’s toothpaste, but if it isn’t actually Colgate’s toothpaste, yet it poisons someone, it becomes Colgate’s problem too. This would be like Facebook or Twitter allowing any account to adopt a WSJ or NyTimes verified badge, one of those accounts publishes fake news, and then the paper itself has a problem too.
Just stopping the insane co-mingling of products from different sellers would go such a long way. The co-mingling is in essence destroying accountability and evidence!
Amazon is simply the worlds largest fence for counterfeit goods, and should be treated as such. If your local pawn shop did what Amazon does, the owners would take a ride in a black-and-white cab.
I have friends who are no longer buying from Amazon. Especially friends with kids. You can’t trust anything safe for your kids when crap like this is allowed. Amazon is in a race to flood the market with availability at the cost of consumer confidence.
Remember all the hoverboard fires you saw on the news several years ago? They weren’t knock offs, but items sold that didn’t have any real safety certifications in mind. Amazon only cares something bad happens on the news and they’re involved.
My neighbor bought a set of woodworking clamps from Amazon. When the ~25lb. box arrived, the driver threw them up onto his porch (his house is quite raised from the street), and he has video of it damaging his siding as it took three attempts for the driver to get them over the railing onto his porch. When he contacted Amazon, they said to contact some insurance company they had. When my neighbor called the insurance company, they never returned the call.
He proceeded to begin researching the insurance company, which was owned by Amazon, but wasn't listed as a valid insurance company in Massachusetts. He contacted Amazon again, and said, "would you like me to call the insurance commissioner and attorney general that you're operating a non-registered insurance company in Massachusetts." Someone was out to fix his siding in 3 days, and they painted the porch as well (due to some paint matching problem).
Despite how much I love being able to order stuff, and not have to go out, Amazon is pretty scum-tacular.
I too learned that the best way to get your problem solved with Amazon is to resort to threats. It took ages to get my account closed -- I was sent by 5 different chat agents to the same "click here and send an email to confirm" page -- until I threatened to complain to the California Attorney General under CCPA. Then suddenly the agent had all the power in the world to close my account.
Did your neighbor call the insurance commissioner and attorney general to tell them that they were operating a non-registered insurance company in Massachusetts?
Does that Amazon owned insurance company have any clients other than Amazon? If it only serves Amazon, it might not count as an insurance company for purposes of regulation.
Amazon sold us a defective and/or counterfeit refrigerator water filter that leaked and damaged our hardwood floors. Homeowners insurance gave us an estimate of $5300 in damage. I sent a demand letter to Amazon legal dept. detailing the claim and threatening a lawsuit. They wrote us a check in about two months from mailing said letter.
I had an experience like this with them recently too--In order to save $15, I bought a part for my Whirlpool washer on Amazon. It was the in-flow controller which the water hoses hook in to. I ordered it from "Sold and Fulfilled by Amazon" which used to be my mark of a decent product (or at least I know I'll be able to get a refund if it has issues directly from Amazon). It arrived in unbranded cardboard, but the plastic wrapper did have "Maytag" stamping. Unfortunately my washer refused to recognize it despite it being extremely basic in design (a couple servos and a tiny switching board connected to some plastic tubes for water inlets). I requested a refund from Amazon which happened with in hours and went down to a local appliance repair place and paid the extra $15 for another.
The one from the local shop was not wrapped in plastic, but it was in Maytag branded cardboard with part-number and SKU. Took it home and compared it to the Amazon part which I hadn't yet boxed up and the Amazon part was visibly of lower quality plastic (edges were poor, you could see where welds had been done at the corners) and the circuit board with the switching components was completely different despite having the same molex-type connector. BOTH units had the same part-number molded in to the plastic in the same spot, yet the actual Maytag version I got locally worked instantly the first time.
I went from being an enthusiastic fan of Amazon Prime and a $50k spend one year [+] to closing my Amazon account and then warning other people away from it in the space of about five years.
I can't recall any other business from which I've moved so quickly and so far from one end of the spectrum of enthusiasm to the other.
[+] Most of it was for business -- parts and equipment for customers, it was often cheaper that way than my wholesale supplier.
Google has been about the same for me. I went from total Google fanboy to migrating a lot of my life away from them and advising others to do the same.
Google search results have been deteriorating in the past couple of years. It feels like the algorithm has been deliberately tweaked to produce larger quantities of less relevant results - it will often substitute words for "synonyms" that are much broader in scope, to the point of rendering the query pointless. I can't help but think that the purpose is to then show more "relevant" ads.
Even so, the deteriorated results I get from Google tend to be better than what I get anywhere else. I have DDG set as my default engine, and frequently need to fallback on Google.
I wish I could say DDG was as good or better, but outside of the privacy perspective, that unfortunately hasn't been my experience.
Once I had great Google Fu. I could find really niche topics. Currently, it's completely useless for that. If it's not something that many people want to find, you cant find it.
(I say this as a longtime user, and this is not meant to be damning with faint praise). Their email is best of class outside of gmail. It even beats in certain ways: It syncs faster. It's not made by a surveillance company. As a paying user, I've gotten very competent tech support. They have very good privacy controls re: image loading. They seem to permanently grandfather rates, which is nice.
Downsides: their label system is, to someone who really likes gmail, not as good. Calendar syncing on Android with their preferred sync app breaks every couple of months until you hit resync. Fastmail is in Australia, and I'm not sure the impact of Australia's police assistance laws.
Same: They support u2f.
Their product has improved a lot in the 5 years I've been using it, and is very worth the money. I think it's critically important that there exist high quality alternatives to google services, so that's a nice secondary reason to pay them.
In the case of Fastmail I don't know what you mean with "their preferred sync app" but I've used CalDAV-Sync in the past and now DAVx5 (because it's easier to use (used to be DAVdroid)) and I've never had these problems you mention.
If you have a domain name registered, sometimes your registrar will offer built in email. For example, I have a domain registered with Gandi and they provide a free email service.
I went from being an enthusiastic fan of Amazon Prime and a $50k spend one year [+] to closing my Amazon account
I used to spend about as much as you. Now I almost never buy anything from amazon.com.
The only value my Prime membership has to me now is discounts at Whole Foods, and Prime Video. Otherwise, I bet I spend less than $500 a year at amazon.com.
How on earth can you possibly spend so much on random consumer products sold on Amazon? Are people really buying so much junk that it costs more than most peoples yearly salaries?
I have a friend who buys nearly everything aside from perishable food via Amazon because they will put it directly on his porch and he doesn't have to go to a physical store. I laughed when he told me it was cheaper to have 50 lbs of cat litter delivered to his porch via Prime than to drive across town to the Walmart.
Whole Foods is another one I have gone from super fan to hating. Every time I shop there now is compounding failures of poor stock consistency, more online order shoppers than actual customers clogging the isles, and overall drop in quality
Cancelled my prime this year, haven't looked back. A lot of retailers offer free shipping if you order a certain dollar amount and while they have a smaller selection, I can be pretty sure I'm not receiving anything fake. They also tend to have a lot less noise in search results.
main downside is I'm having to order from multiple places, but it hasn't been too bad.
I was tired one night and looking for a replacement brake set for my car (oem has a known problem with seizing I was experiencing). Followed a link from a reddit advice post to some company's site with the parts. Said it would take weeks but I needed it so oh well. Realized the next day Amazon had the same exact thing for less and 2 day shipping. Emailed support of the other site to cancel and days later they said they'd "try" but some of the order was "already printed" and there was "nothing they could do" (BS). Amazon one got here in 2 days, other one got here in 2 weeks, all of it. Returning would leave me out their "free shipping" cost so I'm just keeping it.
I'm never going outside Amazon ever again unless the product or a suitable alternative doesn't exist on Amazon.
Another thing i'd like to note is I've ordered dozens of "Amazon Basics" products and I've yet to be disappointed. The company overall has been great for me. Painless returns with no gotchas, lower prices, superior shipping, better ease of use, 5% back with the card.
Yeah, amazonbasics stuff has been great for me too. I'm not boycotting Amazon, I just don't think Prime is worth it anymore for me. Amazon is truly better in some cases, but I just don't mind using saver shipping for the most part. Most of the typical household stuff and packaged foods are typically available for free 1 or 2 day shipping at other retailers. Worst case I can drag my butt over to a physical store, but I'm usually pretty good at ordering ahead.
One of things that pushed me away from amazon is their increased usage of "add-on item" labels. If I have to batch order anyway, Prime isn't actually that great of a deal.
Also for prices, I've actually found that for some items the prices are not always lower, but ymmv. Factor in that you're paying an annual fee. IMO, the 2 day shipping is almost not a factor anymore, since other major US retailers are starting to offer it for FREE. So for me it comes down to, is it worth the price so I don't need to batch order ~sometimes~ ? We could also be using Amazon very differently, so it may actually be a much better deal for you.
> items sold that didn’t have any real safety certifications in mind.
The amount of electronics sold without an UL/ETL cert on Amazon is staggering. Many companies no longer bother getting one because there's noone to stop them from selling uncertified crap. Also, we have seen unscrupulous dealers slapping a fake ETL cert on their product and even when Intertek contacted Amazon they didn't take it down!
Hell, there's an "international" power strip sold under many different names which provides three NEMA 5-15R from a single IEC C5/C6 coupler (the IEC standard is up to 2.5A but the UL certifies it up to 13A but still, the NEMA connector is 15A) and to top it off, it is sold with an ungrounded cable. I often see it recommended on travel forums, for real. I can't even decide whether shock or fire is the bigger hazard with this. Someone eventually will burn down an airbnb with it and then will the finger pointing start.
> a single IEC C5/C6 coupler (the IEC standard is up to 2.5A but the UL certifies it up to 13A but still, the NEMA connector is 15A)
The UL missed the point of C5/C6 entirely. Yes, the contacts are totally fine for that kind of current. But the point of having it with C13/C14 next to it is that because C5/C6 is only rated for 2.5 A you can use thinner coper in the cables. Meanwhile all compliant C13 cables have to use a 1.5 mm² cross section to carry the full continuous 10 A load current. If this is correct, then a "fine according to UL" load would actually melt most C5 cables (generally 3x0.75 mm²).
I'm amazed that a person making "negative ion wellness bracelets" would go to the effort and expense of putting a radioactive material in there to actually generate negative ions! Why not just put a copper-colored thread in there and claim it makes negative ions?
I'm astonished no competitor like Walmart or Wayfair has gone on the offensive yet with TV ads stating flat-out that you can't trust Amazon anymore because their counterfeit problem is out of control. They'd make a killing with defectors.
I have started buying most products directly from manufacturer's websites or in physical stores now. The amount of fake products on Amazon is appalling, I wonder why they don't put effort into stopping this.
>I wonder why they don't put effort into stopping this.
Because they make more money than they lose as a result while driving competitors into bankruptcy. Eventually they'll make a big public spectacle of getting it fixed (once the economics stop being in their favor) and everyone will forgive them.
Agreed. I assume they have ran the numbers and decided that the small number of customers they lose (like myself) don't matter in the grand scheme of things.
I started buying electronics at my local physical Best Buy. I thought 4 years ago I would never step inside a Best Buy again but a string of obvious fakes from Amazon changed my mind.
I bought a tv at best buy recently. it was my first time stepping inside the store in ten years. I had very low expectations, but it turned out to be a great experience. the sales associate I spoke to was actually super knowledgeable; it was almost as good as buying pc hardware at microcenter.
Best Buy even price matches Amazon so I've gotten the same item from there at the same price, same day, no shipping wait, no $120/year charge for "free" shipping.
Their in-store pickup is very convenient. And their prices are pretty good. I'm avoiding buying anything from Amazon since August because of the numerous problems I was having with them. I did have to buy one technical book about database design from them because I couldn't find what I was looking for anywhere else. Otherwise it's been really painless not using Amazon for any purchases.
The actual solution would require them giving up being a "platform" or would require changes that would make logistics and/or management of the platform take much more effort. They'd rather let a "fraud department" keep chopping off hydra heads at a much lower cost.
Very few products on Amazon are sold by the creator. Virtually everything is sold by a mixture of middlemen and importers and drop shippers.
Its virtually impossible to tell the difference between a product I'm middle-manning that's interpreted by investigators as real, vs a product that's interpreted as fake.
With books, nobody really minds if conceptually a book sat unopened on a bookstore shelf with the general public touching and pawing it occasionally vs a book that sat pristine untouched and cleaner on my home bookshelf, although one is marketed as "new" and one as "used", but in practice it usually doesn't matter. Also see the weirdness with $10 "indian subcontinent only" textbooks that normally sell for $200 to sucker american students, nobody complains their book was "fake" with a 95% discount to keep them quiet.
On the other hand, do that same game with toothbrushes and in roll the complaints.
This may be a problem inherent to online shopping in the long term. A copy of "Numerical Recipes in C edition 3" is a fungible commodity. Apparently, as per the linked article, that is not the case with fad overpriced gloves and toothbrushes. Possibly that type of product is inherently unsuitable for online purchase.
Regardless of whether the product is overpriced or fashionable, I want the correct product, without the shortcuts taken by a fake: unsafe paints, plastics etc.
I don't mind "Philips-compatible" brush heads being listed, but the description should be clear.
Otherwise we may as well repeal all trademark, copyright and product safety laws.
Several of the examples in OP are admittedly not counterfeit but simply look too similar to a name brand, or are older versions. Neither is illegal per se. (Assuming there's no design patent, and the product page doesn't specify year of manufacture or exact model number, which is common.)
Counterfeiters counterfeit the medium, not the information. It's mostly harmless to consumers in cases where it's the information that matters (books, digital content). It's harmful when the physical medium is the product.
Elsewhere in the discussion, 'erentz says:
> I see the Amazon fake products problem as related to the social network fake news problem.
I think they're right in more than one way. It's not only the platform vs. publisher issue. Fake news are the information goods equivalent of counterfeiting - faking the bits, not the medium.
>Possibly that type of product is inherently unsuitable for online purchase.
You're confusing online purchasing with "Amazon's approach to online purchasing." They are not the same thing. It's possible to manage the supply chain when selling online just like brick and mortal retails already do. Of course, you don't make as much money in the process.
I agree that the ambiguity between 'like-new' and actually new, but mildly shopworn would make it hard to tell a material difference between the two occurrences, however this:
> nobody complains their book was "fake" with a 95% discount to keep them quiet
This is conflating dishonest substitution of counterfeit goods with consensual purchase of a lower-quality product. If I'm not explicitly purchasing the 'international' version of a book, I would consider myself harmed and defrauded if its materials and construction are not up to expected [North-American / Western / ?] standards.
The user explicitly consenting to purchasing a knock-off is another thing entirely from having the seller 'fulfill' a purchase for a genuine item with the same knock-off.
A couple years back I impulse purchased a Google Chromecast at a local Walmart. When I went to open it up at home, the seal looked a bit funky like it had been carefully pealed back and put back in place.
What it contained looked like a Chromecast, but was actually a knockoff, which I never could get to associate with my network or get working.
Apparently someone bought this cheap one online, didn't like it, bought the real one at Walmart and put the fake one back in the box and returned it to the store.
I have received fake products from Amazon in France and Spain. It's not just the US.
But what's more common from Amazon is to receive an obviously refurbished product as new. The products people return are just sent to the next buyer, without check or cleaning.
I tried this recently. Bought something from the manufacturer, paid extra for shipping & handling, waited longer, the whole bit. I felt good about myself, because I don't want to be taken advantage of anymore, and hey ... I'm buying directly from the manufacturer, so they get a higher cut. Right?
No. I bought directly from the manufacturer's website, paid them, got email from them, the whole bit ... and it was fulfilled and delivered by Amazon. I got an amazon box, and an amazon invoice, and an amazon product.
You can't win anymore. Online commerce is subverted. What you see, no matter how savvy of a consumer or how much experience you have with online shopping, is not guaranteed to be what you get, anymore.
It's like there was real value in a physical store where you could go, look at the product, and speak to experts about said product. Weird.
All snark aside, though, I see a resurgence in small, boutique mom-and-pop shops for goods in the next 5-10 years as Millennials and Gen-Z get sick of being scammed online. The biggest new thing is that unlike gen-x and boomers, Millennials and Gen-Z are savvy enough to have tried to remedy the situation for themselves and understand it's a whack-a-mole game with no winners.
The good news is, it's not even necessarily true that you pay more when buying elsewhere anymore. Amazon is coasting on that reputation but they're no longer subsidizing customers like they used to.
Buying electronic products is not safe, due to fake and fire hazards. Buying body products is no safe due to unknown and untested chemicals in counterfeits. Buying food is unsafe because completely unknown provenance. Buying household goods like water filters can lead to flooding.
Buying things on amazon will lead to something bad.
I've always taken it as a proxy for quality. My thinking was that Prime means it must ship from Amazon (I realize now marketplace sellers can qualify for the Prime flag if their shipment is free and fast for Prime members). And then it follows that shipped by Amazon means they stock it, and are responsible for returns. Therefore, not wanting the expense of excessive returns, they would probably have a system to ensure quality merchandise.
Of course, none of that thinking is accurate, but it appears to be logical on the surface.
And it's not even that any more. You ALWAYS have to check the guaranteed delivery date. ALWAYS. At least half the stuff I start to order -- even with the "Prime" label -- will take longer than 2 days. This situation has caused me to start shopping retail again, whenever I can. It bites me EVERY time I don't specifically check, and stuff winds up coming on a slow boat from China. Prime literally means nothing to me anymore, except their video service (which has a pretty good selection).
And yet many consumers conflate "Amazon Choice", "Amazon Prime" and "Sold by Amazon" and think they all mean roughly the same thing, some stamp of approval by Amazon. But Amazon has no incentive to disabuse them of that notion.
The more crucial difference is that the products were sold by third party sellers. I'm assuming counterfeit goods are almost never a problem if the seller is Amazon.
That may have been true once, but no longer thanks to "commingling":
"Sellers on Amazon can pool their goods with the same exact goods offered by Amazon itself, a practice known as commingling. This has advantages for sellers — less processing is needed, so it’s cheaper — but it also explains how Amazon can unknowingly ship counterfeits despite getting stock directly from the printer."
This happened to me the first time this Christmas. Bought a $25 electric doodad that was "sold by Amazon" for a family member and it was obviously a fake. It came in a very generic white box with the company logo stamped on it, inside was a product that looked completely different and was non-functional. Not only that, but the product was difficult to return (I had to contact support) which makes me suspect Amazon knew it was a fishy product.
It has completely shaken my faith in Amazon. This is probably my last year as a Prime subscriber.
at the risk of upping the amazon paranoia (which i think is valid but blown out of proportion), i also had a little fake product issue recently with amazon.
i had bought two glass (kitchen) storage jars a year ago and decided in november to order one more. the new one was about 10% smaller with slightly different markings, just similar enough that it wasn't noticeable on first glance, but was obvious when placed next to the other two jars.
initially, i assumed it was a warehouse mix-up, so i requested a replacement. the replacement was exactly the same smaller jar and not the original. mind you, the original was already a chinese-made & branded item. the replacement was a cheaper knockoff of what was probably already a ridiculously marked-up import. luckily it was only a minor hassle to return both and get a refund.
i'm not a big amazon shopper and avoid their own electronics like kindles and echos (don't need more plutocratic surveillance in my life), but for anything of (at least moderate) value, i'll sometimes double-check against photos on amazon and manufacturer's sites. fakes have generally not been a significant problem for me.
Can you actually cancel? When I did, they had an obnoxious dark pattern where there was no visible option to disable auto-renewal, but going through the cancellation flow just disabled auto-renewal.
Then every time you try to make a purchase as a former prime user you will hit failed captcha after failed captcha, and a mandatory "would you like to try prime" window with a 'no thanks' click through in size 8 font. Sometimes I have to use a different browser if I fail the captcha too many times and amazon crudely attempts to lock me out.
I bought a monitor once on amazon a couple of years ago. It seemed legit -- packaging looked authentic. Monitor looked authentic. But the power cable was really weird and clunky. It had no branding on it, and everything was written in Chinese. It barely fit into the monitor, and the monitor would only turn on if the cable was in exactly the right position. This was an LG monitor, and not a cheap one, so I contacted amazon and they accepted the return and sent a replacement. Well, the replacement was even worse. Same thing where the power cable seemed incredibly cheap, but the monitor itself seemed fine, but I couldn't even get it to turn on unless I was actively holding the power cable into the monitor.
Ended up just returning it again, but thought it was a fluke. I still used amazon for a while, but this type of thing has become so common that I don't use them anymore at all.
I got stung buying some midrange earphones. I got my money back no problem, but the hassle was far from worth the $10 saving. When the prices of the fake items aren't obviously too cheap, its impossible to tell the difference until its too late.
That said, I left a review warning other customers. I hope I helped them.
Is it not possible to look at the seller to tell if it's the real company selling the product? I wouldn't buy branded from some no-name seller, that's no better than ebay.
If multiple sellers sell the "same" item and use amazon as warehouse, they can be binned together and you get one at random from any one of the sellers no matter which one you actually bought from.
Yup, they call it "commingling". So even if you make sure it says "sold by and ships from Amazon", and Amazon itself only buys from legitimate vendors, you could still wind up with a counterfeit item introduced by a third party seller.
Sorry if this is offtopic, I was planning to buy a Google Pixel 3A from Amazon in a week (It's cheaper than from Google Store). Are mobile phones also forgered on Amazon? or they don't aim to forger stuff like that? Thank you. (I am from a 3rd world country and travelling to USA next week)
I would be a little bit careful. I don't know if there's a risk of counterfeiting, but I once bought what I thought was supposed to be a US region Moto X2 but instead got a European region one. The most important difference, besides getting a different power adapter, was the fact that there's actually a different wireless antennae chip, where it did not have LTE bands for my carrier in the US.
Thanks! Yes, I checked that using https://willmyphonework.net/ and it says it will work :) I used in the past (it's pretty normal to buy phones when travelling to Europe or US) and it never failed. Bythe way, Amazon seller is Google, it says "By Google", so I should trust it, right?
Thanks. The problem is that in BestBuy the price is much higher if the phone is new, not refurbished. I found it new on Amazon fora good price. I just checked and it says "Sold by Google", and it goes to a Google landing page on Amazon, so I should be fine, right?
Not necessarily. (1) Landing pages are relatively simple to fake; just because the link goes to Google, it doesn't mean that Google has authorized an account on Amazon to sell the products. (2) Amazon has been known to mix stock, so even if the seller actually is Google, you might end up getting a product from another seller, which might not be authentic.
Personally, the last 3-4 phones I bought off of Amazon were all different models from what they had been advertised as. It's possible that you might get lucky and receive an authentic phone for less than buying from Google directly, but if you actually want confidence that you will receive the real thing, get it directly from the manufacturer.
I'm saddened that you don't see any middle ground between linking to a site with a very long history of actively facilitating counterfeits through product commingling and not getting paid at all.
I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. Only that a great deprivation has weighed heavily on us to the point that you need to ask what possible alternatives exist rather than knowing several already. I don't condemn you personally for it.
Well, the very reason they exist is for you to click on their links. Thats their business model. So really, for them to write such an article is really to bite the hand that feeds them, which shows some gumption. But they would never cut off all their income by removing the links.
I’m not sure how it works with counterfeits on Amazon, will the same product id or same link sometimes be the real thing and sometimes not?
> I’m not sure how it works with counterfeits on Amazon, will the same product id or same link sometimes be the real thing and sometimes not?
Correct. Say for the moment that Nike decides to sell their shoes on Amazon through the Amazon warehousing program for really great service and delivery options. Then say that I send a bunch of counterfeit Nike shoes to Amazon using the exact same product details that Nike does. Now Amazon says, "if we put these two batches of Nike shoes together in the same bin, we will save money because fulfilling orders for shoes will be more efficient". But if they are in the same bin, then when you order from Nike you might get my knockoffs.
It's at least mostly true. They usually link to the official seller, so while it's possible they either get that wrong, or the seller starts shipping the wrong product it at least saves some of the work.
These official sellers are using Amazon order fulfillment. Amazon is mixing counterfeits into their inventory. Linking to the official seller doesn't matter if Amazon treats the product as a fungible commodity behind the scenes like it does.
Amazon is mixing counterfeits into their inventory. Linking to the official seller doesn't matter if Amazon treats the product as a fungible commodity behind the scenes like it does.
Do you have any evidence at all that this is the case? It's the opposite of what is said in the article - all the examples given are for non-official sellers.
Notably the article say "encountered a few instances in which a _seller_ switched in an authentic product but from a discontinued or lesser-quality line" and "The authentic ‘Ove’ Glove is available for purchase through a page indicating that it is sold and shipped by Amazon.com or sold by Joseph Ent, the Amazon storefront for Joseph Enterprises."
Also none of the sellers in the article that the Wirecutter contacted made this claim which would be surprising if it was the case!
"The goods may look real online, but there is no guarantee of authenticity — whether sold by a brand, a third-party seller or Amazon’s direct-sales arm."
> It's the opposite of what is said in the article
In fact it is _not_ the opposite of what is said in the article! Read it again. Nowhere do they say that you're safe from counterfeits if you buy from the right links. The article steers well clear of even mentioning inventory commingling. The most insidious aspect is that you believe that they've exonerated Amazon, when they just neglected to mention the other half of the problem.
In the last example, they give their credulity away entirely.
"We compared a recently purchased set of Tweezerman tweezers...the seller had swapped in a model that was different from what was listed on the page"
Who was the seller, you ask? The page they link to says "sold by Amazon.com".
There's a follow on question that I'd like to raise, which is: "Are you rich enough to care"? In the race to the bottom on prices, it becomes a mark of wealth when you have the time and money to verify your own purchases, or to shop at more reputable retailers. I'm in that category, but could easily see myself being too cash strapped / too busy to do anything about a fake product being shipped to me from Amazon. I'd probably shrug.
I mean, kinda. But you can buy most of the stuff that you’d otherwise get on Amazon from Costco, Target, or Walmart online, and not have to worry about it being a crappy knock off made with leaded paint. So, I think most people are rich enough to care that much.
"Getting the fake gloves removed from Amazon can be a long process, Hirsch said, taking weeks or even months of playing whack-a-mole with counterfeit sellers"
That's the brand owner saying that. I'd love to see an Amazon response to that.
Personally the brand owner makes me trust them as far as I can throw them as they have a fundamental interest in hampering secondary markets and undermining right of first sale. Sure there are valid concerns but it becomes "CEOs claim higher CEO compensation main factor linked to better company performance".
They also have a fundamental interest in protecting the reputation of their product, which is definitely at risk from someone burning themselves with counterfeit gloves.
There's not a big secondary market in unopened $15 gloves. And I really doubt the used listings are a big deal. So I don't think that's a notable factor here.
"One stay-at-home mom from Kentucky told me she makes $200-300 per month leaving positive reviews for things like sleep masks, light bulbs, and AV cables."
I posted about this on HN recently[1]. Within the last month, I've been getting an increasing amount of native ads on different platforms for "Free [Product]!". If you engage the ad, you find out that the ad-purchaser wants you to buy the advertised product and leave a positive review for it on Amazon, after which they'll refund you for the cost of the product.
Some of these items have thousands of positive reviews[1], which is misleading to consumers who rely on honest reviews to guide their purchasing behavior. Also, it is almost comical how difficult it is to reach out to Amazon about this issue as a user.
In the end, I just contacted my state Attorney General's Consumer Protection division and the FTC.
If you have examples you can try sending it to jeff@amazon.com and it will (eventually) get triaged as a sev-b ticket if you're lucky or it is an interesting enough issue
Are these legit sites / apps you are reading? How are you finding them? Another approach might be to reach out to the ad network to complain about these illegal ads. (Fake paid reviews are illegal ads, and soliciting illegal activity is illegal.)
The solution here is probably to convince authorities to prosecute the individuals are accepting bribes for fake reviews. Amazon should be happy to cooperate.
> Are these legit sites / apps you are reading? How are you finding them?
They are mostly on Facebook. They're native ads[1] because I have various layers of ad blocking implemented, and only native ads get through.
> The solution here is probably to convince authorities to prosecute the individuals are accepting bribes for fake reviews
I'd have to disagree. There needs to be incentives against unscrupulous business practices by sellers who are arguably the bad actors in this situation, and not the unsophisticated consumer caught up in a confusing offer.
I'll bite - how would them caring make any difference in terms of quality of "fake" reviews?
The way I see it the problem is unsolvable. There is no mathematical way to absolutely determine truth of reviews and it is fundamentally an arms race. No measure they could do could keep it true and free of deception.
For sure. This is why we let financial institutions launder money, fund rogue states, and aid in tax evasion with no fear of legal consequence. Because otherwise it’s hard for them to operate.
No measure of KYC could keep it the financial system completely free of illicit activity, after all.
The problem is mostly solvable. Review quality went downhill when Amazon decided to let 3rd party sellers run rampant, in order to boost their margins. A decade ago or earlier, when they had a handle on their supply chain, the reviews were pretty reliable. They can always go back to that model, but the smell of a greenback is too intoxicating for this to happen.
Notice that Walmart, Newegg and other wannabees are going down the same route. Typical cases of crapification of the late stage, overfinancialized capitalism.
> Notice that Walmart, Newegg and other wannabees are going down the same route.
It's sad to hear Newegg is a part of this now. I haven't bought computer parts in 6 years but Newegg was where I typically got most things from (and sometimes Amazon back then too).
Trust seems like the fundamental problem. I used to trust the people writing Amazon reviews but now I don’t. If I could filter reviews to those written by people I trust, then those reviews would still be valuable.
It’s not a comprehensive solution since I probably don’t trust enough people to cover the range of products I’m interested in, but it could be better than the current mess.
The limited scale might even be beneficial because I wouldn’t have to wade through hundreds of nearly identical products.
Well when Amazon takes steps to reduce fraud people scream to high hell about how unfair it is to the small business trying to sell product. Take the case of Apple and Amazon working a deal where Apple products can only be sold by Apple or whom Apple authorizes.
I know the headache of trying to find a Silpat cooking mat, the number of look alike fakes is astounding and worse they use the name brand when they clearly are not that manufacturer.
So the only recourse is to have a setup similar to the Amazon and Apple deal. Anyone wishing to sell a branded product must provide proof to Amazon which includes the manufacturer backing the claim that they are authorized to sell that product. Not line, by product.
After spending $50 on a "Recommended" and "Prime" counterfeit PS4 controller (proven by a tear down), I no longer buy electronics from Amazon. With a brick and mortar, some sort of incoming quality control still seems to be in place.
The switcheroo problem described in the article simply does not exist say over on Ebay. On Ebay, you directly know if you are buying from a legitimate distributor, small time grey market / surplus dealer, or a knockoff shop. There are plenty of products for which knockoffs/generics are good enough, so simplistically "banning fakes" is not the solution either. The problem is this obscuring of the actual supplier, which Amazon could fix tomorrow if their entire business didn't revolve around using that confusing UI to mislead customers with dark patterns.
I'm continually amazed at the popularity of Amazon. It goes to show how powerful advertising, social distortion, and the sunk cost fallacy ("prime") are. For example, Amazon has never had good prices on anything, and yet that myth persists. Presumably the same people that repeat this can't even be bothered to just check eg walmart.com. (Walmart does find some new way to disappoint me every time I step in there. It's just so utterly huge that it's foolish to ignore.)
From the combination of store name, item description/template, quantity, other items by the seller, and comparable items. These things are up front and in your face, with each seller having a vested interest in creating a reputation. Once you see the patterns, you don't have to "investigate" each thing, you just get a feeling.
Legitimate distributors generally have recognizable names and other web presences - Best Buy, Adorama, Beach Camera, Anker Direct, Rosewill, etc. The value here is being able to search prices across all these stores at once.
Surplus distributors usually have conditions Open Box / Seller Refurbished, fixed quantities, many such listings.
Knockoffs/generics either ship direct from China, or have basically identical listings that ship directly from China.
This of course all depends on what you're actually buying, but being able to weigh such details is the whole point. Many generic computer cables/adapters/etc are great, but you'd be foolish to buy lithium ion batteries that way.
Specifically searching for "Ove Glove", I do see an item that is direct from China. So right away I know this is an item that has been heavily copied. Which is a given, with this article. But knowing this means I can either opt for the cheaper generic version (and self-verify it has similar utility), or be extra sure to order it from a legitimate channel.
Walmart's online store is now my go-to for most household products. Free 2-day shipping without a subscription and the ability to actually vet their supply chain means it's basically always better.
You could tell by looking at the two gloves in the story that they were different, but the "fake" actually looked better to my eyes - the blue rubber appeared thicker and more pronounced. Which brings up a really interesting question about fakes - if they are as good or better than the products they are mocking, are they actually "fakes"? I fully recognize that there is a need to protect copyright / product dress / brand and that there is a distinct consumer interest in ensuring that products are safe / made from safe materials, BUT - so many of the products that are cloned on Amazon are only distinguishable by price anyway, and have no unique value proposition from one "brand" to the next.
> if they are as good or better than the products they are mocking, are they actually "fakes"
Quality of an individual product aside, the issue surrounding counterfeits is that confidence in the market as whole will wane, which isn't good for anybody.
I think there's certainly a terminology issue here.
A product that looks like a name brand product, but doesn't claim to be that product is one thing.
A product that claims to be the name brand product, but isn't is a different.
The name brand probably doesn't want either to be easily avaialable, and will call them both fake. A purchaser might want to take a chance on the former, but shouldn't have to have a chance of getting the latter.
I’ve been a Prime customer since it first came out in the early 2000’s, but I’m letting my subscription expire this year. Too much fake crap, and increasingly it’s hard to even find stuff that I’m looking for in the store. No thanks.
For the products that are actually regulated like the child support seats: hold Amazon liable for selling product that is illegal.
Make it expensive for Amazon to not police the shit that third parties are throwing on the marketplace - and soon you won't see any fakes any more.
You want to know where Bezos got his billions? Partially because Amazon outright shits on all the regulation that traditional brick and mortar places have - like, not selling product that is illegal, counterfeit or offensive.
Let's assume a brick-and-mortar store where in the inventory there is Nazi propaganda such as the Reichskriegsflagge (commonly used as a substitute for the Swastika flag which is banned in many countries). No sane person would put this item up for sale because the same second it became public knowledge the store sells such flags it would be swarmed by protesters, and most likely would also attract a lot of vandals, thieves and other more radical protesters.
But on Amazon? There is no such thing as a public space to protest here, there is no cost (not even from lost business) in selling Nazi merchandise, so Amazon happily sells Nazi merchandise that Nazis then fly on their balconies and gardens, thus incurring a cost to society.
I feel like I can't trust anything I buy on Amazon now. For the last month I've been buying from UK registered businesses which pay tax and which I can trust to send me goods which aren't counterfeit and potentially dangerous.
And wow! The dark patterns they use when you try to cancel Prime are really quite impressive!
Amazon third-party sales have been steadily rising for the past decade and now account for more than 50% of product sales on Amazon. More than 70% of searches on Amazon are for non-branded merchandise.
Unless these trends reverse, or there is a massive rise in the number of complaints from customers who've been cheated or injured by fakes, there won't be any significant changes.
Just add Twitter certified check marks to third party sellers. Have official amazon quality control for those sellers and everyone else is a gamble. If I buy from the Nike seller with the blue check mark, I know I’m getting the real thing. Seems like that could work.
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[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 330 ms ] threadOne important part of our solution here has to be that we force these companies to take a position one way or the other. So in Amazon's case it would need to decide - am I a platform for companies to set up there own online shop and provide fulfillment services to? Or am I myself the online shop?
In the later case they become responsible for product, like any business. In the former, they aren't. But in the former they now need to act as just a platform and not provide all the branding that makes it look like you're buying from Amazon. So they'd be more akin to Shopify or something I suppose. Every fly by night shop that wants to set up needs to set up its own branding and that way brand reliability and recognition still works and items are no longer commingled.
This all adds up to a company nobody seems to like in DC. If there's any company I could see getting a Washington smackdown soon, it's Amazon.
Have you ever actually read the WaPo editorial page?
They serve DC, so I’m not surprised or upset they have a bias — but we shouldn’t pretend it doesn’t exist either.
Obviously owning a liberal newspaper doesn’t win Bezos any points on the right, which became obvious with Trump supposedly pressuring the Pentagon not to use AWS.
Just have the police start tracking down what warehouses counterfeit items came from, and getting search warrants to search them.
Apart from the fact that this would directly reduce the number of counterfeit's... repeatedly shutting down warehouses for searches would kill Amazon's bottom line. Cleaning up after the police would kill Amazon's bottom line. Etc.
It's not exactly justice, but it is damn effective. You can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride and all that.
I don’t agree with this kind of regulation. It’s simply not the governments role to decide. You as a seller are not forced to sell on Amazon. I say that as the spouse of a seller who owns a store on EBay that’s continued to be successful. We had a bad experience selling on Amazon and are better off without them. Of course that’s just our experience but I’m not convinced Amazon is a monopoly here.
I do think Amazon needs to be held liable for fake products and whatever damage they cause its customers. Amazon simply selling goods with no liability of fraudulent items is a disgrace, and I don’t think they will change until we ram some regulation down their throat.
what would this look like? they already have a pretty generous return policy. they pay the return shipping and return the funds as soon as the package ships. I'm not thrilled with the status quo of playing fraud roulette every time I order something, but the worst thing that's ever happened to me is having to wait a couple extra days for the genuine item.
Yet there is no option to indicate that "This product is a counterfeit" when filing a return, despite it being a documented problem. The purchaser must choose a different, and inaccurate, reason for their return when filing for one.
One way to read into this is that Amazon doesn't want to keep records of counterfeit items sold on their marketplace because of the liability such records might incur.
I recall RIAA back in start of 2000’s said it should be around $100k-$300k per instance.
Sorry, but this argument is just silly.
Here's some food for thought: Birkenstock stopped selling on Amazon[1] due to a delluge of fakes. Now go to Amazon.com and search for Birkenstock. You get a shit ton of results.
So if Birkenstock is not selling them, since they don't sell on Amazon, then who sells them and do those sellers have a right to sell a 3rd party product despite the brand not wishing to sell on the platform at all?
If you can regulate that a pimply faced teenager in Tenessee is ruined for life for downloading 10 songs, then it should surely be possible to regulate a behemoth like Amazon not to allow the sale of crap from dodgy suppliers on its platform.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/20/birkenstock-quits-amazon-in-...
These companies innovate by showing off a layer of whiz-bang techy goodness so people don't notice that they've simply externalized all the responsibility and internalized all the profits.
They didn’t even shield a wirecutter , one of their largest affiliate referrers.
At least Shopify is a real platform you can build stuff on.
Amazon is just this giant bullying machine. The Dalek of retail.
I have several issues with Amazon the company, but any time I buy something only from any other vendor I'm reminded of what makes Amazon different.
Fast OR cheap shipping. At least in my locality. In the place I most frequently order, free shipping is scheduled for "5-7 business days" to get to me, and frequently gets misdirected and takes an extra day or two (pushing it past another weekend).
When I've ordered to one of Canada's large urban centers it is much faster. But going to an actual store to get something for the same price is also an option, and faster still. And doesn't tend to have difficult to spot counterfeits.
Here, in Hungary, ordering from Amazon is problematic, because it's such a beast. No human in the loop, and they pass on your package to some delivery vendor anyway, which usually doesn't provide much tracking. So we get no* benefit of the machine at all.
* - sure, we get an interface that's at least consistent and usually available in English
Those are all things difficult to get consistently from a random web store.
Agreed. The problem is that generally the descriptions are so useless it's hard to know what's actually what. (For example recently I ordered a case for a Kobo Forma e-reader, and it was impossible to know how it would actually fold, because there were a few pictures, no video, no schematics, nothing. And the description was similarly unhelpful. It worked out okay though.)
> great customer service
I found it impossible to even get in touch with them :o (I wanted to ask where my package is, but they just kept naming the shipping vendor - "Deutsche Post", no tracking ID, no link, no actual contact to the relevant department.)
> saved credentials
Every webshop so far does it, and usually smaller ones provide ability to use PayPal.
> 5% back on purchases
How does that work? It's either priced into the price of everything or others pay for it, no?
Brought it up elsewhere[0], but I think you're right in more than one way. Beyond publisher vs. platform issue, fake news are the digital equivalent to counterfeiting; they're to news - and in general, to information media[1] - what Amazon counterfeits are to physical products.
--
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22399726
[1] - Which include all digital media and most physical books.
There’s a big difference though. Social media allows many individual voices, and much like the printing press, allows previously unheard voices to be heard and to have reach. Therefore, the world’s expert can call out a journalist for being wrong immediately, making it seem like “fake news” is more common than it was previously.
Amazon is actually causing distrust around product quality when there wasn’t any before. Consumers may have trusted Colgate’s toothpaste, but if it isn’t actually Colgate’s toothpaste, yet it poisons someone, it becomes Colgate’s problem too. This would be like Facebook or Twitter allowing any account to adopt a WSJ or NyTimes verified badge, one of those accounts publishes fake news, and then the paper itself has a problem too.
Remember all the hoverboard fires you saw on the news several years ago? They weren’t knock offs, but items sold that didn’t have any real safety certifications in mind. Amazon only cares something bad happens on the news and they’re involved.
He proceeded to begin researching the insurance company, which was owned by Amazon, but wasn't listed as a valid insurance company in Massachusetts. He contacted Amazon again, and said, "would you like me to call the insurance commissioner and attorney general that you're operating a non-registered insurance company in Massachusetts." Someone was out to fix his siding in 3 days, and they painted the porch as well (due to some paint matching problem).
Despite how much I love being able to order stuff, and not have to go out, Amazon is pretty scum-tacular.
This is not legal advice and YMMV.
The one from the local shop was not wrapped in plastic, but it was in Maytag branded cardboard with part-number and SKU. Took it home and compared it to the Amazon part which I hadn't yet boxed up and the Amazon part was visibly of lower quality plastic (edges were poor, you could see where welds had been done at the corners) and the circuit board with the switching components was completely different despite having the same molex-type connector. BOTH units had the same part-number molded in to the plastic in the same spot, yet the actual Maytag version I got locally worked instantly the first time.
I can't recall any other business from which I've moved so quickly and so far from one end of the spectrum of enthusiasm to the other.
[+] Most of it was for business -- parts and equipment for customers, it was often cheaper that way than my wholesale supplier.
I wish I could say DDG was as good or better, but outside of the privacy perspective, that unfortunately hasn't been my experience.
(I say this as a longtime user, and this is not meant to be damning with faint praise). Their email is best of class outside of gmail. It even beats in certain ways: It syncs faster. It's not made by a surveillance company. As a paying user, I've gotten very competent tech support. They have very good privacy controls re: image loading. They seem to permanently grandfather rates, which is nice.
Downsides: their label system is, to someone who really likes gmail, not as good. Calendar syncing on Android with their preferred sync app breaks every couple of months until you hit resync. Fastmail is in Australia, and I'm not sure the impact of Australia's police assistance laws.
Same: They support u2f.
Their product has improved a lot in the 5 years I've been using it, and is very worth the money. I think it's critically important that there exist high quality alternatives to google services, so that's a nice secondary reason to pay them.
https://hey.com/
There's also more encrypted providers like https://protonmail.com/.
Ironically. :)
Too bad they don't offer calendar services with their email though. It's really a choice I can't fathom.
I used to spend about as much as you. Now I almost never buy anything from amazon.com.
The only value my Prime membership has to me now is discounts at Whole Foods, and Prime Video. Otherwise, I bet I spend less than $500 a year at amazon.com.
main downside is I'm having to order from multiple places, but it hasn't been too bad.
I'm never going outside Amazon ever again unless the product or a suitable alternative doesn't exist on Amazon.
Another thing i'd like to note is I've ordered dozens of "Amazon Basics" products and I've yet to be disappointed. The company overall has been great for me. Painless returns with no gotchas, lower prices, superior shipping, better ease of use, 5% back with the card.
One of things that pushed me away from amazon is their increased usage of "add-on item" labels. If I have to batch order anyway, Prime isn't actually that great of a deal.
Also for prices, I've actually found that for some items the prices are not always lower, but ymmv. Factor in that you're paying an annual fee. IMO, the 2 day shipping is almost not a factor anymore, since other major US retailers are starting to offer it for FREE. So for me it comes down to, is it worth the price so I don't need to batch order ~sometimes~ ? We could also be using Amazon very differently, so it may actually be a much better deal for you.
The amount of electronics sold without an UL/ETL cert on Amazon is staggering. Many companies no longer bother getting one because there's noone to stop them from selling uncertified crap. Also, we have seen unscrupulous dealers slapping a fake ETL cert on their product and even when Intertek contacted Amazon they didn't take it down!
Hell, there's an "international" power strip sold under many different names which provides three NEMA 5-15R from a single IEC C5/C6 coupler (the IEC standard is up to 2.5A but the UL certifies it up to 13A but still, the NEMA connector is 15A) and to top it off, it is sold with an ungrounded cable. I often see it recommended on travel forums, for real. I can't even decide whether shock or fire is the bigger hazard with this. Someone eventually will burn down an airbnb with it and then will the finger pointing start.
The UL missed the point of C5/C6 entirely. Yes, the contacts are totally fine for that kind of current. But the point of having it with C13/C14 next to it is that because C5/C6 is only rated for 2.5 A you can use thinner coper in the cables. Meanwhile all compliant C13 cables have to use a 1.5 mm² cross section to carry the full continuous 10 A load current. If this is correct, then a "fine according to UL" load would actually melt most C5 cables (generally 3x0.75 mm²).
[1]: https://youtu.be/C7TwBUxxIC0
> In this video we go through all of the testing I did over the last few months to determine what's in these products and if they're dangerous.
I wish for something important like this they would just say the result in the description. Gotta get that ad money I guess.
For sensitive things, I now buy direct, or Target.
Because they make more money than they lose as a result while driving competitors into bankruptcy. Eventually they'll make a big public spectacle of getting it fixed (once the economics stop being in their favor) and everyone will forgive them.
Its virtually impossible to tell the difference between a product I'm middle-manning that's interpreted by investigators as real, vs a product that's interpreted as fake.
With books, nobody really minds if conceptually a book sat unopened on a bookstore shelf with the general public touching and pawing it occasionally vs a book that sat pristine untouched and cleaner on my home bookshelf, although one is marketed as "new" and one as "used", but in practice it usually doesn't matter. Also see the weirdness with $10 "indian subcontinent only" textbooks that normally sell for $200 to sucker american students, nobody complains their book was "fake" with a 95% discount to keep them quiet.
On the other hand, do that same game with toothbrushes and in roll the complaints.
This may be a problem inherent to online shopping in the long term. A copy of "Numerical Recipes in C edition 3" is a fungible commodity. Apparently, as per the linked article, that is not the case with fad overpriced gloves and toothbrushes. Possibly that type of product is inherently unsuitable for online purchase.
That description is unfair.
Regardless of whether the product is overpriced or fashionable, I want the correct product, without the shortcuts taken by a fake: unsafe paints, plastics etc.
I don't mind "Philips-compatible" brush heads being listed, but the description should be clear.
Otherwise we may as well repeal all trademark, copyright and product safety laws.
3 says "Although the YXTDZ booster is not trying to pass itself off as a Mifold by name, it’s clearly a knockoff of the Mifold’s unique design."
4 says it was called "Toddler Airplane Travel Safety Harness" and says it wasn't FAA certified. It doesn't say that it used the brand name.
5 and 6 are authentic products but older stock or a slightly different model number, respectively.
Elsewhere in the discussion, 'erentz says:
> I see the Amazon fake products problem as related to the social network fake news problem.
I think they're right in more than one way. It's not only the platform vs. publisher issue. Fake news are the information goods equivalent of counterfeiting - faking the bits, not the medium.
You're confusing online purchasing with "Amazon's approach to online purchasing." They are not the same thing. It's possible to manage the supply chain when selling online just like brick and mortal retails already do. Of course, you don't make as much money in the process.
> nobody complains their book was "fake" with a 95% discount to keep them quiet
This is conflating dishonest substitution of counterfeit goods with consensual purchase of a lower-quality product. If I'm not explicitly purchasing the 'international' version of a book, I would consider myself harmed and defrauded if its materials and construction are not up to expected [North-American / Western / ?] standards.
The user explicitly consenting to purchasing a knock-off is another thing entirely from having the seller 'fulfill' a purchase for a genuine item with the same knock-off.
What it contained looked like a Chromecast, but was actually a knockoff, which I never could get to associate with my network or get working.
Apparently someone bought this cheap one online, didn't like it, bought the real one at Walmart and put the fake one back in the box and returned it to the store.
But what's more common from Amazon is to receive an obviously refurbished product as new. The products people return are just sent to the next buyer, without check or cleaning.
No. I bought directly from the manufacturer's website, paid them, got email from them, the whole bit ... and it was fulfilled and delivered by Amazon. I got an amazon box, and an amazon invoice, and an amazon product.
You can't win anymore. Online commerce is subverted. What you see, no matter how savvy of a consumer or how much experience you have with online shopping, is not guaranteed to be what you get, anymore.
All snark aside, though, I see a resurgence in small, boutique mom-and-pop shops for goods in the next 5-10 years as Millennials and Gen-Z get sick of being scammed online. The biggest new thing is that unlike gen-x and boomers, Millennials and Gen-Z are savvy enough to have tried to remedy the situation for themselves and understand it's a whack-a-mole game with no winners.
Amazon == Fake Products == Scamazon.
Buying electronic products is not safe, due to fake and fire hazards. Buying body products is no safe due to unknown and untested chemicals in counterfeits. Buying food is unsafe because completely unknown provenance. Buying household goods like water filters can lead to flooding.
Buying things on amazon will lead to something bad.
Don't buy scamazon.
Of course, none of that thinking is accurate, but it appears to be logical on the surface.
"Sellers on Amazon can pool their goods with the same exact goods offered by Amazon itself, a practice known as commingling. This has advantages for sellers — less processing is needed, so it’s cheaper — but it also explains how Amazon can unknowingly ship counterfeits despite getting stock directly from the printer."
"What Happens After Amazon’s Domination Is Complete? Its Bookstore Offers Clues" NY Times, June 2019 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/technology/amazon-dominat...
It has completely shaken my faith in Amazon. This is probably my last year as a Prime subscriber.
i had bought two glass (kitchen) storage jars a year ago and decided in november to order one more. the new one was about 10% smaller with slightly different markings, just similar enough that it wasn't noticeable on first glance, but was obvious when placed next to the other two jars.
initially, i assumed it was a warehouse mix-up, so i requested a replacement. the replacement was exactly the same smaller jar and not the original. mind you, the original was already a chinese-made & branded item. the replacement was a cheaper knockoff of what was probably already a ridiculously marked-up import. luckily it was only a minor hassle to return both and get a refund.
i'm not a big amazon shopper and avoid their own electronics like kindles and echos (don't need more plutocratic surveillance in my life), but for anything of (at least moderate) value, i'll sometimes double-check against photos on amazon and manufacturer's sites. fakes have generally not been a significant problem for me.
Ended up just returning it again, but thought it was a fluke. I still used amazon for a while, but this type of thing has become so common that I don't use them anymore at all.
That said, I left a review warning other customers. I hope I helped them.
Personally, the last 3-4 phones I bought off of Amazon were all different models from what they had been advertised as. It's possible that you might get lucky and receive an authentic phone for less than buying from Google directly, but if you actually want confidence that you will receive the real thing, get it directly from the manufacturer.
Maybe does their article imply that as long as you purchase through their recommended links you'd be safe(er)?
I'll probably respect them more when they stop hypocritically linking to Amazon.
> Maybe does their article imply that as long as you purchase through their recommended links you'd be safe(er)?
The article implies that, but it's not true.
I’m not sure how it works with counterfeits on Amazon, will the same product id or same link sometimes be the real thing and sometimes not?
Correct. Say for the moment that Nike decides to sell their shoes on Amazon through the Amazon warehousing program for really great service and delivery options. Then say that I send a bunch of counterfeit Nike shoes to Amazon using the exact same product details that Nike does. Now Amazon says, "if we put these two batches of Nike shoes together in the same bin, we will save money because fulfilling orders for shoes will be more efficient". But if they are in the same bin, then when you order from Nike you might get my knockoffs.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/12/13/how-to-p...
It's at least mostly true. They usually link to the official seller, so while it's possible they either get that wrong, or the seller starts shipping the wrong product it at least saves some of the work.
Do you have any evidence at all that this is the case? It's the opposite of what is said in the article - all the examples given are for non-official sellers.
Notably the article say "encountered a few instances in which a _seller_ switched in an authentic product but from a discontinued or lesser-quality line" and "The authentic ‘Ove’ Glove is available for purchase through a page indicating that it is sold and shipped by Amazon.com or sold by Joseph Ent, the Amazon storefront for Joseph Enterprises."
Also none of the sellers in the article that the Wirecutter contacted made this claim which would be surprising if it was the case!
Do you accept this from Forbes? https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/12/13/how-to-p...
How about this from the LA Times? https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-amazon-...
"The goods may look real online, but there is no guarantee of authenticity — whether sold by a brand, a third-party seller or Amazon’s direct-sales arm."
> It's the opposite of what is said in the article
In fact it is _not_ the opposite of what is said in the article! Read it again. Nowhere do they say that you're safe from counterfeits if you buy from the right links. The article steers well clear of even mentioning inventory commingling. The most insidious aspect is that you believe that they've exonerated Amazon, when they just neglected to mention the other half of the problem.
In the last example, they give their credulity away entirely.
"We compared a recently purchased set of Tweezerman tweezers...the seller had swapped in a model that was different from what was listed on the page"
Who was the seller, you ask? The page they link to says "sold by Amazon.com".
That's the brand owner saying that. I'd love to see an Amazon response to that.
https://thehustle.co/amazon-fake-reviews
FTA:
"One stay-at-home mom from Kentucky told me she makes $200-300 per month leaving positive reviews for things like sleep masks, light bulbs, and AV cables."
“Do you actually like the products?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she wrote. “I never use them.”
Some of these items have thousands of positive reviews[1], which is misleading to consumers who rely on honest reviews to guide their purchasing behavior. Also, it is almost comical how difficult it is to reach out to Amazon about this issue as a user.
In the end, I just contacted my state Attorney General's Consumer Protection division and the FTC.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22388067
If anyone has an address I can use to reach out to an actual person, I'd be more than happy to use it to report these sellers.
The solution here is probably to convince authorities to prosecute the individuals are accepting bribes for fake reviews. Amazon should be happy to cooperate.
They are mostly on Facebook. They're native ads[1] because I have various layers of ad blocking implemented, and only native ads get through.
> The solution here is probably to convince authorities to prosecute the individuals are accepting bribes for fake reviews
I'd have to disagree. There needs to be incentives against unscrupulous business practices by sellers who are arguably the bad actors in this situation, and not the unsophisticated consumer caught up in a confusing offer.
[1] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/audience-network/native...
The way I see it the problem is unsolvable. There is no mathematical way to absolutely determine truth of reviews and it is fundamentally an arms race. No measure they could do could keep it true and free of deception.
No measure of KYC could keep it the financial system completely free of illicit activity, after all.
Notice that Walmart, Newegg and other wannabees are going down the same route. Typical cases of crapification of the late stage, overfinancialized capitalism.
Best Buy Canada now too. It's dramatically worse to use the Best Buy Canada website than the Best Buy USA one.
It's sad to hear Newegg is a part of this now. I haven't bought computer parts in 6 years but Newegg was where I typically got most things from (and sometimes Amazon back then too).
I wish I lived near a Microcenter.
It’s not a comprehensive solution since I probably don’t trust enough people to cover the range of products I’m interested in, but it could be better than the current mess.
The limited scale might even be beneficial because I wouldn’t have to wade through hundreds of nearly identical products.
I know the headache of trying to find a Silpat cooking mat, the number of look alike fakes is astounding and worse they use the name brand when they clearly are not that manufacturer.
So the only recourse is to have a setup similar to the Amazon and Apple deal. Anyone wishing to sell a branded product must provide proof to Amazon which includes the manufacturer backing the claim that they are authorized to sell that product. Not line, by product.
I'm continually amazed at the popularity of Amazon. It goes to show how powerful advertising, social distortion, and the sunk cost fallacy ("prime") are. For example, Amazon has never had good prices on anything, and yet that myth persists. Presumably the same people that repeat this can't even be bothered to just check eg walmart.com. (Walmart does find some new way to disappoint me every time I step in there. It's just so utterly huge that it's foolish to ignore.)
Would you mind explaining how you can figure this out? (I've never bought anything on Ebay, so I'm completely ignorant about how it works.)
Legitimate distributors generally have recognizable names and other web presences - Best Buy, Adorama, Beach Camera, Anker Direct, Rosewill, etc. The value here is being able to search prices across all these stores at once.
Surplus distributors usually have conditions Open Box / Seller Refurbished, fixed quantities, many such listings.
Knockoffs/generics either ship direct from China, or have basically identical listings that ship directly from China.
This of course all depends on what you're actually buying, but being able to weigh such details is the whole point. Many generic computer cables/adapters/etc are great, but you'd be foolish to buy lithium ion batteries that way.
Specifically searching for "Ove Glove", I do see an item that is direct from China. So right away I know this is an item that has been heavily copied. Which is a given, with this article. But knowing this means I can either opt for the cheaper generic version (and self-verify it has similar utility), or be extra sure to order it from a legitimate channel.
Quality of an individual product aside, the issue surrounding counterfeits is that confidence in the market as whole will wane, which isn't good for anybody.
A product that looks like a name brand product, but doesn't claim to be that product is one thing.
A product that claims to be the name brand product, but isn't is a different.
The name brand probably doesn't want either to be easily avaialable, and will call them both fake. A purchaser might want to take a chance on the former, but shouldn't have to have a chance of getting the latter.
Make it expensive for Amazon to not police the shit that third parties are throwing on the marketplace - and soon you won't see any fakes any more.
You want to know where Bezos got his billions? Partially because Amazon outright shits on all the regulation that traditional brick and mortar places have - like, not selling product that is illegal, counterfeit or offensive.
Ugh.
But on Amazon? There is no such thing as a public space to protest here, there is no cost (not even from lost business) in selling Nazi merchandise, so Amazon happily sells Nazi merchandise that Nazis then fly on their balconies and gardens, thus incurring a cost to society.
And wow! The dark patterns they use when you try to cancel Prime are really quite impressive!
Unless these trends reverse, or there is a massive rise in the number of complaints from customers who've been cheated or injured by fakes, there won't be any significant changes.